This was where I died.

I remembered the dull grey walls, and the moldy wooden beams that held up the crumbling ceiling. There were more cobwebs than before, and a thick layer of fine dust had covered the ground, everywhere except for the trails of my steps.

I stared at the wall where I’d first met Pablo’s shadow, the same that my brain matter would have splattered, if only the man had no pity and a pair of balls.

A gaping hole opened inside my chest, but it didn’t bleed or hurt. Nothing could have felt emptier than my heart at that moment, aside perhaps from the basement itself.

“I’m sorry, Em,” Juan whispered.

“She’s in here, I know it,” I said, before tears strangled my throat and left me voiceless.

He glanced at each corner of the basement, perhaps for the third time since we’d walked into it, and shook his head. My shoulder sagged beneath the weight of his hand.

“She isn’t,” he answered, “but that’s a good thing, okay?”

I gently kicked the side of the bucket in the corner of the basement, and two small flies flew off the stagnant water. I winced at the unusually rancid smell that rose up from that bucket, and turned away. I took yet another glance at the dark room, hoping there was something I missed– someone, something, a secret door, or a forgotten object.

“I can still hear her,” I breathed.

With every pleading scream, every cry and every whisper, her voice faded, further and further. It was like she was being dragged away, ripped apart from me once again.

“Am I going crazy?” I whimpered, and Juan couldn’t bring himself to answer.

His thumb caressed my arm, up and down, over and over. Soon his soothing gesture began to burn a line into my skin, and I placed my hand over his to make him stop.

Now there was nothing but silence, and a gust of cool air blowing through the trapdoor. My heart shriveled up like an old piece of food forgotten between two couch cushions, and for the second time, part of me died in this basement.

“She’s gone,” I realized.

“Home,” Juan corrected me. “She’s gone home.”

I nodded, but only a little, and slumped down against a wall. There was a bubble of tears at the back of my throat, and I didn’t want it to pop.

Ana had gone home, and as much as I wanted to see her again, that was a good thing. Finding out she had been stuck here for months would have by far been the worst possible outcome.

I wish I could have gone home, too. Instead, I was just going mad.

Juan stood in the center of the basement, slightly hunched over so he wouldn’t hit his head on the ceiling. He scrunched his nose at the fusty smell in the air. There was a thin line on his brow, a tension in his jaw, and a glaze over his dark eyes.

“How long were you in here?” he asked.

“A day or two, I don’t remember,” I mumbled. “It felt like years, anyway.”

“That’s awful.”

“I was the lucky one,” I added with a bitter chuckle. “I got out first. The others must have stayed here a few days more.”

Just when I thought that Juan couldn’t look any worse, his face scrunched up like he’d bit into an onion.

“Are you okay?” I worried.

“Are you okay, Em?” he scoffed.

We stared at each other and both stifled a sullen laugh, because it was obvious that neither of us was fine. We laughed again at our synchronized reactions, only a little more heartily. Juan glanced down at his feet while he swallowed back his uncomfortable smile.

When he looked up, his eyes looked darker than they’d ever been. “How did you live through all of this?”

"Live is a big word,” I muttered. “I barely survived. I guess that’s why I’m such a mess.”

“I know right now isn’t a good time to lecture you, but I don’t think the drugs are helping with the mess part,” Juan replied as he sat down beside me.

“Well, they help with the surviving,” I mumbled. “The first time I took them, I wanted to kill myself. I grabbed Pablo’s gun before I grabbed the pills.”

“I’m glad they kept you alive, but you need some healthier coping mechanisms.”

I scoffed, and tilted back my head, hoping my tears would roll back into my eyes. “Any suggestions?”

His laugh came out as a quiet sniff, and he shook his head. I didn’t have many choices. I had booze and drugs, I had Death, and then I had a long spiral dragging me down into madness until I forever lost myself. The latter didn’t sound like the healthy option, but rather the most painful one.

“Cigarettes?” asked Juan, squeezing a pack out from his pocket.

“Those hardly worked when being broke, alone, and hating my mother were my only problems,” I chuckled softly. “I don’t think they’ll work now.”

“At least they taste good.” He shrugged, and on his lips, I saw a glimpse of a grin, just as he stuck a cigarette between them.

He flicked on his lighter, but all that came out was a tiny, flat flame, whose glow was too faint to brighten up the sickly gray wall behind him. He groaned, shook it, then carefully nurtured the ember until he managed to puff out a small cloud of smoke.

I stared at him, watching how the volutes of white mist wrapped around his jaw, how they stayed trapped in the stubble on his chin, like dew on a lawn on a chilly morning.

I picked a cigarette from the pack, and without a second thought, he leaned closer to me. The end of his cigarette kissed the tip of mine, and my fingers started to tremble. He gently held my wrist to keep my hands from shaking. I inhaled sharply, and the fire crawled from one cigarette to the other.

The smoke burned my throat and choked up my lungs, and yet it had been a while since I’d felt this good. I turned my head away, because I didn’t want to cough out my fetid tobacco breath straight in his face, and when I faced him again, Juan had leaned in closer.

I could feel his thumb digging into the palm of my hand, his warm breath caressing my lips. My heartbeat rose tenfold with every fraction of an inch of the distance he closed, and my head started to spin.

I wanted this. My chest ached where he had touched it days ago, craving that feeling like I craved my pills. I wanted it, but I knew the consequences.

It wasn’t just Pablo and the things he’d do to us if he found out we’d kissed. Juan was engaged to a different woman, and he’d slept with perhaps a hundred more. He would marry her soon, betray me like he betrayed Manée, and I’d already been hurt enough. Falling in love with someone just meant more reasons to worry.

I didn’t need one other problem, let alone a dozen more.

“Juan,” I whispered. “I’m not thinking straight.”

He pinched his lips, and with a nod, he moved away. He knew I was right. It had been a while since I’d said or done anything that made sense, and kissing Juan would have been yet another act of craziness. Yet, the bad taste in my mouth wasn’t from the cigarettes.

If Pablo was sitting in his place, he would have stopped me. Just like he stopped me whenever I was drunk and lonely and ready to offer him my body in exchange for a bit of affection. I wouldn’t have had to tell Pablo I wasn’t thinking straight. He would have said it himself.

In a single puff, Juan had smoked almost a third of his cigarette. He didn’t dare look me in the eye, and it was for the better, because I was afraid of what I’d find in his.

“I’m sorry,” I breathed.

“No, it’s fine,” he answered. “Plus, you just made out with my Dad so it would be weird to– you know.”

“Let’s try to forget that,” I said, punctuating my words with an awkward laugh.

“I can’t, the sight of it is forever etched into the inside of my eyelids,” he snickered, his shoulders finally relaxing a little as he leaned back.

“I’m sorry about that too,” I mumbled.

“You don’t have to apologize, Em.”

“I do,” I sighed. “I dragged you into this, and now I’m a burden again.”

His eyebrows scrunched up. “A burden?”

“Yeah.” I sucked in smoke through my gritting teeth, and lifted up a single finger. “If you tell anyone the secret I dumped on you without you even asking, everyone’s going to die. You, me, everybody. I’m not even exaggerating. It’s going to be a bloodbath.”

Juan nodded, and that grave look covered his face again.

“Two, I’ve been a bitch to you, and you don’t even deserve it,” I mumbled, lifting up another finger. “Now, I don’t think I need your help, but I’m sure you mean well, and yet every time you suggest anything I lash out at you.”

Although my words were sincere, I still believed I had my reasons to lash out. Perhaps he did see me as a poor girl locked up in a tower, guarded by a fire-breathing dragon, needing to be saved by a brave and gallant knight. Still, I knew the dragon all too well, and I knew he’d bite the knight’s head off and leave me in the tower to clean up the bloody mess. The best I could do was lean out the window and scream to the overzealous knight, ′Go away, you fucking idiot’.

“Three,” I continued, and rose up a third finger, “my Mom is an addict, and I know what it feels like to have to take care of someone who fell down that path. It was fun when all we did was drink and give up and forget, but now that drugs are back in the picture, I feel that I’m only half here, and leaving you to deal with all the mess I made on your own.”

I sighed, lowered my fingers, and Juan grabbed my hand.

“I can’t blame you for trying to cope, Emilia,” he murmured. “I’d rather have you half here than not have you at all.”

His words provoked a thousand thoughts, and just as many emotions, fighting each other to take center stage inside my head, leaving me speechless until they went quiet again. Juan squeezed my fingers a little harder.

“Would you be sad if I left?” I asked.

“As long as I know you’re okay and far from this place, I’ll be happy.”

“But how will you know I’m fine if you never hear from me again?”

“You could send me a letter once in a while,” he said with a grin. Then, as he stared at the ashes balancing at the tip of his cigarette, he gulped. “Or we could leave together.”

Both our chests filled with a breath of hope and thick cigarette smoke. I wondered if this basement, the same spot where Pablo shot me and tore me away from everything I knew, was the same place where Juan and I made our plan to run away and start a new life.

How poetic would it be if this was where Sarah Kennedy rose from the ashes in the room where she was killed? I smiled at the thought, but soon I bit my lip. We had to be realistic.

“It’s too dangerous,” I replied. “If we fail, we’re both dead.”

“I don’t know,” Juan mumbled. “He lets you get away with anything.”

“Not with that, he won’t.”

“You made out with my Dad, and he didn’t do anything,” he shrugged.

“Because I caught him with Cassie first, and he knew that was my payback for what he did to me,” I retorted. “We’ll have to wait until he fucks up again, and he has to fuck up badly.”

His face scrunched up the same way the butt of his cigarette did when he squashed it against the ground.

“Is that what you do?” he spat. “You let him hurt you just so you can do something in return?”

My shoulders hitched up and I winced. Who knew a simple shrug could feel so painful?

“It’s how I got my freedom back,” I sniffed.

He squinted his eyes and shook his head.

“What freedom, Em?”

“Well, at first he kept me locked up in a small room, and I never expected to leave it, but then he made a mistake. He drugged me, and I panicked and tried to kill myself, so he gave me a new identity as an apology. That’s how I got out of the room,” I explained.

“How do you know he wasn’t going to let you out anyway?”

“It’s not just that one thing– he could have killed me for smashing a bottle on his head and trying to escape, but he didn’t, because he’d just let me starve for a month and it was fair game, I guess,” I replied, avoiding a question I didn’t like the answer to. “And then, when we went to that club, he should have locked me up again for disobeying, but he let it slide, because he hadn’t been able to keep me safe from Gustavo, and that was his way of saying sorry.”

“Is that what you call freedom?” he asked, and the way he raised his voice made me wring my neck in between my shoulders. “Do you realize what you’re saying?”

I finished my cigarette, but kept smoking through the filter. I was frozen, less bothered by the acrid taste of smoke in my mouth than by Juan’s words. He cocked his head to the side and I glanced at the floor, trying to avoid the judgemental look in his black eyes.

“What will it take for you to leave?” he said. “How much more can you take?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

“You were raped, tortured, and almost killed God only knows how many times, and you still don’t want to leave. What’s next, Sarah?” he shouted. “How far are you going to let him go?”

I closed my eyes. “You can’t call me that.”

“I’ll call you Sarah if I want to, because Emilia doesn’t exist and you don’t belong here,” Juan seethed. “I’ll drag you away from this place kicking and screaming if I need to.”

“We’ve talked about this, Juan, you’ll only make things worse.”

“Em, stop pushing away the only person who wants to help you.”

I didn’t know who had spoken those words, if it was Juan himself or the voices in my head, but they made me tear up all the same.

Mafer had helped me– at least, she’d tried to. I didn’t trust Juan enough to tell him, but I wished I could have warned him about what happened back then. She had a faultless plan and I’d failed her. I put her in danger, and myself in turn when I tried to fix my mistakes.

I didn’t want to go through it again. Not with Juan, not with Mafer, not with anybody, and not even on my own.

“You promised you’d give up,” I sighed.

“I can’t. I can’t watch you die here. And even if you manage to survive, then what?” he muttered. “Best case scenario you turn into a female version of Pablo. The drinking, the drugs, the lies, the cheating... It’s only a matter of time before you start kidnapping young women and murdering people in cold blood.”

“You don’t understand, Juan.”

“I think I’m more clear-minded than you are,” he grumbled. “You said it yourself.”

“You don’t know half of what happened,” I replied.

“And the half I know is terrifying enough,” he said. “Em, you need to get away from him.”

I shook my head, and felt all my blood rush down to my feet. My fingers turned the palest shade of white as Juan squeezed them.

“Let me get you out of here, okay?” he whispered. “I’ll find a way, just give me some time. You tell me where you want to go, and who you want to be, and I’ll make it happen.”

I nodded, and he ran his fingers through my hair.

“We can go to some island no one’s ever heard of, and where no one knows who we are,” he said, his voice a soothing murmur. “Or we can go to a huge city, disappear in a crowd, and start our lives over. We can even go to Paris, and I’ll take you to watch shitty movies in fancy theaters, and then eat snails or frogs’ legs or whatever the French have for dinner.”

A smile cracked through my chapped lips, and his thumb stroked down my tear-stained cheek.

“Do you think we could go to Goose Creek?” I asked.

“Goose Creek?”

“My hometown,” I murmured. “Just so I can let everyone know I’m still alive.”

I played with Ana’s necklace, her cold little heart that hung around my neck like an endless hug. Juan swallowed a lump in his throat, and nervously scratched his thigh.

“I mean, I get you, but I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. “It’s the first place they’d go looking.”

“We don’t have to move there,” I shrugged. “We could just pop by and visit.”

“Well we’d have to wait a few months... a few years, even,” he mumbled. “Depending on how eager the cartels are to find us.”

“I don’t know if she has that many years ahead of her,” I sighed.

“Who?” he frowned.

I let go of the necklace, because I was no longer thinking of Ana. Juan stared at me like I was going crazy again.

“Nevermind,” I muttered. “It’s just a dream, anyway, it’s not like it would work. I’ve tried a few times and it never worked.”

“How many?”

“Three or four, I think. One time, you almost caught me, but I don’t think you noticed anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was in Majo’s room, trying to– just looking for something I needed,” I gulped, biting my lip as if that would stop me from oversharing any secrets. “Then you showed up, and I had to hide under the bed. I had to lie there and listen to everything you did to her.”

His jaw dropped and his eyes widened. “You’re joking,” he breathed.

“No, I even had to give you a shoe you’d lost under the bed. Pushed it out so you wouldn’t look for it where I was hiding,” I chuckled. “I made it out of the house, but I’d lost so much time waiting for you to leave that I had to turn back. Then Gustavo found out, he blackmailed me and– well, you know what happened after that.”

As my words trailed off, his shock turned to horror.

“That was my fault,” he said.

“It wasn’t. You didn’t know,” I answered. “I’ve never blamed you for it, even when I hated you. And if I had left that night, then I would have never met the real you.”

I smiled at him and grabbed his hand. Now I was the one doing the soothing.

“I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to get to know you,” he whispered.

“Sometimes it takes a long time to understand someone,” I sniffled, swallowing back the tears in my throat. “Years, even. Sometimes you spend your life thinking they’re out to get you, and they hate you and you see them as this kind of monster, and then you realize they’re just a human who makes mistakes and bad decisions, and really, everything they did and put themselves through, they did it for you.”

“Are you still talking about us?” he asked, as a frown line split through his brow.

I shook my head quietly.

“What happened?” he said.

“It’s just something you said earlier,” I mumbled. “It reminded me of someone.”

“I’m sorry, Em.”

“No, it’s fine,” I answered, and stood up in a hurry. “Do you mind giving me a minute?”

“Sure,” he shrugged, but I could still hear the worry in his voice. “I’ll stay here, and wait a few minutes so they don’t see us leaving together.”

I didn’t wait for him to finish his explanation to run back out into the garden. I gasped in the forest’s fresh air, hoping I would puke, faint or break down before I reached a bathroom.

I looked at the face staring at me in the mirror. My eyes were puffed up by all the tears I held back. My skin was ghastly, stained with tears and the dirt beneath my fingernails. My cheeks were swollen from all the food and drinks.

If I splashed some water on my face and took a minute to breathe, I’d look just like the picture on Emilia Kovács’ passport. That was the part that hurt the most.

I had hoped to see my mother’s face in the mirror.

I didn’t remember what she looked like at all. I wished I could put one on the memories I had left of her.

All the nights we’d spent together watching old episodes of SNL, curled up on her old sofa and wearing matching fluffy socks.

The last smiles she’d shown when I cracked a dirty joke, made up a small skit, or impersonated that old lady that lived across the street, who had a huge broomstick shoved all the way up her ass and always let her dog shit in front of our house.

The tiny glint of joy in her eyes, like the twinkle of a star thousands of lightyears away, when I’d agree to sit with her on the stairs of our front porch and share a few beers.

On my twenty-first birthday, when she said she’d cook me a meal but managed to burn a whole pot of Kraft mac n’ cheese, and so we ordered my favorite cheese-crust pizza instead.

The first and last time she’d tried to go to rehab, and how hard she’d hugged me when she came home. The next time she’d relapsed, and how she’d sobbed in my arms all night long.

For the first time in about a decade, I wished I could see my mom.

I didn’t need her to be sober, I didn’t need her to be fine, she wouldn’t even need to smile when I came home.

Because I would have rather had her half here than not have her at all.

Kerning

Half Here

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