You're growing to rely on yoga the way you once relied on coffee. You've learned enough that you try that headstand you've been seeing, and it's going well until you lose your balance completely and nearly kill yourself by going over the veranda.
Your neck, recovered from the week prior, spasms again.
The one part of you that seems to have endured thus far without complaint, your wrists, begin aching. You realize you haven't been taping them well enough before working the post and bags. Or maybe you're not punching right, and suddenly you're reexamining the mechanics of the movement, trying to work out what it is you're doing wrong.
On the off days you download video, PBS's Dance in America, footage of the New York City Ballet, the Bolshoi. Dances choreographed by Balanchine, performances by Baryshnikov and Nureyev. An art that never held much appeal before now is fascinating, and you can break down patterns and steps, attempt to recreate what you see. You stink at it, and you know that, but that's not the point. You're beginning to understand the motion.
The food tastes better, though your diet has remained fundamentally the same. Watermelon is astonishingly more delicious than tiramisu. For the first time you're not ravenously hungry.
The fourth week, stepping from the shower and reaching for the towel, you see yourself in the mirror, and for a moment honestly do not recognize yourself.
You stare for quite a while, wondering.
By the eighth week, when you move, swimming in the water or running on the beach or working at the barre, you are completely aware of yourself, the space you consume in your environment and how to travel through it. You see for the first time, perfectly, the nearly infinite ways you can move your body, and with that comes an epiphany: you understand why yoga and ballet have survived for as long as they have. It is no longer just enough to do the exercises; now you strive for proper form and grace.
You understand the beauty and benefits of being able to move your own weight, with mastery, completely. When you hit the heavy bag with your hips driving the blow and not just your arms, you're both delighted and horrified with the understanding of just what that blow would do to another body.
Then one morning you rise with the sun and you look out at the water as you start your morning yoga and you realize you are up first, you are folding yourself out of your handstand before she even emerges from her bedroom. You greet one another, say good morning. You settle into the day.
You realize you have been doing this for almost four months.
And you know it's got to end soon, one way or another.
Chapter 5
She cried in her sleep.
It took me a while to figure out that was what I was hearing. During the remainder of August I was too blitzed from the regimen to do anything but sleep through the night, and my physical exhaustion was so total that nothing short of gunfire could have roused me, anyway. It was mid-September before I actually heard the sound, and even then I couldn't identify it. It was faint and small, inconsistent, and there were nights when I heard nothing at all. If Miata had been able to speak, I'd have blamed it on him; instead, I convinced myself it was wildlife playing about in the trees, a manicou or a bananaquit up past its bedtime.
It was October, fourteen weeks since I'd been taken from New York, when I woke in the predawn and heard it again. A warning had been issued earlier that week for Hurricane Josephine, and though the storm had missed the Lesser Grenadines, Bequia had taken some collateral fallout, with winds and heavy rain. While I had been concerned, thinking that if he were close, Oxford could use the storm to good effect, Alena hadn't seemed to care one way or another. Josephine was the fourth named hurricane to have traveled the Caribbean since my arrival; clearly she was used to them.
My concerns about Oxford had been growing daily; for the last two weeks I'd carried a gun whenever and wherever I could, an HK P7 from Alena's substantial weapons locker. I'd urged her to carry, but she'd been surprisingly resistant to the suggestion, acquiescing only when we were out of the house, either exercising or during the occasional trips into Port Elizabeth.
We didn't talk about it, but we both knew there wasn't much time left.
Thoughts like that made it understandably hard to sleep.
There were other things, too, though, more complex and somehow more potent than Oxford's impending arrival. I hadn't spoken to anyone in New York since the call to Erika, and the guilt had begun to eat at me. It was no longer a question of getting to a phone, because I now had the run of the house; the satellite phone was there for me to use if I wanted it, and Alena had given me the codes both to the hard room in the basement and to the general alarm system. I could call if I really wanted to.
But Alena had asked that I not, and at first I'd told myself that I was respecting the wishes of my principal, so I hadn't. And the longer I went without making contact, the worse I felt about the situation. When I thought about it, which was normally at night after we'd each retired to our separate beds and me staring at the blur of the fan, I knew why the guilt was growing to be so strong. The people I'd left behind deserved to know that I was all right; it was a cruelty to keep them ignorant. And it really wasn't my honoring Alena's request that was keeping me from the phone.
I was scared. I didn't know what I would say. I didn't know how to describe the situation. I didn't know how I could convince Bridgett or Dale or Natalie or Scott that I was not only fine, healthy – hell, very healthy – and relatively safe, but that I was doing something I wanted to do. That I wanted to be here.
As sprung as it sounded, that I was happy.
That wouldn't play in the Big Apple. I could practically hear Natalie lecturing me on the history of hostage/terrorist brainwashing.
They wouldn't believe me. They wouldn't understand.
I wasn't certain I did, myself, and I was the guy it was happening to.
Thoughts that keep you awake at night.
It wasn't the wind, the sound was too varied, too sharp, and without the customary rise and fall that one hears when a breeze finds cracks and corners. It came to me broken, past the sound of the rain pounding the roof and slapping the leaves and branches outside the house. I lay on my back and listened, and abandoned the idea that it was some creature outside. It was coming from inside, and it was coming from her room.
I got my glasses and rose. I'd switched to contacts almost two months ago, and the difference in lenses was briefly disorienting. I thought about taking the gun, and decided that if I was going into her room in the middle of the night, carrying a firearm was possibly a version of suicide.
I went slowly and quietly, crossing through the bathroom rather than through the hallway along the stairs. I left the light on in my room, using the door to block its spill.
The noise was now entirely human, a whimper, and I knew it was her. It stopped me, kept me motionless with my palm pressed against her door, gave me time to consider whether I should open it or not. The sound stopped. The silence filled only with the sound of the rain.