Short Story: Eve on la Isla (past)

The doors banged open in the middle of yet another Isla do Noir storm, on an otherwise clear December night. By the moonlight, Vice-Warden Collins, an employ from the States who often wondered how he’d ended up with this job, watched as a familiar lady strode in and shook the raindrops that clung to her cloak and long black hair. Considering the downpour outside, this took some time. Collins bustled up to her in mid-shake, hands already raised to usher her back out into the storm.

“Whoah, whoah, heeey,” he began, and then realized he wasn’t saying much of anything. He paused, and she looked up from her wringing out and drying off, “The day one of you all can waltz in here unannounced like this is the day hell freezes over. What are you up to, Madrigal? It’s Christmas Eve, we haven’t got the guards on duty to deal with you.”

The woman looked up at him with a look of injured innocence, her blue eyes wide and shining. Completely fake, Collins thought, trying to brush it off. Or at least mostly. He was prone to cut her some slack for being pretty.

“Tonight I’m just a lady visiting her dear old dad, warden,” Cadenza said, “Can't you respect that…? No tricks, honestly.”

Collins sucked his teeth. “Yeah, and I’m a camel’s uncle.” He’d been around long enough to know how a Madrigal operated. They were good actors, and even better liars when they needed to be.

The woman just shrugged, “Hey, I’m not knockin’ your family tree… if it swings the furry way.”

The vice-warden saw that he was outclassed. Perhaps his boss could have had the patience and willpower to quip back and forth with Cadenza Madrigal-Valentia on a Christmas Eve night, but he had to get home sometime soon. He figured the easiest way might just be to give in. “…Hn,” he grunted. “Well… all right. Scout’s honor, you’re not up to anything?”

“I don’t even know what that means, but sure. Who the hell around here is a scout?” She gave the warden a sardonic look, but it quickly faded and she waved the whole subject off. “Never mind. Just let me see my pai…”

Collins nodded and fetched the keys from by the desk, taking special care to obfuscate where he’d kept them from Madrigal’s sight. He dug in unnecessary desk drawers, opened small petty change vaults, pretended to leaf through the pages of a phone book. Somehow, when he’d finally fished them out, he felt the woman still had figured out where they had been hidden. Tomorrow I move them to the bottom of cup of pens, he thought, making a metal note. You could never be too safe… no one ever really used any of those pens to document things like they should anyway.

He unlocked the door, and led Cadenza down the corridor, past sneering prisoners and a number of wolf whistles, his thoughts filled with the image of a hot dinner waiting at home for him by the stove until he realized he’d nearly passed the cell he was headed to and stopped abruptly with a lurch. His belly wobbled under the gray uniform and again, he thought of pot roast and potatoes until the woman gave him a nudge, and one of her most impatient looks.

“Some privacy, yah? Personal family moment here, and all. Thanks.”

“Right right,” Collins grumbled, and hurried off, back to his desk, hoping he still had that corner of sandwich left in his lunchbox from earlier.

When his footsteps had finally faded off down the hall, Cadenza turned to the cell, wrapped her gloved hands around the bars, and peered in. On the dingy cot inside, Galliard Madrigal was slumbering fitfully in the hideous lime-green jumpsuit that was the prison uniform she so hated, his beard untrimmed and going gray at the ends, his hair bedraggled and matted to his head from heat. She sighed, and rattled on the bars with the metallic knuckles of her gloves.

“Moorning, sunshine…”

Galliard stirred but didn’t get up. She rattled again, louder this time, until some of the other prisoners complained in rather colorful language. Cadenza shot them all a glare, fingered a dagger hilt by her belt, and silence quickly reigned again on Death Row. “Bloody lot of rats, filthy little…” her grumbling trailed off as her father eased himself off the cot with a groan and glanced towards her.

“Hija…” he breathed, his deep fatherly voice ending in a parched rasp. The tired, saddened lines of his face and brow smoothed themselves out, reshaped into the laugh lines Cadenza knew so well. He managed a smile. “What are you doing here…?”

“I… brought you a little something, Pai.” She reached into her inner cloak pocket, pulled out a tall bottle of eggnog and two metal tumblers. “You always loved eggnog at this time of year… so… cheers.”

She poured until the two glasses were filled to the brim, and squeezed her slender arm through the bars to hand his to him. A tear glinted in his eye as he took the tumbler and drank, savoring the taste for many moments.

“It’s… perfeito. The sweetest thing I have tasted in some time… gracias, hija…”

“You needed a little pick-me-up… heh, yeah, that’s an understatement, I’m sure… but… I had to bring you something,” she looked down at her soaked boots, unsure of what else to say. It didn’t feel like enough.

“No, no… this is a great gift… my favorite holiday drink… a visit from my hija… I’m glad…”

“How… how can you be!? Here? In this place?” Cadenza tossed her arms in the air, believing the awfulness of the prison needed no description. It spoke for itself. “You shouldn’t be here, and we both know it!”

Every year she got like this, Galliard knew. Every year at Christmas, for the… past seven years now, it had been, she would come to visit quite calmly, albeit maybe sad, at first, and then the slightest thing would throw her into a fit. Her care for him, for his situation… it was always endearing, yes, he loved her greatly and felt comforted by the fact that at least one of his daughters missed him so. But… he knew there were other places she should be, other things she could be doing with her time… rather than visiting her condemned father.

He reached his hand out from the bars, and rested it on one of hers. “Hija… it’s all right… I’m all right… if I am truly innocent, God will see it that what should and must happen will. But right now… shouldn’t you be at home with Paris…? Where is he tonight…?”

Cadenza took on the slightly pouty look that he could remember seeing countless times during her childhood. Even now as an adult, when she tried to hide it, he always knew when she was deeply upset. “He’s at a party, for the soldiers. There’s an armistice declared for Christmas… a party is being thrown on a yacht somewhere in the Seria. It was too short notice, and… too far away, so… he couldn’t bring me.”

“Hija…”

She crossed her arms—the next step of her shutting herself off in anger. She looked away, voice even and cold as she said, “…Not like I care anyway. You know I hate being around stuffed shirts like that… they’re not… my kind of people. I wouldn’t know what to do or say at a party like that.”

The excuse, the defense, the reflection. Galliard knew all these so very well. Cadenza thought she was putting up a good front, but to him, it was as easy as peering through a clean glass window. He knew all that was inside to know. “Hija, I’m sure Paris would have been much happier with you there… he’s probably missing you right at this moment, miserable without his ‘gorgeous sunflower’ to brighten the event for him.”

“Heh… maybe,” she conceded, but it was half-hearted. She poured off another glass of eggnog and tossed it back like it was plain milk. This was the last part, her father knew… the drinking. Ever since that baby was lost, a year ago… she had taken to the bottle, and only gotten worse and worse. Only he even knew all the details of what had happened…

“Cadenza… how is your mother…? Have you visited her recently?” This was always a sensitive subject with Cadenza. Galliard knew he had to tread with care—he had even made sure he’d waited until she was at least on her third tumbler before he asked.

“…Went yesterday with Arietta and Luminari to take her something Ari’d knitted her. She seemed… okay. Same as always… you know, frail, coughing…”

“Ari knitted her a gift…? That was sweet of her…” his thoughts drifted to Sonya, to the smile he imagined must have lit up her beautiful face when she’d gotten a visit and a gift from their beloved daughters. How he wished he could have been there…

“Yeah, well… Ari’s the sweet one. I think she went back over to see Sonya today, took cookies or something like that. Some pretty good cookies, I’d have to say,” she gave a very small smile as she patted her stomach. Galliard could tell the alcohol was slowly loosening her up. It was both a nice and worrying thing. He did miss her smiles, too.

“How long did… the warden say you could stay?” he looked out of the window, at the moon amidst the clouds. He had gotten real good at guessing the time of day or night by the sky over the years. It could have almost been past midnight.

“As long as I damn well please, and I’d like to see him try to kick me out!” she nearly shouted back, voice echoing through the hall. She was getting to the point where she was forgetting to control her volume—a second bottle of eggnog appeared out of a cloak pocket and popped open to fill her glass. “Want more?” she held it out towards him.

“…All right, yes, thank you, hija…” he put his tumbler underneath the mouth of the bottle and let her pour generously. Then he sat down against the bars, on the dusty, cold flooring, and she did the same on the other side.

“…It should be me in there,” she whispered, almost to herself. “I’ve done… far worse things… it should be me…”

“Cadenza… don’t say that,” Galliard pet her shoulder gently, wished he could do more to comfort his daughter. Even though she was grown-up, this was a time when he knew she was really in need of support…

The young woman went on, stubbornly, as she always would, “…All the people I’ve killed… all the lives I’ve ruined, the things I’ve stolen… but I get to run around out here while you rot away in this cell and miss Sonya everyday…”

“You’re not going to turn yourself in, are you…?” each time, every year, Galliard answered with this same thing. It usually snapped her back to her old, tough self. He hoped it would now.

“…Hell no, of course not!” Yes, that was the answer he’d wanted. “I can’t… not… not at least until I’ve found a way to bust you out of here… something… I’ll figure out something, I have to…”

“I know you will,” he told her with a smile. That was his little girl for you… his caring, determined little girl. He felt relieved that she hadn’t changed so much in these past years he’d been gone that he still knew her better than she knew herself. Or at least could tell himself that he did. It helped him feel… like he was still someone’s father. He still had a life and identity beyond these bars that he could someday, one day, return to. It was what kept him going.

“I think I’ll come by again tomorrow, Pai… bring you some pictures from Paris and my trip to Sereia when he had a week’s leave… he went on some boats out with the fishermen and I stood on the docks very stubbornly and watched…” she gave a small chuckle, and then a slight hiccup. A third bottle of eggnog appeared like the rabbit out of a magician’s hat, from another cloak pocket, and began filling her tumbler. “It was a nice trip…”

“I’m sure… you… you pay a visit to your mae too tomorrow, all right?”

Another hiccup, and she drained another tumbler. “S… sure, Pai… I’ll visit ‘er. Tell ‘er ya love h… her…”

He was losing her now, he could tell. There was the faraway, glazed look in her dark blue eyes. Cadenza was elsewhere, and here, now, was the drunken parody of herself, slurring and jolly and stumbling about. It pained him to see it.

She was humming a little bawdy song to herself as she plunked down the bottle of eggnog by the bars and winked conspiratorially at him, “F…for ah… nightcap, for ya later… dun… don't tell the warden.”

Galliard just nodded a little sadly and watched as she staggered off towards the doors, guzzling another bottle now and then and singing her little song. Her footsteps clacked and echoed until she disappeared from sight and hearing, and with her, took his bit of joy for the night. God, he prayed, grant us a happy Christmas Eve…one of these years, please…