Who: Zari What: Narrative: Papi takes a turn for the worse Where: Bathos When: Recentish Warnings: Spanish?
It began with him calling her by her mother’s name.
The morning after the costume party, after she had crawled home covered in shame and guilt, the feeling of violation a tangible thing against her skin. She had grabbed for a coat from behind the door, and she had wrapped it around herself in case he was awake, not wanting him to see her shame.
“Zoilita!” he had called from the kitchen. She had never met her mother, had never heard him call for her like a man did his mujer. It made her pause, and it sent shivers up her spine. “¿Donde esta la niña?”
That is how it began.
She could not lie to herself, could not tell herself it was sundowning, not when it happened from morning until night. Little things at first, things of forgetting. Her name, that they were not in Cuba, that he was not on a mission. Small, nothing things, that all amounted to knowledge chasing along her spine and making her heart ache.
Then the violence began.
“¿Quién está allí? Te voy a matar!” He yelled the morning after, and she was asleep in her bed when she heard him. Someone had broken in, she thought, and she had scrambled from the bed with the bat she kept beneath the mattress. But in the living room, it was only him. Solo, nadie mas. He ran at her, and she dropped the bat. She made him soup for lunch, and she attempted to think things through.
She could not tell Drake, she knew. Drake would kill him, as he had been so ready to do that first day. She could not tell Tomas for the same reason. The vigilantes, she did not trust them not to lock him away until he proved too dangerous to keep living. She did nothing.
That evening, he told her about meeting her mother. “Ella era la mujer más bonita a la isla,” he told her, and he was only her father, then, and no one else. He spun the story of their romance, and of how he wept when her mother died, and she listened and ignored her fears. It might remain like this, she thought. Older people suffered from dementia. There would be good days with the bad, she decided that night.
The city was covered in fog when she woke the next morning, and the apartment was silent. She stayed beneath the blankets, and she listened to the quiet. She did not know yet that the fog was bad. There was no fog on her isla, not even at the foot of the highest monte. It was too warm, and she thought this was like the rain, which never seemed to end. She thought of the party, as she did often, and she rose from her bed to take a shower that was too hot, as if that could wash anything away.
The water covered the sound of footsteps, and she screamed when the curtain was pulled aside. He was crying, repeating the same thing over and again. “¿Porqué estoy asi?” She wrapped a towel around herself, tucked him into bed, and she cried, too. She did not move for the remainder of the day.
That noche, when he overturned the table and sent the arroz con frijoles flying everywhere she was not surprised. She tensed, but she did not panic, and when his hand closed on her wrist tightly enough to bruise, she talked him down. “Mi Zoilita,” he said, wrapping his arms around her. She hugged him back like a child clinging to her father after a nightmare, but there was no waking from this.
She would have stronger locks installed in the morning, and barras for the windows.