06-. The Blood's Law
A whole eternity passed before any of the internists called them from the waiting room and Ronnie had to wait a little more than two extra eternities for Lincoln's sisters to come in to see him first, leaving her to come in alone last.
"Nini, are you sure you want to go in by yourself? You know I wouldn't mind going in with you if you ask me to," In another moment she would have felt offended by her brother's overprotective words, but now, even she was scared. "You know you can always trust me."
The Latina girl's eyes moved almost imperceptibly behind her older brother's shoulder; Lori and the others were crying inconsolably in their parents' arms. Seeing that scene gave her heart the motivation it needed to make up her mind, Lincoln needed someone more than ever to reassure and contain him...someone who was mature enough not to fall apart in front of him. Before she could speak her thoughts, her mother spoke to Dr. Martin Enriquez for her.
"Do you think it's a good idea for my daughter to go in alone, doctor?"
"Of course, there's nothing to be afraid of, the boy got out of the Intensive care unit yesterday so the worst is over... although it will have to be a quick visit," the doctor, who Ronnie thought was too young to be a real doctor, turned slightly and kneeling down a bit ended up at the same height as the pubescent Latina. "But I must warn you that his body, mostly his face, will take a long time to heal... and he'll probably have some permanent scars. You see, he fractured his right arm in two and the same thing almost happened to his jaw... plus he lost quite a few teeth, we realigned his nasal septum and fastened it with a small steel plate... you know, to keep his nose in place."
"Why... why are you telling me this?" The little desire she had left to complain to Lincoln for applying the cold shoulder to her for a week died with the doctor's words.
"I need to prepare you for what you're about to see," Ronnie turned quickly to Bobby, without needing words she let him know that even though she was scared she would be fine on her own. His mother looked like she was about to argue but at the last moment she decided to stay quiet by her son's side.
As the doctor led the way through the quiet, neat corridors of the hospital, Ronnie began to feel like throwing up from nervousness, but still she kept walking, one step after another. Finally, the white-coated doctor stopped in front of a door and Ronnie behind him did the same.
The heavy sigh that left the doctor's mouth told the Santiago girl everything she needed to know and at the same time told her nothing. "Wait out here a little longer while I inform your friend that he has one last visit, okay?"
But Ronnie didn't wait, as soon as she saw the door open she walked in, not caring what that gloried nurse might say.
"¡Oh dios mío…!" The doctor had tried to prepare her for what awaited her, but what was behind the door... was far, far worse than anything she could have anticipated.
She figured she could overcome the initial shock and comfort her best friend and prospective boyfriend, but all she could do when she entered the room was stare at him. Panicked she tried to turn anywhere else, but she couldn't fail him like that either, not now.
Lincoln's face was unrecognizable. The bandages that ran almost the entire length of his body were coming together more and more as they went up until they completely enveloped his head, his face looked swollen, discolored and a little deformed because of the injuries caused by the accident and the emergency surgeries. Ronnie imagined that the boy's body had been stuffed into a meat grinder and forgotten in there. The bandages did nothing to cover his wounds, even highlighting the IV that punctured one of his arms.
And in spite of everything, when the girl managed to assimilate everything she was seeing she realized that Lincoln was sitting very straight on the hospital bed with one of his unmistakable Ace Savy comics in his hands while his characteristic mischievous smile was drawn on his lips, however, underneath all that calm and confident posture, Ronnie managed to distinguish the mute and desperate plea «please, don't cry».
"As I told you, the worst is over for Lincoln," the doctor spoke from the doorframe, trying to lighten the mood. Ronnie began to cry, quietly and sincerely, though she failed to control the tears she did manage to maintain a more solid attitude than any of the Loud girls. "Your friend is young, and for his constitution, surprisingly strong, with time, patience and a little help from reconstructive surgery there is no reason why he couldn't make a full recovery and return to a normal life."
"Doctor Martin, I've already told you many times that I have nothing against the therapy sessions that the hospital offers me or the idea of visiting a psychologist," the albino's voice sounded pasty and hoarse, taking Ronnie by surprise, however, the conviction with which he said each word was still the same that fascinated the Latin girl so much. "But there's no way will I undergo plastic surgery. Can't you see that this beautiful girl is after me because of my lovely physique?"
After flashing a toothless grin that was anything but cheerful, Ronnie could see them; four large, red scars running down Lincoln's pale face peeked through the bandages. Yes, the boy had been saved by sheer miracle from suffering more serious sequelae, however those injuries would mark him for life.
"You're an idiot, Lincoln," Lincoln... in spite of everything he was still struggling to keep his good humor, he was trying hard to stay the same as always, she could help a little with that too. "So... do you think I'm a beautiful girl? More beautiful than Cristina?"
"Of course...! Of course you're prettier than she is!" Blood rushed to Ronnie's face and if there had been enough left on Lincoln's body, he probably would have blushed as well.
The fifteen minutes that they were allowed to be together were the best minutes that both could aspire to, at least the best in that situation, during which Lincoln almost managed to forget how lucky he had been… at least compared to his sisters Leni or Lisa.
-o-
She was floating...
Floating in the middle of a river that appeared to be wider than a whole city and infinitely long, as far as she could see she could only see small figures floating placidly in those still waters, a closer look at the ones near her revealed that all those silhouettes were women, they were either elegantly dressed or simply covered by coarse fabrics and leathers. She was floating near an emaciated woman whose physical features were notoriously indigenous; bare breasts hung smooth and sagging from skin ulcerated and irritated by the sun's continuous punishment, around her waist she wore what Ronnie managed to identify as pre-Hispanic ritual clothing. For a brief moment, looking at the place where the woman's face should be, Ronnie saw herself and a feeling of exhaustion and great violence ran down her back. As best she could, Ronalda swam away from her.
Her body didn't respond fully so she couldn't swim very far. As she took her last strokes she felt how the tired and listless eyes of all those dead and motionless women seemed to fixate on her, following her every movement, no matter how slight.
In time, she learned to distinguish certain features in their clothing that revealed to her small fragments of the lives of those floating women. That woman in the dark leather hat over there, with her face made up to look like a skull and holding large antique revolvers in both hands, must have been an outlaw gunwoman; the woman beyond, in an even more ancient costume, neat, equally black but much more elegant than any of the other women's clothes, with hat and mask, was probably a woman whom the first pilgrims tried to execute when she was accused of being the reincarnation of a local demon; the younger woman she managed to see with a naked torso and linen trousers, from which monsters and skulls were formed from her numerous tattoos, looked at her with extreme pity.
A cold, authoritative voice speaking English laden with a heavy Latin accent began to speak to her in the induced sleep, but she couldn't make out where the words were coming from.
"We were goddesses... or at least the avatars of one, of an imperfect god, full of anger and fear, one at a time we served him, we were women who were forgotten and rejected by their own after helping in times of great need. We are remembered by no one but our own blood. Now we have almost completely disappeared, but our common name and the image we must convey are still know and feared..."
Like water filling a pitcher drop by drop, very concrete images of the first time she discovered her curse began to appear in Ronnie's mind.
To her right, walking on the surface of the infinite river, she was slowly approached by a woman very different from the others, not only because she was the oldest, but also different in her simplicity of dress and slender complexion; with a broad forehead, with shiny coppery skin, her cotton skirt didn't look heavy despite being soaked as if she had just come out of the water: the clothes she wore were very similar to the ones used by Ana Ronalda's actress in "adiós Ana, adiós ", her hair, like Ronnie's was gathered in a thick and simple braid, up close the woman looked small and carried in her left hand a metal rosary firmly fastened, the same rosary that her grandmother Rosa had given her when she arrived to the city.
That woman, like all the others in the river, had no face of her own... as if they were simply an unfinished representation, a broken avatar filled with anger and fear.
"At the beginning they thought we were simple witches and shamans, aggressive women full of power that they could use... but with time they learned to fear us and the name they called us changed." A murmur that soon became a deafening sound that seemed to come from the mouths of all the floaters and that began to spread through the river until it echoed everywhere and from everyone, made Ronnie feel a shiver and irrational fear. "We are the sent ones of darkness, the ones who pursue and get revenge... we are DIABLO"!
And then the little trickle of memories turned into a whole huge torrent that hit Ronnie's mind. As if a MeTube video started playing at full speed, Ronalda saw when, just a couple of hours ago, her mother was running towards her in an attempt to calm her down after the fight with her cousin only to be instantly consumed by the fire when Anne unconsciously concentrated all her fury and hatred against her, it hadn't even been a conscious wish... ¡shut up, chicharrón…!" however, the flames had already claimed a victim, the curse was repeating itself once again.
A deep and blind panic, an ancestral fear, began to grow in her chest, although her grandmother Rosa hardly spoke of her, she had no trouble recognizing the indigenous woman who had spoken to her; she felt she had known her forever... Ronalda Manzano, her grandmother's mother.
Then she woke up with bated breath at noon on that thirtieth Saturday, the last Saturday in November.
The revelation of what she had done the day before came as a shock and then, thanks to that forced sleep, she understood that there was no rest for her or anyone else, that as long as she continued to call herself Ronalda Anne Santiago she would only serve to cause pain and fear.
She hurriedly got up and ran to the front door of the bookstore, almost knocking over the mountains of books already packed in boxes and Angela Roth, the black-haired woman who was approaching her with a bottle of water. If she really wanted to help someone, she had to run away to a place where no one knew her, she couldn't stay with that old Indian and his racist wife.
Ronnie hurried out of the bookstore on that freezing Saturday afternoon.
-o-
Frida sat in the icy, and surprisingly empty, waiting room of the local police station, holding in both hands a small, tear-soaked, woven handkerchief. On the other side of the opaque plastic window was an older man with thick square-rimmed glasses and a bushy red-haired mustache the color of red wine. The policeman with the tired expression had a small stack of papers and reports in front of him... the vast majority of those papers were disappearance forms duly filled out and with issue dates not too far apart from each other.
"You understand that I have to insist on this, Mrs. Casagrande... I ask you to please understand the delicate situation the police station is in" the police officer shrugged his shoulders after pointing to the lonely room, "the city is going through a rather serious crime wave, the same situation that has already lasted some months and has started to affect the police departments in other areas; the city is falling apart and for the moment we can't dedicate ourselves as a priority to the search for your son..."
"All I understand is that you don't want to look for my baby!" In spite of feeling desperate, the woman didn't shed another tear, she had cried too much in those days... even by her standards. "You people always say that the first hours of disappearance are crucial and the firemen assure us that no child was trapped inside the building when the fire subsided!"
"Please Mrs. Casagrande, listen. We've been arguing about this for an hour, in all that time have you seen anyone else besides me on this room? We don't have enough men to even direct traffic! Besides, your case is a 'special' one" the uniformed man ran his index finger over the sheet of paper that crowned the mound of paper in front of him and read to himself for a moment before speaking. "Leaving aside the alleged culprit of the recent fire, the one we're still looking for, are you aware that your son, to date, has twenty-two missing persons reports? That's very close to the national record, and are you aware that most of those cases were just a misunderstanding?"
"Yes... I know I can be very overprotective but this time it's different. The last time I saw my baby was before the fire! It's been over twenty-four hours since he hasn't communicated with me... I know something bad happened!"
The policeman sighed, jotted down a phone number in cramped handwriting, and put the previous reports back in the file cabinet. He rested his pale hands on the small desk on his side of the shielded window, Frida's creative mind unconsciously began comparing them to a pair of pink bald rats. He passed the scribbled paper to her through the small hole in the plexiglass that separated them and looked at the Latin woman over his glasses, his watery eyes gleaming faintly red.
"What is this, some private detective's number?"
"No... it's something much better, you're lucky, you know? I have some acquaintances, they're actually volunteers in a charity organization, they meet every day at the orphanage "Hive", I know that there you'll get all the help you need because they..."
"I know the place and I know the church that runs the place. What I don't understand is how a group of believers and hopeless children will help me find my son?"
"Because they have something we don't, they have eyes and hands free. They are the largest congregation in the city, they are always open to the voices of others, serving the community is their priority, meeting the Church of Blood is a great opportunity and I hope it serves you well..."
The policeman didn't say goodbye in any way when Frida got up to leave, she hadn't really expected him to. Dissatisfied with the result but a little more composed and less nervous, thanks in part to the wonders her neighbor, Mrs. Kernicky, had been talking about the church that was in charge of the "Hive" orphanage, she left the building and got into the senile woman's car.
"Well dear, how did it go, did you make any progress at least?"
"No, but an officer gave me the same advice as you... perhaps it is not a waste of time to ask your church and your people for help?"
"Don't look at it like that, my child, my brotherhood it's not an institution as cold and rigid as a traditional church, I know it first hand; our Brother Sebastian Blood is not only an enlightened man, he's also a great person, he saved me, he helped me find a home when I had nothing and no one... in him and in his teachings I found an unbreakable blood bond. You will see how everything will get better once you get to know him."
The Latina woman couldn't help but smile a little at her neighbor's soothing and convicting words, unlike her mother-in-law, she always preferred to avoid questions related to religion or extrasensory beliefs but what harm could it do to ask for a little help? Besides, it seemed to have worked quite well for Mrs. Kernicky.
"It's all right, I have no reason to refuse to go now, but... it's almost midnight, do you think that Sebastian guy could receive me early tomorrow morning with a group of volunteers?"
"The red temple is closed on Sundays," the older woman's silver hair shimmered slightly as she passed under the street lights, "but I will ask Brother Sebastian in person to organize a search party to meet you on Monday to begin searching immediately, okay?"
"Thank you, I… I can't thank you enough!"
She was truly relieved, almost as if a great weight was lifted from her shoulders, Frida Casagrande fell peacefully asleep in the passenger seat of the old white van her neighbor was driving.
-o-
"You scared the shit out of us when you ran screaming your head off out of that damn bookstore," Sameer handed Ronnie a steaming mug with a chipped rim, "I always knew that dead-eyed witch would take her racist insults to a new level someday."
The girl took the cup and without making eye contact or looking at the almost boiling liquid, took a big gulp that worried both boys before tasting; it was just plain tap water. Seeing the ease with which the steaming liquid passed down his friend's throat, Casey wanted to mimic her and took a big gulp from his own cup... which he ended up spitting all over his chubby curly-haired friend.
That scene that in other circumstances would have given the skateboarding fan a fit of laughter, this time only managed to elicit an absent sigh from her. Even more worried than moments before, Sameer tried to grab his friend's chin to force her to look up, but a little voice in his subconscious whispered to him that doing so was a bad idea; before he could muster enough courage to decide to act, the door burst open.
Nikki opened the door to the small room with her elbow and tossed into one of the piles of laundry the cell phone, now with any minutes left, by her tense posture it was obvious to the two teenagers that the blonde was not in a good mood.
"How is she, any improvement?" As she acclimated to the warmth of the tiny apartment, the young adult took off her blue hoodie before tossing it next to her cell phone. "Has she said anything to you, anything at all?"
"Are you kidding? She hasn't opened her mouth except to sigh!" Casey blew one last time to soothe the burn on his tongue. "She's almost as out of it as her cousin Carl the last time we saw him".
"Do you think the crazy bookstore lady did something... nasty to her?" Sameer approached his friend with another steaming mug in his hands.
"I don't know, when I went back to the place I found it completely empty. Whatever happened in there was reason enough to run away," Nikki thanked the boy's gesture and after blowing the steaming contents she took a small sip of her boiled water. "Angela was a bitter bitch and a bit crazy... but I never thought she was capable of hurting anyone; I guess these hard times bring out the worst in all of us."
The blonde felt a lump in her throat at the sight of Ronnie's affected state "I just hope that calling them was the right thing to do" she took another sip from her cup and approached the girl.
"Do you guys think you could go outside for a minute? I think Ronalda and I need to have a woman-to-woman talk."