by Gwen Florio
Lola touched her tongue to cracked lips. Once, in Afghanistan, she’d gotten so dehydrated—refusing water during a long day of covering demonstrations so as not to have to pee in a place that offered no obvious opportunities—that when she’d finally returned to the safety of her hotel room, her urine was a scary dark orange and her head spun so that she’d clutched the sink to avoid falling off the toilet. She felt that way again now. She shook her head to clear it. It was one thing to fight the urge to leap into the abyss. It would be another to fall into it by accident or through her own carelessness.
“Help me,” she murmured, to no deity in particular. A lizard appeared. Lola blinked. It blinked back. It sat on a protrusion of rock, perfect for a handhold. Its fingernail sliver of a tongue flicked out, then back. Its blue-striped tail switched. There was no way it was the same one she’d seen on her tour. Still. “Hey, buddy,” said Lola.
It was, she reminded herself, a reptile, with a brain about the size of a dust mote. Still, its calm unperturbed presence seemed a blessing of sorts. It turned bright black eyes upon her. They reminded her of Betty Begay’s before she’d gotten sick, serene and steady. I’m just fine here, it seemed to say. You are, too.
Lola replied as though it had spoken. “No, I’m not. Not at all. For starters, I could really use that little rock to hold on to. Do you mind?” She slid her hand along the rock toward it. The lizard obligingly skittered from its perch, spread its toes wide, and clung to a vertical section of wall. Lola grabbed at the rock with her right hand. It was the most secure handhold she’d had so far on her descent. She lifted her left hand, raised a finger, and tentatively stroked the lizard’s back. It stretched out its neck and closed its eyes. “Thank you,” said Lola.
The encounter somehow steadied her. Her next breaths shuddered a little less, her next steps slid a little farther. Then her toe encountered an obstacle. She nudged it. It didn’t move. She inched her foot to one side. Air. She tried the other side. Vertical rock. She looked back toward the lizard, thinking to beseech its help again. It was gone. She kicked a little at the obstruction. Nothing.
She ground her forehead against the rock and cursed. To have gotten this far, however far it was, only to be blocked. She tried to imagine inching her way back up. Repeating that silly business of waving her shirt over her head in a hopeless attempt to attract attention. Surviving another night, then looking for the telltale roiling smoke that would signal the deaths of so many. The temptation to jump tugged at her yet again.
“Goddammit.” She turned her head, millimeter by millimeter, to one side and chanced a glance down to see the obstruction.
It was the splintered end of the intact section of ladder, bolted firmly into place, leading downward to safety, shining as bright and precious in the sunlight as the goddamned yellow brick road.
FORTY-TWO
Lola hit the ground about five minutes after Bub.
She’d beckoned to him from the ladder, thinking to carry him down, but he’d raced past her with a disdainful sniff, free at last to negotiate the trail at his own headlong speed. When she stepped from the last rung, he launched himself at her chest, knocking her to the ground, her laughter and his yapping mingling in a joyful chorus.
The exultation was brief. Lola lay flat, Bub on her chest, the sun shining above. Not straight down on them, but too close. She scrambled to her feet, earning an injured look from Bub as he fell to one side. She still had to get back to the road, and then to town, so that she could warn the police and FBI about Thomas’s plans.
She bent and loosened the laces on her running shoes, easing the pressure on feet swollen and puffy from the heat. A mile, at most, to the main road. “Hell,” she reassured Bub, “that’s a sprint.” Except that after the first few steps, she knew it wouldn’t be. She was going on twelve hours with neither food nor water. The goose egg on the back of her head throbbed, competing for attention with her ferocious thirst. She’d been used to running in the relative cool of the morning, the sun slanting low and friendly across the desert. Now it launched a full-on assault from on high. And finally, because she’d set out on her run so close to nightfall the previous evening, she’d seen no need for a cap. She angled her head downward and traced a crooked, stumbling path down the dirt road leading away from the ruins. Her toe caught a rock. Her hands smacked the ground just seconds before her face. She lay still, spitting red dirt. Bub nosed at the back of her neck.
An hour earlier, she thought as she pushed herself up, she’d have given anything for a flat surface beneath her, blissfully extending in every direction. She’d made the mistake of relaxing her guard once she got on the ground. Potholes and rocks made the track more of a jeep trail than an actual road, and Lola wove her way among them at a trot, thinking back to the occasional races she’d run, always striving for a PB, or personal best, time. If there were such a thing as a personal worst, this was it, she thought. Her head swam. Bub, who usually raced ahead of her in long, low-to-the-ground zigzags, easily achieving five times her own distance, lurched behind her. Normally his missing leg, lost to that gunshot meant for Lola, was no impediment, but on this day the handicap was evident.
A sawhorse loomed before them. Lola stopped and leaned against it, marshaling what remained of her strength. A hand-lettered piece of posterboard flapped in the searing wind: NO CLIFF HOUSE TOURS. CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. She let her gaze slide past it to the beautiful ribbon of blacktop now only yards away. They’d made it. At least, this far. Next step: Flag down a ride.
As though in response to her thoughts, an approaching engine grumbled on the other side of a rise in the road. Lola jogged the final few steps to the road and lifted her arm in preparation. A truck topped the hill. The driver’s head turned her way. The truck slowed. Conrad Coal’s logo adorned its side. She turned and walked back toward the road leading to the cliff houses, a woman and crippled dog trying to look purposeful in the middle of nowhere. She wasn’t sure enough of Thomas’s intentions to gamble on a truck that might end up a victim of a second bombing. The sound of the truck’s engine faded. She turned and stared after it, wondering if her own foolish fears had damned the one chance she might have had.
She broke again into as much of a jog as she could approximate. When a car finally appeared, she simply moved to the center of the road and stopped, blocking its passage, not even bothering with the charade of flagging. The decrepit rez car wheezed to a stop. Regret and relief warred within her. She’d half-hoped for a tourist’s shiny new SUV, one that could speed her to her destination. The car now before her hadn’t sped anywhere in a very long while. But a tourist might not have stopped for her ragged, disreputable-looking self. Indian people generally were more apt to accept that anybody, anywhere, might be having a bad day.
Lola approached the car, reflecting that this was fast turning into the worst day of her life. She opened the back door without asking permission, squeezing herself next to a couple of aunties, pulling Bub onto her lap. An elder dozed in the front seat next to the driver, a middle-aged man who wore a Conrad Coal cap. No one spoke. But as she settled herself in the seat, the driver reached for a plastic water bottle in the console and handed it to her. Lola drank so fast that precious droplets ran down her chin and wetted her tank top. She swiped the back of her hand across it, then licked her hand. She forced herself to lower the bottle and pour some of its contents into her cupped hand for Bub.
“Thank you,” she said when the bottle was empty. And then, “Gaitero. Please. As fast as you can. Do you know Gar Laurendeau’s place?”
Charlie probably would be at the house, she thought. Or he might be with the tribal police, persuading them that his own anxiety about her disappearance in no way would prevent him from helping with their search. He’d take comfort from the known rituals, the cop talk, the bad coffee. But his first priority would have been Margaret, making sure she was safe with someone, almost certainly either Naomi or Edgar.
Not, please God, Thomas. The possibility clutched at Lola’s throat even as she rejected it. Charlie barely knew Thomas. In a situation this serious, only immediate family would do.
The car’s rattling progress slowed as Lola pointed out the turnoff to Naomi and Edgar’s. She pushed her foot against the floor, impossibly willing the driver to speed up the dirt lane to the house. She barely remembered to fling thanks over her shoulder as she and Bub staggered toward the front door.
Lola barely registered Naomi rising from a counter stool, her face a rictus of fear. Behind her, Thomas shrank into a corner.
Lola shot him a look of pure poison and dodged Naomi. “Margaret. Where is she?” Without waiting for an answer, she stumbled down the hall to the girls’ bedroom and pushed through the door.
Margaret and Juliana lay on their beds, unread books propped on their stomachs. Margaret, the girl who almost never cried, shrieked and burst into tears. Lola waited until her daughter was cradled in her arms—and Bub wrapped in Margaret’s—before sliding to the floor, muscles that had been taut with fear and exhaustion for eighteen hours finally relaxing into the reality that she was safe.
Naomi eased into the room.
“Charlie and Edgar are on their way. The police, too. But I’m thinking we should get you to the hospital so they can check you out.”
Lola shook her head and clutched Margaret tighter. “I’m fine. I just need more water. Maybe some food. And—” She lifted a hand and studied its surface, rendered unfamiliar by layers of dirt, crosshatched with scratches and scrapes. She bent her head to one side, sniffed, and recoiled. “Maybe a shower. And some clean clothes.”
Naomi shook her head. The prosecutor in her spoke. “You have to do this. They’ll need to document your injuries. Especially if you were—” She hesitated.
Lola’s lips twitched in a half-smile of acknowledgment. Any woman would have had the same question. The possibility of rape hovered over even the most innocuous situations. “No,” she said. “He just kidnapped me. He didn’t do anything else.” Except leave me to die, she thought.
Naomi sagged back into her chair. “Oh, thank God.” She pulled open a drawer, fumbled with its contents, and brought out a schoolgirl’s black-and-white marbled composition book and a pen. “The police should be here any minute. But maybe while it’s still so fresh in your mind, you can give me a description of the guy. That’s what they’ll want first.”
“No need,” said Lola.
“But—” Naomi held up the composition book as though the very sight of it might cause Lola to change her mind. “It’s really important. Given everything else going on around here, it’s possible the person who took you is the bomber.”
Margaret whimpered in her arms. Lola stroked her hair. “He is the bomber. I’m sure of it. And I don’t need to give a description. I know who he is.”
Margaret raised her head. Juliana, who’d lingered in a corner of the room, crept close. She had to have known, from the day Thomas’s bookbag and its telltale key chain turned up at the cliff houses, that he was involved, maybe not in the bombings—she probably couldn’t have brought herself to think that—but in something he shouldn’t be. Lola cast a glance her way and braced herself to break a nine-year-old’s heart.
Enough damage, she told herself. Juliana would find out soon enough, but she wouldn’t find out from her. She eased Margaret from her lap, clambered to her feet, and gestured to Naomi to come close. She whispered into Naomi’s ear and watched in fascination as the skin on Naomi’s face, so smooth and brown, went as pale and mottled as that of a corpse.
FORTY-THREE
I was tired of Shizhé’é and his companion, and their sick sense of humor.
They laughed and laughed, a rusted creaking sound that iced my veins, when Lola stumbled through the front door. Relief washed in behind the fear. Because a part of me, no matter the reassurances, thought she might die up there. Dehydrate before I could get more water up to her and the dog. Or fall in some crazy attempt to get down. Which somehow she’d managed to do without killing herself. Edgar was always talking smack about her, but the woman had earned my respect. And something else, too. She made me hope there was still a way that this could be stopped. Because it wasn’t over yet.
Only one more thing. And your part is done now. So you can relax.
Relax? If I knew what that one more thing was, I could do my damnedest to stop it. But I had no idea. Maybe this woman, Lola, maybe she could figure it out. And maybe if I stayed closed to her, I could figure it out, too.
I waited for her to come out of the bedroom. She and Naomi and the girls had been in there a long time. At one point, I heard Naomi’s voice raised high, but couldn’t make out the words. A few minutes later, sirens. I went to the window. Edgar’s white truck led a parade of Navajo Nation SUVs and black sedans, all of them moving so fast I could barely see the flashing lights through the cloud of dust.
I stood back as the door burst open, lifting my chin toward the bedroom. Charlie blew past, calling his wife’s name.
Edgar stopped in front of me. Spread his hands wide. “I don’t know what to say.” His voice broke. Maybe Shizhé’é was after him, too? But no. His eyes filled.
“About what?” He couldn’t possibly know.
“This will break Juliana’s heart. All of ours.” He leaned in for a hard, unexpected hug. I hugged him back, wanting to hold on, to postpone whatever was about to happen. Because I had a pretty good idea. Shizhé’é chuckled in my ear, raked his claws through my throat, wrapped his hands around my lungs and squeezed and squeezed.
Outside, car doors slammed. I fought for breath.
Edgar’s arms fell away. He stepped back, his eyes dry, his voice even. “Tell me it’s not true.”
Heavy footsteps. Lights flashing on the walls. Cops and men in suits burst through the door. “FBI!” one of the suits shouted. So that explained the sedans.
A tribal cop, voice pitched gratifyingly low. “Thomas Benally? You have the right to remain silent … ” Handcuffs bit into my wrists.
Those earlier words ringing in my ears, louder even than the ghostly cackling. Your part in this is done. Maybe my part was done. But it wasn’t over.
FORTY-FOUR
There was the hospital, the indignity of the bright lights and various assessments and the necessity for photos of her various injuries, surprisingly minor though they turned out to be.
Then the endless questions from police, Charlie hovering just outside the door, too much the cop to press for inclusion, too much the husband to go get some lunch, as suggested. Eventually, though, there was lunch, Lola ignoring the admonition to eat slowly, the result being that most of her Navajo taco came right back up just seconds after she reached the shelter of the bathroom.
“Another,” she said when she made her shaky way back to the table. “And a milkshake. And a really big glass of water. In fact, you can just leave that pitcher right here.”
And finally, a fistful of sleeping pills from the hospital. “You’re exhausted, both physically and mentally,” the doctor said. “These should get you through the first week. You think you’ll sleep, but you won’t. You’re still wound up, and that’s normal. The minute you close your eyes, it’s all going to come back. Believe me, I’ve seen this before. Too many times.” The doctor took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. The skin beneath them was dark as a bruise. She was white, younger than Lola but looked older. Probably doing a residency at a reservation hospital, Lola thought, to satisfy the requirements of whatever government loan program had gotten her through medical school, counting the days until she could get herself to a big-city emergency room where, despite the nightly mayhem, at least there’d be the nearby consolation of bright lights and martini bars when she finished her thirty-six-hour shift. “Your body needs rest, and your brain needs it even more. Oh, and find a counselor.”
The doctor
had been right about the images. After a shower of unforgiveable length, given their desert locale, Lola dutifully swallowed one of the pills and let Charlie and Margaret tuck her into bed. Bub curled next to her, asleep before they’d even said their good nights, even though it was only midafternoon. “Want us to stay?” Charlie asked.
“I’ll be fine.” But she wasn’t, finding herself back on the ladder, swaying blind and terrified as the gun rapped against her ankle, as soon as the door closed behind them. She rose up on her elbows, thinking to call out to Charlie, but her voice came out in a croak, fallout from all of the shouting atop the cliff. She waited for the pill to work. It didn’t. She climbed out of bed and retrieved one of the painkillers from the container in her Dopp kit. She spent an entire millisecond worrying about the combination of sleeping pill and painkiller, then gulped it down, letting it pull her into a blackness even more enveloping than the fear.
“Lola. Lola.”
The voice floated above her. A hand on her shoulder. “Lola.” A shake. “It’s been almost a day.”
A familiar scent.