“He’s dying. So they might not even prosecute him. I don’t know.”
“Jesus Christ, Emilia. What are you talking about?”
Emilia focused on the lock of the glove compartment. The little silver circle. The bubble gum she hoped was still inside. “He’s been in Seattle all this time.”
“Who? Carl Smith? How’d they find him . . . ? How’d they figure it out? Emilia . . .”
“No, my dad, he wasn’t in Alaska. He was in Seattle. This whole time.” She didn’t even feel like she knew what she was saying, or how to make sense of it all. She looked at Ian. Was she dreaming?
“Is he at your house? Where is he?”
She tried to process Ian’s question. She imagined some faceless man in her house. Carl Smith. Where? In her room? In her bed? Waiting for her.
Maybe he comes by every night. Maybe he’s watching me, sleeping out there, in the yard? In the shed? In the cold?
Her dad’s face flashed into her mind then. No, Dad was the one out in the cold. He was the one hunting for food in the snow, hacking squirrels with the machete he used to keep in the shed. In Alaska. Seattle?
“Emilia?”
She looked at Ian. Everything was jumbled up in her head. She felt tears prickling her eyes as she tried to make sense of all her mixed-up thoughts, but she didn’t want to cry.
Ian grabbed her hand and pulled it toward his chest, but all she wanted was to get out of the car that was now too, too hot. She felt trapped.
“I’m taking you back home.” He looked like he was the one who had to deal with it, like he was the one who had to figure it out.
“No!” she yelled, louder than she’d meant to. “I mean, I can deal with it.” She pulled her hand away, but he held it tighter.
“No, we’ll deal with it together.”
“Pull over,” she said as they came closer to Carro’s deli.
“What? No . . .”
“I said pull over.”
“Emilia . . .”
“I mean it, Ian. Pull over. If you want to help, just listen to me.” She felt like she was hyperventilating.
Ian pulled over, right in front of the deli.
She had to get out of the car. Emilia opened the door. He held on tighter to her hand. “Let go,” she said.
“But . . . where are you going?”
“Please let go.”
He let go of her hand, but got out of the car as she did. He came around to her side.
“Please, just leave me alone.”
He shook his head but stood there, like he was afraid to move.
Was this the effect she had on people? Her presence scared them. They didn’t know what to do about her.
Just like before. Just like that.
“I’m okay. I just . . . I need some space,” she said. “I need time to think. I just need to be alone.” The cold was making her nose run, and two guys sat drinking coffee on the ledge of the deli’s big storefront window, watching them. She couldn’t stand it. She wanted to tell them to go away, too. That it was none of their business. She wanted everyone to go away. To not notice her. To leave her alone.
“I’m not gonna leave you alone right now, Emilia,” Ian said.
“I mean it. I . . . I really want to be alone. I don’t need you to feel sorry for me. Or try to fix everything. You can’t fix this—don’t you get that? I mean, what are you going to do?”
She looked at him and she felt more than a little out of control.
Don’t make a scene! she thought. But she was making a scene. She couldn’t control the words coming out of her mouth.
He looked at her and she kept going. “I mean, what can you do? What can you do about all this?” she asked.
“I’ll . . .” But he stuttered, looked around like the answers might appear somewhere, on the sides of the cars passing by, in the sky.
“Go. Just go,” she said finally.
Ian stood still.
“Please.” She shoved her freezing hands in her coat pockets. “I mean it. Please do that for me.”
He shook his head.
“Go away!” she yelled. “Go! Leave me alone!”
Slowly, Ian took a few steps back toward the car, turned to look at her, tried one more time. But she turned away from him.
He started up the car, slowly pulled away. Emilia watched him go and closed her eyes, trying to keep back fresh tears.
Why are you crying? You sent him off. You don’t want him here. You don’t want his help.
And yet, when she could no longer see his car, when he was gone, she regretted it.
“Sorry, sweetheart.” A voice invaded her thoughts. One of the men on the ledge. He looked at her over the brim of his steaming cup with a bored but sympathetic look as he took a gulp of his coffee.
“Love sucks,” the other guy said, smoking a cigarette. He smiled at her. His eyes were small and gleamed the way they do when someone is amused. “Trust me, baby,” he said, inhaling deeply. “Not worth it.” He exhaled and stared at her through the thin veil of smoke, cocked his head to the side. His eyes took her in slowly, from head to toe. “Or maybe you just need someone who’s not such a little boy, huh?”
“Leave the girl alone,” the other man said.
But the man with the cigarette continued. “Maybe you need someone, I don’t know, more like me, huh? I’m nice.” He sat there, somehow taking up so much space, as if he were the only person who mattered.
Emilia looked at the first guy, but he shrugged and smiled and continued drinking his coffee.
“What do you say?” said the gross other guy.
The cold started on the back of her neck, and traveled up Emilia’s scalp. She hated this guy. Both of them. She wanted to take the steaming coffee out of their hands and pour it into their laps. She wanted to pluck their hair out, strand by strand. She wanted to punch this one in his small eyes and filthy mouth.
She wanted him to choke on his own blood.
“Fuck you,” she said. She looked into those eyes, watched them flash with delight.
“Oh, nice . . . ,” he said, laughing.
Emilia started walking away, but she could still feel his gaze on her, following her, staring at her from behind, so she started running. Fast. As fast as she could.
Before he could reach for her.
Before he could drag her back.
Before he could hold her down.
She wouldn’t let him.
“Hey, don’t be like that, honey!” the guy called after her, laughing, laughing!
She ran faster. She’d run so fast she’d fly. She wouldn’t let him catch and overpower her.
Because that’s the worst, the very worst fucking feeling in the world. To kick! And scream! To push and fight, against someone so much bigger. Stronger.
God, so much stronger than you, so small. So weak.
Get away! Fucking get away from here, Emilia.
Emilia ran faster, faster, run faster! Tears blurring the world.
She ran down block after block, the cars a blur, the streets rushing by. She ran across the street without looking, with the sound of cars screeching, someone yelling, another cursing.
Don’t look back! Keep going! Leave it all behind. It’s all in the past.
Her lungs were cold. They were frozen. They didn’t work. They wouldn’t contract and expand. Her breath just howled in those frozen caverns in her chest. She could hear the howling coming from inside her. She was splitting, breaking from the cold.
Still she kept running. Until she saw it.
The old elementary school was just up ahead.
Faster now.
Then in through the window of the chorus room, down the hall of the basement level, up the stairs, down another hall, until there, there was the classroom.
She ran inside, c
losed the door, locked it.
She slid down against the door, and that howling from so long ago erupted from deep inside her and filled the classroom. It swirled with the cold and wind she’d brought in from outside, the cold that followed her everywhere. She felt the force of it rush under her arms, lifting her high, higher, higher. Until she was floating.
Until she was flying.
Emilia Flew
Emilia flew into a white sky, her flock around her, flapping their wings with hers against the cold.
We heard you, they said. We are here, Emilia.
It’d been so long since she’d reached these heights or heard their fluttering wings so close to her. She felt light and fast and powerful. She felt free.
They dipped in unison, and then up again. They swirled to the left and in a wide fluid arc, then right, riding the gusts of wind. Emilia flapped her wings faster.
Higher! she said to them. And they listened.
Faster! she said.
They flew in and through gauzy clouds, traveling great distances.
Just like we used to, away from everything down there. Gone, gone, gone.
Emilia looked at the blurring landscape beneath her. The white of snow on the treetops and woods of an Alaska she’d pictured in her mind for so long. She saw a smokeless chimney in the distance, and then the cabin she’d always pictured her father in came into view.
The flock slowed, swooped down, and landed in nearby trees, on the roof. Emilia landed at the doorway; the door was open and she peeked her head inside.
It was empty.
No pots or pans, no small black stove, no bed. No books. No table to lay dead animals on, no tools to open and stuff them. Nothing.
Where did you go?
She flew to the nearest tree and perched on a branch, waiting.
Where did we all go?
Emilia waited in that cold as her birds landed and took off around her, flitting. Let’s go, they said. There is nothing here. And she knew they were right.
They flew back, back to the city, where, on a busy street, she spotted her mother’s auburn hair and saw her rushing to her next appointment. The look on her face was the same as she always wore, one of worry.
And then back to their neighborhood, past the pharmacy, where Tomás stood staring out the front window.
Do you see me, Tomás? Do you know I’m here?
His gaze followed Emilia as she flew toward the school. Back through the window in the classroom. Back, somehow, finally, to herself. To the body she’d left and the reality she’d learned to escape so long ago.
When Emilia opened her eyes, she was weary and stunned to find herself in the classroom. She looked to the window, where her black birds were gathered outside, in the trees.
It had been so long since she had taken flight with them like that. But they came for her. They’d heard her cry and there they were.
* * *
*
The sun was so strangely bright, and if it weren’t so cold in there, she could almost pretend it was summer. How long had she been in that room? How long did she fly?
Emilia looked around the classroom, then moved toward the window. She squinted at the daylight outside, which was not the same as this morning. She looked at the sky for some clue as to what time it was, but she couldn’t tell. Then she looked to the ground. The streets were mostly bare, as if everyone was already where they needed to be.
I’ll stay here until I see the high school kids walking home from school, she thought.
In the meantime, she looked at the origami paper she’d brought the other day that she’d found at the back of her closet and hadn’t used in years. Her head still felt fuzzy—from flying? Sleeping? She didn’t know. It felt so real. She’d never been able to explain to her mother or Dr. Lisa how real it felt when she flew.
Emilia reached for a piece of the origami paper and started folding, her fingers moving as if on their own.
Muscle memory? Emilia wondered.
Where had she heard that term? She watched as her fingers worked so quickly, how they seemed separate from her, how they remembered the order and precise folds she made so long ago, this way and that way until suddenly, a perfect little black crow emerged.
“I’ll call you Henry,” she told it. She called so many of them Henry, and so many of them Lulu because when she was little, she’d run out of names. She tossed it in the box, the one full of tiny little crows her small hands had made over and over and over all those years ago, and had recently brought here. The ones her mother hated but let her keep. Hundreds of little black birds. For hours Emilia would sit making them, until her hands ached. Then less and less over the years. Emilia couldn’t remember the last time she’d made one.
But her fingers remembered. And they worked quickly. One sheet after another, over and over, until the hours passed and there was no more paper and Emilia’s hands ached once more.
PART FOUR
Early January 1995
Some Days
Some days Emilia walked all the way to the high school and stayed there for half the day. Other days she walked straight to the elementary school. But each day she worked on that classroom. And when the automated call about her absence would come in the early evenings, Emilia was usually the only one home to answer it. Or she’d be the first to the phone. She wasn’t as worried about getting caught as she should be, and she didn’t understand why. Maybe because she knew she could explain to Ma that she just didn’t feel like being around anyone and Ma would understand.
But she’ll hurry the visit to the psychologist, Emilia thought. Still, it was a chance worth taking.
And maybe going to a psychologist wouldn’t be the end of the world?
No, be okay, Emilia told herself.
All she wanted was to stay in that classroom. Safe. Where she painted each of the origami crows using the glitter paint and a small brush from a watercolor paint set she’d found in a kindergarten classroom. And she sat in the little patch of sun that came in from the window, and one after another, she painted those birds, until they were shining. She tilted them this way and that, watched the way the light reflected off them. She took in their small brilliance, getting lost in it, so she could forget the cold outside and the ugliness of the world.
* * *
*
Emilia searched Ma’s closet for thread. She knew there was some in an old sewing box stuffed under the extra winter blankets. Emilia remembered when they’d gotten the string and crochet needles. She saw how Ma walked into the store and carried them around with her for a bit before casually dropping them into her purse as they walked, pretending to search for something. That was how Ma tried to pick up crocheting.
It’s supposed to help, she would say, but Emilia never understood. Especially when Ma only became frustrated and threw the string and the needles across the room.
But now here they were, the spools of string, from all those years ago. Most of them were brand-new. And underneath them, an old photo album Emilia hadn’t seen in years. She opened it, getting lost for a moment in so many aching memories of her family. There they were on that trip to Jones Beach. And here was a picture of Emilia in front of their house on her first day of kindergarten.
Emilia closed the album and shoved it, along with the string, into her backpack and carried them to the elementary school.
In the school janitor’s closet in the basement, she found a chair that could be used as a table to display more of her items. She carried it past the chorus room, past the art room, up the stairs to the ground level, singing “Ghost of John” to herself. This was where the kindergarten through second-grade classrooms were.
Little Emilia, what did you know, what did you know? she thought as she walked down the hall to the other set of stairs, which led up to the third- through fifth-grade classrooms. Emilia hurried, not just because the chair
was heavy and slipping from her grip, but because she thought she felt the ghost of herself. And she was afraid to turn around and see little Emilia. To see her, knowing the future she didn’t know yet.
Don’t follow me, she told her.
The chair banged against her shins. She’d have bruises. She bruised easily.
Maybe I’m not strong. Maybe I’ll never be, Emilia thought.
But once she got into the classroom, she started working. There, she snipped piece after piece of thread in varying lengths.
She punched tiny holes in her birds with a rusty hole punch she’d found in another classroom. Then looped the thread through those holes and tied a slightly bent paper clip to one end. She climbed the ladder and tacked the metal edge of the paper clip into the soft cork ceiling.
And she filled that room with hundreds of her glittering birds.
* * *
*
Later that week, Emilia went through the photographs, wondering what she could do with them. And she brought more items she found around her house—the salt and pepper shakers she was sure her mother wouldn’t miss. And her father’s battery-run boom box and cassette collection, old romantic songs in Spanish that she used to think were funny but made him melancholy, like poetry. They filled her with sorrow now, too. She also brought chipped teacups and cracked bowls Ma kept in the back of a cabinet because she said it made her sad to throw them out. Emilia had never understood before, but now she thought she did. She brought anything else she could find. Anything else that felt right. Emilia filled that room. And she worked.
She used the cans of paint that had been waiting. And she set out the candles. And blew up the air mattress with the bike pump they’d always had to borrow from their neighbor when they were little, but that she took without asking this time when she saw his garage door was open.
You can have anything you want, Emilia.
This.
She wanted this. A sanctuary, a beautiful place to escape the cold and all the terrible feelings swirling around inside her, filling her more and more. A place where she could be safe from Ian’s confused and pitying looks, Ma and Tomás’s worry, the rest of the world, which up to now had spared her the publicity but might still, at any moment, combust. They’d hate her, ask her why and how. Questions she’d asked herself a thousand times since finding out about Carl Smith but still couldn’t answer. Emilia took a deep breath and closed her eyes; being here helped stop the relentless thoughts of Jeremy Lance and what she’d done to him. How I ruined his life. And his mother’s life. And why do I see, keep seeing, his face in my memory?
The Fall of Innocence Page 21