Water and Stone (34 page)

Tree had vanished.

At first he thought she might've gone to the nearby gas station for cigarettes but looking about the room he saw her purse was on the bed and the clothes she'd been wearing—her waitress uniform, panties, and bra—were crumpled on the floor with the box lying on top of them.

They'd gotten extremely drunk the night before. Church rarely drank though the way Tree slammed back the Jack Daniels and Coke it seemed she'd had plenty of practice at it.

He must've blacked out. They were talking about all sorts of things though the discussion kept coming back to the piedra and what to do with it. Tree had dared him to take it out of the box, to hold it in his hands, but he seemed to remember telling her no.

Or had he? The alcohol might have lent him the bravado that normally eluded him. Reaching down to pick up the box, half expecting it to be empty, Church opened it up to look inside.

The piedra seemed happy to see him, like always. The stone had a habit of singing to him, or maybe it simply liked to sing and it didn’t matter who was around. Tree had claimed to hear it too though Tia Evalena had never mentioned the melody even when the nights were still as glass.

There was a flaw upon its surface that he never noticed before. Had Tree done something to the stone during their drunken revelry? He seemed to recall her talking again about touching it... daring him to do it first... telling him what a coward he'd be if he didn’t do it.

For some reason the memory flustered him more than he thought it should. He set the box back down on the bed and he held up both hands to examine them for any strange markings indicative of him having held something in them quite foreign to everything he knew. As he stood looking at them a memory surfaced though he couldn’t be sure if it was a remembrance of something real or imagined.

"Are you looking for me, Church?"

"Oh... there you are, Tree! I was worried when I woke and you were gone."

Turning around he expected to see his girl standing behind him... the direction from which her voice came. All he saw was the box sitting upon the bed, however. The room was empty.

"Where are you, Tree? Come on, don’t play games."

Had he merely been hearing things? Since his time spent in Mexico, Church had more and more difficulty distinguishing his dreams from his waking life. Perhaps it was some sort of auditory hallucination... maybe like the voice of Lorraine Ford he'd spend weeks listening to in that cave.

He walked over to the bathroom thinking she might be playing a joke on him by hiding behind the door. Tree wasn’t there. Turning and crouching down he pulled back the bed covers to peer beneath the mattress only darkness and dust bunnies greeted his eyes. Taking two steps into the bathroom, yanking the shower curtain open and thinking he had finally discovered her, only the limed-up pink and white wall tiles stared back at him.

"I'm right here, Church."

Her voice was coming from the vacant bed... except it wasn’t quite empty... the box sat upon it with its top still open. Echoes of Lorraine danced in his ears as he walked to the bed to peer into the box.

The piedra was pulsing as was its wont from time to time yet the colors seemed different somehow, more alive, and lovelier than he could ever remember. A nearly irresistible urge to take the stone into his hand pummeled his mind like the waves crashing on the beach outside the motel window.

"You touched it, didn’t you, Tree."

She was inside the piedra. As crazy as it seemed, it occurred to him that Lorraine Ford was there too. But that didn’t make rational sense... how could anyone or anything be inside something so small that it fit into a box he could carry around?

It was some kind of portal to another universe, perhaps. Church used to read tons of science fiction books about such things but he knew those were only stories about things that could never really happen. There had to be some other explanation... most likely he was suffering from some sort of post traumatic stress that caused his mind to invent fantastical tales that seemed as real as day.

He could think of only one way to find out the truth... he had to touch the stone. Yet he'd been warned against doing so, that if he did, the piedra would cause irreparable harm to his body, much like Tia Evalena discovered... though no one ever told him so directly his mother alluded to her having an encounter with the stone which ended up costing her an eye.

He remembered the first night his aunt appeared at the chabola. A storm had been waging war against the entire countryside... he watched wide-eyed from the tiny window in the loft where he slept as lightning danced the sky and rivers of rain cascaded down from dreadful clouds obscuring the heavens.

"Don't stare at the lightning, Church! You'll draw it to us."

His mother always issued the same caution and as usual he ignored her warnings. He was six years old and big enough to know better than to believe in Santa Claus and other fairy tales though he went along with them for his mother's sake.

She only wanted to protect him. Still, it made him feel small when she treated him like a child. Since there was no one to watch him while mother worked he stayed alone at the chabola... he'd always been fully capable of taking care of himself from a young age. In fact, it never occurred to him that he needed anyone in his life... even his mother was a bit superfluous.

Now he was a grown man and he knew better. He'd treated his mother to many harsh words when love would have sufficed always telling himself there'd be time to make it up to her... that he'd be better when he was older.

Tia Evalena had appeared out of that storm, a roll of thunder striking at the chabola like a battering ram. He heard the knocking at the door thinking at first it was something blown loose from the walls... maybe one of the clapboards that were forever rotting away and needing replaced. It was a wonder that the shack could even stand up to the blustery winds hammering at its exterior.

"Please go to the cellar, Church. I'll be along directly. We'll be safer down there."

He hated the cellar. It smelled of the dead and he always saw something moving out of the corners of his eyes but when he looked nothing was there... at least nothing he could see directly.

The cacophony at the door continued. It seemed a force all its own, deadly somehow, and yet enticing. Standing on the wooden ladder leading down to hell and peering into the living room he looked past the overstuffed chair to where his mother stood staring out into the darkness.

He could feel the fear rolling off of her body in waves. It startled him to think that his mother could be afraid of anything. She was his rock. Yet as she stood on her tip toes in an attempt to see who or what was at the door he could sense the fright permeating the room.

The blasts of the tempest outside made their way into the chabola stirring up the dust lodged in all the little cracks of the shack causing them to coalesce into a miniature whirlwind that boogied its way across the floor like a diminutive drunken dancer. As he watched it led his eyes back to now open door.

The girl standing there looked like his mother but there was an air of something sinister hovering about her. He had the sudden urge to jump up from his hiding place, run to the entrance, and slam the door in the woman's face. If she was allowed to enter the chabola their lives would never be the same.

It was too late, though. Seconds later his mother stepped aside as the girl walked into the cabin as if she belonged there with them. As much as he disliked her, Tia Evalena would have the answers that he sought... he had to talk to her before he did anything rash like touching the piedra.

He couldn’t leave Miami though... not until he found Tree. She had to be playing some sort of joke on him. Then again, maybe she was angry that he refused to touch the stone. Perhaps she'd gone back to Texas... or more ominously, maybe she'd left the room in a drunken stupor after he passed out. What if she had been kidnapped?

Should he alert the authorities to her disappearance? He couldn’t seem to think straight. He had a headache and his stomach was unsettled. He needed something to eat. Maybe once the hangover cleared he'd be able to decide what to do.

Packing his meager belongings as well as Tree's clothes and purse he picked up the box, placed it inside the cloth sack, walked out to the truck, and drove down the street to the first restaurant he came to.

She scarcely recognized the woman.

Though she knew the aging process would begin once the effects of the sand wore off she had no idea the changes would be so virulent. The girl who'd once been younger than her was now as old as her great grandmother might have been if she had one.

"Did you do this to me, Evalena?"

"No, of course not, sister... I haven’t the power to call age upon someone. Your years are catching up to you just as I once told you they would."

"You put a curse on me for trying to kill you, Evalena. If I say I'm sorry, will you lift it?"

"Oh, sister... I did no such thing. I love you. Even if I had the ability to do what you think I've done, I could never bring myself to hurt you."

"But I tried to shoot you, Evalena... not once but many times. Aren’t you angry with me?"

The old woman didn’t believe her. She could see it in her eyes and hear it in her penitent words. Denying any wrongdoing on her part had never worked. Everyone took her for a malignant being capable of unleashing untold cruelties upon all those around her yet she had never done anything not in keeping with those people's best interests.

Billy Ford had died but that hadn’t been her doing. Yani shot the boy. While it might have been true that he was doomed anyway, at least something of him would've lived on had her plans for him come to fruition. The tiny granules of sand that she fed him would have given birth to something otherworldly yet it would've been Billy.

That she saw more of creation than others was undisputable. Her vision of reality was direct and unencumbered by sentimentality or emotions or other representations that else wise might cloud her judgment and alter her journey.

It was an accidental discovery... the dropping of sand through the piedra. At first she thought it was unaffected by the stone but soon she learned otherwise. Like anything else that touched the translucent object hovering inside the box, the grains of sand were imbued with the same magic as the piedra, though perhaps not as potent.

Touching the stone was a great taboo... perhaps the gravest sin of all, for like a mortal reaching out to touch the divine only great suffering would result from such an act. Yet the compulsion to do so was ever-present as long as she possessed it.

Perhaps that was the origins of the whole concept of taboo... the great desire to possess that which would ultimately and completely destroy the holder. To stare into the face of the fiery god was the same as courting death. To reach out and touch that god—to claim it for oneself—was tantamount to blasphemy.

Was that why she continually found herself giving the stone over into the keeping of another... she didn’t trust her willpower? Though her memory of long ago events had grown hazy with time she thought there was more than a little truth to it. She'd directly encountered the piedra once... the second time might well spell her doom.

As time lengthened she came to realize that she didn't choose the piedra. It chose her. Now that it had gone from her grasp, she had to accept that there was some reason for that too. She hadn’t been able to delve deeply enough into the stone to learn even a fraction of its secrets but she'd always told herself she had plenty of time for that.

She was wrong. Though her hourglass might have been larger than others it was still glued to the table. Once the sands of time had run out, that was it. There were no do-overs, no time for remorse and guilt over paths not taken.

She'd been mistaken about many things. Coming back to Cuba was just another in a long line of errors that followed in her wake. It seemed imperative to leave the island as soon as possible... to travel back to the anonymity of Mexico and Texas and the poverty that would be hers to revel within.

They were coming for her and now that Yani was here that trip took on a sense of urgency. They were probably watching the house even now. She could run but they'd catch her. Besides, she was tired of living in shadows... of abandoning everyone she loved. The big cat refused to leave her side... was it because he thought she'd leave him again? Or was he a part of the conspiracy against her and her family?

She was as tired as Yani looked. Oh, if only she could simply lie down, go to sleep, and never wake up again. She supposed the possibility of that had long passed her by, however. She was in too deeply to escape so easily.

She should have stayed at the whorehouse. Oddly, that was one of the few places she'd ever been relatively happy. Of course she didn’t realize it at the time... maybe she was fated to only enjoy the seedier side of life, never the sunshine, not at least until it faded and went out.

"Tell me the secret, Evalena... I'm dying so it doesn’t make any difference now, but I'd like to know."

The old woman sighed the words rather than mouthed them. It was raining again... she could hear the angry patter on the tin roof. She had forgotten how wet the island was. Or was it rasping of the spiders building their nests? They always seemed to follow her or maybe they sensed what was coming.

"Secret? What secret, sister?"

"To how you used the piedra... to how you managed to stay young for so long... tell me. It will go no farther than this room."

"There's no secret, sister. You know that. You've had the stone long enough to discover it for yourself if there was anything to know. You're not a stupid girl nor have you ever been."

"I'm sorry I kept the piedra from you, Evalena. That was wrong of me. It wouldn’t let me go. I knew better but that damned thing had a hold upon me."

She supposed she should feel justified in heaping Yani with anger now that the old woman's admission of guilt had finally surfaced yet Evalena knew she would've done the same thing. They were too much alike. What she hated about her sister she also detested about herself.

"There's nothing to forgive, sister. We all do what we must to survive."

She almost felt sorry for the old woman... almost. But sorrow was an opulence she could scarcely afford. Had Yani given her the stone they wouldn't be in the predicament they were in now... she doubted her sister had any idea of the danger that lay waiting for her. If she did, she never would have come.

"I gave it to Church... is he safe carrying the piedra, Evalena?"

"Anyone who possesses the stone is in the danger of the grave, sister. Where's Church now?"

"I sent him away."

"We need to find him, sister. With the piedra we stand a chance at surviving. Without it, we're both as good as dead."

"I'm pretty sure I'll have to get better just to die, Evalena."

"Hush, now, sister... do not call your death upon you so lightly. It'll find us soon enough. Now think... where would Church go? Does he have a favorite spot? Are there friends he might visit?"

"I told him to just go, Evalena. I didn’t want to know where he was heading. The pull of the stone was almost too much to resist. As soon as I gave it to him, I wanted to take it back. But I knew I had to let it go, otherwise..."

"Otherwise I'd end up with it... is that what you mean, sister?"

"Maybe it is... you were acting so strangely, Evalena... and what you did to that boy... how could you? He was just a kid. You ruined his life... you killed that whole family."

"I can do nothing unless those involved allow it... you know that, sister. I made bargains with all three of the Fords... they thought they could get the better of me, otherwise they wouldn’t have agreed to the terms."

"You have a way with words, Evalena. I'll give you that much. I almost believe you... but I know better. Did you make the same bargain with the Fords that you made with me all those years ago?"

She should have known not to try reasoning with Yani... the woman was beyond that now. Her mind had to be failing along with her body. She told herself not to care... that Yani had tried to kill her just a few short weeks ago and given a chance would do so again.

Still, she'd watched her grow into a girl, doting upon her like a mother might, protecting her from the harm that was the world. She didn’t realize it until that moment that she loved the old woman as much as she did. It made knowing what was about to happen all the more difficult, especially knowing she once had the ability to save Yani's life.

This time, however, it would be at the expense of her own life. She'd been lucky before in managing to assuage the anger of the others at Yani's escape, promising them the girl would be found before it was too late. Now, she had kept her word. Yani was ripe for the plucking.

If only they had the stone things might go so much better for them. Not only would it allow them the potential for escape it even might make leaving the island completely unnecessary. She had forgotten how much she loved Cuba... the weather though moist was more tolerable than the incessant heat and dust of the Texas summers and the incessant cold and brutal winds of its winters and she didn't relish going back to the din and the stench of Mexico.

Yani knew more than she was letting on... but it was to her own detriment to deny knowledge of Church and the piedra. If they came for her—which they would—then all she could do was let them have the woman. She had protected Yani for as long as she could, especially if she refused to help herself.

Still, she couldn’t help but envy the old woman. What was it like to grow old and frail... to come face to face with the specter of death? It must feel marvelous.