“Why don’t I sit here, and we’ll wait for the rest of the crowd to leave? Then you can show me.”
“Yes.”
Page felt an ache in his chest. His mind raced with questions that had nowhere to go.
Leaning against the nearby post, Costigan dropped his cigarette and crushed it with his boot, all the while continuing to watch carefully.
“When I was ten, my parents took me with them on a car trip,” Tori said, staring toward the darkness. Her voice drifted off.
Page didn’t understand why she’d told him that. Then she seemed to remember what she’d started to say.
“We lived in Austin back then, and we didn’t reach this section of west Texas until dark.” She tilted her head toward something in the distance. “My father wanted to visit a cousin of his who’d just gotten a job on a ranch out here. The cousin was only going to be in the area for a couple of months.” Again Tori paused, then seemed to remember what she’d started to say. “As you know, all my father’s relatives were wanderers.”
Including him, Page thought, but he was careful not to interrupt. Her father had deserted the family when Tori had been sixteen.
“Anyway, we drove through here,” Tori said.
The exclamations of delight in the crowd contrasted with com- plaints about the increasing chill and the impatience some felt when they didn’t see what others claimed they did. The noise made it difficult for Page to hear what Tori said, but he didn’t dare ask her to speak up for fear of having the opposite effect.
She continued, “I needed to go to the bathroom. Even back then, the county had a couple of outdoor toilets here. When I saw them in our headlights, I yelled for him to stop, but my father was in a hurry to see his cousin. He wouldn’t have stopped if my mother hadn’t insisted. I rushed into one of the toilets, and after I came out, my father was waiting impatiently by the car. Something made me look toward the grassland, and I saw them.”
“Saw what?”
Tori seemed not to have heard the question.
“I couldn’t help walking toward the fence and staring at them. My mother always took me to church on Sunday, and I thought that when the preacher told us about heaven, this is what he must have been talking about.
“My father ordered me to get in the car, but I couldn’t make myself do it. I couldn’t bear to stop looking at what was out there. He wanted to know what the hell I thought I was seeing. I tried to explain, but all he said was something about a damned fool kid’s imagination. I remember trying to push him away when he picked me up and carried me to the car. I shouted and pounded him. He literally threw me into the back seat.”
“I’m sorry,” Page said. “Maybe it was a good thing that he eventually left.”
When Tori didn’t continue, Page regretted his interruption, but then he realized that she’d stopped only because she’d renewed her attention on the darkness.
“There!” a woman at the fence shouted.
“Yes!” a man joined in.
Another woman pointed. “Five of them!”
“I don’t see anything!”
Disgusted, the teenagers got into the pickup truck and drove away. A half-dozen people wandered toward the bus, but a surprising number remained, staring toward the darkness.
“There’s one on the left!” someone exclaimed.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” someone else asked.
Page wondered the same thing.
Again Tori spoke, still not looking at him. “I’d forgotten about this place until two days ago.”
“The day you started to drive to your mother’s house,” Page said. The words he almost used were, The day you left me.
“I’d gone a little beyond El Paso. It was six in the evening. I was at a truck stop, studying a road map while I drank a cup of coffee. I still had a long way to drive to get to San Antonio, and I wondered if I might need to stop somewhere for the night. Interstate 10 goes south east along the Mexican border until it gets to a town called
Esperanza, where the highway cuts directly east to San Antonio. I figured Esperanza might be a good place to stop.” She paused. “Interesting name for a town.”
“‘Esperanza’?” Page had lived in the Southwest long enough to know that the word was Spanish for “hope.”
Tori smiled at something in the darkness. Page waited, beginning to feel afraid. A minute later, she continued. Her voice was so calm that it was as if she were reading a bedtime story to a child.
“I looked toward the bottom of the map to find the inches-to- miles scale and figure out how much farther I needed to go. But as my eyes drifted past the names of towns, one of them caught my attention: Rostov. It must have been tucked away in my memory all these years. Amazing.
“Suddenly that night came back to me as vividly as if it had happened yesterday. I remembered that the roadside toilet had a sign on the door: ‘Property of Rostov County.’ I remembered coming out of the toilet and seeing what was in the darkness past the fence. I remembered how angry my father got when he didn’t understand what I was talking about and threw me into the car. I could feel the tears in my eyes and how I wiped them and stared through the back window to- ward the darkness until I couldn’t see anything out there anymore as we drove away.
“We drove so long that eventually I fell asleep in the back seat. Even then, I dreamed about them.”
“There!” someone at the fence exclaimed, pointing.
“So I finished my coffee and folded the map and got in the car,” Tori said. “When I reached Esperanza, instead of stopping for the night, I kept driving, but I didn’t turn east on Interstate 10 to go to San Antonio. Instead I took a county road and kept following it southeast along the border. The sun went down, but I kept driving until I got here. This observation platform didn’t exist back then-there were just the toilets. I was afraid I’d discover that my memory had tricked me, that what I’d seen that night had been only a damned fool kid’s imagination, exactly as my father had insisted.”
“There’s another one!” someone exclaimed.
Tori smiled toward where a man pointed, and she fell silent again. In a while, she continued, “It was late. Hardly anybody was around. I can’t describe the relief I felt when I stepped out of the car and looked past that fence and saw that what I’d remembered-and what I realize now I’ve been dreaming about all these years-was real. I came over and sat on this bench, in the same spot where I’m sitting now and the same spot where I sat last night, and I didn’t want to do anything but stay here the rest of the night and look at what I’d seen when I was ten.
“My life might have been so much different if my father had just allowed me to watch a little longer.”
“Different?” Page asked. “How?”
Tori didn’t answer. That sent a chill through him that had nothing to do with the night air.
“Watch as long as you want,” Page said.
“I will.”
“I didn’t come here to stop you,” he tried to assure her.
“I know. Besides, you can’t.”
Page looked over at Costigan, who continued to lean protectively against the nearby post. He spread his hands as if to say, Are you starting to get the idea?
But Page didn’t get anything, not anything at all. He was mystified.
And afraid. He worried that Tori was having some kind of breakdown.
If so, he realized, looking around silently, apparently a lot of other people were having the same breakdown.
“Tori…”
She continued smiling wistfully toward the darkness.
“I love you,” he said. The words came out before he realized. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d said them. He didn’t get a reaction.
“Tori, tell me what you’re seeing. Help me see it, too.”
“I don’t think you can,” she said.