Of course, their current circle of friends—Paula and Juan from when Marabela worked at El Tribunal, and Mari and Tomas, who cochair a literacy program Marabela volunteers at once a week—adore her. They know her too well to believe she would disappear for days without telling them, and when Andres gives them his rehearsed excuse each time they call, he gets the sense they’re not fooled. He suspects they’ve agreed to take turns calling, one every other day. They no longer ask where she is, just if she’s all right and if anything’s changed. He wants to tell Paula more than anything.
“¿Como va todo?” she’ll say.
Things are not going all right, he wants to answer. Nothing is going, everything is at a standstill, and sometimes he fears what will kill them in the end is the waiting.
He knows Paula’s concern is genuine. She’s the kind of person who listens to everything you do and don’t say, and it’s exactly this quality that makes her a great friend and an even better reporter. But Andres knows Marabela’s friends are not the right people to tell. Confide in one, confide in all of them, she used to say, and even she admitted this wasn’t always a good thing. Even if he wanted to tell them the truth, Andres isn’t comfortable enough to reveal such vulnerabilities. He doesn’t feel the same confidence with the friends he’s met in adulthood as he did with the ones from his youth; their relationships are tinged with formality. There are lines he can’t cross, gray areas he can’t explore.
In the bar with Nico, maybe he could have complained about the distance he’s felt from Marabela, but he’d never admit that he first noticed because of the sex. She stopped initiating nearly a year ago, and on the rare occasion that Andres coaxed her into intimacy, it felt like she expected him to do all the work, like it was a privilege he had to earn. By the time she left him four months ago, he’d stopped trying. The anticipation of her rejection smothered any sexual urge he had. Instead of mourning this aspect of their relationship, Marabela had seemed relieved.
Andres walks to the end of the block where he usually meets Jorge and waits for the car to pull up. As he climbs into the backseat, he chuckles at the absurdity of Nico’s advice.
“God, what a day. I ran into Nico and he said I should have you take the long way home so I can sleep back here. Like a baby in a carriage. Ridiculous, right?”
“Señor?” Jorge looks through the rearview mirror at Andres, puzzled by the question. Andres shrugs sheepishly.
“My mother never had a carriage quite like this. There’s really no comparison,” Jorge says. Even though Andres can’t see his mouth in the mirror, he catches the driver’s smile in his eyes. As they drive home, he drifts in and out of sleep, his head bobbing up and down, side to side.
“Same time tomorrow?” Jorge asks when they get home. It’s a rhetorical question but a necessary one, his voice just loud enough to wake Andres from his nap.
“Thank you,” he says, grateful to be spared the embarrassment of having to acknowledge that he was dozing in the middle of the afternoon, half drunk, while his wife’s whereabouts are unknown.
He tries his best not to make much noise as he drags his feet up to their bedroom. Once there, Andres closes his eyes to think, but all he hears is the click click of the alarm on his nightstand. It’s a fancy digital clock he bought a year ago when Marabela started sleeping in. She used to be first to wake in the house, naturally and without any sort of clock, ready to start the day. On weekday mornings she’d walk over to Andres’s side of the bed and kiss him on his forehead, cheeks, eyelids, and mouth, because she thought people should be woken gently if they were to be pulled from sleep at all. He looks at the clock’s large letters and silver face, wondering how he could have been so blind to Marabela’s unhappiness. He could’ve asked what was making her so tired, why she’d lost her eagerness to face each day.
Instead, he’d bought an alarm, an ornate, cold metal clock that he now remembers cost twelve dollars. The wooden nightstand it sits on is an antique; he could probably get two hundred for it. He starts doing the math in his head, calculating prices and converting them to dollars. His black leather dress shoes, the books he said he’d read but never got around to, the magical eyeglass cleaning kit he let an old woman convince him he needed, his collection of Mozart and Beethoven cassette tapes aligned in their cardboard package, the audio set and its two brown speakers with silver mesh—everything that surrounds him has a price tag. He lies back on his bed and tries to tally it all up in his head, but there are too many numbers to keep track of. The money he has. The money they want. The amount he can get for the company and the number of employees who will lose their jobs if he sells it. The number of days Marabela has been gone and the years it might take her to recover.
If it were as simple as multiplying or dividing and carrying the remainders, he’d be satisfied. But these figures all blend together, losing their meaning, and his eyelids dim the lights in his mind until he falls into a deep sleep.
He wakes up to the sound of Cynthia’s footsteps running down the hall, followed by heavier steps that make his heart race until he realizes they belong to Guillermo. The two of them are laughing, and Guillermo is out of breath as he chases her downstairs to the living room, shouting, “I got your arm!” and “Your elbow!” and “Your knee!” each time he catches her.
It’s nice to hear laughter again. Andres stretches and descends the stairs unnoticed.
Cynthia seems to have worn out Guillermo, who is now catching his breath on the couch. He reaches over to the coffee table where he left several documents and starts sorting them into a neater pile.
“What is all this, anyway?” Cynthia asks.
“Just a whole bunch of work stuff,” Guillermo says. He quickly scoops up the pile and taps it against the wooden surface to straighten out the edges. He keeps the writing faced away from her.
“It’s about my mom, isn’t it?” She looks so sad and dejected. Andres, who wasn’t purposely eavesdropping until now, freezes in his steps at the edge of the stairs.
“Why do you say that?” Guillermo asks. He doesn’t talk to her like most adults speak to children. His voice is casual, his tone genuinely interested. He acts like her question is nothing out of the ordinary.
“It has to do with her being gone, doesn’t it? I’m not blind; I know how these things go. My friends whose parents are divorced say they each had lawyers to help them. Is that why you’re here all the time, and she’s not?” The way she looks at him, it’s like she’s begging to be proven wrong. Andres wishes it were so simple. From where he’s standing he can’t see Guillermo’s face, but all the usual stiffness seems to slip out of him.
“I’m not a lawyer, chiquitita. I’m sorry if somehow I made you think that’s why I’m here.”
She doesn’t respond—even if she didn’t believe him, Andres knows his daughter is too polite to say so. Yet he’s afraid of what she’ll ask next, so he takes a few steps back up the stairs and dashes down noisily, hoping the distraction will be enough to change the subject.
“What’s all this running around I just heard?” he asks, struggling to sound cheerful.
They both turn, and the relief in Guillermo’s face is palpable. Cynthia, no longer in the mood for games, shrugs her shoulders but manages an unenthusiastic smile.
Andres takes a seat on the couch across from Guillermo and wraps his arm around his daughter, pulling her close to him as he sorts through the day’s mail.
“Tremenda, isn’t she? I’m surprised you kept up with her as long as you did,” he teases. It’s nice to pretend this is a normal situation. The proud father, rubbing his daughter’s belly, bragging about her to the security consultant.
Guillermo happily plays along. “I have three nieces. I’d forgotten how much energy they have at this age. Nothing like a child to make an old man feel older.”
“Careful. I’m not too far behind you,” Andres says.
They laugh and thankfully Cynthia joins them. Andres looks down at the papers in his hand and s
tops to clear his throat. At the top is a small, square envelope, unlabeled except for his name in black capital letters in the very center. With one look, the men decide it’s time to head upstairs. Andres taps Cynthia on the behind and suggests she go check if Consuelo needs any help with dinner.
In the darkroom they take their usual seats across from each other, Andres feeling like they’re carrying a bomb they have to isolate from the rest of the household. When he finally opens the envelope, it takes several seconds for the image to register. He has a hard time believing this is real, that the guns pointed at each side of Marabela’s head are not toys made of plastic, the grenades hanging from her neck not just heavy, flashy jewels. He holds the tiny image in his hand and remembers what Marabela used to tell him about the paradox of photography: it is an art meant for the viewer, not the subject. It captures a stolen moment, shows it to the world so it’s always remembered, while the subject who actually lived it would probably rather forget.
Marabela’s cheekbones are sharp instead of round, her face black and blue, and her shoulders droop toward the floor. In her hands she holds a copy of El Tribunal with today’s headlines. Marabela clutches it across her chest like a shield, as if words and images will protect her. Everything Andres has lost, everything left for him to lose, stares back at him.
The woman in the picture is not his wife but a remnant of her, a desperate body cast away in some dark corner. It’s hard for him to believe that such a drastic transformation could take place in only a few days. The look in her eyes is terrifying, as if the person behind the camera just sprang upon her from behind a wall.
He flicks the photo at Guillermo, who takes a quick look and says, “We knew this might happen. They’re just trying to manipulate you.”
“Let them. So long as they don’t touch her I don’t care what they do to me. They can twist me into little knots for all I care.”
“That’s not going to help the situation. If they’re going to hurt her, they’re going to hurt her. You have to remember that they’re the bad guys here, not you. None of this is your fault.”
But it is. Andres can’t bring himself to say it, but he knows it’s true. There is so much he could’ve done differently. If he hadn’t asked her to pick up the papers, or if he hadn’t chosen the location he did for his office, if he hadn’t opened his business in the first place, none of this would have happened.
The phone rings. It shatters his thoughts.
Before the first ring is even finished, Guillermo has leaped out of his chair and placed the headphones over his ears. It is almost as if he’s programmed for this—a man on autopilot, on a mission to calculate his enemy’s every move—while Andres needs a moment to collect himself.
He clears the desk and answers, asking first for the speaker’s identity and then for Marabela’s proof of life.
“She’s not in the mood to talk today,” Hades says.
“What does that mean? What have you done to her?”
“Relax,” he says, like this is a joke, like he’s only hidden some small belonging. “She’s here but you’ll have to talk to her through me.”
Guillermo snaps his fingers and points at Andres’s desk. Where there used to be a calendar, Andres now has a list of questions, and he looks to them for comfort because they are proof that despite everything that’s happened, there are still some things in this world shared only by him and Marabela.
“Ask her about the flower vendor and the cabdriver. What were their names?”
Andres waits and tries to listen for a trace of Marabela’s voice in the background. It’s been years since either one of them has mentioned the witnesses at their wedding. The ceremony was spontaneous, like everything Marabela did. They were hiking in Machu Picchu one July and got caught up in the energy of the place, the mysticism. Maybe it was the elevation, the lack of oxygen in the air, or the way the city, hidden away from the world for centuries, seemed so impenetrable. Here was proof that some things could live on forever. As they stood at the Inti Punku, the Gateway of the Sun, Marabela had said, simply, “We should get married.” For witnesses, they chose the cabdriver who took them to the chapel and the flower vendor who sold them Marabela’s bouquet.
Andres wants to laugh now at the naïveté of their first years together, but it’s more depressing than it is funny. Their love had been so selfish, blind to the suffering of those around them. When they’d returned to Lima, they’d learned that the military had seized control of the city’s major newspapers—it was only a matter of time before they’d take over Rolando’s. Yet Andres still expected his father to celebrate the marriage, to be happy that his son had even more incentive to start his own company, now that Rolando could no longer guarantee that he’d have a legacy left to pass on.
In the days that followed their wedding, Andres wondered if his father might disown him. Instead, he offered Marabela a job as a photographer.
“I know you’d be miserable working for a state-run paper, but they haven’t come for ours yet. We’ll hold down the fort together,” he told her. It was a peace offering, a way for the paper to stay in the family, even if it wasn’t the family he’d chosen. Marabela accepted, and Andres took it as a silent blessing, a sign that his father had finally embraced his new bride.
Hades’s voice interrupts Andres’s thoughts: “Iyarina and Maiqui.”
“Okay,” he says, relieved to hear the right answer to his question, but also feeling like he’s sullied one of their most precious memories.
“You’re welcome. We didn’t have to do that, you know. We’ve already sent you the proof you need,” Hades says.
“Please, I’m doing everything I can. I can have seventy thousand for you. Just don’t hurt her.”
“For seventy thousand? I can’t promise you anything.”
“If I could get more money for her to be safe, don’t you think I would do it?”
“I think you don’t realize yet what either one of us is capable of.”
“That’s not—that’s not true.”
“You think this is just another business deal, and you’re so used to being in control that you can’t help but try to negotiate.”
“I may be used to business going a certain way. But we both know there is more at stake here. This is the mother of my children. Are you . . . are you a father?” Andres asks, hoping to appeal to the man’s emotions, as Guillermo had suggested.
“That’s none of your business.”
“All I’m saying is that, if you are, you know I’m not playing around. I’m doing everything I can. Once we get the loans from the bank I’ll have seventy and—”
“You expect me to agree to less than a tenth of our original agreement?”
Andres looks up at Guillermo, who’s waving and pointing for him to read one of the many cue cards he’s pinned to the walls.
“We never had an original agreement. I never agreed to it,” he says, his words slow and punctuated. “I never agreed because it was an impossible number. The money you were asking for doesn’t exist. There’s nothing I can do to make that happen. It’s a fake number. This one I’m offering is real. You can’t think of it as lost money because . . . it never could have happened.”
He stops then, unsure where these words came from, and takes a moment to breathe as Guillermo gives him an approving thumbs-up.
“It won’t work. We’ll call you tomorrow with what will.”
The line goes dead, but Andres still feels his heart beating, and it’s like he’s been running for miles, wishing for a moment’s rest, only to realize his body wants to keep going without him.
He releases a long heavy breath and puts his head in his hands. The list of questions he prepared for Marabela’s proof of life stares back from underneath his elbow. He draws a thick blue line over the flower vendor and cabdriver. It was a risky question to ask, but he had to know if she’d held on to this. Intertwined with his fear is a thread of doubt he can’t stop pulling, the one that screams he’s alr
eady lost her, she’s already moved on.
And yet, she remembered.
“That’s a beautiful name,” Marabela had told the flower vendor as Andres counted out the coins for her bouquet. “Where is it from?”
The woman smiled and told her it was Quechua, the language of the Incas. “Iyarina means ‘never forgets.’ ”
5
DAY 10
WHEN HE VISITS Elena for the second time, Andres takes a book and two sets of flowers, anticipating that Betty, the lady at the front desk, might need some extra convincing. The bouquet of pink roses and white ranunculus filled out with baby’s breath is a big hit. Betty hurries around the desk to receive them and thanks him. She unlocks the door and tells him that since he probably knows his way to Elena’s room, she’ll be off getting a vase.
The facility seems busier this morning. Nurses and doctors rush past him carrying small metal trays and syringes. Others push carts with plastic cups filled with pills, the wheels creaking as they move. The practitioners take quiet steps, but the medicine trays keep giving them away. Andres catches a few moans and screams in the second it takes a nurse to open and close the door to her patient’s room. It occurs to him today is the first time he’s seeing this place for what it truly is. During his last visit in the off-hours, he let himself believe it was nothing out of the ordinary, just a friend stopping by to check in on another at the hospital. Except here, the patients are sick from loneliness or despair, and their wounds don’t always heal. He feels like he can’t trust what he sees—perfectly healthy people with invisible demons. As he nears Elena’s room, he picks up speed and enters without so much as a knock, feeling like a kid looking for a place to hide.
But one scream has followed him inside. Before he can even close the door, Elena ducks underneath her bed and covers her face.
“It’s okay, it’s just me!” He sees her peek through the empty space beneath the bed, and she looks at once relieved and agitated.
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