A Fierce and Subtle Poison

by Samantha Mabry

  “Lucas,” Isabel hissed. “Mira. Look!” She pointed at the front door. A padlock the size of my fist hung from the handle. Isabel gave it a tug. “He’s nearby or else he would’ve taken his car.”

  “I’ll go around the side,” I said, “and see if I can find something we can use to smash the lock.”

  I scanned the dark ground around the perimeter of the house. The rain rolled off the roof and steadily dripped from the eaves onto my shoulder. The runoff found a rhythm. It hit harder—more urgently. Then, a blast of cold hit the back of my neck.

  I spun around and saw the girl; she was at least six feet away, partially hidden in the shadows of the trees. Her feet were bare and covered in sand; her skin was concrete-gray. She was wearing a pale, apple-green sundress. Its hem fell to her ankles. The wind continued to swirl, but the fabric of her dress didn’t rustle; the ends of her hair weren’t picked up and tossed around. She was soaked even though the rain seemed to bend and part around her.

  She wasn’t Marisol. She wasn’t Sara.

  “Water.” Her voice was a chorus. “He’s by the water.”

  The girl took a single step forward, toward me, away from the trees. Isabel called out my name, and my head whipped toward the sound. I felt the disappeared girl come close. Her breath was cold and smelled like cinnamon. I would ask her questions: What’s your name? Who misses you? But when I turned back toward her, there were several feet between us again.

  She opened her mouth. Isabel’s voice came from it: “Lucas!”

  I took a stagger-step forward before turning and running to the front of the house, where Isabel was attacking the door with a large, jagged rock. She struck the lock once, twice, and on the third time it broke from the wood frame. The wind caught the door, and it immediately swung inward, spraying rainwater into the dark room. Pieces of paper scattered, and small, unidentifiable objects skittered across the floor. Something large and solid tipped onto its side and rolled across a hard surface. For a split second, it was still. Then: the firecracker-pop of glass breaking.

  Isabel and I tumbled inside, and I pushed the door closed behind us. Because of the broken lock, I had to stand with my back against the wood. In the relative quiet, a brew of smells hit my nose: ammonia, bleach, dried sweat on unwashed skin, the unmistakably sweet stench of rot.

  “We’re too late,” Isabel declared.

  I nearly conceded, but then the sound of fabric rustling came from one of the beds, followed by the gasp of a child startled out of sleep.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  I dragged a squat table in front of the door to hold it in place. Grabbing a lit lantern from the ground, I held it up to the closest of the twin beds. The head of a small dark-haired girl emerged from underneath the covers.

  “Celia?”

  I rushed forward, but Isabel smacked her palm against my chest. “Don’t touch her!” She dropped her hand and leaned in. “You don’t know what she’s like anymore.”

  What she’s like: near death, full of poison, a small and fragile monster. Just like Isabel.

  I approached Celia, scanning her face and what I could see of her arms for red rashes or white blisters, but there was no sign of her being sick or hurt. Leaves weren’t shoved under her bedcovers, pressed against her skin, or threaded through her hair.

  I let out a yelp of victory. I couldn’t help it. I’d done it. I’d beaten the police and a mad scientist and a curse and a storm and a goddess who makes storms, and here Celia was, alive and seemingly well, right in front of me. It was so brilliant.

  I crouched down at Celia’s bedside, and Isabel appeared over my shoulder, holding another lantern.

  “You remember me, right?” I asked.

  Celia nodded.

  “Are you okay?”

  Celia’s eyes sparked with amusement as she watched the water drip from my clothes onto her bed. “You’re wet.”

  I smiled. “Yeah, I know. We got caught in the rain. Here.” I pulled the wolf charm from my pocket and placed it in her hand. “You lost this.”

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “She found it,” I said, motioning over my shoulder to Isabel. “So you feel all right? Are you sure? No stomachache? No itchy skin?”

  Celia shook her head.

  “You really think she’s fine?” Isabel asked.

  “She seems like it.”

  “Still . . . We should get her out of here. Quickly.”

  Isabel went off to inspect the rest of the room. First, she leaned over the unmade bed next to Celia’s, running her hand over the mattress. Past the beds, a crude divider made from an old sheet was hanging from hooks in the ceiling. Isabel pulled it back, revealing a cot with a neatly folded blanket placed across its end. An overturned crate served as a makeshift nightstand, and books and journals were stacked at least two feet high on it. Fastened to the wall over the cot was a rough-hewn shelf filled with more books, along with what looked like a wooden cigar box and a photo in a frame. Isabel picked up the photo and looked it over, her eyes revealing nothing.

  “What’s wrong with your hand?” Celia asked me. “Did you hurt it? If you hurt it, the doctor will make it better for you.”

  “Who else is here, Celia?” Isabel asked from across the room, slamming down the picture frame. She knelt down next to her dad’s cot, flicked a small plastic cigarette lighter that she’d found, and lit yet another lantern that was sitting atop a couple of hardback books. “Is there a girl named Lina?”

  “Lina was here, but not for very long,” Celia replied. “She was sick. The doctor said she might have to go to the hospital. I heard him come and take her out of bed.”

  “How long ago was that?” I asked.

  Celia shrugged and picked at the loose threads on the edge of her blanket. “I don’t know. It was during the storm. Are you a saint?” she asked suddenly, turning her head toward Isabel. “You look like a saint from the pictures in church.”

  I glanced at Isabel. The shadows in the cabin hid the sickly color of her skin, and her face glowed in the lanternlight.

  “I’m not a saint.” Isabel stepped over to a long wooden table in the middle of the room. An array of leaves in various stages of decomposition and more stacks of books and paper covered it. There was also a set of eyeglasses, a pair of thick gloves, a surgical mask, and a collection of pencils, most of them worn down to nubs. Isabel picked up one of the books at random, a thick, hardcover volume, and started flipping through its pages.

  “I’m the doctor’s daughter,” she said.

  “Are you magical?” Celia asked, her eyes widening. “Your dad tells stories about you. He says you’re magic.”

  Isabel shut the book and glared at the little girl. The corner of her mouth twitched.

  “Take the girl,” Isabel demanded, grabbing a set of keys from the table and tossing them to me. “Now. Use his car. Go back to Arecibo and get her to a doctor. Be sure to keep her wrapped her in a blanket—just in case—and say she’s possibly been exposed to poisonous plants. Do something about your wrist as well. It looks terrible.”

  I stood. “What about you?”

  Isabel didn’t answer. Instead, she grabbed the two lanterns she’d recently lit, went over to the door, and set them down by her feet. Using her teeth, she tore the leaves from her wrists and then yanked the others out from under her shirt. A gust of wind blew open the door, knocking back the table, and throwing Isabel slightly off balance. The lanterns almost tipped over, but Isabel grabbed them just in time.

  “What about you?” I repeated, rushing toward her. “We still have to find Lina.”

  “Wake up, Lucas!” Isabel hissed. “Lina’s dead. My dad took her out to the beach to dump her body, and that’s where I’m going.”

  Water, the girl had said. He’s by the water.

  “Just wait a minute.” My voice was trembling. “We have your dad’s car. It’ll take a couple of hours to get back to San Juan. We’ll drop off Celia. After that we’ll find more plan
ts and worry about your dad from there.”

  “I told you I’m not going back,” Isabel said. “I thought you understood.”

  “Isabel.” I lifted my good hand to hold hers. She dodged away.

  “You promised me, Lucas! Save the girl.”

  “Isabel, you can’t just leave!” I reached for the soaked fabric of her shirt, but she dodged me again and knelt down to pick up one of the lanterns. She rested her fingertips on one of my muddy shoes. Her gesture was so careful, like that of a tentative ghost.

  Isabel stood, holding a lantern in each of her hands. She stepped to the side to peer once more into the small cabin. Then, finally, her eyes met mine. They were full of fire and fight.

  “I would watch you when you would stand by the water,” she said. “The way you looked out to the horizon . . . I knew we were the same. We both wanted something. We weren’t really sure what it was, or if we deserved it . . . But now we know, and now we have it.”

  “Isabel. What are you doing?”

  “My life . . . ” she began. “This is not a life. I’m sorry, Lucas.”

  “Isabel . . . ”

  She smiled, just a little. “You are the only one to have your wish come true.”

  “Isabel!” I shrieked.

  She wouldn’t hear me out. Instead, she took a step back and hurled one of the lanterns at the cabin’s back wall, where it burst into flames.

  Twenty-five

  CELIA STARTED SCREAMING. Red-orange flames clawed the walls, and near-white flecks of ash drifted in front of my face and landed on my hands. Moths, I thought. They look like moths. Dry wood and paper crackled and turned black. Windowpanes groaned from the extreme heat and pressure until, finally, they shattered. Glowing embers hit the beds and singed the blankets. Smoke rose and rolled across the beams of the ceiling. The oil lantern next to Celia’s bed exploded, causing the little girl to toss off her covers and run toward me. She clung to my legs and let out another ear-splitting wail. She clung tight, burying her face into wet denim.

  Isabel was gone, disappeared.

  I scooped up Celia with my good arm and carried her out into the relentless rain.

  I was grateful for the warm, fat drops that fell on my face as I slogged through the mud toward Dr. Ford’s Mercedes. They were soothing and helped to wash the sting from my eyes. When we reached the car, I put Celia down. Her bare feet sank several inches into the spongy earth.

  I fumbled with the unfamiliar keys for a few seconds before managing to unlock the back door. I held it open, but the girl didn’t move. I shouted her name, but she just stood there, as if having been absorbed by the ground, staring in silent horror at the cabin.

  “Get in the car!”

  Still nothing.

  It was only after I’d lifted her up and placed her into the backseat that I realized I hadn’t wrapped her in a blanket. Amid the chaos of the fire, it had slipped my mind.

  I recoiled, holding my arms up to my eyes to search my skin for blisters.

  Celia chose to break her silence with a question I couldn’t begin to answer: “What’s wrong?”

  I braced my good hand against the doorframe, bowed my head, and waited for the wave of nausea to come. It didn’t. Celia touched my arm and repeated her question.

  “Lucas? What’s wrong?”

  I stared at her small hand against my skin.

  “The plants don’t make you sick?” I asked.

  Celia shook her head. “I don’t get sick.”

  “What about when you touched the doctor? Did he get sick?”

  “No.” She dropped her hand into her lap. “Why would he?”

  “Wait right here!”

  I slammed the door shut, and went back to the burning cabin. Even before I reached the door, I could see that most of the interior was engulfed in flames. The scattered pages of Dr. Ford’s books were curling and crisp around the edges, and the air was almost completely full of ash and burning paper. Behind the smell of smoke was the bitter stench of leaves releasing their poison.

  Covering my nose and mouth with Rico’s jacket, I plowed into the dense smoke in the direction of Dr. Ford’s cot at the back of the cabin. I found it when my shins collided with the metal frame.

  I gathered up the smoldering blanket, caught sight of the photograph Isabel had looked at earlier, and snatched that, too. Bundling the frame in the folds of the blanket, I swung around toward the door, and stopped.

  There was no door. Only a curtain of smoke and fire.

  I collected all the blessings, prayers, superstitions, luck, and enchantments I knew, held the wadded-up blanket in front of my face, and charged forward into the hot, smoking void.

  A belt of pain whipped against my right shoulder as I burst through the front door, but beyond that I came out mercifully intact. I trudged through the mud and collapsed into the driver’s seat of Dr. Ford’s Mercedes.

  “Is the doctor’s daughter coming with us?” Celia asked as I slammed the door closed and threw the blanket into the passenger seat.

  Wiping the smoke-induced tears from my eyes, I pretended to not hear her. Then I craned my head so that I could look at my shoulder. A ragged hole had burned through layers of fabric, revealing an oozing flesh wound. Smoke rose from its edges; it stunk. My stomach kicked with nausea, and I had to turn away. Remembering the photograph, I reached across the seat with my left hand and pulled it from the still-warm folds of the blanket.

  The glass of the frame was cracked, either from the heat or from Isabel’s having slammed it down. The picture behind the fractured glass, though, was perfectly clear.

  I’d assumed that what Isabel had seen on that shelf was a photograph of herself—younger, happier, and without the weight of all the disappeared girls on her shoulders. Instead, the photo had captured a younger version of her dad, next to a beautiful woman with long dark hair who must have been Isabel’s mother. They were standing together in the courtyard of their house at the end of Calle Sol. They were surrounded by plants. He was in a brown suit; she was in a white sundress with the slightly bulging midsection of an expectant mother. They were holding each other’s hands, and a large gray bird was perched on Dr. Ford’s shoulder. Zabana’s free hand rested on her belly. While both the Fords were smiling, Isabel’s mother’s gaze was directed to some point off in the distance, as if at the very last second before the shutter snapped, something had caught her attention.

  I’d known little about Dr. Ford’s life aside from the sad stories patched together from Isabel and the señoras of San Juan. Those stories all existed in that magical space between truth and fiction, where most of the stories about Puerto Rico existed. That magical space was what the photograph had captured: two people, one happy about his impending child, the other distracted by something from either the past or the future—something there, but not there.

  I tossed the frame down and with a single twist of the key, brought the engine of the old car rumbling to life. I clicked on the headlights and the windshield wipers, pulled the column shifter down into reverse, and pressed gently on the gas.

  Miraculously, the tires found traction, and the car slowly started going backward. That miracle, however, was short-lived. The car lurched and stopped. I took my foot off the gas and gave myself to the count of ten before pressing down on the accelerator again. While counting, I listened to the rain pelt the roof and tried to ignore the pain that swelled throughout my body. Each raindrop sounded like an individual ball bearing striking a sheet of metal. Together, they sounded like a sky determined to crush us to death.

  A single mosquito had found its way into the car with us. I assumed most of its comrades had been kicked off the island by the hurricane. It flew in dizzy circles before landing on my arm. After I slapped it away, it changed course, flying in a series of even dizzier circles toward Celia in the backseat. It approached her arm, backtracked, approached her face, backtracked. Eventually it settled on the seat beside her. It avoided her—the way the mosquitoes all avoided Isab
el.

  Celia pulled the smoke-tinged blanket around her shoulders. She was shivering.

  “You’re sick,” I said.

  She shook her head, and tiny droplets of water sprayed across the interior of the car.

  “Just cold.”

  I didn’t know if I believed her. I needed to get her out of here and to a doctor. I checked everything again—that I was in the right gear, that the parking brake was off—before applying slight pressure to the gas pedal. Over the sound of the rain on the roof, I could hear the back wheels spinning as they struggled to find traction.

  Again, I eased off. “Not now. Not now.” I slammed my eyes shut, opened them, and started counting again. “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . ”

  The little girl’s voice came from over my shoulder: “What’s wrong?”

  That question.

  I clenched the steering wheel in an effort to hide my frustration. The wiper blades skirted across the windshield, revealing the orange glow of the still-burning structure several yards in front of us.

  “Five . . . six . . .”

  What was wrong? It wasn’t that I was worried about us being consumed by the fire. The car was too far away and the rain was too heavy for the blaze to skip across a large swath of muddy ground. Even if the car never started, the rain would eventually stop, and Celia and I could walk together to Isabela and find help.

  What was wrong was that Isabel was gone. Isabel’s mother was gone. Marisol was gone. Sara Fikes and Lina Gutierrez were gone.

  “Seven . . . eight.”

  I slammed my foot down on the accelerator. The tires spun furiously. I knew it wouldn’t do any good, but I kept my weight on the pedal until the inside of the car started to fill up with the stench of burning oil.