Orphans of Paradise

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  They had dinner in the living room, footstools and serving trays refashioned into makeshift tables. It was quiet but the kind of quiet that settles slowly after a long rain—every sound flitting out in soft, melodic drips until there’s nothing left.

  Jax replayed his mother’s voice, first the way he’d anticipated it—hard, aloof, bitter. And then the way it had really been—soft, familiar, wanting. He’d tasted the tears, biting down hard as they painted his face. And then she’d told him to come to her.

  She’d read about Pascual, had seen the trial on the news. Brother testifying against brother, the ultimate betrayal—the type of newsroom fodder middle-America lived for. But it hadn’t worked. Pascual was still free. She’d seen that too.

  Now she and Jax were avoiding each other’s eyes, wafting in the impermanence of every moment. He watched the clock and she watched the window, time an ephemeral tick as shadows bled across the front lawn.

  He watched Rani as she stood by the window, night bleeding across her skin. The humid air stuck to Jax’s skin but she was born in this weather, made for it. She pulled her hair free from a bun, damp ends falling across her shoulder, the frigid Boston air swirling free.

  After dinner he sat on the edge of Rani’s bed watching as she thumbed through her sister’s clothes with a delicate hesitancy. There were night shirts, blouses, rolls of socks, and thin pastel underwear. But these weren’t just her sister’s things. These were the things Medina had given her. Because he loved her. Jax saw his Medina’s face, the echo of the tape burning his ears, and he closed his eyes, waiting for it to dissolve. He felt Rani’s stare and when he looked up she was sitting next to him on the bed.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  But he couldn’t meet her eyes. He couldn’t look away from that open suitcase, clothes hanging over the side. The sight of that gesture, so small and simple, it made him ache. He reached for Rani’s hand, pulling it into his lap and then he scanned the room—Rani’s shoes, the glass of water by the bed, the small crochet blanket draped over the pillow. It was bare but it didn’t feel transitory anymore. And he hadn’t meant to give her any of it. He just didn’t want to let her go.

  He could feel her waiting for him to say something. But he was afraid that she’d hear it in his voice. That she’d hear the fear in it.

  “I’ll be gone tomorrow,” he finally said. “Just for a little while.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I just have to do something for my mom.”

  He sat with her until she’d crawled under the sheets, eyes drawing closed, and then he stepped outside, letting the infinity of the landscape fill his lungs. It reminded Jax of the ocean, stars sinking down, the horizon dark and seamless. Night wasn’t a time of day there. Not like in the city—pierced by the sharp silhouettes of buildings and manmade lights. There the night was everywhere—a living thing whose hot breath slipped in through open windows and swaddled you in your sleep.

  The door shuddered open, spring squealing, and Jax’s mother sat down next to him on the porch steps. She was quiet for a long time, both of them just staring into the dark. Jax felt the rosary coiled tight in the pocket of his jeans and he pulled it out, handing it to his mother. He heard her exhale and then she reached for it.

  “You kept it,” she said. “I knew you would take good care of it.”

  Something sputtered in his chest, his heart in his throat. She’d known. She’d trusted him. But it hadn’t been him. It had been Rani. He remembered her disappearing out into the hall, the beads clinking against the door as she pulled it closed. She’d been torn to pieces running through that empty park, climbing out of her hospital window. And yet she’d hung onto it. She’d kept it safe even when she wasn’t.

  He felt his mother’s hand on his back, the beads wrapped around her fingers. She led them in soft, circling trails across his spine the way she used to and he closed his eyes. Just for a second. When he opened them again her eyes were red, translucent tears blinking across her skin. But she didn’t say another word. She didn’t tell him to stay.

  He passed the dark silhouettes of farming equipment and dilapidated storefronts, the horizon receding on his right as he reached the motel. The sign was dimmed, the 24-hour moniker apparently null and void. The room was on the second floor and he slid in the key, freeing the door with a crack. Dust billowed out, the collective exhale of every former tenant rushing his lungs at once. He coughed, trying to muffle the sound. Then he slipped inside and flipped on the light.

  The room was every shade of rust, sordid hues climbing every surface. It was dull, dingy, a three-dimensional still of every motel room he’d ever seen. All it was missing were the mules sitting on the edge of the bed. The faux wood paneled walls, the dust covered mirror. These were the last things some of them had seen, these graveyards the very thing they’d been running from, that made them start trafficking in the first place. And in the end, as they crawled to the edge of the bed, moist sheets sticking to their skin, or as they were slid into the base of the tub, sinking down, water rising, it was that very thing that had swallowed them whole.

  Jax clicked the light off again and moved to the far side of the room, crouching between the bed and the wall. The carpet smelled like dog shampoo and pest killer. He held tight to his knees, muscles tensed, and he waited.

  Headlights danced along the curtains, flashing there for just a second before being pulled down the road. He counted them—two, three, five. Almost an hour passed. He felt the gun burning and cold in the waist of his pants. He pulled it free, fingers gripping the handle, and then the door clicked open.

  The light flicked on and Jax shrunk, pulse driving into his ears. He heard something slide down to the floor, shoes being kicked against the wall. Pascual moved to the foot of the bed, a hand grazing the comforter, sending a wide dimple along the mattress. He sat there, shoulders rolled forward, elbows resting on his knees. His breaths were hard and heavy, the bed shuddering.

  Jax wondered if he’d driven through the night, if he’d slept at all in the past couple of days. He watched his brother, the silence rippling off his skin. And even though Jax was there he was just an observer and in that moment he realized that he’d never seen his brother alone. There was always Jax lingering nearby, Chavo following after him, Melissa tucked under his arm, and their mother, ever-present and wafting like a shadow. But now there was no one and he was alone.

  Jax rose to his feet and Pascual’s eyes flashed to the dark sheen of the television set, to Jax’s grainy outline beneath the dust. He watched him, still and quiet, and for the first time Jax knew exactly what his brother was thinking. That she wasn’t coming. That their mother wasn’t coming.

  A long breath cut through his nose. He looked at the floor. “Is this what she wants?” he said.

  Jax didn’t speak. He couldn’t. He thought about sleeping under that lifeguard stand, frozen and numb, winter a loud, invisible thing that existed only in his lungs, only when he was holding his mother’s letter, her words on his lips. He thought she’d hated him. His mother. His shadow. His everything. And it made him feel like he didn’t exist. Like he shouldn’t.

  “Then do it,” Pascual said, finding Jax’s eyes again in the television set.

  He tried to see him, that boy dressed in blood at the bottom of that hill, that thick, bristling shadow hanging over Rani in the dark. He tried to see the pieces of a persona, of a man who deserved to be dead. He’d done it before. He’d made that choice before. And he’d learned that it didn’t matter whether you were right or wrong, better or worse. All that mattered was whether or not you could live with the burden. With the truth. And Jax had been doing it for years.

  Jax held the gun steady, his reflection small and warped within the screen. He watched himself take a step forward and then another. He watched his hands grip the gun. He watched himself shaking, trying to shed the fear. And then he watched his brother’s eyes in the dull glint of the television set, watched them
swell, then contract. Jax pulled the trigger and then he watched his brother fold onto the floor, left there like a hundred other mules, dreams settling like ash at the base of their stomachs.

  Chapter 63

  Rani

  Rani woke to her pulse, hard and writhing inside her. It started in the balls of her feet before climbing every inch of her and settling between her ears. She sat up, searching the window. It was still dark but she felt the room rising up around her—small wooden dresser topped with a stained glass lamp, her sister's clothes strewn across the floor, the clean sheets, wood paneled walls lined with the acrylic silhouettes of Christ.

  The room was bare but she cleaved to it. She heard the soft thrum of crickets and she wondered what sort of sounds were spilling in from Veronica’s window just then, or Camilla’s, or Sophie’s. They’d left them in a rush, bags thrown into the back of a used car they’d never seen before, in the middle of the night. Julian was supposed to move the others after he finished gathering their families’ visas and coordinating their flights. But Medina was gone and it would take time.

  Rani didn’t know where they were going or even where they were sleeping at that very moment. Camilla had said she’d call. When she got somewhere safe, when her mother finally arrived, she’d let them know they were ok. But there was nothing. Not yet. Even though the drive had taken them almost three days.

  Rani had sat in the passenger seat, map open across her lap as Jax traced over the lines curving along her thigh, highway markers puckered over her knee. He’d pressed them flat, asked her to signal the next exit, his hand lingering against her leg as he drove. When they reached the state line it was dark. Nadia and Max were sprawled out across the back seat, the twins curled up in the foot space—everyone’s lungs synchronized in a deep sleep.

  Jax was straight against the seat, his fingers drumming along the top of the steering wheel, anxious. Rani’d reached for him, holding him steady as they tore closer and then the headlights swelled over his mother’s front door. She remembered the look on his face. The relief. The fear. But then a shadow stepped out onto the front porch, his mother’s hands gripping her skirt as they drove up.

  Jax killed the engine, the still quiet wrestling the rest of them from their sleep. And then he got out of the car, pieces of him unraveling as he made his way up those porch steps.

  For the past eight hours Rani tried not to feel like an intruder. Even though she was. She was taking from them and disrupting their lives and she hadn’t come alone. There were five of them, everyone a bystander to that awful, strange thing that had bloomed between her and Jax. That thing she still didn’t understand but that she knew she didn’t want to lose. Couldn’t lose. So they’d traveled for days, abandoning whatever plans they’d had before, whatever hopes, and trusting in something else. Something that made it easier for Rani to pretend she was whole.

  Rani’s fingers found the window. It was dark but she could sense the slow crawl of the landscape—the breeze the only thing cutting into that wide open sky. It was what they'd wanted, what they'd been waiting for.

  But something about it still felt exposed. She wanted to be out there, unfurling with the morning, but she was still afraid. She thought about the darkness. All of it. Everything it had torn from her, pressed hard into her skin. And as she caught sight of the sun creeping over the horizon, all she wanted was to see was that darkness ripped open, ripped into nothing.

  She saw something moving, a shadow near the trees. Jax was near the edge of the property and when she saw him standing there, she crawled out of bed. She let the porch light through the screen door lead her through the house and then she was standing at the door.

  He was still and she wanted him to turn around, to tell her it was safe out there, that it was safe to go to him. But then she saw the first beats of the sun, the red horizon line rising from Jax’s feet, and she took off running.

  At the sound of her footsteps Jax turned, dark red shadows carving into his face. And he looked like he had that first night on the beach, that morning in her doorway holding Nadia’s clothes. Cold and still. Like winter.

  Rani reached for him. “Jax?”

  He stared at the ground.

  “Jax. What…?” But then she saw his eyes and she stopped. She stood there waiting for him to look at her, but he was frozen. “Jax, I’m s—”

  “Don’t.”

  His eyes swirled with a dull vacancy, the blood red morning still climbing him.

  “But you—”

  He gripped her arms, pulled her close. “Rani…”

  And he didn’t let her apologize. He didn’t let her say another word. He just held her, her face resting against his heartbeat until she was swollen with it.

  “Rani.”

  She looked up at him, watching his eyes. She watched the pale ripple of clouds, the horizon curling beneath their feet. Beats of sunlight trapped in every blink.

  “It’s over,” he said.

  And then he kissed her. A long, sad kiss that tasted like death. That tasted like hope. His lips pressed hard against her skin, though neither of them blinked, and suddenly the sky was everywhere.

  Also by Laekan Zea Kemp

  The Things They Didn’t Bury

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