The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (22 page)

“This! You! What’s happening to you.”

“Nothing’s
happening to me.”

“Oh,
please
! I don’t even know who
you
are
anymore,
Maria! You’re lying and secretive, taking off and being careless,
breaking up with Logan -”

“If you like him so much,
you
date him,
mom!”

“Do not speak to me that way, young lady. Show some
respect.”

I knew this was a losing battle. “Yes, ma’am.
Sorry.”

“You’re getting into car accidents and
disappearing,” she continued, not quite done with her harangue.

“Mom,
stop
. I’m fine. I made it home for
dinner on time.”

“But what if you
hadn’t
? Where would I
have looked for you?”

“But I
did
. Here I am. Jeez, I wonder how
you’d handle it if you actually had a bad kid, mom.”

She kept listing my faults for me.
“You don’t answer your cell phone when I call you, and you lie to
me. Maria! You know how I feel about lying!”

“I know. Yes, ma’am.”

“Your
dad
was a liar!” she shrieked,
totally losing it now. This is when I saw the half-empty bottle of
wine on the counter. No, more like two-thirds empty. Great. “I
never thought you’d end up just like him, but
look
at you!”

I felt sick arguing with a drunk, but I couldn’t
help it. “That’s not fair. I’m not like dad.”

“You are! You’re
just
like him. You’re a
liar, and I can’t stand it. I am your
mother
!”

She was sobbing now, hysterical.

“Do
not
compare me to him,” I yelled
back.

“How can I
not
? When you go around telling me
lies and sneaking around.”

“I’m not ‘sneaking around’.”

“Sneaking around with a cholo. With scum. Where did
I go wrong, dear Lord?”

My mother angrily yanked the lasagna out of the oven
and set it to cool on the granite counter. She then began to rip
open a bag of prepared green salad, dumping it into a large wooden
bowl while laughing and crying, and otherwise generally looking
more and more like a woman who’d completely lost her mind.

“You must think I’m pretty stupid,
Maria.”

“I don’t. I think you’re very smart. You’re a
lawyer. You went to Stanford. You’re successful. Everyone knows
that.”

Mom dropped the empty bag of salad on the counter,
and threw her hands up in the air.

“You know what?” she asked. “I’m
done. I’m done with this. I’ve done the best I could to be a good
mom to you, and I don’t even know who you are anymore. I can’t do
this anymore. It’s too much. You’re trying to ruin my career,
that’s what this is. You mock my accomplishments, and my office.
How
dare
you. I’m
a mother, yes, but I’m a professional, and I will still be a
professional long after you’ve gone to college and moved out. You
are not my priority.”

I stood mute, and watched my mother rush from the
kitchen, toward her room. I heard her door slam. How was it
possible, I wondered, that my own mother was less mature than I
was?

I found my backpack, and pulled my books out to
study for my finals tomorrow. I was not going to let her drunken
abuses - or the craziness I encountered earlier - deter me from
passing the eleventh grade.

Half an hour or so later my mother returned to the
kitchen, somewhat calmer. She apologized for having lost her
temper, and said that she was also sorry for projecting her anger
for my father onto me.

“No worries,” I told her. “He’s a bastard. I
understand.”

Together my mom and I set the table, and got the
dinner served, somewhat cold but good nonetheless.

“You don’t have to tell me every little detail of
where you’ve been, okay?” she said, finally, doing a 180 from her
attitude earlier.

“Uhm,
okay
.”

“You’re a smart girl, and I know you’ll make good
decisions.”

“Thank you.”

“But I don’t want you to
lie
to me, Maria.” She
wore her politician’s smile.

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

“If you don’t want me to know something, just tell
me it’s none of my business. I’ll ask you where you’re going, and
you can say, ‘you know what, mom? I don’t want to tell you, but
I’ll be okay.’ I’d be fine with that. I wouldn’t love it, but I’d
be okay with it.”

“Okay.”

“And just promise to answer your cell if I call you,
so I don’t start thinking you’re in trouble or going to die.”

“Okay,” I said, even though I apparently was in
trouble and might very well die, according to the company I’d been
keeping.

My mom looked at me with a ton of love now,
switching gears entirely.

“You are so much like me,” she said.

“Thanks. I think.”

She laughed. “I know what it’s
like to be sixteen, Maria. You think your mom is the dumbest
creature who ever lived. You can’t stand being around
her.”

“That’s not true. Except when you
talk about yourself in the third-person.” At least it wasn’t
true
all
the
time.

“All I ask is that you level with me. And that you
go to your therapy appointment so you don’t screw up in school on
top of everything else.”

“I’m doing fine in school.”

“I know. But things - a lot can
change at sixteen, Maria. You can start to think it’s all about
boys, because hormones are terrible things.”

“I’ve heard they don’t really start raging until a
woman hits her late thirties,” I told her with a grin. “We should
probably be more concerned about you, honestly. I worry you’ll go
full-on cougar on me one of these days.”

My mother laughed, and shook her head. “I don’t know
about that.”

“Yeah, you say you’re working late all the time, but
where are you really, hmm?”

My mother kept shaking her head, then began to cry
into her lasagna again.

“Just remember, please,” she said. “We are a
political family. We have an image to uphold. You think it’s easy
to run for office as a single mother and a Latina? No. No, it’s
not. They will judge me twice as hard. I have to be twice as good
for half the credit. I can’t afford to have a crazy daughter. You
have to understand this.”

“I get it.”

“I think we should go to Santa Fe over winter break,
just me and you, for a mother-daughter ski trip, where we can
reconnect and get to know each other again. I think I’ve neglected
you, and I’m sorry.”

“Okay.”

She poured some more wine, with a mysterious smirk
on her face, and switched gears again, no longer loving and
saccharine, back to the rabid she-wolf.

“Logan is a good boy, Maria. He’ll
make a great husband and father someday.”

“Maybe, but not for me.”

My mother looked at me,
exasperated, and started to cry anew. “You don’t
get
it,” she sobbed,
growing hysterical again. “He - if you were
with
him, Maria! His family is
practically royalty around here. Think of what it could do for us.
If you were to show up in the society pages with him at events.
Just imagine.” Her eyes glowed with excitement just thinking of the
possibilities. It made me sick.

“Mom.”

“You don’t get it,” she groaned.

“No,” I told her, as I stood up to
clear my place and get started on the dishes. “
You
don’t.”

♦

My mother sat alone at the table for a
while, then quietly went to her bedroom. The silence and peace that
fell over the house, underscored with the eventual, soothing sound
of her snoring, was divine. I puttered around the kitchen for a
bit, found some cookie dough ice cream to help with the studying. I
got myself ready for bed, and watched a little TV. Then I settled
in to read some more. Finally, near midnight, the numb denial I’d
been in since I awoke in my car wore off, and I realized what I’d
learned.

Demetrio was dead.

Demetrio was dead.

Demetrio was dead, and he could
resurrect animals from the dead. But, presumably, he could not
resurrect
himself
from the dead.

Ridiculous
.

I went to my desk at fired up my iMac. I opened the
Internet browser, and went to Google. I typed in: “DEMETRIO ANTONIO
DE LOS SANTOS VIGIL” along with “HIGHWAY 14” and “ACCIDENT”. I
pressed “search,” and waited.

The search returned several entries, all from the
local media. I clicked on the first one, a brief from last year,
from the local newspaper. It required a login. I was annoyed by
this, but knew that my mother had a login because she subscribed to
the newspaper.

I ran to the kitchen and started to go through the
files in the kitchen desk drawer. My mother was meticulous with
record keeping, and I soon found the one labeled “Albuquerque
Journal”. I flipped through old invoices, and found a piece of
paper with the login and passcode written on it in my mother’s
scratchy, messy doctor’s handwriting. I ran back upstairs with it,
and sat at the desk to punch in the codes. It worked. The article
came up quickly. It was short, and I intended to read through the
whole thing, but only made it a couple of lines before I was frozen
in horror.

Two young men from Los Cerrillos lost their lives in
a tragic alcohol-related fatal crash on NM Highway 14 over the
Christmas weekend. They were Hilario Gallegos, 19, and his
half-brother Demetrio Antonio de los Santos Vigil, 18. Both young
men were reputed gang members...

I could not move, or breathe, or do anything but
blink stupidly at the screen for a long moment. There was a
photograph of the wreckage, a gnarled, mangled tangle of metal that
no one, not even an ant, could have emerged alive from. My heart
beat so fast I thought it would burst. My mouth hung open, and
every nerve in my body seemed to go tingly and numb from disbelief
and fear. I dragged my eyes up to the top of the paragraph once
more as they filled with tears, and read it again, out loud this
time, just to be sure I’d seen it correctly. I moved my finger
along beneath the words as I went.

Two young men from Los Cerrillos lost their lives in
a tragic fatal alcohol-related crash on NM Highway 14 over the
Christmas weekend. They were Hilario Gallegos, 19, and his
half-brother Demetrio Antonio de los Santos Vigil, 18. Both young
men were reputed gang members...

“No,” I said, softly. I gulped for air, and felt
dizzy. I read on.

Both young men lived in Los Cerrillos with
relatives. Neighbors and friends expressed shock at the deaths, but
at least one person who knew the young men said he was not
surprised, as both young men had allegedly been involved with gang
and drug activity.

The grandfather of Vigil said the younger brother
was an outstanding singer and choreographer, and that he graduated
with honors from Santa Fe High, though at press time the Journal
could not confirm this. Friends say Vigil had expressed interest in
leaving the gang, and was working as a veterinary assistant in
Santa Fe to save money to attend St. John’s College in the spring,
where he hoped to major in world religions and philosophy. He also
gained entrance to Stanford and Princeton, where admissions
officials say his essay about leaving gang life moved them to
tears. Alcohol and drugs are believed to have been a factor in the
accident, according to state police...

There were two photos of Hilario Gallegos with the
article. He was every bit as good-looking as Demetrio, though
without any of the warmth or intelligence in his eyes that his
brother had. I punched Demetrio’s number into my phone, but he
didn’t answer. I tried again, and again, and there was still no
answer. I texted, and got nothing back.

I would not be ignored.

I called my dog over to me now, and held him
tightly.

“Come on, Buddy,” I told him, adjusting the cone so
as to be slightly more comfortable. I got up from my desk and went
to my closet to find something suitably warm to wear in the middle
of nowhere on the coldest night of winter thus far. I stuffed some
pillows in my bed to make it look like I was sleeping there, in
case my mother awoke from her drunken stupor and found her way to
my room. Unlikely.

I knew I needed sleep to excel at final exams, but
something in me told me that could wait.

“We’re taking a drive. There’s
someone we need to talk to.”

♦

iPod and cell phone in pocket, with a
flashlight I appropriated from the garage, I headed off into the
night, in my jeans and recklessly applied layers of shirts and
sweaters that either looked bohemian or ridiculous. There was a
very real chance I had achieved both. Buddy tagged along at my
heels, limping with his little cast, yet overjoyed to be going on a
trip at last. I suspected he had felt abandoned by me over the
weekend. I lifted him into the Land Rover, and closed us inside. It
was about 12:30 a.m.

Shortly before 1 a.m., we arrived in Golden. I
wasn’t sure of what to do or where to go at first, so I simply
parked at the church, turned off the lights and the car, closed my
eyes and hoped for a sign. I was afraid, but not as afraid as I’d
been before I understood, at least partly, what was going on. Now,
I felt some semblance of control over my life. He was dead, but he
was nice.