She sniffed the air again, taking her time. No. It was clear as day. Someone was cooking breakfast.
Her heart leaped, soared, did pirouettes. She stopped rocking Joelle and brought her up under her chin.
“We made it. We’re going home. We’re free.”
She couldn’t see anyone—the same panorama of trees, vines, stumps, and ferns. A massive dew-laden spiderweb refracted the sun into sparkling carats of fire.
She followed the smell.
Left, then right, then straight ahead.
Nose, don’t fail me now.
The jungle seemed to thin—not all at once, but slowly, inexorably. The air lost its heaviness, her lungs eased, the insects drifted off.
The smell intensified, tickling her taste buds, reeling her in.
Now she could see patches of empty space through the trees.
She quickened her pace—if she’d been wearing sneakers instead of half-inch heels, she would’ve broken into a run.
Even Joelle seemed to sense a change in the air. Her crying lessened, then stopped altogether. She emitted a series of gurgles and hoarse sniffles.
Joanna skirted vegetation that had clearly been stepped on. Someone had walked here, snapping stems, grinding broad green fronds into the dirt. She thought she could make out an actual footprint.
The smell was intoxicating. She was nearly drunk on it. She lurched past a massive banyan tree and was suddenly staring into thin air.
A lone figure was standing there, backlit by a sun the color of marmalade.
The figure was saying something to her.
Joanna dropped to the ground, Joelle nestled in her ams. She hung her head, rocked back and forth, began weeping.
“No,” she whispered to herself, to Joelle, to the person standing in the clearing, maybe to God. “No . . .”
The clearing sloped uphill to a ridge where a modest farmhouse stood.
It had a smoking chimney, lime-green shutters, and a dilapidated back pen holding roosters, goats, and cows.
It was the first time she’d seen it from the outside.
“Quick,” Galina said, “back to the room before they see you.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Galina snuck her back into the house. Not without being detected. The Indian girl with long black hair came out of the bathroom and nearly bumped into them. Galina had an explanation.
She fainted, Galina told her in Spanish, she needed some air.
The girl nodded, seemingly disinterested.
Once Galina ushered Joanna back into the room, once she closed the door and sat down, she said, “It was stupid. You don’t know the jungle.” She took Joelle from her exhausted arms, changed and fed her. “You would’ve died out there.”
“I’m going to die anyway,” Joanna answered. It was the first time she’d uttered that thought out loud. It seemed to give it an awful legitimacy.
Galina shook her head. “You shouldn’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true. They’ll kill me like they killed Maruja and Beatriz. You don’t want to talk about it. They killed them in here—in this room. I can show you their blood.”
“Her cold’s worse,” she said, referring to Joelle, continuing to avoid any mention of the two ghosts still hovering in the room.
“Yes, her cold’s worse. And her mother’s still chained to a wall. And we won’t talk about two murdered women.” Joanna’s own voice seemed alien to her now—flat, emotionless. It’s hope, she thought—she’d lost it out there in the jungle.
“I’m going to put her to sleep,” Galina said.
“Yes. Wonderful idea. While you’re at it, put me to sleep.”
Galina winced and rubbed her left arm.
Nurse. Kidnapper. Friend. Jailer.
“I don’t understand you,” Joanna said.
“What?”
“I don’t understand. You. Why you’re here. Why you’re with these people. Killers. Murderers. You were a mother.”
Galina had turned to leave, but now she stopped, looked back at her. It was that word, Joanna thought.
Mother.
“You never finished your story,” Joanna said. “Tell me. I need a good story tonight. I do. I need to understand why.”
THIRTY-SIX
I need a good story tonight.”
Just the way Claudia used to say it to me because she didn’t want to go to sleep yet.
A story, Mama, she’d beg. A story.
Well, okay.
A story.
AFTER GALINA AND HER HUSBAND HAD LEFT THE BAR THAT NIGHT, they didn’t speak to Claudia again.
Sometimes the boy from La Nacional would call them.
There was a firefight with helicopter-borne Special Forces in the mountains. A new initiative by a just-sworn-in president who’d promised to get tough with the guerrilleros. The boy said Claudia was there—army officers reported a beautiful young girl in camouflage fatigues. Don’t worry, the boy said, she wasn’t hurt.
These government forays were infrequent and entirely for show. Getting tough on the guerrilleros, everyone knew, was simple posturing. There might be two tough factions in Colombia, but the government wasn’t one of them.
There was FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, on the left.
And on the right, the United Self-Defense Forces.
All names in these kinds of conflicts were exercises in irony. Self-Defense—as if they’d been punched in the nose and were simply defending themselves from a playground bully. Maybe that’s what some of them believed they were doing.
Just not the man who ran it.
If you wanted to understand what happened to Claudia, you had to understand him too. If you saw Claudia tripping down the alleyways of Chapinero as a sensitive and easily bruised eight-year-old, you had to see him growing up in Medellín and doing a generous share of the bruising. They were counterparts. If Claudia was the light, he was the dark.
They were due to collide.
How do you explain a Manuel Riojas?
Bogeymen aren’t usually born, they just are. They lurk in the swamp of human fear and misery. They don’t have beginnings, just ends. But even then, they never go quietly, not before they leave behind desolate swaths of scorched earth.
Real bogeymen do have beginnings. They have birthdays and confirmations and school graduations. They live in neighborhoods, not swamps. Manuel Riojas grew up in the grimy Jesús de Navarona neighborhood of Medellín.
Galina had visited relatives there once. She remembered how a steady gray rain washed the garbage downhill. It was possible she’d driven by Riojas himself—later she’d wonder about that. If he might’ve been carjacking by then. If he might’ve picked their car—pointed a pistol through the window and ended everything before it began.
It’s said he grew up on the stories.
The legends of Colombia’s bandidos. Desquite and Tirofijo and Sangrenegra. Revenge, Sureshot, and Blackblood. Galina came to believe that countries where much of the population is poor and oppressed are doomed to worship the wrong people. People who steal from the rich, even if they never actually give anything back to the poor. It doesn’t matter—they are poor. Or were. They might be vicious, murderous, clearly psychotic. They’re victimizing the victimizers. That’s enough to make them folk heroes. Enough to make children who grow up in uncertain circumstances daydream of becoming them.