El Viejo caught her hands, surprisingly gently, still laughing to himself. «Little girl, listen, listen now. Ninita, nobody else — nobody — ever do what you do. You understand? Nobody but me ever walk that road back from where I leave you, understand?» The big white half–circles under his eyes were stretching and curling like live things.
Angie pulled away from him with all her strength, as she had hit him. She said, «No. That's Marvyn. Marvyn's the witch, the brujo — don't go telling people it's me. Marvyn's the one with the power.»
«Him?» Angie had never heard such monumental scorn packed into one syllable. El Viejo said, «Your brother nothing, nobody, we no bother with him. Forget him — you the one got the regalo, you just don't know.» The big white teeth filled her vision; she saw nothing else. «I show you — me, El Viejo. I show you what you are.»
It was beyond praise, beyond flattery. For all her dread and dislike of El Viejo, to have someone of his wicked wisdom tell her that she was like him in some awful, splendid way made Angie shiver in her heart. She wanted to turn away more than she had ever wanted anything — even Jake Petrakis — but the long walk home to Sunday was easier than breaking the clench of the white–haired man's malevolent presence would have been. Having often felt (and almost as often dismissed the notion) that Marvyn was special in the family by virtue of being the baby, and a boy — and now a potent witch — she let herself revel in the thought that the real gift was hers, not his, and that if she chose she had only to stretch out her hand to have her command settle home in it. It was at once the most frightening and the most purely, completely gratifying feeling she had ever known.
But it was not tempting. Angie knew the difference.
«Forget it," she said. «Forget it, buster. You've got nothing to show me.»
El Viejo did not answer her. The old, old eyes that were all pupil continued slipping over her like hands, and Angie went on glaring back with the brown eyes she despaired of because they could never be as deep–set and deep green as her mother's eyes. They stood so — for how long, she never knew — until El Viejo turned and opened his mouth as though to speak to the silent old lady whose own stone eyes seemed not to have blinked since Angie had first entered the Santeria shop, a childhood ago. Whatever he meant to say, he never got the words out, because Marvyn came back then.
He came down the dark hall from a long way off, as El Viejo had done the first time she saw him — as she herself had trudged forever, only moments ago. But Marvyn had come a further journey: Angie could see that beyond doubt in the way he stumbled along, looking like a shadow casting a person. He was struggling to carry something in his arms, but she could not make out what it was. As long as she watched him approaching, he seemed hardly to draw any nearer. Whatever he held looked too heavy for a small boy: it threatened constantly to slip from his hands, and he kept shifting it from one shoulder to the other, and back again. Before Angie could see it clearly, El Viejo screamed, and she knew on the instant that she would never hear a more terrible sound in her life. He might have been being skinned alive, or having his soul torn out of his body — she never even tried to tell herself what it was like, because there were no words. Nor did she tell anyone that she fell down at the sound, fell flat down on her hands and knees, and rocked and whimpered until the scream stopped. It went on for a long time.
When it finally stopped, El Viejo was gone, and Marvyn was standing beside her with a baby in his arms. It was black and immediately endearing, with big, bright, strikingly watchful eyes. Angie looked into them once, and looked quickly away.
Marvyn looked worn and exhausted. His eyepatch was gone, and the left eye that Angie had not seen for months was as bloodshot as though he had just come off a three–day drunk — though she noticed that it was not wandering at all. He said in a small, dazed voice, «I had to go back a really long way, Angie. Really long.»
Angie wanted to hold him, but she was afraid of the baby. Marvyn looked toward the old woman in the corner and sighed; then hitched up his burden one more time and clumped over to her. He said, «Ma'am, I think this is yours?» Adults always commented on Marvyn's excellent manners.
The old woman moved then, for the first time. She moved like a wave, Angie thought: a wave seen from a cliff or an airplane, crawling along so slowly that it seemed impossible for it ever to break, ever to reach the shore. But the sea was in that motion, all of it caught up in that one wave; and when she set down her pipe, took the baby from Marvyn and smiled, that was the wave too. She looked down at the baby, and said one word, which Angie did not catch. Then Angie had her brother by the arm, and they were out of the shop. Marvyn never looked back, but Angie did, in time to see the old woman baring blue gums in soundless laughter.
All the way home in a taxi, Angie prayed silently that her parents hadn't returned yet. Lidia was waiting, and together they whisked Marvyn into bed without any serious protest. Lidia washed his face with a rough cloth, and then slapped him and shouted at him in Spanish — Angie learned a few words she couldn't wait to use — and then she kissed him and left, and Angie brought him a pitcher of orange juice and a whole plate of gingersnaps, and sat on the bed and said, «What happened?»
Marvyn was already working on the cookies as though he hadn't eaten in days —which, in a sense, was quite true. He asked, with his mouth full, «What's molcriado mean?»
«What? Oh. Like badly raised, badly brought up — troublemaking kid. About the only thing Lidia didn't call you. Why?»
«Well, that's what that lady called … him. The baby.»
«Right," Angie said. «Leave me a couple of those, and tell me how he got to be a baby. You did like with Milady?»
«Uh–huh. Only I had to go way, way, way back, like I told you.» Marvyn's voice took on the faraway sound it had had in the Santeria shop. «Angie, he's so old.»
Angie said nothing. Marvyn said in a whisper, «I couldn't follow you, Angie. I was scared.»
«Forget it," she answered. She had meant to be soothing, but the words burst out of her. «If you just hadn't had to show off, if you'd gotten that letter back some simple, ordinary way — " Her entire chest froze solid at the word. «The letter! We forgot all about my stupid letter!» She leaned forward and snatched the plate of cookies away from Marvyn. «Did you forget? You forgot, didn't you?» She was shaking as had not happened even when El Viejo had hold of her. «Oh, God, after all that!»
But Marvyn was smiling for the first time in a very long while. «Calm down, be cool — I've got it here.» He dug her letter to Jake Petrakis — more than a little grimy by now — out of his back pocket and held it out to Angie. «There. Don't say I never did nuttin' for you.» It was a favorite phrase of his, gleaned from a television show, and most often employed when he had fed Milady, washed his breakfast dish, or folded his clothes. «Take it, open it up," he said now. «Make sure it's the right one.»
«I don't need to," Angie protested irritably. «It's my letter — believe me, I know it when I see it.» But she opened the envelope anyway and with–drew a single folded sheet of paper, which she glanced at … then stared at, in absolute disbelief.
She handed the sheet to Marvyn. It was empty on both sides.
«Well, you did your job all right," she said, mildly enough, to her stunned, slack–jawed brother. «No question about that. I'm just trying to figure out why we had to go through this whole incredible hooha for a blank sheet of paper.»
Marvyn actually shrank away from her in the bed.
«I didn't do it, Angie! I swear!» Marvyn scrambled to his feet, standing up on the bed with his hands raised, as though to ward her off in case she attacked him. «I just grabbed it out of your backpack — I never even looked at it.»