Eve of Eighteen

Pascual stood motionless halfway between the table and the sink, with the kettle in one hand and a moth-eaten dish towel slung over his shoulder.

"Tell me that was just a stone kicked up by the wind," Bianca whispered, pressing her old man's folder against her ribs.

"If the wind in Cañadón Frío has learned to throw mud smelling of Loncopán horse manure, we're in deeper trouble than I thought."

Pascual set the kettle down with a half-hearted clatter on the unlit burner. He shuffled in his plaid slippers over to the small window, the one facing the side alley with the cracked pane held together by packing tape. He pulled the flowered curtain back just a sliver. The condensation on the plastic left his knuckles damp.

"Nobody," he said, letting out a breath. "A small bootprint in the frost. Probably one of Antileo's kids running errands. They left the mark on the baseboard to let you know they saw you come in here."

"How thoughtful."

"Real gentlemen of the frontier."

Bianca looked down at the folder. The black sealing-wax medallion seemed to swallow what little murky light filtered in from the courtyard. One of her fingernails was dug into the edge of the cardboard and her thumb was still red from the salamander stove's spark, but the urge to open it had evaporated, replaced by that acidic heaviness that settled in the pit of her stomach every time the town decided to remind her of the last name she carried.

"Don't open it now," Pascual said without turning around. "If they catch you with that unsealed before curfew, not even Cárdenas will be able to invent an excuse that he gave it to you to sort the archives."

"He didn't give it to me to sort anything. He gave it to me to get rid of it."

"All the more reason."

Pascual grabbed a piece of cold fried pastry from a tin plate, blew on it with a ridiculous earnestness to rid it of some supposed invisible lint, and took a bite. He chewed slowly, staring at the warped corrugated iron ceiling that groaned with every gust of the southwest wind.

"You need to head home before the committee's pickup truck comes by," he added. "Your old man's gonna start calling the neighbors and you already know how the line gets when a couple flakes drop: even the emergency dial doesn't work."

Bianca tucked the folder inside her canvas satchel, beneath her gym sweatshirt and a crushed pack of peppermint lozenges.

"Things I am not going to do today," she muttered while zipping up her heavy parka to her chin: "one, be scared of a lump of mud. Two, ask anyone's permission to breathe."

"Three: give back the flashlight you stole from me in May," Pascual finished.

"That flashlight died of natural causes in the shed, Pascual. Don't make things up."

The street air cut like freshly sharpened sheet metal.

The mud on the sidewalk had petrified into sharp ridges beneath a thin layer of white frost. Every step Bianca took over the dry footprints sounded like eggshells cracking under her sneaker soles. In the distance, against the leaden silhouette of the mountain range threatening the first fierce June blizzard, the orange beacon lights of a municipal Toyota 4x4 flashed with the monotony of a lost buoy out in the middle of nowhere.

Bianca pulled her phone from her pocket.

The shattered screen flickered for a fraction of a second with the battery's dying breath before going dark again, but she didn't need to look at it to remember the exact words.

Still burning on the black glass was the draft she hadn't managed to send before the blackout:

"Why did you put on the red wool if you swore you weren't going to sign anything with the old folks?"

She squeezed the useless device in her palm and shoved her hands into her pockets, quickening her pace down the alley bordering the old power plant.

The communal transformer hummed with a deep vibration that got right into the fillings of your teeth. The unit's insulating oil leaked a black stain onto the frozen ground, barely steaming from the thermal contrast.

Leaning against the chain-link fence, with his fists shoved deep into the pockets of his waxed canvas jacket and his hood pulled low, stood him.

Lisandro.

He wasn't wearing gloves.

His jaw was clenched and his nose reddened by the freezing air, but the very first thing Bianca's eyes searched for—out of sheer traitorous reflex—was his right wrist. His sleeve had ridden up an inch. There it was: the rough strand of raw wool dyed scarlet, tied tight against the tendon.

Bianca stopped three paces short. The frozen mud crunched under her feet.

"You're getting predictable, Véliz. If you wanted to give explanations, you could've left a note on the gate and saved yourself the pneumonia."

Lisandro didn't smile. He didn't even blink fast.

"I didn't come to give you explanations, Bianca."

His voice was dull, worn out, as if he'd been swallowing sawmill dust all morning. He took a step forward, emerging from the shelter of the power plant's sheet metal, and the wind tossed his dark hair across his forehead.

"Pascual shouldn't have let you out with that folder," he said, lowering his tone to a murmur that almost drowned out the hum of the high-voltage cables.

"Pascual does whatever he damn well pleases. And so do I."

"You have no idea what you're carrying."

"I know perfectly well what I'm carrying. My old man's name. Which you lot are ashamed of because he didn't kneel down in time when they came to mark the corrals."

Lisandro clenched his teeth. Bianca noticed the tiny twitch in his jaw muscle, that tic he'd had since he was fourteen whenever he lost his patience during pick-up soccer games on the dirt pitch.

"Your old man was a stubborn bastard who thought he could stare down the mountain range with a rusted shovel," he blurted out, and for a split second his coldness cracked into raw anger. "And he ended up how he ended up for not listening to those who saw the freeze coming."

"What a lovely speech. Did Don Loncopán teach you that while he was tying your little red ribbon, or did you make it up all by yourself while saddling the mare?"

Lisandro took another step. He got close enough that Bianca could feel the warm vapor of his breath breaking against the freezing air between them. He smelled of green coihue wood smoke and hand-rolled tobacco.

"Don't talk about what you didn't see."

"I saw enough. I saw you on Monday at school playing deaf when I walked down the hall."

"I had to."

"Such a huge sacrifice. I'm almost crying."

Lisandro stared hard at her. His dark eyes, the color of river pools when the snowmelt runs turbid, were heavy with a fatigue that didn't belong to a seventeen-year-old kid. He looked older. He looked hollowed out inside.

"You're an idiot, Pezoa."

"And you're an errand boy with a ranch hand's title."

They fell silent. The transformer hummed louder, a dull discharge that made the wire fence behind them vibrate.

In the distance, the bronze bell of Provincial School No. 12 rang to signal the afternoon shift, but the tolling arrived distorted by the gusts, broken into metallic shards that dissolved into the canyon.

"My old man used to say something before all of you erased his name from the records," Bianca said, holding his gaze without blinking. "He used to say that a half-warning is pretty much the same as a trap dug with someone else's shovel."

Lisandro glanced down for a second at Bianca's chest, at the square bulk the satchel made beneath her coat.

When he raised his eyes again, the distance between them was no longer pride.

It was fear.

"Don't go to the communal shed tonight, Bianca. Play sick."