Okay, Paul thought, Xena, warrior princess, was in full battle mode. The cat had been let out of the bag. Only it wasn’t a cat as much as a Tasmanian devil, something large, carnivorous, and repulsive-looking. Probably the way the two of them looked to Galina right at this moment. After all, her back had physically stiffened—one of those clichés that evidently rang true. Her gentle gray eyes had turned hard as glass.
Paul found himself trying to look anywhere but at her, searching for a hole he might be able to hide in.
There was a box of cigars sitting on her mantel.
It had a photograph of a man in a white panama hat.
Paul wondered if Galina smoked cigars. A pair of brown slippers nestled like cats on her front welcome mat. The dog, who’d roused itself from its semicomatose state, had picked up one in his mouth, then dropped it by Pablo’s feet, where it landed with an uncomfortable thud.
He forced himself to turn back to Galina. She still hadn’t said anything—Joanna’s accusation had turned her mute. She looked more or less horrified.
Later, much later, Paul would wonder if there’s such a thing as peripheral hearing. Something that impinges on the ear but only announces itself later on.
He was trying not to stare at Galina’s pained expression. He was wondering whether he should apologize to her. He didn’t notice the muffled sound emanating from the inner recesses of the house.
Galina did. Which accounted for her expression.
Joanna had noticed it too.
Because she reached out and dug her fingernails into his arm. He almost cried out. Which would’ve made it two people crying in the house instead of just one.
Him and the baby.
There was a baby crying in the house.
He’d finally heard it.
He’d finally processed it. Because when he looked down at Joelle, she was sleeping. Which meant that there was a baby crying in the house, yes, only it wasn’t this baby.
“Who’s that?” That’s the first thing he said. Stupid, okay, but then, he was obviously a little slow on the uptake today.
Galina didn’t answer him.
“Whose baby is that?” he said, even though he was starting to have a good idea whose baby it might be.
“Pablo. Can you go see who it is?”
Pablo didn’t move.
“Galina?”
She hadn’t changed expression. Or maybe she had. The hardness in her eyes was still there, and there was something else now, a scary sense of focus and fortitude.
“Galina, is that our daughter? Is that Joelle ?”
It took Paul a while to realize that Pablo still hadn’t moved. That Galina still wasn’t answering him.
Paul stood up with the baby in his arms—the question was, whose baby? He felt faint. “Okay, I’m going to see who it is.” Announcing his plan out loud as if seeking approval.
He reached out to give Joelle to Galina and then, of course, stopped himself. Galina wasn’t exactly his nurse anymore; it was possible this baby wasn’t Joelle. He felt as if he were teetering on the edge of a deep and dangerous abyss—physically and emotionally hovering right over the edge. The room itself seemed to be swaying.
Then things flew into motion.
Joanna stood up and said I’ll go look, and immediately began walking toward the sound of the crying baby. Pablo roused himself from his chair.
Paul offered up the baby in his arms so he could go join his wife, but it seemed to take an enormous effort to lift her.
“Sit down, Paul,” Pablo said gently.
He was offering to look himself. He was telling Paul to sit down and take care of the baby. Pablo was being Pablo.
Paul gratefully reclaimed his seat as Pablo followed Joanna into the hall. The baby was crying louder, screeching even. And Paul finally and completely acknowledged what Joanna had feared was true.
He recognized that crying.
He remembered it from the first day in the hotel room when their daughter had wailed endlessly for food. Until Galina had shown up and made everything all right again.
Galina was still stiffly seated in her chair—only she appeared to be physically closer to him than she’d been before. How was that possible?
For a minute or so nothing happened.
The baby continued to cry from somewhere in the house; Galina continued to stare at him with an odd and unsettling calm.
Then Pablo reappeared, walking back into the living room while supporting Joanna with one strong arm. She was leaning against him, her head laid back on his shoulder as if she were very close to fainting. Where was the baby?
Joanna clearly looked distraught, while Pablo appeared helpful. There was undoubtedly a causal connection between those two things, but Paul wasn’t sure what it was.
Something was wrong.
Look closer.
Her head on his shoulder. It took Paul a few seconds—seconds in which the world changed from A to Z—to understand that the reason it was lying back on Pablo’s shoulder like that was that Pablo had his wife’s dark luxuriant hair wrapped tightly in his fist.
Pablo was pulling Joanna into the room by her hair.
Her mouth was open in a half-muted scream.
He threw Joanna down onto the couch, flung her backward as if she were a piece of luggage he’d thrown into the car at El Dorado Airport.
“Sit,” he said. The way one barks commands at a dog. A stupid, stubborn dog, a dog who should know better.
Paul felt rooted to the couch, a spectator to a horrifying drama that had suddenly and inexplicably become real. He was waiting for the intermission, when he could stretch his legs, shake the cobwebs out of his brain, and thank the cast for their stunningly convincing performance. The play continued.
Galina stood up.
She methodically began closing the wooden shutters on each side of the room as she talked to Pablo in a steady stream of Spanish. As if he and Joanna weren’t even in the room. She seemed to be chastising him—Paul’s Spanish was beginning to come back like a long-repressed memory, and it seemed like he could understand every fifth word or so. You. Called. Not here. For one regrettably stupid moment Paul wondered if she was yelling at Pablo for throwing Joanna down on the couch like that.
For not getting their baby.
For turning on them.
But that was like hoping you’re asleep and dreaming when you’re completely and terrifyingly awake.
Paul handed the baby to Joanna—the baby he’d thought was his daughter and that he now knew wasn’t—and stood up to protest Pablo’s treatment of his wife, to reason this out, to get Joelle and have Pablo take them back to the hotel this instant.
“I told you to sit down, Paul,” Pablo said.
Somehow he delivered this statement over Paul’s prone body. This was an enormous surprise to Paul. That he wasn’t standing. He was lying down on a wooden floor smelling of wet fur and shoe polish. How had that happened? He heard Joanna’s sharp intake of breath.
“I’m okay, honey,” he said. Oddly enough, he didn’t hear the words. His tongue was strangely obstinate; it had decided to lie down on the job. Just like the rest of his body, which felt absurdly heavy. There was a strange metallic taste in his mouth.
He tried to lift himself up from the floor. No go. He felt vibrations traveling through the floorboards, some kind of rebalancing of weight from one place to another. He heard heavy shuffling and sensed a quickening in the air itself.
They looked like marines.
Five men in mottled green uniforms who’d suddenly flowed into the room like a brackish river breaching its banks. Young faces with stolid expressions of dumb determination. Each of them carried a rifle.