by Sara Faring
I set down the cup I’ve been cradling—the tea inside has long lost its heat. “But there’s no reason for little girls their age to lie about this.”
“Oh, my dear,” says Molina. “That is beside the point, though of course there is. These little girls are practically ignored at home. The school is, in a sense, their stage.”
“You can’t possibly believe they would invent a story this outrageous for the sake of gaining attention,” I say, picking up my cool cup again with tremulous hands.
Mole sips some tea without answering, and I stare out at the blank slate of ice, ominous and sickly green at this moment. I swear it looms higher than usual, and it feels like some gigantic god has turned its pallid cheek to us here on this rock. “I don’t know,” replies Mole.
I lean on my elbows. “Shouldn’t the sick girls be sent home before whatever is happening gets worse?”
“Well, now that you—” Mole’s eyes bulge, and she dips toward her plate, her hands rushing to her throat as if she’s choking. She wheezes; she can’t take in any air—it’s plain as day. But she hasn’t taken a bite of cake. Is it the wind? Or the cold, closing her throat and bringing on a form of asthma? Her eyeballs swell, as if they could pop.
Yesi and I rush to help, and my hands encircle her brittle torso when she self-corrects and straightens. Cracking her neck, bone by bone. My hands snap away from her shoulders, which feel so warm beneath my fingertips now. And she turns, inspecting me with chilly disdain—an unfamiliar, confident expression I’ve never seen on her at all.
“No need to blow this out of proportion,” she says in a monotone so unlike her normal register. “The girls will move past their delusions if they are handled carefully, and their flu symptoms will pass with time, as Sara’s did.” She sets a hand on my wrist like a manacle, her skin searingly hot. “God forbid Carmela has to send home students during the first triumphant semester back at this place—that would ruin the school for the rest of time. She’ll bring in a city doctor now. A psychiatrist, too, to address the girls’ fears. And I’m sure she’s called their parents. Framing the situation more lightly, of course, but…” She shrugs with a smug and distant look on her face and releases my hand. I’m left with a welt the size of a fat roach. “The stupid little bitch,” she mutters to herself, pushing back her chair with a discordant scrape, abandoning her plate on the table, and strutting inside.
I stare openmouthed at her back, but Yesi looks only a touch dazed and bewildered.
“Mole’s right,” she says to me, crossing her arms haughtily. “The girls will survive. Now stop blathering on before you upset them even more.”
* * *
I stamp back through the stone hallway, furious that showing concern for the girls has earned me only contempt from high priestess Yesi. I feel it: Even though I’ve tried to follow the house’s absurd rules, it is rotting around me, poisoning the bonds within and making me feel rootless once more. The tenth girl’s advice floods my mind, sweet and acid-edged: I can still leave this place behind. The city might not be safe, but I can reinvent myself elsewhere.
I toy with the tempting idea of escape as I simmer alone throughout dinner, swallowing soggy string beans and bland humps of beef that seem a lifetime away from the delectable feasts we once enjoyed. It should come as no surprise that Yesi and I don’t speak once, but I do listen idly as the girls chatter.
Gisella joins the table for dessert, still pale, yet relishing her plate of flan with a new book in her lap. She’s wrapped in a large coat, her hair released from its braids in gorgeous curls. I’m so unexpectedly relieved by her return that I can’t help but smile at her, and she waves at me, brightening—and dare I say, with that gesture, my instinct to flee begins to settle into a manageable impulse. The adult in me is willing to admit that not every relationship I have in this house is withering.
As we wrap up the meal, Dom grins at me from the end of the table—all warmth and earnestness. I look away—concerned Yesi will spot me eyeing the dark prince as she sparkles over her pot of custard next to me. But then I remember words she once said to me: If you can survive living in a haunted house … you can come to know all the oddest little nooks in yourself.
Perhaps I was wrong to promise the high priestess I would stay away from Dom. She of all people knows there are many hidden nooks in a person, most of them obscured from view. She doesn’t know him, so she cannot know that he does not mirror my every thought, as she claimed. No—his hidden kindness has simply unlocked forgotten doors inside me, surprising the both of us with what lies behind them. When I have shown him those dark corners of myself, he views me not with Yesi’s derision but with an inexplicable wonder, like I’m a creature too complex to understand but too special for him not to accept any bit of me offered forth, with gratitude.
No, not all my bonds in this place have been poisoned.
I catch Dom’s eyes and smile back at him.
One thing is clear: I cannot leave this godless rock just yet.
16
ANGEL: 2020–1600
Before the house dinner, I find Charon in his cloud cottage, thumbing glumly through a blank cloud book.
“It’s you,” he says, hardly glancing up. “My fair-weather friend. Do you only talk to me when you want to pump me for info? Or do you need help bending your morals today? Or perhaps you’d like me to massage your conscience like a good little geisha?”
“I know you saw her,” I say, ignoring him. “You must have seen her. The tenth little girl. Just now. She dove out of the window.” Bored, he continues paging through the book. “She’s about the same age as the others, but she’s wearing this white gown. She’s got black hair, and—”
“Are you cracked, kid?” he asks. “You couldn’t have seen a tenth little girl. You’re losing it.”
“I saw her, and she exists. As much as you or I exist. You yourself told me she hid here! And Mavi’s seen her—”
“Oh, so that’s what you need help justifying today—screwing someone in the house with your Ken doll dick.”
Like a hot Japanese blade through pig fat.
“Screw you, Charon.”
He tsks me. “Everyone has their motivations, fears, and desires, but Jesus, yours are a trip. You’re wasting your goddamned time messing with that little English teacher.”
“I’m not messing with her. We’re friends.”
“Friends. Stop it, kid. Don’t be a goddamned fool. You know how this works. Don’t make me lay it out for you. She’s supposed to fall in love with the son. Get her heart broken. Funnel it into her teaching and become a bitter-ass bitch. She’s just that kind of girl. You know girls like her. We all know girls like her. You’re not special. She’s not connecting with you because you’re different. She thinks you’re someone you’re not. She’ll never meet the real you. She’ll never know the real you. Got it?”
“That’s not true.” I fight the tremors overwhelming me. She did miss our last meeting. “You’re lying to me. Again. Just like you lied about feeding not hurting them.” He scoffs, frowns, wags his open book in the air—the curmudgeonly old man scattering pigeons. “Just like you lie about not knowing anything else about the tenth girl,” I continue. “Just like you lie about who knows what else.”
“You presumptuous little fuck,” he says, snapping the book shut so that it evaporates. “I’m not lying now, for your goddamn record, but that doesn’t mean I have any responsibility to tell you the truth. Just like you don’t have any responsibility to tell her the truth.” He smirks. “Friends forever, right?”
I don’t reply.
“Let me guess: You keep her around because you want her to one day absolve you of what you’ve done, over a heartfelt little conversation with two cups of tea in front of a crackling fire.” He wiggles his fingers, imitating the flames and sending an involuntary chill through me, as I wonder how much he’s seen and how much he knows. “But no one in the house will absolve you. No one in the world can absolve you, alive or
dead. We carry what we’ve done forever. And any darkness inside you stemming from those choices is yours and yours alone, until the end of time. Don’t foist it on anyone else. Learn to live with it. Ride the tides of darkness.”
He’s wrong—he has to be wrong. I’m not trying to rope some poor sucker into sharing the burden of darkness inside me. How could I be if I haven’t even told Mavi who I am? If I haven’t told her about Mama, about Rob? If I haven’t told her about what I’ve done?
“Piss off, Charon,” I say, but I’m the one who storms out of the cloud house as he sits snugly in his seat.
When I drift back to the house in time to pick up Dom for dinner, I’m the one who’s gutted—I’m the one who’s pulled under by the swell of black below the floating crust of cloud.
* * *
Mavi stares into her plate at dinner, twirling strands of hair between her fingers. I hate myself for it, but there’s no stopping the flood of relief and reassurance I feel in seeing her again. I periodically half wave to catch her eye, but try as I might, I can’t transmit any kind of message across her wall of chestnut hair, not from my chair of honor next to Carmela (who fingers her steak knife as if she’s going to wedge it between my knuckles if I so much as breathe too loud). I finally catch her smiling at me as Dr. Molina rises to lead everyone to their rooms.
Mavi strays at the back of the group. I follow her, waiting for a lively uptick in the staff discussion about butchering methods, and I pull her into a sitting room at random. She falls into me.
“This wasn’t your brightest idea,” she says, face flushed, craning her neck in the direction of the fading chatter.
“Desperate times,” I say as I shut the wooden door behind us. “Where have you been?”
She presses herself against the splotchy silk wall. “With the girls. People have been dropping right and left.”
I stare back at her blankly, and she looks at me as if I’ve had a lobotomy. “Mrs. Hawk, of course”—speaking of lobotomies—“and Lamb’s heart attack, Michelle and Gisella…”
We hear some muted whispering behind the door, and her eyes tear away from me, fearful.
“Don’t worry,” I say, gripping the knob. “They can’t hear us.”
She tucks her long hair behind her ears. “You’ve witnessed Morency’s Olympic hearing. Second only to her wrath. And did you forget that mixed-gender discussions lead to artificial insemination and death in this house?” she says, and though I know she means it as a joke, there isn’t a hint of humor left in her voice.
“Listen,” I say. “I saw her. The tenth little girl. The girl from your waking nightmare. She came to my room when she thought I was napping earlier.”
Her posture stiffens. “You’re kidding.”
“Long black hair, wearing a stained gown?”
Her fingers fly to her throat. “What did she say to you?”
I rub my hands together, shaping my thoughts into words—why hadn’t I considered exactly what to say earlier? It’s an opportunity to help her, to be useful by injecting any little tidbit I can, but I’m tongue-tied. “She told me to look out for the girls,” I say. “She told me they are visited at night by spirits.”
Mavi takes my forearm with her hand and grips it hard. Dom’s skin blazes under her touch, a sensation so intense that I am convinced it’s my own skin. “What else?”
“Nothing else,” I say awkwardly. I can’t exactly reveal the girl’s sole pronouncement—she ran off because I’m an evil remnant, Mav.
“I can’t believe she came to you, too,” she whispers back. “They’re here, then. The Others. Michelle told me that she feels as if she’s being watched. Harassed while she sleeps.”
Michelle must have it worst of all now. I remember that she’s Mavi’s pet: the round-faced, shy one, with kind and calm green eyes. My brow wrinkles.
“And now Gisella’s on about the same—men touching her, Dom. It’s sick. Obviously, at first, I thought about abuse, but I can’t picture anyone here committing such an atrocity.” Her jaw sets. “I’m done hypothesizing. I’m going to sneak over to the girls’ rooms tonight—I have it on good authority from Mole that your mother and Morency will be gone by midnight. They’ve been gone by then every evening with Sara.” She looks up at me, eyes raw and red. “We need to solve this, Dom. Not only for the sake of the girls, but—” She stops, nibbles hard on her wine-colored lip. “You should know something. I can’t just leave this place.”
I clear my throat. “What?”
“I can’t go back to Buenos Aires.”
I stare at her in silence.
“My mother was arrested by the military government,” she whispers, biting a fingernail.
I know this, of course, but I let sympathy wash over my eyes. I pull her deeper into the sitting room, and I reply evenly and without judgment. “What happened?”
And to my surprise, she tells me, in hushed tones.
* * *
They arrived before dinner: three men in suits and a woman who smiled at me with teeth as rectangular and perfect as Carmela’s when I answered the apartment door. I had been reading Austen—forced upon me by my mother until I learned to love her—on the worn sofa in our living room. I was meant to be in the kitchen, helping my mother cook dinner. Being a good daughter, as far as I knew what that is.
“Is your mother in?” the woman asked, pressing on the door with a scrape of her nails. Her hair was too shiny to be real, as were her teeth. I could hear my mother’s criticism in my head: Why would people buy fake versions of these body parts unless they wanted to hide themselves to a terrifying degree?
I hesitated to answer her. It wasn’t that strangers rarely came by the apartment—they did—but they rarely came by in polished, polite groups who deigned to inquire if Mother was home. I felt a painful burst deep in my gut. “No,” I said, standing taller. She still towered over me.
“We know she’s here, Margarita Victoria, and we’ll come inside either way,” the woman said with a smile that cut. Unendurable pressure built inside my head as I heard faint frying noises from the kitchen. “It’s time. Why don’t you let her know?”
My ears popped. It wasn’t time. It wasn’t time. It was never time. I trudged inside, not feeling my legs, only their eyes on my back. In the kitchen, my mother was coating chicken cutlets in bread crumbs to fry while humming to herself. This I could have told you even without seeing her. Milanesas, my favorite meal as a child. I could smell the oil heating in the pan.
“Who is it, mi amor?”
“Three men and a woman,” I whispered. “In suits.”
I will never forget how the blood drained from her face. I might have been the last person to witness her in the full bloom of health before that moment. For all her shows of strength and defiance, for all the times she’d hosted those she called “cousins” mere paces from my bed, she still feared the military setting foot in the space she shared with me.
“Did you speak to them?” she asked.
In my silence, she had her answer. She wrapped her fingers around my shoulders.
“Mavi, what did they say to you?”
“They know you’re here,” I said, panic working its nailed grip to my throat. “They know.” My eyes filled with tears, acidic and hot.
“They were civilized,” she said, as if that were some consolation. “Go now. Go to your abuela’s cupboard closet.” It had a false back, this cupboard closet, which led to an enormous hidden room in an adjacent apartment my mother had acquired in secret. The cousins’ room. My abuela was a hoarder, my mother said, and she kept piles of mildewed clothing and newspapers there until my abuelo noticed and snuck the piles out at midnight, blaming hungry rats the next morning.
“The cupboard?” I asked my mother in confirmation. “They’ll find me.”
She took me by the hand—or, that tender notch between palm and wrist—and held it firm. When I was on the cusp of adolescence, we’d rehearsed a routine many nights having to do with this cupboa
rd, the same cupboard the guerrillas hid inside. She told me that if she ever instructed me to hide there, I was to stay inside the closet for three hours after hearing no one. I was to proceed to my godmother’s apartment, taking the bus and speaking to no one. I had giggled at this at the time because she treated it half as motherly law and half as a zany game she had invented.
But in that moment, I was angry and terrified that this had come to pass.
“I am yours,” Mother whispered to me in that kitchen, holding me against her and reading my scalp with her fingers as if to memorize the feel of my head. As if that would be a consolation to us both. “You are mine. The color cannot be stripped out of us.” She kissed me firmly on the forehead, so firmly I felt her chapped lips might be imprinted there forever. I ran to the cupboard and locked myself inside, pushing aside a forgotten bundle of newspapers. Confused, terrified. Counting seconds in my head at a breakneck pace. I didn’t hear anything happen. I thought she must have evaporated. I don’t think they hurt her, at least not there. Not inside our building, where the neighbors might have heard or seen.
Some part of me knew those were the last words she would ever speak to me. I was not a fool, even if I hoped and prayed every day that I might be wrong. I couldn’t make sense of her words for a long time; any other parent facing this situation might have said, I love you or Be strong, or some pale and desperate version of the two, poeticism—or should I say creativity alone—failing them in a time of unspeakable horror, which isn’t to say the standard powerful words fall flat in such a moment. What I mean to suggest is that she’d had the time or the foresight to rehearse final words. That was more difficult to forget.
How furious I was. At her, for the thoughtless risks she took, thinking them noble and high-minded. At them, for their brutality and lack of humanity and understanding for their people. At myself, for shutting myself away when she spoke to those cousins. For failing to act, but more so, for failing to educate myself, so that I could better understand what kinds of action deserved to be taken.
