Girl In The Water Part 2

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

"Look lively, girl. n.o.body likes a sulking wh.o.r.e."

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 a thud, 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 Icana 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.

She was waiting for the girls to come out for a swim as they usually did, but time seemed to stretch endlessly like the rain forest itself. The humidity was already oppressively thick in the air, pus.h.i.+ng down on her, making her tired.

Even as she watched-eyes forward, attention focused-every cell of her body was aware of the man behind her in the small kitchen.

Tap, tap, tap. Phil Heyerdahl was typing away on his laptop at the table.

She glanced back. "Sounds like it's going well."

Phil looked up from his laptop, rolled his neck, his shoulder muscles s.h.i.+fting under his tanned skin. His short blond hair stood up in spikes from running his fingers through it as he worked. He looked hot and handsome in a geeky kind of way.

He was writing a book on the soldados da borracha, rubber soldiers.

During the World War II rubber boom, the Brazilian government had forced tens of thousands of people to the region to harvest white gold, aka rubber. They were promised they'd be treated as war heroes, returned home after the war, and given housing. But the government reneged. The jungle killed most of the rubber workers. Some of the survivors made new lives for themselves in nearby towns and villages. Only six thousand found their way home at the end.

"Did you know the US government paid a hundred bucks for every worker the Brazilian government dragged here to supply latex to US factories?" Phil went back to typing. "We needed rubber for the war."

Carmen and Phil were both twenty-three, one year out of college-Carmen from Penn State, daughter of Brazilian immigrants, Phil from Stanford, son of two professors. They'd met in Africa the year before, working for a charity that installed wells in remote villages.

They'd both planned on doing a year of volunteer work between college and entering the workforce in the US. But by the end of the year, they were in love-with each other and with volunteer work. So here they were, in Brazil, in the Amazon rain forest, hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital, helping to build a clinic while Phil wrote his book on the side, inspired by a nearly hundred-year-old local priest who'd ministered to the soldados da borracha back in the day. Father Angelo had personally administered last rites to well over a thousand, and he had a little notebook with the names of his dead carefully recorded.

Phil was obsessed with the story. He was happy here. They both were. Although, they would be happy anywhere as long as they were together.

Carmen looked back across the black river, at the girls who spilled through the back door at last and jumped from the deck into the river, a short six-foot drop. Splash. Splash. Splash. A bamboo ladder tied to the deck would help them climb back.

Rain dripped from the sky, stopped, then dripped again, as if the weather couldn't make up its mind. At least they were in the dry season. In the rainy season, a good downpour could last for days, and the river would rise, probably all the way to the red house's deck. The girls wouldn't need the ladder then.

Carmen rubbed her aching arm. "I want to do something to help those girls."

"It's a private school for orphans."

He'd actually gone over one morning the week before, knocked on the door, and inquired-to set Carmen's mind at ease. An older woman had responded and told him that she ran the school, explained what they were.

"What else was she going to say?" Carmen tapped her foot again, watching the girls splash in the water. "You were wearing your clinic volunteer s.h.i.+rt. She was probably afraid that you were the kind of foreign do-gooder who would try to interfere."

Sometimes she worried about Phil. He was more of a geek than a warrior. A writer at heart. Was he strong enough for this kind of work?

She watched the girls swim.

Once again, they were rough on the skinniest one, who was also the prettiest, tall compared to the others. She was the newcomer and had the saddest eyes. For some reason, Carmen kept seeing herself in the girl. Maybe because Carmen had been as skinny at that age. From chemo and radiation.

"It can't be a brothel," Phil said. "The girls are way too young. You haven't seen them close-up. I have."

Carmen had seen them. Every time she had to go across the river for something, she made a point to walk by the place. The property was fenced in the front, but she could see through the gaps in the bamboo fence.

She loved Phil's gentle heart for thinking the girls were too young, but she knew there were men with darker hearts who wouldn't think so, not for a minute.

She chewed her bottom lip. "How about the men who visit?"

"Mrs. Rosa said they were the school's patrons, local businessmen." Some doubt crept into Phil's voice at last. But then he said, "I've seen the police over there. If something bad was going on in that house, they would have dealt with it."

Carmen could only shake her head. "The police are customers, like the others."

When she'd met Phil in Africa, they'd both been nave and innocent in the ways of the world. What she'd seen there had changed that.

Africa was a vast continent, with amazingly prosperous countries like Botswana, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, and others, cities as modern as London and Paris, but aid workers went to areas that hadn't caught up yet. The parts Carmen had seen were where young girls were walking miles to school and being raped on the way, but took the risk and went anyway, because they wanted to learn so badly.

She'd seen girls in p.u.b.erty dying of infections from female circ.u.mcision. Preteens being married off, then dying in labor because their bodies weren't developed enough yet for pregnancy, and because there was no doctor for many miles.

Carmen had lost her innocence in Africa. She'd spent most of her time in homes, talking to women, helping them, while Phil had been with the well equipment, surrounded by men, explaining how things worked, and how to take care of everything once the volunteers left. Phil hadn't seen as much real life as she had.

Even here in Brazil, with his head in the book he was writing, he missed things. While Carmen...

Carmen watched the swimming girls in the river. The strongest-looking jumped on the newcomer, and for a moment, it looked as if she was holding the poor girl under water. Too long. Alarm shot through Carmen, but before she could say something, the skinny girl came up, sputtering.

Had they just been playing? They were too far away to tell.

Carmen shuddered. "There's something sinister about all this black water."

"The water is dark from the decomposing organic matter in the swamps. Think of it as dark compost tea. Same reason why the Rio Negro is black," Phil said with patience.

"I want to talk to one of the girls."

"How?"

"When they come out tomorrow morning, I'll swim over."

She was a strong swimmer, and the Icana wasn't that fast or wide, just a small tributary of the Rio Negro. She could more than handle the current.

Phil closed the laptop and came to stand behind her, then enfolded her in his arms. "You want to help everyone you meet. You have a beautiful heart, you know that?"

He turned her in his arms and kissed her. And she kissed him back. He had a beautiful heart too. She loved him so much, more than she'd ever thought it was possible to love another person.

She didn't resist when he tugged her toward the bed, tugged the rubber band from her hair so the dark waves spilled onto her shoulders, or when he laid her down, or when he unwrapped her sarong-style skirt.

They were young and healthy, full of hormones and full of love, so within a minute, they were naked, their limbs entangled. Phil could make her body sing as quickly as he could make her heart sigh.

"I love you," she whispered as she floated off into pure bliss, her body contracting around his.

"I love you too," he said, rolling them so she was lying on top of him. He ran a gentle hand down her back.

They kissed, then soon they were making love again.

They didn't use protection. When she'd been a teenager, she had bone cancer and received chemotherapy, which resulted in infertility.

Phil didn't know. She couldn't tell him. Phil wanted a bushel of children. But she wouldn't be the woman to have them. Eventually, she would have to let him go.

She would let him go.

But not yet. Not yet.

Later, when she lay in his arms, glowing and spent, she said, "I want to do more than talk to those girls. I want to save them."

And he said what she knew he would say. "I'll help."

She couldn't stand thinking about the girls in misery just across the river, when here she was, happier than she'd ever been. The girls' fate seemed incredibly unfair and, more than that, tragic.

Carmen kissed Phil's cheek and sat up in the bed next to him. "I want to talk to the girl the fat man brought down the river two months ago. I see her standing in her window sometimes, looking upriver. There's something in the way she stands, in the set of her shoulders, that's just heartbreaking."

The skinny, tall girl was definitely the most vulnerable of the bunch.

Phil sat up against the headboard and took Carmen's hands. "All right. You talk to her. If she says that she's there against her will, we'll bring her across the river and hide her. I can take her down to Manaus, find her shelter and maybe a small job at one of the international charities."

Carmen squeezed his fingers.

They knew another American in Manaus, an older woman, Mrs. Frieseke, who worked for See-Love-Aid. They'd met her at the airport in Rio when they'd arrived in Brazil, had a good chat while they'd all waited for their connecting flight.

"How about the others?" Carmen asked.

She wanted children, desperately, but since she couldn't have any, she at least wanted to help the needy children of the world. She couldn't stand seeing a child harmed.

Phil drew her into his arms. "First things first. One saved is better than none saved."

She nodded against his chest. She was the more impulsive one, the more emotional one, in the relations.h.i.+p. He tended to be the voice of reason. They complemented each other well. They made a strong couple. Under different circ.u.mstances, they might have had a strong marriage.

"I'm going to swim over tomorrow morning. And if the girl says she needs help, I'm going to bring her over with me right then."

If the old witch, Mrs. Rosa, saw Carmen talking with the girls, she might not let them out again. Carmen had to be prepared to act at first contact.

She said a silent prayer for the skinny girl with the sad eyes. And then she said firmly, "Tomorrow morning."

Daniela Daniela woke at dawn to Senhora Rosa's bony hand shaking her shoulder. The old woman's fingernails were so sharp, they felt as if they'd cut through Daniela's skin.

"Up," Rosa snapped, her voice gravelly this early in the morning. She sounded like a gurgling caiman.

The house slept around them, the other girls still resting, each in her own tiny room that held little more than a bed.

The old woman dragged Daniela out of the house, then shoved her into a boat tied off the dock. For a startled, fearful moment, Daniela thought Rosa would take her to the cove with the piranhas, but instead, the old woman maneuvered the boat into the middle of the water, where the current ran fastest, and they went downriver.

They floated farther down the Icana than Daniela had ever been, past villages, past where the Icana poured into the much larger Rio Negro, far, far away from home, until they reached a sprawling town and Rosa angled the boat toward sh.o.r.e once again.

A sign in the harbor said they were welcome in Santana.

Daniela had never seen so many dwellings before, or buildings so large. In the giant harbor sat a s.h.i.+p so big, it could never go up the Icana to her village, not even in the middle where the river was the deepest.

Rosa led her to a house near the water, nearly as large as the one they'd come from, but instead of many girls, only a foreign man lived there, an American.

"This is Senhor Finch," Rosa said.

Senhor Finch was almost as pale as the missionary but younger, and as tall but not nearly as round. He looked as strong as the loggers. He had boots and pants like the soldiers Daniela had once seen come up the river with the naval patrol. Except for his yellow hair, everything about him was drab, including his tan T-s.h.i.+rt. He had a big smile, and he had all his teeth, as white as cane sugar.

Rosa let go of Daniela's arm. She pulled a plastic bag of little white pills from her pocket that she had every girl take to make sure they didn't end up pregnant. She handed the bag to Daniela. "You will cook for him, clean for him, and do whatever he says. You will stay with him until he sends you back."

Then Rosa took a large handful of money from the man and left.

The water rushed behind the house, almost as loud as the street noises. The smell of fish blew from the Rio Negro, nearly overpowered by the smell of sewer mixing with the smell of engine exhaust that drifted from the town. For a moment, the new, strange mixture made Daniela dizzy.

She tried to stand very straight as she waited to be told what to do, even while her stomach cramped with hunger.

Her missed breakfast was the least of her worries.

But Senhor Finch didn't reach for her clothes, or for his own.

Daniela didn't know what to make of him.

"Are you hungry?" he asked in a funny accent that sounded like the missionary's. Then he showed her into the kitchen where he had piles of food: fruit, vegetables, rice and flour, even a gutted fish.

Her stomach growled. She wasn't sure what she was allowed to touch. Rosa had said she was to cook. So she cautiously picked up a coconut.

The man smiled again.

Buoyed by relief, Daniela smiled back.

The house had a stove with a propane tank next to it like at Rosa's, only bigger and newer. What luck that I know how to use it, Daniela thought. If she didn't, the man would probably beat her.

She cooked quickly-fish with mandioca frita-then put the food on the table and went to sit on the floor in the corner. But the man told her to sit at the table with him. And he put food on two plates, giving her one, filling it completely.