Eleven Hours

by Paullina Simons

  Irene’s arrival three years ago was similar, except she was two weeks late and the birth had to be induced. The contractions got bad fast. Then Didi was given an epidural and stopped feeling. Someone shouted push, push, and then someone pressed down hard on her belly to get the baby out, and then the head was out and the nurse said, look, Didi look, at the head, there it is, touch the head, look at it, one more push and the baby is out. But Didi couldn’t look or touch. When the baby was out, Rich cried, and Didi may have cried that time, too—and regretted she hadn’t touched her baby’s head. But the regrets came later. She couldn’t have looked down for anything. She couldn’t open her eyes.

  When people asked her how her labors had been, she’d say she didn’t remember. Or she’d say she was knocked out for most of it. How did your labor start, do you remember? Yes, Didi would reply. I was marinating a chicken with Amanda and watching a Queen concert on TV with Irene.

  But what was she going to say about Adam or Evelyn? How did your labor start, Didi? Oh, I was sitting in a stolen police car next to a complete stranger. I couldn’t see out of my right eye. I hadn’t had a drink in eight hours. If only she could write that down somewhere. When she was younger and unmarried and childless, she used to write in her diary. About friends and adolescent longings and real and imagined slights. But then her easy life took hold of her, and she didn’t have time to write.

  She would have liked to have a piece of paper to write down her thoughts for today.

  It would be a short diary entry. Dear diary, please let my baby get out of this alive. All I want is my baby’s life.

  Didi stared out the window with her one good eye, while Lyle continued down the narrow country road at seventy miles an hour. Didi felt every bump.

  Where were they headed?

  Her belly contracted again in a vise of pain. She tried not to breathe, nor pant, nor move a muscle. She closed her eyes and clasped her hands together for better control. Trying to remember a prayer for labor, she failed, and remembered only I cry in the daytime, but You do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest.

  This wasn’t karma, thought Didi with palpable bitterness. This wasn’t punishment. This wasn’t cosmic revenge. This was—this was God forgetting about Didi’s forty-three-year-old friend and letting her baby die. This was God slicing up Leslie’s colon during a C-section. This was God on another highway, looking after someone else. Well, He can’t be everywhere at once. And Rich couldn’t be everywhere. Maybe there were children in Bosnia or Africa who needed Him more than Didi did. Otherwise, how could God let her go into labor now in the car with Lyle?

  At that moment, Didi believed in Rich more than she believed in God, because she knew that Rich was searching for her. God, who could find her in a jiffy, was looking the other way.

  Is this my punishment for shopping, for loving shopping? Well, you know what, Didi thought angrily, if I get out of this, then I’m going to shop more than ever, shop with a vengeance—but from catalogs.

  Didi started to pray again, but she had another contraction and stopped. God wasn’t on this farm road, He wasn’t on his way to—

  “Eden,” said Lyle. “Fifteen miles.” And he drove faster.

  Eden? thought Didi. What did that mean? Soon she saw a green sign that said, EDEN, 11 MILES. And she thought, we’re going to Eden?

  “What’s Eden?” she asked.

  “Eden is where Mel lives,” Lyle said.

  “Oh,” said Didi. “So we are going to visit your wife?”

  “Yes,” he said brusquely.

  Keeping one hand on her pulsating eyebrow and one hand on the Belly, Didi fretted. Why would he want to bring me to visit his wife? Are they kinky or something? Didi had heard about people like that. A husband and wife would kidnap teenage girls, lure them into their house, have violent, abusive sex with them, and then kill them and cut them up into pieces. She had read about something like that not long ago. But it had happened in England, and Didi had thought, yeah, that kind of crazy thing happens in England, it’s a foreign country.

  It doesn’t happen in God’s country. In Texas. We’re God-fearing people.

  Her heavy heart was pounding hard inside her empty, thirsty chest.

  A flame of sun singed the horizon to a crisp. They were still heading west to Eden.

  Didi thought back to the last few hours with Lyle in his car. Could she have escaped? Could she have run? Run where? Onto the road, to get hit by an oncoming car, to get shot by him?

  She put her hands on her belly. Her cut-up hands, brown with dried blood, and her brow weren’t hurting anymore. Only her belly. And her heart.

  Didi wasn’t scared. She was sad.

  Heartbroken to be abandoned by God in the thick of her life with a life inside her. She couldn’t fathom dying, being nothing, but she could fathom being alone, and she thought, well, if I’m abandoned now, when I’m still living, who is going to watch over me when I die, and when my baby dies? Who’s going to take care of Richie, of my little girls? If there is no God, then where do we go? Where are we headed?

  And Lyle said, “After Eden—Mazatlán.”

  Didi felt such emptiness, such desolate melancholy inside her.

  She must have been making wretched sounds, because Lyle looked over at her. “What’s the matter?” he said.

  She wiped her face, but it was no use.

  “What have I ever done to you?” she whispered. “I’ve never done anything to you, I’ve never hurt you. I’ve never hurt anyone.”

  “That’s funny, pretty Didi, because until today, neither had I,” Lyle said, unmoved.

  “Well, you’ve made up for it today, haven’t you?” she said. “What’s left for you to do?”

  “Still plenty left,” Lyle said.

  Didi wished she hadn’t asked.

  He laughed.

  Didi thought that if he didn’t have the blood of two people on his hands and her and her baby’s life in his hands, he’d almost have a nice laugh. He would almost seem like a nice man. Clean, quiet, well-behaved.

  But he wasn’t. And when Lyle laughed, Didi trembled.

  “I know you’re afraid for your life, Lyle, I know you are,” she said. “Believe me, you still have the chance to undo what you’ve started here. Think about it. The police, my husband, they don’t want you, Lyle. They just want me. Make a deal with them. Tell them you’ll give them me, and they will let you go.”

  Lyle broke into a hearty laugh. “Desdemona, my optimistic girl, then what will I get in return?”

  “Your earthly life,” she stated flatly. She didn’t want to mention his eternal soul.

  “But I could have just as easily not taken you for a ride with me, if all I wanted was for the police to let me go.”

  “Things have gone wrong, Lyle. You didn’t expect it—”

  “Everything is still going to be just hunky-dory.”

  “No, they’ll find you.”

  He appeared amused. “I’m starting to really enjoy your innocence. You’re so naive, my bologna,” he said, tapping the wheel lightheartedly with his fingers. “First of all, they’ll never find us. You’ll see. Second, you think your life is so important that the cops would forsake me to have you back? You’re not the President of the United States, you know. You’re only some pregnant woman who’s not important to anybody but your husband, and you don’t even know if you’re important to him. Imagine that, Didi, imagine that he went home and is fuming now because you’re still shopping away somewhere, blowing his hard-earned money on Estée Lauder. He’s home watching reruns on TV, thinking, wait till she comes home.” Lyle howled.

  Didi didn’t reply. Not because what he was saying made any sense, but because it was all she could do not to moan aloud with her contraction. Thirty, forty, fifty seconds passed, and her contraction passed, too. How many minutes had it been since the last one? Fifteen? Ten?

  Less?

  Didi wouldn’t think about it. “Lyle, what are you talking about? If it w
asn’t for my husband, then why would I be on the news? On the radio? Why would anyone be looking for me at all, if it wasn’t for him?”

  Her Richard wouldn’t abandon her. No. Rich wouldn’t turn his back on his wife and watch reruns. The knowledge made her stronger.

  “Lyle, they don’t care about you, don’t you see that? They care about me. They’d let you go to have me back.”

  Didi could barely make out his features in the twilight of the day, but she saw him stop tapping cheerfully on the wheel. “No,” he said firmly. “They would certainly say they’d let me go to have you back. But we both know they wouldn’t mean a word of it. As soon as you were in their hands, all bets would be off. No.”

  She knew he wasn’t going to let her go. She wasn’t going to ask him again. “Can you tell me, then, what your plans are?” she said. “For us?”

  “You’ll know soon enough.”

  They passed a sign that read PFLUGER PARK. It meant nothing to Didi, but she noted the oddity of the name.

  “Be patient, Didi. Be patient. We’re almost there.” And then he added, “You shouldn’t be in such a hurry.”

  Suddenly Didi was in the middle of another contraction, but still his words appalled her. “I’m not—in … a hurry,” Didi breathed out.

  Didi needed to get to a hospital in a hurry. She needed her Rich in a hurry. She needed to get away from Lyle in a hurry. But she wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere with Lyle.

  They passed by a sign that read WELCOME TO EDEN. POP. 1597.

  They continued straight ahead on the road at reduced speed, and then he made a right. Didi watched the road more carefully now. She wanted to remember the street address, but it didn’t look as though Lyle was going to a residential area. There were no houses nearby. Maybe Lyle and Mel were farmers.

  Then they passed a sign that read EDEN CEMETERY, NEXT LEFT.

  Didi thought nothing of it until they’d made the left.

  Her fear was interrupted by another contraction. Then, quickly, fear gripped her insides again. It wasn’t over in thirty seconds or even a minute. Fear came to stay.

  “Oh, God, what are we doing here?” Didi said weakly.

  “We’re here to visit my wife,” Lyle said. He stopped the car, left it running, and unclipped a pair of handcuffs from his policeman’s belt.

  “Your wife is dead?” Didi gasped. For some reason, this single, mystifying turn made her day seem surreal.

  “Put your hands in them,” he said.

  Back to reality.

  “Lyle, I’m harmless,” Didi pleaded, not moving, not budging toward the metal cuffs that seemed to her to be the end of her life. “I’ll walk with you. Where am I going to go? It’s not like I’m going to run.”

  Somberly, Lyle reached over and grabbed her hands. “Don’t get smart with me, Barcelona,” he said, roughly clasping the steel rings around her wrists. Didi groaned. She was caught now. Caught with her hands chained.

  As soon as Lyle turned to get out, Didi yanked her hands until the metal bands of the handcuffs dug painfully into her wrists. She didn’t care. If she could have pulled her way out of the cuffs by dislocating her thumbs, she would have.

  8:05 P.M.

  Collapsed in a chair, Rich watched Scott move about the room, cell phone to his ear. After a while, Rich asked, “How many names does the NCIC contain?”

  “Forty million,” Scott replied.

  “How many fingerprints on file do you guys have?”

  “In the neighborhood of a hundred and seventy-three million.”

  Rich gaped. “You’re telling me that out of forty million names and a hundred and seventy-three million prints, you can’t locate a Luft?”

  “We can locate a Luft all right,” Scott said. “But no Lyle Luft. And no—”

  Rich got up. “Scott, let me ask you—have you tried the phone book?”

  “What? And sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

  Rich didn’t listen. “The phone book—have you tried it?”

  “To find a…?”

  “A Luft. Hey, why not? You said you’ve tried everything else.”

  Scott shook his head, but called in the sheriff and asked for the phone book. In San Angelo there was no Lyle Luft, but there were two other Lufts. After five minutes of calls, Scott learned that no one had a relative named Lyle.

  Rich must have looked dejected, because Scott said, “Don’t look so sad, Rich. It wasn’t a bad idea. You know, lay people can have them too.”

  “What, good ideas?”

  “Exactly right,” said Scott, sitting at the edge of the desk.

  Pacing, Rich waved Scott off and then stopped. “Wait. Did you get a search warrant for his room?”

  Scott put a gentle hand on Rich’s shoulder. The two men stared at each other for a moment, one softly, the other helplessly. Rich backed away.

  “Rich, man. We did that three hours ago. We were still in Dallas. Remember, Lopez and Chief Murphy sent men there to see what they could find?”

  “What did they find?” Rich said impatiently.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. He was renting a room from a woman in a two-story house. She said he was quiet as a clam, never had any guests, paid her fifty bucks a week in cash, had no lease, and was always on time with the rent. There was no kitchen in the apartment, just a fridge. The place was furnished, and nearly empty when the police checked it out. He had a couple of magazines. There was a second set of keys to his cars, an old beat-up suitcase with some clothes in it. A few towels.”

  “How did you find all this out?”

  “What do you think I do when I’m on the phone? Talk to my mother?”

  Rich was thoughtful. “Did they find the Honda?”

  Scott shook his head.

  Trying to shrug off the pressure in his head, Rich said, “So what do you think? Lyle will be where the Honda is?”

  Scott nodded. “That’s exactly what I think.”

  Rich still couldn’t understand it all. “What kind of a man lives with absolutely no personal belongings?”

  “The kind of man who’s running from something, or to something, or has lost his reason to live,” Scott said. “The kind of man who lived his entire life without a credit card, without filing a tax return—” Scott paused. “Hey, I just thought of something. I’m going to call Social Security on the West Coast. I’ll find out if Lyle has ever paid his Social Security tax. Maybe there’ll be a list of his employers.”

  Rich shrugged. “The IRS has no returns for him. Why would the SSA? Maybe he worked off the books all his life. Maybe he never worked at all. Listen, call. We have nothing to lose.”

  “It’s all we have now,” said Scott. “Otherwise, you think TRW or other credit-reporting bureaus are going to give us a list of all the women named Luft in the United States?”

  “Only the ones in Texas,” Rich said morosely, knowing it was a long shot, probably nearly futile.

  Scott spent the next ten minutes on the phone, talking to one of the helicopters that was zigzagging across west Texas skies, trying to locate patrol car number 538. He also talked to the Social Security office and to TRW. He had connections. He could talk to the best, most competent people in every area, and he had the entire Texas branch of the FBI at his disposal.

  The only problem was that Lyle Luft and Didi were in a police vehicle that had disappeared off the face of the earth, and the FBI had no idea of Luft’s destination or even of his motives. After all these hours of searching, Rich didn’t feel much closer to finding Didi. He felt he was in the middle of nowhere, and the sun was going down. Rich glanced at his watch. 8:15.

  * * *

  Scott threw the phone down and bolted up. “We got something.”

  Rich exclaimed, “You found the car?”

  Shaking his head, Scott said, “No, but we’re leaving. Come.” He drank the rest of his Coke and threw the can in a wastebasket.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Abilene.”

 
; They ran out to the parking lot in the back of the station, where the helicopter was waiting, its blades bursting the air into tiny particles of dust.

  “What’s in Abilene?”

  “Get in and I’ll tell you.”

  When they were in the air, Rich said, “We have our best conversations cooped up in here, en route to nowhere.”

  Scott replied, “They’re not that good, our conversations, Rich.”

  Rich agreed. “What’s in Abilene?”

  “Lyle Luft’s past is in Abilene. There’s a good chance Lyle’s there too.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because the Social Security office told me that a Lyle Luft paid his Social Security tax out of eight different places in Abilene, Texas, from 1964 until now.”

  “1964?” Rich tried to do the math and failed. “Was our Lyle even born in 1964?”

  “No. I think it’s the dad.”

  Rich got excited; his hands became agitated. “Does Lyle Luft Senior have an address in Abilene?”

  “Sure does. That’s where we’re going.”

  Rich thought. “The white pages could have told us all that.”

  Scott smiled ruefully. “You’re right, Rich. But how long would it have taken us to look for a Lyle Luft through all the telephone records in Texas?”

  Rich said, “About five minutes. To plow through the Texas area codes looking for a Lyle Luft.”

  He didn’t mean it as a rebuke. It was coming back to the same thing—he was an amateur, he wasn’t supposed to have any of the answers. And they were the FBI. They were supposed to find his wife. And then Rich remembered they were only supposed to catch Lyle. The wife was incidental. He briefly felt hostile toward Scott again, but Scott was his only ally.

  “Scott? Tell me,” Rich asked after staring out the glass of the helicopter. “How long you been doing this?”

  “Twelve years,” said Scott. “I joined right out of law school. The only job I ever had.”

  “Do you have a wife? Kids?”

  “Got an ex-wife. One son.” Scott was quiet. “They live in Oklahoma. I see my son once a month and during vacations sometimes. If I’m not working.”