Sol had often had to pull herself out of these dangerous thoughts. She’d heard Chiqui and Cocoa discussing the same in their own ways before and after My’s birth. But she quickly shut them up because she didn’t want the thoughts to start up again. The tragedy of being born in the back room had been obvious. Walking had been as hard for him as seeing, but a four-year-old who still wobbled when he walked had been more obviously challenged. My had never run in the backyard or hopped like a joey on a playground. His deficits had been glaring even to Lucien, who’d also carried the boy during their outings, fearing the concern that he would have drawn from strangers. Sol had known that My would call attention with his exaggerated knock-kneed stance, his slow, wobbly gait that was developmentally inappropriate for a three-, four-, or five-year-old, the frequent falling, his inability to run. She had hoped that some kind stranger would intervene and have the boy taken away from his odd grandfather.
My’s trouble with walking had been evident. The progressing blindness, like his mother’s and the other cellmates’, had not been. His eyesight had been failing long before he could shout-whisper-gasp “No go! No go!” when being taken out of the back room. He’d been going blind even before he started returning to the prison with sunglasses purchased by “Grandpa.” Sol had finally acknowledged My’s near blindness while watching Chiqui attempt to teach him to read. She had assumed that his struggles had more to do with his age and learning by candlelight. She’d dismissed it, preferring to focus on his strengths as a source of hope in the darkness. She’d been able to tell that My’s hearing was impeccable by his response to her humming, Cocoa’s singing, and the music Lucien would pipe through the intercom’s crack, crunch, stuttering static. She’d even seen My count time with the beats.
Even now, as she pulled her legs farther into her curled-up body, Sol could hear My tapping his feet. Cocoa was singing her apology to Asante for the earlier thrashing.
Sol perked up. Chiqui braced herself for Asante’s retaliation for the beating Cocoa had dispensed. Asante hummed off-key while standing up to accept the sorry and join forces.
“We gonna get the hell up out of here!” Asante’s fury was back.
Cocoa stood up to help. “We are not going to die in here. Not even you.” She threw her voice over her shoulder to Sol. She had returned to her own normal.
“This fire must have done some damage to this hellhole. It has gotten too cold in here. There’s no more food. Not even them muthafuckin’ sardines. The damned water is gone! Only a few candles left. I don’t even know if this goddamned lighter is going to flick on again.”
“I’m going to sing.” Cocoa turned to Asante. “You listen for where I fade out. That’s where the cracks are.”
Asante walked along the walls with her ears primed for sound.
“Hand me a candle, please,” Cocoa said with her usual politeness.
“You don’t need light to hear,” Asante said with residual antagonism and mistrust in her voice.
“Just give me a dag-gone candle!” Cocoa struck back.
Chiqui plopped My on the ground and stood up. “Here. Here!”
“Thank! You!” Cocoa shouted at Asante to make her point, but nodded politely at Chiqui.
“You’re going to try to burn the place down again?” Asante squinted.
“Just shut up and sing!” Chiqui’s irritability pierced her diplomacy.
“Any special requests?” Cocoa rolled her eyes in the dark.
“Can you rap?” Asante quipped.
Cocoa sighed. “Old school or new school?”
“What you think?”
“Okay then. Tupac.”
“Who the fuck is that?”
“Tupac Shakur!”
“I only know one Shakur and she’s in Cuba as far as I remember.”
“Come on. You haven’t been in here that long.”
“How the hell are you going to tell me how long I’ve been in here?! And I wasn’t listening to that new-school shit back then. Even if I was, I wouldn’t remember.”
Cocoa rattled off the artists she used to listen to. “You don’t know Nas, OutKast. You definitely don’t know Wyclef. Even if you had been out by then, you don’t speak any Creole.”
“You mean Kre-yôl,” Asante enunciated with the proper accent.
“Fine! What do you want to hear, then?”
“Eric B. and Rakim?”
“It’s just Rakim now.”
“Now? Do you even know what year it is? Do any of us? Now? This little girl said ‘now’!” Asante doubled over as if she were laughing. She was not. She kept Cocoa talking so she could find the cracks in the walls. She listened more closely when she got to the corners.
“Uh. Uh. Uh.” Cocoa gave herself a head start and warmed up her rapping voice. “Check it. Check it. It’s been a long time. I shouldna left you…” Cocoa rapped the lyrics she could remember and mumbled the words she didn’t know, then skipped to the end of the song.
Asante filled in the rest and together they finished the song: “Soul, soul. You got it.”
“Give me another one!” Asante was hyped.
Cocoa leaned into the next lyrics, maintaining a hypnotic rhythm that transported her the way only music could.
Asante was so excited she didn’t let Cocoa finish. “I did not know you could do that.”
“I can do a li’l sumpin’-sumpin’. Almost anything with my voice.”
“Lemme find out you can beatbox.”
“I could learn. I can’t believe you’ve never heard Foxy Brown, Nicki Minaj, Lauryn Hill!”
“Lauryn who?”
“From the Fugees! Shit. You’ve been here that long! Miss Hill!”
“Nope. Just Miss Jackson.”
“If you’re nasty!” they said in unison.
Sol felt My tremble forcefully. It reminded her of the way he had been after every outing with Lucien. She did not have the strength to ask Cocoa and Asante to keep it down. She just started shivering, her teeth chattering with empathy for the boy. This got Chiqui’s attention.
“Chill,” Chiqui admonished. “We need to get these two warmed up.”
“We can’t build a bonfire!” Asante said, reminding them that choking was a horrible way to die.
“Then they’re not going to make it.” Chiqui shrugged.
“We’re all going to make it!” Cocoa threw her body into the declaration. She started singing. “When I was seventeen, I did what people told me.” She dropped the tune and transitioned to My’s comfort song: “You’ll be my…”
Cocoa lifted My up and crooned into his ears. “I’mma warm you up, baby.” She cried the next song into the top of My’s head: “Forever mine, ever mine, ever…” She could feel tears obstructing the song’s flow in her throat. “That’s the last song I heard before that joker made me come in here.”
“I got it!” Chiqui crouched closer to hear better.
“Show me what you got, then!” Asante sang.
“No, I found the spot! Right here.” Chiqui stood up and pointed to the crack. “I’ve been paying attention while you two were doing your MTV thing.”
“Light it up right here.” Asante gestured.
“We got any of those sticks left?” Cocoa reminded Chiqui of My’s souvenirs from the outside.
“And rocks.”
Sol did not rejoice over the cracks in the walls the way the others did. She wasn’t afraid to hope. She just knew that there was much more to be done to get out. They needed more than singing to make themselves heard. They had no sledgehammers or drills to penetrate the stone and steel. Any fire they might build would kill them all before the smoke could be seen by anyone outside. She thought that their best chance would be to ambush Lucien when he came to release or slaughter them. Although she would be too weak to join in the fight, Chiqui, Cocoa, an
d Asante were hopeful, excited, and fearless enough to take him down. The idea that this might be their last chance had pushed their rage to the surface and it was as strong as it had been when each of them had first been taken. Sol could not feel anger, not while dying. She’d decided on empathy for Lucien to explain his evil to herself in the hopes of getting into his mind to overthrow him.
Sol had come to a certain understanding that she and Lucien were more alike than anyone would ever believe. Although she’d never learned anything about his life before his immigration to America, she believed that he’d gone through something that had turned him.
She knew little of her own origins. She couldn’t even name the place she’d come from. She knew that it was somewhere on the Yucatán Peninsula—Mexico? Belize? Guatemala? Some mystical place where the boundaries of three countries came together then fanned out like sunrays. She did not need to understand her beginnings to understand herself. She was timeless. The body she’d been in since birth was just a vessel. That people thought that all she was was only her body, including and especially Lucien, was the joke she did not laugh at. It had offered her no protection, not even from the elements. It did not shield her from inside hurt. It had no special abilities. She could see the shell in the dark. She’d examined it many times while Lucien had showered and touched her. It was the color of roasted cashews. It had a round face, large almond eyes, a broad nose, and thick sucking lips. It was uncharacteristically African given the place where it had been created. She had never met her father, so the question of paternity had floated in and out but left no evidence of its importance. Cara and this man had given her the name Solange, which also did not fit the place where the vessel was formed. Besides the giver of her name, Cara had told her to watch.
“What I do with a man you will have to do too so we can make it. Never mind where. Here and how are what matter. Whatever he wants, you give.”
“I want the little one too,” a man said, climbing off of Cara.
Sol felt her mother snatch her up so abruptly that it felt like flying. She winced when Cara pinned her wrists down as if nailing her to a cross as a sacrifice to the man. Sol wriggled out of Cara’s hold and discovered that she could save herself. She told the body to fight. She instructed it to wiggle and kick. She made it scream. She told it to take bloody bites out of the stubbled cheek. She told her legs to run. She told them to run faster. She whispered in its ears and entered its head. Her body absorbed the voice, swallowed the guiding force, and went where she needed to go.
She found a hiding place in a riverbed that had just enough water to keep her body out of sight. Her body and mind were scared, not ready to lie down again or ever. They heeded her instructions. She told her body to lie still. She told her head to stay underwater. Her mind did not question the water or her body’s place in it. She felt the river take her in. She let go and took pleasure in how it closed over her, how its ripples stilled themselves, allowing its surface to turn to glass. She told her lungs when to breathe and not to. At no point did she flee into her imagination. She questioned nothing, not the stillness of her body, not the peace of a painless drowning. Water did not question its wetness.
When Cara had finally found her, Sol had accepted the belt strap on her wet skin. She listened to her mother’s wails about the missed ride with the first in what would be a line of coyotajes. Sol told her tear ducts not to produce salt water. She told her pulse not to beat fast. She told her heart not to hate or love her mother. After the whipping, she commanded her body to heal and told her hurt feelings to do the same. The whipping primed her body for the journey. But her acceptance prepared her to take her mother’s place.
On the last leg of their trek from the intersection of three countries to the jagged border between two, Sol had felt sorry for Cara’s resentful body that was still healing from the birth. It had been premature, not because the baby had come before forty weeks, but because she’d been born on the wrong side of the damned desert. Finally, to get them to the other side, Sol gave her six-year-old body to the last coyotaje fifty miles from the Arizona border. She did not wonder what else the beating and the rape of her body were preparing her for. She took both in like water.
* * *
—
SOL FELT the room grow colder. She felt the temperature drop even more when she thought about Cara and the things she’d made her do as means of survival before and after arriving in America. But Sol needed to understand how she’d come to be in this place, dying on the filthy dirt floor in the back room of a basement. She lanced her memory as if breaking the skin of a putrid wound and watched it ooze incessantly, unstoppable until it carried her to the safe room.
It had all started on the off-ramp of a highway where planes flew low enough to make the sky seem touchable. Sol had known that it had been wrong of Cara to drag a sleeping baby to sell fruit and flowers under the overpass of North Conduit. But there had been no other choice on the weekends. She and Cara had been the only ones who’d even known that there’d been a baby asleep in the padded crate that lay inside of the stolen supermarket shopping cart. Sol’s presence boosted sales until she grew nearly as tall as her mother. She no longer had the stature of a child, and none of their customers, except Lucien, appreciated the tallish little girl for being just that. A year later, she was both old and big enough to stay at home alone with the toddler. She was an ideal caregiver, too calm and levelheaded to ever scream or lose her temper with her little sister. Not yet an adolescent, Sol was becoming a better mother than her own. She even chose the babysitter on the busy days when Cara needed her on the roadside. She went out to sell with her mother only on holidays, which meant that she was always with Cara on Mother’s Day.
That is where Sol had first encountered Lucien. She didn’t know then that, every time he’d stopped to buy fruit, flowers, and water he didn’t need, he’d offered her candy to test her mother’s vigilance and also to learn what would best serve as a lure. Sol had obliged him by reaching into his van with hands too small for her body to give him his change every time. She was too young to know that he was testing her, trying to see if she would hold the money tightly, hand it over reluctantly, or look at him with pleading eyes. Had she known, she would have thrown the coins in his face to take out one or both of his eyes. But she was ten, eleven, twelve, then fifteen, and despite her time in the desert, she had not learned distrust.
Sol had never been kissed and was still a virgin when Lucien had lured her into his van. She had grown six inches in two years and developed a false sense of invincibility because of her height. It had gotten her closer to the sky. But her breasts and her constant checking to make sure her unwanted gift had not spontaneously arrived forced her to look down more than up. It was this distraction that sealed her decision to get into Lucien’s van. Soaking wet from her sky’s downpour, fearing that a pink puddle might form around her white sneakers, she climbed in and disappeared. Had she not taken such pride in and derived such power from her height, had she not been forced into an adolescent identification with her hips, breasts, backside, and a fear of her flow, she would have never fallen prey to an offer of a ride. She had never taken one before. She’d ducked her head to keep from hitting the vanity mirror. She’d swallowed to suppress the sickness in the pit of her stomach and allowed her overconfidence to rise. She’d told herself that whatever the danger, she would be able to overcome it.
She’d held to this even in the back room. Even when Lucien tried to tempt her tears by withholding sugar. Even when he flooded the basement with music trying to figure out the genre that moved her. She loved all the sounds that he piped through the intercom. She held her breath to keep from humming to the a cappella vocals of the folk songs that reminded her of how her fellow migrants had sung to her during her south-to-north trek. She almost broke down with the flute and guitar of norteño subway artists. A crack approximating a smile ran across her face when he’d brought
Cocoa to the back room with her tortuously gorgeous voice. But no music could silence her guilt for being the reason he’d taken Chiqui. She wouldn’t let him see her agony as he recounted the things he had done and would do to her sister. As much as she wanted to rip his head off with her bitten-down fingers, she bit her bottom lip and drew a thin red line of spit. She knew that, although he could watch all manner of sadistic porn, he could not stand the sight of blood.
* * *
—
SOL SAT up on the layers of damp and dirty sheets. She looked at Chiqui huddled with Cocoa and Asante, scratching at the dirt and stone. They were beyond the point of waiting to be rescued. They figured that Lucien would kill them all before setting them free. After so many years, after feeling the seeping wind and the smell of snow that signaled their last hope, they preferred a death from trying to passivity. The fire they were building would be either a saving grace or a funeral pyre. Either was better than doing nothing.
LA KAY
La Kay curled Itself up like a fetus. It could feel Its roof being torn off. It wanted to scream, but It knew that the worst was yet to come. It was now unsure of Its desire to die. It braced Itself as the crew tore into Its top floor. It curled into Itself tighter—Its head burrowed into Its chest to hide the tears on Its face, Its knees drawn into Its abdomen. The unbearable pain made It weep quietly but convulsively, Its shoulders reverberating the violent ache in Its chest. It definitively decided that It no longer wanted to die. It just wanted the pain to stop. It felt the peeling of Its skin as Its aluminum siding and the foam and fiber insulation were being ripped off.
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