Chapter 26 - Sweet Haven

THERE is a spare bedroom in the Holland home where Naia is allowed to lie down. Rigid atop the pink bedspread, she can stay immobile for what seems like hours, eyes turned to the long screened windows, watching the rain streaming silver from the eaves. She is waiting for Brent, for the continuation of what began in the armory. No one suspects.

It is a girl’s room; it belongs to Tammy-Shalom. Naia doesn’t dare explore. Tammy scares her. Her cryptic rants are all over the Internet, alongside photos of her face, hands, toenails, earlobes, and a parade of fake tattoos. She is a born-again Christian who worships Tori Amos and writes clumsy rhyming verse. Naia dares not cross her. The last thing she wants is to be bludgeoned in a poem.

The room has its own bathroom. On the door is a faded, handlettered sign that reads, DARK ROOM: KEEP OUT. The bathroom stinks of old chemicals; she finds bottles of developer under the sink. This space is the bridge to the next room: Brent’s.

Mrs. Holland tells her she may drop by anytime she has a problem, may root around in the fridge if she likes, may help herself to what food takes her fancy. But Brent’s room is off-limits. When she uses the bathroom, she must lock up from her side.

Brent receives no such instructions. He doesn’t need them. “I trust you,” she teases him, giving Naia a conspiratorial wink. The young girl’s heart leaps at the promise of warmth and attention and fun, but just as quickly the moment is over, and Mrs. Holland is spewing instructions to her secretary, over her mobile phone.

In the afternoons, the maid lets her in. Mrs. Holland is always late. She keeps a busy schedule of meetings and consultations. They are supposed to talk two days a week, but without warning, she can cancel an appointment, leaving Naia to her own devices, satisfied that the girl is safe in her home. Naia crouches on Tammy’s bed, refusing offers of ice cream and cinnamon rolls, listening to the voices from elsewhere in the house. On a couple of Fridays her schedule happens to coincide with her grandfather’s. She knows his tread, on the outdoor staircase, the murmur of his voice.

“Is Naia here?” he asks.

“I’ll check,” Rinky offers, but he does not.

Rinky fears her, or yearns for her, or both. His eyes dart from her face to the round points of her nipples visible beneath her T-shirt. When he passes her a teaspoon or the bowl of sugar, his fingers brush hers; he strives to make contact with her body as he sees her to the door. “It is not acceptable for a woman to receive counseling from a man,” he says gruffly, as though warning her against the riptides of desire.

Naia is not interested.

She is not sure what Mrs. Holland wants to hear from her. She is not sure where to begin. All she knows is a choking frustration, a sense that life has passed her by. She is fifteen. She feels useless and untalented, her energies diffused, her time consumed by texting and peacefully watching pirated PG movies with her grandfather. She surfs the Internet for hours. At school, by dint of Daniel’s position in the university and a steady supply of pocket money and pretty trifles from Antonia, she moves among the haves, the healthy, attractive kids with their forbidden mobiles and their own computers and their broadband accounts. She feels no particular affection for any one of them. They see too little of each other outside school hours to be true friends.

She yearns for the one defining project that will make her special.

Brent fumbles with the catch on his door. By mutual agreement, she leaves her side of the bathroom unlocked. She stands in silence amid the stench of hobby chemicals, until he comes through. He is a small boy, small and compact, only an inch or so taller than she. Everything about him—from the face with its regular features, the fine nose, and the chin pointed like a hero in a manga odyssey, to the gleaming leather shoe tips—bespeaks sharpness and a ruthless perfectionism. He is known to be a terror on the drill field. “Lousy!” he screams at the cadets in his charge. “Squat jump, all of you!” “Morons!” he yells at the band.

They fall into each other’s arms, not speaking. As they kiss, the wet, obligatory kiss, she thinks of bubble gum and churning cake batter, vinegar and toads. The clockwise movement of his mouth never varies, not in the three times they have done this, and inevitably she finds herself counting, each second corresponding to one turn, but she enters his greedy embrace without fail, ever hopeful that the next kiss, the next touch will be different, will fulfill the promise of his sidelong and guilty stares, that early tremulous joy at being the clandestine recipient of his attention.

Brent’s thin brown fingers are tugging at her underpants.

“No,” she tells him. This is not what she bargained for, this clinical distance, this feeling of dismay.

ADAM spends most of his days downstairs, “in his home office,” Brent says with a knowing laugh.

One afternoon Naia stands at the foot of the outdoor stairs looking up at the house, not knowing whether to ring the bell or leave. If she misses her appointment, she knows that Emily Holland, despite her cursory cheer, will be displeased. Emily will make inquiries; she is powerful; she is also, Naia suspects, pathologically jealous of the very young girls she praises and teases and plies with questions about their lives.

She has never kept secrets from her grandmother; nor has the task of making decisions ever fallen to her alone. She is only Naia, youngest of the Pastors. She has done everything her elders tell her, and avoided the intrigues that surround pretty adolescent girls. Or at least she has tried. There is a gap, she knows, between herself and the Naia whom others, looking with lust and envy from the outside, perceive.

A low whistle intrudes upon her thoughts. “In here,” says a voice.

It is Adam, who is handsomer and kinder than Brent, for at twenty-two, he is a grown man. Those are his chemical preparations in the bathroom. His are the photos of birdmen and clouds that decorate the walls upstairs.

She peers past the whitewashed woven bamboo slats, but sees nothing. The door to the ground level opens a fraction. She enters, stepping out of the hot afternoon light and into that netherworld of furniture shapes and drying laundry, of forgotten bottles of cola parked on chairs and the billiard table.

“What a mess!” she says to provoke him.

“It’s not a mess,” says Adam’s voice. “Your grandfather’s house is messier.”

“You haven’t even been there.”

They are already forming the pattern of teasing and complaint that will highlight their relationship.

“But where are you?” Naia says, and then she notices a feeble line of light: a door somewhere has been opened, just a crack. She picks her way, with some irritation, past what seems to be a Formica card table, and an overloaded bookshelf, and chairs heaped with clothes stiff from line-drying. Then she is so close to Adam that his breath is in her nostrils. She stiffens and inhales, her heart pounding in excitement: his mouth has a wet, acidic odor, as of decaying cabbage, in stark contrast to his taut and flawless white skin.

He takes her wrist and, in the darkness, guides her gently over a threshold.

A light comes on.

She giggles. What a room this is, tiny and cluttered, dominated by the computer and the low bed, smelling of paper and dust and clothing in storage. Movie posters, ripped from the backs of video club magazines, decorate the walls: Top Gun, The Right Stuff. The closet door is half open and she catches a glimpse of a leather flyboy jacket with a ratty sheepskin collar; it looks authentic, a World War II relic, or maybe some cheap rip-off he got on eBay.

Printouts of girls cupping or spreading various parts of themselves cover every surface. This does not surprise her. Nothing surprises her: she is too young to have expectations. Boys and porn, the two go together, a given.

She gives the girls a calculating once-over. She is younger and prettier and wilder and infinitely more delicious than any of them.

In the light of the lamp, she examines his profile, with its fine nose and chin: a mestizo profile, the handsomest in the city. A sense of victory, of destiny, sweeps over her.

She weighs her chances while a slow smile, a smile he cannot fail to notice, one that begins at the corner of her mouth.

It would be possible, she supposes, to possess this mysterious individual and keep Brent on the side.

BENDING over her, he crushes the damp white expanse of his face, his soft woman’s lips smelling of dead vegetables, against her upturned cheek.

Naia has been anticipating the kiss, but not the click and whirr that accompanies it, nor the series of rapid flashes that blank out the world for a few seconds. Shapes of green flood her vision, and when they clear, she discovers that he has been looking down at her, into her blinded eyes.

“Who were you thinking about just now?” he says. “Who? My brother?”

She shakes her head, unable to speak, her heart racing. She wonders if he will dismiss her now, or kiss her cheek again. Deep within the box of her pelvis, farther up than her own exploring fingers have reached, some uncharted part of her pulses, like a body turning over in sleep.

He turns the camera around—it is a tiny and expensive model—to show her the screen on the other side, which bears a miniature image of her face, white from the flood of light, lips parted and face blank as though in meditation.

“Look at you,” he says, as though she has only now come into being.

As she turns her face up at him in joy at her own beauty, he touches her mouth with the tips of his fingers. He presses a button on the digital camera, and with the same series of flashes, blinds her again. She has never been a patient girl, but now she waits for the rules of this game to reveal themselves. He reaches down to arrange her hair, brushing, as if by accident, the lobe of her ear; he tips her chin gently to position her face in a manner that suits him.

Something in his ministrations reminds her of Antonia, their playful hugs, the funny little animals she drew on sneakers, the awful hot stillness of her bedroom after she had gone. Confused, she closes her eyes against the flashes, but they come only when she least anticipates them. He chooses to record her in the interstices, the moment when her shoulders freeze in shock, when she leaps away from the insect’s crawl of his fingertips.

She hopes he will stop of his own accord, so she won’t have to ask him. She is still promised to his brother; this is not good.

“What’s the matter?” he whispers, knowing.

“I’m Brent’s girl,” she stammers.

“That idiot doesn’t know what a treasure he’s got.”

She begins to weep, in relief at his empathy, but coyly, knowing more of this wonderful attention will be forthcoming.

NOW that these strange events are taking place in her life, she hates to sleep. She can stay awake until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., listening to the late-night sounds of her grandparents and the maid. She awakens before sunrise, starving, all senses sharpened, reaching at once for the mobile phone by her bedside. There is an unread text message from Adam, his final one for the night. She had not heard it come in, those few hours she had been unconscious. Guilty for the omission, she replies. No answer. Her thumb assaults the keypad once more. She can barely wait for noon, when, awakening, he must find her message and resume their exchange.

Surely today will be the day she collapses in class. The blackboard wavers, the chart on the wall beyond the teacher—“25Mn 26Fe 27Co 28Ni 29Cu 30Zn”—loses all meaning. She stares at the notebook open beneath her nose, reading the same phrases over and over. Her autopilot keeps her aloft. No one notices. The voices of her classmates ricochet about her. She musters the usual smiles, the usual compliments and taunts, for the girls who gather around her, cooing, borrowing her hairbrush, sampling her Gosh cologne, caressing the soft down on her forearms.

She and Brent no longer speak. Sometimes their paths cross, as flocks of boys and girls in their wilting uniforms migrate from home room to science room, from math room to library. Amid a hail of greetings from her former classmates in the honors section, she notes his angry, helpless scrutiny and finds immense pleasure in ignoring it. Once, their eyes meet. He snatches his gaze away, and she is reminded of Mr. Holland, how he studies her clandestinely as he lets her into his house in the early evenings.

Brent must be hurting, she ponders. How strange, that a boy so self-possessed could be dented so easily. She hopes that if he ever finds out about her and Adam it will be years from now, when she is all grown up and on the other side of the world.

Her classmates elbow her and giggle. “Someone’s looking at you,” they whisper.

“Let him suffer,” she hisses back.

If I stopped talking to him, it’s as good as saying I don’t want him anymore, she reasons with herself. She hasn’t double-crossed him. Not technically. Besides, he has never courted her, not in the way her grandmother has outlined: boys in their best sports shirts and khakis, entertained by her grandparents in the living room until she deigns to emerge.

He’s never even sent her an SMS worth saving.

How hatefully he behaves on the drill field, how thwarted he looks now. At the thought, she starts to giggle uncontrollably, so that her classmates slap her with their paper fans and sing out, “Naia is in love.”

ADAM is restless. He starts at the servant’s footsteps directly over their heads. The house cramps his style.

“I wish we could be someplace alone,” he says, sighing. “Totally free.”

“Well, do you know a place, then?” Naia says. “A room?”

Adam examines her with an expression she has never seen before. What is it? Shock? Revulsion? Triumph?

“I knew you were that kind of girl,” he mutters.

What kind of girl? Her mind races in panic. An easy girl, the kind who gets taken to motels? Well, what was so bad about that, after all they had done? What was that look on his face?

“What do you mean? What kind of girl?” she shrieks.

“Oh, shut up,” he says, and kisses her. “You’re such a kid.”

But the Holland car is waiting for her at the high school gate the following afternoon. Adam is at the wheel. “Get in,” he snaps.

Her heart thumps. She wants to hide, to lay her head on his lap, but he laughs this off. Relax, he says. She does not ask how he got this car, where he learned to drive, where his parents are at the moment.

He tosses something into her lap. It is a key.

“Hold on to that for me,” he says, grinning. They are speeding away from the center of town, through roads she has never seen. “There’ll be hell to pay if I lose it.”

It is a strange house, nothing more than a room and bath, and so sparsely furnished it gives no clue as to the people who own the place. But she is not afraid. It is only Adam, her secret friend, whose dark and playful nature matches her own. Laying her down on the clammy bedcovers, he decks her body with flattery, murmuring to her breasts, to her belly. She holds her breath in anticipation and fixes her gaze on the light fixture above their heads.

“What are you looking at?” he starts. “There’s no one there.”

She is completely at home with the camera now. She eases it out of its carrying case herself.

“Touch yourself,” he whispers, staying beyond reach of the hot, bright light. Her fingers pull at her own flesh. The flashes stop: he is taking video. His body becomes immaterial; it has afforded her few pleasures to begin with. The times he has taken her, she has kept her eyes open, staring in fascination at his red, sweat-filmed face, the eyes screwing up into pig slits, the total absorption in his own pleasure.

He puts the camera down to run his hands over her skin, a comforting sensation, different from her grandmother’s smacking lipstick kisses, from Antonia’s hugs. The words he whispers are the best of all: “My beauty. My angel.” She listens close because they are true.

“Put your uniform back on,” he tells her. “I want you to model for me.”