Whisper (18 page)

This couldn't be the city. I found that my hand moved to the carved violin around my neck more and more often with each step that brought us closer to our destination, and I tried to still the twitching of my hands.

We did not stop when darkness shrank the lights to small stars but continued on the road, the houses changing from dilapidated cardboard boxes to houses stacked on top of each other like rocks under a waterfall. The people's voices spilled from the open windows like the din from a flock of starlings. Lines of clothing stretched from the buildings, crisscrossing each other in disorganized spider webs. Here and there in front of the buildings, a few trees jutted through squares cut into hard gray rock, but they looked so forlorn, so lonely and separated, that I wanted to hug one and stay there, our loneliness united. So many people lived here—hoards of people shuffling, pushing, calling to each other. I was just one more.

Celso no longer rode the mule but walked ahead, the rope in his hand. The mule was as tired as I was, its hooves sliding across the hard ground, its head hanging low searching for something to eat, but there was no grass. I kept a hand on its back and leaned slightly, gaining support from its warmth and swaying movements. I tried to look everywhere at once, but I couldn't take it all in. I jumped at noises behind me, at shouts from the windows, at the bump of a stranger's shoulder against mine. My nerves jangled, and I felt flustered and uncertain.

Groups of women, their faces painted vivid colors that blurred their features, stood in clusters where streets came together. Breasts bulged from shirts, naked thighs erupted from short skirts. They moved with big gestures, their strides long, their shoulders rotating. They strode into the streets and leaned into the open windows of cars, where men with square teeth smiled and passed coins from the windows to the hands of the women. My stomach lurched in this place, and my skin tingled the way it did in the moments before a thunderstorm, but no one even glanced at me. It was Celso who didn't fit—a man with a mule who didn't belong in the city.

This was why the rejects from my camp came to the city and stayed. We may not have fit perfectly, but we weren't alone and could, perhaps, get lost in the crowd.

Celso stopped. We stood in front of a building painted a flat gray, like the color of the sky before a torrential rain. The building tilted to the left, almost leaning against its neighbor, and it glowed with swirls, lines and huge swollen words painted on the front. Bars lined windows set high in the walls. No faces appeared at the windows, no singing voices could be heard. This building was cold and lifeless in comparison to the other buildings on the street.

Celso pounded on the door and continued to pound until a light went on in the windows beside the wooden door. The door opened a crack and a woman's face appeared behind the bars.

“What?” she said. I took a step back. She looked rotten, overdone. She was maybe ten years older than my mother, her hair black with a clump of gray right in the front. Her eyes had dark bags beneath them—purple and black bags—and her nose, streaked with red lines, was swollen like her body. Her breath gushed between the bars in front of the door and smelled of rotten fruits.

“I brought another worker,” Celso said. Another worker. Celso had intended for me to come here from the moment he came to our camp and pushed me into this new world. He had done this before. This was how he earned his living.

The woman unlocked the barred door with a cluster of keys, then opened the door wide and stood in the opening, one hand holding the door, the other leaning on her hip. Her body, clothed in a tight nightgown, bulged oddly, like it had been squeezed tight in the middle and pushed out at the chest and hips.

“Take off the veil,” she said. I slid the veil off my head.

“She'll do. She's young enough to look like a child still. We'll have her sit on the corner until she looks too old for that. Then she can work in the brothel with the others.” Her eyes watched me, but she spoke to Celso. “Same as always. Fifty a week for room and board. I take it you want the rest?”

“I will return in a month to be paid.” He held out a folded piece of white paper. Her left hand tightened around it, crinkling it. Celso grasped the back of my neck with his hand and squeezed. I hunched up my shoulders.

“I want a hundred from you by the middle of November. Anything less, and we send you to the brothel. Or if you're lucky, you'll work for SWINC.”

I knew I didn't want to go to a brothel, a place for girls who were too old for sitting on the corners. When Celso let go of my neck, my shoulders slumped and my bottom lip trembled. Nothing felt like home here—the darkness didn't soothe and calm me like at home. I was jarred by the shrieks and the hum of cars. I would have welcomed the sound of the wolf howling.

Celso turned the mule around and walked back into the street. He didn't look at me and I didn't say goodbye. He looked strange, out of date, as he pulled the mule behind him through the painted women. The mule was silent and calm, shuffling its way beneath the music, shouts and screams of this city. I would not miss Celso, and I didn't want to run after him, but at that moment he was all I knew. I felt sweaty, hot and cold at the same time, and the lid above my left eye twitched.

“Well, come on then, girl,” the woman said. “Someone will show you how things work in the morning.”

I stepped into the light of the hallway and heard the barred door shut and lock behind me. Light came from a huge lamp hung in the middle of the ceiling. It glowed and glittered, casting shards of light into the hallway like sun reflecting off the spray from a waterfall. Cobwebs stretched from the lamp and shot to all corners of the room. A skittering black bug crossed a patch of oil on the ground that swirled with iridescent purples and greens. The walls were streaked with dirt and patches of rust. I followed the woman and saw a scurrying rat, its nails clicking on the cement floor, leading us down the hallway. It disappeared into a hole in the wall, a natural ending to the crack that started as a thread on the ceiling and became a fissure by the time it reached the floor. My hand moved to Jeremia's carved violin resting against my chest. I squeezed it until my palm throbbed.

Brown doors with gouges hacked out of them like ax wounds on a tree lined the hallway. They were all closed and had only one distinguishing feature—a clear number painted on them in black.

“I'm Ofelia,” the woman said. “Your room will be thirteen—unlucky and always vacant. Between five
PM
and two
AM,
it's off limits. I lock the doors at night, whether you're in or not.”

When she stopped, I bumped into her soft body, which dented and then popped back into shape. She turned, put her hand out and shoved me against the wall.

“Let's get something straight, girl.” Her teeth were brown, broken and crooked, with big gaps between them. Deep grooves that might once have been dimples lined her sunken cheeks. “You don't touch me, ever. It's bad enough I have to live with you freaks. I won't be touched by you too. You pay for your room and board, and you'll have a place to stay. As soon as you miss a week of rent, you're on the streets. Understand?”

She unlocked the door to room
13
, pushed it open and shoved me inside. She slammed the door behind me. I tried to blink away the darkness.

My eyes burned, my nose tingled, my feet ached. I wanted Nathanael, I wanted Jeremia, I wanted Eva, I wanted Ranita's heart beating against mine. I'd never whine about my mother leaving me, I'd never complain about anything ever again, if I could just go back home. I didn't need a mother, I didn't need a father—I had a family who loved me. I wiped the sleeve of my sweater under my nose.

A slice of moonlight shone onto the floor from a window set high in the wall, and once my eyes adjusted I could make out two mattresses on the floor, on opposite sides of the room. A small table with three legs and stacked bricks for the other leg stood under the window. The cracks in the walls revealed the bones of this building.

Closing my hand around the violin at my neck, I brought it out of my shirt and pressed it against my cheek. The coolness of the wood soothed my hot face. I removed the real violin from my shoulders and laid it on the ground, and then I slipped my shoes off. The small sack from my mother sat lonely and small on the crooked table.

What else was I to do?

A patter of footsteps, like a child's tiptoeing, came down the hall and stopped. I heard a soft shuffle, and something slid through the crack beneath the door. Then the footsteps retreated and a door softly closed. I picked up the piece of paper and held it up to the white light of the moon. It was a hand-drawn picture of the building, its size exaggerated and swollen between anemic buildings on either side. On the bottom of the picture were two words.

Welcome home.

I slid the picture under a mattress and then lay down, trying to calm my heart and find a way to be quiet, relaxed. I closed my eyes against the sight of the battered room, trying to find a place that soothed, but I heard rodents nibbling at something in the corner, I heard the whoosh of cars passing on the road, and I heard my heart tapping out the pattern of my life against my chest. Was this it? Was this what my life would consist of? I closed my eyes and searched for home inside my head, and slowly the nibbling became the crackle of a warm fire, the whoosh became a soft wind through the trees, and the tapping inside me became the chirp of night crickets. If I could live in my head, I would survive this place.

But this would never be my home.

Part Two

Thirteen

I woke to a pounding on the door.

“Get up,” a voice said.

My head felt heavy from lack of sleep, and my body ached from walking for four long days, but I jerked awake because my clothes writhed against my skin. I pulled down my pants and my mother's slip, yanked up my sweater and T-shirt and looked under my clothes. My stomach was speckled with little flat brown bugs that pinched. I slapped and scratched at them, and when the door opened, my pants were around my ankles, and heat rose to my face in a rush.

Ofelia stood in the doorway, her hands on her hips. She looked at me, then uttered a bark of a laugh.

“Bed bugs, girl. Ain't you ever had bed bugs before? Pull your pants up before one of the boys sees you.”

I eased my T-shirt and sweater down and my pants up while willing myself not to cry, even though the tears threatened to fall any minute. I tried to breathe deeply, catching the breath that stuck in my throat, but I couldn't find a calm place. I slid the veil over my head, concealing my burning cheeks, and followed Ofelia out the door. The bugs continued to bite, and I couldn't think of a time I'd felt more uncomfortable—maybe chained to the ground in front of a doghouse.

None of the people in the hallway had split lips or exposed gums, nor did they have smooth, perfect features. They chattered, laughed and grumbled at each other. I wandered behind Ofelia, scratched my stomach and tried to hide beneath my veil.

“Show us what you got, girl,” said a tiny person beside me. Her head reached to my chest, but she was not a child. Her head was disproportionately big in comparison to her body, and she had breasts and hips. She crossed her arms over her chest and waited. She was the only clean person in the hallway.

I slid the veil off and kept my eyes down, focused on the material in my hands, trying to keep them from fluttering and twitching.

“I've seen your type pass through this place. I give you one month.”

“I'll give her six weeks,” said a voice near my feet. I looked down and saw a boy pulling himself along on his hands. He dragged his body down the filthy hallway, dirt gathered in drifts and patches across his skin, his pant legs filled to about six inches below his torso but empty and flat where the rest of his legs should have been. “I'm an optimist,” he said.

“Don't listen to them, dearie,” said someone from the doorway of room 8. The person was probably a woman, but it was difficult to tell, since her skin, bubbled and scarred, was stretched tight from the top of her head all the way down her neck. She was covered in burns, like the patch on Jeremia's arm where he'd bumped into the hot soup cauldron. “I'll bet you surprise us all and only last a night.” She merged with the rest of the residents in the hallway.

Where did people who never grew, people with shortened arms and miniature fingers, people so filthy with grime that it was part of their skin, come from? Maybe they were from Astatla, my parents' village—I had seen a few other children there with deformities. Maybe they were the survivors from Gloriosa. Maybe they'd grown up right here, in the cardboard houses around the city where I'd seen the children with sores on their arms.

I didn't need my veil here.

We climbed the stairs at the end of the hallway and entered an enormous common room, the floor almost as grimy as the hallway on the first floor. This room had a kitchen at one end, which consisted of a huge stove, a giant refrigerator and shelves lined with cans and boxes of foods. Lightbulbs shone naked over our heads. Two long wooden tables stretched from one end of the room to the other, and at the head of one of the tables an elderly man with no hair and wrinkled skin served breakfast. When I got closer and heard him talk, I realized that he was young in an old body. I stood in line beside the boy who had pulled himself along on the floor with his hands and picked up a bowl for me and one for him. Oatmeal was ladled into the bowls, and the old-young boy crossed his eyes, stuck out his tongue and hissed when he saw me looking at his wrinkled hands.

The boy from the hallway pulled himself up to the table and sat beside me. He was about my age—maybe a year or two older. He grinned, and big dimples appeared in his cheeks. In the last week I had met more people than I'd met in my first sixteen years of life. I knew none of them yet, but would sit with them, sleep near them, share food with them and pretend to be their friend.