“Please,” Paul said.
The room was eerily dark; Galina had closed all the shutters but one. It felt like the moment before everyone yells surprise.
The surprise is for us, Paul thought.
Then he passed out.
ELEVEN
Blackness.
But not completely. There were endless visions and dreams flickering through the blackness. Like being in a movie theater for a very long time.
He was eleven years old and suddenly afraid of the dark. He hadn’t been afraid before, but he was now. Maybe because it was dark at the top of the stairs where his mother had recently taken up residence. Not just dark—a thick, suffocating blackness like a wool blanket pulled up over his head. Your mother’s resting, his father told him. She’s sleeping. Don’t disturb her.
He crept up the stairs, where it smelled unpleasantly medicinal. He listened outside the door and heard the distinct sounds of a TV game show: a buzzer, a voice, phony audience laughter.
His mom wasn’t sleeping, after all. It would be okay to open the door and crawl into her arms. But the darkness inside the room was even gloomier than the darkness outside in the hall. Only the soft glow coming from the portable TV with sadly bent rabbit ears made seeing possible at all.
It took him a while before he could make out the monster lying on the bed.
Last Halloween he’d gone trick-or-treating as a skeleton—all black, except for the white bones where his arms and legs were supposed to be.
It looked like that.
In the dream this skeleton lifted up a bony arm and waved for him to come closer.
Eventually, he woke up. Movie over.
“MORNING,” THE BOY SAID.
Just as he’d said it every morning since they’d taught it to him. Not on purpose. When Paul had finally opened his eyes after losing consciousness on Galina’s floor, the boy was there listening when he asked Joanna what time it was. Was it morning ? The boy repeated it several times as if trying it out. Now he used it to greet them.
This morning, which was either the third or fourth morning they’d been here, the boy waited for some kind of verbal acknowledgment.
“Good morning,” Joanna said.
Then the boy placed their breakfast—corn cakes and sausage—on the floor and left.
They were in a house somewhere in Colombia.
It was impossible to know where in Colombia, since they weren’t allowed out. The windows were boarded over. They could hear little from outside—the distant rumble of passing cars, occasional disembodied melodies trickling through from God knows where, a parrot squawking. All they knew was that it wasn’t Galina’s house.
They’d been transported somewhere else.
A claustrophobic room with a filthy mattress on the floor and two plastic chairs. There was a bucket in the corner.
That’s it.
That first morning, Joanna had woken before Paul. When she couldn’t rouse him—apparently, she attempted everything but jumping up and down on him—she’d tried opening the door. Locked tight. She managed to pry open a shutter, only to see solid wood staring back.
When Paul finally and groggily woke up, he was greeted with the sight of Joanna rocking herself back and forth in the middle of the floor. “Oh God,” she was murmuring, “oh God . . .”
He’d tried to comfort her, of course, even as he attempted to make sense of what had happened, to fight through a stultifying haze that seemed to have wrapped itself around his head. She seemed oddly distant, even with his arms enclosing her, as if she were obstinately holding a piece of herself back. He thought he knew why.
“I’m sorry, Joanna,” he said. “For not believing you.”
“Yes. Okay. Great.”
“It seemed ridiculous. Switching babies. I couldn’t imagine . . .”
“Where is she, Paul?” she cut him off. “What do they want?”
It was a hard question to answer.
The first day they saw no one but the boy. He was dressed in mottled green camouflage like the others. He carried a rifle that seemed far too big for him. He might’ve been all of fourteen. Except for his good morning s, he remained mute.
The next afternoon they were finally visited by someone higher up the food chain. A man in his mid-thirties, a face Paul thought he recognized from Galina’s house, just before he’d found himself staring at the ceiling.
“Look, we’re not political, ” Paul said when the man entered the room and locked the door behind him. “I work in insurance.” This reminded him of something else. “We aren’t rich.”
The man turned and looked at him. “You think we’re bandidos ?” His English was passable. He had what looked like a Kalashnikov looped around his shoulder, but he seemed neither violent nor unsympathetic.
“Where’s my baby?” Joanna said. “I want my baby back. Please.”
“I think I ask the questions here,” he said, not particularly rudely. Just as an unequivocal statement of fact.
“You’ve been captured by FARC,” he said, “the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,” spelling it out for them in case they weren’t up on their acronyms. “We are the legitimate voice of the Colombian people.” Paul thought it sounded like a speech he’d made hundreds of times before. “You are our political prisoners. Comprende? ”
Paul said, “We can’t help you. I told you, we’re not political. We have no money . . .”
He was interrupted by a rifle butt to his midsection. Delivered with enough force and precision to bring him straight to his knees.
“Paul!” Joanna recoiled, the obvious reaction when your husband is physically assaulted right in front of your eyes.
“When I ask a question, answer me,” the man said. “You must remember this.”
Paul attempted to get up, for Joanna’s sake, if not his own. He felt her fear as if it were a physical entity, cold and dense and implacable. But he couldn’t straighten up; his stomach was on fire. His eyes were tearing.
“You are political prisoners of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Comprende? ”
“Yes,” Paul said, still on his knees, still gasping from the vicious blow to his solar plexus.
“You won’t try to escape. Comprende? ”
“Yes.” Paul gave it one more try, gathered himself in an effort to scale what seemed like a sheer wall of pain, and finally managed to make it to a barely standing position.
“You step away from the door when we come in the room. You step away from the door when we leave. You stay away from the windows. Yes?”
“Yes, we understand.”
“How are you feeling?” He was addressing Joanna.
“I’m nauseous.” Her voice shaky if even-toned, as if she were desperately trying to maintain some semblance of composure, but pretty much failing. “I feel like throwing up.”
He nodded as if he’d expected this. “Escopolamina,” he said.
“What?” Joanna asked, breaking the don’t-ask-questions rule, this time apparently without consequences.
“A street drug. They use it to rob the turistas here.” He shook his head and uttered a dismissive sigh, as if that kind of thing—robberies and such—was beneath him. “We were late—she was frightened, huh.”
Galina, Paul thought. He was referring to Galina.
“She put something into our coffee,” Joanna stated flatly.