At one that morning, having tossed and turned since ten, he got up and turned on the computer, hoping that crunching numbers would lull his brain into a state of relaxation. The three cats sat on his desk while he worked, clearly pleased that he was finally acknowledging the joys of being nocturnal.
At two he went back to bed. The soft rain had intensified into a downpour. He drifted off only to be startled awake by a deafening clap of thunder. At two-thirty, he ignored the rains, strode out to his truck, grabbed the statue and its newsprint wrappings, and brought the whole soggy mess into the house and set it on the kitchen table with a thump.
He glared at it for a few moments before taking the funny little statue out of its newspaper cocoon. A bird woman. Great. What was he supposed to make of that? He looked at it back and front, examined it top to bottom. Disgusted and more exhausted than ever, he gathered up the tattered newspaper to toss.
Which is when he saw it. A thin strip of yellowed paper in the very bottom of the wrappings, and on it, written in bright, red ink: Set me as a seal upon thine heart …
He studied it, surprised. Obviously, Liora’s cool disinterest was a ruse. Clearly, she’d meant for him to find this; that was why she’d been so pissed that he’d left the thing in the truck. She wanted him, after all. She just couldn’t come out and say so. And he’d almost thrown it away.
Mystified but pleased, he turned off the kitchen lights and was about to return to bed when he decided on a little extra insurance, just to make sure he slept this time. He reached into one of the cabinets for a bottle of tequila.
His hand closed on the glass bottle and he pulled it out of the cabinet. He reached for the cap and realized it wasn’t a bottle at all. Turning on the kitchen light, he saw that he held a red glass votive candle. A decal of the Virgin of Guadalupe graced its front, a fiery sacred heart its back. It was the same candle his mother had brought his grandmother. She’d stopped by his house after the nursing home ordered it removed. She’d said that abuelita wanted him to have it.
He shook his head, set the candle on the counter, and once again rummaged for the tequila. The bottle was half empty. Nearly a year ago Lupita, another ex, brought it to him as a gift. She claimed tequila was medicine, that it opened the heart. What he’d found was that Lupita didn’t like making love without it. The tequila buzz dissolved her Catholic-school inhibitions. Two shots and she was all over him, her body swaying to some inner music. Three shots and she began murmuring about love and after the fifth, she had a positive gift for the scatological. On one such high, she’d told him in revelatory tones that the outline of his balls and the shaft of his erect penis combined to form the shape of the sacred heart. Ultimately, though, Lupita had been a good Catholic girl who wanted a husband and babies in white baptism gowns. He’d explained that he wasn’t the marrying kind, then had promptly taken up with both Madeleine and Gwen to prove his point.
He opened the half-empty bottle and swallowed. He felt the golden liquid burn its way through him, then swallowed several more times, letting the liquor melt him into ease. Ten minutes later, he felt sure he would finally sleep. He turned toward the bedroom then on impulse turned back.
Feeling foolish but too drunk to care, he struck a match and lit the votive candle. A tiny yellow flame danced inside the red glass.
“You know I don’t believe in you,” he told the Virgin. “But my abuelita does. So maybe you’ll help her out, okay?”
It rained without cease all the next day and the day after. The washes ran high on the first day. By the afternoon of the second, they began to flood. Roads were blocked off and a bridge washed out. The city traffic became a tangle of detours. The Rillito River, normally a dry wash, had risen so high that people were canoeing and swimming their horses, and one of the riverside university buildings was in danger of joining them in the drink. Enrique found himself doing crisis management, assessing the damage to the river bank, consulting on the repair of the bridge, assuring assorted politicos that the city of Tucson would not be swept away, and even doing an inane forty-second TV interview that somehow took an hour to tape.
It was dark by the time he got finally home from the TV station. The rain was still falling. His driveway was a sheet of mud. Inside the house, the cats greeted him impatiently, demanding their dinner. The kitchen glowed with a dim red light. The votive candle was still burning. He turned on the overhead, took care of the cats, and found himself staring at the candle. La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgin Mary who had miraculously appeared in sixteenth-century Mexico as a pregnant, dark-skinned Indian woman. She was depicted as she’d been for the last four hundred years: wearing a blue cloak scattered with golden stars, standing on a crescent moon upheld by an angel, and surrounded by a spiky golden halo.
He nuked himself a frozen dinner in the microwave, listened to phone messages (Liora hadn’t left one), and made a brief call to the nursing home. His grandmother’s condition hadn’t changed.
Seena rubbed up against his ankles, plaintively crying to be let out into the garden. He turned on the porch light and let her onto the porch. The rain had thinned to a drizzle.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “It’s wet out there.” The cat replied with a definite affirmative. He shrugged and opened the screen door. “It’s your fur,” he told her.
He waited through the tedium of the evening news, only to find that his interview had been cut for a report on the sighting of black jaguar roaming the outskirts of the city. Jaguars were extinct in Arizona, though there was a remote chance one had wandered up from Mexico. It was typical that they’d bumped his interview for a highly doubtful rumor. More storm hysteria.
Two hours later he called Seena in. She made a guttural sound in response but did not come to the door.
Resigned, he stepped outside. As there’d been no need to water, he hadn’t gone out into the yard in days. The garden, he saw, had been transformed by the rains. The sage was taller than he was. The grape vine so thick and heavy that it was snaking along the roof, blanketing the porch screens, the kitchen and bedroom windows, and wrapping around the western edge of the house. The datura had climbed all the way up to the top of the fence, covering it in white blossoms; a hibiscus he hadn’t even remembered being there was wound with pink flowers; and a carpet of purple verbena covered even the garden paths. Just beyond the gates a chorus of coyotes began their eerie harmonies. It reminded him uncomfortably of the night he’d seen that woman, the night the cat had disappeared.
“Seena!” he called again. He was embarrassingly relieved when she trotted right up to him. He scooped her into his arms and took her back into the house, making sure to lock the sliding glass door. He locked the other doors, then turned in for the night. He fell into a deep sleep at once.
He never knew what woke him. Not thunder or lightning or coyotes or the cats. It was curiously quiet for a summer night in the desert. Even the crickets were silent.
Thirsty, he got up and padded into the kitchen for a glass of water. The votive candle was still flickering, burned nearly halfway down, the Virgin gazing at him with compassion.
“And a good night to you,” he told her as he finished his water. It was beginning to seem like she was the only woman he was actually having a relationship with.
He started back to bed when he thought he heard something on the porch. He switched on the porch light and peered through the sliding glass door. The wicker rocker was rocking and the porch swing swaying, as if both had invisible occupants.