A Fierce and Subtle Poison

by Samantha Mabry

  “According to my dad, the world spun very quickly in the following years,” Isabel said. “The island got bigger and smaller at the same time. People starting moving out of their villages to the bigger cities, like Ponce and San Juan, and my mom stopped going to the beach where the god had woven the basket for her. The cacique died, and no one replaced her. In addition to Borinquen, my mom learned to speak both Spanish and English. She dreamed of moving away.

  “She and my dad met when she was still a teenager. She’d taken a trip to Ponce with a boy she’d pretended to like, but really she was just using him for his car. They’d gone to a bar, and that’s where she’d seen my dad, with his lighter brown hair and a suit she thought was too old-fashioned. When my dad told my mom he was a scientist, that he’d come to the island to study its tropical plants, she told him about how, when she was a little girl, she would weave bowls out of palm fronds.”

  “My dad always claimed he loved my mom madly, but she told him she thought that he loved her like an imperialist would, that he found her ‘exotic’ or ‘curious.’ After all, she was just a jíbara from a tiny beach village, who’d grown up with next to nothing and whose parents worked in sugar fields and died too young. He swore up and down that wasn’t the case. The word he’d used to describe her all those warm nights they’d kissed under the swaying trees was ‘magical.’ My dad would say to me, ‘Isa, you are magical just like your mother.’ ”

  There was a hitch in Isabel’s voice, either from being overwhelmed by emotion or from trouble with her breathing. She paused before gathering her waves of hair into a thick coil and tossing it over one shoulder.

  “My dad still won’t believe in the curse. I know he loved my mom very much, but he never understood. He’s a scientist. He’ll always try to find the most logical solution. That’s why we’re here right now.”

  “We’re here right now,” I said, “because of how petty and jealous you are.”

  The needle on Isabel’s machine to screeched to a halt.

  “We’re here right now,” Isabel repeated, “because of how petty and jealous I am. You’re right. And I haven’t forgotten about that for a single second. I’ve avoided telling you about my mother because I haven’t wanted to shift blame onto her, or her curse, or her brother, or my father, or whoever or whatever.”

  Isabel was scowling, her bony shoulders hitched up by her ears. Her rickety frame looked like it held a world of damage and pain, like it had been patched up and reglued countless times.

  “You never found out what happened to your mom?”

  “What’s to find out, Lucas?” Isabel asked, exasperated. “She’s gone, desaparecida. When I was a kid, my dad used to take me with him as he searched the island for my mother. He made it all the way to the village near Ponce where she was born. He told me later that all he found there was an empty village, a deaf old man, and his three-legged dog. There weren’t even any houses left.” She glared at me. “What about your mom? She’s desaparecida, too, right?”

  Stung, I turned onto my back and closed my eyes. “Yeah, she’s . . . gone.”

  A couple of seconds ticked away. “That’s it?”

  Of course that wasn’t it, but what little of my mother I had, I liked to keep to myself. The thing was, Isabel and I were the same this way. The two of us clung to the scraps of stories that when cobbled together made a strange and incomplete picture of a parent.

  “She grew up in the Dominican Republic,” I began. “She was adopted by a couple of white doctors who worked with poor people out in the countryside. When she was my age, she went away to boarding school and then college in Texas. She met my dad there. They got married, had me. She moved to New York when I was ten. We lost touch. End of story.”

  “I would have never have guessed you were Dominican,” Isabel said. Her machine clicked and whirred back to life. “You look just like your dad.”

  “If you saw pictures, you’d think I looked just like my mom. She had blonde hair and blue eyes. She never knew who her real parents were, and my grandma never talked about it.”

  “Does she have a new family?”

  “As far as I know she’s alone.”

  “So, that’s where you get your solitary nature from.”

  I barked out a laugh. “When I was a kid, I dreamed of living here in this building. I thought there was no way I’d ever get tired of finding new places to explore and to hide in.”

  “It’s a good place,” Isabel said. “If I wasn’t the way I am I could live here. I’d mostly keep to myself, except for once a year when I’d have a party. I’d invite the entire island. There’d be music and dancing. I’d wear a dress, a long, sparkling green dress with no sleeves. That way the people, when they passed me, might skim up against my bare skin. And on that one night I would turn on all the lights in the building, and it would be so bright that sailors miles away could see it.”

  Isabel stopped talking, so I opened my eyes and turned to see why. She’d hit a snag and was hunched over the machine, her nose scrunched up and the tip of her tongue pushing past her teeth as she concentrated on untangling a mess of thread and plant fibers.

  It was all so real. Isabel wasn’t a myth. A myth is simple. Isabel was a muddled mess. Like Marisol, she had big, impossible dreams. Like me, she was teetering on a line between bending to the will of her father and piloting her own future. She was just a girl trying to make a blanket out of leaves. In that moment, it seemed perfectly within the bounds of normalcy.

  “I guess for someone who’s spent most of her life creeping around in the shadows it makes sense you’d want to be the center of the attention every now and then,” I offered.

  “Oh no, Lucas.” Isabel shook her head and glanced up. “You don’t understand. The party wouldn’t be for me. It would be for the island.”

  Isabel eventually got her snag straightened out, and the regular humming of the sewing machine eventually lulled me to sleep. That’s when I dreamed of the real Isabel for the first time—no green skin, no grass for hair. She was at her party at La Andalusia. The ballroom looked like I’d always thought it should’ve: lit up brilliantly by its massive chandelier, filled with men wearing stiff black suits and beautiful women wearing long slinky dresses that clung to their legs when they walked and spun around. The partygoers all stood and laughed and danced on carpet that was as red as blood from a freshly pricked finger. As they raised their glasses to their lips, the crystal winked.

  Small leaves, brittle and brown, dotted the carpet. They swirled around the ankles of dancing couples and were crushed under sharp heels and slick soles of leather shoes.

  Isabel was in the center of the room, laughing and surrounded by her guests. She wore a dark green strapless dress that fell down to her feet, and her hair was pulled up in a bun that sat just above the nape of her neck. Two chunky wooden bracelets hung around her right wrist. Her skin glowed in the near-blinding light.

  I looked to the mirror behind the bar and saw that I was dressed like the other men, in a black suit and bow tie against a white dress shirt. My hair was slicked back and so appeared darker than normal. Silver cufflinks glinted at my wrists. The glasses hanging above the bar and the liquor bottles on the shelf were starting to rattle from chamber music that was getting louder and louder. No one seemed to hear the music except for me.

  Above my head, the chandelier pulsed and shook, its individual crystals crashing against each other.

  I panicked and pushed through the crowd, calling out Isabel’s name. Either she couldn’t hear me or was choosing not to respond. She was laughing; everyone was laughing. She raised her champagne flute into the air; everyone raised their champagne flutes into the air. When she made her way up to each of her guests and rested her hand gently on their shoulder or caressed their cheek with her fingertips, they gave her that look of reverence and gratitude usually reserved for someone holy. They were there just for her.

  However.

  Mere seconds after Isabel touched a woman’
s shoulder or caressed a man’s face, that person would stop laughing, and their smile would fade. They would stumble off and put their glass down on the edge of a table. They checked their balance against a chair or another person before falling to the ground. Even though the partygoers were collapsing on top of one another in piles, more women in long slinky dresses and men in black suits took their place, lined up for Isabel.

  I shoved my way through the crowd, but it kept expanding. Some faces belonged to strangers, but others I recognized. There was Señora Garcia, the old lady who lived on Calle Sol. She was standing on the far side of the room next to a one-eyed man who worked at one of the food stalls at the market and who was always fingering the crucifix that hung against his breastbone. Near them was my dad, in a light blue suit and Panama hat. The older Reyes women were in a corner, a chorus of mourning in black veils. A single candle in a votive made of red glass was resting in the center of each of their open palms. They were calling out to me, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the music and sounds of clinking glass.

  A girl called out my name. I knew it was Marisol before I even turned. She was with Celia; they were holding hands. They were soaking wet. Their hair was long, too long. It came down to their ankles. They started walking toward me, and it was then I saw their feet—heels forward, toes pointing back. They opened their mouths as if to sing but nothing came out.

  I took a step toward them, but then, in an instant, everyone vanished. It was just me and Isabel and the long and layered notes of stringed instruments. As I walked up to her, she latched onto my wrist, pulled me toward her, and pressed her lips against mine.

  I kissed her. I didn’t want to, but I had to. She was hurting me, but I wanted her to hurt me more. Her mouth tasted like ash. I closed my eyes. I wrapped my fingers around her shoulders and could feel her bones breaking under the skin and thin muscle. My fingers reached down to hers, causing them to snap. She wanted me to hold her close, but all my hands and lips found was a body that was disintegrating like dried paper.

  I opened my eyes, and the music finally stopped. Isabel was gone, leaving me grasping at stale air. The chandelier above my head was still and blooming with light. I was alone in the beautiful ruin of La Andalusia, like I’d always loved to be, with tiny brown leaves swirling around my feet.

  Eighteen

  I WOKE WITH a start and a bar of sun across my face. I sat up and looked around the room, running my fingernails across my scalp and trying to smack the taste of sleep out of my mouth. When I squinted at my watch I saw it was 11:35, a little over three hours since we’d first left Isabel’s house. I remembered the Celia from my dream—monstrous, soaked, and silently screaming—and jumped to my feet. I called out Isabel’s name and was met with echoes.

  Isabel’s sewing machine was packed back up in its suitcase. The table she’d been working at was empty, and the chair she’d been sitting on was neatly pushed in. Isabel was nowhere in sight.

  I stepped across the faded red carpet and crawled through the open window, emerging into the balmy, mosquito-plagued morning and onto a deserted beach. Isabel was down by the water’s edge. Her back was turned toward me. She’d taken off her jeans and was wearing just her white cotton tank top and what looked like black underwear. She’d gathered her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck, just like in my dream. Without her clothes on and without her hair flowing around her shoulders, she looked shockingly small.

  If things were different, if she had just been a girl I knew, if there had been no Marisol, this might have happened: I might’ve walked up behind her and threaded my arms around her waist. She might’ve lifted her head up, tilted it back. We’d have kissed. Her lips would’ve been warm.

  I shook off the image before it was fully formed. It wasn’t fair to Isabel to imagine her as any different than biology and a curse had created her.

  I called out her name, and she turned. Wisps of loose hair blew around her face while the small frothy waves broke around her ankles. With the rays of the sun coming up over her shoulder, she smiled in that wry way a person smiles when they’re hiding a secret. I kicked off my Converse, rolled up the cuffs of my jeans, and ran out toward her.

  “It’s been forever since I’ve been on a beach,” she said, licking her dry lips.

  We stood for a moment, side by side, as if considering the wonder of the sun.

  “This is near where you found Marisol.”

  I pointed off to my left. “Just down there.”

  The police tape from that night was long gone. Waves innocently lapped against the shore. The beach had tucked the memory of Marisol away in its depths and forgotten her.

  A small surge rose up around our ankles, and Isabel kicked lightly at the surf with her left foot.

  “We should go.”

  “You can stay a little while longer,” I offered. “I’ve got to find a phone and call Rico.”

  Isabel turned. Her black eyes lingered on my face so long I had to look away. Down the beach a golden-haired dog, most likely a stray, barked as it tried to snatch up water in its jaws.

  “I know you hate me,” she said. “I can figure out a way to do this without you.”

  “No you can’t,” I replied. “Just promise me this plan of yours will actually work. I’m having a hard time believing your dad would’ve come back to San Juan and left Celia out there somewhere by herself.”

  Isabel looked back to the ocean. “It’s what he’s done with me practically all of my life. Since I was younger than Celia.”

  “Why would he come back, though?”

  In front of us, a seagull soared in a circle over the water before halting, tucking its wings, and diving for a fish.

  “I’m not sure,” Isabel replied. “You saw him. He left in a hurry. He may have forgotten something.”

  Maybe. But I had the suspicion there had to be something else—something about why he came back when he did, why I found him drinking scotch in the library of the St. Lucia, why he gave me that book and talked openly about being my mentor, why he was roaming around the festival.

  I searched Isabel’s face for telltale signs of lying—a jaw held tight, the unnecessary tucking of hair behind her ear—but she was simply looking out into the sea as if searching it for ships.

  “We should go,” she repeated, more urgently this time.

  I turned and started trudging through the sand toward the hotel. Once I reached my shoes, I glanced back to the water. The sun continued to beat down against the beach, but there wasn’t a small-framed, dark-haired girl basking in it anymore. Then a head broke the surface of the water far from the shore. As soon as it appeared it disappeared again, and a moment later Isabel’s feet kicked up from the waves, as if she were diving straight down in an attempt touch the bottom of the ocean.

  The nearest phone was at the front desk of one of the neighboring high-rise hotels. Rico was pissed that I’d woken him up, but when I told him it was an emergency and I needed him to get to La Andalusia, he said to give him ten minutes. I’d left out as many details as I could, which was easy because Rico rarely asked for specifics about anything.

  As I was making my way back through the lobby, I noticed a small crowd gathered near the bar, watching a special news report on one of the screens. There was a grainy picture of Celia. Under that was the number for a tip line.

  “Poor girl,” I heard someone murmur. “I hope they catch the creep who did this.”

  “Again, to revisit our top story,” said the newscaster. “Police are searching for a possible suspect in the case of the disappearance of Celia Reyes. Sources confirm that suspect’s name as Michael Lucas Knight, aged seventeen.”

  My yearbook picture appeared on the screen. It was followed by a live shot of Detective Lopez. Several microphones surrounded her crimson lips.

  “A mentor of Mr. Knight,” she said, “a man who lives on Calle Sol in the old city who wishes to remain nameless at this time, claims that Lucas confessed his crimes to him. After t
hat confession, and when the older man threatened to call the police, Mr. Knight attacked him and left him for dead.”

  I squinted, and cocked my head like a man who’s just been hanged. There I was, onscreen. There were words coming out of Mara Lopez’s mouth. None of it made sense.

  A voice from off screen demanded, “Are we to assume that the Reyes cases are now linked?”

  Detective Lopez turned to share a glance with the tall, thin man next to her. I remembered him but not his name. He’d also interviewed me the night I found Marisol.

  “All we’re willing to say is that Mr. Knight is a ‘person of interest,’ and that while we’re asking for the public’s help in finding him, we also ask that they be careful. His mentor claims Mr. Knight stole a firearm from his house. It’s also important to note that the young man does have a history with the San Juan Police Department.”

  Sensing eyes on me, I looked down to my left. There, a little girl with blonde hair in two perfect pigtails was holding a beach towel and staring up at me. With her free hand, she slowly reached up to tug on her dad’s shirt.

  I ran.

  Nineteen

  I BOLTED INTO La Andalusia, where Isabel was sitting on the floor near her suitcase. Her wet hair was twisted up in a knot, and the hood of her sweatshirt was again thrown over her head.

  “Your dad,” I gasped. “They’re showing my picture on the news.”

  Isabel sprang to her feet and rushed to look out the window. “Did anyone see you?”

  “No. Yes.” I shook my head and doubled over, bracing my hands on my knees. “I don’t know. A little girl, maybe.”

  I heard the distinctive whine and sputter of Rico’s scooter approaching.

  “He’s been setting me up this whole time!” There was that feeling again, in my throat and in my lungs, as if they were being forced to suck in bad air. “He took Marisol and Celia, knowing I was connected to them. He told my dad he was my mentor and all about my newfound interest in poisonous plants. Then he went and told Mara Lopez—who hates me—that I confessed to him and then left him for dead.”