He was not a lawyer.
He moved in. She was not consulted about it. He moved in and filled the shack with his noxious presence. He took up more space, the little girl thought, than any ordinary man. He bumped into things. He drank—though not, at first, excessively. His huge hands moved over the girl’s mother with an aggressive intimacy which was received without resistance or encouragement. The walls dividing the two rooms were thin enough that there was no mystery about what happened during the night: it was sex, the little girl thought, a messiness of grunting and moaning, unspeakable. When it happened, she would hide her face and cover her ears. In the mornings Carlos would grin at her and whisper: “How did you sleep, little one? Too noisy for you?” And laugh a secret, terrible laugh at the back of his throat.
One day when Carlos was at work, the little girl dared to ask her mother why she had allowed him to move in.
The contempt in her voice was impossible to conceal, and her mother slapped her for it. The girl gaped and raised one hand to her wounded face. Her cheek was on fire.
The girl’s mother flushed. “We’re not in a position to choose,” she said fiercely. “Look at me! Am I young? Am I pretty? Look! Am I rich?”
And the girl observed for the first time that her mother was none of these things.
“He brings money in. Maybe you don’t know what that means. You don’t look at your plate when you eat. Maybe you should. There’s meat there. Meat! And green vegetables. You have clothes. You don’t go hungry.”
So we are poor, the girl thought. Carlos was the curse of their poverty.
These things astonished and frightened her.
She might have adjusted, even so. Except that now Carlos himself began to change. Bad as he was to begin with, he grew worse. His drinking intensified. The girl’s mother confided that Carlos was having trouble on the job, fighting with the foreman. Some nights the grunting and moaning in the next room would end in muffled curses. Carlos would not make jokes the next morning, merely glower at his breakfast. His casual intimacy with the girl’s mother became more aggressive; he tossed her back and forth in his arms in a way that made the girl think of a woman being mauled by a bear. Increasingly that was what Carlos seemed to her to be: a large and powerful animal fuming in a cage. But the cage was insubstantial; the cage, its restraint, could vanish at any moment. She didn’t like to think about that.
He began to touch her more often.
She accepted this at first the way her mother accepted it, with passive resignation. She was aware of her mother watching closely when Carlos coaxed her into his lap. Carlos had hands like hairless animals, hands like moles. They moved with a blind volition of their own. They touched and stroked her. Usually when she had endured this for a time, Carlos would stand up abruptly, scowl at her as if she had done something wrong, take the girl’s mother off into the bedroom.
Her mother apologized one day. They were alone. The float shack rose in a gentle swell; rain beat against the roof and the bilge pumps rattled under the floor. “I’m sorry,” her mother said. “What’s happening … I didn’t expect it.”
The girl felt an anger well up in her, huge and unexpected. “Then make him leave!” She astonished herself with tears. “Tell him to go away!”
Her mother hugged and soothed her. “It’s not that easy. I wish it were. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s hard to be alone. You don’t understand that. It’s been difficult. Difficult to be alone. I thought he would help, you know. I really thought he would.” She stroked the girl’s hair. “I thought he might learn to love us.”
That night, when Carlos began to touch her, her mother told the little girl to go to her room. She listened through the door as the two adults spoke and then shouted. There was a scuffling, the girl’s mother cried out, a door slammed. The little girl waited but there was no more sound. She was afraid to go out. She slept finally, trembling in her sleep.
In the morning Carlos scowled at her and left the shack wordlessly. The girl’s mother had a blackened bruise across her cheek. She touched it periodically and with an expression of wonder, as if it had appeared there by magic. Her face, with the bruise, looked terribly old. The girl gazed at it in confusion. When had those lines grown out from her mother’s eyes? That webbing of brittle skin beneath her jaw?
Now it was the girl who wanted to apologize. But the room was full of awesome silences, and she was not sure how to begin. When she did, it was a disaster.
“Mama,” she said, “I’m sorry if—”
“Sorry!” Her mother turned on her. Grease spilled from the stove in a sizzling puddle. “You’re sorry! My God! If it weren’t for you—”
Her hand leapt to her mouth. But of course it was too late. The words had escaped. The girl held them in her mind. The words were like hot coals: impossible to touch, but intensely interesting. She was both stricken and curiously pleased. Pleased, because she understood things at last. How simple it was! It explained everything. It explained the foul looks Carlos had given her. It explained the bruise on her mother’s cheek. She had caused it. She was at the center of this tempest. She had tempted Carlos somehow—seduced him. She had not been conscious of it. It was not something she had set out to do. But she had tempted him, and Carlos had enacted his anger and frustration the only way he could—with the girl’s mother. In bed. And with his fists.
She told herself that this was an adult thought and that she should be proud of herself: she was not being childish anymore.
The good little girl understood that she was not such a good little girl after all.
Byron leaned into the camera angle of the telephone, absorbed. Keller could only stare at Teresa. He had never seen her like this. Her eyes were moving wildly under the lids; tears streaked her face.
It was obscene. He couldn’t let it go on. He must not let this happen to her.
You see somebody hurting, Keller thought wildly, the thing to do is help. He had learned that. A long time ago.
Byron turned away from the phone and said, “Hey, no—Ray—”
But he was already reaching for her.
The fire began at an oil terminal by the sea wall.
Later, people would say it had been inevitable. The Floats possessed only the most rudimentary public facilities. There had been no zoning laws, no building codes, no safety commissions. It was a community made of wood and paper. Some places, oil runoff had filled the water beneath the factories and the balsas. The fire began as a trivial industrial accident involving an acetylene torch; it quickly became something else.
The little girl was home that day. Carlos was at work; her mother was patching the kitchen wall with plaster. The little girl climbed out onto the flat tin roof of the shanty float—it was a sunny morning—and was surprised to see a line of smoke rising from somewhere north along the sea wall, punctuating the seamless blue arc of the sky. The smoke seemed to be drifting straight up; in fact the wind was carrying it almost directly toward her. She was fascinated by this.
Humming to herself, lulled by the wash of the sunlight, she watched for a time. The line of smoke slowly broadened and became a kind of wall, a clouded turmoil sheeting the sky, and when she stood on tiptoes she imagined she could see the flames at the base of it, still far away, licking up from the float shacks miles down the placid canal.