A Fierce and Subtle Poison - Samantha Mabry Page 0,81

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 moment 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.

I spent the night after Rico and Ruben left sitting alone on the beach. The air was unusually thick, and my ears were filled with murmurs from the sea and the trees.

I didn’t hear the sound of the boy’s feet kicking through sand as he approached, but when I looked over my shoulder, there he was. He had to have been about eight or nine years old, with ears that stuck out past his short-cropped dark hair.

In his outstretched hand was a small piece of paper, folded along a neat crease.

“Qué es esto?” I asked.

“Es para tí.”

I pointed at my chest.“For me? De veras?”

He dropped the piece of paper at my feet and took off down the shoreline, toward the flickering lights of a string of small houses in the distance. I unfolded the note, but the light was too dim and the handwriting too bad for me to see what it said. I would have to wait until I got back to my room before I could read it and put it with all the others.

I went back to that story in my head, the one I’d started late last summer and had been building upon ever since. It started with a witch who could grant wishes. There were parts in the middle about girls who disappeared in the night, spirits who guarded a great island, and a scientist gone mad with grief. Two girls I would never get the chance to love would die; both their bodies would get swept out to sea with a storm.

But that won’t be the end. One of the girls will come back. She’ll walk out of the water just before dawn. I’ll be waiting for her. She’ll clutch the front of my shirt with her wet hands, pull me toward her, and kiss me with a mouth that tastes like saltwater. She will be warm.

THE END