The Paper Swan

by Leylah Attar

  It’s true, he thought.

  Love don’t die.

  It gave Damian reason to hold on to his sanity, because without focusing on something, a man can go crazy in solitary confinement. Damian tore off a button from his boxers, turned around in a circle, and flung it in the air. Then he got on his hands and knees and searched for it in the darkness. When he found it, he repeated the process again and again until he was exhausted. After a while, he used his game to figure out the time between meals, and day from night. Sometimes he ran on the spot, sometimes he balanced on his head. He kept busy and he kept fit, and when they opened up the door to let him back into his cell, he surprised everyone with his resilience.

  Monique had served no more than a few days in the hole, because Monique was important. He played a key role in keeping the peace. The first day Damian was back in the chow hall, a nervous energy surrounded the whole place. The guards were extra vigilant and the prisoners fidgeted as Damian took the same seat across from Monique. The menu was spaghetti with meatballs, a side of peas, and the ubiquitous Jell-O. Damian forked a meatball from Monique’s tray and put it into his mouth. Monique stopped chewing. His nose had healed, but it was now slightly crooked. The tension between the two men was palpable. Then Monique reached across and picked a forkful of Damian’s peas. He held the fork between them, the peas hovering in a slippery stack of machismo, before shoveling them in his mouth. They stared at each other, taking their time, chomping down each other’s food. Damian swallowed and turned his attention back to his tray. Monique continued eating silently from his. Everyone returned to what they were doing.

  “Nice scarf,” mumbled Damian.

  Monique was wearing a bright floral scarf around his head and sporting a pair of dainty pearl earrings.

  “Bitch please,” replied Monique without lifting his eyes from his spaghetti. “You ain’t ever getting a piece of this action.”

  “DAMIAN, YOU HAVE A VISITOR.” A correctional officer stopped by the Release and Receiving area where Damian and Monique were painting a mural.

  “Praise the lord.” Monique raised his palms to the ceiling. “Take this useless piece of shit away. He’s been messing with my field of corn.”

  “It’s corn,” said Damian, putting his brush away. “Not some phallic representation of corn.”

  He followed the guard through heavy steel doors with plexiglass windows. Each door buzzed a warning, opened with a puff of compressed air, and slid shut behind them with a definitive fffphut.

  Damian walked into the visiting room and looked for Rafael. In the year that he had been there, Rafael had been his only visitor. Damian monitored his business from behind bars, and Rafael followed through with his directives. Sometimes they sat out in the adjoining patio, which had patches of green grass, and caught up on their lives. Damian was going nowhere, but Rafael’s visits gave him glimpses of the outside world.

  “They told me no strapless or halter tops. And nothing more than two inches above the knee.” Rafael was always ribbing Damian about his unlikely friendship with Monique.

  Damian wondered what wisecracks Rafael would make that day, but there was no sign of his friend. Half of the little seating areas in the room were occupied by visiting kids and families. He glanced at the guard manning the podium.

  “Outside,” said the guard.

  Damian stepped onto the patio and froze. Sitting on one of the bolted-down benches was Skye, more beautiful, more real, more everything than he remembered. She had her back to him and he felt a pang of pure agony because her hair was almost at her waist now, because he had missed a whole ticker tape of moments—what it looked like when it reached her shoulders, when it grazed past her breasts, when it curled into the hollow of her back. The sparse, soft down of hair on her arms was almost silver-white where the sun fell on it. It gave her an aura of brightness that lit up every dark, dusty corner of his heart.

  He would have stood there indefinitely, paralyzed by the sight of Skye, but one of the guards prodded him along. Damian stood behind her for a moment, trying to find the words, when she turned around, sensing his presence.

  Skye had been expecting something different. A small booth, a glass barrier, a phone through which they would communicate.

  Distance.

  She had been expecting distance.

  She had replayed the scene in her mind, over and over. Fluorescent bulbs overhead, a closet-like space, surveillance cameras monitoring their interaction. She would sit down. He would be brought in. That’s what she had envisioned, that’s what she had prepared herself for. But there was no glass between them, nothing to confine the raw emotions crackling between them, nothing to contain the pull Damian still had on her.

  “Sit!” one of the guards called out, breaking their bittersweet scrutiny of each other.

  Damian slid onto the bench across from her. A small, rectangular table separated them.

  “I—”

  “You—”

  They stopped at the same time.

  “You first,” said Damian, thinking of another time they had interrupted each other, and the mad kisses that had followed in a dark hallway.

  “They told me I was on your approved list when I asked to visit,” said Skye.

  “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  They stopped talking because they were too busy looking. Skye had braced herself for the worst, but Damian was a survivor. He had survived El Charro and Caboras, and he was surviving prison. If anything, his chest was broader and his shirt hinted at muscles that had grown bigger and stronger. But his face was leaner and his eyes were different. They had shifted yet again. Still black, yes, but with the darkness of loss, of possibilities embraced and then turned to ash.

  “How . . .” She swallowed, trying to hold up under the intensity of his gaze. “How have you been?”

  “You look good,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her, as if the sight of her was overwhelming all of his senses. You look so, so good.

  He wasn’t talking about the fact that she’d put on some weight, or that her breasts were rounder under the long-sleeved blouse, or that her cheeks had filled in from the last time he had seen her in court. He meant that she looked good to him, no matter where, no matter when.

  “How’s your shoulder?” he asked.

  “Fine.” It’s not my shoulder that hurts. It’s my heart. “How’s your leg?”

  Damian didn’t give a damn about the old wound on his thigh, a reminder of their last day on the island when Victor’s men had cornered him in the shack. He leaned across the table, as close to her as he knew the guards would let him. “What’s wrong, Skye? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  She looked startled, although he couldn’t imagine why. They had always been able to read each other.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked. “After everything we went through, you still had to go after my father’s company?”

  Damian sighed. He didn’t want to talk about all the things that had torn them apart, not when he was seeing her after so long, but he told her what she wanted to know. “Because even after he put me away, he wasn’t done. Your father sent someone in here to rough me up, with a warning to stay away from you. He said that if I ever tried to contact you, I wouldn’t have to worry about serving out the rest of my sentence because he’d put me in a box long before then.”

  “When? When did he do this?”

  “A few months after I got here.” Damian could feel the pieces of the puzzle moving around in her head. He wished he could get inside her mind and rearrange every single piece so they weren’t wasting this time, this precious time discussing Warren Fucking Sedgewick.

  “So you sold your Sedgewick Hotels stock short and sent his shares plummeting. You must have lost a lot of money. Why shoot yourself in the leg? Why not just take over?”

  “I don’t react well to threats, Skye. And that company was built on dirty money. Cartel money. I would have given anything to see the look on Warren’s
face when it all came tumbling down.”

  “Well, that’s never going to happen now. He’s gone, Damian. My father died a few days ago. You got your revenge. It took a while for everything to crumble, for him to lose everything, piece by piece. The stress was too much for him. Foreclosures and debt collectors. Everywhere he turned. He had a stroke last year, and then another one a few months later. He didn’t survive the third one. So congratulations. You finally did it. You avenged MaMaLu.”

  “Good.” Damian sat back and folded his arms. He should have felt a small measure of victory, of justice, but it did nothing to fill the Skye-less hole that was gnawing away pieces of his soul. “I can’t say he didn’t deserve it.”

  “Don’t, Damian. It’s time to let it go. My father meant to get you and MaMaLu out of there. He was going to get you new lives, new identities. He came looking for you after MaMaLu died, but you were nowhere to be found. He couldn’t undo what he did, but he never meant you or MaMaLu any harm.”

  A sick, slow heaviness curdled in Damian’s veins, the initial burst of happiness at seeing Skye dissipating like cool ether. She wasn’t here for him. She was here for her father.

  “So that’s it?” he asked. “That’s why you showed up? A year later? To berate me for something he started? I walked away, Skye. For you. But he couldn’t leave it alone, could he? He just had to try to strong-arm me into keeping my distance. As if I could ever bring myself to contact you. You deserve better. I knew that. He knew that, but he had to prove that he still held the cards.”

  “That’s not why he did it!”

  “Then why, Skye? Why? I lost MaMaLu. I lost you. I lost eight years of my life. Why the fuck couldn’t he just leave me alone?”

  “Because!”

  “Because what?” Damian slammed his palms down on the table. “I hated that fucking bastard and I’m glad he’s gone. What did you expect, Skye? Did you expect an apology? You want me to say I’m sorry?”

  “Stop it, Damian.” Skye could see the guard making his way towards them. “I thought it would be different. I thought you would be different. But you’re still filled with so much rage.”

  “And you’re still defending him.” Damian got up and let the guard cuff him. His outburst was going to cost him. He wished Skye had never come. He wished he’d never known her or Warren Sedgewick. He wished he could stop the pain that was shooting through him. “I guess blood will always be thicker than water.”

  Skye’s face changed at his parting remark. She looked both heart-broken and enraged. The last thing Damian saw as they led him away was her back, shoulders hunched over the table.

  That was the only time Skye came to see Damian in prison. He didn’t see her again for the rest of his incarceration, not once over the next seven years.

  DAMIAN STOOD AT THE ENTRANCE of Casa Paloma, by the tall wrought iron gates that had once barred his way. The first thing he’d done when he got out of prison was to put in an offer, and he stood now as master, where his mother had been the help. The few prospective buyers with the means to afford the property had turned away from the daunting task of restoring it. Years of neglect had left it in disarray. Vine-smothered walls and balconies obscured Casa Paloma’s graceful lines. Overgrown trees encroached like dark shadows around the edges. The garden had transformed into a jaundiced mess of dry, tangled weeds, trash bags, and empty beer bottles.

  Damian removed the chains and pushed the gates open. They squeaked from worn, rusty joints. The main house stood before him, its boarded-up windows staring at him with pale, blank eyes. Damian walked past it, ignoring the flurry of grasshoppers that clamored out of his way, to the small, modest building in the back that had once housed the staff. It was a single row of dormitory style rooms with a communal bathroom and kitchen. He stood outside the third door, overcome with nostalgia and a strange, tight knot in his throat. MaMaLu’s broom was still leaning against the wall, mummified in layers of dust and cobwebs. Damian shuffled his feet at the entrance.

  “It’s me, MaMaLu,” he said, trying to get the words past his clenched throat. “Your Estebandido is home.”

  The door remained shut. There was no one to let him in, no one to stare him down for being a bad boy. Damian leaned his forehead against the door and traced the frame. Flakes of peeling paint fell on his shoes. His let his hand rest on the knob for a minute before walking in.

  The room was much smaller than he remembered. A single shaft of sunlight lit up the dark, musty space. There was no lingering scent of the jasmine hair oil that MaMaLu used. The fabric partition between their beds lay crumbled on the ground, from the night they’d taken MaMaLu away. There were no tostadas waiting for him, no glass of horchata, but what broke Damian that quiet morning was her bed. MaMaLu’s bed was never unmade, but now it sat there, sheets pulled back, pillow askew, covered in dust. They had dragged her out, and it had stayed behind, empty and forgotten, unmade for the last twenty-three years.

  Damian was moved to action. He took the bed sheets outside and shook the dust out of them. He pounded the pillow, turned the case upside down and shook it some more. He made the bed up, stretched the sheets out tight so not a single crease marked the surface. He turned down the top sheet and tucked the ends in. He returned MaMaLu’s pillow, stood back, repositioned it, and stood back again. A speck of dust settled on the covers, and Damian, determined to have nothing mar MaMaLu’s bed, started the whole process over again.

  He was still fussing over the sheets when the bottled up sensation that had been building in his throat erupted. Damian had not cried for MaMaLu, not in Valdemoros when they’d told him she was dead, not when he placed sunflowers on her grave every year, and not when he opened her little Lucky Strike tin. His grief had been curtailed by rage. But now the rage was done. He had avenged her, made El Charro pay, made Warren Sedgewick pay. They were gone, and with them, his burning need for vengeance. Damian had nothing to hold on to, nothing to keep the storm of tears at bay. All the deep, dark emotions that had tormented him lay hollow and spent, like a pile of powdery skeletons. Hate was an illusion, rage was an illusion, vengeance was an illusion. They were all empty husks that he had watered and nurtured, and in the end, they bore no fruit.

  Damian crawled into MaMaLu’s bed and rolled up into a ball. He was a boy when he’d left and he had returned a man. He had been alone then and he was alone now. The only difference, the only cruel, bitter difference, was that he had lost his one chance at redemption. He had been so busy holding on to hate, that he had let go of love.

  Damian thought of the last time he had seen Skye.

  You’re still filled with so much rage, she’d said.

  He finally understood what she’d been trying to tell him.

  THE TASK OF RESTORING CASA Paloma was colossal, but Damian had both the time and the resources. For eight years, he had run his company from prison. His direction was necessary, but his presence was optional. Damian had achieved what he had set out to do, but it had brought him no comfort. He found solace in gutting and painting and patching the main house. He ripped the vines off the facade, cleaned out the pumps so the fountains worked again, and hired a team of landscapers to restore the grounds. He had the roof replaced with terracotta tiles and gave the exterior stucco a fresh coat of white paint.

  Slowly, the house started looking alive again. Flowers bloomed in the garden. Butterflies and hummingbirds returned. The place had been ransacked over the years, but a lot of the original furniture remained, along with the chandeliers. Skye’s mother, Adriana, had had a flair for drama. Damian wasn’t sure if he wanted to keep the velvet curtains in the dining room. He sat at the table where Warren had once convened with El Charro and his men, and considered the heavy crimson fabric. It added a touch of old world opulence, but it also blocked out much of the light.

  A soft thud interrupted his thoughts. The renovation crew was gone for the day, but old houses made all kinds of noises. Damian ignored it and got up to examine the curtains.

  There
it was again. Another little thud. Damian spun around. It was coming from the antique hutch he used to hide in, the same hutch from where he’d spied Skye and MaMaLu interrupting Warren’s meeting. Damian stood before it and heard a distinct thump. Whatever was in there, possibly a bird or stray cat, had seen him. On the other hand, it could be something not quite as harmless, like a snake. Damian got on all fours and opened the door slowly.

  She was a bony little thing with brown skin and a long, messy braid. Her knees were folded up to her chin and she peered at him with huge, cocoa eyes. She was wearing a white shirt with a school crest, and a navy skirt. Her socks were askew, one pulled up to her knees, the other at her ankle.

  “It’s okay,” said Damian, as she eyed him warily. “You don’t need to hide.” He held out his hand, but she refused to take it.

  The last thing he’d expected to find was a little girl hiding in the hutch. Perhaps her father was one of the workers he’d hired, and she’d come looking for him. Perhaps she walked by on her way to school and curiosity had drawn her into Casa Paloma—years of walking by an abandoned house that was suddenly ablaze with activity. The renovation crew had been in and out in muddy pick-up trucks, drilling, clanging, banging, hammering. Wheelbarrows of broken tiles and old flooring were lined up by the gates, but flowers spilled from the hedges and what was once dull and dead was now lush and green. Damian was surprised no one else had ventured in. The little girl was his first visitor, and she was obviously scared for getting caught.

  “I’m not going to hurt you.” He sat back on his heels and waited while she assessed him. He must have passed her threat level detection scan because she crawled out of the hutch and stood before him, fidgeting with her skirt.

  Damian remembered all too well the feeling of knowing you were in trouble, but not knowing how you were going to be dealt with. In many ways, it was worse than the punishment itself.