“Chinese,” Alex repeated. He started walking again, but his eyes kept wandering over the Oriental faces around him. “The Chinese built the railroads,” he suddenly said. Then: “The railroad barons, Collis P. Huntington and Leland Stanford, brought them in by the thousands. Now San Francisco has one of the biggest Chinese populations outside of China.”
Lisa stared at Alex for a moment; then suddenly she knew. “A tour book,” she said. “You read a tour book, didn’t you?”
Alex nodded. “I didn’t want to spend all day asking you questions,” he said. “I know you don’t like that. So I studied.”
Bob Carey’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You studied? You read a whole guidebook just because we were coming up here for a day?”
Again Alex nodded.
“But who can remember all that stuff? Who even cares? For Christ’s sake, Alex, all we’re doing is messing around.”
“Well, I think it’s neat,” Kate told her boyfriend. Then she turned to Alex. “Did you really memorize all the streets while we were on the cable car?”
“I didn’t have to,” Alex admitted. “I got a map, too. I memorized it.”
“Bullshit!” Bob’s eyes were suddenly angry. “Where’s the mission?” he demanded.
Alex hesitated a moment; then: “Sixteenth and Dolores. It’s on the corner, and there’s a park in the same block.”
“Well?” Kate asked Bob. “Is he right?”
“I don’t know,” Bob admitted, his face reddening. “Who even cares where the mission is?”
“I do,” Lisa said, reaching out to squeeze Alex’s hand. “How do we get there?”
“Go down to Market, then up to Dolores, and left on Dolores.”
“Then let’s go.”
The little mission with its adjoining cemetery and garden was exactly where Alex had said it would be, crouching on the corner almost defensively, as if it knew it was no more than a relic from the city’s long-forgotten past. The city, indeed, had even taken away its original name — San Francisco de Asís. Now it was called Mission Dolores, and it seemed to have taken on the very sadness its name implied.
“Want to go in?” Lisa asked of no one in particular.
“What for?” Bob groaned. “Haven’t we all seen enough missions? They used to drag us off to one every year!”
“Well, what about Alex?” Lisa argued. “I bet he doesn’t remember ever seeing a mission before. And did you ever see this mission? Come on.”
Following Lisa, they went into the little church, then out into the garden, and suddenly the city beyond the garden walls might as well have disappeared, for within the little space occupied by the mission, there was no trace of the modern world.
The garden, still kept neatly trimmed after nearly two hundred years, was in the last stages of its summer bloom. Here and there dead leaves had already fallen to the ground, dotting the pathways with bright gold. Off in the far corner, they could see the old cemetery. “Over there,” Alex said softly. “Let’s go over there.”
The quietness of his voice caught Lisa’s attention, and she turned to look into Alex’s eyes. For the first time since the accident, there seemed to be life in them. “What is it, Alex?” she asked. “You’re remembering something, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Alex whispered. He was walking slowly along one of the paths now, but his eyes remained fixed on the weathered headstones of the graveyard.
“The graveyard?” Lisa asked. “Do you remember the graveyard?”
Alex’s mind was whirling, and he barely heard Lisa’s question. Images were flickering, and there were sounds. But nothing was clear, except that the images and sounds were connected with this place. Trembling slightly, he kept walking.
“What’s wrong with him?” Kate asked, her voice worried. “He looks weird.”
“I think he’s remembering something,” Lisa replied.
“We’d better go with him,” Bob added, but Lisa shook her head.
“I’ll go,” she told them. “You guys wait for us, okay?”
Kate nodded mutely, and as Alex stepped into the tiny fenced cemetery, Lisa hurried after him.
The images had begun coming into focus as soon as he’d entered the cemetery. His heart was pounding, and he felt out of breath, as if he’d been running for a long time. He scanned the little graveyard, and his eyes came to rest on a small stone near the wall.
In his mind, there were images of people.
Women dressed in black, their faces framed by white cowls, their feet clad in sandals.
Nuns.
In his mind’s eye he saw a group of nuns clustering around a boy, and the boy was himself.
But he was different somehow.
His hair was darker, and his skin had an olive complexion to it.
And he was crying.
Unconsciously Alex moved closer to the headstone that had triggered the strange images, and the images seemed to move with him. Then he was standing at the grave, gazing down at the inscription that was still barely legible in the worn granite
Fernando Meléndez y Ruiz
1802–1850
A word flashed into his mind, and he repeated it out loud. “¡Tío!” As he uttered the word, a stab of pain knifed through his brain, then was gone.
And then voices began whispering to him — the voices of the nuns, though the images of them had already faded away.
“Él está muerto.” He is dead.
And then there was another voice — a man’s voice — whispering to him out of the depths of his memory. “¡Venganza … venganza!”
He stood very still, his eyes brimming with unfamiliar tears, his pulse throbbing. The voice went on, whispering to him in Spanish, but only the one word registered on his mind: “Venganza.”
His tears overflowed, and a sob choked his throat. Then, as the strange words pounded in his head, he gave in to the sudden unfamiliar rush of emotion.
Time seemed to stand still, and he felt a kind of pain he couldn’t remember having ever felt before. Pain of the heart, and of the soul.
The pain seared at him, and then he became aware of a hand tugging at him, slowly penetrating the chaos in his mind.
“Alex?” a voice said. “Alex, what’s wrong? What is it?”
Alex pointed to the grave, sobbing brokenly, and Lisa, after a moment of utter confusion, began to understand what must have happened. She had listened carefully that day last month before Alex came home from the hospital, and she could still remember the words.
“He could start laughing or crying at any time,” Alex’s mother had told her. “Dr. Torres says it won’t matter if something is funny or sad. It’s just that it’s possible that there will be misconnections in his brain, and he could react inappropriately to something. Or he could simply overreact.”
And that, Lisa was certain, was exactly what was happening now. Alex was overreacting to an ancient grave.
But why?
He had remembered something, she had been sure of it. And now he was staring at the grave, tears streaming down his face, uncontrollable sobs racking his body. Gently she tried to pull him away as a priest appeared from the back of the church and looked at them quizzically.
“Something wrong?”
“No,” Lisa quickly replied. “Everything’s all right. It …” She floundered for a moment, trying to think of an explanation for Alex’s behavior, but her mind had suddenly gone blank. “Come on, Alex,” she whispered. “Let’s get out of here.”
Half-dragging Alex, she edged her way past the priest, then out of the graveyard. Once back in the garden, she put her arms around Alex and squeezed him. “It’s all right, Alex,” she whispered. “It was only an old grave. Nothing to cry about.”