Free Devil's Harbor by Alex Gilly Page A

do.
    â€œLe gusta?” said the old woman.
    â€œShe wants to know if you like it. The mural,” said Mona.
    â€œI was looking at it before I came in,” said Finn.
    â€œMrs. Gavrilia painted it. It’s called The Fifth Sun .”
    â€œWhy?” he said.
    La Abuelita started speaking again.
    â€œIt’s from a Nahua creation myth,” translated Mona. “Before ours, there were four other cycles of creation and destruction. To make sure the fifth sun burned, the young god Nanahuatl threw himself bravely into the fires. In this picture, the Virgin is blessing the people who have thrown themselves into the fires so that the light should remain for those who come after.”
    Finn nodded.
    People were always so afraid to be alone in the dark.
    He turned to the old woman and said, “If your cousin wants me to find his son, he must talk to me directly. Otherwise, I can’t help you.”
    The old woman gave a spluttering laugh. “I did not come here to ask for your help,” she said in English, “I came to help you .”

 
    CHAPTER SIX
    The next morning before sunrise, Finn slipped out of bed, taking care not to wake Mona. He stood by the bed for a moment and watched her sleep. The evening before, they had gone for dinner at a Korean crab place near the pier at Redondo. Mona had had a glass of wine and something inside Finn had seized up. He’d found himself resenting her without reason, and had pulled away a little. He’d woken in the middle of the night and lain in the dark next to her with his eyes open, listening to her breathe, wishing away the part of himself he’d kept from her.
    Now he put on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and running shoes and headed out the door into the pale, predawn light and ran toward the sea.
    When he got to the beach, he took off his shoes and socks and put them under one of the legs of a lifeguard tower. Then he hit the cold, hard sand down by the water. A bleakness had crept into his heart after he’d shot Perez, a dark mood that left him feeling restless and ill at ease all the time. It was a familiar feeling—he was a teenager the first time it had inhabited him, after his father’s suicide—and for years he’d dosed himself against it with alcohol, until he’d found that he was allergic to alcohol, and that his way of drinking was incompatible with marriage and the kind of steadiness that marriage is supposed to beget.
    He’d tried to ignore it, and to carry on as normally as possible, doing one thing and then the next, day after day, waiting for it to pass; but the pall had remained stubbornly in place—if anything, it had reached deeper into him after the Internal Affairs hearing—and the urge to dose himself against it was growing stronger, and this was the thing that frightened him, so much so that he was having trouble admitting to himself that it was even real.
    This was also the thing he was keeping from Mona. He knew that if he told her about it, she’d say it was all the more reason to go talk to that counselor, and Finn knew that that counselor would want to talk about everything, especially all the things he’d made a habit of never talking about. His father’s suicide, for instance. Finn never talked about that.
    Ever.
    He didn’t talk all that much about what he called his “lost years,” either, by which he meant the five years between the ages of sixteen, when his father had died and Finn had dropped out of high school, and twenty-one, when he had signed up for the navy.
    Finn had always had trouble reading—in school, he’d felt like it came much harder to him than it did to other kids. It hadn’t mattered so much in junior high, where the teachers had been kind. But in high school, with its overcrowded classes and overwhelmed teachers, and with no support at home, Finn had sunk to the bottom of the curve and settled there. On a skateboard or