A misunderstanding. A missed understanding. I can’t think. I hear Rey getting upset with the police officer, but it washes over me, too much noise. Gabi would never leave with a stranger. That means it must be someone she knows.
Rey sits down heavily beside me. “I can’t report her missing because I’m not her guardian or parent. Asshole probably thinks it’s a prank. Jesus.” She presses her hands into her head. I don’t move and I don’t speak. I’m afraid I’ll break.
“Listen. When Dad and Indranie get my messages, they’ll come right home.” Rey called her father; I called Indranie and Traci. We have left messages everywhere we could. I don’t know how long Gabi has been missing, but I have known about it for ten minutes, and already I cannot breathe properly.
“Dad will call the police and get shit done. It’s not completely useless being a pillar of society.”
“It doesn’t matter. No one will care about one more illegal girl,” I say.
“Don’t say that! That’s not what she is.” Rey’s voice is so sharp I know she doesn’t believe it. The sharper the protest, the less the faith.
“Who is going to find her? Care about her?” I ask.
Rey’s agitation grows, mirroring mine. I can feel her shaking beside me—can she feel me falling apart? “If we could just figure out what happened.”
“I know what happened.”
Rey searches my face. “You do? What happened? Who took her?”
“La Mala Suerte.”
“La what?”
“Bad luck.” I make a face. It sounds silly when I say it in English. Bad luck. As if I’ve only lost a key or missed a bus. “La Mala Suerte is always taking things from my family. Now she’s taking Gabi.” I hold my head with both hands. When that does not help, I dig my fingernails into my scalp.
Rey sighs, leaning into me. “No, no, no, Marisol. That’s just your head playing games with you. Believe me, I know.” She reaches her arms to me, but I cannot be still anymore. I stand, exasperated. Where before I could barely move for fear of breaking, now I feel if I stop moving, the earth will stop turning.
“You don’t understand. La Mala Suerte is real. I don’t mean she has a body and arms and legs. She works through real people. She makes things happen.”
“Why?”
“There is no why! It just happens.” I double over, forcing the air from my lungs. Family. Home. Love. Nothing can be mine. I gasp and gasp, falling to my knees.
“Marisol!” Rey’s voice is farther away than it should be. I can’t see Rey’s face or the Warner house anymore.
* * *
Liliana opens the door, her face as cold as the moon.
“Where’s Gabi?”
I stand at the open door to Liliana’s house. I didn’t think I’d have to see her again. Her little dog, Bonbon, yips at her feet.
“She’s not here,” she says, turning away from me.
“Mamá said she left with you. What did you do to her?” I follow her inside her house. She hasn’t invited me in. She never has. I was too stupid to wonder why. Why we stayed in public places, why she didn’t want to be alone with me.
Liliana’s hair is tied back, her face clean of makeup.
“I did Gabi a favor.” She clutches un trapo to her chest, a bottle of Actichlor in her hand.
“My mother is scared, Lilí. I’m scared. What did you do to Gabi?” My voice is too soft, too fragile, when I want to sound harsh.
She puts the cleaner and rag on the table, and leans against it for strength. I don’t recognize this defeated person. “Your sister won’t be confused like us.” Liliana looks up at me. “Don’t you want that? Don’t you want her to be happy?”
“I want her to be herself.”
“You mean, you want her to hate herself.”
“Is that what you do?” I step closer to her, but she pushes back, knocking over the cleaner. The smell of bleach spreads through the room.
“Yes! Don’t you?”
I thought I knew her. I thought she knew me.
“No.”
Liliana is on her knees, putting the cap back onto the bottle of Actichlor, wiping the spill with the rag. “You should,” she says bitterly.
“¿Qué hiciste?” I ask. My body seizes, hot and cold.
“I made her beautiful. I dressed her and did her makeup. I gave her tacones, un brasier como la gente.”
I can’t imagine it. My little Gabi dressed in Liliana’s clothes, her shoes, and bra.
“I turned her into a woman.”
“She’s just a kid,” I spit. “You turned her into una puta.”
“Better to be a whore than to be dead,” she shouts.
I freeze.
Liliana stands, her pants wet with bleach.
“Marisol, don’t you see? Antonio wants her. It means she will have everything. Clothes. Money. Protection. Don’t you want that for her?”
I shake my head violently. “No. Pablo would never let it happen.”
“He already has. Pablo no quiere dos lesbianas en la familia. One in the family is enough. He’s going to make sure Gabi isn’t like you.”
I look at her. She is more beautiful than ever. It makes me hate her more. ¿Quién dice que la vida es justa?
“Like us,” I say.
“No. I’m not like you. Not anymore.” She wipes the tears from her face with her fist. I almost pity her.
“Where is she?” I grab her by her ponytail, finally finding my rage. Her gasp of pain means nothing to me.
“Pablo took her. I only dressed her.”
“Where is she, Lilí? Where is Gabi?”
“It’s too late. They took her to el Club. She’ll be better off in the end.” She smacks my hand away, then holds it. To stop me or to pull me to her, I don’t know. “If I were you,” she says, “I’d worry about myself.”
* * *
I snatch my hand away and smack my elbow into the glass table so hard I’m afraid I broke it.
I blink back tears. When my blurry eyes clear, it is Rey’s startled, worried face I see. I know I have been caught, tangled in the past. My heart races as it did that day.
I pull myself back, sitting on my heels. I try to mimic calmness.
“Antonio’s men took Gabi,” I say between struggling breaths.
“Who?”
I close my eyes. I don’t want to see the judgment on her face. “Antonio. He was the leader of a gang in my hometown. He killed my brother.”
“Shit.”
I cannot afford to fall into the past again. When I try to forget, to pretend it didn’t happen, the past comes after me like a nightmare.
“And I killed him.”
Rey’s voice is soft. “You killed a gang leader?”
I open my eyes. “It was not because I wanted to. I had to.”
“I believe you.” Where’s her judgment? Where’s her disgust? “Jesus,” she says with a tiny lift of her lips. “You are a badass.”
“Because of me, we had to run away. I had to take Gabi, or they would have killed us. My mother went to her sister’s house far in the country to hide.”
“The one with the goats?” Rey is beside me on the floor. We’re crammed between the sofa and the glass table. But it feels safe here. She holds my hand.
“Yes. Then we left with the coyotes.”
“What?” Rey’s face is tight with concentration.
“The men who take you into the US. The ones you pay for a chance.”
“But how would they get here? The gang, I mean? When it was so hard for you to get here?”
“Nothing is hard when you have money and guns. They come for la revancha, to take the one thing away from me that I can’t live without.” Every organ in my body is waiting. Every thought in my head is frozen. There is no reason to go forward. I want to d
ie.
Rey shakes my shoulders. When I don’t look at her, she grabs my face in her hands, forcing me to pay attention. “Stop, Marisol. Just stop.”
I stare at the purple smudges under her eyes. The way her lips almost don’t meet. She is here with me.
“You’re freaking out,” Rey says. “Not that I blame you. With the shit you’ve had to deal with, I don’t blame you for thinking the worst. But maybe this time, it’s not the worst.”
I feel like I’m blind, even though I can see Rey’s face, see the room we sit in. What could this be if not the worst?
Rey gently strokes my hair, holding me tightly to her shoulder. I think she is afraid I will fall away if she doesn’t hold on. She is right. “Didn’t you tell me Gabi wanted to go to a party?”
I am slow to answer. “Yes. This party of Juliette’s that wasn’t real.”
“No. Before that. She wanted to go to a boy-girl party. Some kid named Justin or Julian, remember?”
I remember arguing with Gabi when I barely felt like myself. I remember her being so angry with me.
“Jake,” I say. “His name was Jake. He was in high school. A freshman.”
“Okay. So, what if they just went to a party?”
I shake my head. It can’t be that simple. “Gabi would never do that.” But there is a doubt in me. I’m not sure anymore of what she would or would not do. I’ve spent too long pretending she’s a baby. “What if she did? How can we find her?”
“Okay. Stay here. Don’t move. Don’t think. Do breathe, okay?”
I nod.
She crosses to the kitchen and starts opening drawers. “There’s usually a directory or something that the schools send home. So you can call other parents and invite them to parties, that kind of thing.”
I did not know this. “I should have done that,” I say.
“No. You’re done with blaming yourself. You have reached your maximum quota. Try again tomorrow.”
In a moment, Rey settles herself next to me again with a little orange book in her hands. She opens to the back, where the older kids’ names and numbers are listed.
“Well, shit. Every kid is named Jacob that year.” She turns a page. “But this guy . . . he lives less than a mile away.” She looks at me. “Could Gabi and Juliette have walked there?”
“Walking is nothing to Gabi,” I say. I’m getting hopeful, and I know I shouldn’t. Could it be true that Gabi is only at a party?
Rey calls the number listed in the book but only gets a voicemail.
“That could mean they’re not home, or it could mean they don’t want anyone to know they’re home.” She taps the booklet against her lips. “Okay, let’s go.” She pushes against the table to stand up.
“Go where?” I am bewildered by too many emotions, as if I am wearing the cuff again. As if I’m being hit with waves and I don’t know where I am. Rey holds out her hand to me. Not to hold it but to help me up. My legs tremble as I stand. I fear I will fall.
Rey hugs me hard. “Let’s go get Gabi.”
Chapter 32
I barely remember getting into the little car, or leaving the carriage house. Rey’s hand tugs on my shirt, and I take it gratefully.
If Rey is right and Gabi and Juliette walked to Jake O’Brien’s house, they walked through private gardens and climbed over fences. We have to drive a long way around. Not all the houses in this neighborhood are as big as the Warners’. There are a few that are, incredibly, bigger. Jake O’Brien’s house is one of them.
We park in front of a fountain. It is like el Museo de Arte, with statues on either side of a huge wood and glass door. The door is unlocked.
I don’t know what I expected, but it was not this quiet entryway of marble and polished wood. Beautiful flowers in a vase almost as tall as Gabi. It looks nothing like the time on Cedar Hollow when Aimee’s parents went to Switzerland and Amber threw a party in her friend’s house without her permission. Amber’s friends broke things, no, trashed things. You trashed the place, Aimee angrily accused Amber. I remember because I wrote the word down, surprised that it could be used as a verb.
Nothing in America is like Cedar Hollow. It was a fantasy I kept alive for too long. I never realized how much I needed it to be real. Aimee and Amber with their containable drama, their incredible safety. How I wanted it to be real.
“She isn’t here,” I say, heartsick.
“Hold up,” Rey says. She’s listening intently, and I listen too. Far away, as if it is in another house, I hear music.
Rey’s smile is a satisfied line. “Looks like Jacob O’Brien has a basement lair. Come on,” she says, pulling me toward the faint music.
In a kitchen twice as large as Mrs. Borges’s kitchen, Rey opens a door to a stairway. The music becomes much louder.
“Have you been here before?”
“No. I’ve been in places like this. Brace yourself. Jacob O’Brien has terrible taste in music.”
“Don’t make jokes,” I snap. My stomach feels full of víboras, a ball of them, sliding over each other, biting me from the inside. If she isn’t here—
“It’s going to be okay,” Rey says, and pulls me down the carpeted steps, not letting me give in to the snakes in my barriga.
This basement is not like any sótano I have ever seen. I didn’t expect it to have a dirt floor, to have barely enough space to stand, to smell of mold and spiders—I knew it would be different, from the pure white carpet on the steps, but it is even more than I could have imagined. It looks like a hotel. There are people everywhere—not puking in corners or breaking vases like on Cedar Hollow. They are playing games. Video games in one corner, with a TV as wide as the wall, and card games at a large table in the middle of the room that looks like it belongs in a casino. A long bar runs the length of the room. Girls in silvery dresses sit in high leather chairs drinking cloudy pink drinks. And everywhere there is music, murmurs, and laughter.
“This is not the right party,” I say. “We made a mistake.”
“No. This is right. I know some of these kids. A few are twelfth graders slumming it,” Rey says.
The basement is as large and as wide as the house above it. And beyond this room are smaller rooms, each full of people. I don’t even know how I would find Gabi. Most of these kids would look right at a bar in a city, or at a dance club. My Gabi should stand out like a thumb. But I don’t see her anywhere.
“We need to split up,” Rey says as she scans the room. “I’ll check those rooms over there. You look here.”
I grip her hand reflexively.
“You’ll be okay. You have your phone. I put my number in it.”
“When?” I reach in my pocket for the phone.
“This morning. When you were sleeping.” A quick smile warms her face. “When I was worried you’d freak out and run. I wanted you to be able to call me.”
I look at the phone. Rey has put a picture on the screen. Before, it was a simple blue screen. Now it is a picture of Gabi, grinning up at me.
“No llores,” she says awkwardly, her terrible accent beautiful to me. She presses a kiss to my lips before moving through the crowd as if she belongs here. I feel like I’ve fallen through a hole into a strange world. Like Alicia in Wonderland. Any moment someone will notice the mistake of me and ask me to leave. I put my head down and keep my phone clutched in my hand. Find Gabi. Find Gabi. That is all I need to think about.
I walk around the largest room, peeking into groups of people, boys and girls, sometimes two or three sitting on each other’s laps, laughing. Sometimes there are couples kissing, but mostly they are pushing at each other, teasing. I look for Juliette’s shoulder-length hair, for Gabi’s dark braid. I look for kids in a grown-up world.
“You want a drink?” A boy stands in front of me holding up two bottles of beer like they are fish he’s just caught. He has a messy grin,
and his blond hair is smeared with sweat. He tips from side to side, as if the room is spinning. I suppose it is for him.
“No, um, no, thank you.” I try to move past him, but he steps in front of me.
“You sure? I’ve got an extra for a pretty girl like you.”
I scowl at him.
He pulls back, unsteady. “Cold bitch, huh? Okay, whatever,” he says, and turns away. I push him as I pass, hard, just for the pleasure of seeing him fall down.
I am terrified that I have made a mistake. That Gabi isn’t here and we’re wasting time.
Then I see her boots—the ones that Indranie bought her and that she’s worn almost every day since—in a heap with other shoes.
“Gabi!” I yell. One girl, in a T-shirt and high heels, turns to look at me. No one else notices. I scan the group of people near the discarded shoes.
Am I losing my mind? Are these boots very common and I’m seeing the things I want to see?
I open a door near the boots, but it’s a bathroom. I try the next. It’s a room with a washing machine, warm and smelling of soap. I feel worse than ridiculous. I am wasting time. I look for Rey. Maybe she has found Gabi. Or maybe Gabi was never here.
“GABI!” I scream. The girl with the high heels turns to look at me. I turn away, my face on fire, and bend to look at the black boots.
“Hey, you okay?”
I whirl around to find the girl with the high heels looking at me. I take a deep breath to find my words. “My sister. I can’t find her.” This girl has long black hair with dyed blue ends.
“Who’s your sister?”
“Gabriela. Gabi. She’s only twelve. She ran away from home.” That is a little true.
“Ahh, I get it. She snuck out and came here, huh? Jake is not the most discerning host.”
“I don’t know Jake.”
“Really? I thought my little brother knew everyone. Have you checked the game room?”
“Where is that?”
She points to another door. “My dad’s a freak about the Persian in there—no-shoe policy.”
The Grief Keeper Page 25