Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

It was dark by the time he got finally home from the TV station. The rain was still falling. His driveway was a sheet of mud. Inside the house, the cats greeted him impatiently, demanding their dinner. The kitchen glowed with a dim red light. The votive candle was still burning. He turned on the overhead, took care of the cats, and found himself staring at the candle. La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgin Mary who had miraculously appeared in sixteenth-century Mexico as a pregnant, dark-skinned Indian woman. She was depicted as she’d been for the last four hundred years: wearing a blue cloak scattered with golden stars, standing on a crescent moon upheld by an angel, and surrounded by a spiky golden halo.

He nuked himself a frozen dinner in the microwave, listened to phone messages (Liora hadn’t left one), and made a brief call to the nursing home. His grandmother’s condition hadn’t changed.

Seena rubbed up against his ankles, plaintively crying to be let out into the garden. He turned on the porch light and let her onto the porch. The rain had thinned to a drizzle.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “It’s wet out there.” The cat replied with a definite affirmative. He shrugged and opened the screen door. “It’s your fur,” he told her.

He waited through the tedium of the evening news, only to find that his interview had been cut for a report on the sighting of black jaguar roaming the outskirts of the city. Jaguars were extinct in Arizona, though there was a remote chance one had wandered up from Mexico. It was typical that they’d bumped his interview for a highly doubtful rumor. More storm hysteria.

Two hours later he called Seena in. She made a guttural sound in response but did not come to the door.

Resigned, he stepped outside. As there’d been no need to water, he hadn’t gone out into the yard in days. The garden, he saw, had been transformed by the rains. The sage was taller than he was. The grape vine so thick and heavy that it was snaking along the roof, blanketing the porch screens, the kitchen and bedroom windows, and wrapping around the western edge of the house. The datura had climbed all the way up to the top of the fence, covering it in white blossoms; a hibiscus he hadn’t even remembered being there was wound with pink flowers; and a carpet of purple verbena covered even the garden paths. Just beyond the gates a chorus of coyotes began their eerie harmonies. It reminded him uncomfortably of the night he’d seen that woman, the night the cat had disappeared.

“Seena!” he called again. He was embarrassingly relieved when she trotted right up to him. He scooped her into his arms and took her back into the house, making sure to lock the sliding glass door. He locked the other doors, then turned in for the night. He fell into a deep sleep at once.

He never knew what woke him. Not thunder or lightning or coyotes or the cats. It was curiously quiet for a summer night in the desert. Even the crickets were silent.

Thirsty, he got up and padded into the kitchen for a glass of water. The votive candle was still flickering, burned nearly halfway down, the Virgin gazing at him with compassion.

“And a good night to you,” he told her as he finished his water. It was beginning to seem like she was the only woman he was actually having a relationship with.

He started back to bed when he thought he heard something on the porch. He switched on the porch light and peered through the sliding glass door. The wicker rocker was rocking and the porch swing swaying, as if both had invisible occupants.

It’s the wind, he told himself. But he was not certain enough of that be able to go back to bed.

He unlocked the glass door and walked onto the porch. It was the wind, rising again, rippling through the leaves of the grape vine, carrying the scents of orange tree and honeysuckle, washing him in the garden’s perfume. He hadn’t put on a robe, but he stepped outside anyway, drawn by something he couldn’t begin to name.

She stood beside the Rose of Sharon, waiting for him to register her presence. He was naked, exactly as she wanted him, and comely. And his garden made her very happy. It reminded her of that first garden, awash in the sweet mix of scents that she had known when she first came into the world.

Enrique found himself moving tentatively, aware of being barefoot on land that had long been the province of scorpions, black widows, rattlers, and a host of other venomous creatures. The desert, he’d always known, was searingly beautiful and far from benign.