During the day when the children are at school, Marabela spends most of her time in the garden. The walls in the house suffocate her, but she doesn’t dare step beyond them into the streets. Instead she sends Guillermo to the market to buy flower seeds—any he can find, as long as they are colorful and plentiful. By ten o’clock in the morning she’s on her knees with her fingers in the cold, dark soil, planting the seeds in little holes she digs with her own hands, covering them gently and humming as she goes on to the next. Guillermo sits on the patio, drinking chicha quietly but for the deep ching ching of his ice cubes. When he leaves to pick up the kids from school, Marabela eats her lunch on the patio. She nibbles on light pieces of ceviche and kernels of choclo until the kids come home.
Little by little the sun puts life back into her. Most of her bruises have faded, and when she strips to shower at the end of the day she can see the traces of scars along her shoulders and legs are growing fainter. She tries to eat more and more each day, and has begun setting small goals for herself to measure her recovery. Four steps up the stairs without using the railing is progress; five is cause for a private smile. She’s not sure if the exercise is helping, but she’s tired of staying still. When Andres suggests she rest while he makes dinner, she paces back and forth along the hallway upstairs, passing her bedroom, his office, the children’s rooms, and, finally, her darkroom. She longs to go inside but the thought of such tight quarters keeps her moving past it.
It’s strange, but Marabela resents Guillermo’s unobtrusiveness, how he’s constantly there but tries to hide his presence. When she walks into a room, he pretends to ignore her, avoids looking directly at her, even though they know it is his sole purpose to look after her. As soon as she turns away, she feels his gaze shift in her direction.
This morning she is not in the mood for it. Marabela turns around swiftly and bellows out, “Good morning!” more loudly than she expected to. Only she is caught off guard by her voice; Guillermo simply smiles and nods hello back, his lips tight.
“Do you need any help?” he asks, taking a few steps toward her.
She estimates that he is a foot taller than she is, but the crick in her neck the closer he gets tells her otherwise. Marabela shakes her head no as she rummages through the drawers, slamming them shut each time her search proves fruitless. She knows she could easily tell him what she’s looking for, but she’s tired of feeling helpless. Knowing that Guillermo is watching and waiting, she exaggerates her motions, moving abruptly from one end of the kitchen to the next. In her periphery she watches him follow her with his eyes.
“There you are,” she says. Consuelo’s meat-cutting scissors are sharper than any knife atop the counter. They’re tucked away, hidden from little hands.
Marabela pulls them out slowly. She snaps the scissors open and shut, runs her thumb across the blades to test their sharpness. When she’s satisfied, she wraps her palms around the pointy end and makes her way upstairs.
“Señora?” Guillermo says as she reaches the staircase.
She hadn’t realized he’d followed her down the hall.
“What?”
“Do you need any help?” It’s the same question he asked earlier, but now his tone has changed. Guillermo points at the scissors.
Confused, she starts to wave him off. The realization hits her just as they lock eyes. “Oh! No. It’s just for a skirt I’m taking in,” she says. “All my clothes float on me lately.”
“I know a great tailor,” he says.
“You know all sorts of people, don’t you?”
“Señora?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry. Never mind. I was just saying you seem to be very resourceful.”
He smiles. “That’s a nice way of putting it.”
“It’s meant to be a compliment. If you knew me, you’d know—”
“I understand. Thank you.”
They stand in silence, face-to-face since Marabela is a couple of steps up. She wishes he’d turn around first but knows it’s not in his nature. “Thank you for the offer, but I’d rather do the sewing myself. It’s a welcome distraction.”
“Of course. If you need anything at all . . .”
“I know,” she says, surprised to find herself feeling grateful for his warmth. “I know.”
Cynthia has started referring to herself in the third person. “She wants an ice cream,” she says when the man with a D’Onofrio cart passes in front of the house. Or “Can she have a Doña Pepa?” if she wants something sweet before dinner.
One day Guillermo brings her home from school as Marabela is wiping the soil stains from her knees. Cynthia drags him out to the garden by the arm and tugs on her mother’s gardening apron, smiling a gap-filled smile. “Do you want to play a game she just learned?”
Despite the odd phrasing, Marabela realizes she’s discovering a new part of her daughter, witnessing a new growth. It doesn’t matter that Cynthia speaks as if she is talking about someone else; her usual shyness around adults other than her parents seems to have melted away.
Marabela falls back on the grass and takes Cynthia with her. “A ver, ¿cómo va?”
It’s a simple game Guillermo taught her on the way home. Standing next to her, Cynthia leads Marabela across the yard, making sure that both are using the same legs. She sings a chant to keep a rhythm, but with Cynthia’s small legs, it isn’t long before they’re both off track.
“Now you have to move back!” she shouts. “Four steps!” She giggles like a child. Like herself.
It takes them countless tries to get across the yard, and eventually Cynthia insists that Guillermo join them. He hesitates at first, but it’s clear to Marabela that the man has trouble saying no to her daughter. Cynthia stands in the middle, holding both their hands with her arms up as if she were swinging from a tree. They take three steps before they have to move back again, and as they do, Guillermo and Marabela lift her into the air, her legs dangling like ribbons in the wind.
“Again, again!” she says.
When they’re done, Marabela’s entire body is sore. Her stomach aches from laughter and her arms feel cold and stiff from lifting Cynthia too many times to count. She rubs her worn thighs and smiles at the pain.
There’s an hour in the day, after dinner’s done and the kitchen’s been cleaned up and the kids are about to shower, when everyone retreats upstairs and all the lights on the first floor of the house are dimmed. That flip of the last switch is a moment Andres cherishes, a sigh of relief at another day’s accomplishments. As he double-checks the locks in the house, he can hear the quiet footsteps of his family overhead, the tucking away of worries and tasks that can be attended to tomorrow. Briefly, he lets himself fade into the shadows of his home, feeling untethered and content.
No one notices when Andres uses these few minutes to make a phone call. He dials the facility by memory, counting the long, low buzzes on the other line. The staff never lets him talk to Elena—the patients don’t have phones in their rooms and it is against the rules to disturb them for a simple phone call—but Betty gives him updates in quick whispers. She’s fine, she went for a walk today, she told him last week. She didn’t have much of an appetite—a few days ago. Tonight Betty tells him that Elena didn’t wake till late in the afternoon, but that she received the flowers he sent and went promptly back to bed.
“I’ll be by to visit soon. It’s just been hard to get away lately. I wouldn’t feel right leaving.” He doesn’t know why he tells Betty this, as if she’ll relay the message. When they hang up, he calls his mother and asks her to check on Elena for him. She agrees to go first thing the next morning.
Andres climbs the stairs and is quietly making his way to the bedroom when a thin shadow in his office catches his eye. The door is slightly ajar, so he leans into the threshold to peek through and finds Marabela, haunting the room like a ghost. Her gaze floats over the hardwood surface, empty and weightless. It strikes him that she has become so utterly unnoticeable. There was a time when
she could walk into a room and the chatter went down a decibel, as if everyone had stopped to hold their breath. Now no one would notice her; they wouldn’t even notice the absence of her.
He’s hardly been in his office since Marabela’s return. Last week Guillermo took all the contents of the darkroom and emptied them back into these quarters, and Andres hasn’t felt up to the task of sifting through them. A stack of cue cards sits next to his phone. The list of questions—some of them crossed off because he changed his mind about asking them, others checked off because he did ask—are faceup on his desk. The tapes, the recorder, and all the cables they had to run are tangled in a small mountain at the very center. Marabela stands behind his desk, arms crossed over her chest, and reads the papers, pausing only to flip each sheet with two stiff fingers, as if the paper is toxic and she’s afraid it might rub off.
Andres can’t decide if he should interrupt her or let her have this moment. If she’s ever wondered what he went through while she was gone, what kinds of decisions he was faced with, this is her chance to understand. He knows it’s selfish of him. He knows he could never compare his experience with her own, but this was all he had.
Her hands meander over to the tapes, the ones Ignacio carefully labeled with the date, time, and a circled number designating their order. When her fingers glide over the play button, Andres steps through the threshold.
“Please don’t. You don’t want to hear it, Mari. Maybe it’s better to just put it behind you.”
She startles a little; he sees it in the way her neck looks like a tree for a moment, tendons stiff as roots, and then relaxes as she pulls her sweater close.
“It’s just a morbid curiosity. I could always tell when he was talking to you. I could never understand the words, of course. But no one else spoke like he did,” she says, with a hint of admiration. “It made me wonder—how does one negotiate a life for money? You wouldn’t think there’d be much negotiating at all. Just a man who hands over whatever is necessary.”
“I wish it had been that easy.” He takes a step closer to her and places his hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t welcome it but doesn’t push away. The indifference hurts the most.
“I guess it seems simple. Someone puts a price on something and you want it, so you pay. It’s not the kind of thing I imagined you’d overthink,” she says.
He tries to remember how Guillermo explained it to him, in those days that seem like months ago. “But there had to be a strategy. For the long term. So they wouldn’t keep coming back, like we’re some ATM machine that can be easily replenished.”
“They said you were better at protecting your money than your wife.”
“And you believed that?”
“I know what they were trying to do, but there are very few things to hold on to in a place like that. Enough time passes and you start believing the lies.”
“Mari, I swear. I did the best I could. They thought we were millionaires. I don’t know where they got their numbers. Even if I’d wanted to, I simply didn’t have it.”
She points to the stack of cue cards, at the top one facing up. “You did everything you had to do, flawlessly. It’s a good thing you had plenty of time to rehearse your lines.”
He tries to argue, but she’s already gone, vanished from the room noiselessly. The air feels thinner, the space emptier. Everywhere she goes, she seems to take something with her. She is a void that can never be filled.
10
MORE THAN ANYTHING, she enjoys sitting outside on the backyard patio. The space is larger than the entire first floor, and although it’s enclosed by three thick cement walls, Marabela no longer feels trapped when she looks up at the sky. In the two weeks since she’s been back, the weather has started to turn cold, but she doesn’t mind the chill against her skin. She is fresh out of the shower, moist and dewy from a lilac-scented lotion she found underneath her sink, and when the wind touches her body she feels the breeze wrapping itself around her rather than passing her by. When she closes her eyes she feels light again.
Her friends have been calling, every few days as Andres explained they did in her absence. She’s let him assure them she’s home and safe and resting, but she hasn’t felt ready to speak to them yet. Initially she didn’t want them to see her in the state she was in, but as the days have passed, Marabela feels the need to protect this moment in her life. It’s an odd kind of blessing, to be able to dedicate time to yourself so completely. It’s also fragile; amid moments of simplicity, she still gets flashes of terror.
And yet this morning, when Andres suggested she invite friends over as a way to settle back into her life, Marabela surprised herself by agreeing. She requested that Consuelo and Carla visit, causing Andres to give her a brief, questioning look before he made the call. She had to resist the urge to tell him that these women had always been there for the most normal parts of her day. Their absence has been like a bruise that refuses to heal. Marabela has yet to discuss how much Andres paid for her ransom, or what sacrifices he had to make, but from the looks of the house—the way the dust has accumulated on the light switches, the stickiness of the handles on the kitchen cabinets—it’s clear that her confidantes were the first to go. Marabela knows she shouldn’t resent Andres for their absence, but she simply can’t help it. He never could understand the level of trust she had with Consuelo and Carla; to him, they were expendable.
“I sent Guillermo to pick them up,” he tells her, clearly uncomfortable as he sits down across from her. He crosses his leg in a wide ninety-degree angle, then closes them as if to command less space. He rests both arms on the chair, then only one as he leans his chin on his fist.
It seems wasteful to her, to have a bodyguard doing a driver’s job when his salary alone could probably cover the costs of two maids, even ones who, at Marabela’s insistence, were paid more generously than most.
“Are you thirsty?” she asks. It is really her way of telling him that she is.
He brings out glasses of store-bought lemonade that is far too sweet, but Marabela doesn’t complain. She relishes drinking something other than the lukewarm water she survived on in captivity, now preferring Coke and teas drowned in honey. She laughs at Andres’s face, the way his mouth puckers with each sip.
They hear the garage open, the door creak, and a cacophony of footsteps and plastic bags being brought into the kitchen. Someone gasps behind her, and from that one small sound she recognizes Consuelo. She stands to hug her, and Carla joins them, embracing Marabela’s back.
“Gracias a Dios,” Consuelo says, over and over again. “I prayed for you every day and every night. I just knew He’d watch over you and return you home safely!”
Carla holds Marabela’s hand and mumbles that she missed her. Without realizing it, by standing so close to one another and speaking in hushed voices, they’ve shut Andres out of the conversation. When they finally sit down, he offers Consuelo his chair, even though there is an empty one right next to him. Nobody protests when he excuses himself.
Marabela is in awe of how Consuelo and Carla look. They are fresh faced and radiant, the only people she’s been reunited with who are consumed by happiness at her return. Her family always seems so hesitant, no doubt wondering exactly what she’s been through.
“I’m so happy you’re both here. Home doesn’t feel the same without you.”
“It will in time,” Consuelo says. “I made you some chicken and rice the way you like it, a little mushy.” She holds up a clear container tainted green from the cilantro the rice was cooked in.
“You didn’t have to do that. Thank you.” She turns to Carla. “You look happy.”
“Because you’re back, señora.”
Marabela has tried for months to get Carla to call her by her first name. Señora makes her feel old; it puts her on a pedestal she has done nothing to earn. Consuelo at least calls her Doña, but over the years the word became an endearment, a nickname only she can use.
“How are the children?�
�� Consuelo asks.
“They’re fine. They’re a little afraid, I think. I don’t know if it’s because they worry they’ll lose me again, or that we’re no longer safe.”
“Cynthia never understood the situation. We never told her exactly what happened,” Consuelo says. “I think Ignacio just wished he could have done something to bring you home sooner.”
“I don’t think that frustration has left him. If anything, it’s probably intensified,” Marabela says.
“Youth doesn’t always make one ignorant. Some simply struggle with the knowledge of the pieces they’re missing.”
“How much does he know?”
“I don’t know details, of course. But it seemed to me that Señor Jimenez tried to keep him out of it. He and Guillermo were always locked up in your room upstairs, but I think your son snuck in there a few times. The last couple of days they were in there together.”
“Was he home a lot? My husband?”
Carla glances at Consuelo.
“He didn’t go to the office much,” says Carla, looking at her hands. “His mother brought him papers and things—”
“Yes, I heard Lorena was here,” Marabela says. She would be surprised that Andres still hasn’t mentioned it, except he’s barely mentioned anything to her about what happened while she was away. Intent as he is on planning for their new future, he doesn’t seem to realize that Marabela needs to catch up on all the things she’s missed.
“Moments like these make old feuds seem irrelevant, don’t they, Doña?”
“Of course,” she says, only she doesn’t really believe it. She thinks of the moments she experienced—nothing like the ones everyone else did. Her moments constantly promised to be her last. Time was cruel to her; it stretched for weeks that felt like months, but still nothing changed. During her first days in captivity, when it still felt so unreal, neither the darkness nor the voices upstairs could destroy her hopes and prayers. But the human soul adapts all too quickly, no matter how unexpected the circumstances. The days repeated like a tape stuck on replay, until there was nothing left to look forward to. Eventually the only thing she could be sure of was that she would die, on a day just like the previous one, in a dark room with her arm tied to a bike rack that’d been wedged into the cement floor. The only uncertainty, and thus the real torture, was the question of when.
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