Bella

by C M Blackwood

  Moving quickly and quietly, Lucie struggled to her feet. She cast a swift glance all about; spied Robert’s cell phone on the table-top; snatched it up in her hand, and whirled from the motel room. She ran so very fast, in spite of the hundred aches and pains that cropped up as she went, that it was hardly of any import whether or not Robert had followed her to the door. She was across the lot, into the street, down the sidewalk and around several dark and narrow corners, quite before any person in all the world could have said “Jack Robinson.”

  After a few minutes her adrenaline began to wear away, and her aches presented themselves in howling form. It was then that she started to notice more closely the impenetrable darkness of the streets – devoid as they were, where she walked, of lamps. She began to fear more than just what she had left behind, and thought perhaps that there were things lurking in the dark, the sorts of things that creep in the heart and belly of such slums as she traversed through presently. She was almost frantic, when all of a sudden there appeared to her eyes a brightness of variegated color, shining like artificial sunlight.

  She had come upon a little all-night diner, wrapped all around with thick bars of neon light. She stumbled to the door, and nearly fell into the place – though it was empty almost as a ghost-town, and no one noticed.

  She went to a corner booth, whose table was etched with a myriad of names and phrases, and whose plastic seats were cracked and leaking stuffing. Here she sat down, and took Robert’s phone out of her pocket. She scrolled through the list of telephone numbers, and quickly came across that of César Vicente. She hadn’t forgotten what awkwardness had passed between them that night – but she thought of it, and weighed it, and compared it with the uncertainty she currently entertained regarding Clara. In such an exercise, it was César who presented himself as the smaller risk.

  So she highlighted his name, and sent the call. She listened to one, two, three rings with anxious breath, till finally he answered on the fourth. His voice was thick, and clogged with sleep and liquor.

  “César,” she said, pinching her thigh beneath the table so as to balance the emotional discomfort heaving through her breast. “It’s Lucie.”

  “Lucie?”

  “Yes.” She paused. “Will you come and get me?”

  He paused. Then he said, “Yes.”

  “I’m at a place called Camila’s. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll come?”

  “I told you yes.”

  “Thank you, César.”

  He grunted in answer.

  She set down the phone, let loose the quantity of flesh she had been twisting in her fingers, and winced at the addition of a much unneeded bruise. Surely all her others had not required any more company.

  César arrived, faithful as always to his word, a very small number of minutes later. He rambled into the diner, exchanged a greeting with an old waitress behind the counter whom he seemed to know, and approached Lucie’s booth.

  “Will you come home with me?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Lucie replied.

  So he held out his hand, and she took it. They went out into the lot, where he handed her into the car, and then settled himself behind the wheel.

  They had driven for long, silent moments before he spoke again. “You think I did not see your bruises,” he said, “and the blood on your face. But I saw – and I do not forget it. I will bring you home, and then I will go to your brother.”

  “I don’t want you to do that.”

  “It does not matter to me.”

  “Why do you have to be such – such a man?” Lucie asked, banging her fist against the door handle.

  “Because I am a man,” he answered simply.

  At Little Tortuga Street, Lucie scrambled out of the car before César could come to help her. But she followed him docilely enough to the big metal door, and didn’t attempt again to dissuade him from what he had in mind to do. She couldn’t, in her heart of hearts, say for certain whether she thought Robert warranted a measure of punishment. She simply regarded her doubt, as proof enough that it might be possible.

  They went together up the four flights of steps, and César let her into the darkened apartment. He didn’t even enter, but simply kept a hold on the door knob, and began to pull the door shut behind him. He stopped for only a moment, to poke his head through the crack. “Eduardo is in his bed,” he said. “He left the couch when you did not come back. If you want to rest, you can go into Clara’s room. She is – no, wait. She is not working tonight. You will have to go to the couch.”

  With this short statement, he retracted his head, and closed the door with a dull click.

  ~

  Lucie sat alone in the kitchen for a long time. All the family was asleep – and with César gone after Robert, she sat for what seemed many weary hours of darkness, with a little cup before her filled with water. She was parched, and had tried several times to take a drink of the cold liquid; but each time she choked on it, and spit it back into the cup.

  After César went out of the apartment, she was tempted to turn on the light. She was sad, lonely, and in pain, and thought very much that a little light might serve to brighten her spirits. But in the end, she kept to the darkness, so that no one who might venture into the kitchen would catch sight of her. She could hide in the black space between the wall and the refrigerator, until they went out again . . .

  She started at the sound of an opening door. It didn’t come from the hallway; but rather from the right, at the entrance to the apartment. Surely César wasn’t back already? Yes, it had seemed like hours; but really it had been nothing close.

  She was preparing to hide, when all of a sudden the room flooded with yellow light, and it was too late. Then, it wouldn’t have mattered – but it wasn’t César. Lucie’s heart sank at the sight of Clara, standing in the little hall between the kitchen and the parlor, with her hand still poised over the light switch.

  “César said you weren’t working tonight,” Lucie said simply, averting the side of her face which was most bruised.

  “I wasn’t,” said Clara, “but Teodoro called me around eleven, and asked me to come in. Things were a little – out of control – after all of us left.”

  “I imagine so.”

  Still Clara stood as if frozen in place, with her arm stretched out towards the wall. Perhaps she kept it there, in the case that she should need a support for her trembling legs; or perhaps she intended to make use of the wall, in order to catapult herself all the more quickly from the room. Lucie couldn’t tell which.

  But she began to suspect that she had been wrong in her latter assumption, when Clara came towards her. She walked very slowly, and it seemed a long while before she finally reached the table; but she came just the same. She sat down in the chair beside Lucie.

  “Why are you here all alone?” she asked. “Were you looking for me?”

  “No,” said Lucie; and she took great comfort in being able to pronounce the word sincerely, and to sound as if she were scoffing at Clara’s foolish notion.

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I came with César. He only went out for a while.”

  “Why didn’t you go with him?”

  “For God’s sake!” Lucie cried, bringing her hand down on the table. “If you’re that disappointed to see me, I’ll wait for him outside.”

  But Clara caught her hand as she made to rise; and in her annoyance, she inadvertently turned her face in the wrong direction. She realized her mistake too late, and by the sound of Clara’s gasp, knew that she couldn’t correct it.

  Clara leapt to her feet, and brushed the hair away from Lucie’s face. “What happened to you, Lucie?” she cried.

  “Do you really want to know?” Lucie asked in a hollow voice.

  Clara’s face darkened, and her eyes glistened with black fire. She looked capable, in that moment, of throwing down an army; but when she stepped nearer to Lucie, and put her ha
nd to the place where Robert’s fist had come down, her touch couldn’t have been more gentle.

  “I suppose you don’t need to say anything, anyway,” she said softly. “Your brother’s hand struck my sister, too, tonight. Though it looks like you got the worst of it.”

  “Not so much,” Lucie lied. She tried to turn her face away.

  “I don’t understand it,” said Clara.

  “Don’t understand what?”

  Clara looked at her for a long moment.

  “Don’t understand what?” Lucie repeated.

  “Do you love him, Lucie?”

  “Yes. He’s my brother.”

  She spoke these words, and never stopped for a moment to question their sincerity. She knew they were true. She knew – and she even forgot in that instant, all about what the staircase had revealed to her.

  “What does that matter?” Clara asked. “He doesn’t treat you like a sister. He screams at you, and curses you, and insults you. He disrespects you. He loathes you.”

  “He loves me.”

  “Does he?”

  “Yes.”

  Clara didn’t appear to be convinced. But Lucie uttered a half-strangled sob, turned her damp eyes to Clara’s face, and begged her very earnestly that they would talk no more of Robert. She couldn’t explain him, she said, no matter how she tried. And she didn’t want to try.

  “Will you just – will you just sit here with me a while?” she asked, pointing to the table.

  “Don’t you want to go to sleep?”

  Lucie squeezed her eyes shut, and felt a few warm tears trickle down. “No,” she said. “I just want to sit.”

  And so they sat. They sat for a long while – it may have been more than an hour – there in the bright light of the overhead bulbs. Lucie made another go at the water in her cup, and was somewhat more successful. Still she choked a little, and coughed as the water passed down her constricted throat; but the cool liquid served to ease the dryness there, and to calm the flush that had burned across her cheeks, ever since leaving the motel.

  Neither she nor Clara spoke a single word more, until there came the sound of the apartment door opening, and César presented himself in the kitchen. He was pale as his brown skin would permit, and his furled fists shook with the remnants of his rage. Most alarmingly, though, was the prodigious amount of blood spattered across his white T-shirt. Lucie gasped, and shot out of her seat.

  “You haven’t killed him?” she demanded.

  “No,” César said grimly. “Unfortunately – he is alive.”

  “What did you – what did you do to him?”

  “I taught him a lesson.”

  Clara nodded her head in satisfaction.

  “But – but –”

  Lucie floundered for words, yet could hardly piece her broken thoughts into cohesive strings, she was so terribly anxious. “But,” she attempted again, “what did you do to him?”

  “I told you,” said César. “I taught him a lesson. One he needed very badly to learn.”

  Lucie dropped back down into her chair, and began to moan.

  “Do not worry,” said César, going to the cabinet for a bottle of rum. “He will live for many years yet. That is – unless someone else tries to kill him.” He took a long swig from the bottle, wiped his mouth and smacked his lips, before he added: “I would not be surprised.”

  26

  Round the Bend

  When the party of three broke up in the kitchen, César went with his rum bottle to the room he shared with his brother, and Lucie went with Clara to her own little apartment. It wasn’t quite as tidy as it had been, the last time Lucie saw it. Rather, there were several items lying on the floor, that looked as if they had been tossed there on purpose. The bed had been half-stripped, as if in a fit of fury, and its covers had slid down to the boards.

  But most significantly, in Lucie’s opinion: the contents of an entire bookshelf had been swept from their place, and scattered all around, with no rhyme or reason to justify. Some lay open, face-down or face-up, with their pages bent. Others lay very calm and composed, as if they were only sleeping in strange places – but still they glared up at their owner in what seemed a very accusatory manner, and beseeched the newcomer for assistance in their plight. Lucie heard their call, and bent down straightaway, to begin restoring them to their former order.

  “It looks as if Boreas swept through your room,” she said tonelessly, as she hefted a stack of books onto the shelf, and set to work straightening them.

  “Notus,” answered Clara, with just as little feeling.

  “Some wind or other,” Lucie muttered under her breath.

  For a while, Clara sat on the bed while Lucie worked, watching her progress absently. But finally she shook herself, and got to her feet, so as to set about organizing the rest of the room. She picked up what things it was obvious she had thrown, and then made up the bed. So meticulous was Lucie’s method, however, that even by the time Clara had finished with her own tasks, she hadn’t completed repairing the shelf. Clara had been sitting silently some ten minutes or more, when Lucie finally decided that she had done herself justice, and deemed her work complete.

  By then, all of her various hurts had begun sincerely to smart, and she limped to the bed very wearily. Her head ached terribly, on account of being smashed against a wall. Her body was sore in a score of different places, from the many kicks Robert had distributed so very evenly. She thought now that the crack she had earlier heard, but couldn’t explain, was the effect of something gone amiss in her upper back; so she lay down very carefully, so as to avoid putting it any more out of order. She had thought, for a while, that her wrist (which her brother had crushed with little clemency in his giant hand) had sustained a small fracture; but now, though it still hurt her very seriously, she found that she could bend and twist it well enough, when the need arose.

  To add to all this (and Lucie thought very reasonably that all of this was quite sufficient), the pain of her hip injury had flared up again, while she was meandering the dark streets round the motel. Now it burned very uncomfortably, so that she could hardly lie still.

  To add to this what small hurts she had sustained from Pablo in Tijuana (of which she no longer had any feeling at all, but which caused just the same a dark bruise that still lingered on her forehead), she estimated that her time spent so far in Mexico had been by far the most detrimental to her health, of any similar length of time, in any other place she had ever been, her entire life.

  But, unfortunately – her pain pills were under the pillow of Eduardo’s bed. She could scarcely keep her lips from forming a faint whimper, as she tried unsuccessfully to make herself comfortable. The lamp beside the bed still burned, and the room was filled with light, which resulted in a shadow thrown across the wall, as Clara leaned over her.

  “Are you asleep?” she asked.

  “I can’t sleep,” Lucie answered moodily. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”

  She paused a moment, and then went on, “Probably the truck would have been better. At least I’d be dead.”

  “Don’t say things like that.”

  “I’ll say whatever I like, thank you very much.”

  “That’s a nice attitude.”

  “Yours isn’t much better.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re not being so wonderful yourself.”

  “Now, you listen,” Clara began.

  Certainly Lucie did listen; but rather than listen to the words, she noted the difference that came into Clara’s voice, when she began to grow angry. Lucie had observed it earlier in the evening, at the cantina. Her voice seemed tinged with a fire that blazed in her throat, and the Latin accent on her English became much more pronounced.

  She continued to speak, after telling Lucie to listen; but her words became so mingled with their Spanish counterparts, that Lucie could follow very little of her soliloquy. In it, however, she could make out what she thought were
derogatory remarks concerning her brother, something about César, and then merely the name “Tomás.” It was this last utterance that made Lucie go stiff, and prick up her ears. But it seemed it was here that Clara meant to leave off.

  “And, so you see,” she concluded (much more calmly, and all in English), “that it’s not me who has a problem. Is any of it my fault? Is any of it my doing?”

  Lucie sighed, and rolled away from her. “Of course not,” she said (rather sarcastically). “You didn’t do anything. You didn’t do one thing, when maybe you should have done another. You didn’t tell me one thing, when really you –”

  Here she took a deep breath, and left off. She didn’t see the good that could come of prolonging such a theme. But the corners of her lips turned up into a smile, which she tried to suppress although Clara could not see her; and she asked, in a more playful tone, “And I suppose it really was the Notus, that came through here? Or the Eurus?”

  “Or the Zephyrus,” Clara added, in what seemed to be very good humor.

  “Or just the Clara,” Lucie concluded. “Yes – I think it was just that one.”

  “You’re right, I think,” said Clara. “They say she’s worse than all the others.”

  “They say rightly.”

  “I’m sorry, Lucie.”

  Lucie looked back at her. In these three simple words, you see, there were oceans of meaning. They could have been stretched, augmented, continued and expounded upon till Clara was hoarse, and blue in the face – but there was no need. She smiled sweetly, and took Lucie’s hand; and there was no need.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Lucie told her. “You really don’t.”

  She turned from Clara, and reached to douse the lamp. They lay very still, and very quiet, for a very long while. It seemed as if the sky outside the window should be beginning to lighten – but still there was only a thick, moonless, starless darkness. It filled the room like a deep hush, and covered the bed like a warm blanket.