A Fierce and Subtle Poison

by Samantha Mabry

  “What is this?” I asked, holding the slips of paper between us. “How do you know my name?”

  The girl tilted her head as if she’d misheard me. “Everyone knows your name.”

  “Not everyone knows what room I stay in.”

  “Yes, they do. It’s the haunted one.”

  I focused on the girl’s eyes, which now appeared so black that they reminded me of the shiny jet stones of a brooch my mother had worn to my grandmother’s—my dad’s mother’s—funeral. She’d referred to it as her “mourning jewelry.”

  The girl—Isabel, I now remembered the note had said—was examining me, too, and I could tell by the way her lips were pursed that she wasn’t completely convinced she liked what she saw.

  I flicked at her last note. “Why did you call her this?”

  “Call her what?”

  “The disappeared girl.”

  “I overheard the señora next door say that.” Isabel still hadn’t taken her eyes from mine. “She was talking to one of our neighbors about a girl named Marisol. She said she’d gone missing and that a boy named Lucas found her on the beach.”

  “How do you know I know a girl named Marisol?”

  “Because the other night I heard the two of you joking about trying to jump over the wall of my house.” She paused for a beat. “My cursed house.”

  I choked out a laugh.

  “You’re kidding, right? How about on the night before Marisol and I were joking outside your house, you pelted me in the face with rocks?”

  Isabel finally broke eye contact. Her thin lips twisted into a sneer as she reached up to tug at the hood of her sweatshirt.

  “You were bothering me,” she muttered.

  “Bothering you? This is why you asked me to come here? To rub salt in my wounds and tell me that I’ve been bothering you?”

  “It’s not like you’re the first couple to ever go down there.” Isabel threw out her hand, gesturing toward the stone wall on the far end of the courtyard. “I’m tired of being subjected to everyone’s amorous encounters. I . . . ”

  Her mouth slammed shut as if she were trying to catch whatever words were going to fall out of it next, but it wouldn’t have mattered because she’d pretty much already landed hard onto my wrong side.

  Isabel thought for a moment and changed her course. “I’m sorry. Okay? I wanted you to come so I could apologize. I was playing tricks before—with the other letters, and the stones. I realize now it was all in such poor taste, considering all that’s happened to you recently.”

  “All that’s happened,” I echoed. “Marisol is dead.”

  It was the first time I’d said those words out loud. In the next instant, my left temple burst with pain, and white light flooded my vision. I had to slam my eyes shut and press my fingers hard into my forehead just to keep my balance.

  “You’re not well,” I heard Isabel say.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. “But if you wanted to apologize, there are better ways. You could have just written I’m sorry on one of your cards. You could have knocked on my door. You didn’t have to formally request my presence and make me dive in here like an idiot.”

  “It’s not that simple, actually.”

  The pain in my head eased enough so that I could peer at Isabel through narrowed eyes. She’d retreated away from me, dissolving herself into the shadows cast off by a canopy of leaves.

  She was clearly so strange. All this time cooped up in this house had really taken a toll on her ability to act like a normal human being.

  “Why are you hiding?”

  She paused and threw her shoulders back. “I’m not.”

  What a terrible liar Isabel Ford was. Even with my head throbbing and thoughts turning about as smoothly as rusted-over gears, I could see she was trying to give off a casual confidence through the feigned conviction in her stance and in her voice. I’d just done almost the exact same thing at Ruben’s house with Celia.

  “This is the second time I’ve come here and made a fool of myself because of you.”

  She didn’t respond, so I went on. “You knocked over that pot yesterday, right?”

  Still, silence.

  “Right?”

  Her reply was maddeningly simple: a shrug and an uptick of her chin that meant yes.

  “What for?”

  Isabel scowled; her brief façade of cool confidence fractured. She ran a hand roughly across her cheek and her chin. It may have been a trick of the light or my unreliable vision, but her nail beds appeared black, as if her fingers had been recently slammed in a car door.

  “Like I said, it was a gag. Just a stupid prank. I didn’t think you’d actually come.”

  Again: an obvious lie, but she didn’t leave any time for me to point it out before she went on.

  “I needed to get you.” Her first finger emerged from the cuff of her sweatshirt to point at me. “To come here.” She pointed at her feet. “Leaving the house for long stretches of time is not in my best interest. I’m sick. That’s why I . . . hide.”

  “So, you’re contagious?”

  She frowned. “That’s not the way I’d describe my condition, no.”

  “How would you describe your condition then?”

  Isabel didn’t respond. Instead, her eyes landed on my arms, which were burning from my wrists to the creases of my elbows, and then traveled to the plants around us that pulsed as if held together by a singular heart. A wasp, possibly the same one that had been buzzing around my ear earlier, dipped and weaved in between where she and I were standing. When it flew roughly an inch from her face, Isabel turned her chin slightly in its direction. She blew out as if extinguishing a candle flame. For a split-second the wasp hovered in the air. Then it dropped dead to the ground.

  Ten

  I DON’T KNOW how many seconds I watched that wasp lie motionless on the bricks. But I do know I said something small and meek—like, oh—before I tripped over my own feet to get to the front gate and start to fumble with the latches. A splinter wedged itself underneath my middle fingernail, and I swallowed that new burst of pain. My skin was crawling, and my fingers were trembling to the point that I wanted to tear my useless arms from my shoulders.

  “I really am sorry about that rash,” I heard Isabel call out from behind me. “The itch should fade in a little while, and any blisters should heal by morning.”

  I pretended that I didn’t hear her. After several desperate seconds, I triumphed over the latches, scrambled through the gate, and then slammed it shut behind me. I’d made it only a few houses down Calle Sol before pain gripped my head again. I braced myself against the cement wall of Señora Garcia’s courtyard. Soon, something light and cool began to fall on my arms and the back of my neck. It had started drizzling again, thank God.

  By some miracle, I made it back to my room without throwing up in the middle of the street. Once there, I stripped my sweat-soaked shirt off, ran into the bathroom, and turned on the tap. I stuck my face under the running water and took a series of large, desperate gulps. Once I’d had my fill, I let the cold water run over the inflamed skin of my arms and gasped with relief.

  As the water ran, I checked my face in the mirror. I looked like shit. My eyes were bloodshot; the strands of my hair had formed into greasy tangles, and despite all I’d just drunk, my lips were dry and cracking.

  There was a new loop going through my head: Isabel told me she was sick. There was a wasp. It was alive. She blew on it. It died. I panicked. Isabel told me she was sick . . .

  My arms went numb from the cold. I turned off the tap, threw a couple of aspirin down my throat, went into my room, and fell onto my bed.

  I must have left the television on earlier because I could hear it buzzing in the background. The meteorologist was talking about the oncoming storm. I peeked to see her pointing at a map of the Atlantic, trying to predict the trajectory of a giant yellow swirl.

  Almost immediately, the room started to spin along with the storm. I buried my face in
to the sheets and squeezed my eyes shut. That was how I managed to force myself to sleep.

  I woke up late the next morning to the sound of someone banging on my door. Before I opened it, I looked down at my forearms. The bumps were gone, and I wondered if I’d imagined them there in the first place. All that remained, along with a faint itch, were pink blotches, like uneven stripes around both wrists.

  Isabel told me she was sick. There was a wasp. It was alive. She blew on it. It died. I panicked. Isabel told me she was sick . . .

  “Lucas!”

  I finally flung the door open, and there was Rico, bleary-eyed and frantic.

  Behind him the sky was swirling into a thick, dark cream. It was gray, yet it glowed. A cool wind whipped through the courtyard, causing the leaves of the palm trees to slap against each other. There was no rain, not yet, but there would be soon.

  The first drops would hit full and fat. The gray sky would burst orange, and the birds would abandon their nests on beaches. Once the winds picked up, the raindrops would fly in needles cutting sideways through the sky.

  It was hurricane weather.

  Rico saw where my gaze was directed and turned his head. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just some cat 3. It’ll probably pass to the south and maybe hit Ponce later this afternoon.”

  Irene had only been a category 1, but I’ll never forget the faint click-tap when the power went out in the hotel, and how for hours all I could hear was the wail of the storm sirens and the roaring wind. There was a point when that wind shook the glass of the patio doors to my room so violently they shattered. My cheek is still marked with a faint scar from a shard of glass that flew across it. That morning, I had run to my dad’s room, watching the palm trees in the courtyard struggle to stay rooted and fighting a wild wind determined to either knock me flat or suck me into the sky.

  After the storm had passed everything was quiet. Wet palm fronds ripped from their trees were on everything: cars, roofs, sidewalks, power lines. The stray cats were hiding and didn’t come out for days. One person died. He was probably a surfer; they never heeded warnings. Other than that, the old walled city survived to open its windows to the sea again, like it had done hundreds of times before.

  “Lucas, listen,” Rico said, shoving me on the shoulder and snapping me out of the memory. “Celia’s gone.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Celia,” he repeated. “She wasn’t in her bed this morning. Her family thinks she wandered off to search for Marisol. Ruben said she went a little nuts last night, kept asking everyone why they weren’t trying to find her. They called the cops, but until the storm comes I’m taking my scooter out to see if I can find her. Maybe you can take one of your dad’s cars?”

  I nodded but knew it wasn’t a possibility. What I could do was slip a taxi driver a few twenties and tell him to drive me around for a while.

  After throwing on some clean clothes, I flew from my room, down the stairs, and out the front door to hail a cab from the stand across the street from the hotel. Rico could handle the narrower cobbled streets of Old San Juan by himself on his scooter, so I had the driver take me a couple of miles out so I could work from the outlying districts back into the city center.

  The sky was darkening, growing more hateful by the second, and the rain was falling down in sheets. People were leaning out windows, snapping their shutters closed, preparing to stay in and brace for the onslaught.

  My cab was only about a mile and a half away from the convent when the driver stopped and told me I was out of luck.

  “La tormenta!” he said, leaning forward to knock his knuckles on the windshield.

  I pulled out all the cash I had and urged him on, telling him in broken Spanish that he was used to driving in the rain, that it rained todos los días here. I needed to find a little girl, una chica desaparecida, didn’t he understand?

  He didn’t, apparently.

  I climbed out of the cab. The wind instantly clung to the folds of my wet clothes and tried to pull me both off and to the ground. Trudging down the street, I passed shuttered buildings and pictured the people inside them. On the off chance they had power, they might be wrestling with rabbit-ear antennas, struggling to get TV reception. If they didn’t have power, they were likely playing cards or dominoes by candlelight around the dining room table.

  It was crazy to be out—a total gringo move. I had to get back to the hotel.

  I’d just slogged around a corner when I saw her, through the slanting rain: only a slice of yellow at the far end of an alley, but that was enough. That yellow belonged to a dress I’d run my fingers across, gripped, and pulled at.

  “Marisol!” The storm swallowed my cry.

  Despite the dark water swirling around my ankles and the persistent winds beating me down, I pulled myself down the alley in her direction. Ten feet ahead, the butter-colored fabric of Marisol’s dress fluttered once more, and I watched it, along with the heel of one of her bare feet, vanish around a corner.

  I pushed forward, and seconds later emerged from the alley into the empty Plaza de Armas. On a normal day, it would be full of locals going about their lives and tourists posing for pictures. Now, the only vaguely human figures around were the four gleaming white statues—one representing each season of the year—that guarded its central fountain. On the opposite side of the plaza from where I was standing, a dim yellow floodlight appeared to blink as the rain came down in front of it. The twitching fabric of a dress was an illusion caused by water and light.

  Grief was a strange thing, bewitching and bewildering. It had convinced both Celia and I that we could defeat a hurricane and track down a phantom.

  My muscles were shot, torn and trembling. The wind was hitting my head so hard, I couldn’t think. It was time to go home. I leaned into the wind and began to march through the ankle-deep water. When I reached edge of the plaza, I turned. Just to make sure. It was still empty; the yellow floodlight still blinked.

  Eleven

  NO NEW NOTE was waiting for me when I returned to the convent, thank God. I wasn’t in any condition—physical or mental—to deal with that right then, but I hadn’t even closed my door before my dad rushed up.

  “Lucas?” He braced himself against the frame of my open door as he looked me up and down, seeing for the second time in as many days that I was drenched. “I wanted to make sure you were alright. I checked earlier, but you weren’t here.”

  “I got caught in the storm.” I wiped the water from my eyes. “It took me a while to get back.”

  I diverted my gaze from his and noticed that even while riding out a major meteorological event, my dad was dressed to impress. The creases in his suit pants were sharp, and his shirt collar was perfectly starched. Even the brown leather of his shoes shone.

  “I left you a message saying I’d come back early and to check in with me. Did you not get it?”

  Before I could answer, wind and spray tore through the courtyard, causing my dad to check his balance.

  “I didn’t get it.” I latched on to my dad’s arm to steady him. “I just got back.”

  “Yes, you mentioned that,” he replied without looking me in the eye. “I was worried about you. Tell you what—why don’t you change into some dry clothes then and have dinner with me? I’ll order food and tell you about all you missed in Rincón.”

  I gathered that last bit was an attempt at a joke, so I forced a smile as I tried to come up with a reason to refuse his invitation. Aside from our breakfasts, we rarely spent time together; he was either holed up in his room on the phone or out on the road. The fact that he’d practically been waiting at my doorstep meant he’d been genuinely worried.

  “Luke?”

  “Sure,” I said, snapping to. “I’ll be there in a minute. You didn’t get a message, did you? About Celia Reyes?”

  My dad shook his head. “No. Is this a friend of yours?”

  She’s a child! She’s missing! How could he have not heard about this?


  I changed clothes, shoved my collection of notes into the back pocket of a dry pair of jeans, and fought the wind around the mezzanine to my dad’s room. As if this was any other early evening, he was enjoying a glass of red wine. He’d also set the television to the cable channel that plays classical music and was picking from various plates containing cheese, fruit, tiny fried smelts, and a Spanish potato omelet. I sat down and forced myself to eat, even though I wasn’t hungry. Under the table my knee bounced uncontrollably as I thought of Celia somewhere out in this weather.

  As the rain and branches of trees pummeled the windows, I half-listened while my dad told me about his plan to build a massive Italian villa–style resort on the hills overlooking the beach in Rincón. His firm had already bought the land, and he’d gone out there to meet with the architects and engineers who’d design and construct the place. He envisioned luxury bungalows, a world-class spa, and a series of sparkling wading pools with elaborate fountains made from Venetian marble.

  I envisioned a giant blot on a perfect stretch of beach.

  “Doesn’t that seem excessive?” I asked.

  My dad peered at me across the table as if he hadn’t heard me right.

  I clarified: “I thought the reason people love going to Rincón is because it’s semi-deserted.”

  “Don’t be so romantic,” he said after a sip of wine. “People like going where people like me tell them they like going. Regardless, that’s where you and I’ll spend next summer. The resort won’t be entirely finished of course, but they’ve promised to have a couple of the bungalows done in time.”

  “We’ve never lived on-site like that before. We’ve always just stayed here. I’ve gotten used to it.”

  “Well, that’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about.” He threw a sliver of white cheese into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Last month we sold the St. Lucia to developers. Next winter they’re going to close it, tear it down, and start building something new in its place.”