CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I’d stopped Tía Vivian in the middle of her work only one other time since we’d arrived in Sacred.
It seemed like a lifetime ago that I’d sneaked an invisible, dream-state Penn into the barn to find out if my tía could see what I saw.
Ironically, that day wasn’t part of any other lifetime at all, but a half life I couldn’t begin to understand.
The second time I went to her was quieter. She was whittling small, intricate carvings into a molding or edge piece. No machines screamed in the background but the grinding gears of everything I was about to tell her.
She took the news with the same silent strength she’d always had.
I had no choice but to tell her about the watch—that there had been more to the story of me finding it.
She didn’t argue when I said it was full of magic.
Only gasped at learning that this watch had changed what had happened on the road to Sacred.
But I did hold back a few details during my revelation. I didn’t tell her about the watch’s full history and Penn’s grandfather. Because—-
I didn’t tell her about Penn.
I didn’t tell her about Penn because I wanted something to have and to hold that was wholly mine.
I didn’t tell her because my final recuerdos of this Earth would not be framed photos and embroidered handkerchiefs and locks of hair.
My ofrenda was built from wishes, and gossamer kisses, and one single secret.
Like most things Vivian Rojas, though, I misjudged what her reaction to this horrible truth would look like.
“Let’s go to the woods” was all she said. She stood and walked away, expecting me to follow.
The woods felt quiet as we moved through them, the branches and sap and worms taking in all the horror and magic of us. “It helps, being here,” Viv started. “I knew, Sylvie. I have known for some weeks that something strange happened to us.”
The shiver that rustled through me could’ve shaken the entire forest. “What? How?”
“The changes in my body stretched beyond what fresh air can do.” She trained a look my way. “My hair is different, my skin and my muscles too. I’ve been feeling stronger and more energetic.”
“Like . . . younger?”
She nodded. “And the cat hair didn’t affect me. I’m sleeping better—so wonderfully, I forgot about my trazodone prescription. I’ve had some dreams that seemed so real, they left me disoriented when I woke.”
My next breath skipped. The signs my own body had been giving me now blared like a warning.
“Everything is the total opposite for me. I don’t dream at all.
My wounds won’t close or clot. My skin is so dry and chapped.
My eyes fogged. My head has been worse than ever, and my nails all broke off,” I said, pausing as something hit me right there.
“Tía, I haven’t had my period since we came. ”
“Ay, Sylvie. Mine came back. I had to use the supplies I bought for you at the market.” She lifted a hand to her temple. “Dios mío. I . . . forgot to put in my contact lenses this morning.” Her mouth dropped open. “I can see perfectly.”
Meanwhile, I woke up being hyperaware of every breath I took, as if my reflexes might fail at any moment.
We were changing, but limbo was affecting our bodies in different ways. I was physically declining. How many more days did—-
“There were other clues,” Vivian continued. “My email inbox has been empty. On my Instagram, there are no new photos. Only older ones repeating.”
Repeating? Another rock sank to the base of my stomach.
I opened my app, and she was right. I never paid attention to dates.
My feed was full of photos I’d never seen—I’d thought they were updates.
But none of them were actually new. And Ana and Grier .
. . “All my friends’ posts seemed like they were only a few days apart. ”
But the posts I’d swiped through were not days apart. They had just hit my feed that way. Four weeks ago, five weeks ago, four weeks ago, read each and every photo.
A massive raven soared above our heads as we traded the same questions silently. What was going on out there? Were they grieving us right now? How was this possible?
Time and the watch and calendars had proved we weren’t completely in the same realm where our loved ones lived. We were in our own kind of elsewhere, enclosed in leafy, green arms and fed by the sound of a hurrying creek with a renovated bridge.
That same forest shifted around me—the energy, the atmosphere.
That old pull and tug returned, but this time it offered an intoxicating sense of rest. Safety.
I could’ve tucked myself inside these grounds and never turned back.
Like the watch, this place wanted me too—soul and limb, breath and root—but not in a devouring-monster sort of way.
But as something new and exciting. Something sweet.
I could close my eyes; adventure, a big, big life—an afterlife?
—was waiting just there. All I had to do was . . . stay?
But no, not yet. I forced my lids to remain open and pushed out a strangled sound with my next breath. (Maybe it was a test to see how much was left.)
“How can you be so calm? How have you been so calm and normal for weeks? We died. They brought us to the hospital, and we’re dead!” I repeated, my voice carrying the panic I’d buried since the truth revealed itself.
Tía Viv’s hands were in mine again, careful of my wounds but still so strong.
Cold. My tía felt cold to the touch. Penn had said that about me, weeks ago.
He was always the warm one. I’d missed the enormous sign that warm things lived.
Tía and I were affected differently by limbo. But neither of us were truly alive.
Vivian brushed a hand through my hair. Golden-brown strands came away with her fingers. “My mind has been consumed with art. All that creating, the beautiful wood grain and colors. The feel of everything.”
The power of being in her element.
She squared her stance, an airy sound fluttering through her chest. “At first, I was so alive inside my work that I didn’t question or even notice my body.”
My bottom lip trembled. “I didn’t really notice the changes either—not enough.
” But not because I’d been fully absorbed in my element.
I didn’t have one of those. But because I’d been so consumed with pushing every hard thing away.
So focused on moving forward while trying to never look inside.
Until Penn had recognized the whole of me, seeing me enough to finally make me want to see myself.
Lincoln City and him flashed into my head.
Penn’s words at the beach had felt like accusations at the time.
But now, if I could’ve bent hard things like Vivian, if I were the magical force, I would’ve listened to his callouts a thousand times if I could’ve brought him back to say them. I wouldn’t have brushed them away.
You move past the hard stuff instead of dealing with it, he’d said.
No, I didn’t deal. I pushed all my hurts so far down until I could pretend they weren’t even there. I was so heavy inside because of it, grief and resentment doubling each year. And on the outside I kept masking it from my family. My friends.
Vivian’s weighted sigh drew me back. “And to be honest, I thought there may be another reason we became what we are. I don’t think the watch is the only thing to blame for what happened to us.”
I halted, and she followed, my eyes as wide as any planet.
“I did not tell you everything when we talked about the legend of the cascara tree triangle. I found it, mijita, when I was working here all those years ago. The trees appeared to me.”
A world-changing revelation. “God” was all I managed. “What happened?”
Tears clouded my tía’s eyes. “It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.
To see it, you know that you are in its presence.
There is no doubt, no mistaking the sight for anything else.
And when I drew close, calming voices urged me to go to the middle of the formation and lay down the hurt inside my heart.
” Vivian’s face grew shadowed. “But I didn’t sit at first. I didn’t listen.
The artist in me couldn’t get over the quality of the wood on those three trunks.
Incomparable.” She gave a wry, wondrous smile.
“And the berries were so beautiful and lush. I only thought of my craft and what these materials could do to enhance my work. So I laid down my hurt the only way I knew how. By creating.”
“Your last caja de suenos,” I said.
She nodded. “My tools were with me that day. I took materials from one of the trees. Then I finally did as the voices asked and sat in the center of the triangle. But, Sylvie, my heartache did not pass. My grief did not fade away. In fact, the voices shut me out completely. I have never felt so alone. I ran back to the collective. And the rest is the same, about giving away the box. About me having to give up making any more of them for so long.”
Somehow we began strolling again. “But you did heal.”
“After so much time. It felt like a penance. And the voices, the urges, I did not hear them again. Until we arrived here.”
Helpless, hopeless, I simply stared.
“This time, they are peaceful. They fill my nights and my dreams, and they are always so close, welcoming me to . . .”
There was no need for her to continue, because my twisted heart, the twisted memory of us and my childhood, already knew. I shook my head, faster and faster, trying to erase the truth or outwit it. “There has to be a way—”
“No.” Her soft hand cupped my cheek. “My future already is. I am already too-much gone. Pero óyeme, amor, I am at peace.” She gestured with her head deeper into the forest. “Something incredible is waiting. My body, my soul—everything—is at rest.”
“I don’t feel that way at all,” I admitted. “My body is totally falling apart, and all I feel is lost and confused.” Displaced. As if my own sense of self had abandoned me this time.
“You will know everything when you are supposed to. The right path, the next step. That I can promise. Breathe now.”
I tried, but the motion felt half-hearted. Stilted.
She threaded her hand into mine like she did when I was little. “You are the reason I have stayed so long . . . like this. And I will stay, as long as you need me, before I go on.”
“Don’t. Please. We need to get through this together.” I grabbed on tighter, the word “go” ringing out dark and final. No, not yet. “Tía, my parents. What if we never see them again?”
She nodded, her eyes blurry and a little lost. “Right now, the only thing we can do is focus on remembering them.”
I tried to follow, but remembering didn’t feel like enough.
Not when my memory of my mom and dad was shadowed by everything we’d left unsaid.
Days ago, I’d scoffed at Viv when she’d suggested confronting them.
But now I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them with a forever amount of silence between us.
Were my parents even solid enough to pull toward each other instead of falling apart after the tremendous, life-altering loss of . . . us?
“We have to do something,” I stressed. “There has to be a way to leave a message for them.” A notion grazed the edges of my mind. “Do you think that’s why we were sent into this kind of limbo? To get the chance to make peace?”
Her head bobbed in contemplation. “If so, I think that is a worthy thing. Maybe we can think of a way. For now, let’s just keep walking.”
We did. But if there was one thing Tía Vivian had taught me about the natural world, it’s that it was always in motion, always changing.
The world around me changed too, as my feet shuffled over the uneven landscape.
Sacred, Oregon, was the last place I would ever travel.
I would never see Grier graduate from NYU or Ana rule the universe.
The growing list of I would nevers stacked higher and higher, and questions became as weighty as resentment.
How long did I have? And what would make me finally cross over, and what would that even feel like?
Panic wrapped around my limbs. I zeroed in on the gold watch on my left wrist and swore under my breath for even checking. Of course Penn wasn’t coming back this quickly.
But now that Penn had revealed the whole truth of death and half life to me, would the watch bring him back at all?