Fernanda
“But the little god underestimated the girl from the water. When the god’s back was turned, the girl grabbed up the talking stone the god had thrown in the fire and tossed it to the bear because his thick paws didn’t mind the heat.
The stone was relieved, and promised to tell the girl where the little god hid—”
The sound had come from the mountain.
Frank was a fool, in other words. But a lethal one.
Stepping inside, the first thing she’d heard was an endless scream from upstairs. She found her brother Miguel alone in an unfurnished room, screaming and rocking next to a broken sewing machine and a box of burned-out flashbulbs like any other piece of junk.
“It’s good you came,” one of the tax men told her. “We were worried we’d have to put him away somewhere.”
Fernanda would never let that happen. Even in her shock—even as she realized that her fortunes had been obliterated—Fernanda’s first priority had been Miguel.
It was always Miguel. He was autistic, deeply so, and Fernanda had learned a long time ago that when he got like this—when his mind seemed to collapse in absolute free fall—the only thing that could calm him down was a story.
So she had sat on the bare floor in the upstairs room, careful to give him space, and said through the screams, “Have you heard the one about the baby wolf that ate the moon?”
By the end of the story, Miguel was quiet. The men from the tax office were long gone. She sat with her brother in the long sunset of a Monterey summer, watching the light seep over the bare walls like honeyed blood. Her life, hemorrhaging before her eyes.
But at least her brother stopped screaming.
In his tiny, tiny, tiny voice, Miguel said, “Nanda.” His name for her. The only word she’d ever heard him speak.
“Nanda.”
The stories were a trick Fernanda’s grandmother had taught her back when Miguel’s challenges had first become obvious.
You get a good hook, a problem right in the first sentence, and all the rest comes easy.
Be surprising and familiar at the same time, her grandmother used to say.
Not really surprising: life’s bad enough with those already.
Give the listener the sort of surprise they think they should have seen coming. Give them a magic trick.
Fernanda often wondered just how much of her stories Miguel really took in, but they always calmed him down.
In the end, Fernanda had found a frosty aunt who agreed to take in Miguel, but only when Fernanda handed over the last of the money she’d been able to scrounge together from her family’s devastated accounts.
She didn’t exactly trust her aunt to be a perfect caretaker for Miguel, but it only needed to last a year.
Fernanda herself was going to return to Connecticut to complete her schooling.
A bilingual woman with a prestigious finance degree—there wouldn’t be much limit on what she could do.
Fernanda should have known, when she booked a bus back to the US, that the fare was too cheap.
She had climbed aboard to discover a coach full of surprisingly good-looking young people heading north, passports in hand, only to watch in dread as they took a sudden detour into the desert.
The fat driver and his wife up front had pulled a black curtain over the plastic partition, like an executioner draping a handkerchief over the face of a convict bracing for the axe.
The girl in the seat next to Fernanda started to weep. Fernanda said, “Have you heard the story about the cat that talked to the ocean?”
A reflex, really. But somehow, it always worked.
The rest was a blur. The bus stopped near the Rio. A pontoon bridge was already set up, waiting for them. Several men and dark SUVs waited on the other side. When the passengers saw the words on the sides of the SUVs, they were foolish enough to think, for a while, that they were safe.
Fernanda had no such illusions. When their hands were zip-tied and their documents seized, she held her head down and kept walking. Already, one thought and one thought alone dominated her mind.
She was going back to her brother. Some way. Somehow.
And then the tallest of the men at the border, the one who was clearly in charge, hooked a finger under her chin and lifted her head to study her eyes. “I’ll take this one,” he said. Like she was a dog at the market.
The name on his shirt read O’SHEA.
It didn’t bear repeating what Frank had wanted from her.
What he’d done to her when he’d taken her back to his massive home and his massive bed.
What mattered was what came after. That first night, Frank O’Shea had dozed off on top of Fernanda, only to awaken a few moments later with a scream in the small hours.
He shook with fear. He didn’t know where he was.
Who Fernanda was. Before he could collect himself, Frank whispered, “Mother?”
Fernanda knew an opportunity when she saw one. She forced down a wave of nausea and gently guided his head back down to her chest. “Have you heard the story of the wolf that met the falling star?”
It was absurd, it was humiliating, but it had calmed him down. The next day, he said, almost a little sheepish, “That’s the best I’ve slept in years.”
Frank didn’t release her back to Mexico, of course. But he didn’t sell her down the river either.
Here, in the Brake Inn Motel, the motel’s generator stuttered yet again. Outside, the toe-curling SHRIEKS, like something from the worst of her grandmother’s stories, came closer.
Through it all, Fernanda watched Kyla sleep.
When Kyla had tackled Stanley Holiday back in the office, the big man had thrown her against the desk so hard Fernanda had feared the girl might not wake up.
Probably no danger of that. Kyla seemed to be breathing steadily, deep in slumber, but her dreams had clearly troubled her.
Her mouth twitched and scowled, twisted with fear.
Another of those deafening moans echoed over the motel, and this time Fernanda realized something terribly sad.
There was a pain in the sound, an obvious agony, and it sent a bubble of tears swelling in Fernanda’s throat.
In a way that was hard to explain, the sound from the mountain made Fernanda think of nothing so much as the wail of her brother in free fall.
And then, when the sound faded again, Fernanda looked down.
Kyla’s eyes were open.
The girl sat up with a gasp, blinking in the light, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Without a word, the girl started to move. She rolled to the other side of the bed and struggled to stand.
Fernanda rushed to her. “Wait. Slow down. You hit your head. Hard.”
Kyla sank back to the bed, but just enough to gather her strength. “I’m fine. What time is it?”
Fernanda looked at their alarm clock. “Just past eleven fifty, but I believe that clock is fast.”
“It’s not. Shit.”
Kyla rose again, pushing past Fernanda. She grabbed her jacket from where Fernanda had draped it on the other bed, grabbed Lance’s gun off the nightstand.
Kyla wobbled with every step. She shook her head, popped her jaw.
She didn’t stop moving. She unlocked their door.
She went out into the cold, Fernanda on her heels.
The wind was picking up. Fernanda had to shout over the noise. “Where are you going?”
“There’s no time. He’ll be here any minute.”