Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  “Ten, nine, eight, seven—stand by. And … we are live.” The monitors buzzed, and the titles scrolled.

  Their announcer spoke, a ghostly voice booming from the corners of the studio. “Welcome to This Week, coming to you live tonight from Mexico City. And now our host, Angelina ‘Sonia’ Torres!”

  The monitors cut to Torres. She flipped the switch in her head, conjuring a brilliant smile. “Welcome to This Week. On this morning’s live broadcast, we have a very special guest, former governor Ramone Quinones of Chihuahua. Governor, the first question I have is: you’ve been notoriously private since you left office. Why, after so long, have you finally agreed to be interviewed?”

  Whatever momentary discomfort he had experienced had flown. “Ms. Torres, as you know, certain legal matters will soon commence. I thought that it would be best to give my side of the story.”

  Something within her blossomed, warming. This was one of the greatest moments of her career. Torres barely noticed as the cameramen jockeyed about to find the right angles. “You won’t be tried in the court of public opinion, sir.”

  “True. But I still want to present my story in my way, in my own time.”

  “Then please,” she said. “Tell us your view of the charges.”

  “Let’s have camera two,” the director whispered in her earpiece. Instantly, she adjusted her profile.

  “As we know,” Quinones began, “the narcotics industry has long been a cause of friction between Mexico and the United States. When progress doesn’t match whatever is demanded in the editorial sections of their failing newspapers, when inept response to domestic catastrophes or the latest bedroom scandals necessitates a distraction, they need a … I believe the term is ‘fall guy.’”

  She had anticipated that comment. “So you are maintaining total innocence?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I’m guilty.” A pause for effect. “Guilty of accepting donations for my children’s charity. Guilty of paving roads and building bridges in flood-ravaged sections of rural Chihuahua.”

  She wanted to laugh, but despite her doubts, he remained seductively sincere. “Governor…” she began, but he soldiered on.

  “And guilty of having old friends who are rumored, rumored only I must insist, to be involved in narcotraficante. These three things: money, works, and associations, are all that some norteamericano journalists have to accuse me of being a notorious man.”

  She decided to split hairs. The questions on her sheet were specific to his conflict with the Mexican legal system, but where the district attorney had limited authority to speculate upon things he could not prove, a journalist could go quite a bit further.

  “What of the murders?”

  He almost smiled. Almost. But the expression was concealed beneath a put-upon air. With irritation, Sonia realized that she was the one who had stepped into a trap.

  “Our friends north of the border love their chemical entertainments. And are willing to pay almost any amount to obtain them. That amount of gold attracts greedy men. And where there is greed, violence often follows. It is I, and the citizens who entrusted me with their governance, who feel insulted that so much of this has happened in our state. But these men, these…”

  He paused, shaking his fingers as if suffering a cramp. “Excuse me,” he said. Something different had crept into his voice. Unless she was mistaken, he was being authentic now, the play-games over. Had her question touched something she hadn’t anticipated? Excitement percolated. A predatory hunger within her, some relic of a once keen journalistic instinct shook itself to wakefulness and bared its teeth.

  “I was saying. These men try to cast me as a villain in a drama they … they themselves…”

  He blinked, flinched as if dealing with a sharp blow to the stomach, and shook his head hard, twice. His eyes were unfocused. Quinones cursed and tore off his microphone, stood up to stretch his left leg. He wasn’t looking at her, or at anything at all. Was the man sampling his own supply? Had he come to the studio high, for God’s sake?

  “Governor? Are you—”

  “I can’t … something…” His words died in a scream. “My head!” His teeth clamped on his tongue, and in an instant his lips were painted crimson. Fingers tensed into claws and he clapped his palms to his temples, howling pain.

  Groaning, Quinones arched backward. The cables in the sides of his neck bunched and crawled, and his cheeks grew gaunt as those Olympic sprinters straining to the finish line, just membranes stretched across a bare skull.

  The ex-governor screamed again, then straightened a final time and collapsed. He curled onto one shuddering side like a weeping child.

  Torres ignored her director’s voice, or the uproar surrounding her and stood, tottering unsteadily. Sound and sight dissolved in her fog.

  Quinones’ bodyguards rushed to him, rolled him over … and then sprang back in horror. His mouth stretched wide in a silent scream. His spine arched violently, a circus contortionist viewed in a fun-house mirror. His fingers splayed and then tensed into tight, clumsy fists. The governor’s muscles knotted and strained, producing muffled cracking sounds, like wooden slats splintering under pressure. Blood seeped from the cuffs of his perfectly tailored Bijan Pakzad pants.

  Torres’ vision swam, then swirled, and she collapsed to the ground beside him.

  What is that thing we seek? We walk a line between birth and death, misremembering the one, seeking infinite postponement of the other. Is it any wonder our days are tasteless, our nights filled with restless slumber or furtive grasping? The true aspirant knows both birth and death, fearing neither. Seeks neither pain nor pleasure, clings to neither subject nor object. Seeks not happiness and deigns to avoid grief. It is only in embracing the All that the Nothing appears. And in the Nothing is Everything.

  —Savagi, commentary on The Yama Sutra

  CHAPTER 2

  DECEMBER 15

  6:15 A.M. EST

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  By the time her alarm’s insistent burr fluttered the morning air, Olympia Dorsey was already awake.

  In fact, she had been awake for almost five minutes. She liked waking up before the hostile alarm clock reminded her that another day was upon them.

  She groaned, remembering the days, not so long before, when she had possessed the time and energy for dancing until dawn, or more recently, scaling the Atlanta Rocks! climbing wall three times a week. Olympia wondered if she would ever again have such luxury. Or such a sinewy, toned body. So much had changed in the last three years, including the most obvious. The most painful.

  Raoul was gone. For three years now, his absence had been more concrete than most of her waking reality.

  Wasn’t she supposed to be healing by now? Didn’t Dr. Phil say that after a year, such loss began to recede from immediate consciousness, replaced by new concerns?

  Instead, the loss was something her mind returned to again and again, like the tip of her tongue searching out the site of a recent extraction. Something precious had been ripped bleeding from her life, and there was no replacing it.

  She rolled, yawning, out of bed, and shuffled downstairs. Olympia planned to turn on the coffee, treasuring the last few moments of peace before family became her primary concern.

  No … not minutes. Because eight-year-old Hannibal stood there in the kitchen already dressed in a favorite red Avengers T-shirt and jeans, waiting for her. He was small for his age, with coppery skin and tightly curled hair. His body hadn’t quite caught up with the size of his head, lending him a babyish aspect that broke her heart anew every god damned day.

  Even though he didn’t look directly at her, the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile that warmed her darkest moods. His eyes were as darkly chocolate as her own skin, and shone even in dim light. God help her, she loved him more than anything in the world. Mothers weren’t supposed to favor children, but that was how she felt, and she prayed that his sister, Nicki, could somehow understand.

  Hannibal needed
her more.

  She hoped he hadn’t been standing there all night, counting cracks in the ceiling or leaves on the artificial plants.

  He was drawing again, using the dining room table as an easel, and sheets of butcher paper as his canvas. She didn’t know why he loved to draw houses, mansions, office buildings, apartments … anywhere people lived or worked. Hannibal drew the houses, erased or crossed them out, then drew again as if trying to perfect an image he held in memory, always frustrated, but never stymied. She did not know which was closer to the truth. Hannibal rarely spoke, so she had precious little access to his inner world.

  Always the same rough design, although it had grown more refined over the years. By the time he put one of the drawings aside, they sometimes had so many wings and floors that they resembled images from the book Gormenghast. He had done this since he was five, with pencils, paint, crayons, and pens, and at this point all she could do was smile.

  Her son … their son … was the center of her life, and God bless Nicki for understanding and not throwing a snit as so many other teenagers might have done. Why does Hannibal get all the attention? Nobody gives a damn about me, or cares if I live or die …

  Not Nicki. Never Nicki, thank God.

  Hani shuffled toward her, his eyes cast down toward the ground, as if searching for dropped coins. Usually this didn’t cause him to bounce into walls—in fact, she wondered how he avoided that, so oblivious to environments he sometimes seemed. He took small steps, flapping his hands like the wings of a flightless bird. When he finally looked up a tiny smile warmed his face, the expression he almost always wore, unless displaying the pouted frown that so easily tore her heart.

  “Hi, baby,” she said. “Got words for Mommy?” Mommy loves to hear anything you have to say. Anything at all.

  She hoped he couldn’t hear the pain in her voice. He deserved better than that. Much, much better.

  But as always, he did not speak to her—more … at her, without meeting her eyes. He rarely looked directly into her face, seemed more comfortable looking at a spot a few degrees to the left or right of whoever he was addressing. “Oatmeal. Want oatmeal. And cartoons.”

  He moved his gaze to stare up at the wall as he spoke, as if distracted by a ghost. “With nuts.”

  Cartoons with nuts. That should be easy.

  Oh, and oatmeal.

  She kissed his cheek, and he wiggled away from her. That stung, but Olympia tried not to see it as a personal rejection. “I love you, too, hon. We have a good life.”

  Was that wrong? To assume that he was thinking something he had not said? To answer questions he had never asked? Almost as if he understood her yearning, he reached out with one arm and hugged her without looking at her, as if the contact was an obligation, not a comfort.

  Once, his hugs had been different. He had clung to her with full body, showering her with small, warm kisses. He had done that for Raoul as well.

  Back when Raoul was still alive.

  * * *

  Nicki was awake when Olympia opened the door to her room. The thirteen-year-old knelt on the edge of her bed, staring out through her window, down at the common grass area shared by all the Foothill Village condominiums. A rectangle of manicured green, a basketball court. Behind a gated wall, a swimming pool and spa. So much more than she’d had as a girl, living in the concrete wasteland of Miami’s Liberty City.

  “Almost time for school,” Olympia said. She peered over Nicki’s shoulder to share the view. Nicki was five years older than Hani chronologically, a thousand miles from him mentally.

  Nicki still wore her hair in braids, still had her baby fat, but Raoul’s Seminole cheekbones already lent her face an arrestingly exotic flavor. Even with minimum care, her long dark hair was lustrous, much straighter than Olympia’s own tight and wiry curls. Even her wire-rimmed glasses just made her more appealing. Her daughter was going to be a knockout.

  “What’s going on out there?” Olympia asked, already knowing what had captured Nicki’s attention.

  Her daughter was focused on the neighbor across the street. If Harry Belafonte and Eartha Kitt had spawned an athletic love child, he might have looked like Terry Nicolas. Fortyish, six feet tall, he seemed to glide as if wearing invisible ice skates.

  At the moment, Terry was crouched down on the basketball court, flexing through his morning body-weight exercises. Even before daylight hit the grass he was usually out there, bending and stretching his legs and torso into patterns that resembled nothing so much as a cross between break dancing and a solo game of Twister. On other occasions, he imitated Cirque du Soleil, balancing on his forearms, palms flat on the ground with elbows tucked tightly into his sides, shaven head close to the ground, pushing his legs and trunk off the ground in apparent defiance of gravity, holding that impossible position for sixty seconds or more.

  Whatever he was doing, it kept his body looking like an action figure woven of knotted rope. Not an ounce of excess fat dappled his frame. Scars, yes, a fascinating variety of puckered ridges and pale valleys … but no flab, as she remembered … viscerally.

  Viscerally. That was the word, and she fought a blush as the memory swept her in dizzying waves.

  She had first encountered Terry fifteen months ago, at a Foothill Village barbecue mixer. Hannibal had run breakneck into him, almost bouncing off into the empty swimming pool. With reflexes that would have shamed a tennis pro, Terry had scooped Hani out of the air and deposited the boy lightly on his feet.

  Hannibal had just giggled, unfazed by his brush with disaster. Terry had patted Hani’s curling hair, and smiled dazzlingly at her. The impact of that smile was like Yo-Yo Ma strumming a cello string in her tummy.

  He had asked her to coffee, and then wrangled her to Mongolian barbecue, speaking of life (Olympia’s adventures growing up in Miami, her father an impoverished civil rights lawyer. Terry’s on army bases around the world with his constantly reassigned father), dead siblings (Olympia’s preemie older sister, dead weeks after birth. Terry’s younger brother, victim of a hit-and-run at the age of thirteen), and shared love of cinema (they both loved Poitier’s In the Heat of the Night and Lady Sings the Blues, Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, as well as Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird. Go figure), all the time carefully ignoring their growing mutual awareness of each other’s bodies. One October night he had kissed her, so sweetly she thought she was dreaming. She had surprised herself by kissing him back and then leading him, hand in warm hand, to her bed. Their lovemaking had been exquisite, a revelation of sensual hungers she’d feared she’d buried with Raoul. Banked but not extinguished, when fanned those fires had burned so very, very brightly …

  She didn’t know where things between them might have gone. How far.

  But within days of their first date, she had begun to feel an odd panic, a fluttering in her gut almost like mild food poisoning. He’s lying about something. I can feel it. See it when his eyes shift away when he talks about that “consultant” job of his. About his relationship with his roommate, Mark. Bisexual? Drug dealer? There’s a secret here. Be wary. Keep your mind on your family, not this foolishness.

  She recognized that voice instantly: her mother’s. Gone but hardly forgotten. Terry had lost both his parents as well, one of the bonds they had shared.

  That is, if stories of his childhood had been true. If any of it had been true.

  If Hani hadn’t responded to Terry with such an evident, naked hunger for male attention, the entire misadventure might have been less devastating. No. There was nothing that could have diminished the pain. Terry had been a wonderfully visceral reminder that life flowed on. And then he was gone, and that was just the way it was.

  “Come on. We have to get moving.”

  Nicki nodded and rolled off her bed. “Need to feed Pax.” Olympia smiled at that thought. They shared a backyard with the houses on either side, and their right-hand neighbors, the Haleys, had once again gone on an extended Christmas Royal Ca
rribean cruise and left their lovable doofus of a dalmatian-spotted Great Dane in the Dorseys’ care. This was the third year they’d pulled that disappearing act, and Olympia was getting irritated.

  Nicki, on the other hand, loved walking, grooming, and feeding Pax, and Paxie loved her, so Olympia tended to keep her irritation to herself.

  In her nightgown, Nicki’s strong, slender body reminded Olympia of her own early teenage years. Ample hips, slightly thick waist, and only a promise of the spectacular figure that had exploded by seventeen.

  Olympia had yet to have that talk with her daughter, but suspected Nicki knew enough to figure out what had happened between her mother and the handsome neighbor, and accepted it with a wisdom informed by the Internet generation’s infinite access to imagery.

  “Down in five, Mom,” she said, and Olympia knew that her daughter’s word was good.

  Unlike Raoul, who had promised to stay with them forever.

  CHAPTER 3

  Shilo Middle School was generally only eight minutes away from Olympia’s Foothill Village driveway, but this morning she spent another minute dawdling before pulling out. Terry was heading back to 906 Market, across the street from her own three-bedroom, and Olympia hoped that he would saunter past them without comment or notice. If she pulled out he’d be forced to acknowledge her and …

  But no, damn it. He waved and smiled, and Hani waved back, although Nicki sat like a stone.

  “’Erry!” Hani yelled. Olympia gave up and backed out, so that their Kia pulled up parallel to Terry. It was cold, but perspiration glistened on his arms, and his cutoff sweatshirt was dappled with wet spots. He made pistols of his fingers and fired shots through the back window. Hani giggled as if he’d never seen anything so funny in all his young life.

  Then Terry’s eyes met hers, and his hands relaxed. Although nothing save kindness lived in his dark brown eyes, she could barely meet them.

  Correction—while she could see nothing but kindness in his eyes. But … she felt something more, as if he was somehow focused beyond her. Saw through her, or this place, and this time, to something else. You don’t want to see what I’ve seen, those eyes seemed to say. What I see.