“Too warm,” Rafe said.
The AC was blasting, and the ceiling fan was directly overhead, whipping around at what seemed to be a dangerously high speed.
Rafe turned his head and mumbled something to his youngest daughter. Rosa left the room and went into the kitchen, where Iridian could hear the creak of a cabinet door opening, followed by the whoosh of water running from the tap.
“Hey.” Iridian poked her dad in the shoulder. “If you’re sick I can call Jessica and have her bring something home from the pharmacy, yeah?”
Rosa returned and placed a glass of ice water in her dad’s hand. None of the family’s glasses were part of a matching set, and some were so old they used to belong to the girls’ grandparents. This one once had white-and-yellow flowers painted on it, but by now all the flowers had practically smudged off from years of use.
Rafe took a shaky sip of water, then cleared his throat to get Iridian’s attention. When their eyes met, Iridian braced herself for her dad to tell her she was like a disease, or something else equally awful.
He croaked out, “Ana,” and then erupted into a coughing fit. Rosa snatched the glass away so that he wouldn’t spill and placed it on the coffee table.
Ana. Ana, Ana, Ana.
“Dad, I know—” Iridian started.
“Iridian,” Rafe said, interrupting. “I can’t breathe . . . my head.”
Iridian sighed. Which was it? His lungs or his head?
“We’ll call Jessica,” Rosa offered. “She can come home and take you to one of those twenty-four-hour clinics.”
“I don’t need a clinic. No doctors.” Rafe groaned and pushed himself to standing. He was up, but wobbly. He placed his hand on the back of the couch. There it was again: that little string bracelet.
A series of soft sounds—a click, a plunk, and a thunk—caused Iridian to turn. The glass Rosa had just placed on the table had tipped, spilling water and ice across the wood surface and down onto the carpet.
“I must’ve bumped it,” Rosa said, rushing to the kitchen for paper towels.
Rafe hobbled into his room and closed the door. Iridian was still on the floor in the living room, sitting on her heels. By then, both of her feet were asleep. Her thoughts went to her closet, to her books, then to her bed, and to her notebook. All she wanted was to spend the rest of this day with those pages.
“I’m going back upstairs,” Iridian called out to Rosa. “If he does this again, don’t come get me.”
Jessica
(early Wednesday, June 12th)
Stones plunked against Jessica’s window. At first, she had one of those moments when dream and reality merge: She was at the pharmacy, opening boxes in the stockroom. Peter Rojas was there with her, and he kept picking up and dropping the same heavy box on the concrete floor over and over again.
Then Jessica was awake, but not all the way. She vaguely realized she was in her bed with the covers pulled up over her head. Her breath caught, and her eyes flew open. She tossed off her comforter, hurled herself across the room, and pulled back the curtains. John was there with his arm cocked back like a baseball pitcher. He grinned as he let a stone fly at Jessica’s window. Behind him, idling at the curb, was Jenny Sanchez’s Buick.
Jessica hadn’t gotten much sleep in the last few days, so she wasn’t in the mood for whatever this was. She knew, however, that she couldn’t just leave John out there. She held up a hand, telling him to wait, and after wrestling on some clothes—cutoffs, a T-shirt, flip-flops—she crept downstairs.
“What are you doing here?” Jessica whispered to John once she was out in the yard. “What happened to your phone?”
“Dead,” John replied. “Come on.”
John led Jessica to the car and held the door open. Jessica slid into the back seat, bracing herself for the reek of stale cigarette smoke. John climbed in next to her. Jenny’s Buick was a hand-me-down of a hand-me-down. It used to belong to Jenny’s brother, and before that, to Jenny’s uncle. Its color was a nearly iridescent pale sky blue, and what was left of the original interior—what wasn’t patched up with black electrical tape—was royal blue leather. It reminded Jessica of a big metal blue jay.
“Hi, Jenny,” Jessica said.
“Hey, girl.” Jenny flicked the ash of her cigarette out her open window and reached up to the steering column to shift the car into drive.
John threw his arm around Jessica’s shoulders.
“Seriously,” Jessica urged. “What are you doing here?”
“C’mon, Jess.” John brought her into an embrace that was just a little too tight. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Jenny drove north, into the heart of downtown San Antonio, and then parked her car on an empty side street. From there, John led Jessica across a large, empty square toward the Cathedral of San Fernando. This was Rosa’s church, and the family’s church back when they pretended to be Catholics. It wasn’t just a church, though. It was more like a monument, an architectural marvel, a mammoth thing built hundreds of years ago with towers and arches and spires and bells that rang to mark the hours.
As Jessica neared this church-monument, she could hear whispers and hushed laughter, but she couldn’t yet see who was there. She could only make out dark, body-shaped clouds and phone screens and the glowing tips of cigarettes.
“Hey,” Jenny called out. “Sorry we’re late.”
Heads turned. People said hey back. At this point Jessica could see that the group was made up of people from school or friends of friends, maybe a dozen total, including, of all people, Peter Rojas.
Peter was standing on the fringes, next to Calvin, another one of the boys who was always at Hector’s house. It was weird to see Peter there, out of his element, wearing normal clothes—army green shorts that came just past his knees and a white T-shirt—and without a name tag pinned to his chest. His shoes were the same, though: off-white canvas sneakers, not that Jessica would admit to noticing. Their eyes met, and Peter gave Jessica a small nod before looking away.
“So what’s going on?” John asked.
“Okay,” Jenny said, pausing to light another cigarette. “We’re playing sardines in the church. Someone hides, like in hide-and-seek. The rest of us wait out here for five minutes, then go in. When you find the person who’s hiding, you hide with them. The point is for the group of hiders to get bigger and bigger until there’s just one person left running around the church wondering where the hell everyone is. So.” Jenny looked around, took a drag from her cigarette, and exhaled a puff of smoke into the dark night. “Who’s hiding first?”