Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

a stinging at his eyes, looked down at her black hand on his white arm.

“I guess you want your other hundred.”

Alberta tsked impatiently and disengaged.

“Hope?” Ran reached her his free hand.

“I don’t need to go.”

“Come on. You haven’t used the bathroom since we left.”

Her frown was mutinous. She held her ground.

“Don’t mess with me,” said Ransom, suddenly putting on the face of power and channeling his father’s voice.

Hope came then. Downstairs, past the Piranesi scenes, beneath the gasolier…

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he muttered, staring upward as they passed.

“Who are you talking to?” Hope asked.

“To you, Pete,” he replied. “Tell the truth, now, honest Injun: don’t you think that chandelier is cool?”

Hope looked at it and blinked, then looked at him and blinked some more. Suddenly, she was Claire. Four years old, she got the thing that Tildy meant, the thing he never got, however many times it was explained. Her expression didn’t judge, it pitied him because he never would.

Ransom felt a tremor in his throat. “Come on, Charlie-boy, let’s do this thang! Who wants ice cream afterward?”

“I do!” Charlie said. “Me! Me! Me!”

Hope said nothing. Careful not to look at her, Ran felt like a lifeguard as the line that held his little girl slipped, burning, through his hand.

After he changed Charlie’s diaper and helped him wash his hands, Ran knelt, face-to-face with them, a hand on each small hip. “Listen, guys, I need your help again. There’s been a little change of plan. We’re going to take a ride.”

“Where we going, Doddy?”

“I’m not sure,” said Ran.

“What about Mommy?”

“Don’t worry, Pete. We’ll see her later.”

“Okay, Doddy.” Charlie blinked his little mismatched blink and nodded. He was in.

“Hope?” he said, and swallowed.

“Do we have to?”

Ransom took a sighing breath. “No, you can stay, if you want to. But I’d really like it if you came.”

Hope just pressed her lips and nodded, giving him a gift that her expression said might be the last.

Ransom leaned and kissed her cheek. “Okay, upsy daisy! Everybody climb!”

With that, he threw the window up, and out they went.

THIRTY-FIVE

Quién hizo esto a ella?”

“Tu sabes, Mamá.”

“I don’t believe it,” says Paloma, stretching the skin on Addie’s temple, examining what lies between her index finger and her thumb.

“¿Quién podría haberlo hecho?”

The second voice is Jarry’s. Addie—wanting only to sleep, to escape into unconsciousness—notes him and his mother in the room, hears their gravity of tone, but notes it only as one detail among others, none of them important. They’re talking about her the way people talk about someone who’s dying, or in imminent danger thereof. Is she going to? Until a little while ago, the idea would have seemed preposterous—to die before life has begun? Death, though, now, from Addie’s vantage, is only a word, another unimportant detail among unimportant details. Her dwindling reserves are wholly vested in the wish to sleep, that and in summoning the strength to take this breath, and the next one after that, when her chest feels so tender, so wounded and so raw, and each breath is like a drought of fire. And the headache. Her head is ringing like an anvil hammered by a maul. The vibration shivers down into the pit of her stomach, making her feel she may vomit at any time.

“No lo creeré.”

“Don’t believe it, then,” says Jarry. “Just help her.”

“Why?” the old woman says. “Why should we help her, hijo?”

“Because she’s innocent.”

“She’s not. This woman looked into my face and lied to me over your father’s corpse.”

“I don’t believe that. And even if she did, does she deserve to die for it?”

“Everything we bled and sweated for, she steps into possession of it all—how is she innocent?”

“If it were me,” he says, touching her shoulder, “you would not allow this.”

“You are my child,” Paloma says, “my son.”

“If I am, then do for her what you would for me. Do it for me, Mamacita.”

Paloma frowns. “Fetch me albahaca from the garden, and holy water in a vial.”

Reaching into the neck of her dress, she takes out her makuto, the leather amulet she wears, and from the pouch, carefully folded, the prayer to San Luis Beltrán, written in the hand of Tata Quien Vence, the nom de guerre of Andrés Petit. Three times nightly for three nights running they say this prayer over her—“Criatura de Dios, yo te curo, ensalmo, y bendigo en nombre de la Santísima Trinidad, Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo…”—sprinkling her with holy water as they pray and making the sign of the cross with basil leaves. By the fourth dawn, however, the fever is undiminished. There are fourteen knots in the string now, twenty-eight days of illness. Addie, physically, has become a wreck. It’s become an almost insuperable battle simply to force herself to breathe.

“The bilongo is not familiar to me,” Paloma says. “It’s very strong.”

“Can you set the Fiery Wall?”

She gives Jarry a hard look. “You expect me to set a black light on my child?”

“Then don’t use graveyard dirt. Throw the candle in the river.”

“And have it carry her away? No, I won’t work against her.”

Jarry takes her hand. “If she dies, Mama—how can it help Clarisse? It won’t. It’ll just be something else on her account, something else for which she’ll have to pay. And what has Addie done to suffer this?”

Far down in the dark world where she is—like one at the bottom of the sea, gazing up toward sunlight and the white sand beach—Addie hears him plead for her. It’s the first time she’s heard him use her given name, and this fills her with pathos—not as something that might be, but what might once have been.

“We’ll try angélica,” Paloma says, but roots, too, fail, and there are sixteen knots in the string now.

“There must be something else, Mama,” Jarry says.

“There is one last thing. If it fails, I don’t know….”

“Then try it, Mama, try the one last thing.”

Paloma frowns at him. “Bring her, then,” she says, and leaves the room.

As