The Shrine at Altamira Read online

  “Paint thinner.”

  “Will you? Now?”

  Russell went out to the car and got a gallon can of paint thinner and came back to the house. John had taken off the bedspread and the blanket. He was standing by the door, waiting.

  Russell sprinkled the icy fluid from the head to the foot of the bed and then back again. When the can was half empty, he turned it upside down and let the stuff soak into the pillow where his face would be. He kept on pouring until the can was empty.

  He couldn’t look at John.

  He lay down on the bed. “Now?”

  “Now,” John said.

  Russell reached into his breast pocket where he had the matches ready, but before he struck one, he looked at his son and said, very softly, “I want you to know I love you.”

  He struck the match.

  John was on top of him at once, smothering the tiny flame, clutching the dead match in his fist.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” John said, and he said it again, louder, more out of control, and then he began to scream. Russell held him close as John screamed himself into exhaustion, and he continued to hold him as the boy shook, convulsed, as if he could not stop crying. But he was not crying. It was a choking, gasping sound. The ache, the betrayal, lay too deep for crying.

  Russell held him until he was quiet.

  After a time John got up and stood beside the bed.

  Russell, too, got up. He gave his son a hug, but he said nothing. There were no words.

  They were standing in front of the bureau, avoiding each other’s eyes, when suddenly they discovered they were looking at each other in the mirror.

  “That’s us,” Russell said, and he smiled.

  John smiled too, studying his father’s face, and then Russell saw the boy study his own face, and he saw the smile tighten, and he saw something in John’s eyes go dead.

  “Let’s go,” he said. His mind was made up.

  Russell opened the car door for John, and then he went around and got in the driver’s side and pretended to be confused for a moment. “I forgot my keys,” he said. “Wait here, John. I’ll be right back.”

  He jogged around the house to the back.

  John sat in the car, his head bent forward, trying not to think of what he had almost done, but thinking of it anyway. He had nearly burned his father to death. He had asked his father to do it, and his father had spread the paint thinner and soaked the pillow and lay down on the bed. He would have done it. He would have lit the match. And it would have been John’s fault.

  He loved his father, but he had never said it to him. Deliberately. It was the last bit of power he could hold over his father, he knew that. He could hold his love back to the very end.

  But he wouldn’t hold it back. He would do it now. He would say ‘I love you’ as soon as his father came back with his keys.

  “I love you,” he said aloud, just to hear the words, and as he said them, he realized his father had not left his keys behind—he’d opened the car door, after all—and he’d gone back to the house, to the bedroom, to that bed, and now John would never see him again.

  John flung the car door open and ran to the back of the house. The door was locked. The key was gone from the ledge above the bathroom window. “No,” he shouted, and pounded on the door.

  He went back to the bathroom window, but it was locked, and so he hit it with his fist until it broke. He hoisted himself up onto the sill, fell back, and tried again. This time he made it, though he cut his hands on the broken glass, and in only a minute he pushed himself through the window and tumbled onto the bathroom floor. It was then he heard the whooshing sound, an explosion of flames from the other room, and he heard his father’s low moan.

  He was at the doorway and his father lay in the bed, in flames. He could run away, he could save himself, but he only stood there, watching. He knew well what it meant to burn. He knew exactly what he was doing. And then, with a terrible cry, he plunged into the fire. “I love you,” he said. And he cried out, “I love you.”

  The flames were slow, and not merciful.

  Later, when the fire was out and the corpses carried away, the medical examiners had trouble separating the two bodies. Their arms were tight around each other, and their chests had melted together, and there was no recognizing the faces. But everyone knew who they were. Everyone had been expecting something like this. It was just one of those awful things that happen.

  THE PILGRIMAGE

  A year passed, and then most of another year, before Maria’s transformation was complete. She was transformed in personality and character and—finally—in soul, a change so absolute that nobody seeing her would recognize the old Maria. In her living room she had a little shrine to the Virgin and she prayed there each time she left the house and came back, before each meal, whenever she was tempted to complain. Around the statue of the Virgin she had placed photos of her mother, her dead husband, her dead son. There were talismans too: a wedding ring, a note from her son folded tight and slipped inside a locket, a pair of joke glasses.

  Physically, the change was even more dramatic. She had become an old woman—impossible to guess how old—a Hispanic peasant lady who cleaned houses and spoke very little English and visited the church each morning and each night. She dressed like her mother, though not so well, and she worked alongside her mother, and she lived with her mother too. They fought continually.

  Long before her transformation was complete, Maria had planned her pilgrimage to the shrine at Altamira. She had a map, and she had plotted out the roads they would follow, the distance they would cover, the time it would take … to walk from their purple house in San Jose to the shrine at Altamira.

  Walk? Was she crazy? Her mother would have nothing to do with it. Maria begged, insisted, taunted her. Finally she threatened to go by herself, and then her mother gave in.

  They had been walking for almost a week when they reached Point Reyes, and it took a full day, and then another, before they could locate the shrine. Maria stood alone among the tall cypresses and prayed to the Virgin Mary, Mother of Hope. “Forgive me for what I ask,” she prayed. “Forgive me for what I do,” and then she tacked her little sheet of paper to a tree and read it through yet again to make sure she had said it right.

  Holy Mary, how is it you permit such things? My son burned, and then my husband burned, and then my son burned again and forever. I know it is God’s will. I know I must accept it. But I ask you now, and I will ask you at the day of judgment, I will raise my voice before the throne of God and shout and will demand an answer: Why?

  Two lines beneath, in her small neat hand, she had written “Why?” It was signed Maria.

  The note hung there for a day and a night, and then the hard winds that blow through Altamira tore it free, it was rained on, it was nibbled by deer. Someone found it eventually—an old priest or maybe an old drunk, what difference does it make?—and saved the last remaining scrap, and tacked it once more to the tree. All that remained was the single word “Why?” and the name Maria.

  From what, the pilgrims wondered, had she been saved?