He paused, and Caitlin held herself still, waiting for him to go on. From the way his fingers clenched the stem of his wine glass, and the way he wouldn’t quite look at her, she could tell this was difficult for him. This wasn’t just his prima he was talking about, but his own grandmother.
“I suppose it started about four months ago…right after La Día de los Muertos.” The dark eyes slanted toward her. “You know what that is?”
“The Day of the Dead,” Caitlin said promptly, recalling the candles lit for loved ones now gone, the sugar skulls she and Roslyn had bought from a vendor at the Tlaquepaque Village event a few years ago. “They have a festival in Sedona for that. I’ve gone a few times, when it didn’t conflict with our Samhain observances.”
“Right. So some years my family would go up to Scottsdale to take part in the rituals there, and sometimes we would stay down here, depending on what everyone’s schedules were like. Last November we stayed in Tucson, mainly because there are more and more people who aren’t willing to make the drive, and my mother, as the prima-in-waiting, handles things here.” He toyed with the handle of his fork, but Caitlin could tell he didn’t seem terribly interested in eating right then. “The next day we got a phone call from my Aunt Francesca, who said my abuelita had had some kind of seizure and that the healer was with her but couldn’t seem to figure out what was wrong.”
“That must have been frightening.”
“It was. We all went up to Scottsdale, but by then the seizure had passed, and Maya seemed a little better.” He shook his head. “‘Seemed’ being the operative word. She had another seizure soon afterward, began growing weaker, and yet still the healer couldn’t find anything wrong. Valentina, who’s our healer down here in Tucson, couldn’t seem to figure it out, either. But she’s younger than Alba, who’s been the healer in the Phoenix area since long before I was born, and so she insisted that the prima go to a hospital for tests.”
In Jerome, the McAllisters had been without a healer for long enough that using civilian medical facilities was something no one thought twice about, but Caitlin supposed she could see why it might be an entirely different prospect for a clan that had never been forced to rely on modern medicine. Voice quiet, she asked, “Did they find anything?”
Another head shake. This time he abandoned the fork and picked up his wine glass instead, took a fairly healthy swallow. “Nothing. They tested for cancer, for epilepsy, for Parkinson’s and diabetes and a bunch of other things I can’t remember, and nothing. Not one of those tests turned up anything. At last she said it was enough, that she wasn’t going to be poked and prodded anymore. That was about a month ago. And since then….” He set his glass down and stared off into the distance, although it was dark enough by now that Caitlin wasn’t sure what he could be looking at. “Well, you saw her. That’s where it stands. She’s not getting better. Every day, she gets a little bit worse.”
And how horrible that must be for him. For his clan as well, but Maya was more than just his prima — she was his grandmother. Losing Great-Aunt Ruby had been terrible for the McAllister clan, but more because everyone knew their safety then depended on Angela, who’d been roughly the same age Caitlin was now when she had to take over as prima, than because it was a tragedy to lose someone at eighty-eight, someone who’d lived a full life. No, Angela’s youth had been the real issue; most of the time, a new prima was much older, had a family and a life of her own before she was asked to assume the role of leader of her clan. At least in the de la Paz family, Luz seemed ready to take over for her mother, even though she shouldn’t have had to worry about doing so for another ten or fifteen years.
“I’m so sorry,” Caitlin said, since anything else would have probably sounded like false platitudes. From what Alex had told her, it sounded as if Maya was dying. Not quickly, but in a way that made every day another one where they had to worry about how much more debilitated she would be, how much more she’d have to suffer. And if neither the healers nor the doctors could figure it out, there didn’t seem to be much hope for a cure, either.
“It is what it is,” Alex responded, then scowled. “Actually, I hate that saying. And I hate what’s happening to my grandmother. If it had been something sudden, like a stroke or a heart attack, it would have been terrible, but at least it would have been over.” His mouth pulled into a tight line. “But I guess that sounds terrible, too. It’s not that I want her dead, but — ”