THIRTY-ONE
THE CROSS
Yep. A goddamn sloth.
In March’s arms, the furry little guy—I’m not entirely sure if it’s a he or a she, by the way: there’s nothing sticking out—has stopped squeaking and is now thrashing . . . very slowly. Its short legs pedal uselessly against March’s stomach while its lanky arms curl around his shoulders.
“Um . . . it must have sneaked in when I was in the bath. Beatriz told me they sometimes manage to enter the garden,” I venture. No wonder Angel hates them, if they hide under his bed too while he does . . . whatever it is that he does to women with those terrifying eyes of his.
March doesn’t reply. He stares down at the beatific smile permanently etched on the creature’s lips, his expression something halfway between befuddlement and dejection. The face of a modern Icarus who was about to touch the stars when a squeaking sloth burned his wings and sent him plummeting to the ground. My gaze trails to his lower body, and I bite my lower lip in disappointment. Yeah . . . everything is going down.
I leave the bed, pick up my towel from the floor, and cover myself. “I’ll dress and take him back to the trees. I’m sure he can find his way out.”
“I’m certain he will,” March concurs, in a flat, remote voice.
With a compassionate wince, I extend my arms and allow our unexpected voyeur to latch onto my body. “I’m really sorry about that . . . but I won’t be long,” I say, stroking the strangely rough fur covering the small body—maybe it’s a baby? The sloth is lighter than I expected and sort of . . . limp, like it’s barely holding on to me in spite of its long claws. I suppose it’s—understandably—freaked out.
A muscle tics in March’s jaw. “It’s . . . all right, biscuit. I suppose these things happen.”
I’m afraid the curse is actually ours alone, but I’m not going to tell him that because he looks crestfallen enough as it is. Better get the sloth to safety before it gets shot.
•••
I slipped on a pair of panties, a light cotton dress, and my sneakers to go free Hadrian—I decided that would be its name. I’m not sure why, but I think it sounds cute. Ignoring the strange or otherwise amused looks a few of Angel’s guards send my way, I hurry across the garden to the nearest tree. I don’t care what they think—or rather I prefer not to imagine—I have a sloth to save, and then I’m gonna run back to that bedroom, tear my clothes off, and jump on March! I’ll let him take the lead right afterward though, because obviously, he’s the most qualified of the two of us.
Dammit. The guards won’t stop staring at me . . . I hope no one actually ever mentions the incident in public. I’ll probably have to change my name and go prowl the badlands, alone on my Harley. Like a renegade.
Hadrian alerts me that we’ve found the perfect tree with a faint squeak. He’s right: a ground light gilds the rough bark, lighting up a path back into the safety of thick foliage. Just what we need. I help him latch to the trunk and watch him slowly climb up. I wiggle my forefinger at his departing butt and hiss, “Yeah, that’s right, back to the jungle, mister. And you’d better pray I don’t find you under my bed again!”
“What in the world are you doing, little Island?”
I whirl around in mild panic. Sweet Jesus, there’s a witness to eliminate! Dries is standing on the lawn a few feet away, shadowed by a pair of palm trees. When he moves into the light, I notice that he too must have been chilling a bit. His white shirt hangs lose over a pair of linen slacks.
“Um, I was just . . .” I shake my head to collect myself. “We found a sloth in our room, and I went to help him back into the trees.”
His eyes turn to slits. “We?”
“March and I,” I clarify.
Under his silvery beard, his lips go thin. “I see . . .”
I give a tentative smile. “You don’t need to be like that, you know.”
“You mean a responsible, concerned parent?”
Uncontrollable laughter shakes my frame in response, and it takes me a good thirty seconds to recover under Dries’s irritated stare. “Sorry . . . sorry about that. But yeah, what I’m trying to say is that you don’t need to play dad. I’m old enough to—”
“You’re vulnerable.”
I blink in surprise. There’s no contempt to be found in his admission, only raw anguish. Deep lines of worry wrinkle his brow, crease his eyelids, and I recall with a shiver the way he exploded back in Finland, when he realized what Anies had done to me. It’s easy to forget that Dries is a human being because he hides it so well most of the time; everything seems to glide over him like on the scales of a fish. But it doesn’t. The pain, the blood, it ravages him from the inside, and I see that devastation now, carving its way out.
I glance back at the darkened window and the room in which March still awaits. Such is our curse . . . I sigh and take a step toward Dries. “Do you want to walk?”
He gives me his arm like an old-fashioned gentleman, and we tread in silence across Angel’s lawn, away from the ground lights and the guard, in the comfort of obscurity. We eventually sit together under a tree, near a patch of fragrant orchids.
“Think of it this way,” I say as Dries settles against the trunk, stretching his legs in the grass. “I could have fallen madly in love with Angel. Wouldn’t that be marginally worse?”
“I should have strangled him with his own cross back there.” He grunts.
“His cross?”
“He hides it under his shirt. He’s a Catholic.” He spits that last word like it’s actually worse than being an arms dealer.
I shrug. “Okay . . . whatever floats his boat. What I mean is that I’m an adult, I make choices, for better or worse, and you can’t protect me from everything and everyone. Also you don’t get to criticize March when you banged the flight attendant practically right under our noses. I can’t believe you did that . . . Seriously!”
His lips curl in the dark. “She was a fine little thing.”
I let myself fall on the lawn. “Can you at least feign contrition?”
“I never apologize.” He chuckles. “That’s my religion.”
I let his words sink in, gazing at the star-studded night sky, the crushing beauty of space one can only witness in the absence of any light pollution. “Dries.”
“Little Island.”
“What happened with Alexander Morgan? With his family?”
He doesn’t say anything at first. I register some rustling, and he moves to lie by my side. “I was under the impression that you already knew . . .”
A wave of sadness washes over me, that numbs me, engulfs me whole. “March said you had Morgan’s family killed when he was twenty-two. His parents and his little sister. He said that Morgan tried to use me to take revenge on you, and you shot him, and you . . . you took his eye out to punish him.” My eyelids briefly flutter shut as I remember those minutes of overpowering fear I spent alone with Morgan and his demons, back in the dark room. “I think that’s why he went crazy.”
“Are you making excuses for him?”
“No. I’m just trying to understand.”
Because if my father truly killed a sixteen-year-old girl and her mother in cold blood . . . I don’t know how I can deal with that. It hits a raw nerve, makes me think of my mother.
His chest heaves, and the deep exhale that follows smells faintly of the cigar he must have smoked before he joined me. “He’s probably not the only monster I created. There’re two things you can never fully control in our business: side casualties, and . . . what you might call the ripples. Everything that will unfold once the job is done.”
I shift to look at his profile, barely outlined by the distant glow of the Refugio’s lights. “So that’s what they were, Morgan’s mother and his sister, side casualties?”
“They weren’t supposed to be in the plane.” In the dark, his hand moves to take mine, like a big, warm paw squeezing my fingers a little too tight. I startle before gripping it in return. “But it’s no use living in the past; I’m not asking for anyone’s forgiveness,” he adds gruffly. “Morgan should have never touched you. He should have come to me and faced me like a man. I would have given him a fair fight.”
“You would have killed him,” I correct him.
Dries’s thumb strokes my palm. “Of course.”
“So he went to Anies instead . . . like Stiles did.”
He jackknifes up with a look of outrage. “Please don’t tell me you feel sorry for that clown too!”
“Not really . . . more like this impression that . . . it never ends. They take revenge, you take revenge, and it goes on and on.”
Dries’s lips curl in disdain. “He was a low-grade frumentarius who traded intel behind my back—”
“I honestly don’t care what he did fifteen years ago,” I say wearily. “Don’t you ever have regrets? You never wish you’d have worked nine-to-five in your biltong factory?”
“And missed out on all this?” He chuckles, waving at the Refugio and the jungle around us. “No. But when Léa left . . .” His voice softens, hesitates before he goes on. “I found out she was pregnant a few months later, and I was too proud to beg. I told myself that if she wanted out, she could go to hell for all I cared.”
I reach for his hand again, gripping it under the stars while my heart breaks silently.
“I should have gone after her, kept you both.”
I sit up in my turn and huddle against him. I smell the sandalwood and the cigar. My father’s scent. “You would have made a terrible dad,” I say, wrestling the word past the lump in my throat.
“I know.”
•••
When I return from the garden, I find March lying on the bed with his eyes closed, his breathing soft and even. He almost fools me into thinking he’s fallen asleep, but he never lets his guard down: he stirs the moment I make it past the muslin curtains, as if that mere whisper was enough to alert him to my presence. I strip down to my underwear to join him back in bed and curl against him. The room goes silent, save for the occasional birdcall past the walls of the Refugio.
He gathers me close and presses a kiss to my forehead. “I saw you chat with Dries; I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Don’t worry; we’re safe. He doesn’t know what happened with the sloth.”
“I get to live to see another day,” March notes, a smile playing on his lips.
“Is it true that Angel is super Catholic, by the way? It sounds—”
“Strange?”
“Kind of.”
“It’s true. He thinks God needs monsters like him too. I’m still not entirely certain how he reconciles the path he chose and the demands of the Lord—he tried to explain it to me once, but I thought it was very convoluted, and we were watching his men bury half a dozen bodies in the jungle at the time.” He sighs. “But he thinks God is sending him signs once in a while. He accepted Beatriz’s wedding because Jesus came to him in a dream and told him Antonio was his cross to bear.”
I caress his chest, threading my fingers in the silky curls there. “Do you think God sends you signs too?”
“I don’t know. Religion never made much sense for me. But I’m starting to think he’s looking down, and he doesn’t want someone like me to defile you.”
This time I snort in laughter. “March, I honestly think the sloth was an accident.”
But March doesn’t laugh; he looks at me, his irises shining with an emotion I’m not sure I can read in the dark. “Maybe he believes you deserve better—”
“You’re all I need.”
He goes silent, his hand rising to caress my cheek. I lean into his touch as he smiles, and he replies, “Then I suppose I’m Dries’s cross to bear.”