The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (24 page)

Nutmeg stood next to the headstone and wagged her
tail enthusiastically. I clicked the flashlight on, and shone it
now on the tombstone. The name was clear.

Demetrio Antonio de los Santos
Vigil

I turned the light off, because it felt intrusive
here, and knelt at the side of the grave, next to the dog. I’d
never been so unafraid in my life, oddly. I was suddenly at peace
here. Calm.

“You see him, too, don’t you girl?”

Pant, pant, pant.

I scratched her behind her ears, and tried to
understand.

“How is this possible?” I asked the tombstone, as
though it might answer me. “I know you’re there.”

A small, very faint breeze kicked up then, and
circled around me, warm. It was well below freezing out, but I was
enveloped in a warm little gentle tornado that smelled of sun on
sand.

“I don’t understand,” I whispered.

The lights were back now, circling in the moving
air, and softly flaming in and out. In them, I saw his outline, and
his eyes, briefly, but they were there.

“But how, Demetrio?” I asked, tears coming to my
eyes.

I heard his voice again now, right next to my ear,
smooth as always, and filled with confidence, though sounding now
as though it traveled to me from a great distance, crackling and
amid a cacophony of static.

“If you love me, as I love you,
tell
no one
,
mamita. Tell
no one
. Not even Kelsey. You are part of my world now, and you have
to keep my secrets. If you want Buddy back, tell
no one
. I’m just the guy
called 911. That’s it.”

“Do you have Buddy? Did you take him?”

“No,” came the hissed, elongated reply, from far
away. There was a brief pause, and then the voice returned,
stronger. “It is important that you do as I ask this time. Promise
me. If you let me down, it could mean the end of Buddy, and the end
of my chances. And yours. I need your word.”

I watched as the light died out one last time, as
though exhausted from the effort. I wrapped my arms around myself
as the cold air came flooding back over me and the warmth and peace
I craved and adored seeped away into the night. Fear returned. I
didn’t know what chances he referred to, but I knew I loved him,
and he needed my help.

“I promise,” I said, as I ran my fingers across his
name on the gravestone, my shivering beginning anew.

♦

I got home late, happily undetected by my
snoring mother, slept, and drove myself to school the next day
feeling blank and moving on automatic pilot. It might seem strange,
to someone who didn’t experience the surreal things I had, that I
reacted with numbness to such extraordinary circumstances, but I’m
positive in retrospect that this reaction from my mind and heart
was a protective one. Denial. There are some things that human
beings simply are not equipped to process all at once, some things
we need to take in piece by piece - if at all. Denial was given to
us through evolution, so that we could survive. The old Maria never
had thoughts of this nature; for the new Maria, the post-accident
Maria, they were somehow second nature.

I arrived in Art History class before Kelsey did,
and sat in my usual spot. It didn’t take me long to notice that our
classmates were whispering about me, and trying to seem like they
weren’t. I was clearly the center of attention, and not in a good
way.

“They’re talking about me,” I told Kelsey.

“I know.” She looked at me with
great pity. “It’s all over Twitter and Facebook. Logan’s started a
‘save Maria’ campaign to let everyone know you’ve lost it.
Apparently someone has a video of your argument with your mom at
Dion’s, and he got ahold of it. It’s everywhere. I guess Logan
thinks any chick who dumps his lousy ass is certifiably
insane.”

“Oh, God.” I slid down in my chair, wishing myself
invisible.

“You can get him for cyber-bullying,” Kelsey said.
“I looked into it. He’s such a pig.”

“This is really bad.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll get through
it,” she said. “I started a ‘Screw Logan’ page, and we’re getting
almost as many hits as the ‘save Maria’ page. Thomas had a photo of
Logan in his underwear with a rainbow afro wig on, from the school
camping trip last year. I used it.”

“Thanks,” I said, smiling a little, but still
feeling pretty glum. “Nice to know we can sink to his level when we
need to.”

Yazzie appeared in the room then, rushing in from
somewhere with her hair half sticking up all over her head. She
looked like she’d been electrocuted by a clown, and inexplicably
wore what appeared to be a red rubber pair of overalls. She
apologized for being late, and instantly set out to feel and read
the energy in the room, drifting about. When she got to me,
horrifyingly, she stopped, and stared as she was wont to do.

“A revenant,” she said.

I balked. Kelsey snorted, because she didn’t know
what I knew - otherwise, I was sure she, too, would have
balked.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am?” I said.

“I feel the blue 4th aura of a goodly ghost here. It
has touched you.”

I gulped, and tried to hide the fact that my heart
thundered like the hooves of a team of Clydesdales at a trot. I
hadn’t allowed myself to so much as think about my night yet.

“Have you read the story I gave you?” she asked.

“No, not yet. I’m sorry.”

“Soon,” she said, thoughtfully. “You should.
Imperative.”

Then, as quickly as she’d honed in on me, Yazzie
moved on, handing out the final exams as though she were a flower
girl at a wedding, laying rose petals upon the floor. I was
grateful for the silence that fell over the room, because it meant
I didn’t have to notice my former friends gossiping about me.
Unfortunately, the test was a Yazzie creation, and as such it was
very easy, with no right or wrong answers. Too easy. We all
finished in about fifteen minutes, leaving us with nearly two hours
to kill. Yazzie informed us that we’d be spending class in the
Lucero Library on the other side of campus, researching
photorealism.

“I want you to think about the
controversy this style ignited. People began to paint from
photographs, with technical prowess, and their paintings looked
like photographs, but weren’t photographs,” she said, pacing back
and forth at the front of the room. “Ask yourself, is this art? The
people in the high art world in Europe and the States did not think
so at the time. They felt that art had to be purely imaginational,
spiritual, that it had to come from within and be expressed in a
highly stylized and original way. The question is one of great
significance to a world steeped in science and technology, though,
isn’t it? If a thing
looks
like a photograph, and serves the same purpose as
a photograph, but came into being through the attention and love of
an artist who saw something in it that might not have been seen
before, is it a photograph? Is it a painting? What is it? And does
it matter? And aren’t both photographs and paintings both just
approximations of life? Who is to say one is art and the other is
not? Who is to say one is real and the other is not? Who, but the
creator, can make such determinations?”

I thought about this, and was
struck by the parallel with Demetrio. He looked like a human. He
felt like a human. And yet he wasn’t a human. Or was he? Was he a
spiritual work of art, somehow, or something? Were things always a
matter of perspective? As Yazzie spoke, she watched me, and only
me. I knew she meant this lecture for me, for this reason. I didn’t
know how I knew this, but I knew it - just as I knew that
she
knew things the way
I did now. With a start, I realized Yazzie wasn’t actually as crazy
as everyone thought.

We gathered our things, and began to walk across the
cold campus toward the spectacular structure that was Coronado
Prep’s Lucero Library. It was better endowed, as libraries go, than
many college facilities. Coronado Prep had ridiculous amounts of
money floating around. I braced against the cold wind, and tried to
get Kelsey onto a new topic.

“Have you picked a dress for the
dance yet?” I asked her, ignoring the group of girls who laughed at
me from across a courtyard, and the other group of girls who gave
me a fist-pump and shouted “team Maria all the way!” Great. I was a
team now, all on my own.

“Nah,” she said. “I was hoping maybe we could hit
the mall next weekend, or sometime over break. If you’re still
going.”

Right. I’d forgotten that when I broke up with Logan
I forfeited my rights to the dance.

“How about we go stag?” she asked. “We can go as a
group, me, you, Victoria and Thomas.”

“Sure. That’s a good idea. I’m assuming you’ll go
for black?” I tried to smile as though I hadn’t a care in the
world.

“Dunno.”

“You should try blue,” I told her, as a flock of
crows alighted from a branch in a tree above us, one of them
swooping so close we ducked. “Or turquoise. It would really set off
your eyes.”

Kelsey looked at me now, hard, at
the door to the library. “What’s
wrong
with you today?” she asked me.
“I mean, besides all this crap with Logan on the
Internet.”

“What? Nothing. Why?” I grabbed the handle to the
door, and held it open for her to pass. She didn’t budge.

“You don’t seem like yourself. You
are
so
not the
girl who says ‘wear blue to set off your azure eyes.’”

“That’s not what I said, exactly.”

“Close enough. Out with it. What’s eating you?”

“C’mon. It’s freezing out here. Continue your
inquiry inside.”

“Fine.” Kelsey stomped past me, unsatisfied with my
answer.

Members of the class paired and grouped up, or went
off alone, to find information. To my dismay, I saw Logan here,
too, with his calculus class. He sat with a group of kids and they
all looked at me when I walked in, and burst out laughing.

“Morons,” said Kelsey, putting a protective arm
around me.

“What are they saying, you think?”

“It’s all about Demetrio. Logan put up photos of
prisoners and thugs and various other creepy men with metal teeth
that he randomly found, and said you’re dating them. His team is
saying you’re slumming it with a hoodlum and that you’re under his
spell because you like drugs.”

“What?”

“Logan’s pretending he wants to
help you, but it’s all about how mentally unstable you are and how
you’re a danger to the school now that you’re bringing gang members
on campus.”

I felt my eyes fill with tears. I tried to avoid
everyone’s gaze as Kelsey and I settled in at a table on the north
side of the building, near the windows that faced out to the
expansive playing fields. The fields were covered in snow at the
moment, flanked by stark, hibernating deciduous trees, and their
perkier - and to my eyes at this moment, arrogant - evergreen
cousins.

“Me, I
like
photorealism,” I said dismally
as I plopped down in my chair across the table from her. My eyes
strayed across the field, in hopes of enticing Kelsey to follow my
gaze. It did not work. She continued to stare at me,
interrogation-style.

“Did you kiss him?”

“No.”

“Lame,” she said.

“He never wants to.”

“Gay?”

“Negative. I asked.”

“Maria.” Still staring.

“What are you hiding? You won’t even look at
me.”

I finally met her eyes with mine, and sighed, hoping
she’d notice how weary and unhappy she was making me.

“He told me a lot,” I said,
sincerely, in a half-whisper. “I’m
dying
to tell you. But he also told
me he’d
kill
me
if I told anybody.”

She looked hurt and shrugged, and totally missed my
subliminal messaging technique. “Okay. I’m used to it. He’ll just
be the new guy who comes between us, is that it?”

“It’s not that I don’t
want
to tell you,
Kelsey. I do. I want to so badly it hurts. But I can’t.”

“I understand,” she said, seeming to be hurt by my
words.

“Don’t take it the wrong way. Please?”

The good thing about Kelsey was that she had a
singular ability to consider things before reacting to them. This
was one of those times. “Can I think about this a while?” she asked
me.

“Of course.”

“Okay.”

I turned my eyes to the playing fields once more,
hoping to calm my brain down enough to slip into a cozy denial once
more, but this was not to be, because tied to one of the
aforementioned deciduous trees, a tree that moments ago had been
reaching in solitary determination to the sky, was a small black
dog.

Buddy.

The rope was long and red, and stood out crisply
against the white snow, as did the dog. My dog.

“Omigod,” I said, under my breath. My pulse did that
thing it was getting so good at now, and began to hammer away
inside of me.

I scanned the field with my eyes, looking for
Demetrio. But I saw nothing. Just Buddy, the red rope, the trees,
and the otherwise vacant snowy fields. Buddy, being his usual self
and appearing unharmed, tugged at the rope and yapped at the crows
flying overhead. They were bigger than he was, but being a
Chihuahua he was certain that he was the biggest and most fearsome
dog who ever lived. I watched, astonished and unsure about how to
handle situation, as Buddy pulled and pulled at the tether.

Soon, the rope came loose from the tree, and Buddy
got his wish of freedom. He promptly squandered it in running
across the field, chasing crows straight toward Adelante Road. The
good news was that Adelante Road was far enough away that it would
take Buddy a minute or two to get there. The bad news was that
Buddy was inexplicably drawn to busy streets, and seemed to think
that it was a Chihuahua’s macho duty in life to challenge moving
cars to a duel, confident that he would always win. Given that he
was roughly the same color as blacktop, I was forever rescuing him
from this particular delusion.