1
She clicked the light switch on the hotel room wall, and in the infinitesimal space between the absence and arrival of light, a space undetectable to the mind, much less the eye, Sarita Bardales saw someone who could not be in the room. A tall shadow standing near the window, featureless but facing her and Frank, nonetheless. Watching them enter.
The shape disappeared before the click of the light switch left Sarita’s ears, too quickly for anyone to have ever been there. Sarita told herself that it had been a product of her inebriation, but she had still recognized the man within the silhouette in the fraction of an instant it had appeared to her. She took this recognition as additional proof that she imagined it. Imagined him. He had no reason to be there now, at the close of this perfect day.
Six months ago, after watching mutual friends suffer restless children, condescending relatives, and unhelpful friends at their wedding, with hypnotized smiles on their faces, Sarita and Frank promised each other that their nuptials and reception would be different. They would set rules and see to their own wants first, and anyone who wouldn’t be happy to attend under their guidelines would be free to stay home. Sarita had gone so far as to co-author her maid of honor’s brief speech, though that was primarily due to Tori admitting she was concerned about saying the wrong thing. Given Tori’s state of mind the past few years, her obsessions with the “flexibility of reality” and the power of prayers and “spells,” Sarita thought it prudent to help Tori find words appropriate to the occasion.
Frank’s biological mother, Harrah, took issue with their plans. She wanted to be first in line to dance with her son at the reception, but he had every intention of giving his stepmother, Misty, that honor. The latter had been in his life for twenty-two of his twenty-seven years, during which time his birth mother had been fitfully present, which was, arguably, for the best. The faint scar that divided his right eyebrow, and the deeper, curved, and jagged rows of scars on his left forearm, strengthened that argument. Still, Harrah had insisted on having the first dance because she was his “real” mother, and that, to her, was that. Frank told her he loved her, but she could either accept what he wanted or not attend. She formally declined the wedding invitation soon after, as did most of his family, save for his grizzled bulldog of an uncle, Everett, who attended as an ambassador of the Stallworth clan rather than an eager guest, although he broke down as the reception ramped up and danced almost enough to make up for the rest of the family’s absence. Sarita and Frank agreed it was all for the best.
Simple resoluteness had guided them through a terrific day. An ideal day. Everyone in attendance, so far as Sarita could tell, had had a wonderful time. No stress, no pressure, no awkwardness, no drama. It had been, as she’d desired, a carefree celebration. Now the wedding was in their rearview mirror, overtly pleasant, colored in the warmth of a generous buzz. Just ahead of them, close enough to kiss, was their first night together as husband and wife.
Frank brought her to the large bed, tried to set her down but fell forward himself and pushed her away to keep from falling on her. She laughed so hard she briefly lost her breath.
The shadow man she’d imagined a moment earlier was as close to forgotten as could be. She rolled toward Frank as he turned onto his back.
“Next time,” he said, “I think maybe we should go a little easier on the vino. Just a thought.”
Her fingers toyed casually with a lock of his brown hair. “Next time? Next time we get married?”
He looked at her, his smile widened. “You know this is all a practice run, right? It has to be. People talk about the day they got married as being their best day, but it’s not really supposed to be that. Nothing’s ever this good. So, we’ll have to break up at some point and start this over again. Just a little more down-to-earth and realistic next time.”
“Makes sense,” she said. His cologne and the wine on his breath comforted her in ways she wouldn’t want explained, like she wouldn’t want to read a textbook study of why cocoa tastes sweet, and then why sweetness is coveted, and what receptors of the brain get placated and whatnot when you eat chocolate. Some things were enriched by a little mystery. Love, she thought, was among those things.
“I’ve told you I love you today, right?” Frank said. “Not counting the vows. Wait, I put ‘I love you’ in the vows, right?”
“Don’t ask me to remember too much right now, babe,” Sarita said. “Best I can tell you is I know you said, ‘I do.’ That happened. Oh, and then right after that you started shouting, ‘My chick is hotter than yours’ at everybody in the room.”
“I’m almost sure you’re making that up.”
“It happened. I was shocked, but flattered. I don’t think my mom appreciated you yelling that at my dad, though.”
He chuckled, then kissed her. She had changed into a sleeveless, white, knee-length dress following the ceremony. He was still in his black tuxedo, but he’d lost the tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar hours ago. Now she removed his jacket and untucked his shirt. He sat up, back against the headboard, and she straddled him. They kissed intermittently until he started to laugh at her inability to get the first button open. She laughed, too, looking down at the button near his waist.
“Are you wearing a chastity shirt? What the hell…?” When she looked up at him the seriousness of his expression startled her so much that she needed an extra second to realize he was not looking at her. He was looking at something behind her.
Then Sarita sensed it. A dimness had stolen into the room. Something else, as well. A third party. Him.
Gooseflesh rose on her skin, and she had an unconscious urge to scratch all over to make her nerves go away. It can’t be, she thought. Why would he be here? When she looked back, she saw him.
Angelo stood at the foot of the bed, dressed in black. Strands of his long, flaxen hair hung over his face. Through the thin curtain of hairs he met Frank’s gaze with an ash-hot glare.
Sarita had never actually seen him this close, she realized. The only other time she’d been this close to him, she’d been unconscious in his arms. Every other sighting had been at some distance. Now she appreciated how muscular and simply immovable he looked. He was a stone-skinned statue, well over six feet tall, hulking and unnaturally lean all at once. Even through his clothes, this could not be more evident.
His fists were balled tight. He made no sound, seemed not even to breathe.
Is the hotel on fire? she thought. Fire. Or a bomb. Active shooter. Something. We’ve got to get out of here.
Before she could begin to explain this to Frank, to find the words that would convince him, he took Sarita by the shoulders and moved her to the side, then moved ahead of her. He tried to speak, croaked, cleared his throat, tried again. “If you want money, you can have it. I won’t fight you over it. I have credit cards and I have a little cash on me, too. All right? My wallet’s still in my pocket. I’m just going to take it out. I’m not trying anything, as long as you don’t try to hurt my w—”
Before Frank could reach for his wallet, Angelo reached for his throat. His massive hand clamped around Frank’s neck and lifted him from the bed, took him toward the balcony windows. Sarita leapt toward Angelo, grabbed his arm. She wasn’t a slight or weak woman. She still carried a little of the muscle she had acquired in high school, playing softball. Nowadays, she ran, did a home-boot-camp workout somewhat routinely, and also wasn’t too particular about what she ate. Despite all of this, she hung from Angelo’s arm like she was a child. Smaller. She was a doll. So, too, was Frank, at the mercy of Angelo’s strength.
“What the hell are you doing? Angelo, listen to me. He’s my husband. He’s not going to hurt me! What are you doing?”
Frank tried to pry Angelo’s hand free with one hand, punched him repeatedly with the other. He may as well have been punching a wall. Angelo slammed Frank into the window. The glass cracked but held. Frank’s pupils rolled up. His face was turning blue.
“Angelo, stop! Listen to me, damn it! Angelo!”
He flung her away, more forcefully than she could have expected. She tried to hold on, lost her grip, flew over the bed, and fell headfirst into the side of the honeymoon suite’s oversized, heart-shaped bathtub. A heavy, dull ringing enveloped her head, pushing all other sound into the far distance, like she was wearing a vibrating church bell for a helmet. Darkness overtook her for a moment, then receded to reality.
A voice called to her. She couldn’t truly hear her name through the stuffy haze of her concussion, but she knew the voice, sensed its urgency. It was Frank. Something was wrong. He was in trouble, and still on the other side of the room. The face before her, staring at her with concerned, guilty eyes, was not her husband’s.
“Why—?” she said to her guardian angel.
A hand with a gold wedding band on the ring finger came over Angelo’s face, tried to claw at his eyes. Angelo turned, raised a fist, brought it down. Frank’s pained scream sliced through Sarita’s head. She tried to lift herself up from the floor and the room tilted. Her stomach contracted and she almost vomited. There was no strength in her arms or legs, but she couldn’t let that stop her. She needed to move. She needed to do something, because Angelo’s fist was up again, down again. Up, red and wet, then down. Again. Again. And now Sarita could hear the impact of each punch, a mallet crushing a sack of sticks and mud. She crawled forward and grabbed Angelo’s back.
He stopped, turned to her, eyes swimming with insanity and hate, and then shame. He looked away from her, stood. The room went black as though he had commanded it to, then the lights flickered on again. Angelo was gone.
Sarita wished she could follow him, disappear with him, partly to keep fighting him, beat him until he answered her question—Why?—but, more than that, she wanted to go away with him to avoid confronting what remained with her in the hotel suite.
She could see Frank’s legs where he lay on the floor, but his upper body was blocked by the end of the bed. She called his name. He did not respond, did not move. She called it again, more urgently this time, as though he were playing a cruel prank and she meant to let him know with her tone that it had gone too far. Still, he did not move. She crept over to him.
“No, no, no. Frank … Oh God. Oh God.”
The pulped ruin of her husband’s skull made her gag. A wealth of blood spread across the floor from beneath what little of his head was left. She wanted desperately to deny what she saw, tried to will it to disappear the way Angelo had. Instead it stuck in her vision like a broken claw. When she tore herself away its scar remained in her mind’s eye.
“God, please,” she said, eyes still shut, begging for a miracle. She’d believed since she was a child that anything was possible. That Heaven sometimes intervened to save a life that should have been lost. She’d been the direct beneficiary of this four times. Now she pleaded for one more miracle—just one—for Frank.
She looked at him again and nothing had changed. He was still dead. Defaced. Unrecognizable. She screamed loud enough to be heard beyond a room designed to contain a different kind of screaming. It was raw and powerful, purposeful. It was as though she was trying to call a weapon into existence through sheer force of horror, anguish, and rage. Something sharp, heavy, and hellish enough to gut an angel.
2
Sixteen years prior, on an overcast Thursday at the beach, nine-year-old Sarita Bardales had her first brush with death.
José and Janelle Bardales had passed their love of sand and sea on to their children. That day, Janelle drove Sarita and her brother, David, from San Antonio to Malaquite Beach near Corpus Christi for a day trip, something they tried to do at least twice each summer, supplementing the week-long annual vacation they spent at South Padre Island.
Janelle was alone with the children on this trip because José’s job had pulled him out of state at the last minute. Janelle had suggested they reschedule, but hadn’t really wanted to, and was glad when José objected to cancelling their little getaway. She pulled the kids out of school for the day and drove two hours to one of their favorite places to be, at one of the best times of year to be there.
It was the week before Memorial Day, just ahead of the annual crush of visitors that came with the beginning of summer vacations. The weather was warm and there were far fewer people at the beach, especially on a weekday, than would be present once school was out. José not being there just meant they were guaranteed an extra trip to the beach this summer to make up for his absence, which was fine by everyone.
The kids were easy to handle. As easy as a laid-back thirteen-year-old boy and his tireless little sister could be, anyway. They seldom fought. When they did it was almost always due to Sarita trying to badger David into doing something lively, something that required running and shouting and getting scraped up, anything other than sitting around listening to music through headphones or playing video games, David’s two favorite pastimes. Most of the time one or the other would relent before an argument flared up and José or Janelle had to intervene. They got along even better at the beach. They both loved to play in the water and made games of challenging the modest waves.
Sarita and David were both very good swimmers for their respective ages, with David even making it onto his school’s swim team. His sister, naturally, was already hoping to emulate him and routinely begged him to take her to the public pool in their subdivision to teach her how to “get as good as you are.” When the pools had reopened in March of that year, he obliged a few times, with Janelle and José even allowing them to go by themselves on one occasion. They respected the water as much as they loved it, and Janelle trusted them not to do anything too reckless. They knew better than to dive into the shallow end of the pool, or to drift too far out when they were at the coast.
On that day in May, the waves were coming in steadily, and were active enough to be fun, but not fierce enough for the beach patrol to raise the red flags warning of potentially dangerous currents. Instead, the yellow flags were up, which carried the more generic warning that just because the current was calm or moderate, “Do Not Assume Safe Water.”
Janelle went out into the water with the kids when they first got to the beach, played with them some while also privately gauging the strength of the current. After several minutes she judged it to be safe—No assuming here, thank you kindly, yellow flag—and returned to the sand to do some sunbathing, leaving the kids to enjoy themselves in the Gulf.
* * *
It was Sarita’s first time at the beach since she had turned nine and, perhaps more importantly, since David had turned thirteen and started looking like he had a few muscles. Not only was her mom a little more trusting of her in the water, but her parents also trusted her big brother to take care of her.
He’d gotten strong enough to lift her up from under her armpits and toss her into the air, letting her splash back into the water, with a pretty big assist from her jumping along with the throw to get as much height as possible. Mom was more open to them doing this than Dad was. They’d had a small argument over it when they went to the pool together in April, their mother only objecting to them doing it if too many other people were nearby because it wasn’t fair to be jumping into other people’s space, while Dad wasn’t too keen on it overall, telling David, “Be careful with her” or “Not so high” after almost every toss.
Later, Sarita overheard Dad explain to Mom why it concerned him so much. When he was younger, he’d seen a couple of kids doing something similar at a lake, until the smaller kid landed on a large stone with a sharp edge under the water and cut his leg open.
“I’m just saying, things can happen,” Dad had said.
“Yeah, but we don’t take them to lakes,” Mom replied. “I mean, you can see what’s underwater at the pool, and they don’t really have rocks like that at the beach.”
“I know, I know.” And, like a lot of their little arguments, at least the ones Sarita eavesdropped on, that was it. Short, simple, and easily resolved when one or the other conceded with “I know” or “I get it.”
As much fun as it had been at the pool, Sarita couldn’t wait for David to throw her into waves at the beach. They tested it out a couple of times while Mom was in the water with them, and couldn’t get as much height and distance here as they could in the pool. It was harder for Sarita to get her footing for a jump in the loose sand and with the current constantly nudging her, and David was dealing with the same thing. The way it felt when she landed on the waves, however, more than made up for it. Hitting the water and immediately feeling it push her around was like being on a carnival ride she didn’t have to wait in line for, especially when it was a nice, strong wave with a little bit of a monster’s roar preceding it.
Copyright © 2024 by Johnny Compton
