“When I was little, I prayed the Lord’s Prayer. Do you know it?”
“Of course. I’m not particularly devout, but I am Catholic.”
He saw she hadn’t heard his answer, for she was speaking as if in a trance. “I prayed each night, every night.”
She hadn’t listened for his response because her mind was far away. Her posture was revealing. She was pressing her back against the wall, her knees slightly bent, and she was staring at the floor as if hypnotized by the little circle of light projected by her flashlight. “I repeated every word, every phrase of it, but especially the first one: ‘Our Father.’” She spoke slowly and quietly. “I wasn’t praying to God, though. I was pleading with my own father. He was in the next room, but he always pretended he hadn’t heard.”
She paused. Then she smiled faintly. “All these years, I never realized that. I saw it today when I was trying to pray for that man’s soul.”
Dupree was mesmerized. Questions crowded his mind, but he pushed them away. Her father was in the adjacent room, but what had frightened her? Was she pleading with him? Dupree took in what she’d said and what her body language betrayed. He absorbed every syllable. She had just had a true revelation, and as he listened, he knew his intuition had been correct. And he knew this woman was a mystery.
“I was calling for my father. Like this whole city, I was crying for help from the rooftops.” Again, Dupree saw Amaia realizing the truth of the words as she spoke them. “You think you’re part of a family, and you pray because you think your father’s listening. He didn’t listen until I died. I waited and waited, and at the last moment, he pulled me out of the grave.”
She looked up at Dupree. He silently begged her not to stop. He prayed his expression wouldn’t alert Amaia to how much of herself she was revealing.
“For years I thought he picked me up from where I was lying because he loved me. But the truth was that he was ashamed. That’s what motivated him: shame. Shame stopped his ears, and shame made him pick me up and take me away. But only because everyone was going to find out. Because if he hadn’t moved me, things would have been even worse for him. I was as devastated as this city, but the reason he rescued me was that he didn’t want to be humiliated before the whole town.”
Dupree watched the young woman as she slept. She’d slipped into sleep almost instantly: one moment she’d been speaking, the next moment she was curled up into a fetal position below the open window. She left him so quickly that he wondered whether she’d actually been aware of what she’d been saying. Maybe he’d witnessed somnambulistic free association brought on by stress and exhaustion. The flashlight beam aimed at the floor painted sinister shadows on her face. He was sure they mirrored the darkness that haunted her dreams.
Amaia was his needle in a haystack, a human capable of brilliant logical reasoning yet keenly aware of the invisible universe. She analyzed the world from two eternally contentious perspectives. Dupree brushed his fingers across the scars on his chest and counted the raised knots along the edge of the injury. Five of them. He’d been honest with her. He didn’t remember that distant night his parents had died; that night had belonged to Samedi. That night had plunged the city into chaos. He looked down at the unconscious young woman, fearing and yet at the same time urgently desiring a crisis that would push her to her limits. That crisis would come when Baron Samedi appeared again to reinstate his reign of anarchy and death.
41
THE HEART OF A ROEBUCK
Elizondo
Ignacio Aldecoa didn’t care for Elizondo. His wife, Joxepi, claimed he spent so much time up in the mountains that he was getting as rough and antisocial as his sheep. She used to tell her women friends that for Ignacio, walking through Elizondo was like being caught up in a mill wheel, because when he got back to their house, he seemed as confused and disoriented as if he’d gotten a toss and a dunking. Ignacio didn’t mind. He knew his wife loved him just as he was. She respected his silence and need for his own space, and she was happy raising their children at his side in that remote little hovel her sisters claimed no woman in her right mind would ever put up with.
Ignacio knew that in return, he had to accompany his wife to town, usually once a week. They’d order a coffee, enjoy a snack from the pastry shop, run a few errands, and do some window shopping.
They’d been standing for a while on Calle Santiago in front of the church. His wife was chatting with Engrasi, whom she’d known since their childhood together. Ignacio nodded from time to time without following their conversation as he watched Engrasi’s little niece playing nearby. The girl was thin and tall for her age, which was maybe ten or twelve. She hopped, avoiding the cracks between the stone sidewalk tiles that glistened after the afternoon rain and presented an almost invisible hopscotch pattern. From time to time, Amaia raised her head, glanced at her aunt, and then continued her silent, solitary game.
Ignacio appreciated Amaia. He didn’t usually care for children other than his own. Most were noisy, wild, and demanding. But this delicate little creature was different. Once he said as much to Joxepi, and she explained, “The poor little thing has suffered a lot. Her mother is sick in the head, and nobody’s been able to cure the woman. She has three daughters, but she’s rejected this one since the day the child was born.”
Ignacio had been raised in the countryside, so he understood entirely. Among animals both wild and domesticated, sometimes a mother rejected an offspring for no apparent reason. She left it to die from hunger, cold, and neglect. And those babies simply accepted that extraordinary cruelty from a mother entirely devoted to her other offspring.
Ignacio was aware he felt an affinity for Amaia because she resembled him in some way. Quiet and watchful, she greeted people shyly and then withdrew a few steps to play in silence, always keeping close to her aunt. Amaia didn’t care for Elizondo either. She moved like a roebuck caught in traffic, cocking an ear at every sound. He had the impression that her little heart quivered at every fleeting intuition.
The child continued playing her game of invisible hopscotch. Ignacio glanced at the sky. It had darkened, but he hadn’t noticed, because the streetlamps had been lit for a while. He checked his watch and was surprised, realizing once again how much Elizondo’s artificial urban illumination distorted his sense of time. He looked back at the girl, lit by the orange-tinted gleam of gas lamps on the church front. He felt a sudden stir of alarm.
At first he wasn’t sure what caused it. Long before this moment, he’d developed a reliable sixth sense while protecting and caring for his flock—that’s what happens when you go out on the mountainside every day with sheep as tasty to predators as candy is to children. He stepped away from the women without a word and went to keep a closer eye on the girl. Nothing at all unusual happened during the following five minutes. The child continued her game of hidden hopscotch.
Engrasi and Joxepi chatted cheerfully. At one point, Ignacio heard his wife call out for corroboration. “Isn’t that right, Ignacio?” He nodded automatically without taking his eyes off the girl. A car pulled up next to the sidewalk. Raindrops on the chassis shone like blisters from countless burns. The orange illumination of the streetlights was mirrored in its high sheen. He instantly recognized it as the car with French plates that had idled past a few minutes earlier on the way downhill. Later that night, as he tossed and turned in bed unable to sleep, he would become almost certain that wasn’t the second but instead the third time he’d seen the car. A few minutes earlier he’d wondered why that vehicle with tinted windows was creeping along so slowly.