It was still hard for him to believe that she was the one who was ill. All through his childhood, whenever he was sick, it was his abuelita, not doctors, whom his mother called. Abuelita would sit beside his bed and explain that being sick meant that your alma, your soul, was a little lost. Even fear, she’d say, could shake the soul from a body. So what they had to do to make him well was to call it back. He remembered being wide-eyed with wonder as she explained that his soul had not traveled far — it hovered near his pulse points: his wrists, his temples, his throat, his heart. Solemnly, she would touch these points, calling his alma back into his body. She would then supplement this therapy with candles and incense, soups and fruits and herbs, hot compresses and her omnipresent prayers to la Virgen. Her cures had never failed him.
The door to her room was open. His grandmother sat in a wheelchair, a thin crocheted blanket wrapped around her shoulders. When had she gotten so small and wizened and gray? She used to be so round. He remembered sitting next to her in church as a boy, leaning into the soft warmth of her body.
“Abuelita. It’s Enrico.”
There was no movement or response. Her eyes, he noticed, seemed focused somewhere beyond the room.
He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “I brought you red flowers,” he said in Spanish. Red was her favorite color. “Do you want me to put them in water?” He did not ask her how she was feeling. That would have been absurd.
He busied himself filling a drinking glass with water and attempting to arrange the long, green stems inside it. He put the carnations on the night stand where she could see them. When she’d first come here, his mother had brought her one of the tall votive candles, with a decal of the Virgin on the red glass. She never even got the chance to light it. An aide informed them that the nursing home forbade candles.
He sat down on the neatly made bed. “They told me you had another stroke last night.”
A trickle of saliva ran from the corner of her mouth. He grabbed a tissue and dabbed at it gently.
“Are they treating you okay here? … Can you hear me at all?”
His grandmother’s only response was to continue to drool.
“Mama’s in Mexico with Tía Carmen,” he told her. “So it’s just going to be me visiting for a while. Is there something I can get you? Something you want?”
As far he could tell, she didn’t even know that he was in the room with her. He laid his fingertips against her wrist, as she would have done for him. But he detected nothing beyond her heartbeat.
He glanced at his watch. He’d been here fifteen minutes. He’d stay another ten and then he really had to take a look at that wash.
He sat with her in silence, listening to the hum of the air-conditioning system, to the sound of medication carts being wheeled down the hall. Neither Dr. Donovan nor Ms. Mitchell appeared, and he had no desire to seek them out.
When the twenty-five minutes were up he got to his feet.
“I’ve got to go now,” he said. “But I’ll be back later this week, okay?”
He was halfway to the door when she spoke. “Te …” Her voice was weak and slurred.
“Qué?” he asked. “Digamé, abuelita.” He tried in English, “What? Tell me.”
She never once looked at him, but she struggled to speak. “Te … te … ten miedo,” she said at last, her voice a whisper.
He listened for more, but there wasn’t any. He waited another five minutes, until he was convinced that it was all she would say. He wondered if she were sensing her own approaching death. If her soul had been shaken loose. What she’d struggled so hard to say was: Have fear.
He stroked her cheek. “No miedo,” he told her, and kissed her once again before leaving.
“You related to her?” A voice stopped him as he walked down the hall.
He turned to see a tall, black woman dressed in a nurse’s white uniform. A blue cardigan hung from her shoulders.
“I’m her grandson,” he answered.
“I haven’t seen you here before,” she said pointedly. “What’s your name?”
He told her.
“Guess you’re not him.”
“Who?”
“Yesterday afternoon, I went in to give her her medication. She was in a state. Very agitated. Kept repeating, ‘Elbooho, elbooho, elbooho.’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. I checked her elbows — nothing. So now I see you coming out of her room and I think, maybe his name is Elbooho.”
He shook his head. “Sorry.”
The woman gave him a long look. “Uh-huh,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Guess I can’t tell a grown man he ought come around and visit his grandma more often, now can I?”
“Point taken,” he told her. “You’re very subtle.”
She finally smiled at him. “It’s my talent.”
It was not until he was halfway across town, driving toward the wash, that he let his grandmother’s words run through his mind. He thought about the way she’d phrased it. She hadn’t meant that she had fear, he realized. It was a command, a warning, perhaps even for him. An even odder thought occurred to him. Maybe elbooho wasn’t the name of a person. Maybe it was two words: El búho. The owl.
The wash was at the very edge of town, in the foothills of the Rincons. The area was still rural — dirt roads, a few houses, mostly cactus and palo verde and a few soft green mesquite bosques hidden in the folds of the land. It was slated for two different developments that would include houses, a strip mall, and a small industrial park.
He drove down a wide, graded dirt road that had once led to a ranch, then took a smaller road, branching north. He parked the truck beside the wash, surprised to see a dust-covered Jeep a few hundred yards away. He hadn’t expected company.
Curious, he stepped out of the truck and glanced up and down the wash. The owner of the Jeep wasn’t in sight, nor were there footprints in the soft, sandy soil. The channel was fairly deep here, and the banks and even the middle of the wash were covered with green, a thick growth of acacia, desert broom, scrub oak, and mesquite. A striped lizard skittered across the sand and disappeared behind a rock.
He knelt to check the soil sediment, then began walking upstream to see if the banks were stable, to see where the erosion was going. He glanced up as he heard a low rumble of thunder. It was still early in the afternoon, and full white clouds were rising from behind the Catalina Mountains to the north. The clouds were already a good deal larger than they’d been when he’d left the nursing home half an hour ago. Another storm was building.
He stopped walking as he saw her. This time she was wearing loose khaki shorts and a black, sleeveless T-shirt. Her hair hung in a single, heavy braid. She was kneeling in the wash, brushing gently at the soil.
“Ah,” he said, “just the woman I was hoping to meet up with. ¡Qué casualidad!”
Liora shaded her eyes to look up at him. “Not a coincidence,” she corrected him. “The State Historical Commission hired me to do some sampling.”
“Let me guess. We are standing on the site of a prehistoric Native American village. Or better yet, a sacred burial site.”
“If we are, your developer doesn’t get to divert the wash,” she said, rising to her feet.
He stared at her, aware of the sheen of sweat on her arms and chest, of her eyes being nearly as black as her hair and of both being darker than the faded cotton T-shirt. “Maybe I ought to wait on my report until you tell me whether or not you’re going to stop the project.”