Alex Adams: White Horse

“Did you find her?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“She was probably eaten by animals. Or worse.”

“Or she escaped.”

“Unlikely. Not with a wound such as that,” he says. “How is my baby?”

“My baby is fine.”

“May I?” He holds out his hand as if to touch me. Suddenly polite.

“Touch us and I’ll cut you.” Cold. Calm. Truthful.

He laughs like I’m kidding.

“I thought for certain your womb was empty, like that stupid girl’s.”

“When are we leaving?”

“Soon,” he says.

“What are you waiting for?”

“My baby.”

I won’t let him takemy baby. I won’t. Never. I’d die first, and that’s what he wants. A plan. I need a plan. I have to get away now before it’s too late and I’m dead and my child is his.

Where are you, Nick? Why won’t you come and save us, you bastard? I came this far for you. Just come the rest of the way for us. Please .

The thought is unfair but I can’t control it; Nick has no way of knowing we’re here. The thing bobs around in my head like a speech balloon in a comic. It’s not supposed to be this way—for any of us. But as people used to say in the old days, when there were enough of us to create and perpetuate slang: It is what it is. And that’s what I have to work with.

He leaves just after dawn. Gone again to get things for a child that isn’t his. This time he cuffs me to the single leg that holds up a tabletop in this tiny room below the deck. He empties my backpack onto the carpet, picking out anything I might use as a weapon. Good-bye, nail clippers, tweezers, and an old dressmaker’s pin that’s been rusting in a side pocket for maybe ten years. He locks the cabin’s door. I know he’s worried Irini isn’t dead, despite his protests and his faux certainty. Nothing is certain anymore—not even tomorrow. I wouldn’t even put money on the sun setting this evening.

I’m on the floor of a boat surrounded by everything I have in this world: old clothes, maps, and Nick’s letter. What can I do?

The carpet peels away easily enough. I don’t pull up much, just enough to figure out how the table’s attached to the floor. Bolts. They’re on as tight as tight can be.

What do I have? A big fat nothing.

Pain cuts across my back. I change positions, lie back, breathe deep. Junior rolls with me. I stare up at the underside of the table. It’s crafted from cheap fiberboard that flakes when I scrape my fingernail over it. There’s a lot number scrawled on there. Or maybe some secret code meant for someone long dead.

When I see it, I wonder how I didn’t see it sooner. Whether it’s pregnancy or malnutrition or exhaustion, my mind isn’t as sharp as it once was. But I do see it now, I do, and hope unfurls her tiny wings. The tabletop is held in place by four shiny silver screws that run through a T-shaped bracket. Hope goes through its rapid life cycle, dies as quickly as it was born. There’s no way the cuffs will fit over the bracket. It and the table leg are one solid piece.

I am doomed. The Swiss will take my child.

Why don’t you come for us, Nick?

Now is all the time I have left. I can’t die without reading Nick’s letter.

I dreamed of the letter last night .

Again?

I nod .

The exact same letter?

Always the same .

Describe it for me, Zoe .

It’s just paper. Dirty. Tattered edges .

How does it make you feel?

Terrified. And curious .

It’s the jar all over again. I have no hammer so my fingers unwrap my fears.

Baby,

I have to go. It’s killing me to have to leave you when I’ve only just found you. It’s more than my family: it’s me. I’m sick. It feels like White Horse. I won’t put you at risk. I love you, you know. I hope you feel the same way and I hope you don’t. That would be easier. I’m going to Greece to find my family—or at least I’ll go in that direction and see where it takes me. Live on. Please.

I love you more than anything in this world.

Bang. Out of nowhere atrain comes and knocks my heart and soul right out of my body, leaving a crater where me used to be. There’s no way—Nick can’t be dead.

No.

No .

I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.

There’s not enough heart left in me to conjure up a tear storm. I’m an empty space on the verge of collapsing in on itself like some dead star. I’m a black hole.

Cold. Calm. A vacuum.

I fold the things the Swiss scattered on the floor and fit them neatly into my backpack. Nesting. When that chore’s done, I sprawl out on the floor to relieve the ache in my back. The cabinets start to look interesting. I can reach them with my feet. If I slip off my boot, I can use my toes to flip the latches that keep the doors in place while sailing rocky seas, so that’s what I do. The lower cabinets are stuffed with cans of baby formula and water in plastic bottles. My gaze snags on something I’ve seen before, although not in months.

Nick can’t be gone. I won’t let him. If I do these things, then he isn’t really gone. I can hold death at bay by doing .

The pain in my back increases as I stretch further, reaching for that holy grail, the mystery of mysteries: a rectangular box made of metal and painted a slick black. The Swiss has carried it with him all this way. And now my curiosity is eating me alive. My toes dip under the handle. White-hot lightning shoots up my thigh. Cramp. I relax the position, wait for the pain to die, then slowly ease the box out of the cabinet until I can reach it with my hand. There’s no lock. Just a silver latch. Strange that he’d be so cavalier about something that clearly holds meaning. It springs apart, almost promiscuous in its ardent action, as though it’s been waiting for this moment and wants me to look inside. The box’s wanting doesn’t save me from the guilt. I don’t like to snoop, but I make an exception for the Swiss. He’d afford me the same courtesy, after all.

The metal box is filled with photographs. Fading Polaroids, yellowing pictures with curling edges depicting people in fashions that might have swung back into favor again someday. The subjects differ, but they’re all blond, Nordic, lean and fit people. The Swiss’s family, I imagine, for who else could they be?

My fingers pick through the leaves of his family tree. It’s the strangest thing: all of these photographs, and he’s not in a single frame.

It made me better. Stronger .

Faster and faster, I flick through the pictures, searching for clues. What did White Horse do to him? How did he change? Then I’m looking at a grainy photograph from some newspaper or another and my face falls slack like somebody sucked out all the bones. I try to fit the pieces together in some way that makes sense in some universe where everything isn’t wrong.

George P. Pope and a cool, sleek blond woman. He’s grinning at the camera, pompous and proud—even in freeze-frame—while she looks like she’d rather be anywhere but there. Oh, she’s smiling, but it hurts. I know that face. I’ve seen it in the last hundred or so photographs. I’ve seen it in a lab. In an elevator. The pained expression is a repeat, too. Her brother wears it. Or maybe he’s a cousin or a young uncle, but I’m betting he’s a brother— otherwise, why carry all these memories across the world?

I want photos. I want my memories in print. I want Nick and our child and the children we haven’t had a chance to make yet, and I want to be able to look back at pictures and laugh at the things we did. But that future is gone, snatched away by that egomaniacal prick in the photograph and that bastard who’s coiled in the grass, a snake waiting to take the only thing I have left of the man I love.