Black Hearts

by Karina Halle

  So he did some searching.

  Found out Dad was married before.

  Then fucking Mom called Ben into the kitchen to help her with something and now I’m left with information I don’t know how to process.

  I knew I couldn’t go back to the hotel with Vicente, even though he’s been so good dealing with my crazy (lying, fucking lying!) parents. I wouldn’t be able to leave Ben, I wouldn’t be able to leave without knowing more, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on Vicente.

  I had to stay and he had to go.

  I might have hurt his ego to push him out of here, but right now it can’t matter. Tomorrow it will. But tonight, I have to be here for my brother. I have to know the truth.

  I look in the kitchen, but I don’t see him. I pop my head into the living room to where my parents are just settling down on the couch with the wine.

  “Where’s Ben?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” Mom says, looking above her at the ceiling. “In his room, maybe?”

  Oh god, I can barely look at them. How much does she know?

  “Where’s Vicente?” Dad asks.

  I can’t look at him at all.

  “He left,” I say through grinding teeth.

  I don’t have to stick around to see the look of relief on their faces.

  I head down the hall and up the stairs.

  My bedside light is on in my room. Ben is sitting on my bed drinking the tequila straight out of the bottle. For a moment, in this strange prism of time, I can see it. See him for who he’s always been. His skin has always been darker than anyone’s in the family. His nose is Roman and out of place. Even his eyes have a different angle to them.

  I close the door behind me and he looks at me through drunken eyes.

  “Sophia Madano is my mother. I’m fucking Italian.”

  I can only shake my head, hugging my arms to chest like the room has grown cold. “Tell me again. Everything. I don’t understand…”

  “And you think I fucking do?” He waves the bottle around and then laughs sourly. “Look, Vi. I’ll tell you what I know. Dad was apparently framed to look like he kidnapped his ex-wife and child. He never did it, which I guess is the good part. It was actually Sophia’s brothers, the very infamous, very horrible, Madano brothers. It doesn’t matter how much looking I do, I’m searching every fucking thing that was ever put on the web, but all I know is that there was once a Sophia and Camden McQueen and they lived a very happy life until they got divorced. Dad then went to live in Palm Valley and opened a fucking tattoo shop. Three fucking guesses what the name was. I lived with my mom in LA and took the name Madano. Then something happened. Sophia, my fucking real mom, disappeared, but I didn’t, and then suddenly I guess Dad moves on, marries Mom, and you were born and one big happy perfect family. Right? Right!?”

  He’s near tears. My brother isn’t emotional in the slightest, not on the surface anyway, so it breaks me in pieces to see him like this. I can deal with my feelings about it later—after all, this doesn’t affect who he is to me—but I don’t know what to say. I wouldn’t know how to feel if I were him.

  “Ben,” I say softly, sitting on the bed next to him. I put my hand on his back. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to make excuses for them…”

  “And you never have,” he says bitterly. “You know that, Vi. You never have. You always said there was something off, something wrong. You knew. I was the fool. After this, I’m starting to think they might not be our parents at all.”

  I give him a look. It’s very clear that there’s a lot of my mother in me and a lot of my father in him. “They’re our parents, Ben.”

  “They’re both yours,” he says. Then he takes another gulp from the bottle. I’m tempted to take it away from him. “They’re not both mine.”

  Ugh. My heart sinks. “Ben,” I say to him softly. “Let’s go down and talk to them. Tell them everything. Get it all out in the open and deal with it together.”

  He shakes his head, staring at nothing. “No. No, I don’t want to do that.”

  “But you have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because neither you or me can live with this burden of keeping it to ourselves. And we’re both probably making it out to be worse than it is. We need the truth.”

  He hangs his head, making him look like a little boy. “They’ll lie again.”

  “No they won’t. They can’t. And you know they want what’s best for us. I’m sure whatever the explanation is, it’s something worthwhile. You were so young.”

  “I was three. I wondered why I have no memories younger than five. Something so traumatic must have happened to me that I blocked it out.”

  Well, kidnapping would do that.

  I get up. “Come on. Let’s go downstairs.”

  “Violet,” he says in a voice I don’t even recognize. “Let me deal with this my own fucking way.”

  Then he gets up, nearly knocking me over, and storms out of the room to his old one across the hall, slamming the door. The tequila went with him.

  I exhale loudly and sit down on the bed.

  Nothing makes sense anymore.

  Nothing except one man.

  I know I shouldn’t bug Ben anymore, so I go about getting ready for bed. After I’ve brushed my teeth and washed my face, slathering on moisturizer, I pick up my phone to text Vicente.

  With one hand on the phone, about to type, I reach up with my other to lower the blinds.

  I gasp.

  Outside the window, down below in the courtyard, is the tall figure of a man standing beside my mother’s lemon tree. He blends in so well that it’s hard to know what I’m looking at, especially as the mist curls around him and scatters the faint light from the back door.

  But there’s a glowing amber in the darkness. A lit cigarette that moves from being held at the side and then up to the mouth where it burns bright like a star.

  It’s not just the hairs on the back of my neck that are standing up. It’s every single pore of my body, raised, electric.

  I keep my eyes on the figure while texting Vicente at the same time.

  Where r u?

  I press send and wait.

  I watch.

  The figure seems to be the same height as him with the same wide shoulders, but I can’t make out any details or features. For a moment I think my eyes are playing tricks on me, but when I keep watching, the figure moves slightly as if off-balance, the cigarette still glowing.

  Who are you? I think. Are you my Vicente? Are you ghosts from my parents’ past? Are you the white man who follows me?

  But the figure gives no answer and I don’t dare look away. The longer I stare at him, the more he seems to morph into nothing at all.

  And then I realize that visibility is down to a few feet. Fog obscures everything. I quickly glance down at the phone and see the text from Vicente.

  Just got to the hotel. Talk to you tomorrow, mirlo.

  I look back to the window.

  The fog has quickly blown past.

  The tree is there.

  The man is gone.

  I shake my head, trying to blink him back into existence. It must be the wine, it must be the tequila, it must be the stress of dealing with Ben.

  He was probably never there.

  I shut off the light and get into bed.

  I close my eyes.

  I know there was someone there.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ellie

  Ellie sits up in bed, in the dark. She can feel the gun burn beside her in the bedside table drawer. Vicente was right about that, the little fuck, but he doesn’t know that there’s a gun in the other bedside table as well.

  You can never be too careful.

  Ellie knows this well.

  She waits until Camden comes through the door and shuts it behind him, his tall silhouette approaching the bed.

  “They’re asleep,” he says with a heavy sigh. “I think Ben’s passed out.”

  Ellie nods, h
olding the blanket up to her chest, her fingers curled over the hem like she’s a child all over again, holding on to that one stuffed rabbit she had, the only thing she really remembers from her childhood that signified she ever was a child.

  Everything beyond that rabbit—grey matted fur with the stuffing coming out, the one shiny eye and crooked yarn smile, the cliché of every marred childhood—was a blur of lies and pain. She never had a childhood, she just had games she had to play, games that ended with acid being poured on her leg by a madman.

  She was so young when she was scarred for life. Scars that traumatized her throughout the years, that reminded her each and every day that she had no one to love her, that she was just a pawn and would always be a pawn.

  Her husband’s cherry blossom tattoo masks the deformities, but even beautiful art can’t hide an ugly canvas. It will always be there, underneath.

  “Are you okay?” Camden asks, getting into bed beside her.

  “Yeah,” she says quietly and hates how weak her voice sounds.

  Camden puts his arm around her and pulls her to his chest until her head sinks in there, fitting just right. She can hear his heartbeat—it’s her metronome. It’s the pulse that her life moves to. Without him, she has nothing.

  And without her children, she has nothing too.

  This is what scares her. That they’re all on the verge of the abyss, and one wrong move will send everyone over. She doesn’t know what she’d do if anything were to happen to Violet or Ben. It doesn’t matter that Ben isn’t hers biologically—she’s raised him since he was three years old to be hers, and so he is.

  Time seems to slow in their bedroom. The house creaks on with the night. Finally she says, “I’m scared.” Her voice seems to echo in the room, like the room is scared too.

  “Don’t be,” Camden says. “Violet can take care of herself.”

  “You really don’t think it’s him?”

  “Javier’s son?” he asks. “No. You’re right about the eyes, but everything else…I don’t know. I think you’re seeing what you want to see.”

  She stiffens. “Why the fuck would I want to see that?”

  “Because it’s your past. Because the past has recently caught up to us, and now we’re seeing it everywhere. It’s just bad timing, Ellie. That’s all. Vicente just happens to look the same as Javier and you’re taking that and running with it, assuming he’s been sent here for her.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  Camden swallows noisily. “If I’m wrong, we’ll know. And we’ll deal with it then.”

  “That’s a big risk.”

  “I trust our daughter. That’s all there is to it.”

  “But she doesn’t know what that man is capable of.”

  “That’s true. But Vicente isn’t that man. Even if he does end up being his son, and that’s a long shot, he still isn’t that man. It’s been too long. Too fucking long.” He sighs. “This is just life. We knew this wouldn’t be easy, to keep everything the way it is.”

  “Keep up the lies, you mean?”

  “It’s for the greater good,” he says. “The only time lies are worth telling.” He holds her close to him, kisses her forehead. “It’s going to be okay. It will be.”

  He needs it to be okay. They both do.

  Her eyes are wide open, staring into the shadows of the room while she listens to Camden’s breath grow deeper and deeper as he falls into sleep.

  Ben was acting weird tonight, she thinks. But she can’t bear to bring it up. He’d chalk it up to her paranoia again, her guilt over Sophia, that she’s not Ben’s real mother.

  So many lies, one on top of the other.

  A pile of matchsticks about to go up in flames.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Vicente

  The dream comes back again.

  Santa Muerte.

  But this time she has blackbirds instead of hair, swirling around her in a gathering storm.

  I’m alone in the desert, wide open and stretching as far as the eye can see.

  There is no life here.

  Only death.

  This is the home of Santa Muerte.

  The Saint of Death with Violet’s eyes.

  I want to ask her what she wants from me, but I cannot speak.

  She’s not alone.

  She has a man with her.

  Or the remains of one.

  She drags him behind her on a leash made of frayed rope.

  But though the man is nearly skeletal, his suit hanging off him in dirty, wet tatters, he’s not dead. He’s still alive.

  She moves, throwing her arm out, birds flying forth from underneath the endless void of her cloak, and she whips the man around until he’s lying at my feet.

  For one horrible moment, as the dust rises and falls, I think I’m staring down at my father.

  It is my father.

  Younger. Ten, twenty years younger. But still him.

  Then it quickly fades and morphs, as faces do in dreams, and becomes the face of Juan Alvarez.

  The first man I ever killed.

  I had known him for years. He was the man who drove me to school in the mornings. He was the driver for our family, in charge of making sure Marisol and I got to where we needed to go. He watched over us, protected us.

  Then one day my father found out that a federale had bribed Juan for information.

  Juan would never give us up. I believed that even as a child.

  But what he told the federale led to a bust on one of our shipments.

  My father doesn’t take betrayal lightly.

  And because Juan had been in charge of driving me to school for years, I was to be the one to end Juan’s life.

  I still don’t like to think about what happened that day. My father had Juan down on his knees, naked, hands bound in front of him, in front of the wall that wrapped around the courtyard where my mother liked to have her coffee in the mornings.

  In Juan’s mouth was an apple, shoved so far back against his molars that he couldn’t spit it out.

  My father, dressed in a white linen suit, handed me his gun and told me to shoot the apple out of Juan’s mouth as “punishment.”

  I was fourteen at the time. I knew how to handle all weapons. I wasn’t a bad shot. I knew that if I aimed for the apple, I would shoot the apple. I would shoot him clear through his head.

  That was the moment in my life when everything changed. When I took the step from child to adult. When I realized that tears couldn’t save me. A good heart couldn’t save me. That I could never go back to the way things were, that I would call for my innocence but it would never return.

  Despite being a good shot and handling all guns, this gun in particular felt heaviest to me. A brick of lead. I almost dropped it. Who knows what would have happened if I had. It would have probably gone off and killed my father.

  Sometimes I wonder if that’s what should have happened instead.

  But it didn’t.

  I took the gun and raised it with shaking hands, squinting at Juan over the barrel, the Juan who would drive me through the heavily guarded roads on the way to school and give me sips of his coffee from the thermos. The Juan who would offer me a smile before he offered anyone else one. The Juan who sometimes acted like he cared about me more than my own parents did.

  I shot that Juan right in the head.

  A part of me died that day with him. Maybe all of me did.

  I try not to think about it.

  Until it’s looking right back at me, a figure from the grave, a reminder of how far off the path I’ve strayed.

  Even though it’s a dream, a song lyric floats into my head.

  The righteous part is straight as an arrow

  Take a walk and you‘ll find it too narrow.

  And it was too narrow. Too narrow for the likes of me.

  In the dream, Juan looks up at me from the desert floor. A rotten apple rolls out of his skeleton mouth.

  Santa Muerte laughs as more blac
kbirds fly from her eyes, her hair, her lips.

  “Good job,” my father’s words ring across the desert. “You’ve done me proud.”

  And I think that’s all I’ve ever wanted.

  Until now.

  I’m tired the next day. The dream did a number on me. After I woke up, I tossed and turned for hours, wishing Violet was with me to keep the nightmares at bay, both the living ones and the ones in my dreams.

  She wants to see me at her house today. We’re going to this damn music festival, which is the last thing I want to do.

  What I really want is her here in this room. On her knees. On her back. That gorgeous face staring up at me, promising all the good in the world, even if it’s locked inside her.

  And yet for all her softness and kindness and bleeding heart, I want to make her stronger, better. Something more like me.

  God forbid.

  But that won’t happen today, so I make do with what will. I’ll see her and that’s the most important thing right now.

  Plus, I’m hoping she’ll confide in me what happened with Ben. When I got back to the hotel last night, I thought I would dig around a bit online and see what I could find about Ben McQueen, but there was nothing. Ben’s obviously got some mad hacking skills to pull up the stuff he did.

  Since the festival posters promised lots of alcohol along with the free music, I have one of the hotel’s private cars take me to Violet’s door.

  She and her brother are already waiting on the steps, sitting on the stoop like the poster for an old sitcom I used to watch on Telemundo. Except instead of cheesy grins, they look like they’re going off to war.

  “Hey,” I say to them, shoving my hands in the pockets of my jacket. “Ben, you look like shit.”

  He does. Too much tequila and something else.

  Whatever it is I’m supposed to find out.

  He just dismisses me with a pained wave, getting up off the step with a pathetic whimper before staggering down the street.

  I turn to Violet and hold out my hand, helping her to her feet.

  “How are you, mirlo?” I ask her, running my hand over her silky head.

  “I’ve been better,” she says, standing on her tiptoes for a kiss.