If that had been the case, maybe they would’ve been able to talk her back—the way you talk someone down off a ledge. Maybe they could’ve simply lifted her off her feet and carried her back home.
Claudia didn’t look ragged. Or thin. Certainly not sick.
She looked happy.
What’s your greatest wish for your children?
The wish you end each nightly prayer with?
The one you whisper to yourself when they tell you to blow out the candles for another birthday you’d rather not be celebrating?
I wish, you murmur, for my child to be happy.
Only that.
Claudia looked radiantly, unmistakably happy.
Was beaming too strong a word?
If she’d been in the throes of first love before, now she was clearly in the midst of a full-fledged affair. One look at her, and Galina knew they’d be leaving without her.
Claudia kissed Galina, then her father.
The three of them held hands, just like when Claudia was four and she’d coerce them into another game of dog and cat. Claudia was always the cat. And the cat was always captured.
Galina asked her how she was.
But she already knew the answer.
“Good, Mama,” Claudia said.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Galina asked, then began doing what she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. Crying, crumbling, falling to pieces.
“Shhh . . . ,” Claudia whispered, daughter-suddenly-turned-mother. “Stop, Mama. I’m fine. I’m wonderful. I couldn’t tell you. You know that.”
No. All Galina knew was that Claudia was her heart. And that from now on life would consist of hurried meetings in transvestite bars and furtive messages from friends.
Claudia told them little of anything specific. Where she was. Whom she was with. She mostly asked about home. How was her cat, Tulo? And her friends, Tani and Celine?
For their entire time together, Galina refused to let go of her hand. She must’ve thought, in some primitive part of her brain, that if she never let go, Claudia would be forced to stay with them. That as long as they were touching, they couldn’t be apart.
She was wrong, of course. Hours flew by, the opposite of all those days waiting to hear from her when she’d felt stuck in time.
Claudia announced she had to leave.
Galina had one last, enormous plea left in her. She’d been practicing it as Claudia asked about home, about relatives and schoolmates, as Galina sat and held her hand like a lifeline.
“I want you to listen to me, Claudia. To sit and hear everything I have to say. Yes?”
Claudia nodded.
“I understand how you feel,” she began.
She did understand. It didn’t matter.
“You think I’m too old. That I can’t possibly feel what you feel. But I do. There was a time, when I was very young, that I was just like you. But what I know, I know. FARC, the USDF—it doesn’t matter. Both sides are guilty. Both sides are blameless. In the end they are each other. Just as innocent. Just as murderous. And everyone dies. Everyone. I’m asking you as your one and only mother in the world. Please. Don’t go back to them.”
She might’ve been speaking Chinese.
Or not speaking at all.
Claudia couldn’t hear her, and even if she could, she was incapable of understanding a word.
She patted Galina’s hand, smiled, the way you do to those already claimed by senility. She stood up, embraced her father while Galina remained frozen to her chair. Then Claudia reached down, put her head in the hollow of her neck.
“I love you, Mama,” she said.
That’s all.
On the way home, they sat in complete, numbing silence. They’d dressed as if going to church, but they returned from a funeral.
There were just a few messages from her after that.
From time to time the boy from the university called with news. Every time Galina opened the paper, she held her breath . . .
THE DOOR CREAKED OPEN.
Galina stopped talking.
Tomás—one of the guards—nodded at her, motioned for her to get up.
Joelle was out of danger now. Joanna would have to give her back, return to her room.
“What happened to her?” Joanna asked Galina, transferring Joelle to her, suddenly desperate to know the ending. “You didn’t finish the story.”
Galina simply shook her head, pressed Joelle to her chest. Then she headed to the door.
TWENTY-SIX
He didn’t know he was alive and kicking until he realized that’s what he was doing. Kicking. Moving his legs back and forth in an effort to put out the fire that was crawling up his skin.
He must’ve passed out from the smoke. He remembered the wall of flame bearing down on them like an act of God. Maybe it wasn’t an act of God—because he seemed to remember he’d prayed to God just before everything went black and here he was alive.
So maybe he and God had made up. Maybe God said enough with numbers and equations and risk ratios and let’s try blind faith for a change, okay?
He wasn’t actually on fire. Not literally. His pants, what was left of them, were smoking. And the skin poking out from their tattered remnants appeared baby pink—the telltale sign of first-degree burn.
Somehow they’d made it past the line of kerosene.
Everything to his left was a charred, smoking black. The wind had taken the fire in a single direction. Meaning Miles was right. They’d headed toward the fire and won.
Or he had. Miles was missing in action.
What about them?
Paul tentatively raised his head and peeked.
It looked volcanic. Picture one of those Discovery Channel specials where islands of lush vegetation are reduced to boiling stews of smoke and fire. Here and there scattered bursts of flame still shot high into the air.
Overall it was lunar-empty.
They were gone.
With this ecstatic realization came an equally horrific one. They were gone; so were the drugs. They were interred in the black soot. His one and only chance of saving Joanna had vanished. When God shuts a door, he opens a window, his long-dead mother used to say. But going along with his newfound doctrine of faith, it was entirely possible the reverse was also true. That when God opened a window, he shut a door.
Paul was alive; Joanna and Joelle were dead.
Soon enough.
He collapsed back onto the still-steaming earth, as if shot.
Someone said hello.
A creature with a completely black face, save for the eyes, moon white like those of a minstrel singer, his whole person surrounded in rising wisps of smoke.
An angel? Come to earth to tell Paul he was wrong, sorry, he hadn’t survived the fire, after all? Given Joanna and Joelle’s probable fate, would the news be that unwelcome?
It wasn’t an angel.
It was Miles.
THEY FOUND MILES’ CAR PRETTY MUCH WHERE THEY’D LEFT IT. Both doors were yanked open and the windshield was smashed.
That wasn’t what upset Miles.
Not that they’d trashed his car, but that they’d actually seen it, taken note of it, jotted down his license number or maybe his registration, which was stuck somewhere in the glove compartment. Now that the euphoria of actually surviving had worn off, Miles seemed to understand that it might not be for long. He retreated to somewhere inside himself.
That made two of them.