“Why?”
“Because he enjoys controlling people in other ways. It would be too coarse. He let my father go to town for years, he let Catalina go to church. He even let Virgil and my mother get far away from town and find spouses. He knows he needs people to obey his will and do his bidding, and they must welcome it, otherwise it’s too exhausting.”
“And he can’t control them all the time,” Noemí ventured. “Ruth was able to grab a rifle, after all, and Catalina tried to tell me the truth.”
“That’s right. And Catalina wouldn’t reveal who’d given her the tonic, no matter how much Howard tried to wrestle that information from her.”
Plus the miners had organized a strike. As much as Howard Doyle would like to believe himself a god, he couldn’t push and force everyone to submit to him every hour of the day. And yet, in decades past, he must have been able to subtly manipulate a great number of people, and when that wasn’t enough he could kill them or make them disappear, like with Benito.
“Outright confrontation won’t work,” Francis said.
Noemí examined the butter knife and knew he was right. What could she do? Kick and punch and she’d end up right where she was, perhaps even worse off. “If I agree to go along with this charade, then you must get Catalina out too.”
Francis did not reply, but she could guess that he wasn’t enjoying the idea of springing two people out by the way he frowned.
“I can’t leave her behind,” she said, clutching the hand in which he still held the bottle. “You must also give her the tincture, you must also break her free.”
“Yes, fine. Keep your voice down.”
She let go of his hand and lowered her voice. “You must promise, on your life.”
“I’m promising. Now, shall we give it a try?” he asked, taking out the bottle’s glass stopper. “It’ll make you a little sleepy, but you probably need the rest.”
“Virgil can see my dreams,” she muttered, pressing her knuckles against her mouth for a moment. “Won’t he know, if he can see my dreams? Won’t he know what I’m thinking?”
“They’re not really dreams. It’s the gloom. But be careful when you’re there.”
“I don’t know if I can trust you,” she said. “Why would you help me?”
He was unlike his cousin in a thousand tiny ways, with his slim hands and his weak mouth, spindly where Virgil was solid forcefulness. He was young and wan, and infected with kindness. But who could say if it was all for show, if he couldn’t sink into ruthless indifference. After all, nothing in this place was what it seemed. There were secrets upon secrets.
She touched the back of her neck, the place where Virgil’s fingers had dug into her hair.
Francis twirled the glass stopper in one hand. It caught a stray ray of light, filtering through the curtains; a tiny prism, painting a rainbow on the edge of her bed.
“There’s a cicada fungus.Massospora cicadina. I remember reading a journal article which discussed its appearance: the fungus sprouts along the abdomen of the cicada. It turns it into a mass of yellow powder. The journal said the cicadas, which had been so grossly infected, were still ‘singing,’ as their body was consumed from within. Singing, calling for a mate, half dead. Can you imagine?” Francis said. “You’re right, I do have a choice. I’m not going to end my life singing a tune, pretending everything is fine.”
He ceased toying with the glass stopper and glanced at her.
“You managed to pretend so far.”
She stared at him, and he stared back at her gravely. “Yes,” he said. “And now you’re here and I can’t anymore.”
She watched him, silent, as he poured out a minute amount of liquid onto a spoon. Noemí swallowed the tincture. It was bitter. He offered her the napkin that had been set by her plate, and Noemí wiped her mouth clean.
“Let me take this away,” Francis said, placing the bottle back in his pocket and picking up her tray. She touched his arm, and he stopped.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” he replied. “I should have spoken sooner, but I’m a coward.”
She pressed her head back against the pillows after that and let the drowsiness take over. Later—she wasn’t sure how much later—she heard a rustling of cloth and sat up. Ruth Doyle was perched at the foot of her bed, looking down at the floor.
Not Ruth. A memory? A ghost? Not quite a ghost. She realized that what she had been seeing, the voice whispering to her, urging her to open her eyes, was the mind of Ruth, which still nestled in the gloom, in the crevices and mold-covered walls. There must be other minds, bits of persons, hidden underneath the wallpaper, but none as solid, as tangible as Ruth. Except, perhaps, for that golden presence that she still could not identify and that she could not even declare aperson. It didn’t feel like a person. Not like Ruth.
“Can you hear me?” she asked. “Or are you like the grooves in a vinyl record?”
She wasn’t afraid of the girl. She was a young woman, abused and abandoned. Her presence wasn’t malicious, merely anxious.