Mute (35 page)

“I didn’t do nothing,” Kyle said. He pointed at his
brother. “He was the one who did
this
.” Kyle hurled a stick at the
banana spider. It sheared off the bottom supports of its web, leaving the yellow
web-work dangling in the breeze like a shirt on a clothesline. The determined
spider held on, but if they kept this up, it would jump off soon. And it might
choose one of their heads for a landing pad.

“What if it bites you?” one of the boys in class asked.

“The stupid bug can’t bite us after we step on it,”
Cole said.

“Yeah. Our house has no bugs ‘cause we kill ‘em
all,” Kyle said. “Even the love bugs. We pluck off their legs and crush their
heads like ‘pop!’” He squeezed his fingers together.

Instead of a nature appreciation trip, the Buckley
twins fancied this as a trail of destruction. It’s a good thing they didn’t
bring their BB guns along, or the bobcats and deer would be in trouble, Mrs.
Mint thought.

Just as she concocted the perfect punishment she
would threaten them with, Mrs. Mint saw Mariella slink through the crowd
watching the Buckley Show and insert herself between the twins. Instead of
admonishing them, which would have proven difficult without speaking, she cast
a sympathetic gaze up at the banana spider. It thrust its golden and white
abdomen up and down in what Mrs. Mint interpreted as more apprehension than
appreciation. Its puny brain couldn’t tell friend from foe. The teacher
understood why Mariella had stepped up. The girl indentified with being picked
on and, especially, with being hunted by those larger than her.

Mrs. Mint assumed that the Buckley twins would have
learned their lesson after their previous attacks on Mariella had resulted in
an aching head and a dead dog, whether the latter incident had been her fault
or not. Once again, she underestimated them.

“You think he’s cute, don’t you?” Cole asked
Mariella as he pointed at the spider. “Why don’t you give him a kiss?”

“Yeah, get a little closer,” Kyle said. He shoved
Mariella into the slash pine that supported the bulk of the web. This time the
web couldn’t withstand any more. The silk latticework came undone and the
spider leapt off—right onto Mariella’s arm. The girl didn’t notice it until she
regained her footing. She must have felt those hairy legs grasping her flesh.
Mariella stared in wide-eyed disbelief at the spider with a leg span wider than
her slender arm. If the girl had any wind in her pipes, she would have
screamed. Her face cringed in terror. Her gaping jaw dropped to her neck as
someone screaming would do. Mrs. Mint didn’t need to hear a word from the
girl’s lips. She galloped over the bed of leaves toward Mariella. Fogel got
there first. The assistant swiped at the spider, but its dozens of eyes saw her
coming and it hopped off.

“Get it!” Cole ordered his brother.

Kyle stomped at it. He squished nothing but leaves.
The banana spider darted into the bushes.

Mrs. Mint shot the Buckley twins a bitter glare as
she strode by them. Their punishment would wait. Damage control with Mariella
must come first, she thought. Detective Sneed might need her as a witness for
the trial, so she couldn’t let her brain turn into jelly under the bombardment
of this almost daily trauma.

“Are you okay, Mariella? It didn’t bite you, did
it?” Mrs. Mint knelt down and reached for the arm that the spider had crawled
on. She didn’t see any marks.

Mariella whipped her arm away and skirted around
her teacher. Mrs. Mint’s head spun for a few seconds as if she had been
plummeting off a cliff, and then suddenly stopped in midair. She wondered why
she had let those boys attack Mariella once again. This girl depended on her
for protection, and she kept letting her down, first with the Buckley twins’
brutal torment, and then when the Lagoon Watcher came for the girl’s blood.
Time and time again, she had proven useless when this vulnerable child needed
her. That spider hadn’t hurt her, but if it had…

“Hey, where are you going?” Fogel hollered.

Mrs. Mint swiveled her head just in time to spot
Mariella slicing through a thicket of ferns across the wooden marker of the
trail. She saw only the shiny crown of her black hair as the girl treaded
briskly through the forest.

“Oh my,” said Mrs. Mint, who restrained herself
from using a more harsh word that came to mind. “Keep the kids here and call
the park rangers,” she told Fogel as she hustled after the girl. “I’ll get her
right back.”

The teaching assistant agreed and drew out her cell
phone. Yet, the Buckley twins offered up another plan.

“Aw, let her go,” Cole said.

“Yeah, she’s only looking for her spider
boyfriend,” Kyle said. “Let the lovers be together.”

As much as those brats deserved a smack on their
fannies, the teacher didn’t have time for that. She hurtled over the ferns and
raced after Mariella. The sharp pines scraped across her arms and face so hard
that they nearly drew blood. She caught fleeting glimpses of the girl up ahead.
Even without a good view, she could easily follow the sound of her plowing
through flexible branches and rustling across fans of leaves. The teacher
ducked under a branch covered in spiny plants. When she caught sight of the
girl again, she realized that the child’s short legs had actually been forging
more distance between them. While Mariella’s motor showed no signs of slowing,
the teacher already felt heavy lead sacks dragging in her lungs. She could
barely last five minutes on a treadmill in an air-conditioned gym, much less
run a marathon through the thick woods in the sweltering heat. The pain that
nagged at her knees and ankles when she had chased Mariella the day before
returned. This time her inflamed joints had uneven ground tormenting them. Her
knees throbbed with each step. Her ankle tendons tightened every time she took
an unbalanced gait across a rock or branch. Refusing to let it stop her, the
teacher’s mind drifted into thoughts of her strolling into the cool
administrative office, and scheduling a nice long emergency vacation.

She didn’t know whether it came from her persistent
effort or the girl tiring a bit, but Mrs. Mint at least maintained her distance
behind Mariella as they traversed into the scrub palms. This endangered habitat
had sandy soil that made her feet slide as she shuffled her boots around sand
pine scrubs, and dodged study
myrtle oaks. She cursed under her breath as she
saw that Mariella’s nimble feet didn’t encounter any such problems.

Mrs.
Mint cursed again when she pictured the Enchanted Forest map in her mind and
realized where they were headed. Waiting for them as they raced north was the
Addison/Ellis Canal. It had been built in 1912 to drain the St. Johns River
floodplain so farmers and ranchers could set up shop. It sent all that water
east, right into the Indian River Lagoon.

She
remembered what had happened to the Buckley twins’ dog along the canal behind
their house. She had heard about the cop and the DCF agent who were murdered by
the serial killer along the canal behind Officer Williams’ home. And those were
canals in civilized areas where whatever madness lurked in the waters had a
good reason for acting discretely.

The Lagoon Watcher has been put
away. Nothing should happen now.

Those
thoughts didn’t comfort her much and the tingle at the base of her spine
alerted her that approaching the canal would lead her straight into danger. The
familiar rotten egg stench that festered even stronger than the smell of the
woodlands reinforced the feeling tenfold. The problem was the stubborn kid
headed towards the canal. Did the girl insist on dying alone in the wilderness?
Mrs. Mint could turn around and simply leave her. No, she absolutely could not.
Mrs. Mint had always considered herself an excellent teacher, and leaving
Mariella behind would shatter that increasingly fragile self image. She
couldn’t very well explain to her principal, and especially to Officer
Williams, why she had given up and abandoned Mariella in the forest on the
banks of a toxic canal.

“Get
away from there,” she huffed as she treaded down the long slope towards the
orange-brown water. Mariella solemnly observed the canal with her toes just
inches away from it.

The
canal didn’t look unusual, but it sure stank nearly as bad as the lagoon.
Luckily, it didn’t run very deep. Mariella couldn’t drown unless she squatted
down, but the canal went deep enough to conceal all kinds of predators, from
gators ,to the occasional massive python that had been imported from South
America and released by naïve pet owners into Florida’s ecosystem. Any one of
those wouldn’t mind a little girl, or a grown woman, for a meal that would fill
their reptilian bellies for a month.

 
Mrs. Mint got within arm’s reach of the girl,
and planted her feet. She gasped for air as her heart worked on overdrive
pumping blood through her dehydrated body. The teacher waited for Mariella to
turn around and gratefully acknowledge her for coming all this way through the
forest so she could save her life. The girl didn’t do a thing. She faced the
lagoon, as someone contemplating suicide might stare into the abyss over the
edge of a cliff.

“Mariella,
please step away from there. Let’s get you back to the…”

Every
inch of her body froze. The tan and brown scales lapped out of the water with a
lethal grace; a python that thick would measure longer than a car. She had
heard about them eating deer and boar—animals not much lighter than her. Any
person it coiled its muscular body around wouldn’t have more than the slimmest
odds of escape.

“Listen
to me carefully. There’s a big snake in that water. Step away slowly.”

Mrs.
Mint followed her own advice but the girl didn’t move. She couldn’t tell
whether Mariella favored dying, or enjoyed playing the victim. The teacher
didn’t much care at this point. If she approached the water to save the
reluctant child, the snake might go for the larger meal instead. Too many
students and future students needed her. Sacrificing her life for a girl who
didn’t even care about her own safety would deprive all those young minds of
learning. If she walked away and let nature take its course, she could claim
that she hadn’t found Mariella until it was too late.

 
Knowing she’d rather not stomach the sight of
this outcome, the teacher turned her back on Mariella. She climbed up the
embankment of the canal. A broiling swoon quickly overcame her head. She
stumbled to her knees on the sandy dirt. The chirping of the insects and birds
seemed to die down. Bright spots flickered across her vision. She roasted under
the heat, but it no longer came from the blazing sun. Something inside her mind
burned. It melded into a molten ball of guilt and regret from what she had
done.

Mariella
was a vulnerable child with special needs. How could she judge her as harshly—more
harshly if she was honest with herself—than the other kids? If the Buckley
twins had been provoking a black widow instead of a banana spider, she would
have physically stopped them. So why wouldn’t she help Mariella? The teacher
searched within herself, but she couldn’t find an answer that she accepted. The
girl’s brown, Latina skin and immigrant status came to mind, but Mrs. Mint
couldn’t accept herself as being racist. Maybe it came from the sudden change
in the girl after she lost her parents. Mrs. Mint had never seen a child shift
into such a dramatically different personality and, instead of gradually
returning to normal, actively embrace her antisocial identity. It wasn’t
healthy and it wasn’t right.

Against
her better judgment, but with little choice from the knife of guilt digging
into her brain, Mrs. Mint turned around and gazed at Mariella. The girl
remained on the edge of the canal. Apparently, the prospect of being left alone
in the woods with a massive python didn’t bother her. Approaching the girl with
that huge snake lurking in the water sure as hell bothered Mrs. Mint, though.

The
python lashed its head out of the canal and looped around Mariella’s feet. The
snake tripped her up. The girl got sucked waist deep into the canal with her
arms flailing. Mrs. Mint yowled in terror, even as the girl couldn’t while the
python’s tail lashed across the water in front of her.

Ignoring
her cowardly better judgment in favor of her instincts, Mrs. Mint dashed
towards the canal. The adrenalin of the moment couldn’t mask the wrenching pain
of her overworked knees and ankles. They didn’t hurt nearly as bad as the
devastation she would feel if this child died right in front of her because she
had hesitated. She saw Mariella sinking deeper into the murky water. The
teacher stretched out her hand. This time Mariella didn’t ignore her. She
grasped her palm desperately. The girl stared at her teacher with brown eyes
that spoke of the agony of balancing atop the sharp, steel gate between life
and death. Mariella reached out, and hooked Mrs. Mint’s shirt. She pulled the
teacher close and wrapped her arm around her back in a tight embrace. The girl
hadn’t hugged her since she had lost her parents. Mrs. Mint hadn’t seen her hug
anyone besides Officer Williams. Stooping down on one knee, the teacher wrapped
her arm around the girl and hugged her back while at the same time lifting her
out of the water.

“I’ve got you! Just hold on.”

Mariella’s distressed expression instantly shifted
into a sneer. The little hand clasping the teacher’s palm bore down so hard
that her knuckle bones snapped. She screamed, and dropped the girl. The hand
that had been embracing her teacher grabbed her by the seat of her pants and
hurled her over the girl’s head. Mrs. Mint nosedived into the water. The top of
her head slammed into the mucky canal bed.