The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (21 page)

I arrived after he did, and found him waiting in one
of the velvet armchairs just inside the door. He bounded up when I
came in, and seemed a little goofy and overly happy. I guess the
news about Logan had cheered him.

“Hi,” I said, suddenly awkward.

He stepped toward me with a grin, and held his arms
open for me. “I won’t bite,” he said. The look on his face was
supremely confident, and just a tiny bit cocky, and turned me to
jelly. “Just a friendly hello. That’s it.”

For the first time since the crash, I found myself
in his arms. This time, he didn’t touch me in the clinical way he’d
originally done. He touched me passionately, romantically. He was
solid, and comfortingly warm, and he smelled like sunshine on
freshly turned earth. We didn’t do much for a long moment, other
than hold each other. I didn’t care who was watching. I just wanted
to feel him. I let my hands move along his back a little. It was
like a big, strong Valentine.

“Coffee, madam?” he asked, at last releasing me from
the embrace and opening one arm toward the counter. I realized now
that people were staring at us. This was my neighborhood, after
all, and not the sort of place where you’d usually find a guy like
Demetrio. Except that he was here, and he had every right to be
here, and I didn’t give a flying rat’s ass what they thought about
it anymore. I really didn’t. I smiled at him, and touched him
gently on the arm.

“Let’s do it,” I said, in answer to his question.
“Decaf for me, though. I’ve got finals in the morning, and I can’t
afford to be up all night.”

We ordered. He paid. Then we decided to take a
little walk on the bike path along Tramway Boulevard. Demetrio
wanted to hear all about the conversation with my mom and Logan. As
I told him about what happened, he listened attentively, stopping
to ask me how I felt about the whole thing a couple of times. Logan
never asked me how I felt about things. It was really nice to have
a guy do that.

“I’m cool with it,” I told him. “My mom will get
over it once she gets to know you.”

We kept talking, and even held hands a bit, as we
walked along the bike path. Just south of Academy, the path crossed
over a canyon - Ardilla Canyon, actually, owned by my school - with
a gorgeous unobstructed view all the way to the foothills. The sun
was low in the sky in the West, and we stood for a moment, facing
East, admiring the beautiful view and the way the Sandias turned
pink and red at dusk. We talked about how the color of the
mountains were the reason the Spaniards who colonized this land
originally had called them the Sandias, because sandia means
watermelon in Spanish. We were near my house, but I didn’t mention
it.

Suddenly, as we stood on the overpass, a large
orange Chow dog, mangy and apparently stray, ran up from the
canyon, scaling an embankment and landing on the path about ten
yards from us. It ran as though being chased, right out into the
busy traffic, looking behind it rather than ahead. Almost before I
realized what was happening, the dog was struck by an oncoming
Hummer, so hard and so fast that it’s body was thrown clear past
the bike path and back down the embankment it had come from. I saw
an arc of blood, like a twisted rainbow from hell, smear the sky as
the animal flew. The sound was horrible, a wet thud, and a noise
like cloth tearing. I screamed. The Hummer kept going, as did all
the other cars.

“Come on,” said Demetrio, already scaling the
railing, on his way toward the animal down below.

“No. It looked bad,” I called out, shaken. “I don’t
think I want to see what’s left of that dog.”

“I have to help it,” he told me. “Come if you want,
or wait here.”

“Oh, God,” I whispered, making the sign of the cross
on myself. Not to be outdone in my love for animals, I cautiously
followed him, scrambling past cactus on the loose sand of the
embankment. The dog lay just beneath the path, in two pieces. I
fought the urge to wretch, and looked at its terribly vacant eyes,
the bloodied fur, the back legs that hung to the top part of the
torso by just a few strips of tendon. Guts spilled out across the
dirty snow and sandy frozen earth.

“Oh, no, no,” I said. “So sad. This is horrible. We
just saw it! It was just alive, and now. Oh, no. How is this
possible? So unfair.”

Demetrio kneeled at the creature’s side, his eyes
fixed on the body, trancelike, his hands floating over it much the
way he’d done with Buddy the first day I met him.

“Demetrio,” I said. “Let’s go. It’s dead. There’s
nothing we can do for it now.”

He ignored me, closing his eyes and chanting some
words I couldn’t understand, in a language I didn’t know, beneath
his breath. I was so disgusted with the sight of the disemboweled
animal that I was about to turn away, when I caught sight of
sparks, like flaming, icy blue snowflakes, from the corner of my
eye.

I looked back at Demetrio, and saw that the sparks
fell from his fingertips onto the dog. I blinked, hard, to make
sure I wasn’t hallucinating. The sparkling lights were still there,
raining down from his fingers like the spray from the tip of a
sparkler on the 4th of July, onto the body of the animal below. All
around Demetrio’s head I saw a golden orange glow, almost as though
someone held a flashlight behind it.

In total disbelief, I watched as the dead dog began
to glow a sort of blue-white hot color. To my astonishment, bits of
it began to move back together, on their own, inching like worms,
the skin and organs falling into place, kneading one another into
place, and knitting themselves shut. Demetrio’s breath was haggard,
labored, and sweat dripped from his face. He was straining,
exhausted by this, whatever it was he was doing.

I stumbled closer, unable to fathom what I was
seeing. Bit by bit, the animal fastened itself back together again,
and the blood seeped backwards from the earth, back into the dog.
Moments after he’d begun, the dog that had previously been cut
nearly clear in two was whole again, and breathing, and opening its
eyes to look at us in a sort of grateful confusion. Demetrio put
his hand upon the animal’s fur now, and pet it gently while
speaking in a calm voice to it. He pulled a water bottle from his
pocket, and dribbled some of it into the animal’s mouth. The dog
lapped it up, and sat up, and wagged its tail appreciatively.

I felt lightheaded, dizzy, faint.

“Mami,” said Demetrio, as though he were about to
deliver some very bad news, the way police did in shows when they
said someone had died. “Sit down. Come here. I have something to
tell you.”

“No,” I said, staggering away,
then back, around in a little circle, stunned. “What
was
that? What just
happened?”

“I didn’t want you to have to see it, but it is my
duty to do this. I couldn’t wait, or she wouldn’t have made it.
Would you girl?” He scratched the now-healthy dog behind her ears,
and she wagged her tail in reply. “I think I’ll call her Nutmeg,
after the color of her fur. You like that? Nutmeg? Kind of cute,
no?” He was trying to put me at ease, but I didn’t think anything
could do that now.

“Demetrio.” My teeth chattered together.

The dog looked at me, and wagged its tail.

“Go get her, Nutmeg,” he said to the dog. “Go
on.”

It cocked its head to one side at me, and walked
over to me, nudging me toward Demetrio - as though it had
understood his words.

“This - hold on - no, this can’t be happening,” I
said, numbly, as I tripped over my own feet and ended up sitting
next to him with the dog lying at our feet as though we owned
her.

I met his eyes, and blinked, again and again, trying
to compose myself.

“You just brought that thing back from the dead,” I
told him.

“Yep.” He smiled with a shy shrug, as though he were
a little boy who’d been caught stealing candy and couldn’t find a
way to deny it.

“But that’s not possible.”

“You think?” he asked. “Then I’d say you got mad
skills at denial, mamita. Unless you weren’t here just now.”

“But how? It’s
impossible
.”

Demetrio let out a long sigh. “Well, I guess I was a
fool for thinking I’d be able to hide it from you.”

“Hide what?”

“My work.”

“This
is
your work?”

“Search and rescue. Only today I wasn’t searching,
but I found one anyway. This is what I do.”

“Okay.” I took a deep breath and
tried to rationalize what I was seeing and hearing. “I knew that.
You told me that. I’ve known this fixation you have for road-kill.
But I didn’t realize you could do
that
. I figured you just found
injured animals and nursed them back to health.”

“That’s about right.”

“No, that is
not
what I just saw. It was way more
than that. No one can do what you just did.”

“I can. But never twice for the same creature.”

In the west, the sun was getting lower, and Demetrio
was watching it closely. Seeing him eyeball the sky with anxiety,
preparing to run as soon as the sun set once more - the realization
hit me like an errant golf ball upside the head.

Doink
.

“You heal things. You can’t be out
after dark. Coincidences follow you like mice after the Pied Piper.
You’re not exactly a regular person, are you?” I asked him. Even as
it came out, the words sounded exactly right; absurd, but right.
I’d known this, somewhere, at some level, in my gut, from the
moment he first touched me.
Demetrio
wasn’t human.

Demetrio’s face fell into a frown.
He seemed torn and reluctant to answer. “I
want
to be,” he said softly. “Ever
since I met you, that’s all I want, mamita. It led me to do some
reckless, stupid things, too.”

“Like letting me see
this
,” I said of the
dog, who wagged her approval.

“Yeah. I shoulda had more self-control, but
seriously, I’ve never felt the way I feel with you when I have been
around a girl. Ever. It’s like, I don’t know, like you were meant
for me.”

I felt sick, and cold, overcome
with nausea at the realization that I was not in the world as I’d
known it before. There was more than I’d ever known. At a visceral
level, I understood this now. There was
much
more.

“So, what
are
you, exactly? An angel?” I asked
him, flinching a bit afterward, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to
know the answer.

“Nah.”

“Magical healer, like in those churches on TV?”

“Nope.”

“Then...what?”

“I’m dead, mamita,” he said, plainly.

“Dead,” I repeated, in a breathy whisper, feeling
faint.

“Right. Just like my
descanso
said. I’m a
person, like you, but I’m dead. I’m sorry, Maria.”

“Dead,” I said again, trying to wrap my mind about
it. “But I can see you and feel you, you’re warm, you’re right
here.”

“I - I wanted to tell you. I’m a revenant, a ghost
in human form. Sometimes I’m in human form, I should say. In this
dimension. It’s like in Dickens, when Dr. Manette is returned to
life, except he only died symbolically, and I actually did.”

“Dickens. Tale of Two Cities, you mentioned it the
first day.”

“I dropped you a few hints. You didn’t pick ‘em up
though.”

“Dead.”

“Hey. You heard of La Llorona? She’s a revenant. I
am too, but not all the time. I didn’t know how to say it, without
scaring you away. There’s science involved, it’s not what you
think, it’s actually beautiful, it has to do with the Golden Ratio
and Fibonacci numbers, if you’ve heard of them, and the Maker, he
believed I deserved -”

The world spun, and I placed my hands on the ground
to steady myself, but it didn’t work. The Golden Ratio? The thing
Thomas was prattling about the other day? Impossible coincidences,
too many of them. Everything began to fade, and disappear. Sounds
grew distant and fuzzy. I felt a buzzing in the center of my brain,
a churning sickness in the center of my soul.

And I knew I was passing out. And I knew I couldn’t
breathe right. And then I knew nothing but darkness.

♦

When I came to, I was in the driver’s seat
of my Land Rover, in the rear Starbucks parking lot, near the
dumpster, with the doors locked and the Saint Anthony of the Desert
card on the dashboard. It was dark out, and I was alone. My purse
was on the floor of the passenger seat. There was no note, nothing
from Demetrio. Just me, safe in my car, with no memory of how I’d
gotten there.

Shaken, I drove the three minutes to my house. I
made it home just in time for dinner, and found my worried mother
in her yoga pants, fuzzy yellow slippers and an oversized National
Hispana Leadership Institute t-shirt, busily checking a frozen
lasagna in the oven while the evening news blasted tragedies on the
under-cabinet flat screen TV.

“Hi,” I said. I tried to sound normal, and
failed.

My mother crossed her arms sternly
over her chest, angry. “Maria.” She then proved that she had a
singular penchant for holding a grudge by balling up a dishtowel
and hurling it to the floor. “What is going
on
with you? Where
were
you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I don’t
like
this, Maria,” she said as her
voice began to crack with tears.

“You don’t like
what
?” I was growing
irritated with her.