My Soul to Keep

by Melanie Wells

  “Depends on the roads. It’s three hours by Jeep in good weather. A local guide was going to meet them. They were going to camp for the night and drive in the next day.”

  I stared at her. “So you’re telling me your husband and two little boys are missing in Guatemala.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you so calm?”

  She threw up her hands. “Who said I’m calm?” She pointed at the door. “My little girl’s in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of her. A little boy got kidnapped by a man that grabbed my kid too and then changed his mind. I think calm is out of the question, don’t you?”

  I took a step back. I’d never seen Liz angry before.

  “Exactly what good is it going to do for me to fall apart now?” She began to pace in front of Christine’s door.

  “None. None at all.”

  “I can’t help them. I can’t reach them by phone or radio. If I wanted to go down there and look for them myself, it wouldn’t do the slightest bit of good. I couldn’t even get there, and even if I did, what use would I be? There’s nothing to do but wait.” She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, the anger dissipating into fatigue, her face draining of color. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m yelling at you. I’m on my last nerve.”

  “I can take it.” I smiled and shrugged. “It’s one of my few strengths.”

  Her face softened as the tension eased.

  “Look, this happens all the time on Angel Wing missions. They always come back. Always.”

  Always seemed like good odds, but the way our luck was running, I wasn’t betting.

  I left Liz in the hospital room and went to pick up cheeseburgers and fries at Jack’s—one each for Liz and me, and for Christine a junior burger with meat and bun only and a strawberry milk shake. I didn’t know if she’d eat the burger, but I thought the milk shake was probably a lock. By the time I walked into the room, Maria was sitting there with Liz, having just come off a three-baby half-shift. Christine was awake and energetic, sitting up in bed and listening to her own heart with Maria’s stethoscope.

  We divvied up the food and ate ravenously.

  “When are they discharging her?” Maria asked.

  “They haven’t said.” Liz dipped a french fry in ketchup and handed it to her daughter. Christine took it, licked the ketchup off, and dropped it on her plate beside another half-dozen that had been licked clean and discarded.

  “I’ll check on it after lunch. She should be out of here this afternoon at the latest. I guess you guys will be heading out after that?” Maria asked.

  “George is on standby. We could load up and be out of here by …” Liz checked her watch, “… five or six, I guess. How does that sound, Punkin?”

  I choked on my pickle.

  “You okay, Dylan?” Liz asked.

  I nodded. “Fine. Wrong pipe.” I took a swig of Dr Pepper and tried to remain calm.

  Once again, I felt strangely appalled that she and Christine might leave. Like it would jinx Nicholas’s chances or something. The three of us had been through so much together.

  “We can get Eeyore all settled in at home and then fix grilled cheese for supper. With the crunchy chips you like and some carrots?”

  We turned to Christine, who was about to cry, her chin puckering, her eyes puddling with thick, drippy tears.

  “I want to stay with Miss Dylan.”

  Liz rolled her eyes. “Christine, it’s time for us to get out of Miss Dylan’s hair and go back home to Chicago.”

  “We’re not in her hair. Are we, Miss Dylan?”

  I fluffed my hair, running my fingers through the thick tangle of auburn strands. “Nobody in there but me.”

  “We need to go see Dr. Friedman and see what she has to say about your breathing. You love Dr. Friedman.” Liz turned to Maria and me. “Dr. Friedman always has Tootsie Pops.” Then back to Christine, “Aren’t you ready to take Eeyore home and show him your room?”

  Christine crossed her arms and launched into a full-blown pout. Her lip curled into a defiant frown as tears ran down her face.

  I, of course, was absurdly flattered, though I managed to maintain a convincingly neutral mask so as not to betray my staggering self-absorption.

  “Christine,” Liz said, “I’m not going to have any fits out of you. Not today. Now straighten up and finish your burger.”

  “I wanted cheese on it.”

  Christine wiped her tears, crossed her arms again, and refused to take another bite.

  Liz ignored her and turned to Maria. “Will I be able to get copies of her records? I want her to get seen at home as quickly as possible.”

  “Of course. I’ll make sure they have them ready for you.”

  “Did you tell Maria about the … communication issue you were dealing with this morning?” I asked.

  Liz cocked her head toward Christine. “Haven’t had a chance.”

  Maria raised her eyebrows. Liz looked at me, the hint obvious in her eyes.

  “Want to take a walk?” I asked Christine.

  She nodded. I walked out in the hall and signaled Wanda, who came in, unhooked Christine from the monitors, and got her all arranged, hanging her IV drip on a pole with wheels, which I slid alongside us as we walked. She named the pole Archie, chatting with it amicably as though they were fast friends. Christine wore a little yellow hospital gown with daisies on it and her Barbie sneakers that lit up when she walked. She looked sweet enough to eat, even after her little fit of temper.

  We held hands and walked down the corridor, pausing often so Christine could introduce herself and Archie to everyone she encountered. Me, she forgot about completely. So much for her unflagging devotion to Miss Dylan.

  When we got back to the room, I could hear my cell phone ringing through the thick door. I swung the door open and handed Christine off to her mother so I could take the call. It was Martinez. I stepped out into the hall and picked up.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  “At Children’s.”

  “How is she?”

  “She seems fine. They’ll release her any time now, I think.”

  “Maria said she was going to check in with you guys.”

  “She’s in there with Liz and Christine now. Do you want to talk to her?”

  “No. I called to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “They found a body.”

  I fought off a violent urge to vomit, my face flushing and my skin suddenly clammy and cold.

  “Is it Nicholas?”

  “I don’t know. Some kayaker spotted something in the reeds out at White Rock Lake. All I know is small frame, curly brown hair. They’re on their way out now. I just wanted to make sure you were with Maria. Just in case.”

  “Does she know?”

  “I just found out myself. I don’t want to tell her unless it’s Nicholas.”

  “Why put her through it?” I agreed.

  “Can you stick with her for a while? I’m on my way out to the scene.”

  “Sure. Enrique?”

  “What?”

  “Do you think it’s him?”

  Silence. Then, “I’ll know in a few minutes.”

  He hung up.

  I slid once more to the floor in the hall, my back to the wall, hugging my knees. I couldn’t go back in that room knowing that Maria’s kid might be floating dead in a lake on the other side of town. I could feel myself sinking in a swirl of nausea mixed with rage mixed with panicky, frantic dread. I was losing my grip. My mind took off, spinning around like a lawnmower blade, ripping up everything it could find to run over and destroy. Shredding any remaining hope of calm, of common sense, of intentional optimism. My heart pounded, the blood pulsing loudly in my ears.

  I mentally slapped myself around and tried to focus on my exchange with Liz. What good would it do to lose control of myself now?

  I found a pulse in my neck and counted the heartbeats, focusing on slowing them down. Breathing slo
wly. In and out. In and out.

  I stared at my phone, willing it to ring, then began walking down the hall and back, counting my steps. Twenty-three to the end of the hall. Turn. Twenty-three steps back.

  From inside the room, I heard a loud, long beep, then voices.

  The door flew open, and Maria stuck her head out the door and yelled at the nurses’ station.

  “She’s crashing!”

  As Maria shouted instructions to the staff, I pushed past her and ran back into the room. I knelt by the bed. Christine’s eyes were open, but her lips were beginning to turn blue. I peered frantically into her face, as though I could keep her there by locking her eyes onto mine.

  She looked at me knowingly and smiled, her mouth barely turning at the corners. Then she closed her eyes and was gone.

  10

  THE THING WITH Peter Terry is, his booty isn’t cash or Social Security numbers or flat-screen TVs. What he’s after is your mind. And your soul if he can get it. But in this game, your soul is just the bonus round. His eye is on your serenity. Your peace. Your sense of safety in the world. If he can lift those precious little items off you and toss them onto his pile, he’s pulled off a score unlike anything you’ve ever read about over a morning cup of coffee or seen at a ten-dollar movie.

  Naturally, intensive care is Peter Terry territory. You sit there, staring at your loved one, in the company of strangers who are also staring at their loved ones. And you’re surrounded by the architecture of suffering—monitors, pumps, bags, needles, tubes. And you can feel the skin being ripped off your illusions. Flesh covers veins, and veins web through organs and muscles and bones. And they’re all stuck together with the fragile, electric sinews of sensation, of movement. It’s the perfect disguise, this farce of wholeness.

  And the parts, they all break so easily. When you’re sitting there, staring at your loved one, the one with the broken parts, you can’t believe any of it ever works at all.

  And then, as you pace between beeps and alarms and rhythmic whooshes of air, you hear the whispering and the murmuring. And you peek around curtains, where rosaries are fingered with confident intention, where heads are bowed, where hearts are turned upward because it’s the only possible option. And the atmosphere of hope in the place is overpowering.

  Then you realize hope is all there is. There’s nothing else to live on.

  The rest is just parts and a jump-start.

  I’d been adopted into the Zocci family on Maria’s authority, since intensive care is a “family only” floor. So I sat there with Liz, gripping her hand as we sat by Christine’s bed. Christine slept soundly after her near-death experience—or her death experience, to be more accurate. Technically, she had died, if only for a few seconds. Her breathing had stopped, her heart had arrested, and she was gone. But Maria tubed and bagged her, and Christine was back in no time, kicking and fighting and trying to pull the tube out again.

  Liz got on the phone with the Cleveland Clinic and spoke with the nation’s leading expert on childhood asthma. The doc implied that Christine’s case was routine and suggested Liz get a good night’s sleep. She hung up on him.

  A quick call to Christine’s pediatrician in Chicago relieved her mind. Dr. Friedman recommended they stay put, get Christine stabilized, have some tests run. No reason to risk putting her on a plane—with the altitude and limited medical resources—when she was already in one of the best children’s hospitals in the country.

  Don’t panic, the doctor had said. Christine’s tough. And asthma is treatable. They’d get to the bottom of it in no time and everything would be fine.

  Looking at Christine’s pinched little face in ICU made that hard to believe.

  Martinez showed up an hour into it, having been unable to reach me by phone. No cell phones in ICU. He pulled me out into the hall.

  “It’s not him.”

  I dissolved into tears, clutching Martinez and sobbing all over his tie. He hugged me politely and waited for me to stop.

  I pulled back eventually and choked out, “Who was it?”

  “No ID yet. It’s a woman. Shot in the face. Half the body was in the mud. Guy couldn’t tell if it was man, woman, or kid. Just saw brown hair in the grass and called it in.”

  I closed my eyes and breathed a silent prayer of thanks, though I hurt for the nameless dead woman.

  “Are you going to tell Maria?” I asked.

  “I don’t want her reading it in the paper. I’ll find her and let her know.”

  As he went inside, I walked out to the waiting room and stared through the dirty window into the summer haze. I wondered where the dead woman had lived. What terrible trail of events had led her to a surly end in a muddy gully at White Rock Lake? Was she loved, or was she alone in the world? Was she married? Did she have a lover? Children? Had anyone noticed she was gone?

  Whoever and wherever those people were, their pain was just beginning, though we’d won at least a brief reprieve.

  My eye wandered over the neglected neighborhoods near the hospital—the buckling houses. The choked, lonely yards. The skinny dogs, chained and barking at aimless neighbors who were ambling along with nowhere to go and nothing to do. What sad-luck lottery had landed them here? Or had led me to stand on this mottled square of tile and stare at them from a window at Children’s Medical Center on a bright Tuesday afternoon?

  I could almost hear Peter Terry laughing. How do they know where the vulnerable ones are, these spiritual warlords? Are there pins on a map somewhere? Darts on a board? Do they do it because they get a kick out of it—imprisoning and starving their millions? Or is it part of some grand strategy? When does it count as genocide?

  I turned and walked back to the room. Liz said that Martinez had taken Maria home for the day. No news was bad news, of course. We could all feel the clock ticking. The FBI was still camped at her house, tracing phone calls and monitoring e-mails on the chance of a ransom request, though Maria had no money to speak of and no connections to any. She’d submitted gladly to their presence, thawing tamales and tortillas for them from her freezer. Her parents had arrived that morning from El Paso. Maria had skipped the second half of her shift and gone home to check on them and collapse for a while.

  I needed a break myself, so I got a list of items Liz needed, kissed her good-bye, and promised I’d be back in a few hours.

  Walking to my truck in the warm May afternoon, I felt a strange and unwelcome sense of relief. It seemed ages since I’d been outside or noticed the feeling of the sun on my face. It was only the second time in days I’d been alone for more than a few minutes. I tried to wave away the guilt clouding what little pleasure I might have taken from the beauty of the day. But it hung on like a bad smell—guilt for my momentary relief from the cold, noxious air of the hospital, for my freedom to walk out of there, and for failing somehow to bar the gate to the wormhole.

  I headed for SMU. I needed comfort, something familiar and normal and everyday. I love the SMU campus—mainly because the trees are big and all the buildings match. It’s modeled after the University of Virginia, which was designed by Thomas Jefferson, a very orderly person and thus, to my mind, a pretty good sort (apart from that whole Sally Hemings thing, of course).

  College students are seasonal creatures, moving in mass-migration patterns every three months or so. SMU’s flock had taken off for their summer mating grounds shortly after graduation. So I pulled on to a largely deserted campus, my truck almost leading the way on its own in my perpetual search for a convenient, shaded parking place. I parked with a lurch in a near-empty lot and grabbed my swim bag.

  I changed in the locker room and walked past a few student stragglers who were sunbathing in the pool’s rickety lounge chairs. I spread my towel out on the starting block and sat there for a minute, watching the other lap swimmers slap the water in rhythm and trying to remember what it felt like to not be gripped with fear all the time. Not so long ago, I’d been one of them, swimming along with normal, general-issue
worries knocking around in my head—the ever-present pressures of work and of money and the languid loneliness of living perpetually in a boyfriend-free zone. It had all seemed so heavy at the time. Now I felt trite and small for ever thinking any of it important.

  I’d lost that innocence the day I met Peter Terry. It was a summer day, not unlike this one, when the gate swung open without a sound and Peter Terry walked into my life, sucker-punching me blithely as he strolled on by.

  I sealed my goggles over my eyes, slipped into the pool, and pushed off the wall, feeling the awkwardness of my time out of the water. I summoned rusty self-discipline, the physical persistence—stroke, stroke, breathe—and the mental patience, waiting for my body to settle into the familiar movements, to shake off the stiff uncertainty that comes when I’ve spent too much time on land. The water felt good. A few hundred meters and I had my rhythm again, the water slipping over my skin, washing away some of the strain of these days.

  I let my thoughts wander back to the day at the park.

  Nicholas, with his tiara and plastic gun. The man watching the soccer game. In my mind, I could see him pace, staring at the game, turning and pacing again. Stopping to look over the crowd.

  I flipped and pushed off the wall, holding a tight streamline and trying to keep the man’s image in my head. Peering into his face, looking for something, anything. His eyes had been strangely intense, almost aggressive. His features were gone from my memory, though—only his expression remained. It was greedy. Hungry.

  Another wall, another turn, another streamline. Stroke, stroke, breathe.

  I could see the park clearly. The petting zoo. A little girl in yellow overalls, crying when her parents put her on the pony for a photograph. A gardener—the only black face in the park—dogged and solitary, clipping hedges and raking leaves and twigs into a pile. I hadn’t seen anyone use a rake in a long time. Always those horrible leaf blowers.

  Mentally, I scanned the crowd at the soccer game. A little herd of ponytailed girls, all five-and-unders, in their stiff shin guards and knee-socks and teeny team jerseys, running up and down the field in bunches, blindly following the ball around. Dads with excessive enthusiasm jumping and shouting and waving their arms. Moms with expensive hair and pastel outfits, talking idly to one another, ignoring the game. Me with my Supercuts hairdo and cutoffs, licking my xanthan pop and allowing myself to get swept up in the joyful simplicity of the day.