by Sam Tranum
‘We’re going to press ahead to Managua,’ Richard said. ‘We’ll get back on the road, and the kids can pee behind some bushes.’
‘I don’t want to pee in the jungle. What about scorpions?’ Julie our oldest said. Ever since she found one in her favourite jeans on the laundry line – she had beaten it with the killing stick notched with her extermination count – Julie kept a strict vigil. She even built a cage out of a scrap of screen to protect her and her siblings’ toothbrushes against ant nesting. Just like her father: see a problem, name it, face it, fix it.
Richard stopped. The kids piled out of the van with Julie beating the bushes. We sat in silence and watched our intrepid daughter lead her siblings, with fistfuls of wadded toilet paper, into the scrub. Back in Baltimore, they each had a private bathroom. They took bubble baths in a marble Jacuzzi. They had towel warmers. Julie would never have learned how to kill scorpions from me. There they were, a living tableau right out of their geography books. When they were finished, we pulled back onto the cratered highway. I reached over and massaged Richard’s shoulder. Sometimes a touch helped.
‘Daddy, I’m hungry, too,’ Laurie wailed.
‘Well, your mother shouldn’t have given away your lunches, now should she?’ Richard shrugged his shoulder out from under my hand. I didn’t think he had seen me passing out our sandwiches to those begging kids at the border. His eyes were as hard and dark as the blacktop under our tires.
I reached into my bag, found a plastic spoon and handed it back to Daniel with a jar of peanut butter. ‘Here, help your sisters with this. There’s a jug of water in the back. This should hold you until we get to the hotel.’
I settled back into my seat, rested my cheek against the cool glass of the side window and closed my eyes. I had checked the map at the border. One main road traversed Nicaragua. Richard would get us to Managua without my navigating. A silly song Chloe Kate made up about ‘Mommy reading maps backwards’ buzzed through my head. I woke up with a headache to the sound of my children calling out answers to Richard’s rapid-fire geography questions.
‘Okay, give me the Great Lakes in order, west to east.’
Julie’s and Daniel’s voices tangled around my head.
‘I know! I know! Let me have a turn! You answered last time!’ Julie shouted.
I turned and saw Daniel clamp his hand over his older sister’s mouth and with a gotcha smirk say, ‘Lake Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, Ontario.’ While he waited for Richard’s praise, Julie ripped Daniel’s hand off her mouth and crowed, ‘You’re wrong. Michigan comes before Huron. I guess you read maps backwards like Mommy.’
Richard laughed out loud.
I stretched my lips, not exactly a smile, and pretended it didn’t bother me.
The rest of the trip passed in relative quiet. The closer we got to Managua, the more life we saw. A snarl of arms and legs, both animal and human, dangled off every kind of wheeled contrivance. Rooftop bus riders were perched so precariously that they might have been circus acts. I couldn’t take my eyes off their nonchalant war against gravity. They needed to move, and they found a way.
Daniel’s voice brought me back. ‘Hey Dad, can we go there after we check into our hotel?’ He was pointing to a sign VOLCAN MASAYA PARQUE NATIONAL. Lately, he had been interested in explosions, both man-made and natural – a short-lived phase, I hoped.
‘I don’t see why not, Dano.’
‘I think we should find out if it’s safe, first,’ I said.
‘It’s a national park for God’s sakes, Cara. You worry too much.’
‘Yeah, Mommy, don’t worry so much. We’ll take care of you,’ Laurie said in a mimicking voice. My face burned. My four-year-old was imitating Richard. My eyes and the top of my head were throbbing.
We drove into Managua. The Hotel International was an easy find. It was the only building taller than two stories still upright. I took no comfort in its verticality, the jagged crack running down its fake Mayan façade an almost perfect match for the lightning bolt cleaving my brain. Rubble bordered the hotel on three sides, the leftovers of a ten-year-old earthquake the country, in its war frenzy, hadn’t had the resources to clean up. On the fourth side, elegant European-style villas housing foreign embassies stood incongruously intact.
After an expensive hotel lunch, Richard mumbled that he was paying the entire waitstaff’s salary for the month. We checked into a modern room with the kind of plumbing and electricity we had not seen since we left Baltimore. The children bee-lined for the television. Even Spanish soap operas looked good. Just as quickly, Richard turned it off.
‘I thought you wanted to see a volcano. Who’s ready?’
I got up from my chair slowly. What I really wanted was a warm shower and a nap in the cool, dark room, by myself. I turned to Richard. He cut me off as if he read my mind.
‘Come on, the fresh air will do you good,’ he said. I translated: he didn’t want to take all the children by himself.
I reached for my purse. I remembered the armed guards we had passed on our way into the hotel. ‘To keep the beggars out,’ Richard had told me. I hooked the strap around the right side of my neck and under my left arm. We passed through the lobby. The concierge said the park was worth a visit and that we shouldn’t have any problems there. I thought about leaving my ring and our cash and travellers’ cheques in the hotel safe, but Richard said not to bother. We were safe. I looked out a side window at some almost-naked, stick-thin children playing in the rubble while their equally gaunt mother tried to sell single cigarettes to anyone leaving or entering the hotel.
We piled back into the van. Managua slipped past us like a child’s block world knocked sideways by the class bully. But every now and then, a small new building stood up above the wreckage. We stopped at a kiosk for some cold Cokes and an orange Fanta for Laurie. A toddler wearing a rag of a diaper sat under a table, banging a spoon and kicking at a chicken getting too close to his toes. A small, wiry man, probably the father, was frying empanadas while his soft, round wife swept the concrete floor. I looked at my children, quiet and safe in the back seat. I looked at Richard. He was right. My headache was easing.
After about ten kilometres, dodging oxcarts, tractor-fronts, donkeys and bicycles piled high with ragtag riders precisely counterbalanced by bulging sacks – more circus acts – we pulled into the Masaya Volcano parking lot. A small armed guard, not much more than a boy, stopped us, and pointed out where to park. I frowned at Richard when I saw the crusty rifle he shouldered against his torn park-service t-shirt.
‘See, don’t you feel better now? This is the only entrance and exit and nobody’s getting past him.’
I nodded, more to appease Richard than out of relief. I hugged my bag with our cash and traveller’s cheques close to my ribs. Richard grabbed his bag with our passports and visas in one hand and scooped up Laurie with the other. Julie, Daniel, and Chloe Kate ran up the twisted stone stairway carved into the side of the volcano. The rise was so steep and sharp circling up into the low-hanging clouds that Rapunzel’s castle could have peeked through the mist. I picked my way over loose lava rock, too slow to keep up with my scrambling children. Richard, with Laurie on his shoulders, passed me when I stopped to catch my breath. The wind was so strong that I saw rather than heard Laurie’s squeal when a gust whipped my tulip skirt up to my chin, exposing me to a group of tourists on their way down. I gasped and laughed at how I would tell this one later: a Nicaraguan Marilyn-Monroe-over-the-steam-grate moment.
I finally reached the top. Knots of tourists were milling around the rocky plateau. Richard, with Laurie firmly in his arms now, motioned for me to come close. He was standing at the edge of the caldera. I craned my neck over the precipice and saw a very rough footpath leading down to a plateau full of stone letters about fifty feet below us. I caught Daniel’s, Julie’s and Chloe Kate’s heads as they bobbed out from under an overhanging ledge.
‘I told them it was all right to go down there and spell their n
ames,’ Richard said, pointing to the other tourists’ volcanic graffiti. He almost had to shout, the wind was so loud. Laurie buried her face against her father’s shoulder.
‘Daddy, I want to go back to the car,’ she wailed into his shirt. ‘I don’t like it up here.’
Richard hugged Laurie tightly to him and turned to me. ‘You’ll be all right. There’s only one way up or down, and the guard’s there.’
‘Go ahead,’ I said, the wind almost stealing my voice. ‘I’ll wait here for the kids.’
I watched Richard and Laurie begin their descent and noticed another couple leaving right behind them. I turned back to the caldera to keep an eye on my children. There were only two young men left on the plateau with me, locals by the looks of them, who might have been playing hooky from school. Some things are the same everywhere: a nice day, a long lunch, and before you know it, AWOL. I smiled at them and then turned to motion for the kids to finish and climb back up. I walked to the far side of the plateau to get a better look at the National Geographic view across the needle-sharp landscape stretching out below me.
Just then, one of the young men, the one who had smiled back, gestured frantically for me to come closer. I panicked, thinking maybe one of the kids had fallen. Before I took my second step, I felt a hard hand across my mouth and another around my waist. For a moment I relaxed. It must be Richard come back to surprise me, Laurie putting him up to this little game. Then I was on the ground, the smiler pinning me down. No game. I tightened my body as if it would make a difference. The other one cut my shoulder strap with a swift, accurate slice. I was an animal with nothing to lose. I thrashed blindly. My fingers gripped the already amputated bag at my side as I weighed my options: to give up our money or die or both. Then the blade flashed again so close to my mouth, I tasted dank metal at the back of my throat. I screamed into the wind. A hand moved the knife to my neck, where it delicately cut through a fine link in my gold-chain necklace. I felt fingers, not my own, touch my ring and pry my fist open. My hand was swollen. The ring was a blue ballooning aneurysm sprouting from my knuckle. The only way to get it was to take my finger. I stared at a hand that was attached to a wrist that was mine. The knife made a tentative move toward the ring.
‘No, no, please, no,’ I whimpered.
I lay perfectly still, transfixed. I wondered, in the time it took for the point of the blade to rest gently under the sapphire, how I would tell Richard that I lost the ring. I looked at the gaunt man-boy straddling me. Our terrified eyes met.
And I knew: this was his first time, too.
He dropped my hand and flicked the blade carefully between my watchband and my wrist. Not a scratch, and the watch was his.
The smiler was losing patience. He pulled his partner off and kicked me toward the edge of the caldera. I would not survive the drop.
I didn’t want my children to see.
Oh. God. No. I live in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. The concierge said it was safe here. Richard promised I’d be safe. I squeezed my eyes shut. Pain was coming.
I don’t know how long I waited to die. When I opened my eyes, the men had disappeared.
‘Richard!’ The wind swallowed my scream. I had come to rest at the cliff’s edge, my hand dangling into the abyss. The ring remained embedded in my swollen finger.
*
Later I thought how desperation cushioned my attackers’ flight, their thin-soled sandals no match for foot-slicing outcroppings. Later when I felt poetic rather than mugged, I heard the rocks in the caldera calling the sapphire back home. In the years after we returned to our estate overlooking Lake Roland, our children took to calling us Madre and Padre. When they talked about our time away, they described it as demarcated by the volcano: Madre, before and after. I knew what they meant.
In the beginning I told what I remembered. Then I left the story to my family. Their personal embellishments made heroes of whoever the teller was. Daniel and Julie both claimed they saw me first, when they climbed up out of the plateau and pulled me back away from the ledge. Chloe Kate said how she was the only one not afraid to go down the stone staircase by herself to get Padre. Laurie said how she saved her Padre by making him leave before the bad men came. Richard described his chase over the sharp-as-broken-glass terrain, with shots fired by both him (with a borrowed pistol) and the armed guard, like a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
There were things I did not tell. Some days I felt hands on my neck. Some days I wondered who got our dollars: the man-boy’s family, maybe a baby sister or brother, a grandmother? Some days I felt so light, a good, strong wind could have carried me away. The children stopped singing the reading-maps-backwards song. Richard called me hard and guarded because I looked directly at him and sometimes said no.
One day I said no at the wrong time. He was talking at me in our bedroom. One hour. Two hours. Three hours. He had so much to say about how disappointed he was: why I didn’t trust him, why I didn’t respect him, why I wanted to get a job now that the children were growing up. I should have wanted to be with him. And there was so much yard work to do. We could do it together. Except for the months that he was in the Congo doing his medical philanthropy.
If I were working, who would pick up the black walnuts all over the property that the squirrels wanted to bury in his newly seeded lawn, all four acres of it?
‘I bet Phil and Hugh next door will be happy to earn some spending money,’ I said.
And who would keep the wood stove going?
‘Turn on the furnace until I get home,’ I said.
It was getting dark and late, dinner time. Laurie and Chloe Kate were downstairs pretending we were ‘in conference’, which was Richard’s way of telling them that he wanted me all to himself. Daniel and Julie were away at college.
‘Madre, we’re hungry,’ Laurie called up the stairs. ‘When’s dinner?’
Finally. Saved.
‘I’ll be right down, honey.’
I headed toward the doorway. Before I could ask if she wanted rice or noodles with her chicken, Richard jumped in front of me.
‘Madre and I aren’t finished with our conference, Baby Girl. You and CK can get a snack.’
‘I don’t want a snack, I want dinner,’ Chloe Kate whined up the stairs. Her intolerance for delayed gratification was legendary.
‘Do what I said. Madre will come down when she’s ready.’ Richard enunciated each word.
Silence downstairs. Even Chloe Kate knew better than to try again. I sank back.
He planted his feet in opposite corners of our bedroom door and reached to the upper corners with his hands.
He was an X. A fill-in-the-box next to your selection X.
I watched him and, for a crazy moment, wanted to believe he was stretching.
‘I’d like to finish this conversation later, after dinner,’ I said, as if I were asking a friend to call me back later. Because I was busy. No big deal. Nice and easy. I moved toward him and judged the space between his elbow and his knee.
‘No, Cara, I want to finish now. I’m not really hungry yet. You’re not, either.’
If I bent down and hunched my shoulders, I could just squeeze through because of how his right hip was canted.
I made my move.
My head grazed his forearm.
I was in trouble.
‘You shouldn’t hit me like that, Cara.’
He dropped both arms, grabbed my neck and shoulders and pushed. Hard. I missed the foot of our sleigh bed. Just. I watched myself fall and land on the thick plush of a rose-and-lily-bouquet rug we bought together in Manhattan. Madison Avenue. Aubusson, I think. On my way down, the flowers looked so silky I almost didn’t think to break my fall, and then I was surprised at the abrasions on my elbows.
There was more. I felt other hands. On me. On my neck. Around my waist.
Boy-man hands.
I was above the caldera, and if I didn’t scream for help with all my might, the wind would lift me and carry me over the edge, l
ike a bird without wings, and I wouldn’t wake up because this was not one of those dreams.
My bedroom, my house, my world filled with a terrible sound. It was coming from me. Five minutes … fifteen … sixty. I didn’t know how long. I heard a keening harmony from downstairs. I stopped. Richard was standing over me.
‘You’re scaring the girls. I didn’t push you that hard. Stop screaming. You sound like a banshee yodeller.’
I stopped. His face was a mask, stretched and discoloured like something spoiled, waiting to be thrown away. He ran down the stairs, and I heard murmuring, comforting sounds breaking through the miasma that was my daughters’ fear. I pulled myself up, like a dog, on all fours, panting. If I could make it downstairs, they would see I was all right. With legs that felt as if at any moment they would return to dog position, I let myself circle, slide and slip down my winding staircase, where a lucky girl could have floated in her wedding gown toward her waiting Prince Charming.
Richard was standing, hugging and comforting Laurie and Chloe Kate, telling them I was fine.
‘I need to apologise. I want to apologise,’ he said. He reached out to include me in his circle of love. Chloe Kate and Laurie looked at me sideways, to see how fine I was. I was so stunned at the impending apology – Richard never apologised to me – that I gave my daughters a nod of confirmation.
‘Girls, I’m so sorry Madre and I scared you. Madre didn’t mean to scream so loud. We were having a disagreement, that’s all. Everything’s going to be all right. You know how much we love you.’
He stopped talking, and tears – real tears – puddled, spilled and left glistening tracks down his grey, drawn cheeks. I didn’t know why he was crying. Laurie and Chloe Kate were probably crying from relief. My eyes were dry.