Sympathy crosses his face, then he scrubs his stubble with his hand and wipes it away. “Well, for whatever reason”—he glances at the mirror—“the FBI doesn’t want to press you on your story. But if you had anything to do with what went down tonight, you’re more than lucky. You’re smart.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He takes his notepad and tucks it under his sweat-stained armpit. He stands but doesn’t leave, waiting for me to acknowledge what he’s said.
I examine my imaginary nail polish again. “Can I go home now?”
“Yeah. But it’d be a good idea for you to stay in Miami for the next week or so in case we need to talk to you. Your cooperation is important if you want to avoid charges. Do you have someone to take you home?”
“I can call my sister.”
“Right. And Valentina,” he says, “if you did have anything to do with it, you should know you did a good thing. The Cruz organization is responsible for some of the most horrific—”
“Stop.”
He looks startled.
I push my chair back and it makes an angry scraping sound, but I don’t say another word. I shouldn’t have to explain why I don’t want to hear what he has to say about my father’s legacy. My name. My life.
He nods.
Leaving Miami takes longer than it should. Lola turns into a mother hen, practically forbidding Ana and me to look out the windows for fear of having our pictures end up on TV. That’s not even possible—our pictures are already everywhere—but she’s too mortified to be reasoned with.
Humiliation. That’s the death blow for Ana and Lola, maybe almost as painful as realizing Papi will never see the light of day. Everybody knows. Everybody. How many of them knew before, I wonder? But that seems unimportant to my sisters—like it’s so much more shameful having your father incarcerated than having him be a known drug lord.
In quieter moments, though, I wonder if Ana and Lola aren’t lost in a darker tragedy. Maybe the public scorn is something benign for them to hate. It’s safer to wail about our social demise than to mourn our mother and learn to hate Papi, too. The detective only hinted at what Papi had done to her, but my sisters aren’t stupid. Lola was old enough that her loss has a face and a touch and a smell.
She doesn’t talk about that, though. She talks about how mortifying it is to be online gossip fodder. She talks about escape.
My humiliation is different. I’ve already been gone for months, been a different person during my self-imposed exile in Montreal. Maybe that’s what makes this embarrassment minor. Not even minor. Nonexistent. Or maybe it’s that I’m too busy feeling something else.
While my sisters lick their wounds and wander around our home wondering how much of their lives will be seized by the government, I call Marcel. I call him again and again and again. Each time I honestly believe he will pick up—I’m not sure why, after the first day of failed attempts—which means each time he doesn’t is rich with fresh devastation. I leave a message the first time, and the second, but after that I can’t make myself talk to a machine and pretend it’s him. It’s not him.
The silence drives me crazy in increments. One day becomes two, becomes three, becomes four. First, I’m just a little insane, imagining him driving north through that first night with his ankle broken, arm broken, face bleeding, and who knows what else. I see our trip here in reverse. Does he stop at a hospital right away? Or does he take my advice and not stop at all? How terrified was he, is he, that Victor Cruz or one of his enforcers is behind the headlights in his rearview mirror?
By the time I’ve worked through all the details I can think of, I’m practically senseless with worry. I lie on my bed and stare at my phone, debating whether calling Marcel’s parents will result in an immediate international search, or whether they’ll pass the phone to him as if nothing has happened.
I’m a complete lunatic by the time I’m considering the worst: Marcel is dead. He was bleeding internally after the beating from Fernando and Jose, and he died in agony on a highway in Georgia. But even if he had no ID on him, Ana’s car would have been found. It hasn’t been. Ana is still carless and pissed off at me for it. The fact that Lola wouldn’t let her go anywhere if she did have a car is irrelevant.
But if he isn’t dead, and he somehow made it back to Montreal, and there’s no other physical force preventing him from answering his phone or calling me, then that would make sense. Terrible sense.
If he’s alive, he’s lucky to have survived his brush with the Cruz regime. He must be thinking that. He must be thinking about Lucien.
I don’t think about kissing Marcel. Not consciously. When that memory finds me it’s against my will, while I’m asleep or zoning out to Lola’s paranoid nattering.
We meet with Detective Pearson again, all three of us together. I’m prepared to play dumb, but I don’t have to. The questions are too easy, like he doesn’t think we know anything or he doesn’t care if we do.
“That’s all?” I ask as he stands to leave, ignoring Lola’s glare.
“That’s all.”
I frown, not sure whether to ask the question I’ve been worrying over since Papi’s arrest.
“We don’t need you to testify,” Pearson says.
He’s not the idiot I’d thought he was last time.
“Good,” Lola says tersely. “Because we wouldn’t. Let’s go.”
She’s wrong. I might.
Ana and Lola stand, so I do too. If they’ve got enough on Papi without us, then that’s probably best. The collection of murders permanently burned into my mind is too much to share, and Marcel’s bloody face, his twisted, beaten body as he limped away from me, is just as bad as all the others.
I have to find him.
We go home and eat stale cookies and make plans. Lola and Ana are convinced the only cure for their blistering shame is Aruba, so I sit with them and pretend I’m going to go with them, pretend the Bahamas are still the place I want to be, pretend that a month on the beach will be long enough for the reporters to stop calling and the photographers to get bored with milling around the gate and leave.
After I’m done pretending, I go up to my room and pull up a list of hospitals in Montreal. It’s a long shot—him making it all the way home in that condition—but where else would I start? According to the internet, in Montreal alone there are at least a dozen places where he could’ve been treated.
I waste the first call asking if Marcel LeBlanc is a patient.
“We can’t tell you that, miss,” the receptionist tells me. Her French accent, flattened from what sounds like years of telephone receptioning, makes me oddly sentimental. “Privacy laws, yes?”
“Oh. Right. Yes.”
On the phone to the second hospital, I ask for my call to be transferred to Marcel LeBlanc’s room.
“Of course,” the operator says at first, but then, “I’m sorry, we don’t have a current patient by that name.”
“No current patient? Does that mean he was there?”
He pauses. “I’m sorry, but I can’t give out that information.”
“When was he discharged?”
“Miss, that information—”
“He was a patient, though.”
“By law, I can’t confirm whether he—”
“No, I get it. Sorry.”
I exhaust the list. He’s nowhere. It’s been two days since Ana reported her car stolen (all the chaos and upheaval surrounding Papi’s arrest bought me three days of excuses before I made up a story about leaving it on the causeway with a flat tire). But if he made it to Canada, it’s less than a long shot. Maybe he made it to an airport and flew . . . anywhere.
I could wait.
I could wait like I waited for Emilio, paralyzed by fear and shame and passivity, starving and cold and useless. But I’m not that girl anymore. I don’t hide in closets, and I don’t stare at water stains, waiting for my hero. I’m the hero. But I still don’t know what to do.
/>
The mandolin appears from nowhere with nothing. It’s just there on the porch one day when I’m going out to search for an avocado that isn’t yet rotten. Based on the label and the packaging, it came on a UPS truck, but there’s no return address to tie it to Emilio’s apartment, no letter.
An anonymous apology. I take it in.
My sheets are slippery. I move a little and slide so far, like I’m floating, and it’s not good or bad but different. Everything is. Home should feel more like home. The sheet below me feels silkier than water, the one on top smooth like wind. I shouldn’t feel trapped by something so loose and light that it might not even be there at all.
I sleep, I think, or I have my eyes closed long enough that when I open them again it takes a while to find the lines of my dark room. It’s all curved: the beveled poles of my canopy bed, the oval mirror, the stoic slope of the armoire. Nothing is straight. Sometimes, irrationally, I miss the harsh right angles of my upturned crate and the broken-faced clock.
But my eyes adjust, and the decoratively bowed becomes familiar again.
I can’t hear Lola and Ana anymore, so they must’ve gone to bed. Seven days have passed since Vizcaya, and on every single one of them I’ve fallen asleep to the sound of my sisters talking across the hall in Lola’s room. Tonight, like the other nights, I started out in there with them, but I can only take so much before I start to suffocate. I didn’t say much tonight, just lay across the foot of Lola’s bed and nodded at the appropriate times. Their woes are justified. I should be more sympathetic. But I’ve already processed the sting of Emilio’s betrayal and mourned the darkest side of Papi’s life.
They’re worried about money. It’s not like I’m not worried about money, but I’d already cut myself off from Papi’s filthy wealth. There are worse things than poverty.
Papi’s bank accounts have been seized, and FBI agents have been traipsing in and out carting off Papi’s computers and files and safes. Lola thinks it’s only a matter of time before they start taking our belongings—the valuables, at least. I doubt she really knows, but I don’t call her on it either. I listen and nod and commiserate.
I think about Marcel. All the time. All the time. All the time.
Once my eyes are fully adjusted, I roll onto my right side and stare at my Degas sketch. Three ballerinas. It’s mine, or I’ve always thought it was, but now that I’m staring at the charcoal figures warmed only by moonlight, I’m unsure. It feels like it’s mine, even if all the other art in this house has become tinged with the ugliness of what I know.
Papi bought the sketch because I begged. We were at an auction house in London, one of the first I remember, and despite his detailed explanation of its overvaluation and the unlikelihood of resale at anything close to cost, I wanted it. The economics meant nothing to my seven-year-old mind.
“But can we buy it anyway?” I asked him.
“Tell me what you like about it,” he said.
I frowned. I was sure there was one right answer, but I didn’t know it. I liked that it made me feel sad—nostalgic, if I’d known the word. It made me want to close my eyes and dream those dancers real, but I couldn’t close my eyes and risk losing them. It made me feel like I knew a secret, but that reason made the least sense of all.
Papi watched me as I frowned at the sketch. I remember his face-crinkling smile when I turned to him and shrugged.
There’s something in that smile for me now. It’s the one I’m going to remember, the one I’m going to intentionally recall when the facts of his life make me doubt he was ever sincere about art or about me.
We left the auction house that day with the Degas wrapped in a tube, my hand tucked under Papi’s arm.
It’s mine. Legally, who knows, but I feel no moral qualms as I slip out of bed, reach up, and lift the sketch from the wall. I know enough to at least estimate what it would go for. Two hundred thousand dollars. Maybe even three. That’s more than enough to go somewhere new, start over again, be anyone I want to be. Not Jane and not Valentina, or at least not the Valentina I’ve been. I’ll know exactly who it is once I get where I’m going.
There. Even before I’ve thought about it, I know where there is.
“Here you are,” Señora Medina says, handing me the cardboard tube.
I give her the check. “Señor Lopez will love these. The last ones sold quickly, and these ones are so beautiful.”
“I’m glad. You have an eye for beauty, don’t you?”
I smile. I do.
I slide the tube into my satchel. Four small watercolors of Girona: a Mediterranean beach, a Catalonian meadow, a young girl playing with a dog, and my favorite, a boy in front of an easel. Unframed. Originals. I handpicked them all.
I couldn’t go without real art again. That had been a mistake in Montreal, my barren walls, my refusal to go into the museums I passed. Lucien’s amateurish attempts were the closest I came to seeing art, and the result was emptiness and loneliness.
Here in Girona, my walls are covered with my postcard prints—a poor girl’s gallery, as Rosa calls it. Rosa, my only roommate, has her own poor girl’s gallery, except hers alternates between French and Spanish Vogue pages, and the torn-out pages of a firemen’s calendar. She’s studying fashion at the university. Her study of firemen is somewhat less official.
“Where are you from?” Señora Medina asks.
I hesitate. I’ve come up the hill to buy her watercolors several times now, and we’ve always conversed in Spanish. But she must hear that mine is slanted with South American tones. There’s no need to lie, but it takes an effort to tell the truth these days. “America,” I say.
She frowns, eying my short cotton shirtdress and brown sandals. I bought them here.
“You don’t look American,” she says bluntly, “but you don’t sound Spanish.”
It wasn’t a question, so I don’t try to explain. I intentionally bought my clothes here so I would at least blend in when I wasn’t speaking. Spanish clothes were a carefully weighed expense, and worth every penny.
Señora Medina stares harder at me. Smooth-faced and beautiful. “I’ll see you next week, then?”
“Next week,” I say, and slip out the door into the sunlight.
I slide the tube into my satchel and pull the strap over my head. Like the clothes, the sturdy leather bag was a bit of a splurge. The Degas sketch brought in more than I expected, but every purchase I make now has the feel of finality. There’s plenty of money, but once it’s gone, the only thing replenishing it will be my own earnings at the art shop, which are . . . not huge. Last I heard from Lola and Ana, the trial was underway, but all of Papi’s assets have been seized now. If I’d wanted his money—which I didn’t—I couldn’t have it.
I start the walk down the hill and through the park, bag swinging on my hip. Señor Lopez’s operation is small, but beauty doesn’t have to be big. I sell prints and postcards (the tourists love their Dalí), as well as the work of local artists. Most of them stop by the store to replenish the stock themselves, but Señor Lopez sends me out to pick up also, and sometimes, like today, to buy. My shifts there earn enough money to pay my rent at the apartment building across the plaza and for food, but not much else.
Not that I need much else right now. I’m drunk off freedom and anonymity. I had that in Montreal, but fear washed it with gray. Fear chilled me more than ice or wind, left me lonelier than I’d imagined possible. But I’m not afraid anymore.
The walk from Señora Medina’s is fifteen minutes, but it’s oddly warm for January and the sun slows my feet. We’re closed for siesta for another hour anyway, so I take my time, wandering Girona’s now familiar cobbled streets.
Girona was unplanned. I’d been sure I wanted to be in Madrid. But then I got there and realized it was too much, or I was too little. I was too frazzled for bustle, too overwrought to be inspired by the buzz of a thriving city, no matter how beautiful. After one day of anxious wandering, I knew that I needed to be closer to the ocean.
I needed a place to think. So I took the train to Barcelona and then kept riding farther east and farther north, vaguely aware that I was getting closer and closer to France, but not ready to decide exactly where I was going. The coast. That seemed good enough. Minutes before we arrived in Girona’s station, I realized it was my last stop before Spanish become French, so I disembarked.
Crinkled and exhausted and suddenly brimming with self-pity, not to mention the broken heart I’d been running from, I probably should’ve hated it. But Girona wouldn’t let me come and keep my fingers entwined in my grief. It made me let go. Something about the depth to its romance, the stoicism to its prettiness. Right away, it felt like a painting.
I stayed the first few nights at a hostel, exploring the spiderweb of Girona’s cobblestones by day. By the time I found Señor Lopez’s shop, I’d already decided I would stay. The bright abstract prints propped in the display window, the mustard-yellow awning like a gold frame itself, the SE NECESITA EMPLEADO card taped to the door—they were all confirmations of what I already knew. This could work. Maybe this was even meant to be.
I wasn’t looking for home. I’m not so naive or optimistic to think that home is a place, but in Girona I recognized something scrubbed clean and quaint and earnest that make it perfect for starting anew. Alone.
Finding Rosa and the apartment across the plaza made me certain. She’s silly and honest and warm, but nosy and messy too, which makes her an average roommate and a better-than-average friend. Rosa actually likes it when I play the mandolin. She isn’t sweeter than Nanette, but I’m better than Jane, so it works.
After my first paycheck, I mailed a stack of my favorite postcard prints to Nanette. It’s surprising, the relief of saying thank you, even if the thank you is anonymous.
I called Lola from a pay phone to let her know where I was and tried not to listen as she informed me of the latest pretrial injustices they had been subjected to. The credit cards, the cars, the jewelry, all gone.
The art too. Seized. All of it.
It’s taken weeks here in Girona, but now I can think about it without tears. I can do this—walk down the hill, satchel of art bouncing on my hip, and acknowledge without crying that the paintings and sketches and silk screens and sculptures that decorated my childhood aren’t mine. They never were. Somebody else is looking at them now, and me, I’m finding my own.
Kiss Kill Vanish Page 31