Immutable

by Cidney Swanson

  “So, the house and land are yours, now, are they?” asked Monsieur.

  “Once I see Monsieur Jaquette and sign a few things,” mumbled Matteo.

  “Ah, yes,” said the tidy man. “My friend Jaquette. I’m certain he can speed things along for you. I could ask him, as a favor—”

  “No,” snapped Matteo. And then, more calmly, “I think I can handle this myself.”

  “Monsieur Jaquette is an associate of mine. It would be good for you to remember this.”

  In the flare of Matteo’s nostrils, Martina saw he’d caught the veiled threat.

  The tidy man tapped his cell phone and looked down at something while he continued talking to Matteo. “I am in a bit of a pinch tonight. I would like you to do a second delivery. Since you were late, the fee will be the same.”

  “No,” said Matteo, his voice firm. “One delivery, one fee.”

  “You were late. I need a favor. This is what we do: favors. Like with Jaquette, non? Two deliveries. One fee.” The tidy man reached for two packages, one larger than the other.

  Matteo’s fists clenched. He was silent, staring at the ground. His face gave nothing away, and Martina was certain this was done with great effort.

  She wanted him to tell Monsieur no. He had to refuse.

  “You don’t want to refuse me, boy,” said the tidy man, still thumbing through screens on his phone.

  Matteo’s head bowed slightly forward. He spoke softly and clearly. “Because of our long … friendship, I’ll do it this once,” said Matteo. It was an awkward attempt to save face. Like most awkward attempts, its success was limited.

  “Don’t be late again,” said the tidy man, handing the brown-paper-wrapped packages to Matteo. “I’ll speak to my friend Jaquette tomorrow. These legal proceedings … they can drag on and on, you know.”

  Martina got the distinct feeling Monsieur was going to ask Jaquette to drag things out. The dark look on Matteo’s face told her he feared the same thing.

  “Merci, Monsieur,” said Matteo, his mouth tight as he dropped the packages in his bag.

  “Au revoir,” said the tidy man, shooing Matteo from his sight with a flick of his hand.

  “Goodbye,” said Matteo.

  The tidy man looked up, hearing the finality with which the word was uttered, but Matteo’s back was already turned. The tidy man pressed his fingers together for half a second. Then he began texting someone. Martina wanted to read the message in case it concerned Matteo, but if she stayed, she might not be able to follow him. The message was evidently going to be a long one. Martina gave up and pressed her form through the thin wall and then up into the air.

  Matteo was just ahead. He’d stopped running. He was leaning over to empty something from his pockets into the hands of two scrawny children. His plantains. Wrapped in the waxy paper that had held their dinner. Martina had been so consumed with enjoying hers that she hadn’t seen him pocketing his. He leaned over to ruffle the hair of each child and then, a furtive glance to either side, he took off at a run to make his deliveries.

  The first address was in a notably nice part of a town three miles down the main road encircling the island. Matteo ran the entire way. Martina was torn between being very angry with him for involving himself with such an employer and feeling awful that she couldn’t fly him to wherever he needed to go next.

  Before pressing the buzzer at the gated residence, Matteo composed himself, caught his breath, and pulled the shirt out of the bag slung over his shoulders. This, he tugged on quickly. Then he rang the buzzer. A man, dark and elegant—a butler?—answered and accepted the package. He directed Matteo to wait outside for payment. Matteo ran his fingers through his sun-bleached hair, leaving it in a somewhat worse state than it had been before. A moment later, he accepted a bulging envelope. The door closed behind him and he dashed back to the gated entrance, depositing the envelope in his bag, along with his shirt.

  Then he was off again, running at his breakneck pace. The second delivery was to a dwelling up in the hills. It had no fine view of the ocean and no front gate with buzzer. Martina could hear at least one child crying inside. The house was very much like the one Mutti had settled in, only with neighbors stacked on every side and smells that were much less pleasant than charcoal fires and burnt bread.

  Matteo stood to one side of the door, which was open. He didn’t knock or call out. After he’d stood there for half a minute, looking up and down the road, he rapped once on the door jamb. A man and woman were arguing inside. They spoke mostly in French, mixing in some English. She translated, automatically. Don’t! Don’t you do it!

  The man inside shuffled to the doorway, greeting Matteo with a brief lift of his chin. The woman inside was still yelling in French at the man. Two children were crying. One sounded like a baby.

  The man held out one hand, fingers twitching. Martina couldn’t tell if the twitch was involuntary or if it meant here—give it to me.

  Matteo shook his head, mumbling something including the word “first.”

  The man grumbled under his breath and reached into a pocket, removing a small knife and a roll of cash. He made no attempt to threaten Matteo with the knife, but Martina felt a rush of alarm anyway.

  Matteo said only, “Put that away, man. You don’t want trouble with Thibaut.”

  The man grunted in an assenting sort of way and re-pocketed the knife.

  Matteo accepted the roll of cash, counting it swiftly and efficiently without exposing it to any eyes that might have been nearby and curious. After counting it, he palmed it and dropped it in his bag while removing the smaller package addressed, Martina assumed, to the man with the shouting wife.

  The older child, who had stopped crying, ran to the doorway and hugged one of the man’s legs, calling softly, “Papa, papa, papa.” The boy handed something small and made of glass to his father. A pipe. For smoking illicit drugs. Martina had seen them at the clinic, brought in by distressed parents.

  Matteo looked away. Martina saw discomfort in the way his eyes narrowed. Then Matteo took off again at a run.

  Martina wanted to grab Matteo by the shoulders and shake him, stop him, make him give the money back and take the drugs away from the father with the child grasping his leg, still chanting his father’s name in the doorway. She was too angry to chase after Matteo anymore, too angry to think what she wanted, other than to have never come to Sint Maarten in the first place.

  22

  UN ANGE

  Sint Maarten, The Caribbean

  Martina sank onto the ground, hugging invisible knees to her invisible chest. She’d never been good at believing her body wasn’t still real, even when it was insubstantial. She’d excelled at Aunt Helga’s “Find the Hidden Object” games because she still believed her hand could reach for and find things.

  Her back was to the doorway now, but she could still hear the noise of the woman shouting at her husband: How will we buy food? The child chanted papa, papa, papa and the infant cried. The woman’s shouting climbed to a shriek, shrill amidst the buzz of the crowded cluster of dwellings. Who will employ a woman with a bébé and la tuberculose?

  The father was leaning over a table, smoking Matteo’s delivery in the glass pipe. He clutched his knife in his free hand, waving it vaguely in his wife’s direction. She was crying, still shouting things at him. He let the knife do all his talking. The child was no longer clutching his father’s leg; he had switched to clutching his mother’s.

  Inside the house, the room was filled with the reek of something like burning tires and some sweet smell Martina didn’t like, even muted as it was by her invisibility. The child didn’t like the smell either and was waving a hand before his nose to waft the odor away.

  Now the pipe was empty and the man was alternately laughing at it and cursing it. He looked like he might throw it at the doorway where Martina perched, but then he grinned broadly and set it down gently, gently, so gently.

  His wife was screaming at him again. “Ge
t out, get out!” she called. “Monstre! Get out!”

  “Come here, chérie,” he called. “I feel good. You feel it, oui? Everything is good.” He reached for his boy and swung him high, high in the air. Then, wincing, he stared at his arm and set the child down. “’Cept maybe me troublesome arm.” He stared at it some more and then laughed, looking back to his wife. “Come and kiss me, chérie!”

  His wife told him to go somewhere warmer than Sint Maarten.

  “Come here, ma belle,” called the father.

  “Papa, papa, maman, maman.” The child ran between his parents, calling for one and then the other. The woman set her crying infant in a small box—its cradle—ignoring husband and boy alike. Having set the baby down, she turned to her husband and shouted again. “Monstre! Monstre! Get out! Now!”

  To Martina, it looked suddenly as though he was straining for breath.

  Papa, papa, maman, maman!

  Get out, get out, get out!

  The man clutched at his arm, his shoulder, his chest. His eyes bulged and then fluttered closed as he collapsed to the floor.

  “Maman! It’s papa! He fell down!”

  Martina felt as though it took her two years and not two seconds to solidify in the house. The odor was terrible, but dissipating fast. She reached down, feeling on the fallen man’s neck for a pulse.

  She felt nothing.

  Beside her, the child, wide-eyed, whispered his shock. “Un ange, un ange, maman.”

  “He needs a hospital,” Martina said to the woman. “Do you understand? Your husband will die. Il va mourir, vôtre mari.”

  The woman stared, her eyes unblinking.

  “I will take your husband to the hospital.” She tried to remember where she’d seen one. There had been a sign. Back in Marigot. “Do you understand? I am taking your husband to the hospital.”

  “I comin’ with you,” said the woman.

  Martina thought swiftly. “No. You cannot. I’m … I’m an angel. Je suis un ange. I must fly. You must follow on foot. Understand?”

  “Oui,” whispered the woman, her eyes wide.

  Martina grabbed the man and vanished, not waiting to see what would follow in the wretched house. She felt no thoughts from his mind. Usually she heard something, even from the minds of those unknown to her. She flew up high over the compact houses until she could make out the main road along the shore. This, she followed, hovering just above the handful of taxis and tourists in small white rental cars.

  She tried to tell herself he was unconscious, but long before she saw the sign pointing the way to the hospital, long before she reached the outskirts of Marigot, she knew the truth. She was carrying a dead man to the Centre Hospitalier.

  She burst through the front glass door. Finding the hall empty, she came solid. The man was suddenly heavy in her arms.

  “Help,” she cried. “Help!”

  An orderly ran to her side. Called for a nurse, a doctor, a gurney. Martina trembled and then shook as they took the dead man away. She was escorted to a waiting room, offered some coffee, and told someone would be by to take a statement.

  Martina waited until the room was empty, and then she vanished.

  Much, much later, the man’s wife arrived, guided by the young boy, carrying her baby. Much, much later, the doctors came to tell the mother her husband had not survived. Much, much later, Martina found a quiet spot on a quiet hill where she could weep and rage and curse Matteo all by herself.

  23

  LIED TO HER

  Sint Maarten, The Caribbean

  Martina didn’t know how her body continued to make tears. She was thirsty, but thirst was insignificant beside this truth: Matteo had lied to her.

  She’d asked him point blank if he was running drugs, and he’d refused to tell her the truth. And now, because of him, a man was dead, children were orphaned, a sick woman was widowed. Because of Matteo.

  Her life and all its bitter losses paraded before her as she spilled tears on the empty hill. Matteo, sneaking away by kayak without an explanation. Her belief in the beauty and purity of Helmann’s dream—gone. Her invisibility, kept from her in two week increments. There were the siblings who abandoned her for hateful Uncle Fritz and the siblings who abandoned her for medical school. Worst of all, Mutti was dead.

  With Matteo at her side, her anchor in rough waters, all the other losses might have been bearable. But he was lost to her. A liar. A drug dealer. A murderer. She had never been so alone. She cried the moon halfway across the sky. She ran out of tears and howled the moon further, further west.

  At last, even the dry sobs subsided, and she fell silent, hearing the sounds of creatures rustling past, the shift and twitch of branches. The moon had nearly set.

  It was time to go back to France. Time to learn to live alone, since she had no other choice. She stood, ready to fly herself to the airport and invisibly board the first plane that would take her away.

  She would not say goodbye to Matteo. She’d been wrong—so, so wrong—to think that she still knew him after all this time. Her breath hitched in her chest one last time.

  I won’t cry for you anymore, Matteo. She was done. Invisible once more, she rose and flew toward the Dutch side of the island. Before she’d gone far, she realized she had left something important back at Mutti’s house: her passport. She cursed in silence. Her passport had been slipped inside the linen trousers she had discarded while Matteo watched, smiling. Martina’s cheeks flushed as she remembered what had followed. The hunger in Matteo’s eyes—the hunger in her own belly.

  No.

  She would not think of him anymore. Would not regret him, either. There was only her future. And, right now, her passport.

  Pfeffer might demand the passport back or he might not, but either way, she would use it to obtain a permanent form of identification. Of all the things Helmann had kept from his Angel Corps, their lack of formally recognized identities was surely the most demeaning.

  She would have to return to the house on the hill quietly. Tonight was the time to do it: now, while it was dark, because she would have to come solid to grab her passport. She wheeled back to retrace the path to Mutti’s house.

  When she came solid, just outside the front door, her neck had a crick in it, and she stretched it to the sides and back. Overhead, a smattering of stars flickered, looking much like they would back home in Nice.

  Back home in Nice. There was a phrase she’d never thought she would utter. But it was the closest thing she had to a home for now. She felt tears trying to form as she thought of Mutti again. It would have been so good to see her one last time. Well, it was too late. She could murmur a goodbye to Mutti’s grave, ghosting over it when she departed.

  Martina passed into the house. She’d seen a dark lump in the hammock outside; Matteo had left the bed for her. Or maybe he just liked it better outside. The night air wasn’t much cooler than the daytime air, but it was fresher out than in.

  Searching the ground on hands and knees, she located her linen pants. They were right where she’d left them. No one could accuse Matteo of being a meticulous housekeeper. Or of possessing any other worthwhile trait, Martina thought bitterly.

  Martina considered Mutti’s blue skirt and button up shirt, and decided to keep the skirt. A remembrance. She undid the buttons of the shirt, but hesitated removing it altogether. Maybe she would keep it, too. It was perfumed faintly with plumeria, Mutti’s scent. And then Martina recalled the cigar box of remembrances for herself and her siblings. The starfish necklace would be a way to have Katrin always with her. The box was probably still on the kitchen table.

  Martina moved softly forward in the dark. A sliver of moonlight spilled through the window by the kitchen table, outlining what might have been the cigar box. She stepped toward it, moving quietly.

  But she was not the quietest person in the house.

  Martina smelled saltwater and lavender a moment before Matteo’s arms encircled her waist. He nipped softly at the back of he
r neck and tugged her shirt off, exposing her white tank, her bare shoulders and arms.

  Beyond the curse that sprang to mind, Martina experienced two sharp responses to Matteo’s embrace. One was the desire to turn and slap him. The other was the desire to turn and kiss him. She was gripped by indecision, frozen in the moonlight. Then she made her choice and went with the former desire.

  “Ouch!” cried Matteo. “It’s me.”

  “You say that like it makes things better,” snapped Martina. “But guess what: it doesn’t!” She slapped him again. Her eyes had adjusted well enough to ensure her aim was true.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Matteo demanded. The whites of his eyes gleamed in the dark.

  She reached up to swat him again, but this time he caught her wrist.

  “Let go of me,” she said.

  Her tone wasn’t one to be ignored, but Matteo didn’t let go right away. He held her hand in his iron grip for a count of three before dropping it.

  “How about you tell me why you think I deserved that?” he asked, his voice low, colored with anger or hurt.

  Martina wanted to say:

  A man died tonight

  and

  A child lost his father

  and

  A woman lost her husband

  and mostly, mostly, she wanted to say: It’s all your fault!

  What came out of her mouth instead was: “You lied to me.”

  Matteo exhaled heavily. He walked to the window and grabbed a match. Striking the match, he fiddled with an ancient kerosene lamp, finally convincing it to catch. The room flared with a flickering light that became, gradually, a steady light.

  Martina looked away from the bright lamp. She should go. She should walk away right now.

  “Is this about my job?” asked Matteo.

  “Did you lie to me about other things, too?”

  Matteo’s sigh was heavy as the sticky night air. “I didn’t tell you the truth about my job. I’m sorry. I figured out it was drugs, or drugs some of the time, a few months back. Mutti got me the job, okay?”