Secret
Lorona hated herself for entertaining the thoughts, but they marched around her head in tighter and tighter circles, growing hotter and hotter like elements in a toaster oven.
Did I really marry a womanizer who played his cards softly until I said “yes”?
None of the logic mattered anymore. Wisdom, control, trust, and faith were melting like ice sculptures under the feverish heat in her skin.
I just need to know if the phony entry exists.
It was all too ridiculous to say out loud. If it was true, that just made it more awful.
She imagined herself as Blackbeard's wife, intent on digging up her husband's one dark secret. Kestrin wouldn't kill her for this, unlike the fairy tale. But if the secret was bad enough, he might be angry, he might threaten to leave. As much as the thought of his departure crushed her lungs, the need to know his secret towered above it like a menacing shadow. Lorona scrunched her face, trying to paralyze her mind by freezing her muscles.
So this is what addiction feels like.
Lorona had never touched drugs, but she would have sworn this was the same pressing need. Her synapses were short-circuiting and fireworks crackled behind her eyes. Her vision shrank until all she could see was the journal lying a few feet away.
She slid out of bed and reached for the old quilt that she, Kyle, Teri and Yuki had used when they watched the movie. She wrapped it around her shoulders as her leaf shroud in Eden, to hide her shame. The blanket had some pizza sauce and a dried olive slice stuck to it from an ancient dinner.
She carefully lifted the journal and its key from Kestrin's bedstead, cursing herself for taking advantage of his sleeping trust. She slipped into the bathroom, locked the door, and ran her fingers over the leather surface of the forbidden object. The journal was scuffed with use and bore small copper caps on its corners. It had a triqueta stamped into its cover. The three-sided triangle looked like interlocking loops with leaf-pointed ends and Lorona remembered that it was originally the symbol of three Irish goddesses, whose names Lorona couldn't remember. Later, Christian missionaries took it to represent the Holy Trinity. Either way she looked at it there was a perfectly unwelcome reminder, like three eyes staring, that she was being watched by an all-seeing force.
The drip from the shower echoed and Lorona decided the bathroom was too oppressive a place to read. She pressed the journal to her chest and tiptoed to the kitchen where the light from the 24-hour diner next door shone a large swath of neon pink and tangerine light through the open window. Aided by the glow from Flamingo's Tango Lounge, she succumbed to the temptation in her hands.
She slid the key into the hole, closed her eyes and twisted it, feeling the pop of the mechanism releasing. The book was almost weightless across her knees. She opened to its most recent entry. She saw her name, then closed her eyes and flipped to the front of the journal.
“If I'm going to be damned, it should be worth every word,” she muttered. The front page read in sharp but legible script:
I, Kestrin Lionel Feather, declare that these contents are my journal, thoughts, and any evidence that one might use to prove that I possess a soul.
This established, you're not supposed to be reading this if you're not me. If you are not, know that upon turning this page you are irrevocably cursed unless I've handed this to you myself. To be terribly honest, I don't think I'd ever do that. I can hardly deal with my own thoughts, not to mention what someone else would think of them.
The evil on those unsanctioned fools who dare to trespass is effective immediately.
Die Accursed.
Lorona used to love getting chills when she watched Unsolved Mysteries on the Discovery Channel with its accounts of creepy, inexplicable horrors that had befallen explorers who disturbed ancient treasures. It felt like this now.
Any curse made by Kestrin can't touch me, she told herself. Nevertheless, the hairs on her neck and arms prickled. It was much easier to be spooked, if not superstitious, in the dark. She assumed it came from her mother's blood, one of the few things the woman had given Lorona.
She skimmed the pages first. Most entries were dated in a loose, hurried hand.
She stopped on an entry written two months prior.
I saw some kids playing hide and seek when I was outside on my lunch break. I wanted to play and hide with them. Why?
I hide the dream I have of competing, just for fun, in the Tour de France. I hide my hope of inventing a chocolate cake that actually creates real love. It would be a scientific, romantic, achievement. It would also be artificial, because love can't be designed.
I like to keep knives nearby because they remind me of the power I have to cut apart things that don't make sense. I like to feel a prick on my skin and know that I really truly could end it if I wanted to.
Lorona felt a twang in her chest. She had no idea he'd struggled with suicidal thoughts. She cast a frantic glance at the array of knives hanging on the magnetic strip in the kitchen.
She couldn't bear to read chronologically. Her previous intentions gave way to randomness. An earlier entry near the beginning of the journal read:
The world isn't a dark horrible place and it's not a place of joy. It's a mix of gray and fog that makes everything unclear 360 days a year and clear for only the lucky five remaining.
Sometimes the stars do line up and I'm creative or witty or inventive. Or maybe I'm cooking and something special clicks and the chicken marinade is fabulous at the restaurant—I have achieved momentary Enlightenment. Then I wake up the next morning and there are eight holes in all four pairs of my socks and my car got a parking ticket even though it was legal to park in that spot last week. Seriously. What the hell?
Lorona smiled, feeling as though she perfectly understood him. She found a piece of paper taped to a page. Scrawled above it, Kestrin had written the date of the Halloween party when she and Kestrin had first met.
Can't find my journal, so I'll transfer this when I do:
Lorona. (Don't know her last name). Spirited and uncanny in her potency. This one's definitely different. She's got the perfume of “I'm looking for a knight in shining armor” all over her. I was her first kiss. I've never woken up wanting the taste of the last night's drink—usually because the remains of it are in the toilet. But not today. I had to eat all the oranges in the house. I want to chase her down and let her know she can settle for a guy like me, but she's also got the holier-than-thou thing going. I think I'm terrified of her.
She smiled. He'd been frightened. Then she frowned. He'd also thought she was a snob. Her stomach cramped, as if to remind her that she was violating his personal private thoughts. Lorona flipped to the final entry. It was dated with the current day's date.
At last, the journal is back.
It's so different when you know she really loves you. She isn't like this desperate hungry animal, which is what so many of those other girls were like (I feel bad writing this, even in here). I knew that Lorona actually trusted me when I saw her eyes the day we were married. Woe to me on the day when I make this sweet thing cry.
Is it inevitable? Does she really have to know who I am, or more accurately, who I was?
Just let her read the dream. At least give yourself that peace.
What dream? Lorona paused and quivered. Was this the fake journal entry? She spun the pages backward under her fingers, looking for a page corner that was more dog-eared than the rest. This would likely be the manipulative entry that Kyle had mentioned. Perhaps Kestrin wanted to show it to her as a form of confession or maybe he planned to make it out as more harmless than it really was. She stopped at a well-worn page and smoothed it with a sweaty palm.
The writing here was more careful, as if Kestrin had taken extra time to record it, or perhaps to make it easier for his female audience to read. Lorona swallowed hard and read:
I need to remember this, so here it goes: She's standing under the stars. She always is. The falling stars love her so much that they're landing in her hair. Her skin is smooth like silk in the moonlight. Her white dress presses against her in the wind. I can see every curve and valley of her body.
She held me in her arms and we danced while she sang songs that could have been nonsense or maybe another language.
Why does everything in this dream pass so softly, even when my mind hurts so much? As soon as I wake up, the rage is right there, waiting for me because I still don't know the answer. Who is she?
I see smaller people, children, sobbing in the shadowed trees behind her. She looks too skinny to have given birth to any of them, but I see her reach out to them. Her hands touch nothing.
She says that I am the way to these children, like I'm some sort of religious savior. This is the part that scares the hell of out me: She tells me that I am the way to save her from completion of the cursed name that her mother gave her. I tell her every time that I don't understand. I never have anything more intelligent to offer.
She swears to me that I can use her name in a beautiful way so that she'll never need to fulfill it. I know already that I will do anything to take away her sadness.
Then, in the calmest voice I've ever heard she says:
“I am She Who Cries.” She holds out her hands and says, “I have something for you.”
The entry stopped. Lorona had to remind herself to breathe as her heart thumped in frantic attempts to beat free of her chest. She Who Cries. Lorona's mother had named her after La Llorona, and shortened it to Lorona at the last minute, because the absence of the Spanish double “l” made it look closer to a “normal” name. La Llorona meant “The Crying Woman” or “She Who Cries.”
This entry was several years old, judging from the dated entries before and after it. Kestrin had written it long before they'd met. Her name was exactly what Kestrin's dream had said, only he had no way of knowing. He didn't speak an ounce of Spanish, she'd tested him. He could have looked up the story after meeting her, but that still didn't explain the relative date of this entry or the worn page. Besides, this was supposed to be a fake dream.
Lorona remembered hearing her own mother telling La Llorona's tale. “She was a beautiful woman. She could have had any man she wanted from her village. She used her charm to ensnare the richest of them all. They lived happily for a few years in wealth and passion. He gave her two children. When La Llorona discovered his affair with another woman, her jealousy drove her mad. She took his most precious possessions, their children, and drowned them in a river. Overcome immediately by her own guilt, she drowned herself. On nights when mist drifts above the river, we keep our little ones close because La Llorona walks and calls to children in a soft, tender voice. If she finds a child alone, she will take him to the gray lands where her damned soul hovers, trapped between this world and the next.”
Of course, Lorona hadn't been overjoyed by her mother's whimsical choice of a namesake. And Kestrin's dream had even talked about a cursed name given by a mother. She shivered.
This is too weird.
By the time Lorona went to college, she told people the root of her name as if it were a joke and they'd laugh together about it. Once she'd gone to a costume party as La Llorona, but everyone just guessed she was a ghost in her white dress. Close enough.
She looked back at the pages, her excitement mounting. The journal entry wasn't finished. What was it the girl was going to give to Kestrin in the dream? Lorona turned the page, only to find an unrelated entry. Then it dawned on her and her excitement melted into cold, slimy disgust. She rolled her eyes and mentally slapped herself.
“Give it to me, baby,” she spat. The magic of the faux entry had even worked on her. She'd forgotten that it was entirely designed to captivate and seduce a girl who thought she was this woman in the dream. No wonder there were no details on hair or eye color. That would have ruined the whole point of ambiguity.
She Who Cries… It must have been coincidence. He'd probably dredged up a tragic story from some fairy tale book. There had to be other figures like La Llorona in the cosmos, and it wasn't as if She Who Cries was a complicated title to think up, either. Once he'd made sure that the girl reading it was emotionally overworked and that she understood that the girl in the dream had come with something to offer, the girl would offer Kestrin exactly what he wanted.
Lorona stared at the neon sign outside, her eyes flaming.
Who wouldn't want to fall into the arms of someone who was swearing he'd love and protect her and wipe away her tears?
It was one of the sexiest things a girl could hear. Kestrin would know all about that, wouldn't he?
It was a sick coincidence. Lorona chuckled bitterly. She was just as stupid as the next girl. All these women had brought him their hearts, their bodies, and their adoration, as offerings. He took them gladly, chewed them up, and spat them out the next morning.
Her blood flushed hot. A spurt of Spanish expletives bubbled up and over her tongue. She hurled the journal at the wall. It bounced into a dining table chair, which screeched across the floor, then collapsed, face down. A brawl rumbled on the street below and Lorona heard glass bottles smashing.
Kestrin murmured in his sleep from the other room and panic gripped Lorona's throat. If he knew she'd read it, what would he do? She coaxed herself into a place of mental calm, repeating over and over, “Just put it back. Put everything back in its place. You've seen enough.”
She set the journal back on the nightstand beside Kestrin and crawled into bed.
The drunken brawl thundered louder and a man howled into the night. Lorona glanced at the journal again and noticed a new mark on the cover, illuminated by the neon lights. It was a lined indentation from the corner of the dining chair leg, cutting straight across the triqueta design. Would he notice? She let her head fall slowly back onto her pillow. Sleep would be impossible.
Kestrin mumbled something. Lorona's fever broke out afresh. He'd seen everything and had only been pretending to sleep! The next moment she recognized the slower, intent pattern of speech that Yuki sometimes used when she was especially tired and talking in her sleep. That was it.
Kestrin reached above his head and forcefully grabbed his pillow. He growled. “I know, I know! But…no one says it. No one knows…I want words…not kisses…not sex. They don't know…they don't…even know.”
He must have been having a nightmare. Impulsively, Lorona stroked his face, starting below the corner of his eye and tracing a line down his cheek to his chin.
Traitor that I am, I still loved him.
She knew she was probably just bewitched like every other girl who had come before, but for some reason Kestrin had decided to marry her, and this made her different.
His eyes flew open and their knife-sharp intensity made Lorona certain that he'd read her mind.
“She Who Cries,” he murmured, and then unceremoniously rolled over. He was still not fully awake. Was he dreaming about the fake entry right now, plagued by a guilty conscience? Or perhaps he was haunted by memories of past girls. Jealousy crept in at the edges of her mind and Lorona sat up.
Kestrin's eyes softened into a lucid glow. “Hi, baby,” he smiled sleepily. “You okay?”
She evaded a direct answer. “You sounded like you were having a nightmare.”
He yawned, but made no comment.
“What was it about?” she pried.
If he's willing to confess that he was dreaming about the other girls, maybe I'll confess about the journal.
“I'll tell you about it in the morning.” He ruffled her hair and she looked away. There was another chorus of shouts outside and glass splintered at a soprano frequency.
You won't tell me in the morning. You'll pretend that you forgot the dream. Fine. I can keep a secret, too.
She kissed his forehead so that he would think all was well and curled up to a series of doomed sleeping attempts. Journal entries flew past her eyes every time she closed them, random words popping into her mind. Tour de France. Chocolate Cake. Knives. She Who Cries. Dark. Hide.
Lorona thought later that she must have fallen asleep thinking about She Who Cries because she dreamed of the morning her mother left. It was just the one image, the shape of her mother's hips under the black and green striped dress as she trailed a large suitcase behind her down the stairs. Each thump of the suitcase had grown louder and louder until it hit the bottom landing with a boom that shook the walls of the apartment's foundation.
Ten-year-old Lorona had wailed, unbridled, for the entire, slow-moving departure parade while her father had held her hand, doing nothing to quiet her until finally her mother turned on her heel, the boom of her suitcase still echoing in the hallway, and hissed, “Patrick, can you please comfort Lorona?”
He'd answered quietly. “That's her mother's job.”
Lorona woke with her chest hurting from a fifteen-year-old wound. Her eyes were dry, just as they'd been ever since that day.
“Good morning, sunshine.” She heard Kestrin's voice. It was soft, but with a heaviness in it.
She looked at him, mind still full of the bad dream. He sat on a chair beside the bed, cross-legged, swinging a key suspended by a green ribbon. The journal sat open in his lap.
