by Laura Resau
“Quick,” Faustino says, just as the men are rounding the last bend, the machine gun raised and ready. “Help me close it.”
He leans against the door, and Wendell and I move to help him. There’s an inch more to go when the machine-gun barrel forces its way between the door and the frame. Before we can hurl our weight against the door, the men burst inside.
They’re silhouetted against the rectangle of light, the same men from yesterday, only now I’m seeing them up close, close enough to smell their stomach-turning hair gel. One’s chunky, with a double chin and an XXL Tommy Hilfiger shirt and a fancy gold watch. The other’s younger, maybe just a few years older than me and Wendell, and what I notice most about him is a huge zit on his left nostril.
They take a moment to catch their breath, enough time for me to take in how dire our situation is. Frantic, my mind runs through the possible outcomes. They almost all end with us riddled with machine-gun bullets or left to starve to death in the pitch-dark. My one hope is they’ll keep us alive for ransom, but even then, Layla has only a few hundred dollars in her bank account.
“We found the missing stones,” the Tommy Hilfiger guy says, breathing hard. He holds up the sad-looking bear that Faustino dropped. “But we need that two thousand.”
“Give me more time,” Faustino says, his palms up. “The boy doesn’t have the money.”
“We’ve been more than generous. More than patient.”
“Compadres, one more chance.”
“No more chances.”
“Take my truck, compadres. It’s worth a lot more than two thousand.”
“We don’t want that piece of mierda.”
“And my TV. It’s deluxe.”
“We want the cash.” The Tommy Hilfiger man jabs the machine gun at Faustino’s throat.
“Wait! I have some money. It’s hidden.”
“He’s lying, hermano,” the zit-nose one says.
So they’re brothers. I can see that. Maybe in five years, after a lot of beer drinking, the zit-nose one will get a gut and another chin like his brother.
“Yeah, he’s a bad liar,” the Tommy Hilfiger brother agrees.
“Let’s give him some floripondio and find out the truth. We passed tons of it on the way.”
The Tommy Hilfiger brother stays, gun pointed at us, and the other leaves to pick flowers. I glance at Faustino. I’m pretty sure he’s lying about the hidden money.
The zit-nose brother returns with a bouquet of huge white blossoms turning rosy pink at the tips. “How much of this stuff do we give him?”
His brother shrugs. “When I use it to rob people, I get it already in a powder.”
“The worst is we’d kill him,” the zit-nose one points out. “Then we could just kidnap these gringos to get the money.”
I’m not a gringo, part of me wants to shout. The other part of me is too scared to talk. My legs feel so weak, I’m sure they’ll buckle beneath me. And if my heart beats any faster, I might have a heart attack. Maybe this is a terrible dream, and soon Layla will hear me tossing and turning in distress and wake me up softly with Rumi quotes.
“Give him one.” They watch Faustino for a reaction, but he responds with a stony stare.
The guy rubs his double chin. “Make it two, on second thought.”
With the machine-gun barrel digging into his neck, Faustino eats the flowers. We wait, and wait, and wait. The guys lean against the wall and talk about a telenovela they watch called The Clone, and how hot the star Jade is and how they wouldn’t mind her doing a little belly dancing for them. Then the conversation turns to whether Leandro or Lucas—who are apparently clones with very different personalities—will end up with Jade. Then they discuss the ethical implications of cloning, punctuated with plenty of cursing.
And as they debate, I feel like I’m falling fast, into a pit with no escape and nothing to hang on to. I’m trying not to let my knees buckle underneath me, trying not to collapse into a hysterical, sobbing heap on the ground.
Then I hear something soft under the men’s voices. It’s Layla’s voice. The echoes of whispers of all the times she’s read to me before bed, all the lines of poetry, ribbons of wisdom that slipped inside me.
They fall, and falling,
They’re given wings.
The lines repeat themselves, a birdsong on a loop. Over and over with my heartbeat and my breath.
Meanwhile, Faustino has sat on the ground and closed his eyes, resigned and waiting. After an eternity of maybe a half hour, he starts saying he’s thirsty and clutching his throat. Soon he’s mumbling incoherently. I can’t tell if it’s an act or if he’s really drugged. His pupils do look a bit dilated, although it could be because of the cave’s darkness. And he is pale and sweating, but that could be because of the angry armed men.
Either way, the thugs seem convinced. “It’s working,” the zit-nose brother says. “Ask him.”
“You got a money stash, cabrón?”
Faustino smiles. “I have something more valuable than money.” His words are slurred but comprehensible.
“What?” The Tommy Hilfiger brother jabs the gun into his side. He seems oblivious.
“My most precious possessions.”
“Bet he’s been pilfering emeralds. Bet he has his own private stash, the little snake.”
“Where?”
“In a big cardboard box. Tied up with twine. Behind the TV.”
“Better be good,” the Tommy Hilfiger brother says. Then he raises his gun and bashes Faustino on the head.
Faustino falls sideways, blood dripping from his forehead and making a little glistening puddle on the ground.
Wendell sucks in his breath and kneels over him.
“Why’d you do that?” the zit-nose brother asks.
“’Cause he’s a cabrón. I didn’t kill him. I won’t do that till I make sure we get our money back.”
The Tommy Hilfiger brother tears Faustino’s keys from his neck. He turns to us. “If nothing’s there, we’ll kill you. That or we’ll kidnap you. Make your family fork over a few hundred thousand for the headache. You better hope we find what we’re looking for.”
They close the door. The key turns in the lock. I kneel beside Wendell. Now there is nothing but the sound of our breath in total blackness.
Chapter 27
After a moment of shock, I find Wendell’s hand. My other hand rests on Faustino’s chest. It’s moving up and down with his breath. Sticky blood clings to his head, but the wound seems to be clotting.
“I think he’s okay,” I say. The outside layer of me is talking, but the center of me is reciting, like a prayer, the same lines over and over.
They fall, and falling,
They’re given wings.
“Breathing okay,” I report. “Bleeding controlled. He feels hot, though, and his heart’s racing.” A few years ago, I signed Layla and me up for a CPR and first aid course in Tanzania, where we lived hours from the nearest hospital. I give Faustino a gentle shake. “Faustino, can you hear me? You okay?”
He moans.
Wendell’s hand pulls away from mine and I hear him trying to open the door. “It won’t budge, Z. What did those guys say? I caught a few words, but they were talking fast.”
I give him a recap. The top layer of me is talking while the deeper layer is wishing my hands would turn into wings, the bones lengthening, the skin stretching into a thin membrane. I picture a bat’s skeleton, which I saw in a photograph at Layla’s Brazilian ex-boyfriend’s art opening. The bones of the wings looked like fingers, as though one day the creature decided, I’m tired of climbing and falling and climbing and falling … Why not fly?
“You know what’s in that box, right, Z?”
I nod, willing myself to calm down and think logically. “His poisonous-creature collection.”
“Best-case scenario, they get bitten and die.” Wendell’s voice is scratchy. “But then we’ll still be stuck in here. And no one knows where we are. Worst case,
they get bitten but not bad enough to die and they come back really angry and kill us.”
“We need to hide,” I say. “Either that or find a way out.”
“This place seems familiar to me, Z.”
“Did you have a feeling about it?”
“Sort of.” He pauses. “I think this is the place of dark and light.”
Dark and light. Where’s the light?
It hits me. “Wendell, remember when Faustino said his earliest memory was a room of crystals? Taita Silvio told me about the crystal room. A secret chamber in a cave.”
“We’ll be safe there.” His voice is strangely confident, floating in the darkness. “We just need to find it.”
Again, I hear Layla’s whisper speaking ancient words, her hand lightly touching my hair. Darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest.
“We can find it,” I say. “Silvio told me about it.” I try to conjure up my conversation with Silvio. It isn’t easy, especially under pressure. Five minutes have already passed since the thugs left. By now they might be opening the box. I’m warding off panic and sifting through everything Silvio told me about the chamber.
Right, he said. All right turns. “Okay, Wendell,” I say, taking a deep breath. “Let’s go. The tunnel on the right.”
“What about Faustino?”
“We have to leave him here.”
“But they’ll kill him, Z.”
“We have to save ourselves.” I find Wendell’s hand again.
“Regresamos, Faustino,” he says in perfect Spanish, even rolling his Rs. We’ll be back.
I squeeze Wendell’s hand. “It’s all right turns. That’s the secret.” I let my other hand brush against the wall to my right. Wendell keeps his left hand outstretched in front, in case of a dead end. We make our way through the tunnel, ducking down. If I let my head rise too high, it hits the ceiling.
The tunnel grows cooler the farther we go. It smells like old rock. Once in a while I hear a flapping, a flutter. “Bats,” Wendell says, and I shiver and imagine wings stretching from my fingers.
We walk back even farther, our hands running along the sides and moving in front of us. Even if we’d gone to this chamber dozens of times before, it would still be hard to find in the complete darkness.
How far does this mine go back? We still haven’t reached a turnoff. What if Silvio was wrong? Or what if we were supposed to start in one of the other tunnels and then make all the right-hand turns? After all, he wasn’t giving me exact directions, just offhandedly mentioning an old childhood memory. Or was he?
Even with directions, the likelihood is that we’ll get lost in the dark, or else fall from a drop-off or plunge into a deep hole. Even if, by some miracle, we do survive this, Layla will be making us settle down in Maryland and Wendell will never forgive me once he discovers his parents are coming. Whether we survive or not, I’m doomed. I’m falling. I try to focus on wings spreading, lifting me, a candle of darkness lighting the way. I try to hear Layla’s voice.
That’s when the tears start pouring out and my nose fills with snot.
When Layla cries—over recent roadkill or a skinny child begging—she quotes Rumi through her tears. Cry easily, like a child. Keep your grief glistening … The darkness hides my tears, but soon my sniffling gets out of control. Wendell stops. He pulls me close and holds me. “It’s okay, Z. We can do this. It’ll be okay.”
Now I’m shamelessly sobbing and gasping. “A-a-are you mad at me, Wendell?”
“Why would I be mad?”
“That I called your birth father a loser and took the bear.”
“I’m glad you’re here.” He finds my face and wipes the tears with his thumbs. “Let’s go. There’ll be a turnoff to our right coming up soon. I have a good feeling about this. We’re headed toward light.”
And that is what I need to feel myself lifting again. About a minute later, my face is dry and the wall curves. “Here it is, Wendell!”
We follow it to the right.
Soon the wall curves again to the right.
A couple minutes later, it curves yet again.
“Stop,” Wendell says suddenly, pulling me toward him. “There’s stone in front of us.” I feel with my hand, and yes, it’s a dead end.
“Now what?” he asks.
“There’s a hole somewhere. At the base of the wall. Covered by a rock. A pretty small hole. Taita Silvio said his dad couldn’t fit through it.”
“Let’s hope I fit,” he says. It’s true, his shoulders are so broad they might not. But I don’t let myself think about that now. And I don’t let myself wonder what happens after we find the chamber, how we’ll ever get out of these tunnels. I focus only on surviving the next few hours.
We feel all around the base of the wall, running our hands over the rough stone. The occasional insect scurries away from our hands, which gives me shivers. On instinct, I keep looking back over my shoulder, even though it’s too dark to see anything. There’s a ruffling sound, and my heart jumps. Footsteps? Bat wings?
“Here it is!” Wendell says, moving my hand over the top of a rock, about a foot or two in diameter, at the base of the wall. With a grunt, he pushes the rock aside. We stick our hands where the rock was. Our hands move in empty space. A hole!
“I’ll go in first, Z.”
“Let me. It could be a drop-off.”
“All the more reason for me to go first.”
“I promised your mom I’d take care of you.”
“I’ll be fine. I told you, I have a good feeling about this.” Without waiting for my response, he lowers to the ground and crawls in. I keep my hand on his legs, which go first, and then his hips and back, and then his shoulders, so wide they barely fit. He turns and twists to squeeze them through. His head follows.
And he’s in.
“Z, come on in! Careful. There are crystals everywhere.”
Again, there’s a rustling. I can’t tell if it’s coming from our tunnel or another tunnel. Or inside or outside the chamber. I can’t tell if it’s people walking, trying to stay quiet, or if it’s bats, or something else. Don’t bears and mountain lions use caves as lairs?
Taking a deep breath, I crawl in, feetfirst, slithering backward, pausing to squeeze my shoulders through. Inside, I stand up slowly. Wendell’s hand finds my body—my left boob to be exact.
“Oops, sorry.” He lowers his hand to my waist and slips it around my back. I wave my arms around me. Above, my fingers touch crystals of all sizes jutting out from the ceiling, smooth sides and sharp points. I bend down and feel the ground below us, covered with slippery, pointy crystals.
Wendell’s voice: “I feel like we’ve been here before. But where’s the light?”
Of course. The candles! “There is light, Wendell! Taita Silvio told me they kept matches and candles here. In a basket. Think they might work after all this time?”
“Maybe Faustino still comes here and restocks the supply.”
I can only imagine Faustino coming in here to do something shady, like stashing smuggled jewels. I don’t know what Wendell thinks Faustino would do in here, and I don’t ask. Even after all that’s happened, he’s still hoping Faustino’s a decent guy. I think, instead, about the task at hand. “If I hid candles,” I say, “I’d put them right inside the entrance.”
We feel around, moving our fingertips over the crystal, all sharp tips and glassy sides. Within seconds, my fingers touch the fibers of a woven basket and then smooth wax and a wick.
“Here!” I pass the candle to Wendell and feel around the basket. There’s a small cardboard box. I shake it. Could be matches. I slide it open and my fingers touch dozens of small wooden sticks. “Found the matches!”
I strike a match. Nothing. I try again. Come on, come on. After two more tries, a tiny flame appears, an orange glow that lights Wendell’s face and the space around us.
I look up and nearly drop the match. I gasp.
It’s one thing to hear about a chamber of cr
ystals, and it’s another to be inside one. Even from this one flame, the light reflects and refracts thousands of times through thousands of crystals of all shapes and sizes. It’s like being inside a heap of snowflakes or icicles, a hollowed-out snowball in sunlight.
Silvio is right. It feels like flying.
Wendell lights a candle. The room is about as big as my and Layla’s apartment living room. All the surfaces—the walls and ceilings and floor—are pure crystal. I light another candle. I wish Layla were here.
“My dad used to do some caving,” Wendell says finally. “He’d dig this place.”
“Layla would, too. She’s into crystals.”
Somehow, the crystals defy the senses, don’t limit themselves to sight or feel. If they had a sound, it would be hammered dulcimer music, notes tinkling off the tips of every tiny crystal. And the big crystals would emit low, mysterious harp sounds, deep and resonant as the calls of whales.
“Let’s roll the rock back over the entrance,” Wendell says.
“Hide out here until they give up looking for us. Then we can go explore and see if there’s another exit. It’ll be easy now that we have light.”
We pull the rock back in front of the hole and tuck my sweater around the edges so that no light can escape through the cracks.
Slowly, we move around, half-crawling, half-climbing, stepping very carefully between the jutting crystals. Some are the width of my pinkie, some the width of my torso. Impulsively, I hug the biggest one—the diameter of an old tree trunk—my fingers barely touching on the other side. Hugging a crystal! What will Layla think when I tell her?
If I can tell her.
If we ever get out of here.
We walk and crawl and climb to the far side of the chamber. In a little natural niche is a cluster of half-melted candles, white, in pools of wax. There are more than a dozen candles, melted down to different heights. They’re arranged in a perfect circle around a broken crystal base, about a half inch in diameter. It looks like some kind of altar.