They killed your uncle six months later, you still latched to my chest, you still sleeping in a bundle by my side. I will spare you the details and say only this: I made a choice again, for you. And I am sorry I had nothing else to offer, Ana. That there are no real rules that govern why some are born in turmoil and others never know a single day in which the next seems an ill-considered bet. It’s all lottery, Ana, all chance. It’s the flick of a coin, and we are born.

6

PREY

Carmen

Miami, 2016

Carmen was setting a bird-of-paradise centerpiece among the linen place mats when she heard the guttural growl, a persistent rumble that sharpened into an alarm. It sounded almost like Linda—her blue Siamese—when a bird in flight mocked the cat’s predatory wiggles from the safer side of the sliding glass door. But this shriek went far beyond a pitch Linda could emit. This shriek had the unmistakable texture of wildness.

Not that Carmen would have known. In Coral Gables, the wildest residents were peacocks, lazy pageant queens traversing between parked Aston Martins on hedge-hidden driveways. Carmen had been to a zoo exactly once, some twenty years ago, as a chaperone for one of Jeanette’s elementary school classes. As far as she could remember, none of the lions had growled. Neither had the cheetahs or the white tigers. She’d found, on a whole, the zoo an entirely forgettable experience. But she must have seen a nature show at least once in her sixty-odd years (who could even remember their own age anymore?) because somewhere in her mind’s gathered archives an immediate connection formed: the noise came from a wild beast, a beast that didn’t belong in the civilized world.

She’d told guests to arrive at 7 p.m. It was three o’clock. The turkey glowed beneath the oven’s lights, crisping. She’d set all fifteen places. Carmen had chosen a hybrid décor, the usual Thanksgiving stand-ins with some tropical flourishes: a cornucopia filled with cascading autumn vegetables nestled among marble figurines on a hallway table, single lipstick-red hibiscus blooms in crystal vases throughout the living room.

Still clutching a few stray petals that had drifted from the centerpiece, she left the house in yoga pants and house slippers to investigate. Carmen looked up and down the street and the scene was as always—the street empty and quiet and grandiose, the banyan trees arched in a canopy like kissing lovers, her neighbors tucked safely in their own houses or out already for early dinners. Ever since her husband’s death—she felt ill even thinking of him, the pervert—she’d thought Coral Gables the loveliest and loneliest neighborhood in the whole world. Its faux-Spanish street markers, its vine-laden fences and stone gateways: all flourish, all enamel, hiding nothing, just persistent nothing beneath.