by JJ Pike
She closed her eyes and let herself float on the bobbing surface of the mighty river that ran alongside their village. Her hair spread out behind her and her arms floated at her side like diaphanous wings. She turned and dove, a fish flashing through the reeds, a seal thwapping its tail and rocketing across a reef, a penguin sprung from its plodding land ways and released into a sleek line of flashing black and white. She was a deep-sea creature. Something never before seen. She was waves, the water, the tide. She flew away from Alicia and her nightmares and flashbacks and horrors, dove deep into the dark, left all of them behind in her bubbling wake. She was nothing and nobody and dispersed to the seas.
Alice snapped to. The water lapped at the walls far below the subway. Had it been so close when she fell asleep? How long had she been trapped? How much longer would she survive? What would she do if no one came? How was she going to get the past to stop racing through her brain?
The tickle on her ankle was unbearable. She let her foot writhe and spasm, hoping to kick the rat away. She had to make it as difficult as possible for the vermin to get at her. The sensation was on the move, light and fast, sending waves of panic up and down her leg.
Whatever was down there was much smaller than a rat. And lighter. And up her leg. She thrust her calf back, hoping she was right. The climbing stopped. She eased her leg back into the neutral position. The tickle didn’t start back up. Instead, a carcass slid down her calf and onto her shoe. Too gross. The roaches were coming.
The tickle came again, this time on her shoulder. She cricked her head to one side but didn’t have enough room to get her chin onto her arm to crush the blasted vermin. She was panting. Not good. She was in no danger of losing air, but she didn’t want to pass out again. Every time she nodded off or blacked out, some new vile memory appeared to torment her.
Again, this time on her forehead and her cheek, followed quickly by a stream of insane, feather-like prickles down her face and onto her neck. She squeezed her eyes shut and clamped her lips tight. If only she could fold her ears closed so they couldn’t invade her. Had the roaches swarmed up her? Because if they had, she was ready to mash every last one of them to death.
She thrashed her head from side to side. There was definitely something small and light and close to her face. She felt it again. Was it feet or whiskers or teeth or tail? No clue, but it tickled and was gross and made her wish she could shed her skin and slip into the dark and never feel anything on her face ever again.
She held her breath for as long as she could, wishing the sickening sensation of little feet skittering down her would go away. No way they were going to win. She smacked her face into the rock in front of her. It had worked before. It might work again. Blood streamed from her forehead into her eyes. Had she missed it or landed a blow? She lowered her chin and swept the area directly below her jaw, just to make sure she hadn’t partially smushed it and left it to die so close to her mouth. No roach, no roach carcass, but they were so small she might have killed it and let it fall into the cavern below.
She waited, blinking away the blood and sweat.
The tickle came again and she was finally screaming and thrashing and swearing. Only when the copper tang of her own blood made it into her mouth did she realize there were no roaches. The tickle was an enemy far more formidable. It was water.
Chapter Eleven
Bill hated travel, and international travel was the absolute pits. It had been a grueling eight hours. There was the recycled air on the plane, then the rubber chicken dinner that he couldn’t taste, then the endless lines at immigration ending with the unsmiling and vaguely hostile agent who made him feel like he’d done something wrong, even though he was innocent of all charges. For now.
He made it to the baggage carousel. Standing on the other side of the moving belt was his translator, trying and failing to look nonchalant. Bill gave a barely visible nod and looked away. No need to draw attention to themselves. The fewer people who saw them together, the better. Bill wanted there to be no trail of evidence, no witnesses, nothing leading back to either of them. His plan was perfect. Now all he had to do was follow it to the letter.
He grabbed his bag and made his way to customs. He was ready with his answers. Nothing to declare. No, I am not bringing anything illegal into the country. No, I have visited no farms in the last six weeks. No, I have no firearms. The preparation wasn’t necessary. He was waved on through, along with everyone else thronging to the taxi ranks.
He endured the taxi-ride—radio blaring, driver talking fourteen to the dozen in broken English, the world whipping by in a haze of palm trees and high rises—and was deposited at his motel. There was no a/c, no minibar or restaurant or vending machines, no hot water or clean towels or little bars of soap. There was a room with a bed, flanked by a lamp with no shade, and an ancient TV on a rickety table. None of those things mattered. He had chewed the rubber chicken, downed a couple of mini bottles of Jack, ignored his fellow travelers, and kept his eye on the prize. Now all he had to do was make it to the morning.
He kicked his shoes off and flopped onto the bed. Alice would have turned the cover down, to prevent the transmission of “effluvia” to their clothes, but Bill had a strong suspicion that the sheets were no better. Like all motels on the wrong side of the tracks, the place smelled of desperation and broken dreams. The carpet laid the motel’s secrets bare: a fist fight in the corner, a bottle thrown from the door, the steady drip of infidelity as someone exited the shower and waited on their lover. The wallpaper was ancient and peeling, the furniture scratched and scuffed, the tub streaked with rust. The place was perfect. No one would expect him to be there and no one would come looking.
He flicked on the TV and churned through the channels. Nothing he understood, other than the blocked pay-per-view static on Channel 14, which didn’t interest him. He turned the TV off. How was it that he’d been married to a Guatemalan woman for thirteen years and still barely understood the language? She would never teach him. She loathed hearing it; said it made her jumpy. He dropped his head. He knew why, now. Things that hadn’t added up before were starting to fall into place. Alice’s decimated childhood had left crazy-paving cracks throughout her life.
He’d continued to see Dr. Moore on his own. He needed to understand. How could Alice do anything to harm Aggie? It was unthinkable.
“It’s not her,” said Dr. Moore. “Not in the strictest sense of the word.”
Bill sighed and glared at the bookcase. He wanted to punch something. Hard. He hated that he was doing this. Hated that he had to.
“It’s extremely rare to find a documented case of someone who’s been in a dissociative state. It’s hard to diagnose because the patient…sorry, because Alice looks like Alice, sounds like Alice, walks and talks and laughs like Alice. It isn’t until she loses time or can’t remember something or finds herself in a new place with no recollection of getting there that we start to see this pattern.”
“But why? Why now?”
Dr. Moore was patient. She’d gone over it a dozen times, but she never sounded irritated or harried. “Alice had great violence done to her when she was young. The younger the patient, the more extreme the trauma, the more likely it is they’ll suppress those memories in order to go on with their lives. We’re seeing a lot of this with veterans. It’s more common than people know. Not in a ‘shoot ’em up’ way, as you might see in a television show, but in small, distressing, everyday ways that interrupt their lives and make it hard to keep a job, or stay in a relationship, or as in Alice’s case, care for a child who’s the same age as she was when she was abducted.”
“But, why Aggie? Why not the twins? They were eight before she was.”
“That’s right,” said Dr. Moore. “But there were two of them and, from everything you’ve told me, they’re deeply bonded. Right?”
Bill nodded.
“They have their own language system, their own support network, they’re self-sufficient in a way that Alice
never was. They wouldn’t have elicited the same stress response in her.”
Aggie had been punished the same way Alice had been punished: kept in a small space, denied meals, beaten. There was one merciful detail that hadn’t been reenacted. Aggie was spared the worst of Alice’s experiences.
Bill wept for his darling daughter and his beloved wife. Alice had been robbed of her sense of safety, broken, and never put back together again. He hadn’t been able to prevent that. He couldn’t turn back time. But he’d been there for Aggie, been able to step in before any real harm was done.
Sitting in his motel room, waiting for his chance to face Mateo Hernandez head on, Bill decided he’d leave his job and stay at home with the kids. Alice had been working part time while studying for her Masters. The timing was perfect. From the outside, it’d look like he was stepping down as the family’s primary breadwinner just as she stepped up. He would never breathe a word of what had happened to anyone. She deserved his loyalty, even if he didn’t quite trust her enough to leave the kids alone with her.
There was a light tap at the door. Bill checked his watch. Right on time. He opened the door, its paint peeling and the number swinging from a single nail. The sun was low on the horizon, but he still had to squint it was so bright.
“Want to grab something to eat?” It was his translator. Better to think of him that way, rather than “my friend.” It would look more like a professional arrangement if people thought they were casual acquaintances. Would going out to dinner blow that cover? He weighed the pros and cons. He didn’t speak the language. It was going to be a major hassle going anywhere on his own. And, in any case, he’d discussed the need for discretion with his translator, so with any luck they’d both stay in character and no one would be the wiser. Bottom line, they needed to eat. Decision made.
“Give me a second.” He went to his side table and grabbed his watch and wallet. His wedding ring sat there, alone and accusing. He opened his wallet and tucked it into the coin pocket, low and tight where it couldn’t fall out. He was Bill Everlee, single man, while he was down here. No ties. No family. Nothing messy he could track back to the States.
“Where are we going?” He pulled his motel room door closed and shoved the key in his pocket.
“Little hole in the wall. Great food, no atmosphere. You’ll love it.” His translator, who was a naturalized U.S. citizen and whose English was perfect, had drummed up a fake accent just for this trip. Bill worried that he was laying it on a bit thick, but what did he know? Perhaps this was exactly what a Guatemalan translator who’d been living in the States for many years would sound like. That was his cover. Let him worry about it.
The restaurant was barely more than a shack behind a garage, but the line to get in wound around the block. There were no menus and no ordering. You got what the chef made and you liked it. Beans, rice, plantains, a spice he couldn’t identify, and meat that fell off his fork. It was good. He wanted more, but the line was long and he was leery of drawing attention to himself. He washed it down with a warm beer, but turned down a second. He needed to stay sharp, even if he wanted to blur the edges a little.
“5 a.m.?” he said.
“5 a.m.,” said the translator.
They parted ways at the food stand and Bill wound his way back to his motel through the half-lit streets. A ball rolled onto the pavement in front of him. The kids shouted, waving at him to throw it back. Half of him wanted to kick it about, join in, pretend he was back in college with his friends, back when he didn’t know the world could be so cruel. But the kids would be weirded out if a foreigner invited himself to their game. And, in any case, it would draw too much attention. He lobbed the ball back and let their squeals and cries follow him back to his crummy room.
He tossed and turned, finally giving in to the realization that he was never going to sleep. He pulled his socks on before hitting the floor. No point catching a fungal infection or getting bitten by a snake while he was down there. The gun was in the back of his case, behind the lining. He held it in his palm and felt the weight of the life he was going to take. Twenty-two ounces. That was all he needed. Twenty-two ounces of his Glock 17 and it would all be over. He held the magazine in his other hand. He tamped down the urge to load his baby and take her for a spin.
Not long now, Bill. Not long.
He fell asleep with the unloaded Glock on his chest, his fingers tight around the grip.
Dawn came and with it the sickening knowledge that he was going to come face to face with evil on this day. What happened next was up to Mateo Hernandez.
Bill went through his morning routine on automatic pilot. His shower was cold, but it barely registered; his mouth cottony, even after he’d brushed his teeth. He stared at himself in the mirror. His disguise was simple. He was going to go on the hunt as a version of himself. People didn’t know how to remember jaw lines or noses. They generally remembered those details that were most easily manipulated. His hair was plastered to his head. He’d purchased a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. They had no prescription, but no one looking at him would know that. He’d be the foreigner in the tan slacks and beige shirt, with greasy hair and spectacles.
He sat on the edge of his bed, the gun pressing into his ankle so hard he feared it might brand him. He would have waited outside for his friend, but he didn’t want to give anyone time to study him. He reprimanded himself. “He’s not your friend while you’re down here. He’s just a guy you hired to translate for you. Think about him like that. Not as a friend.”
5 a.m. sharp there was that tap at the door.
“Senõr…” His translator hesitated.
Don’t lose your lines now, buddy. I need you to do this for me. I didn’t pay your plane ticket down here so you could flake out.
“I have the car ready.” He was committed to the faux accent. Bill prayed he knew what he was doing.
The streets were free of taxis and crazy drivers and honking horns, the drive to the other side of town a breeze, relatively speaking. There were the early-morning workers, but they paid the two men in a beat up rental car no heed. Cars in Guatemala were driven until they fell apart. They’d lucked out. Their car still had floorboards and full-paneled doors. Not all the cars on the road were in such good shape.
Bill and his buddy stopped for a morning coffee. It was good and strong; the cake sweet and filling. Bill wished, just for a second, that he was a tourist and could savor these delights, but he couldn’t. He had a man’s life in his hands.
The search was exhausting and being silent a kind of torture. The sun beat down on them as the day wore on. Bill checked his watch. He and his translator had been hunting for “the man” for six hours. Bill didn’t want to say his name, even though his translator had to say it over and over again. Why do him the honor of speaking his name when he’d done Alice such dishonor? It was impossible not to hate him. She had thrashing night terrors, daily panic attacks, full-on PTSD. She had hurt Aggie because of that monstrous excuse for a human being.
The trees afforded them some shade, but not enough. Bill’s shirt stuck to his back and his face was beaded with sweat. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. It was an exercise in futility. Two steps and he’d be drenched again.
The picture came out. The luxury of not understanding the language is it frees you up to watch the body. “Do you know this man?” the translator asked. Bill watched their faces, their shoulders, the twist of their torsos. “Yes,” said the eyes, “I know this man. I worked for him.” Their mouths moved, telling a story. Many words. Always the same result. “They don’t know where he lives now.”
“Oh, yes, yes” said the arms, hands open and excited. “I knew him. Long ago. He was good to my family.”
“Yes,” said the nods and smiles and handshakes. “Mateo. We knew him. He did so much.”
Their eyes said, “Yes, yes, yes.” His translator reeled off the same story in English every time. “He came from nothing. He was a poor man. Then he was big d
uring the troubles, but that’s behind us now. He made a fortune and gave it all back to the people. Good man. Don’t know where he lives. Sorry, I cannot help you.”
They paused at a bar. The ceiling was low, the lighting barely there, the floor that rare brand of sticky that comes of too many spills and not enough mops. Bill’s translator ordered them a couple of shots of rum. “To keep us cool,” he said.
“Are they telling the truth?” said Bill. “Can a man change that much?”
His translator shrugged. “Seems that way.”
Bill toyed with his drink. “Are they afraid of him? Covering for him? Giving us the run around?”
“That’s not the sense I’m getting.” He downed his shot, signaled for another, then downed that.
“Do you know this man?” The translator was back at his job. The liquor had made him easy, less pressing, more like someone who has good news rather than bad. That was their cover story. “We’re looking for Mateo Hernandez. His cousin from the north.” A thumb jerked over the shoulder at Bill indicated he was the cousin in question. “He brings money. For sure. He’s crazy, but who are we to get in the way of good fortune, when it comes?”