Orphans of Paradise

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  He turned, trying to cover his face and then there was a hollow ding, wiry and echoing off of the walls as Javier fell to his knees. His face slapped against the blood stained floor and Jax saw the girl standing behind him, the crow bar balanced between her hands.

  There were voices floating down the narrow makeshift corridor and Jax led the girl up a flight of stairs. The landing was dark but Jax took the steps two at a time, the girl’s forearm slipping from his grip. When he reached the top he heard her slip, a stilted gasp escaping from her lips and then he saw him. Pascual was on the first step while his second in command, Chavo, hung back in the doorway, his gun drawn as he examined Javier unconscious on the floor. Pascual caught a fistful of the girl’s hair, twisting it in his fist until she screamed, while Jax took one silent step backwards, letting his body slip into the shadows.

  Jax unraveled his mother’s words again, smoothing the letter flat against his thigh, and read:

  I’m leaving to be with Mari in Texas. I’m very tired and I can’t sleep in the apartment anymore. If you’re going to be with him, please don’t tell your brother where I am.

  Chapter 4

  Rani

  Rani was still clutching the rosary, beads splayed across her knees as she tried to figure out if the topaz colored stones were real and how much they might be worth if they pawned it, when she heard a faint whistling upstairs. She inhaled, lungs shuddering at the sudden temperature drop as she rose to her feet.

  Rani left the rosary on the bottom step, her hands reaching instead for her knife and the boy's gun, hoping it would be enough to scare someone away despite being empty. She held them both out in front of her, the blade pressed between her hand and the side of the gun like a makeshift baronet and then she rounded the corner, pulled into the swirling vortex of cold air rushing in from the open window.

  She froze, the weight of the gun feeling dead between her palms.

  “¿Quién es?” she whispered. Who’s there? Her eyes scanned the darkness, hoping it was just some bum looking for a warm place to sleep—the drunk kind, the harmless drunk kind.

  The floor let out a creak and Rani spun to her left, fingers tensed around the handle of the gun. She faced the corner of the wall, inching forward, letting the barrel lead her around the edge.

  “Holy shit, don’t shoot me.” The voice was rough but weak, each word rushing into the next.

  “Venga.” Come out. Rani heard her own voice rising but the language was all wrong. She searched her memory for snippets of conversations on a bus, inside the airport, but she couldn’t find the words.

  She took a few steps back and then there he was. The boy from the beach. The boy she’d almost killed. The boy that had almost killed her but didn’t. His dark hair was still wild, the rippled scar along his jaw growing tense.

  “Por favor,” he started, his hands raised.

  “What are you doing here?” Rani slid back into the shadows until just the blade of her knife glinted between them. She didn’t want him to see the gun up close, to see that it was his and that it was empty. “Did you follow me?” she said when he didn’t speak.

  Her eyes flashed to the open window, just for a second, searching for stray lights in the yard, for the long shadows cast by other bodies lingering in the bushes. What if he wasn’t alone?

  “I…in my bag…”

  “What?"

  “I just need something from my bag," he said.

  “It’s not your bag," Rani spat, confused.

  “A rosary," he said. "Please." His hands still hovered there in the narrow space between them, pleading. "A rosary was hidden in the inseam of the bag.”

  Rani glanced back down the stairs to where the dark beads were sprawled across the bottom step. He inched out of the shadows and Rani fell against the wall, finger poised over the trigger of the gun.

  “Get out,” Rani hissed at him.

  He lingered there, mouth fluttering open.

  "Get out!" she yelled again.

  His eyes were the first thing set in motion, blinking wildly, fierce on Rani's face. But as he made his way back toward the window he suddenly stopped.

  "You look like her."

  “What?”

  “Was she your, were you her sister?” he asked.

  Rani couldn't breathe and the words came out in a torrent. “You saw her? Where is she? What did they do to her?”

  “I don’t know. They…she got away.”

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't know how," he said.

  Rani searched his eyes but she could feel the truth trembling hot against her lips. “You. You’re one of them."

  She remembered seeing him at their hideout, going in through one door and out the other. And he’d seen her. He’d seen Nadia there. She knew it.

  “No," he fumbled. "I'm not, I—”

  “Get out,” Rani choked, dry tears strangling her. “Before I kill you, get out!”

  “Rani?” Max's voice floated up the stairs and she snapped in his direction.

  His eyes stilled on the gun and even though he knew it was empty, even though they both did, his gaze never shifted from the way she gripped the handle, from the way her knuckles tore white against the dark metal.

  "What happened?" he said.

  Rani turned back toward the open window, now empty where the boy had just slipped through. She inched toward it, letting the night's landscape manifest in pieces, searching every silhouette and every shadow. But he was gone.

  “Someone broke in." Rani finally met Max's eyes. "Get Breezy and Enzo. We have to go.”

  Chapter 5

  Rani

  They tried the locks on at least six abandoned houses, two of which already had squatters, before they finally found a small metal trailer, grass and vines crawling in through the cracked windows. Rani dreaded them all having to sleep there, so exposed, where more than just bugs could reach them. But it would have to do.

  “We can’t keep doing this,” Max said after they’d settled in.

  Rani looked down at Breezy’s nose, rubbed red and raw from the cold and she felt sick. “I know,” she said.

  She pressed her hands to her mouth, warming them before resting them on Breezy’s face the way their mother used to when they were cold and dripping, just out of the bath. She wasn’t even sure if Breezy remembered but she could see that Max did, his eyes dark as Rani reanimated their mother’s ghost.

  “I miss them,” Max said, his knees giving way as he slumped to the floor next to Enzo.

  The admission hung there, quiet and solitary. But Rani didn’t say a word. All she could think about was that chair, so cold against her bare legs though the windows had been open, summer bleeding in from the black tar of the street. She’d gripped the edges tight, nails carving tiny indentions into the wood her father had fashioned himself, her eyes on that empty doorway all night.

  Rani’s mother had worked nights in a nearby factory, prepping roses to be sold overseas. She remembered the way their dank breath clung to her mother’s clothes and hair and the shallow impressions of their thorns along her calloused fingertips. Their father had been a carpenter, his clothes always soiled by oil and dirt always clinging to his knees. Rani remembered his hands flung over the edge of the sink, nails black as her mother tried to scrub them clean on Sunday mornings before church.

  Both of them had died in a territory war gone bad. A large meth lab was being hidden behind the beauty supply shop near their home and when it caught fire it destroyed the entire city block. Members of the cartel had even set up a roadblock before fleeing, preventing ambulances and fire trucks from reaching the area and the wounded for almost forty minutes. By then the fire had jumped across the road, engulfing the small church where Rani had been baptized, the flames seething up power lines and the gnarled roots of trees, the heat destroying everything.

  They’d been at school when the fire started—itching in their cheap polyester uniforms and mulling over algebraic equations while their parent
s burned. Rani wondered where they’d been, which room, if they were together. Was their father sitting in his favorite chair by the window? Was their mother running a bath and stripping out of her factory uniform?

  And then there were the questions she could never bring herself to ask. The questions, that if answered, could strip death of its authority altogether. Because people are supposed to be afraid of dying. That’s what forces them to squeeze into narrow wooden pews on Sunday mornings, what gives them pause every night before they go to sleep.

  But what not even death could have anticipated is that losing someone you love is worse. Losing someone strips death of the fear, of the anticipation. Suddenly it’s not the end but the middle—the ambiguous point between life without someone and life with them. And Rani hung there, suspended by a grief she could never indulge in, not with Max and Breezy and Enzo still tethered to her, not with Nadia missing.

  And in Nadia’s absence it was the waiting that was all too familiar—that raw cleaving to every sound and every word and every movement. After the fire they’d waited all night in Doña Jara’s kitchen. She was Max’s history teacher and had bought furniture from their father. When news got to the school what had happened they released everyone early, except for the kids whose homes were now just a dark shadow over the city, the ashes already settling over the bay. When night fell they’d rode to Doña Jara’s house, all five of them crammed in her backseat while some American song sifted in through the car radio.

  Rani and Nadia had been resolved to wait in the kitchen, so close to the front door that they could reach the handle as soon as someone knocked, while Max and the twins huddled in front of the Dona’s TV. For eight hours they sat, no one saying a word—not to ask for a drink or where the bathroom was. They just sat, clinging to the night, waiting for it to unravel.

  And then it did.

  Rani felt a hand on the back of her knee, Enzo’s fingers gripping her pant leg. She searched his eyes, trying to keep her own steady as she waited for his lips to move. He hadn’t said a word since they’d landed in the states. And again, today wasn’t going to be the day.

  “One of us has to go find some food,” Max said, obviously trying to give Enzo a voice.

  “I’ll go,” Rani offered. She could still feel the weight of Enzo’s hand pressed to her as she pulled her sweater up around her mouth. She was the one who was supposed to be taking care of them. She was the one who had to hold it all together.

  The city streets were already beginning to warm with the car exhaust from all of the people heading to work but Rani’s face and hands still burned from the biting wind. She entered a large drugstore crowded with people and used the security cameras to map her route around the store.

  Stealing was an art Rani had perfected by age six when her neighborhood became monopolized by the cartel's storefronts and people started avoiding the barrio she'd grown up in. It wasn't an obligation the way it was now. Her parents would have beat her blind if they’d known. But when the people stopped coming so did the money and even though her parents never said a word in front of their children, Rani could see the way her father's eye grew dark, his skin pallid when they all sat down for dinner, Max stewing in his chair over having empanadas again.

  Nadia, racked with her own guilt, decided to get an after school job babysitting some of the neighborhood kids while their mothers took on extra shifts at the factory. It wasn’t until the fire, until after their parents were gone that being a mule suddenly became an option. She’d heard about women working for the cartel in exchange for their passports and money to feed their families and for a seventeen-year-old high school dropout with four younger siblings, the allure was too much.

  But when Rani was only twelve, their parents still alive and struggling, it was she who’d been willing to take the risk and instead of earning the money to buy the things they needed she took them instead.

  That first time she'd stumbled through the busy market, her stomach in a knot, she’d lingered between pant legs and ruffled skirts, waiting for a distracted shop keeper to turn his back. Then when he wasn’t looking she’d slip past and grab something small off one of the shelves—a figurine she could trade in the park for a stick of gum, a pack of cigarettes she could sell to the junkies on the street for a third of the price.

  Sometimes she’d wrap a few pears in the hem of her shirt or waddle home, her pockets full of candied nuts and dried fruit. Once, she managed to hide a pineapple in the waist of her coat, the sharp barbs biting into her skin until she could make it to the safety of her and Nadia’s tree house where she tore the flesh open with her fingers and gorged on it alone.

  The older she got, the bigger the risk. She couldn’t hide behind the legs of strangers, wading near the displays until a crowd bustled past and blocked her from view. But the trick, she’d learned, was just to stay calm. Making eye contact was collateral not a confession. As long as you act natural people will have no reason to think that you’ve done something wrong.

  Rani kept one hand in her pocket, carefully browsing with the other, her fingers lingering over a bag of chips, a package of wet wipes, and a metal tin of breath mints before reaching for a pack of gum and dropping it inside her coat.

  She mulled over two items at a time, one in each hand, before using the larger of the two to block the other from view as she slid it into her pocket—every step and swipe of her hand perfectly calculated. She paused next to the travel toothpaste, gaze shifting from the guy at the counter to the one standing right next to her, his finger raised at a brand of cigarettes along the wall. He leaned forward, blocking her from view and she slipped a few tubes into her coat.

  It took her ten minutes to go down each aisle and stumble back out with six smashed granola bars, three bags of nuts, four packs of beef jerky, a cinnamon roll, a bag of potato chips, and two packs of gum to help curb their hunger when they were out of food again.

  Outside the cold still billowed up from the streets, burning Rani’s skin as she made the trip back to the residential area on the other side of the train tracks. She kept her eyes low and fastened her arms around her waist, gripping the gaps where something might slip through.

  She watched her reflection in the dilapidated storefronts, not yet open for the day, her silhouette blurred in the dark sheen. And she watched the empty street too, examining every shadow and peering down every empty alleyway; checking the fogged windows of cars and counting the people moving from one side of the street to the other.

  At first she thought it was the cold—that it hadn’t just seeped into the landscape but the people, into their very bones. She wondered what it would have been like if they’d come in the spring, if the sun was enough to get the locals’ pulse’s drumming again, if it clung to their skin the way it did to hers when she was sprawled out in the tide.

  Those first few nights after wandering the streets, all huddled together in an empty bus stop or beneath the filigreed dome of a church, was when the city finally came alive. Rani remembered peering out from beneath her hood and counting the shadows as they bled down the street, stranger’s silhouettes cut only by the flashing headlights of police cars and city buses. Some disappeared down dark alleyways while others managed to slip into an empty building through a busted window or a door with faulty hinges. And some just curled up beneath a doorway, faces tucked into their coats, nightmares tugging at them.

  Something about the way they clung to themselves, shuddering there in the dark, reminded Rani of death. And that’s when she knew. This wasn’t the paradise her sister had painted for them every night back in Colombia, the bustling cityscape where people armed themselves with neckties and briefcases instead of guns and switchblades. And these homes they’d been sleeping in with their windows boarded up and the grass waist high hadn’t been abandoned by choice. They were bank owned now, and would decay, empty with no one to look after them, while the former inhabitants searched for a new place to live. This wasn’t paradise. This was just a differen
t kind of suffering.

  A soft scraping trickled down the alley to Rani’s left and she moved closer to the street, her foot almost slipping off the curb. A man slinked onto the sidewalk, his gait twisted and heavy as he stumbled after her. She clutched tight to her coat and quickened her pace, scanning the street for an open store, someone waiting for the bus—anything to sever her solitude and the danger that lingered there. But there was no one. There was only her.

  He grabbed her wrist, nails biting into her pulse. She kicked into a run, trying to wrench free but he was already pulling her toward the alley, his other hand tangled in her hair. He steeled her to the wall, his knees pressed hard to her thigh and she drew her head back trying to scream, but then he slapped a hand over her mouth. She parted her lips and bit down hard but he just reared back, a fist flying toward her face. She slumped to her knees, breathless, and he climbed on top of her.

  She writhed there between his legs, his face a blur as the pain in her skull reached its apex. That’s when she saw the glass, glinting there in the morning dew, almost invisible against the pavement. She tore her hand away, one arm still barred against her chest as the man ripped at her coat. She took the shard between her fingers, cold and slick against her skin, and gripped it tight, the severed edge cutting into her palm. And then she closed her eyes, blood trickling down her wrist as she aimed for his face. He howled, stumbling back on his hands, and she wriggled out from between his legs, the sharp edge still poised between her fingers.

  He lunged forward and she swung, catching him in the jaw, the glass tearing through his bottom lip. He stumbled to his knees, hands clutching his face, and she ran. Blood burned hot against her skin, spilling from her palms as her pulse quickened. It ran in a torrent down her coat sleeve as tubes of toothpaste and foil packages flew out from the waist of her shirt. She stumbled, trying to scoop them up and then she ran down the only street she recognized, the side of the house they’d been staying in coming into view.