Page 93 of Born for Starlight

I recognized it. It was the industrial kind. Same type I’d smelled in hospitals and even at Casa Semente. But here it was different. It had a different flavor, a different texture. At the other places it felt like healing and caring, here it felt like it was covering up rot. Here the smell was hurtful. It didn’t make any sense, but neither did my roiling stomach.

Keep it together, Drakos.

They'd set the choir up in the courtyard, where the light was best, and Costa was right, they'd checked.

Eleven girls, ranging in ages from four to twelve if I had to guess, stood in matching white shirts with blue skirts on a low riser under a jacaranda tree. A woman at a keyboard gave them their note, and they sang the song from my latest film. Small voices that were so sweet.

They’d learned every word, and made up darling gestures. They’d practiced and it showed. I allowed part of me to be swept away, but there was another part, a deeper part, that kept scouring the room, searching for clues. Anything that might tell me something about Luzia. The staff stood at intervals like fence posts. Too many for just eleven girls.

I scanned the room again and saw something new. A blanket. A blanket held up to the face of a child. I couldn’t stop myself from staring a second too long. Was it Luzia? The child turned. They, no, she, was sucking her thumb. She couldn’t have been more than three years old. The hope went out of me.

My fists clenched. They never did that when I was performing. My breathing never hitched when I was performing. I yanked my eyes away and focused on the singers. The song was on its last verse, and then the smallest one, on the end of the riser, wet herself.

She didn't stop singing. That was the thing I would remember. Urine dripped down her thin leg. Trickled into a puddle onto the riser. She stood in it, eyes front, and kept singing, because someone had told her to sing until the song was over. She was more afraid of that someone than of standing in her own wet.

Nobody moved toward her. Not a teacher, not a nurse. Then a staffer's hand closed on the child's shoulder, quiet, no fuss. The woman turned her, steered her off the end of the riser, and through a door in the courtyard wall. The song went on with ten voices.

I looked for the child with the blanket. She was gone too.

The ammonia smell of urine reached me a second later, across the warm air.

My stomach dropped like a trapdoor.

Far, far out of proportion to a small accident from a scared child. I'd seen a hundred of them. This one went into me like a hook and pulled. I stood there with the oversized check in my hands and my smile on my face, and for one long second I could not feel my fingers.

I looked up, across the courtyard, without meaning to.

Matthew was looking at the door the girl had gone through. Then he was looking at me. Something in his face changed, the professional going still. I could not tell if he'd read the hand on that child's shoulder or read whatever had just crossed mine.

I turned back to the cameras. There wasn't anything else to do.

Presenting the check went the way those scenes go.

Costa beside me on the front steps at six-ten, gracious, expansive, sweating lightly in the good light. The ten children gathered, props for the ceremony. The cardboard rectangle the size of a door. I held my end of it a half inch higher than his, so the photographs would read the way they needed to read, me giving, him receiving, and he never noticed that either.

Then the pre-submitted questions came from the pool, softballs lobbed by people who'd been told which questions to lob. I answered every one of them and answered them well. A woman from a Rio paper asked what today meant to me, the question they always asked and the one that usually meant nothing. But today, I gave her the answer that meant something.

"It means a girl in this building can be anything she wants to be. I know, because I was a child in a building like this one, and look what I got to be." That would run tomorrow with my name over it in three countries, and memed around the world. I knew it the second it left my mouth. I'd built it for that. I said Brazil had given me my life. I said the girls here were the reason for my visit. I said all of it in the voice that closed deals.

After the questions were over and the reporters were packing up, I turned to Costa. Expectant. You didn’t do hopeful, you did expectant and purposeful when you wanted to push someone.

"And the dormitories, Senhor Costa?" I asked it lightly, on the move, the way you ask about the weather. "I'd love to see where the girls live.”

"Ah. The renovation, Senhorita. The plumbing. It is not safe for such a beautiful dress."

"I've worn worse in worse." I laughed. He laughed. Vargas, a step behind me, did not laugh, and I felt Pinto go very quiet on my other side. "Next time, then. You'll owe me."

"Next time. Certainly. Next time."

He would sooner have shown me the inside of his own coffin.

“I can show you the cafeteria. Of course it is empty now.”

Of course it was. I nodded.

Staff only, me, Costa, two chosen cameras. Somehow, some way, Julian was one of the two. He fell in at my elbow the way he'd fallen in at every elbow in his life. Warm. Intimate. Oblivious.

"Angelica. God. Look at you. This is huge. This is the story."