Darkest Fear (24 page)

“You sound better, Vivi,” she said in her accented English. Thankfully, she wasn't speaking Portuguese to make sure I kept up.

“I do?” Taking stock, I realized I did feel less crushed, my pain not as rawly searing. My days were busy with work, lessons with Matéo, and hanging out with everyone I lived with. I was hardly ever alone, didn't have much time to dwell on anything.

“It's still . . . awful,” I said. “I still miss them, still can't believe it happened.”

“I know, darling. I feel the same way. My only sister is gone.”

That would have been a good opening into asking about her other sister, but I couldn't bring myself to go there. As far as Matéo and I could figure, the split between the sisters probably happened over Donella dumping my dad, and then my dad marrying my mom. But why had Juliana been part of it? I might not ever know.

“But you're eating?”  Tia Juliana went on. “Sleeping okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “I've gained most of the weight back. I still have nightmares, but not as often.” I wanted to tell her that I was trying to learn how to control the change, but she would want to know
who was teaching me. I was keeping secrets from even more people in my life—Jennifer, Rafael, my aunt. It was exhausting.

“Tia, have you ever heard of anyone doing the same thing to other haguari? Cutting out their hearts?”

Tia Juliana was quiet for a while, and I wondered if it hurt too much for her to think about.

“You know,” she said slowly, “now that you ask, I do remember something about that many years ago, when I was a little girl. Horrified whispers at temple. Let me think about it. Maybe I'll ask one of the temple elders.”

“Okay. Thanks. I'm just wondering if there's a bigger picture.”

“Have you heard of anyone else?” She sounded surprised.

“No, uh-uh,” I lied. “It's just that it was so strange, and it had to have been another haguari. I'm still trying to make sense of it.”

“Of course, my dear. Have a good Fécinte—have you thought about coming here for Finados?”

Finados was All Souls' Day—November 2 in Brazil. In America it was the day after Halloween—All Saints' Day—but most places didn't observe it. Traditionally Catholic cities like New Orleans usually did: Kids had school off; many businesses were closed. Among haguari it was one of the more important observances because the boundary between living and dead, between human and jaguar, was the thinnest.

“Um, I think I'm going to stay put,” I said.

Tia Juliana sighed. “I won't let you refuse to come for Christmas. You will be here.”

“I'll definitely think about it,” I promised.

“I won't take no for an answer,” she warned.

“I have to see Jennifer, too. She'll be home from college.”

My tia went on to ask about Jennifer and her family and quit pestering me about coming to visit. Maybe I would go to Brazil for Christmas. I didn't know. The thought of driving back to Sugar Beach to see Jennifer seemed so strange. I had a whole house there full of my things, full of my parents' things. Of course I would have to go back someday. And I was dying to see Jennifer. I just . . . wasn't sure if I could do it. If I stayed here I could pretend nothing bad had happened in Sugar Beach. Or like Sugar Beach didn't exist.

That was dumb. It would have to change someday. But not today. Today I had to help get ready for a party. Still, time kept passing, and though my life was acquiring patterns again, nothing truly felt solid or sure or predictable.

And, of course, it wasn't.

FÉCINTE FELL ON A SUNDAY
that I had off from work. Of course I hadn't participated in an equinox ceremony in years; now I was helping Aly and Matéo fix snacks, clean the house, and tidy the yard. It made me feel so disloyal to my parents, but what would be the point in refusing to take part in this now? Which led me to think, what had been the point of refusing to take part with my parents? It had made total sense to me then, had seemed like absolutely the only thing to do. My world was turned sideways. Before, I had thought of myself as the stalwart conscientious objector; I now looked back and saw myself as the tantrum-throwing four-year-old. It felt awful.

To ramp up the contradictions, in some ways I was happier and more, I don't know—comfortable?—than I'd ever been. Surrounded by people who were exactly what I'd hated and feared becoming, living a life that required me to lie to my nearest and dearest—I felt inexplicably more like myself.

I needed a shrink.

“What are you doing?” I asked Matéo. He'd locked up his workshop with its delicate and expensive tools, and had vacuumed the downstairs. Now he was tying a wide red ribbon across the bottom of the stairs.

“The party is downstairs and in the yard,” he said firmly. “No couples sneaking upstairs.”

“Oh. How many people are coming tonight?” We'd gotten mini pumpkins from the grocery store and cut branches of pyracantha from the tall shrub in the yard. Their red berries looked autumn-y and festive as I arranged them on the side table in the front hall.

“I didn't really keep track,” he said. “And people will probably bring friends. Maybe sixty altogether?”

“Haguari or peladi?” It felt daring, using this word, as if I were swearing.

“Haguari. About sixty or so.”

“So does everyone keep it all secret all the time?”

Matéo tacked the ribbon to the wooden chair molding on the wall, then stood back to survey his work. When I'd first met him, I'd thought he was kind of odd-looking, with his Johnny Depp face and Rupert Grint red hair, but now he was just Matéo, my cousin.

“I think pretty much everyone keeps it a secret,” he said finally. “The few stories you hear about someone trying to live more openly all have a bad ending. End up being an urban myth.”

I looked at him somberly. “So we always have to live two lives, pretending to be something we're not.” It seemed like an unbearable burden.

“Oh, Vivi!” said Aly, coming downstairs with a cardboard box. “Can you help me decorate the altar?” A few steps from the bottom she picked up on the tension in the air and looked from Matéo to me. “What?”

“I just asked Matéo if everyone always kept being haguari hidden,” I told her. “And he said yes, and it just seems overwhelming. Looking ahead to keeping this to myself for the rest of my life. I mean, my best friend Jennifer doesn't know anything about it, and she never will. So what kind of friends are we, really?”

Aly ducked under the ribbon and sat down on the bottom step with the box next to her. “That's a question we all wrestle with, obviously.”

Actually, I'd been so preoccupied with me, me, me that it hadn't occurred to me that, yes, duh, every haguari must have to deal with that. It was like I thought I was the only haguara with problems or issues—like it was simple and easy for everyone else.

“How do you deal with it?” I asked.

“Everyone handles it in a different way,” Matéo said. “At some point, almost every single haguari wants to live openly, and to hell with people who can't accept them.”

Aly smiled wistfully at Matéo. “And almost every single haguari comes to equate our special nature as a liability, making us vulnerable to being persecuted or discriminated against in society.”

“That's exactly what it feels like!” I said.

“The five stages of being haguari,” Matéo intoned, holding up five fingers. “Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.”

Those were the five stages of grief—they'd been explained in a pamphlet I'd gotten at the hospital. I started to argue about it, but then began recognizing almost all of my behavior as being one stage or another. Except for the acceptance part. Hadn't gotten there.

There was room on the step next to Aly and I sat down. My feelings seemed so important, so huge and heavy—it was unsettling to think they were just a typical pattern that everyone felt.

“People I talk to here seem so thrilled to be haguari,” I said glumly. “Tink said it was like finding out that he was a superhero. Am I the only one who was horrified?”

“I've wondered if that's why thirteen is the magic age when a kid finds out,” Aly said. “Because you're still kid enough to think, oh, awesome, cool! Without being grown-up enough to foresee the not-always-positive consequences of it.”

“But just about everyone I've ever talked to about it has run into problems somewhere in their lives,” Matéo said. “Like anything else, there are pluses and minuses. Sometimes it seems like all pluses, and sometimes like all minuses.”

“But the keeping-the-secret part of it,” I said. “That must take such an effort, forever.”

Aly shrugged. “It becomes second nature, something you do without thinking. The more you do it, the easier it is. But . . . that's also why most haguari seem to hang out with and have relationships only with other haguari. Because it's easier, and you don't have to hide.”

Rafael came to mind: his dark attraction, the feel of his mouth on mine . . .

“Do we ever have relationships with non-haguari?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Aly. “My mom knows someone who is married to a pelado. For like thirty-eight years and counting.”

“And she's never told him?” I couldn't see how that was possible.

“I don't think so,” said Aly, shrugging.

“What about kids?”

“Haguaro plus haguara, cute little haguari,” said Matéo. “Haguaro or haguara plus pelado or pelada, cute little peladi.”

“So their kids aren't haguari?” I frowned. “They're just regular?”

“They're usually really good athletes,” said Matéo. “Good-looking. Charismatic.”

Aly laughed and kicked his shin with her bare foot. “Not that you're prejudiced or anything.”

Laughing too, he reached over and smoothed her dark hair behind her ear. They planned to get married someday and wanted to have kids. Had they really been set up as a couple when they were teenagers? It seemed too personal to ask.

“So basically the answer is to not be close to any peladi?” I could hear the put-upon childishness in my voice and I hated it.

Aly looked at me, and I felt embarrassed. “I think we each find our own answers,” she said mildly.

Biting my lip, I nodded. “I guess I'll go decorate the altar.”

Aly handed me the box and I tried to smile, managing only a closed-lip grimace. They didn't say anything as I headed into the
front parlor, the one I'd sat in the first night I'd come here. I set the box down and glanced at my watch—I'd offered to make some spice cookies and a pumpkin cake, but I still had plenty of time.

The night I'd come here, the room hadn't been well lit and I'd been so exhausted and discombobulated that I hadn't even noticed the altar on the side wall. I'd seen it since then, of course. This room was where we sometimes had game night or just hung out, and I'd often dusted in here as part of my self-given chore list.

Like my parents' altar, this was made of carved wood and looked quite old. Matéo had told me it had belonged to his parents. It must have been so difficult for Donella, to be cut off from her family. I imagined her setting up this altar in this house, knowing she would probably never share holidays with her first family again. My parents' figures of our gods were finely carved and inlaid with semiprecious stones. This Tzechuro and Tzechura were painted wood, simpler than ours, as if handmade by a primitive artisan.

Beneath the altar was a small bookcase, maybe three feet high. On the top shelf were framed pictures of Donella and Patrick and of Matéo as a small child. Donella of course looked like my family, and Patrick looked about as Irish as you could get: very pale, freckled, green eyes, bright red hair. They were smiling happily, their arms around each other.

On the next shelf were framed pictures of Matéo and Aly. One picture looked quite recent and one looked several years old—Matéo was thinner and they were both obviously younger, younger than I was now. And already life partners.

On the bottom shelf were several red and orange candles and a small brass incense holder. Kneeling, I opened the cardboard box and saw folded red velvet, some dried branches tied in small bundles by brown ribbon, two narrow wine glasses, some gold beads, and several other small brass figurines. Looking at them more closely, I saw that they were like that poster of evolving hominids that starts with apelike creatures and ends with Chris Hemsworth. This set had a plain jaguar and a plain human, and then other figures that were bits of both—a person with a jaguar head, a jaguar with human hands and a human smile, a sphinxlike cat with a woman's face. I'd never seen anything like them and I was still looking at them when Aly came in.

“Aren't those cool? They were my grandmother's. Mom let me have them when I moved in with Téo.”

“They're awesome.”

“I usually put them on the top shelf, with a candle on either end. I've never known whether to start with the person or start with the jaguar, so I alternate. And then I drape the velvet around the altar shelf. It would be nice to gather colorful leaves to symbolize autumn, but we might have to settle for some acorns or something.”

I smiled. “I'll look around outside.”

Together we arranged the rest of the things, and for the first time in my life it seemed, well, joyous to celebrate these gods. Aly was clearly so into it, so comfortable with it—she made it seem fun. My folks had also been into it, obviously, and comfortable with it,
but my fear and dismay had pretty much sucked the joy right out of our holidays.

“Excellent,” Aly said, standing back to look at it. “A lovely Fécinte altar.”

“Yep. Works for me,” I said. “Thanks for letting me help.”