Nulla

That winter, death comes barreling down on the Macario family with expected talons to claim Pumpkin, the old orange family cat. His age and origins they’ve never known for certain, though these unknowns have never lessened their love. The day it comes time for mercy, Mamá, who found Pumpkin all those years ago, comes with Papá to pick Tomasa up from school early, huffing and donning painted pink cheeks as she pulls Tomasa away from a particularly rigorous game of Seven Up. By the time Tomasa and her siblings are clutching lifeless orange fur for what will be the last time, the game is long forgotten, her oft-released childish wails justified in the echo of the sterile room. Even at the unripe age of seven she thinks it woefully unfair that this is it, that this is where Pumpkin has breathed his last: an unfamiliar room. Cold, metallic, colorless. Above all else, cold.

When her parents have settled everything and they’re heading back to their minivan, cavernous silence where Silvina and Martín would usually be bickering—which really means Silvina scolding Martín, and Martín retorting with a swear word or a shove—Mamá falls behind with the lagging Tomasa and wraps her scarf around her, then adds an arm to boot.

“Don’t be too sad, Tomasita.” With each word Tomasa’s eyes moisten more and more. Through this wetness she looks up at Mamá, whose lips have formed the tiniest of something that looks like it means to comfort, and it’s with these lips that she adds, “It was his time.”

Which finally gets Tomasa to pipe up something other than a wail, indignant when she croaks out, “Who said so?”

“If we knew that,” Mamá says, and Tomasa is barely listening, she’s thinking too hard to try to will the tears away, “we wouldn’t really be human, would we?” Then she tightens the scarf in tandem with her hold on Tomasa, and together they stumble to the car behind Tomasa’s father, behind Tomasa’s older siblings, behind the suffocation of death in the family.

It’s something Papá tells Silvina after a while of Mamá being gone, and seven-year-old Tomasa has gone unnoticed and is picking at lint balls behind the couch where she likes to hide sometimes.

“Your mother,” he says to Silvina, and Tomasa is only half-listening, “has always been addicted to being alone.” A few minutes later, having heard her father shuffle off and away from the living room, Tomasa jumps up and throws herself next to a red-eyed Silvina. At the age of fourteen, Silvina is graceful, poised. Today, she looks younger than ever, her hunched figure startling at the sudden motion from Tomasa.

“What’s addicted mean?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Then, Silvina starts asking if Tomasa has finished her homework, which makes Tomasa shriek and run off. They’re all being so dramatic, so solemn. Even Martín has started sulking more than usual. Tomasa doesn’t understand why her mother has been gone for almost two weeks, or why her maternal grandparents came around to speak in hushed voices with Papá, or why Silvina has been so teary. Mamá will be back. She goes, but she always comes back and when she does, Tomasa jumps into her arms and it’s like she never left. So yes, Mamá will be back. Tomasa wonders if she ought to tell them this. It’s ridiculous, after all, to think that Mamá, who wouldn’t pass her name down to Tomasa no matter how pretty Papá thought it was, would want anything to do with being alone. Soledad in name, not in practice.

Wanting to die isn’t so novel—it’s in the back of Tomasa’s mind, mostly, until something yanks it forward, like when she’s eighteen and all the people she thought of as friends go to colleges more distant than the local state one, the only one to which she applied, and separate ways ends up meaning incompatible ways, and she wonders if they were ever really her friends at all if they were so easy to lose.

Or when she’s nineteen and a pissed-in-two-senses-of-the-word Martín decides the Thanksgiving table is the best place to tell Silvina that he overheard a conversation years ago and Soledad—whose only real form of contact with them for years now has been in the form of sending extravagant Christmas and birthday gifts—isn’t her real mother because her real mother is dead, and Tomasa wishes she could unsee the unprecedented anguish that contorts noble eldest sister Silvina’s face.

Or when she’s twenty and one of the more traumatizing files in her file cabinet of girlfriends—and girls who wouldn’t let her call them that—swipes a few hundred dollar bills from Papá’s nightstand drawer and all he gives her is a look, silent and expressionless, before turning away from her tears.

Or when she’s twenty-one watching Martín check the pulse of a body they found turning into an alley on a shortcut home from the bar, a route she’ll only take if Martín is with her, and when nothing happens and she sees the gunshot wound, clear as day in the night, she thinks about how it doesn’t matter that Soledad didn’t pass down her name because she didn’t want her youngest daughter to be alone, because Tomasa is alone anyway, and how would her shaking hands explain it to Martín and the police if she did it; or when she’s twenty-two and she finally does it.

Or when she’s twenty-two and she wakes up from her temporary death after the so-called attempt that was, definitely, of course--how could it not be after how many she swallowed--successful. Tomasa’s shock announcing itself in a scream startles the already shaking Silvina kneeling down on the ground next to Tomasa’s once-lifeless body, and then Tomasa realizes, with rage and a variety of emotions not yet named, it wasn’t her time.

Well, fuck whoever decided it wasn’t Tomasa’s time. Her life isn’t a fucking tragedy. It never has been, and it might never be. She knows this too well, she knows it as she’s shipped off to the hospital, she knows it as they tell her it’s a miracle that she lived, that it’s a miracle because they can’t even find any signs of overdose despite her self-report of having done just that. It’s a miracle, it’s a miracle, it’s a miracle. She bites her tongue instead of spitting back don’t I fucking know it.

In a move the Macario family--save for the perpetrator--must’ve been expecting, Tomasa takes her playground havoc-wreaking too far one day and shoves a smart-mouthed, pristine-pink ribbon-wearing playmate in her second grade class, leaving her with a bloody nose. The school responds with a brief suspension lasting up until the end of the school year; Papá deals with the ribbon’s parents, and Tomasa spends all summer seeing a psychologist every other week. The psychologist says that, based on what Papá has told him about quote-unquote family history, there may eventually be the need for a certain,official diagnosis. But Tomasa is too young for him to tell for certain, he also says, so he never divulges anything further to Tomasa. And she never thinks to push the topic, too fascinated by the pastel Legos in his city office.

Always quick to rattle off any thought that comes to mind, Tomasa is rendered a complete pariah as she enters third grade with no one to talk to her aside from her siblings. But Silvina is a sitting-pretty high schooler and Martín’s sixth-grade status may as well mean he lives in a different country altogether for how little attention he pays to Tomasa. So she explodes when she gets home, rotating listeners and talking everyone’s ears off. Only Soledad, who has been gone for a few months, escapes these vocal tirades.

After a few weeks of this, Papá tells Tomasa that Mrs. Umstead and her daughter Julia, the latter a year above her and someone who has never spoken a single word to Tomasa, have extended an invitation for Tomasa to come over and play. The words are an incantation that carry her from her house to their porch, where Julia opens the door, offers a nod as greeting, and wordlessly escorts Tomasa to her second floor bedroom.

When Soledad returns unannounced, Tomasa has troves to unload that everyone else in the house has already heard. She tells her about how Julia has beautiful coloring books from which she’ll give Tomasa a page nearly each time she visits. It doesn’t matter that Tomasa has her own beautiful coloring books that Soledad and her maternal grandparents—all of whom respond to Tomasa’s material demands with sleek cards more often than Papá does—have given her because Julia’s beautiful coloring books are more special, more of a novel. How mature and wise nine-year-old Julia is sometimes trusted to watch her younger sister, how Julia and her play with the abundant neighborhood stray cats and have even named one: a rare brown one. The name they chose is Lily, which means the name Tomasa chose is Lily. Tomasa says all this and more and omits other parts, like how Tomasa and Julia, both naturally bossy, clash more often than not and Tomasa holds her breath after each impulsive outburst, expecting it to be the last one Julia will ever tolerate because Julia’s anger is so much more contained, so much more graceful, hidden behind careful quivers. She talks and talks about Julia, all the time knowing that Julia, when they’re at school, won’t even look at her once. Julia, so tall and pretty in the pink floral prints and frilled lace socks her mother makes her wear, pretended she didn’t hear Tomasa the one time Tomasa, bold as ever, said hello as they passed each other in the cafeteria.

When Tomasa is done and out of breath, Soledad nods and murmurs, “She sounds nice.” With that she turns over in the guest room bed, her snores becoming booms in the otherwise empty house. The dusk light dissipates almost as rapidly as the thing that sparked alight in Tomasa’s chest when Soledad’s car pulled into the driveway.

Tomasa forgets about matters of dissipating light the next day when she and Julia are stalking through the neighborhood at Tomasa’s behest, Julia’s twinged-with-irritation twinkle of a voice saying, “Tomasa, it’s going to get dark soon.”

“So we need to find her by then.”

“She’s a stray, we don’t need to find her.”

“Just a few more minutes. What if she’s hungry?”

Sometimes Tomasa wants to shake Julia. She never actually does, although she’s felt her fingers flinch more than once. Julia, who has never known loss, can’t possibly understand, she often thinks with a bitter twang in her heart. Tomasa needs Lily like she’s convinced herself Lily needs cat food, always taken from the large bag Soledad bought a few days before Pumpkin died. The bag, almost two years old and nearly empty now, still sits in their cluttered garage.

They turn the corner into the street behind theirs, Tomasa leading the way with purpose, the small plastic bowl gripped tight between both of her hands. Julia sees it first, a sharp intake of air preceding a yelp that makes Tomasa jump, turning to look at Julia before following her gaze and catching sight of the brown, pink-red lump. The color of insides, sole occupier of the asphalt, and two girls the only audience.

Without a second thought, Tomasa lunges toward Lily. Julia’s strangled airy voice tells Tomasa to stop, to put Lily down, that she shouldn’t touch dead animals even if she loves the dead animal. Both of them are screaming when a hiss halts their yells and the bones spring out of Tomasa’s arms, but not too fast for them to miss Lily stitch back together. Instantaneously and impossibly, there are glowing embers in Tomasa’s throat burning bright for just a second--and just a second is all it takes. Then Lily decides her second life would be best spent elsewhere.

“She was definitely dead,” uttered Julia. Her voice falls on Tomasa’s pounding ears, and Tomasa finds herself affirming this with words that come out mechanically. Then Julia bolts, new sandals click-clacking loudly. Too loudly.

Soledad is gone again when Tomasa stumbles back home empty-handed, head spinning, breathing hard with a thirst like no thirst she’s ever felt before in her young life. She goes to the kitchen, her bloody t-shirt unnoticed by Martín, who is in the living room. She drinks three glasses of water in a row before scurrying upstairs. She stuffs her shirt between her mattress and bedframe. She feels delirious. She collapses atop her comforter. She falls asleep.

Later that night, she wakes up and walks downstairs with bleary eyes, narrowly avoiding running into a thin-lipped Mrs. Umstead being escorted to the front door by Papá. And Papá, he gives her a look like the one he gave her after she pushed that girl over. He tells her she can’t see Julia anymore, that Julia won’t be seeing her anymore. And Tomasa, she wishes Soledad was here, wishes Soledad would make sense out of the nonsensical, like she always does. She wishes Julia wouldn’t hate her so badly because of something she isn’t even sure she did. She wishes and wishes.

III

So Tomasa, age eight, resolves to forget about it. It takes effort not to look at Julia when they’re going in and out of the house at the same time or when they pass each other at school. Even if she did something, even if what they think she did was real, she doesn’t want to reckon with it alone. And Julia has taught her enough about how others might react. With each passing year, though, it gets harder not to look at Julia, for different reasons. Reasons she buries behind some door in her heart, and she puts the key aside. Still there, though never wielded, she feels this presence the most on the second day of middle school, when she sees twelve-year-old Julia with a boy. It bothers her and she pretends she doesn’t know why it bothers her. She picks up the key and stands before that door in her heart before she walks away.

Often, Tomasa finds herself walking away in her mind’s eye. Better to not know, better to not think. It’s already so very hard to get out of bed or keep herself from going crazy for how noisy the world is, never mind how noisy she can be, despite mostly outgrowing her childhood temper tantrums. Yet, also with aging, brief moments of wonder possess her and she’ll run the possibility over in her mind: that for some insane reason, some faulty mechanism of the universe, she has been chosen for something as grand as this. But that also pulls back what Tomasa has decided is illusion—being “chosen.” Chosen, implying that Tomasa must have somehow done something to earn this. If not, then it was a mistake. She bristles at that, the possibility that she’s some kind of mistake. More than once, Martín has proposed that they, as a collective sibling unit, are Soledad’s mistakes. For all the times Silvina tells him to be quiet, she never tells him that he’s wrong.

Soledad, intermittently arriving and leaving, leaves for the last time when Tomasa is thirteen. Her grades are sinking, too, which is part of how she earns her first psychotropic prescription.

It’s been a year and a half of Soledad’s absence and Tomasa’s medicated state when Papá, driving her to school, tells her Soledad won’t be returning, so he’s going to put some extra shelves in the guest room for Silvina’s overflowing collection of books. May as well do something with the room, and it’s not like they have many other guests.

Tomasa says okay, which is a lie.

It’s frog dissection day in her first period biology class, and she’s volunteered to help set up the room in exchange for extra credit, so she jumps out of the car without saying goodbye to Papá and heads there with an aching head, thumping heart. Following the rules should be simple, just organize the vacuum-sealed frogs, one per station, and leave it at that.

The biology teacher Mrs. Nuñez leaves the room and, through her aching head, Tomasa thinks it wouldn’t hurt to just see, and no one will miss one frog. Never mind the question of how she’ll discard it. The dead thing attacks her with its pungency, and she still has the ripped packaging in her hand when she touches its slimy texture and her throat burns. This time practicality has the decency to possess her. But she still can’t catch the frog before Mrs. Nuñez enters the room again, gracing the entire E Hallway with a banshee-like howl as a frog—curious, wide-eyed—bounces towards her.

Afterwards, Tomasa looks through an encyclopedia of Google search results for a myriad of different phrases, more or less fruitless: bringing things back to life, bringing things back to life after touching them, making things alive again and feeling completely numb and then feeling really thirsty and dehydrated. If there are others out there like her, they aren’t talking about it on the internet. She makes a long dramatic monologue of a post on an unexplained phenomena forum and the sole answer is a link to a WebMD page about psychosis, which is disappointing because she made a new email account and elaborate fake name up for that post: Antoinette Frances Ursula Ramirez.

There’s experimentation as well. It isn’t easy to find test subjects, but she makes do. Three tangled-dead spiders she touches spring back to life. Tomasa conducts another internet search and finds out spiders rarely die of natural causes, and the pieces start coming together. Miscellaneous others, mostly insects and varying in success rates. There was a dead squirrel on the road by the school that sprung back to life like it had something to prove, and all that was left behind was the blood-coated concrete.

People suddenly want to talk to her after the fact, especially after the hospital stay is over with. People that left her alone for years, and now are suddenly interested. Tomasa responds by keeping her phone off altogether, eyes glued to YouTube videos on her laptop screen behind a resolutely closed bedroom door, her family allowed entrance in short intervals that are really instances of masked supervision. Soledad tried to visit when she was in the hospital but, by then, Tomasa had already made a point of telling her doctors she wanted Soledad Emilia Sanchez, who never changed her surname to Macario, on the list of people forbidden to visit her. This brought her list to a grand total of one.

Now Soledad continues trying to make amends, or at least that’s what Tomasa gleans from the fact that she won’t stop calling. At least one call a day. At least Soledad half-got the hint and doesn’t come to the house. She’s a county away, her voicemails say, she’s not far at all and, when Tomasa is ready to see her, she’ll come. Tomasa periodically listens to these voicemails, deletes them, and turns her phone back off. Because look at what she had to do for Soledad to be interested again; because she hates herself for wanting to tell her mother everything. All of it, not one detail left out:

Something clicked. How it clicked, Tomasa cannot know—she only knows, with a certainty etched into the marrow of her bones, with the certainty of something ancient or something divine even though she has rarely pondered the ancient or the divine. When she died, something clicked. A dial was turned. It did not save her immediately, did not keep her from being immersed in that emptiness. She was falling for years that felt like seconds turned into minutes turned back into seconds turned into years. No perception of anything but that emptiness so full. With Lily, with everything else, all she could think about was heaving and rushing to grab water or in one case to grab a frog, left with no time to think about what one might feel after being dragged—perhaps kicking and screaming—from the banks of Styx. But she didn’t see a river, she didn’t see any kind of god, she didn’t see anything. She woke up at 3:46 p.m., about twenty or so minutes from the time she’d done it. On the ambulance ride she kept thinking so it’s different for humans, huh. So it’s different if it’s me, huh.

Tomasa still thinks about this, turned-off phone in hand, curled up in bed and facing the bedroom window that gives her a good view of the Umstead’s driveway. She knows what she’s wishing for, who she’s wishing for. So it goes.

Soledad long gone, Silvina an anxious workaholic. Tomasa steps into the odd borderland between girl and woman without fully noticing, mostly occupied with pondering her ability to conditionally negate death. Inevitably the obsessive solitude of the cross she bears is beat by the look a girl in her art class gives her when she sees Tomasa’s rainbow anklet. A look that promises her something other than solitude and a look that turns out to not be the last of its kind, nor unique to this girl.

She hears the news first from art class girl: after three or so days in critical condition, Julia’s younger sister has passed away from injuries sustained in a car crash. The Umstead patriarch will, as far as they know, continue to outlive her, and at the funeral, Tomasa finds out he did, in fact, outlive her. She watches the Umstead family from her awkward position in the polite acquaintance outskirts alongside Papá and her siblings, bitter and buried beneath the black coat Silvina made her wear. Papá threatens phone confiscation when Tomasa resists Silvina’s instructions for her to come along and give condolences, like he threatened phone confiscation when Tomasa pitched a fit about attending the funeral. It’s uncomfortable, being moved along until she’s standing in front of Julia, who looks delicate in her black dress even though her sharp features have never let her be delicate before this. Uncomfortable, to look into those blue eyes and avoid looking at the sobbing Mrs. Umstead, the bandaged and bruised Mr. Umstead, as she says, “I’m sorry.” Which could mean a lot of things.

Julia doesn’t nod, just says, “Thank you.” Like they’re perfect strangers, and maybe they are. Tomasa doesn’t know what else to say, starts to walk away and back to her family and then there’s a hold on her wrist, a tentative hold by Julia’s cold fingers.

“Tomasa,” says Julia, the three syllables pins that stick Tomasa in place more firmly than those fingers ever could, “I’d like to speak with you tomorrow, if you have time.” And who is Tomasa to say “no” to the request of a grieving person.

It isn’t until the sun starts setting the next day that Julia knocks on the front door, bike resting against the porch step railing. Tomasa’s heart is an alternating cycle of palpitations and stillness as she tells Julia to wait for her to grab her own bike from the garage. Martín, the only one home, halfheartedly tells Tomasa, on her way out, that she needs to be home by midnight, meaning nothing because Papá doesn’t get home from work until after 3 AM. Julia doesn’t say much, just that they need to go somewhere before she can talk, and impressively, Tomasa’s nerves let her make it five blocks pedaling behind Julia until they dissipate and morph into frustration. She brakes, startling Julia into doing the same.

“I really am sorry about your sister,” Tomasa says, and Julia’s face, only half facing her, is glazed in the orange streetlight, which makes this easier, “but where the hell are we going?”

Still glazed in orange, Julia looks at Tomasa head-on, lip trembling when she says, “To the cemetery, Tomasa.”

That makes enough sense: a surprising, disturbing amount of sense, enough to make Tomasa step back. Still gripping handlebars, she brings her bike back with her. She starts to say something about needing to go, not bothering with an excuse. Julia, like before but with more purpose this time, lurches forward and grabs Tomasa’s hand, fingers tentatively lacing themselves with Tomasa’s own—Tomasa’s fingers betray her when they mirror Julia’s.

“I heard about the frog from last year.” This comes out in a rush. “How you were the one to find it, and how it’s not native to California, how it’s the same species as the one your class was supposed to dissect, and I—”

“I failed biology, so I wouldn’t know anything about that,” tumbles out of Tomasa, a knee-jerk reaction that should surprise her except she can’t stop thinking about what this is really about, how it’s not really about her, how foolish she was for having thought this was about her. Another knee-jerk reaction, contradictory, when she adds, “I can’t do anything about it anyway.”

“You can, though—”

“You don’t know anything about what you think you know,” Tomasa finds it within herself to pull her fingers apart from Julia’s, “You haven’t talked to me since I was eight.”

“I know what I saw, Tomasa. We were kids, I know, but I know what I saw.” Julia is crying. Tomasa wonders if she’s been tearing up this whole time, and she just hasn’t noticed in the semi-darkness. Tomasa doesn’t get to announce her second attempt at going home before Julia says, “It was messed up that our parents made us spend so much time together, I know, but…” Like a defendant that has sealed their own judgment, Julia’s face goes ashen when she sees the look on Tomasa’s face. “You never figured it out then, did you?”

“I don’t care.” It’s not nerves pumping Tomasa’s heart so quickly anymore, it’s something else altogether. She turns her bike around, turns her back to Julia, so the older girl won’t see her shaking hands. “Who gives a shit? I barely remember all that.”

“Tomasa.” The final plea. “My mom, she’s—my dad—it’s just not good, Tomasa.”

“How’re you planning on explaining her miraculous revival to everyone who saw her buried yesterday?” Tomasa doesn’t turn around, doesn’t add the how dare you ask this of me on the tip of her tongue, doesn’t think much of anything as she pedals back home with no one behind her. Modus operandi.

So she ignores Julia. Ignores her with purpose and with faux dignity. It’s not like it’s hard, it’s not like Julia is exactly vying for her attention. Sometimes they’ll accidentally make eye contact, maybe because it’s hard to forget what they both know about Tomasa. Julia always looks away first. Tomasa wants to be angrier than she is.

Still, she treks on. Tries to forget what she knows about herself, too. It’s Silvina who tells her when Julia has committed to an out-of-state college. Mrs. Umstead had stopped Silvina outside and, apparently beaming with pride—rare, even after two years have passed, to see her smiling at all—announced the jolly news.

Tomasa isn’t thinking much, really, when she finds herself bussing to the cemetery that night; she doesn’t make it, gets off halfway through the route and then busses back. It’s not that she wants Julia to stay, it’s that she wants that possibility of Julia staying. That possibility that one day she’ll grow up and Julia will grow up, and she can rest knowing that someone else out there understands. She makes it to the cemetery on her third bus ride, the ridiculousness of it all collapsing on her as the doors open and she steps onto the sidewalk. Before the homebound bus arrives, she leaves a pile of vomit next to the rusty bench, a panic-induced pile.

Soledad is a ghost that makes Tomasa shriek when she gets home from the cemetery.

“I’ve been meaning to come back for some jewelry I left behind,” says Soledad, and Tomasa wants to ask why it took her four years to do that, and why it’s jewelry she missed, and why she doesn’t just buy replacements because they all know she can afford it.

Instead all Tomasa says is, “I just came from a cemetery.”

“Of course you did.” Then, Soledad presses a quick kiss to Tomasa’s forehead, and Tomasa isn’t sure but she thinks there’s sadness on her face when she darts off, leaving Tomasa with a lipstick stain to rub off. It’s not the power of prophecy that she’s been given but, somehow Tomasa knows with fierce certainty that she won’t be seeing Soledad, again.

What a damn useless gift, and a damn cruel trick, giving her something as mighty as the power to bring back the dead.

Just the unlucky ones, though.

VII

Para todo hay remedio, si no es para la muerte. Words, spoken by Papá one day when he walks into Tomasa’s room and finds her there, in bed instead of in group therapy, unmoving and listening to too-loud 2000s rock, blared and tinny from her laptop speakers. His dichos slide unnoticed past Tomasa, mostly, for how frequent they are. Donde hay amor hay dolor, al mal tiempo buena cara, something something this will change your perspective trust and believe. But that one—that one, she’s never heard before, never heard such absurdity sprout from his mouth that moves her to promise that next week, at last, she will finally make it to group therapy. The group therapy that comes after intensive outpatient therapy.. Two weeks out of the hospital and her head is still mud, a differently colored mud than it was before, but still mud.

With her mud-filled head Tomasa stalks downstairs, where Silvina is planted at the kitchen table working on something boring, something that has to do with accounting. Silvina’s been doing that lately—coming around, staying around, supervising. Tomasa plants herself across from Silvina and announces, “I brought a cat back to life when I was eight years old.”

“You mean you nursed it back to health?” Silvina pencils something in before looking at Tomasa with a raised eyebrow. “I think I’d remember something like that.”

“No,” says Tomasa. “I actually brought her back to life. She was dead and I touched her and she was alive again after that.”

“Right.” Silvina pauses, then takes a sip of lemonade, already losing interest. “It must’ve not been dead, then.”

Tomasa takes this in. She makes a show of nodding. She says, “You’re probably right.”

“I usually am,” says Silvina, and Tomasa snorts loud enough for an encore of that confused eyebrow. And that eyebrow, paired with those words, are an incantation that carry Tomasa from the Macario house to Umstead’s porch, where Mrs. Umstead opens the door, surprised, and Tomasa smiles a smile that shows teeth and tells her the Macario family will be sending Christmas cards this fine winter. Tells her they’ll be sending them to everyone they know and they’d like Julia’s address to send her one too, please.

“For everything there is a remedy, except for death.” And only one other person, Tomasa thinks, knows this to be false. By the time she is halfway to the city where Julia is getting a PhD in something she can’t remember because she wasn’t paying attention to Mrs. Umstead’s idle, post-address-acquisition chitchat, she’s realizing it might have been a better—smarter—idea to take a Greyhound instead. It would have certainly been less demanding of her meager savings account. At least the drive gives her the isolation she needs to think about what she’s going to say when she gets there, even though she knows she’ll promptly forget as soon as she opens her mouth.

VIII

Julia who doesn’t come home for holidays. Julia whose face Tomasa hasn’t seen in over four years, nearly five. If Tomasa wanted to, she could count the exact number of days, it wouldn’t be so hard. But she doesn’t want to, not now when she’s looking at Julia and the older girl—woman, now—has changed so little in appearance that Tomasa, in her still, staring trepidation, wonders if Julia can also do something odd, inexplicable but no less real than so many years ago when Tomasa touched a dead cat and Julia watched as it sprung back to life.

And Julia, blue eyes as unnerving as when they were children, averts her gaze finally, her surprise having run its course and leaving her once again cognizant of social graces.

“I just saw a message from my roommate about an old friend stopping by. I can’t say I was expecting it to be you,” she says, and her words break the cautious line between them.

“Yeah.” Tomasa is suddenly hyper aware of her disheveled appearance, of the many students afoot around them in the hallway of this college building. Ridiculous, sure, because she wasn’t exactly self-conscious when she took off and made the interstate drive to the university where Julia is a graduate student. “Sorry I lied and said we were friends.”

“In elementary school, we kind of were.” Julia is visibly troubled, which is something in which Tomasa—not shamelessly—finds satisfaction. She knows it has nothing to do with the question of whether their companionship was genuine friendship. “For a while.”

“We weren’t,” says Tomasa, because it’s the truth. “Anyway, I’m sorry to impose but, if you’re not busy right now, can we talk?”

“I’m not busy,” says Julia. Like she’s at a confessional, like she’s someone with a screen between her and someone holier. For once, Tomasa feels like the someone holier.

“That’s what it felt like.”

“Oh, Tomasa.” Julia, looking down into her lap, rubs tears away from her winter-chapped face. The bench on the fringes of campus is isolated enough that neither of them have to worry about anyone overhearing the impossibilities Tomasa has just recounted. It’s gentle when Julia asks, “Why did you come all the way over here to tell me this?”

“Because,” Tomasa starts, and the sensation that fastens itself onto her is urgency and relief in a combined avalanche, “all these feel-good stories online talk about coming out of it with wisdom from God, stuff like that. But there’s more to it that I can’t really tell, except.. well, to you.”

“How did you do it?”

“I don’t know. But you believe me?”

“Of course I believe you” Closer now, Tomasa can see that Julia has changed, that her under eyes are dark and that her face is slightly rounder. Small alterations, barely noticeable. Human. “I always believed it. You scared me.”

“Till you needed me,” Tomasa says without thinking, and Julia nods.

“Till I needed you.”

They fall quiet, comfortable like old friends. Odd, not entirely unwelcome. After a few lingering moments Julia says, “So the universe makes mistakes sometimes, and you’re the failsafe.”

“It wasn’t a mistake. I did it on purpose.”

“If you can do this, maybe it’s not so much of a stretch to believe in something like fate, though.”

Fate. Tomasa turns that over in her head—fate that dictates only Julia ever knowing this secret. Fate that dictates Julia running away from whatever went on in the Umstead house after the car accident. Fate that dictates Tomasa taking Martín’s car keys without asking. An impulse, an itch, to tell Julia about this one grand feat that feels so grander than the rest. Julia who barely knows her. Julia who knows her so well. In Tomasa’s pocket, her phone feels heavy. She puts a hand over it. She thinks about how she isn’t alone, not in this moment, and how much of a miracle that is. How much of a miracle she can be. Her phone, on silent and clutched in her hand, lights up. Soledad, like clockwork.

Tomasa says, “I need to take a call.”

“Service isn’t so great here, but if the call’s coming in, then you should be fine,” says Julia, and she looks confused when Tomasa laughs.

“Not today,” says Tomasa. “Tomorrow, or the next day. Soon.”

Alex Luceli Jiménez (she/her) is a writer of horror and other types of speculative fiction from the inland city of Fontana, California. That said, she has also been known to write the occasional lesbian love story. She is currently a fourth-year student at the University of California, Berkeley majoring in comparative literature and English with a minor in creative writing. Her writing — fiction and otherwise — has previously appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, The Daily Californian, and Lunch Ticket. Please send any and all LGBTQ+ literature recs to her Twitter: @alexluceli.