An hour later, she and I had bathed and scrubbed most every square inch of Zaul—who was sleeping peacefully under a haze of morphine. Once clean and disinfected, she began stitching, starting with his side. Doing so required her to stitch both internally and externally. Her hand was steady and her stitches near perfect. She worked like an experienced surgeon. “Your husband teach you that?” I asked.
She shook her head but kept her eyes on her work. “No. Necessity.”
From there she worked her way up to his face, eye, and his arm. She set his broken finger and worked his dislocated shoulder back into its socket. When it popped back in, I said, “Necessity teach you that?”
She almost smiled. “No.” She massaged his shoulder to manipulate the bloodflow. “My husband did.”
When the doctor showed with the unexposed film, the priests rolled in the X-ray machine, flipped the camera head horizontally, and I helped position Zaul to get the best pictures, of which they took several. Once developed, she and the doctor examined them and determined he had four broken ribs, but they had cracked along the line of the rib and not across, which meant that while painful, they weren’t poking into his lungs and demanded no treatment other than rest. The doctor also felt rather certain that Zaul did not appear to have multiple internal injuries other than severe contusions, but time would be a better indicator. At first, given the sight of his torso, he feared a burst spleen but that did not materialize. For the next hour, she and the doctor gave Zaul a rather thorough exam from head to toe, which was made all the more difficult by his being asleep, preventing him from answering the “Does this hurt?” line of questioning.
By 10:00 a.m., Leena and the doctor had done what they could. Zaul needed rest, fluids, antibiotics, and freedom from the fear of further harm. “And make no mistake,” the doctor said, holding a finger in the air. “Someone has caused him great bodily harm.” The doctor lifted the sheet off Zaul’s stomach, exposing deep blue-and-purple contusions. He waved his hand across Zaul. “Grey Turner’s and Cullen’s sign.”
“I’m not familiar with either of—”
“Intra-abdominal bleeding caused from blunt trauma. May indicate hemorrhage.” He turned to Leena. “Monitor carefully.”
Leena nodded as if she understood. The doctor returned to the hospital, promising to check on Zaul later that evening. Walking out, he turned and cautioned us that Zaul would be laid up a while. And that we should make plans for an extended recuperation.
I stood over the sink, scrubbing my arms and watch. Trying to get the blood out of the cracks in the bezel where it had caked and dried. Again. While we’d found him, things had gone from bad to worse.
Time to check in.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I put in the call, said “George,” and waited a few seconds for the return call. When he did, I answered, “We found him. Or rather, he found us. Anyway, he’s here.”
“How is he?”
“Well…he’s alive and he’ll recover, but he’s in pretty bad shape.”
“I’ll send the plane. I can be there—”
“I don’t think that would be helpful.”
He was quiet a moment. “You need money?”
“No. I’m good. The doctor just left. Leena is taking care of him. We’re probably looking at a week or two of bed rest. Somebody really worked him over. He’s in a bad way.”
“You talked with him?”
“Not much. He’s been in and out. Sleeping now. Doc gave him a pretty heavy dose of something to help him sleep.” I swallowed. “He’s got a bit of a recovery ahead of him so rest easy. I’ll take some pics with my phone and send them your way over the next few days. Give you something to have hope in.”
“That’d be good. That’d be good.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
He cleared his throat. “You know that other matter?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s complicated.”
“How so?”
“You can get it, but I’m not sure you’re going to want to go where you’re going to have to go to get it. Or, that you can afford it.”
As Colin explained, I sat quietly listening while the ramifications of his explanation settled in me and the ripple effects spread out across my mind.
When he finished, he said, “Send us some pics if you think about it. Marguerite will like that.”
Colin hung up and I sat there with my head in my hands, certain that I’d never felt so empty in my entire life.
* * *
Leena spent the day by Zaul’s bed, charting his progress—temperature, blood pressure, medications administered, and any change in his condition. Paulo, seeing he could do nothing here, took Isabella home, leaving the two of us at the cathedral, where we would spend the night before trying to move him tomorrow.
Toward evening, my stomach reminded me that we hadn’t eaten all day. I stuck my head in the room where she was listening to Zaul’s heartbeat with a stethoscope. “I’m going to get some dinner. You want anything?”
She nodded, smiled, and said, “Yes, but stay away from fresh salsa.”
I held up a finger. “Note to self.”
She laughed.
I struck out, walked the streets of León, bought two to-go plates at Meson Real and a couple bottles of water, and then returned to the dark clinic. Paulina was asleep in a cot next to Zaul’s bed. I left a plate on a table next to her and covered her with a blanket. From there, I walked into the cavernous cathedral. I picked a pew that lined the back wall and sat, staring at all the stained glass, and picked at my dinner.
Across from me hung a painting. Maybe eight or ten feet tall and half as wide. It was old, cracked, and had been poorly repaired. It depicted a slave market where a naked man, bloody with the stripes of a scourge, stood on a block, the auctioneer next to him. A bloody spear hung horizontally above his head. It dripped into the dirt at his feet. Around him, angry men shouted bids while he stood helpless. At the bottom, a plaque had been engraved: SOLD UNDER THE SPEAR.
I lay on the bench. Another painting hung above me. Below it, some words had been carved into the massive stones: YOU HAVE SOLD YOURSELVES FOR NOTHING. AND YOU SHALL BE REDEEMED WITHOUT MONEY.
I closed my eyes and shook my head. I could not wrap my hands around that. Couldn’t see how that was possible.
Leena shook me some twelve hours later. A priest was mopping the floor nearby. She was smiling. “He’s asking for you.”
Zaul was sitting up when I walked in. His face was still puffy. He spoke when I walked in. His voice was ragged. “How’s Maria?”
“She’s better. Been asking for you.”
“How’s her face?”
“Your dad said Shelly did a really great job. Can hardly tell.”
I stood next to him, letting him speak, not pressing him. He looked away and tears cascaded down his face. “You tell her I’m sorry?”
“You can tell her yourself.”
“I’m not going home.”
On the surface, Zaul was a muscled, tough-talking seventeen-year-old. Inside, he was still very much a kid. I pulled the cell phone out of my pocket. “Little over a hundred years ago, some really smart guy invented a thing called the phone. It’s been through a few versions but I have one here. It allows you to talk to people who are a long way away.” I pointed to the earpiece. “When you put your ear here, it sounds like they’re sitting right next to you. And when you talk in this part”—another point—“you can tell them things like you’re sorry and that you love them…That you hope they’re okay.”
He nodded, laughed, nodded, wiped the tears on his sheet. “Guess I made a mess of things.”
I rolled the stool up next to the bed and sat. “You did.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “But if we’re comparing messes, mine’s bigger.”
As tough as he liked to pretend to be, Zaul had his mother’s heart. He tried to mask it with steroids, tattoos, piercings, and four-letter epithets, but all that had been exposed
for what it was. Just a cover. Something to mask his own insecurity. The kid sitting before me was none of that, and his hard shell had been cracked. Exposed for what it was. He was like the kid who walked into the living room wearing his dad’s robe and slippers. It just didn’t fit.
He shook his head, exhaled, and clutched his ribs. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a Mack truck.”
“Want to tell me what happened?”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“How about the beginning. After I made the drop.”
Zaul glanced at Leena, not knowing how honest he could be.
“She knows about me. I told her.”
Zaul explained how he’d been tracking my drops through his dad’s phone. Learning where, when, how much, etc. I made it a lot easier for him one afternoon when he saw me lift the SIM card out of my locker in the back hall of their house and then drop the old one in the trash can. I’d never known he was there. Since then, he’d been following me, trying to learn how I did what I did. He was also trying to figure out where his dad kept the bulk of his drugs, so he could skim a little off the top and make some money on his own. He thought, after all his many screwups, that his dad would appreciate his entrepreneurial efforts. He also explained how when his losses mounted and he realized he wasn’t all that good at poker that he started hanging out with some guys who ran a dogfighting operation. Hence, pit bulls. Easy money. Thought he’d pay one gambling debt with another sure bet. So he bought a dog and paid some guy to train it, but when he put it in its first fight, it lost badly. As did he. He’d bet a good bit at bad odds. Poker losses compounded with dogfighting losses meant they’d come to collect. So on the night he took Maria for what he told her and us would be a moonlight stroll, they’d followed him and caught him off guard. The dog was meant for him. He called 911, then waited until Life Flight landed in the street, afraid to look at his sister’s face. Zaul paused here a long time. He said his mom and dad had bailed him out so many times that he couldn’t face them again, so he fled to the only place he could think of. When he landed in Costa Rica, he called some guys he’d met the summer prior. Career surfers. Things soon spiraled out of control, and before he knew it, there were two hundred people trashing his folks’ house. Again, trying to be like us, he thought he’d buy and sell and try and make good on all he’d lost, which took him to León. He actually had visions of walking back into his parents’ home in Miami with enough money to repay all they’d spent to bail him out. Once in León, he heard about the poker game and flashed around enough money to get invited. He quickly lost, and when he tried to run, the foreman unleashed his bouncer on him. Low on funds and without a vehicle, he and his surfer “friends” began living in hostels and a few resorts, which they left in worse condition than when they arrived. Somewhere in there he got in a drunken fight with a man wielding a knife, which explained his stomach. When he ran out of money and wouldn’t call his dad for more, his friends turned on him—which explained the cuts above his eyes and broken ribs. Like a pack of wolves, they’d attacked when he was wounded and literally kicked him when he was down. The result was what we saw before us. They took what little money he had left, left him in a ditch, and he crawled his way to the highway, hitchhiked south, and then walked once the truck entered Costa Rica. He said he knew I’d be looking for him, and sooner or later, I’d either find him or his body at the house.
When he finished, he was tired. He leaned back and closed his eyes. The telling had exhausted him. Leena pulled up a blanket, and I told him to get some sleep. We’d talk more later.
He was asleep before I left the room. Leena met me outside the door. “He’s weak. Needs another day here.” She held her hands behind her back and rocked back and forth on her tiptoes. “Don’t you think a chocolate-filled croissant would be really good right now?”
I needed some time to process. “Be right back.”
* * *
The day passed and Zaul slept through most all of it. Late in the evening, after all the priests had shut the huge doors of the cathedral and gone to bed, Leena found me napping on my pew. She shook my foot. “Got a second?”
I sat up. “Sure.”
“Not to be overly pushy, but what’s your plan?”
A shrug. “He doesn’t want to go home. I can make him, but I’m not sure how long that’d stick or what it would accomplish. I can take him to the house in Costa Rica and let him recuperate, but that’s a constant reminder of where he’s messed up, of the ongoing tension with his folks, and there would be no one there but us. I think we’d get cabin fever once he got healthy. I can get a room at the hotel here, but once he got up and about, we’d run into the same problem. Not to mention that he’d be more likely to bump into some of his friends around here, which neither he nor we need. I can take him with me back to Bimini, but I think that would just reinforce the whole drug runner thing. Plus, I’m pretty sure I don’t need that, either.”
Leena sat next to me. “What about spending a few weeks in Valle Cruces? With us? We could add a bed to the chicken coop. You and Paulo could fix it up a bit. I’ve seen what you can do with wood. Maybe you could make it less…” She laughed. “Barn-like.”
“I paid you to help me find him. Not nurse him back to health.”
“I’m not asking you to pay us.”
“I know, I didn’t mean—”
“Zaul’s wounds are much deeper than his skin and bones. He’s a scared kid who has no idea who he is.”
She was right. I nodded. “You’re really perceptive.”
“I’m a woman.”
I smiled. “That you are.”
“When I was young, younger than Isabella, my father would walk me up in the mountains where he was tending to his coffee plants. Sometimes, he would come upon a plant that would not flourish. No matter what he did to it, it just produced no fruit. No coffee. So rather than just ripping it out by the root and throwing it off the mountain, he’d gingerly dig it up and transplant it to another place where the soil was different. Then, he’d stake it up with something stronger than itself, he’d water it, fertilize it, and give it a chance to put down roots someplace new. Sometimes a change of soil is all that’s needed.”
“With all deference to your father, a change in geography does not necessarily mean an improvement in circumstances. In my experience, problems have a tendency to follow you whether you’re in Boston, Miami, Bimini, or Nicaragua.”
She laid a towel across her lap, pulled a mango the size of a small football from her bag, and began peeling it, while the juice dripped off the knife and onto the towel. She offered me a slice, which I accepted. She then cut herself a slice and placed it in her mouth. She spoke with her mouth full. “In my experience, I usually run into some trouble when I let my experience dictate another’s.” She turned to me. “I don’t have the corner on the market, but I have known some pain in my life. And I see the same when I look in that kid’s eyes. His body will heal, but it’s his heart that’s in question.”
I smiled as she gave me another slice. I, too, spoke with my mouth full. “Did your father teach you all this?”
“Which part?” A sly smile. “The peeling part or the giving of unsolicited advice part?”
“The advice part.”
A single shake of her head as mango juice trailed from her lip to her chin. “Mom.”
“Smart woman.”
She pointed the knife at me. “She’d have liked you.”
“I highly doubt that.”
She laughed and stood. “So, it’s settled then?”
“I’m pretty sure you had it settled before we started talking, but just so I can feel like I had some say in this situation, I need to run it by Colin. I think he’ll agree—and I imagine you’ve already thought about that.”
“I have.”
“I know what I’d do if he were my son but he’s not, so in a very real sense, I’m stuck between Zaul on this end of the phone and Colin on the other.”
“
If Colin is smart, he’ll see that you have more influence in Zaul’s life right now.”
“He’s pretty smart.”
“Evidently he’s pretty dumb if he’s the one that suckered you into the family business.”
“Well, yeah. There’s that.” I sat back, crossed my legs, and folded my hands over my knees. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Was it your mother who taught you this leading line of conversation, which not even the experts at Harvard ever mentioned to me?”
“You went to Harvard?”
“Graduated.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
“So you’re smart?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘smart’ as much as ‘able to adapt.’”
“What’s your degree?”
“Finance. Followed by an MBA.”
Her jaw dropped. “You have that in your back pocket and you run drugs for a living?”
“Ran.”
“Whatever.”
“Yes.”
She considered this and then returned to my question. “You asked whether it was my mother or father.” She shook her head. “Neither one.”
“Who then?”
“Wasn’t a who. It was a what.”
“Well, what was the what?”
A hard-earned belly laugh. “Life. After we lost the plantation, I had control over very little, so I had to learn how to protect Isabella and myself and later Paulo when his wife died—the three of us. You learn by talking, asking questions. It doesn’t grant you control, but it does help eliminate and name the players who don’t have control over you from those that do.”
She walked toward the clinic and left me chewing on everything she said. I had two responses: First, I’d single-handedly created the circumstances that caused her to lose the plantation. As that realization settled in my gut, a pain rose beneath it unlike any I’d ever felt. Second, I liked watching her body language when she talked. There was a concert between what she said and how she said it. Maybe it was the way the Spanish language is spoken by those who are native to it, but it’s beautiful and mesmerizing. And, okay, maybe there was a third. Maybe I was self-aware enough to know that she was trying to convince me to do something I already wanted to do anyway.