by Mary Morris
In the morning as first light entered the room, Mercedes came in to wake Isabel and she found the girl, immobile, staring at the ceiling with a snake coiled on her chest. Isabel only blinked as Mercedes stopped, cupping her hand over her mouth, then raced out of the room. She returned with a campesino who clutched a machete in his fist, and he nudged the snake. Isabel watched as the snake unwound itself, raising its head and writhing on her chest. She heard it rattle.
As the snake hissed and prepared to strike, the man swooshed the blade through the air above Isabel’s chest and sliced off the snake’s head in one clean stroke.
For hours after that, though her sheets were covered in blood, neither Mercedes nor Rosalba could get Isabel to move. She had no idea how long she remained frozen there, breathing her shallow breaths.
“You see,” Isabel told me, “it’s as if I can still feel that snake on my chest. And I’m waiting for the morning when it will go away.”
Nine
IN THE LOBBY of the hotel I have noticed a smell. The smell of bodies. This is because there is no soap in la isla; the people cannot bathe. There is water—cold water—but they have no soap. When the waiters bring me my coffee in the morning, I tip them with bars of soap.
I am sitting at the little table I have staked out for myself. It has become my place. It helps under these conditions to establish routines, create familiar things. My table, my room, my waiter, my shower curtain, my Major Lorenzo. I am trying to read the newspaper, but it is difficult to concentrate because of the sound of breaking balls.
A pool game is going on in earnest in the corner. I listen to the clacking of balls, the groans of players as they miss their shots. I get up and chalk a cue. “Rack them up,” I say to the group of Dutch boys. One of the blond men smirks as he puts the balls in the triangle, but one of the few things I know how to do in this world is play pool. My father had me racking balls on our basement pool table when I could barely see over the rail. I notice that two balls are missing. “You break,” I tell him. And he smashes the cue ball toward the center of the triangle. The ball makes odd, sliding movements along the green felt, which is torn, and the slate beneath it is not lying flat.
The table is old, circa 1950s. My guess is that someone dug it up out of a storage room in one of the casinos, where it had been sitting in dampness for the past thirty years. The Dutchman’s break sinks one ball, then he scratches. It is my shot and I line up a combination, put a little English on, and watch the cue ball wobble across the table. No one is sure where anything will go, but the five ball sinks into the side pocket. Though I’d been aiming for the seven in the corner, everyone applauds.
“Nice shot,” a young woman says. She is wearing a short red dress and has pretty dark hair. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” she asks me. I know that I’ve seen her before too. I finish my game, though it is all hit-or-miss. I sink a few balls, but lose. When I return to where I had been sitting, the woman in the red dress is sitting there.
“¿La molesto?” she asks me. “All the tables are filled.”
“No problem,” I tell her, “please join me,” though I notice that the tables aren’t filled.
“My friends are here too,” she says, pointing to my extra chairs.
“Them too,” I say.
Her friends also have short skirts, thick makeup on. They wear giant gold earrings, the size of door knockers. One wears a pink and black spotted jumpsuit. There aren’t many women with the body for this kind of a jumpsuit, but this woman has one. They introduce themselves. Their names are María, Eva, and Flora and they remind me of the three birds on my dentist’s drill when I was a girl. Which birdie is singing? Dr. Yeagar used to ask as he drilled.
“I’m sure I’ve seen you before,” María, the woman in the red dress, says.
“Probably just from the other day,” I reply.
“No,” she says, shaking her head, “it was a long time ago.”
“So,” says Eva, who has red lipstick and wears a short skirt, “you just get here?” Suddenly I recognize her as the woman who was with one of the Finnish men. María, who is smiling, was with the dwarf. “Yes, just yesterday.”
“Oh, where you from?” María asks. “Canada?”
“No, America, actually.”
“America? This is America,” says Flora, in the black and pink spandex.
“The United States,” I reply.
Distracted, Flora, who is black, looks away. “Oh that one.”
“So perhaps you have things you’d like to sell? Underwear? Blue jeans?” Eva plucks at my jeans.
“I just have soap.” I hand them a few bars, which I keep in my bag. They hold them and sniff. “You can keep these,” I say, and for the moment they seem content. Flora tucks hers between her breasts. Suddenly there is a flurry of activity. A tour group from Germany has just arrived and María, Eva, and Flora stand up to excuse themselves. “Duty calls,” María says, giving me a wave of her hand, containing a bar of apricot soap. Her hips move as she heads to the counter, where a tired German traveler is just checking in.
Major Lorenzo crosses her path, but his eyes do not settle on her at all. Instead he scans the room, and when he spots me he waves. As he approaches with his aide trailing behind him, the staff and guests all look my way. Enrique cannot miss this; neither can the prostitutes as they now move toward the bar. I receive significant stares, then everyone turns away.
“So,” he says, “how are you? Have you found everything you need?”
His asking is a formality but I assure him that everything is fine. Pulling back an extra chair, I invite Major Lorenzo to join me for drink, but with a wave of his hand he refuses. He does not say it, but, of course, this could be misinterpreted; it could be perceived as a bribe.
“At least sit with me,” I say, because I feel comfortable at this table.
“No,” he says, his voice firm. “I prefer to wait for you in the lobby.”
When I finish my coffee, I join him. He rises as he sees me coming, extending his hand. He wants to know if everything is all right. If there is anything he can do to make my stay more comfortable. I am certain that under other circumstances he would invite me out for coffee, perhaps to his house to meet his wife. He is trim and fit and tells me he bicycles each day. Not because he has to, he assures me, not because he cannot get gasoline for his car, but because he wants to stay fit. He pounds his chest and it is tight as a drum.
The two men who accompany him are also fit, but they are much younger so it is less impressive. They are also more frightening behind their reflector shades with guns strapped to their hips. Major Lorenzo doesn’t wear a weapon. He doesn’t wear reflector shades. “So,” he says, “we are trying to move forward. To get you back as soon as we can.”
“Yes, I suppose that would be best.”
“There are, however, some delays. Technicalities that hopefully we will clear up soon.” I ponder pressing him, asking him once again for the reason I am here. Yet I think it is better if I don’t push him. He has been so considerate of my needs, providing me with a room with a view. He does not wish to disturb my coffee. He has been so kind, really, and yet I have this sense that I would not want to cross him, that it might not be the right thing to do.
“So,” he says, “have you spoken with your daughter?” His daughter is sixteen, he tells me, and she wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up. “Do you have a picture?” he asks. Fumbling in our wallets, we produce pictures of our children, both apologizing that the photos are old. His daughter has crooked teeth, which Major Lorenzo says already have braces and that she is taller than he. Then he gazes at my snapshot of Jessica. Like Isabel, he says that she looks just like me, which isn’t true so I know that he is being polite. And this makes me wonder if there isn’t something that he too wants from me. A confession or the whereabouts of the disappeared. But the truth is, and perhaps Isabel has seen to this, I have no idea what happened to her. I have no idea where she is.
Though it is only five o’clock in the afternoon, I find I am suddenly tired after he leaves. There is nothing really that I want to do, and I seem to have no energy for anything anyway. It is as if I have somehow been drained of my strength. I go up to my room, thinking I’ll lie down for a moment. My head rests on the soft pillow. My hands grope at the cool sheets. The room is darkened, the French doors closed. Outside there are shouts, laughter.
I do not remember falling asleep, but soon I am dreaming. I am in a jungle where howler monkeys shake the branches overhead. Blue morpho butterflies loom. A capybara lumbers through the woods. Suddenly the sky darkens and turns a winter’s gray. At first only a light snow falls, but then it gets heavier, thick and billowy.
I grow smaller, more compact. I’m in a snowsuit, heading into the jungle where now the snow falls densely. The jungle becomes a forest. My hands wear mittens, a scratchy scarf covers my face. I find a trail of human tracks and I follow these through the snow.
Ten
ONCE WHEN I was a girl, there was an ice storm, and for days we couldn’t go to school or drive to the store. We skated up and down the street, but mostly Lydia and I stayed inside, where we played games. We pretended our beds were continents, the floor a roiling sea. For hours we jumped from bed to bed, never touching the floor, where we’d drown.
We played trading places, though we didn’t look anything alike. Everything about her was long, even her fingers and her nose; even though I am older, I am small, round, and brown, like an acorn. But for a day I was Lydia and she was me. We put on each other’s clothes. Hers were too big and I had to roll them up, and her ankles showed when she wore my pants, as if she had just outgrown them.
We switched beds. I did her English homework and she did my math. She could do math fractions in her head while I wrote an essay on why I liked to ice skate (which is what she liked to do). She liked to get out on the ice and twirl, and she never fell because she had strong ankles, but I tripped over my feet, bruised my bottom on the ice. Still, I wrote how I loved to feel my feet beneath me as they glided, how I loved hot chocolate and rosy cheeks, when in fact I’ve always been someone who loves warm, open places, surf pounding the shore.
I called her friends and made dates and she called mine. When our father hollered for Lydia to come downstairs and set the table, I came. He got so angry it was almost funny to see, the way his face wrinkled up and his eyes set their sights on me as if he’d hit me, but he never did. Instead he shouted, I didn’t call you, I called Lydia.
I told him, Daddy, I’m Lydia today, but he didn’t think that was funny. He didn’t find it funny at all.
My father didn’t like to be in the house, which our mother had furnished from a Sears catalog. He wanted to be at the office or in his “studio,” which was the unheated garage. He ran a small manufacturing firm, before it went bankrupt, that made plastic ashtrays, ice packs, and plastic handles for hamburger presses. The ashtrays had three designs in them that he’d drawn himself—horses, dogs, antique cars. Perfect for the sporty set, he’d joke. He had schemes for other things he wanted to do—refrigerator magnets, party balloons.
In the garage during the warmer months our father painted. He painted mostly seascapes, landscapes, and cities from postcards—usually Paris in the rain. Lydia and I would go out there in the summer and he’d give us a brush and some paint and we’d try to copy his paintings on pieces of paper he’d tack to the trees. Whenever Lydia asked him to paint us, he always said, “I don’t do people.”
When it was cold, he tried to paint in the basement, but he complained that we bothered him too much. “There’s not enough room here,” he’d say to our mother of the two-bedroom ranch house they’d never pay off.
The January of the ice storm, there was a thaw and the thaw brought rain. It rained and rained, and as the temperature fell the rain glazed the trees, the power lines, the roads. Lydia and I saw fairy castles in the glass and pretended to be snow queens while our father tried to break up the ice in the driveway with a pickax, whacking like a prisoner trying to escape. But the driveway was too long and the ice too thick, and once he had broken it up there was nowhere to go.
We dressed up in long cotton skirts and our mother made grilled cheese sandwiches. We ate them in front of the fireplace with pickles and potato chips. The sandwiches were hot with thick, runny cheese, and the pickles stung my tongue. When we were done, our father said to carry our dishes back to the kitchen. Lydia never wanted to carry heavy things because she dropped them, so I loaded up the tray. But when I passed our father on the three stairs that connected the living room to the kitchen, he said, “Maggie, you’re going to drop that tray.”
“I won’t,” I told him.
His nostrils flared; his jaw was set firm. “Yes, you will.” Even as he said it, I felt my foot tangling in my skirt. The tray grew heavy in my hands, tilting as the dishes slipped forward. I listened as the dishes tumbled down the stairs, shattering on the floor. “You see,” my father said, as he walked away, “I told you you would.”
Eleven
THE RINGING of the phone wakes me and for a moment I am not sure where I am. My surroundings aren’t familiar and I cannot recall what city I am in or how I got here. Then I hear a voice, speaking Spanish to me. “I’m afraid I’ve woken you,” the voice says apologetically, and I know it is Major Lorenzo. I struggle to sit up.
“It’s all right. I should be getting up.” I reach for my watch, which is on the nightstand, and see that it is only eight o’clock in the morning, but I have been asleep since the previous afternoon. There is a hollow pit in my stomach and suddenly I am very hungry.
“There are some people who would like to see you.”
“Oh,” I say, “are they here?”
“No,” he replies, drawing out the word, as if this thought never would have occurred to him, “we are going there.”
“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” I tell him. I am about to get up, to shower quickly, but as I lie there, I am struck with the odd feeling that I have not been alone, as if someone has been in the room, watching me. Looking at my belongings, at me as I slept. I am warm, sweating, as I get up and go through my things. My head seems to be reeling, as if I have fallen into a dead sleep. I open drawers, peer into the closet. Scan the walls for holes, hidden cameras. Everything seems to be in place, as I left it. When I close my eyes, I can almost hear another person breathing, yet I know no one is there. Still I undress in the bathroom, where I take a cold shower; I put on my clothes before leaving the bathroom.
That is when I notice the frog. It is a small, green frog, wedged between the wall of the bathroom and a window that must have once opened onto the outside. How the frog got into my room, let alone into that wedged place between the window and the wall, I’ll never know. But it makes a deep, guttural sound. The window is locked shut, so I’ll try to find a maid to let the frog out.
As I leave the room, I see a maid and signal to her, but she just looks at me, then scurries away. I hear her whispering to another worker in the corridor as I walk by. They know, I tell myself. Everyone knows who I am. And what I have done.
Major Lorenzo sits in the lobby, leaning forward, speaking with his aide, who even inside wears his reflector shades. I have yet to see his eyes. Major Lorenzo is dressed in perfect military attire and looks like a man who is going somewhere. As soon as he sees me, he stops talking and rises. So does his aide, and people turn, looking my way, since there aren’t many men around in reflector shades with semiautomatic weapons strapped to their waists.
Major Lorenzo extends his hand and I notice that he smells of after shave. Canoe? Old Spice? Some brand my father used to wear. “Well, Maggie,” Major Lorenzo says, calling me by my first name for the first time, “I’m sorry we disturbed you.” He motions for me to sit down.
“It’s all right,” I tell him, “I have things to do.”
Both men give me quizzical looks, wondering what that could possibly be. I shrug, pointing to my nail
s. “A manicure,” I say, and they laugh. Major Lorenzo has coffee and toast waiting for me and he sits beside me impassively as I gobble it down.
Stepping out into the plaza, I am blinded by the light and the heat of the day. In the short time I have been here, I find I am growing accustomed to drawn shades, the subdued light filtered through them. Major Lorenzo holds my elbow as I step down from the curb, as if we are on a date. Perhaps now we will go out for coffee, have lunch at El Colibrí. I feel the sturdy cobblestones beneath my feet. Solid ground.
People saunter past—full-bodied women move in languorous steps as if they have just risen from their beds. Men strut; others mill about, smoking cigars. Suddenly I am gripped with the urge to run, to dash away, to lose myself in the throngs. I’ve seen this in my dog. Sometimes he gets out and races down the street and I know that what he wants to do, what it is in his heart to do, is to run away.
But I do not break free. I do as I am told. Major Lorenzo opens the door to the plain beige car I traveled in before. His aide waits until I am comfortably seated inside. Then the two of them sit in front, Major Lorenzo with his arm draped over the back of the seat, turning to me from time to time. “Is it too much air?” he asks as he did when he first brought me here. “Did you have enough to eat?” I am torn between feeling like a visiting dignitary and a truant child en route to some official reprimand, my disgruntled parents in the front seat.
We drive inland, away from the sea, and this disappoints me, since I was hoping we would follow the water. I want to take deep breaths. Instead the air grows heavy and thick. We move swiftly down the winding roads that lead away from Puerto Angélico, twisting so many times that I am not sure whether we are going to the east or the west.
I have always had a good sense of direction, but now I cannot seem to get my bearings. I try to find markers so I’ll remember the way—a billboard, a sports arena, a road sign, but everything seems generic, nondescript, though I know I have never taken this road before. Isabel never brought me this way, so there cannot be much of interest here.