Page 23

T hat Sunday, Igor went out for shoe polish and brought home The Brooklyn Daily Eagle instead. It had a headline to cast a pall over the entire Albemarle, if not the entire city:

OVER 150 PERSONS, MOST OF THEM GIRLS, DIE AS FIRE TRAPS HAPLESS FACTORY WORKERS IN MANHATTAN SKYSCRAPER

The disaster—this one out of water—had everyone in the parlor that afternoon heartsick and stuck for words to explain how a three-story fire in a ten-story building could eat up that many souls in less than half an hour. If the article had its facts straight about what happened at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, then most of those girls were immigrants from Brooklyn younger than Sonia.

Lulu and Igor took it especially hard, having both spent their pre-Menagerie years working in Garment District factories, Lulu sewing skirts she couldn’t fit into herself, and Igor cobbling work shoes. “You couldn’t hardly breathe in those rooms,” Lulu said, wiping tears and holding tightly onto Timmy, who sat surprisingly still against his mother’s side. “I can’t stand the thought of those innocent kids having to choose between jumping out a window or burning alive.”

“Is proprietor’s crime,” said Igor quietly as Navya brought him a fresh cup of café . She sat down next to him and put her small hand on his enormous one. “When laborers is sick, when they working too long hours, when people is crowded in unsafe building... they do nothing .”

Matthias pushed up his glasses and sighed. “Greedy is as greedy does. What do they care so long as the cash flows into the bank?”

“I dunno, but I amn’t smokin’ indoors no more,” whispered Vera.

There was little I could add when I’d just escaped factory life by the skin of my scalded hand only ten days ago. I didn’t miss my old workplace, but when I thought about Farty, Dan, and the others still sweating at the furnaces in Red Hook, I was surprised to find sympathy for them lurking under all my resentment.

The mood was too glum for evening drinks, so the Albemarle’s lamps were all turned off by nine o’clock, making it easy to slip out to the theater unnoticed. When I arrived, Río looked as if someone had turned down his lamp too, until I showed him what was wrapped in the Eagle ’s ad page.

“Salmon,” he sighed happily. “Neptune bless you.”

“De nada.”

I handed it to him through the grill and pulled out a canteen of Igor’s café while he ate, noting a slight dip in his usual energy. I wondered if the pump had interfered with his sleep, and tried not to think about how Río was trapped in his tank the way those girls were trapped in that factory.

“Tell me that story again, Benigno,” he said through a mouthful of fish. “The amusing one from the other night.”

“Wasn’t much of a story,” I said. “The pig got loose, and we found it eating the communion wafers in San Juan Bautista’s bell tower.”

His giggle sparkled like water. “An earthbound creature in a tower. Absurd,” he mused between bites. “Everything is so much heavier on land, climbing seems impossibly difficult.”

“That’s exactly how swimming seems to me,” I said.

Río licked his lips and dabbed the corner of his mouth. “Swimming is easy. Even a tailless creature like yourself can do it.”

“Ballsy assumption from a guy with a tail.”

“It is a fact,” he insisted. “Mankind has bathed in Neptune’s robes for generations. How did you never learn to swim?”

“Bum lungs,” I admitted. “The hurricane too. Tití Luz believed in her own kind of Currents, and she figured if the water had spat me out, then I was never meant to swim in it.”

“Odd. She was right to believe in the Currents,” said Río, thoughtfully, “even if her interpretation of them was wrong.”

“Says you.”

“Indeed. And I will prove it when I teach you to swim.”

“When pigs stop climbing and start flying, you mean.” I choked down a lukewarm sip of the café and grimaced at the bitterness. “Have you done anything yet with those shells I gave you?”

“Yes, though much practice lies ahead of me before my hand is steady enough for the task,” he said with a grimace of his own. “I have chipped a good many.”

“I can always bring more,” I said. And some sand too, I thought. It would give him something more comfortable than a steel floor to sleep on.

He glided closer. “Where did you find the carved shell that hangs from your neck?”

“This?” I held up the medallion. “This ain’t a shell. It’s San Cristóbal , the patron saint of travelers. Tití gave it to me for protection on the way to Nueva York .”

“So that you could find a new harmony?”

I didn’t usually like poking around the old, abandoned corridors of my past. But Río was a natural at getting my malas manas out of the way. Tactless though he was, when I turned over my memories to him, he handled them carefully.

“Feels like I’ve been hunting for a harmony my whole life,” I said. “I’m beginning to think there’s nowhere on earth where someone like me can even find one.”

“Someone like you? A Puerto Rican boy, you mean?”

Since Río first spoke to me almost two weeks ago, he’d called me a parasite, a coward, and a barnacle. But he never lied, and he never cracked wise about the parts of me I couldn’t help. He’d told me his darkest secret when he spilled his guts about the General Slocum ; maybe it wouldn’t kill me to spill some of mine.

“Brace yourself for a stupid story,” I muttered, so he laid back on the water, settling in to be entertained.

This particular memory would be easier to share in Spanish.

“ Tití Luz had found me in Humacao where she had business, but then she brought me home to her tobacco farm in Caguas , where I met Ramón—the son of an insurrectionist who lived in the sugar plantation nearby. He was the sort of rascal everybody liked: cheerful and fearless and more handsome than a jíbaro had any right to be. He was tall, even though he ate like a juí bird, with coffee eyes and a smile as bright as a coquí’s chirp whenever there was some mischief he wanted to include me in. Ramón was my best friend. And I had no words for what I felt whenever I looked at him.

“After long days working in the sun, the dirt would be all over our skin and clothes—Ramón smelling like sugarcane, me smelling like pigs and tobacco—so we often went to the shallow stream to bathe. One afternoon, we sat on the bank waiting for our clothes to dry and the feeling came over me again. Like warm honey.”

I opened my palm, recollection rising to the surface of my skin. “I took his hand. Just to feel it against mine. But as soon as I did it, he yanked it back with a glare like I’d attacked him. ‘What is wrong with you?’ he said, disgusted. And he grabbed his wet clothes and ran back down the yellow path away from me.”

“Benigno,” Río breathed, but I couldn’t look at him. If I did, I’d lose the nerve to tell him the rest.

“When I called on Ramón the next day, he puffed himself up and blocked the door frame as if I was an invader. He had obviously told his father what I had done, because he wasted no time telling me there was no place in an independent Puerto Rico”—I ventured a look at Río—“for a nameless queer like me.”

The fronds of his tail fin came up behind him and draped over his shoulders. He shrank into them. “What did you do?”

I cleared my throat of the rock that had lodged itself there and fell back into English. “I bloodied his lip.”

Río nodded soberly. “While generally I disapprove of violence, he appears to have earned it.”

“Yeah, well”—I shrugged—“I learned all I needed to know about what the world thinks of ‘someone like me,’ by which I mean... Manos a Dios , I don’t know how to say this...” I drew a deep breath. “A Puerto Rican boy who falls in love with other boys.”

If I hadn’t had it already, I had Río’s complete attention now. I thought my whole body might dissolve through the grill from shame.

“What ridiculous savagery,” he breathed in English, “would make humans spurn a person for something so... so... ordinary ?”

I squinted at him. “You mean merpeople don’t care?”

“Benigno, why in the Seven Seas should it matter who we love?”

Instead of an answer, a different question slipped out before I could catch it. “Have you ever been in love?”

“Young as I am, and sparse as we are, the souls that have drawn my affection have been few indeed, but if my heart sought the love of another merman, we would not be hindered by senseless rules meant to separate us for being the same sex. A host of sea creatures would cease to exist under such constraints.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Honestly, Benigno, I despair for your race!”

“Obviously, not all humans have this hang-up,” I said, compelled to defend humanity from an outraged merman’s judgment. “Turns out Eli and Emmett, the two men who pretend to be twins, aren’t brothers at all.”

Río looked like his brain was about to combust from all the human nonsense it was trying to interpret at once. “They are lovers?”

“Yeah. And I guess they figured it out. About me,” I muttered.

“You’ve a trait in common. This is good, is it not?” he said when my sullen expression didn’t go anywhere.

“I denied it.”

His tail slipped off his shoulders. “ Denied it? But why?”

I groaned into my hands. “I didn’t know how to admit it. Because, not counting this conversation, I’ve never admitted it. I should’ve been happy—finally, people who understand, who might show me how inverted folks survive in America without burying themselves alive,” I said, my voice climbing to a hysterical pitch. “And it’s because, after everything, I still wish it wasn’t true. Everything else in my life is so damn hard already, couldn’t God give me one less complication?”

I chanced a glance at Río and instantly regretted it. He looked stunned.

“See?” I muttered. “Estupido.”

For a moment, it looked like he might agree with me.

He dove under the water instead.

“Uh... Río?”

His blobby shape swam a slow oval path several times before he reappeared at the surface looking refreshed and resolute. “I have given it some thought, and what I think is this: Guarding your heart because it has been broken is not una estupidez .”

I pursed my lips. “Really.”

“Yes. Revealing your truth is like swimming, Benigno. It may not come naturally or easily. But in still waters, it can be learned,” he said firmly, his hair painting a rusty halo around his shoulders. “Though you feel regret about what happened, I am glad you have found others like you. Perhaps one day you shall feel safe enough to tell them what you have told me.”

“Safe,” I repeated, looking down at his conviction with envy. “In my whole dumb life, I’ve never felt as safe anywhere as I feel sitting on a metal grate twenty feet above the ground with you.”

As soon as I said it, I wished I had the good sense to stop spilling my guts into that tank. The habit would be hard enough to break later. But Río just raised an eyebrow and said, “Spoken like a true barnacle.”

We both cracked up. It left behind a sensation I didn’t expect. Half ache, half ease, I didn’t know what to call it.

“?Río?”

“?Qué?”

“Won’t you give me your name?”

His smile faded slowly. “No.”

“Why?” I whispered.

“For the same reason you could not confirm aloud what Eli and Emmett already knew about you.”

Sure, I was disappointed. But I couldn’t blame him. I looked down at my hands—the ones that had built his prison—and knew whatever safety I felt around him would always be one-sided.

“Lo siento,” he said quietly.

“Don’t apologize. You’re right to hold on to it.”

“I am grateful you told me your story, though,” he said, “and sad indeed to learn you are not free to love who you wish. Perhaps you were right. Perhaps the Currents brought us here because they knew we would meet.”

My face flushed. “Why do you say that?”

He looked pityingly up at me through the iron bars.

“Because we are both caged.”