“Pay attention to my body,” he said, raising his voice over the engine so I wouldn’t miss any important details. “When I lean in for the turns, move with me. Straighten up when I straighten up. And when we stop, put your feet on the ground like I do. Basically, on the bike, we’re one person. It’ll help keep us balanced.”
“Balanced is good.” I let out shaky breath and leaned in closer, tighter.
Embrace the oneness.
“Hey. I won’t let anything happen to you.” Emilio grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze, then he pressed it to his stomach, right over the ridge of his scar. His body was hard beneath his shirt. “Do you trust me?”
It wasn’t the first time he’d asked, but I’d never fully answered. I closed my eyes and focused on the feel of his hand over mine, safe and strong, and my stomach filled with butterflies. “I trust you, Emilio.”
He squeezed my hand once more, then shifted forward, fingers curling over the handgrips as he lifted his feet from the ground. He rolled us into a slow turn, guiding us down the driveway and out into the street.
We rocketed over the pavement, rapidly picking up speed on the hot blacktop. The wind tornadoed my hair at the base of the helmet and snapped against my sunglasses. At first it was hard to catch my breath, but I didn’t turn away. I faced it head on, gulped it up, tasted every moment.
Abandoned silver mines, sky-high rock walls, overhangs that dropped into oblivion—we passed them all. The wheat fields were a golden blur, the sky a vast blue possibility, everything and nothing all at once, and my legs trembled from the vibrations, the bike growling between them, eating up the road as we zoomed along.
Emilio hugged every curve. At times we tilted so low to the ground I was sure we’d wreck, sure we’d spin off into the canyon. But I trusted him, like I’d said, so I leaned in closer, mirroring his angles and moves, following the lines of his body and the bike as if we were one, a bullet cutting through the air.
We climbed the Million Dollar Highway, the sun streaming around us, and I tipped my head backward and stared at the sky, cloudless and perfect. I lost all perspective, all sense of time and place. I couldn’t see what waited ahead, but one thing was certain.
Behind, there was nothing but memories and dust.
I’ll outrun you, black demon. So hard and so fast, I’ll be gone before you even know I was here.
An hour later we’d reached our destination and left the bike and helmets at a trailhead parking lot. I’d packed a bunch of empanadas and sodas and grapes into canvas bags, and Emilio took them out of the saddlebags and slung them over his shoulder. My legs still hummed and ticked like the engine, not quite steady on solid ground.
“You’ll get used to it.” Emilio beamed at me in the sun, his whole face shone. “You just had your first ride up the Million Dollar Highway. How do you feel?”
“Amazing.” It was such a cheap word, the wrong word, but the right word to capture this feeling didn’t exist. So I said nothing more, just grabbed his hand and hoped that was enough.
He led me along a rocky path away from the main trailhead, another secret passage through the woods. We hiked a short, steep climb, and just when I thought my legs would give out, we reached the last boulder.
“This used to be Danny’s spot,” he said from the top of the rock. He held out his hands to help me up, and then we walked into a thick cluster of aspens. “He kind of left it to me.”
“Do you miss him?” I asked. “You guys were close, right?”
A breeze ruffled the trees, and we both stopped and turned our faces toward the sky. The canopy of yellow-green leaves shivered, scattering the light. It felt like they were sprinkling us with sunshine.
Emilio leaned sideways against a tree, still watching the leaves. “Danny and me were like brothers.”
“Does he visit ever? Or does he pretty much stay on the island?”
“Ain’t seen him in two years. I miss him. Hell yeah, I miss him.” Emilio peeled a loose flake of bark from the tree and dropped it to the ground, and when another breeze laced its fingers through the leaves, my heart felt heavy. I didn’t know the details of Emilio’s family problems, and it was clear I’d said the wrong thing, asked too many questions.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know family stuff is . . . I just thought . . . because you talk about him sometimes, and you said this was his spot, and—”
“It’s not you. It’s . . . complicated. His mother basically hates me and Ma, and . . .” Emilio smiled and held out his hand. “Damn. I should be the one sayin’ sorry. Your first bike ride and I turn into a downer.”
“You’re not—”
“We ain’t even there yet.” Emilio put his arm around my waist and guided me through the grove, out the other side where the land opened up like a giant storybook.
Together we took it in, the infinite canyons below, rolling foothills of green and gray and purple in the distance. It seemed everything that had ever lived and died in this world had passed through here, had left its indelible imprint.
I walked to the edge, looked down into the dusty red canyon. The walls were smooth and rough all at once, great columns of weathered stone that rose out of the earth. The river here had dried up millions of years ago, but still the rocks weren’t safe from the unstoppable effects of time. Now it was the wind rather than the rapids that hollowed their bellies. It whipped through the canyon as we watched, carrying dust and debris, particles that carved new pathways on their unending quest to exist. To change.
I pulled out my phone and snapped a few pictures, tried to get a panoramic shot I could stitch together later. My hands were fumbling and giant, and the strangest thought came to me as the wind peppered them with dust: I could approach the seemingly immovable rocks with my giant human hands and impossible human strength, beat on them with all I had, and cause not even a flicker of the destruction that these tiny, invisible forces would wreak, day by day, second by second, for thousands and millions of years after I’m no longer remembered by another living being.
It made me dizzy.
I sat down next to Emilio on a red-brown boulder. He set the food on the ground behind us, and as he looked back across the vast stretch, I picked up a shard of rock and carved beneath my legs.
I was here. . . .
The wind hurtled through the canyon below, moaning eerily as it clawed its way up to us. It lashed me, but by then it had lost some of its power. It vanished before I could catch my breath.
All of it—the wind, the dust, the rocks, the trees, the road—it was the most pointless and beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
Emilio opened his mouth to say something, but when he saw my eyes, his face twisted with concern. “What’s wrong?”
“This place is amazing. It’s . . . I can’t . . .” I choked back a sob, and Emilio rubbed my back until the words found their way out. “My father’s disease is genetic.”
“What? What does that—”
“I have a fifty-fifty chance of ending up the same way.”
I’d spent two days fighting off those words, locking them deep inside, because I knew the moment they passed my lips, they’d grow into something I couldn’t ignore.
The truth.
Emilio confirmed it: the shock crossed his face like a visible current. “Okay, but you don’t know if . . . Don’t they have ways to . . . Are you sure? Like, sure sure?”
I nodded, the confession growing bitter on my lips. “Here’s another way to crunch the numbers. Of me and my three sisters, two of us will lose our memories and fade into oblivion. And the other two will watch it happen.”
Emilio twisted away from me. His jaw was tight, shoulders tense. “Can’t they treat it? If you know early like this? There has to be something. . . . Medication? Surgery? Therapy? Something?”
The desperation in his voice was almost too much. I hated and loved it all at once, and the mix of emotions tightened my throat.
“There’s a test,” I said stiffly, “but all it doe
s is give you the bad news early.”
Emilio reached for a fist-size rock.
“My parents were supposed to go to Argentina.” I was rambling now, but I had to get it out, and if I said it all here on this boulder, maybe the wind would carry the words away, take them someplace far, someplace I’d never have to hear them again. “Their dream was to move back with Lourdes. They wanted us all to go there eventually, but they were supposed to head out next summer. They were waiting for me to get settled in at college.”
Emilio pitched his rock over the edge and listened for the sound that never came.
“Now it’s too risky to move,” I said. “Papi might remember stuff from back home, like his old neighborhood and friends, or he could get totally disoriented. Besides, with all the logistics involved . . . they can’t. They’re stuck. So when Lourdes shows up next month and looks at me like I’m not taking care of him . . . I mean, she’d never say it. She wouldn’t even think it, really. It would all be me. They should be with her.”
The wind smacked us again, filled my mouth with hair and dust until I coughed it out.
“Lourdes?” I said. “She’s the calm one. She always took care of things before, and she never got all dramatic like Mari or freaked out like Araceli. She’s just one of those people. Like the saying, she’s good people. You know?”
Emilio wiped the tears from my cheeks. It was hard to tell whether it was the wind or the truth, but both were whaling on me.
“It’s like this,” he said. “I know you love your pops, and, yeah, this whole thing sucks, right? But you have him now, and you gotta enjoy it. You have your own life too. Don’t sit around and . . . I don’t know. Don’t settle for stuff. That’s pretty much the only thing I learned in life. You see something, some chance for something great, you take it. You grab your keys and jump on your bike and go, no regrets.”
I looked back over the canyon, the endless cycle of death and rebirth below.
“Sorry.” I wiped my eyes again and gave him a faint smile. “I guess I turned into my own downer now.”
“Shh.” Emilio slipped his arm around my shoulders. “Hey. Not to get all, like, religious. But this summer, workin’ with you guys and hangin’ out? It’s the most at peace I been in a long-ass time.” He met my eyes at the end, held them like he had more to say, but the words dropped off, and so did mine. I watched them march over the edge, right into the abyss below.
I leaned into Emilio, let him wrap around me like a blanket. My breath was on his neck, and he shivered in its wake. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, and I ordered my brain to be still, to catalog his scent and the haunting moan of the wind in the canyon and the grind of the ancient dust on my skin and the taste of him, so close to my lips.
I didn’t want to forget any of it. I wouldn’t forget it. Fight or no fight, that demon could hunt me down and smoke me out and take whatever he wanted. He could devour my favorite songs and the color of my bedroom and the sound of my own name on my tongue, but he’d never take today.
My heart thudded in my ears and I pressed myself closer, burying my face against his neck. His arms were so warm and strong around me, my insides were buzzing and light, and for once I was giving in. Letting him take care of me, take this one thing entirely for myself that no one—not from the past, not from the future—could touch.
I looked into his caramel eyes, closer than we’d ever been. He didn’t look away, didn’t smile, didn’t breathe. I pressed my lips to the scar on his chin, tasted his skin, and he gasped. All we had left were sounds and tastes and looks and smells. He took my face in his hands and slid his thumb across my lips, and I closed my eyes. His mouth found mine, feather soft, and then we were kissing. My heart raced, the butterflies unfurling their tiny wings inside me, floating and fluttering, and his hands felt so good, fingers slipping across my skin like powder.
I shuddered as his tongue traced my bottom lip and slid into my mouth, setting everything inside me on fire. I pulled him on top of me as we leaned back onto the boulder, and I let my entire body go boneless, nothing but heart and spirit and maybe, way down underneath the shadows, a little hope that everything would be okay after all.
I wrapped my hands in his shirt and peeled it off, tugged it over his head. My fingertips traced the lines of his arms, his chest, the thin white scars, the mysterious gouge that snaked across his abdomen. I stopped there, lingered, looked into his eyes for an explanation I was too scared to ask for with words.
I thought he’d look away, but he held my gaze, his eyes full of a raw honesty I’d never seen in another person. There were nerves too, something uncertain and vulnerable. And in that moment I felt alive. Whole. Protected from the ravages of time and completely immune to its passing.
Nothing about this could ever end in tears.
He smiled, shy this time, and I smiled back, and then we were kissing again, pressing our mouths and bellies together while the rest of the world eroded around us, one pointless breath of wind, one insignificant grain of dust at a time.
We stayed tangled up on the boulder, pausing only for a late and hasty lunch, falling into each other again and again until the sun dipped behind the canyon and the rock cliffs blazed red-orange in the fading light. Emilio helped me onto the bike when it was time to go, pulling me into a long, deep kiss before navigating us along the winding road home.
As we rolled down the Million Dollar Highway, I closed my eyes and held him close around the waist, and he squeezed my hand like it was forever, like we’d really found a way to stop time, and I wanted so, so badly to believe it.
Chapter 22
Emilio and I stopped for mango shakes in town on the way back, but we hardly spoke—nerves, I guess, everything between us still hot to the touch—and the intense good-bye in my driveway was cut short by Mari’s cigarette smoke puffing out the kitchen screen door.
“You were gone awhile,” she said when I walked in. She gave me a hard stare, but a smile lit her face too, undeniable. “Papi said you guys went up the Million Dollar Highway? I’ve driven it before, but not on a bike. I’ve never been on a bike, actually.”
“Seriously? You should,” I said, and then her smile stretched, huge and bright. No warnings. No third degree about how I’d been out fraternizing with the enemy and how I’d come home with swollen lips and windblown helmet hair and guilt tattooed all over my face.
“I’m glad you had fun.” She stared at me a few seconds, and I thought she might ask for more details, but she just smoothed my hair down, hands lingering. “You look happy, Juju.”
Her voice broke at the end, but she turned to wash her hands at the sink, RIGHT FOR COLD/FRÍO. LEFT FOR HOT/CALIENTE, and I slipped away unnoticed.
My heart was still buzzing when I downloaded my photos later. But once I saw them up close, they didn’t feel worthy.
That was the thing about pictures. No matter how beautiful, they couldn’t capture the truly felt parts of a moment. Life was different looking through the lens, the colors less vibrant, the beauty less grand.
By the time you took the shot, the moment had already passed.
I sipped maté from one of Celi’s hand-painted mugs, a big white one with sunflowers, and inhaled the tea’s beer-bitter scent.
I certainly didn’t need photographs to remember looking out across the canyon today, feeling small as we watched the dust erode the world. To remember being in Emilio’s arms, his lips on my collarbone, my fingers tracing his map of scars. I didn’t need photographs to believe in the story. To remember that I’d lived it, even if I was doomed to forget.
Pictures couldn’t tell the whole story anyway. That was the other thing about them—they were always a carefully edited glimpse, a story out of context. My pictures of Papi and Emilio working on the bike showed the successes, the good days, but I didn’t capture evidence of Papi’s meltdown at Grant’s Pharmacy. The doctor’s appointments. The lines in Mom’s face after all the bad news. Even the scrapbook I’d given Zoe was make-believe, a
best-of-the-best highlights reel that fast-forwarded over the snags.
Through pictures, we cut reality in pieces. We selected only the choicest moments, discarding the rest as if they’d never happened.
So did El Demonio.
“You’re up late, queridita.” At the sound of Papi’s voice, I looked up from my computer. He leaned against my door frame, an old Harley manual tucked under his arm with a hundred blue Post-it flags waving from the pages. “I couldn’t sleep either. Ay, your mother snores like bears!”
“I think you woke yourself up, Papi. Mom doesn’t snore.”
He laughed. “You all do, querida. Trust me. How was your ride?”
“Pretty much awesome.” My cheeks hurt from smiling so hard. “It was cool. Really great views.”
Among other things.
The skin around Papi’s eyes crinkled. “I’m sorry I never got to take you myself, Juju. When you’re young, you think you have so much time, and then life comes and tomorrow turns into tomorrow, and before you know it . . .” He sighed and waved away the words. “Ah, don’t listen to this cranky viejito.”
I smiled and watched him watching me, and I wondered how much he really understood about what was happening to him. Every time that bastard demon devoured another of his memories, did he feel it? Was it like a scraping, a chipping away? An inexplicable, gnawing loss? Could he hear it? Did he know when it would happen, which thoughts or words or faces it would consume next? Which parts of his life story would end up on the cutting-room floor?
“I’m glad you had fun with Emilio,” Papi said. “I knew he’d take good care of you. That boy knows what he’s doing.”
Yeah, no kidding. I shivered at the memories from the day, but Papi didn’t seem to notice that my central nervous system had been replaced with a tangle of electric wires.
“Look at all the different parts, queridita. He knows all of them by heart.” Papi laid the Harley manual on my desk and pointed to an illustration, charcoal-colored twists of metal and gears. He circled things with his finger, named them as if he were helping me study for a biology test.