Whisper (15 page)

In the morning I made breakfast and then returned to the lean-to. I wanted to sweep in the daylight, dust the edges of the room before starting this day's bread making. When I returned to the house, David stood in the kitchen, his hands kneading and turning the contents of a large bowl. His hands were coated in flour, his face had a slight dusting, and his shoulders rotated in rhythm with his hands. I dropped the basket for dirty clothes inside the door and stood beside him in the kitchen. As I watched his hands turning and kneading, the muscles in his arms tensing and releasing, I understood that this was not new to him.

“You almost had it,” he said. “The last batch would have worked if you'd ignored Mateo.”

“You don't need me to bake the bread.”

“Yeah, we do. Dad doesn't want anyone to know I'm doing woman's work.”

I continued to watch his hands and could see the confidence and enjoyment he found in doing this. It soothed me to watch him, and I leaned against the stove.

“But they'll send you away if you don't do the bread right, and if you don't stop making Dad mad.” David's dough was soft and stretchy, matching the pictures next to the recipe.

“Where will they send me?”

“The city. And I like what you did to Mateo yesterday. He deserved it. He needs it. Mom used to keep him in line, but there's no one to do that now. I want you to stay here.”

Tense, release. Tense, release. The dough was smooth and malleable, not sticky or flaky. His movements mesmerized me. When a shadow stretched across the square of sunlight from the door, I looked up, blinking, waking from the calming movement of David's kneading. A dark shape stood in the doorway—I couldn't see the person's face with the light behind him, but David stopped his movements, pulled away from the bowl and stood trembling against the refrigerator door. I stood in front of David and waited.

The man took a step into the room, out of the sunlight, and now I could see the heavy brow, thinning hair and deepset eyes of Celso, Belen's brother. The man who'd chained me to the doghouse. David breathed hard behind me.

“David, David, David,” Celso said, his voice singsong, light and teasing. His eyes didn't match the tone, though, and I moved closer to David. “I've told you before, kid, you're not cut out to be anyone's protector, not even your reject sister's. Making the bread for her, were you?”

A squeak entered David's breathing, a high-pitched wheeze that sounded almost like the buzzing of the cicada. The rhythmic squeaks began to increase in speed until there was barely a pause between them. David held my arm, and then he slid to the floor, his other hand against his throat, his breath coming in gasps. Celso pushed me out of the way and stood over David.

“And look at you now. Can't even breathe. Your mother never should have taught you how to bake the bread.”

I turned on the cold water at the sink and ran a cloth under the tap. I knelt next to David and wiped at his face, around his eyes, around his mouth. He stared up at Celso, his eyes huge, his breath ragged. The cool water on the cloth didn't seem to help, but I kept wiping at his face while Celso watched, a half smile on his face.

“Like brother, like sister. You two are both damaged, he with asthma, you with ugliness.”

I stood then and pushed Celso in the chest so hard I grunted and he fell, landing on his back in the doorway to the house. I bent down again and wiped at David's face. He could no longer see Celso, but as he watched me, his breath began to slow, began to lose its squeak, and the skin around his lips became pink again instead of blue.

When a shadow stretched through the room, sending its darkness like a blackened cloud over us, I leaped to the side and David raised a hand to shield his eyes. Where I had been the moment before, the flash of a blade came down as Celso swept his knife through the air above David. I crouched now, hands out, and he charged at me, but I leaped aside and ran through the kitchen and out the front door.

I could hear him breathing hard, almost growling, but as soon as my feet touched the grass, I knew I could outrun this man. I could run back to the camp in the woods and never see this village again. But then he would use my running away as an excuse to torment my camp family, and he had probably been tormenting David for years. I slowed my feet, turned and faced the man with the knife.

He charged at me with the momentum of a rolling boulder. He was lumpy and slow with his body but quick and sneaky with his hands. When he ran at me with the knife pointed to my chest, I stepped to the side and he pushed past, but his hand reached for me, grasping my arm and pulling me with him down to the earth, where my shoulder hit hard against the ground. His hold loosened, and I stood quickly.

He rolled, lumbered to his feet and switched the knife to the other hand. His chest heaved, like the dying wolf's in our campsite. I bent my knees, held my hands out from my sides and waited. David appeared on the small porch, one hand steadying himself in the doorway, the other hand on his chest.

Celso barreled at me, the knife flashing, and cut a groove in the palm of my hand. I gasped and stumbled over the lumps in the grass, falling hard. He came at me again, his face angry and mottled, his knife pointed at me and glinting in the light of the sun. I should have run, escaped to the woods when I'd had the chance.

I curled into a ball, held my hands over my head and waited. When the gunshot came, Celso stopped. Djala stood at the end of her porch, pointing her rifle between me and Celso.

“My eyesight ain't too good, Celso. Wouldn't want to hit the wrong person.”

The tendons in Celso's arms stood out, tense and rigid. He watched Djala, and I stood, tensing my legs for another run or assault or fall.

“Go back to sleep, Djala,” Celso said.

“Think I've slept enough today.” She didn't look at me, but I was pretty sure she was speaking to me. “Don't know that Belen would appreciate your messing with his little project here.”

“She should be chained to the doghouse.”

“Well, she ain't.”

They stared at each other, both with jaws set and eyes hard. I didn't know if Djala was being nice to me or if she was merely protecting Belen's interests.

I backed up until I felt the steps to the house behind my heels. I looked up at David. His breathing was normal now, his face no longer pinched and blue. Together we went into the house and shut the door. We watched Djala and Celso from the window over the sink in the kitchen. David held out a towel to me, which I wrapped around my right hand. I had been holding my hand up and the blood had dripped from the cut, disappearing into the sleeve of my black sweater. We didn't hear what was said, but Celso walked down the street and then disappeared between two houses. David put the bread dough in a bowl, placed it in the sunny spot and covered it lightly with another towel.

He stood in front of me for a minute, and we looked at each other.

“The loaves mustn't burn this time,” he said. Then he left the house, and I watched from the doorway as he dragged his feet in a slow, plodding path through the dust of the road.

When I pulled the loaves from the oven, the top of the bread was a crisp golden brown and the smell in the house breathed of possible success.

Belen walked in the door, followed by Celso, almost tripping over the backs of Belen's shoes. When I saw the two men together, I wondered if they were twins—same heavy brow, same square body shape, same hooded dark brows—but Belen's eyes looked away while Celso's tried to bore holes in my veil. I bit my lower lip while they examined the bread. What had Celso told Belen about the bread? What had Celso told Belen about me, about Djala, about David?

Celso broke one of the loaves of bread open, sniffed the fluffy interior and took a bite. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Not bad. Not as good as Teresa's, but not bad.”

He sat at the table and consumed a quarter of the loaf of bread. I saw Belen tuck the other loaves into a bag, which he placed in the refrigerator. Mateo came running into the house, David trailing behind, his hands deep in his pockets and his eyes wary.

“We smelled it all the way down the road,” Mateo said. “I want some.”

Belen cut a thick slice, spread it with melting butter and handed the first piece to David. He cut another slice and handed this to Mateo. Then he cut one for himself. David did not breathe deeply and consume the smell of the bread but ate with great bites while watching Celso. Mateo hummed to himself, a tune my mother used to sing to me that spoke of happiness and goodness and maybe some innocence somewhere.

Belen sat at the table across from his brother. He ate his slice of bread carefully. His eyes flickered, never holding still. He appeared to be talking to his bread when he spoke.

“You said she'd make how much, again?”

“In one week she could make as much as Teresa made in a month baking the bread and selling it at the market.” Celso watched me then, his lips pulled up at the corners. “Tell her to take off her veil. I want to see her face again.”

Belen nodded at me.

I stood against the stove in the kitchen. The room felt hot, sticky, the yeasty smell of the bread causing my stomach to groan. His reasons for wanting me to take off the veil didn't make sense. He'd seen me without the veil when Djala had shot between us.

“Take off the veil,” Belen said.

When I still hesitated, he stood, placing both hands on the tabletop. I slipped the veil off my head, trying to still its fluttering by using both hands. The wound on my hand still bled.

Celso raised his eyelids enough to look at me. He examined me up and down, from the top of my head to my toes. I wanted to look where he was looking. I wanted to understand the knowing look on his face, examine myself from outside my body. What did people see when they looked at me? Why did it feel so different to look out of my own eyes, feel who I was, know who I was, when almost everyone else looked at me with shock and revulsion?

“If she doesn't make the money sitting on the corner, she can make the money in other ways. Her body is fine. Men pay a lot for young flesh like that.”

Belen jerked his head away from me. Both David and Mateo sat silently, watching this exchange with serious faces and mouths full of bread.

“We never agreed to that,” Belen said. “I'll not have her used in that way.” He glanced at me, at the two boys, back at Celso, who was watching him. “Begging, yes.”

Celso said nothing. Something stirred in me, something dark and deep. The way he looked at my body, the smell of unwashed skin and smoke that emanated from him, how he spoke through Belen as though I weren't worthy of his attention—all of this made me see him as a coyote, skittish and devious.

Maybe he hadn't told Belen about attacking me with a knife, or about David making the bread. Should I say something? Might that make things worse?

“We may not need to go that far. Her face alone should earn you plenty of money,” said Celso. “Or she could work at the SWINC factory in the city. They'll hire her type there.” He looked at me now with his mouth pulled down at the corners and his eyebrows drawn tight over his eyes, as though I were something filthy, something slippery and rotten. He stood, pushing back his chair and wiping the crumbs from the table onto the floor.

“If you decide to send her, I'll be here before dawn. Dress her in rags, add some dirt to her face, make her bring that violin she is said to play.”

I forgot for a minute that the veil was in my hand. My lips quivered, and I blinked my eyes. I'd been here for how long? A week? And already they were sending me away. I was too much trouble, too hideous, too incompetent. When I opened my mouth, my voice wouldn't cooperate. I couldn't even summon a whisper.

Belen tapped one hand against the top of his thigh. His eyes focused somewhere on my knees and I stood very still, hardly daring to breathe, hoping that he'd allow me to stay.