A Fierce and Subtle Poison

by Samantha Mabry

  I looked up and saw Isabel, pacing, gnawing on the edge of a blackened thumbnail.

  “Please tell me you didn’t know about this,” I begged. “Because if you’re lying, this is finished. I’m leaving you here to haunt this place by yourself, and I’m going out to find Celia.”

  “No!” Isabel cried out. “I knew he was taking the girls, but I didn’t know he was trying to frame you for it. Lucas, I promise.”

  “Why Marisol, then?” I demanded. “Out of all the girls, why did you pick her?”

  Isabel faltered. “She had a wish to throw,” she said. “She had you.”

  The very next moment, Rico climbed through the open window and stumbled into the room.

  “Shit, man,” he chuckled. “I don’t remember that hole being so small.”

  Rico surveyed the room, but the moment he saw Isabel, he recoiled, his fingers flying up to grasp to his St. Anthony medallion.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Have you seen the news?” I asked.

  “I woke up. I came here,” Rico replied flatly. He jabbed the pointer finger of the hand that wasn’t twisting his charm at Isabel. “Who is this?”

  Isabel’s arms were hanging down at her sides, and her hands were clenching in and out of fists.

  “This is Isabel,” I said. “She lives at the house at the end of Calle Sol. She’s the scientist’s daughter.”

  Rico opened his mouth, but his voice got caught in his throat. He took a step back, and his right knee buckled. He managed to catch himself by latching on to the back of a chair with his free hand. The other was still at his throat, clutching his small token of protection. He gaped—mouth open, mouth closed—like a fish, hooked and hoisted out of the water.

  After a moment, he managed to compose himself enough to let out a tiny burst of laughter. “She’s not real.”

  I looked to Isabel. I thought her face would’ve shown sorrow—at the very least mild disappointment—but it was composed, as if Rico’s reaction wasn’t unexpected.

  “Of course she’s real.”

  “Touch her then,” he dared.

  I hesitated. “I can’t.”

  “He can’t,” Isabel echoed.

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t have time to get into the complexities of Isabel’s existence.

  “Mara Lopez is on TV,” I said, “telling the entire island that I beat up Isabel’s dad and kidnapped Celia.”

  “Why would she say that?” Rico asked.

  “My dad’s been taking the girls.” Isabel stepped forward. “Sara, Marisol, Celia. That’s why Lucas asked you to come. We need your scooter. I know where Celia is.”

  “If you know where Celia is, you call the cops,” Rico replied, “not me.”

  “Are you listening?” I hissed. “The cops think I did it! Isabel’s dad knew I had a history with the police here. He knew that these were Lopez’s cases. He’s been setting me up and steering her in my direction this entire time.”

  Rico scoffed. “Get real, Luke.”

  “Get real?” I moved toward him. “I’m the perfect fall guy. I’m sure half this town is already convinced I’m guilty and they’re glad about it. Even Ruben turned against me.”

  “She came to you, too, yeah?” Rico asked with a snicker. “In your dreams? That girl whispered in your ear and told you she could give you anything you wanted? Because that’s what she told me. I tried to tell her I didn’t want nothing to do with her and her witchcraft, but she wouldn’t listen.” He ripped his hand from his pendant and flung his finger in Isabel’s direction. “Whatever she promises you, Lucas, it’s not worth it.”

  “She didn’t promise me anything,” I replied, pushing his hand out of the air. “Are you even listening? This is not some dream you had. This is real. She is real. Her dad killed Marisol and then he took Celia.”

  Then, coming from the direction of Avenida Ashford: the wail of police sirens. More than one, from the sound of it. I waited for the bouncing echoes to fade away, but they only seemed to get louder.

  Isabel ran over to her duffle, dug quickly through its contents, and pulled out a bundle of letters tied together with red yarn. Walking up to Rico, she held the letters out to him. As always, she’d taken the precaution of covering much of her hand with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

  “These belong to you,” she said.

  I knew immediately what they were. Wishes. Way more than I had ever thought to throw.

  Rico waited a moment before snatching the batch of papers from Isabel and breaking the yarn. His eyes scanned the various scraps. From the size of the stack, there must have been at least twenty. Finally, his eyes lingered on one in particular. It was on a yellowed piece of lined paper, the kind with a combination of dashed and lined rows that kids use when they’re learning to write cursive.

  The sirens outside had grown to a near-deafening howl.

  “You were younger,” Rico said, his eyes still scanning his wishes. “In my dreams, you were a little girl with green skin and green hair. Your eyes are the same, though. Their color. Lucas may be right. Maybe you are real, but you’re still terrifying.”

  Rico looked up. His mouth was closed but moving; he was chewing on his thoughts, trying to separate them out.

  “I’ll help you because of Celia, alright? I’m not doing this for her.” Rico tipped his head in Isabel’s direction. “You really think you’re the ones who can make things right?”

  Isabel nodded. “I do.”

  I nodded, too, accepting this strange alliance once again.

  “If that’s the case,” Rico said, handing me his keys, “Vayan con Dios, you two. And try not to fuck up my scooter.”

  Twenty

  THERE WAS A wall of traffic in front of us, cars and more cars in an unbroken, unmoving chain. Sweat trailed down the sides of my face, and the fumes were making me dizzy. At least I hoped it was the fumes that were making me dizzy and not the girl huddled up behind me who’d remained quiet, her blanket of leaves barely keeping her alive and barely protecting me.

  I snapped my head to the right, then the left to try and relieve the stress in my neck. This wasn’t my first go-round on Rico’s scooter. I’d ridden it through the bumpy, narrow streets of Old San Juan countless times, dodging cats and tourists and nearly wiping out on slick spots left by leaky jalopies. Weaving through bumper-to-bumper traffic couldn’t be too different from that, right? At least the highway was somewhat evenly paved, unlike the roads in the old town. At least it wasn’t raining.

  The guy next to us in a rusted-out Nissan Stanza looked from Isabel, wrapped in her blanket in eighty-five-degree weather, to me, now wearing Rico’s baseball cap and denim jacket in a pathetic attempt at a disguise. His left eye twitched slightly.

  “Hold on!” I yelled, revving the engine.

  The scooter shot through the narrow gap between the two cars in front of us. I felt Isabel clutch at my belt loops and pull herself closer to me as drivers started honking their horns. All around us the quick beats of salsa music, the running commentary from that day’s baseball game, and exhaust fumes poured from cars. We sped past a series of strange, blurry scenes: children having tantrums while tethered to their seats, a woman simultaneously eating an orange while applying mascara, a couple ferociously making out in the backseat of a taxi while the driver in the front seat spied on them in his rearview mirror, his teeth clamped together in a gross grin.

  If I kept my eyes on the road ahead, I did fine. There were a few close calls when I had to swerve around cars that merged without regard for who or what they might be merging into.

  After nearly fifteen minutes of mild terror, and by some miracle without running into any cops, we made it out of San Juan and were on the narrow highway heading west to Rincón.

  Puerto Rico is shaped like a finger on a left hand, held to the side, and cut off at the knuckle joint. San Juan is on the northern edge, near what would be the nail bed. Rincón is on the shorter western edge, where the digit would�
�ve been severed. To get to Rincón, you have to trace the outer northern coastline until it dips south. There were other smaller roads that crosshatched the island, but they led to forests, mountains, rivers, lakes, and other out-of-the-way places people rarely went, probably for good reason.

  Despite its lurking mystery, the countryside was stunning. Outside of the city, Puerto Rico was practically prehistoric. Everything was green and wide and very tall. On the side of the road, multicolored birds perched on fallen trees, and if I listened hard enough I could hear the tiny tree frogs croaking out a sound that was impossibly loud for creatures their size. Aside from the paved road and the occasional food stand or road sign, everything appeared untouched by human hands. I’d been out this way several times, but never in the open air like this—with the hot wind tearing at the folds of my clothes, the smell of the sea in my nose, and my heart beating wildly against my ribs.

  I pulled over to a gas station and fruit stand just outside of a small town called Arecibo. I was anxious about stopping but also thankful for the short break. It gave me time to stretch my legs, and even with the blanket and several layers of clothes as buffers, being so close to Isabel had started to make my head spin.

  A handful of tourists from the mainland were there, leaning against their cars, shaking the pebbles from their sandals, talking loudly in English, taking long pulls from bottles of water, and swatting at the air with makeshift paper fans. A mother slapped a little boy’s arm to kill a mosquito and then doused him in bug repellant.

  A bus from Mayagüez, a largish city south of Rincón, pulled up at the same time we did. As the passengers climbed off, many of them yawned, raising their stiff arms skyward, before heading to the stand to buy coconut water and ripe guavas.

  It was a lazy scene, one that didn’t fit with the emotional mess I’d become ever since leaving La Andalusia.

  “I don’t want to be around all these people,” Isabel declared as I rode up to one of the pumps and killed the engine.

  “Let me just get gas, some water, and something to eat, and then I’ll move the scooter over there.” I pointed to a patch of grass on the opposite side of the road.

  Isabel watched as a family, including a little boy about five or six, climbed out of the car next to us. The boy had a blue blanket that was tied in a knot at his throat and draped over his shoulders. When he saw Isabel, with her blanket pulled tight around her body, he smiled broadly, held his arms out, and flexed his biceps. Isabel brought one of her arms out from under her blanket and mimicked the boy’s gesture.

  “He thinks you’re a superhero,” I said once the boy had followed his mother over to the fruit stand.

  Without responding, Isabel shook her blanket off her shoulders. She folded it and placed it under the seat along with the rest of her stuff.

  I rushed to pump the gas, stop off at the restroom to splash water on my grit-covered face, and grab us a couple bottles of water and two large hunks of mango dashed with chile powder. Then I moved the scooter to the other side of the road.

  “We should keep going,” Isabel said, leaning against the scooter.

  “We need to eat,” I replied. “You also need to tell me exactly where it is we’re headed.”

  Isabel took the mango from me and nibbled at the flesh while looking down the road and trying to reconstruct a map of the island from memory.

  “Once we turn to the south, there’ll be a sign for Aguadilla. A little ways after that there’ll be a dirt road—or at least it was a dirt road seven years ago. We’ll turn onto that and follow it for a mile or two. It’ll lead to a clearing and a cabin.”

  That meant we’d have to take one of the snaky roads into the heart of the island after all.

  “He has two cabins he uses as field labs,” Isabel added. “That one’s closest. The other is farther west.”

  “Seven years. That was the last time you were out here?”

  Isabel nodded, wiping the pink juice from her mouth with the back of her hand. She pitched the thin rind into the grass behind her and looked up at me. What she asked next threw me for a loop.

  “Do you know what you want to do with your life?”

  I swallowed the piece of fruit I’d been chewing. “Presuming I don’t wind up in jail?”

  “Presuming that, yes.”

  “I want to live out here. I’ll probably end up working for my dad.”

  “Don’t you want to go to college? Join the military? See the rest of the world?”

  I shrugged. “Not really.”

  “You really just want to bum around the island?” A blast of warm wind hit us like a gut punch, throwing me off balance and sending the strands of Isabel’s hair in all directions. From somewhere nearby, a bird let out a long lonesome cackle. “I don’t believe you.”

  “What’s not to believe?” I tossed my own rind into the tall grass beside me and poured some of the bottled water over my arms to rinse off the sticky juice. “Why are we even talking about this?”

  Isabel looked away.

  “If you’re thinking now is a good time for us to interview one another,” I said, “I’ve got a few questions of my own.”

  “Oh, yeah?” she snapped. “Like what?”

  “You were outside your house this morning. Where had you been?”

  “Your room.”

  I choked out a laugh. “How is that possible? I would’ve seen you coming through the lobby or up the stairs. I was there the same time you were.”

  “I’m not a vampire who turns to mist,” Isabel said, brushing away the hair that had blown into her face. “You have a habit of leaving your balcony doors unlocked. And climbing a palm tree to reach a second story isn’t particularly difficult, even for me.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I was leaving you a note. I thought I’d never see you again.”

  That was why no one in the hotel ever saw Isabel. She didn’t slip notes under my door; she came in from the balcony and placed her notes where I was sure to find them.

  Isabel looked to the ground and started tracing a wide circle in the dirt with the toe of her sneaker. She tilted her head, and over her shoulder, I spotted an old woman sitting on a bench near the fruit stand, staring straight at us.

  “I don’t know why people throw their wishes over my wall,” Isabel said, locking her eyes with mine, “but they do. I don’t know why I started showing up in people’s dreams, but I did.” She paused. “Did you ever dream about me?”

  “All the time.”

  “What did I look like?”

  “A little girl with green skin and grass for hair.” I didn’t mention the Isabel from the other dream, the one who both adored and destroyed the people around her.

  “Why is that?” Isabel urged.

  “Why is what?”

  “Why do I show up in people’s dreams like that? And if I’m some sort of little green monster, why do people send me—of all people—their wishes as if I had any power to grant them.”

  “Maybe . . . ” I trailed off.

  “Maybe what, Lucas?”

  “Maybe . . . ” I paused, knowing that Isabel wasn’t going to like what I was about to suggest, “ . . . it had something to do with your mom being able to talk to gods.”

  “What?”

  “From the story you told me. Your mom talked to a god. She was a prophet or something.” Isabel covered her face with her hands and groaned. “Just listen. I agree with your dad about one thing, Isabel. You’re pretty . . . unique. Which isn’t to say you’re not extremely flawed in many, many ways, but he’s right that there’s no one else like you. Maybe part of that comes from your mom, but most of it is just . . . who you are.”

  “I’m dying, Lucas.”

  It was the first time I’d heard her say those words. And the way she said them, with such certainty and pity, as if I should’ve known this was the case since the day we met, made me feel like a fool.

  I lamely pointed to the scooter seat. “What about that
?”

  “What about that?”

  “The blanket. It doesn’t help?”

  I knew the blanket didn’t help; I knew it the second the question left my lips.

  “All that does is buy us the tiniest sliver of time.” Isabel impatiently whipped a strand of hair behind her ear. “Can you get me another bottle of water? Maybe two so we can take one on the road? We’ve wasted enough time here.”

  That was it. Isabel had put an end to the conversation, so I hustled back over to the fruit stand and stood in line to buy water as the group from Mayagüez was starting to file back onto their bus. From inside the small stand, salsa music, punctuated by bursts of static, blasted from an old, rabbit-eared radio.

  I glanced back at Isabel, who was leaning against the scooter, her eyes fixed on the road that led west. She was biting her thumbnail, but then stopped to swat at her ear with her right hand—once, twice—like a bee had flown too close.

  As I came to the front of the line the music from the radio faded out and was replaced by the voice of a man speaking Spanish in a rapid clip. Because of the terrible reception, I could only make out a few words:

  “ . . . chica desaparecida . . . Lina Gutierrez . . . de la comunidad del Hato Rey, San Juan . . . tiene ocho años . . . ”

  Those garbled fragments were from a report about an eight-year-old named Lina Gutierrez, who’d gone missing from the San Juan neighborhood of Hato Rey. I thought of the little girl I’d seen Dr. Ford crouched in front of at the festival, the one with the ribbon.

  Then, from the radio: “Michael Lucas Knight . . . la policía esta buscando en la vecindad de Bayamón . . . ”

  Bayamón? Bayamón is a town back near San Juan, nearly fifty miles away from Arecibo.

  Why would the police be searching there?

  I threw down my cash and grabbed the bottles of water. I turned to run back to Isabel, but was forced to stop. Someone had a hold of my sleeve. I spun around and saw the old woman from the bench—the one who had been staring at me and Isabel—standing in front of me.