The Woodlands

To leave Pau all that was needed from Mother was a signature and a small bag containing a change of clothes and letter writing materials, but she was panicking. Her fragile state gave me a pang of guilt for making her do this but she was the one who was forcing me to leave eventually anyway. What difference was a few months going to make?

“I can’t find a pen, Rosa. Where are all the pens?” She sounded out of her mind with worry, her voice taking on a high-pitched, hysterical edge.

“Mother, come here and sit down.” I was going to have to be the calm one. Words came back to me, but not in Paulo’s voice, it was my own, level and heavy. ‘Be stronger’.

“It’s ok, I’m sure they will give me one if I ask.”

She followed me into the kitchen, back to place where all this started. She looked so frail, her tiny, dark frame teetering on the edge of the chair.

“I know you’re upset but I think it’s best to go now. If I stayed, I think I would only start to resent you and that baby.” As the words came out, I knew they were true. “I love you. I don’t want that to change. Just promise me you’ll look after yourself.”

I reached across the table to hold her hand. She withdrew, always a thin, cold pane of glass between us. She regarded me for a second, tears in her eyes. Then she stood up.

“There’s probably a pen in Paulo’s office,” she muttered, mostly to herself. That was it. She walked off talking to herself and I went to my room to change.

I stood in the doorway for a while. Taking in the home I was leaving—the standard, grey-green walls that were in every home, my small bed and yellow bedspread. I wasn’t really going to miss this place. To miss it, I would have had to have some enjoyable moments here. There were none I could think of. Not here. Not since Paulo came to live here. I put on my school uniform, grey-green again with a silhouette of the Pau Brasil tree on the front. Its tiny trunk completely out of proportion to its vast foliage, looking like a stick with a puffy cloud jammed on top. I looked in the mirror. A calm girl stared back at me, her brown and blue eyes steeled and determined. I had to make this work. I had to make a better life for myself. Anything would better than this. I combed my long, brown hair back into a ponytail and tied the allowable silver ribbon around it. A memory of strong hands straightening my uniform and tightening my ribbon swaddled my consciousness. Not now.

I looked tired, dark circles under my eyes. I wondered if Joseph would be there, feeling a sharp punch to my chest. I decided I wouldn’t care if he was there or not. Hilarious that I thought I could decide such a thing. We weren’t going to be in the same class so it didn’t matter. But it did. It mattered so much more than I could ever admit to myself, bringing with it a crippling, doubling-over feeling of pain. No, I wouldn’t care. I couldn’t.

When I walked out to the living area, my mother had composed herself. She had put on her best coat and also tied her hair back tightly into a bun, tiny slivers of silver showing through her dark brown mane. My bag sat open by the door, packed with clean clothes, with about five pens poking out of one of the pockets.

“Thank you,” I said, trying to sound normal, unruffled, but my voice was quivering. I wanted to pat her arm but my hand was shaking so I left it where it was, by my side, as hers were. We stood looking at each other. Mother went to say something but the sound of the door being unlatched stopped her.

“I forgot my jacket.” An oily voice slipped through the crack in the door.

Paulo arrived and surveyed the room. His eyes landed on the bag and he quickly put it together. “Well,” he said, exultant. “We’d better get you to Ring One.” He swiftly picked up my bag, zipped it up, and threw it over his shoulder. I put my shoes on and had to run to catch up with him as he energetically strode down the front path. He almost looked like he was skipping. I suppressed a giggle. My mother locked the door and walked briskly behind us, hugging the papers to her chest. I looked behind me at the rows of grey houses—each one identical. I wouldn’t miss this bleak, nothing of a town. Our neighbor eyed us curiously as my mother and I struggled to keep up with Paulo’s cracking pace, watering the pavement instead of his lawn.

We passed through the gates to Ring Two in silence. As we approached the gate for Ring One, Paulo spoke.

“Rosa, you need to line up at the Class administration building. Esther, you can get her bags checked, and I will talk to the transports and see if they will have any room.” Paulo’s hatred was actually proving useful to me that day as he quickly and efficiently guided us through the steps we needed to take to get me on that transport and out of his life forever.

I don’t think Paulo really needed to worry. There were two helicopters and only about ten scuttly teenagers getting ready to go. They were dressed in their school uniforms. All looked very nervous—fiddling with their jumpers, chewing on their fingernails. One girl bawled hysterically as her parents held and tried to console her. Everyone was staring at them. It was not normal to show emotion like this in public. Others were shaking hands with their fathers and giving their mothers light pecks on the cheeks. I sca

“You’re sixteen,” the man said, raising his eyebrow dubiously as he looked me up and down.

“My mother, Esther Amos, is pregnant, so I am entitled to leave with this intake,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. He was young, mid-twenties maybe, muscular and stiff, with a pudgy face that looked odd atop his fit body.

Unsettled by my attitude, he muttered, irritated, “You’re not on the list. Move aside,” using his arm to ‘guide’ me out of the way.

Changing tack, I looked down at my feet, trying to appear humble, tugging on my ponytail, saying quietly, “I’m being surrendered.” It didn’t work.

Paulo expertly took control of the situation. He introduced himself and shook the man’s hand. Paulo called my mother over and asked the man to scan her. The Guardian called up her information on his portable reader. It would all be there—her pregnancy, her due date, everything. Our lives were a transcript, a series of dot points and dates. I felt violated that someone could reach into our lives and take little pieces, but this was life in Pau Brasil. Nothing really belonged to us, not even our pain.

After staring at the reader for some time, the man stood, straightening his uniform. “Very well, here’s your ID sticker,” he said, not even looking up as he scrawled my number across the yellow sticker in big, black numbers. “Put it on your bag and check it with the others.” He closed down his reader and left the station. I must have been the last one.

As I put my bag down and made my way to the middle where everyone was standing, Paulo stopped. “Wait!” he said to the Guardian we had just spoken to. I was confused—was he having second thoughts? I had a sudden fear that he may have changed his mind. That he was going to make me stay. A tiny part of me flickered like the blue flame on a gas burner, not warmth, just the inkling of the idea of heat. Did he actually care about me?

Paulo spoke to the man for a few seconds. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but the Guardian nodded and handed him an envelope. The flame was snuffed out in an instant, leaving a blackened, cold ring. The money. He was securing his payment for my early surrender. I returned my eyes to the center circle.

There were only a few of us milling around. The circle’s large, paved sandstone ground and elaborate design was so out of place amongst the rest of Pau, which was concrete, plastic, and air conditioning. The center podium was darker than the rest of the stonework. Too much blood they could never quite get rid of, no matter how hard they scrubbed. I think, now, they put plastic sheeting down to protect it. Dark and light stones alternated from the center circle, like the circle was the sun and dotted stone lines radiated out from it like rays of light.