The Paper Swan(56)

I placed the tray on the bed and turned the spoon his way. He just stared at the tray. I knew he was thinking of all the times he had done the same for me on the boat, bringing me food, except under much different circumstances. I knew what it took for him to pick up that spoon. He held it over the bowl and put it down again. His throat spasmed as he fought whatever was tormenting him.

It dawned on me that no one had cared for Damian, not since MaMaLu, not when he was sick, and not when he was hurt. The world had denied him tenderness, and he didn’t know what to do with it now, or how to react. He had singlehandedly brought down a drug lord, but a bowl of soup was breaking him down. He wanted me to hate him for what he’d done. An eye for an eye. That made sense to him. Not this, not kindness where he expected loathing. It was turning his whole world upside down.

I wanted to put my hand on his clenched fists and tell him it was okay, but I got up and left. I knew he would never eat while I watched. A few hours later, when I went back to his room, he was sleeping. He had taken his pills, but left the food untouched.

Rafael was right.

Damian was a bull-headed prick.



I opened more cans of soup. More trays went untouched. I was ready to hold him down and force feed him when I found a jar of roasted peanuts. When Damian opened his eyes that afternoon, I was sitting on a chair watching him.

“About time,” I said, tossing a handful of peanuts into my mouth.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

He looked from me to the cone of peanuts that I’d fashioned out of a magazine cover, but didn’t say anything.

I continued munching. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

He had to be hungry. Starving. He was just too f*cking proud to let me do anything for him.

“I thought you were allergic to peanuts,” he said.

“You know very well I’m not.”

For a fleeting second, the hint of a smile played on his lips.

There it was, a memory that had gotten past his defenses: me discovering chocolate peanut butter ice cream and hiding the container under my bed so I could share it with him. There was nothing left when he climbed through the window that evening. I had eaten the whole thing and was trying not to be sick.

I failed, and he helped me clean up the evidence.

“You knew,” I said, realizing why he hadn’t blinked when I told him I was allergic to peanuts. I thought of him moisturizing his feet. “You *.”

He laughed, catching the peanut I threw at him.

Damian f*cking Caballero laughed. And it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I pretended it didn’t matter, like my breath hadn’t caught, like my throat wasn’t clenched, when I dumped the rest of the peanuts in his lap and walked away.

I needed to be alone so I could hug that moment, the moment his face had cracked into a smile. He needed to be alone so he could eat those peanuts without feeling like I had prepared anything special for him.



Damian got better. He finished his food. When we ran out of soup, I moved on to refried beans and cans of chili and peaches and pears. I hit the motherload when I opened the freezer and found TV dinners I could nuke in the microwave. I was going positively gourmet, adding a pinch of paprika to the mac and cheese, and a floret of thawed out broccoli (which Damian flicked out of the way, the ungrateful bastard).

Sometimes when he was sleeping, I turned on the radio. There was no TV, so I had to rely on crackly news broadcasts. They repeated my name and description, along with Damian’s. He was considered armed and dangerous. I listened to a short plea from my father, addressed to Damian. He had a hotline and a reward set up for any leads. I had disappeared almost two weeks ago, and I could hear the strain in my father’s voice. He was coming after Damian, guns blazing, not knowing the root of the story. He had no idea that Damian was Esteban, that he was paying for the repercussions of his own actions. I wavered between anger over what he’d done, the lies he’d told, and a deeper conviction, that there was more to the story. I knew my father, just as I knew Damian. I wanted to tell my father where I was, to put an end to his obvious distress, give him a chance to explain himself, but that meant exposing Damian, and I wasn’t about to betray him, like he thought I’d betrayed him all those years ago.

I busied myself with nursing Damian back to health and not thinking about anything else. One night, I opened up a can of tuna and decided it was time I made something. I looked in the fridge and found some lemons, an overripe tomato, and a lone onion rolling around in one of the drawers. I figured I could make ceviche. It was a summertime staple at my favorite restaurant. I had ordered it countless times, and let’s face it—how hard can fish cured in lemon juice be? Granted, it was normally made with fresh, raw seafood, but I was all about innovation. I emptied the tuna into a bowl and juiced the lemons over it, being careful to keep my bandaged pinky out of the way.