Duckling Ugly (15 page)

“Sometimes.”

“Well, don’t! I never think about any of them—not at all. Because I am
not
Tuddie anymore, and you don’t have to be the Flock’s Rest Monster!”

“Tell it to the mirrors!”

I realized I was shouting, and I looked down, even if he didn’t want me to. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not you I’m mad at.”

“So who are you mad at?”

“I don’t know. Everyone? No one? God?” I reached up the sleeve of my dress to blot my tears. And the fabric got stained, not just with tears, but with a spot of yuck still oozing from my popped zit. “Let’s just go back,” I said, disgusted. “Picnic’s over.”

But he didn’t move. Instead he said: “I know something that’ll help your acne.”

“No, you don’t,” I told him. “Nothing can help it. Believe me, I’ve tried everything.”

And then he whispered, “You haven’t tried this.”

Aaron got up and began to climb higher up the steep, rocky slope behind us. “C’mon,” he said. “It’s not far.” Then, when I didn’t move, he said, “Or are you just gonna sit there and feel sorry for yourself?”

That got me moving. Like I said, I didn’t like to wallow in self-pity, and here I was doing just that. “Okay,” I said, “wait up.”

After only about two minutes of climbing, we came to a deep crack in the mountain face. I could feel warm air rising from its depths and smell earth, like in the first moments of a rainstorm. This wasn’t just a crack in the stone, this was the mouth of a cave.

Aaron stepped into the darkness, but I hesitated. Standing in the stark daylight, I couldn’t see him in the cave ahead of me, but I heard his voice coming from inside. Now, without seeing his face, just hearing his voice, I truly recognized him as the boy I once knew as Tuddie.

“I can’t force you to follow me,” he said. “You have to come because you want to.”

Want. There were a lot of things I wanted right then. Too many to put into words. I was a big empty bucket of
want.

“You’ve trusted me this far,” he said from the darkness. “Will you trust me a little bit farther?”

There was something important about all of this. Then it occurred to me that being at the mouth of this cave was no coincidence. Whatever was down there in that cave was the reason we came all the way up this mountainside for the picnic.

M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.

I felt like I did when I stood in my room, before my mirror, daring myself to tear away the sheet. Spelling the words in my head always helped move me forward.

D-E-C-I-S-I-V-E.

One step more, and I entered the mouth of the cave.

D-E-S-T-I-N-Y.

I reached into the darkness, felt Aaron grab my hand, and he pulled me out of the light and into the bowels of the earth.

W
e lingered in darkness for a moment, then I heard the
whoosh
of a flame, and I could see his face again, lit in orange flickering light. In one hand he held a torch.

When my eyes adjusted to the dim light of the cave, I could see a narrow slope leading deeper into the mountain. He didn’t speak as he led the way down.

“What’s down here?” I asked.

“Best to see for yourself.”

We went through one cavern after another, and when I thought we had reached the bottom, there was yet another deep, winding pathway taking us farther down.

“Stay close to the light,” he said when I started to lag too far behind. “There are things living down here.”

“What kinds of things?”

“They don’t have names—but they won’t come near the light.”

I tried to imagine what could possibly live here beside bats and rats, but my imagination hadn’t prepared me for the “things” Aaron was talking about.

We rounded a bend, and only for a moment I saw it scuttle up a wall and out of sight. It looked something like a koala, with soft, furry eyes, a small snout…and eight spidery legs that clung to the wall as it scurried away. I groaned slightly. Seeing that was more information than I needed, and from that moment on I stayed as close to the light as I could possibly get. Even Aaron seemed frightened by it, but only slightly—or maybe he was only being brave for me.

“No one’s ever been hurt by the things down here.”

“Always a first time,” I told him.

The caverns, which began as empty stone chambers, slowly began to change their nature the deeper we got. Massive stone formations, almost bonelike in shape, stretched from floor to ceiling around us. Stalagmites grew from the ground like jagged teeth, and stalactites dangled from above us like limestone icicles. They all shimmered like they were covered with diamond dust, reflecting Aaron’s torch in every color of the rainbow. The fear I had when I began our descent was slowly replaced by wonder.

Finally, we reached the most magnificent cavern of all, and Aaron doused the torch because he didn’t need it anymore. The walls themselves were glowing, giving off a strange light as bright as moonlight on snow. It was hot and humid here; my clothes stuck to my body, and yet it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. The air hung motionless, smelling like mint and eucalyptus and cinnamon wrapped together in a rich earthy peat. Miss Leticia would have liked this place.

Aaron spoke in a whisper, but here the softest voice sounded loud. “Abuelo says God needed a cauldron to brew up creation,
and here it is. We call this cavern
El Caldero de Vida
—the Cauldron of Life. After He was done, God might have cast the cauldron aside, but it’s never entirely empty.”

We walked forward into the cavern. The floor was covered with moss greener than the grass in the valley. I couldn’t imagine anything green growing down here, about a mile down, and yet it did.

“Take off your shoes,” Aaron said.

As I remembered from my days in Sunday school, that’s what Moses had to do when he approached the Burning Bush. “Why?” I asked. “Is this holy ground?”

Aaron shrugged. “Maybe.” Then he smiled. “But I just like the feel of the moss on my feet.” He was right about that. Once I took off my shoes, it felt like I was walking on plush green velvet.

“Abuelo believes the earth itself is a living thing, and this is where its soul lives.” Looking at this place, I could see why the old man felt that way.

“Do you believe that?” I asked.

Aaron thought about the question and, rather than answering, said, “Abuelo is sometimes very crazy, and sometimes very wise. It’s hard to figure out which is which.”

We stepped forward across the massive domed cavern. In the very center, hanging from the ceiling, was a single stalactite, tapering down from the roof and coming to a pinpoint about ten feet above the floor. It was glistening wet, and I got a shiver, because it reminded me of something, and I didn’t know what. I stopped walking, but Aaron gently took my elbow and urged me forward.

I slowly approached the great glistening stalactite. The only
sound now was the squelch of my feet against the soft moss and a rhythmic drip of water. Suddenly it occurred to me what the stalactite reminded me of.

An uvula. That strange dangle of skin at the back of your throat.

Beneath it was a stone formation growing from the cavern floor. It looked like a pedestal widening into a basin, like a birdbath just a foot or so wide, full of water. Moisture had collected on the stalactite, and every five seconds or so a single drop of water fell from the tip into the basin, with a delicate
plink.
The sound was like the faintest, highest note struck on a xylophone.

There was a mist across the surface of that little pool of water. The closer I got, the more I could feel its heat.

Plink.

“Mineral water,” Aaron said. “Just what your face needs. It’ll open those pores and get rid of that acne.”

“You think so?”

“Oh,” said Aaron, “I
know
so.”

Plink.

Then he put his finger in and swirled it around. “It’s just right,” he said. “Body temperature.” The steam cleared away as he stirred, and colors played in the water like the aurora borealis—the northern lights captured in a shallow stone bowl. When he took his finger out, he wiped the water beneath one of his eyes, and then the other, as if it were invisible war paint. Then he licked his fingertip.

Plink.

The surface of the water was glassy, and for a strange instant I had the impression that someone was in there looking out at me, until I realized that it was my own reflection. I was just as horrible as
ever. There was mustard on my lip from our lunch, and smudges of dirt from touching my face after touching the cavern walls. It was the longest I’d ever been able to see my own reflection, because
this
water did not cloud.

Plink.

“Go on,” Aaron whispered, standing right behind me now. Then he brought his lips as close to my ear as he could without actually touching it and whispered, “Your face is dirty. Wash it off.”

Plink.

Between one drop of water and the next, I dipped both my hands deep into the pool and splashed the water onto my face. Once. Twice. Three times.

It burned. Not like the heat of water, not like the heat of flames, but a different kind of heat that soaked in through my pores, like fine needles penetrating so deep I could feel it all the way to the tips of my toes.

I opened my eyes, thinking they would sting, but they didn’t. And when I looked at my hands, the water had already dried up, absorbed into the dryness of my skin.

“There,” said Aaron. “All your skin needed was a good deep cleaning. No more acne for you.”

The shimmering lights were gone from the pool, and it had misted over again. Another drop plunged from the pointy tip of the stalactite into the stone bowl.

Plink.

“Come on, Cara,” Aaron said. “Let’s go home.”

I
t was already dusk when we emerged from the caverns, and by the time we made it back down into the valley, the sun was long gone from the sky.

There was a celebration at Abuelo’s mansion when we got back. The entire population of De León was there. This time they weren’t scattered around the mansion as I’d seen them before. Tonight, everyone was in that great room at the top of the stairs.

Musicians played, and people danced. Harmony was the first to hurry to me, and she gave me a bone-crunching hug.

“It’s so good to finally
see
you,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked her. “I just saw you yesterday.”

“Let me take you to Abuelo,” she said. “I know he’ll want to see you right away.”

We weaved through the dancing couples. The band played a melody that was a strange cross between classical and swing. I had never heard that piece of music before, and wondered if it had been written by one of the citizens in the town.

I looked around for Aaron, but he had already dissolved into the crowd behind me, and then, as we moved through the couples
spinning one another to the music, there was Abuelo, on his settee. Next to him was an intravenous stand, and a plastic bag of clear fluid dripped down a narrow tube that went into the vein on his left arm.

I had seen this before, on my own grandfather, when he was dying in the hospital. However, this old man seemed in the best of health. Truth be told, he seemed more radiant than any other time I’d seen him.

“What’s the matter, Abuelo?” I asked. “Are you sick?”

He found this amusing, and turned to a woman beside him who was not quite as old as he. They shared a look and a chuckle. It irritated me that I couldn’t be in on their little joke.

“I am, as you say, fit as a fiddle. Even fitter, for a fiddle will break its strings, whereas I will not.”

He saw me looking at the intravenous bag.

“Oh, this thing. It’s just a little pick-me-up. My annual beauty treatment.” He and everyone within listening distance laughed.

He called to the musicians to stop playing, and they did almost instantly. The dancing couples turned around to see what was happening, and as Abuelo stood, they cleared the floor.

He went out to the center of the room, rolling his intravenous stand with him. “My dance partner is slender and graceful, no?” Then he turned to me and gestured with one hand. “Come.”