Anyway, I covered up my arms so she wouldn’t ask about the bruising, and I almost didn’t show Tic either, because what could you possibly say to that? Bruising is not the same as a hallucination, and I was petrified that whomever it was I had encountered in the arroyo that night was a living, breathing human being.
A living... breathing... human... being.
Was a living, breathing human being.
Fuck, I thought, what if I killed someone? Or at least directly contributed to a person’s death?
Tic laughed when I showed him the bruises.
“Look,” I said, “it’s... a handprint.” I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice.
“Oh my God,” he said dramatically. He poked the bruises with his index finger and laughed.
“What?” I said.
“I know who you saw in the arroyo,” he told me, and winked.
“Who?”
“La Llorona,” he said, his voice sinister.
I’d heard of La Llorona, the Wailing Woman who, in Mexican folklore, drowned her children after being spurned by her lover — her husband? — and then wandered the riverbanks wailing and grabbing feckless children who were out after dark. Drowning them. I’d heard she haunted Santa Fe arroyos.
But in what version of the tale does La Llorona herself drown?
I asked Tic that, and he laughed.
“Nah,” he said, “she didn’t drown. She’ll appear somewhere else, someday. In the meantime... she branded you.”
“Branded me? Is that something she... does?”
Tic laughed and poked my bruises again. “These will never go away,” he said, “and she’ll always be able to find you.”
“Look,” I said, annoyed by his laughter, “whoever it was, that person looked so much like you.”
Of course, the long hair that fell from beneath the cap didn’t fit — Tic’s was longish on one side, but short on the other. The person I had seen in the arroyo had long hair that fell past his... her?... shoulders.
Rachel was sitting nearby, eavesdropping, and said, in all seriousness, “La Llorona can shape-shift, you know.”
Tic, who had just stopped laughing, guffawed again.
“She can!” Rachel insisted. “She can look like somebody else... like an old dude or something, or even Tic!”
“People always tell me I look just like La Llorona,” Tic said, giggling, “and what better way to lure you into the arroyo?” He struck a pose, then doubled over in more laughter.
“What the fuck, you guys?” I said, looking from Tic to Rachel and back again. They were fucking with me and I didn’t like it. “La Llorona’s just a folktale. A fucking myth. A fucking, I dunno, lie when you think about it. Designed to scare kids.”
Rachel went straight-faced and looked me square in the eye. “Don’t say that. Don’t fuck with La Llorona, or she’ll fuck you right back.” She lifted a pipe to her lips and took a long drag, held it, exhaled, then leveled her dark eyes at me once again. “And I don’t mean the good kind of fucking.”
Tic collected himself and wiped a tear from his eye. He put his hand on the side of my face, and smiled at me. “Tina, Tina, Tina...” he said. “You fell down in that arroyo, what, three times?”
I nodded.
“I mean, what better way to get some bruises?”
I shrugged. Looked at my arm.
“We’re just fucking with you,” he said, and kissed my cheek. “You’re so easy to fuck...” he paused, dragged out a long silence, “with.”
I left Santa Fe after that. Went back home, across the country where rain meant green hills and trees, not flash floods, and on my twenty-first birthday I got a wild idea. I sketched up an image of whomever it was I saw in the arroyo, cap on and hair down, smudged it with charcoal (the one class I excelled in through high schooclass="underline" visual arts), added some deep black outlines, and then walked into a tattoo parlor.
Had that visage engraved into my upper left arm.
There’s not much you need to know about my life from then until right now, except that I’ve always been shit-ass broke and in debt. So when Aunt Mimi’s Santa Fe lawyer calls to tell me that I need to come to Santa Fe for a reading of the will in one week’s time, I don’t hesitate to sell a few things so I can afford the airfare. I can go back to counting cards again, ’cause I am pretty good at it, and maybe even borrow money from my mom, but I’ve got it in my head that I won’t be needing much from my current life after this. My hopes for the future are pinned on that phone call, that trip, to a place I hated, mostly, but where I also found love for a moment or two.
I think about looking for Tic when I get there, but I’m not even sure where to start. Perhaps for now it’s sufficient to just go and claim what Aunt Mimi wanted me to have so I can reckon with my karma, or some shit, and get on with my life. Say adiós to my shitty job, my crappy-ass efficiency apartment with rats in the walls, my beater car pockmarked with Bondo and held together, in several places, with baling wire. And maybe, once the dust settles and I have my inheritance in hand, I’ll go to Hawaii just to spite my mother. Take a picture with a view of the beach. Send it to her.
Wouldn’t this be nice, Mom? Signed, Tina.
I get into Santa Fe an hour before the reading of the will. The office is near the plaza so I walk around a bit, killing time. Grab ice cream from Häagen-Dazs and scrutinize faces for something familiar.
At the lawyer’s office, I’m alone. A sole heir? I wonder, as I settle into a leather chair and prepare to hear my fate.
“To my niece I leave the key to my house, within which she will find more information about what is to be rightfully hers,” the lawyer reads. She pushes a single key across the desk to me, and I pick it up. Turn it over in my palm.
“So, she’s leaving me her... house?” I ask.
“Officially, she’s leaving you the key to her house,” the lawyer responds. “That’s all it says here, so I suppose you’ll need to go look for yourself.”
“But...”
“Katrina, I suppose it’s possible she signed the house over to you and left the deed for you there,” the lawyer says, and shuffles a stack of papers. “I suggest you go look.”
It’s just like Aunt Mimi to set up hurdles for me to leap over even after she’s departed this world and really shouldn’t care anymore. Of course I go to the house. I use the key to unlock the big wooden door and step inside to a smell of musty feet and stale food. The refrigerator is still packed full of perishables, all, sadly, perished. Worse: the front toilet bowl still has piss in it. “If it’s yellow let it mellow...” Aunt Mimi used to sing, because save the water or some shit. Now it’s anything but mellow... it’s fucking rank. I wonder why nobody bothered to clean shit up before I came.
“Isn’t that what a lawyer or whatever is supposed to do?” I mutter to myself.
I have my hands full, clearly, but I’m not too disappointed. Real estate prices in Santa Fe are astronomical. At the very least, I can sell the house and make a kick-ass profit.
That’s when I notice a padlocked wooden box sitting smack in the middle of the dining table, and there’s a card with my name on it pinned to the top of a wire stand, like the type you put place cards in for fancy dinner events. Not that I’ve been to a fancy dinner event... yet. I open the card, hold it into the light from the dining room window, and read.
Welcome back, Katrina. I’m sure you’re a little confused by all of this, so allow me to shed some light on things. I could think of nobody more worthy of this final task than you, so please follow these simple instructions. Before anything else happens, the box on the table needs to go to its rightful owner. Please walk it over to the house on the corner — you know the one. With the blue shutters and broken front walk. Ring the doorbell and give the box to Mrs. Santo. Do you remember meeting her? Her father, a Japanese American, was captured and interned in the prison camp set up by the government during World War II right here in what’s now this neighborhood. Anyway, she’ll open the box while you’re there so that you’ll know what happens next. She’s expecting you.