The Exquisite and Immaculate Grace of Carmen Espinoza (7 page)

I blinked a few more times and rubbed my forehead, surprised by the heat radiating off my head. When the world around me had come completely back into focus, I could see that the massive gate had cracked open, splitting the golden gargoyle’s face precisely in half. A strong warm wind was blowing my hair in wild strands around my face—it was tunneling through the slit in the gate.
 

“I saw it,” I said.
 

Ray looked intently into my eyes, “Saw what?” he whispered.

“I saw the day she killed him.”

He stared at me a moment more and then took his hands from my arms. “Then you are ready?” he asked and stepped aside.

I narrowed my eyes, tried to understand what I was seeing. Stepping closer, the air rushing through the tight space made the hair on my arms and legs stand up. The gate didn’t just open up to the stretch of forest on the other side—the gate opened the forest. Before me, another world, one very different from the dark forest around us, peered through the crack.

“Ladies first,” Ray said sardonically and gave a low bow while flourishing his arm towards the strange world before us. I gave him a sidelong look and stepped closer to the entrance.
 

The warm wind hit my face and carried an acrid odor, like sulfur and matches, that burned my sinuses and made my eyes water. The sky before me, swirling, melting shades of yellow and gray crossed over by wispy clouds, was a vast expanse that looked diseased and pressed down on the craggy land below it. We stood high above The Between on a iron colored ridge. The rock beneath my feet was sharp and brittle, like shale that would probably flake into large slabs if I kicked one of the jagged jutting pieces around me. Far off in the distance, a giant black mountain pushed up into the heights of the sick looking sky, its peak capped in light, pointed precisely to the fat orange moon that hung in the night above it.

Below us, in the land that spread between the ridge we stood on and the mountain in the distance, a series of rolling hills seemed to divide the land.
They looked like enormous waves carved into the earth, the valley of one rested against the rise of the next, all pressing towards the ominous mountain. As my eye moved over them I quickly counted three individual hills.

“Those,” his voice whispered near my ear and sent shivers across my neck and down my back. “Are the boundaries for the offenses.”

The side of his face was very close, I could feel the heat of him warming my cheek. Unsteady, I closed my eyes to gather myself and took a deep breath of the foul scented air, “What are the offenses?”

“The offenses are the errors in judgment, thought, word, or deed that a soul makes while living their human life. They are transgressions a body makes, against another, against oneself, that create great shifts in their energy. When an energy arrives at The Between, they are first carried by their guides on golden wings high over the offenses, directly to the black mountain.” He nodded his head toward the looming rock mammoth in the distance. “The Great Balancer lives there, high above all of this in her iron tower. When the soul steps before her and gives an account of their life and death, the energy of their physical existence either balances and they move on,” he gestured vaguely by flitting his fingers in the air. “Or it does not balance. When it does not balance, they are transported back to the beginning of The Between,” he pointed to the first half circle below us. “And they must traverse the offenses.”
   

“And what happens in the offenses?”

“A great many things happen there.”

Ray stood beside me, watching, waiting for my reaction.

I turned to him, “Where is Daniel?”

The corners of his mouth turned up slightly, almost imperceptibly, I would have missed it if I had not been staring at him so closely. He inclined his head an inch and directed his gaze to the cliff that dropped off several feet in front of us.
 

I narrowed my eyes at him, disbelieving, and inched towards the edge. As I moved further away from the gate, the wind pushed my body harder. Several feet from the edge, I glanced back at Ray and shivered with the chilling sensation of him rushing me from behind and shoving my body into a plummeting and jagged death.

He stood exactly where he had been but now, one corner of his mouth was raised. He shook his head gently, as if watching an amusing child, as if he could read my thoughts about my mistrust. Could he read my thoughts?

My feet remained firmly planted as my body leaned out as far as I dared. The cliff, as I had feared, dropped away for several thousands of feet before ending in clumps of black and brown plumes of tree tops that reminded me of molding broccoli. From what I could see of the cliffs sheer face, Daniel was not on it.
 

“I don’t see him,” I accused.

“Oh, he is waaaay ahead of us. We’ll need to hurry if you’re planning on catching up. But please, by all means, continue to stare off into the wonderment of The Between,” he raised his hands sarcastically before him. “After all, I’m not the one on the deadline,” he pointed his finger at the horizon before us.

“What?” My gaze followed his finger. All I saw was the massive black mountain and the moon.

“See that bright orange melon floating on high?”

I focused on the strange moon before us.

“That’s your clock,” he said. “Once it moves from there,” his finger traced a high and invisible line from the mountain’s peak, into the sky above our head and down to the top of the gate behind us, “all the way over to here,” he finished. “Your time is up, your Day of the Dead will be over. If you are not back here, moving out of this gate by the time the moon sets over these beaming metal bars, you’ll be trapped forever on this side of them.”

“I don’t understand,” I said gazing into the rotting forest far below us. “If he came to me for my help, why isn’t he waiting for me?” I looked questioningly into Ray’s eyes. Ever since I had first seen Daniel in the Basilica de la Soledad, near the Virgin of Solitude, he had been running away from me. “I would think he’d be running to me.”

Ray stared at me, again, for a very long time before answering. “He’s one day away from becoming a faint. I doubt very much he realizes who you are, much less that you are here to help him.” He walked the distance between us, passed me, and continued straight up to the edge of the cliff. The toes of his brown leather shoes hung inches over the edge. “By now,” he continued as the winds made his body sway. “Your brother doesn’t even know he was alive, never mind what life actually is. Or that he might one day want to choose to have a life again. He is driven by a singular memory of a want that he can’t even form a concrete thought around.”

“What,” I breathed waiting for him to fall off the edge at any moment. “What does he want?”

Ray turned and looked into my eyes. “Your mother,” he said. He turned back to the view before him. “He wants his mother. He’s looking for her. Has been looking for her for thirteen years. Not that he would be able to quantify it like that. He has been looking for his mother for so long now, it is all he knows. Single, continuous moments of searching for her is all he knows now. There is no before he began searching for her and there is no after he is searching for her. There is only that. Always, forever…he is lost.”

I shook my head, “But why? Why would he want her after what she did to him?”

Ray seemed to avoid my gaze. “You said it yourself,” his foot extended into the abyss of sky before him. “He does not know what happened to him in his life.” He leaned into the death step he was making and fell down past the edge.

I gasped and ran to the edge. When I looked down, I expected to see him still falling or cracked and bleeding, but he stood on a ragged footpath cut into the side of the cliff. Amused with himself for making me panic, he grinned up at my worried expression, “He does not believe she hurt him. So I should think that, as a small lost boy, looking for his mother is probably a very natural response.” He began walking the narrow path.

His smooth soled shoes crunched the small rocks and dirt along the path. Still only watching him move away from me, I scanned the ledge and tried to find a way down to the path.
 

“Just jump,” Ray called casually over his shoulder.

A surge of annoyance tightened my chest. He
could
read my mind.
 

“Not exactly,” he said as he rounded the first bend dropping him lower down the cliff face.

“How, not exactly?” I yelled after him.
 

Just jump?
 

It was at least an eight foot drop to the narrow path below me. And if I over shot it I would go tumbling down the jagged face. Ray was getting further and further ahead of me, being left alone here was making a panicky feeling beat fast in my chest.
 

As I crouched down to try scooting over the edge, I heard his answer to my question carry on the air but the wind swirled his words so that I couldn’t make out the details. All I could make out was, “I…eel…tion.”

The rocks pressed sharply into my hands as I lowered myself and stretched one of my legs as far down as I could while the other tried to keep a shallow foothold that didn’t feel steady. Too late, I realized I should have tried this on my belly. The sky felt like a giant invitation in front of me, all it needed was one slip and I would tumbled into its emptiness.

I was stuck. With my elbows jutting sharply behind me and my tenuous foothold slipping, I was losing the strength to hold myself in this awkward position for much longer. My hands began to sweat and the rough cliff edge suddenly became slippery beneath them.

The feeling happened first, bright and instinctual, I was going to fall. Just jump. Where was Ray? As my foot slipped off the wall, I pushed myself as best I could and tried to aim my body for the narrow ribbon of path below me. Sharp edges sliced at one of my elbows and I heard fabric tear behind me. When my feet landed on the ground, the force of my chaotic momentum propelled me forward. The sky yawned open before me and my arms wheeled wildly back, trying to save the rest of my body from death.

It didn’t help.

Falling. I was falling over the cliff.

Suddenly, hard fingers grabbed my arm and jerked me back.
 

Shocked, my breath raced in and out of me while my heart drummed loudly in my brain. I wasn’t falling. I looked up and saw Ray standing beside me. I could feel his hand still clutching my upper arm, his fingers tightly pressing my small muscles painfully against the bone.
 

On the path. I was on the path, my feet were under me and I was standing on the path. A shaky relief flooded through my body and made my legs buckle but Ray easily kept me up right with just one hand.

“Are you going to be alright?” he asked.

I nodded my head and straightened my legs beneath me, forcing them to stand on their own.
 

His fingers released slowly from my arm, “I told you to jump. All that sliding and messing around is why you just about catapulted yourself over the edge.”

Disbelieving, I looked into his eyes. Was he scolding me for almost dying? Anger, bright and hot ballooned in my chest. “I thought you were supposed to be my guide,” I spat. “What kind of guide just leaves the…” I couldn’t think of what I was. “The guided to flounder down a sheer cliff face all by themselves? It’s clearly nothing for you to pull and toss me around like I was nothing more than a rag doll. How hard would it have been for you to
help
me down?”

Looking calm and mildly disinterested, his expression never faltered. “By my estimation, you seemed to require more help with up than down,” he turned from me and continued back the way he had come.

Infuriated, I stood a moment more before I began following him down. And how had he gotten back up here so fast anyway? He had been no where near me when I began falling.

“I am nowhere near as limited as the man who owns this face.”

I stopped short and stared at his back. “What do you mean,
owns this face
—that’s not your face?” my tone was acid.

He waved his hand dismissively over his shoulder and never stopped walking, “I can have any face I choose.”

“And how did you choose that—” I stopped, suddenly realizing why he was so familiar to me. It was the face of the man in the church, the Basilica de la Soledad in front of the Virgin of Solitude. The man who had been joking with me.

I started walking again and stumbled over a large rock, “You
can
read my thoughts,” I shouted, annoyed with him and my own faltering feet.

He shook his head. I couldn’t see his face but I knew he had a self satisfied grin. “No, I can’t. As I said before, which you would have heard if you had just jumped and kept up like I told you, I see images and I feel emotions associated with those images. I do not read your exact thoughts. So when I met you in the desert, and you were very distressed by my natural state, I saw the image of this man’s face in your recent memories and was hoping it would help calm you down—even though your emotions about him were very…volatile.”

I felt like picking up and rock and throwing it at his smug head. “My emotions are not volatile!”

He laughed, “Okay. My mistake. There is clearly nothing unusual about launching into a rage just because someone is flirting with you.”

There were so many pieces of his statement that annoyed me, I didn’t at first know where to start. “He wasn’t
flirting
with me,” I sputtered.
 

Ray continued silently down the path in front of me.
 

“And I didn’t launch into a rage,” but before I could help it, the image of my shaking, fumbling hands loosing their grip on my camera took hold in my brain.

Ray stopped walking abruptly, turned around and cocked his head. “Yes, I can see that I was very much mistaken. You clearly have a masterful command of your emotional states.”

Gaping, I only watched as he turned on his heels and kept moving down the winding path.