“My skin is very sensitive,” Jenny said. She pointed to the damage. “Weak. My skin is very weak.”
Kisa nodded slowly. She looked Jenny in the eyes. “You are witch?”
“No. What? I'm telling you, I have this disease where my skin breaks and bleeds very easily.” Jenny didn't like hearing the word witch. People who called her that usually ended up trying to lynch her in front of a courthouse.
“La Bruja,” Kisa said. “The witch. For Alexander, for Papa Calderòn. For the dead.”
Jenny knelt and rinsed her arm in the salt water. “No, not a witch.”
“It's good,” Kisa said. “Papa Calderòn...has many...cómo se dice? Witches? Los astrólogos? Las psíquicas?” She grew visibly frustrated, then spoke rapidly in the unfamiliar tongue Alexander used with Kisa and her family.
“I'm sorry, I don't know Spanish,” Jenny said. “Je parle...je parle un peu...français,” Jenny attempted.
Kisa laughed. “I know...” She held her fingers a pinch apart. “English.” She widened them as much as she could. “Español.” Then she pointed to herself. “Maya.”
“Maya? That's what you speak?”
Kisa tapped her chest and smiled wide. “Maya.”
“Mayan? Like the people who built the pyramids?” Jenny tried to make a pyramid shape with her hands.”
Kisa nodded and copied the gesture, seeming to understand Jenny. “Maya.”
“I read about Mayans in ninth grade Social Studies, but I though they were ancient. I didn't know there were still Mayans in the modern day,” Jenny said.
Kisa just smiled—Jenny might have exceeded her English.
“Well, that's cool,” Jenny said. She looked up and down the deserted beach. “Can we go swimming?” She pointed to the ocean and mimed swimming.
Kisa shrugged, looked up and down the beach, then smiled and nodded.
Jenny set her shoes, jeans and shirt on a boulder and waded out into the ocean in her underwear. The water was like a hot, salty bath.
Kisa glanced around again, then removed her dress and followed Jenny into the water.
“La bruja,” Kisa said, pointing at Jenny's forearm.
Jenny looked at her inner forearm, where she'd created the bloody blister, supposedly evidence that she had some skin disorder. The blister had already healed itself, leaving no trace.
“You caught me.” Jenny pointed to herself. “I am a witch.”
Kisa laughed and dove into the water, swimming out and away from her. Jenny floated on her back, looking up at the expansive blue sky, the puffy white mountains of the clouds radiant with golden afternoon sunlight. Kisa seemed to understand that Jenny had strange powers, and to be perfectly okay with that.
“I'm really starting to like it here, Kisa,” Jenny said. “I think I could really like it here.”
CHAPTER NINE
The party began at nightfall, while the sun sank into the Pacific, filling the house and grounds of the walled compound with rich red and orange light. The burning hues of sunset lingered for an hour, and Jenny was beginning to understand why this place was called La Casa del Fuego—the house of fire.
Men had spent the whole day decorating the back yard with rows of potted bushes full of bright flowers, interspersed with large sculptures of skulls painted with cheerful floral designs. Candles burned everywhere, planted in neat lines along all the flower beds, or tied to the plants themselves, to light the lawn.
“What are those skulls?” Jenny asked.
“Day of the Dead decorations,” Alexander said.
“Oh, I've seen that on TV,” Jenny said. “It's like Halloween, right?”
“The day after,” Alexander said. “The first of November. But I brought them out tonight because I knew you would like them.”
“I really do,” Jenny said. “They're so...scary and pretty at the same time.”
Alexander sat at the head of the outdoor dining table, facing the setting sun. Jenny sat at his right hand. Kisa stood near Jenny's elbow to wait on her, and she refused Jenny's invitations to sit down and relax. Kisa also helped the elderly Noonsa, as well a couple of Mayan girls hired for the occasion, bring out wine and food from the kitchen.
Yochi and some of his cousins roasted piles of fish and shrimp over the firepit. Women brought out corn tortillas and a dark chopped-vegetable sauce that roasted the roof of Jenny's mouth, though it was delicious. Jenny sipped dark wine to cool the burning, then tried the hearts of palm in a cooler, vinegar-tasting sauce. The food was all unusual but very, very good.
“Have your dessert first. Life is short,” Alexander said, sliding her a glass tray full of tiny, delicate sugar skulls decorated with shells of bright candy and circles of dark, strong chocolate, richer and thicker than any Jenny had ever tasted before. She could have eaten a hundred of the chocolates.