Close Reach

by Jonathan Moore

  “Oh, Lena.”

  “Anyway, that’s how I got the scar.”

  Kelly felt the girl’s tears fall onto her collarbone. She held Lena and marveled at her. The depth of her love, the endless bank of it.

  “What about yours?” Lena asked. “This one.”

  She brushed her fingertip along the line of Kelly’s neck, just under her jaw. The old scar had healed to a delicate white against the rich caramel of Kelly’s skin. She wore it like a necklace, never trying to hide it. It stood for everything she’d put behind in a distance of years and circumstance, if not miles.

  “It’s old,” she said.

  She thought about how to tell the story, whether to tell it at all. She decided to go ahead. They were where they were, and a story from the past wasn’t going to make it any worse.

  “I was in the eighth grade. We lived in New Haven, in Connecticut. My dad was a cab driver. My mom was working in her brother’s grocery store if they needed extra help. So there wasn’t much, and we lived in a rough part of town. I’d saved all year and signed up for a semester of this after-school science program—”

  A door slammed somewhere nearby, and then they heard footsteps approaching across the rocky ground. Lena’s arms squeezed Kelly hard around the waist, and they each scooted backward in the cage so that they were in the far corner, away from the trapdoor.

  The footsteps came close to the sidewall of their building and then stopped. Kelly heard a zipper, then the sound of urine streaming onto the stones.

  They’re drinking, she thought. They’ll wait till they’ve killed half the bottle, and then—

  But she stopped the thought in midstream. It wouldn’t do her any good. And if Lena could feel fear coming through Kelly’s skin, it wouldn’t do the girl any good either.

  Outside, the stream stopped and the zipper went up. The footsteps crunched away.

  After five minutes, Lena relaxed her grip and Kelly could breathe again. She petted her hands through Lena’s hair and down her back, looked through the cage bars at the gray light outside the building, and told her scar’s story.

  “I was walking home from school in the dark. Three high school boys in a pickup truck drove past. It was a new truck. They were white kids, not from the neighborhood. They circled back once and honked, then circled again. They’d come looking for pot. Or maybe for someone like me.”

  Kelly looked at Dean again. He was still sleeping. The story she’d told him about the scar was true, but it left a lot out. She hadn’t wanted him to expect less of her, to have a shortcut for thinking of who she’d been instead of who she’d become. What shamed her was not what the boys had done to her but the poverty that had put her in that position to begin with.

  “It was snowing. Nobody was on the street. They stopped after passing me three times and rolled down the window. Said they’d drive me home. I knew better, but I was cold. I didn’t have a good coat. Just an old windbreaker, a thrift store thing, and I was cold all the time that winter. I thought the worst that’d happen was they’d want me to smoke pot. Or maybe they’d want to stop somewhere else, like a club. A party at one of their friends’ houses. And if I didn’t like it, if they were mean to me because I wasn’t in their circle, I could just go. So I got in.”

  She stopped and thought about it, remembering the way it had gone. They hadn’t even waited till they got to a house.

  It started right there, in the truck.

  “It’s always worse than you think it could be,” Lena said.

  Kelly nodded.

  “They took me on a Friday. One of them, his parents were gone. So they took me to his house, kept me through Sunday night. Then they dumped me back where they found me, with nothing but my windbreaker and this cut on my neck from the wire they’d used.”

  They’d said all kinds of things that weekend. Called her an Indian ghetto princess and a raghead and a whore. Talked about killing her. Cutting her up and cooking her to see if she’d taste like curry. She’d begged to be let go, and in the end one of them had done it. He’d been the weak one: the cruelest in front of the others but the one with no stomach for it. The others had gone to steal beer, and he’d volunteered to stay behind. To watch her. She thought either he was going to finally kill her with the wire noose and the pillow or he was going to let her go. He’d looked at her for a while as he finished his beer, and then he’d shrugged his shoulders like it was nothing special, and he’d taken her back to Goffe Street. He’d said he’d tell his friends she got away, and she’d nodded. As if it mattered where he’d stand with them later.

  At the time, maybe it did matter to her. She’d never figured that part of it out.

  When the police brought her father to the hospital, when he saw she had no clothes but her coat, he’d gone white with rage. He hadn’t done anything there. Not in front of the cops, with the nurses surrounding Kelly’s bed. But he hadn’t forgotten it, either. A week later, when she was strong enough to take it, he’d beaten her. Her mother stood in the tiny kitchen and wailed at the water-sagged ceiling as her father worked her over head to toe with his belt and his fists.

  She’d spent most of the next four years living on friend’s couches, staying in spare bedrooms for as long as the adults would allow it. There were more consequential scars, deep wounds that in healing had left her barren. But the scar on her neck was the platinum chain that reminded her to walk straight ahead and never look back. To never accept anything but what she’d worked for and to work for everything in sight. She held Lena and watched Dean sleep. He hadn’t saved her. She’d done that for herself; she’d fought for all she had. Even the charity and the scholarships she’d gotten. But her life with Dean was a measure of how far she’d come, a signpost marking the distance between Goffe Street and Mystic.

  She told Lena some of this just to talk, but she was thinking of other things.

  Four or five years ago Lena had given a kidney. She’d have been tested first for tissue matching. There would be records of that. Files that could be uploaded and then bounced through space from Scotland to a satellite phone somewhere in the Southern Ocean. Information that could be as dangerous to Lena as the knife in David’s hand.

  Sour Breath, who’d brought the soup, came in the early dawn with a wheelbarrow.

  Kelly saw the way he paused and cocked his ear toward the other building, listening for sounds. And then she saw the contents of the wheelbarrow. It held a woolen army blanket and a few ratty towels, and there was a cedar bucket of steaming water. The man was doing something he wasn’t allowed to do. She sat higher and looked at him in a new way.

  There’d been something different about Sour Breath from the start.

  On La Araña, he’d been the one who dragged Lena from the trap with a gaff. But he’d been wearing a mask then, and now that it was off, he couldn’t meet Kelly’s eyes. He could watch her, certainly. Could watch her body beneath the blanket, could watch her when she came naked out of the trap to help Dean. His mouth hanging open and his rotten breath fogging around him as he panted. But he looked down or away whenever she looked in his face.

  As he pushed the wheelbarrow in, she thought about that, what it might mean.

  Lena woke. Sour Breath spoke to her in Spanish, back and forth for a minute or two in a low whisper. He was crouched next to the cage with his right hand cupped by the side of his face.

  Then Lena spoke into Kelly’s ear.

  “He’ll let you out for a bit. You can bathe Dean and tend him. And you can give him the blanket and a towel to put under his head.”

  Kelly’s throat swelled shut. She didn’t want to be grateful to this man. She didn’t want to think this was generous. She began to cry anyway.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “He’ll give you about ten minutes. After, you and I can bathe. And he’ll let us each go into the corner and use it, you know, like a toilet. If you need to.”

  Kelly nodded.

  “Tell him I’ll come out and take care of
Dean. I’ll be fast. Do I need to leave my blanket, or can I keep it on this time?”

  Lena whispered to the man, who answered with a nod.

  “You don’t have to leave it.”

  “Okay. Tell him I said thank you. Tell him I said he’s doing the right thing and we’re glad for it.”

  Lena told him, and Sour Breath nodded again as he knelt and unlocked the trap. In spite of the tears and the catch in her chest, Kelly knew he was it. He was the weak spot Dean had told her to find. The thing she would have to break to win their freedom. She looked at him, and she decided right then: he wasn’t a man. He was just Sour Breath. A thing. She could destroy a thing and move on without a glance backward. Morality had no part in it. She’d stopped crying but let the tears stay on her cheeks. She looked at the man and pretended a weak smile. He held the door open, and she came out.

  * * *

  Dean hardly woke for his bath. She pulled the exposure suit off him, its inside foul with blood and urine, with yellowed pus and the stink of infected wounds. She put one of the towels under his head and then stripped him naked and cleaned him as best she could with the hot water from the bucket. It was salt water. She supposed that nearby there must be a place where boiling seawater pooled over the smoking rocks, and the man had simply dipped this bucket in. Dean’s legs had deep, infected wounds where the harpoon had gone through and where they’d snagged him behind his knee with the landing hook.

  She cleaned the wounds but had no soap and no antiseptic. His shinbones were broken, but not as badly as she’d feared. The breaks were not compounded: the bones hadn’t torn past muscle or punched through skin. But his shins were bruised black in heavy circles. They’d hammered him with a mallet to break him.

  Tomorrow she’d be aboard Freefall for the videoconference and would beg to bring back the first aid kit. But for now this was the best she could do. When she was finished, she wrapped Dean in the thick wool blanket and scraped out the rocks from underneath him so he’d have a smooth place to rest. She tossed his soiled clothes toward the wall, where their stench would be far from him.

  When she was done, she carried the bucket back to the cage. Sour Breath hadn’t picked up a rock this time. He was beginning to trust her. That was important. She nodded to him, and he returned the gesture. Then Lena crawled from the trap, and the two of them squatted on the rocks at the man’s feet and bathed in the hot seawater from the bucket. It smelled like broken stones and sulfur, like something that had bled from wounded ground. Lena scrubbed her skin with a wet stone until she was pink and steaming, and then she scooped water into her hair and washed it with her fingers. When they were done, they took turns peeing in the corner, and the man watched that, too.

  Lena went into the cage first. She put the blanket over herself and huddled, shivering. Kelly looked at Lena and then at the man. Before she ducked into the cage again, she knew she had to test him. To condition him for what would come later. She came up to him and put her left hand on his shoulder and quickly leaned up to kiss the corner of his mouth. She pulled back and went into the cage before he could put his arms around her, and she felt as if she’d gotten away with kissing a pit viper.

  If she could charm this snake, she could kill it.

  Lena hadn’t seen the kiss, and she was glad for that. She didn’t want to explain.

  * * *

  Later, while Lena slept, Kelly took one of the chicken leg bones from the empty pot and began to work on it with a shard of rock that she pried through the wire floor of the cage. When she was finished, it hardly looked like a human tool. It was like something an archaeologist might sift from the rubble of a dig to hold in his palm and wonder how men could fall so low. What desperation, what poverty, would drive a man to make such a thing? She drew her dark hair into a ponytail and knotted it around the bone to hide it. Finally, she curled herself behind Lena and went to sleep.

  In the brief darkness near midnight, Kelly heard the Zodiac shuttling back and forth from the shore. She heard footsteps over the rocks and the heavy thumps of crates falling into the small boat and the creak of a block and tackle as the men raised cargo aboard La Araña. She heard more arguing and then the deep rumble of La Araña’s engines as the mechanic tested them and let them idle up to running temperature. The engines cut, and she heard one more Zodiac run and footsteps crunching from the shore to the other hut. The door slammed, and there was silence again.

  Their first hour at the island, the men had argued about who would make a delivery. They must have decided, because they were ready for it now. The boat was loaded, the engines tuned.

  Lena was awake and also had listened. She wiped the tears from her eyes and lay down again, covering her head with the blanket. She shuddered as she cried, and Kelly held her close.

  What the girl suspected, Kelly knew.

  Everything these men did had a purpose. They wouldn’t have given Lena the Eldoncard test for nothing, wouldn’t have transmitted her heartbeat through a satellite phone unless the man on the other end of the line had demanded it. If David had found Lena’s CHI number before he kidnapped her, he’d been watching her from afar, monitoring her movements south every time she updated her online journal.

  Lena was carrying his prize, and everything else was just bycatch. Beneath her shaking palms Kelly could feel Lena’s heart racing.

  It would all begin in the morning.

  The men, all five of them, stood around the trap.

  “It’s time,” David said. “For your call.”

  She looked up at him. He was wearing another set of new clothes, fresh out of whatever box he’d stolen them from. The other men around him were carrying pipes and lengths of rusty chain.

  “I’ll have time to clean up—put on some clothes? They’ll see me.”

  “Sure. You’ll get some time.”

  He looked at the man next to him, Sour Breath, the weak link, and nodded at the trapdoor. The man squatted and brought out the key; a minute later, Kelly pulled her blanket tight and came out. She met his eyes, and he looked away quickly. It would be different if the other men were gone. She was sure of that, counting on it. They had a few secrets between them, and that would make him comfortable.

  David took her arm and started pulling her away, but she didn’t take her eyes off Lena.

  The girl was past tears. She was on her knees with her hands wound into the chain-link wall. Her eyes were bruised-looking from the crying, from the days without sleep. Sour Breath left the cage unlocked and stood, following David as he pulled Kelly away. The other three men were opening the trapdoor again when David yanked Kelly out of the building.

  Lena’s screaming started while they were on the rocky beach, walking to the Zodiac, which lay half in the water. Kelly tried to stop and turn back, but David’s grip on her arm tightened as if his fingers were made of iron. He jerked her forward.

  “Lena’s not your problem.”

  “Please don’t let them hurt her. Let her come with me. She can sit on Freefall while I make the call.”

  David didn’t answer but marched her toward the Zodiac. She tripped and fell on her knees, but David didn’t stop. He dragged her for ten paces until she staggered up, wrenching her arm against his grip and trying to look back at the building.

  Sour Breath was already at the Zodiac.

  He held its bow steady as David led Kelly in and sat her on the wooden bench. Sour Breath shoved them off and climbed in. He started the outboard and backed them in a half circle until the bow faced Freefall. Then he threw the engine into forward, and the bow lifted off the glassy water of the inner harbor as they raced away from the beach. David let go of her arm and turned to speak in Spanish with the other man. Sour Breath took something wrapped in a scrap of oil-soaked chamois leather and gave it to David, who took the pistol from its wrapping and put it in the cargo pocket on the side of his khaki pants.

  Of course she’d known they’d have guns. What frightened her was that she’d never seen them until now. Thes
e men were so comfortable with their power that they didn’t need guns to back them up. But now David was carrying a pistol. He’d come this far without carrying one, but he wanted one now. Something was changing.

  Sour Breath cut the throttle. The Zodiac lurched and slowed as it settled in the water and ate its own bow wave. They slowed to a halt at Freefall’s side, and the man stood on the Zodiac’s inflated tube and held fast to the yacht’s toe rail. He didn’t kill the engine and he made no move to bring a rope and tie the Zodiac off. He wasn’t coming aboard. She’d be alone with David.

  She could feel the chicken bone, tight in the dark knot of her hair. If she and David were alone together on the boat, she might have a chance to use it. Gun or no gun. He might not see it coming if he forgot to keep his distance, if he was distracted somehow. But the other four men would still be on the island with Dean and Lena.

  “Hey!”

  She looked up. David had already climbed aboard Freefall. He stood on the side deck, looking down at her.

  “Get up here.”

  She nodded. To get aboard, she had to take the blanket off her shoulders and toss it to the deck. Then she bounced on the balls of her feet from the Zodiac’s side tube and hoisted herself on the toe rail, rolling onto the deck on her side. She picked up the blanket and put it on again as she stood.

  David pointed the pistol at the flat of her stomach. It was a snub-nosed black thing. She didn’t know anything about guns. This one looked as deadly as anything she’d ever seen, like a scarred-up fighting dog. She thought of what the bullets would do if he pulled the trigger, the holes he could tear through her with just the flex of one finger. She thought of what she’d do with the gun if she could get it.

  “Let’s go inside,” David said.

  She nodded and turned her back to him, walking to the cockpit. She heard the Zodiac motoring away, back to the island. More faintly, she could hear Lena screaming. They must have dragged her out of the building and to the beach. She didn’t dare turn back and look. She ducked into the open pilothouse and bent to the companionway doors. David was right behind her, his hand on her hip.