The Way We Bared Our Souls

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ISBN: 978-0-698-13724-0

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Latham, Zoe, and Harper

IT FELT AS IF WE’D
just been here, on this same dirt floor, within these same adobe walls, in this same spectral formation.

But it had been a full week since the subterranean ritual, and everything had changed since then. For the most glaring example, I needed only to look around the ceremonial kiva at the stricken faces before me. Only four of us remained in the ghostly underworld of our initiation. Where Kaya, our fifth, had sat beside me on a blanket last Saturday night, there was now just a depression in the dirt. Kaya, the girl who felt no pain.

Now she would feel nothing, ever again.

What would Jay say? He had warned me of the consequences, but I hadn’t listened. He had entrusted me with his magic, and I had let him down. Could he have been completely wrong about me? He’d told me that I had a powerful soul, but now I just felt muted and buried, crushed by the earth above me. Maybe I’d never been equipped to lead my friends to better lives. I’d wanted so badly to be healed that I’d let myself get carried away—and had doggedly carried others with me. And we definitely weren’t noble Indians of the Southwest communing with the benevolent spirits of our ancestors. We were just four kids from Santa Fe High crowded around a fading fire in the New Mexico desert that served as our city’s suburb. And now we’d lost one of our own. I’d lost her. Me. My fault. Not Jay. Not his mystical coyote. Me.

I was Kaya’s murderer.

Across from me and through the thickening smoke, Ellen looked berserk—more jittery and unmoored from reality than she’d ever been in her burnout days—and this despite the fact that most of the drugs had been flushed from her system. Except for the ones she took for her incurable disease. Or rather, for
my
incurable disease. If it was still my disease. Confusing, I know, but bear with me. A lot of crazy things happened that week.

Ellen’s bleached blond hair was tangled with sage and juniper from scrambling down the mountain the night before. The mud on her face had hardened, like the aging adobe slathered on every building in our city. I wrapped my Navajo blanket around her shoulders. She accepted the offering numbly, lost in her own anxious world. I almost wished she would lash out at me, as she used to when she was under the influence. Now, her distance felt unnatural.

Not that any of this was natural. Death seemed the most unnatural thing of all.

When Ellen adjusted her arms I saw the turquoise horse figurine she clung to. I looked down at the object I gripped in my own hand. It should have been a deer totem, but instead it was a shard of bone. Which, I didn’t realize until now, was drawing blood from my palm. And I was the one expected to save us?

“Lo,” Thomas said, his voice muffled by his zipped-up hoodie, “you’re bleeding again.” Was it my imagination, or had some of the solicitude left his voice? As a child Thomas had been through a war, practically a genocide, and yet even he was shell-shocked by recent events. You can only see someone bleed so many times in a week without getting caregiver fatigue.

“Here,” he said, offering me a fresh white towel from his backpack. I shook my head and tucked the sharp object back into my pocket. I didn’t want to soil something so pure.

“Serves Lo right,” Kit said, prodding the fire with a stick. He had revived his old resentment. The joyful, manic energy he’d been cultivating for the past week seemed to have taken a sinister turn. He ran his fingers through his stubby Mohawk, which barely moved under the gesture. He also hadn’t seen a shower for a couple of days. We’d all been too busy trying to survive. Trying, and failing, to keep each other whole.

“Leave her alone,” Thomas told Kit. But judging from his weak, exhausted voice, I could tell his heart wasn’t even in that small defense. Kit could probably shove me violently against the kiva’s sacred wall right now, and Thomas would scarcely budge. I deserved all that and more. Thomas knew me better than anyone else in the world at this point, well enough to know that he would be wise to be done with me. He’d been a foot soldier for a psychotic warlord, and I’d still never be good enough for him. We were both killers, but at least he could cite force and coercion as an excuse for his fatal mistakes.

Judging by the buttery light filtering through the hole above our heads, the desert sun was finally rising. Kaya should have been waking up right now to the dissonant hum of her alarm clock. Her mom should have been in her bedroom to take her temperature and check for any cuts and bruises that might have accrued in the night. But now Kaya was beyond injury.

My eyes climbed the ladder rungs that we’d descended to get into the ceremonial chamber the night before. We were buried together in this dark interior, but I could still see the peekaboo brilliance overhead. Another blue-sky day in New Mexico, big surprise. It was the Land of Enchant-ment, after all. I guess I couldn’t expect this climate to reflect the tragedies I created. Santa Fe boasted three hundred days of sunshine every year. I boasted one stupid decision to haunt me for the rest of my life. However long that might be. My days were numbered differently every day.

“Please just bring her back,” I murmured, but to whom, I wasn’t sure.

Then the opening darkened, and a pair of legs appeared on the ladder. For one ecstatic moment I thought they belonged to Kaya, but then I recognized the weathered hiking boots, the worn Levi’s.

Jay.

The ring of desert sunshine formed a halo around his head as he seemed to drop effortlessly from the sky. When Jay touched down I immediately felt more grounded. Maybe he could miraculously undo the damage I’d inflicted.

Jay quietly assessed the kiva’s inhabitants. “Where is your fifth?” he said. Ellen began to cry.

“We were hoping you could tell us,” I said. I closed my eyes and tried to see Kaya’s face, but it was pushed aside by images of deranged coyotes and angry bulls, machine guns and burning men. . . .

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Jay studied me softly. He seemed to understand my guilt, my fear. Our overwhelming loss.

“You already know,” I said. He nodded.

“It’s over, Consuelo,” Jay said. “It’s time to reverse the ritual.” I crumpled to the ground. My selfish experiment had reached its ugly, bitter end. Jay reached out to touch my quaking back. I raised my head. “It’s not just Kaya who departed our circle last night,” he continued. “You have all let your centers weaken. It’s time for you to reclaim your souls. Only then can you see your friend again.”

See her again. Maybe we could resurrect her after all.

Jay’s coyote trotted up from some dark recess of the kiva and licked my bandaged forearm, around the puncture wounds that she’d made the night before. I petted her absentmindedly on the scruff of her neck. I knew she wouldn’t try to hurt me.

Thomas, Ellen, and Kit regarded me through the smoke, hungry for whatever wisdom I could deliver. It seemed they still saw me as the natural leader of our spiritual outfit, even though I’d failed them miserably. We were all suffering beneath our burdens, but right now the heavy, subterranean silence weighed on us the most. I had never felt more lost, more disconnected from people, from my own strength, from daylight itself. I took a deep breath and prepared to speak.

“I got you into this,” I said, pulling a precious object from my pocket and extending my wounded, lifeless hand toward the flames. “And now I’m going to get you out.”