by Susan Wiggs
Hang on, buddy, she thought. We’re nearly done here.
The officiant obliged her with haste, concluding the ceremony quickly. “You may now kiss the bride.”
Logan smiled down at her and placed a gentle, brief kiss on her mouth. “Welcome to the world, Mrs. O’Donnell,” he whispered, stepping back and gazing down at her with a look of pride and triumph.
She smiled back, then turned and held out her hand to Charlie. “How about that?” she asked. “Your mom and dad are married.”
He beamed at both of them. “Finally.”
The curiously adult inflection broke the tension, and they had a laugh. Mr. Lee gestured at a round table with a fringed cloth. “We have to do a little paperwork, and you’ll be on your way.”
The certificate was signed all around and witnessed by Mr. Lee’s assistant, who had been working the sound system. “Congratulations.” He handed them the official packet. “I hope you’ll be happy together.”
Logan shook his hand. “That’s the plan,” he said.
Part Three
Twenty-One
Through slitted eyes, Julian stared at the wand of the cattle prod, hovering near his face. His heart raced with unnatural force, as though it possessed a will of its own, the will to escape his tormented body. He was strapped into a battered wheelchair that bore the scratches and dents of former users, including Jesús me guarde etched in the chipping black paint. His prison-issue clothes—a loose blouse and pantaloons made of rough burlap—had been wetted down to better conduct the current.
The picana electrica was an old-school torture device, first used by the gauchos of Argentina on their herds. Nowadays it was commonly applied to prisoners, a cheap and effective way to deliver agony and disorientation without killing the victim.
This particular interrogation team was new to him; whenever they moved his location, he faced a new team. From the start of his imprisonment, he had been moved, blindfolded and hooded, at least a dozen times. He suspected this was to keep him from mounting an escape. And it worked. There was simply no time to come up with a strategy.
The interrogator was a slender man in paramilitary garb, who looked more like a fussy bureaucrat than a practiced torturer. He leaned toward Julian and spoke in English. “You give us nothing, we offer you everything. Freedom, escape, for the simple truth.”
They wanted information about the cooperative operation. Julian could barely make his jaw function as he repeated the only information he was authorized to offer—his name and rank, social security number and date of birth. Each time he was moved to a different location, a new interrogator took over, but despite the beatings, the electrocutions, sleep deprivation and coercion, he gave up nothing. His training in SERE—survival, evasion, resistance, escape—had come into play from his first moment of captivity, and he held fast to its harsh lessons. In attempting escape, he would probably die. In staying put, he most certainly would die. There really was no other option.
“Again, to the temple,” the interrogator instructed in Spanish.
Julian was a master at hiding things. He didn’t know where this skill came from, but he used it every moment of every day. He pretended to have only a rudimentary grasp of Spanish; as a thick piece of rubber was inserted in his mouth, he gave no sign that he knew where the prod would touch.
He retreated in his mind, a technique he’d rehearsed during the mock interrogations of his training. He coaxed himself back to his earliest days, living in New Orleans with his bachelor father. His dad had been a brilliant man, gifted far beyond his humble roots in southern Louisiana. He had loved Julian in his distracted but sincere way, teaching him the principles of rocket science as a bonding activity.
Julian remembered the exact moment when he realized love made him brave. He’d been maybe six years old. It was a steaming summer day, and the window units of their wood frame house were churning out cool, mildew-scented air. Their place was a small guest house, squeezed between mansions on Coralie Street, convenient to the university. His dad was in the cluttered dining room—which was never used for eating—laboring over some problem or theory. Julian, hot and bored, had decided to climb to the top of the fig tree in the backyard because that was where he’d find the ripest, sweetest fruit. The climb was wicked fun, and he’d reached from branch to branch until he felt as if he’d gone to the top of everything. Being aloft in the tree had been a revelation. The world below didn’t appear so large and complicated and bewildering. Instead, it intrigued him; it was something he could understand and fit into, like a piece of a puzzle. Everything was in perspective. No wonder birds seemed to soar for the sheer joy of it. Who wouldn’t want to be as high in the sky as possible?
“Dad,” he yelled, hoping his father could hear him despite the chugging of the old dripping air conditioner wedged in the window. “Hey, Dad, look how high I am!”
The branch he’d been on bowed but did not break. It was almost graceful, the way it dropped him. He grabbed another branch to save himself, managing to hook on with one hand. He hung there briefly, stunned by the distance to the ground but oddly energized by the danger. He fought to hang on, all the while knowing he would lose this battle. Gravity would do what gravity always did. When your dad was a renowned physicist, you grew up with this understanding.
The smooth bark had offered no purchase, and the tree let him go. The second he was airborne, he had an immediate sensation of weightlessness. This had been rudely disrupted when he’d crashed down through a series of branches below him, then hit the ground with a whump.
He didn’t remember crying out as he fell, but something must have alerted his dad. Maybe the sound of his long fall through the branches of the gnarled old tree had grabbed his dad’s attention.
Everything had rushed out of Julian on impact. His next breath of air eluded him completely. Mute and wild-eyed with panic, he’d gazed up to see his father looming over him, as imposing as the Lord above. Julian’s vision had focused, and he’d seen his father’s terror, rimmed in stark white around his eyes.
His father never left his side while the ambulance guys came. He’d talked to Julian more than he’d ever talked to him before, speaking in reassuring tones, saying he loved him, praying Julian wasn’t hurt.
At the emergency room, they’d examined everything about Julian, inside and out. They’d shone a light in his eyes, put headphones on him to check his hearing, listened to all his insides with stethoscopes and ultra-sounds, had taken X-ray pictures of him and scanned his brain.
Julian had learned a couple of new words that day—abrasions and contusions. It was a fancy way of saying scrapes and bruises. He learned that, although even the minor ones hurt, things could have been worse. Lots worse. No matter how hard the doctors searched and prodded, that was all they could find wrong with him.
And throughout the tests and observations, his dad had been there, projecting worry and love and relief. It was the longest amount of time in Julian’s memory that his dad had stayed focused solely on him. He had never felt so loved and secure.
All because he’d dared to climb to a high place.
“You’re a very lucky young man,” the doctor said, signing his name on a form.
Julian had felt a flood of warmth. “Yes, sir.”
After that, he’d been brave about everything. He knew he could be brave because his dad loved him. He was no idiot; he realized he wasn’t invincible, but courage that came from confidence took him to new places. He was always pushing at the edges of safety, climbing trees and water towers, scaling walls, jumping from bridges and train trestles, riding a bike or skateboard in hair-raising places. No one scolded him. His dad believed, in the most scientific sense, that for every action there was a reaction, and this held true for growing boys. Everything a kid did had consequences, which made scolding unnecessary.
Julian, of course, found this out the hard way, having to face disgruntled property owners, highway patrolmen, traffic cops, schoolteachers. His dad had neve
r judged him, but simply loved him in his distracted but sincere way.
And so, when Professor Gastineaux was in a wreck and ended up in a wheelchair, Julian had despaired and lost faith. Loving his father was not enough to heal him. Julian had felt stupid for ever believing otherwise.
“Don’t you fret, honey,” his dad had said, surrounded by all kinds of high-tech gear. “I’m safe now.”
To Julian, it was beyond comprehension how someone could feel safe without the full use of his body. His dad said he could still think and theorize and teach, and those were the things that were important to him.
He had been sent to a rehab facility to be trained for his new life, and the training included personal stuff, everything from drinking a soda to going to the bathroom. During this process, eight-year-old Julian was sent to summer camp, where his much-older half brother Connor worked as a counselor.
Camp Kioga had given Julian a glimpse of a different life. He’d never really seen people who lived this way, their days revolving around organized activities, singalongs and home-cooked meals served family-style at long tables in an old-fashioned pavilion.
Sending him to Camp Kioga had turned out to be his father’s final gift to Julian. For when he’d returned to New Orleans, he’d been told his father did not have much longer to live. “Not much longer” turned out to be a few years, during which Julian made it his mission to absorb every bit of knowledge and love his father offered. He learned the painful intimacy of caring for someone in a wheelchair, and he never resented his father’s physical needs. Young as Julian was, something in him had recognized that when time was short, you made the most of it.
He had a mother he didn’t know. Supposedly she’d tried to keep him after he was born, but within six months, she’d had enough and gave him to his dad to raise. She kept trying to launch an acting career, and she didn’t pretend to be happy about bringing Julian back in her life. Unfortunately, when Julian’s father quietly passed away one night, neither she nor Julian had a choice.
Seared by loneliness and grief, he’d been forced to move to California. There, he’d hurtled his way through adolescence, hell-bent on self-destruction. He’d careened recklessly through each day, taking risks and getting in trouble, always one incident away from juvey. After his junior year of high school, his exasperated mother had sent him to Camp Kioga once again, this time to help his brother renovate the summer place. If not for that summer, he probably would’ve gone off the rails long ago. Instead, it became the summer of Daisy Bellamy.
Reality came splashing back as a bucket of water was dumped over him. The odd smell of high voltage electricity—more a sensation than a smell, really—mingled with the harsh prison stench. A string of spittle pooled in a fold of his shirt.
“Ever wonder if paralysis can be cured with an electrical current?” asked the voltage operator. “I have seen a dead frog animated with a shock.” He yanked at the waist tie of Julian’s trousers, recoiling when he exposed the condom catheter that conducted urine into an attached bag. “Good God, what is that?”
“You will have to remove it if you intend to shock the genitals,” said a laconic voice.
Julian thought he was hallucinating. Francisco Ramos? He didn’t move or offer a sign of recognition. He wondered what Ramos, the partner who’d surrendered during the recon mission, had endured in order to become a part of this operation. Their gazes met for a fraction of a second.
“Disgusting,” said the operator. “Forget it.”
“He has no sensation anyway,” Ramos said. “That is why he cannot take a piss on his own.”
Toileting was the least of Julian’s worries. His father, wheelchair bound from the time of his accident to the end of his life, had made such things seem routine to Julian.
So where the hell are you now, genius? he asked himself. Stuck in a hole in the jungle somewhere, a prisoner with no hope of justice. This was what he got for trying to be a good guy, minding his ps and qs, joining the military. Looking back, he figured he’d have been better off being a juvenile delinquent.
The thought filled him with dark amusement. Another survival tactic. If you can keep a sense of humor or at least irony, maybe you’re not so far gone.
Another tactic was something called self-guided imagery, sending your mind on a trip to a better place. That was where Daisy came in. He had developed the ability to conjure her image in his mind in the minutest detail—the shadow of her eyelashes on her cheeks, the shape of her fingernails, the sound of her laughter, the way her smile lit him up when he walked into a room, the scent of her hair when she laid her head against his chest. He made sure he thought of her many times a day because he didn’t want her to slip away, inch by inch.
She was the great love of his life. This was something he knew with gut-level certainty. He’d sensed it the first moment he’d laid eyes on her—beautiful and troubled, with a chip on her shoulder and a bad attitude. Even then, her sweetness had seeped out, as irrepressible as the rising sun.
Daisy. She was the whole reason he opened his eyes each morning. The reason he took the next breath of air. She was the reason he would find a way out of this hellhole.
He pictured her now in her favorite place, relaxing on a dock overlooking Willow Lake. He could see her sun-browned arms braced behind her, head tipped back as she lifted her face to the sun. Her corn-silk hair had always been long; she claimed she was too insecure to cut it short. He claimed she was too beautiful. It was a good argument to have. The prospect of a lifetime of arguing with her kept him sane and focused.
Sanity and focus, he reminded himself again and again. Sanity and focus. In this situation, they were mandatory.
Ramos had a distinctive gait, no doubt due to the leg injury that had caused him to surrender. Julian stayed completely still when he heard the footsteps outside his cell, giving no sign of recognition. “Take these in with his meal,” Ramos said.
“Why should he be given something to read?” the guard demanded.
“Best to occupy his mind with fiction. It is better, anyway, than letting him lie around all day, contemplating rebellion.”
Along with the day’s rations—the usual stale, crumbling arepa bread and some beans in broth—were two battered paperback books in English. Julian suspected Ramos understood completely the irony of the subjects. There was a Penguin Classics edition of The Count of Monte Cristo and a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, its pages curled and yellowed. Julian devoured both books, combing the text for any sign of intel from Ramos. The only possible clues were a couple of dog-eared page in Alice—“So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible….”
Julian couldn’t tell whether or not the passage had been marked by design or by happenstance.
He read both texts obsessively, absorbing the words, even memorizing whole passages. Each book was a particular sort of fantasy—a tale of injustice, endurance, escape and revenge. On the surface, Monte Cristo seemed to reflect Julian’s situation—a man imprisoned and forgotten, bent on escape.
Yet he felt more of a kinship with Alice, trying to find a way back through the rabbit hole. He was a stranger in a strange land, filled with characters who bore him ill will or, at best, utter indifference. Some were as insane as the Mad Hatter, their brains fried on coke, their livers stewing in aguardiente, which more than lived up to its literal translation, “burning water.”
Edmond Dantès was another kind of lifeline. Reading the frayed pages of The Count of Monte Cristo, Julian learned there was more power in forbearance than in an exploding temper. He never lost it, no matter how they tormented him. Poor Dantès had to wait seventeen years for success. That was another thing Julian had learned—things could always be worse. Always.
Alice was more puzzling, maybe because she was female. Another passage that may or may not have been marked by a crease in the page gave him much to contemplate: “Just at this moment Alic
e felt a very curious sensation, which puzzled her a good deal until she made out what it was: she was beginning to grow larger again, and she thought at first she would get up and leave the court; but on second thoughts she decided to remain where she was as long as there was room for her.”
Twenty-Two
“Well, look at you.” Sonnet breezed into Daisy’s house to find Daisy hard at work, applying a maple-colored stain to the dining room baseboards.
“I’d rather not, thanks,” said Daisy, blowing upward to chase a lock of hair out of her eyes. She was long overdue for a trim.
“You look so…domestic,” Sonnet said. “Mrs. Happy Hands at Home.”
“Right, that’s me.” The phrase had appeared in an outdated home economics textbook they’d been made to study in high school. Apparently the authors considered an idle wife to be the devil’s instrument, and so keeping busy at all costs was advocated.
“What on earth are you doing? I’m up from the city to babysit for your first anniversary weekend and you’re what, painting the woodwork?”
“Staining,” Daisy corrected her. “I’m staining the woodwork because it needs doing.”
“Well, I hope you’ve got some big plans for this weekend, seeing how the wedding itself was kind of a nonevent.”
Daisy sat back on her heels. “You’re still bitter about that, aren’t you?”
“Moi? Bitter? Why would I be bitter about my best friend and stepsister running off and getting married on the sly?”
“It wasn’t like that. It was…spontaneous.”
“You were my only hope of being a maid of honor, and it was snatched away by your insane Vegas impulse.”
“I’ll get out my tiny violin.” Daisy used a rag to rub on more stain. She knew Sonnet had forgiven her long ago.
“Seriously, how’s it going?” Sonnet asked. “And I don’t mean the woodwork.”
