Detour
Page 30
Nearly two-thirds of passenger fatalities in SUV rollover crashes are unrestrained.
There was that moment when the Jeep hovered between air and ground, when Paul could see asphalt looming like a dark wave he hadn’t seen coming. Then it broke over him.
He heard glass shatter, a scream, the awful sound of shearing metal. He must’ve blacked out. When he came to, he was upside down and staring into a pool of blood. He was still in his seat, but the seat seemed half detached from the car, held there by a few flimsy screws.
Where was Ruth?
He turned his head around, half afraid he wouldn’t be able to, that he’d discover he was paralyzed and dying.
No. His head pivoted around just like God intended it to.
The entire backseat had disappeared.
He looked out the shattered window to his right.
There.
It was a surreal photo, something that belonged on the wall at MOMA. The backseat was sitting upright in the grass perfectly intact, and so was the person sitting on it. Intact, seemingly whole, and demonstrably alive. She looked as if she were simply waiting for a bus.
That accounted for two of them.
Where was the bird-watcher?
The entire windshield was blown out. Gone.
The interior of the upside-down Jeep was beginning to fill with thick, acrid smoke. Something else. The putrid odor of gasoline.
He unclasped the seat belt that was digging into his gut. He used his hands to feel his way through the window and out onto the pavement. He pushed himself out. Every inch of movement left a trail of blood.
His face. Something was wrong with his face. Numbness had given way to searing pain. When he touched his cheek, his hand came away bright red.
He stood up, somehow made it to his feet, both arms out for balance like a tightrope walker.
A body was lying about twenty feet from the totaled Jeep.
Paul stumbled toward it.
The bird-watcher.
He wasn’t moving. He was still as death.
And then he wasn’t.
He moved. One hand at first. Slowly feeling around as if looking for something. Then the other hand, Paul about five feet from him, caught between moving forward and moving back. The bird-watcher lifted himself up onto his palms—executing a kind of half push-up, gazing around like a man appearing out of a hole.
He saw Paul frozen to the spot.
The bird-watcher had been searching for something.
He’d found it.
He stood up—one leg, then the other—smiled through an ugly matting of blood and dirt. He pointed his gun at Paul.
“Remember Rock-’em ’Sock-em Robots, Paul?” Something was off with his speech—he seemed to be missing part of his tongue. “Had two as a kid. You could knock their blocks off, right off their bodies, but it didn’t matter, they kept coming.”
He took a few steps forward, gun still pointing at him.
Ruth began crying. When he gazed back at her, she seemed caught up in a shower of green leaves.
Paul turned back to face his fate—one way or another it was going to end here.
The bird-watcher was still stumbling, unsteady, oddly loose-limbed, but inexorably boring in.
“That was some trick you pulled.” He was having problems with his t’s. Ha was some rick you pulled. “Learn that in actuary school?”
No. In actuary school you learned the difference between risk and probability. You learned that not wearing a seat belt during a rollover should kill you. Should, but not always. But you learned something else about life and its opposite number, something of a mantra around the halls of an insurance company.
If one thing doesn’t get you, the other thing will.
A Dodge Coronado had come hurtling off the LIE onto the exit ramp. Safety rules recommend a slowing down of at least 50 percent while turning into a highway exit. The driver of the Coronado must’ve missed that class.
When confronted with the smashed and smoking Jeep sitting in the middle of the sharply curving exit road, he was forced to swerve dangerously onto the shoulder, then lurch back onto the road to avoid a weeping willow. That brought him face-to-face with another slightly swerving object.
The bird-watcher had no time to react.
He was sent flying into the air, looking like one of those circus tumblers performing a gravity-defying finale.
He came down with a loud thud.
Then lay still.
FORTY-FIVE
She needed to dream tonight.
She’d noticed the looks from Tomás. The fact she’d received no dinner for the first time she could remember. The frazzled look on Galina’s face, and her trembling hands.
She’d kissed Joelle good night in a way that really was good-bye. She’d said her prayers, confessed her sins. She’d made peace with it.
She needed to dream.
If she was lucky, this dream would involve being woken in the middle of the night, not by a gun muzzle, not by the sharp blade of a knife, but by Galina’s soft whispers.
It would involve Galina quietly opening the lock that chained her leg to the radiator. Whispering directions into her ear. Then slipping silently out of the room the way people do in dreams.
It would involve standing up and padding softly through the door.
Slowly making her way down the empty hall and then pushing open the door to outside, the way she did once before.
It would certainly involve following those directions whispered into her ear. Walking not into the jungle, but the other way entirely, down past the back pens where chickens were nervously pecking at the ground, then onto the one-lane road.
She would walk down this road as if floating, her feet barely touching the ground. She would walk without looking back. Without fear or rancor.
She would come around a bend, and a car would be waiting there for her. A midnight-blue Peugeot. Its engine would be softly rumbling, and its driver would slip out of the front seat to greet her, making sure to put a finger to his lips.
He would reach into the car and pull out a bundle of blanket and hair. Her baby daughter, whom he’d gently place into her arms.
“Thank you,” she’d whisper to Pablo.
Thank you. Thank you.
TWO YEARS LATER
Sunday in June and the Central Park merry-go-round was full.
Paul and Joanna sat on the bench holding hands.
You could smell cotton candy, roasting peanuts, and candied apples. A catchy calypso number drifted over from the circling horses. Something from a Disney movie, Paul thought. Under the sea . . . under the sea . . .
Occasionally, Joanna put her head on his shoulder and left it there, and Paul got the strong sensation that the world was, in fact, perfect.
It seemed light-years away from the events of two years ago.
From Bogotá. And Miles.
From that day on the exit ramp of the Long Island Expressway.
And yet, sometimes it wasn’t far away at all. It was right there in the room with him, lurking around his office, riding with him in the car, sleeping in his bed.
Memory is like that, a friend from childhood that you never really lose contact with. Even when you desperately want to. Popping up at moments in your life when you least expect it.
In the middle of a balmy Sunday in June, for example.
He wondered sometimes how much he’d tell his daughter.
Would he tell her, for instance, about the spectacular assassination of a certain Colombian ex-drug lord in the bathroom of a Florida courtroom? How Manuel Riojas was going through pretrial motions when he was escorted to the men’s room to relieve himself and never came back.
Would he tell her that the assassin apparently gained access with the use of a DEA identity badge? This badge evidently genuine, if clearly defunct, having belonged to a DEA agent who’d been dead for more than two years.
An agent who’d been known to don other uniforms from time to time. The u
niform of an ornithologist, for example, resolutely searching the jungles of northern Colombia for the yellow-breasted toucan.
A bird-watcher.
Would he tell her how the bird-watcher’s badge came to be in the possession of a hired assassin?
Would he explain, refer to that day on the LIE when the DEA agent lay dead in the middle of the exit ramp, and the badge that he’d placed on the dashboard lay right next to him, virtually begging to be picked up for some future if undetermined use.
Would he tell her about that day later on, when he brought that badge to a familiar office in Little Odessa, Brooklyn? When he sat on the other side of a door with El Presidente stenciled on it. Talking business with Moshe.
You know what the Russians call the Colombians? Miles asked him the day he shot himself.
What, Miles?
Amateurs.
And maybe Miles was dead right about that. The Russians ran a very profitable cash business. Maybe because they were willing to do anything for the right price. Just about anything at all. Break-ins, heists, even assassinations.
Including truly spectacular ones, the kind others wouldn’t even touch.
As long as you had the cash, of course. Lots of it.
But where could Paul possibly get that kind of cash?
Would he tell her? Would he explain where?
Would he go back to that day again? The smoking Jeep, the puddle of blood and oil. I already cashed out, the bird-watcher had said to him before he went tumbling into the air and took forever and a day to come down.
And when Paul looked back at Ruth, she was covered in a whirlwind of green leaves. But they weren’t leaves. Because the bird-watcher had cashed out, received his wages from his new paymaster, from Riojas. And years of DEA training had given him the perfect place to stash it.
How many cars had he ripped the floorboards out of over the years? Looking for bags of coke, Baggies of pot, bricks of hashish? Enough of them to realize what a fine place it was for hoarding things you don’t want found.
Only he wasn’t counting on an accident. He wasn’t factoring in Paul putting the transmission in reverse while they were doing sixty miles an hour.
The impact ripped the Jeep apart, blew out the sidewalls, sending hundred-dollar bills hurtling into the air, where they settled like snow onto Ruth’s head.
Would he tell his daughter how easy it was to stuff the money into his wallet, into his pockets, as they waited for the ambulance to arrive?
Would he remind her?
The merry-go-round slowed, stopped spinning, came to a halt. Accompanied by the bittersweet cries of disappointed children.
Two of them came toward the bench.
Joelle, of course. Looking quite the little lady in a pink jumper, her black hair pinned up with tiny pink barrettes, pink being her most very favorite color—at least this week.
And carrying her, dragging her away from the merry-go-round that she just had to take another spin on, was her big sister, looking every inch a real lady, almost sixteen, those astounding brown eyes widened with what Paul fervently hoped was happiness.
Or, at the very least, peace.
This was the daughter he thought he would have to tell everything to one day. Perhaps not. Maybe whatever he’d done to keep her safe would be better left unspoken and unacknowledged, part of a secret history she’d left behind for good. Protect her, Galina had once written to Miles. And finally, at last, someone had.
In the end, adopting her had seemed the obvious thing to do.
When Joanna and Joelle returned from Colombia, Paul had called Galina and Pablo to explain as best he could what happened. That completing his part of the deal was now uncertain, and very much on hold. They were once his kidnappers. Now they were simply distraught grandparents. And two people who’d risked their lives to return his wife and daughter to him. He was eternally grateful.
He told them what their granddaughter was like, sent them pictures, described how unusually sweet she was, that she was blessed with the special gift of endearment.
She was facing a statusless limbo—an intercountry wrangling that was going to leave her back in Mount Ararat Hospital for quite a while. Maybe forever.
Paul visited her, visited her again.
One day he brought Joanna and Joelle along.
It became a weekly routine. So did Paul’s calls and letters to Ruth’s grandparents in Colombia. This time, of course, the letters detailing her life weren’t made up. They were genuine. So were the feelings of regret every time the three of them left Ruth at the door of the hospital. She’d stand there and wave at them until their car disappeared around the corner.
He honestly couldn’t remember who brought it up first.
Galina and Pablo? Or was it him?
Call it a tie. Colombia wasn’t necessarily any safer for Ruth than it was before. It wasn’t safe for anyone these days. Galina and Pablo were feeling their age. Suddenly, it was as if all parties involved knew the right thing to do. Where Ruth belonged.
Galina and Pablo gave their permission.
Paul and Joanna filed for adoption and were granted it one year later.
She wasn’t out of the woods. It was entirely possible she might never be. She attended group therapy on a triweekly basis, remained medicated, and occasionally lapsed into periods of heartbreaking desperation.
Most of the time she smiled, even glowed. Paul was convinced that her family nourished her, every bit as much as it nourished him.
He’d gone from no family to a full one in the seeming blink of an eye. He’d abandoned the safety of numbers for the uncertain possibilities of life. Odds are, he thought, it would be a good one.
“Come on, sweeties, let’s grab some lunch,” Paul told his daughters.
Joelle and Claudia.
Oh yes. On the day they officially gave Ruth their last name, she’d asked them if she might change her first one as well.
“To what?” Paul asked her.
What was my mother’s name?
Joanna told her.
“Claudia,” she said. “Claudia Breidbart. It’ll do.”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by James Siegel
All rights reserved.
Warner Books
Time Warner Book Group
1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com.
First eBook Edition: March 2005
ISBN: 0-7595-1335-X
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