Eventually, I buried the memories, along with the hurt. Our trip to San Diego turned out to be a permanent stay. When my father slapped me that day, he’d slammed the door shut—my world had turned wary and guarded. Family is family. Friends aren’t forever. Everything will break. People say goodbye. Get too close and you get hurt.
When Damian slapped me, he’d blown the same world apart, bringing down tiny little pieces that I was still trying to put together. There was more to the story than my father had told me. MaMaLu and Esteban hadn’t just left without saying goodbye. Something had happened. Something that had turned Esteban into Damian.
I thought he’d chopped and dyed my hair black to keep people from recognizing me, but he’d done it for himself, so I bore no resemblance to the girl he used to know. Damian was set on revenge for whatever horrible, terrible thing he thought my father had done, and whatever associations he had of me were buried so deep in his psyche that he was able to do horrible, terrible things to me. He treated me like a thing rather than a person to safeguard himself. He hurt me, humiliated me, shut out my voice, my face, my tears. But once in a while, those memories came back, and they still meant something because they shook him out of the red haze of anger and hatred. The Esteban I knew was in there somewhere, and he’d heard me praying for him. He was the only reason I was still alive.
I didn’t know how long I had, but I knew there was no point asking Damian to explain why he was doing this. He would never have come this far if he didn’t feel justified. There was only one person who could get through to him.
I had to find a way to get to MaMaLu before it was too late.
BREAKFAST WAS TIGHT-LIPPED AS DAMIAN and I stared into our plates. I wanted to look at him so badly in the daylight, to really, really look at him. It hurt to chew. My lip was swollen so I pushed the food around. Damian had covered the cut on his neck with a piece of gauze. The longer we stayed together, the longer our list of cuts and bruises grew—both inside and out.
“How is MaMaLu?” I asked, holding on to my coffee.
The sea was rough and things were sliding back and forth on the counter.
“I’d like to see her,” I said, when he didn’t reply.
He dumped his plate into the sink and turned to me. “That’s where we’re headed. If you can make it through the next fourteen days, you’ll get to see her.”
Damian had mentioned twenty-one days earlier. We had been on the boat for about a week, which meant that he had been counting down the days until he saw MaMaLu.
“Does she know . . . ?” That you planned to kill me? “Does she know to expect me?”
I caught a pained expression cross his eyes before he turned away. Of course she didn’t know. She would never stand for it. If I could just make it to her in one piece, MaMaLu would fix everything. MaMaLu knew how to fix things—lost things, hurt things, cracked things, cut and bruised things.
I watched through the porthole as we left Bahia Tortugas. A colony of sea lions surfed behind us, playing in our wake.
Ay, yai, yai, yai,
Sing and do not cry. . .
The thought of seeing MaMaLu comforted me and for the first time, I felt a glimmer of hope.
We sailed past rocky cliffs obscured by swirling clouds of haze. As the day progressed, the waves got choppier and the sky turned dark and ominous. I could hear the crackle of the radio from upstairs, but Damian’s voice was drowned out as the bar stools toppled over. Everything went crashing and rolling as the boat lurched and heaved.
I held on to the walls as I made my way upstairs. Sharp, cold needles of rain pelted down on me. The sky was a scene of high drama. Black clouds roiled towards us, dragging deep shadows across white-capped water. The wind whistled in the rigging and came at me in shrieking gusts. I couldn’t make out the horizon. Then I peered into the eerie darkness and realized why. Up ahead was a wall of water so high, that I had to tilt my head back.
HOLY FUCK.
“Get back down!” Damian shouted over the chaos as I struggled to stay on my feet.
The boat began flying off the crests and crashing into the troughs, bringing us to an abrupt, heart-stopping halt through each terrifying wave. I held on to the railing, but the metal was wet and I kept losing my grip. Buckets of water were being tossed in my face and my feet slipped on the deck.
Damian barked something into the radio and hung up. He made his way towards me, fighting against the wind, and slipped a life vest over me. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. We were falling into each wave with a resounding crash. He pointed towards the stairs and started inching his way back to the cockpit.
I was almost there when I heard something whip past me—a high-pitched, metallic whoosh. I looked up and realized that one of the lines securing the dinghy had come loose and was whipping around in the wind—probably the one I had unlatched partially when I was on the roof. The heavy, steel fastener at the end had just missed me and was swinging back, heading straight for me. I stood paralyzed, unable to move, unable to breath, as the wrecking ball of death came for me.