Embers and Echoes

by Karsten Knight

THE HUMIDOR PRISONER

  Tuesday

  When the plane finally landed, Ash was still mentally back in the late spring cool of the Pacific Northwest. That is, until the airport’s electronic door whisked open and the wall of hot air billowed inward. She staggered back into a family of four, who quickly skirted around her and walked into the outdoor oven as though they didn’t notice the abrupt climate change.

  “Out of the ice cube,” Ash said, “and into the kiln.”

  On the bright side, she thought as she walked out into the humid high-ninety-degree air, she could at least be grateful not to have a bag to cart around.

  By the time she finally flagged down a taxi, her body had gradually embraced the saunalike conditions, and she reminded herself, You’re a freaking volcano goddess. This weather should be your element.

  “Where to?” the taxi driver asked as Ash clambered into the backseat. He peered around her, perhaps looking for a bag, and then seemed to appraise her dirty clothing. He raised his eyebrow.

  “Um . . . ,” Ash said. She hadn’t even thought that far in advance—probably something she could have taken care of on the seven-hour flight between restless naps. And it wasn’t like the taxi driver could just type “Explosive Little Girl” as a destination into his GPS. No, she needed a home base first. “A hotel would be a good place to start.” It sounded more like a question when it came out of her mouth.

  “Ah, yes.” The driver narrowed his eyes at her in the rearview mirror. “I will take you to the one hotel we have here in Miami.” The driver sighed, flipped his Hurricanes cap around so that it faced backward, and then slammed his foot on the gas.

  Twenty minutes of awkward cab silence later, they arrived in Miami Beach. The driver only smiled once he’d counted his tip, and he screeched away from the curb as soon as she slammed her door closed.

  He had dropped her off in front of a high-rise, next to the Ritz-Carlton, that overlooked the ocean beyond. After a few minutes of exploration, she was in love with the hotel. It was beautiful, luxurious, and attentively staffed, and had its own tropical grotto in the back. But even though her fake ID listed her as twenty-five, she knew a nice place like this was likely to take one look at her rumpled clothing and see through her ruse. The fifteen hundred dollars remaining in her bank account—all the money she’d hoarded last summer working as a paralegal at her parents’ firm—wouldn’t go far at a four-star affair like this, and there was still food, clothes, and transportation to think about. And asking her father for money was just inviting him to get on a plane, if he hadn’t already.

  Instead she wandered across the street to a shady, run-down motel. The owner there barely looked away from his soaps on a little flat-screen, which looked modern and strange next to the peeling fleur-de-lis wallpaper and the yellowed ceiling fan. He just ran the card through the machine, pulled a key down off one of the hooks behind the desk, and handed it to her as though it were radioactive.

  The room smelled like an ashtray, but she kind of liked it, a fresh break from the suburban comforts of Scarsdale and the pristine Blackwood dorm rooms. Sad, she thought, when a beachside motel felt like “roughing it.”

  Next on the priority list: replacing her belongings that had been incinerated in the car wreck. Ash felt the vaguest pangs of guilt that she had to spend half of the money left in her bank account on a new wardrobe. Everything—from jeans and tank tops right down to underwear and socks—was just as expensive in South Beach as she remembered it being in Manhattan. The one luxury item she did splurge on was a nice swimsuit, a red two-piece that cost practically as much as all of her jeans combined. She wrote it off as blending in with the locals and passed the cashier her plastic.

  On the walk back to the hotel, it occurred to her that she’d left her cell phone off since the plane had landed. She juggled her bags until she had a free hand to withdraw the phone and power it on. Sure enough, to her expected horror, there were five voice mails in her in-box, four of them from her mother, along with a text message from her father that simply said, “Call your mom.”

  The fifth voice mail was from Ade. It began with a long silence during which she could hear only the patter of rain and canvas—the thunder god must have been calling from his tent on the construction site in Haiti. When he finally spoke, his voice was as deep as a chasm, and as hollow, too: “Today would have been his seventeenth birthday.” Another long pause. “I miss him.” Then he hung up.

  Ash closed her eyes and tried to imagine what Rolfe would be doing today if he were still alive. She pictured him at the beach, sitting on the hood of his station wagon, watching the first rays of dawn spilling over the Pacific. There was still so much about the Norse god of light she didn’t know. So much she would never know. All because of Lily.

  With Rolfe dead; Lily rogue; and Serena, the blind siren, as strange as ever; Ade and Raja were the only two gods left who could understand what Ash was going through.

  In the end Ash could only bring herself to text Ade back: “I miss him too.”

  Ash allowed herself a shower and a change of clothes back at the motel before she headed off to Ocean Drive in search of some dinner—and answers. Ocean Drive, true to its name, was a long strip of restaurants on one side of the palm-lined road, with the beach and ocean beyond on the other. At five p.m. many people were just getting up from their lunches at the sidewalk bistros, polishing off appetizers and oversize mojitos.

  Ash found a club down by Tenth that was fairly empty, and slipped into a bar stool directly beneath a ceiling fan. The bartender, a middle-aged Cuban man, was hunched over the counter, staring off into the rafters. Despite his age he had a symmetrical beauty and a chiseled body that seemed to come standard with anyone who worked this part of the strip. A tattoo of a crucifix on his neck poked just above his collar, and he wore a name tag that identified him as Osvaldo.

  When he finally noticed her, he asked with his slight accent, “Just here for a drink, chulita, or do you want to see lunch specials too?”

  “Lunch specials?” Ash echoed. She pointed to the wicker clock that was half-hidden behind a row of multicolored vodka bottles. “It’s almost six!”

  Osvaldo grinned. “Still on New York time? Things run on a different schedule around here.”

  Ash threw up her hands. “I give up. Is my accent that obvious? Am I really that transparent a tourist?”

  “Relax—everyone’s basically a tourist in South Beach. And when I say that, I include half of the people who live here.” He slipped a dinner menu in front of her. “In any case, once your jet lag wears off, commit this to memory: breakfast at noon, lunch at five, dinner at ten, sleep at dawn.”

  “That a rule, or just a general guideline?”

  “I can give you some lessons on how to better blend in. For instance, when I ask what you’d like to drink, you say . . .”

  Ash bit her lip. “I’ll have a Diet Coke?”

  Osvaldo sighed. “I know a lost cause when I see one. At least order something with a lime in it next time.” He scooped ice into a pint glass and pressed a button on the back of the soda nozzle.

  Now that they were building a rapport, Ash figured it was a good time to fish the waters for some answers. “So if I can ask some more touristy questions, I was just wondering . . . if I were a cargo ship coming into harbor in Miami, where would I go?”

  Osvaldo looked up. The cola overflowed. “You call that a touristy question?” He dried the sides of her glass the best he could before he slid the soda across to her on a coaster. “You come to the most beautiful city in America in the middle of the summer, while half-naked gorgeous people walk up and down the beach across the street, and your first thought off the plane is, Where can I find incoming cargo ships?”

  Ash sipped her cola with the most innocent expression she could muster, then shrugged. “I’m a sucker for sailors, I guess.”

  “Well, if you want to go chase deckhands, I guess you can lurk around the Port of Miami. That’s where all the big shi
ps come in. Maybe you’ll come to your senses and decide to take a cruise instead.”

  “And what if I were a smaller ship?” She stirred the straw counterclockwise. “Maybe one that wanted to fly under the radar.”

  “Listen,” Osvaldo said, suddenly serious. He checked on the few stragglers still at the bar—a couple canoodling a few seats down at one end, and a middle-aged man in a Hawaiian shirt—before he leaned over the counter. “I’m not an idiot. I see a girl like you come through the door, and I don’t bother to check your passport, because I know a lost soul looking to have some fun when I see one. But I’m not about to let some high school student go prancing about in seedy areas by herself like some sort of mouse that wandered into the cat’s lair.”

  Ash pushed her drink aside. Nothing ever went the easy way. “Give me your hand,” she said impulsively.

  “Are you . . .” Osvaldo shook his head. “Are you coming on to me now? Because you’re my daughter’s age, and Mrs. Osvaldo has a nasty temper when she gets jealous.”

  She held out her hands, palms up. “Just do it.”

  Osvaldo toweled off his wet hands, and with a last self-conscious look at his few remaining customers, he placed his sun-freckled hand delicately into her own, so that this fingers just barely tickled her palm. She took her other hand and placed it on top of his so she was cupping it between them. She closed her eyes.

  Just as she had been learning to do over the last two months, she reached into her soul and found the magical valve. Only this time, rather than wrenching it on, she was careful to tweak the valve just a little bit.

  When she opened her eyes again, the warmth radiated out of her palm onto Osvaldo’s hand, just the first whispers of heat, like the sun emerging from behind the clouds. The bartender’s face contorted with surprise, and he instantly started to retract his hand. But then he suddenly relaxed, and allowed it to bask in the strange warmth.

  She blinked, and the valve twitched off. She opened her hands to allow Osvaldo to take his own back, but at first he just let it linger there. When he finally pulled it away, he held it out in front of him like he didn’t know what to do with it. “You hear of such things, but you never . . .” He trailed off and peered at her as though he’d forgotten that the world could still have surprises in store for him.

  Ash could see the condensation that had formed on the outside of her Coke glass, like a liquid kiss. “Not everything is as it seems,” she said. She hoped that she’d done the right thing, revealing herself to this near stranger. She’d always thought she was a good judge of character when it came to whom she should and shouldn’t trust, but if Colt and Lily were any indication . . . Still, she was here to find her sister, and she didn’t have the time to sweet-talk answers out of reluctant bartenders. “Now,” she said, “I need to know where I can find those little boats.”

  Osvaldo held up a One minute finger to the customer in the Hawaiian shirt who was trying to flag him down. “Miami River,” he told her after a brief hesitation. “Parts of it are nicer now, but some smaller boats still dock in marinas upstream, closer to Little Havana. But I swear to God,” he said with intensity, his accent thickening, “if I turn on the news tomorrow and I see your face among the missing . . .”

  “Thank you,” she said. “You’ve been both helpful and knowledgeable.”

  He held up his cell phone. “Your dinner is on the house if you’ll call Mrs. Osvaldo and tell her that.”

  But at the mention of food, her own hunger made her think of Rose again, the persistent throb of starvation Ash had suffered while seeing the world through the little girl’s eyes. It was hard to complain about her meal of airplane cookies and soda when her six-year-old sister had spent a month roaming the jungle and scavenging off the forest floor. With Rose potentially only a few miles away, dinner was going to have to wait. Despite everything that had happened with Colt yesterday, having a sense of direction felt . . . good.

  Osvaldo caught her smiling. “For someone who’s skipping the beach to hang out by the docks, you sure are grinning like a jaguar child.” He chuckled. “You happy to be here, or are you just happy not to be somewhere else?”

  “A little of both, Osvaldo. A little of both.” She dropped a five on the counter and stood up. “How long do you think the taxi ride to the river will be from here?”

  “Not long . . .” He tapped his chin. “But if you’ll allow me, can I make a suggestion for more creative transportation?”

  As the wind billowed through her helmet and the crisp bite of Biscayne Bay washed over her, Ash couldn’t help but have flashbacks to just yesterday, sitting on the back of the Honda Nighthawk with Colt. But now she was on the opposite coast, on a motorized scooter alone, and cruising over a long bridge into who knew what sort of trouble.

  This is the way I like it, she realized. On my own.

  She didn’t want to have to ride through life on the back of a bike, with her arms strapped around someone else. She wanted to be at the helm.

  To the south of the causeway, on her left, a mountain of cargo containers glowed in metal bouquets of blue, green, and red under the low angle of the setting sun. Beyond that she could see a few mountainous cruise ships at dock. The ship she was looking for was probably more on the petite side, and hopefully docked on the Miami River where Osvaldo said it might be.

  But where to begin? The boat could have already pulled into dock and unloaded its cargo: Rose. Ash still had both sides of the five-mile-long river to canvas in her search. The odds certainly weren’t leaning in her favor.

  The causeway wound to the north until her phone’s GPS indicated her upcoming exit, and she snagged the off-ramp. Music blossomed from Bayfront Park’s amphitheater on her left—a concert that Osvaldo had suggested as a last-ditch attempt to derail her mission. She tapped her toe on the footboard to the rhythm of the song, a tune she recognized from the radio. Some stupid pop number with lyrics that basically boiled down to getting hammered and throwing yourself at every man in the nightclub.

  She was almost glad to be scouring the river instead.

  Ash had pored over a map of the city as she was renting the Vespa back in South Beach. To the south side of the river was Little Havana, a sweeping neighborhood that was apparently home to a large population of transplants from Cuba and Latin America. Directly north of the Miami River were a university, a hospital, a college, some hotels, and a convention center. Neither side of the river screamed “crime-ridden” to Ash, but the boat had been coming from Central America, and if she were smuggling a six-year-old war goddess into the country, she’d probably avoid the side in plain view of a convention center.

  Much to her annoyance, there wasn’t just one road that ran the full length of the river’s south side. Instead she had to tediously carve her way in and out.

  After four continuous miles of weaving roads and silent docks, she was beginning to feel like she was running a fool’s errand—and she wasn’t just thinking of her combing the Miami River in search of the boat, but her journey to Miami in general. Yes, Lesley had her little sister, and yes, Rose was just a little girl. But Ash had come to Florida with only two leads: the number on the boat’s container, and the port of destination. She might as well have been searching for a coconut shaving on a glacier.

  She was about to turn around and call it a night, maybe even have takeout delivered to her motel, when her eyes abruptly began to boil. The heat escalated until her vision grew bleary with tears, and she jerked the Vespa over to the side of the road.

  When her line of sight cleared, she found herself standing in a world without color. Everything that lay in front of her—the shipyard, its compound of metal-sided buildings, the yachts and speedboats in the marina ahead—had been muted to shades of gray and brown, and even the dusky sky had been poached of its color.

  No, not everything, Ash realized as she leaned her Vespa against one of the dock buildings. In the gravel there were two parallel lines of fading orange, trailing off into the marin
a grounds beyond.

  Ash couldn’t spot any dockworkers in the empty shipyard, so she followed the ember trail all the way to a boathouse in the back, where the lines stopped just behind the tires of a waiting van. The moment she touched the van, color leaked back into the world around her and the heat trail in the gravel faded into the stone.

  Ash rubbed her eyes. Hopefully the weird heat vision was a sign that she was on the right trail, and not an indication that she was going completely insane. It was increasingly hard to tell these days.

  The main door to the boathouse was locked from the inside, so her only way in was through the opposite end, where the boats exited. She had to skirt along the thin ledge between the dock walls and the river beyond. Up this close, the river water below had a green and brown tinge to it like mossy tree bark, and Ash prayed that she wouldn’t fall in. Even fire wouldn’t protect her from river pollutants.

  Once inside the boathouse, she slipped quietly down the row of white midsize boats.

  Four boats later, she found it.

  It looked exactly as it had in the dream, and as she stared up at the two-bar railing, she had a flashback to her vision, to staring out of a child’s eyes as the pursuing ship balled up into a nugget of steel and death and was swallowed by the wrath of a war goddess who didn’t know any better.

  Ash had to be sure, though. A metal gangplank had been extended from the starboard side of the boat down to the dock. She cursed the hollow clanging of her footsteps against the metal treads.

  Once she had boarded the ship, Ash crept down the hallway until she was standing in front of a familiar crate. She took the crossword clipping with the numbers and held it side by side with the actual numbers to make sure they matched. As she brushed the stenciled numbers and letters with her fingertips, it occurred to her that at one point her little sister had walked down this very hall.

  For the first time since she’d had the original vision of Rose, Ash’s sister seemed like a reality, not just some borderline nightmare that lay outside her realm of responsibility. In fact, Ash was beginning to feel downright ashamed that she’d chosen to brush off the visions in favor of tennis matches, the school dance, and Colt. All of that felt so frivolous now.