The next day I was to meet Solomon at the café and together we would go to the university, where he would show me my new home, introduce me to my classmates and elevate me to a new status—one I probably didn’t deserve. I listened to his plans, nodded, inclined my head, but they were words, words, words and I couldn’t bring pictures of this new life to my mind. That, in itself, should have been a warning.
When I returned to Purgatory Palace, I squeezed into the alleyway, stood on the overturned bucket and tapped on Candela’s window. A few minutes later, the front door to the building opened, and Candela stood in front of me, her eyes watery, her nose red. I followed her into the building, past Ofelia’s closed door. Candela didn’t look at me. She climbed onto her bed and lay down with her face to the wall. I stood by the door and slowly closed it. My violin case rested in the corner of the room, and when I opened it, the coins I had earned that day still lay on the bottom. I placed my violin on top of the coins and closed the case.
“So, are you going to live with him?” she said. Her voice was low and hoarse.
“He’s a professor of music at the university. He wants to teach me.”
Candela sat up straight on the bed. I hadn’t seen this Candela before. Her face was scrunched around the nose, her mouth pursed tight, her eyes narrowed, her cheeks sucked in. I took a step back.
“And you believe him. I thought you were smarter than Rosa. I thought you had talent and goodness. I thought you would be the one friend who stayed, but you’re just as moronic as she is. I hope this life you’ve chosen makes you miserable. I never want to see you again!” She screamed the words at me. Her fists were tight balls, and her face was the color of the blood stain on my mother’s slip. She threw the rest of that day’s money at me, the coins rolling around the room.
Panic flittered in my chest.
“It’s not like that,” I said. “He’s writing a contract…”
“Whisper. No one offers opportunities and hope to people like us. No one. We have to make opportunities for ourselves.
But you don’t have to believe me—find out for yourself. Just don’t expect me to be here, waiting to put you back together again when you realize what this guy wants from you.” She turned her head away, toward the wall, and wouldn’t answer me even when I said her name three times.
I picked up the few coins that had landed by my feet and tucked them into my shoe. I took the picture off the wall that Candela had made for me and slipped it into my violin case along with my birth certificate, the only validation that I existed in this world. Now I had no home, no friends and a promise that might be empty.
I thought of what I could say to her, what I could murmur softly that would fix this, but words were hard for me and I couldn’t think of anything. My throat felt closed and tight. I opened the door and shut it behind me.
Ofelia, in a lumpy purple robe and gray slippers, stood at the front door of the building, her back to me. She turned her head when I closed the door to Candela’s room.
“Well, speak of the devil,” she said with a thin, watery smile.
When Ofelia stepped aside, I could see the two police officers standing outside the door.
“That’s her,” said one of them. “She matches the description.” This officer was skinny, with pointed cheekbones, a pointed chin and a pointed nose—even his eyes looked sharp.
“She’s the one,” said the other officer. He looked younger than the other, with rosy cheeks and a red-tipped nose. Both men wore green-and-white uniforms that reminded me of lizards and grass snakes.
“Now I’ve got to fill that damn room again,” Ofelia said.
“You’re under arrest,” the older man said to me.
The police officers stepped aside, a narrow passageway opening between them. I stared at my feet, my brown shoes that would carry me to the next place. My options had disappeared like earthworms, sucked back into the ground where they had come from as if they’d never been there at all.
I walked down the hall and away from Purgatory Palace, a police officer on each side. They led me to the car. The younger man opened the door and waited for me to climb in.
The car smelled of dirty bodies, overripe fruit. A musky odor that reminded me of Astatla upset my stomach. I turned to the side, ready to run. The older police officer pushed against my back, and my head hit the frame of the car right above the door. He pushed me again and I found myself lying on the back seat, my violin beneath me, my belongings scattered on the floor. The two men slid into the front seat so quickly, so fluidly, that the car was rumbling and jerking before I understood that we were moving.
Blood dripped from a gash on my forehead. I wiped it away with the sleeve of my sweater. My insides were twisted into a tight fist, but no tears came to my eyes, no cry came from my throat. I thought about Jeremia’s wolf sitting by his dying friend, how silent and forlorn she had seemed, and for the first time I understood that feeling. Nothing was sure in this world. The memorabilia on the floor of the car meant no more than Solomon’s offer, a cloud of possibility that had dissipated.
I had cried in embarrassment when the hot cocoa had dripped out my nose, and I felt the sting of tears now as the loss overwhelmed me. But we drove away, and my tears didn’t change anything.
We drove past the town square, where the fountain with angels was lit by lights from below. We arrived at the police station in minutes. The police station looked like the twin sister of Purgatory Palace, a low, squat, stone building covered in scrawled words. The older police officer grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the back of the car as if I were about to resist, as if I’d be able to run away and save myself, as if I had anywhere to go. Two women in short skirts and big hair were shouting horrid words through the entryway to the police station. An unwashed man in a sloppy gray coat that hung past his knees was chanting a song under his breath, a tuneless rhythm about a dog bite. These were the people I fit with. These were my new companions.
I blinked at the brightness inside the police station. The front room contained a few desks, people behind these desks and milling people, all ripe with odors that made me hold my breath. The walls were an empty, impersonal gray. Anyone could disappear into walls like that.
“Assault,” the older police officer said as he pushed me toward a hard wooden chair by the first desk. The woman behind the desk didn’t look up. Her computer screen displayed words, numbers and strange images that disappeared, reappeared, changed and returned like flashes of lightning. She clicked at a row of letters under her fingertips.
The computer hummed, rumbled and emitted beeps and clicking chirps, a living entity with no softness. The woman asked me questions—name, age, date of birth, occupation—and typed my responses into the computer. I swallowed my whisper and spoke over the noises in the room. When I said “musician” for occupation, she coughed a dry laugh, and then her fingers tapped and the word appeared on the screen. When she asked about my address, my home, and I couldn’t answer, she looked at me.
“Your mom’s been here for a while, a regular attendee. You guys can have a family reunion. You look just like her.” When she laughed loudly, her chin disappeared into her neck. Her hair was the color of the berry from the dogwood tree, and her skin looked flaky and old under a coating of white powder. My mother was not here.
I was being charged with attacking the man in the store who had put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me away from the beautiful coat. My imprisonment would be for a month unless I was able to come up with bail. They told me that someone had to pay two hundred dollars to get me out of jail, the cost of a month’s stay at Purgatory Palace, the cost of two months’ pay that I owed Celso, the cost of two beautiful green coats that reminded me of forests.
They pressed all my fingers against a black inkpad and then recorded the print my fingertips made on a piece of paper where all my information had been printed in neat, perfect type. They took my picture against a white background, then told me to turn to the side. I had never had my picture taken before—my deformities would now be visible to those who had never even met me.
“I’ll take her to her cell,” said the younger police officer. I was glad that it would be him—his rounded cheeks were gentle, not angled like the older one’s.
He pointed to a door at the back of the room, and I moved toward it. An old woman with no teeth was being asked questions at another desk. When I walked by, she reached out and scratched the back of my hand. I looked at the line of red that appeared on the top of my hand, but I avoided meeting the eyes of this woman I’d done nothing to. The police officer reached around me and opened the door, and I looked down a long flight of stairs. The stairs were made of stone, like the outside of the jail, and twisted and turned downward. The smell of dirt and urine wafted up.
I put my right hand against the wall to steady myself. I wasn’t shaking, but I felt tired—very, very tired.
“I’m Officer Nicholas,” he said. His footsteps fell heavily on the stairs behind me, spurring me on into the darkness below. Small lights jutted out of the wall—lights that gave off a white glow with no warmth. I’d always thought of the earth as a warm refuge from the chill of the night, but the air in this place grew crisp as we descended.
When we got to the bottom, I stood in front of a row of locked cages with metal bars that reached from the ceiling to the floor. No windows broke the darkness with rays of warm yellow light. I heard a moaning that made the hair on my arms stand up.
The first two cages housed silent, staring men who watched our progress, their clothing so worn and old it fell in strips over their bodies. The moaning was coming from the next cell, from a heap of clothing in the far corner.
“Lizzy, shut up already. You want to scare your new roommate?”
The pile of rags rocked back and forth, but the noise didn’t stop. Gray hair, curled and matted like discolored yarn, was all that was visible of the woman inside the heap. Officer Nicholas opened the cell door and waited for me to enter. I took a couple of tentative steps into the cage.
“Oh,” he said. “I need that instrument and that sack of stuff.”
My hands tightened around the mouth of my small sack. And then my breathing sped up, my heart began to thump, my shoulders hunched. Through all the questions, the giving of my fingerprints, the taking of pictures, I had not felt the tears burn, but now, when he was about to take the last few items that defined who I was and where I’d been, I choked and coughed on my swelling throat and flooding tears.
“I need this,” I whispered.
“Sorry. Can’t have it. No belongings in the jail cells.”
“But there’s nothing in here, nothing I could hurt someone with or hurt myself with. The violin was a gift.” I could hear the pitch of my voice begin to rise. I felt ashamed—frantic and embarrassed.
Without asking again, Officer Nicholas took the sack away from me and pulled on the violin strap. When he dragged the strap off my shoulder, the violin began to slide down my back. I clung to the strap with my right hand, envisioning the instrument hitting the floor and snapping in half, my life torn in two.
“Got it,” he said. His hands were on the violin case, and he lowered it to the floor. I stepped out of the strap and into the cell. When I turned around, Officer Nicholas locked the cell door and walked away with my only possessions. My violin and small sack of belongings would sit on a desk at the bottom of a stone hole. Now all that remained of me was a deformed face, a carved violin around my neck and a stained slip that warmed my legs. The stones seeped cold through my sweater and rough cotton pants, and the floor offered nothing but hardness. There were two benches in the room and a bucket.
A month.
I sat down on the bench nearest to me. It was pushed up against the metal bars of the next cell, a cell with a woman in it. This woman had red circles painted on her cheeks and blue arches over her eyes. I turned my back to her, pulled my knees up to my chest and curled around myself, wishing I had a blanket to wrap around me. This was it—all I was, all I had left. I was a husk now, an empty nest, and even though I was broken and deformed, no one would rescue me or fit their body against mine. I knew this.
I woke when I felt hands in my hair. Lizzy stood in front of me, layers of tattered clothing hanging from her like vulture feathers.
“Black rain,” she said.
I looked into her face, into her toothless mouth. I slid along the bench, and when I got to the end, I stepped off and stumbled to the door of the cage. She watched me. She didn’t try to grab me. She didn’t run after me with clawing fingers, scratching and tearing. Her crooning had stopped, but the white lights from the stairway threw shadows under her eyes and made her sunken cheeks almost skeletal.
“Don’t like what you see?” She put her hands on her hips and offered me a smile of missing teeth and blackened gums. The bars pressed against my back, locking me in as I tried to wedge myself into the corner away from her.
“What you so scared of, lovey? Old Lizzy won’t hurt you.”
She took plodding, careful steps toward me. I balled my hands into fists. When she was a step away, she smiled and cackled a low, creaking laugh.
“Lizzy knows you, and you know Lizzy.”
I shook my head. My breath came fast and shallow. I needed Rosa, someone hard and worn—someone who knew how to protect herself, to lash out and slash. Candela wouldn’t have put up with anything from this woman, and here I was, cowering in the corner.
“Lizzy and you are the same.”
I shouted so loudly, the echo from my voice, from that one word, bounced back at me, nasal and harsh. The word itself seemed to mock me. “NO.”
She cackled loudly, her mouth wide open, an irregular circle. I covered my ears with my hands and squeezed my eyes shut. I screamed over top of her laugh. I screamed until my voice became hoarse. I squeezed my eyes shut tighter and slid down the bars to sit on the floor, crouching there until my arms ached from being held to my ears and until my back developed indentations from the bars behind me. When I couldn’t stand to keep my arms wrapped around my head, I dared to open my eyes.
Lizzy was asleep on the bench where I had originally sat, her snores rhythmic and calm. She was not me. That woman was not me. I would never croon in the corner of a jail cell, reek of urine, lose my sanity—she was not me, even though her face looked exactly like mine.