Chapter 4 — The Scar Remembers
The photograph should have sent Alma home.
Instead, it made home feel like the least honest place she could go.
Camila drove back to the Ríos house because somebody had to answer Marisol’s calls before Marisol involved the police, the church, or God personally. She made Alma promise to stay somewhere public. She made Silas promise not to be “heroic, secretive, or male in any way that makes the situation worse.”
Silas told her that eliminated most of his available personality.
Camila did not laugh.
Alma did, which felt almost indecent after the day they had survived.
Then Camila left.
The mechanic shop where Silas worked sat three blocks from his house behind a tire store and a faded mural of orange groves that no longer existed. The front bays were closed, but he had a key to the side office.
“Public enough?” he asked.
Alma looked at the empty street.
“No.”
“It has fluorescent lighting. Nothing dangerous has ever happened under lighting this ugly.”
She followed him inside.
The shop smelled like rubber, hot metal, coffee burned down to tar, and the faint chemical sweetness of coolant. Tools hung in careful lines above a workbench. A radio sat silent beside a stack of invoices.
Silas turned on the office light.
The brightness made them both look exhausted.
Alma placed her phone on the desk between them. The anonymous photograph filled the screen.
Silas studied the angle.
“They were in the back alley.”
“For how long?”
“Long enough to know which window.”
“Could it be a neighbor?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No.”
Neither did she.
Alma zoomed in until the image pixelated. No reflection. No shadow. Nothing useful.
Silas reached for an old first-aid kit on the shelf.
“Sit.”
“I’m not hurt.”
“I am.”
She looked at his jaw.
A bruise had begun to rise where Rafael hit him.
“That was my father.”
“I noticed.”
“I’m sorry.”
Silas opened an instant ice pack and struck it against the desk. “You did not hit me.”
“No. I just made sure the entire town had a reason to watch.”
“They were already watching.”
He pressed the cold pack to his face and leaned back in the chair.
The bruise made him look less invulnerable than he had at the memorial. Alma did not like how much that mattered.
She looked at his right wrist.
The scar disappeared beneath his sleeve.
Silas saw her looking.
“No.”
“I did not ask yet.”
“You were about to.”
“Then save us time.”
He lowered the ice pack.
“Alma.”
“Were you in the house?”
His eyes went very still.
She heard the building around them: the small tick of cooling metal, a refrigerator motor kicking on in the back, a truck changing gears on the avenue.
“Eleven years ago,” she said. “Were you inside the Ríos house the night of the fire?”
Silas looked down at his wrist.
When he rolled up his sleeve, he did it slowly.
The scar was worse than the glimpse at the memorial had shown her. It curved from the inside of his wrist toward his forearm, pale and uneven, a narrow river of changed skin.
Alma’s body remembered before her mind did.
Smoke.
A hand.
A boy’s voice.
Don’t look back.
Her breath caught.
Silas noticed.
“Yes,” he said.
The word was quiet.
It rearranged eleven years.
Alma gripped the edge of the desk.
“You were there.”
“Yes.”
“You pulled me out.”
He closed his eyes once.
“I found you.”
“That is not what I asked.”
His eyes opened.
“I found you in the back hall. You were on the floor near the linen closet. You kept trying to go the wrong direction.”
“My brother.”
“You were calling for Samuel.”
The name cracked something open in her chest.
“Did you see him?”
Silas did not answer immediately.
“That night?” she pressed.
“Yes.”
“Alive?”
“Yes.”
Alma stood so quickly the chair legs scraped concrete.
“When?”
“Before I found you.”
“Where?”
“Near the kitchen.”
“What was he doing?”
Silas rubbed the bridge of his nose, as if the memory had weight.
“He was yelling at someone.”
“Who?”
“I could not see.”
“You are lying.”
“I am not.”
“You remember my voice. You remember where I was. You remember enough to say don’t look back eleven years later, but suddenly you cannot remember who Samuel was yelling at?”
“I remember pieces.”
“So give me the pieces.”
His temper showed for the first time.
“You think I have not tried?”
The room sharpened.
Silas stood.
“I was twelve years old. I woke up because my father was leaving. I thought he was going to see a woman. I followed him on my bike because twelve-year-old boys are idiots in very specific ways.”
Alma stared at him.
“He went to your house. I waited across the road. I saw him go around back. Then I saw someone else arrive.”
“Who?”
“A woman.”
“Who?”
“I do not know.”
“What did she look like?”
“Light-colored clothes. Maybe a dress. Maybe a coat. I remember shoes hitting the stone path.”
“What kind of shoes?”
Silas’s mouth tightened. “Heels.”
Alma thought of Marisol’s cream dress at the memorial. Of Celia Voss’s polished shoes on the platform. Of half the women in Santa Bruma who knew how to look respectable while carrying a knife behind their teeth.
“Then?”
“I waited. Ten minutes. Maybe twenty. I heard glass break.”
“Before the fire?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“I crossed the road.”
“Why?”
“Because I heard Samuel.”
Alma’s skin prickled.
“You knew my brother.”
Silas looked away.
“How?” she asked.
He said nothing.
Alma stepped between him and the door.
“How did you know Samuel?”
“Move.”
“No.”
“Alma.”
“How?”
Silas’s shoulders dropped.
The fight went out of him so suddenly she almost regretted winning.
“He used to come to the drainage canal behind the orchard,” he said. “There was a place where the concrete broke and the water slowed down. Kids went there because adults did not.”
“Samuel went there?”
“All the time.”
“With you?”
“Sometimes.”
“My brother was friends with you.”
Silas gave a bitter little laugh. “Your brother was friends with everybody until their parents noticed.”
Alma sat again because her knees had become unreliable.
Samuel had been sixteen when he died. Old enough to have a life beyond the rooms Alma had been allowed into. She had known that in theory.
Theory was nothing like discovering a door in the wall eleven years later.
“Why did no one tell me?”
“Because after the fire, nobody wanted a story where a Ríos and an Abarca had ever liked each other.”
“You could have told me.”
“When?”
“Any time.”
“While you were nine? Twelve? Fifteen? Should I have stopped you in the grocery store between the cereal and the tortillas and explained that your dead brother used to steal my father’s cigarettes and throw them in the canal because he thought he was saving his lungs?”
Despite herself, Alma laughed.
It came out broken.
Silas did too.
For three seconds, Samuel was not a name on stone.
He was sixteen and irritating and alive enough to annoy somebody.
Alma covered her mouth.
Tears arrived without permission.
Silas did not touch her.
She was grateful for that until she wasn’t.
“What happened after you crossed the road?” she asked.
His face changed again.
“I went to the side door. It was open. Smoke was already in the hallway.”
“Where was your father?”
“I did not see him.”
“Samuel?”
“He came through the kitchen. He saw me and yelled my name.”
Alma closed her eyes.
There it was. Proof inside memory.
Not a photograph. Not a town version.
Her brother had known Silas Abarca by name.
“What did he say?”
“First? ‘What the hell are you doing here?’”
That sounded so much like a sixteen-year-old brother that it hurt.
“Then?”
Silas looked toward the dark window of the office.
“He told me to get out.”
“And you did not.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I heard you.”
Alma’s throat tightened.
“I do not remember calling you.”
“You did not call me. You were screaming Samuel’s name.”
He looked down at his scar.
“I found you. The ceiling had started coming apart. Something fell. I put my arm up. That is this.”
He touched the pale skin.
“I got you to the side door. You tried to turn around.”
“Samuel.”
“Yes.”
“And you said—”
“Don’t look back.”
The words were softer now.
Not a threat.
A twelve-year-old boy begging a nine-year-old girl to keep moving.
Alma’s tears spilled.
She hated them for arriving so late.
Silas set the ice pack down.
This time he did touch her.
Only her hand.
His fingers closed around hers with almost no pressure.
Her body recognized the shape before her mind did.
Not exactly. His hand was larger now. The bones different. The strength controlled instead of terrified.
But memory moved through her skin anyway.
Alma turned his palm upward.
The scar crossed his wrist between them.
“You saved me.”
Silas looked at her with something close to anger.
“I got you out.”
“You were twelve.”
“So were a lot of stupid things I did.”
“Stop making it smaller.”
He looked away.
“People in this town have spent eleven years making me responsible for a fire I did not start. I learned not to volunteer for other titles.”
The sentence sat between them.
Alma tightened her fingers around his.
“Why did your father confess?”
Silas pulled his hand away.
There it was.
The locked door inside the locked house.
“I do not know,” he said.
“You do.”
“I know what he told me.”
“Which was?”
“That some truths cost more than the people hearing them can afford.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No. It is my father.”
Alma studied him.
“What did he tell you to do about me?”
Silas’s face went still again.
“Nothing.”
“You paused.”
“I am tired.”
“You paused.”
He cursed under his breath.
Then he walked to the workbench, picked up a rag, put it down, and laughed once without humor.
“The last time I saw him without glass between us,” he said, “he told me three things. Take care of my mother. Stay out of Maravilla Road. And if the Ríos girl ever remembers me, do not tell her what I remember.”
Alma felt the room tilt.
“Me specifically.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I asked him that.”
“What did he say?”
Silas looked at her.
“He said because you were the only person who got out of that house without learning what the adults had done.”
The fluorescent light buzzed above them.
Alma could hear her own heartbeat.
“What adults?”
Silas shook his head.
“I do not know.”
She wanted to believe him.
That frightened her more than not believing him.
Her phone vibrated.
A message from Camila.
HOME. YOUR MOTHER IS QUIET. THIS IS WORSE THAN YELLING. COME SOON.
Below it, another message appeared from the unknown number.
No photograph this time.
Only five words.
ASK HIM ABOUT SAMUEL’S CAMERA.
Alma read it twice.
Then she lifted her eyes to Silas.
His face told her he knew exactly what Samuel’s camera was.
The story continues in the next chapter.