A Fierce and Subtle Poison (18 page)

Strange and Uncertain Gods

RICO WAS THE
only one of my friends to ever ask about Isabel. The others hadn’t known she’d existed, so they couldn’t have known she was gone.

Five weeks after I’d walked up that forest path to the cabin, watched the embers dwindle, then set off on foot to the nearest town with Celia clinging to my back, what remained of Rupert Ford washed up on a beach near Rincón. The police identified him by a pocket watch that had his name engraved on the back. He was not mourned.

Isabel remained lost to the ocean, as did Lina Gutierrez.

When Detective Mara Lopez knelt in front of Celia, held her hands, and asked her if I was the man who’d taken her, Celia laughed. She told the detective that Dr. Ford had approached her when she was walking down the street searching for her sister. He showed her a trick, how he could make a cat’s cradle using a long loop of string. He asked her if she believed in magic. She trusted him when he told her that he knew where to find Marisol.

She remembered very little about what happened after that—just the smell of something sweet followed by waking up in a warm bed in a small cabin. She told Dr. Ford she was lonely and missed her sister. He found Lina for her.

Despite Celia’s story, I was arrested and thrown into a Puerto Rican jail. Every day for a week, Mara Lopez sat me down in a windowless room and pounded me with questions about Marisol and Celia.

Do you not think it a strange coincidence that you had a connection to both victims? What exactly is your interest in poisonous plants? Why would Dr. Ford lie about what you said and where you’d gone? How many times have you been to Rincón? How did you know where to find Celia?

I answered those questions the same way each time: Rupert Ford, once he learned of my interest in botany, had given me a book explaining, among other things, the symptoms of poisoning. That book described the same symptoms that the police claimed Sara and Marisol’s bodies showed signs of. I went over to ask Dr. Ford about it. He threatened me. I was defending myself when I pushed him. He fell to the ground and hit his head on the tile. I found the directions to a cabin among some papers in his study, borrowed my friend Rico’s scooter, and set off on my own, afraid the police wouldn’t believe my story.

Mara Lopez wasn’t satisfied. No surprise there.

My face was on the news for several days. People I’d never even met before hated me. People I
had
met hated me even more. I was lucky, however, that the people of San Juan hated the man who lived at the house at the end of Calle Sol more than they could ever hate me.

When I was finally released and returned to my room at the St. Lucia, I found Dr. Ford’s book on my bed. The dedication had been altered:
To Zabana
Lucas.
There is nothing in this or any world strong enough to divide us.
This was added underneath
: I’m sorry for what I’ve done. Thank you for helping me lift the curse from my house.

That very same day, I jumped over Isabel’s wall and stole away with her trunk of wishes. In other trunks I found the scraps of the girls that Isabel had mentioned back in the cabin—a ripped piece of paper showing the last four digits of a telephone number, a blue plastic barrette dotted with rhinestones, a bracelet made of pale woven string, a single stud earring inlayed with fake turquoise. I could imagine Isabel wearing the bracelet, but the earring, no, and the barrette, probably not, unless it was years ago. It would’ve been no match for her wild hair.

I debated keeping those scraps, but in the end, left them where they were. When Mara Lopez searched the house, she’d find them, study them, make stories out of them, form conclusions based on them, enter them as evidence. I decided, finally, it was time to leave the detecting to the detective.

Also, Isabel wouldn’t have wanted me to take them. She’d say that there’s no use for mementos of dead girls I never knew. She wouldn’t have wanted me to turn those fragments around in my fingers, and make up stories that served no point other than to answer
what if?
with
what if?
with
what if?

Even without the scraps, I still thought of those girls, their hair wet, their clothes wet, their feet covered in sand, and I wondered what they had wanted to do with their lives before they ended up that way. Maybe they wanted to move to America; maybe they wanted to learn to play an instrument.

Then the letters started. I’d find them slipped under my door when I woke up in the morning or waiting for me at the front desk. They’d ask for help dealing with the loss of a loved one or finding a lost pet bird. I kept them all in a suitcase.

The mosquitoes left the island as they had come: swiftly and without warning. The weather for the rest of the season was mild. Warm days were punctuated by the occasional sun-shower. For now the island was at peace with herself, but the old people all knew that peace has a short memory and comes with a price.

Only when I left the island later that summer did I start to dream of Isabel again—in all her forms. Her face was indistinct; her skin was a pale shade of green, and instead of hair, long green leaves tumbled down from her scalp. Sometimes she was throwing rocks at my face; sometimes she was sitting on her bed in her room of glass. Sometimes she was standing in the sun at Condado Beach. I also dreamed of her standing in my room, her hair up in a bun, looking at me—frowning, chin tilted down slightly—like I’d broken her heart. Those dreams were the worst. They were even worse than the nightmares that jarred me from sleep, the ones in which she was wrapped in leaves, floating in the middle of the ocean, her lifeless eyes gazing up to the sky. Sometimes I just saw her hair, rippling under water. Sometimes I wondered if it was Isabel I was dreaming or if it was Marisol or if it was my mind merging the two girls.

When I woke, I’d go to my closet and take down the suitcase from the top shelf. I’d open it and randomly read through wishes, though I always made a point to read Marisol’s—I’d added hers back in. I’d push my fingers through the scraps of paper, so that my hand was submerged, and I’d stir the wishes around. Even when I’d zipped up the suitcase and placed it back on the shelf, I’d hold those wishes in my heart, saving them for the moment I knew would come, when Isabel would emerge from the water and take them back.

A year passed. When I returned to Puerto Rico the next summer, the convent had been torn down, and I was forced to go with my dad to the hotel he’d been building in Rincón. He told me he’d never believed that I’d kidnapped those girls, that I was too much like my mother to do such a thing. He didn’t explain what he meant by that. I was too sensitive? I was a coward? I didn’t want to know, so I didn’t ask.

We’d struck a deal: in exchange for taking a gap year, I’d work for him for room and board. I became a builder, spending most of my days with the foul-mouthed crew, hammering nails in the warm sun, laying pipe, pouring concrete. On my days off, I would stand at the water’s edge, staring at that blue-green ocean and trying and failing to summon spirits.

Rico and Ruben came out for a week. Carlos wasn’t with them. He’d saved up enough working at the convent to move to Chicago. He’d been gone since winter. My friends rarely heard from him, though they told me every month he would send a little money back to his mother and abuela.

Ruben was different, quieter. He said that Celia was doing all right. She didn’t talk much about the doctor or her time at in the cabin, but every once in a while she’d mention wanting to go back to the western edge of the island to visit the other girls, the ones who she said came out of the water at night. She wanted to be there to greet them. She said they were lonely. I wanted to ask Ruben if she ever made him dizzy or sick to his stomach when he’s around her for too long, but that isn’t the type of thing you ask someone.

One night in Rincón, after Ruben had fallen asleep in my room in front of the television, Rico told me that all the plants in the courtyard of the house at the end of Calle Sol had died. One day they were alive, the next, wilted. I think he expected me to be sad, but I wasn’t. The señoras once told me that the same thing had happened before, but that after a while the plants came back taller and thicker. I told Rico to wait and see, that in time those plants would be back. He nodded, said
sure, sure
, but I knew he didn’t believe me.

I spent the night after Rico and Ruben left sitting alone on the beach. The air was unusually thick, and my ears were filled with murmurs from the sea and the trees.

I didn’t hear the sound of the boy’s feet kicking through sand as he approached, but when I looked over my shoulder, there he was. He had to have been about eight or nine years old, with ears that stuck out past his short-cropped dark hair.

In his outstretched hand was a small piece of paper, folded along a neat crease.

“Qué es esto?” I asked.

“Es para tí.”

I pointed at my chest.“For me? De veras?”

He dropped the piece of paper at my feet and took off down the shoreline, toward the flickering lights of a string of small houses in the distance. I unfolded the note, but the light was too dim and the handwriting too bad for me to see what it said. I would have to wait until I got back to my room before I could read it and put it with all the others.

I went back to that story in my head, the one I’d started late last summer and had been building upon ever since. It started with a witch who could grant wishes. There were parts in the middle about girls who disappeared in the night, spirits who guarded a great island, and a scientist gone mad with grief. Two girls I would never get the chance to love would die; both their bodies would get swept out to sea with a storm.

But that won’t be the end. One of the girls will come back. She’ll walk out of the water just before dawn. I’ll be waiting for her. She’ll clutch the front of my shirt with her wet hands, pull me toward her, and kiss me with a mouth that tastes like saltwater. She will be warm.

THE END

Acknowledg
ments

Many thanks to . . .

my champions: Krestyna Lypen, Elise Howard, and the team at Algonquin Young Readers; Michelle Andelman, Claire Anderson-Wheeler, and all at Regal Hoffman.

my teachers, including but certainly not limited to, Dennis Covington, Lad Tobin, and Paula Lemmon (
gratias tib
i
).

my parents and family, all the Mabrys, Garcias, Schulzes, and Clarks.

my friends, particularly those who offered kind, brutal, and necessary feedback on early drafts of this manuscript.

my colleagues and students who spend their days in English classrooms.

my Jay.

A

Fierce

and

Subtle

Poison

Samantha Mabry

Questions for Discussion

Questions for Discussion

1. What did you think the title meant before you started reading the book? How about after you finished it? Discuss the similarities and differences. What was the biggest change in your interpretation? How big an effect did the title have on your choice to pick up and read this book?

2. How does the weather contribute to the overall tone of the story? What was the most vivid or memorable description of the weather? What effect did it have on the story and the characters. On your reading?

3. Lucas’s friends refer to his father as el patrón “or, when they were feeling particularly brutal, el conquistador” (
page 16
). What do el patron and el conquistador mean? Why do his friends choose these words?

4. On
page 47
, Lucas says, “What my dad didn’t get was that Mara Lopez hated me not because I was white but because I was spoiled. I sometimes hated myself for the same reason.” What does it mean to be spoiled? In your opinion, is Lucas spoiled? If so, does he exploit it throughout the story? How? Does he use his privileged position for good, evil, or a little bit of both?

5. The author often describes sounds in her writing. For example, “I stayed there, sweating, through the duration of many candles, listening to the hiss of the paper fan Ruben’s abuela used to keep the mosquitoes at bay and to the clacks of her dentures shifting in her mouth as her lips moved in silent prayer” (
page 80
). How do the auditory details affect the story? What are some other examples of uses of sound in this story?

6. Isabel says to Lucas, “Looks can be deceiving, you know. In many ways, these plants seem harmless, but they are good at hiding their true nature” (
page 119
). Does this apply to the humans in this story, too? Discuss in regard to Lucas, his father, Dr. Ford, and Isabel.

7. Both Lucas and Isabel had mothers who abandoned them at early ages. How does this affect their lives now? What do you think are other ramifications? Put yourself in the shoes of each mother and discuss possible motivations for their actions. Are the disappeared mothers parallel to the disappeared girls in the story? Why or why not?

8. In the beginning of the story, the cursed girl in the house at the end of the street is merely a legend—a myth with many different and complicated origins. Once Lucas gets to know her, he finds out that “Isabel wasn’t a myth. A myth is simple. Isabel was a muddled mess” (
page 193
). Have you ever had a similar experience with someone you’d previously only known through stories or reputation? Was this person different once you actually got to know them?

9. On
page 234
, Lucas says “To me, stories were stronger than the truth.” How does this statement apply to the stories the islanders share? What parallels are there between the truth and the stories? Do the myths ultimately reflect the truth? If so, how?

10. On
page 251
, Lucas feels like a hero as he lets out “a yelp of victory. I couldn’t help it. I’d done it. I’d beaten the police and a mad scientist and a curse and a storm and a goddess who makes storms.” On
page 268
, Lucas says, “Isabel didn’t need a hero. She was saving herself.” And on
page 269
, he says, “She had the soul of a giant, and no one would ever know.” Is Luke a hero in this story? Why or why not? What about Isabel—is she a heroine and “a giant”? Why or why not?

Reader’s Guide by Diane Cain