“Come on, Miles. A little further.” It took an enormous effort for Paul to get the words out of his mouth. They tumbled out half formed and garbled, as if he were speaking in tongues. They had zero effect. Miles lay there, unmoved and unmoving.
The fire was making a beeline for them. It was almost there.
“I . . . can’t . . . ,” Miles whispered between gasps. “I . . .”
Paul grabbed his shirt collar—hot and steaming, like laundry fresh from the dryer.
He pulled.
It made no sense. It was merely symbolic, since he didn’t have the strength to pull Miles from the fire, any more than he had the strength to stand up and take on the murderers who’d started it.
He pulled anyway.
Suddenly, Miles seemed to gather what little energy he had left. He moved. Just a foot or so. Then another foot. And after coughing up some black phlegm, a foot more.
It was too late.
They were in the mouth of the furnace. It was yawning open for them. They weren’t going to make it.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, my . . . My rod and my . . . My rod . . . Where were the words when you really needed them? He was down to crawling on bloodied hands and knees. He was doing what any atheist does in foxholes. He was mumbling the magic words he’d abandoned as a sad and lonely little kid.
Miles was there beside him. The fire lit him up like someone in a flash-frame.
Paul’s flesh began to sear—to literally burn off. He took one last lunge, then covered up his face, hoping it wouldn’t hurt.
That was all.
TWENTY-FOUR
Nothing had been said to her. But she knew just the same.
Galina might’ve told her it was going to be all right, but it wasn’t all right.
It was monotonous and deadening and endless.
Every moment, at least, that she wasn’t holding Joelle in her arms. Those moments, by contrast, were achingly life-affirming.
She got to experience those moments only twice a day—for morning and evening feedings. Galina would bring her to another room in the farm—she was fairly sure it was a farm, since she could hear roosters and chickens and the bleating of cows and sheep. She could smell them too—mixed in with the unmistakable odor of freshly turned manure. She’d been born in Minnesota, farm country, and her olfactory senses had been honed on those earthy smells.
When she asked Galina what happened—whether Paul had delivered the drugs like he was supposed to—she shrugged and didn’t answer.
No answer was necessary. He had or he hadn’t, but Joanna knew that she needn’t be packing her bags anytime soon.
It was the routine that saved her—those morning and evening feedings, waited for with a tingling anticipation. It was routine that was murdering her too, bit by bit. The sameness, the torpor, the sense of unyielding and unbroken siege.
Her emotions, raised to the sky by Galina’s whispered assertion, were all dressed up with nowhere to go.
She was losing weight too—she’d become familiar with certain bones in her arms and rib cage she hadn’t known were there.
One night she heard a furious slapping from somewhere in the house. Followed by someone moaning—a man.
She sensed Beatriz and Maruja awake and listening next to her on the mattress.
“Who’s that?” she whispered.
“Rolando,” Maruja whispered back.
“Rolando,” Joanna echoed the name. “Who’s he? Another prisoner?”
“Another journalist who’s become the story,” Maruja said.
“Like you?”
“No. Not like me. Bigger. His son . . .” And her voice trailed off as if she’d fallen back asleep.
“His son. What about his son?”
“Nothing. Go to sleep.”
“Maruja. What . . . ?”
“He had a son . . . that’s all. Shhh . . .”
“What happened to him? Tell me.”
“He became sick.”
“Sick?”
“Cancer. Leukemia, I think. He wanted to see his papa one more time. Before he died.”
“Yes?”
“It was in the newspapers,” she whispered. “On the television. A big kind of national soap opera. They let Rolando watch. The talk shows. He saw his son on TV speaking to him, pleading with them to let him go.”
Joanna tried to imagine what it must’ve been like for a father to witness his dying son on TV, but gave up because it was too painful to contemplate.
“People came forward—how do you say . . . los famosos. Politicians, actors, futbolistas. They volunteered to take Rolando’s place. Take us, they said, so Rolando can be with his son. He had a few months to live.”
“What happened?”
Maruja shook her head—Joanna’s eyes were getting used to the dark, and she could make out the vague outline of Maruja’s pointy chin.
“Nothing happened.”
“But the boy . . .”
“He died.”
“Oh.”
“Rolando watched his funeral on TV.”
Joanna wasn’t aware she’d begun crying. Not until she felt the wet mattress against her cheek. She’d never been much of a crier. Maybe because she spent most of her workday getting other people to stop, even as she secretly resented their public displays of weakness. But now she thought it was both terrible and wonderful to cry. It made her feel human. Knowing that she was still capable of being moved by someone else’s tragedy, even in the midst of her own.
“Rolando?” Joanna asked. “How long has he been here?”
“Five years.”
“Five years?”
It didn’t seem possible. Like hearing about one of those people who’ve survived for decades in a coma, kept alive in a kind of suspended animation.
“When his son died, Rolando became very angry with them. He doesn’t listen. He talks back,” Maruja said, as if she were snitching on another child. Joanna wondered if Rolando’s defiance made life difficult for Beatriz and Maruja. Probably. “He ran away once,” Maruja whispered. “They caught him, of course.”
Ran away. The very sound of it caused Joanna’s heart to quicken—what a mysterious and exotic notion.
To run away. Was such a thing possible?
She heard some more slapping, yelling, what sounded like someone being slammed into a wall. Joanna shut her eyes, tried not to picture what was going on in that room. Rolando was tied to the bed, Maruja said.
She imagined what running away would be like instead—how it would feel. She pictured the wind at her back, the scent of earth and flowers, the dizzying sense that every footstep was putting distance between her and them. It was such a delightful dream she almost forgot whom she’d be leaving behind.
Joelle.
They had her baby.
The fantasy dissipated—poof. She was left with an empty ache in her chest, the hole that’s left when hope takes off for parts unknown.
Eventually, the slapping subsided—a door slammed shut.
She had trouble getting back to sleep. Maruja and Beatriz were slumbering away, but she remained obstinately awake. In a few more hours it would be morning and Galina would bring Joelle to her, and together they would feed and change her.
It was something worth holding on to. Even in this place. Sleeping three to a bed, and in the next room a man tied up like a barnyard animal.
She dozed off but was awakened what seemed like minutes later by the crazy rooster who seemed to crow all hours of the day and night.
JOELLE HAD A COUGH.