I stooped and collected the tinfoil in case he had some elaborate plan to use his hood pulls and shoelaces to retrieve it, believing he was entirely capable of that, turned, and walked calmly up the stairs.
Where I promptly began to freak the hell out.
I mean, what else could be expected of me?
That whole interaction was just... surreal.
Surreal.
Unreal.
That was what I kept telling myself as I poured some more birdie kibble into Diego's food dish on his play stand where he was happily preening his feathers, getting ready for sleep after his calls to wake up the neighborhood. I also told myself that as I stripped and showered, feeling like the entire day was a layer of filth and slime over every inch of skin that I needed to scrub at until it was red and just shy of raw.
I was even still trying to tell myself that as I dressed in a tee and PJ pants, sat down on my bed, and reached for it.
My laptop.
I wasn't going to do what he said.
No freaking way.
Because I knew who my father was.
I was totally just going to check the weather, my email, new stories. I had missed out on a lot internet-wise being off the grid like I had been. I had used it before, of course. My father didn't want me to be a complete Luddite. But my usage was just a couple minutes here and there every month or two.
I had no idea how useful it could be in all kinds of ways. I could order groceries online. I could have my home insured without ever speaking to another human being.
It was no wonder Americans were so damn unhappy. They never interacted with one another.
I mean not once, in my entire life, did I have a dinner alone until I moved back to the States. Often, it wasn't even just my father and me either. Meals were a communal thing. They were for sharing of riches, for sharing of stories, of wisdom, of mutual enjoyment. It was always my favorite time of day, dinner. It never mattered that these people often didn't have a clue who we were, they welcomed us with open arms and hearts.
Hell, I went to a bar a few months back, and the people sitting almost shoulder-to-shoulder with each other were steadily looking ahead at the TVs.
No one interacted anymore.
It was all digital.
And while it was good that it was a way to bring people together who would never be able to know one another any other way, it was still lacking.
Nothing compared to sharing actual face-to-face interactions.
Just yet another thing I missed from my old life.
But I would adjust.
If there was one thing being a nomad your whole life taught you, it was how to seamlessly go from one extreme to another, to accept things as they came to you.
I exhaled hard at that, shaking my head.
If I believed that, if I believed things came to you, that you must accept them at face-value, why then was I being so reluctant to open a new window and do the search Luce challenged me to?
Was it because there was a part of me - albeit a minuscule part of me - that wondered if maybe there was even a slight chance of him being correct?
I wasn't sure, but with oddly numb fingers, I started typing.
Just his name.
Just Alejandro Cruz.
Not rapist.
Just a man. One of many.
There was nothing even relating to him for a long time, just other men by the same name who had done more public things with their lives.
Ten pages of the search in, my shoulders relaxed, my chest loosened enough to allow me to draw in a proper breath, my jaw unclenched, making me realize for the first time how much it hurt.
And it was right then, right that second, as I was wiggling my lower jaw around to loosen it up, that my eyes caught it.
The Rapist of Papua New Guinea.
That was the headline, making my heart plummet, and my belly twist painfully as I forced my eyes down below to read the blurb under it.
And that was the first shred of proof that Luce wasn't lying.
Because there was his name.
Alejandro Cruz was the rapist of Papua New Guinea.
I scanned the article even as my mind wandered back to our first trip there. I remembered the serious talk we had as we landed, before he would even let me get in the car. We were standing in the suffocating heat, the sun beating down relentlessly. At seventeen, I had been annoyed from the long travel and anxious to get somewhere to bathe and eat and get some sleep that wasn't interrupted by turbulence or someone else's too-loud speaking. But something in his eyes stopped me mid-grumble.
My father wasn't often serious with me.
So I knew it was time to listen.
"This is a very diverse land," he started with.
I had rolled my eyes at that. I knew that. I had learned that from the book he threw at me while we were still in Chile, telling me it was our next stop, and that I needed to brush up on the country. That was very much my father's homeschooling technique.
Papua New Guinea was one of the most diverse places in the world with over eight-hundred known languages, large amounts of 'un-contacted peoples,' and because it was one of the world's least explored territories, it was thought to be home of many undiscovered animals and plant life.
"Don't give me that look, mija," he scolded, tisk-tisking me for being a pain in the ass. "This is serious."
"What is so serious? They can't be worse than those cartels in Colombia, Papi."
"You didn't finish the book, did you?" Again, there was the tisk-tisk in his voice. He didn't often need to tell me how disappointed he was; it was in his very tone.
"I read most of it. I glazed over in the law chapter."
"And that law chapter is what has me standing here warning you, Evan." And then he went ahead and said something that, as time would prove it seems, was completely ironic. "Papua New Guinea is ranked the number one country for human rights violations against women. Fifty-percent of women in this country will be raped. Sixty-percent of that fifty-percent happens before the age of eighteen."
I felt my stomach twist at those facts.
Even at seventeen, even as white as a lily sexually, that word had a painful effect through my system. And it no longer felt like it was a hundred degrees in the shade. Because I was cold all over.
"Do you understand what I am telling you?"
I had to swallow before speaking, choking back the bile that seemed to work itself up my throat. Because this was never a topic I needed brought to my attention before. Not because it was not an issue. There were perverts, child molesters in every culture. Human trafficking was a very real and growing problem. But it had never really been on my radar. My father protected me. My father was feared by most. He had never needed to put fear in me because it had never been necessary.
So, if he was telling me, then the issue was serious.
And that was terrifying.
"Yes."
"You have me most of the time," he comforted me, touching my shoulder.
I always had him most of the time. Work always took him away from me, often leaving me in the company of some local group of women who promised to keep me company and, it went without saying, safe.
But this was a country where half of the women weren't safe themselves. They wouldn't be able to protect me.
"And this," he said, reaching into his bag and pulling out a small rectangle of thick leather material, tied around the center loosely. "Is what you have when I am not here," he told me, flipping the top flap open to reveal eight pointed, slightly shiny, thin as matchstick pieces of wood. "One scratch and they will be dying within seconds. So you keep this on you at all times," he said, reaching back into his bag to get a long leather strap which he threaded through two holes in the satchel, then moved to tie it around my waist. "And you use it even if there is a hint of unwanted advances. Yes?"
My stomach turned over at the idea.
It was one thing to learn about poisons, to know their effects in
a detached sort of way. It was a whole other thing to be willing to inflict them upon a living being.
Even if said human being deserved it.
But I nodded with certainty, even though I felt anything but.
It was four days later, in some remote village where women went bare-breasted, something that wasn't unusual to me since I had seen it in countless places and had recently grown a pair of my very own, and was kinda happy with them, and the men wore nothing more than loincloths. It was a practice I used to find almost charmingly wild, but in this new place, in this women's rights violation capital of the world, all my brain could seem to wonder was if they wore them so they had easy access to their offending cocks when they wanted to take a woman by force.
My hand had gone down and stayed on the pouch as I watched my father disappear.
I had no idea at the time that he wasn't off to do business.
No, according to this article, this very in-depth, very well-researched article by a known and respected investigative reporter, he had been out committing a chain of gang rapes with other men like him- foreigners, looking to cause terror on a different continent and get away with it.
What better place than a country where the women were so subjugated, so accustomed to the abuses of men?
I scrolled a little further, my stomach tightening into knots.
And that was when I saw the worst thing I could imagine seeing.
I saw my father, clothes only half-fastened, standing beside a group of other men similarly dressed, all from different regions by the looks of them, smiling.
That wasn't the bad part.
Oh no.
The bad part was what they were apparently smiling at.
A group of naked native women laying on the ground several feet away, clutching one another, and crying.
I flew off the bed, running so fast out of the room that my hip collided full-force into the doorway, sending a shooting pain up my body. But there was no time to think about that.
Because the bile wasn't just bile anymore.
I dropped down onto the cold tile floor and let it all purge out.
The vomit, sure.
That was first. Violent. Seemingly never-ending.
Then after there was nothing left in my stomach, as I blew my nose, and rinsed my mouth, the tears started. The pain started. It was a clawing, a ripping sensation, like something was trying to burrow its way out of my chest.
And, I realized with a loud whimper, I knew exactly what was trying to free itself from my body- my heart.
The love of my father.
Because you couldn't or, more accurately, I couldn't love a man that vile. I couldn't be that piece of shit, spineless family member standing there saying 'but he was good to me' meanwhile the bastard brutalized other women.
Fuck that.
Evil is as evil does.
And evil was something that lived inside my father, was a big enough part of him to have him traveling the world, not to expand my horizons, not to give me a childhood that many would envy, but to get away with serial rape while wearing the mask of a doting father.
I refused to be his beard.
Because there was no hiding anymore.
I refused to be his defense attorney too.
Because his actions were indefensible.
I lowered myself back down on the floor, pulling my knees up into my chest, wrapping my arms around them, and pulling tight.
There was this strong, almost overpowering sensation of falling apart, that if I didn't physically hold myself together, I might genuinely just break into little pieces. There would just be splinters of myself that would be too small and jagged to glue back together.
I couldn't tell you what the drive was that pulled me up onto my feet, moving silently through my house, then, oddly, into the garage, and down the stairs, the cement floor frigid on my bare soles, making goosebumps work up my legs, and my nipples tweak.
"You alright?" Luce's voice reached me from his position sitting against the back wall, wide awake still. His deep-set, heavy-lidded eyes looked even more set back with tiredness.
He was supposed to be the enemy.
I had no idea why the words tripped from my tongue, but they did.
"The Rapist of Papua New Guinea?" I croaked, eyes stinging again, hinting at a fresh stream of tears, and I knew the sound was heavy in my voice.
He watched me for a long second seeming to show no reaction at all to the mess I knew I must have been in that moment. Which was weird to me. Usually, there was some reaction- namely discomfort, a strange fear, a helplessness, something. Not in Luce. He was just as blank as ever.
"Is that as far as you got?"
"Before my dinner decided to come back up, yeah," I admitted as he slowly rose from his seated position, and moved across the floor to reach up and grab the bars only a foot or so from me. He could have reached out, grabbed me, and slammed my head against the bars in a heartbeat.
But he didn't.
"I was with him on that trip," I admitted, unsure why I was saying it. Maybe I just needed to purge it, and he was the only one who would understand. "He warned me about how chronic assault against women was, and gave me a satchel of poison to keep on me. You know, while he went off and attacked women himself."
"What's this for?" he asked oddly, but then his hand moved between the bars, his finger gently swiping the tears off of one of my cheeks.
"Because my father is a disgusting rapist."
"Well, you're both right and wrong," he said, making my brows draw together.
"What do you mean I'm wrong? You're the one who told me he was a rapist in the first place."
"True. And he is that. Worse than you realize too, unfortunately."
Ugh.
That hurt.
I didn't think there could be a worse feeling in my chest than there had been half an hour before, but I was obviously wrong. There was always more pain, new pain, deeper pain. Always.
"Then what was I wrong about?"
"Ever look at your father, doll face?"
"I looked at him every day of my life," I said, eyes squinting.
"Ever look in a mirror?"
"What are you trying to say here?" I asked, feeling my stomach tighten.
"I'm not convinced that fuck was your father."
Okay. So we didn't exactly look alike. That was definitely true. My features were more delicate, my eyes very dark, almost black. My father's features were very wide, almost burly. He was tall, wide-shouldered, broad-chested. And his eyes, well, they were hazel.
But it took two to tango, as they say.
I always figured I must have just looked like my mother.
"Didn't notice it right at first, but the longer I look at you, the less likely I think it is you two share any DNA. I mean, your skin is a completely different shade than his. He had olive undertones. You're warm."
"I had a mother at some point," I reasoned.
"Hazel eyes versus almost black. You're long and lean, but hold your weight in your hips. He held it in his chest and belly. His hair was at least five shades lighter."
"That's all circumstantial."
"He had that giant fucking cleft in his chin too. You don't have a hint of it."
"The only way that would prove anything was if my mother had a cleft too, and I don't. Again, I don't know anything about her."
"It's a lot," he said, shaking his head. "I like when things add up, and something is off with the math here."
"So I should just... bring you a laptop and let you poke around in my life some more?"
There was bitterness in my tone, the origins of which I wasn't sure of. Why be bitter? It wasn't his fault. Don't shoot the messenger and all that jazz. But that being said, I couldn't confront the source of my anger, resentment, and pain. He was gone. There would never be closure there.
Also, in one internet search, every plan of perfect vengeance just... disappeared.
I had no right to keep Luce
anymore.
He hadn't done anything to me.
He had tried to do something that I actually found commendable.
In the process, he had set me free.
Sure, it hurt. It might always. But that was the price you had to pay for the truth at times.
And, truly, I had to set him free.
I turned away without anything else, going back up the stairs, and into my bedroom where I grabbed the key, then made my way back down again.
"Where's the laptop?" he asked, brows drawing together.
I moved over toward the door, pressing the lock, and turning, hearing the click, then the groan of the un-oiled joints.
"At your home," I answered, moving slightly to the side of the doorway to allow him to walk past.
"You're just letting me out," he half-asked, half-declared, leaning against the bars of his prison, crossing his arms over his chest, watching me like I had lost my mind.
"I can't keep you here. You didn't do what I thought you did."
"And if I had?" he prompted.
"Even if you had, I would probably let you go. Now that I know the truth."
"Gotta say, I'm liking the ability to be rational about this shit."
"Gee, thanks," I mumbled.
I wasn't exactly sure it was healthy to be rational about it all. Wasn't love supposed to trump all? Shouldn't a daughter be able to forgive the sins of the man who loved and raised her?
I didn't know about should, but I knew I didn't.
Because being good to me didn't undo all the bad he did to who knew how many others. If your bad outweighed your good, then you were bad. It was simple math really. And maybe if his crimes were just more murders of deserving people, I could have looked past it.
This was different.
This was horrific.
There was no excuse for his level of evil.
And knowing he had done it to other women while protecting me from the same fate? Yeah, no. The bastard.
"Look, I think it's good to be able to compartmentalize things."
"Says the robot," I agreed, wincing at the snarky tone, not liking that I was being cruel to someone who didn't earn it.
"Imagine how much shit I had to learn to box away in password protected files on an external harddrive, so the motherboard didn't fucking explode, Evan," he said, tone almost a little... sad?
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