by Audrey Braun
I march back and stand above Benicio with fists on my hips. The sun has fully risen, and his eyes light up like a cat’s. “That was my husband. I’m sure it was his voice.”
Benicio chews and nods without looking at me.
I grab my hair at the roots and pace a wide circle, avoiding the broken glass from Isabel. My mind is rusty cogs, straining to function, my thoughts slowly, painfully slipping into place. Jonathon hasn’t studied Spanish since high school. We had this conversation when Oliver took Japanese last year.
I stop in the middle of the room and turn to Benicio. “Tell me everything you heard.”
A small smirk rises in the corner of his mouth. Perhaps it would be bigger without the swelling in his cheek. Or perhaps it wouldn’t appear like a smirk at all. It could be a look of pity gone lopsided with pain. “Please,” he says, patting the space next to him.
What choice do I have? He knows a hell of a lot more than I do. I take a deep breath and resign myself to sit.
He hands me a blue mug full of coffee. “It’ll taste terrible once it’s cold.” His fingers linger beneath mine. They’re warm and surprisingly soft for a gardener’s. Our eyes lock, and something electrical passes between us. I shove it aside. It doesn’t mean anything. This isn’t the time or place. But the circuitry between us zaps me again. I turn to the window and gulp my coffee.
“These pastries are from the French baker here in town,” he says.
“Goddamnit!” I turn to face him. “Tell me what they said!”
“All right. We can eat and talk at the same time.”
It’s like hanging off the side of a cliff, suspended between one reality and another. I glance at the apricot Danishes, the congealed layer of sugar on top. My mind may be wrapped in an agonizing mix of confusion and fear, but my body is desperate for food. That first bite of pastry is the best thing I’ve ever tasted in my life. I wash it down with the strong coffee. I bite the pastry like a dog.
“How well do you know your husband?” Benicio asks.
I stop chewing. Jonathon is a smart man. But high school Spanish? If I go by the unbroken rhythm in his speech, I’d have to say he sounds fluent. Is such a thing even possible? I swallow a lump of apricot that nearly chokes me. “What kind of question is that?”
Benicio shrugs.
I swallow again, feeling a wedge in my throat. “We’ve been married for eighteen years.”
“Long time.” He takes another bite.
“Yes.”
“But that’s not what I asked.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your husband is not who you think he is.”
Dread wraps like a worm around the pastry in my stomach. Jonathon has gotten himself into some kind of trouble. The bank. Investments. The news arriving on his BlackBerry, thrown across the room.
“You’re pretty presumptuous about two people you don’t even know.” Heat rises to my temples. I take another bite and chew furiously on one side of my mouth.
“I see the look in your eye,” he says. “Something has occurred to you.”
I plop my mug and the rest of my pastry onto the tray and cross back to the window. It must be eighty degrees, but the breeze in my wet hair makes me shiver.
“Whatever is going on here has nothing to do with my husband,” I say, even as my mind races through all the strange things he’s done lately. This could be exactly what Benicio wants. For me to make connections where none exist.
There has to be an explanation. I snatch up an unused zip tie from the floor and fasten my hair into a ponytail, a small gesture that makes me feel more organized, more in control. I return to the window and speak as if to someone outside. “You’re playing a mind game with me. Or maybe I’m playing one with myself. Maybe I just imagined the voice belonged to my husband.” I turn to Benicio. “Is that bruise on your face even real? Or did you let them do that, tie you up, hit you in the face, just to gain my trust or some such shit?”
He nods at the floor. “That was your husband outside. You weren’t mistaken.”
“You’ve never even read Joella Lundstrum, have you?”
He leans back and places his hands on his knees. “Alice Brown single-handedly brings an entire corporation to justice.”
“You could have read that on the back cover.”
“’And the men who hold high places will be the first to come to their knees.’” A quote I recognize from the middle of the book. “Are we really going to argue about this now?” he asks.
“My husband doesn’t speak Spanish. And even if he did, why would I still be in here if he’d already given them what they wanted? Come on. What’s the plan? Shoot me, rape me, cut off my head, or all of the above?”
Benicio sets his cup down and crosses to me, slowly, stopping only inches away. “Your husband has been here before.”
“What?”
“He’s been coming here for years. As recently as two months ago.”
“You’re lying.”
“Where did he tell you he was going at the end of January? A business trip?”
“He’s president of a bank,” I say, my voice breaking at the realization. “Of course he takes business trips.”
“The end of January. Where did he tell you he was going?”
I feel faint. The American Bankers Association in Vegas. But maybe they already knew this about him, that he’d been out of town, and now Benicio’s trying to convince me that Jonathon had actually come down here instead.
I regain my footing. “What does pero con-something mean?”
Benicio draws a long breath.
“Jonathon, if it was Jonathon, kept saying that.”
“He was making sure that Leon hadn’t hurt you.”
This sounds so right to my ears that my body loosens with relief. Even if Jonathon really is mixed up in something, and I’m not fully convinced this is the case, but if he is he’s come here to negotiate. He wants to know I’m all right. He’s working to get me out.
“What I mean is, his exact words to Leon were, ‘We agreed last week that you wouldn’t hurt her.’”
Maybe something is lost in translation.
“He also mentioned something about going to Switzerland.”
Switzerland.
Benicio grips my arms to keep me from slumping to the floor.
The warm clothes in Jonathon’s suitcase. Perfect for Switzerland this time of year. Is Oliver going, too? Or is he being held somewhere like me?
“Listen to me,” Benicio whispers.
I take a small step back. He follows with a step forward, still supporting my weight. Then something crosses his face. It seems to throw him off from the words he intends to say. He searches my eyes. “I don’t understand how a husband could do this to his wife,” he says.
I hang there a moment longer thinking of how unusually relaxed Jonathon was the morning we left. A man headed off on a vacation. It doesn’t make sense. I struggle free and grip the iron bars. “Get away from me. You’re making this whole thing up. That’s not what he said out there.”
“Listen.” His voice is a deep whisper. “I tried to stop them from taking you. That’s why they put me in here.”
I squint and jiggle my head trying to make sense of what he’s saying. “I was in your car, Benicio. You kidnapped me.”
“My aunt and uncle own the condo you’re staying in. Leon is their son. He told me your husband needed to find you. It was an emergency. When he gave me the keys to his car, your husband was standing outside the condo door looking half out of his mind. This is why I picked you up. They fooled me the same as they fooled you. And when I realized what was happening, when they pulled you from the car, I tried to make them stop, but the next thing I knew they put the same cloth over my face, and when I woke I was tied to a chair like you.”
“Why didn’t they just grab me themselves? Why send you?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I’m not stupid,” I say, but the irony of my wor
ds hangs in the air. Oh but I am, just look at how easily I’ve been fooled.
“Leon has been trying to get me to join the family business for years. No matter how this looks, he cares about me. He wants me to do well, have a big family, all that.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“The last thing I want is to join the family business.”
“Right. Still not following.”
“He thought if he made me an accomplice to kidnapping he could blackmail me to do what he wanted, and someday, when I was living this great life, I’d be thanking him for it. I know. It’s impossible to believe that this is what people do when they care about you. You’ll just have to take my word for it.”
“What does this have to do with anything?”
“If you’d somehow escaped, you’d be a witness to me trying to kidnap you. They were driving right behind us. They’d back up your story, and I’d spend the rest of my life in prison. That was how Leon planned to blackmail me.”
“I still don’t get it. Now they’ve tied you up instead?”
“There were other guys. Leon answers to someone else on this. He’s in over his head. I got the impression that this was mild compared to what was coming next.”
I’m more confused than ever. “Just tell me how my husband is supposed to be involved in whatever the hell is going on here.”
“He cheated them.”
“Who? How?”
Benicio leans closer. Dark flecks in his amber eyes make them look like raw honey in the sun. His teeth are bright white against his smooth, café au lait skin. If it were just his good looks, he couldn’t distract me like this. Couldn’t make me transcend, if only for a second, everything that’s happening. I’m not easily swayed by looks the way some women are. Whatever Benicio has goes beyond that. A visceral impulse buzzes between us, and I see the recognition of it in his eyes.
“Your husband is a businessman,” he says as if forcing something, anything from his mouth. “An investor.”
I let him continue.
“My family is always looking for investors. At some point the two met up.”
“What kind of business?”
“I don’t know a whole lot about it.”
“What do you know?”
“What do you know?” he snaps.
“Me? I don’t have a clue about any of this!”
He works his swollen jaw from side to side. He blinks.
“Is that what you think? Is that why Leon said I knew exactly what he wanted? That I’ve got some part in all this?”
“Are you saying you don’t?” he asks.
I laugh and shake my head at the floor. This just isn’t happening. Wicked and Wanting has storylines more believable than this.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Fine.” He stares at the wall. “I believe you,” he says, softer. “It didn’t sound right from the beginning.”
“What didn’t sound right?”
“That you had taken their money.”
“All right. Wait a minute. Let’s get something straight here. What are we talking about? Money from what? Drugs? Because there’s no way my husband, or me for that matter, could possibly be involved in something like that.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.”
“Clearly you don’t know my husband.”
“Clearly neither do you.”
Rage sears my skin. “Fuck you.”
The room turns unbearably hot. I wipe my forehead. It instantly flushes again with sweat.
“I’m sorry,” Benicio says. “It’s not what you think.”
“You have no idea what I think,” I say, though in the back of my mind I know he’s reading me like ticker tape.
“What if he thought he was helping people?”
I nearly laugh. I shake my head. “What?”
“People dying of cancer, heart disease, AIDS.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Pharmaceuticals.”
I stop, allowing the idea to sink in.
“Black market. Everything from oral chemo to high blood pressure.”
Now I do laugh. A single, hysterical bark. “You’re trying to tell me my husband is peddling prescription drugs?”
“Yes.”
“To whom?”
“Clinics, dealers in the States. Thousands of people who couldn’t afford them otherwise.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to. But if you can find a better reason for being in here I’d like to hear it.”
“You’re awfully cocky, aren’t you?”
“Chalk it up to extenuating circumstances.”
“Extenuating circumstances? Where did you learn to speak English?” Before he can answer I say, “What you’re telling me here is absolutely absurd.”
“I don’t doubt it sounds that way.”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“I’m no happier about the facts than you.”
I picture the man I married, the man at the pool with the pale legs and humorless face, the man who instantly falls asleep at night, the man who cupped my breast and whispered that he loved me, the man who found Oliver’s flip-flops and asked me if I’d forgotten what it is to be sixteen. I try to connect this careful, meticulous man to, what? The messy underworld of prescription drugs?
“From what I’ve overheard this past year, I think your husband made much more money than he was expecting to.”
I barely have time to stop spinning from what he’s just told me. “This past year? How long has he been doing this?”
“I’ve only been back in town for two years. But I got the impression it started long before that. All I know is the money just kept coming. More people down here got involved. He’s got quite a payroll. Or did. For some reason it stopped.”
“What made it stop?” I’m on autopilot, in search of nothing but the facts.
“I don’t know. Maybe he wanted out. Maybe he invested some of it in the stock market and lost it. Or stole it. I have no idea. All I know is that he owes my cousin and the people he works with a lot of money. And they think you had something to do with it.”
“Why in the world would they think that?”
Benicio doesn’t meet my eyes.
“Why!”
“Because that is what your husband told them.”
9
For months I’ve had the feeling that I was lying in wait for something that had no name. Something that I yearned for and dreaded at the same time. This feeling wasn’t attached to reason. What little I shared of it with Jonathon always received the same careful response. It doesn’t seem to be grounded in fact. Please pinpoint what it is and I’ll try to make it better. But facts have been elusive little details beyond my reach. All I knew was that something was wrong, and the only thing I had to go on was a feeling, an intuition, a flimsy, namby-pamby notion from meditation class.
“What else?” I ask Benicio.
“Pharmaceuticals aren’t their only ‘project,’ as they like to call it. They’ve got their hands in other things I don’t care to know about. Business is business, especially for the guys Leon answers to. It’s a lot of money, and they handle one the same as the other. Even if it were only prescription drugs, we’re still talking millions of dollars. And people who go from having nothing but dirt to owning millions can get very angry if you take it away.”
“Wait a minute. All right. Let’s just say for argument’s sake that everything you’re telling me is true. Why would Jonathon bring Oliver and me down here with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.”
“Celia,” he says, and my heart thumps against bone.
“I deserve to know,” I say.
“I suppose you do.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s only a guess.”
“So guess!”
“All right.” He takes a deep breath. “I think the m
oney has been missing for a while and things reached a point where they no longer believed your husband was going to pay up. My guess is they told him to bring you to prove he meant what he said about paying what he owed, or else. They take the money; you enjoy your vacation. They don’t get the money; they take you instead.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re collateral. To show he was true to his word.”
“Collateral.”
“Right.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. If he brought them the money, then why did they still kidnap me?”
“Maybe he didn’t bring it.”
My lip quivers. How did Jonathon remain so calm, knowing what was going to happen as we headed out the door of our home? He was unusually serene. Had he taken something? Some antianxiety drug? Or was his intention all along to get rid of me?
I begin to hyperventilate. How can any of this be true? If Jonathon knew he didn’t have the money, then why else would he bring Oliver and me? Putting me in harm’s way is one thing. But Oliver? His own son?
I shake the bars on the window. I growl and scream, even as Benicio tries to calm me.
“I could be wrong,” he says.
“Get away from me! Don’t touch me! I want out of here!”
The door flies open and in comes Isabel, screaming in Spanish, brandishing her gun.
Benicio raises a hand to stop her from coming any closer. He pumps it as a signal to calm down.
“Por favor,” he says, and something in his twisted face convinces her to stay back.
She yells in Spanish. She repeats herself several times, jerks her head at me.
“Isabel wants me to tell you that this is what you get,” Benicio finally says without taking his eyes off his sister. “It’s your fault. And you’re lucky she doesn’t kill you right now.”
Isabel steps closer. I turn away, focusing on the palms across the hillside, feeling the presence of the gun behind me.
She spits in my hair.
After a moment of excruciating silence, she walks off and locks the door behind her.
I wipe my hair with my shirttail. I hang my head between my shoulders and weep, my fingers clinging to the bars. Oliver is a two-year-old running into traffic all over again, but this time I can’t reach him. This time Jonathon is driving the oncoming car.
