The Lucky Ones

by Julianne Pachico

  It’s only that evening—when Angelina still isn’t back, when she cannot get through to her parents, when their cellphones ring and ring—that she starts to get the feeling that something is happening.

  —

  The first thing she does is phone Katrina. She’ll know what to do—she’ll send her chauffeur along with the bodyguard; they’ll come and take her away. But the telephone is silent when she presses it against her ear, the plastic heavy in her hands. She flicks the light switch a dozen times, pushes her thumb down on the TV power button as hard as possible, but the screen stays black and silent. She turns on Angelina’s radio, the ridged wheel imprinting her fingertip as she rapidly surfs through the hisses and crackles. She finally finds a program that seems to consist (as far as she can understand) of a fuzzy voice ranting endlessly about the need to drive out all the rebels, smoke them out of the mountains, exterminate them all, punctuated by short blasts of the national anthem. It creates a tight feeling in her chest. She switches the radio off, pries out the batteries with a kitchen knife, and puts them away in the drawer with the silver bell Angelina uses to ring to announce dinner. She spends the rest of the day in her bedroom, curtains shut tight, watching Disney movies on her laptop. The battery dies seconds before the Beast’s magical transformation into a handsome prince, and after that she just lies there without moving, knees tucked near her chin, ears tensed for the sound of car wheels on the road, keys rattling, the doorknob turning.

  The next day is Monday, the holiday—Katrina’s chauffeur never arrives. By midafternoon she heads outside to check the generator, more in hope than expectation. It’s located in the garage, behind a barred door that prevents stray dogs and street people from sneaking in and sleeping there. She wraps her fingers around the bars, studying the thick braids of red and green wires, the forest of rust-encrusted switches. The gardener is the only person who knows how it works, when the power goes out due to bomb attacks in the city center. He’d head to the back of the house, wiping his hands off on his denim shorts, and two minutes later, as if by magic, the lights would fly on again. (What is his name again? Wilson? Wilmer?) Her brother would whoop, bolting to the computer room, her parents smiling in relief as the soothing tones of BBC broadcasters returned, and she would blow out the candles and pick the wax off her algebra homework with her nails. Now, as she stands there by herself, she takes a last long, slow look at the impenetrable cluster of wires and switches before trudging back to the house.

  The computers in the office seem like medieval relics. The screens stare at her, blank and impassive as children asking for coins at traffic lights. In the end, she closes the office door, shutting it tight with her hip. It’s not like there’s anything in there that’s useful anyway; most of the room is used to store cardboard boxes full of junk: her parents’ skis from Yale; faded blue-and-pink tapestries covered in dead-moth wings; the wooden toucans and leopards she played with as a child, their eyes colored in with washable markers; Christmas presents from Angelina that she opened politely before stuffing them away—brightly patterned shirts and alpaca shawls she’d never dream of wearing, not even alone in her bedroom.

  If necessary, they’ll come for her. She’s certain of it. Some kind of international peacekeeping army. Professional rescuers, speaking Norwegian, light green berets and cars with blue diplomatic license plates. Pale smiling faces pressing against the white bars of the door, extending their arms as she runs to the kitchen to get the keys out of the wicker basket on top of the fridge. They’ll take her away in a shiny black car with squeaky plastic seats. Embassy members, the international community.

  She won’t just be left here. She won’t be forgotten.

  Mostly she wanders through the house, drifting from one room to another. The days blend lifelessly together, thick fuzz growing over each one like the dust accumulating on the unspun fan blades. She spends hours reading her fantasy novels, lying stomach-down on the bed. She reads childhood favorites, like a novelization of Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope with half the pages missing, ending shortly after the scene where Luke bursts into Leia’s cell: My name is Luke Skywalker, and I’m here to rescue you. She stares at the page for hours, the words blurring until they could be saying cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich over and over again.

  She never puts anything away. She starts eating the canned food her parents reserved for parties, strange things like silvery fish floating in red sauce and olives in slimy black liquid, and leaves jars of sticky jam and cans of condensed milk licked clean and shiny on the kitchen counters. She rummages through old school papers from eighth grade, Ms. Márquez’s world history syllabus and Mr. B’s English reading list (she never got around to reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, barely made it through the first few chapters of The Scarlet Letter). She finds ancient notes Angelina wrote to excuse her from P.E. swimming class, every misspelled word painfully scrawled out in shaky capital letters. She rips open pink and purple envelopes she never gave to her father to mail to America, pen pal letters covered in Lisa Frank stickers for friends who moved away, people who left years and years ago (during third grade? fifth?), names that haven’t crossed her mind in years: Hi, Flaca! Hi, Betsy! How’s New York? How’s Washington, D.C.? Miss you lots and lots, forever and ever. She lets them fall to the floor slowly. Time to get ready, a voice whispers in her head: a vague memory of someone speaking to her, somebody walking away on a playground (who? when?). The moment is just there, barely fluttering on the edges of her mind, and it’s easy as anything to chase it away, like when she swats at mosquitoes buzzing at her face.

  While walking through her parents’ bedroom she keeps her eyes strictly averted from her mother’s clothes in the open chest drawers, the stacks of books on her father’s bedside table (it’s best not to worry about where they are, what happened: Don’t wonder, don’t go there, just don’t). She heads straight to the bathroom instead, opening her mother’s makeup drawer, spilling peach-colored powder all over the sink, smearing herself with eye shadow, ignoring Angelina’s high-pitched cries in her head: Mija, what a mess! What do you think you’re doing? In her brother’s bedroom she lingers by the Transformers poster on the door but avoids the framed photograph on the wall of the entire family: her parents, her brother, herself, and Angelina (don’t think about it, don’t, don’t, don’t). She pulls dusty games out of the hallway closet, Monopoly and Clue and Candy Land. She finds a puzzle from third-grade geography with Ms. Simón, each piece a different department, the capitals represented with tiny red stars. She picks out the familiar names first: Valle del Cauca, Cauca, Antioquia. And then the more exotic ones: Guaviare, Putumayo, Meta.

  Once the pieces are sorted, though, she never tries to fit them together. Instead she leaves them scattered on the floor—she has to take an enormous step over them every time she heads down the hallway, like a giant who can cross an entire country with a single stride.

  Every once in a while a frothy panic will start to rise in her stomach, making her hands shake, and when that happens, she can’t control herself; she dashes to her room and peeks out through the window, holding the curtain close to her face like a veil. He’s always there, still in the scratchy poncho, sitting on the grass by the bristly hedge. Leaning against the banana tree. Pacing, mouth moving as if talking to himself, arms swinging exaggeratedly as if mocking army marches. Standing still before the tiny crosses on the far left side of the front yard, where she and her brother and Angelina buried generations of dead pets, cats and dogs, ducks and chickens, killed by possums and tropical diseases. If she squints her eyes, he multiplies into blurry doubles, triples, quadruples. There are dozens of him, an army. Pressing their scarred faces against the door, wrapping their sticky brown fingers around the bars, calling out again and again in a voice muffled by the glass against her ear. Hey. Beautiful. Let me in.

  One night she feels both brave and desperate enough to go outside by the pool. It’s so quiet she can hear the water move, gently lapping aga
inst the concrete walls. She hugs the grapefruit tree and strains her eyes as she looks toward the mountains, almost convincing herself that she can see the fires, as small as the orange dots burning at the end of her cigarettes. She wills herself to smell smoke and gunpowder, hear the explosions and gunshots of incoming American forces, foreign backup support. Closing her eyes and pressing her face against the scratchy tree trunk, she can almost hear the helicopters, the clang of the metal doors as they slide open, the thud of the knotted rope ladder as it hits the ground by her feet. Stephanie Lansky, we’re here to rescue you! But when she opens her eyes there’s only the scratchy gray fungus draped over the tree like a fisherman’s net.

  Later she stands outside Angelina’s room, hand resting on Baby Jesus’s face. She looks down at the sandals, waits for the picture to form in her mind. Angelina dressed in her white apron (what else could she be wearing?), carefully unlocking the front door, heading outside. Dawn is breaking, the earliest morning birds are singing. Or maybe it’s still dark, the sky speckled with stars. Angelina’s humming, hands in her pockets; Angelina’s frowning, face wrinkled in her classic sour scowl. No matter what she imagines, the picture always abruptly ends the moment Angelina rounds the hedge corner, apron swirling through the air. Walking busily, purposefully, on her way to—what? Toward whom?

  Sometimes she thinks she hears the slapping sound of black plastic sandals hitting floor tiles and turns her head sharply. But there’s never anything there.

  —

  One morning she awakens abruptly to the sound of someone banging on the door, the same insistent sound ringing out again and again. It takes her a second to realize that she’s lying down instead of standing, fantasy book resting heavily on her chest. She struggles out of bed, dragging the bedsheets along the floor, dressed in her mother’s fancy silk nightgown and saggy pink underpants (she ran out of clean pairs of her own panties long ago). Pale dust motes float through the air, following her down the hallway as she stumbles forward, still dazedly clutching the book to her torso like a shield.

  Once again she just barely opens the door, so that only her face can be seen. He’s holding a walking stick, beating the bars like a monk ringing church bells in one of her Arthurian novels.

  “Oh,” he says, his face framed in the diamond-shaped gap, “you came!” His eyes widen in what is unmistakably delight. The whites of his eyeballs are lined with yellow; the scar on his face looks redder and puffier than ever. There’s a low-pitched rumbling in the distance she hasn’t noticed until now, the sound of a low-flying plane or helicopter. He’s dressed in the same poncho, but the plastic bag is gone, his feet are no longer bare; instead he’s wearing a pair of shiny black rubber boots with yellow bottoms. The sight of those boots make goosebumps break out on her neck; sour liquid leaks from her tonsils.

  “Be a good girl,” he says. “Open the door.”

  “It’s locked,” she says. She’s turning away when he presses his face against the bars and reaches out, fingers fluttering urgently toward her.

  “Mija,” he says. “Time to go.”

  “Could you please not touch me?” She uses the book to roughly push his hands away. The buzzing of the aircraft returns for a bit, circling overhead, is replaced by a single engine. He says something else, speaking in a low voice, but his words are muffled beneath the sound of shots rattling out. She flinches.

  “Don’t worry about it, mija,” he says. “It’s nothing.”

  This time she looks directly at him. But he’s already abruptly turned away, the hem of his poncho swirling through the air like a cape.

  The tiles feel cool and steady under her feet as she backs away. The book clatters loudly against the floor as it falls. She watches herself head toward the back of the house to the washing machine and boxes of champagne, bedsheets trailing behind her. She’s standing in front of the Baby Jesus sticker, spreading her fingers on his face before turning the doorknob. The door opens easily. It only takes a few seconds to take everything in: the bed with thin pillows, the window with faded curtains, everywhere the strong smell of soap. She opens the closet, but there are only rows of white dresses hanging headless and limbless, a pile of neatly folded aprons, a single black cardigan, no shoes to be seen. There are thick gobs of candle wax on the windowsill by the altar. On the floor by the bed, propped up against the wall, is a framed photograph of the two of them, her and Angelina. It’s an old photo: She must be around six or seven years old. They’re standing behind a birthday cake on a table, her arms around Angelina’s waist; her hair is hanging in her eyes and she’s smiling sweetly. Angelina is looking straight into the camera, mouth flat, expressionless. What Angelina is thinking or feeling at that moment, she couldn’t even begin to say.

  She sits down on the bed, letting the sheets she’s dragged from her room drift to the floor. The sharp smell of mothballs makes her sinuses itch.

  She thinks, I have got to figure this out.

  She thinks, If only I had more time.

  She doesn’t know it yet, but there’s something waiting for her. It could be a future or it could be something else. It could be the plastic gearshift of a car pressing stickily against her knee, a man’s wet fingers on her legs trembling as he helps her pull her saggy underpants back up from her ankles, mumbling over and over again, I’m sorry, so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you. Or maybe she’s in an enormous orange tent next to the raging, overflowing river on the border, one orange tent among many, where she wakes up at the same time every morning to stare at the silhouette of a lizard crawling across the fabric and think about how she needs to head to the Red Cross tent to get into the line early. Maybe she’s running through a field, grass stinging her legs and an aluminum taste in her mouth, the thudding footsteps and clink of machetes against belt buckles behind her getting louder.

  Or maybe it’ll be something else. It could still happen. She could be lucky. She could be sitting in a wood-paneled classroom in Europe or Australia, her pen moving slowly across a notebook, her eyes never leaving the professor as he speaks at the opposite end of the table.

  It’s still possible. But for now all she has is her slow rise from the bed. She has this walk toward the refrigerator, the reach for the wicker basket hidden on top, the round ball of the key chain in her hand and the rattling metal. As she watches the many keys dangle from her fingers, she thinks about how there’s not a single one that she recognizes, not one she can pick out and say with confidence, this key opens that door, that key opens this one. This home was never really hers, and nothing in it was ever really hers, and the tightly clenched muscle squeezing out blood in her chest has never really been hers either. For now there’s only the cool metal in her hand that rattles loudly as she lifts it toward the dirty silver lock.

  “Oh!” he says. The door makes a loud scraping sound against the ground as it swings open. “You clever girl.” He lets out a deep sigh that could also be a groan of pain. Behind him the hedge rustles and she turns her head sharply. It could be the flash of a white apron or the metallic shine of a machete. It feels like noticing the shadow of her own half-closed eyelid, something that has always been there and should have been seen at least a thousand times before.

  GUAVIARE

  Something is going to happen today. He just knows it. Call it a hunch, a gut sense he got from how roughly Pollo rapped the metal spoon against his plate this morning, trying to get the gray lump of oatmeal to fall off. Or maybe it was the way Julisa’s shoulders hunched up as he marched brusquely past her toward the latrines with the shit-encrusted shovel, or the random, loud giggle César let out before abruptly falling silent as he sat on the overturned bucket, blackening his rifle with a tube of printer’s ink.

  But he can’t think about it. Not right now, not with class about to begin, students lined up neatly before him on the forest floor. Sitting calmly, expectantly, the same way they do every morning: dark tapestries of ants marching steadily over them, salamanders scampering through the surrounding fern
leaves and scattering tiny drops of water. Waiting patiently in place, the same way they’ve waited every morning for the past five years, eight months, two weeks, and five days (today counts, even though it’s still unfolding, even though it technically hasn’t happened yet; today always counts). They are waiting for him to begin, same time (nine A.M. on the dot, an hour and a half after breakfast), same place (sandy beach on the riverside, within sight of the armed guard on duty—today it’s César, currently struggling with the solar panels to recharge his clunky cellular phone). Five days a week. Here they are.

  “And good morning to you too,” he says to the vine-covered ceiba tree, raising his voice to be heard over the screeching chorus of crickets and birds. “Late again?” he says to the flattened-out leaves on the ground, green and brown and yellow, chosen deliberately for maximum diversity in terms of their size, shape, and texture. “How embarrassing. Ah,” he says to the row of sticks and branches, covered in scratchy gray lichens and powdery green moss. “Wonderful to see you; I’m so glad you’re feeling better. That flu has really been making the rounds, hasn’t it? Everybody, make sure you grab some hand sanitizer before we break for lunch, okay?”

  Everybody nods. Attentive, focused, the same way they always are. Hanging on to his every word.

  He begins the same way he does every morning: peace fingers pressed against his lower lip, chest out, back straight, standing steady as a general. The students wait with bated breath. The fern rustles slightly in the wind; a row of smooth river stones keeps the leaves pressed against the ground.