Close Reach (15 page)

It would pass the time; it might tell her something.

“This scar,” she said, tracing the rise across Lena’s skin. “How’d you get it?”

She waited while Lena kicked up from the current she was riding. Her face changed as she brought herself from wherever she’d been to the time and the place that gave her the mark Kelly was tracing with her fingertip.

Lena nodded slowly and then whispered.

“It was when I was eighteen. I used to have a sister. Did I tell you?”

“No.”

“She was two years younger. She had a problem called PKD. I can’t think what it stands for.”

“Polycystic kidney disease.”

“Yeah, that. And she was really sick. Like, she was dying. She needed a kidney, but they needed to find one that’d match.”

“So they came to you.”

Lena was whispering into Kelly’s neck.

“My mom was—she was overweight, and her health wasn’t so good. And she drank a lot. So even if she’d been a match, she couldn’t have been a donor. So, yeah, they came to me.”

“What happened?”

Lena thought about it, her thumb rubbing a circle on Kelly’s back as she remembered. Kelly could feel the blood David had drawn from Lena’s finger with the knife. It was wet and sticky against her spine as Lena moved her hand along it.

“They took it out and gave it to her. Like a transplant. And it was fine, at first. But Megan had a lot of problems. She wasn’t, you know, she wasn’t well. She was supposed to take all these drugs, immuno-somethings—”

“Immunosuppressants.”

“—so her body wouldn’t reject the kidney. My kidney. But she didn’t. She had a boyfriend in Glasgow, and she ran off with him. They were staying with friends at first, but then maybe they were living on the streets. Shooting up, all that. I guess you know how she was getting the money.”

Kelly nodded, her cheek moving against the nest of Lena’s hair.

When she’d met Lena for the first time in Peru, treating her chlamydia with antibiotics from
Freefall
’s stores, she’d sensed all this. This hidden history and Lena’s scrabbling fight to walk away from it with her head up. To look at the settled world and think:
I belong.
Maybe that was why she could love this girl, and hold her close under a blanket, and listen to her whisper while they were locked in a cage together at the mercy of men who had none.

It was like talking to herself.

“They found her in the basement of an old factory. She was in a sleeping bag. Had been there maybe a month. Down in the dark, with the rats. I saw the boyfriend once while I was at university. Two, maybe three years later. He was in a bar, and I asked him—I asked why he didn’t take her to a hospital when the infection set in. And you know what?”

Kelly shook her head.

“He just looked at me. He didn’t know who I was, and he didn’t know what I was talking about.”

“Oh, Lena.”

“Anyway, that’s how I got the scar.”

Kelly felt the girl’s tears fall onto her collarbone. She held Lena and marveled at her. The depth of her love, the endless bank of it.

“What about yours?” Lena asked. “This one.”

She brushed her fingertip along the line of Kelly’s neck, just under her jaw. The old scar had healed to a delicate white against the rich caramel of Kelly’s skin. She wore it like a necklace, never trying to hide it. It stood for everything she’d put behind in a distance of years and circumstance, if not miles.

“It’s old,” she said.

She thought about how to tell the story, whether to tell it at all. She decided to go ahead. They were where they were, and a story from the past wasn’t going to make it any worse.

“I was in the eighth grade. We lived in New Haven, in Connecticut. My dad was a cab driver. My mom was working in her brother’s grocery store if they needed extra help. So there wasn’t much, and we lived in a rough part of town. I’d saved all year and signed up for a semester of this after-school science program—”

A door slammed somewhere nearby, and then they heard footsteps approaching across the rocky ground. Lena’s arms squeezed Kelly hard around the waist, and they each scooted backward in the cage so that they were in the far corner, away from the trapdoor.

The footsteps came close to the sidewall of their building and then stopped. Kelly heard a zipper, then the sound of urine streaming onto the stones.

They’re drinking
, she thought.
They’ll wait till they’ve killed half the bottle, and then—

But she stopped the thought in midstream. It wouldn’t do her any good. And if Lena could feel fear coming through Kelly’s skin, it wouldn’t do the girl any good either.

Outside, the stream stopped and the zipper went up. The footsteps crunched away.

After five minutes, Lena relaxed her grip and Kelly could breathe again. She petted her hands through Lena’s hair and down her back, looked through the cage bars at the gray light outside the building, and told her scar’s story.

“I was walking home from school in the dark. Three high school boys in a pickup truck drove past. It was a new truck. They were white kids, not from the neighborhood. They circled back once and honked, then circled again. They’d come looking for pot. Or maybe for someone like me.”

Kelly looked at Dean again. He was still sleeping. The story she’d told him about the scar was true, but it left a lot out. She hadn’t wanted him to expect less of her, to have a shortcut for
thinking of who she’d been instead of who she’d become. What shamed her was not what the boys had done to her but the poverty that had put her in that position to begin with.

“It was snowing. Nobody was on the street. They stopped after passing me three times and rolled down the window. Said they’d drive me home. I knew better, but I was cold. I didn’t have a good coat. Just an old windbreaker, a thrift store thing, and I was cold all the time that winter. I thought the worst that’d happen was they’d want me to smoke pot. Or maybe they’d want to stop somewhere else, like a club. A party at one of their friends’ houses. And if I didn’t like it, if they were mean to me because I wasn’t in their circle, I could just go. So I got in.”

She stopped and thought about it, remembering the way it had gone. They hadn’t even waited till they got to a house.

It started right there, in the truck.

“It’s always worse than you think it could be,” Lena said.

Kelly nodded.

“They took me on a Friday. One of them, his parents were gone. So they took me to his house, kept me through Sunday night. Then they dumped me back where they found me, with nothing but my windbreaker and this cut on my neck from the wire they’d used.”

They’d said all kinds of things that weekend. Called her an Indian ghetto princess and a raghead and a whore. Talked about killing her. Cutting her up and cooking her to see if she’d taste like curry. She’d begged to be let go, and in the end one of them had done it. He’d been the weak one: the cruelest in front of the others but the one with no stomach for it. The others had gone to steal beer, and he’d volunteered to stay behind. To watch her. She thought either he was going to finally kill her with the wire noose and the pillow or he was going to let her go. He’d looked at her for a while as he finished his beer, and then he’d shrugged his shoulders like it was nothing special, and he’d taken her back to Goffe Street. He’d said he’d tell his friends she got away, and she’d nodded. As if it mattered where he’d stand with them later.

At the time, maybe it did matter to her. She’d never figured that part of it out.

When the police brought her father to the hospital, when he saw she had no clothes but her coat, he’d gone white with rage. He hadn’t done anything there. Not in front of the cops, with the nurses surrounding Kelly’s bed. But he hadn’t forgotten it, either. A week later, when she was strong enough to take it, he’d beaten her. Her mother stood in the tiny kitchen and wailed at the water-sagged ceiling as her father worked her over head to toe with his belt and his fists.

She’d spent most of the next four years living on friend’s couches, staying in spare bedrooms for as long as the adults would allow it. There were more consequential scars, deep wounds that in healing had left her barren. But the scar on her neck was the platinum chain that reminded her to walk straight ahead and never look back. To never accept anything but what she’d worked for and to work for everything in sight. She held Lena and watched Dean sleep. He
hadn’t saved her. She’d done that for herself; she’d fought for all she had. Even the charity and the scholarships she’d gotten. But her life with Dean was a measure of how far she’d come, a signpost marking the distance between Goffe Street and Mystic.

She told Lena some of this just to talk, but she was thinking of other things.

Four or five years ago Lena had given a kidney. She’d have been tested first for tissue matching. There would be records of that. Files that could be uploaded and then bounced through space from Scotland to a satellite phone somewhere in the Southern Ocean. Information that could be as dangerous to Lena as the knife in David’s hand.

Sour Breath, who’d brought the soup, came in the early dawn with a wheelbarrow.

Kelly saw the way he paused and cocked his ear toward the other building, listening for sounds. And then she saw the contents of the wheelbarrow. It held a woolen army blanket and a few ratty towels, and there was a cedar bucket of steaming water. The man was doing something he wasn’t allowed to do. She sat higher and looked at him in a new way.

There’d been something different about Sour Breath from the start.

On
La Araña,
he’d been the one who dragged Lena from the trap with a gaff. But he’d been wearing a mask then, and now that it was off, he couldn’t meet Kelly’s eyes. He could watch her, certainly. Could watch her body beneath the blanket, could watch her when she came naked out of the trap to help Dean. His mouth hanging open and his rotten breath fogging around him as he panted. But he looked down or away whenever she looked in his face.

As he pushed the wheelbarrow in, she thought about that, what it might mean.

Lena woke. Sour Breath spoke to her in Spanish, back and forth for a minute or two in a low whisper. He was crouched next to the cage with his right hand cupped by the side of his face.

Then Lena spoke into Kelly’s ear.

“He’ll let you out for a bit. You can bathe Dean and tend him. And you can give him the blanket and a towel to put under his head.”

Kelly’s throat swelled shut. She didn’t want to be grateful to this man. She didn’t want to think this was generous. She began to cry anyway.

“Okay,” she said.

“He’ll give you about ten minutes. After, you and I can bathe. And he’ll let us each go into the corner and use it, you know, like a toilet. If you need to.”

Kelly nodded.

“Tell him I’ll come out and take care of Dean. I’ll be fast. Do I need to leave my blanket, or can I keep it on this time?”

Lena whispered to the man, who answered with a nod.

“You don’t have to leave it.”

“Okay. Tell him I said thank you. Tell him I said he’s doing the right thing and we’re glad for it.”

Lena told him, and Sour Breath nodded again as he knelt and unlocked the trap. In spite
of the tears and the catch in her chest, Kelly knew he was it. He was the weak spot Dean had told her to find. The thing she would have to break to win their freedom. She looked at him, and she decided right then: he wasn’t a man. He was just Sour Breath. A thing. She could destroy a thing and move on without a glance backward. Morality had no part in it. She’d stopped crying but let the tears stay on her cheeks. She looked at the man and pretended a weak smile. He held the door open, and she came out.

* * *

Dean hardly woke for his bath. She pulled the exposure suit off him, its inside foul with blood and urine, with yellowed pus and the stink of infected wounds. She put one of the towels under his head and then stripped him naked and cleaned him as best she could with the hot water from the bucket. It was salt water. She supposed that nearby there must be a place where boiling seawater pooled over the smoking rocks, and the man had simply dipped this bucket in. Dean’s legs had deep, infected wounds where the harpoon had gone through and where they’d snagged him behind his knee with the landing hook.

She cleaned the wounds but had no soap and no antiseptic. His shinbones were broken, but not as badly as she’d feared. The breaks were not compounded: the bones hadn’t torn past muscle or punched through skin. But his shins were bruised black in heavy circles. They’d hammered him with a mallet to break him.

Tomorrow she’d be aboard
Freefall
for the videoconference and would beg to bring back the first aid kit. But for now this was the best she could do. When she was finished, she wrapped Dean in the thick wool blanket and scraped out the rocks from underneath him so he’d have a smooth place to rest. She tossed his soiled clothes toward the wall, where their stench would be far from him.

When she was done, she carried the bucket back to the cage. Sour Breath hadn’t picked up a rock this time. He was beginning to trust her. That was important. She nodded to him, and he returned the gesture. Then Lena crawled from the trap, and the two of them squatted on the rocks at the man’s feet and bathed in the hot seawater from the bucket. It smelled like broken stones and sulfur, like something that had bled from wounded ground. Lena scrubbed her skin with a wet stone until she was pink and steaming, and then she scooped water into her hair and washed it with her fingers. When they were done, they took turns peeing in the corner, and the man watched that, too.