You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom, page 20
What was Aury doing down here? Xiomara scanned the room as she followed the claw marks, imagining the path the creature had taken in pursuing Aury. The fact that the lines weren’t continuous, a long break between one and another, told her that it likely jumped from one end of the room to the other. Where it landed, there was a skirmish of singed crosshatches surrounded by crushed boxes.
Xiomara couldn’t be sure where the marks started or ended—she wasn’t an expert in tracking known animals, much less supernatural creatures—but she could hazard a guess at what Aury did in response. Her aunt likely threw what she could. That was why so many of the boxes were overturned, contents spilled all over the path. She didn’t have Henry’s strength or boldness—so she did her best in keeping her distance and using whatever was around her to escape.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to escape for long. Xiomara circled right back to where Aury’s body had lain. She crouched over empty Tupperware containers, most snapped into pieces.
Sulfur. Xiomara froze as if afraid she were going to startle the scent into fleeing. She inhaled slowly through her nose, until the subtle sting of heat and rot had touched the back of her throat. The smell was weak but steady. She chased it to her left, where her aunt’s cassette tape glinted in the light. Aury must have dropped it during the attack. Xiomara picked it up. The tape was somehow in pristine condition.
Outside the room, Yaritza hadn’t moved an inch from the wall. Shock had rooted her to the spot.
Maybe it was Yaritza’s usual devil-may-care attitude or the immediate danger that awaited them in the shadows. Whatever the reason, Xiomara felt herself grasping for sympathy and found it shaved down to a nub. She asked, “You going to talk about this online?”
And Yaritza shook her head, eyes glazed over as she stared into the middle distance. Xiomara sighed and held out her hand.
“Come on,” she said. “At this point, no one in our family should be left alone for even a moment.”
They went upstairs. The door to Rafael’s room was wide open, with a constant stream of pissed Spanish and accented English rushing over one another like water molecules in a river.
“Don’t touch me!” Aury’s voice kicked up, sobbing. “Why was it me again? What did I do?”
“You took something.” Xiomara explained, entering behind Yaritza. “Yaritza told me earlier that el bacà protects its owner’s properties. You took Papi Ramon’s pills the first time, and Henry took his watch. Look, you can see his initials on the book. So what did you try to take?”
Yaritza beamed at her cousin. “You do listen to me.”
Xiomara didn’t look away from her aunts. Marisa was trying to get Aury to lie down next to Henry. Manuel stood on the other side, massaging his forehead like he was trying to scoop out his frontal cortex. Wanda sat facing the corner of the room, wrapped in one of the thinner bedsheets, eyes closed like she was in the middle of a prayer.
“I didn’t take anything!” Aury screamed, nose flaring. “I was just organizing his stuff!”
“Until that lawyer gets back with the will, none of us own any of Papi Ramon’s things. So don’t try to take anything in this house.” Xiomara realized the timing of the storm on such a day was too perfect. What if the lawyer never came back? Why hadn’t Papi Ramon just given them their inheritances along with the message in the first will? It seemed he’d been keen on keeping his wealth and assets away from the family.
“She’s fine!” Naomi scoffed, pushing past Marisa. “She’s awake and breathing. She doesn’t need my help.”
Marisa gasped. “What if she has a concussion?”
“The fuck am I supposed to do about that?”
Rafael rolled his eyes and dug his fingers into the back of the armchair as he swiveled it around. “Everyone sit down,” he said. “We need to talk.”
Yaritza hesitated but then obeyed.
Xiomara closed the door. “Are we finally going to talk about the will?” It was beyond time that they kept that in mind. They’d read the will about eight hours ago, leaving them with four hours to find the demon and remove it from the family.
The energy in the room heightened with every look exchanged. Rafael rolled his lips over each other, casting his eyes down in muted shame. “Yes. I think we should talk about Papi’s will.”
A weight fell off Xiomara’s shoulders. Finally. The first step to solving a problem was acknowledging it. How were they going to extract a demon they didn’t believe was there?
Marisa sent a nervous smile around the room. “We don’t have to worry about that. Remember—the lawyer is getting the—”
“I’m not talking about some other will!” Rafael snapped, and turned his attention to Manuel. “I’m talking about the one we all heard today. Come on, let’s read this again,” he pleaded with a steady voice and wrapped an arm over his brother’s shoulders; with his other hand, he waved the document out of his pocket.
Manuel could not move away fast enough—he planted his feet and shoved Rafael’s arm off. “Papi did not deal with demons!” Manuel shouted. “He was a man of God.”
Rafael tried again with a soothing tone. “Even men of God make mistakes—”
“Not Papi!” Manuel shook his head vigorously. “So stop talking bad about him.”
“Okay, then,” Xiomara cut in. Her family members turned with such bewilderment, it made her wonder if they’d forgotten she was there. “Let’s just . . . all go around and say where we were when Aury was attacked.” The fastest way to determine who did the attacking.
“I was with Xiomara,” Yaritza said quickly.
Bewildered, Xiomara shook her head. “No, you weren’t.”
“Then who else were you with?”
“I was with . . .” The truth arrived in a single thought. No one. Xiomara was told to wait for Manuel to return and she didn’t. In an impulsive bid for safety, she said, “Oh. You’re right. You and I were together.”
Xiomara kicked herself for not risking it and turned away from her cousin immediately.
“Then I ran into Manuel on my way down here,” Yaritza added. Manuel confirmed it.
“And I ran past you two to get down here,” Marisa declared, giving Yaritza a look.
“Yeah, I remember that.” The niece nodded with half-hearted enthusiasm.
Aury sniffled through an accusatory “Where were you?”
Rafael balked. “Me? I was trying to get to your ass, but you had the door locked!”
“I didn’t lock the door!” Aury shouted. Tears were still falling down her face, trailing mascara while droplets of blood pricked through her skin.
“Well, it was locked, okay?” Rafael said. His lips were pulled back into a snarl, and he squared his shoulders the same way Henry did when he got defensive. It seemed that stance ran in the family.
Aury stared at Rafael in silence as she struggled to regulate her breathing.
“Wh-wh-why are you lying?” she hiccupped.
Rafael exploded. “Oh, I’m lying?”
“Yes, you are!”
“Okay, stop!” Manuel shouted, getting in between them. “Aury, I saw Rafael trying to open the door.”
“Mm.” Aury looked at Manuel up and down. “And? Am I supposed to believe you after everything you did?”
“This is not the same as that!”
“Ha! Why’s that?” Spittle flew when Aury laughed. “Because we’re supposed to be family?” The bed shifted under her as she swung her legs over the side. “Tell me, who am I supposed to trust in this family?”
“You can trust me,” Marisa whimpered. Aury laughed once more.
“You? A year ago, you asked me to borrow money. I sent you ten thousand dollars—that you still haven’t paid me back—but I find out that you sent your little boyfriend fifty?”
Stunned, Marisa took a step back, tears coming faster than she could wipe them away.
Rafael snapped. “Why are you accusing Marisa?” he said. “She’s the only one here who was crying over you. God only knows why. You’re probably the demon the way you’re always trying to drag people to hell with you.”
Aury turned to the rest of the family. “Isn’t it suspicious that all this stuff came out about me and my company and Manuel and his kids . . . but there’s nothing in the news about Rafael? Or Yaritza?”
Panicked, Yaritza threw out an accusation. “What about Naomi? Where was she?”
Naomi chuckled in response. “Bet you were holding that in for a while.”
Yaritza held her gaze, steady and hostile, as she raised her phone before passing it on to Marisa. Xiomara paled immediately as she watched her aunts’ expressions change. “I did some research on someone’s background.”
Naomi lengthened her back and squared her shoulders. “Yeah? And what did you find out?”
Xiomara’s pulse quickened—she could feel the fire ignite, making her warm, so warm; how could a room rise in temperature so quickly? Calm down, she told herself. Don’t get hot now.
“Don’t listen to Yaritza—she’s just making things up,” Xiomara muttered.
“We need to send her out already,” Yaritza argued. “What are we still waiting for? For Aury to die?”
“Don’t say that!” Marisa rebuked.
“I’m just being honest!” Yaritza clicked her tongue. “It’s either her or us.”
Naomi threw up her hands. “I don’t know anything about a demon, dumbass.”
“Everyone, shut up!” Manuel roared. Once the accusations faded to silence, he looked about the room. “Papi never dealt with a demon. Don’t even say that. Whatever is going on here is because someone wants something from this family. That’s it.”
“But I saw—” Aury jumped up.
Manuel stomped, shaking the room. “I don’t care what you saw!”
Xiomara massaged her temples. Being around her family was beginning to impede her investigation, not make it easier. Without another word, she made her way to the door, not caring if anyone had anything to say about it.
“Where are you going? The bathroom?” Aury mocked. With one foot already out the door, Xiomara simply turned with stoic determination.
“We still haven’t found a cassette player,” she lied, and held up Josefina’s tape. “And I need to listen to this.”
Do you want to know how your mother really died?
11:32 p.m.
“Why did you stop?”
If there was ever a burning question Xiomara had during Papi Ramon’s exorcism stories, it was that one. A simple one that could lead to a simple answer—not that it ever did.
At the end of every exciting tale, when Papi Ramon would beam with self-satisfaction, and pride would pour out of his skin like light, Xiomara would ask him the question. In fact, he gave no answer at all. The only acknowledgment Xiomara’s question was given came in the form of a hard flinch.
If it had only happened one time, maybe the flinch wouldn’t have registered so violently in Xiomara’s head. It wouldn’t press at the forefront of her memories or followed her as closely. But it was exactly the fact that it had occurred so often that it stuck with her like a stubborn popcorn kernel between her teeth.
It happened every single time.
And it would happen so fast, Xiomara’s brain could only process it as a flicker, a momentary lapse in her grandfather’s luminescence. Papi Ramon would swiftly change the subject, decide that he needed a bathroom break, or suddenly remember he needed to call someone.
After a while, Xiomara learned to stop asking. As she got older, she started making excuses for him. She thought, maybe Papi Ramon misheard her, misunderstood her, mistook her question for something else and reacted accordingly. But then came the next question—every time? He misheard her every time, misunderstood her every time, so on and so forth, every single time she had asked the question—was that right?
What an amazing coincidence that would be. Maybe it was her that was misremembering. Maybe she didn’t really ask after every single story—what kind of kid would do that? But no, the conviction would punch her in the stomach: she knew she asked every time. She remembered it specifically because it was such an odd thing to do and she did it.
And it was because of those memories that Xiomara now found herself in Papi Ramon’s personal bathroom. She sat on cool porcelain, with the Walkman on her lap and Aury’s tape inserted but not played. Not yet. Every time she listened to Papi Ramon’s voice, she’d imagine his face, and along with it, that flinch.
This is where he went? She took a cursory look around the bathroom. It had been stripped of towels and floor mats and shower curtains, leaving behind stark white tiles smelling vaguely of Clorox and Fabuloso. Naomi was very thorough in her cleaning.
It spun a certain kind of grief in her chest. Bathrooms are, by nature, very intimate settings. So are bedrooms; so are entire homes. To have much of the house cleared of Papi Ramon’s belongings felt like he was being erased.
Or it should have. Instead, it reflected an unflinching truth. That for all that Xiomara adored her grandfather, for all that Papi Ramon fawned over his granddaughter, was accused of favoring her above all else, he didn’t really tell her anything she needed to know.
And perhaps the blame was partially hers. Maybe she had been too young to learn everything, and once she got older Mami’s death parted them harshly. Xiomara moved to the other side of the country. She hardly visited, hardly reached out. Papi Ramon seemed to respect her space.
Now that she was here, in his space, in the same bathroom he’d claimed to run to whenever she’d asked a simple question, she realized something. Papi Ramon only ever told her stories in his study, on the first floor. There was a bathroom just across the hall, right next to the stairs. Yet he would always climb the steps instead. If she had asked him about that, would he have told her the truth?
Had he ever?
Xiomara’s heart jumped when a door slammed through the wall. She could hear someone stomping down the hall as they shouted aggressively.
“I don’t want to be in the same room as you!” It sounded like Marisa. The floor creaked as others left her alone. Finally, silence. Sighing to herself, Xiomara slipped in her earbuds and pressed play. The tape began with a light buzz of static in the background.
“Out of all my children, I think Aury takes after me the most. She’s sharp, capable, she knows what she’s doing with her business. I don’t worry about her as much as I worry about Marisa. But that’s only when she isn’t making the same mistakes she always does. I don’t understand why she does it. The pills aren’t good for her. Her mother and I didn’t raise her to be that way either. I don’t know who taught her. I keep thinking it must’ve been those friends at school, maybe one of her boyfriends . . . but she’s single now and she’s still doing it. I know she is, even if she tries to hide it. I can tell, I can always tell. Whenever Aury lies about something, she opens her nose like she’s not getting enough air. I don’t think she knows she does it, and I don’t tell her. I think part of the reason why her business does so well is because she’s good at lying, at hiding things. She’s so good at it that sometimes I think she might be the demon, [REDACTED].”
Xiomara paused the tape. There it was again—the distortion. She rewound and played it again.
“I think she might be the demon, [REDACTED].”
Pause. Rewind. Play.
“—the demon, [REDACTED].”
Pause. Xiomara gripped the Walkman, if only to keep herself from chucking it at the wall. The distortion was keeping her from hearing the demon’s name.
Is he doing this on purpose? No, she didn’t think so. Papi Ramon wasn’t tech savvy enough for that. The censoring happened for the same reason that the smell of sulfur still lingered after every attack.
Certainty gripped her by the throat. The demon knew about the tapes. It knew and had distorted them so any information about it was unrecoverable. The way that sentence was going, Xiomara knew the distortion had to be a name.
But then why leave the tapes where they were hidden? Why not just destroy them altogether?
Because demons liked to play. That’s what Papi Ramon said all those years ago. A person might think they’ve outsmarted a demon but really they’ve played according to the script.
Though she didn’t smell sulfur, Xiomara imagined the demon circling her. If she didn’t figure this out quick, what would happen? Would she be attacked like Aury and Henry? Would the demon rend her flesh from bone? Papi Ramon had said the entire family would be damned if the demon wasn’t caught and expelled—but he didn’t say anything about how to expel the demon even if they did find it. Or did the demon erase those words from his will too?
Xiomara squeezed her eyes tight enough to see stars. She should’ve expected this—she had always been told that demons were crafty. Why had she thought she could find and expel one in just one night, especially when she hadn’t stepped a foot in a church since Mami’s funeral? Xiomara was far out of her depth.
Yet, for some reason, Papi Ramon had believed she could.
She opened her eyes.
“Then again . . . I don’t know if I should blame her for lying or hiding things. When she was little, she always told me she felt like she was constantly being watched. Manuel later told me that she believed it was me secretly watching them through the walls, and that I was lying when I said I didn’t. But she’s always had a strong conviction. So maybe she learned how to lie from me. I never told her she was right—what else could I do?”
There was a long stretch of silence. Xiomara wondered if this was the end of the tape, or if he was just gathering his thoughts. She shifted forward on the toilet seat as if trying to lean into Papi Ramon’s space. All she could hear was the static of a TV in the background.
“Regardless, Aury is one that I want to believe she’s not my daughter just as much as I feel she is. How can I not? How can I look at each of my children and believe they might be a demon? I remember when every one of them was born. I was there, I was . . . but I know [REDACTED] and I know how good he is at manipulating memories. And my memory isn’t the way it used to be. I just—”
