Her slow walk now turned into a fast run. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and her hot face began to sting even worse than it had before. She was noticing that the rain was turning into balls of hot ice.
‘But wait,’ she thought, she stopped for a moment to look up at the sky. The heat wave was stopping, and huge pieces of hail were coming down from the sky. This made her happy. So she lay down and fell asleep, predicting that the next morning would be just as bad as the first, and took this chance to sleep.
‘It might be my only chance,’ she thought, lying down on the soft sand once again, this time happily. But just as she was about to shut her eyes, she noticed something — something that she’d never seen before.
It was a little girl, about the age of four. Of course she’d seen many little girls before, but this one was tired and hungry and dirty and blinded by the hot rain and hail. She was stumbling, bumping into sharp cactuses, there was nothing she could do. Mariana thought, ‘How could I let her stay here? I’ve been that sick, I’ve been that lonely, but I’ve never been blinded in a hot rain and now hail like this. And, boy, would I have liked somebody to come and help me. I must go and save her,’ she thought. ‘I must carry her back to my house. I must.’
She got up and picked up the child. The child’s heart stopped beating so fast. She calmed down. Her eyes for the first time opened. She looked up at Mariana with such happy eyes, sparkling eyes of pure glee, as if to say, ‘You have saved me, Mariana, you have done well.’
Mariana looked back at her, as if to say, ‘I’ve only done what people should have done for me.’ She started walking. Each footstep she took now felt heavier and more uncomfortable. But the child was not the burden to her. The only thing that made her upset was the child’s tears. The child was crying, not out of pain, but out of happiness. But Mariana had no idea that a child so young could be happy in the midst of something so horrible.
The next day, as she predicted, it was hot rain again. But this time not just boiling like the first, but so hot half of it was turning to steam. Steam only meant hot drips covered her face — both of their faces, rather. Their steps were heavier. The girl was crying, crying with pain, not from herself, but from looking into a face that had so much pain.
But now Mariana had come to a part of the desert where she was not alone. Many other people like herself were suffering, adults. She tried dragging one of them along, but it would not help. She was not strong enough to carry a three-year-old and a sixty-year-old. She found a shawl on a cactus. She took it off and wrapped it around the little girl. The little girl smiled. Then she took another shawl and wrapped it around herself this time. She thought she could walk faster if she had something to protect her from this awful rain, but it seeped through. She thought that this should be her punishment, to suffer this horrible rain, and to carry this heavy little girl, her punishment for being so selfish and taking the best spot she could pick in the year and taking the plane instead of walking.
She knew that she could, of course, because she had done it before. She had walked through places so full of trees and sticks carrying heavy buckets of hard metal for the princess Malina, in India. Finally she tried sticking a hollow stick into one of the cactuses, by cutting with her pocket knife a hole in it. She sucked and it burnt her mouth terribly. For an animal had died, a black-skinned animal, on the cactus, where she had struck in her stick. It was then that she decided that there was no way of getting water, she was stuck, she had to go home.
The little girl spoke for the first time. ‘Do not carry me,’ she said. ‘You have to take care of me and find a place for me when you get home.’ And as if she had read Mariana’s mind, she said, ‘A cactus would be a better burden for you. It would punish you even more, because of the spikes. And you could easily saw one off and carry it home, and then you wouldn’t have an extra punishment of taking care of me when you get home.’
But the girl had begun to love her, Mariana, that is, and Mariana was not apt to let the girl go away and die. For she knew she would. She walked on, quicker, quicker now, the hot rain got hotter and hotter. Her face started bubbling it was so hot. Her sweat turned red with blood. The girl cried blood in looking at a face that seemed to have so much pain again. Mariana spoke softly to the girl. ‘Do not cry, dear, do not cry, it takes blood from your precious body.’ The girl wiped her tears. Mariana, seeing the girl wiping her tears, remembered her own face, and how much it hurt. She touched it. It felt more pain, and what the little girl saw is what you should see in your mind. She saw pain: the face was very swollen and she touched it. The air-filled skin broke, very thin now, because it was full of air, and blood gushed out. It was painful-looking and definitely was painful for Mariana.
She was almost at home now. Of course she couldn’t see it, but she had gone two quarters of the way. Only ten miles to go, but her feet were so sore. Her hair was dyed almost red. Walking farther and farther and farther and farther, tired to beat the band. The girl looked up again, like she had done the first time Mariana had picked her up. Now with swollen cheeks but a happier face. She looked wise. ‘We are almost home now,’ she whispered, ‘I can tell by that cactus.’ She pointed to the tallest cactus Mariana had ever seen. Mariana stepped back. She forgot about her pain, the heavy child she was holding, and all the hot rain. It reminded her of when she was a baby. She was born under a tall, tall sequoia tree. The tree had been cut down to build a nice beautiful house, but in her mind it was not cut down, but was still standing there, in Australia. The sand was getting more shallow now. It would have hurt more now for me or you but to her it meant home. It meant getting the little child safe, finding her new parents, or finding the old parents, if they had not died, and getting home to her own mother and father out there. In the bottom of her heart she thought they might have died, but I can tell you now that they hadn’t. But in her heart she also thought something else. She thought, ‘I can adopt her. She can be my own child, I can take care of her.’
The child read her mind once again. ‘You are my mother now,’ she said. ‘My parents have died.’ Wisely she said this, not as a three-year-old, not as an old person, but as Mariana’s own mother would have said it. Mariana remembered the Australian look of her mother now. Long beautiful black hair, and now she also noticed something else about the child. She, too, was an Australian. Mariana hugged the child tight now, with the child upright in her arms, as she had seen women in Australian doing.
Finally she came to the wooden house. The sight of it was miracly happy-making for her. She lay the child down on the couch on the front porch. Her mother and her father hugged her. Then she fell, her knees bending. They gently took her to her bed. She slept a gentle sleep. It felt like it lasted twenty days and twenty nights. In later years, she raised the child, with her parents’ help, and the two of them became best friends.
And that was only one of the stories of the amazing, everlasting Life of Mariana.
16. Something Needs to Fail