By the time she came around to pick me up, Gina’s 5 p.m. had turned to 8 and it was dark and cold as we took off. I wore a heavy coat and gloves, but the heater in Gina’s car was blowing a thin, inadequate stream of lukewarm air. I leaned back in the seat and tried to nap, longing for my bed, or at least a comforter to huddle into.
     Gina’s mood had changed — I could sense it the minute she arrived and during the quiet hours spent on the road. When I’d spoken to her last, she’d seemed excited and happy; it was the Gina who’d shown me her favorite places in Austin and who’d confided to me some of her passions and dreams.
     The Gina driving southbound was spooked. She was quiet and distracted, barely speaking when she arrived at my place and silent still over the empty miles that stretched on after we’d passed San Antonio.
     I’d packed two days worth of clothes, unsure how long we’d be staying. But Gina had said nothing about her parents. Instead, we were going to a place I’d never been: a church I knew nothing about.
     "Hey, Gina? Where are we staying?" I asked just past San Antonio.
     She didn’t answer for a moment. But the words must have penetrated because she finally spoke, her eyes never leaving the road. "Staying? No, we’re not staying. We’re coming back tomorrow."
     "Right," I said. "But where are we staying tonight?"
     "We’re going to the church tonight."
     "All night?" I asked. "Are they even open right now?"
     "They will be by the time we get there," she answered.
     I looked at my watch. It was almost 9:30 p.m.
     "Gina, we’ll be there at around 12:30. Unless they have a late midnight mass, their doors might not even be open."
     "We’re not driving all the way," she said.
     I was confounded, unsure if Gina was making sense, or if I just wasn’t listening properly. "We’re what?"
     "I’ll try to explain," Gina said.
     Three nights ago, Gina said, her sister called. Mom was worse. She was having trouble keeping food down and she was getting weaker and thinner. The doctors, who’d been optimistic throughout her surgery, were now saying they didn’t get all the cancer. They weren’t sure yet how far it had spread.
     Five minutes before she called me, Gina had made up her mind about what she would do. She called, happy that she’d broken her depression long enough to find a direction. And now we were on the road and her doubts and fears and depression were back, darkening her mood like the wintry sky outside.
     We were on our way to the town of San Juan to visit the church where Gina’s prayers had always been answered. The place where a shrine hangs of Our Lady of San Juan Del Valle.
     What Gina didn’t tell me before we were driving was about the promesas. The church, she explained on the way, is special to a lot of people in the Valley. It’s beautiful, she said. "Huge and beautiful and imposing. You can see it from the highway."
     The church has a history. Since the 50s, a more humble version of the shrine stood. In 1970, someone in a small plane deliberately crashed into the church, destroying part of it. Although services were going on, nobody was hurt, including 50 priests and a hundred and fifty children. And the statue of the Virgin suffered not even a scratch.
     The church has roots as far back as the 1600s when an image of the Immaculate Conception was placed in the town of San Juan de los Lagos near Guadalajara. A traveling acrobat, it is said, was brought to life by a statue of the Virgin.
     The Texas church grew in the late 40s after a woman claimed to have seen the image of the Lady of Guadalupe in a stone near San Juan. The shrine itself was built in the 1950s.
     The promesas are a tradition, but they are even more common at this church where people come from across the country to see the Virgin and to pray. Promesas are a promise to God, a kind of covenant where you agree to a sacrifice in the hope that a miracle or help will be delivered.
     We arrived near the Valley and I could see the transition as palm trees appeared next to the road and the ground surrounding was lush again after a hundred miles of empty Texas dust and weed.
     I recognized the area even in the dark as we approached the place of Gina’s birth. We were on the highway, but instead of going east, we were heading west toward the church.
     I was looking out for it, sure that whenever we hit it I wouldn’t miss the sight.
     "Are you ready?" Gina asked.
     "Yeah," I said. Ready to arrive? I wasn’t sure what she meant, but five hours on the road had made me sleepily gullible; I just wanted to get out of the seat.
     "Okay. Let’s stop here," she said.
     I thought, absurdly, that she might have to go to the bathroom, out here, where there were even bushes to shield her from passing motorists.
     "Um, why are we stopping?"
     "For the promesa," Gina said. "I have to walk."
     "Walk to the church?" I asked.
     "Yes, Heather," she said, sounding like the patient teacher of a slow child. "I have to walk to San Juan."
     "How far is that from here?"
     "About 10 miles," she said. She had pulled over and was already unstrapping her seatbelt and shutting the car off.
     "It’s after midnight," I said. "Why are you doing this at night?"
     "It’s easier this way," Gina said. "Fewer cars, less distraction. I’ll get there in the morning when the sun is rising."
     "Oh," I said, agreeing to the logic, if not the principle of what she was about to do.
     "What do you want me to do?" I asked.
     Gina paused. In her excitement, she may not have thought much about how I fit into this. I read this as true as her eyes darted left and right, looking for a direction for me.
     "Well... that’s up to you," she said. "You can go with me, or you can stay in the car and drive there, or you can stay in a hotel. Whatever you want to do."
     "I can’t let you walk by yourself," I said. The thought of walking 10 miles in my present tired state was a nightmare, but my sense of responsibility wasn’t going to let me sleep or rest if I let her walk along the highway alone.
     Gina just looked at me. "I can’t make you go," she said. "I didn’t think about that when I asked you to come. I just wanted you to see the church."
     I weighed my options. Stay in the car. Walk. Walk. Stay in the car. For a minute, I thought about being Gina’s pacer, driving along at a crawl as she walked on, giving her little water cups to keep her thirst sated. Stupid.
     "I’ll go," I blurted. I figured the less I thought about it the better.
     I left my purse, taking only my credit card and $20 and folding them together in the right front pocket of my jeans. Gina and I both wore coats. I’d been chilly on the road, but the night air outside was even colder. As I stepped into it, I could see the plumes of misty breath in front of me.
     "Let’s go," Gina said. We each locked our doors and closed them and then we were walking.
     We walked mostly on the sandy dirt area between the breakdown lane and where stringy, weedy grass began to the right of the pavement. The walking at first was energizing. Being out so late and inhaling cool air into my lungs invigorated me. My steps were tall and true and Gina matched me stride for stride despite our height difference.
     It went that way for an hour, neither of us saying much. When I looked to her, I sometimes saw Gina walking with her eyes closed. Sometimes, her lips trembled and moved, as if she was frightened in prayer.
     I did what I do when I jog sometimes and am without a Walkman — I played songs in my head, sometimes mumbling the words under my breath. Although I hadn’t heard the song in at least three years, I was thinking about this stupid Paul Simon/Linda Ronstadt duet that was on "Graceland." I know, I know, Linda Ronstadt? The lady who sang the mouse song from "An American Tail?"
     Their voices were soothing in the night, though, so I let them in...

"Joseph’s face was black as night / the pale yellow moon shone in his eyes.
His path was marked by the stars in the Southern hemisphere /
And he walked his days under African skies..."

     By the time the were doing the "Uh, ooomba, oomba, oomba whooahh ooohhhh" part, I was already lost in the melody and if my feet connected to the road, I wasn’t aware.

* * *

     An hour later, my feet were starting to hurt. I was trying to compensate, my feet doing weird things like stepping away from the balls and heels of my feet and trying to skirt along the edges of my shoe soles. That made things worse because soon my ankles were getting tired of being cranked in unnatural directions.
     I gave that up and walked normally. Feet hurting.
     Gina was still silent. She had lost the slight bounce in her step she’d started with and now just walked. She wasn’t carrying a purse or a backpack, so her stride was the most natural thing in the world, unencumbered even by the bags she’d be carrying if she were mall Power Shopping.

* * *

     Hour and a half more. My bones weren’t aching yet. If I had been jogging, they would be by now, oxygen-deprived and cramping. But I wasn’t sweating – the air was still cool and not as cold as when we’d left Austin – and my body had adjusted to the stride/stride, left/right.
     It was Gina who suggested we stop. She just lost stride, stopped, turned to me as I was still walking, and said, "Let’s stop here."
     She sat in the breakdown lane, sitting Indian style. I sat next to her.
     "How are you feeling?" I asked.
     "I don’t feel anything," Gina said. "I’m not here. I’m praying and thinking about mama and thinking about the church. But I’m not here. Are you okay?"
     "Better than I thought I would be," I said. "I didn’t think I could walk this far."
     The truth was, it wasn’t walking that was wearing me out. It was just being up this late. My watch said 3:15 a.m. The pain in my feet had gone away, as it sometimes does when the initial pinching of a roller skate numbs out and you settle into the feeling.
     "I’m thinking a lot," Gina said suddenly.
     "That’s a good thing," I said.
     "Do you think you can erase the past, I mean if you do really good things? If you clear them from you, like purging a virus or bad blood? If they stop being a part of who you are?"
     "Everything you do is who you are," I said. I looked up and the skies, pockmarked with the off-whiteness of its stars, making me wonder how significant it all was to begin with. Who are we but little bits of carbon and ether in a vast expanding Everything?
     "What if Mother Teresa had had some horrible past secret? She wouldn’t be any less great, right?" Gina asked.
     "What if Hitler had lived and repented?" I asked. "Would he be any less a monster? It’s easy to be sorry afterward. It’s easy to repent when you’ve already committed sins."
     "So it’s impossible?" Gina said, allowing hopelessness to creep into her voice.
     I wanted to make her feel better. I wanted to lie. But instead I found a way to tell the truth. "If you believe in God, which you do, then He’ll know what’s sincere and what’s bullshit. It’s between you and Him, knowing who you really are. I’ve been trying for three months to know who you are, and I don’t think I’m any closer than when I started."
     Gina absorbed that. Her head was lowered and in the darkness, I couldn’t see her face anymore. "You know a lot more than most people," she said.
     "I wish I knew why I did these things," she said. "These self-destructive things. Cheating on Juan, not caring enough about my mother until this happens."
     "That’s not your fault," I said quickly.
     "I want to experience everything," she said. "All the pleasure, all the desire, everything. But it pushes me away from love sometimes. Tanto sabor, pero sin amor. That’s me," she said.
     "Translation?"
     "Without love, but tasting life’s fruits," she said.
     "Oh."
     "I thought doing this would clear my mind, but also clear my sins. Like a bulk confession, pulling the dump truck up to the church and just unloading."
     "It’s not that easy?" I asked.
     "No," Gina said. "It’s not.
     She started to get up to walk some more. I had thought for a minute that she was giving this up, calling the whole thing off and that we’d walk back the way we’d come. Instead we continued the walk, passing a few lit billboards for hotels an trailer home parks I would never visit and diners I’d probably never dine in.

* * *

     4:30. Found an all-night gas station. I grabbed coffee, hoping it would enliven my sleepy, heavy eyes. Gina grabbed a half-liter bottle of water. No snacks or food.
     Gina said we were getting closer. Just another hour or two. My feet began to ache again, but my music kept me going. Whatever was keeping Gina going, be it the role of mother’s savior or the avoidance of damnation, we didn’t talk about it. Gina took a step, then another, and we were getting closer, closer to the church.

* * *

     San Juan. The church was just ahead. The sun was peeking up and it was just past 6 a.m.
     Gina told me, quietly because her voice was tired and raspy, that three towns meet here where the church stands. San Juan, Alamo and Pharr. The Triple City ballroom, where lots of Tejano acts play, is nearby. So is PSJA, the abbreviated school of the three towns.
     When I first saw the church, hazy in the morning mistiness, I was already amazed. It was enormous, with a huge cross tower just south of the highway. As we approached, I saw it was even larger than my first glimpse had promised.
     Gina and I were both ragged, our steps heavy and leaden. Before the church came into view, I wasn’t sure we were going to make it. I was making a mental backup plan, wondering where the nearest phone could be found to call a cab and get us back to Gina’s car.
     Seeing the church reenergized us both. We pressed on a little quicker, despite fatigue. I could see as we came closer that the church was surrounded by a campus, lots of little buildings including a massive gift shop, a huge parking lot and lots of sidewalk.
     The structure, architecturally beautiful and angular, was lit by amber lights. It all seemed very holy and enormous, like some desert mirage.
     Gina had told me that some who make promesas start or end the journey on their knees, practically crawling to the alter for the last bit. We didn’t do that – instead we walked up to the church. From here I could only see a few cars in the parking lot, but at least it was open.
     As we approached the steps, Gina crossed herself. Without thinking, I did the same.
     We went inside. It was a cathedral, a shrine, a holy place, a warm expanse of structure that unlike other churches, enveloped me in welcoming. It was less a church and more an indoor amphitheater, the seats pointing toward the center and positioned like inside a concert hall.
     There was a huge Christmas tree at the altar and red leafy flowers in small pots. I looked around and saw large signs pointing to the Rector’s Office, or the Candle Room or the Confessional, all in Spanish and English and all, with the Big Blue Official Sign look, reminding me of an airport walkway.
     I followed Gina around the inner perimeter of the round building. I could see the statue of the Virgin from here. I thought she would be bigger. Instead, the figure of her, with her blue robes, was high atop and behind the altar. It was only about two feet tall, surrounded, however, by ornate and beautiful art.
     We walked around and behind the alter an there was an area just below the shrine itself. Gina knelt where there was a long line of candleholders. She hadn’t brought one of her own. But she prayed anyway, her head down, her promesa, I believed, at its conclusion.
     I wandered on my own and I peeked inside a place labeled "Candle Room."
     It was a black room full of racks and racks of candles in glasses with the Virgin’s logo on them. I looked at the room as the flames burned silently – more than silently because they absorbed and fed on the oxygen surrounding them. I watched them burn, thousands of promesas and prayers and dreams and communions with God. I watched them silently as Gina prayed behind me. The stillness of it, instead of making me sleepy, filled me until I was wide awake, transfixed, hypnotized by the light.
     I stood there for a few minutes, unaware of anything else. I made my own promise. To write as much as I could, to live well and to love, and to stop hiding in this shell of myself waiting for things to happen.
     It was a little early for New Year’s resolution, and I’d always believed it was too late for me and God to give it a whirl. But I knew I was making a promise to somebody outside myself. Somebody was watching, making a note of it, seeing if I could keep my promise. My skin tingled with goosebumps. I couldn’t see them with my coat on, but I knew they were there, prickling my arms and legs. My breath quickened.
      And then it passed.
      When Gina tapped me on the shoulder to tell me she was done, I was ready. I was done here, too.