The Tenth Girl Read online

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  To EAF and WOF, who never once hesitated to give me more books than I could carry

  PROLOGUE

  Do not be fooled:

  territorial spirits inhabit our earthly flesh

  as we move through this brightly painted world.

  And long after our flesh rots,

  the spirits remain, playing in the muck.

  Only the gods are free of them,

  watching from beyond the ice,

  in their forgotten houses of cloud.

  —ZAPUCHE TRIBE TEACHING

  At the very southern tip of South America, where fields of ice meet mountains of salt, a finishing school for girls existed on a lone shelf of rock. The school wasn’t always a school—no, it was once a grand country home, built for a wealthy family fleeing unnamed bloodshed in Europe. No one quite understood how this family tunneled vaulted cottages into sheer Argentine stone, but after their escape from the old country, nothing was impossible for the De Vaccaro family. As the stories go, their clan relished life atop their cliff, at least for a time. Their matriarch, Domenica De Vaccaro, was a cheerful woman with strong hands the size of a giant’s, who ate a dozen eggs each day for breakfast—raw—and instructed her sons to walk off their troubles and pains. And walk off the sons did—to the City of Good Airs. The remaining De Vaccaro house shrunk to nearly nothing, but Domenica knew how to manage a problem as trivial as loneliness. She recruited girls from other rootless families abroad and offered them a rich education from her perch over the ice.

  The first class comprised only ten girls, one of whom was Domenica’s own young daughter. She taught them herself. But in time, the classes and the faculty both grew. A president’s daughter attended. A tyrant’s. An exiled artist’s, and the daughter of the minister who exiled him. Such was the will of Domenica De Vaccaro—any gap could be bridged: political, moral, and otherwise. Experts visited from far and wide to take in the Patagonian air and teach lessons ranging from the practical (arithmetic) to the mystical (curing illness with candlelit vigils). The reputation of the school soared, and Domenica soon handpicked her ten pupils per year from the stacks of handwritten letters that reached her ice-locked home, as if flown there on desperate paper wings. They were happy, her pupils, and the precocious little things went on to explore all corners of the globe, enriched with a level of experience few outsiders could understand. Surely, said the Buenos Aires society pages, there was something in the meltwater.

  One day, tragedy befell the historically fortunate De Vaccaro family, as tragedy is wont to do. A mysterious illness swept through the house and school, an illness that could not be cured, much less described to those who did not feel its chill in their own bones. The local Zapuche tribe—from which many of the staff hailed—whispered that unhappy spirits from across the world had flocked there to help their tribe seize back the cliff. They called these spirits los Otros, or the Others, a name that may be known to you. In time, the house was emptied out—barren, but never soulless.

  Sixty years later, an intrepid group of teachers, led by De Vaccaro descendants, ventured out to that remote edge of the world. They returned to the house and reopened the school.

  We find ourselves there, on the ice at the shore.

  Welcome to Vaccaro School.

  1

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, MARCH 1978

  The boat wove around dozens of fat, fake-looking icebergs parked in the aquamarine depths to reach this solitary dock. Three hours on the lake, and I never glimpsed another person but the captain, a ruddy-faced, early-emphysema case. After hour one, I was grateful when the massive ice shelf appeared. Its milky-blue shell looks like a cloud formation drawn by a five-year-old—at least from afar. Close up, cracks form black veins in the ice. Black slices that are five times the length of the boat, above the surface alone. Acid worms through my stomach: If I slipped down one of these crevasses, I think I would reappear on a different plane of existence. A Patagonian Alice, lost to Wonderland.

  Glacial water gurgles behind me as the captain idles the boat. He crosses his arms, and tattooed mermaid’s breasts bulge on his wrist. Argentina, home of the 1978 FIFA World Cup, reads his pristine sky-blue shirt. A proud proclamation from a country plunged into a state of terror.

  “We’re here?” I ask, uneasy, studying the worn planks of the dock, broken wooden teeth. I can’t see a single building, and overgrown bushes conceal any path up the stony hill.

  The captain grunts—the most he’s managed besides a series of coughs and belches since we left Punta Bandera—and eases back into his pleather seat, crinkling open his empty bag of ham-flavored chips to funnel spare crumbs down his gullet. I know my cues. I step off the boat, wood creaking. He doesn’t even glance back as he pulls away. At least I can rest assured he hasn’t taken me out here to rob me and leave me for dead. Silver linings … I take a breath, one breath, of the crisp air, painfully fresh compared with the Buenos Aires smog I sucked up only yesterday. There’s already a chill damp enough to penetrate the warmest of coats—my ratty one won’t stand a chance as winter nears.

  You shouldn’t be here, the wind whispers, curving around to caress the base of my skull. Because good Catholic girls aren’t meant to run away into the wild, much less alone. Or so I’ve heard. Faraway, savage mountains, crumbling rock faces, and lonesome ice peaks—that’s all there is to this inhuman landscape. I rebutton my coat, stiffen my shoulders. I tamp down my nerves—hoping to fool even myself—but I feel it stronger than ever now, that citrusy ache that fills you before beginning a brand-new chapter of life. New-school jitters, sort of. I’m five years old again, every cell alive to the thrilling or wretched twists I might face ahead.

  I shoulder my half-empty bag. I was told the house would have everything I could possibly need—the kind of blanket assertion that concerns and delights. Would they have those miniaturized complimentary chocolates fancy hotels leave on down pillows? Or provide a stiff cot and a Bible to rest my head on? Who does Vaccaro School think I am, and who does it want me to be? Does it know me as the daughter of a wild-haired rebel, or as the daughter of a buttoned-up professor? I wonder, for the millionth time, if I’ll be as natural a teacher as my mother was, even though I am young enough to still be in school myself: I’m eighteen, despite feeling a decade older. I wonder if the others here will accept me, even though I’ve had no chance to soften the edges my godmother always clucked about, with no small dose of affection. I wonder if I’ll be able to hide what I must in order to fit in. All I’m carrying with me is the little clothing I thought to be Vaccaro School–appropriate (prim and boring but patched of most holes), my first-ever curriculum plan (embarrassing and incomplete, yet earnest—sure to be thrown away), and toiletries (a toothbrush with graying bristles, a leaking bottle of face cream). It’s hardly enough to make do in the wilderness, unless pumas enjoy Lancôme. So I hurry down the dock, locate a set of stone steps tucked into the hill like an afterthought, and climb towar
d what I hope is Vaccaro School.

  The steps are never-ending: the kind you’d expect to find billy goats prancing up, jaunty little grins on their slit-pupiled faces. I wish I had legs that slim and toned; ten flights in, I’d even accept the tufty beard in exchange for them. I swear that the mottled gray slabs beneath me are identical, too, never changing no matter how far I climb—it’s as if some god, somewhere, personally curated every molecule on this rock face during an obsessive-compulsive fit. When I collapse on my bag to catch my breath, the geometric pattern of rock stretches above me into an uphill infinity, the trek a warped Sisyphean task. Lord help me.

  And that’s when I turn: Behind me is a sheer drop, some three hundred meters down to ice. If I were to slip down the stones, I might slide all the way off the steppe and the earth. A familiar ache of loneliness cuts through me like a boning knife. I came here to escape, I remind myself. Posing as a twentysomething to teach here was the only way to protect myself from the men who took my mother. If I didn’t feel lonely, I couldn’t have fled far enough. But visual reminders like this of the bald fact we live and die alone are few and far between, and they hit me on a primal level. I only hope my mother doesn’t—didn’t—feel this way in the black oblivion of her cell.

  Adrenaline powering me, I push on, and a single chimney materializes behind a copse of brushy-topped araucaria trees as if on command. I see the pitched roofs of hill structures, too, some meters up the steps—medieval-looking and all too incongruous. I pass stone cottages built into the mountain, shuttered. It’s difficult to see where one cottage ends and the next begins: They’re precariously stacked shoeboxes in the home of a hoarder, uneven layer teetering atop uneven layer, defying my layman’s impression of the rules of architecture. The rusted handles of the heavy doors rattle but don’t give.

  Something in the atmosphere is wrong here, a something I can’t articulate—I only feel a discomfort in the hollow of my chest, the same one that tells you you are not alone when you want to be, or that you are entirely alone when you shouldn’t be. But the stones feel solid to me, rasping beneath my feet; the air tastes herbal in my mouth; the sweat smells tangy on my skin … The thought crosses my mind that I’m ascending a staircase to a misanthropic, colonial vampire who feeds on young Zapuche women’s blood.

  The trek, all in all, takes nearly an hour—an hour of woozy stumbling through thickening cloud cover. The fog engulfs the buildings and the path ahead of me, making it impossible to plot a course; I trip a dozen times and curse everyone possible. Mist or sweat soaks through my shirt under my coat, the only crisp white number I own. I briefly consider resting again on my bag so that I don’t liquefy into a puddle before Carmela De Vaccaro, but I’m too spooked to sleep when I can’t see a meter in front of my own nose.

  When I reach into my bag’s depths for a clean scarf to mop myself up, a mottled cloth flag ruffles out of the haze, its pole affixed to the most imposing stone structure I’ve ever seen. The building is a swollen version of the cottages, its facade crusty and burned. Diseased, leaking pus-like grout at the window seams. Malformed gargoyles hang off ledges irregularly shaped to resemble clouds, intricate swirling carvings adorning their edges. It’s grand, wholly European in style, and a touch dilapidated—visibly rich in a history that those who live inside likely want to forget. Bloodred baroque curtains block the second-floor windowpanes, and the unmoving, thickening mist obscures those closer to the sky.

  The flag alone ripples with life: On it shimmers a fierce, sword-wielding woman dressed in a yolk-yellow cloak, emerging from a cloud. Lord, I could kiss her: It’s the De Vaccaro crest, recognizable from the cover of the brochure. I drop my bag and punch the air. Staggering up the building’s front steps, I feel my shoulders relax, and I’m able, for the first time, to fill my lungs to the brim with air.

  But the door is an iron wall as impenetrable as a bank vault, and the door knocker is shaped like an unsmiling woman’s head—she’s understandably upset, I suppose, that visitors will slam her head for all eternity. I paste a jagged fake smile on my face and knock with her. Then knock again. Politely.

  “Hello?”

  The flag flaps above me, the golden warrior, in her impractical getup, watching. I circle round and find no other entrance, no other stair. Not even a ground-floor window.

  Panic creeps up on me, slowly, steadily, from its hiding place on the stones, and latches onto me with its greedy, sucking mouth.

  My calls swell into shouts. I pound on the damned door until my palms bruise. Throat scratching, I look for a hidden snack in my bag, sustenance I did not have the wherewithal to pack. I eye the cream—read the ingredients list. Shea butter, I think hungrily. Madly.

  I chuck pebbles at the various windows as the gargoyles chuckle at me; they know I’m a runner with nowhere to run to, pitiful prey.

  It’s the truth: I’ve nowhere else to go, even if the boat captain returned to the dock by magic. My safe havens only exist in memory, and my memory’s poor, a winding montage of half-repressed sights and smells, pulled from a life I feel no ownership of. But I better kill that thought. If I think about my past too long, my mind unravels.

  I sit and shut my eyes for a minute, only a minute while I mentally regroup, and a tingling warmth spreads through me, a bone-melting exhaustion. I sit, splayed across the steps like an old drunk, a look not all that different from my recent setup in Buenos Aires.

  * * *

  I never intended to strand myself in the Patagonian wilderness.

  “Between you and me, Mavi, my dear,” said a mustachioed principal on my thirteenth failed interview, grasping at my knee with a limp fish of a hand that made me gag, “someone would have to die around here for a role to free up. Unions, you know.”

  The realization made me consider murder, or at the very least, a nunnery and the associated Catholic-school jobs. But the truth was, there were jobs; there were simply no jobs for me. More than one staff member at every school guessed (correctly) that I might be lying about my age and that the English-language teaching degree a family friend had procured for me was fake. But most important, they knew about my mother.

  They knew the rumors about her helping—or indoctrinating—the bright-eyed, radical strangers she called my cousins; they knew the government had taken her away for this; they knew I might be taken next and they would be punished for associating with her kin. As a country, we’ve learned one harsh fact over the past few years: When the military government takes people to prison, they rarely, if ever, appear again. That’s why we call them los desaparecidos—the disappeared. Those who vanished, with no explanation at all. And if you speak too loudly about the missing, if you venture to ask what has become of them, you risk becoming one of them yourself.

  As for me, I was a living, breathing reminder of my disappeared mother—my confused grief and rootlessness palpable. My presence alone frightened my peers and even the otherwise fearless head nuns at school. So I dropped out and lived with my godmother, deciding I had a better chance at safety and anonymity while working in a new neighborhood. I waitressed for tips while trying to find a better opportunity. Nothing came. The pizza place cut shifts. The banks froze accounts. The cash I had was the cash I had on hand: hardly more than a handful of valueless currency. I had no passport and no hope of getting one. I was trapped in my country, the only country I’d ever known. Hoping for a better day that never came, then hoping to keep hoping.

  I learned they were coming for me, too, when my godmother told me, wringing an old rag in her hands like a chicken that needed killing, that men in uniform had dropped by asking about me. She loved me, she said, but as with many people she loved, our time together must be over, sooner than she wished. They’d killed my mother in prison, she was sure of it, and if they found me, they would kill me and her both.

  “The angels will protect you,” she said, kissing me and slipping me a wad of bills. Then it was time to go.

  So of course I was elated to receive an offer to teac
h English at a school through an old and loyal colleague of my mother’s, the same guardian angel who furnished me with my fake degree, a man we called Tío Adolfo, our Angel of Peace. The offer was from Vaccaro School, in Patagonia, of all places. The end of the earth. He pressed the glossy brochure into my hands like a ticket to paradise. Vaccaro School had once been a finishing school of historical significance, long abandoned and recently reopened by the De Vaccaro widow, the sole owner of Argentina’s second-largest cement company, after the death of her husband. Its reopening would signal a return to more civilized, old-fashioned values—the school would be free of any and all modern technologies, and the privacy of her students (the wealthiest girls in Argentina) was paramount. She needs new teachers, and she won’t ask where you come from, much less question your age, Tío Adolfo had said. Besides, you’re precocious—you always have been. And she’s connected—old money, but at a remove from the military government. Follow her rules, and she will protect you, if it comes to that. We both knew what he meant.

  The brochure photos were striking, showing proud stone structures built into a hill, as well as images of what I assumed were the interiors of those buildings: gleaming, modern, asylum-white classrooms, better than American hospitals in the movies. A dream come true. A way out. Carmela De Vaccaro, a striking platinum blonde who looked like a Norse god crossbred with a Lithuanian model, with rows and rows of teeth she flaunted painfully in every photo, was hoping to find a young and innovative teacher with an experimental edge to teach English to her class of twelve-to-thirteen-year-olds. I know English! I thought cheerfully. The offer was room and board plus a generous lump sum after the successful completion of the nine-month term. The only catch being that you were stuck in the middle of nowhere for nine months—which was no catch at all, at least for me. It was perfect.