“I want to thank you, Alison. I know it can’t be easy,” my mother said, her words blurry, slurred. The day had been too much and her pain had caught up with her. At her request, I’d given her an extra dose of morphine just after dinner. Her eyelids seemed heavy, her eyes glazed and narrow. She sank back against the pillows, her face pale and skeletal. “Having me here.”
I smiled at her. “Don’t be silly. I’m so happy you’re here. It’s all going to work out wonderfully.” I forced the words out, as if reciting a magical incantation, as if just by speaking them out loud I could make it so.
She smiled vaguely at me, closed her eyes.
I stepped back toward the door. Moxie was waiting for me on the other side, watching carefully. She seemed hesitant to come into the room. She usually loved having new people in the house, but didn’t they say some dogs could smell cancer? Maybe my mother’s frailty and illness was making my normally happy-go-lucky pup uneasy.
My mother popped her eyes open, lifted her head. Something about her movements was all wrong—jerky, like she was being pulled by invisible strings. “You can tell yourself that all you want,” she said, her voice mocking and cruel. “But we both know the truth, don’t we?”
I froze, clenched my jaw so hard I was afraid it might lock in place. “What truth is that?”
Behind me, Moxie gave a nervous whine.
My mother laughed a tired, dry laugh, then closed her eyes, drifted off without answering.
EVERYONE ALWAYS WANTS TOknow about the stone. People ask, but I’ve never told the story to anyone but you.
The story of the stone is really the story of Bobbi.
We were together that day, but it was Bobbi who found it. She went looking for a ghost and came out with this beautiful stone.
We’d never even planned on going to Mexico. We were supposed to have gone home the week before, but neither of us wanted the trip to end, to return to the real world with all its expectations and realities. I wanted to keep traveling forever; the only time I felt truly at home was when Bobbi was by my side.
So when she suggested the Yucatán Peninsula—where we could lie in the sand, smoke some Acapulco Gold, drink tequila—I was in. It was 1972, and everyone smoked a little grass back then, even Vassar girls.
We met a young man in a little beachside bar down in the Yucatán—Miguel. He was good-looking, I suppose. My Spanish was complete shit. (Still is.) So I only understood a few words of what Bobbi and Miguel were saying, but she kept turning to me to fill me in as she and Miguel spoke.
He was telling her all about a haunted cenote not far from there. A deep pool in limestone—like a cave, but not a cave, she explained as he explained to her. I could tell she was having a hard time understanding the details; she kept having him repeat himself.
“Mal,”Miguel said several times. I had no trouble understanding that word. It meantbad.
I also knew the building excitement on Bobbi’s face.
I loved watching Bobbi when she talked to people. She was the most expressiveperson I’d ever known; she’d been the lead in every school play. But it was more than that: she had a natural charisma that stopped people in their tracks. Everyone wanted to be around her, to bask in her glow.
Men fell in love with her on the spot, and strangers just struck up conversations and told her things. Even this trip, locals happily offered her tips for the best beaches, the hole-in-the-wall restaurants and cafés that weren’t in any guidebook, the safe and comfortable yet absurdly cheap lodgings. And, of course, the haunted places.
My God, was Bobbi a sucker for ghost stories, for the creepy and macabre. She absolutely loved the Tower of London, all the terrible torture devices. Manacles, the rack, that awful thing called the Scavenger’s Daughter.
Bobbi had dragged me to haunted castles, the streets where Jack the Ripper had stalked his victims, the catacombs in Paris, their walls lined with the ornately stacked bones of millions of people.
Anyway, as Bobbi talked to Miguel, she got that look, the one that said soon she’d be dragging me off to a haunted swimming cave.
Miguel told her a whole complicated story about the cenote. He said that back in the early 1900s, there was a European man, filthy rich. He came down and started to build a huge estate there in the village near the water—paid lots of people lots of money to help with the construction. But he went crazy. Started talking to himself. Arguing with himself.
“Loco,”Miguel said. I understood that too.
One night, the story went, this rich European got so tired of arguing with the voices in his own head that he drank a bottle of tequila, stuffed his pockets full of heavy rocks, and threw himself into the cenote, sinking straight to the bottom.
Miguel swore that if we went there and swam down deep enough, put our heads under, we’d hear him talking to us. Telling us things only the dead could know.
Bobbi and I drank more tequila and smoked some grass with Miguel—don’t tell your mother I told you that part, but you’re old enough for the truth—and then he picked up a cocktail napkin and drew a map with directions to the cenote.
An hour later, I was following Bobbi down a trail in the jungle with a flashlight the desk clerk at the hostel had found for us. I was afraid we’d get caught, get thrown into a Mexican jail—like I said, my Spanish was bad, but I understood whatNO TRESPASARmeant, and the signs were all over the place. Also, I was terrified of snakes, of spiders and scorpions. I kept my eyes on the little funnel of light from Bobbi’s borrowed flashlight, kept begging her to turn around.
My head was spinning from the tequila and the grass. I was sure there’d been something else in it—it wasn’t a normal high. I didn’t feel mellow and at one with the world; I felt like everything around me was jagged and out of place, like a puzzle with sharp edges that didn’t want to go back together.
Sorry. Where was I? Following Bobbi, right. I’m sorry, I’m tired. But there’s not much more to tell. And I can’t stop now. This is the best part.
