The Girl at the Border

by Leslie Archer

  Richard lapsed back into silence, staring upward into the star-studded sky. Some sixth sense in her perceived that he wished he was up there among those stars, that he had had enough of whatever mistakes he had made in his private life—or he believed it was too late to make amends for those mistakes, to go back, as she longed to return to her father, to talk to him as the woman she had become.

  “I’ve never caught my balance,” he said, “not with Maggie, not with Bella. Things happen that are out of your control.”

  Angela thought of her flight from America, from Dey. “When I left the States, in those early years . . . I had been working for an evil man—a gangster. There’s no way to sugarcoat it.”

  Richard’s brow creased in surprise and concern. “That was a very bad mistake, Angela.”

  She ignored his remark, went on: “I imagined being shot in the back of the head, being suffocated with a pillow in my hotel room in Geneva, or being bound and gagged, dumped at night in the middle of Lake Geneva, being knifed in the side amid the crowds of an Istanbul maidan, or having my throat slit while I shopped at the Grand Bazaar. Those were days and nights of sheer terror. It became clear to me that everything is out of our control. Even the very concept of time, the calendar, they are man-made things, illusions created to keep us from seeing the chaos of the universe. To keep us sane. But my flight had torn that curtain, and I was now face-to-face with that chaos.”

  “That really is chilling,” he said. “I wish I could have been there to stop you.”

  “Nothing would have stopped me,” she said.

  He nodded without understanding; how could he? It was an acknowledgment of his acceptance of her, even after this revelation. The wonderment of what he had just done brought tears to her eyes.

  He misunderstood those tears, thinking they were creatures of the dreadful memory she had shared, and now, in response, he sought to normalize the conversation: “But illusions do keep some of us sane. For others, it’s as if they never existed at all.”

  She recalled how he had described Maggie as venomous, how he had left Bella in the poisonous environment of that venom, and she felt an involuntary spasm of anger toward him. As she had toward her father. And that, of course, vaporized the anger immediately. She was quits with that kind of anger, the kind that ate at you, hollowed you out inside, made of you less than what you were, forced you to bow down before it.

  “But I’ve been thinking about what you said the other night, about it not being too late.” Richard pursed his lips, as if he were about to kiss her, but he faced her and sang a riff on the first verse of Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” rearranged to suit his purpose:

  “The Owl and the Rabbit went to sea

  In a beautiful pea-green boat,

  They took some honey, and plenty of money,

  Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

  The Owl looked up to the stars above,

  And sang to a small guitar,

  ‘O lovely Rabbit! O Rabbit, my love,

  What a beautiful Rabbit you are,

  You are,

  You are!

  What a beautiful Rabbit you are!’

  “Once, long ago, before I left, I would sing Bella to sleep with that.” Richard took a breath, let it out slowly. “When I go home after the Sinai assignment, I’m going to do everything you laid out in the email you sent to her.”

  He looked at her, his eyes glimmering in the moonlight. “I want my rabbit back, Angela. I want my daughter back.”

  In the deepest sleep, at rock bottom, Angela dreamed of the teenager Laurel, of her father’s heavy tread on the staircase in the hour before dawn. The cold rain had briefly turned to wet snow and back again, making her jack-o’-lanterns glisten like glass. The house, which had been in her father’s family for generations, creaked and groaned as the heat dried out the wooden floorboards and beams.

  “Dad!” Laurel leapt up from her position curled around the second floor newel post. “Daddy!”

  He paused on the stairway, the big man looking somehow shrunken inside his enormous lumberjack coat, droplets standing out atop its surface like a coating of dew on a field of flowers. He looked up, his eyes darkened, his lips chapped from his walk through the icy night.

  “What is it, Rabbit?” At the sight of her anguished face, rushing up the remainder of the flight. “Why are you up at this hour?” Taking her into his arms, the wetness of his coat, warming between their bodies; she felt as if she were being hugged by Nana, the Newfoundland sheepdog in Peter Pan, her favorite book until she read the first page of Moby-Dick and fell head over heels in love. “Are you all right?” Checking her forehead with the back of his hand, which he had first breathed on several times to rid it of its chill.

  “Mom is gone,” Laurel said, her voice full of fear, anger, and despair.

  “Gone? What d’you mean ‘gone’?” He took her by her shoulders, held her at arm’s length. “Honey, you’re not making sense.”

  “She’s left us—both of us. Some man picked her up in a car outside and took her away.”

  Her father’s face darkened. “What man? Took her where?”

  She just shook her head, sobbing.

  “C’mon, Rabbit.” Putting his arm across her shoulders, he took her into the master bedroom. He left her side to look in the bathroom, then pawed through his wife’s closet. He turned back to her, his voice almost accusatory. “There’s nothing missing, Laurel.” He only called her by her name when he was angry with her. “All her clothes, her toiletries, not one thing is missing. And no note.” He took a step toward her. “Is her leaving a dream of yours?”

  “No! I was awake! I saw what I saw!” She was near to shouting now, beside herself at not being believed. She lifted her arms, dropped them to her sides. “Where is she! Where has she gone?”

  “I don’t know.” Her father sat heavily on the side of the bed, passed a hand across his face. “But she’ll be back. I mean, how could she leave us?” He offered the shadow of a smile. “You’ll see, Rabbit. She’ll be back before noon. I promise.”

  But she wasn’t, and it was at that point that the center ceased to hold, and things fell apart.

  Dusk stretched cool and gray as a Siamese cat. Gunmetal clouds roiled the sky, seeming close enough to reach up and touch. To the north the horizon vanished in midnight-blue downpour. A moderate chop, the water ruffled like a sea eagle readying itself for flight.

  They had been napping. She came awake a few moments before Richard, still enmeshed in her dream. Grabbing his mobile, she checked to see if there were any replies from Bella. There weren’t. She debated for a moment, then quickly wrote:

  Out here @ sea, it’s so peaceful & calm for as far as the eye can see. So different from being on land, even this island. Your father wishes u were here; he talks abt u so much it seems I already know u. You remind me of myself. Is that silly to say? I mean, we haven’t even met. & yet I feel we have. I feel u.

  Angela

  Coming up beside her, Richard looked out over the water and said, “Okay with you if we go back this evening?”

  “You’re the captain.” She saw that he was looking over her left shoulder, northward. “The storm’s some way off,” she added. “Using the engine, we can make shore without a problem. Should we haul up the anchor?”

  “Stay right where you are.” He vanished belowdecks, returning moments later with a pair of binoculars. Pointed them due north, toward the darkness.

  “If it’s the storm you’re worried about,” she said, “we’d better get started.”

  “What did I say?” He almost barked it. “It’s not the storm I’m worried about.”

  Frowning, she looked north. “What is it? What?”

  He handed her the binoculars. “Aim at that white dot,” he said, pointing.

  Putting the binoculars to her eyes, she turned the center ring, refocused them. The white blob resolved itself into the bow wave of a motor launch. It was coming directly at the
m full speed. “What?” she repeated.

  “Go below,” he ordered. “Put on a pair of jeans. You’re already wearing a windbreaker; zip it all the way up. You have a scarf?”

  She nodded, bewildered.

  “Wrap that around your head.” He gestured with his chin. “Now go, go, go.”

  She did as he asked, no more questions. When she clambered topside, he handed her the binoculars. She refocused as the launch came on, frighteningly closer now in the short span of time she had been below. She saw the men, then. Six of them, the lower halves of their faces covered, black headbands streaming out behind them. And the semiautomatic weapons they held aloft.

  “Jesus,” she said under her breath. Now she knew why he had ordered her to cover herself, Muslim-style. “Jesus Christ.”

  Thrusting the binoculars back at him, she rose, heading for the anchor. Richard pulled her back down.

  “What are you doing? We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “That’s precisely what we won’t do.”

  “But they’re armed. Pirates. Terrorists, probably.”

  “I have no doubt. But you saw how fast their boat is. We can’t outrun them.”

  “So what?” She searched his face for some reassurance. “We just wait here for them to board us?”

  “Pretty much,” Richard said.

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand. Richard, they’ll kill us.”

  “Maybe they will, and maybe they won’t,” he said. “If we run, they will shoot us dead. This way we have a chance.”

  “My God, my God. What kind of a chance?”

  “No one knows.” He gripped her arms, held her close. “I’m asking you to trust me. Don’t move; don’t say a word, even if provoked. Nothing. You don’t exist—hear me?”

  She nodded, terrified. Her mind had already left her body, was hovering somewhere a hundred feet overhead. Safe. In your dreams, a voice laughed hysterically inside her head. What kind of a world is this? she asked herself. One minute you were happy as a lark, eating breakfast with your friend, the Mediterranean your oyster; the next you were under threat of death or possibly worse. Incarceration, deprivation, with no hope of escape. Then she laughed, a thin, sickly utterance that made Richard flinch.

  “Don’t lose your nerve now,” he said, misinterpreting the sound.

  No, the joke was on her. For the first time since she’d changed identities, fled the States, become lost, she had ceased to fear Dey’s long arm. Dey was nothing, a mere speck in her eye, wiped away with a stray mascaraed lash. The advent of the speeding launch had thrust her into an entirely new universe, one where all her meticulous planning, her wildly expensive camouflage, her launch of a new identity meant absolutely zero. These people boarding the sailboat now didn’t care whether she was Laurel Springfield or Angela Chase. Feeling the rise of hysteria inside her, she cautioned herself. Don’t lose your nerve now.

  Four men boarded; two stayed behind, the driver and an outrider, haunch on the starboard gunwale. The men were like something out of a documentary: thin, bearded, sunken eyed, the fever of extremist fervor igniting their entire beings like infernal auras. They were young, these four—one no more than a boy, and yet in many ways he seemed the fiercest, the most heavily indoctrinated, hate and rage absorbed, bitter mother’s milk nurturing him.

  The leader said something in what sounded to Angela like a rough and cracked version of Arabic. To her monumental surprise Richard answered him in the same language. The leader looked only slightly less stunned than she felt. There ensued a rapid-fire conversation. Not one of the extremists so much as glanced at her; all their attention was riveted on Richard. She had been reduced to a nonentity. She did as Richard had ordered; she did not move or say a word. In fact, she scarcely looked at anyone, recalling admonitions not to make eye contact with wild predators, an instinctual sign of aggression.

  In real time, the conversation did not last long. For Angela, it was a lifetime, every second another beat ticked off toward the ending of her freedom, her life. There arose in her now an acute realization of, Dey or no Dey, how privileged her life had been as an American citizen living in the United States, even with the rise of homegrown terrorism; how far away all of her fellow citizens were from the violent reality of the world, day in, day out being reshaped by extremists of all stripes; how strong their rage was; how monocular their savage gaze; how desperately they needed something, anything, to strike back at, even if it meant the loss of their own lives. The veil had lifted. How precious was everything she had taken for granted, how fragile, how ephemeral. Life was a passage, the flutter of a bird’s wing, and then it was gone.

  People on the boat were in motion, and she tensed, feared now all was lost. But the leader and one of his men were ducking down into the small cabin. Searching for—what?—while the third man stood in front of Richard, studying him as if he were an insect pinned to a table. The fourth man—the kid—strode over to her. His outsized cockiness would have been amusing in anyone else his age. Not this boy. He stood in front of her, staring at the scarf she had wrapped around her head to cover her hair, ears, and the corners of her face, as if looking for a flaw in her makeshift hijab, looking to punish her for even the tiniest infraction. She could tell from the intensity of his gaze that no infraction would be insignificant. Then his gaze lowered, bit by bit, as if in a slow-motion film shot, to the swell of her breasts. His hand came up; the grubby fingernails bitten almost to the quick were ragged, feral looking. He started to reach out toward her, then, like a hyena sensing the presence of a larger predator, turned his head. Someone out of her field of vision must have been looking at him because his hand withdrew; his gaze moved on. She registered all this out of the periphery of her vision, staring as she was into the middle distance over his head, wishing nothing more than to lie down, close her eyes, count sheep. She bit her lip, forcing back the words she longed to speak to him, the sorrow of seeing so much hate in such a young face. She wanted to tell him that it didn’t have to be like this, but with the reemergence of the extremists from belowdecks, she understood how wrong she was. It did have to be like this. Hate was the essence of these people: it had molded them into who they were. It made them tick.

  The leader spoke briefly to Richard again in that rapid-fire way of his. They exchanged words, not as friends but, it appeared, not as enemies either. Then the four men were back on their launch; its motor revved up, and they were pulling away. Angela watched in a kind of rapt detachment as the launch described a semicircle, white foam rippling out, rocking the sailboat in what seemed to her like a last warning gesture. Then it headed back the way it had come. It took her some time to breathe normally again. The storm, blackening the horizon, had advanced no farther.

  THIRTEEN

  For a long time after that neither of them spoke. Angela could have taken off her scarf, but shock and fear ensured that she didn’t. She stared out over the sea to the long smudge of land she knew to be the island of Crete, while Richard weighed anchor and got them underway. Crete had been a way station for her. Now it was not even that, merely a bleak and desolate pile of rocks. For her entire life she had had no direction home . . . now home was Richard. The only rock that meant anything to her was Richard. The danger they shared had shaken her. The bonding that resulted had altered her reality to its core. Perhaps she had been so long unmoored in the world that it had taken this long—or it had taken this terrifying incident—for her brain to catch up. And while it would take time for the fear to subside, for the first time in her life, she felt berthed in a harbor filled with sunlight and calm waters, everything shining, etched in sharp relief. The realization pierced her so deeply that tears sprang out in the corners of her eyes.

  Misinterpreting her incipient tears, Richard finally broke their silence. The shoreline had become a firm brushstroke in the early evening moonlight rather than a pointillist blur. The wind was at their backs, so he could have used the sails. She didn’t think either of them wanted th
at.

  “I was in Sinai over 9/11,” he said without preamble. “Two years to the day after the birth of my daughter. The dig was long and arduous, and then we got the message. We stopped working, sat stunned, not looking at one another. We should have come together, but we didn’t. For some reason the news blew us apart. We all went to our separate corners, like wounded animals looking for a safe place to lie down. As it happened, there was no safe place.

  “As is usual, our group was multinational: British, Italian, Jordanian, Palestinian. American, of course. There was even an Iranian, an incredibly beautiful woman who knew more about what we were finding than all the rest of us put together.

  “Anyway, it was the next day, the twelfth of September, along about sunset. I was standing with one of my American compatriots, a jolly fellow. Ben, his name was. Benjamin. From Nebraska—or was it Illinois? I’m sure I’ve made myself forget. So we were standing at the eastern edge of the dig, discussing—what?—the Beatles versus the Rolling Stones—can you believe it? All at once, there was a colossal noise. The back of his head exploded. I was covered in blood and brains and bone chips.”