Mauricio shrugged. “Lying here I came up with an idea about why people need to believe in an afterlife. I don’t know if it makes sense or if it’s just the drugs talking. I’ve been thinking that only bad people need to believe in it. Good people got nothing to be afraid of and nothing to make up for, so oblivion is fine with them.”
Mauricio picked up a plastic cup from the over-bed table and took a sip of water. Donnally pulled a tissue from a Kleenex box and wiped away a drop that slipped by Mauricio’s mouth.
“There’s something in there for you to read,” Mauricio said, setting down the cup and tilting his head toward the side table.
Donnally reached toward the drawer, but Mauricio raised his palm, stopping him. “Afterwards. Everything is just like we talked about.” He then looked toward the open door. “Except one thing.”
Chapter 2
Harlan Donnally stared down at the headstone. It read “Mauricio Quintero,” not “Mauricio Aguilera.”
It bore no epitaph, nor age, nor dates of birth or death, for as Donnally now understood, any further inscription would’ve just compounded the lie that had been Mauricio’s existence.
Right at the end, just before he died, Mauricio had said his true name was all he wanted on the marker. The only part of the Bible he’d acknowledged he believed in was the phrase “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” and he didn’t think there was any reason for people to come honor the fiction he’d created out of his life.
Donnally stood on the snow-covered ground next to the gravesite as the backhoe pushed the mound of dark soil over the coffin. In those few minutes, the mist slid in, bleaching out the brown and green of the pines and turning the red dirt gray. Only the granite headstones standing around him like lost souls seemed impervious to the whims of light and fog.
After watching the rusty John Deere grind its way back to the equipment barn, Donnally took a final look at the etched name, then walked over to his truck and climbed in. Lying on the passenger seat was Mauricio’s last will, and the confession he had denied the priest.
January 23
Dear Harlan:
My real name is Mauricio Quintero.
On March 14, 1965, I shot and killed my father.
I came home from school and caught him molesting my sister in a migrant shack where we lived outside of Livingston in the Central Valley. I was fifteen. She was five.
I don’t think she understood what he was doing to her. Maybe she just thought it was a weird game. Eventually she would’ve figured it out, because he wasn’t going to stop.
It was up to me to put an end to it, and that meant putting an end to him. There was no one else because my mother had died giving birth to her.
The news article about my crime is in my safety deposit box at the Valley Bank. It’s only a couple of lines. Mexicans didn’t count for much back then.
My sister’s name is Anna. I don’t know what her last name is now.
I didn’t know what to do, so I took her up to Berkeley one night and left her on the doorstep of New Sky, one of the communes they had there back then. (The address is in the box, too.) I hoped they’d do the right thing, but not call the police.
I went back there in 1974 and waited around the high school for a couple of days until I saw her walking toward the bus stop with some girls. I didn’t try to talk to her and I never went back. She didn’t need the burden of being the sister of a boy who killed his father. It would’ve cast a shadow over her whole life. It’s one of those crimes that’s like a genetic disease, only one that kills the spirit.
And I didn’t want to lie to her. I thought that would’ve been even worse.
But lying here the last few weeks made me think differently. I figured out that everybody needs to be from somewhere, otherwise you’re just kind of floating. Even though you hate where you come from, Harlan, at least you know where that is.
I realize now that I should’ve started thinking about death a lot sooner, but I guess I did too much pretending all my life. You’re different. You stopped pretending about things when your brother got killed in the war. I hope you didn’t stop forgiving back then, too, because I need some forgiveness now.
I didn’t tell you before because you’d have turned me in. You wouldn’t have wanted to, but you would’ve because there isn’t a statute of limitations for what I did. I know that there are just certain things we have to do in order to live with ourselves. I’ve got mine and you’ve got yours. And one of yours would’ve sent me to prison.
I’d like you to find her. Use whatever money you need from selling my place and give the rest to her.
I’m sorry to dump this on you, but I just ran out of time and of life. Or maybe I was a coward all the way along.
If you want, show her this letter so she’ll know I was thinking about her at the end.
And take care of Ruby, she’s been a good dog to a bad man.
Mauricio
Donnally stared through his windshield at the snow now swirling around the cemetery. All these years he’d thought that Mauricio made up his life because the truth didn’t mean anything to him. It was the opposite. The truth meant everything, but he’d just never known what to do with it.
And Donnally didn’t know what to do with it either.
Find Anna and do what?
He folded the letter and slipped it into the inside pocket of his parka, then switched on his wipers against the obliterating flurry, the flakes growing larger and wetter and collecting on the mound of cold clay and scraps of dead grass and weeds now piled on top of Mauricio.
Find her and do what?
Donnally found himself gripping the steering wheel. His body telling him that anger was finally emerging from the grief.
Mauricio was right about himself and there was no maybe about it: He was a coward.
You don’t leave it to other people to clean up after you. You’re supposed to learn that as a child, when your father trips over one of your toys, or when you spill the milk, or when you’ve got to break up with a girl.
But Mauricio had just shrugged it off.
It was one thing to be the executor of someone’s estate. That Donnally had been willing to do. It was another to be the executor of his life.
Anyway, Donnally thought, executors were supposed to follow instructions, not make them up as they went along.
Donnally lowered his hands and turned off the wipers. He poured himself a half cup of coffee from a thermos. Steam rose in the dead air of the cab, and the headstone disappeared behind the fogging windshield.
That slab of granite might as well not be there at all, Donnally said to himself. Might as well be a pauper’s grave, or a John Doe’s, for nobody in Mount Shasta knew who Mauricio really was.
Mauricio Aguilera had simply been a prism that had refracted away the truth of the who, and the what, and the where of Mauricio Quintero.
And the foundation on which his life had been built lay not in Mount Shasta, but in a Central Valley town that nobody in Siskiyou County had ever heard of or would’ve cared about if they had, except for Donnally.
The image of Livingston stuck in Donnally’s mind like a live moth on flypaper. In the late eighties, as a young officer working the SFPD fugitive detail, he’d driven down the heart of the state through fog yellowed by agricultural burning, breathing in smoke and diesel fumes, hunting for a wino who’d stabbed a postal worker in a skid-row hotel lobby. In morbid irony, the killer, who’d been drunk on the fortified wine marketed to alcoholics that had made the Gallo brothers rich, had sought refuge at the Gallo labor camp.
For years Donnally’s memory of Livingston had been anchored in a single image: walking into the shed, finding the killer hanging from a rafter, his neck snapped, his dead body still rocking above an overturned crate. And by a single thought: that the last sounds the man had heard were Donnally’s footsteps on the wooden porch and the squeak of the turning doorknob.