He shrugs, eyes on the window. “Just thinking.”
“Obviously. About?”
“Can I ask you something?” He pauses in between words to close his eyes and rub his eyelids, stretching the thin skin toward the bridge of his nose. He feels Elena’s hands, warm and light against his face, gently covering his to make him stop. It’d be so easy just to purse his lips together and kiss them. Instead he takes her hands between both of his, like he’s praying, and lowers them away. He’s here for truth, not comfort, and he knows he won’t find one where there’s the other.
“After you got home, what made you decide to leave again and come here? I know you said you didn’t feel safe and that you were afraid, but what about being with your family? How did you choose?”
“I didn’t really feel like I had much of a choice. It was just a matter of one emotion winning over the other. The fear was too powerful, I guess. Or maybe I’m too weak.”
“Don’t say that. I didn’t mean to imply that.”
“I know this is going to sound horrible, but part of me stopped trusting my family. Or at least, I stopped trusting in their ability to keep me safe. If they could only do so much to get me out, then how could they keep me from being taken again? Sometimes I’d think it would’ve been different if I had a partner to come home to, someone who could be strong enough for both of us. But my parents, they’re not so young anymore, and I can’t ask them to take care of me forever. At least here, I can try to heal on my own time. I know I’m no good to anyone until I do.”
“That’s not true. You’re good for me.”
She smiles. “That’s sweet of you to say.”
“Are you sure you’re healing?” He hesitates to say what he’s about to, but he feels it can’t be avoided anymore. “How do you know you’re not just hiding?”
For an instant, he sees the look in her eyes harden, the slightest hint of her raising her defenses. “I’m fine here. I’m safe.”
“But those aren’t the same things.”
“What is this really about, Andres?”
He gets the urge to light a cigarette. Andres pats down his coat, his pants, to see if he has any in his pockets, but no luck. He stands up and sits on Elena’s bed, slouching to rest his arm on the footboard. “Marabela left me a few months ago, and then she came back. And now she’s gone again, and I’m trying everything I can to bring her back, but every day that passes, I can’t help but imagine that she’ll never feel at home with me again. Not the way she used to. I don’t want to bring her back to a place where she feels as trapped as she is now.”
“What makes you think she wants to come home again?”
“Didn’t you?”
“I was in a completely different situation.”
“That’s the thing. It’s not that different. This time, she didn’t leave. Marabela was taken.”
Elena stares at Andres. She covers her mouth, closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath. The air comes out slowly, in hysterical whimpers that build momentum until they start to get out of control. Her cries are quiet but violent. Andres gets down on his knees next to her chair, just like on the first day he came here.
“It’s okay. Shh . . . it’s okay. She’s going to be fine. I’m—I’m trying everything I can.”
“It’s all my fault. It’s my fault they took her. It’s my fault.”
“Tranquila, linda. It’s not your fault.”
“You really don’t understand. You don’t understand at all. It’s my fault they took her.”
“How is that even possible? It doesn’t make sense. Maybe we should go for a walk again.”
She thrusts herself deeper into her chair, practically standing on the cushion. “You’re not listening to me! I gave them a list. I gave them names. Names in exchange for my life. That’s how they said it. I told them no, but they kicked me until I spoke, and by that time I couldn’t, and they gave me a piece of paper and a pencil and they left me in the dark to think about it. And I couldn’t move. Or think. Or write. When they came back they said if I didn’t give them the names, it would only get worse every night. But I couldn’t imagine it getting worse, so I didn’t give them anything. And then the fourth night—”
“Elena, stop. I—”
“— and the fourth night they came and took my clothes,” she says. “They did everything and anything to me. They were trying to tear me into pieces. I gave them everything, Andres. I gave them all the names. They wanted the easiest targets. The richest ones. And Marabela was so easy and I just wanted them to stop. They said it’s common, that everyone makes a list. I didn’t think they’d actually take her. I just wanted them to stop.”
He sits, frozen, on his feet, which have fallen asleep by now. The numbness spreads to his legs and soon he thinks it’ll be in his core, and he won’t have to deal with any of this because he could just as easily retreat the way Elena has, curled into a ball in the corner of a bare room. And yet he knows that he’ll never be able to do this. He is not the victim here.
He wants to reassure her. But the words that come out of his mouth aren’t the ones he expects.
“They came for her . . . because of you?”
She nods, feeble, pathetic.
“What—what did you tell them? Was it just a name? Or was it our address, where our children sleep at night?”
Elena brings her knees closer to her chest, turns her body into a fort. “It was just a name. It was one of many. I never thought they’d—”
“Why not mine instead? Did you ever think of that?”
“I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
He says nothing because he’s incapable of putting himself there, of imagining what it must have been like.
Elena spits her words at him. “I don’t expect you to understand. You think what you’re going through is torture because it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”
“I never said I was the victim,” Andres says. He feels like he’s shrinking, like the world could swallow him whole.
She follows his gaze, holds it steadily. “You can’t imagine what’s on the other side of that phone,” she says, and he knows she’s right. He’s tried to so many times.
“I can’t . . . I don’t want to hear it,” he says. His whole body is so tired now he lets it fall back against the wall. He stares at his legs, stretched across the floor, and wishes he could find the strength to stand up and leave.
“Have you been listening when they call? Really listening?”
“Just . . . please stop.”
“You get to hang up at the end of it. That’s a luxury I didn’t have.”
“Please, Ele . . . please don’t,” and he feels this moment carving itself into their reality, a massive hole they’ll never bridge. She finally grows quiet.
Outside, the halls are starting to fill with the sounds of a regular morning. Elena doesn’t move but her eyes shift to different parts of the room each time she blinks: first the door, then the bed, the courtyard, finally him.
“I should have done more,” she says. “I should’ve held on a little longer.”
“They would’ve never stopped.”
She shakes her head, side to side as if she’s got a bee stuck in her hair and she’s trying to push it away. “They didn’t.”
“They didn’t what?”
“Stop.”
“I’m sorry. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
She wipes her eyes and smiles again, and he realizes her smile isn’t from happiness but submission. “You don’t understand. What I meant was, they didn’t stop. Ever. Even after I gave them the names, they had their way with me. I should have just kept quiet.”
Already, Andres has forgiven her. Already, he knows he has to leave. He knows he can’t just leave her like this, but he also can’t stay. He holds Elena until her body stops shaking and the sun has risen, and when the room starts getting warm she looks up at him and says, “You should go to her. As soon as you can
. Go.”
“You’re a good friend,” he tells her. “Don’t ever think otherwise.”
On his way home, it occurs to him that Elena’s connection to the kidnapping is a lead. They can follow it, they can find out who these people are and where they keep their hostages, and they can try to rescue Marabela so she doesn’t have to stay there another minute more. They can talk to Elena, help her remember details that’ll give them clues. Although remembering will be painful, her guilt will heal knowing that she made things right again.
Back at his office, he tells Guillermo everything. He’s expecting the man to jump out of his chair, gather more supplies and perhaps even weapons, but Guillermo barely reacts. He focuses on some notes, and Andres wishes he could shake him by the shoulders.
“It’s actually not that simple,” Guillermo finally says. The words seem to hurt coming out of him.
“What more do we need? They’re the same people who kidnapped Elena. She can lead us to them.”
“That’s not how these things work. The ones who took Elena, they’re just minions. None of these guys stay in the same place for long. The whole system’s a monster—it’ll cut its own legs off for survival anytime it gets in a tight spot. It moves somewhere more comfortable and grows a new set. The men who took Elena are probably in prison or already working for someone new. The man in charge, at the top, is too smart to stay in the same place with the same people for very long.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“Andres. It’s been two years since they took her. Two years.”
But Andres can’t accept this. He needs a plan to hold on to, something that he can do besides wait. He’s haunted by the possibility that Marabela might endure what Elena went through, only to emerge a shell of her former self.
“We’ll go to the cops. We’ll see if Elena’s kidnappers were ever captured,” Andres says.
“No cops. You know that already.”
“Then what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“You’re already doing everything you can. It’ll take some time, especially after the last call. He wasn’t happy not to find you on the other line. He said they won’t move off three-quarters of a million. But we can still make this work. We can still talk the price down.”
But nothing Guillermo says can help anymore. Andres looks at the chart of their offers again, plagued by the thought that he hasn’t done enough. So far he’s only tried the minimum and optimum price; the maximum still stands far below the current ransom, which is marked on the chart by a thick red X.
“I want to raise it. Make this go faster.”
“You know how important it is for them not to get everything they ask. Besides, you said so yourself, you don’t have that kind of money.”
“No, but I can get closer to it.” He takes a marker and draws a new dot on the chart, farther away from his last offer and much closer to the ransom.
Guillermo shakes his head. “It’s your choice, but I don’t recommend it.”
“I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of feeling inadequate. This is it.” Although he wasn’t completely sure until he said it out loud, Andres knows now there’s no going back. With every important decision he’s made in his life, he’s had the luxury of time and a safe estimate of the outcome. This decision he’s just making because he has to, because there comes a time when doing anything is better than the alternative.
Andres calls his mother and tells her he’s ready to talk to Mr. Graves, but he won’t negotiate anything outside his home. Everything has to be done within the safety of these walls, if even that exists. They agree to talk over dinner, and Lorena makes arrangements with Consuelo for each aspect of the meal.
“The children will eat earlier. This is a very serious meeting, you see.” Andres can’t help but notice a tinge of excitement in her voice. Is she happy that he’ll have nothing now? He thinks this and immediately regrets it. He’ll have Marabela back, and that should be enough.
Except he still doesn’t know how long she’ll stay this time. And if she does stay, he’ll never know if she’s staying out of fear or from a genuine desire to be with him.
DAY 13
It’s a bleak, quiet Tuesday night. Andres has asked Guillermo to take the children to the movies and without them the house feels abandoned, too peaceful for his own comfort. Andres dresses in a dark suit—the same one he wore to the wedding of one of his colleague’s daughters last month—and tries to imagine Marabela at his side. She would be happy to learn he’s selling the company. When the first offers from Graves came in last year, they made love like they hadn’t since their twenties. Every night that Andres considered it, Marabela came to bed rejuvenated. Maybe she imagined he would change once he’d let go of his life’s work. She always said it tied him down, that it was a burden he carried with him everywhere, even in his sleep. She’d talk about all the free time he’d have, how this would be a new beginning, but the truth was he couldn’t fathom starting something else. His company was not something he could set aside and be done with. When is one finished with love, or a friendship, or a child? When he tried explaining this to her, Marabela again grew distant.
By the time she left, it took Andres almost an entire day to notice; he’d gotten so used to rarely speaking with her, rarely getting a call from her to check in.
When Graves arrives for dinner, they talk about the new board members he’ll bring in, many from the United States and parts of Europe, to advise him on how to best grow the company once his and Andres’s businesses are merged. He talks about it like it’s a done deal, like they’ve signed the papers and there are no hard feelings. Even worse, he talks about his people like they’re not people at all. They are their titles, not their names. They are their job descriptions, not their hobbies or accomplishments.
“Your advisers are willing to move here? With their families?” Andres asks.
“Why wouldn’t they be?”
Andres has been noticing trends in the papers. The new money lies in US imports—top executives of banks or tobacco companies or soft drink corporations. “You don’t worry for their safety?”
“We insure them, Andres. You know how it is.”
Of course, he wants to say. Of course he knows this all too late.
“And what about my employees? Most of them have been with the company for ten years or more.”
“We’ll keep as many of them as we can so long as there are no redundancies. No point in having two people doing one person’s job, just because one was there first.” Graves laughs as if the alternative is the most absurd thing he’s ever heard. Loyalty means nothing to him; the thought makes Andres lose his appetite. This is why he swore never to do business with him, years ago, when even Marabela was smitten by his charm and his ultrasupportive wife.
As if reading his mind, Graves wipes his mouth and asks, “How is Marabela? I was hoping to see her tonight.”
“She’s visiting friends in Florida,” Andres says. He has become more comfortable with this lie. In Florida, he imagines, people drive any car they want and wear the most extravagant clothes without worrying about attracting danger like a magnet.
They are only on their second course and already Andres is tired of the pleasantries and small talk. He starts growing curt, speaking in monosyllables and answering questions with a yes or a no, fully aware that his mother is probably burning from embarrassment. She’s kept quiet most of dinner, but now she starts dominating the conversation, telling a story about her husband back in the day, how he spent a summer in London watching the Olympics with friends.
“He was fascinated by the runners, how their legs could go so fast that when the race was over they’d just collapse. My husband’s business partner, Saul, preferred watching the swim meets, so they’d argue about which was better: land or water. Never were two business partners more opposite than they were,” Lorena says.
“There is as much beauty in teamwork as there is in competition,” Graves says. But there is no
sincerity in his voice, and Andres realizes they are more alike than he’d like to think. He wants to buy his company not just because it’s good business, but because he wants to be the last one standing. He wants all the pieces to himself.
“You know, you don’t have to say things you don’t mean just to humor my mother,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“It just seems a silly thing for you to say. You love being the only one in charge. And you’ll love it even more with less competition, right?”
The silence speaks volumes. Lorena looks like she wants to protest, but keeps quiet in the end, and Graves only chuckles like he’s been caught enjoying himself in the naughtiest kind of way.
“Let’s just get this over with,” Andres says.
They skip dessert and go straight to the paperwork. Andres recognizes most of it from the last time they played this game, only now there’s no backing out at the last moment. After he’s signed away his company and confirmed the transfer of funds, Andres lets his mother escort Graves to the door.
“I don’t see why you felt the need to burn a bridge,” she tells him once Graves is gone. “You’re starting over now. You’ll need connections.”
It occurs to him that maybe he won’t.
“Maybe it’s time I found some new bridges to cross,” he says, surprised at the relief that overcomes him, the realization that his only responsibilities in this world have been stripped down to the basics. Right now, he is a man in charge of taking care of his family, nothing else. For one delusional moment it makes him smile.
Andres finds Carla and Consuelo in their room, which he hasn’t entered since he first moved into this house nearly twenty years ago and Marabela decided this would become the maids’ quarters. He has a vague recollection of how it looked back then: small, but with a refreshing amount of light coming in through the window. Perhaps a quarter the size of his room, tucked behind the hallway leading out to the garage, the maids’ room is another place he passes every day without noticing. He is beginning to realize his house is full of hidden spaces he can’t claim as his own.
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