“What?”
“You know.” He smiles. “Switch to English for my sake.”
Esmeralda stares at the closing elevator doors. “I’ve found that Ameri—that English speakers—think you’re talking about them when you speak Spanish—even though you’re usually not.”
“You’re American too, you know.”
“I’m well aware of that, Brian.” She lifts her eyebrows. “I’m even proud of it, believe it or not.”
They lapse into silence, mesmerized by the digital display of floors: 25, 24, 23 . . .
“You know, Brian,” Esmeralda says softly, still staring into the glassy black doors. “You might want to be a little more cautious.”
His jaw loosens. “Because I said you’re American?”
“No, Brian.” She glares at him, folds her arms in her silk blazer over her imposing chest. She has the skinniness of incipient old age—her stockings have a fold at each ankle—but at sixty-five, she has held on to her good bones and posture.
17, 16, 15 . . .
“Because, you really might want to ask yourself if it’s worth it.” Her tone has softened into something unendurable, like pity, as she raises her presumptuous, irritating nose. He turns back to face the digital display.
“I honestly don’t know—”
“Fernanda,” she cuts in. “I’m talking about Fernanda.”
10, 9 . . .
He sighs, squeezing the fingers of his left hand with his right. Is that a tremor? Is he actually developing a tremor? Deep in his body, he feels something shift, as if his bowels were loosening.
“That’s a certain type of girl.”
6, 5 . . .
He stares at her. “Oh, now, Esme.”
“You’re in over your head with that one.”
The elevator doors swish open to the marble lobby. “Just so you know.” Esmeralda strides out into the watery light, one hand curled up behind her back to wave at Brian as she goes. He remains in the elevator, watching. Twenty years ago he and Esmeralda had carried on an energetic flirtation. He’d been distracted by her topaz eyes, her tiny feet and waist, the way her upper lip curled back when she smiled, creating a minuscule dimple. But they were both married, and Brian wasn’t actually interested in taking things any further. He’d even wondered if there was something wrong with him for not going after Esmeralda, pursuing her the way he heard upper management pursued affairs. And in all those years of secretaries, escorts, interns, the rumored private trysting apartments supposedly shared among the vice presidents, the junkets and conferences and the trading-in of spouses for ever-younger models, Brian had never seriously entertained the idea of having an affair.
She’s jealous: he winces and smiles. He strides across the lobby, briefcase swinging; he feels rising indignation on behalf of both himself and Fernanda. These . . . Cuban women—he thinks—with their village minds.
Rufus steps forward and holds the door. Brian walks through, so preoccupied, he barely notices the man. Rufus says something. He turns. “What was that?”
Rufus’s face is like a piece of carved mahogany. “Didn’t say nothing, Mr. Muir.”
Brian holds his shoulders squared all the way to the car. His hand shakes as he turns the key in the ignition and he checks his rearview at least a dozen times as he backs out. What is wrong with him? He needs to have that pressure in his lower abdomen checked out. If only he still believed in doctors. He cranks his big steering wheel, pouring his car into the stream of traffic—the speed demons and sudden-stoppers and befuddled elderly—the deep madness of Miami embodied in its drivers. The sky is backlit with high, dense clouds, a fast-approaching system. He passes the dinosaur crouching outside the Museum of Science. In the middle of the traffic, creeping and stopping and loitering for miles along the Dixie, he turns on the radio. The Miami skyline, pale as a leisure suit, glistens in his rearview. It’s only 5:50 but the sky darkens, gathering clouds. Brian creeps ahead one car length as he tries, once again, to listen to the angry chanting of rap. It may take him an hour and a half to travel the seven miles back to the Gables. There’s a rumble he assumes is a jet. Then another—this one so close he flinches, the floor of the car vibrating.
He drives under a canopy of poinciana and spiky palmettos growing up along the highway, then passes a wreck taking up the right-hand lane, and finally the traffic begins to move. Brian muttering along with the music as if there’s nothing wrong at all.
Felice
FELICE AND EMERSON STRETCH OUT ON A BIT OF lawn in Flamingo Park by a stand of fragrant, inky trees, the night overhead tinted lilac by the city lights. First Emerson lies back, then he holds out his arms and she laughs but she lies down and rests her head on his chest, the fabric of his T-shirt warm and smelling of outdoors air. At first he holds as still as if she were a sparrow that’d miraculously lighted on him, only gradually relaxing. Felice thinks they will just lie there for a while, her hand riding the rise of his chest, listing to the chirp and creaking of geckos and the watery swish of cars. She remembers being six years old, sprawled in the stiff, sun-warmed grass—not quite asleep or awake—while Stanley picked the tiny strawberries in his garden. “Hey, hey, hey,” Emerson murmurs into her hair, soothing her. She hears the clip and snap and thump of people getting into their cars in the parking lot—off to the clubs. There’s a burst of French nearby, then some German from another direction. She doesn’t even notice when she hears Spanish. Her best friends Lola, Bella, Yeni all spoke Spanish at home. She feels, as she listens to the rush of air through his chest, that it’s been years since she’s experienced the luxury of falling asleep, instead of passing out from exhaustion or drinking or both. It has felt, for such a long time, as if there was always something to watch out for.
ON THE DAY FELICE ran away, she brought almost nothing with her: a cosmetics bag, a tube of her mother’s expensive sunscreen, a bottle of water, the sweater her brother had given her. Nothing to eat. It was cool and dry, an early March morning; still dark. Her parents had learned to watch her at night: they weren’t expecting her to get up early. She watched for police cruisers and stayed on the back streets, walking from the Gables through the chain-link Shenandoah neighborhoods, then crossed U.S. 1, weaving through lanes of stopped traffic, into Coconut Grove. There were so many roller bladers, baby carriages, and dog walkers on Bayshore, she risked strolling along the big thoroughfare, taking in the view of white Biscayne Bay. It took hours to walk and by the time she’d made her way into downtown, the morning commuters were clogging the narrow street and the air was ripe with exhaust. Felice was sweat-soaked before she was even halfway across the Venetian Causeway, but before her were plains of silvery water and the mirage horizon of high-rises. She had a feeling like struck sparks flitting through her body: anticipation and scraped-away dread and grief, and clear drops of joy.
Felice hadn’t wanted to move to the beach. But an older girl at a Gables party talked to her about it in a low, serious voice—you could so totally be a model. She’d heard it all her life; this girl had actually done it. She had a trapezoidal jaw and listless eyes: a strange ugly-beauty that made you stare. Felice had seen her on covers, her concave stomach and shoulders and peach-pit mouth. She said: Go do it, now, while you’re young. Felice was scared and crazy enough to think it would work—she would leave the thing behind in another time; she would be changed and lifted out of her life.
After she got to the beach, she napped in a wooden booth at the back of an Internet café, and that night Felice partied with the kids out on the sand. This became her regular practice—stealing naps in cafés, partying on the beach, along with spring-breakers, drunks, transvestites, homeless kids, bums, skate punks, illegals—everyone rooting through each other’s coolers, setting huge, illegal bonfires, trashing the beach grasses and dunes. Someone always had Quaaludes or Ecstasy, or tabs of acid, which she particularly enjoyed. She fell in with a group of tough, pretty Mexican girls who worked as chambermaids: they had hard brown arms and shoulder
s from bed-making and vacuuming. Sometimes they let Felice sleep in an empty room at night; but the air-conditioned spaces were so clean and silent she felt as if she didn’t sleep there so much as float, drifting on the slab of her body. Hilda, a tiny, dark girl, gave Felice her skateboard just before she moved to Orlando. Hilda said: Skateboarding is wearing wings—which Felice found was especially true when she was high. Felice and the girls used to drop acid together—the girls favored it mainly for the extra kick of speed. They dared each other to run through the sizzling edges of the bonfire. Once, Felice got to her feet and walked into the fire. The low flames rippled and bent around her feet like water, sealing up behind her. The beach rats faded beyond the scrim of heat. She dashed across the burning wood and the bottoms of her flip-flops melted. After that, the beach patrol started to crack down; they arrested the kids who were too strung out to run away—some had to spend two months in jail—and that was the end of bonfires for a while.
BACK THEN, SHE SLEPT outdoors all the time, legs cinched in a knot against her chest, like she’d dried up in that position, and one stiff breeze off the water would sweep her away. Felice saw outdoors kids everywhere. That’s what Reynaldo called them: “Like some pets are made for inside—little fluffy cats—but some you just gotta let run around outdoors.” Reynaldo’s dad kicked him out of the house. The police had their own name for kids like him—thrown-aways. Laughing, Reynaldo chanted his father’s words, bestia, perro, serpiente, maricón . . . “I called him a Colombian redneck. Asshole. He came after me with a machete. Lucky he was so fat—he couldn’t move fast enough to kill me.”
There were times she found herself about to confess to Reynaldo what had happened in school. But she believed silence might be part of the punishment—that telling would somehow lighten it. Anyway, the outdoor kids didn’t tell so much about where they came from—not unless they could make it a joke, like Reynaldo did.
Felice met Alma at one of the bonfire parties at the beach. Alma wanted to be a model and she said Felice could come live with her and they could be models together. It had seemed like a good plan. Alma lived with her mother in a tiny ground-floor apartment, so Felice slept in a battered recliner in the living room. Then the phone started ringing with modeling requests for Felice: Alma scowled and chewed at her nails while Felice chatted with booking agents.
Alma’s friend Bethany came around the apartment whenever she needed a shower or some food. Bethany was maybe fourteen years old: her face had a feral, foxy quality, her eyes full of glinting light, as if she could see in the dark. There was a thread of grime like a shadow along her jaw, her nails were lined with dirt. She talked about something she called her “baby” that Alma said was code for crack cocaine. Bethany ate candy mostly, clutched in her pointed, tiny hands, her face pinched in a nearsighted squint. She was pin-thin—the size of an eight-year-old—and had a stream of “clients.”
Felice couldn’t stand Bethany—her small teeth or her chatter. She couldn’t stand her furtive manner—the way her gaze roamed around, as if she were looking for something to steal. Lots of outdoor kids were like that: after a year on her own, Felice was also beginning to sense some of those qualities in herself. But Alma thought Bethany was “hilarious,” with her stories about seducible police, executives with fetishes, tourists with poisonous breath. There were her detailed, depressing dreams, and the way her voice sped up, clicking spit or stretched out like something unraveling, depending on the drug.
Alma’s mother cleaned houses in the afternoons, then worked a night shift in an imaging lab at Miami Beach Community, so Alma and Felice usually had the place to themselves. One night around 2 a.m., the girls were sitting around drinking Diet Cokes, watching a dumb reality show about people starving on a tropical island. There was a bang on the window and Felice jumped; she turned to see Bethany’s grubby face pressed to the glass. She wished Alma would tell her to get lost. Instead Alma giggled. “Oh my God—Bethany is insane.” They went outside: Bethany was so stoned she swayed from side to side, rippling with laughter. “I gotta take a leak, you guys!” she brayed.
It was a late-summer night, the warm air was filled with bugs like ruby dots in the darkness. Felice wished she weren’t there. She never would have hung out with anyone like Bethany in school. Though sometimes the girl’s slanted smile, the forced, splintered quality of her laughter, reminded Felice of Hannah, and a wave of dizzying sickness and guilt rushed over her.
“Go for it!” Alma sat on one of the squat cement posts that lined the building’s front entrance. “We’re all outside in nature. That’s what animals do.” Alma propped herself with a straightened arm and her brown hair swayed in a curve down her back. When Felice first met Alma, she was working as a temp in several of the Miami Beach modeling agencies and she had all sorts of friends and “contacts.” But Felice gradually came to understand Alma was just desperate for people to like her.
“You think I won’t?” Bethany’s laughter made her look old, wrinkles cracking around her eyes. She plopped down on the patch of grass in hysterics, kicking her legs, panties around her knees, peeing on herself and into the grass. Like a baby. Alma told Felice that Bethany hadn’t even known what her period was—she’d come to her, shaking and tear-streaked, and Alma’d had to explain everything, show her how to use a tampon, give her aspirin. “She left blood all over the toilet seat,” Alma said, rolling her eyes. “My mom shit a total brick.”
That night, Bethany (now smelling of pee) wanted to go out and Alma immediately agreed. Felice wasn’t sure if she was even allowed in the apartment without Alma. Alma’s mother put up with having Felice underfoot, but she muttered about her daughter’s “user-loser friends.”
First they went to The Sinker, then to Gerk’s, places where they wouldn’t be carded. The bars seemed interchangeable to Felice: starchy triangles of light suspended over pool tables, jukeboxes, waves of rancid grease, nicotine, and old beer. The men leaning against the bar automatically looked the girls over. Their eyes lingered on Felice, then slipped to Bethany. At the second bar, a man with an oily gray ponytail reached for Bethany, pulling her close; Felice watched Bethany turn pliable and childlike, pressed against the side of the man’s gut, her hands resting on his half-buttoned guayabera. The man tongued his cigar from the front to the corner of his mouth. “Esta es mia!”
After he’d bought them rum and Cokes, the girls moved on to another bar Bethany knew about, closer to the beach. It was in the basement of an apartment building and the only marker was a little acid blue lightbulb above the door. Felice didn’t like the look of the place. Alma said, “So leave if you want to, you big wuss.”
This place was the worst one yet—its sour old reek mingled with something chemical, as if it were built on a toxic waste dump. The bar had a flinty light, like that of an office in a nightmare, and except for a few hazy forms at the bar, it was deserted. Even Alma mumbled, “Fuck, Bethany—the fuck kind of place is this?”
The bartender nodded, his white cap of hair dimly visible. He had some sort of tattoo that crept up his temple, extending halfway onto his forehead. Bethany went over to one of the men leaning against the back wall. A few minutes later, Felice, Alma, and Bethany sat at a table in the corner with a dusting of white powder on a ceramic plate like the ones in her mother’s kitchen. They weren’t even going to hide it. No one—not even the bartender—seemed to pay any attention. The man crouched over the powder, chopping it up with a butter knife and scraping it into lines on the plate. Felice thought they looked like mathematical symbols—equal signs and minuses—a coded warning. He handed Alma a rolled-up twenty. His name was Gary. He had one clear green eye, and one murky green one that lazed in the wrong direction. Felice didn’t like his fawning manner or the way he put his hand on Bethany’s head while she snorted, as if holding her underwater. Most of the kids Felice knew couldn’t afford real cocaine. Felice snorted less than half a line, gulped back the chemical drip from her sinuses. “I’m good.”
Gary
smiled, his teeth big as chalk. “You don’t like my present? That’s not crack, you know—that’s the real shit. You think it’s full of baking soda and Ivory soap?” He turned to Alma and Bethany. “I don’t see any soap bubbles coming out of the princess’s nose? Do you see bubbles coming out of her nose?”
Gary watched as Alma and Bethany finished the powder. Bethany straightened up, shivering and sucking air through her teeth. She waved her hands. “Mmm!” Alma rubbed her nose fiercely with the flat of her hand. “Everybody happy?” Gary asked. The girls collected their bags as if they were leaving a restaurant, and trooped out of the bar into the soft night. Felice still tasted the acrid drip. She wasn’t sure if she had a buzz or if it was sheer relief that made the air seem so feathery. “Finally,” she blurted. “God—did you ever think we’d get away from that slime ball?”
Alma elbowed her and Felice realized that Gary had followed them out. He caught up to Bethany and put his hand on the nape of her neck. “What about my tip?” Felice grimaced at Alma, trying to stave off a beat of fear, but Alma’d had the most to drink: she rolled forward, unsteady on her feet; head swinging as if too heavy for her neck. After just a few blocks, Alma sat down on some cement stairs leading up to another apartment building and grabbed the edge of the step with both hands. Her head tipped forward. Felice sensed the weight increasing in the front of her own temples, as if she’d snorted lead dust. She waved to Bethany and said she’d have to help Alma get home. Bethany twisted around under the man’s hand, her eyes small and hard, before Gary jerked her forward.
Felice stood there watching Bethany stumble up the street beside the man. Alma was already passed out, her upper half slumped at the waist, so her face rested on her knees and her arms dangled to her ankles. Felice would’ve been content to curl up on that step beside Alma. They were on a quiet residential street, dead-ending at the lip of the beach: everyone was indoors, peacefully asleep. But Felice couldn’t stop seeing Bethany’s face—contracted, mottled crimson, as if fright could seize up under the skin. After a minute of dread and profound indecision, Felice started up the street after her. She went cursing Bethany under her breath, walking at first, then trotting. She spotted them at the opposite end of the block as she rounded the corner. They were hard to see in the dark; the man was pressing Bethany into a shadow against the side of a building, pinning her with his body. As Felice came closer, she saw Bethany’s head turned flat against the bricks. Uncertainty wobbled inside Felice: bat wings seemed to pulse in the air. One or two cars swished past. It was a wide public street but no one was out, the whole island weirdly deserted.
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