When Galina placed her in Joanna’s arms, her little body shook with each tiny eruption.
“It’s just a cold,” Galina said.
But when Joanna tried to feed her, Joelle refused the rubber nipple. Joanna waited a few minutes, tried again, Joelle still wouldn’t eat. She kept coughing with increasing and violent regularity. Each cough caused her deep black eyes to go wide, as if she were surprised and affronted by it. Joanna pressed her lips to Joelle’s forehead—something she’d seen friends do with their own children.
“It’s hot, Galina.”
Galina slipped a hand under Joelle’s T-shirt to feel her chest, then laid her cheek against her forehead.
“She has a fever,” Galina confirmed.
Joanna felt her stomach tighten. So this is what it’s like, she thought. Being terrified not for yourself, but for your child.
“What do we do?”
They were in the small room Galina always took her to for feedings. Four white walls with the faint impression of a crucifix that must’ve once hung over the door. They walked her there maskless now, something that had both comforted and terrified her the first time. It had seemed to make an astonishing statement to her: You’re in for the long haul. There was no need to play hide-and-seek with her anymore.
When Galina put her hand on Joelle’s forehead, she pulled it away as if it were singed.
“Wait,” she said, and left the room.
She came back waving something. A magic wand?
No. The thermometer she’d purchased for them in Bogotá. Joanna numbly let Galina remove Joelle’s diaper—her thighs were chafed and red. Galina placed her stomach-down on Joanna’s lap and told her to hold her still.
She gently eased the thermometer in.
When Joanna saw the mercury climbing, she said, “Oh.” An involuntary response to naked fear. When Galina took it out and held it up to the light, it was nudging 104.
“She’s sick,” Joanna said. This wasn’t the little fever babies get from time to time. This was for real.
Galina said, “We need to sponge her down.”
“Aspirin?” Joanna said. “Do you have baby aspirin here?”
Galina looked at her as if she’d asked for a DVD player or a facial. They were obviously somewhere rural—a place where the guards were relaxed enough to watch TV at night and not really bother to stop Maruja, Beatriz, and Joanna from talking to each other. A place as far away from a stocked pharmacy as it was from the USDF patrols looking for them.
Her daughter’s fever was sky-high. It didn’t matter. They were on their own.
“Please.” Joanna heard the pleading in her own voice, but this time it didn’t surprise or disgust her. She would beg on hands and knees for her baby. She’d offer to give her right arm or her left arm, or her life.
“If we sponge her, it’ll bring her fever down,” Galina said, but she didn’t sound very convincing. The worry lines in her face had taken on an aspect of true fear. Joanna found that far more terrifying than the sight of the soaring thermometer.
Galina left in search of a wet rag.
How strange, Joanna thought. That Galina seemed able to effortlessly change back and forth between kidnapper and nurse, first one, then the other.
She came back carrying a pewter bowl filled with sloshing water. Somewhere she’d found a small hand towel, which she liberally soaked while sneaking worried peeks at a still-screaming Joelle. She wrung it out and began gently sponging her down. Joelle didn’t cooperate—she twisted and turned on Joanna’s lap as if the touch of the rag were physically painful.
She was screaming in anguished, heartbreaking bursts. Her tiny body quivered.
Joanna grabbed Galina’s hand. “It’s not helping. It’s making it worse.” The wet rag hung down limply, drops of water softly hitting the rough wooden floor.
Pat, pat, pat.
“Look at her, for God’s sakes. Look at her.”
“It’ll bring the fever down,” Galina said. “Please.” But she didn’t attempt to yank her arm away. What would the guards think if they saw Joanna with her hand wrapped around Galina’s bony wrist?
Joanna let go.
When Galina finished, she felt Joelle’s forehead again. “A little cooler, yes?”
But when Joanna felt it, it was like touching fire.
Galina diapered Joelle, lifting her off Joanna’s lap, rewrapped her in a rough wool blanket. Joelle was still wailing away—her red face clenched like a fist—as Joanna rocked her against her breasts and shuffled back and forth in the small space allotted to them. She sang to her, barely above a whisper.
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,
Mommy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.
If that mockingbird don’t sing . . .
Her mother used to sing that to her. She’d play the James Taylor, Carly Simon duet on the living room stereo and dance around the Castro Convertible with Joanna in her arms. It had always made Joanna feel safe and adored.
It wasn’t working with Joelle.
She’d stopped screaming, but only because she’d cried herself out. When she opened her mouth, there didn’t seem to be enough energy left to emit a human sound.
Galina said, “I have to take her now.”
“No.”
“They’ll get angry if I don’t.”
Joanna was too scared to notice, but later she’d turn Galina’s words over and over in her mind.
They’ll get angry if I don’t.
The first tiny admission that in the us-versus-them dynamic of the household—Maruja, Beatriz, and Joanna versus their guards—there might be another them too.
Galina and her.
Galina would’ve left Joelle with her, only she couldn’t because they’d get angry.
In a world devoid of tangible hope, you grasped at verbal straws.
She gave Joelle back to Galina. She was led back to her prison, otherwise known as their room, where Maruja and Beatriz saw the expression on her face and asked what was wrong.
WHEN EVENING FEEDING CAME AROUND, GALINA SHOWED UP AT the door looking ghostly pale. That wasn’t the alarming part.
She was Joelle-less—that was the alarming part.
“What happened? Where is she?” Joanna asked.
“In her crib. She finally cried herself to sleep. I didn’t want to wake her.”
She took Joanna to the feeding room anyway, past two mestizo guards playing cards—one of them a girl with chestnut skin and shimmering black hair that fell to the small of her back. After Galina shut the door, she said, “She has pneumonia.”
“Pneumonia?” The word resounded like a slap. “How do you know? You’re not a doctor. Why would you say that?”
“Her chest. I can hear it.”
“It could be a virus? Just the flu?”
“No. Her lungs—they’re filled with flúido.”
Fear gripped Joanna and refused to let go.
“You’ve got to get her to a hospital, Galina. You have to. Now.”
Galina stared at her with an expression that under different circumstances Joanna might’ve termed tender.
It was the tenderness shown toward the hopelessly brain-addled.
“There are no hospitals,” Galina said. “Not here.”
THAT NIGHT JOANNA COULD HEAR HER DAUGHTER SCREECHING.
It made the guards unhappy. It got on their nerves. In the middle of the night one of them pulled her off the bed, where she’d been holding Beatriz’ hand to keep from running to the door and screaming at them.