The Paper Swan

by Leylah Attar

  Damian squeezed the trigger.

  I moved at the same time.

  You can either choose love or you can choose hate, because where one lives, the other will die.

  “Skye!” I heard both men calling as the bullet ripped through me.

  The room stopped tilting. Everything went still. No more fighting. No more tug of war. I held my breath.

  Sweet, sweet silence.

  Then I exhaled and lurched forward, as the blood spread like a red blot across my t-shirt.

  IT WAS A HIGH PROFILE case. People go missing every day, but a kidnapped heiress who beats the odds and gets shot during a rescue mission has everyone buzzing. Damian could have told his side of the story. Reporters were hungry for it, but he was tight lipped through the proceedings. He had done what he had done and nothing was going to change it. It was almost a relief when the judge handed down his sentence, and the media got their pound of flesh.

  On his first day in prison, Damian knew that he could walk in like a lamb or he could take the bull by the horns. Whatever he chose would set the tone for the rest of his incarceration. He kept his head down for most of the day, watching and learning. Survival was the name of the game, and his time in Caboras had served him well.

  Most prisoners segregated themselves according to racial allegiance. There was power in numbers. If you were in a gang, you were protected. People thought twice about getting in your face, so you picked a camp and stuck with it. Damian made out three distinct groups in the yard: BMW. Black, Mexican, and White. There was always someone who didn’t fit, and some of them splintered into smaller factions. There were those who ran with God, mostly Christians and Muslims, those who were homosexuals and transgenders, and those who stood out as loners: lifers, career criminals, and roughened, toughened old men. No matter what group they belonged to, they were all men who had committed major felonies—murder, robbery, kidnapping, treason. There was another section, separate and removed, for prisoners who couldn’t be put in with the general population: the Sensitive Needs Yard. This was where they fenced off high notoriety inmates (ex-cops, celebrities, serial killers), sex offenders (rapists and pedophiles), and men with mental health issues.

  The Robert Dailey Correctional Facility, east of San Diego, was not a place that housed white-collar criminals or those who committed minor misdemeanors. It was a desolate prison outpost, ringed by curtains of wire and thickets of dusty wildflowers, a stone’s throw from the colonias and maquilidoras of Tijuana. It was the place Damian had been sent to, to serve out his sentence.

  When the bell for supper rang at 4 pm, Damian shuffled out in a single line with the other inmates in his housing unit. The chow hall was a cavernous rectangular room with a dozen stainless steel tables, each of which sat eight people. On both sides of the hall were armed guards, monitoring the prisoners from behind glass cubicles. A row of six convict kitchen workers moved trays along, assembly style, behind a cafeteria-like glass barrier. That day, they were serving chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes, gravy, a thin slice of cornbread, and Jell-O.

  Damian got his tray, filled his state-issued plastic mug with cold water, and joined the gay prisoners. Monique, the six-foot-four burly, black inmate, raised a razor thin eyebrow when Damian took the seat across from him. For a moment, Damian wavered, wondering if Monique was his best option to establish a reputation. Monique was a lifer and the shot caller for the group, an ex-boxer with biceps as thick and corded as tree trunks. The correctional officers required a representative from every group. If there was trouble between different affiliations, the guards locked everyone down and got the shot callers together to resolve the situation. This allowed the prisoners to police themselves, and the system ran better for everyone. In return, the shot callers won favors or ‘juice cards’ from the guards. Monique obviously held a lot of those, from his purple lipstick to his black nail polish, to the New Orleans style beads around his neck. He was the biggest, most powerful, most flamboyant character in the room. So, when Damian reached across the table, speared Monique’s chicken patty and ripped off a big bite, everything came to a faltering halt. The kitchen staff stopped mid-ladle, gravy dripping from their spoons. Chatter ceased. All eyes focused on Monique and Damian.

  Monique blinked. Had this piece of fresh meat, this newcomer, just swiped the food off his plate? Only a fool would disrespect another prisoner so blatantly, and this fool had chosen to tangle with him?

  Damian needed a reaction. Fast. Before the guards got involved. He picked up his mug and splashed icy, cold water in Monique’s face. Monique let the water drip off his nose and down his chin. He wiped his face without breaking eye contact with Damian. And then all hell broke loose.

  If you’re going to get in a prison fight, be the first to strike, thought Damian, as he slammed his elbow into Monique’s throat, getting him in the voice box. It took the bigger guy a second to recover. By then, they were surrounded by a circle of convicts, keeping the guards at bay.

  Monique lunged across the table, toppling Damian off his chair. The two men crashed to the floor, grappling with each other. Damian took heavy blows to his chin, his jaw, his chest. Each hit felt like he was being pounded by a hammer. Monique powered over him, stomping on his instep to keep him pinned down, so he couldn’t fight his way back on top. He grabbed Damian’s neck, clamping down on his windpipe, choking him with an iron grip, before bashing his head against the floor. All the air in Damian’s lungs left him in a sharp whoosh. Damian felt like his face was going to explode, like all the blood had collected in his head and Monique was tightening the wrench, cutting it off from the rest of his body. Monique was dodging his punches, punches that were quickly losing force as Damian’s vision started to fade. The inmates looking down on them turned blurry, one blue uniform melding into another. The noise, the chaos, the chants turned distant. Skye’s face floated before him, haunting and frozen, the moment before he’d pulled the trigger, her eyes stricken, the silent ‘no’ she’d mouthed.

  What do you do, Damian? He heard her voice in his head.

  I fight back and I fight hard.

  Damian’s eyes shot open. He grabbed hold of the beads around Monique’s neck and pulled. When Monique’s face was close enough, Damian head-butted his nose. Monique let go of Damian and clutched his nose. Blood spewed over his blue chambray shirt. Damian punched Monique in the jaw and got on top of him. By the time the guards got through, Monique’s face was raw and purple from smeared lipstick and Damian’s blows.

  As they dragged Damian and Monique away, the sea of prisoners parted. Both men were unsteady on their feet, bloodied and battered, but one thing was clear: Damian Caballero was not a man anyone wanted to mess with.

  Damian was thrown into isolation for instigating a fight. Isolation was the prison’s purest punishment. ‘The Hole’, or Solitary Confinement Unit was nine feet long and seven feet wide, with walls and ceilings of heavy gauge sheet metal. The floor was cold concrete. There was nothing in the cell except a metal bedframe with a thin mattress, crammed up against a toilet and a sink. Damian’s only point of contact with the outside world was the feeding slot. They took away his uniform and gave him a thin t-shirt and boxer shorts. At night, they turned up the air conditioning so he couldn’t sleep.

  For ninety minutes a day, Damian was allowed into an exercise pen where he stretched and lunged and squatted, making the most of the extra space. For the remaining twenty-two and a half hours, Damian was left in total silence and darkness. For the first time since he pleaded guilty to the charges brought against him, Damian was alone. The isolation was supposed to break him, but he welcomed it. He had gone far too long without being held accountable for all the men whose blood was still on his hands:

  Alfredo Ruben Zamora, the man who had tried to take down El Charro in the cantina.

  El Charro.

  Countless members of the Sinaloa cartel and Los Zetas, in the warehouse explosion.

  But it was what he had done to Skye that weighed
most heavily on Damian’s mind. He couldn’t stop thinking about the last time he had seen her, and even though it hurt like hell, he recalled every last detail.

  When Damian walked into the courtroom, Skye was the first person he saw. His eyes automatically went to her because that’s how it was. When they were in the same space, she commanded all of his attention.

  She looked different—not the girl who belonged in an ivory tower and not the girl who belonged in his island bed. She didn’t look like Warren’s Skye, or Damian’s Skye, or a torn up, in-between Skye. This Skye belonged to herself. Whatever she’d been through since the island had changed her. Damian felt the retraction, like she had closed herself off, not just to him, but to everything around her. She was sitting in the same room, but in her own zone, breathing her own air.

  The bullet had grazed her shoulder and although it had exited without permanent damage, her arm was still in a sling from the injury. Damian could not look at her without thinking of her blood trickling through his fingers the moment he’d caught her. Blood that he had spilled. Warren’s men had apprehended him. They had carried Skye and Victor, who had passed out from blood loss, to the helicopter. Warren had flown to the hospital with them, while Damian was taken—handcuffed and guarded—to the police station. Rafael had kept him updated on Skye’s status and recovery, but he had not seen her since his arrest.

  She was blond again. Her sleek, chin length hair was tucked behind one ear. From Damian’s angle, it accentuated her full, pink lips and made him yearn for things he’d lost the rights to when he’d pulled the trigger.

  Skye was wedged between her father and Nick Turner, the guy she’d had dinner with on the night Damian had abducted her. Damian hated him for sitting so close to her, for being able to sit so close to her, his shoulder touching hers. He hated him more for that one single privilege than all the charges Nick had brought against him, because Nick was also the lawyer who was prosecuting Damian.

  Although Damian had dual citizenship—Mexican and American—he was tried in San Diego because he had kidnapped Skye on U.S. soil. Except it never got to a trial. Damian pled guilty. He had maimed Victor, kidnapped Skye, held her captive, cut off her finger and finally, shot her. Damian’s lawyer and Nick worked out a plea bargain, with Nick pushing for the harshest sentence.

  Nick despised Damian for taking away the girl he had come to adore, and for the things he believed he had done to her. Although Skye refused to see Nick outside of legal proceedings, Nick was convinced it was because of the trauma she had suffered, and that with time, she would give him another chance. He did not believe her when she told him she had fallen in love with Damian. So what if Damian was this Esteban kid she had once known? Skye was not in her right mind and it was up to him and Warren to put Damian behind bars forever. They trumped the kidnapping charge to aggravated kidnapping, given that Damian had caused Skye bodily harm. They wanted to tack on aggravated rape, but Skye insisted that the sex had been consensual, and refused to let them turn it into something ugly.

  Of course, Damian knew none of this as he watched Skye between the two men. He saw them as a unit, a trio of joined forces.

  Whatever you choose, Damian, know that I will always, always love you, she had said to him.

  He wanted to believe that. He wanted to believe that so much, but how could he, knowing that she was withholding the one thing that would have earned him some lenience? The fact that he had let her go. He had set her free, dropped her off and she had come back to him. That was something only the two of them knew. Yes, he had made the wrong choice. He had given in to the darkness when he should have stood by her, but he needed to know that she still cared. He would happily spend the rest of his life locked up in a cage for all the things he had done, but he needed that one fleeting moment of light, so he could go knowing that it had been real for her.

  As Damian stood before the judge, ready to receive his sentence, his eyes fell on Skye. One look, one glance from those haunting gray eyes, and he’d be redeemed.

  Say something, I’m giving up on you.

  But she kept her head bowed. She had not looked at him the entire time, and she did not look at him then. Skye knew that if she did, if she looked up from her lap, she wouldn’t be able to keep anything from him, and she had held it together for too long to let everything fall apart now. The sooner this case got wrapped up, the better for them all.

  She had told her father and Nick that Damian had let her go, that she was the one who had gone back, but they were convinced she had suffered some kind of psychological breakdown. They were prepared to call in a psychiatrist to discredit anything favorable she had to say about Damian, and testify that she was suffering from Stockholm syndrome and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

  “I can’t understand why you’re defending him, Skye.” Her father had paced the hospital room where she was recovering from the bullet wound. “Look at what he’s done to you. He shot you, Skye. He was going to shoot me, but he ended up shooting you. Is this the kind of guy you want walking free? Someone who is so blinded by revenge that he can’t see straight?”

  “You were blind too, Dad, so blind that you couldn’t see what you did to MaMaL—”

  “You want to know what I did to MaMaLu?” Warren’s eyes flashed with indignation. “I saved MaMaLu. That’s right. I saved her. El Charro and his men would have killed her. Prison was the safest place for her. Out of sight, out of mind. I paid Victor a small fortune to make sure Esteban was looked after and that MaMaLu got everything she needed in Valdemoros. I don’t know if any of that money made it to her. I suspect Victor used that money to start up his private security business, but that’s irrelevant now. As soon as we were settled in our new home, I was going to send for MaMaLu and Esteban, get them new identities, and sponsor them over. I owed it to her. A new life, a fresh start. But it didn’t work out that way. She died before I could get them out. I went looking for Esteban, but his uncle was gone and he had disappeared. There was no trace of him. No one knew where he went or what happened to him. I closed that chapter of our lives with a heavy heart, Skye. I burned the letters you wrote. It broke my heart, but I wanted to protect you. You were so young, I was sure you’d forget. I thought it would be easier if you assumed they’d moved on.” Warren sighed and sank down onto the chair. “If there’s one thing I regret, apart from not leaving Mexico while your mother was alive, it’s MaMaLu. And if Damian wants to come after me for that, fine. But I’m not letting him get away with this.” He gestured to Skye’s bed and all the machines beeping around them.

  Skye closed her eyes. So many misunderstandings, so much time wasted, each man standing stubbornly in his corner.

  “Damian needs to know what happened, Dad, what your intentions were.”

  “He never gave me the chance to explain, did he? He just made his assumptions. Judge, jury and vigilante justice. He kidnapped you, hurt you, and he permanently injured a man. Victor will never have use of that arm. The doctors have reattached it, but the nerves are severed. That’s irreversible.”

  “It was self-defense!” said Skye. She was sick of the endless tug of war. “Victor was under contract with you. He knew what he was getting into. The risks go hand in hand with his job. Damian didn’t have a weapon. He was hurt. It was Victor who threatened him with a gun.”

  “Why?” Her father looked exhausted. “Why do you have to fight me at every turn? Let me handle this, Skye. One day you’ll look back and you’ll see. You’re not yourself right now. You don’t know—”

  “Enough!” Skye cut her father off. “Enough.”

  That was when the old Skye switched off and a new Skye took her place.

  “I’m done,” she said. “I’m done with you. And I’m done with Damian. I won’t let either of you use me to get to each other.”

  Nick urged her to turn down the plea bargain that Damian’s lawyer offered, but Skye knew that if the case went to trial, they would paint Damian as a monster and have her testimony negated.
Everything they had shared would be sullied and violated. And so, she came to an agreement with Nick and her father. They wouldn’t subject Skye to a psychiatrist if she didn’t force their hand, if she kept her mouth shut about Damian letting her go.

  And so she sat there, in the court room, staring into her lap, even as her face burned where Damian’s eyes skimmed over her. Her love had not been enough. He had retired one gun, only to pick up another. When push came to shove, her love had not been enough.

  The judge sentenced Damian to eight years, because he had shown remorse by pleading guilty, and had spared the court the time and expense of a lengthy trial.

  Nick and Warren didn’t look too happy, but it was a time frame they had anticipated and come to terms with.

  Rafael gave Damian a curt nod as they handcuffed him.

  Damian turned to look at Skye one last time before they led him out, still hungry, still desperate for one glance. What he felt, he couldn’t put into words—sadness, loss, a feeling of having disappointed her, and of being let down himself.

  Skye kept her eyes trained on her lap.

  Damian had loved two women in his life. He had been unable to save one and he’d made things impossible for the other one. In the darkness, when the weight of his isolation sat on his chest like a stony gargoyle, MaMaLu came to him. He felt her presence settle around him. When he closed his eyes, he could hear her singing. He was a little boy again, sitting in church with her, his hand clasped firmly in hers, as angels and saints looked down on them.

  Damian realized that MaMaLu had not been alone, that even in her last days in Valdemoros, he had been with her, just as she was with him now. Because when we love, we carry it on the inside, and we can turn on its light even in our darkest moments. The deeper we love, the brighter it shines. And even though MaMaLu was long gone, she was still there with him, in his darkest, loneliest moments.