by Audrey Braun
I’ve grabbed another bag and thrown all the clothes inside. I search for car keys and cell phones but find neither. Then a sickening thought occurs to me. I hobble down the hall and meet Benicio rushing toward me. “Does Isabel have a cell phone?”
“Shit!” Benicio runs back to the room. I stumble behind. When we open the door Isabel looks up from her cell phone with a grin. She snaps it closed, already finished with her call.
Benicio rushes toward her with such violence that I scream for him not to hurt her. He grabs Isabel’s phone and throws it out the window. He screams some more, but I coax him out by shouting that we’re running out of time.
“They couldn’t have gotten very far by the time she got a hold of them,” I say, feeling the weight of the oversight that may have cost us our lives.
I lock the door behind us while Benicio rummages through drawers in the second bedroom. I meet up with him again just as he pulls out a pistol and a large wad of dollar bills.
“Here.” He hands me a black handgun. Jonathon is right. It does feel lighter than you expect. “You know how to use one of these?” Benicio drops open what I know from TV to be the magazine, and check for bullets. It’s full.
“I’m a quick study,” I say.
He clips it shut and tries to smile. His face is so distorted I can hardly make out what his features are supposed to look like. “Ready?” he asks.
“Sí,” I say with a grin.
The plan we’ve made will no longer work. It didn’t include Benicio’s broken nose and my getting shot in the leg. The speed we hoped to have by running downhill is now stalled. Someone is going to return any moment. Besides, Benicio has been right from the beginning. It’s all too risky. The condo. The consulate. The police. Going about things in a way these people would expect.
I keep telling myself that someday I will know Oliver as a man. I will know his children, my grandchildren. No one is going to take that away.
We can’t go near the road, not even down the hill through the trees. The only way to survive will be to go up the mountain, through the jungle, and come out the other side.
14
When I was twelve and on my way home from school one afternoon, a boy named Michael Mahon came riding down the sidewalk on his bike toward me. He stopped and skidded a black mark across the concrete. He turned and studied it, apparently impressed.
“There’s an ambulance at your house taking your dad away,” he said.
Michael was full of shit. He was always telling stories about how he and his mom were millionaires in hiding. How they pretended not to have money by living in that small, lopsided house so that Michael’s father wouldn’t come back from wherever he’d gone and take it all away. Michael claimed to be royalty, a black belt in karate, a keeper of secret codes, and when he went away in the summer he bragged it was to France. “Merci beaucoup,” he’d said to everything until another boy slugged him on the playground.
I walked out around him.
“I’m not joking,” he said.
“You’re a liar,” I said, and kept on.
“Am not.”
“My dad is at work right now, you idiot.”
I could hear him turning his bike around behind me and starting to follow. I was at least four blocks from home.
“I knew you were walking here. I saw you when I passed by earlier.”
“So.”
“So, I know where you live.”
I didn’t like the sound of this, even though everyone knew where everyone lived in those days. “And?”
“And I know what I saw at your house.”
“Leave me alone,” I said. “Or I’m going to scream rape.”
“Fine, Miss Freak. Have it your way. But it sure looked a lot like your dad on that stretcher.”
My stomach turned. I was now three blocks away but it felt much farther. My father had complained of feeling tired that morning. My mother had pointed out that he didn’t look well and suggested he stay home.
Either Michael was playing a sick trick on me or an ambulance was taking my father away. Either way was bad.
I made a run for it, grappling with my giant math text and two English books covered in Mylar from the library: To Kill a Mockingbird and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. My hands sweated around the plastic. I had to stop three times when they tumbled to the ground.
I heard the commotion of voices before I rounded the corner, saw the flashing red lights reflecting in the neighbor’s cars. I reached my yard just as an ambulance was pulling away.
Neighbors had gathered around my mother in the street. Mrs. Barbery stroked her back. She saw me approaching, and turned my mother in my direction.
My mother held her fists against her chest, her cheeks wet with tears. Her hands shook when she fastened them onto my shoulders. “Get in the car. We need to meet Daddy at the hospital.”
“What happened?”
“I think he had a heart attack. Hurry now. I don’t want him wondering where we are.”
“But I thought he was at work,” I said, my mind trying to make sense of what was happening. My father had dropped me off on his way to work that morning, his briefcase tossed between us in the front seat as always. He had gone to work, and therefore, the man in the ambulance could not be my father.
“He came home sick at lunch,” Mrs. Barbery said, as if reading my mind.
If only I’d listened to Michael Mahon. If only I’d run home the second he mentioned the ambulance, I wouldn’t have missed the last chance I’d ever have to speak to my father. That morning he had yelled at me to hurry up. Yelling was not something he often did. He wasn’t feeling well. But I wasn’t listening. I didn’t care. I changed my shirt for the tenth time, making us both late.
I wanted to apologize. I wanted him to know how much I loved him. I wanted to hear him ask, “What’s my little raven-haired doll up to?”
His heart stopped for good before he even reached the hospital. For the first time, maybe the only time in Michael Mahon’s life, he had told the truth.
I think about this as I trudge uphill behind Benicio, through the trees and brush along a river gushing with rapids. I try thinking of anything other than Jonathon’s lies and the pain in my leg. My shins itch and sting from the million micro-scrapes in my skin. I’ve never finished either of those novels. To this day, I can’t even look at them without feeling a pang of loss. I’ve never been good at math, but after that day I couldn’t crack open a math book without thinking of how it’d kept me from my father by continuing to slip from my hands. I hate math. Hate its cousin, finance, too. It doesn’t help that my mother became interested in the stock market back then. I understood as I got older that she’d been forced to do something without my father’s income. But back then it left a funny feeling in my throat when I saw her hunched over the paper on Sunday mornings, excitedly checking the Dow.
Mosquitoes puncture my skin, heat and blood loss leave me lightheaded. Tropical caws, screeches, and barks shudder my nerves. Hot pain flares in my leg with every step, and in the midst of this I think of numbers, of money and finances and the power they have to make or break a person’s life, and I hate them even more.
I recall the times Jonathon sat at the kitchen table frowning at his laptop, and how quickly he turned on a smile when I walked past. Like hitting a switch. On again, off again. Had he been e-mailing Isabel? He’s probably already taken the money from my checking and savings accounts, the fund from my mother, which is so small I can only appreciate it for its sentimental value, something Jonathon would easily dismiss. But that fund is one of the few things I have left from my family. One of the few pieces of proof that I once had a place where I belonged.
Jonathon had lied to me about so many things and then had crawled into bed with me, made love to me, told me that he loved me, and made it seem as if all he ever wanted was my happiness and all I ever did was stand in my own way.
After an hour of pushing through the jungle, Benicio and I stop for wate
r.
“You need to change that bandage,” he says. Earlier he gave me antibiotics and Tylenol with codeine, which has barely made a dent in the pain.
The gauze is blood-soaked. My whole calf, swollen.
“Have a seat,” Benicio says, his face even more hideous outdoors. What a sight we are. Gruesome creatures escaping through the jungle like half-eaten prey.
I remove the gun from the waist of my shorts and lower myself to the ground. Pain throbs deeper when I release the pressure.
“Watch out for snakes,” Benicio says. He elevates my foot on a log.
I think he’s joking but then realize that of course there are snakes, among many other things I have no idea about.
He unwraps the bandage to reveal a gouge the size of a grape on the outside of my calf.
“That bullet took a chunk out of your leg,” he says, absorbing the tiny pool of blood with the fresh ends of the gauze.
I bite my knuckle to keep from crying out. Even the slightest touch is unbearable.
“You could use some stitches,” he says.
“I could use a cork.”
“You’re funny,” he says.
“You’re the first person to think so.”
“Maybe it’s a side of you that only comes out in Mexico.”
“After kissing a comedian. Who can say? It’s all a first.”
“Right. Maybe it only comes out when your husband has you kidnapped.”
He holds my gaze for a moment, clearly trying to smile. Dried blood has settled into thin creases on his neck and begins to soften and drain from sweat. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You didn’t deserve that. You didn’t deserve any of this.”
I lie my head on the ground and gaze into the canopy of trees, remembering the days of staring at the Japanese maple in my yard, convinced my life couldn’t get any worse.
Benicio takes out the fresh gauze and rubbing alcohol. I know what’s coming and turn my head and grit my teeth. Hot lava pours inside my leg. I cry out and pound my fists.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry.”
I cover my eyes and take several deep breaths, my chest heaving with tears. I focus on our plan to reach the kiosk near the canopy tours by dark. I’m losing faith. Our only other choice is to hide out another full day until it closes again. It isn’t as if we can walk up and buy food and ice and not be noticed. We have to break in during the night. Maybe even get a few hours of sleep in the locked bathroom.
Benicio gently wraps my leg.
I open my eyes and think of Isabel and Benny. “Your sister was determined to kill me,” I say. Insects gather in the air around us. I reach for the bug spray in the bag. “I saw it in her face. She was aiming for my head.” I spray the air, my arms and neck, and then I spray some into my palms and rub it over my face.
Benicio doesn’t look up. He tears the end of the gauze down the middle like the tongue of a snake, and makes a tourniquet. He fastens it just above the wound.
“At least I understand now why she hates me.”
“She just wants the money.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What good could possibly come from telling you?”
“I would have known what I was dealing with.”
“What would you have done differently if you’d known?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should forget about my sister. She’s the least of our worries. At the rate we’re going I don’t think we’ll find the kiosk before sundown.” He stands and offers his hand.
I snatch up my gun and allow Benicio to pull me to my feet. “That boy is my son’s brother.”
“I’m sorry.” He places his hand on my cheek. “I’m just trying to keep us alive, and I’m afraid we’ve lost too much time.”
I turn away and shove the gun in my waistband. The pressure on my leg shoots pain into my back. It robs me of my breath, but I make every attempt not to show it.
“They most likely think we headed downhill,” Benicio says. “But I don’t want to underestimate them.”
“I can’t go any faster,” I say.
Benicio locks eyes with me. “It’s not your fault. Let’s see how your leg holds out. You’re still losing quite a bit of blood.”
We both stare at the gauze already dotted with red.
“Shit,” I say.
Benicio turns his head as if chasing some far-off thought.
“Come on. I can do this,” I say, lying.
“I’m not so sure.”
“What about your face?” I ask. “Shouldn’t we be doing something about that?”
“I need ice and a surgeon. Not a lot of those in the jungle.”
“It looks worse than you can imagine.”
“I’m sure it does.”
He digs a hole with his heel and drops in the bloody gauze from my leg. He kicks dirt over the top and takes my hand. “This isn’t a competition,” he says, and I think of how I cried against his chest, the heat of our kiss, his heart pounding against my back. He touches my cheek again. “For good or bad, we’re in this together.”
15
Benicio distracts me from the pain by pointing out vanilla vines and coffee trees as if the two of us are on a day hike, strolling along, taking in the sights. He points out parakeets flying to and from a termite nest they are raiding to feed their young. He tells me about all the animals we’re likely to run into. Badgers, armadillos, and squirrel monkeys. Lizards, iguanas, countless varieties of birds with shocking green and yellow feathers.
“Just tell me what’s going to eat me,” I say.
“Jaguars, though no one ever really sees them. But there is the poisonous beaded lizard. I’ve seen plenty of those. Tarantulas, of course.”
“Are you serious?”
“Lots of snakes.”
“If we don’t make it to the kiosk, where are we going to spend the night?”
“Here somewhere. We don’t have a choice.”
I glance around at the thick brush and what I now know is an enormous parota tree, which the indigenous people use to make canoes. I imagine lying on the ground with snakes and tarantulas crawling across my prone body. Some kind of insect nesting in my wound. We may as well have tried to make it to the consulate. We seem doomed either way.
It isn’t long before we need to rest again. I make an effort to hide the pain, but Benicio is clearly on to me, asking to stop for just a moment while he doles out another round of Tylenol with codeine. He swallows another round himself.
Rapids rush by on the river, making it difficult to hear our own voices. But the unmistakable sound of laughter suddenly carries on the waves. We stop.
Benicio tucks me behind him and pulls out his gun. I grab my own from my waistband but am suddenly unsure what to do with it. I can imagine using it to threaten people the way characters in movies do, bossing them around, getting them to do what I want. But shoot it? Even now, after everything that’s happened, after being shot myself, it seems out of the question.
We duck behind a clump of bamboo. Benicio takes my gun and shows me where the safety is. “The only thing left to do is cock the hammer, line up the rear and front sights in your aim, and pull the trigger.”
He talks of shooting a gun like it’s nothing more than mixing a drink. Add that, then that, then this.
A new round of fear passes through me.
The laughter on the wind is now followed by screams.
We ready ourselves behind a parota tree. My hand sweats around the warm metal of the gun.
Yellow-helmeted tourists come rushing down the rapids on a yellow inflatable raft. They jab yellow oars into the choppy water, laughing as they work to keep the raft facing forward. Once they pass, two more rafts charge by the same way. After that there’s nothing but water hurling against the rocks.
Benicio clicks the safety and shoves the gun into his jeans. He releases the breath from his chest.
I realize I’m no longer holding my gun. I’ve
dropped it to the ground with the safety off.
“We may be closer to the kiosk than I thought,” Benicio says. “Let’s rest a while longer. Take the pressure off your leg.”
I shake my head no.
“If we keep pushing it, you’ll end up not being able to walk at all.”
I know he’s right, but I don’t like handing over the decision-making. Handing over too many decisions is what got me into this mess in the first place.
Benicio clears the ground at the base of a tree. He sits down with his back against the trunk. “Here,” he says, patting his lap. “Lay your head down and rest.”
I’ve been up all night counting, and before that I was tied to a chair.
I lower my head onto his thigh, feeling a warm surge of feelings in my stomach. He brushes a tangle from my face and strokes my hair with a single finger until I drift into a dissatisfying sleep, dreaming the universal dream of running in place.
I wake to him watching me.
“Your fingers were twitching,” he says. “You moaned a couple of times, too.”
“How long was I out?”
“An hour and a half at the most.”
“What!” I sit up with a wince. “Why did you let me sleep so long?”
“That leg needs to heal.”
I swallow dryly and turn away.
He stands and brushes the dust from his shorts. “We may be closer than I thought, but that doesn’t leave room for something that might go wrong along the way.”
I offer my hand and Benicio helps me stand. My leg has swelled even more. “Oh God,” I say, before I can catch myself. How much codeine do I need to make it go away?
Benicio wraps my arm around his shoulder. “Let’s get over to the water,” he says. “The cold will feel good on your leg.”
“But we’ll be out in the open.”
“We’ll be quick.”
My leg is now hard and hot as an iron grill.
I lower myself onto the rocks, determined not to cry. The pain is worse, if that’s even possible. I feel light-headed, a little high, afraid of passing out.
