Surviving Santiago (24 page)

Clipboard in hand, the doctor reads Tía Ileana and me the damage: a lacerated right kidney, which means Papá will be peeing blood for the next week. Bruised genitals. Stitches in his tongue. Three broken ribs on the right side. Stage-two trauma to his liver, which might have escaped injury if it hadn't been so enlarged because of his drinking. These thugs knew his weak spots, thanks to Frankie and my big mouth. On the positive side, his right arm isn't broken, only bruised from him using it to protect his head.

“Keep him away from alcohol until his liver heals,” the doctor says.

Tía Ileana sighs. “One more thing to do.” Louder, she asks, “How long?”

“Six months. Maybe nine.”

My aunt shakes her head slowly.

The doctor hands her a pamphlet with the title
ENFRENTE UD. EL ALCOHOLISMO
. “Face Alcoholism.” And another:
EL ALCOHOLISMO: UNA GUÍA PARA LA FAMILIA
. “Alcoholism: A Guide for the Family.”

“We'll keep him through Monday for observation and to ease his withdrawal symptoms,” the doctor continues. That's a long time for Papá to stay in this dingy place. But I'm also relieved that I won't have to see him, he won't be drinking, and people who know what they're doing will take care of him.

I suppose that's what Tía Ileana also means when she pats my shoulder and says, “He's in good hands,
amorcita
.”

At three in the morning, she and I leave without seeing Papá again. I don't tell her about our detour into the mountains. Maybe they'll drug Papá so much that he won't be able to talk, and no one will find out how I almost got him and me killed.

I hear Tía Ileana getting ready and leaving early in the morning, but when I finally crawl out of bed at noon, she's home. Graciela is there, too, and there's a strange man in our living room. He's stocky, with thick charcoal hair.

Tía Ileana introduces us. The man is Rafael Jaramillo, Graciela's husband, and he's going to be staying at the house with us for a while. For our protection.

So they already know what happened. I wait for the accusations.

Rafael moves to the chair next to the sofa where I sit. In his hand is a yellow enamel smiley-face key ring with two keys. I recognize it immediately.

“Your father took this from the boy's back pocket last night.” Rafael waves the keys in front of my face. “Seen 'em before,
chica
?”

“Frankie was looking for them. I thought he left them in the apartment,” I blurt out. That must have been what I saw flash in Papá's hand last night, when we got back to the city and he wriggled out from under the blanket.

“Where's this apartment?” Rafael asks. His voice sounds like car tires crunching gravel.

I shake my head. It feels heavy, unbalanced, and I realize I haven't brushed my hair from when I put it up in a bun to take a shower.

Tía Ileana stands behind me and squeezes my shoulder. “Give her time. She's just been through a traumatic experience,” she says.

“Nino wants the place raided before they can remove or destroy evidence.” Rafael glances toward the front door, then at Tía Ileana and me. “If he wasn't drugged to the gills with four different tubes stuck in him, he'd do it himself.”

Drugged? Tubes? Like the dying patients surrounded by beeping machines in
St. Elsewhere
. I swallow and almost choke.

“That's enough, Rafa,” my aunt says.

“Doesn't she have somewhere else to go? Some grandparents?”

I shrink back against the sofa. “No way I'm going there.” With my grandmother's rules, it would be like spending the next six weeks in jail. And everybody, Mamá included, would find out and blame me for what happened.

“You're not safe in this house. The boy is out there, along with the people who set him up. They're going to come after you and your father again,” Rafael says.

“Does Papá want me to go away?”

Rafael and Tía Ileana look at each other.

Rafael scoots to the edge of the chair. “As head of your father's security detail, I advised him this morning to send you to a safe place. He wanted you to stick around, to help him locate the gang your boy is working with.”

“He wants me to rat out Frankie?” I yank out the rubber band and shake my hair loose. My scalp stings from where the band pinched and pulled.

Rafael stands and slips the key ring into his pocket. “Your so-called Frankie,” he says, “brought you and Nino into the mountains to slit your throats and leave you in the snow for the vultures.”

I spring to my feet. Tía Ileana and Rafael are a blur in front of me. “But he didn't! He took us to the hospital. He saved Papá's life!” I back toward the stairs. “Send me to Madison, okay? Where it
is
safe and the people aren't crazy!”

I run upstairs to my room and, slam the door. How can I call my mother without everyone seeing me? How am I going to explain everything that's happened? And how quickly can she get me a plane ticket?

One just for me. No Frankie—because the Frankie I thought I knew doesn't exist.

I hear a soft tapping at the door. When I open it, Tía Ileana holds an armful of sheets and the blanket from Papá's bed. The dark circles under her eyes stand out against her pale skin.

“I'm leaving for the hospital,” she says.

I point to the sheets and blanket. “What are those for?”

“You have to bring your own change of sheets.”

“That's awful.” I picture the grimy floors and walls of the hospital, then Rafael and Graciela downstairs. “I bet everyone hates me now.”

“No one hates you. They just don't trust you.” My aunt sets her bundle on the desk. “There's a lot more to it than what Rafa said.”

“Like what?” I stare at the white sheets, at the quarter-size light brown stain near one edge.

“For one, I met the boy. Multiple times. I believed his story, too. Besides, you didn't make your father speak
at that demonstration. You're not the only one who did something foolish and dangerous.”

“I'm the one they blame.” I sit in the chair and fold my arms across the bedclothes, fingering the stain.

“Maybe.” She rubs my back. “Because of what Marcelo stands for and what he did to end the dictatorship, a lot of people act as though he can do no wrong.”

“Except for the ones who want to kill him.”

“True,
amorcita
.” My muscles start to relax under Tía Ileana's hands. “I'm more worried about the harm he does to himself.”

I stare at my fingernails, all of them picked ragged since last night. “When he spoke at the demonstration, he may have been, uh, drunk.” I sniff. “I could smell it on him at the police station five hours later.”

“I'm not surprised.” I catch a whiff of her perfume.

“And the police wanted to charge him for public intoxication and starting a riot, but then they changed their minds.”

Tía Ileana's sigh tickles my neck. “I'm surprised none of this has made the TV or newspapers. Maybe it's because they dropped the charges.”

Or maybe because the cops thought they'd killed him, when it was supposed to be the job of Frankie and his gang.

“Daniel said he didn't use to drink when he was working,” I say. But I can't say what else I'm thinking—that it's only a matter of time before he'll be unable to work. Like one José Francisco Heider if Frankie is telling the truth.

“You're right. It's getting worse. And I wish you didn't have to be here to see it.” My aunt stops rubbing my back and slides the bundle from under my arms. “I have no idea how we're going to do this. I need your help.”

“Remember the book you told me about? The one in Italian about the guy drowning?” I also envision it on the shelf downstairs, in Frankie's hands, then in mine—neither of us able to read it. “Did it give you any good advice?”

“I wish it did. But it wasn't that kind of book.” She kisses the top of my head.

I want to spend more time with her, to figure out what we can do and how I can make up for my mistakes, but she says she has to get to the hospital soon to relieve one of Papá's coworkers. She sighs a lot, so I know she's not happy about it. I wouldn't want to see that hospital again. Or Papá, in the condition in which Frankie and I brought him there. I promise her I'll take care of the birds while she's gone. At least that's one problem she won't have to deal with.

After she leaves, I put on my headphones and slap my cassette of Pink Floyd's
The Wall
—my number-one favorite album—into my Walkman. No more Metallica for me. I flop down on the bed, listen to “Hey You,” rewind the tape, and listen to it again. I sing the words, committing them to memory, hoping maybe they will tell me what to do.

C
HAPTER
23

M
y last hope is my mother.

After the cassette ends, I tiptoe down the stairs, hoping to get to the telephone in the kitchen without Rafael or Graciela seeing me. The living room is empty, and there's no one in the kitchen, either. But men's voices float in from the open door to Papá's office. I carry the phone into the living room and dial the fourteen digits of my home number. The rotary dial clicks, and holding it next to my body fails to muffle the sound. Why does my home number have so many zeroes and nines? Finally, I dial the last digit.

Strong hands grip both my shoulders and spin me around. I glimpse Rafael's dark eyes. “What do you think you're doing?” He lifts the phone out of my hands, but I can still hear ringing.

I gaze at the gaps between the floorboards, as if I could squeeze through and escape. “Calling my mother,” I say.

“She's calling her
mami
,” Rafael shouts, followed by laughter from two rooms away. He holds the receiver
toward me. Ring after ring tells me no one's home.

A skinny man totters in. He's no taller than I am, with dark hair and a thick black mustache. He grips the neck of a whiskey bottle—the whiskey Papá usually drinks.

“Well, well,” the small man slurs. “If it ain't the little girl who started everything.” He takes a swig and nods at me. “Look on the bright side,
pendejita
. We get to drink up Nino's stash.”

I break into a sweat at the word
pendejita
—little fool. “Where's Graciela?”

“Next door. Where she normally works when she's not looking after you.” Rafael spits out the words. “You spoiled gringa brat.” I back away from him into the kitchen. He follows me and sets the phone on the counter.

I scoot toward the sink. “Leave me alone!” The words come out an octave too high for anyone to take me seriously.

“Typical gringa. Thinks the whole world revolves around her.” The smaller man appears next to Rafael and laughs. I try to look him in the face, the way the counselors told me to do when kids pushed me around in middle school. But I can't make myself do it, and my gaze falls to his body, where a pistol sticks out of the waistband of his jeans.

“And I hear you're a real
puta
.” He staggers toward me. His hand grazes my hair. “We ought to teach you a lesson.”

My stomach lurches. My gasp sounds like a cry.

“Watch it, Héctor,” Rafael says. “That's Nino's daughter.”

“I was only kidding, man.” The man named Héctor taps the grip of his pistol and shakes his head. “Damn, if I had a kid like her, I'd want to blow my brains out, too.”

Rafael claps him on the back. I slide along the kitchen counter toward the door to Papá's office and backward down the three steps. A large man with red hair and freckles sits in Papá's desk chair. On the desk are a can of Coke and a bottle of pisco. The man belches. I push open the sliding door.

Outside, I suck in the damp, smoggy air and gag. I look for an escape, but high walls, the house, and the birds' cage trap me.

In the silence I hear the flutter of wings. Víctor darts to the other end of the cage. He hovers over a branch before perching with his single intact foot. On the tree branch nearest the cage's door, Pablo stares at me, his beak quivering. I unhook the latch and squeeze through the wire door. My eyes sting and then I'm crying for real. I don't even bother to muffle the noise or wipe the tears that stream down my face.