I told Lydia not to go to the reservoir that summer. The water was too low, the reeds too dry, and the sheriff's deputies had been prowling those back roads since June with nothing better to do than hassle girls with braids and secondhand skirts. But Lydia never listened to me when the moon was full. She said the stones out there hummed when the air got hot enough. She said she could hear voices under the surface.
I believed her. That's the part that still keeps me up.
We lived in Adobe Falls, a dried-up cattle town in central California where the asphalt cracks into puzzle pieces every July and the only thing that moves before sundown is the dust. My grandmother and my sister and me in a clapboard house on the edge of the almond orchards. Babi was ninety-one that summer, her skin like crepe paper stretched over bird bones, and she saw things. Real things. She'd been seeing them since she was a girl in Fresno, when her own mother got taken by men in uniform for reading tea leaves and wouldn't say where she'd learned it. Babi never forgave any man in a badge after that. And she never stopped reading.
The night before the fair, Babi called us into the kitchen. She had the bones out — not chicken bones, not cards. Mammoth ivory. Real ivory, yellowed with age, passed down from mother to daughter for as long as anyone could remember. She'd soak them in salt water and lay them on a linen cloth, and then she'd go quiet for so long you'd think she'd died sitting up.
"You'll leave this house tomorrow," she said to Lydia, not even looking up from the ivory. "And I need you to know what's waiting."
Lydia laughed. She always laughed when she was scared. "Babi, it's just a fair. I'm entering the weaving contest."
"I'm not talking about the fair, child. I'm talking about after."
Babi's fingers moved over the bones, slow and deliberate, the way blind people read faces. She was muttering in a language that wasn't Spanish and wasn't English, something older than both. Then her whole body went rigid, and the candle on the table flickered without a draft.
"Four of them," she said. "Four men in uniforms, and they see you at the water. They think the dark covers them. They think because you're a Rom girl with no father, no one will come looking."
Lydia stopped breathing. I stopped breathing.
"But I see different," Babi continued, her voice dropping to a rasp. "I see what follows them home. Every single one. It won't be quick, and it won't be clean, and it will wear their own faces when it comes."
She opened her eyes then, pale gray like the underside of a cloud, and fixed them on my sister.
"Take this to the water with you," she said, pressing a river stone into Lydia's palm. Smooth, black, heavier than it had any right to be. "And when they ask you to stop, you tell them the truth: you don't carry curses. You carry what they deserve."
I want to say I understood what Babi meant. I didn't. I was twenty-three, I worked the register at the feed store, and I thought my grandmother was just an old woman with superstitions and too much grief. I thought curses were for horror movies and campground stories.
I was wrong.
The fair was in Tipton, two towns over, and Lydia wore the red skirt Babi had sewn for her with the beaded hem. She looked like a flame moving through the dust. The weaving she'd done that spring won second place, and we bought tamales and watched the rodeo, and I remember thinking the world wasn't so bad, the world could be simple, we could just be two sisters eating tamales in the grass.
We drove home along the reservoir road because Lydia wanted to see the sunset on the water. The highbeams swept over the reeds, and the air coming through the open windows smelled like hot mud and juniper.
That's when they turned their lights on.
A sheriff's SUV lunged out of the dark behind us, red and blue splattering across our faces. I pulled onto the shoulder, both hands on the wheel, heart like a jackhammer in my throat.
"Evening, ladies," the deputy said. He had a shaved head and a smile like a cracked sidewalk. "Why don't you step out of the vehicle for me?"
He wasn't alone. Two more cruisers rolled up behind the first one, and three more deputies got out — two white, one big Samoan guy I recognized from the stock restaurant where he'd come in drunk one night and tried to touch Lydia under the table. I remembered calling the manager. I remembered the look he gave me on the way out the door.
Now he was standing twenty feet away with his thumb hooked over his belt buckle, watching.
"License and registration," the first deputy said. But he wasn't looking at my hands. He was looking at Lydia in the passenger seat, at her long black hair and the coin earrings catch ing the truck's lights.
"I don't know what we did wrong," I said. "We were going the speed limit."
"Ma'am, I need you to step out of the car."
The next few minutes come back to me in fragments now, the way dreams do. Lydia on the gravel with her hands cuffed behind her back, the sound of the reeds whispering, the flash of the river stone falling from her skirt pocket. One of the deputies laughing. The big Samoan one, the one from the restaurant, pulling the cuff chain until Lydia cried out.
And then the one with the shaved head bent down close to her face and said, "Nobody's coming for the likes of you. Gypsy trash."
He shoved her. She went down into the mud at the water's edge, the black stone in her palm, and her eyes found mine across the dark, and I saw them change.
It wasn't fear. I've seen fear. This was something else, something ancient and still, like the surface of the reservoir just before something breaks through it.
"I don't carry curses," she said. Her voice came out level and clear, as if someone much older was speaking through her. "I carry what you deserve."
The deputy raised his boot.
I think I screamed. I don't remember.
What I remember is the light. A green light, like a flashbulb the size of the whole sky. It rose from the water, from the reeds, from the stone in my sister's hand, and it moved through the air like a living thing, splitting into four streaks that each found a deputy and seeped into their chests. The men didn't see it. They were too busy dragging me back into the car, too busy telling me to drive away and forget what happened, forget my sister's face in the water, forget all of it.
They thought they'd covered it. They thought the dark would swallow the evidence.
But the light didn't care about any of that.
The first one died on August 9, 1989. That's a Thursday. He was forty-one years old. He went out to his truck to get his sunglasses and dropped dead in the driveway, his face turned blue as a dawn shadow, a ring of black water pooling around his head. The official report said it was a ruptured aneurysm. But his boots were wet, the way they would've been if he'd walked through water. There wasn't a drop of rain in Tulare County that whole month.
I read the obituary out loud to Babi while she shelled almonds at the kitchen table. She didn't even slow down.
"One," she said.
The second one drowned in his own bathtub with the water heater off. The third one burned to death in a house fire that started in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, in a room with no electrical outlets. The big Samoan one, the one who'd hurt her the most, he drove his patrol car into the reservoir in broad daylight with the windows rolled up and the doors locked from the inside. They found him in nineteen feet of water, his hands still gripping the wheel.
Four men. Four fates. Just like the bones said.
Now, here's the part that people in town don't talk about. The part they'd say is coincidence, or hysteria, or heat stroke. But I know better.
I know because on the night the last deputy died, I woke up at three in the morning to the smell of juniper smoke in my bedroom. Through the window I saw a figure standing at the edge of the orchard, glimmering like heat off an asphalt road. It was Lydia, but it wasn't Lydia. It was the size of the whole night, pressing against the screen.
In her hand was the river stone, glowing soft and green.
I didn't scream. I pulled the curtain shut and climbed into bed with my grandmother, and for the first time in months I fell asleep without dreaming.
The next morning, the county forensics team was out at the reservoir. Some fishermen had found the patrol car. And two weeks after that, the county paid us a settlement. They didn't say why. They didn't say what they were sorry for.
The check was for $240,000.
Babi looked at it for a long time, the ivory bones on the table between us. Then she handed it to me with steady hands.
"Buy the orchard," she said. "All of it. And put a fence around the water."
It turns out she'd had a plan all along. The reservoir land was county held, but the almond orchard adjacent to it had been in foreclosure for years. We bought it before the check cleared. By November, we'd torn down the old house, planted four hundred juniper trees along the reservoir's edge, and put up a fence with a locked gate.
Every year on August 9, we open that gate and let people walk down to the water. They pray. They leave flowers, candles, little offerings of bread and coins. They ask about the girl in the red skirt.
And every year, I tell them the truth.
"Her name was Lydia. She was nineteen. And she carried what they deserved."
The gate never needs oiling. The lights along the path never burn out. And sometimes, when the moon is full and the reeds are dry, you can still hear her singing beneath the water.
I don't know if that's a curse or a promise.
But I keep the key on a chain around my neck. And I keep the river stone on my nightstand, warm as a living hand.
