Then . . .

The first girl was still alive when he poured the cement into the cavity between the floorboards and the earth. He decanted it tenderly, like wine from a chalice. She managed to raise her hand above the level of the setting liquid and over the course of the next two days, the cement-coated limb turned to stone. He watched the transformation without interval. Viewed it dispassionately. Viewed it the same way he had watched her die.

At length, the sight of the stone hand began to unsettle him. Even when he closed his eyes he could still see that arm and wrist, that palm and halted pulse; fingers curled inward, rising up from the floor as if reaching out for him. Eventually he had to hack it off with a spade. The hand sits on his bedside table now. He uses it to hold his ring, watch, and crucifix as he sleeps. The flesh inside the stone shell has started to corrupt but he does not mind the odor of the rotting claw. It is a comforting smell, like baking bread or mown grass.

With the second and third girls, he made sure their hearts had stopped beating before he began to pour.

By the time he entombed the eighth girl, he had begun to know, almost to the exact hour, when their pulses would give out through lack of food and water. He had begun to know on what day their cries would stop.

This girl is different. She is still alive two days after he expected her to expire. She still has some luster in her eyes.

It is almost as if she believes there is still hope . . .

—

Though she can no longer feel her legs, the girl senses they are drawn up, babylike, pressed against the swell of her gut.

In these moments she fancies that this place, with its wooden roof and bare earth and its dead-animal smell, is a womb. She is an unborn child, protected and embraced by the walls of the cavity in which she squirms.

At other times, she feels that the chamber has the properties of a cocoon. She will be reborn as something magnificent, all effortless grace and dazzling wings.

In such moments, she does not despise her confinement but sees it as the man wishes, as a place where she is safe. She can almost forget the reek of piss and blood and the sensation of scuttling beasts that scamper, multilegged, like disembodied hands, across her unwashed skin.

The man is right, after a fashion. She is safe down here. Her prison is impregnable. She knows the ceiling to be sturdy and immobile, having banged upon it with fists and knees until both were bloodied and numb. She knows that she can only burrow down a few inches into the cold soil before she strikes rock. At first, she had believed herself capable of turning onto her belly, perhaps finding a softer patch of ground where she could begin to tunnel out. But the wooden timbers are only a few inches above her face and the size of her stomach makes it impossible to rotate. So she lies in the dark and the cold, sticking out her tongue and trying to catch the water that dribbles through the cracks between the wooden panels. She savors the tastes of mud and brick, of spilled gas and old leaves.

It has been several hours since she last lapped at the chemical-tasting water that her captor has gently drizzled through the tiny fissures above her face. She has begun to yearn for the pleasant numbness that she has come to associate with its presence upon her tongue. Her thoughts are becoming less fuzzy and the pain in her stomach is turning from a vague ache into something that seems to be tying her intestines to her spine. She realizes that she is choking. Her tongue has rolled to the back of the dark, wet cave of her mouth. For an instant she imagines rolls of fifty-dollar bills, wrapped with a band and pushed down her gullet. And then the image is gone, replaced by flashes of gold that stab into the blackness of her vision with each dry, punishing cough.

She can hear movement up there, the rhythmic thrump-thrump-thrump of the rocking chair as it moves forward and back, forward and back, disturbing the dirt and the dust and the chalky gray powder that carpets the floor and billows down onto her filth-streaked face.

Please, talk to me. Please, don’t give up. I’ll listen. I promise I’ll listen . . .

The sound of the rocking chair stops abruptly. Icy panic fills the girl’s chest and throat.

Footsteps reverberate softly on the floor above her face. A sprinkling of dirt tumbles through the cracks and into her open mouth. She begins to cough again and closes her eyes instinctively as she begins to retch and heave.

She opens her eyes as the hinges creak. Light floods the six-by-six pit in which she has lain these past weeks. It is not a harsh light. It makes her think of old-fashioned photos and oil paintings. It speaks to a part of her that she only half remembers but the voice is strong. She finds her eyes brimming over, emotion pushing on her chest. She finds herself reaching up. She wants to be picked up, like a child, wishes for warm, strong fingers to close upon her wrists and to lift her, effortlessly, from this pit of filth and despair. Through the blurring swirls of her vision, she fancies that she can see her father, with his straight back and his curly hair, his gold cross and colorful shirts. Tries to smell him, to lose herself in the sweat and soap powder and tobacco and rum. She cannot find it. There’s only the stench of herself.

And then him.

Him, with his pale eyes and pale skin and his empty mouth.

She opens her eyes into the thin, sunken face of her captor. He looks like a dead thing. Looks as if he has begun to decompose, only to open his dead eyes and worm his way back into the light.

“Please,” she begs, and it sounds as though there is a foot on her throat. “Talk to me. Please. You can. I’ll never tell. I’ll never say . . .”

She sees herself in the blackness of his pupils. And then she sees, for a moment, the person she was. She has a name. A family. A home. She used to be called Alejandra, but these past years she has answered to Ali. More American, her father said, in an accent thick with the sounds of home.

Her head feels like it is exploding. Memories collide and smash and splinter. She was running through the place her family called Alphabet City. Counting the streets, the way she always did. The early evening sky was silvery-blue, like the blue around St. John’s severed head in the jigsaw puzzle picture that glared down behind the priest as he smiled and twinkled through Mass. Blue like the man’s watch, scratching her wrists as he pushed her down and covered her body with his own. His associate. That was the word he used, that warm night when she looked upon the handsome devil who did things to her that she did not understand and which at first she did not want to stop. Regret came later. Regret and pain, followed by those long months of not knowing what to do or what to say and watching her body change while praying over and over again that nobody else would see the truth of her.

A sudden rasp, almost masked by the casters of the chair. A sudden mechanical noise, and then it feels as though her ears are filling with water as the tomb reverberates around her.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been eight months since my last confession. I have allowed the devil to seduce me on four occasions when I was unable to stop myself from touching my skin in a way that would displease the Lord. I have harbored many impure thoughts. I have thought disrespectfully about the man who calls himself my father. I am grateful for his kindness and yet when he speaks to me I feel a great rage inside me—a hunger for something I can’t describe. I have imagined myself stealing into his room at night and smashing his brains in with a hammer—perhaps driving a nail into his skull as if it were the wrists or feet of our Lord. I do sincerely repent . . . Shush, please, no more . . . I repent of these sins and ask for the strength to not repeat such offenses. Forgive me, Father, for my actions in making this confession. The girl I took had kind eyes and spoke kindly to me. Please allow her torture to cease. She suffers and screams and cries and her skin has begun to repel me. Father, please intercede with our Lord and pray for her agonies to cease so she may rest with Jesus and her sinful flesh can be consumed by this sacred earth. Bless me, Father. Amen.”

Ali pictures the other girl and knows, with an intuition she cannot comprehend, that she once shared this tomb. She sees the girl as a mirror image of herself, beneath the ground, growing weak, fading with each flimsy tick of her heart. She wonders whether the girl still lies next to her. Whether her head is near her own feet so that they sleep top to tail, as her mother used to call it. She wonders whether there was pain in her final moments, or if she flew to heaven as softly as falling asleep.

Ali suddenly remembers a sensation of . . . hollowness. Of being an empty thing, a vessel to be filled. More than that. Exhaustion. Her knees and back ached. She was scrubbing floorboards. Floorboards that were almost golden. Floorboards in which she could see her face. Mama had been skinning poblano peppers that morning. The apartment would smell of sofrito verde. There was homework to be done but nothing she did not enjoy. History. English. But then it rolls over her again, that memory of wrongness. That sensation of unease, like a patch of dampness on her clothes or a stone in her shoe. She remembers pain. Remembers sitting alone in the bathroom and weeping into her hands. Her mind fills with traffic and neon. That night. That night . . . running down the alley off Avenue C, four streets from home, safe in Alphabet City, in these streets of guns and dealers which her father still called Loisaida, and where she never felt afraid.

In the mirrors of his eyes, she sees herself clearly. She lies on her back, face twisted upward, bare legs drawn up to her belly. She is dressed in rags and she senses that her black curly hair looks like the hide of a long-dead bear.

Strong hands close around the bare skin of her wrists. She makes little noise but for a strangled gasp as she is pulled upward, jerked into a sitting position and lolling in this unfinished grave like a puppet.

For an instant, she sees the room. Brick fireplace. Wooden walls. A solitary wooden chair and a table with a tape recorder. A three-seater sofa, covered in magazines. Empty food cartons and discarded clothes. A wall, crammed with books. And mirrors. So many mirrors . . .

He pulls her upward and suddenly the pain is not in her arms. The whole lower half of her body seems to contort with agony and the sensation gives her strength. She resists the tugging on her limbs. Instead she gives in to the crippling pain encircling her whole lower half. And then she is free, slumping back into the hole in the ground as her captor steps back, anxious to avoid the gush of liquid that sprays down her legs to splatter her round, rippling belly.

“My baby,” she says, as memories flood her like daylight. “Please!”

The light is snatched away as the lid of her prison slams shut. Her scream bounces back and forth between the wood and the earth until she is a lost in an echoing tomb of her own cries.