Isabel sipped her drink and watched the poker game. George still had the bigger pile of chips. Nothing happened for a while. The brothers played in silence. Maybe they were so absorbed that she could get upstairs to a computer and send a message.
They had finished another game when George got up and went to the bathroom on the other side of the kitchen. Raúl put his head down on the table to rest, like he was taking a nap in school. Isabel stood, with a moment’s light-headedness from the drink, and moved toward the stairs. June was hunched over the bunny. Penny and Sebastian were playing tic-tac-toe on the floor. Maria was rummaging in the refrigerator. Marcus saw her, of course, but she put her finger to her lips. Raúl didn’t look up. She climbed silently.
Upstairs, there was a door immediately on the right. Isabel turned the doorknob and it opened. Inside were two big computer monitors and an open laptop. She eased the door closed behind her. One of the monitors had a screen divided into six parts, with grainy black-and-white images in each box. She recognized a shot of the door they had come in, from outside. And one of the gate at the end of the driveway. A shot of the stables with the white horse. It wasn’t even that fancy a security system. Some of her friends had better ones.
She slid into the chair and tapped the laptop keyboard to wake it up. The screen asked for a password. She blew the air out of her cheeks. Her dad always wrote down his passwords. She opened the drawer in the desk. There was junk, paper clips and pens, and a yellow sticky note. It said “panocha” in handwritten letters. She thought of her own triangle of hair and she blushed, but she entered it as a password and it worked. She guessed it was Raúl’s password. That guy was a dick. She opened a browser window to message her brother.
The computer was slow and she was still waiting for it to open Facebook when she heard steps behind her on the stairs. Her heart started going twice its normal speed. She typed her login and password but then the door opened. She quit the browser before a hand grabbed her chair and swiveled it around. Raúl was standing behind her, leaning close. His hand was on the back of the chair, behind her towel-wrapped head.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
If she were a spy caught like this in a movie, she would kiss her enemy, to distract him. Then she would punch and kick and climb on his head to break his neck with her legs. But she didn’t know martial arts.
“You have to let us go,” she said.
“Do I?”
“Please,” she said.
A weird look had come into Raúl’s eyes. He wasn’t listening to her. He pulled the towel from her wet hair. She grabbed at it, but it dropped to the floor. He put a hand on her breast, through the white T-shirt, and she jumped.
“Please don’t,” she said.
“It’s okay.”
“Stop,” she said, pushing at his hand. “Stop!”
He pinned her arm to the chair and slid his free hand down over the T-shirt and moved the shorts aside. Then he slid a thumb inside her, as if investigating something. She tried to shove him away but he was so strong. His hand was locked over her pelvis. She couldn’t move him.
He lifted her out of the chair with one arm. He was so much stronger than she was. He kept his thumb inside her, fingers splayed across the front of her shorts. She felt frozen, paralyzed. Her throat constricted, and she couldn’t scream as he carried her down the hall. And if she did, what would the little kids do? Would Maria help? She felt like a bowling ball in his hand, with his thumb inside her.
They were in a bedroom. She had time to register its messiness, like a teenage boy’s room. And then she was face down on a bed and he was peeling off her shorts. She tried to kick him but he pressed her torso to the bed with one arm. She could barely breathe. He kneeled on her leg so her hamstring seized and cramped. She heard him undo his belt and his zipper.
“No!” she said.
He spread her legs, hard, and then there was only pain. It seemed to be ripping her apart. When she turned her head and cried out, there was the suffocating feeling of a pillow over her face, and the heavy weight of his body pushing her into the mattress again and again.
Then she lost track of time, and the next thing she knew another voice was swearing in Spanish. “Son of a bitch. What the fuck, Raúl.”
There was a stinging between her legs, and something sticky on her thighs, and she rolled painfully, trying to cover herself. George stood in the doorway. Isabel looked around the messy bedroom. There were clothes thrown over a chair, bottles and crumpled paper and trash on the bureau. Raúl lay on the other side of the bed, playing with his phone. She felt sick when she saw him. She pulled her legs up, edged away.
“She came onto me, maje,” Raúl said. “I swear it.”
“I did not.”
“She was wet as fuck,” Raúl said.
“I can’t leave you for five minutes?” George said, his voice high with fury. “I can’t go to take a shit? Do you know what you’ve done?”
“Had a first-class teenage fuck,” Raúl said. “Best sleeping pill there is.”
“I was trying to solve this!” George shouted. “You’ve completely fucked it up!”
“She was so ready,” Raúl said.
“She is a child!”
“I’m not a child.”
“See?” Raúl said.
“Just her saying that proves she’s a child!” George said.
Isabel looked under the sheet and saw blood on her thighs. “I have to throw up,” she said. She stumbled, half falling, off the bed.
She didn’t make it, but puked all over the rug.
“I’ll clean it,” George said, and he helped her to the bathroom.
She stepped into the shower and crouched under the water, and George left her there. She washed the puke out of her hair, and did a gingerly wash between her legs. It hurt. There was some blood but not a lot. She peed into the shower drain, watching the water between her feet become yellow and a little bit red. Then the water cleared and washed it all away. She pulled a clean towel around her shoulders like a tent, and sat hunched on the bathroom floor, trembling.
There was a knock, and George came in. “Are you okay?”
She stared up at him.
“My brother is a monster,” he said. “I’m sorry. Do you want to see the doctor?”
“No!”
“The doctor’s safe,” George said.
But she didn’t want any more hands, any more investigating. “I just want to go home.”
George closed the toilet and sat on the lid. He put his head in his hands. “I told you to stay away from Raúl,” he said. “I told you to stay with the little kids.”
She winced. “I was trying to help them.”
“This makes it so much harder. You understand that, right?”
“I won’t say anything.”
George laughed. “Yeah, right.”
“I promise!” she said. “I won’t let any doctors near me.”
“That will be proof enough.”
“You can’t keep us forever.”
“Yeah, I know.” He sighed. “Raúl says you were on the computer.”
“I wanted to send a message to my parents.”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t have time. Raúl came in.”
George looked at her, and she thought he was trying to tell if she was lying. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
“I want to go downstairs.”
“I don’t want you to scare the little kids.”
“It will scare them more not to see me,” she said. She didn’t know if that was true, but she couldn’t stay up here. She felt her stomach churn again.
George sighed. “I’ll go get your clothes.”
She put a cold, wet washcloth over her eyes. That was what her mother did after she cried a lot, to make the puffiness go down. George brought her yellow bikini from downstairs and she put that on first. Then she pulled on the too-big shorts, the cotton T-shirt. Her wet hair made the shirt stick to her back. Her legs were wobbly.