The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba - Chanel Cleeton Page 0,64
her is enough to bring the guards running.
“Who is at the window?” she asks.
“N-No one,” I sputter. “I am feeling poorly and came to the window for air.”
Rosa stares at me for a beat, and I can’t tell if she believes me or not. There are moments when it feels as though she is here with us, and others when she is somewhere else entirely, an altogether different sort of prison.
She doesn’t respond, but she lies back on her side, curling her body as though leaving space for another to fit inside the curve.
The low hum of a familiar nursery rhyme my older sisters once sang to me fills the room as she sings to the baby she lost as she so often does.
Tears prick my eyes.
I approach the window once more to tell the men it’s too risky tonight, that the laudanum clearly hasn’t done its job sufficiently. If I’m caught trying to escape, they’ll kill me.
I return to the window, but it’s clear that the men have already figured the same thing out for themselves, because their tools are gone, the bars intact, my hope of escape this evening shattered.
Karl hovers on the side of the building.
“Promise me you’ll return tomorrow night,” I whisper, tears threatening. “Please. Promise me. I cannot spend another night in this place, I cannot—”
“We’ll be back. I promise.” Karl reaches through the bars and squeezes my hand again before he pulls away, leaving me to stare after his retreating back as the men return to the house across the street.
There’s nothing to do but lie down in my bed like the others, even though I doubt sleep will come with the nerves and fear rattling around inside me. To have freedom so close I can taste it and then yanked from me so quickly feels like a cruel thing indeed.
But despite the events of the evening, my eyes eventually close, my body sinking into sleep.
When I dream, I am back home, in the house with the courtyard and the dancing fountain, and in the precious hours when I am asleep, I am free.
* * *
—
The next day begins as ordinarily as all the ones before it, and as much as I worry Rosa will speak of the unusual goings-on last night, she keeps to herself, occasionally cradling her imaginary baby and crooning to it, her thoughts on the past and not on me.
I watch her carefully, waiting to see if there is a moment when she will give me away, and then finally, I ask the question I never thought to ask before.
“Your baby? What is its name?”
Rosa stares through me, and just when I think she isn’t going to answer me, she replies—
“Her name was Maria.”
She walks past me before I can say another word.
Did she lose her daughter before she came here? Or is her body buried somewhere in this place?
How could you move past a thing such as that?
As the day wears on, I do everything I can to keep from arousing suspicion, guilt over drugging my cellmates with laudanum again plaguing me.
Later in the day, I go to make the coffee, the laudanum clutched in my hand, my back to the other women.
Behind me someone calls out—
“I’ve been feeling terribly all day. Perhaps Evangelina used some of that famous beauty and bewitched the coffee.”
My cheeks heat, but before I can turn around and deny it, peals of laughter greet me.
I join in, my shoulders shaking with feigned mirth as I pour the drug into their coffee.
Nineteen
The moon burns bright in the sky, illuminating far more of the night than I’d prefer. The temperature is hot, the air still, the heat bearing down on me.
My room is on the second story of the prison on the Sigua Street side. There is a small window that looks out to the city and opens up to a flat roof that must be about twenty feet wide, hidden from the sight of the street by a high parapet along the front of the building.
Behind me, the women in the dormitory sleep, dreaming laudanum-laced dreams. I increased the dosage from the night before to ensure there would be no repeats of Rosa or any of the others waking, but hopefully not so much as the doctor cautioned would bring about death.
The rhythmic sounds of their breathing are a balm to the nerves inside me.
I stare out at the sky, at the clouds surrounding the moon. There is a movement across the street, and I