Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗

Jeanette did as she was told, more metal in the mouth. More blood. She felt part of her mouth go numb.

The high came so fast, Jeanette wasn’t sure it was really a high and not some kind of trick of the mind. Her body felt electrified and the dizziness evaporated. She was seized by an excitement, the feeling of something incredible about to happen. She felt at the precipice of a whole new life and couldn’t believe she’d ever doubted herself. She was amazing! Queen Caro times infinity squared, ruler of all the dance floor, killer of all the men. What would it feel like if she turned the tables on Johnson? If she ended up chopping his body into pieces so everyone he’d ever known would grumble, What was he thinking, letting a stranger into his car who could have been a serial killer for all he knew?

“Let’s dance,” she said, unable to get the words out fast enough.

Johnson wore an exaggerated smile like a marionette. He sweated even more. Jeanette just wanted to dance dance dance. She just wanted to kill him kill him kill him. That was the solution! How had she missed it all this time? The next time her father came at her drunk, wanting a too-tight hug, the next time he had an angry outburst, she’d simply kill him. How simple. The music split into individual notes. That was the weed high bleeding into the coke high, she imagined. She could suddenly identify every instrument, every tempo change, every beat, every lyric. The music became physical like gas into water; if you had asked her at that moment what each music note tasted like, she’d have been able to answer.

They danced but it wasn’t about sex anymore. It was about the miracle of having a body. The miracle of not understanding a single thing about firing neurons, about the mechanics of moving her ass, but doing it anyway. She danced to I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly! She screamed, For the mamis and the señoritas, Cuban girls and fine Boricuas! She twirled and thought, U remind me of a girl I once knew …

It was three in the morning when they left the club. Jeanette had her cell phone but nobody had called. She imagined her mother puffy from the surgery, fuzzy on whatever painkillers the plastic surgeon had given her. Asleep. She probably wouldn’t notice how late Jeanette got home.

The high had started to fade. Now Jeanette felt panicky, watching the euphoria leak out of her, desperate with the knowledge that her confidence hadn’t been real, just a chemical trick. She couldn’t remember where Johnson had parked but he was leading her by the arm toward the ocean, they were crossing the boulevard toward the dunes.

“Where are you taking me?”

Johnson also seemed depleted. He seemed angry now. At the club, he’d stopped dancing and nearly punched a guy who looked at Jeanette from head to toe. A bouncer had intervened, and Johnson said they were leaving.

“Let’s go look at the water,” he said, not even turning to see Jeanette as he led her by the arm.

“Why?”

He didn’t answer. Jeanette was so tired. She just wanted to go home.

The beach was dark enough that no one would see them unless they walked down the stairs toward the shore and right up to them. But it wasn’t so dark that she couldn’t see Johnson’s eyes. The Miami Beach skyline formed a lighted wreath around them. Jeanette took a breath of salt air and felt the airy rumble of a wave. Okay, do what you’re going to do. The water shone black, pure black, the boats in the distance shiny bobbing dots when he held her down.

It was the dead body that saved her. Later, she would think of this moment and know that nothing else would have stopped Johnson’s hands digging all over her skin and into her brain, implanting the sound of skin on skin that she’d retrieve with shame the rest of her life. Later, standing on the shore, watching water bob around the lifeless woman, only then would she feel a deep sorrow for this body that saved her own.

“I’ll call the cops. About the body,” she said, and Johnson responded, “You crazy? We’re high as fuck. You’re like twelve years old. Shit. Shit.”

“I’m fifteen!” she said.

At their right a locked pile of beach recliners wrapped in metal twine leaned precariously. An empty lifeguard booth cast shadows over its dirty plastic bands.

“Jesus Christ,” Johnson yelled at her. “Jesus Christ. Jail time—that’s what it fucking is.”

Jeanette stared at the tower of beach loungers. She wanted to climb its rungs and go to sleep on top, a disgraced version of the princess and the pea.

“Well, we can’t just leave her here,” she said. “Can we just leave her here?”

Jeanette wasn’t used to a grown man without an answer. The world felt so much more dangerous, so much more uncertain than it had just a day ago. Tendrils of the dead woman’s hair pulsed like jellyfish with the tide. She had hair the color of Jeanette’s, hair the color of her mother’s.

Johnson had cast off his sneakers earlier, and his socked feet left little oval nests in the wet sand along the shore as he paced. Jeanette placed a foot in one of the little foot pools and marveled at the empty space.

“We gotta go,” Johnson said, grabbing her by the arm and pushing her toward his shoes and damp T-shirt that lay in a pile. “Come on. Get yourself together.”

“What about—?”

“They’ll find it. Someone will find the body in the morning.”

Johnson sprinted toward Ocean Drive, holding his pants up and wobbling like a duck. Jeanette followed, thinking their footprints that led up to the body were a bad idea. She wondered if she could call the cops from the car. But how would she explain why they had fled? Why she’d been at the beach after dark in