Chasing the Sun: A Novel

by Natalia Sylvester

  “Long enough,” she says, her voice heavy.

  He shakes his head. “It all happened so damn fast,” he says. “Well, now you know that this time, she hasn’t disappeared by choice.” He waits for her to answer, though he knows she won’t say anything; Consuelo, who consoles the family with her quiet servitude, has always been discreet. Even now, she makes her face unreadable and pretends not to know what he’s talking about—not about the kidnapping, not about Marabela’s leaving. Andres catches a quiver in Consuelo’s throat before she lowers her head, and he remembers how busy she kept the last time Marabela left, rushing at every chance to go to the market, never serving dinner even a minute late, as if she were incapable of holding still. He’d thought she’d work herself to exhaustion.

  “I haven’t told the kids yet. I need this news to never leave our house. Carla and Jorge will figure it out soon enough so I’ll be relying on you to make sure it doesn’t get out.”

  “Of course. I’ll talk to them today. If there’s anything else you need . . .”

  “Just shut the door, please.”

  Outside, the sounds of horns scream back and forth at one another as cars try to squeeze through spaces that aren’t big enough. Even in his neighborhood, there’s no escaping the city noise; quiet is relative. Andres takes a sip of his drink and looks out the window. These are the same streets where he used to play soccer as a child, where he let his dog run free without a leash. Now everyone seems to be rushing by, looking straight ahead at no one in particular and everyone in the same glance.

  He stares at the desk, at papers from work scattered across the surface, some folded, others highlighted, others perfectly clean. Had they really been so important? He pictures them scattered across the city, like a path of bread crumbs to wherever Marabela is being kept. The coldness of the glass in his hand turns his fingertips numb, and the condensation has made it so slippery that it simply falls from his grip. The sound of the glass shattering startles him, but only enough to make his neck tense and his nose constrict with one quick breath. His hand still hangs in the air, holding a glass that isn’t there.

  The captors will bark orders, but they are still waiting on him to make the next move. He tries thinking of it like this to muster up some courage, yet he knows he is the only one with everything to lose. They have Marabela. Worst of all, this is a game to them, practically the country’s unofficial sport.

  The kidnappings started slowly. He first started hearing about them from colleagues who’d had too many drinks at the end of a long workday. Leaning too close to him with whisky warming their breath, they’d whisper about executives sending their children overseas, how the men were making plans to follow suit. They’d shake their heads at the scratched-up Toyotas friends had bought in exchange for their beautiful Mercedes-Benzes, trying to conceal their wealth. It was all gossip back then, talk of terrible things that had happened to other people. Andres and his friends were not like the executives being targeted, the ones who ran international, billion-dollar corporations. Their companies were successful within limits, within their country, where they’d foolishly felt safe until recently.

  Now the kidnappings have trickled down, from the extremely to the moderately wealthy—to the family of a prominent surgeon and the owner of the telephone company, to the heir of the country’s smallest airline. Each family that pays adds to the collective bank that aspiring criminals feel entitled to.

  Andres feels utterly sideswiped. Ever since the Shining Path guerrillas and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement began inching closer to the capital, all his attention has been misplaced in their terror, in car bombs detonated outside the government palace, in arson, in assassination attempts on the president of the electoral council. Both groups claim their war is on the government, but every day they attack more civilians. What Andres can’t understand is how quickly civil unrest can become normal, how instead of finding a solution, people adapt. Things have been this way for so long that the general unease has become common. It is like a stovetop left unattended—everyone feels the heat but they’ve chosen to protect themselves rather than get close enough to shut it off. Why risk getting burned?

  In the nearly two years since the new president was elected, his promises of a crackdown on terrorism have turned as brittle as cracking paint. Tired from sleepless nights in the darkness of terrorists’ blackouts, Lima’s spirit has aged decades in only twenty months; the city is now the perfect incubator for a thriving business in kidnapping. While the majority of the country’s police force focuses on controlling armed uprisings and terrorism, smaller crimes are overlooked. Who has time to track down a missing mother of two when terrorist groups are detonating bombs at multiple embassies and gunning down the former minister of defense?

  Except the kidnappings are not small crimes at all. They are deep and personal, they target everyone, even random men riding in taxis who get held up and taken to an ATM, where they are forced to empty out their accounts and, with it, their hopes for a new home or health care for a sick child. Each class has its own set of criminals. Some plan months ahead of time for millions in ransom, others inject a lifetime of fear into their victims with a quick hour that yields a couple grand.

  Andres suspects this won’t be the case with Marabela. He wants to think that her captors are just desperate fools acting on impulse, that perhaps they won’t be able to carry through on their threat to bleed him dry of every penny he has and then some. He tries to hang on to this thought, even as the sound of the captor’s voice echoes in his mind.

  He spends the rest of the day inundated by numbers, calculating his life’s worth. Calls to the bank and his financial managers leave him feeling less than hopeful, and he becomes so focused on retracing each conversation and leafing through accounts that he barely notices when the kids come home from school. Andres catches Cynthia scampering through the hall out of the corner of his eye. Soon an unusual sense of calm settles over the house, and he can hear the faint whispers of his daughter, playing in her bedroom. She likes to give tea parties or make-believe lectures to her dolls; or so Marabela has told him. He gets up and walks toward her room, until he is standing at the doorway unnoticed, watching her tiny fingers wrap themselves around miniature plastic teacups, the ones with rose petals similar to the set Marabela inherited from her great-grandmother. She is at an age where she still enjoys dolls but feels she should be growing out of them. She stops when she notices she has an audience in her father and sets the dolls down on the floor behind her bed, trying to push them out of sight. Again, he recognizes the look of confusion on her face. Is he really such an odd sight in their home?

  Andres smiles but says nothing. He can feel the back of his neck tingling and the tears coming to his eyes. Cynthia lives in another world, in a roomful of pink wooden furniture and white eyelet curtains, her only worries her doll’s high fever and whether she can stay up late. He wants to keep her there, protected, but when he steps inside, he feels like he has carried all his horrors into the room with him.

  “Hi, sweetie. That looks like fun.”

  Cynthia smiles and shrugs her shoulders.

  “Will you pour me some?” he says, pointing at a cup.

  She does, careful not to spill any of the invisible fluid on his clothes. For minutes they sip on their tea, not saying a word. Andres tries to stay engaged, but his mind is somewhere else, wondering if he should tell his daughter that her mother is in danger, wondering if she is even capable of processing the concept, half hoping she isn’t. His eyes wander across her room to the pink-and-green plastic purse hanging from her doorknob.

  “What’s in there?” he asks, grasping at any chance to change the subject of his thoughts.

  Cynthia stands up and walks to the door, her feet pointing slightly inward with each step. The purse is no larger than a book, but she opens it with two hands and glances inside as if looking through a window.

  “My hairbrush and some gum,” she says matter-of-factly.

/>   Andres sets his cup down, but it teeters on the round rim of the plate and tips over. Cynthia drops her purse to grab a napkin and clean up the invisible mess on the table.

  “What’s wrong, Papi?”

  He looks down at her brown eyes, her long lashes that curl back far enough to touch her eyelids. “Nothing, sweetie.”

  It used to be that when Andres couldn’t fall asleep, he’d ask Marabela to tell him a story. They’d lie in bed—him with his back to her, her fingernails tracing loops and lines against his skin—while she told him about the village she’d visited when she was eighteen, the summer before they’d met. She’d gone along with eight other volunteers, traveling by bus, by train, then foot, uphill, to help build a school for eighty-five families. She spent only three months there but the experience stayed with her. Marabela’s stories always went back to that summer; her memory of it was like a bottomless valley, full of life, and she’d always find a fresh experience to pluck out of it. The characters and the narrative changed while their stories of hardship did not. As he began to fall asleep, Andres tried to hold on to her words and the pictures they conjured, and images of the little town would slip into his dreams.

  She told him, “The little girl was only four but she’d wake up every day at dawn and walk three miles uphill to collect water for her family. By the time she’d walk back, the sun would be shining so bright her cheeks would turn pink. She was so proud of how strong she was.”

  Andres listened and dreamed about the little girl. Each time she tried to wipe the tears from her cheeks or the sweat from her forehead, she’d scrape herself and cry even more. One day she nearly lost her grip on her bucket as she pulled it out of the well, and in a panic she reached too far for it and fell inside. The warm water soothed her, softening her limbs and nurturing her cracked body until she began growing into a tree.

  The next night, Marabela would start again. “On our way into town the first thing I remember seeing was a woman peeing on the side of the dirt road. It took me a few seconds to realize what she was doing because she was wearing a long black skirt with all these layers underneath, and as she bunched them up close to her chest they created a bundle of reds and blues and oranges. I was so distracted, trying to figure out what it was. I thought it was a baby at first, then maybe flowers, and then I realized she was squatting and there was a thin stream of urine slivering down the road. I tried not to stare at her but when she caught my eye she didn’t seem to mind. I guess it was nothing out of the ordinary for her. Not really meant to be a private moment.”

  Andres listened and dreamed Marabela was a bouquet of flowers: her long legs, the stems; the features of her face, each a rose. He was trying to keep them bundled together as he walked down a dirt road, but the wind kept pushing against him, peeling petals off Marabela’s face so she now had only one eyebrow and was missing a patch of hair. She started to cry tears that dripped one by one like pearls sprinkled on the bouquet, until he noticed a black ribbon on the side of the road and managed to tie her stems together. The next second he had the bouquet in his hands and was giving it to her. She untied the ribbon and wrapped it in a bow around her hair, and then she took the bouquet in both hands, brought it to her face to breathe in its scent, and tossed it into the air, letting the wind carry it onto the road behind them as it turned into a river.

  Tonight Andres can’t sleep, so he tries to think of the school she built, tries to piece it together from the snippets of stories he can scrape off the bottom of his memories. It was a tiny house, she’d said, with a roof that slanted slightly to the east so that rain could slide off. They’d painted it white and its main door blue. Inside, the floors were just cement. To the back of the room there was a sink that was actually a large basin because there were no pipes, and next to that a door split horizontally across the middle so it could double as a window. If you stepped outside, you were only ten yards from the outhouse. They had placed the windows in the front of the room closer to the ground, for the younger children, and as you made your way to the back they grew taller and taller.

  Andres lies in bed with his eyes forced shut, trying so hard to fall asleep that his eyelids start to feel sticky, like they’re sucking on his dry eyes. He pictures the little house on top of a hill and he pictures a younger Marabela walking through the door, but when she steps inside it’s empty and dark and someone neither one of them can see is pushing her to the center of the room, to the floor that they could never afford to tile. The cement is scraping her knees and palms as she tries to crawl away. In an instant Andres realizes he’s dreaming but he’s not yet in control enough to make it stop. Marabela’s hands are leaving bloody prints as she moves across the floor and tries grasping at the walls, and the hand marks start multiplying in every color all around the room, looking almost like children’s artwork except that the hands are too large, the fingers too desperate, to be innocent. Andres wants to do something but he isn’t even in the room. He has never been there and he doesn’t know where it is or how to get there, and the more he tries to recall if Marabela ever gave him directions the farther away he feels. He watches the little house pull away from him and tries not to leave her there, alone and trapped, but the house is getting smaller and her screams are getting louder, and though he can’t figure out where either of them is, all he knows is that their pain is being held somewhere deep inside of them in the same exact place.

  2

  DAY 3

  IN THE LAST two days Ignacio has asked about his mother only twice, a fact that both relieves and astounds Andres. He doesn’t want to keep telling the same lie, and he senses that likewise, Ignacio doesn’t want to hear it. Now that she’s been gone more than a day he’s had to change his story. Marabela is on a last-minute search for a venue for a weekend fund-raiser she’s planning with friends. They’re dead set on having the event near Huancayo, which is about a five-hour drive to the east.

  “You know how particular the ladies are,” Andres says. “Who knows how long it will take to find a place equally rustic and luxurious.”

  His son rolls his eyes and laughs in the way men do when they complain about women. If he only knew what Andres was really thinking, maybe they could share this burden. Instead Andres is completely alone, and, worse, he must keep his pain invisible. Every time the phone rings he must walk calmly to the next room to answer it, wishing his senses could run ahead of his body. He must pretend this is just a casual conversation, that his wife’s life isn’t hanging on the other line.

  None of this is made easier by the fact that it’s the weekend; all this extra time only slows its passing. He tries to read the paper in the family room upstairs, sprawled across the couch while Cynthia doodles outside all the lines in her coloring book. Andres rarely spends time here. He’s used to seeing Marabela’s wet photographs hanging from a line of twine by the windows, but it seems she didn’t get around to starting a new roll this week. The couch cushions do little to support his back, and he readjusts his position every few minutes to keep it from aching. Through the wall of Ignacio’s bedroom, he can hear the staccato bass of his music. This, combined with the sound of the newspaper pages turning, of Cynthia’s crayons scratching against paper, feels like it could drive him mad, make him scream out for silence.

  He turns onto his side and reaches over to Cynthia’s book. “What are you coloring?”

  She sets down her crayon and cups her chin in her hand, sighing as she shakes her head at the pictures. He knows he’s seen this gesture before, in Marabela when she reads the morning paper. “Nothing. It’s stupid.”

  “That’s not true. Here, let me see.” When he flips through the book, he can see she took great care with the first few drawings. There are sweeping mountain landscapes with two-toned skies, colors Cynthia blended with her fingers so that the marks of the crayons are barely visible. He flips to a picture of a woman weaving a rug, the threads stretched tight over a wooden loom. Rather than fill the rug in with one color, Cynthia created a bold,
multicolored symmetrical pattern. “These are beautiful,” Andres says, flipping back to the current page, which is full of dark, sharp scratches that seem to have no purpose other than to wear the crayon out. “You didn’t like this one?”

  “It’s not that, it’s just . . . I’m bored with it.”

  “Why don’t you get some blank paper and draw something new? It can be whatever you want.”

  She seems to like this idea and runs to her room to get a pad of paper. “Here,” she says, ripping a sheet out for Andres. “You pick a word and we’ll both draw whatever it makes us think of. Then we’ll see what we came up with. But you can’t peek, okay?”

  He smiles, amused. “Where did you come up with this?”

  “It’s a game Mami and I play sometimes. Pick a word. Point to a random one in the paper.”

  He does, but all he keeps landing on are words like conspiracy and threats and capture. The paper is flipped to a story about a group of army officers arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate the president. He quickly scans it and finally lands on a word he’s satisfied with.

  “Leaders.”

  With her elbow over her paper, Cynthia begins drawing, hurriedly switching colors as she sets one crayon down for another. Andres takes an orange one but doesn’t know where to start. He’s never been able to draw more than stick figures, so he makes a line across his paper, where he sets a rectangular box with a microphone coming out of it. Two men stand behind it, and all in front of them, a crowd of round heads looks up to them, listening.

  “Time’s up! Let me see.” Cynthia trades sheets with him and giggles when she sees his attempt. “We didn’t think of the same thing at all,” she says.

  And it’s true. Hers is a simple depiction of four people, fully outlined with clothes and hair. There’s a girl with brown hair, who’s the smallest, and a boy just slightly bigger than her, who looks like a mini version of the man who stands in front of them. He holds hands with a woman in a red dress and long black hair parted in the middle. They’re all in a line, and it’s clear they’re going somewhere, that the two children are following.