Orphans of Paradise

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  “Maybe we should try to get out of the city.”

  “We don’t have any money. We don’t have anything. We don’t even speak English.”

  “Then what do we do Rani?”

  Rani fell against one of the bare walls of the abandoned house. “Let me think.” She slid to the floor.

  Max sat down next to her and rested his arms on his knees. A car’s headlights swelled at the end of the street, cutting through the wide slits in the boarded windows. Rani watched her brother’s eyes wafting closed, his lashes pricking his cheeks before he shot them open again.

  “You should go to sleep,” Rani said. “Let me think about this. I’ll have a plan in the morning.”

  “No, I’ll stay up. You sleep. You need it.”

  “You’re already half way there. Just go and put everyone to bed. I’ll be fine.”

  “You’re sure?” Max said, the last syllable catching on a yawn.

  Rani nodded. “Trust me. I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”

  And it was true. Adrenaline was still hot in her veins and even though she’d made it back to the house in one piece and they were surrounded by bare shadow lit walls and boarded windows that overlooked an invisible cement porch, the giant slab nearly swallowed whole by the wild yellow grass—everything screaming the words keep out, she still didn’t feel safe.

  Max went into the next room where they had their bags in a pile in the corner; full of clothes they used them as pillows during the night, Breezy and Enzo each taking turns keeping warm with Max’s coat.

  An hour later everyone but Rani was sleeping, or had committed to what passed as sleep for them these days—a shallow tussling against the cold hard floor, eyes fluttering open ever few hours to scan the darkness.

  They had a flashlight, Max had lifted it from a hardware store near the airport, but Rani kept it switched off, trying to reserve the batteries, which they had also stolen from a convenient store near the bus stop. Rani hadn’t remembered it being that dark outside, even as the storm was starting to swell overhead. Even the moon was just a shadow as it struggled to sift in between the bank installed wooden blinds and Rani felt like she was in a black hole.

  Every second she sat there in the darkness she could feel herself swirling closer and closer to the center, the gravity baring down on her bones. She felt the night air settling against her skin and drawing up her neck, an invisible draft blowing in from somewhere upstairs. The chill only accelerated the stiffness pinning Rani to the floor and she pulled herself to her feet, trying to stay warm.

  Her feet moved silently into the next room where Max was lying on his back, Breezy and Enzo each curled under an arm. The sole of her shoe bit into the plastic floor with a squeak and she stopped, thinking for a moment about taking them off, of letting her feet rest, just for a second. But she wouldn’t let herself.

  She knelt next to the empty bag, its contents stacked across the floor in neat rows, the dark shapes moving from smallest to largest, each piece carefully dissected from the whole. She noticed a small strip of fabric and lifted it by one of the loose strings. It puckered and then a string of beads spilled into her open hand, the metal crucifix trickling down into the crook of her arm.

  Enzo stirred, his legs twisting under Max’s coat, and Rani crept to the stairs rounding the hallway and sat against the railing. She clutched the rosary, the smell of rosewood adhering to her skin.

  She knew it hadn’t belonged to her mother. She’d been buried with the ivory rosary she wore every Sunday to church, the one she used to trace across their skin when they were sick. Rani wondered if Nadia had found it somewhere, maybe there in the States. Or maybe someone had given it to her.

  She was supposed to be there. They were supposed to be together. Safe.

  Rani thought about the moment they stepped off the plane. The way the fog billowed out like smoke from the gutters and trailed behind taxicabs, swirling and catching on people's ankles as they made their way down the slick grey streets. The first things Rani noticed were the colors. Winter—the ruthless kind she’d only seen in movies, white subtitles disappearing in the snow—had swallowed the city whole. Even the people, pink cheeks buried beneath scarves or covered with gloved hands, shuffled muted and grey along the frozen city streets.

  Rani remembered the cold stopping them at the edge of the parking lot and for a second she knew they were in the wrong place; that they’d gotten on the wrong plane, and when Nadia wasn't there Rani wasn't surprised. As strangers rushed past them in the cold, Rani just knew that it was them who were lost and not Nadia.

  A month before they were to come to the states Nadia had bought a set of cassette tapes to help them all learn English. She had the American woman's voice streaming from the kitchen in one monotone loop as she practiced repeating the words, smiling to herself every time the narrator followed up with, “Well done.” Rani remembered watching her slide them into the front pocket of her pack the morning she left.

  They’d sat in the kitchen with the door hanging open, the soft whirr of June bugs trickling in with the wind. And the sounds, the warm night, the empty house—they made it feel safe to go.

  Rani had been the only one awake to see their sister leave. When she heard the click of the bathroom light and the soft dribble from the sink she was pressed to the mattress breathing in deep, her body trying to store every dimple and every smell of her bed. But Nadia's quiet footsteps finally drew her out. She knew she was probably afraid and even though she had no idea what to say she didn't want Nadia to feel alone.

  They’d sat together, quiet, waiting and when Rani felt her skin sticking to the wooden seat of her chair, she’d made the mistake of pouring herself a glass of water while Nadia looked on, a pained expression on her face. She hadn’t eaten or drank anything in almost two days. Her stomach had to be completely empty to make the transport. Rani’d turned her face, wiping the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand before pouring the rest out in the sink.

  “It’s going to be ok,” Nadia said, words caught in the stagnant air between them.

  "It better. For Breezy and Enzo’s sake.” It came out more threatening than Rani had intended and she lowered her voice. "How do you know they won’t come looking for you?"

  Nadia looked from the dark street back to Rani.

  "After you just take—"

  "By the time they realize I’m gone, that we’re gone, it’ll be too late. Four days is plenty of time for us to get out of the city. It will be a waste of time for them to go out looking for me then.”

  Rani recognized the dry inflection in her sister's voice, the same flatness on her cassette tapes—emotionless, rehearsed. Rani wondered how many times a day her sister had repeated the same speech to herself. Fooling herself into thinking that the cartel didn’t thrive almost as much on revenge as it did on making a profit. No. She knew they would look for her. Rani could see the fear rising in the veins along Nadia's neck and in the red cracks spreading out from her tired irises.

  Headlights swelled at the end of the street, the glow climbing the sidewalk as the car pulled to a stop in front of the house. Nadia slipped her bag over her shoulder and walked to the door. The cabby’s face was lit up by the glow of a cell phone, dialing the number to the cartel, letting them know their mule was en route.

  Rani had been thinking about that moment—leaving. About the last thing she’d touch, the last place her feet would tread in that house. Would the toe of her shoe catch on the peeling tile between the kitchen and the living room the way it always did? Would she linger in the empty corner by the window where their father’s chair should have sat? Rani watched as Nadia did none of those things.

  Instead she kept her eyes down as she gave Rani a kiss on the head and then she whispered “I'll see you soon,” before walking out to the car.

  Rani had never gone with her sister to the plant but as she stood there watching her leave, she knew exactly what was going to happen next. The cab driver, commissioned by the car
tel, wouldn't even glance at Nadia in his rearview mirror. He already knew what she looked like, what they'd all looked like and he didn't want to see her eyes, buried beneath those familiar shadows, the kind that pooled there in the hollows of their faces. Darkened by fear, by responsibility.

  Neither of them would say a word as the narrow residential street gave way to the shantytowns still clinging to the hillside, power lines dark until they reached the city. Then he would drop Nadia off at the end of a still dark street lined with restaurants, laundry mats, and beauty supply stores—all fronts for the cartel to launder their money—and Nadia would take soft calculated steps to an alley entrance where she would knock twice or three times, an almost imperceptible melody buried beneath the sound that would serve as her ticket inside.

  Some faceless pair of eyes would lead her into one of the windowless planting rooms where she would stand in front of a table lined with powder filled latex capsules. They’d give her a glass of water mixed with the sap of an Aloe Vera plant to coat the back of her throat. Then one by one each capsule would be weighed, the results written down, before Nadia would rest it on the back of her tongue, lean her head back and swallow—thirty, maybe forty until her small frame looked pregnant with them.

  Her flight had left around noon—Rani and her siblings were set to leave the next morning—and she called as soon as she’d landed.

  “I’m outside the airport,” she’d said, her voice severed by the wind cutting between her lips and the receiver.

  “And the ones coming to get you, when will they be there?”

  “Soon," Nadia coughed into the phone, choking on the cold. "Anytime now really.”

  “You’re not going to have to stay with them are you?” Rani asked.

  There were only so many variables under their control and whether or not the cartel would force Nadia to stay in one of their hideouts or trust her to spend the night in a motel without trying to run away, vanishing into the alluring folds of the North American landscape like so many other mules tried to do, was not one of them. But this wasn't her first trip to the states or even her first drop in Boston and the Capo there knew that.

  They could trust that the steady income was more important to Nadia than running and taking her chances in a foreign country where she had nothing and no one. And there was no doubt that the Capo in Boston also knew that her parents were dead and that they’d left behind four younger siblings who Nadia was now responsible for.

  It was their job, after all, to know not just the circumstances of every girl that transported drugs for them or who operated the store fronts they used to launder their money, but also their weaknesses and their most impossible desires, shackling them with hope, and then once they were in the fray, in so deep they couldn't see their way out anymore, with fear.

  Rani waited for her sister’s voice to solidify on the other end of the phone.

  “I don’t plan to. There’s a motel just on the other side of the bridge. But I have to cooperate with them. They’re expecting to drive me back to the airport in the morning and I can’t do anything to make them suspicious of me.”

  “They know we’re still here. They know you’d never leave us.”

  “I know. They’re counting on it and so are we.”

  “Nadia?”

  “Oh, Rani, they’re here. I see them.”

  The phone clicked off. I’m sorry, Rani had wanted to tell her, I’m sorry it’s you doing this…alone.

  Chapter 3

  Jax

  The slip of paper torn from his mother's legal pad was crumpled in his fist, sharp folds jutting out from between his fingers. He loosened his grip and let the note fall into his lap, the ink fused along his palms. The dull reflection of his name was scrolled across the edge of his thumb and after spitting on the ink he raked the skin across his jeans. It finally faded and he ran the back of his hand across his forehead, catching the trickling beads of sweat before they froze there.

  But he didn't care about the cold. He liked the way it burned him. Slicing across his bare skin, lingering there until the limbs were dull enough to cut off. That's what he wanted to be. Cut off from everything. From his mother, from Pascual. And it turned out his mother wanted the same thing.

  He’d been carrying the letter with him for two weeks, usually in his pocket or tucked into one of the folds in his wallet. Not because it was the only piece of her he had left, she’d left the rosary too, the one she always used to keep strung around her wrist. But because he was never going to let himself forget her reasons for leaving or that he was one of them.

  Pascual had bought their mother an apartment in the better part of town with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and enough empty closet space to store his back-up arsenal of illegal weapons. It was supposed to be a safe place for her to live; a manifestation of her oldest son's gratitude for raising him on her own. But instead it was just his way of using her the way he used everybody else, including Jax.

  Jax couldn't even remember the first drop he’d ever made because Pascual would disguise the packages in super hero embossed lunch boxes or inside the hollowed out bellies of stuffed animals and when he was still in elementary school and Pascual was just a teenaged thug they would make the exchanges in as public of places as the park or grocery store parking lots. Pascual would park the car or if they were on foot he would crouch behind someone else's and point to a man or woman within the crowd, who oddly, didn't look so out of place. Sometimes they were even with their own children. Sometimes it was the children he traded with.

  Then Pascual would hand Jax the disguised drugs and say, "Give this to that man over there, the one with his hands in his pockets."

  And Jax, always less afraid than the time before, would traipse through the chalk pebbled playground and hand the man the stuffed dog, his other hand edging out from beneath the long hand-me-down sleeve of his coat waiting for the candy bar, the paper lined with hundred dollar bills, or the box of cracker jacks stuffed with cash.

  It wasn't until Jax was ten that he started to connect his childish packages with the junkies who howled from their porch steps when he walked home from school, mouths watering at the sight of him as if he was the thing they wanted to sink their teeth into. There were other kids too, ones he went to school with whose brother or father or grandfather sold drugs.

  Some of them knew more than Jax, a lot more, and they never hesitated to tell him how things worked, how they were supposed to work if you were loyal to your family. Those conversations would usually erupt in a thirty second playground tussle between the tiniest animals on the cartel's food chain, only to be interrupted by a panicked throng of pale faced teachers who didn't know enough Spanish to even know who started the fight or why.

  Middle school was when Jax really started taking advantage of his older brother's reputation. He was bigger than the other kids but not in a good way. He hadn't grown an inch since fifth grade but his appetite had. Though, the taunts grew to whispers once he told them that his brother was Pascual Rodriguez. It was a guarantee to the other teen drug runners that he would eventually grow into his size and that they might want to be on his good side when he did.

  It was a persona at first, a familial duty, but as Pascual's operation grew so did Jax's inherited responsibility. His knuckles burned as he remembered his hands on the man’s throat, blood dribbling from his lips onto Jax's thumb as his brother beat him.

  He was seventeen that first time he’d watched his brother kill someone and an entire year would pass before he stopped having to avoid their eyes. So Jax had been used to the cold and the ecstasy of the blind numbness that accompanied it.

  But that was before he’d seen her hands. Palms bloody, fingernails splitting against the bars as she tried to claw her way out. Detective Franco Medina and the handful of policemen who weren't on Pascual's payroll were waging a war against the cartel, meaning less mules were making it past airport security and more dealers were being arrested. In other words, it was time to div
ersify. Actual flesh and bones would never bring in as much as cocaine would but if that flesh and bones were used for sex the product suddenly had a longer shelf life. So Pascual got into the sex trade and instead of killing the mules who tried to escape, he sold them.

  Jax remembered the girl’s eyes peering out from between the slats of her crate—grey and pinning him there. Making him see her. And he couldn’t pretend like he hadn’t. He couldn’t pretend anymore. And suddenly the crowbar was wedged beneath his foot and there was a loud crack as the wooden crate splintered and started to break. She’d reached for his hand, her shoulders struggling to squeeze past the narrow slit.

  But before Jax could break it, before he could lift her out, another pair of hands was pulling him to the ground. His face hit the concrete floor, dark clouds fogging his vision. He saw the girl, blood trickling down her shoulders and dripping into the soft hollow of her chest as she ripped herself free.

  One of Pascual’s narcos, Javier, wrenched her up by the throat, his fingers tangled in her hair as he tried to push her back down into the crate. She snarled at him, teeth catching his wrist and Jax stumbled onto his back, kicking Javier in the knee and sending him to the ground. They tussled there, Jax getting a few blows to Javier’s face as the man’s arms tried to fit themselves around his neck. Javier fumbled for something, his head rolling between Jax’s knees and then something slick and cold sliced across Jax’s chest.

  Javier gripped a long steel cable, the grooves tearing into his palms as he lashed Jax across the chest. The metal teeth bit at him, tearing at his shirt and grating across his skin. The sting sent him to his knees and he crawled behind an empty crate, trying to regain his footing. But when he stood the crate came sliding into his chest, pinning him to the wall.