“It was more than that. It was everything I fear. It is why I wanted this case, why I joined the police, why I found and married Ximena. . . . The dream is an allegory my mind torments me with: my inability to stop something horrible from happening, my inability to make it right—to retrieve the moment the evil became inevitable—because I have already lived through it and it will never be right. As a young man—a boy—I helped my mother hide from my father the bodies of three men she had killed in our kitchen. I had watched her kill them. I did not help her—I was too afraid—and I did not save her.
“My mother had been frightened, too, but it did not stop her. When they lay dead, she cried. She sat on the floor and wailed as if they had injured her, and she was so covered in blood I thought they had—you could not even see the pattern on her dress through the gore—so I came out from my hiding place and I tried to comfort her. At first she seemed not to know I was there. After a while she noticed and she got up. Now it seems almost humorous that she tried to straighten her dress and her hair, but that’s the woman she was—very concerned for things to be proper. Perhaps even more so because the situation was so very improper. She put her arm around me and said we must clean up so my father wouldn’t know what had happened. I did not question that. My father was a policeman. Such a thing—such a mess—in his house would not do. Now that so many years are past, I cannot recall how we did it, but we carried the men away and we buried them and then we returned and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. . . . My mother burned her dress and we never told a soul. I never felt I had a choice as we did it. It seemed my life had led inevitably to that unforgivable moment where one evil piled upon another and I could never take it back. When I left Colombia, I hoped for something better—for a cleaner justice—than what we had done. For the ability to make things right.”
I was confused. “I can understand why you’d help your mother, but why did she kill them?”
Solis blinked and shook his head as if he had been sleepwalking and was now awakening. “They had come to rape her. The drug cartels were at war—Medellín and Cali—and she was the wife of a Cali policeman who would not take their payoffs to turn a blind eye. They thought they could destroy him by hurting her, by . . . making her worthless. You understand the culture of the place and time would have condemned her as much as the men who raped her. It would have reflected badly on my father to be married to a woman who was . . . soiled in that way. They told her what they wanted and she fought them. They tore her clothes and held her down, but they didn’t know how fierce my mother was. She killed two of them with a kitchen knife and the last with a shotgun my father kept at the back door.”
“And she didn’t want your father to know.”
He shook his head. “It would have embarrassed him. I told you she was a very proper woman.”
“How old were you?”
He thought a moment before he answered, “Twelve.”
“Your father never found out? Not even when the bodies were discovered?”
“They never were that I know of. Santiago de Cali lies in a fertile valley and there are places a body will simply melt into the ground. If picked bones were found some year after a cane burn, few people would ask where they came from.”
My stomach lurched a little at the image that rose in my mind of blackened skeletons and remnant flesh gnawed by the rats and other things that might run through the tangled growth of sugarcane fields. I’m still a wuss about that sort of thing, no matter how many times I’ve seen death memories or dead bodies, or died myself, and I hope I never become inured to it. “It didn’t bother you at the time?”
He blinked at me. “At the time I could not think at all—I only acted. But I have never forgotten the horror of it. Of looking down into the ruin of what was a man, of how my mother fought them and then cried over them, of the blood—how we scrubbed it and hid it and lied about the stains that wouldn’t go. We told my father I’d killed a chicken—it’s true, that saying about headless chickens—to explain the splashes on the walls that we couldn’t remove in time. That was what decided me to come here and join the police—somewhere I thought the law and justice did not give each other a cold shoulder. I have learned that it is not always the way here either, and I despise that, but it’s better than my home country was when I was a child and criminals thought they could harm my father by ruining my mother. There was no safe path once they came into the house. We let them dictate our shame, even if we did not let them win. My mother and I hid what had happened because dead criminals in her kitchen would have been almost as bad for my father as if she’d let them rape her. She killed them but they still owned a piece of her soul until the day she died, and they still own a piece of mine as well.”
TWENTY-TWO
Solis’s words echoed in my head. I swallowed a lump in my throat and couldn’t think of what to say. “I . . .” I started in a weak voice.
Solis shook his head and looked aside. “An unpleasant tale. I offer it so you will know where I am broken and cannot be trusted. But if you do not want it . . .”
“Don’t you dare.”
Solis raised his eyebrows at me.
“Thank you.”
“Why?”
“You can’t take something like that back. It can’t be unheard. And you are not broken or untrustworthy and I don’t want to forget how much you’ve entrusted to me. No matter how ugly it is, it’s still precious.”
“But it is ugly,” he agreed.
“So are my feet and I don’t apologize for them. Of course, I also don’t wear sandals. . . .”
He looked puzzled.
“You know I used to be a dancer.”
He nodded. “It’s in your record.”
“Never seen a dancer’s feet? I spent so much time in dance shoes as a kid, en pointe, or hoofing in road shows more weeks on than I was off that my feet look like they were run over by a truck. Dreadful, crippled-looking, knobby things. I earned them through pain and vanity. They remind me of what I left and why I left it. I don’t show them to most people because they’re . . . well, they’re awful, but they are part of why I am what I am. And I don’t regret that.” I studied his face to see if he understood and it seemed he did. He nodded, scowling a little. I nodded back and gave a tiny laugh. “But they’re still disgusting.”
“More disgusting than those creatures in the waves?” he asked with a grimace.
“There’s a lot that’s more disgusting than those,” I said. “Most of the things coming over the rail were illusions filled with water to give them weight. They wasted our energy and distracted us from the real ones coming up behind them. I tried to let you know, but I didn’t have the breath to shout—I’m sorry about that.”
He shrugged and I had an odd spark of hope for his nightmare’s resolution. “I have survived. What manner of attack comes next?”
“I’m not sure. They may just try to batter us to death in this storm, since we’ve figured out their weakness.”
“I haven’t. What is this weakness?”
“The sea witch’s power is limited and she has to choose where she’ll spend it. The merfolk—or, more likely, the sea witch we keep talking about—casts illusions to create the impression of an army of her minions. But only a few are really flesh and blood. They aren’t pushovers—though I’ll admit the illusions are powerful, too—but once you know most of what you’re seeing isn’t real, it’s easier to dodge the real ones and break the false. The merfolk aren’t quite impervious to the motions of the water in the storm, so while the storm may continue to wear us down, I think they’ll have to make their next sally against us in a less-unsettled circumstance. Anything else that comes at us will be magic, not meat.”
“That may reassure you, but I do not feel better hearing it. What if she’s holding the majority of her men and power in reserve against the eventuality of our arrival in her domain?”