The Fiancée
Fiction by Gabriel da Silva-Schicchi
i. Miami International Airport
While the remaining passengers from Managua milled about the baggage claim at MIA, beginning to believe their belongings had dropped into the cracks between borders, Valeria stared blankly at her phone. She played the message on speaker again, though the words had already seeped permanently into her skin.
Hey, Val. I’m not picking you up at the airport tonight. I…. The long silence meant even Victor couldn’t believe what he was saying.
If you can stay with your friends for a few days…. That meant, “Don’t go to my parents’ house.”
I’ll be in touch. As though she’d failed an audition.
She’d imagined him picking her up with a bouquet of white roses, asking how her mother was doing. They were supposed to have a beach ceremony on Marco Island in a week. His parents were buying them a house.
But it was all over, and there was no one to blame but herself.
Her student visa would expire with the end of her music scholarship in two months, and she would have to go back to Nicaragua. Back to friends who called her gringa for idolizing European composers and dreaming of moving to the U.S. She would spend her life the way her mother had, without friends who understood her passions, organizing her own recitals from time to time for the neighbors, maybe giving lessons to their children. But she’d never make a living from the piano if she couldn’t stay in the U.S. And she couldn’t stay in the U.S. without Victor.
In a burst of resolve, Valeria ordered a rideshare to a South Beach address that she knew by heart. Gernando, the driver, who looked shriveled and ancient in his picture, would arrive in four minutes driving a maroon Dodge Caravan.
She trudged out of the refrigerated airport into the velvety South Florida heat, feeling like she’d picked up a strange suitcase tagged with her name but that she didn’t recognize or want.
I need some time. Maybe we should think about alternatives. That sounded like a break-up.
ii. through the bougainvilleas
With the windows open, Gernando’s erratic driving made Valeria feel like she was in a chariot race. They flew between LED skyscrapers, past the islands alongside MacArthur Causeway, through colors and music, voices and skin.
Miami was the city Managua dreamed of being and woke up shattered that it was not. All the colors shone confidently: the palm trees knew how green their fronds were expected to be, the streetlamps glowed an opulent white. The billboards were fresh, the neon sharper.
She couldn’t believe it had only been this morning that her mother had called her down from the sprawling ceiba tree outside their house. They’d driven from their rundown village in the mountains to the papier-mâché streets of Managua, through chain-linked thoroughfares and sweaty traffic. Nothing like this palace of a city.
A great bellowing sound like a male choir came from the channel outside of Valeria’s window. A cruise ship was launching. It seemed to chase after her, at once fast and slow. Figures on the deck waved and she waved back, glad to be distracted from thoughts of Nicaragua. She wondered if it was naive to think about how incredible a cruise ship is, that humans over millennia had figured out how to make 100,000 tons bounce over the waves. It didn’t seem like something an American would think about.
Beneath thick wreaths of flowering branches, on a side street a few blocks from the water, Gernando’s minivan came to a stop. After a gracias and buenas noches, Valeria stepped out into a miraculous residential silence.
There was never much wind in Miami except on the beach itself. But if the sky was clear, then the residual heat of the day could rise up through the atmosphere, and the moisture in the air could cling like frost. Valeria looked up: no clouds, just a chemical-pink patina to the night sky that gave her the impression it was just a different sort of daytime.
She took slow, deliberate steps toward the sleek new apartment building where Javier lived, dragging her suitcase behind her as though it were a reluctant child. As she moved from the asphalt to the smooth coral path leading to the front door, the wheels of her suitcase changed their song from a guttural snore to a continuous conveyor-belt vvvvvv. The path was lined with half-moon track lights and tall, manicured bougainvilleas.
After she pressed the buttons for apartment 2, she could hear the buzz inside Javier’s apartment because his ground-floor porch was just beyond the hedges to her right. It was like hearing the heartbeat of a stranger. There came no reciprocal buzz at the front door to let her in.
The lights were on in his apartment, but Javier often kept the lights on even when he was asleep. He said it was to ward off burglars, but she knew he meant rivals. She tried again, and considered for the first time what her options would be if she couldn’t stay with Javier.
She looked through the hedges at his porch, identical to the balconies stacked above it except that it was stuck on the ground. She could stay on the porch tonight. No one would see her, and then she could buzz again when she heard Javier come home.
Why wasn’t she calling him? She could just ask when he would be home. The answer seemed obvious when she thought of it: she didn’t want to see Javier. She was so disinclined to see him that she would rather walk the streets of South Beach until the sun came up than call his number now.
It was Victor who had first brought her here, for drugs (coke for her, the harder stuff for him). She hadn’t realized the extent of her homesickness until she’d walked in and saw the azure flag of Nicaragua, with its five volcanoes, hanging on the wall above the TV. She’d started coming back alone, the first time for more coke and thereafter in secret. But intimacy with anyone but Victor now seemed suddenly grotesque.
Valeria forced her suitcase through the bougainvilleas, heaved it over the railing into a corner of Javier’s porch, and took a step back. The suitcase was completely hidden.
Slowly, to avoid being pricked by thorns, she threaded herself back through the hedge. Without an inkling of where she was going, she walked lightly away, leaves and flower petals falling from her hair.
iii. a real police car
She had about $100 in her bank account and a $26 lump of cash in her back pocket. She wouldn’t go hungry, but it also wasn’t enough for a hotel room. In her deep-neck leotard and ripped jeans, she wasn’t dressed well enough to get into a club, but she didn’t want to risk bumping into Javier or his friends at any of the dive bars around here. She resigned herself to walking at least north of 15th Street, where Ocean Drive terminated and the beach became a little less garish.
The restaurants along the promenade were at full capacity, their lights kissing the palm trees as she passed. As she entered the beach, she took her chanclas by the straps in one hand, to let the cold sand massage her heels. The wind was sharp on her bare neck and shoulders, but she knew that the long walk would warm her up, so she didn’t mind. The lights of Ocean Drive spilled into the wind like radioactive particles.
What was so different about the beach that she could show more skin without being demonized? The whole archipelago of Miami Beach was, by extension, a zone of shirtless men and overspilling cleavage. Why did the rules change on the mainland?
Victor’s friends would hate her no matter what she wore. They were all sons of immigrants, but they spoke English better than Spanish, they’d made it through college, they could dress and act like their families had arrived on the Mayflower.
With her approximate diction and her skintight skirts, Valeria still danced as though she were in downtown Managua. Flirted like it, laughed like it. She was loud about being sexy, and proud of where she was from. When her mouth opened, they became uncomfortable because it might tell their deepest secret: that they were no different.
She preferred having her Nicas around, who cruised Biscayne in a Camaro and looked at white people hard. In bars, they ordered “Coca” and poured Aguardiente in it from a flask. Like her friends back home, they considered her suspiciously white for a chola, and too chummy with the Cubans and gringos. But Nicas felt familiar. The way they danced was familiar.
Their familiarity with her is what made Victor’s friends assume she must be unfaithful, but she’d only cheated on him with Javier. And only until Victor proposed.
And what happened with Gael…. She’d intended to use Gael to teach Victor a lesson, that’s all, but she’d botched the execution.
It was at their engagement party two weeks ago, on the roof of Victor’s apartment, the lights of Midtown like low-hanging stars. As the guests dribbled in, she’d found Victor in his room. At first, he looked like he was carefully writing something on the inside of his arm, but the pen was really a needle. She looked in his eyes, and he didn’t care which way was up, let alone what the party was celebrating.
She had given up her dorm room to move in with Victor. She had dropped out of her music exchange program to get the ball rolling on the wedding, thinking that she would have plenty more opportunities once she was married to an American. Had she blown her only shot on someone unmoored?
She joined Victor’s friends on the roof, began drinking in a fury, and soon became belligerent. No one suspected there might be a good reason. She was just the tramp who’d seduced their golden boy and always found a way to embarrass herself.
After Victor came up and snapped at her in front of everyone, things became blurry. She remembered climbing the ladder down to the apartment. Victor’s best friend, Gael, joined her, and they did shots in the kitchen.
Then she and Gael were in Victor’s room. The lock made a sucking sound as he shoved it into place. Things became even blurrier after that.
No one caught them. Which meant that while she was in Nicaragua — visiting her family because they wouldn’t be able to attend the wedding — Gael had told Victor what happened.
Her plan had been to tell him herself, so that he would think twice about indulging his dangerous habits on such a special occasion. But she couldn’t remember how far they had gone. There was a line that, had they crossed it, Victor would never forgive either of them, but she couldn’t trust Gael or her own memory to tell her whether they had crossed it.
Gael had been the only one of Victor’s friends who hadn’t pegged her as some gold-digging wetback. And secretly he’d always wanted her, she knew, though it was harder to tell with boys in the States. He’d admired her for getting out of Nicaragua with a piano fellowship, and they’d bonded over their love of Chopin, who had chosen exile from his native Poland for a freer life.
But after that party, he became the rudest of them all, the most condescending. Was he trying to punish her? He’d even taken things she’d told him in confidence — like her father giving her long, wet kisses when he got drunk, her mother beating her with a shoe when she’d told her — and made it a public joke.
Val learned how to kiss real early, didn’t you Val? Tell them who taught you.
She could brush off disrespect from the others the way she brushed off catcalls; they were Victor’s friends, not hers. Gael got under her skin.
Still, she never thought Gael would go as far as compromising his own friendship with Victor just to take her down. And had he told the truth? She couldn’t even claim the dignity of knowing what the truth was.
She walked closer to the water. The damp sand felt like cold steel against her feet, and her calves and ankles hurt from negotiating the dry, chaotic dunes. Each wave crashed and sizzled like fireworks.
Somehow, battered on the beach by the wind, Valeria wasn’t in a woeful mood. Maybe it would set in later, the fact that she’d be a housecleaner the rest of her life all for a reckless hook-up. Right now, it was early on a Friday night. Right now, she was a young woman on South Beach dancing in the sand to a distant beat. As long as she was still in the United States, anything could happen.
She heard the sound of an engine behind her and turned to see a police Jeep lumbering toward her. She stood in place, waiting for it. The headlights grew until white light was all she could see, and then they passed her. The Jeep parked so that the officer could speak to her through the window. She had to squint to see anything.
“Good evening,” said a man’s voice, with that Miami timbre that reminded her of wet skin rubbing against a pool floatie.
“Hi,” she said, hugging her arms. Now that she wasn’t walking, the wind was intolerable.
“Going fishing, or what?” This was another voice.
“I’m taking a walk,” she said.
“The beach is closed.”
“Oh.”
“You sound Mexican or something.”
“No,” said the other. “That’s Central American. Guatemala? El Salvador?”
“I’m from Nicaragua,” she said.
“Nicaragua! What’d I say, bro? These ears don’t lie.”
“Can we see some ID?”
“I can leave the beach,” she said.
“We’re gonna need to see some ID, honey.”
She dropped her shoes to free her hands and drew her passport out of her back pocket. Before handing it to the officer, she flipped through it to make sure there weren’t any coins or important slips of paper within its pages. As he took the booklet his bony fingers touched hers, and she quickly bent down and clasped her shoes back on to hide how violently she had recoiled.
“Oh. Hmm,” he said. “I don’t know if this will be enough.”
“Why? It says I can be here until October.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. We’re gonna have to keep this.”
“What?”
“Hey, hey, relax, beautiful. I was just joking. Don’t whip out the machete, I was joking. You can have this back. But. Not without a price.”
The other cop chuckled.
She said nothing.
“Don’t worry. It’s nothing you can’t afford.”
“I’ll leave the beach. Can I have my passport back?”
“Are you giving me orders now?”
“No.”
“No? Are you sure? Cause that sounded like you were bossing me around.”
“I wasn’t.”
“That’s too bad. I kinda liked it.”
The other cop laughed again.
“Come closer, honey. Let’s get a good look at you. You ever been in a real police car? We can give you a ride back home.”
“No.”
“Why are you acting all tough like that? We’re just being nice. Come on, take a ride. You look cold.”
“I’m okay. Thank you.”
The first cop laughed now.
“Alright, we’re just playing around with you. Here’s your passport. Beach is closed, alright? Next time, we’ll have to put you in handcuffs, you hear me? Hey! I said, did you hear what I said?”
“Yes…sir.”
“Good. Get outta here.” Under his breath but perfectly audible, he murmured, “Puta índia.”
The Jeep rumbled toward the water, did a tight U-turn, and sped off down the beach. She felt for the first time how exposed she was on the beach: nothing to hide behind, no comforting landmarks. The trees in the distance, purely for decoration.
iv. Fantaisie-Impromptu
Valeria caught the gate as a group of laughing white girls unspooled onto the beach. She looked down as they passed so they wouldn’t see her swollen, watery eyes.
She slipped in behind them and found herself near the corner of a long, turquoise pool. All around it, positioned like mannequins, an abundance of skin — black, alabaster, or tanned, but never sun-burned. They yelled their conversations, brandished perfect smiles, and drank elaborate tiki drinks. At any moment, she expected the record to scratch and everyone to stop and stare at her, but no one noticed her at all. Why couldn’t she have brought a jacket?
She tip-toed around the deck looking for the movements of security guards approaching her, but nobody cared. Should she leave?
She really wanted one of these fancy drinks first. Her heart was still palpitating.
“Piña colada,” she said to the bartender, who looked as though he’d been in a boy band twenty years ago.
“De nada,” he said, winking. It was the exact same wink her first boyfriend had used in grade school when he dumped her, saying, “Hey, don’t worry. We can still fuck.”
She counted out $16. She used the wink to justify not leaving a tip. Two young women crash-landed next to her on the bar, holding and touching each other like they might start having sex on the spot. The blonde, who looked like a young Shakira but tall, spun her head toward Valeria.
“¿Qué tal?” she asked, with an upscale Venezuelan accent. Valeria sensed she was probing for a reaction; she flashed back to being gaslighted by the wealthy girls in her hometown. It was the same all over the world.
“Tremendo,” Valeria said, and looked down at her cash.
The blonde laughed like a dolphin.
“Que bueno,” she said, and resumed slathering the neck of her lover, a light-skinned Black woman with a highlighted Jheri curl.
Valeria’s drink arrived, looking nothing like a piña colada. She slapped down the money and walked away, feeling chained to this place by her enormous drink.
She heard the bartender call, “¡Gracias a ti!” emanating cheerful sarcasm.
After hesitating toward several different regions of the patio, Valeria noticed a small group heading for a pair of French doors. At a party with no one to talk to, she thought, you explore the house.
The last one in the group to enter, a reedy Aryan boy with a fedora, nodded at her as she came in behind them. The room she entered was a stylish lobby, elevator music barely audible from the high, chandeliered ceilings, double staircases leading up to suites or lounges, probably both. There was no concierge desk, just a security guard wearing a black suit and black dress shirt. The group she’d followed went smoothly up the stairs like water pouring in reverse.
In the landing between the staircases, a grand piano sat alone, lid alluringly open.
Without a moment’s hesitation, she walked toward it, glancing at the guard to see if he objected. They made eye contact: he was an islander with a thick ponytail of dreads, eyes as still as gemstones, and he encouragingly made no movement or expression.
Valeria set her drink on the hardwood next to the bench and, comfortable for the first time in hours, began to play Debussy’s first Arabesque. After a minute of waiting for someone to stop her, she closed her eyes. The Arabesque flowed seamlessly into the first movement of Schumann’s Kinderszenen and then the seventh.
She’d done this once before, in a department store in Managua. Although she’d been 15 and looked 12, everyone had thought she’d been hired. Her mother had watched her play for almost an hour, tears in her eyes as though she were debuting at Lincoln Center. It was one of Valeria’s fondest memories of home.
Valeria ended the piece, afraid she would cry if she continued.
She reached down and took a long draught of her cocktail. She wasn’t cold anymore, no longer haunted by Victor or the cops, or intimidated by her surroundings. But she also couldn’t think about what lay ahead for her that night. She still had nowhere to go, and not a trace of a plan. She looked up at the guard, but he didn’t meet her eyes. He was glancing from one door to the next. She recognized the tactic from when she used her phone in the lunchroom at school: he was watching the doors for a manager. She had an audience.
Valeria looked down at the keys, asked them what to do next.
Her fingers began Massenet’s Valse folle. They were warm now, and emboldened by her apparent freedom. Massenet handed the torch to Chopin for the Fantaisie-Impromptu. Effortless ripples up and down the keyboard, 32nd-notes sewn together in one legato swell. The piano grieved and fulminated, elegized, celebrated. She knew she was showing off, calling too much attention to herself. And, at last, it crossed the line.
She felt — and then looked up to see — a middle-aged man standing next to her with a name tag that designated him as the Assistant General Manager. The notes stopped as though she’d sailed them over a waterfall.
v. straight tequila
She was still warm from the piano and the alcohol, but the night had hemorrhaged more of its heat and she needed to find shelter. Standing on the front steps of the hotel or club or whatever it was, she was surrounded by more clubs and more hotels; bars, gift shops. Nothing like a home.
Maybe it was time to call Javier. Her phone had died — of course — but she could walk back to his apartment. If he wasn’t there, she could grab her charger…. But there he was. Right across the street, with his stupid friends.
Valeria took a step back, suddenly mortified that he might see her, but it was too late. One of his friends, Juan, was pointing at her. The whole group, six of them, were walking across the street toward her.
“Vale, what the fuck?” Javier was massively drunk. His sweaty, shoulder-length hair shrouded half his face, and his lanky body reminded her of those tube men flailing unpredictably by the side of the road, advertising computer parts.
“Vale, I thought you went home to Nica,” said Juan. Juan was more clean-cut; he never drank but he always had snow up his nose.
Juan absently held the hand of his girlfriend, Yoni, who’d always been suspicious of Valeria and hung back, sucking her vape pen. There were two other guys Valeria didn’t recognize, but she saw their neck tattoos and knew everything there was to know. One had his hand on his girl’s ass, and all three were checking Valeria out as though she were a yellow Lamborghini. It was the opposite kind of look from those she’d gotten at the patio bar, but it made her feel just the same.
Javier asked if she would come to some new club off Lincoln Road. She made up an excuse about waiting for Victor to pick her up, but it only fanned the flames.
“Coño, ever since you’re engaged to that guy, you’ve been acting like a fucking bitch.” Javier’s eyes were bloodshot. He was up close to her now, and she could smell his rank odor laced with half a bottle of Tommy Bahama cologne. His spittle was straight tequila.
She’d never resisted him when he was drunk, not wanting to fight. Now her indifference gave her courage.
“Por favor, Javi.” Valeria turned from him.
He was instantly in front of her again like he was guarding Maradona.
“Dale, it’s Juan’s fucking birthday tonight. Have some fun for once in your life.”
“Don’t be a liar, Juan had his birthday party like two months ago.”
Before she’d finished her sentence, Javier cocked back his arm and she huddled in defense.
“Fuck did you call me?” He put his arms snake-tight around her. Sense memories that she could usually suppress rushed to the surface: Her father’s sulphuric breath asphyxiating her, his brute persistence. To succumb felt like a sort of death, and the only way to come back to life was to wait….
Sometimes he would fall asleep on top of her, weighing her slowly down into her little mattress. She would be numb by then, closed off to the experience, but another part of her would frantically imagine nightmare scenarios: pregnancy, getting caught by her mother, anyone finding out at all.
“Mm, Vale, you’re smelling so sexy. It’s been months, baby. How ‘bout we just go home, just you and me?” Javier’s mumbled overtures reverberated in her chest. His sweat dripped from her face and neck, and her hands were clammy as she tried to push him off.
The thumb of his right hand was starting to dig into her underarm, her eyes burning with pain. Why had she talked back to him?
“Tell me, baby. Tell me you’re still my little puta. Did you hear what I said? Fucking say it.”
“Hey, break it up,” came a booming voice behind her.
In an instant, she was alone again. While she stumbled, gasping, the dreadlocked guard behind her found himself with four amateur boxers in his face. Javier was loosing a nonstop flow of violent threats at him. It was all in Spanish, but the guard looked like he understood the gist.
Yoni trotted up to Valeria and pulled up her straps, which had fallen from her shoulders or been pulled down.
“Pasa nada, Vale,” Yoni said. She put her hand on the side of Valeria’s face. “Tal vez ahora es tu oportunidad.”
She gestured with her chin toward the melee near the door. Another guard had come out holding a baton, but it didn’t stop one of the boys from shoving him back. Valeria made fleeting contact with a pair of gemstone eyes, and then she ran.
vi. the dicks of the earth
She was out of breath, and she didn’t care anymore. About her night, about herself, about the future. She just wanted to avoid human contact. She dragged herself through the backstreets, regaining her heart rate, but she was so tired she could barely process what surrounded her.
South Beach after midnight was no place for anyone to be walking around alone, and Valeria’s bare arms and legs, the deep neckline of her leotard, might as well have been a beacon, calling out to the thugs who patrolled the Beach in twos and threes, guiding the dicks of the earth.
How did she get here? How had she screwed it up so badly?
Why was she still blaming herself?
Anger mounted within her. Not the silent self-flagellation she was accustomed to, but a wildfire that moved and hunted others. Victor had put her in this hell, and she knew without a doubt that Gael had gotten him to do it. And for what, to keep his friend single? Out of sheer hatred for her?
She was too angry to shed tears, but her eyes were hot. She was shaking, from the wind or from the rage or both. She wanted the blackout of sleep more than anything, more than Victor.
She was surprised at how ungrudgingly she entered a dark alley in the middle of the night, but her legs seemed to have made the decision for her, and her pride didn’t leave any alternatives.
She sank to the dank pavement between two dumpsters. The alley’s darkness was soothing, and its filthiness asked nothing of her.
Her arms a makeshift pillow atop her knees, she fell asleep within seconds.
Not long after — to her it felt like mere moments — she startled awake, a jackhammer in her heart.
A rat skittered past her, and she saw its tail disappear beneath the backdoor of a pizzeria. They’d closed hours ago, but the smell still lingered. She stood up, too hungry to feel reluctance.
She crossed the alley, slopped her toes in its glimmering puddles, and threw open the dumpster that had the pizzeria’s name stenciled on it. Not going back to Javier’s had taken what pride she’d had left. Now she wanted pizza. With strength she didn’t know she still had, she lifted herself over the side, just enough to reach what she knew would be there: a stack of pristine, red-and-white checkered, corrugated-cardboard pizza boxes. She grabbed the closest one — it was heavy — and lowered herself back down on the rough pavement.
The last time Valeria’s friends had taken her on a raid of Managua’s back alleys, they’d chided her for not taking any.
She’s above us now. A whole pizza, right out of the oven — not good enough for gringa anymore.
She’d had no defense, because they all knew what it was like to go a day without eating. They all had families who knew.
I’m sure that piano tastes real good.
Watching two cockroaches zigzag the alley like respectable citizens in some nocturnal town, she inhaled a slice and a half of lukewarm veggie pizza. There was nothing more important than food.
Twice, she heard groups of men walking past the alley. The dumpster kept her hidden, but both times she stopped chewing to hear whether they were turning to walk toward her.
When she could no longer stomach the tang of cold bell peppers and onions and the sour aftertaste of congealed cheese, she frisbeed the box into the dumpster next to her and fell back asleep feeling almost comfortable, almost cozy. No one bothered her and no rats went by until morning.
vii. morning
Over the Atlantic Ocean, less than a mile from shore, drifts of rain tapped on the surface of the water. The sun shone through the falling droplets, creating a long garland of rainbows across the water that no one noticed.
As the sky blued above her, Valeria thought she felt a sprinkle of rain and woke up. She could sense the time from the amount of heat already spilling down her back. Apparently, the night’s adrenaline still coursed through her body, because she had none of the usual grogginess that often kept her in bed until noon. She was awake and firmly on her feet as though she’d never been asleep at all.
Without a thought to her appearance, she headed toward Washington Street, into the muted tropicalia of the residential blocks. She wanted to see as few people as possible on her walk back to pick up her suitcase. She didn’t think about the night’s events, or how it would go with Javier if he caught her there, or anything. She just walked. When joggers went by, she looked the other way.
She was still within earshot of the shore, and grateful to be hours early for the regular noise pollutants to switch themselves on: gift shop windows were not yet shaking from the thunder of Celia Cruz, Collins Avenue not yet clogged with the competing subwoofers of Escalades. That left the entangled susurrus of sparse traffic and crashing waves, and the bleep-blooping of birds up in the foliage.
The sky was overcast, making it even more humid than usual. Her throat was parched and her pores leaked sweat.
She hadn’t gone even halfway when she came upon an old art deco library, its clean, modernist lines expressing coolness and rest. Following her impulse as though it were a divine authority, she turned into its lawn and was greeted by a breath of fresh air conditioning.
There were maybe half a dozen silent strangers in the single, cavernous room. A skeletal old librarian beamed over her reading glasses, then returned to her reference book.
Valeria’s eyes scanned the room for silver: there, in the corner beside the periodicals, stood the water fountain. She pressed its round knuckle and it flung a clean, sparkling arch over its perforated basin. The water was icy and hard on her tongue. She drank for what was probably an inappropriate amount of time to spend drinking at a public water fountain, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She felt lucid again, as though she were nearing the surface of a lake after nearly drowning. The long night was over.
She didn’t have the strength for reading, so she gravitated to the rows of PCs, only one of which was occupied. She logged into her email account and saw, amid the spam and family correspondence, an email from Gael.
She opened it to find an endless pillar of text.
I’m sorry I told him. She held her breath.
I know you’ve been through a lot and I’m so sorry I put you through more.
I understand the position this puts you in and I wanna make it up to you.
I would be willing to marry you myself.
Valeria looked at the words like a cliff she stood at the edge of, an inexhaustible darkness down below.
She closed her eyes, steadied her breath, tried to determine whether this was salvation or if she had been played. Had Gael known what he was doing from the start?
When she opened her eyes again, the library was different. No longer pristine but aseptic. It felt like the hospital in Managua where her father had died, gasping as though the laundered air were as dark and viscous as the sap from their ceiba tree. She could nearly feel her mother’s desperate grip on her wrist as they watched his spirit leave his pendulous body.
At the time, Valeria assumed that the desperation was a result of losing her beloved husband, but now she understood it came from a much more practical and urgent terror: they were about to be poor.
She was out of options.
Valeria looked down at her hands, the only part of her she could trust, and asked them once again to carry out their duty. They trembled as they moved over the keyboard, as if their years of piano training had led inexorably to this final performance.
Gabriel da Silva-Schicchi is a Brazilian-American writer based in San Francisco. He is the founder and Chief Enthusiast at Gushreview.com, and is working on a novel about a country singer whose marriage spectacularly implodes on a trip to Rio.
