The Girl in the Glass Box

by James Grippando

  “Are you going to be okay here?” asked Cecilia.

  Julia’s sister was going out for the night with her roommates, celebrating in Salvadoran fashion the “friends” component of El Día de Amor y Amistad.

  “Yeah. Go have fun.”

  Cecilia told her to call if she needed anything. The front door closed, and it was just Julia and her daughter in the house. She hoped.

  He can’t be here. Please, God. Don’t let him be here in Miami.

  She’d panicked on the phone with Jack, threatening to leave town, but that didn’t make her fear any less real.

  Julia finished drying the dishes and checked on Beatriz. The bathroom door was closed, and she could hear the shower running. Julia went to the living room to inflate the air mattress. Cecilia had been cool about sharing her place, but the spare bedroom was barely big enough for Julia, and Beatriz still had no room of her own. Julia needed to find an apartment, but with the news about Jorge, it was scary enough living with Cecilia and her roommates. The thought of just the two of them, her and Beatriz, getting an apartment of their own in the same city as Jorge was beyond frightening. She’d talk to Cecilia in the morning about staying a little longer.

  Julia unfolded the deflated air mattress and began her nightly search for the battery-powered air pump. It was Beatriz’s job to deflate the mattress each morning before school, and she had yet to leave the pump in the same place twice.

  A knock on the front door startled her. The thought of Jorge in town had her completely on edge, but she wondered if he would actually knock if he ever came for her. Probably not. Still, she stepped tentatively to the peephole, saw it was Theo, and opened the door.

  “Jack asked me to swing by and check on you,” he said.

  “Oh, that was my bad. I guess he thought I was serious about leaving town.”

  “Serious was not the word. I believe he said ‘freaked out.’”

  “Yeah, I was a little freaked.”

  “But you’re good now?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re staying put?”

  “Where would I go? And if Jorge followed me all the way from El Salvador, what good would it do to run from Miami?”

  Theo nodded, seeming to follow her logic. “Okay, then. Glad you’re all right.”

  “I’m sorry Jack made you come all the way over here.”

  “No problem. It’s not far, really. Not too far, anyway. At least not in a Star Wars galaxy sense of the word.”

  It made her smile, but she knew his club was miles away in Coconut Grove, which made her feel bad about wasting his evening. “Would you like to come inside for a minute? I have some tea that was brewing in the sun all day. Have some with me.”

  He accepted with a smile. The air mattress and bedding on the floor was a little awkward, but they walked right past it on the way to the kitchen.

  “Do you like herbal tea?”

  “If it comes with bacon.”

  She assumed he was kidding and poured the tea into two ice-filled glasses. “Flor de Jamaica,” she said. “Good for the liver and kidneys. Smart bartenders drink it every day.”

  “Smart bartenders don’t own their own bar,” said Theo. “Cheers.”

  Their glasses clicked, and Julia watched Theo’s expression as the tea went down.

  “Good stuff,” he said.

  “Liar,” she said, and then she squeezed a shot of honey into each glass. “It’s pretty nasty without it.”

  They shared a laugh, and then Julia turned serious. “Tell Jack I’m sorry I wigged out on him like that.”

  “He’s used to it.”

  “I was cleaning a house over on Venetian Isle today. Lousy phone reception.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  Julia had almost forgotten that it was Theo who’d purchased the disposable phone for her when she got out of jail. “That’s not your fault. But I was saying, it wasn’t till I was riding home on the bus that I got the message from the school principal saying that the police talked to Beatriz. Then I called Jack, and he told me about Jorge and—well, that put me over the edge.”

  “Jack really thought you were gonna run off with that guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “From the bakery at the church. Hugo.”

  “Oh, Hugo.”

  Theo added another shot of honey to his tea. A big one. “That was a pretty heavy ‘oh’ in the ‘Oh, Hugo,’” he said.

  Julia sighed. “There was a time when I thought Hugo was the answer to my prayers. And in a way he was. He made me feel safe. Or at least safer than I was without him. Hugo is the only man I’ve ever known who actually scared my husband.”

  “Was Hugo okay with you coming to Miami?”

  “I didn’t tell him I was leaving.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s weird, but if you had asked me that question six months ago, my answer would have been ‘I don’t know.’ It was just something I did. But now that time has passed, and especially after I saw him here in Miami, things have gotten clearer in my mind. I know exactly why I left the way I did it.”

  “Why?”

  Her gaze leveled, and her voice dropped a bit. “Because Hugo was starting to scare me, too.”

  “Does Beatriz feel the same way?”

  “Beatriz is living in the past. She wishes me and Hugo would get back together. There’s an old photograph of us at the bakery from a couple of years ago. Beatriz and I have an ongoing tug-of-war over it.”

  “Tug-of-war?”

  “Yeah. I keep putting it in the drawer, and Beatriz keeps putting it on my nightstand, as if that’s going to rekindle something.”

  “So you and Hugo are not—”

  “No, no. We are not a thing. I care for Hugo, but I don’t need to go from a man whose mission in life is to destroy me to a man whose mission in life is to save me.”

  Theo added even more honey to his tea. “How is Beatriz doing after what happened at school today?”

  “She’s—” Julia stopped and checked the clock on the wall and listened. The bathroom and kitchen shared a common wall, and she could still hear the water running through the pipes. Beatriz had been in the shower for over an hour. “Excuse me one minute, Theo.”

  Julia pushed away from the table, walked down the hallway, and knocked on the bathroom door. “Beatriz?”

  There was no answer, just the hiss of running water. Julia tried the knob, but the door was locked. She knocked again, harder this time, and waited. No reply.

  “Beatriz,” she said, louder. “Open the door, sweetie.”

  It was like white noise, the steady drone of an hour-long shower. Julia’s pulse quickened, and her call became a shout.

  “Beatriz! Open the door!”

  Theo came up quickly behind her. “What’s wrong?”

  “She doesn’t answer me. That shower’s been running over an hour. We have five minutes’ worth of hot water in this house, tops. She was so upset after what happened today and—oh, God, I’m afraid to think.”

  Theo tried the knob, which didn’t turn.

  “Beatriz!” Julia screamed.

  Theo took a step back and kicked the door open on the first try. Julia hurried past him and screamed at the sight.

  Beatriz was sitting on the tile floor, knees to her chest, huddled in her glass box, soaked to the bone from the falling water.

  “Beatriz!” She flung open the shower door and turned off the water. It was freezing cold, but strangely Beatriz wasn’t shivering. Julia wrapped her daughter in a towel and called for Theo’s help. He rushed in from the hallway as Julia checked her pulse. The cold water had turned her skin a bluish purple, but her heart was beating.

  “Take her to the bedroom,” she told Theo.

  Theo gathered her up in his arms, carried her across the hall, and laid her on the bed. Beatriz’s eyes were open, and Julia was standing directly over her, calling to her—“Beatriz! Beatriz!”—but it was as if her daughter couldn’t even see her. />
  Julia tapped her cheeks gently to revive her, but she drew only that vacant look.

  “Could be hypothermia,” said Theo. “I’ll call nine-one-one.”

  “Hurry,” said Julia, squeezing her daughter’s cold hand. “Please, hurry.”

  Chapter 42

  She wanted him. There was no doubt in his mind that she wanted him, bad. Julia was the master of mind games, always putting obstacles between them, forcing him to prove himself over and over again. How much did one man have to prove to a woman? Why should any man have to prove himself to his wife?

  The Miami-Dade Metrobus stopped at the curb, and the doors opened. Jorge pitched his smoldering cigarette into the gutter and climbed aboard, exhaling his last lungful of smoke all over the bus driver as he passed.

  “You mind, pal?”

  In San Salvador, that kind of disrespect would land a bus driver facedown on the pavement in a pool of his own blood. But this was Miami, not El Salvador, and Jorge had more important things on his mind.

  The bus rumbled forward as Jorge made his way down the aisle. There were plenty of empty seats, but Jorge chose to stand at the rail about halfway down, where the extra-long coach folded like an accordion to maneuver around tight corners. He watched through the window as the bus rolled past one residential cross street after another. The streets were dark, save for one, where the orange light of an ambulance swirled at the end of the block. The bus gathered speed, merging into traffic on the busy commercial boulevard on its way downtown. Jorge’s gaze remained fixed on the orange beacon of the ambulance until a passing billboard blocked his view of the side street. Then he settled into the nearest seat.

  Jorge had spent two hours on that street, casing the house since sundown. He’d gotten there around the time Julia’s sister was leaving with her girlfriends and stayed until the ambulance arrived. Jorge had no idea who called 911 or why. Maybe Julia was choking on El Negro’s dick. The irony was that if that ambulance hadn’t shown up when it did, those two valentines would have needed one.

  Jorge dug his new smartphone from his pocket. It wasn’t technically his. He’d stolen it just that morning, and the true owner had canceled the phone service a few hours later, but the camera still worked, and it took excellent photos. Really excellent photos. He scrolled through the album he’d just created. El Negro pulls up to the house. Julia opens the front door. Julia invites him in. The kitchen light goes on.

  Jorge had seen enough when the bedroom light went on. He didn’t need to sneak up to the house, hold his camera up to the window, and video it. He knew.

  Fucking slut.

  Funny thing was, he’d gone there on Valentine’s Day expecting to catch her in the act with Hugo. Hugo, the dumb shit who seemed to forget that Eighteen was not just in San Salvador, that its tentacles reached all the way to Miami. The unwritten code was that membership in Eighteen was a lifelong commitment. “Finding Jesus” was the only exception. Anyone who tried to fake “finding Jesus” was a dead man. Hugo was a fake. Convincing Eighteen that Hugo was a phony Bible banger had saved Jorge’s life.

  Jorge was on his knees, his wrists bound so tightly behind has back that the cord had broken the skin. Rivulets of blood trickled down his fingers, the crimson drops collecting on the concrete floor of a dank garage that smelled of mildew. A spotlight shone down from the rafters, effectively blinding him. More than a dozen members of Eighteen had crammed into the abandoned building at midnight to witness Jorge’s execution.

  El Gusano, the drunken men called him. The worm.

  The word in Soyapango was that Jorge had turned against Eighteen and was informing to the police. The barrio chief, a lunatic called El Demente—the Demented One—was minutes away from hacking him to pieces with a razor-sharp machete.

  The side door to the garage opened, and El Demente entered to the cheers of his men. El Demente was naked from the waist up, except for the purple bandanna wrapped around his head. He had the ripped body of a gangbanger who’d spent most of his adult life in prison, with nothing to do but push-ups and sit-ups from sunup till sundown. A collage of multihued tattoos covered his body, including a rattlesnake that wound around his right arm, its gaping jaws and exposed fangs dripping with poison on the right side of his face. One of El Demente’s disciples offered him a blow of meth, and the men went wild as he leaned over the workbench and sniffed a heaping, nearly lethal line of white powder up his nose and into his brain.

  “El Demente! El Demente! El Demente!” the men chanted.

  Sweat poured down Jorge’s brow. He’d declined the offer of a blindfold, and he wished he hadn’t. Jorge had witnessed the ritual before from the party side. This time he was the entertainment. The man of the hour always begged. It never worked. Not a marked man in the history of Eighteen had managed to talk his way out of a gang-ordered execution. At least not with El Demente in charge.

  El Demente sorted through the tools on the workbench. A claw hammer. A hacksaw. A power drill. So hard to choose a favorite. He took the machete, “old reliable,” and raised it over his head.

  His men fell silent.

  “Jorge likes to talk to the police,” he shouted, which drew a chorus of boos from his men.

  “It’s bullshit!” Jorge shouted. “It’s total bullshit, man!”

  El Demente lowered the machete. He stepped toward the prisoner until he was within striking distance, but the machete remained at his side. He smiled sardonically and said, “You just called me a liar.”

  “No!” said Jorge, his voice quaking. “Not you. Hugo is the liar. Hugo put the lie on the street that I’m an informant.”

  Hugo had done no such thing, but Jorge was desperate for a scapegoat.

  “Hugo has gone to Jesus,” said El Demente. “Why would he lie about you?”

  “Hugo is a fraud. He’s fucking my wife!”

  “We all fuck your wife!” one of the men shouted, and the others roared with laughter.

  El Demente raised his machete, silencing them. It was highly unusual, even for a condemned man, to confess before Eighteen that his woman was unfaithful, at least if she was still alive. El Demente seemed intrigued.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “It’s true. He fucked my wife and got her pregnant.”

  “When?”

  “A while ago. He’s been doing her ever since.”

  “Prove it.”

  Jorge struggled for a response, not sure how to prove such a thing. Then it came to him. “Talk to the doctor who did the abortion. I made her get one. It was a son. Would I make my wife abort my own son?”

  El Demente was thinking it over. “Who was the doctor?”

  “Vazquez. The one we always use.”

  A pregnant prostitute was a common problem in the Eighteen sex trade. Vazquez was the go-to problem solver, even if he hadn’t actually graduated from medical school. El Demente had him on speed dial.

  Jorge remained on his knees, sweat pouring from his body. The pressure was more than he could bear, as he and the other men watched El Demente make the call. It was quiet enough in the garage for him and everyone else to hear El Demente’s side of the conversation, and his heart raced with the fear that Dr. Vazquez would have no memory of Julia. His only hope was that this procedure would stand out in his mind, the one that had gone terribly wrong, ending with all that bleeding that had nearly killed Julia and had landed her in the emergency room.

  El Demente showed no emotion as he spoke into the phone, his expression cold as ice as he questioned Dr. Vazquez. Then he hung up.

  “You are a lucky man, my friend.”

  Jorge nearly collapsed with relief. El Demente put away his phone and addressed his men.

  “Hugo is a fake,” he said in a booming voice. “What is the punishment for those who wiggled their way out of Eighteen by pretending to love Jesus?”

  “Death,” the men said.

  El Demente stepped toward Jorge, stared down at him, and slapped his face lightly with the blu
nt side of the machete. “You will take care of Hugo.”

  It was a green light to eliminate one of Eighteen’s only protected class of ex-members, and Jorge had waited years for it. Without El Demente’s blessing, killing a gang member who had turned to Jesus would have been a capital offense.

  “It will be my pleasure,” said Jorge.

  The bus stopped. Someone got on, but Jorge didn’t even look up. His focus was entirely on his phone. He’d scrolled through all the evening’s photos twice, and the best shot was the one of El Negro getting out of his car, before he’d gone to the front door. Jorge had snapped it from across the street, but this new camera had an amazing zoom. He enlarged the image on the screen to the max, cropped it so that he had a close-up of that black face, and then he hit “save.” He stared down at that glowing image on the screen through the next two bus stops, memorizing that face, burning it into his mind.

  He’d been commissioned to Miami for a specific purpose. But Hugo’s execution could wait.

  “You’re next,” he said, as he tucked his phone into his pocket. Then he smiled to himself, gazing out the bus window at the moonlit Miami skyline, soaking up the energy of “the capital of Latin America,” knowing that El Negro had just fucked his last Latina.

  Chapter 43

  Miami’s UM/Jackson Memorial Hospital was a two-minute drive from Jack’s office, and he stopped by the ER on his way to work. The waiting room was filled with the typical array of morning patients, heavy on substance abusers who’d had a bad night and mothers with newborns who just wouldn’t stop crying, not even with the sunrise. Theo was slouched in a chair under a ceiling-mounted television that was tuned to a Spanish-language broadcast. Jack took the seat next to him.

  “How’s Beatriz?” Jack asked.

  “Spoke to Julia about an hour ago. She thinks the doctor’s going to let her go home.”