The Smoking Mirror Read online

  “You want some of this, wankster?” Johnny growled, his vision going red with fury. It was as if someone else had taken over his mind and body. He couldn’t even think clearly about what he was doing. “I will take your flunky, useless carcass out and feed it to the coyotes if you EVER speak about my family again.”

  Pushing himself violently away, Johnny left the older boy sputtering and rubbing his neck. The entire hallway had gone silent, and other students just stared at him with their mouths open as he headed to class. A security guard, who like always had just been standing by and watching, clapped him on the shoulder. “Way to go, Garza. But now you’d better watch your back. That guy’s an animal.”

  Johnny didn’t reply. His breathing slowed, and he thrust his black bangs out of his face with a trembling hand. As he entered class, his mind slowly unfroze. An animal? Well, maybe I am one, too.

  ~~~

  It turned out, however, that there was no need for Johnny to watch his back. 3:15pm he was called to the office and told to take his backpack with him. In the reception area sat his father, Carol standing in front of him with an angry look on her face. When he saw Johnny, Dr. Garza stood up and gestured.

  “Come on, John: your cousin Stefani is waiting to accompany you two to Monterrey.” He set his hand on his shoulder and began guiding him toward the exit. “I know there’s a week of school left, but I went ahead and withdrew you. They didn’t want to, but I had them classify you as migrants.”

  “Migrants?” Part of Johnny didn’t even care anymore. Something had his mother. It was waiting. He wasn’t going to find it in school.

  “Just a formality. You know, use the system to our advantage.”

  “Ours or yours?” Carol’s eyes were blazing.

  Their father said nothing more as they walked to their SUV and climbed inside. The afternoon May sun glowered with hostile heat; the air slowly baked the landscape, and the vinyl seats defied the power of the air-conditioning to quench their searing touch.

  Okay. You’re waiting, whatever you are. Well, I’m coming. I don’t know how, I don’t know where. But I’m on my way, you monster. And I’m getting my mother back.

  Chapter Three

  The drive to Monterrey was nerve-wracking. Carol kept imagining that at any moment the Zetas—those violent, ex-military drug traffickers—were going to stop the bus and get everybody out. We’ll end up in one of those big graves they dig. They’ll find us months from now, no head, no hands.

  Stefani, who insisted on speaking English so she could practice, laughed these fears off. “No way, Carolina. Those Zetas, they aren’t going waste their time stopping this bus. I choose the cheap one, you see? Very bumpy ride. No movie.”

  Carol couldn’t argue with that. The bus was miserably warm, and the bathroom stunk like road kill. She tried to read a book, but Stefani kept chattering away about American movie stars and singers, none of whom Carol knew anything about. Johnny was pretending to be asleep in the seat in front of them, so she had no choice but to nod politely and give one-word responses to the older girl’s comments.

  Eventually Stefani sighed and got serious.

  “Carolina, I know that this is hard for you. When my dad left us, I cried and cried. It’s not easy. Maybe you think that you have the fault, but no. Our parents, they decide for their selves what they’re going to do. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love us.”

  Carol tried not to be upset. Her cousin was just trying to comfort her. But she was very tired of everyone’s assumptions. “Look, Stefani. It’s easy for you and other people, including my dad, to believe that Mom ran off. But check the facts. She didn’t take any clothes, no toothbrush, no hair-iron…nothing. That woman is always in front of a mirror. Why would she leave without taking all her make-up and expensive clothes? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Stefani nodded. “Ya veo. I see. But Uncle Oscar told to my mom that there was no signs of…struggle. All doors locked. But her car was in the parking…the driveway, yes? Could be possible she had…with all respect…a boyfriend? Maybe with more money? Could be that he pick her up, promise to buy her new things?”

  At that, Johnny sat up, his fake sleep forgotten. “That’s stupid. Mom wouldn’t do anything like that. It’s pretty obvious what happened. She walked to the store, and she was grabbed. Same thing happened at that gas station three years ago. Woman was pumping gas, and some gangbangers took her. Family never heard from her again…till they found her body near the river.”

  “Shut up, Johnny.” Carol’s face felt hot. She wanted to reach out and claw at his stupid smug expression. “Mom’s not dead. I…I can feel that she’s not.”

  Johnny’s hazel eyes misted over for a second. “Well, it’s not doing anyone any good, all this talk about stuff we can’t change. Why don’t you two just change the freaking subject?”

  But the conversation was already dead. They traveled the last few hours in silence, jolted miserably by the uneven highway. The mountains loomed closer and closer, almost menacingly. The grungy industrial metropolis of Monterrey finally seemed to spring up out of nowhere all around them; gray and cracked concrete broken here and there by graffiti or the bright colors of the occasional home that struggled to be different. Carol noticed Johnny staring intently at the buildings and elevated metro lines. Like their mother—a respected sculptor who had exhibited work in Austin, Dallas and Mexico City—Johnny was fascinated by design and construction. His dream was to be an engineer when he grew up...he had spent much of his free time since their mom’s disappearance using a computer-aided design program to plan all sorts of buildings and bridges that Carol had to admit were pretty ingenious. As they passed the Arch of Independence, her brother craned his neck to stare at the statue of Victory poised at its very top. Victory was flanked by bronze eagles, and she hoisted a globe in one hand while the other gripped a broken chain. One of Mom’s favorites. Even though she’d left her country, she was still proud of its history.

  As they passed the stately city hall, museum and basilica that flanked the Macroplaza at the heart of Monterrey, Carol reflected on her parents’ passions. Her father’s doctoral dissertation had been on Mexican history, and he’d expanded those ideas into a series of well received books over the past decade. It’s like Mexico is part of what held our family together. Even though Johnny and I are pretty Americanized—gringolizados, Mom always said—we love the old country, too. Me with its history, Johnny with its architecture and music.

  At the bus station, Aunt Andrea hugged them tightly and fussed over how much they had grown. Carol had to bite back tears: Andrea looked so much like her mom, had the same raspy voice, used the same phrases. Seeing her was a reminder of the special friendship that had developed between mother and daughter, and Carol’s heart ached like it hadn’t in weeks.

  The four of them piled into Andrea’s sedan and weaved through the dense afternoon traffic to Colonia Tecnológico, a once-exclusive borough of Monterrey that was slowly fading as the wealthier families either moved to even more ritzy neighborhoods or emigrated to the States, fleeing narcoviolence. Andrea parked in front of an apartment building whose two towers made it look like an artificial version of the saddle-shaped Cerro de la Silla, the hill that rose majestically on the horizon.

  That evening, Carol helped her aunt and cousin prepare dinner. Andrea’s kitchen was a magical place, full of colors and spices and fantastic cooking utensils. The three of them joked together about how stupid boys and men could be sometimes, telling each other anecdotes of particularly knuckleheaded behavior. Andrea, who had just divorced her third husband, was especially gifted at pointing out men’s defects. For a while, Carol could simply forget, relishing the company of women.

  But that night, as she lay in a narrow bed across the room from her brother, her dreams returned. She was roaming the unfamiliar neighborhood, guided by new smells. There were many dogs, she could tell, all of them competing with each other. A sense of calm confidence flooded her. They would not da
re approach her. They were slaves to men, made docile and stupid. Street canines believed themselves free, but they lived off men’s garbage and handouts.

  She soon caught the scent of an opossum. She hated the vile creatures. But she was hungry, so she gave chase. Cornering the hideous, slippery beast, she rushed it, her teeth sinking into its back, cracking its spine…

  Sometime later, she snapped awake, an unpleasant taste in her mouth. She padded to the bathroom and scrubbed her teeth. In the mirror, her eyes glinted strangely. She spent a few minutes combing tangles from her hair, which had frizzed out wildly in all directions. Returning to her bed, she tried to fall back to sleep, but adrenaline kept her eyes wide open. She heard her brother stir, sit up, mutter a curse. Quick footsteps indicated that he rushed to the bathroom and after a few minutes, slipped outside. Finally Carol sensed him moving around in the kitchen. Checking the time on her otherwise useless smartphone, she saw that it was already 6:00am, so she got up and went to join him.

  “Dude,” he said apologetically as he poured milk over corn flakes, “I didn’t mean to wake you up. Sorry.”

  “Nah, that’s okay. I was having weird dreams, anyway.” She grabbed a banana and sat down across the table from him. “You alright?”

  He nodded, his mouth full. “Yeah, sure,” he said after a couple of seconds. “I guess it beats watching Dad get drunk every day. It’s just…” He glanced down the hall, toward Andrea’s bedroom.

  “She’s a lot like Mom, huh?” Carolina peeled the banana and took a bite. “It’s tough to forget with that voice in your ears.”

  “Who said I’m trying to forget?”

  “Oh, come on, Johnny. You don’t even want to talk about it.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “That’s because, like I said, we can’t do anything. You girls, I swear. You think you have to talk about your feelings and stuff. Why can’t you just feel your feelings and leave it at that, huh?”

  “Because, you moron, talking about them makes them easier to deal with.”

  “Well, whatever. I don’t think they should be easier to deal with. We lost our mom, Carol. I want to feel that. I need that pain.” His voice hitched. “It keeps her alive for me.”

  Carol decided not to argue. An accustomed silence fell across the table. Eventually, Andrea and Stefani woke up, made coffee, and outlined plans for the day that included visiting a museum and a park. With the pretext of throwing the kitchen trash away, Carol went to the parking lot, trying to figure out why her brother had slipped outside before breakfast. She didn’t find anything until she opened the trashcan and saw a bit of clothing peeking out from under a bag. Carefully, she reached in and pulled a shirt free. It was Johnny’s favorite, purchased at a Nortec Collective concert he and their dad had attended two years previously.

  It was in shreds. In fact, it looked like it had been clawed to bits.

  And it was stained with blood.

  ~~~

  Carol didn’t say anything to Johnny about the shirt. Their aunt dragged them all over the city, buying them more clothes and even paying to get service for their phones. After they got back to the apartment, Carol spent several slower-than-normal hours on the Internet, getting caught up with the goings-on back in Donna, messaging her friends and downloading a few more tunes. But as bedtime got nearer, she realized she had to investigate.

  I’ll stay up and keep an eye on him. There’s no way that happened to him in bed: the sheets are fine and there’s no blood in the room. He must’ve snuck out.

  They both finally lay down at nearly midnight, after watching a couple of dubbed movies on TV. Carol didn’t have to wait long for her brother to start softly snoring; like their dad, he was one of those early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of people, different from Carol and her mom, who stayed up late and slept until noon if they could. As she lay on her side, she surfed the net with her phone to occupy her mind. Nearly an hour passed in this way.

  She had just begun researching unexplained abductions along the border when she heard a snarl from Johnny’s bed. Flipping her phone around so that its light fell on her brother, Carol squinted in the gloom. Johnny was twisting strangely in his bed, his back to her. Suddenly he bolted upright, his arms shooting out from under the sheets.

  Both hands were covered in fur, and claws jutted from every finger.

  Stifling a scream, Carol pulled up the camera app on her phone and started taking photos. Johnny’s head snapped around at the clicking noises, and she watched as his face changed. His nose widened and flattened; his jaw protruded painfully, causing a grimace that revealed sharp, feline teeth; his eyes glimmered redly with each flash from the smartphone. With a muted growl, he leapt from the bed and crawled out the open window. Carol hurried to look outside and saw him dashing off, hunched over as if wanting to get down on all fours. She switched her phone to record and grabbed a few seconds of footage before he disappeared into the night.

  Quietly, trying to calm her ragged nerves, Carol made herself a cup of café con leche and sat on her bed, awaiting her brother’s return. She looked up werewolf and wolf-man and everything else she could think of. I can help him. I know I can.

  Despite all her intentions, Carol had begun to doze slightly when Johnny bounded through the window and curled into a ball on his bed. His tail twitched as he closed his eyes.

  His tail? What the…

  Sleep overcame the transformed boy, and slowly his body reverted to its more human shape. This time he had not torn his clothing.

  Can he remember stuff from his normal life? Did he take more care this time? Her questions would have to wait until morning. By now it was nearly 4am, so Carol lay down and drifted off. She was not troubled by dreams.

  ~~~

  “Carol, wake up, dude.”

  Blearily, she sat up. Johnny was lacing up his Converse hi-tops. He smiled at her, and for a moment, she seemed to see that feral face superimposed on his features.

  “Johnny,” she said as he got up. “Wait. Lock the door.”

  “Uh, excuse me?”

  “You need to see something, and I don’t want Andrea walking in.”

  Johnny raised an eyebrow and scratched his temple.

  “Photos on my phone, dude,” she explained when he made a funny face.

  “Ooookaaaayyyy.” He locked the door and sat down on her bed. “What are these top-secret pictures of, anyway? Your cute friend Nikki?”

  “Oh, my God. You are an idiot, aren’t you? Look, you wouldn’t believe me otherwise…I found your shirt in the trash.”

  Johnny’s face blanched. “Wait, I can explain…”

  “Hold on. So I stayed up to see where you were going.”

  “I didn’t go anywhere!”

  Carol opened up the camera app and accessed the photos. “Oh, yes, you did.”

  Johnny took the phone and began swiping through the images, his eyes getting wider and wider. “Dude, you totally photoshopped these.”

  “Yeah. In the middle of the night. On Andrea’s five-year-old computer. With my non-existent image-manipulation skills. That’s your department, Mr. Computer-Aided-Design. Here, give me that.” She found the video she’d recorded of him running off into the night. “How do you explain this then, genius?”

  Johnny watched himself rush away like a creature from some 1930s horror film. He set the phone down and ran his hands through his hair. “Holy crap, Carol.”

  “Yes.”

  “But it explains a lot. The strange feelings I’ve been getting, all the shirts I’ve been ruining…”

  Carol thought for a moment about her own dreams, about waking up with a dead rabbit in her hands. She kept all that to herself for the moment. No reason to make things even more complicated. Pushing down the suspicion that something strange might be happening to her as well, she nodded.

  “Yeah. I don’t know…maybe you caught something, maybe you were bitten…”

  “Maybe it’s a family thing,” Johnny finished, almost looking excited. “
And maybe Mom’s disappearance has something to do with it.”

  Before Carol could add her thoughts to this line of reasoning, someone tried to open the door.

  “Hey, Carolina? Juan Ángel? Open up,” Andrea said to them in Spanish.

  Johnny unlocked the door. “Sorry. Force of habit.”

  Andrea waved his apology away. “Kids, my sister just called from Saltillo. Your grandmother wants to see you.”

  Picking sleep sand from her eyes, Carol tried to remember Abuela Helga’s face. Four years ago she had suffered an embolism; another one had followed six months later, leaving her paralyzed on one side of her body, confined to a wheelchair and barely able to speak. A flush of shame crept across Carol’s cheeks as she thought about her grandmother, helpless, needing family to care for her, making do with just tía Sandra, the solterona, the spinster.

  When we came last summer, Mom asked me to go with her. I told her I would just stay at the hotel, watching movies with Johnny. I can’t believe how cruel I was. And Mom just shook her head sadly. It must have broken my mother’s heart.

  Biting her lip to hold back tears, Carol stretched with feigned laziness. “Okay. Are we driving there today? Let me just get dressed.”

  If Andrea noted anything strange about the twins’ behavior, she kept it to herself.

  ~~~

  A few hours later, they were travelling west through the Chihuahuan desert, climbing closer to the Sierra Madre Oriental. Saltillo spread before them, stone and concrete and adobe that blended with the surrounding sand and rock. Making their way through busy streets, they passed street vendors whose mobile puestos were parked in front of American chain restaurants. We’ve invaded, like the Aztecs and the Spanish did before. But this invasion is harder to fight. She remembered her dad telling her about Comanche warriors striding along the streets of Saltillo in the mid-1800s. The Mexican government had hired former Texas Rangers to hunt that tribe down. And they’ve been stuck with us ever since, she reflected, a little embarrassed. The English names disappeared as they traveled deeper into the city. The ancestral home of the Quintero family stood near its center, in the historical district, a century-old structure of caliche block and clay roofing tiles.