Page 7 of Girl in the Water

Chapter Two

Daniela

For one moment, Daniela was free.

Then caught, beaten, and dragged back.

“A girl who runs away makes me look like I can’t handle my own house,” Senhora Rosa said. “So the next time you run away, I’m going to feed you to the piranhas in the cove.”

The big red house down the river where Pedro had taken Daniela had a floor of boards instead of bamboo, glass windows, and a bathroom. The electricity came from wires, not from generators. About twenty girls like Daniela lived here, at least half of them peeking around doorways at the moment to watch the new girl’s fate.

Daniela hung her head, her heart frantically flopping inside her chest like a river dolphin stranded in mud.

Piranhas didn’t like the fast currents of the river, but at the cove at the edge of town where the water stood nearly still, piranhas hunted. Daniela had heard gruesome tales from the men who visited Senhora Rosa’s establishment.

“Do you understand me,garota?” Senhora Rosa snapped.

“Sim, senhora,” Daniela mumbled.

“Then off you go, and thank these nice policemen for bringing you back.”

Daniela led the two men to her room, her back and arms aching from the beating they’d given her.

The aches wouldn’t hurt long, not beyond a day or two. Senhora Rosa beat her too. And sometimes so did the paying customers.

Not all of them. A lot of men liked her,but, because of that, the other girls didn’t. Which, at the moment, was the least of Daniela’s worries.

The snake-eyed policeman shed his rumpled clothes in seconds, but the fat one huffed and puffed and struggled with his belt. He caught Daniela looking. “Too old for this, aren’t you?”

She thought he meant Rosa’s house, since the other girls were even younger.

But he said, “Too old for still not knowing your place. Are you wrong in the head? You better learn quick, girl.”

He yanked off his belt at last.

Her blood rushed loudlywroom, wroom, wroomin her ears, like the distant sound of chain saws in the forest, the sound of loggers.

“Look lively, girl. Nobody likes a sulking whore.”

She plastered a smile on her face.

At the beginning, she had cried and wished she could return to her village, but Pedro never came back to see what had become of her. So Daniela stopped crying. She stopped missing her mother. She stopped missing the village. She stopped feeling altogether.

She no longer thought about going far away to become a teacher. She understood that dream had been washed away forever. The dark water had carried her dead hopes down the river like it’d carried her mother’s log coffin.

The fat policeman pushed down his pants.

She thought about how long it might take for the piranhas to kill her, and how much it might hurt. She must never give Rosa a reason to take her to the cove.

The snake-eyed policeman closed the door with athud, a tree falling in the forest.

And in Daniela’s head, her grandmother softly whispered,We endure.

* * *

Carmen

Through the hazy morning, Carmen Barbosa looked across the Içana River at the red house that hung out over the water, raised on stilts, a flat blob like a well-fed caiman—the Amazon’s version of an alligator. She tapped her foot. Chewed her lip. She could see people move behind the lit windows at night, but she couldn’t see enough of what went on inside.