Detour

by James Siegel

  Then she observed something else.

  Something horrible.

  Riojas had always used protection with her. Lately, he’d become careless. He was usually drunk or coked up.

  She missed a period. Then another.

  One morning she woke completely consumed with nausea and spent half an hour on the floor of the marble bathroom, staring at her warped reflection in the gold-leaf fixtures.

  She decided she would kill herself.

  She came to this decision calmly and rationally.

  There were knives in the kitchen.

  There were two swords mounted above the fireplace in the den. She would put one of them right through her, through his monstrosity, before anyone could stop her.

  Riojas was away. She cleansed her face, meticulously applied the French makeup Riojas had brought for her, dressed in a charcoal pantsuit she thought suitable for a funeral.

  The armed guards he kept stationed around the house were fortuitously absent from the den.

  The swords appeared to be ceremonial. Japanese, she guessed—delicately curved steel fixed to bright hand-painted hilts. They were hung on nails, crossed at midblade.

  She was reaching for one of them when she felt it. Or maybe she just imagined she had.

  Like a kick in the gut.

  She’d touched the instrument of her own death, and something had moved in the pit of her stomach. She sank to the floor.

  She understood. She knew what it was.

  More than that. She knew she couldn’t bring herself to kill it.

  It was half her.

  It means I can have grandbabies for you, she’d once whispered to her mother, Galina. Maybe she remembered saying it that morning. Maybe it gave that tiny movement in her belly a face, a place in the world.

  She hovered between despair and worse.

  She’d made a decision to live, but it was a decision impossible to live with. So she made another kind of decision.

  When Riojas returned from Bogotá, Claudia feigned happiness, guiding his hand onto her stomach as if helping him claim new territory. Another piece of the world ready to be affixed with his monogram—those cartoonish-looking Rs prominently displayed on every one of his handkerchiefs, napkins, undershorts—anything capable of bearing thread.

  He began pampering her. Within limits, of course. She wasn’t his wife. He had one of those back in Bogotá, in addition to three obscenely rotund children. He couldn’t squire her around town. But he showed what might be termed deference. The leash grew looser. A captured rebel, even one showered with mink coats and five-hundred-dollar shoes, might run. But a girl carrying his child?

  He stopped talking about the women who’d crossed him.

  Except for the day she told him.

  He asked for sex and she turned him down, pregnancy being a convenient excuse, one to be added to all the others.

  Of course, he said, he understood. But before leaving her room he turned and spoke to her.

  If you ever try to leave with my baby, I’ll hunt you down and kill you. Both of you. However long it takes, no matter where you’ve gone. Do you understand?

  She nodded, forced herself to smile, as if that were a sentiment worthy of admiration. A macho declaration of love.

  Good, he said.

  She began venturing further. Past the tiger cages. Down a twisting dirt path into the jungle. She had smelled salt air. The hacienda’s property ended on a bluff overlooking the Caribbean, where a small fishing village sat directly below the cliff. Skiffs sat half beached on the sand, spidery nets drying in the sun.

  A bodyguard still came with her, but the distance between them seemed to increase in proportion to her swollen stomach. He’d often leave her alone with a book, let her nap undisturbed on one of the hammocks overlooking the water.

  She befriended the zookeeper; in addition to the tigers, there were ostriches, llamas, chimpanzees. His name was Benito, and unlike the other men in Riojas’ employ, he seemed to lack the psychotic gene. He’d been trained in zoology. He let her know that feeding live horses to the tigers wasn’t his idea. Feeding two-legged things to them wasn’t either.

  A job was a job.

  He let her watch as he fed them freshly cut hunks of sheep and cattle, venturing into the cage dangling the day’s lunch from a long hooked pole.

  Claudia waited for Riojas to make one of his numerous trips.

  She slipped out of bed at 3 a.m. She opened her top drawer, removed a change of clothes, wrapped them around the kitchen knife she’d slipped into the waistband of her pants.

  She’d unlocked one bay window in the den before retiring. She opened it wide enough to slip out—no mean feat considering her swollen stomach. She stepped out onto the blue grass.

  She’d rehearsed this at least a dozen times.

  She could’ve walked the route in her sleep.

  She waddled past the tiger cage to the zookeeper’s shack.

  She removed the keys from the bent nail. She pushed the sleeve of her shift back to the elbow, pulled out the knife, and placed it against her skin.

  She used the extra clothes she’d taken from her drawer to soak up the blood. She walked back out to the tiger cages and pushed the bloody clothes through the bars.

  Claudia carefully placed the keys into the cage-door lock and left them dangling there.

  She turned to the path that led to the sea.

  She was buying time.

  In the morning they’d discover she was missing. They’d find the keys to the tiger cage still sitting in the lock. As if someone had let themselves in and locked the door behind them to ensure that there would be no way out. In case they lost their courage and changed their mind. They’d discover her bloody clothes. Shredded to pieces.

  Riojas would be called in Bogotá. He’d think back to their last night together. He’d replay everything. Her smiles and laughter and demure assurances, and he’d see only lies. Had she killed herself? Had she really?

  Eventually, he’d know the truth. They wouldn’t find any ground-up bones. They’d understand the charade she’d perpetrated, and Riojas would start to make good on his promise.

  If you ever try to leave with my baby, I’ll hunt you down and kill you. Both of you. However long it takes, no matter where you’ve gone. Do you understand?

  Maybe Claudia heard those words as she walked through the jungle that night and down to the sea. As she sat and crouched in one of the slowly rocking fishing skiffs and waited for the fishermen to appear like ghosts out of the early-morning light . . .

  THE SOUND OF A CRYING BABY. IT STARTLED JOANNA BACK TO reality. Back from that hacienda and the tiger cage and the jungle.

  Joelle had woken up.

  It was her cold. Galina reached over and wiped Joelle’s nose, cleared the crust from her eyes with a tissue. Joanna gave her the bottle, urged the nipple into her mouth, gently rocked her. Soon Joelle’s eyes grew sleepy, fluttered, closed into two tiny slits.

  Galina was hugging herself as if she were suddenly freezing.

  “What happened, Galina?” Joanna asked. “What happened to Claudia?”

  GALINA SPENT THE EMPTY DAYS DUTIFULLY FEEDING AND BATHING and powdering other people’s daughters.

  She ritually and repeatedly cleaned house.

  She discovered bits and pieces of Claudia and arranged them in a kind of shrine. Old birthday cards. Photographs. Letters. Half-burned incense candles. Little items of mostly cheap jewelry. She did what people are supposed to do at shrines. She prayed for a miracle.

  Sometimes they actually happen.

  Sometimes you wake up and dress yourself in the same dowdy shift as the day before. You sit down at the kitchen table and listlessly eat a breakfast of stale corn cakes and fruit, because you’re supposed to eat, even if you have no appetite. You vacuum a carpet you’ve already vacuumed enough times to wear smooth. You dust every piece of furniture in the house. You rewash the dishes and scrub the floor. Then you sit back down at the kitchen ta
ble because it’s time to eat lunch.

  And sometimes you hear a soft knock at the front door. You wearily stand up to answer it, not immediately, because you hope they’ll go away and leave you alone. But they don’t, so eventually you have to get up, shuffle over to the door, ask who it is.

  And you hear a murmur from the other side. Something with an M. A voice you can’t quite place that seems to touch some distant part of you. And you ask again. Who is it?

  And now the M comes with other letters attached to it. It’s no longer an orphan. You suddenly understand that the person on the other side of the door isn’t telling you their name. They’re stating yours. Only it’s a name only one person in the world can use.

  Your heart stops beating as if there’s some kind of electrical short in your wiring. You turn the lock with trembling fingers. You fling open the door and the person whispers it again.

  Mama . . . Mama . . . Mama.

  And she falls into your arms.

  THEY FOUND HER A HIDING PLACE.

  Colombia was a big country.

  Riojas was bigger.

  Aunt Salma wasn’t an aunt by blood, but by affection, a spinster who’d been semi-adopted by the family long ago and was from then on always present at holidays, confirmations, and funerals. Back in Fortul, where Galina was born.

  They drove Claudia there the next day.

  Claudia assured them Riojas didn’t know her last name. All FARC converts changed their surnames to save their families from retribution.

  Galina knew that would protect her only so much.

  Claudia was striking and pregnant. Riojas would be beating the provinces to find her.

  It was a measure of Galina’s manic joy that she hadn’t noticed. Not immediately. Certainly not at the door, where she’d gazed teary-eyed at her; not even at the kitchen table, where they’d clung to each other like shipwreck survivors.

  But when they finally separated and she checked her daughter for damage, she saw the kind she hadn’t expected.

  “You’re pregnant.”

  Two years ago Claudia might’ve had an answer for that—a comment on her mother’s diminishing powers of observation. She simply nodded.

  “Whose is it?”

  Claudia told her. She was never going to speak about it again—just this one time. She held both of Galina’s hands. She spoke slowly, softly, calmly. It was good she kept Galina’s hands prisoner. Galina felt like using those hands. To hit something. To cover her ears. To wrap around her mouth to prevent herself from screaming. It was impossible for a mother to sit there and listen to this. It was beyond endurance.

  The subject of abortion never came up.

  It’s possible the pregnancy was too far advanced by then. Maybe it didn’t matter. It wasn’t how either of them had been raised.

  Aunt Salma lived near a dairy farm outside the city, where it was possible Claudia might live in relative privacy and anonymity. At least for a while. At least until the baby was born.

  They told Salma just enough to understand the gravity of Claudia’s situation. They constructed a story for anyone who couldn’t be avoided. An unfortunate love affair. An unplanned pregnancy. A girl who wanted to be left alone with the result of her bad choices.

  Galina and her husband visited every two weeks, making sure to leave late at night, to stop several times along the way to check for any suspicious cars that might be following them. Any more than two weeks might be risky. Any less would be unbearable.

  With the help of a local mestiza midwife, Claudia gave birth to a baby girl.

  Galina had wondered how she’d feel. If she’d ever be able to embrace the baby as her actual grandchild. When the infant emerged headfirst, Galina saw Claudia in every facet of her features. She felt transported through time. To a hospital bed in Bogotá, the smell of blood and alcohol and talcum, a screaming baby who even then seemed to grab for something just out of reach.

  She was named for Claudia’s paternal grandmother. Sofía, the ventello singer. She was swaddled, baptized, showered with affection from the small circle of people allowed to know of her existence.

  For a time, brief and fleeting, Galina allowed herself to relax and luxuriate in the peculiar pleasures of being an abuela. When she visited Fortul, baby toys in hand, she was like anyone else visiting their grandchild. She pretended that Claudia lived in Fortul because her husband worked for one of the refineries there. That Claudia never made the return trip because the baby wasn’t ready to travel. That they always stayed inside because the weather was nasty or because Sofía was sensitive to the sun.

  Then it became impossible to pretend.

  Salma returned from the market one day looking nearly anemic. She told Claudia that people were asking questions. Someone was showing a picture around. Claudia remembered her first days of captivity when Riojas had interrogated her, when he’d posed her naked in various positions intended for maximum humiliation. Even with her eyes swollen shut, she could see bursting flashbulbs shooting out of the black like Roman candles.

  They had to move them.

  Another family resource was contacted and imposed upon. And it was an imposition. Whoever hid them was keenly aware they were putting themselves in the line of fire. A kind of ad hoc system developed. Claudia and Sofía were shuttled. Back and forth and back between whichever relatives and friends were momentarily able to swallow their fear and provide them with a temporary home.

  It wasn’t easy for Claudia to be passed around like an unwanted relative. But that’s what she was. A burden, an albatross. Albatrosses meant death; so might Claudia. She’d spend a few weeks to several months at each house or apartment before leaving. Usually in the middle of the night. She became adept at packing quickly, bringing just enough from one place to another to make each new stop seem remotely like home.

  Slowly, pressure eased. Stories of paramilitares inquiring after a beautiful girl with a small baby became more sporadic, then stopped altogether. Claudia’s stays lengthened, routine replaced fear. Sofía grew from infant to toddler—in an instant, it seemed to Galina, who only saw her in carefully parceled-out increments. Claudia seemed to grow as well, regaining pieces of herself that had been taken away from her in that hacienda. She began venturing outside, baby in tow, disguised in sunglasses and an enormous straw hat.

  Galina accompanied her on some of these walks. She let herself imagine that life might reach some kind of normalcy. It had been four years. If one read the papers correctly, Riojas had more than enough to keep him occupied. They were threatening to extradite him to the United States for narcotics trafficking. Maybe he’d forgotten about Claudia. About them. Maybe he no longer cared.

  When the three of them strolled hand in hand—lifting a begging Sofía over the curb by both arms—it was easy to imagine this was true.

  Later Galina would understand that’s what he’d wanted them to think. So they’d begin to believe it was over. Become a little more carefree, even careless. So they’d stop peeking around corners.

  She never knew how it happened.

  Not exactly how it happened. She would never know that. She would have to imagine it, which was worse than knowing. Because the imagination can conjure up every nightmare never dreamed.

  Someone spotted Claudia. That much she knew.

  Galina received a panicked call from her daughter. Or rather, her answering machine did. For the rest of her life she would admonish herself for going shopping that day. For opening the refrigerator and somehow seeing the necessity for food. She would have hours and days and weeks and years to imagine what was being done to her daughter while she performed the mundane tasks of daily living. To ponder a single question. If she’d been home to take Claudia’s call, would she have been able to save her?

  When Galina did get home, when she casually pressed the button on her answering machine and heard her daughter’s clearly terrified voice, she knew it was already too late.

  She buried her panic, did what you’re supposed to
do when someone calls you. Call back. Claudia’s uncle—the one she’d been staying with for the last month and a half—answered the phone. He didn’t know where she was, he said. Her or the baby. They must’ve gone for a walk.

  Someone saw me at the market. That’s what Claudia had whispered into the phone.

  She hadn’t waited for her uncle to return home. Out of self-preservation, out of the desire to protect him, she’d gathered up Sofía and run. Later they’d notice some of her things were missing. Not everything; some of Sofía’s clothes and a small picture of the three of them—grandmother, mother, and baby—she’d managed to tote from one hiding place to another.

  Claudia had been spotted in the market, and in a near panic she’d called the one person she trusted most in the world.

  Galina wasn’t there. She was out shopping.

  Claudia had decided she needed to leave then.

  After that, who knows?

  After that, you’re left with the clinical police reports and a few eyewitnesses who may or may not have seen anything.

  Mostly, you’re left with the body.

  She was found on the edge of a barrio.

  No one was aware it was a she at first. It was an amalgam of flesh and bone, a jigsaw puzzle that took two police pathologists a solid week to piece together before proclaiming it was her. They knew this much. What had been done to her had taken time and patience. There were traces of rope found around her neck. What once was her neck. There were acid burns everywhere. Every inch of her skin. That’s what the police report said. It was supposed to be kept confidential to spare the family, but it was leaked to a newspaper, which printed it as a small item on the weather page. She’d been burned and mutilated. The report didn’t mention if she was alive and conscious during the ordeal.

  It didn’t tell Galina who did it either.

  It was another unsolved homicide. To be added to the thousands of other unsolved murders in Colombia.