Orphans of Paradise Read online

  Chapter 18

  Camilla

  Honduras

  When Camilla opened her eyes she was drowning in the pale yellow stuffing of a bare mattress, blood dripping down her thighs and into the rusting metal springs, morning sifting in through the dusty window. The man who’d beaten her, ripped at her flesh and clothes, was face down in his own vomit, his eyes open, his body completely still.

  She lifted her head, holding it there until the pounding gave way to sight, and listened. The morning was silent save for her own breathing. She was still breathing. She crawled to the edge of the bed, never looking away from his face, from his eyes that had been watching her the moment they went still.

  She searched beneath the doorframe for shadows and quietly moved to the window. She stopped, leaning against the wall until the nausea let go of her and she could think. She pulled the back of her shirt to the front to cover her chest, her arms moving slowly through the stiffness and then she pressed her hands to the window frame and pushed.

  She looked down at the street below and her eyes found the base of the fire escape two windows down. She crawled out onto the ledge, her knees grating along the concrete, nails fighting to break into the rough cement. She kept her head up, eyes never straying below her chin as she reached the railing to the stairs. She took one step and then another, her feet moving slow and silent until she could feel the gravel of the parking lot beneath her feet.

  Her eyes found the spot where the taxi had sat idling, the driver a friend of Esteban’s who shuttled mules to and from the city in exchange for a cut of their runs. There was nothing there now except for a dark pool of oil and chalk gravel displaced in the shape of tires.

  Camilla wondered how long he’d waited, how long before he realized what had happened, what was happening and how long before he decided not to do anything about it. Or did he know before she even got in the backseat of his cab? Maybe that’s why he never met her eyes in the rearview mirror. Maybe that’s why he hardly said a word at all. When dealing with the cartel passivity was key. Unless it was your own life in danger you didn’t move, you didn’t make a sound.

  Camilla stumbled across the road, almost losing her footing as she climbed across the ditch into the trees lining the highway. It was cold, the sun still low and tangled in the branches twisting above her head. When she was far enough into the trees, feet muddy and wet leaves sticking to her bare skin, she stopped, her shoulder grating past the rough bark of a tree as she slumped to her knees. She could still see the white outline of the apartment building, the lines lucid and smeared beneath her tears, and she heaved forward retching into the grass.

  The shadow of his fingers still burned dark against her arms and the inside of her thighs—more bruises blooming below her navel and around her throat. She rose to her feet and used the sound of passing cars along the highway to lead her back to the city, to the small one bedroom apartment that she and her mother shared. Her mother.

  Camilla knew her mother hadn’t slept. She’d probably sat on the end of the bed, fingers parting the curtain at every sound. But she wouldn’t be there when her daughter finally got home. Camilla knew she wouldn’t risk it. She couldn’t. She had to keep her job at the factory, something Camilla hoped would be temporary, only until she started earning enough money herself working for Esteban and the cartel. That was the plan, to transfer the burden, to let her mother rest.

  When Camilla was born they lived on the mountain in the highest point in all of Paloma. Until a fire crawled up from the city, swallowing their slice of the mountainside whole. Their little house covered in a thick mud patchwork and surrounded by wild flowers whose seeds had tumbled down with the wind was the house Camilla’s mother grew up in, the house where her grandparents had lived into old age, where they had died, and where Camilla’s father had stayed for the two months he was commissioned there to help with the construction of a paved road that was never completed. And it was where Camilla was born and where she lived until she was thirteen.

  Now they lived in a one room apartment in the city where the bed wasn’t just where they slept but where they ate their meals, where they ironed their clothes the mountain way with stove warmed blocks, and where Camilla did her homework during the weeks her mother could afford to send her to school.

  In the city every street and every sidewalk was a one-way track where you were always being shoved, pushed forward toward a destination no one ever seemed to finally reach. Camilla felt the eyes on her, stinging hot on her face when she was buying meat at the market or thread for her mother to patch their clothes. They were always watching her, the other mothers with their daughters, the other girls her age, whispering their silent prayers of thanks for their fair skin, the hair they never had to wrestle into submission. They called them mountain people as if it were a caste, as if it meant they’d been soiled somehow and it showed in their dark skin.

  She was a pariah, a deviant. Until she met Esteban—his skin the same russet as hers, the lilt of the mountain breeze fluttering in his voice. The first time Camilla saw Esteban she was standing in the market, her arms burning as she tried to balance the bag of food against her thighs, the bananas and loaf of bread threatening to spill over the top. She’d felt for the thin bills inside her purse, pulling out all of them but two and then watched as the lempira slid across her hand, catching for just a second on her calloused fingers. The vendor handed her back some change and she carefully slipped the coins back in her purse, noticing the faint echo of their collision. And then there he was, kneeling in front of her, the bananas dangling from his finger.

  Esteban was eighteen and had lived in the city for most of his life. He’d assimilated well to the culture, despite having dropped out of school at sixteen, and when he and Camilla walked the streets together it seemed like he knew everyone, and when they talked to him, they looked into his eyes and they shook his hand without an ounce of hesitation.

  It started with him helping to carry her bags. Then he started walking her home, the route always shifting, each day taking longer than the day before. And then he pulled her against an abandoned warehouse, slid his fingers into the hair she barely managed a comb through every morning, and kissed her. It was a hard kiss, fraught and furious—the kind of kiss that didn’t want to be just a kiss.

  Camilla thought of it now, of his lips on her face, his stubble grating across her cheek. She wondered if he would ever touch her like that again but as she stared down at the bruises and wet leaves climbing her legs, part of her hoped that no one ever would.

  When she finally made it home and saw that her mother was gone she felt an ounce of relief. She stood under the showerhead, cold water peeling down her skin and then she lay bare across the mattress, a dark wet bloom sprouting across the sheets. She watched as shadows drifted past the window, dark lines moving slowly across her skin. And for a long time she just lay there waiting for someone to find her. But when she realized she didn’t want to see them when they did, she closed her eyes and waited for sleep.

  Chapter 19

  Veronica

  Argentina

  Clouds slid past the window, static explosions twisting and translucent, the wings cutting right through them. Veronica looked down at the terrain as it rippled from one shade to the next, plot lines and vegetation suturing it into geometric shapes that you could never see from the ground. They passed over huge cities in one beat—cars crawling over highways the size of her thumbnail and landmarks looking more like their plastic replicas than the real thing.

  She could feel Tomas trying to look over her shoulder and she leaned back to give him room. Neither of them had ever flown before or had even driven past an airport. They’d both grown up on the same street in Monte and the closest one was almost an hour away by car. Even commercial flights rarely appeared over their patch of habitable desert. But when they did, Veronica could remember running outside, the concrete hot against her bare feet as she waited for Tomas to meet her at the end of the street j
ust in time to see the stark white belly passing overhead.

  Veronica sat there, quiet, watching as Tomas’ shadow crept over her shoulder. They cut through a band of wind, the plane dipping, and she clutched the seat. But still she couldn’t tear herself away from the view. She felt Tomas’ fingers inching toward her own, one resting over her knuckles while another curled around her thumb.

  “Are you afraid?” he said.

  She felt the last word tugging at her. There was something warm twisting in her stomach but she wasn’t sure if it was fear or his hand on hers or something else.

  “Don’t be,” he said.

  But that current rising under her skin, she liked the way it felt. Whatever it was, fear or Tomas, she didn’t want it to go away. And he never touched her like that. Not when they were kids chasing each other around the church parking lot, not when they walked home from school together when the desert turned to ice, not even at her mother’s funeral.

  Her mother would have loved this, she thought—being suspended, infinity spilling in all directions. Veronica remembered learning about black holes in school, about the theory that the explosion of a star was so powerful that it would rip a new seam in the universe, energy and stardust and undiscovered planets all swirling into nothing.

  And that’s exactly what it had felt like when her mother died. Like she was this flash of light—warm and bright and pouring over everything. And then she was just gone. This dark, winding energy all she’d left behind and for two years they’d been trying to find a way out.

  But maybe this is it. Maybe Rodolfo would introduce Veronica to an agent in California. Maybe a director would notice her standing in line at the supermarket. She could find a job as the girl who always ran into Rosa Sepulveda’s scenes with that dog chasing after her. She was getting older; they’d have to replace her soon. She could become Tomas’ assistant and hail his cabs when he was late for filming. She could send Isa ten new pairs of shoes and she could let her father rest. And maybe, just maybe she wouldn’t be invisible anymore.

  After eight hours just staring out of that small oval window, Tomas’ quiet commentary fluttering against the back of Veronica’s neck, they finally changed planes in Maiquetía, their next stop Miami. She could feel herself drifting and she wanted to close her eyes, to not think about her father or Isa. She didn’t have to wonder what their faces had looked like that morning—she’d seen grief smeared there before. But they would forgive her. When she sent for them, when they could start over, together. They would forgive her.

  But as a torrent of rippling blue swelled beneath the plane—the ocean she’d never seen before spilling into a sky she’d been lost in too many times, she didn’t want to sleep. She didn’t want to close her eyes. She felt Tomas’ lips by her ear, exhale stalled against her skin and then his fingers slipped from hers and found the glass—the two of them absorbing every shade and rippling fold until it churned dark, the night rising in a pulsing watercolor of stars.

  Chapter 20

  Camilla

  Honduras

  Half of the apartment complex had been destroyed in a fire and as the cab pulled into the parking lot the structure stood there exposed, a charred skeleton with its mouth open wide. The only evidence that anything had survived was the faint blue pulse from the remaining tenants’ televisions. Camilla found the entrance and used both hands to guide herself up a flight of stairs, her fingers lingering on the walls as she searched for the room number etched in ink on the back of her hand.

  She found the door, hovered there. Voices bled through the walls. Two men, maybe three. Camilla looked back toward the exit, down into the dark stairwell, but she didn’t move. She could almost hear the cabby’s ticker, could see the numbers scrolling on her fare and she knew she couldn’t waste any more time.

  Esteban went with her most nights. But even though it was dangerous, Camilla preferred to go alone without someone else waiting at the bottom of the stairs or in the parking lot, their hand stretching toward her for their cut the moment she stepped out of the darkness. She waited until the yelling fell to a low buzz and then she knocked. She heard their heavy footsteps, the click of the lock, and then the door opened.

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Esteban sent—”

  And then he dragged her inside, her forearm clenched between his fists.

  “Stop.” Her lips fought to say more but she couldn’t breathe.

  She threw herself at his feet, the nails on her free hand digging into the carpet, and he gripped her scalp. She felt the burning sting of hair being ripped from the root and then she was screaming.

  Camilla dug her teeth into his calf and tried to twist onto her feet but his leg came too fast, burying itself in her stomach. He ripped her up from the ground, dragging her into an empty room before flinging her onto the bed. She pulled her knees to her chest and he climbed on top of her, his thighs pinning her to the mattress.

  “He sends me the fucking…”

  His eyes were wild as he ripped the plastic bag of cocaine from the waist of her pants. The powder trickled free from a tiny hole and the man flung it in a white spray onto the floor. Then one hand gripped Camilla’s throat while the other rang against the side of her face.

  She kicked and writhed, trying to twist herself free but his legs only wedged themselves deeper into her ribs. Then he grabbed the collar of her shirt and twisted it in his fist until it split in two and her chest was exposed. His fingers brushed across her skin and then he twisted her onto her back.

  She’d felt him sinking into her, his crotch buried in the small of her back, his chest pressing into her until she couldn’t breathe and then his fingers slipped. She felt his knees tightening around her and then he lurched forward, vomit trickling down his right arm.

  When the warm mess reached her skin, Camilla screamed, fingers digging into the yellow stuffing of the mattress. And then his fists drove into her, one after the other until she couldn’t feel his legs around her, until she couldn’t feel him on top of her, until she couldn’t feel anything at all.

  ***

  Camilla woke in her mother’s apartment, a hand resting on her shoulder. She blinked, carving her mother’s silhouette from the night. She was still in her factory uniform, the hem of her shirt pinched between her fingers as she traced Camilla’s swollen lips, flecks of a scab peeling off onto the bed.

  “What happened?”

  Camilla held her breath, lips tight. “I’m fine,” she said.

  Headlights flashed across the far wall, spilling across her skin, and she pulled the sheet over her mouth. It hung there, trapping them in its flame, and that’s when she saw the deep bruise that stretched the length of her mother’s forearm stopping in a scabbed scrape near her wrist.

  “Did that happen at work?” Camilla asked.

  “I’m alright,” her mother said, the words just as flat as when her daughter had said them.

  “But where did you get that bruise? How did you cut yourself?”

  “I…I didn’t,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “It’s not a bruise. It looks worse than it is. They’ve been using some new chemical on the plants at the factory and I accidentally got some on my skin.”

  “And it made you bleed like that? What are they using?”

  “Some preserves, I don’t know how you say. But I’m fine. Camilla.” She clutched her waist, trying to hide the bruise.

  “We have to take you to the doctor,” Camilla said, voice quavering.

  That’s where she should have gone. Not there, not home. She knew that. But she was just a drug mule, her injuries an inevitability, the risk a part of the job. The bruises glowing dark against her skin might as well have been self-inflicted. That’s how the doctor would see them anyway.

  “I can’t. I have to work,” her mother said.

  “No. You’re going.”

  Camilla reached for her mother’s thumb, maneuvering her arm back into the light
. The skin there was taught—black and swollen—not like any bruise she’d ever seen. It bled down into her wrist, pulsing like a blister. Camilla let go and her mother pulled her arm to her chest, cradling it there until the car’s engine ticked off and it was finally dark again.

  Chapter 21

  Veronica

  Miami

  The change in turbulence shook Veronica awake, her face in the crook of Tomas’ arm. They were still curled up next to the window, their faces inches from the glass.

  When they finally landed they filed out slowly, their carry-ons clutched to their chests. Veronica had packed the only nice clothes she had, an extra pair of shoes, and a melting package of unopened concealer, some mascara—probably dry from years spent on that convenient store shelf—and a tube of blush colored lipstick.

  She’d mulled over the only two colors that had survived the trek to the desert—a dark red the color of the native’s skin and a blush barely darker than her own. She’d never worn makeup; she’d never needed to. But in the States she was supposed to be someone different and that meant dressing the part.

  She didn’t know what Tomas had brought with him in that old brown satchel but whatever it was she could tell it was important by the way he cradled it against him with both arms. The truth was he already looked like a movie star—all jutting cheekbones and low brooding brow. He was the one who belonged there, not her. That was the real reason he’d never touched her before, Veronica thought, because he knew he was different, because he knew he was better.