Page 33

M orning arrived at the Albemarle without anyone having gotten so much as a whiff of Light the Night’s miserable finale. Meanwhile, I was still settling my pulse from everything that came after it. If not for my wet clothes hanging off the footboard of my bed, I would’ve had a hard time convincing myself I had kissed Río and managed not to die from happiness, much less that Sonia had kissed me and managed to keep it a secret from the Menagerie gossip brigade.

When I found her in the kitchen, pulling ingredients for breakfast croquettes with the harried focus of un tabaquero wrapping cigars, she ducked all my attempts to clear the air. It took me withholding the eggs for her to even look my way, and when she did, her eyes telegrammed the warning that she’d rather take a walk off the Brooklyn Bridge than talk about what happened last night.

I put down the eggs and backed away.

The workday might have passed like any other if not for the riot of feelings that soldered my attention to the velvet curtain. Cleaned and mended, I’d hung it back up, leaving the pump turned off as well so Río could rest in quiet privacy after staying up all night with me. He’d held us for hours at the surface with only his strength, kissing away all the evidence that I’d been in shambles.

Santa María. I never knew a kiss could feel so good. I’d never sought one out before, though I was pretty sure it wouldn’t have felt like this if I had, like touching my mouth to a circuit that lit up my body like a ballroom chandelier. A guy can hardly focus on stripping varnish once they’ve seen salt water roll off the curve of Río’s bottom lip; I was out there sanding benches with the energy of a dozen men just to cope.

Back at the Albemarle, my housemates had their noses to the grindstone as well. When Morgan had made his announcement, I’d assumed the company couldn’t exceed their current standards of oddity, but like every other assumption I’d made since taking up with them, I was wrong.

I was hammering nails on Lulu’s new settee when the madam towed Igor into the parlor by the leg, donning a more lavish tunic than she usually wore, with ornate embroidery wrapped around the hem at her knees, bracelets jangling from both wrists, and a bright red shawl draped across her collar. Igor seemed to stand even taller dressed in his homeland’s fashion—an oversized shirt lined with patterned ribbons cinched at the waist by a thick striped scarf.

“How is looking?” the dapper giant asked.

I gave the hammer a break and smiled. “Real spiffy. Both o’ you.”

“If the audience is going to gawk at our size, they shall learn a thing or two about the Eastern world while they do it,” Navya said proudly. “At least it will be an improvement over sitting on a stool and smiling while Morgan asks impertinent questions about our shoe sizes and how many steps it takes for legs like ours to walk to the front gate.”

“I suggest madam ride on my shoulders for good stunt, but,” Igor laughed, “she call me ‘beans for brains.’”

“If I wanted to sit in the sky, I would have asked Mr. Benny to build me a tower,” she snorted, then walked around his legs back out of the parlor.

In the dining room, Eli and Emmet were having their own disagreements.

“Aw, c’mon, Em,” Eli whined. “Vaudeville’s hep right now! We could make a whole new name for ourselves!” He held up his hands to frame the billboard he saw in his mind. “Eli and Emmett: the captivating, comedic, and conjoined!”

“I ain’t learnin’ to juggle with your leg in my pants, end of story.” Emmett sealed the argument with a pound on the table—then immediately relented after Eli unleashed a pout so pitiful it made Timmy’s look dignified.

Not everyone was thinking in pairs. Donned in breeches and one of my work shirts, a cigarillo hanging from her lips (unlit per her recent pledge against smoking indoors), Vera contemplated the aesthetic virtues of tattoos while studying pictures of the New York Botanical Gardens in the Saturday Evening Post .

“Forget it, fire breath,” Matthias said, passing her on the way to the kitchen. “There’s room for only one tattooed freak in this show, and that’s me.”

“Go get ‘killjoy’ tattooed across your bloody face.” She threw down the magazine. “What’re you doing to save the show?”

He emerged with a fresh cafecito . “Nothin’. Morgan’s a fool if he thinks I’m about to mess up the reputation I spent a decade building just to buy stage time from Moby Dick. Trust me, y’all are better off if I just stick to expanding the circumference of my biceps.”

A small gasp of profanity from Lulu’s corner of the parlor interrupted my eavesdropping. Looking up from the hammer, I found her eyes holding in a sheen of tears as she sucked her finger and shook it out.

Timmy abandoned an anthill of shredded magazine paper to climb up her dress. “Mama?”

“You all right, Lulu?” I asked.

Quickly, she stuffed whatever she’d been working on into her sewing bag and molded her face into a placid smile. “Just pricked a finger, sweetie,” she said to Timmy, then to me: “Everything’s jake. I think I just need some air.”

Timmy dutifully gave his mother her cane, and she rocked onto her feet with her sewing bag under her arm, making for the door without a glance in anyone’s direction.

Must’ve been one hell of a finger prick. I put down the screwdriver and tried to make myself inconspicuous as I wandered after her.

Soft sniffles lured me onto the porch. Lulu didn’t look up from her seat on the top step when the door clicked shut behind me; instead, her focus stayed on her lap where something resembling the museum’s Chimera pelt was bundled in her sewing bag.

“Want some company?” I asked.

“Aw, Benny. You don’t need to be out here right now.”

“Sure I do, it’s a nice evening.”

I pocketed my hands and waited against the banister. If I’d learned anything in the last day about consoling someone, it was that talking was overrated.

Predictably, the silence wore her down. “I envy you, kid.”

“Envy me ? Why?”

“Look at all the lives you’ve lived. A blacksmith. A seaman. Now that you’ve taken up with us freaks, you’re a regular butcher, baker, and candlestick maker,” she rambled, waving her hankie emphatically at me before blowing her nose into it. “You’re young. Changeable. Which is exactly what I’m not. Not anymore.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“Oh, but I do . Sam came back asking this old dog to learn a new trick when the fact is, I can’t change no more. This body’s all I’ve got to help this family stay afloat, and I was already stretching the truth with that whole ‘takes seven men to hug her’ claptrap. Without Saul, I’ve got no gimmick, and you gotta have a gimmick, Benny.”

“Is that what you’re making?” I gestured at her sewing bag. “A gimmick?”

Lulu’s eyes welled up again. She raised her hands so I could get a better look at what they were holding.

It was a beard.

The moment she caught my startled expression, hers crumpled. “I’m g-gonna b-be so ugly ...”

Quickly, I dropped down next to her and wrapped an arm around the soft slope of her shoulder. “That’s not possible, Lulu. You’re so pretty, there’s nothing a beard could do to change it.”

I meant it. She had better style than Sonia, curves she didn’t need whalebone to achieve, a permanent rougeless blush on her cheeks, and a cherub mouth she’d passed onto her lucky nene.

Lulu dabbed at her nose with her hankie. “You sound just like my Charlie.”

“Must’ve been a smart guy. You know,” I said, rubbing her arm, “I knew a lady with a beard in Porto Rico. She put ribbons in it. Said it kept the mosquitos off her neck. And she was married and had seven kids, so I guess it didn’t matter what anyone thought if the person she made all them kids with thought she was a doll.”

At this, her sobs mixed with laughter—the kind that disappears into silence before coming back in an infectious blast. “You’re fulla shit, Benny,” she said through a soggy smile. “I know you didn’t bet on living in a house full of lunatics when you left Red Hook, but I sure am glad you’re here.”

“Me too, Lulu.”

She tipped into my open arms so I could hug her. It didn’t take seven of me to do it either.

After dinner, I rushed back to the theater with pockets full of haddock and sandwich, powered by an eagerness that all but made me sprint across the manmade lake just for the shortcut.

Río was waiting for me at the glass. This time, he followed me up the ladder, his expectant smile greeting me between each rung, the lamplight turning his copper hair russet. He met me at the lattice where I knelt above him, my blood singing in my ears.

“ Buenas noches, Río. ”

“Buenas noches, Benigno.”

I passed the haddock down to him through the grate, unwrapped my sandwich, and an awkward moment passed when all you could hear was quiet chewing and the gentle burble of water as Río’s tail did its dance to keep him afloat. I hadn’t noticed how quickly he’d gulped down his dinner before I caught him staring at me like he was still hungry.

“Are you waiting for an invitation?” he said softly.

I choked down an unchewed bite. “Am I invited?”

His fins skimmed the surface as he backed away from the hatch, making room to catch me. “Come awn in, the wua-tah’s fine,” he drawled in perfect Brooklynese.

“Your impressions are almost as good as mine.” I ditched the sandwich. “Almost.”

I skipped right past yesterday’s nervous impulse to fold my clothes if it meant delaying another taste of Río’s salted lips. They landed on the ground, and wearing only San Cristóbal and my union suit, I gathered my courage and lowered myself into the water with slightly more grace than I’d done last night, giving in immediately to a grip so solid, it could have been made of cast iron itself.

How had I held out this long? My gaze followed the rivulets of water down his forehead and off the steep end of his straight nose. His eyes gazed back, two blue stars on a horizon of dark, wet lashes.

I’d waited all day for this—

“You know,” he whispered, interrupting my trajectory to his mouth. “I seem to remember you telling me you were going to beg.”

I remembered no such thing. “Beg?”

“For me to teach you to swim.”

“What, you mean... now ?”

“I have a theory, you see,” he murmured, lifting my arm off his shoulder to kiss a water droplet off my wrist, “on the elasticity of human lungs.”

Another kiss, this time to my fingertips, and all the muscles above my neck immediately stopped working. “W-which is w-what?”

His fingers found their way to my chest, tracing the silver chain down my sternum. “That holding your breath for extended periods underwater may increase your capacity for air.”

The floor of my stomach dropped out, and I didn’t know whether to blame his maddeningly gentle touch or my complete terror of what he was suggesting. “How ’bout you just tell me how to do it, and I could, like, try it in the bathtub or something?”

His quiet laugh sent a breeze of warmth across my face. “As much as I relish holding you for hours at a time, you are a rather heavy barnacle. And I am not as strong as I once was.”

“Not as strong? What do you m—”

“The first thing you will learn is how to float.”

I glanced warily down below us. Now that we were entertaining ideas of my independence in the water, it looked like we were a hundred feet in the air.

“ No te preocupes. I have your arms,” he reassured me. “You will now lean forward, with your chest in the water, extend your legs behind you, and just... keep your eyes on me.”

That part was easy. “Jesucristo, ayúdame,” I muttered, which wasn’t begging, but close enough. Slowly, I leaned forward, then lifted my legs up one at a time so my stomach rested flat in the water. “Like this?”

“Perfect. Let us take a turn together.”

His tail unfurled elegantly beneath me, blue and silver and made of myths. As we started to move, I noticed the sandpapery feeling was back on his palms, confirming my theory that the texture helped him grip things in the water.

Río propelled us around the tank. Eventually, as I gave in to the motion, my panic and the day’s labor washed off in the brine. It felt good . My body had always been this clunky, wheezing thing I tolerated against my will, but the water seemed to bring out a gracefulness I didn’t know I had.

Getting an eyeful of Río’s upper half didn’t hurt either.

“I believe you are ready to dip your face in the water,” he observed. “Shall we?”

“We don’t gotta be hasty—”

“It is easy. Breathe in deep and hold it while you are under. Here, would you like an incentive?”

Taking my waist, he leaned backward until his head disappeared into bubbles. As he went under, he pulled my hips over his, so we were both horizontal in the water—me looking down from above the surface, Río grinning impishly at me through a halo of copper hair and ripples. I was gonna kiss that comemierda smile off his face.

I mumbled the world’s fastest prayer to Santa María , gulped air, squeezed my eyes shut, and dunked my face in. The world went silent, and just like that, I was weightless.

One at a time, Río’s hands released my waist, and like a mira-cle, I didn’t sink. I felt soft kisses on my eyelids—the right, then the left.

When I opened them, there he was. Beaming at me.

I took his face in my hands and reached for his mouth. He backed away, a teasing glint in his eye, so I kicked my legs out—clumsily, the way cabras kick trying to get a foothold on a craggy cliffside. It got me closer.

This time he let me catch him. Or maybe he caught me. We floated into a kiss that could’ve boiled water, his hands on my neck and mine skating over the folded ridge of fin that lined his lower back. When I couldn’t hold my breath anymore, I let it out in a stream of bubbles between our faces.

Río tipped us back above the surface and the world splashed into bright, noisy focus. I was puffing like I’d run a race, my curls dripping into my eyes. I shook them out—

“Stop, you insidious urchin!” Río cried, nearly dropping me to shield himself from the spray.

“ ?Oye! Did you see that?” I gasped.

“Of course I did. I was there,” he said, recovering. A proud smile took shape on his lips. “I daresay you will be swimming circles around me before long.”

I pulled him closer. “I can’t believe I get to be with you like this,” I whispered, sweeping his hair back over his shoulder. “I think you’re even more beautiful underwater than you are in my dreams.”

Halfway to his mouth, I saw Río’s eyes widen, and I paused.

“Benigno,” he whispered, “can you see underwater?”

“Huh?”

But before he could answer, the ease drained from his face. He snapped his head toward the proscenium, and in a terrified whisper, said, “Someone comes.”

I jerked my head to look. “ What? ”

“Hush,” he hissed. “You must go!”

He spun me around and hoisted me up by the waist toward the ledge. I grabbed onto it and pulled, Río pushing up my legs.

Caramba , why hadn’t I turned the pump back on? In case there was still time to thwart discovery, I put out the lamp then padded blindly down the rungs, gathered my clothes, and tiptoed to the edge of the curtain, where I waited.

All was silence, and then: The scuff of a shoe. The groan of a bench skidding across the stripped flooring.

An intruder was inside the theater.

I flattened myself against the proscenium wall and gave my lungs a stern command to shut up. The trespasser’s steps were hurrying away; once they had faded enough to suggest a safe distance between us, I stuck my head out and raced on bare feet all the way to the entrance of the Menagerie in hopes of catching a glimpse of whatever Dreamland interloper had come to spy on Río in the middle of the night.

By the time I reached the door, they were gone.

I squinted across the darkened promenade. When my eyes failed to show me anything, I tuned my ears.

The silence had never been so loud.