The Exquisite and Immaculate Grace of Carmen Espinoza (14 page)

I nodded my head, at the truth of it, the certainty of it. The relief it brought made me cry harder. “I think I love you,” I whispered.
 

“You do love me Carmen. You have always loved me, you will always love me. You just forgot about me for a while,” he smiled.
 

My lips pressed hard against each other and I nodded quickly—what he said felt right.

“Carmen?” he asked.
 

“Yes?” I cried, still so overwhelmed by the relief of him being here with me.
 

“Could you give me my clothes back?”
 

I looked down and realized I was still holding his clothes in my arms. I looked back at him and was suddenly, consciously, aware that—
Ray is lying here naked—
and handed the bundle down to him while looking away. “Sorry.”
 

He took the clothes and I turned away. “It’s okay,” he said. “I was just wondering if maybe you preferred me this way?”

His joking didn’t completely put me at ease, but I felt my neck relax a little. I could hear him moving behind me, the sound of his clothes moving over his body and his shoes shifting against the dirt, then I felt his hands grasp my arms and the force of him pulling me towards him. He lowered his mouth to my ear and I closed my eyes.
 

“Carmen,” he whispered.
 

I nodded my head.
 

He turned me around and wrapped me in his arms, pressed me tight against his chest. “I want you to know, I will be there. There with you, every step of the way.”
 

I nodded my head, not wanting to think just yet about any of those steps. Wishing instead we could stand here forever, me inside his arms, forgetting about large holes that led God knows where.

“I will be there,” he hesitated. “If I can.”

I didn’t want to hear this and so I pressed myself even further into him.

“If I can,” he continued. “But you’re going to have to be strong too,” his voice caught at the end, as if it pained him to have to say such things. “You have to be strong Carmen…because what comes next…”

I closed my eyes and waited, waited for him to say it even though I already knew what the words would be.

“It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever have to face.”
 

As if on cue, the collective cry rose up again from somewhere deep inside the belly of the crater and my body trembled against his.
 

“You can do this,” he said. “You’re stronger than you realize.”

A sudden thought occurred to me and I pulled away from him and looked into his eyes. “You know,” I said. “You know what happened that day with Daniel. “If you’ve always been with me then you were with me that day.”

He stared back at me, his expression unreadable.

“I don’t remember,” I said. “But you do.”

After a moment, he nodded his head.

I stepped away from him and his arms fell to his sides. “Why?” I asked.
 

“Because I can’t.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “What does that mean…can’t.”

“It means impossible. Forbidden. Couldn’t even if I tried.”

“But you haven’t tried. You didn’t even tell me you knew.”

He took a breath. “Okay,” he sighed. “Watch carefully because here is where I try and just tell you what happened that day.”

I stared at him.
 

Ray opened his mouth—his whole face disappeared.
 

I flinched. His face was like a blank skin canvas, completely featureless. A moment later his face returned. “Even if I try to tell you, answer a question, give you a hint, this place forbids me.”

We stared at each other a moment more, this new understanding between us. Ray knew the truth. I had to find the truth. Then, as if we were connected, we both looked up into the sky and found the large orange moon, my ticking timer, so much closer to the setting horizon that I would have believed possible. “We need to get moving,” he said.
 

“Yes,” was all I could manage to say.

He took a step towards me and reached for my hand. “I would have told you, that very first moment in the dessert, if only I could.”

“I know,” I swallowed.
 

“Are you ready?”

“Not really.”

“Well, I think that’s going to have to be good enough. We need to get you to that pool soon, and we’re running out of time.”

Every fiber of my body felt weak. “I’ve just been waiting on you,” I tried to smile.

He leaned forward and kissed my forehead. With our hands together, we walked to the edge of the crater and stared down into an abyss of nightmares unlike any I could have imagined.
 

There were limbs. Arms, jutting out of the earth, hands reaching, fingers stretching. Legs and feet. Heads. Halves of bodies. Eyes rolled in their sockets, mouths gaped in pain. An ocean of body parts lining the walls of the crater before us.
 

This was where the sounds were coming from.
 

“What happened to them?” I asked.
 

Ray didn’t answer right away, he stood staring at the mass of writhing parts, the look on his face was a mix of horror and disgust and I realized that was exactly what I was feeling. “This is for those whose crime was so horrible, so offensive,” he whispered and I had to strain to hear his voice over the rising chorus of pain below us. “They are not even allowed to become faints.” Ray looked into my eyes. “Being allowed to just disappear, stop existing, is no punishment for the wrong they committed.” He looked back to the pit. “Eternal damnation. Infinite suffering. They will never rest, never be released.”

I stared back down the hole, the cold chill of fear clawed at my back. “That’s horrible.”

“It’s the least they deserve,” he said and led me closer to the edge. From here I could see that a thin path wove its way down and around the crater walls. We would be walking right through all of them.
 

The place was different. Of course the whole of The Between was unlike anything I could possibly believe in the real world, but this side, the side beyond The Balancer, was very different than the place we had already traveled through. It was darker, deeper, the terrain more severe and desolate.
 

Ray began making his way carefully down the steep path and only when the length of our connected arms had stretched long between us did I follow after him.
 

This side was heavier somehow. I could feel the weight of it all over me. There had been offenses before, but somehow I knew they were the lesser evils compared to what lie ahead of us.
 

What was in front of us?

“Ray,” I asked, never taking my eyes off my feet and the rocky uneven ground beneath them.

“Yes?”

“You knew I didn’t remember exactly what happened to Daniel.”

“Yes.”

“Did you know we would have to come through this side of The Between.”

“I hoped we wouldn’t. I hoped you would remember. Sometimes people do. Once they see their words forming before them, the pictures in their minds become clearer. I had hoped that would be the case for you.”

Something pulled at my hair, “Ouch,” I pulled away and saw a bony hand at the end of its arm reaching from the wall. It fingered the strands of my hair it had managed to pull from my head. I let go of Ray’s hand and reached up to rub the spot on my scalp that hurt.
 

Ray stopped and looked back to see what had happened. “Try not to get too close,” he warned. “They will want to touch you, talk to you. Ignore them as much as possible,” he said before he turned and started walking again. “But we need to move quickly. You can’t run out of time and we’ve wasted so much already.”

I stared at the hand still blind and groping for me, I considered snatching my hair from its fingers, for some reason the idea of leaving any part of myself behind in this place disturbed me—but I didn’t dare risk possibly touching the thing again. Leaning away as I moved around it, I hurried down the path after Ray.
 

The further we walked down into the crater, the more limbs and body parts littered and jutted from the walls. There were faces, sometimes whole and round, as if the rest of their bodies were only submerged beneath the surface of the earth walls, sometimes only an ear and the corner of a mouth. The ones with eyes always stared at me passing, like paintings in a scary movie, the eyes shifted with me when I moved.
 

The mouths moaned. Cried and pleaded for help, to be let out. Some swore repeatedly at God or the names of other people I didn’t know, angry and vengeful, they promised to get even using methods and degrees of violence that caused me to hold my breath.
 

Twice I had to pry my sleeve from hands that fooled me and were able to reach out much further than I had guessed.
 

Finally, after what seemed like forever, we were near the bottom. For a moment, I stood still and looked straight up—the mouth of the crater was now high above my head.
 

“Carmen,” a voice called.
 

Instinctively, I turned towards the sound, a voice that knew my name. My eyes scanned the walls all around me, terror pumped from my heart and through my veins. What was I looking for? “Hello?” I asked.
 

“Carmen!” Ray yelled from the bottom of the path. “What is it?”

I looked at him and shook my head, “Nothing. It’s nothing…I just thought I heard something.”
 

He gave me a strange look and motioned with his hands over his ears as if to say,
You heard something in all this noise
? and motioned for me to hurry up.

I nodded back and turned one last time to scan the walls around me. It bothered me. Had I heard my name? And if I had, it wasn’t so much that one of these damned creatures knew my name—it was that I could have sworn I recognized their voice.
 

“Daddy?” I whispered.

But none of the faces answered back.
   

The bottom of the crater was only the beginning of an underground world. As the ground beneath us continued to fall away, our journey, I could now see, would take us further and further down.
 

“How far does it go?” I asked.

Ray stood beside me as we stared out over the landscape of the next portion of our journey. “I don’t know for sure.” He turned his head to face me. “Maybe forever.”

“Impossible,” I said.

“Nothing is impossible Carmen.” He turned back. “Especially here.”

“Well how far to the Epiphany Pool?”

Ray shook his head slightly and my heart froze in my chest.
 

“What does that mean?” fear made my voice shrill.

“It means I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.”

“What?”
 

“I’ve never been to the Epiphany Pool. I’ve never even seen it. She keeps it hidden.”

“Why?” I asked but the answer came to me almost immediately. “She doesn’t want anyone to find it,” I said. “Because, when they find, if they find it—”

“They can account for their life and death,” he finished.

“And she doesn’t want that,” the words fell dead from my lips. “We’re never going to find it, are we?”

“Don’t say that,” he turned on me. “We will find it. If it exists, and it has to exist, we will find it.”

I looked up, past the mouth of the crater and found the moon hanging near the edge. “Before I’m out of time?”

“We don’t have any other choice.”

“If only you could—”

“I can’t, Carmen! Don’t you think I would tell you if I could? Don’t you think I would give anything, do anything in my powers to help you? It kills me that I can’t tell you what I know.”

“And it may actually kill me,” I said.

He didn’t say anything at first, only stared straight into my eyes. “You might remember before we get to the pool. The offenses are supposed to help people. Their original purpose was to help guide people to understanding their mistakes.”

“They seem more like traps to me.”

“Now, yes. She uses them, constrains them as much as is allowed. Once, before she came, the whole of The Between was filled with Epiphany Pools. Waters of opportunity for souls to gaze back on their lives and comprehend its meaning. Before her, most souls passed through this place and there were very few faints.”

“And now there is only one pool?”

“One pool. The only one she is not allowed to touch. The deepest spring hidden in the depths of this world. And if traveling through the remaining offenses does not restore your memory, then we will find it. I promise you Carmen. I won’t lose you like this.” Without another word, he started walking again. Down this new path that dropped away from the earth ceiling hanging above us.

I followed him, down the craggy path winding through the rough terrain that reminded me of the Mexican dessert outside of Oaxaca. In the distance, around scrub brush and large black boulders, faints wove and whispered, hovering at the edge of us. Some floated closer and then drifted away—they were waiting for me. I could feel their desire for me, for my energy. They collected, like a swarm of insects attracted to my scent, and followed us.
 

In the distance, I could see a stone archway spanning the path. Overhead, the dirt ceiling that had been receding higher and higher as we descended deeper and deeper, ended. I looked up and could again see the moon in the sky. Behind us was the sheer wall of a ragged cliff and I realized we had come down inside of that. Somewhere, high at the top and hidden from my view, was the iron castle of The Great Balancer.
 

I imagined her, way up there, watching Ray and I far below her, like ants scurrying in the dirt.

Ahead of me, Ray waited outside the entrance to the offense. When I was closer, I could see his expression heavy with dread.
 

“What is it?” I asked as I walked up.

When he turned to me, his eyes were closed, as if the stress was too much to bear. “I wish…” he started but his voice trailed off.