A Fierce and Subtle Poison

by Samantha Mabry

  I let off the gas and sat back hard in my seat, crying out in pain from my shoulder. I balled my bad hand into a fist and slammed it down on the steering wheel in sharp, successive whacks. When the pain got unbearable, I collapsed forward, pressed my forehead against the steering wheel, and tried to take deep breaths. They were more like gasps: uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

  “We’ll have to walk,” I gasped. “To Isabela.”

  “We can’t leave,” Celia replied. “The doctor’s daughter will get lost.”

  “That’s what she wants, Celia! She wants us to leave her here.”

  Celia grew quiet. My eyes flickered up to the rearview mirror. She was at the brink of tears, and I feared beyond anything else the words that were about to come out of her mouth.

  Her small lips trembled. “But I dreamed about her.”

  As if my heart couldn’t break any more. “Everyone dreams about her, Celia.”

  “She told me that she grants wishes. I wished to go home. I think she’s an angel.”

  “She’s not an angel.” The windshield wipers swished back and forth in a futile gesture. “She’s just a girl.”

  “Why did we dream about her then?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, exasperated. “But I’m not going to just leave you here while I go try to find her.”

  Celia sat on the edge of her seat, and leaned in to whisper in my ear. “She must be a ciguapa.”

  I spun around in my seat. “What?”

  “My grandmother told me they were drawn to the water, and that their eyes were sad, and that they were the prettiest girls you’d ever see.” She paused. “The doctor’s daughter is like that.”

  The magical ciguapas could also be ugly, my mother had said. They left tracks that faced backward and lured foolish, hopeful men into thinking they would receive a kiss. Then they would suck the breath out of those foolish men’s bodies. They could bewitch you with a glance. They were monsters, vengeful and sad.

  “She’s just a girl,” I lied.

  Celia pointed in the direction of the front window. “I bet she went to the beach. I can show you how to get there. The doctor took me there to hunt for shells.”

  I turned to look at the fingers of my right hand. They were swollen, no doubt broken, and pulsing with pain. I lifted my head and peered up again into the rearview mirror.

  “You’re sure you can show me the way?”

  The little girl nodded.

  “Let’s go.”

  Twenty-six

  I HELD CELIA tight against my chest and ran through the trees. My feet plunged deep into pockets of mud and wet sand. My ankles buckled. The rain beat against my face. My soaked clothes, Celia, and the drenched cotton blanket I’d wrapped her in were like iron weights across my chest.

  A large, high branch from one of the trees gave in to the relentless wind and rain and crashed to the ground not ten feet in front of us. Water splashed across my eyes and lips. Celia shrieked, buried her head into the crook of my neck, and gripped at my clothes. I peered up to where the branch had fallen, half expecting to see bodies of Taínos swaying from the trees. There were none. I listened for the voices of their spirits to tell me that I was lost and to keep back and out of their business. Those voices never came. I wouldn’t have listened to them anyway.

  We pressed on. Wind ripped through the trees with such force that my molars rattled and the earth shook. It threw me sideways to the ground and Celia out of my arms. I landed on my burned shoulder and screamed, sure that the island was going to crack in half and that I would fall right in.

  If that were the case, I, too, like the spirits in the trees, would never leave. I’d merge with the forest. I’d be the rustle in the leaves. I’d be the rain.

  Celia climbed back into my arms, wiped my wet hair away from my eyes and some of the grit from my lips. I trembled at her touch and closed my eyes. She pried my eyelids apart, forcing me to look at her mud-speckled face. She was afraid of the water. I’d forgotten that she couldn’t swim.

  “We can go back!” I shouted.

  That wasn’t what Celia wanted. She pointed to the left. There, in a break of the trees, was the furious ocean and a dark, menacing sky that appeared to be continually folding in on itself.

  I hauled myself to my feet and regained a good grip on Celia. Stumbling a few more yards through the fallen branches and palm fronds, we finally broke through the trees. The line where sea and sky met was nonexistent. Even from where I was standing, a good forty feet from what should have been the water’s edge, the surf crashed around my ankles and calves, at times rising nearly to my knees. The ground beneath me shifted and slipped.

  Through the rain that cut down from the sky, I saw the white crests of waves beating their way toward me. I scanned the water for the pale limbs or puffed-up clothing of a little girl named Lina, floating all alone because I’d thrown notes and jumped over a wall. But there was no color, nothing out of the ordinary in this out-of-the-ordinary scene, just the hungry waves that gathered everything they could take back with them into the ocean.

  I knew Lina was gone, lost to those greedy waters.

  Celia pointed again, this time to a spot several yards down the beach. Isabel and her dad were standing apart, facing one another, in water that nearly reached their waists. Isabel was holding her father’s sleeve. Her mouth was up near his ear, her lips relaying a message. Her wet hair flew around both their heads.

  I cried out to Celia to hang on as I began to stomp farther out into the water.

  I watched as Dr. Ford lifted his free hand and placed it on the back of his daughter’s head in the effort to try to control the fluttering strands of her hair. Isabel dodged away from his touch. As she stumbled back, her head turned. It was obvious from her expression—collapsed, gray like the roaring storm clouds—that my coming after her had broken her heart. But she had to have known that’s what I’d do. She’d watched me. She’d known that ever since I was a kid, I’d been drawn to her house—to her. I wanted in, desperately. I wanted to make things right, bring light to her shadowed rooms, and pry her loose from the grip of an old curse.

  And yet if I tried to save Isabel Ford—pulled her off this beach against her will and then went running through the forest gathering plants for her until I was ranting and covered in blisters—I would merely be one more person who controlled the curve of her life.

  Isabel didn’t need a hero. She was saving herself, lifting her own curse, atoning for the Saras and the Marisols and the Linas, and all the other nameless disappeared girls.

  Still, I took a step forward, toward Isabel, always toward Isabel, but my foot never found the ocean floor. I was under water; Celia was under water, panicked and thrashing.

  The tides kicked and spun both of us, but I managed to fight back and break the surface. Gasping, I pulled Celia up by the armpits. Her head flew back and slammed against my chin. The impact stunned me, and Celia again slipped from my arms and fell back under the churning water. I plunged my hands into the chop and found fabric. I pulled and pulled, frenzied and desperate, but it was just the blanket. I’d lost Celia to the water. After all this, I’d let her fall right out of my hands.

  Just then: a head broke the surface. Celia’s. It was followed by another. Isabel’s. Isabel was holding up Celia while her chin rested on top of the little girl’s head. Her forever-melancholy eyes closed slowly, opened slowly, with great effort. She wheezed, sucking strands of her hair, both black and chalk white, into her open mouth.

  A sob broke from my chest—not just because Isabel was dying, but also because, out here in the great, wide ocean, she was so small. There needed to be more of her. She had the soul of a giant, and no one would ever know.

  “Go!” Isabel tossed Celia to me and then turned. She took a gasping breath before half wading, half swimming back to her father.

  This time, I did as Isabel commanded. I paddled back far enough to find semisolid footing and was able to lurch back toward the tree line w
ith Celia in my trembling arms.

  “I’m sorry,” I sputtered. “Celia, I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

  Celia wasn’t listening. Her eyes were focused on the girl who had saved her.

  I turned. Dr. Ford and Isabel were again facing one another. Isabel could hardly stand, her weight shifting on failing legs. Dr. Ford reached for her again, this time for her hand. Again, she dodged away, but instead of merely stumbling, she fell, sideways into the sea. Dr. Ford was quick. He caught his daughter’s wrist with both his hands and strained to pull her limp body from the hungry water. His mouth gaped open as he brought her against his chest and held her there. He buried his face into her hair. His shoulders began to shake. His fingers clung desperately to Isabel’s unmoving arms.

  “See?” Celia released one of her hands from my shoulders. Again, she brushed the wet hair out of my eyes. “The doctor loves her very much.”

  “He loves her very much,” I echoed.

  I watched the doctor’s strength dissolve. It happened first in his legs. Then his head lolled. But even as they both dropped like stones into the swirling water, the doctor’s arms remained around his daughter.

  I waited, desperately scanning the surface. Isabel was in there, somewhere. The water was tossing her around as if she were nothing. It was carrying her and her father out into its cold heart.

  I thought of how, just a few hours ago, the sun had shone on Isabel’s face. She’d smiled her sad smile and told me it had been years since she’d been on a beach. She’d gazed out into the ocean like it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, like it was waiting for her.

  I waited, but the ocean never gave Isabel back. Eventually, I picked up Celia and started back through the rain and muck and trees in the direction of the cabin and the car. Celia’s hands rested gently on my wet clothes. She was speaking, but it was in that made-up language of hers, the private one, the one she used to talk to her dolls, the one that sounded like water.

  Strange and Uncertain Gods

  RICO WAS THE only one of my friends to ever ask about Isabel. The others hadn’t known she’d existed, so they couldn’t have known she was gone.

  Five weeks after I’d walked up that forest path to the cabin, watched the embers dwindle, then set off on foot to the nearest town with Celia clinging to my back, what remained of Rupert Ford washed up on a beach near Rincón. The police identified him by a pocket watch that had his name engraved on the back. He was not mourned.

  Isabel remained lost to the ocean, as did Lina Gutierrez.

  When Detective Mara Lopez knelt in front of Celia, held her hands, and asked her if I was the man who’d taken her, Celia laughed. She told the detective that Dr. Ford had approached her when she was walking down the street searching for her sister. He showed her a trick, how he could make a cat’s cradle using a long loop of string. He asked her if she believed in magic. She trusted him when he told her that he knew where to find Marisol.

  She remembered very little about what happened after that—just the smell of something sweet followed by waking up in a warm bed in a small cabin. She told Dr. Ford she was lonely and missed her sister. He found Lina for her.

  Despite Celia’s story, I was arrested and thrown into a Puerto Rican jail. Every day for a week, Mara Lopez sat me down in a windowless room and pounded me with questions about Marisol and Celia.

  Do you not think it a strange coincidence that you had a connection to both victims? What exactly is your interest in poisonous plants? Why would Dr. Ford lie about what you said and where you’d gone? How many times have you been to Rincón? How did you know where to find Celia?

  I answered those questions the same way each time: Rupert Ford, once he learned of my interest in botany, had given me a book explaining, among other things, the symptoms of poisoning. That book described the same symptoms that the police claimed Sara and Marisol’s bodies showed signs of. I went over to ask Dr. Ford about it. He threatened me. I was defending myself when I pushed him. He fell to the ground and hit his head on the tile. I found the directions to a cabin among some papers in his study, borrowed my friend Rico’s scooter, and set off on my own, afraid the police wouldn’t believe my story.

  Mara Lopez wasn’t satisfied. No surprise there.

  My face was on the news for several days. People I’d never even met before hated me. People I had met hated me even more. I was lucky, however, that the people of San Juan hated the man who lived at the house at the end of Calle Sol more than they could ever hate me.

  When I was finally released and returned to my room at the St. Lucia, I found Dr. Ford’s book on my bed. The dedication had been altered: To Zabana Lucas. There is nothing in this or any world strong enough to divide us. This was added underneath: I’m sorry for what I’ve done. Thank you for helping me lift the curse from my house.

  That very same day, I jumped over Isabel’s wall and stole away with her trunk of wishes. In other trunks I found the scraps of the girls that Isabel had mentioned back in the cabin—a ripped piece of paper showing the last four digits of a telephone number, a blue plastic barrette dotted with rhinestones, a bracelet made of pale woven string, a single stud earring inlayed with fake turquoise. I could imagine Isabel wearing the bracelet, but the earring, no, and the barrette, probably not, unless it was years ago. It would’ve been no match for her wild hair.

  I debated keeping those scraps, but in the end, left them where they were. When Mara Lopez searched the house, she’d find them, study them, make stories out of them, form conclusions based on them, enter them as evidence. I decided, finally, it was time to leave the detecting to the detective.

  Also, Isabel wouldn’t have wanted me to take them. She’d say that there’s no use for mementos of dead girls I never knew. She wouldn’t have wanted me to turn those fragments around in my fingers, and make up stories that served no point other than to answer what if? with what if? with what if?

  Even without the scraps, I still thought of those girls, their hair wet, their clothes wet, their feet covered in sand, and I wondered what they had wanted to do with their lives before they ended up that way. Maybe they wanted to move to America; maybe they wanted to learn to play an instrument.

  Then the letters started. I’d find them slipped under my door when I woke up in the morning or waiting for me at the front desk. They’d ask for help dealing with the loss of a loved one or finding a lost pet bird. I kept them all in a suitcase.

  The mosquitoes left the island as they had come: swiftly and without warning. The weather for the rest of the season was mild. Warm days were punctuated by the occasional sun-shower. For now the island was at peace with herself, but the old people all knew that peace has a short memory and comes with a price.

  Only when I left the island later that summer did I start to dream of Isabel again—in all her forms. Her face was indistinct; her skin was a pale shade of green, and instead of hair, long green leaves tumbled down from her scalp. Sometimes she was throwing rocks at my face; sometimes she was sitting on her bed in her room of glass. Sometimes she was standing in the sun at Condado Beach. I also dreamed of her standing in my room, her hair up in a bun, looking at me—frowning, chin tilted down slightly—like I’d broken her heart. Those dreams were the worst. They were even worse than the nightmares that jarred me from sleep, the ones in which she was wrapped in leaves, floating in the middle of the ocean, her lifeless eyes gazing up to the sky. Sometimes I just saw her hair, rippling under water. Sometimes I wondered if it was Isabel I was dreaming or if it was Marisol or if it was my mind merging the two girls.

  When I woke, I’d go to my closet and take down the suitcase from the top shelf. I’d open it and randomly read through wishes, though I always made a point to read Marisol’s—I’d added hers back in. I’d push my fingers through the scraps of paper, so that my hand was submerged, and I’d stir the wishes around. Even when I’d zipped up the suitcase and placed it back on the shelf, I’d hold those wishes in my heart, saving them for the momen
t I knew would come, when Isabel would emerge from the water and take them back.

  A year passed. When I returned to Puerto Rico the next summer, the convent had been torn down, and I was forced to go with my dad to the hotel he’d been building in Rincón. He told me he’d never believed that I’d kidnapped those girls, that I was too much like my mother to do such a thing. He didn’t explain what he meant by that. I was too sensitive? I was a coward? I didn’t want to know, so I didn’t ask.

  We’d struck a deal: in exchange for taking a gap year, I’d work for him for room and board. I became a builder, spending most of my days with the foul-mouthed crew, hammering nails in the warm sun, laying pipe, pouring concrete. On my days off, I would stand at the water’s edge, staring at that blue-green ocean and trying and failing to summon spirits.

  Rico and Ruben came out for a week. Carlos wasn’t with them. He’d saved up enough working at the convent to move to Chicago. He’d been gone since winter. My friends rarely heard from him, though they told me every month he would send a little money back to his mother and abuela.

  Ruben was different, quieter. He said that Celia was doing all right. She didn’t talk much about the doctor or her time at in the cabin, but every once in a while she’d mention wanting to go back to the western edge of the island to visit the other girls, the ones who she said came out of the water at night. She wanted to be there to greet them. She said they were lonely. I wanted to ask Ruben if she ever made him dizzy or sick to his stomach when he’s around her for too long, but that isn’t the type of thing you ask someone.

  One night in Rincón, after Ruben had fallen asleep in my room in front of the television, Rico told me that all the plants in the courtyard of the house at the end of Calle Sol had died. One day they were alive, the next, wilted. I think he expected me to be sad, but I wasn’t. The señoras once told me that the same thing had happened before, but that after a while the plants came back taller and thicker. I told Rico to wait and see, that in time those plants would be back. He nodded, said sure, sure, but I knew he didn’t believe me.