A Fierce and Subtle Poison

by Samantha Mabry

  “I need you to know that after you fell, I had to move you.” There was a hitch in her voice. She released her hand from the plant, pulled her sleeves over both her fists, and folded her arms across her chest. “It would’ve been much worse if you’d just stayed where you landed. I covered up my hands the best I could, but sometimes that’s not enough.”

  My eyes were still on the columbine. Its leaves were now green and glistening, its petals revived from their once near-dead state. Isabel did that. I touched my arm, recalling the burning itch, the blurred vision, the delirium and shooting pains. Isabel did that, too.

  “It wasn’t the plants,” I said. “It was you. You made me sick.”

  Isabel exhaled. “It happens when I touch someone. Or if I’m too close to them for too long. You might be starting to feel sick now—”

  “I’m fine,” I interrupted.

  “You’ll probably get sick later then,” Isabel said. “But I swear, you falling into all those plants out there made it much worse.”

  “Plants like these?” I reached out and snapped a leaf from the columbine.

  “Lucas!” Isabel unfolded her arms and snatched the leaf from my fingers. “This isn’t a game.”

  “That plant has no effect on you whatsoever?”

  Isabel faltered, rolling the leaf between her fingers with such force that it tore and was smashed into fibers and green pulp.

  “One of the stories about this house is that there was a baby born here full of poison,” I said. “That was you.”

  Isabel wiped the crushed remainders of the leaf on her jeans. “That was me. The poison builds up. When I’m around my plants, I can transfer some of it to them. If I’m not around them, the poison just keeps building up and up and I get sick. Sicker.”

  “That’s why you stay here.”

  “That’s why I stay here,” Isabel echoed. “When I was little, I could go for days without having to be near the plants. I would go with my dad to his labs out near Rincón. You recognized my painting the other day. But now I have to be around the plants almost constantly. I tuck leaves into my sheets when I sleep. I wear them between my skin and clothes, but it doesn’t do much good. I don’t know what the problem is.” She paused. “It’s been getting worse since the start of summer.”

  I asked a question I realized was stupid the second it passed my lips: “Can’t your dad do anything?”

  “He’s trying, Lucas.” Isabel collected up her mass of wet hair and whipped it over one shoulder. “Despite your stories, he’s not evil. He’s just . . . protective. He doesn’t want to lose me like he lost my mother.”

  From the corner of the room, a grandfather clock readied itself to usher in a new hour. I was able to hear the subtle ticks and whirs of gears. I glanced up at the ceiling as the chimes began to toll and saw that individual drops were hitting the glass as opposed to sheet after sheet of water.

  I would have to leave soon. I didn’t want to.

  “What’s it called?” I asked, looking back down to Isabel. She had her eyes fixed on the hem of her jeans, where she’d started to pluck violently at a loose thread.

  “What’s what called?” she muttered.

  “Your illness?”

  Isabel smirked. “I’m quite sure it doesn’t have a name.”

  As Isabel continued pulling at the thread, I moved forward, pushing the pot containing the columbine aside, narrowing the space between us. Despite everything I’d seen and heard and experienced over the last two days, I had to sit on my hands to keep them from twitching. They had minds of their own. They didn’t want to touch the columbine anymore. They wanted to touch Isabel. The fever that toppled me last night had been transformed by memory into nothing but a minor inconvenience, nothing worse than the outcome of a typical night out drinking.

  The questions I’d had, the ones collected over the years about witches and curses, I didn’t want to ask anymore of those. New questions had formed—about Isabel. About her life, if you could call it that. About her paintings. About what it was like to hide yourself away and watch and listen. Was it lonely or was it wonderful? Could it be both?

  “What would happen if I touched you again?”

  Isabel’s head snapped up; she again folded her arms across her chest, tighter this time. “Was I unclear about that?”

  “Your dad’s been around you his whole life—and lived to tell the tale.”

  “Sometimes by the skin of his teeth. If he had to pick me up when I fell, he’d get rashes on his hands. If I got sick and he had to be near me for a long time, he’d also get sick—sometimes for days.”

  “Did you ever think that he might die?”

  “Several times.” Isabel stood abruptly and bolted past me. A drop of water fell from the tips of her hair onto my hand. “It didn’t take much time for him to figure out it’s best to stay away from me, and I figured out how to take care of myself. Speaking of that,” she continued, flinging open the front door, “you should probably leave. Now that the storm is passing, my dad might be back soon. And, like I said, it’s not good for you to be around me very long.”

  I started to protest, but Isabel had disappeared into the soggy, leaf-strewn courtyard.

  Apparently, both of the Fords were terrible at goodbyes.

  I stood and, shaking the pins from my legs, followed Isabel into the courtyard. I hopscotched fallen branches, palm fronds, and even a single brown shutter that had been torn from some unfortunate house. It was still lightly raining, but since I was still somewhat damp, it didn’t much matter.

  The post-storm sky was cantaloupe-colored. In that light, as Isabel undid the latches on the gate, I noticed again her black-rimmed nails and the nasty bruise on her hand, dark purple and yellowed around the edges.

  “What happened there?”

  Isabel saw where I was looking and shook her head dismissively. “It’s nothing. I just bruise easily. Bad blood.”

  “Can I see it?”

  Isabel dropped her hand from the gate and turned to face me. “Why?”

  “I just want to see it.”

  Isabel’s mouth twisted into a slight scowl, but she pushed back her sleeve and lifted her hand to where it hovered between us.

  “You know,” I said, “someone once taught me a way to make bruises like this fade more quickly.”

  My thumb landed lightly on the center of the bruise, and Isabel’s hand immediately tensed. I traced the edges of the bruise three times and moved closer. My lips had barely grazed Isabel’s skin before she bit back a scream and hit me across the face.

  Thirteen

  I WAS SICK for three days.

  I hadn’t even straightened up before Isabel pushed me out the gate. And after the gate had slammed shut behind me, and I’d started down Calle Sol with a smile on my face, I could still hear her calling me bad names in Spanish.

  Eventually, I passed the house of Señora Garcia. With bare feet and a broom clamped in her arthritic fingers, she was attempting to sweep up the wet leaves and palm fronds that had fallen in front of her house during the storm. She was wearing a housedress that came down to her knees, and her dark varicose veins pulsed across her bare calves as she worked. She stopped and stared, making sure that I could see her mumbling at me under her breath.

  I waved and gave her my best grin. “Buenos días, Señora.”

  She spit in the street and went back to sweeping.

  I got back to the hotel just in time for my dad to wave me over for breakfast in the restaurant. The manager apologized for the half-functioning kitchen and delay in fresh coffee. My dad ignored him and continued to read from the soggy, day-old newspaper.

  “Did you hear about these girls who went missing?” he asked. “One of them died. Sisters from San Juan, Cara and Marilyn.”

  “Marisol. Is there something about them in the paper?”

  “No.” He flipped the page and recrossed his legs. “I heard a couple of the porters talking about them on my way down this morning.”


  My dad clucked his tongue and said it was a pity that so many young girls in Old San Juan were undereducated and lacked proper guidance. He apparently could not put two and two together to figure out that Marisol was the reason I’d spent close to ten hours at the police station.

  “You should really be thankful for what you have, son.” He looked up. “Is that a new shirt?”

  As I chewed violently on a hunk of banana bread, I envisioned myself swimming out into the ocean, never stopping, never returning.

  It wasn’t until the first forkful of eggs entered my mouth that I realized my food didn’t taste right. I spit the eggs into my napkin, but the courtyard had already started spinning. I had to grip the table to keep from getting dizzy. The skin around my lips started to crawl, like it was being swarmed by tiny beetles. I slapped and scratched to get them off.

  I heard my dad call my name. He said I looked terrible and asked if I got enough sleep. I couldn’t answer. My tongue felt heavy and numb. As I pushed away from the table, I lost my balance and fell onto one knee. My coffee cup tipped off its saucer and hit the ground, where it smashed into several pieces and sent hot coffee all over my hand. The pain barely registered. The slivers of porcelain turned to worms inching across the wet bricks.

  I peeled myself off the ground and managed to stumble up to my room just in time to retch up a mixture of coffee, banana bread, and stomach fluid into the toilet. As I was resting my cheek against the cold porcelain, I realized that Isabel had entirely avoided answering my question about her mother. I smiled, thinking that gave me good reason for another visit. Then I passed out.

  I woke up in my bed with one of the housekeepers dabbing my forehead with a damp washcloth. I was burning up. The sheets were soaked. My breaths were thin and made whistling sounds. When I ran my tongue over my dried-out lips, I could feel small blisters around the edges.

  I slept and woke, slept and woke, always thirsty. I dreamed. First, of a Christmas back in Houston. I must have been six. I’d gotten a plastic baseball bat and a ball with a stand. Even though it was icy outside, I went into the backyard to play. I imagined a crowd cheering for me as I hit a grand slam and ran the bases, pumping my small fists in the air. I imagined them cheering loud enough to drown out my mother calling my dad a selfish asshole from inside the house.

  I dreamed of the dog I was never allowed to have. He was a golden retriever named Frankie. Imaginary Frankie and I went on a long walk around the neighborhood. When we got back home, I filled up his bowl in the backyard and petted his thick hair as he lapped up water.

  I dreamed of being with Marisol, kissing her full lips and putting my hands under the thin fabric of her dress in a quiet, empty room. She told me again that she’d waited all year for me to come back to the island. Then she told me she had a secret. In between kisses on my neck and my throat, she told me she was full of poison, and now that she’d kissed me all over, I was full of poison, too. I didn’t care. If anything, what she told me made me only want to kiss her more.

  I dreamed of my mother; she was standing near a window, with her back to me. She was telling me the story of la ciguapa, the monster who lives in the trees on the edge of the beach. La ciguapa has dark eyes, and her black hair is so long it touches the tops of her feet like the hem of a dress. Her feet are backward so her toes face behind her. She is full of misery and hate. At night, she paces and sings—if you could even call that noise she makes singing. It sounds more like children wailing in an empty church. In the morning, you can trace the path she was walking because of her backward footprints and because rocks and the leaves will be sprinkled with her tears.

  La ciguapa is not dead, my mother said in the dream, but she’s not alive, either. She roams the trees around the beach looking for the man she once loved a long time ago—some say he was a sailor who went out one morning with his ship and never returned—but as much as she searches, she will never find him.

  So she finds substitutes.

  I’d heard this story before—not in a dream but for real. My mom had said there was an old man in her village who everyone believed had met the monster. It happened one morning when he went out fishing. La ciguapa was just there, standing at the edge of the tree line, gesturing for him to follow her. He did; he followed her deep into the forest hoping to get a single kiss. She kissed him, yes, but when she pulled away, he realized she’d taken a piece of his spirit. Now when he spoke, he’d trail off in the middle of sentences and leave certain letters out from all his words.

  In the dream, I asked my mother if she believed in her, if she thought la ciguapa was real.

  My mother smiled. Her answer was perfect: “What’s there not to believe?”

  Last, I dreamed of the young nun. She sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed my hot feet with her cold hands. She’d been in love with the blacksmith’s son, not the butcher’s son, she told me. She didn’t know why everyone kept getting that wrong. Most of the rest of the story was true, though, she’d said with a sigh. My room was once her room. She’d remembered lying right where I was lying, and gazing up at the ceiling, tears running down her cheeks, as the blood drained out of her.

  She looked at me. She had no eyes, just fuzzy circles that were as dark as her habit. She told me that some loves are not meant for this world. She asked if I understood; I nodded. I told her they were tearing the hotel down and that I was sorry. I told her I wanted to help her, but she just turned her head and was quiet as she continued to press her dead thumbs into the arches of my feet. Before she left, she walked around the room, looking for her letters one last time. When I told her I’d never seen any as long as I’d been staying here, she seemed disappointed.

  Eventually a doctor came, and I was lucid enough to hear her tell my dad I’d contracted some kind of fever. She said it looked like it was breaking, but that it might be causing hallucinations.

  No shit, I wanted to say. I’ve been talking to ghosts.

  I slept again for what seemed like days. I dreamed about my mother again, about running through burning buildings, about Marisol, about a little girl who turned into a wolf, about imaginary Frankie, about swimming into the ocean, but never about Isabel.

  When I finally woke up, Rico was sitting on the edge of my bed, watching my television. At first I thought I was imagining him, too. I was tired of opening my eyes and feeling like the world had completely changed since the last time I’d shut them. As a test, I closed my eyes slowly and then opened them again, just as slowly. He was still there.

  “What are you doing?” I mumbled.

  Rico spun around. “Hey! Look who’s up! It’s La Bella Durmiente!”

  “Way to be sick, dipshit.” I turned to see Carlos lying beside me, shoeless but still dressed in his porter’s uniform. He had something like five pillows under his head. I checked: I had none.

  “Make yourself at home,” I said.

  He grinned. “Don’t worry, Lucas. I have been.”

  “So, what?” Rico asked. “You feel better?”

  Surprisingly, I did. I didn’t feel like I was burning holes through my sheets while surrounded by figures from my dreams. I put my hand over my heart and confirmed that it was, in fact, still functioning. I licked my lips. The sores were gone—if they’d even been there in the first place.

  “One of the ladies who works here said your fever finally broke,” Rico said. “So what happened to you, man? Eat something bad? Get bit by a rat?”

  “Something like that,” I muttered.

  I dragged myself out from under the covers and into a pair of jeans that I’d tossed on the floor several days ago. They smelled like piss and old sweat. I’m sure I smelled just as bad.

  My legs felt wobbly from lack of use as I made my way to the bathroom, leaving my friends to continue their full-room takeover. After splashing water on my face, I leaned against the sink and looked in the mirror. The skin under my eyes was deep purple; my cheeks and chin were covered with dirty blond stubble, and my hair was so greasy it pr
actically stood on end. What was sad was that I’d seen myself look worse.

  “Hey, Lucas!” Carlos shouted from the other room. “The reason we stopped by was to see if you were up to going to the Festival de San Juan tonight.”

  Every June, the locals all gather in the Plaza de Armas to celebrate San Juan Bautista, the patron saint of the island. Street vendors hock fried codfish, beer, and cheap necklaces made from shells, and little kids run around holding sparklers too close to their faces. Couples old and young dance to live bands consisting of men sharply dressed in their best guayaberas, fedoras, and boat shoes and who can play their instruments all night long. Women come in from the outlying districts in droves in their finest flower-print sundresses and don’t leave until the sun comes up or until they find a man, whichever comes first. Kids my age find dark corners where they can drink and feel each other up. Inevitably, either Rico or I—or sometimes the both of us—end up drunk and in the fountain.

  “Yeah, sure.” I shoved a toothbrush in my mouth. “Hey, so where was Celia?” I asked, stepping from the bathroom. I assumed that she’d found her way home, since she wasn’t the first thing either of them brought up.

  Rico spoke without turning his head away from the television. “She’s still missing, Luke.”

  I halted mid-brush.

  “The police are still looking, man,” Carlos added. He interlaced his fingers behind his head and snuggled deeper into his mountain of pillows.

  I turned to spit in the sink and then dragged the back of my hand across my mouth.

  “And you’re just okay with that?” I asked, stepping out of the bathroom.

  “I know it freaks you out since you and Mari were kind of . . . you know, close,” Rico added, his eyes still glued on my television, “but we’ve done all we can do at this point.”

  “Our friend’s cousin vanished into thin air,” I said, “and neither of you give a shit.”