Once, in the half-light, Ethan had seen the man from the diner in Turner, the one in the gabardine suit, peering into the room’s wardrobe.
He’d seen Hunter stepping, stark naked, from the shower.
He’d seen the two men, both unaware of each other’s presence, as they stood side by side at the window, peering out into the night. The sight had made Ethan almost double over in grief.
Everything was ruined. Everything. This time last night, he and Hunter had been in Ellersby, playing a video game on the couch. Upstairs, unbeknownst to them, Ethan’s brother had been loading his shotgun. This time last night, Ethan had been happy. He’d thought that Hunter was a tough man, a little rough around the edges, but fundamentally decent. He’d thought things could last forever.
Bang.
Mark my words. This man is going to get you into the sort of trouble you cain’t never get out of.
Here, at the Brake Inn Motel, there was a knock at Ethan’s door. The strange man, Ryan, called his name. “Ethan, can I talk to you?”
Ethan wasn’t sure he trusted Ryan Phan. When they’d spoken earlier in the office, the guy never quite met Ethan’s eye, never seemed able to sit still. He had a shifty way of walking, a sort of scuttling quickstep—never in a straight line—that made Ethan think of a fox.Sly, Ethan’s mother would have said.Never will give you the whole truth, no matter how many times he comes clean. Just like my daddy used to be.
“Ethan?” Ryan called from outside.
Ethan sighed. With Hunter gone and the girl Kyla in her room—Was she even still alive?—the night wasn’t exactly overflowing with friends. He rose. He unlocked the door. He found Ryan Phan standing with a fist raised, ready to knock again.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” the little man said. “But we’re in even more trouble than we thought.”
FERNANDA
“But the little god underestimated the girl from the water. When the god’s back was turned, the girl grabbed up the talking stone the god had thrown in the fire and tossed it to the bear because his thick paws didn’t mind the heat. The stone was relieved, and promised to tell the girl where the little god hid—”
A terrible sound fell over the motel: a new sound, somehow even worse than the shrieking cries of the monsters in the dark. It was a strange, deafening bellow, like a foghorn or the wail of some massive beast, and when the sound rolled across the motel, Fernanda felt the earth shake. The glass of their window rattled against its bars. Her teeth vibrated in her mouth.
The sound had come from the mountain.
The shock of the noise made Fernanda hesitate, and hesitation was the death of a good story. The thread snapped. The story wouldn’t return. She had been weaving a new one on the fly, a twist on a tall tale her grandmother used to tell when Fernanda was a girl—but then so were all of Fernanda’s stories.
She was losing her touch. The last twenty-four hours had worn her down. Even just a few nights ago, Fernanda could have gone on and on forever, one story into another, the “Scheherazade of the Sierras,” as Frank used to call her. Frank O’Shea: a sharpened stick of a man with a black heart and bloody hands, haunted by terrors in his dreams. Frank had lost his mother as a little boy—the most frightening thing that can happen to a child—and he believed that by inflicting fear on others he might somehow dilute the fear that lived inside him.
Frank was a fool, in other words. But a lethal one.
The man with the broken nose, Ryan Phan—he’d been correct when he’d guessed how Fernanda had entered into Frank’s operation. She had indeed been picked up by his crew when she tried to cross (legally) into Los Estados Unidos. Last summer, Fernanda had returned from college in Connecticut to discover her life in Montereyin ruins. Her father’s chain of camera stores had been going under for years. Apparently, he’d done some foolish things with his taxes to try to keep them afloat. The Mexican government is a strange beast, often corrupt to the point of uselessness, but it can still bite. Fernanda’s father had been arrested while Fernanda was in the air. Her mother had already vanished with what money she could get her hands on. By the time Fernanda’s taxi reached the house, the government was there, stripping the place to the studs.
Stepping inside, the first thing she’d heard was an endless scream from upstairs. She found her brother Miguel alone in an unfurnished room, screaming and rocking next to a broken sewing machine and a box of burned-out flashbulbs like any other piece of junk.
“It’s good you came,” one of the tax men told her. “We were worried we’d have to put him away somewhere.”
Fernanda would never let that happen. Even in her shock—even as she realized that her fortunes had been obliterated—Fernanda’s first priority had been Miguel. It was always Miguel. He was autistic, deeply so, and Fernanda had learned a long time ago that when he got like this—when his mind seemed to collapse in absolute free fall—the only thing that could calm him down was a story.
So she had sat on the bare floor in the upstairs room, careful to give him space, and said through the screams, “Have you heard the one about the baby wolf that ate the moon?”
By the end of the story, Miguel was quiet. The men from the tax office were long gone. She sat with her brother in the long sunset of a Monterey summer, watching the light seep over the bare walls like honeyed blood. Her life, hemorrhaging before her eyes.
But at least her brother stopped screaming.
In his tiny, tiny, tiny voice, Miguel said, “Nanda.” His name for her. The only word she’d ever heard him speak.
“Nanda.”
The stories were a trick Fernanda’s grandmother had taught her back when Miguel’s challenges had first become obvious. You get a good hook, a problem right in the first sentence, and all the rest comes easy.Be surprising and familiar at the same time, her grandmother used to say.Notreallysurprising: life’s bad enough with those already. Give thelistener the sort of surprise they think they should have seen coming. Give them a magic trick.
Fernanda often wondered just how much of her stories Miguel really took in, but they always calmed him down.
In the end, Fernanda had found a frosty aunt who agreed to take in Miguel, but only when Fernanda handed over the last of the money she’d been able to scrounge together from her family’s devastated accounts. She didn’t exactly trust her aunt to be a perfect caretaker for Miguel, but it only needed to last a year. Fernanda herself was going to return to Connecticut to complete her schooling. A bilingual woman with a prestigious finance degree—there wouldn’t be much limit on what she could do.
