He pauses and grips the steering wheel with both hands, moving the palm of one hand over the ridges of the leather as if to keep his hand from hitting something else.
“I hope that one day you will tell me the truth,” he adds, not looking at me. “About what’s happening to you. About what really happened in Budapest. And if that has anything to do with what you’re doing now.”
“There is nothing to tell,” I say.
“Dammit! I am not Vonnegut!”
“No, you are Niklas, the only person in this world whom I trust.” I point out ahead. “Drop us off there. I’ll need to get a new car.”
Despite wanting nothing more than to shout at me all day until I tell him something satisfying, Niklas drops it altogether. Discipline. Something he will never have.
We pull through the front gate of a car dealership.
“Around to the side,” I say. “Wait for me there.”
Without objection, Niklas does as I say and parks on the side of the building next to another customer vehicle.
Before I get out, I glance back once at the girl, Sarai. She’s motionless and lost. Her eyes are open, but whatever it is that she’s staring at somehow I know she doesn’t really see. I want her to look upon me, just for a moment. But she never does and I walk away.
Sarai
I feel like I should be like Cordelia, sitting next to me wide awake yet unaware of it herself. I know it will take her months of therapy to overcome what she’s gone through. I know because I went through the same thing after I watched my mother die.
The only way I’m anything like poor Cordelia is that I can’t find the will to speak. I just sit here, letting the time pass and being completely incoherent to it, numb to its efforts to cause me discomfort. Fifteen minutes could be two hours and I truly wouldn’t know the difference.
Unlike Cordelia, I’m aware of everything around me. I just don’t care.
Sometime later, Victor emerges from the building and opens my door on the SUV. He just looks at me for a moment as if waiting for something, I guess for me to get out.
I look over at him, letting my head fall sideways against the seat. “You didn’t have to leave her there.”
“Yes I did,” he says and takes my hand. “She’ll be found soon, if she hasn’t already. You have my word.”
I take Victor’s hand, but glance over at Cordelia before I get out.
“What about her?”
Victor turns his gaze on Niklas in the driver’s seat.
“No long stops in-between,” he instructs. “Meet Guzmán at the waypoint we discussed. The money for his daughter. Inform him of the turn of events and that we could not control Javier’s absence, but the job will be done.”
“Whatever you say, Victor,” Niklas agrees flatly, his words tinged with bitterness and disappointment.
Victor tugs on my hand and I get out of the SUV.
As we are walking away, Niklas stops us:
“Where will you go?” he asks, hanging partially out the window with his arm resting on the door.
“For now,” Victor says, “Tucson. Await my contact for the rest.”
Niklas drives away.
As Victor walks alongside me toward a shiny new dark gray car, I fall back behind him for a moment.
“Why are we going to Tucson?”
He stops mid-stride and turns around to face me.
“I’m taking you home.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
When I see ‘home’ on the horizon many minutes later, it doesn’t affect me the way that I always dreamed it would. I don’t even lift my head from the passenger’s side window to look at it as we roll by. Because I know there’s nothing for me here.
Instead of gazing out at the city, I watch the black asphalt move rapidly as we coast over it.
“Where do you live?” Victor asks.
Finally, I lift my head and turn to face him.
“Why are you doing this?”
Victor sighs and puts his eyes back on the road.
“Because I think you’ve seen enough.”
He pulls the car into a roadside convenience store parking lot and puts it into Park. It’s starting to get dark outside.
“You need to tell me where to take you,” he says and I detect the faintest hint of discomfort in his face.
“Your father?” he urges when I don’t answer.
Absently, I shake my head. “My father could be one of a hundred men in Tucson. I never knew him.”
“A grandmother? An aunt? A distant cousin? Where would you like to go?”
I quite literally have no family. Since I don’t know my father, I don’t know any of my family on his side. I never had any siblings; my mother got her tubes tied after she had me. My grandparents both died when I was a teenager. My aunt, Jill, lives somewhere in France because she could afford to move there and she disowned my mom when I was thirteen-years-old. And in-turn, she disowned me, accused me of being just like my mom even though I was as different from her as night is from day.
Not wanting to give Victor any reason to believe that he owes me anything else, I say the only person that comes to mind so that he can drop me off and leave me to whatever kind of life I can make for myself.
“Mrs. Gregory,” I whisper quietly, lost in the memory of the last time I saw her. “She lives about ten minutes from here.”
I catch Victor’s eyes staring at me from the side and mine meet them for a moment. What is he waiting for? He seems to be studying my face, but I don’t know why.
I look away and point in the direction he should go next.
Victor puts the car into Drive and we head for the trailer park where I used to live.
It looks exactly the way it did when I left, with broken toys scattered around in side-yards, old beat-up cars parked in various spots with grass grown up around the flat tires. Window unit air conditioners hum a racket into the early evening air and dogs bark from their short chains wrapped around trees. When we drive by the little blue trailer I lived in for most of my life, I barely look at it. But I do wonder, just for a moment, who lives there now and if they ever managed to get rid of the incessant cockroach infestation that my mom never could.
“Right here,” I say quietly, pointing to what I hope is still Mrs. Gregory’s home two trailers down.
But seeing the bright red Bronco parked out front, I’m beginning to think that it’s not. After nine years I wouldn’t expect it to be.
I go to get out, but Victor stops me.
“Take this,” he says, reaching into his inside suit jacket pocket.
He pulls out a thick wrapped stack of one hundred dollar bills and hands them out to me. I glance to and from him and the money, hesitant only because it’s so unexpected.
“I know it’s blood money,” he says, putting it further into my reach, “but I want you to take it and do whatever you need to with it.”
I nod appreciatively and take the stack of bills into my fingers.
“Thank you.”
I start to walk away but I stop and say, “What about Javier? If he’s willing to pay that much to have me killed, he’ll send someone else to find me if you won’t do it.”
“He will be dead before that happens.”
“Are you going to kill him?” I ask, but then add, “I mean not for me, of course, but for that other man?” I want him to say that, yes, it’s for me, but I know that’s not the reason.
“You will be safe to live your life now,” he says simply.
We share a quiet moment and I get out of the car, shutting the door softly behind me. And then I watch Victor drive away, his brake lights penetrating the partial darkness at the very end of the road. And then he’s gone. Just like that.
What just happened?
I doubt I’ll ever be able to wrap my mind around the past nine years of my life and even more-so, the past couple of days. As I stand here at the end of a driveway of a place familiar yet so foreign to me, I realize that I can’t feel m
yself. At least the person I used to be, or the person I was supposed to be but the opportunity was taken from me by Javier. By my mother.
I have lived a life of seclusion and bondage, a prisoner of a Mexican drug lord who although treated me with a strange sort of kindness, abused me in other ways. I have slept with a man I didn’t love and who I didn’t want to sleep with for most of my young life. And Javier is the only man I’ve ever been with sexually. I have seen rape and kidnapping and abuse in every form possible. And I have seen death. So much death. My only friend died in my arms just hours ago. I watched the life leave her body as she looked at me.
After all of this, I feel like, as I sift through those memories casually as though scanning a hand of cards, none of it is affecting me the way that it should, the way it would a normal girl. And I know why. I just hate to admit it to myself: over the years I became used to it. It was how my life was. My mind conformed and adapted the best way that it knew how.
But now here I am back at home in Tucson, free to do whatever I want. I could walk a few blocks to the little store I used to go to everyday after school and buy a soda and a bag of Doritos. If I wanted, I could go to my old elementary school down the road and swing on the swings or lay down in the field that surrounds the building and just look up at the stars until I fall asleep. I could steal that bike in the front yard of lot number twelve and ride to my old friend’s house twenty miles away. But the trailer behind me at the end of the cracked concrete driveway is just as good. And it’s right there. It’s taking me longer than I anticipated to walk up to the door and find out if the only person I knew who could help me now still lives there.
I can do whatever I want, yet I find it eternally difficult to choose where to begin. Or if to begin at all.
I guess now I know what it feels like when a person has spent half of his or her life in prison and is released back out into the world. They don’t know what to do with themselves, they don’t know how to fit back into society. They constantly look over their shoulder. They can’t sleep past five a.m. or believe that they can choose what to eat and when to eat it. Violence and darkness and confinement is so much a part of them that half of them never learn any other way.
I don’t want to be like that. But right now, as I stand here staring at the blaring light on the front porch and letting it bring spots in front of my eyes, I feel like it’s how I’ll be forever whether I want it or not.
A shadow moves across the front window.
I shove the stack of money in the back of my shorts, pulling my tank top down over it and then I take a deep breath.
I walk up the wooden steps and knock lightly upon the door.
“Who is it?” a man’s voice asks from the other side.
I’m pretty certain now that she’s long gone from this place.
“It’s…Sarai. I used to live over at lot fifteen.”
The chain on the door shuffles and then the door breaks apart. A short, chubby man peers out at me.
“How can I help you?”
He’s shirtless and his round belly hangs over the elastic of his knee-length gym shorts. The smell of popcorn filters out the door and past me.
“Does Mrs. Gregory live here anymore?” It feels awkward asking because I already know that she doesn’t.
The man shakes his head.
“Sorry, but I’ve lived here for two years now,” he says. “And I never knew of a Mrs. Gregory.”
“OK, thanks.”
I turn my back on him and descend the steps.
“Are you alright?” the man calls out.
I glance up at him momentarily. “Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”
He nods and closes the door as I leave, the sound of the chain lock being slid back into place is brief.
My bare feet move painlessly over the sand and rock-littered road of the trailer park. The street lights mounted high on the light poles begin to thin out and bathe me in darkness as I make it to the end of the road and leave the property. A car drives by and I’m instantly on edge, thinking it might be Javier here to kill me. But it drives on past and leaves me only with an erratic heartbeat and paranoid thoughts. At least I know that Izel is dead. I picture her last moment lying on her stomach in the sand with that gun in her hand. I didn’t flinch or recoil when I saw Victor’s bullet pass through her skull and her upper-body hit the ground face-down like a toddler falling asleep in his birthday cake. No, I felt only the satisfaction of revenge. I was glad to watch her die. Because she had it coming.
I only wish that it had been me who killed her for what she did to Lydia.
Strolling past a line of about a dozen mailboxes, I see the stop sign out ahead where I remember that if I go left it’ll lead me to the elementary school. I decide in this moment that that’s where I’ll go because I have nowhere else to go. And after many long minutes of walking I make it there, glad that nothing about the playground has changed, at least. The same old rusted seesaw I remember sits near the swing set with one seat raised high in the air. Three spring riders: a dolphin, a lion and a walrus, are lined next to each other inside an encased sea of playground pebbles. I make my way through the dry grass and sit down on the same swing I always went straight for during recess. And thankfully it feels the same, too. The way I coil my fingers around the linked chains just above my head, how the conformable plastic seat fits just right against my thighs. But I’m much taller now than I was back then, so my legs are bent awkwardly beneath me. I dig my toes into the cool pebbles and watch a tiny white light from a plane move across the distant sky, making no sound.
And the only face I see in my thoughts is Victor’s. He helped me, after all, even when I had accepted that he never would. I think about the conversation that he had with Niklas in the SUV and it only creates for me more questions about Victor. I wonder why he fired first. I wonder why he didn’t just go along with the original plan to hand me over, trade me for Lydia and apparently, Cordelia, who I had no idea was any part of this at all. Maybe he knew that Izel would’ve killed me anyway and afterwards tried to kill Victor and take Lydia and Cordelia back. It’s very plausible that Javier ordered Izel to go along with it, make the trade and then the second she had the opportunity, start shooting at us. I don’t know; there are many ways that the whole thing could’ve gone. And there are many reasons why Victor might’ve done what he did.
All that I’m sure of is that I’m alive because of Victor. I’m home in Tucson because of Victor. I’m free from a life not of my choosing, because of Victor.
Cold-blooded murderer-for-hire or not, he saved my life.
I reach around and take the money from the back of my shorts. I run my fingers fast over the edges, letting each bill fall rapidly onto the next, expelling a small blast of air on my face. There has to be at least five thousand dollars here. I start to count the ends of each bill, but stop a quarter of the way and just accept that there’s a lot. Enough to rent myself a room for the night so I can get a shower and some rest. I resolve to do just that, relieved that I’ve come up with a solid first part of a very long plan. But then I realize that I don’t even have a driver’s license. I don’t have a single shred of identification to prove that I’m me, or anyone else. I’ll be lucky to find a hotel to rent a room to me without identification, no matter how much money I try to bribe them with. And I need to spend this money wisely, do what I have to do to stretch it out. Because it’s all that I’ve got.
In the back of my mind I know I could simply go to the police and tell them my story and that they would help me. But I feel so overwhelmed by the simplest things that with work, I know, could be remedied that I feel utterly defeated by it all.
I sigh miserably, letting my head fall in-between my slouched shoulders and I press my toes into the pebbles some more, moving them around in a circular pattern.
And then for the first time in what feels like forever, I break down in tears of self-pity. Not of anger or anguish or frustration. I cry for myself. Sobs roll throug
h my body. I let the money fall on the ground next to my bare feet and I grip the chains on either side of me and just let it all out.
When I’m done minutes later, I raise my head and wipe the tears from my face.
A set of headlights turns on the street on the opposite side of the school building and I watch the car until it stops in the road about fifty-feet from me.
It’s Victor.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I don’t get up right away. I just gaze out over the grass at the car, knowing what I want to do but having a hard time figuring out if it’s what I should do. But then finally I stand up, giving in to that desire and I pick the money up from the ground and set out for the car.
The window slides down seconds before I get there.
“Who was Mrs. Gregory?” Victor asks with both hands resting casually on the steering wheel.
I open the door and get inside; there’s no need for either of us to question or explain why he’s here. We both know already. For the most part.
I close the door.
“She was more like a mother to me than my real mother.”
A light breeze moves through the opened window and brushes through my hair.
Victor remains quiet looking at me, letting me relive the moments. I keep my eyes trained out ahead, peering into the darkness through the spotless windshield.
“I spent most of my time with her,” I go on, seeing only Mrs. Gregory’s face in my mind now. “She fed me dinner in the evenings and we’d watch CSI together. She loved baking her own seasoned Chex Mix.” I glance over, laughing lightly. “She was a mean old woman. Not to me, of course, but she told my mom off a number of times. And once, one of my mom’s boyfriends came over to Mrs. Gregory’s looking for me—” I glance over again sharply and say, “He was one of the jerks who thought because he was sleeping with my mother that he could tell me what to do. Anyway, he rapped hard on Mrs. Gregory’s door, calling out my name. It was so funny.” I laugh again, resting my head back on the headrest. “She came to the door with a shotgun in her hand. It wasn’t loaded, but it didn’t need to be. That guy looked like somebody just kicked him in the nuts. He never came over there looking for me again.”