Whisper (31 page)

As we stood together in the hallway with paintbrushes in hand, we talked. I told her about the university, the students who watched and whispered, the music that filled my days with a beauty I'd never known before. She talked about Oscar and how he'd told Blaise, the street bully I'd met my first day here, that he wouldn't pay him anymore. She told me about Oscar tripping Blaise, knocking him to the ground where they could at least look each other in the eye. She said Oscar had been beaten so badly he didn't get out of bed for three days. Ofelia, she said, was getting worse—she stumbled and slurred, grabbed them by the hair and screamed into their faces when she came out of her room. Ofelia cried every night, the sound muffled but heartwrenching, and she'd told them that they didn't have to pay rent the week of Christmas if they'd use their money to fix the place up. She was selling it. They didn't know if they'd be allowed to stay when the building was sold or if they'd be out on the streets, living in the hills with all the other beggars.

How could I complain about my life—a room to myself, three meals a day, the luxury of education—when they didn't even know where they would live after the sale? I pretended that my life was acceptable by not saying that it wasn't. When Candela and I had finished our spot in the hallway, we went to see the decorations in the common room.

“Oh, incredible,” I said. The common room had been transformed. A Christmas tree spread its branches through the middle of the room, the tin star on top brushing the ceiling, the branches loaded with red bows and lit candles.

“Where did you find such an enormous tree?” I asked.

“The dump,” she said. “We find a lot of good stuff there.” Candela showed me the branches, perfectly formed, bizarrely symmetrical—a plastic tree with hints of dust between the needles. It was almost as beautiful as Christmas in the woods, where nature adorned the real holly trees with blood berries and where the song of the owl joined our carols. As I began to feel comfortable, warm and relaxed, someone tapped me on the shoulder. Sonja, the woman with the burns, spoke through lips that were pulled tight into bloodless lines.

“Little Miss Princess. The Purgatory Palace is for people who understand hell—you've graduated, honey. You no longer meet the resident requirements.” Her wrinkled, pinched fingers poked my chest.

“How long do you have to live in hell to know what it's like?”

“All your life, princess, not just the first bit.”

“And what would heaven look like in your world?”

“A soft bed, no begging and maybe a man to tuck me in,” she said. She might have been sneering, but her face was so stretched and scarred that all her expressions were the same.

“Then I don't have it either.”

Sonja pushed her hand against my chest so quickly I fell back against the table, the edge pushing into my side. I glared after her, but she was right. I didn't belong here—or at the university or at Belen's house. I didn't fit. I didn't fit anywhere except the camp in the woods.

But I was learning music—how to hold my violin correctly, what
arco
and
pizzicato
meant, how to use vibrato and how to make a sound so keening and plaintive, wolves on the hill would howl their replies. Maybe I didn't have heaven, but I was closer than anyone here.

The next day, Candela grumbled and muttered as she brought me to Rosa.

“Forget about her, Whisper. She has her own life now—the baby, her career.” The words might have tasted of fire, the way she spit them out. I showed Candela my last loaf of bread and she shook her head, put her hands on her hips and narrowed her eyes.

Rosa lived by the river, next to a huge building with smokestacks that spewed thick smog into the air and that had a barbed-wire fence all around it. White trucks with the word
SWINC
in black letters on the sides were parked behind the wire fence. On the front of the building were the words
SWINE INCORPORATED
, written in block letters.

I hadn't been down her street before, and I vowed that I would never come here alone. The people seemed vacant, absent, as though they lived within themselves rather than outside with the rest of us. Candela held on to the sleeve of my coat and pulled me along as I watched two women in an alleyway, crouched together and jabbing something sharp into their arms. I hugged the loaf of bread to me with one hand and held Jeremia's violin with the other.

Parts of the building were falling apart—metal poles showed through the walls like ribs, crumbling bits of stone exposed more metal, and shards of glass poked out from frames where windows should have been. It was as if the building had been turned inside out.

The smell of urine, unwashed skin and rotted food made my eyes water. I pushed a hand against my nose as we stepped around garbage, old toys and sleeping people lying on the walkway outside the rooms.

Rosa lived on the third floor. Candela and I paused at the door and glanced at each other. I held my breath when Candela knocked. A man opened the door. He was stooped, his shoulders rounded as though they had once been strong but now pulled his body toward the ground. The room had a couch, chairs, a refrigerator, and it seemed much more livable than the outside of the building suggested.

“What?” His hand reached up under his shirt and scratched at an enormous stomach thick with hair.

“Where's Rosa?” Candela asked.

“Gone.” He crossed his massive arms over his chest. He was built like the cars I saw rumbling through the streets. “She doesn't want to see you freaks anyway.”

“Like I want to see her.” Candela pointed her thumb at me, and I tried to loosen my arms from where they pressed the bread to my chest. I thrust the loaf toward the man. Even though the bread was a day old, the aroma of yeast and flour wafted between us like a message.

“She went for a walk. The baby was fussy.”

Both of us held on to the loaf for just a minute, and he looked at me fully, seeing me.

“You from that camp in the woods?”

“Yes,” I said.

“She cried for hours after she saw you.”

“I'll watch the baby if she ever needs help.”

“She'd like that,” he said, then took the bread, stepped back into the room and slammed the door.

Candela looked at me, one eyebrow lowered, creases between her eyes. She put one hand on her hip.

“Jeez, girl, he just said something nice to you. I've met him twice, when he helped Rosa move out of Purgatory Palace, and he never said anything nice to me.”

“Is that the baby's father?” I asked.

“Who knows. He's a leech. She works and he lives off her. I don't like you being nice to him.”

“Everyone can use kindness.”

“Yeah, or a couple nights in jail.”

“No one needs jail.”

“That's bull,” Candela said. She turned and stomped back the way we'd come, around the sleeping people, over the garbage, through smells so dense and horrid they made my eyes water. Maybe when Rosa returned from wherever she was, she would at least smell the bread-scented air and think of me.

When we reached the street, I looked at the factory next door. A haze surrounded the building, as though fog had settled around it and didn't mean to leave anytime soon. Candela pointed to the trucks behind the fence.

“I think their main factory is in Gloriosa.”

All I could remember of Gloriosa was the farm where most of the people in the town worked—the huge buildings that blocked the light and created the head-crushing smell.

“What is SWINC, exactly?” I asked.

“Meat-packing plant. If you don't want to beg, if you don't want to work at the brothel, the next best job for us would be there,” Candela said.

It looked like the type of building that if you went in, you might never come out.

When we returned to Purgatory Palace, Candela and I joined the others in the common room. I unstrapped my violin from my shoulder, opened the case, fit the instrument under my chin and steadied my hands. It was nice here, warm and inviting, but I couldn't shake a sadness that made my fingers feel heavy or a tension that spoke of surprise visits from men who meant me harm. I played the violin for many hours a day, trying to understand my emotions. If those around me could find happiness, why couldn't I?

I stayed for seven days—the days between Christmas and the New Year—and even though I played games, talked to Candela, laughed with Oscar and felt comfortable and warm, a hollow feeling had lodged itself in my chest, and I knew that the only way to get rid of it was to see Jeremia again, hold Ranita, play with Eva. I wanted to tell them about the surgery, ask for their advice, but I was on my own here and had to live with the decisions I'd make.

After midnight on New Year's Eve, I left Purgatory Palace. I hugged Candela, wrapped my arms around the tall Oscar, avoided Sonja's eyes as I had all week and wished them a happy new year. I rubbed my fingertips across Ofelia's newly painted door and thought about the snuffling I'd heard in the night, about the sadness that even normal people could feel.

It was the middle of the night, but the darkness of the streets had been pushed back by revelers. Shouts, singing and bursts of fireworks shot pinpricks of celebration into the blackness, and people ran by me, giddy with happiness and camaraderie.

The university buildings were dark, most students having gone home for the holidays, but a few dorm windows winked with light—a few students unable to go home, celebrating in their rooms. I approached Clarence Hall, the tall stone building with four rows of dorm windows, and slid my card into the lock. I kept my head down as I walked along the hallway, the hood shadowing my face, but I sensed someone in the hall before I got to my room.

Shuffling and stifled giggles filtered out from the darkened stairwell beside my room. My heart quickened and my hands became sweaty, the key slipping in my fingers as I approached the door.

“Look who's finally here.” From beneath the stairwell emerged three figures. They were silhouettes, dark, but I knew who they were before they stepped into the light of the hallway: Tomas, Carla and Ben, Solomon's students. I stood still, the dorm door two strides in front of me but as far away as my camp in the woods. At least it wasn't Celso.

“Hello, Whisper. You go home? Spend Christmas under the bridge?”

Ben giggled. Carla crossed her arms over her chest. I looked down at the floor.

“And what is up with that stupid veil?” Tomas said. He drank from a bottle in his hand and stood crooked, his limbs dangling and disjointed. The three of them smelled like Ofelia, fermented and poisoned. I stepped back.

“Where you going?” Tomas said, closing the distance between us, his black hair a shadow across his face, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. Carla stood beside Tomas. Ben loomed behind them, tall, gangly, red-haired and smirking.

“We want to know what you're hiding, what you've got under there. Solomon thinks you're some kind of miracle. We think you're creepy.” I took another step back, my breath coming in short bursts.

The wall was against my back. Tomas stepped closer. Carla and Ben flanked him. My hand reached up to my neck and clasped the violin made by Jeremia, squeezing until the edges poked into my palm.

“Show us what you got.” Tomas reached up, pushed back the cowl of my hood, his hand clumsy and hot, and yanked my veil off my head, dropping it on the floor. I squinted from the sudden light in my eyes.

All three of them stepped back.

“Whoa,” Tomas said.

I looked at them, not avoiding their gaze, and set my jaw as I'd seen Candela do. My hands no longer shook, and my breath began to slow. Tomas gaped, his nose pulled up in disgust. Carla's hand impulsively moved to her face, where she touched her lips, her nose, her perfect features. Ben stumbled backward, turned and strode down the hallway.

I stepped forward. I felt the power that this face could wield in a dimly lit hallway with no one around. My breath deepened, my jaw tightened, my shoulders tensed, and then I stepped toward them again, my feet moving as though with a will of their own, and I pulled my mouth into a half smile as I watched Tomas and Carla back away from me. I made a final rush at them, my fingers reaching for them but still clamped tightly around Jeremia's carved violin. Too late, I felt the string around my neck stretch taut and snap. I let go, and the hand-carved violin dropped through my coat to the carpet of the hallway and I stepped on it, snapping the carving in two. Tomas and Carla ran, following Ben, and I stumbled, crying out. I knelt and rocked back and forth. Ofelia's shuddering breaths, heard through the thin walls of Purgatory Palace, now became mine, and I sobbed.