A Fierce and Subtle Poison

by Samantha Mabry

  How strong was the fabric of a story?

  If it was well made, it was stronger than a human body. It could hold up for years and years, never fraying, never growing stiff.

  To me, stories were stronger than the truth. Maybe this is what had led to my belief in heroes—that I could be the hero—and in worthy, but imperfect villains.

  Of course, Isabel thought differently. To her, the girls—their bodies and the artifacts they left behind—were truer and stronger than whatever story could be spun about them.

  I glanced over my shoulder to a set of ancient bed frames. The mattresses to both were missing and the wrought iron frames were rusted—like Isabel’s voice—as if they’d been left out in the rain and open salty air for months.

  That reminded me: the scooter.

  “I need to move the . . . ”

  “I moved it,” Isabel said quickly, not turning to look in my direction. “There’s a small shed out back. There are gaps in the roof, but it’s the best that I could do. It’ll be fine.”

  She held up the note the old woman had given her and waved it in the air.

  “It’s a burden, you know, being the vessel for everyone’s wishes. I want to help them. But of course I can’t.”

  At last, she turned away from the window. When I saw her face, I snatched the lantern off the table behind me and held it up between us. The color of her skin was a sickly, almost pale shade of gray-green and it seemed barely able to stretch over her cheekbones. Her lips were white and blistered at the corners. A bruise ran down the length of her throat. I caught a glimpse of the leaves that made up the blanket’s underside; they were withering, their edges brown and brittle.

  “I don’t know how much longer.” She swallowed and looked down to the bruises covering the backs of her hands. “The storm probably won’t break in time.”

  “How long was I out?”

  Isabel pressed her cracked lips together. Another wave of wind crashed into the walls, causing the rotten wood and the rusty nails that held the cabin together to shudder and groan.

  “Isabel. How long was I out?”

  She looked away. “A few hours—four maybe. Possibly more.”

  I scrambled to my feet and threw a hand against the wall for balance.

  “Why are you even still here? Why didn’t you just leave while I was passed out and finish this yourself?”

  One of Isabel’s hands was resting on the floor next to her. I watched as her fingernails dug into the old wood as she spoke. “The weather got worse. I couldn’t just leave you.”

  “You’re dying! You need to be anywhere but here—out looking for plants or on your way back home to your courtyard.”

  Isabel dove toward me and flung a dirt-covered finger in my face. Her eyes, ringed with deep, near-black purple, gleamed with anger.

  “I thought you understood!” she seethed. “I’m not going back to that house. I can’t live there anymore. This is my fate. You’ve heard the stories about when the Taíno finally realized they were about to be forced onto sugar plantations and lose the freedom they’d always known, the bravest ones came out here and hanged themselves in the trees.”

  I’d heard those stories, yeah. The señoras had told them to me when I was a boy.

  Isabel stood and pressed her palm against the windowpane. Her chest rose and fell at an erratic pace. “They refused to be slaves. Their spirits are still here protecting the island, and I am one of them. My home is out here. If the storm breaks we’ll still go after Celia and the other girl—Lina—but you have to promise me that when this is all done you won’t take me back to San Juan.”

  I was reeling and nauseous. It was too much to consider: saving the girls while allowing Isabel to die. It was clear, however, that’s exactly the scenario she had in mind since the moment her father hit the floor—maybe even since before then.

  “If it comes down to me or the girls,” she continued, “you have to choose them. I choose them. They deserve it. I don’t. I don’t want to live my life in that prison anymore.”

  Isabel—the determined, bull-headed combatant—glared at me, daring me to defy her. If there was one thing I’d learned from this version of her, it was that outright defiance did not work.

  So I lied, with a cringe to make it seem convincing: “I promise I won’t take you back.”

  She nodded, evidently satisfied.

  After depleting what little strength she had, Isabel teetered, checked her balance, and collapsed clumsily against the wall. She flipped a long wet strand of hair over her shoulder, covered her head with her blanket, and closed her eyes. She was quiet for a long time.

  “She wanted you to stay.” Isabel yanked hard on one of the leaves, separating it entirely from the blanket. A wisp of curled black thread hung from it.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You, Lucas, were Marisol’s wish,” Isabel said. “She wished you would stay on the island so that the two of you could be together.”

  “Oh God, Isabel,” I groaned, raking my mud-flecked fingers through my mud-flecked hair. “What are you doing to me?”

  The answer was easy: She was killing me. With poison. From heartbreak.

  “I’m sorry,” Isabel whispered.

  If Isabel had anything left to say, her words would have been drowned out by the wind, which screamed with a fury that pulled the air from my stomach. I watched as the front door trembled, then shook with determination against its weak hinges and rusty lock. The storm wasn’t content being outside anymore. It wanted in. After just seconds of fighting, the lock gave up. The door was ripped from its frame and swung inward, attached to the house now only by its lower hinge. The wind howled again. It filled the room, filled me. I pressed my palms against my ears, but the roar seeped between my fingers and into my skin.

  The only thing I could think to do was scream right back and try to convince the storm that I wasn’t scared. Then I turned to Isabel. Her hair and blanket rippled around her body. She was glaring out the door, into the swallowing darkness. She was furious.

  The bed behind me squealed as its legs were dragged across the floor. Next to my head, the oil lamp, as if picked up by a shaky, invisible hand, rattled across the surface of its table, hovered on the edge, and then crashed to the ground. In an instant, its once-tiny flame spread into a sheet across the floor.

  Twenty-three

  THE FIRE CAUGHT Isabel’s blanket, singeing its edges and causing a toxic stink. Instead of beating out the flames, Isabel gazed warily at the smoldering fabric the way someone might gaze upon an unwelcome person standing in her doorway.

  When it became clear Isabel wasn’t moving, I slung my arms around her waist and lifted her near-weightless body. Pain spiked in my head. I threw out my left hand to brace myself against the wall, and something large and sharp, the exposed end of an old nail, punctured my palm. Fresh blood burst from my skin.

  The front door was swinging madly on its remaining hinge. I grabbed it with my bloody hand to keep it steady and carried Isabel into the merciless rain. Outside, the winds came from every direction, causing the tall grass and Isabel’s hair to whip and twirl. Isabel started yelling in Spanish, even though her voice was no match for sounds of the storm.

  I placed her down on her feet. She swayed slightly but then regained her balance.

  “Wait here!” I shouted.

  My mission was to find the scooter, but the smoke and rain and flakes of ash from the cabin made that mission hard. Staying upright, let alone moving forward, was nearly impossible. My legs almost immediately fatigued as I trudged through shin-deep pools of water and muck. I was dizzy and thirsty. Nearby, the cabin pulsed with a wet heat.

  A gust of wind plowed into me from behind, spun me one hundred and eighty degrees, and threw me onto my knees. I sucked rainwater off the ground and was reminded of my insignificance.

  I hauled myself to standing, turned, and fought the wall of wind until I finally found the shed. The door was missing, and I could
see the scooter leaning against a metal table on which rusty tools had been carelessly left and were now rattling as if they were alive and angry about it. Isabel was right about the roof. The rain poured freely through gaps created by missing or rotted boards.

  I dragged the scooter out of the shed and back into the field, climbed on, and twisted the key in the ignition. It didn’t catch. I counted off five seconds and tried again. Nothing.

  I offered a desperate prayer to the goddess who makes the storms. I couldn’t remember her name and hoped she wouldn’t mind. I told her I was sorry that she was angry. I was sorry for men like my father and Dr. Ford, men who come to the island only to tear things down, build things that don’t belong, and make girls disappear. Maybe she was upset with me. I was no saint. I’d done some shitty things in my life, but I was trying to do better.

  “Would you please give me a break?” I cried out.

  I twisted the key in the ignition again. It caught, and I cried out in triumph. Clicking on the single headlight, I released the hand brake and lunged forward, the wheels of the tires spitting up mud and grass behind me.

  Isabel was where I’d left her, standing in the field and struggling to keep the blanket around her shoulders while the wind fought to claim it. When she saw me coming, she wiped the hair out of her face and motioned to the cabin, which had started to sway. The nails and windowpanes squealed loudly against the strain of the heat and expanding wood.

  The wind won, as it does, ripping Isabel’s blanket of leaves from her hands and carrying it high in the sky. Isabel held her arms up, her fingers splayed desperately.

  “Forget it!” I yelled. “Just get on!”

  I slowed down enough for her to climb onto the scooter, and together we burst through the field. Just before we entered the dense mass of trees, I turned to look over my shoulder and saw the cabin lift from its foundation. For a long second, the fragile structure seemed to hover, perfectly intact, no more than a foot off the ground. Then it crashed down into a heap of splintered wood and rusted metal. The wind screamed its victory.

  Isabel wailed and buried her head between my shoulder blades. I turned to refocus my efforts on getting us through the forest in one piece. It seemed unlikely. Above our heads, the rain hit the wide leaves of the palms and then poured down onto our heads in thick streams. Beneath us, the ground was more uneven than it had been out in the field. The path we’d been on a few hours ago had turned to sludge. The wind hurled palm fronds into the side of my face. They stung like slaps.

  “Where do we go?” I shouted back over my shoulder.

  “Back to the main road! Then left toward Rincón.”

  What should’ve taken minutes seemed to last hours. If the goddess had somehow magically started Rico’s scooter, she must have dusted off her hands and decided that was enough for the day.

  All I saw were trees and mud and water. The single headlight didn’t illuminate shit. Every time the front tire caught a root or a rock, my entire body tensed in anticipation of a blowout. I tried not to think about missing a turn and wrapping us around the trunk of a tree. I imagined someone years from now finding our sun-bleached skeletons alongside the rusted and mangled carcass of a scooter. The stories people would tell about us would pale in comparison to the truth. What a sad thing it would be to simply disappear in this forest.

  The mud road beneath the scooter’s tires eventually changed to a gravelly slush, and then, once we finally turned onto the main highway, to slick asphalt.

  The rain still poured down from the gunmetal clouds that swirled and cracked, and there was paltry traction between Rico’s balding tires and the wet road. We drove with the current, with the rain rushing along with us back to its source: that sea into which I’d always wanted to disappear. But not today.

  I gripped the handlebars, bracing for the hissing winds that seemed bent on sending us spiraling into the sky. My ears were ringing, probably because I was clamping my jaw shut with such force that I was surprised my teeth didn’t shatter. More than once I had to remind myself to exhale after anxiously holding my breath until my vision had started to blur.

  But neither the unrelenting weather nor the awful conditions of the road distracted me from the fact that Isabel, without the protection of her leaves, was fading fast. Her body felt like a wet sack flung against my back.

  All I could do was keep driving. The landscape tore by, dark and frenzied.

  A few miles down the road we sped past a reflective sign announcing we’d arrived in Isabela, a town originally named for the queen of Spain, now known for its beaches and cockfights. As we passed the dark town, only a few lights twinkled from buildings far off in the distance. Like San Juan, Isabela was another sea-facing city where people were used to sealing themselves into their homes to wait patiently for the world to find its balance again. They knew the score. Storms come; storms go.

  For a long time the road was empty, except for our little scooter, the rain coming down in sheets, the angry wind, and the spinning gray clouds. Eventually, we passed another sign, this one for the town of Aguadilla, and I felt Isabel shift behind me. She tugged on my jacket with her thin fingers, trying to pull us closer. I leaned back, burning and shivering as her wet lips grazed my ear. She swallowed and took a couple of breaths in preparation to speak.

  “Turn . . . here.” There was an extended pause between the two words. “To the right.”

  I did as she asked, maneuvering the scooter onto a barely visible road that led into a thicket of trees.

  I let out the throttle and shot forward. With the thin stretch of road in front of us bubbling like furiously boiling water, there was no way I could’ve seen the spikes.

  Twenty-four

  THE TIRES BLEW out in two loud, successive pops, causing the scooter to shake violently as if suddenly possessed. Despite my best efforts to keep a hold of the handlebars, I flew into the air and landed face-first in the mud. I heard a sharp crack as my right wrist twisted under my body at an unnatural angle. I cried out, my mouth filling with brackish water, as I started to float and move along with the current. With my good hand, I made a fist and slammed it through the water and into the mud to keep from being washed away.

  I crawled to my knees and took several gasping breaths as I tested the mobility of each of the fingers of my right hand. Thin ribbons of pain shot all the way up into my jaw.

  Despite that, I managed to stand, disoriented, in a wide-leg stance. In the middle of the road a few yards back, the scooter was on its side, crushed. Though its front and back tires were pulverized down to the rims, the motor was still despondently firing. What a champ.

  A few feet beyond the scooter, a piece of metal stuck up from the ground, then another right next to it, then another.

  I looked down the road in the opposite direction but couldn’t see anything aside from rain and trees.

  “Isabel!”

  A thin, pale hand shot up from the other side of the road. Cradling my lame arm, I trudged forward. Isabel was crouching in the underbrush near the trunk of a massive tree. As I approached, she stood abruptly.

  “Watch it!”

  Her arm was outstretched, and around her wrist were two thick leaves, secured in knots. Others were shoved under the straps of her tank top, close to her heart. Despite a line of shallow cuts running across her cheek, Isabel was, of all things, smiling. It was a wan smile on a tired face, but a smile nonetheless. She held up her other wrist, around which were the same leaves tied in the same way.

  “Dumb cane!” she exclaimed.

  “So, you’ll be all right?” I asked.

  Isabel stepped out of the underbrush and into the road. “For now. How about you?”

  “I’m okay.” In an attempt to mask the pain, I bit down on the inside of my lip. “Our ride’s wrecked, though.”

  Isabel’s eyes shifted to the remains of Rico’s scooter, then to the road ahead.

  “So we run,” she said.

  So we ran, or at least tried to run
, down a road turned to river in the driving rain. I kept my wrist close to my body, because when I let it swing down by my side the pain was unbearable.

  Eventually, we turned a corner. Up ahead was the glow of a faint light. The sight of it caused both of us to run faster, kicking up the thick mud and water under our feet.

  Soon, what had been just a small light took the shape of a white, luminescent square: a window. Something moved across it. While it could’ve been a palm frond or a coconut falling from one of the trees, I was hoping it was a girl.

  The cabin that eventually came into focus was bigger than the one we’d just seen lifted up into the sky and then thrown to the ground. It was sturdier, cobbled together out of large, round stones and bolstered by wooden beams. Rather than standing unprotected in the middle of a field and exposed to the elements, this one was nestled in a kind of alcove, surrounded on three sides by dense trees.

  In the road, maybe forty yards in front of the house, was a light blue Mercedes-Benz, the old kind with the hubcaps that boasted the Mercedes symbol and matched the car’s color. As we neared it, Isabel slowed to a stop, taking in the house, the trees, the car.

  “He must’ve passed us while we were back at the other cabin. I don’t think the police are coming this way, or else he wouldn’t have put down the spikes. Those were just for us.”

  “Maybe, but Mara Lopez tracked me down at some random church in the dead of night, so I doubt a rainstorm and some spikes are going to stop her.”

  Isabel dug into her back pocket and held out the damp and mud-splattered note that the woman from Mayagüez had given her.

  “Take this,” she said.

  “Why? What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Put it with the others. That’s all I did. People need something to put their hope in.” Isabel swallowed and nodded her head as if convincing herself that she was doing the right thing. Stepping forward, she shoved the note into the front pocket of my jeans. “You be the wishing fountain now.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Isabel took off toward the house. As she neared one of the front windows, she crouched to peer through it. I took my place beside her. The inside of the house was dark, except for a couple of lanterns burning on small bedside tables. Through the muted light all I could make out were the faint outlines of two beds, much like those in the other cabin, and across the room from those, a long table about the height of a kitchen counter. Everything else was fogged up, dark, and indistinct.