Angel Falls

Mikaela raced to the picture window that looked out on Brownlow Street. It was high noon in the first week of July, and the storefronts all wore the crackled, faded look of exhaustion. It was too hot for anyone to be outside.

The sound came closer, grew louder. Out in the deserted street, dust swirled up in a thick brown cloud that grabbed hold of black-tipped leaves and swept them into eddies in the air.

Three silver helicopters hurtled above the rooflines like bullets against the blue sky, then dropped out of sight behind Bennet’s Drug Store. An eerie silence fell, the windows stilled.

A limousine pushed through the dust storm like something out of a dream, sleek and black and impossibly shiny in this dirty heat. No car could get to Sunville that clean, not if it drove on the back roads from Yakima. The blackened windows captured the town’s tired reflection and threw it back.

Mikaela leaned forward, pressing closer to the glass. The orange polyester of her uniform stuck to her skin. Overhead, the wooden fan swirled slowly with a thwop-thwop-thwop that did little more than distribute the smell of burning bacon.

Three limousines pulled up in front of City Hall and parked. No one got out of the cars, and the engines kept running. Gray smoke seeped lazily from the tailpipes.

One by one, people came out of the stores and stood on the sidewalks, drawing together, speculating among themselves, pointing at the cars that in this town were as foreign and unexpected as spaceships.

Rosa and Mikaela crowded into the diner’s narrow doorway.

The click of a lock silenced the crowd, then the doors opened, all of them at once, like huge, enameled beetles unfurling their wings. Strangers in black suits and sunglasses emerged from the cars, one after another. And then he appeared.

A shiver of recognition moved through the crowd.

“Oh, my God, it’s Julian True,” someone whispered.

He stood with the casual, unaffected elegance of one who is used to the stares of strangers. Tall and lean, with long, sunstreaked hair that covered half his face, he looked like a rebellious angel cast down from the heavens. He wore a loose black pocket T-shirt and a pair of ragged Levi’s that were tattered and ripped out at the knees. Whatever blue dye had once been woven into the denim had long ago bleached to a foamy white.

The crowd surged toward him, crying out. One sound, one name rose from the confusion.

Julian True … It’s him … Julian True in Sunville.

Then came the requests: Here! Sign my shirt … my notebook … my napkin.

Rosa turned to whisper something to Mikaela, but the words caught in her throat. Her daughter looked … mesmerized. Mikaela stepped back into the diner and glanced around. Rosa knew that her daughter was noticing the cracked floor, the broken light fixtures, the ever-present film of grease that coated everything. She was seeing the diner through this stranger’s eyes, and she was ashamed.

Rosa moved away from the door and went back to work. Mikaela headed for the lunch counter and began refilling the sugar jars.

Suddenly the bell above the front door jingled, and he was standing there, in Joe’s Get-It-While-It’s-Hot diner, beneath the lazily whirring overhead fan.

Mikaela dropped the half-empty sugar jars on the table. Her cheeks turned bright pink.

He gave Mikaela a smile the likes of which Rosa had never seen. It was the old cliché, sun erupting through the clouds. Eyes the color of shaved turquoise looked at Mikaela as if she were the only woman in the world.

“C-Can I help you?”

His smile held the tattered edge of exhaustion. “Well, darlin’,” he said in that world-famous Texas drawl, as thick and sweet as corn syrup, “we’ve been travelin’ for hours over the shittiest patch of road I’ve seen since I left Lubbock, and any minute that doorway’s gonna fill up with every thirteen-year-old girl between here and Spokane. I was hopin’ a pretty little thing like you could round me up a beer and a sandwich and show me where I could eat it in peace. ”

That had been the beginning.

Rosa opened her eyes. She could feel Liam behind her, hear his measured breathing, and she knew she’d been quiet too long.

“Hola, Mikita,” she said softly. “Mama estoy aqui. ” She took a deep breath and began. “You remember the first day you met him, querida, your Julian True?”

Mikaela sucked in a sharp breath; her eyelids fluttered.

Rosa felt a rush of hope, as pure and clean and cold as springwater. “We were at the diner, both of us working the lunch shift. There was a noise, one like I had never heard before. Helicopters, in our little town. And then he appeared. Ah, the way he looked at you, as if you were the only woman in the world. Even I could feel the lure of him. He was like no one we had ever seen before … like no one we would ever see again.

“You thought I was too old to understand what you were thinking, my Mikaela, but I could see it in your eyes. You thought you were Cinderella, all covered with soot and dirt, and here … here was a prince.

“He called you a pretty little thing, remember? Dios, I have never seen you smile so brightly. He started calling you Kayla almost from the start. Kayla of the midnight hair, that was his nickname for you, recuerdes? I hated that he would give you a gringa name and that you would take it … but it did not matter what I thought, not once you had met him.

“When he first kissed you, you told me it felt like you’d jumped off a skyscraper. I said that such a fall could kill a girl. Remember your answer? You said, ‘Ah, Mama, but sometimes it is worth it to fly. ’”