Pink Stucco – Max Thrax

September 17, 2024

1

From Boca Raton, they drove an hour down I-95 to a suburban-looking neighborhood in Coral Terrace, a few blocks east of Barnes Park. Jeremy halted the car outside one of the dozens of red-tiled, pink stucco houses lining the street. He glanced at his watch before speaking to Nina. “I’m not a doctor,” Jeremy said, “but you need to stay awake.”
        “This is the place?”
        “Change of plans. I’m due at back at the boat, and since the cottage isn’t ready, we booked on short notice.”
        “Does here have a name?”
        “Premier Recovery,” Jeremy said. “They got a lot of good reviews.”
        It was early evening and the cicadas droned as Jeremy hauled Nina’s bags from the trunk of his rented Audi and wheeled them to the door. When he returned, Nina’s eyes were closed. He tapped her shoulder.
        “I’m not dead.”
        “You’re bleeding,” Jeremy said. He tore a cotton swab in half and stuck a piece in her nostril. “Let’s get you out of the car.”
        “It’s strange,” Nina said, “you’re so close and I can’t smell you.”
        “You can always see me.”
        A middle-aged woman in yellow latex gloves answered the door. “Yes, what?”
        “A room for Nina DeLeon,” he said. “Sorry we’re late, but traffic ran slow in the rain.”
        The woman’s hair was black and stringy. “You booked for three o’clock,” she said. “No discounts.”
        Nina’s bedroom had an old metal IKEA frame and vinyl curtains with a Minnie Mouse motif. “I don’t want you to leave,” she told Jeremy.
        “Tonight, we’re sailing back to Bimini,” he said. “In a week, those rags will be off and I’ll be outside waiting for you.”
        He was ready to depart when Nina moaned and sank down on the floor next to her duffle bag. “Must be those headaches,” Jeremy said. “Here, sit.” She remained flat on the carpet, so he lifted her up and set her back against the headboard, then slipped a pillow behind her neck.
        “I have to go.”
        “Kiss me.”
        He leaned over the gold sheets and pecked her forehead. After he left, a yellow glove switched off the light and closed the door.
        Nina felt too tired to move her arms; the headache was gone, but whatever painkillers the clinic slipped her were wearing off. She recalled almost nothing about the drive to Miami. It all looked gray and flat in the rain as the clouds drifted east from the Everglades.
        Before the accident, Bimini was blindingly white.

2

The gloved woman’s name was Esmeralda. At eight o’clock, she rapped twice on Nina’s door: “Awake?”
        Nina rose from the gold sheets and bare comforter and Esmeralda led her to the living room, where three red sofas were arranged in a semicircle. Next to the window sat a blonde girl the same age as Nina, with the same white swaddling over her face. Esmeralda propped up Nina’s back and said tea would be ready.
        “Are we the only ones?” Nina said.
        The blonde girl took no notice as she lifted and dipped her Lipton bag.
        “What’s your name?”
        Finally, the girl crossed her legs and faced Nina. “Chloe,” she said.
        “Has it been all right?”
        Esmeralda cursed and banged around some pots in the kitchen. Chloe stood up, leaned over the carpet, and whispered, “Don’t bother asking the man questions. He might understand, but he can’t speak English.”
        “Who’s the man?”
        “You’ll see.”
        Their caretaker entered the room and placed a steaming mug at Nina’s feet. Without a word, she went out the back door and began sweeping the porch.
        “You know,” Chloe said, “you’re the first person I’ve spoken to in three days. The girl who stayed last week—she went to a budget clinic in Westchester and something went wrong with her butt lift. This chick stayed in her room all day, either screaming or crying. It was kind of muffled, because her face was on the pillow… Where’d you get your work done?”
        “Envision, I think.”
        The blonde girl grinned. One of her front gums was higher than the other, although the teeth were perfectly white. “Westchester,” she said. “At least you didn’t get a butt lift.”
        “What happened to her?”
        “She got tangled in some ropes. The man untangled her and drove her away.”
        Nina returned to her room and took four Tylenol on an empty stomach. Jeremy sent a text: he’d gotten back late and almost canceled the launch to the Bahamas. He signed off with an insult aimed at the boat’s purser, a dyed-red Milanese woman named Beatrice who loathed Nina and resented her romance with a billionaire’s son. Nina winced and drifted off into sleep.

3

At nineteen, Nina bought a one-way ticket to Antibes and rented a room in a stew house near the dock. Despite having no experience on a yacht, after two days she was hired as a greenhorn and worked the next two years as third stewardess. The work was hardly nautical: a hospitality job with long hours scrubbing and wiping down every inch of the Apex II and little time to rest. Last August, the boat docked at Cannes, where Jeremy chartered it for a week. He brought Nina into the owner’s suite on his first night.

4

Nina’s pain and swelling grew worse; it took patience to swallow only two pills at a time. She sat on the edge of the twin bed as Esmeralda changed her dressings. The woman’s fingers were white and smelled of laundry bleach.
        “Careful with the cast,” Nina said.
        “I am always careful.”
        “The girl with the butt lift—was she careful?”
        Esmeralda grunted, cut the tape: “She came by mistake.”
        Nina drank her cold tea. She heard the Escalade leave the driveway and took her mug to the back porch. The narrow yard was black dirt and concrete, bound by a high and weathered white fence. Nina leaned against a dryer below the wooden overhang.
        “You should be inside.” The voice came from the far side of the patio. Nina saw a man wearing a straw hat and a wrinkled green polo shirt. He walked a few feet closer to Nina, pointing a stubby finger at the door.
        “Where’s Esmeralda?” Nina said.
        “She went to the park.”
        “For what?”
        “A walk,” the man said. “She likes to walk there.”
        “Do you have a cigarette?”
        The man broke out laughing. “My name is Hector,” he said. “They always ask, but smoke is bad for your blood. I give you something…”
        An hour later, Nina came to consciousness on the sofa. Hector was watching soccer and eating pistachios. “You should be in bed,” he said. He cracked another shell and dropped it on the glass coffee table. “Esmeralda will be upset.”
        A loud clang sounded from Chloe’s room.
        Hector said, “I have to go.”

5

Esmeralda inched through the doorway with a bag of groceries under her arm and a phone tucked between her round jaw and collarbone. “Yes,” she said, “We’re always working. You never see the house so clean.” She noticed Nina sprawled on the Turkish rug, then put away the phone and rubbed her forehead. “You must eat, bathe, change your clothes. A man is coming to see you.”
        “A doctor?”
        “No, the landlord.”
        She sponged down Nina in the tub. “Stop shaking,” she said, “or your wrappings will fall off. Hair is very straight, we leave it.”
        “Is it Jeremy?”
        “Jeremy? I think he will visit later.”
        “We’re getting married.”
        “Beautiful bride… I am not so beautiful, but I know what looks good.”
        Nina spotted a black leatherbound Bible on the nightstand.
        “Is there—”
        “Please.”

6

The man in the doorway was of medium height, with straight gray hair parted in the center and expensive-looking wire rim glasses with gold frames, as well as a half-buttoned white shirt and beige Harrington jacket. “Is she awake?”
        “Here and there,” Esmeralda said.
        “Give her everything she needs,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I feel responsible.”
        “Hector found her on the patio.”
        The man crossed his arms and chuckled to himself. “It’ll be cold tonight. Slip her a turtleneck or something.”
        Dizzy and bloated, Nina said: “Are you Jeremy’s dad?”
        The man stopped laughing and retired to the living room. Esmeralda said something and the man went on a rant in Spanish, scraping his heels against the tile. At last, a door opened down the hall and Nina heard tiny wheels screeching toward the front entrance. She got up and saw Hector leading Chloe to the steps, her bandages gone and her face purple with welts and bruises. “What do you want?” she said to Nina, before turning back as they guided her to the staircase.

7

Jeremy wasn’t answering his phone or Nina’s texts. She grabbed a cigarette from a pack of Russian cheap whites in the kitchen.
        Hector stood over by the dryer. “Bad for your blood,” he said. “Nicotine shrinks the vessels, makes them tight.”
        She lit up the cigarette and exhaled in Hector’s direction; for a second, the cloud hid his sweaty, stubbled face.
        “Esmeralda will catch you,” he said. “She never likes it when girls choose for themselves.”
        “Since no one wants to tell me—what the hell goes on here? Where’s Chloe?”
        “Chloe?”
        “The blonde girl.”
        “She got sick,” he said. “Drove her to the hospital.”
        “Who was that man? Jeremy’s dad?”
        “He comes here sometimes—the landlord. Who is Jeremy?”
        Nina had seen pictures of Jeremy’s father, either staged portraits or photos of him sitting at big tables during big conferences in Switzerland and Brazil. The man in the doorway was smaller, more tanned, more wrinkled, but close…
        Her phone was missing. She searched through her bags, under the bed, all the drawers. As Nina flipped over the mattress, she heard the gravel crunch under the Escalade’s wheels.
        “Where’s my fucking phone?”
        Esmeralda said, “You have been smoking. Smoking cigarettes.” She yelled for Hector and he lumbered over from the patio. “This girl wants her phone.”
        “It’s in her room,” Hector murmured.
        “Please show her.”
        Hector grabbed Nina’s wrist and yanked her out into the hallway.
        “You insulted the landlord,” Esmeralda said. “He came for you and took the other one. Why insult him? Why insult the landlord?”
        “Call Jeremy,” Nina said. “I’m ready to go back.”
        “You need rest. The landlord paid for your stay—months, a whole year.”
        While Hector held down Nina, Esmeralda prepared a syringe. “I was a nurse a long time,” she said. She injected it into Nina’s tiny bicep and wiped off the blood with a coffee filter. Next, she turned off the humidifier. “Makes her ill,” Esmeralda said, “all the clouds and moisture. Mildew in her brain.” She leaned over the gold sheets, two inches from Nina’s nose: “I know you went in the other room, the blonde girl’s room. The one with the pearls. You think you’re pretty? Are you pretty now?” Her saliva dripped down into Nina’s open mouth.

8

Before the accident, she and Jeremy rode a motorcycle off the Kings Highway, past fruit stalls and abandoned tarpaper shacks to the mangrove forests of north Bimini. Jeremy wanted to find the fountain of youth.
        “Why the fountain of youth?” Nina said. “You’re still young.”
        “So are you.”
        A man carrying a cart full of timber appeared a quarter mile down the road.
        “Jeremy, slow down.”
        “He’s not supposed to be there,” Jeremy said. “He’ll move.”
        They continued to speed toward the staggering man. As they drew closer, Nina saw he was indeed a hunchback.
        “Slow down.”
        “He’ll move.”
        She heard the thump and then flew off the bike into the marsh. When she finally climbed up the bank, her face was numb. Jeremy stood over the hunchback’s cart. A tossed wicker basket had spilled out branches and shapeless hunks of driftwood. The hunchback lay on his side; his face caught the wheel and his nose and front teeth were missing.
        “Is he alive?” Nina said.
        “If he is,” Jeremy said, kicking the cart, “he’ll move.”
        They sped back to the Apex II, where Jeremy told the crew they’d stay docked until evening. He called one of his father’s lawyers in Boca Raton and he joined them two hours later.
        The police were sympathetic and claimed the hunchback was a known drunkard. They warned him to stay out of the swamps. “God punished the man,” said one of the cops. “All the same, we have a few questions…”
        The lawyer argued with their investigator for an hour. Nina heard them but saw nothing as she lay on the lower deck, a half-drenched towel over her face. Eventually they left port, with the lawyer swearing at Jeremy all the way across the water.

9

Hector sat smoking at the foot of Nina’s bed. When she coughed, he turned around: “You must go to the other place.”
        “The boat.”
        He extinguished his cigarette in a tea mug. “Esmeralda says the hospital.”
        She sat up against the pillows, her shoulders resting flat on the headboard. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
        “You have skin grafts. Only me and Esmeralda see them. Red, infected.”
        “Where’s Jeremy?”
        “I don’t know this man.”
        He crossed over to the dresser and filled a fresh syringe, then placed the needle on the window sill and lit another cigarette. When he exhaled in her face, she snatched the syringe and slammed it into Hector’s thigh. As he keeled over, Nina stabbed him again; one thrust sliced his carotid and the vein spilled out over the bedding. She wiped her eyes and shoved the dresser down on his skull. Then Nina tried to retie her wet dressings, fumbling as she reeled to the bathroom.
        She slid back the curtain and saw her face: the nose was prosthetic, flopping down half-way from its hole. The rest was blood—Hector’s.
        Esmeralda beat her fists against the door: “Perra estúpida…”
        Nina could no longer smell; she no longer wanted to see or hear. With the plunger of the syringe, she pressed against the base of her right eye until it popped out and hung from a stalk.
        Esmeralda finally opened the lock. “No, no, no,” she said. “He paid for you. The landlord…”
        Nina bolted from the room. She tumbled down the front stairs and heard the crunch of bone, followed by the shrieks of neighbors and the scrape of Esmeralda’s wooden heels against the steps, her gloved hand squeaking down the rail.