James Siegel - Detour

She was suddenly aware that the car had stopped moving. No rushing air. No stomach-turning bumps in the road. The car radio was off.

She heard a rooster crowing loud and clear.

The car trunk opened. A gray light filtered in through the wool fibers. She was pulled out by her legs. Her chin banged against the lip of the trunk. She could smell her own blood.

She was stood up. The man who did so took the opportunity to run his hands up over her breasts. Bueno, he said in a singsong way, and laughed.

A sudden chill gripped her. Of all the various ends she’d contemplated, of all the numerous indignities and violations she’d envisioned in her darker moments, she hadn’t thought about this one.

But why not?

The man stopped pawing her, began leading her somewhere. She could make out vague shapes through the wool. She was being taken into a house.

In through a door—a big step up which no one warned her about, causing her to trip and smack her knee against solid stone. She was yanked back up onto her feet again and pulled down what must’ve been a hallway. She could barely sense two walls on either side of her.

It smelled of farm, she thought.

Sheep, cows, chickens. Unvarnished wood beams. Baking bread.

Suddenly, they stopped and the ski mask was pulled off her head.

She was in a small room—not unlike the room she’d just left. The windows were boarded up just like that one. There was a dirty mattress on the floor—an identical twin to the one she’d just spent eight nights sleeping on. But there was a major difference.

People.

Two of them. Other women.

When the guards left, they came up and touched her as if they weren’t quite sure she was real.

“Hola,” one of them said—a woman of about forty or forty-five.

“I’m American,” Joanna said. “Do you speak English?”

“Not really. But then, neither do you,” said the other woman. And she smiled.

THEIR NAMES WERE MARUJA AND BEATRIZ.

Maruja was a journalist—or had been one, till she’d been pulled out of her car just across the busy Plaza de Bolívar. Beatriz was a government official who’d recommended stronger action against the guerrillas. She’d paid for this by being stolen off the street in broad daylight and having to witness her bodyguard being shot dead before her eyes.

A morose-looking man the guards called el doctor appeared to be in charge. He appeared just minutes after Joanna was placed in the room. He told them they weren’t allowed to speak to each other. No talking. He wagged his finger at them, like an exasperated mother superior at a convent school for girls.

The other guards were more lenient, Maruja said. Or at least more distracted. At night they mostly listened to soccer matches and soap operas on a small TV in the hall and didn’t pay much attention to them.

Joanna had lost Paul, then Joelle. Now she was surrounded by people going through the same thing she was. They had husbands and children and parents. They understood.

The three of them whispered and signed. Maruja and Beatriz related their respective stories. They passed pictures of their children and spouses. Of their houses too, one in the fashionable La Calera section of Bogotá, the other nestled in the hills above the city.

When they asked Joanna if she had children, she told them yes. One. No picture, though, just the one she kept in her head. She told them what had happened to her and Paul. Maruja and Beatriz sighed, shook their heads in empathy.

The three of them slept on the one mattress, head to feet to head. Maruja, an unreformed smoker back in the real world, snored; Beatriz elbowed her in the ribs to make her stop. Apparently, sisterly affection only went so far.

They had to be in the mountains, Joanna thought. It grew icy cold that night—they breathed vapor and huddled against each other’s bodies for warmth. In the morning Joanna saw tiny droplets of frost on the wooden slats covering the windows.

By the second day it felt a little like an endless pajama party. They braided each other’s hair. One of the guards had procured Maruja a bottle of cheap nail polish—Purple Passion. They took turns doing each other’s nails, pedicures too.

The man who’d felt Joanna’s breasts kept his distance. Joanna’s fear of rape faded, pushed aside by other fears. Death, of course. And another gnawing fear which was a kind of death too: Would she ever get out of there?

Maruja and Beatriz had the gray pallor of the confined and dying. Joanna wondered how long it would be before her own skin turned the same shade.

Occasionally, the guards let them watch TV with them, Beatriz confided. Maruja and Beatriz looked forward to the news shows. Sometimes their husbands would be on, offering messages of hope.

We are negotiating. We are in discussions. Stay brave.

Joanna knew there’d be no such comfort for her. Paul had left and vanished into the ether, as quickly and completely as her former life.

Her third morning, there was a knock at the door. That itself was unusual, since the guards tended to simply barge in on a whim. The three of them might be sleeping, whispering, even partially undressed and sponging themselves from a tepid bucket of water; a whore’s bath —wasn’t that the expression?

This morning they were sitting in the center of the room fully clothed, passing the time constructing lists of their favorite cities. Beatriz had picked Rome, Rio, and Las Vegas. Maruja, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, and Acapulco. It was Joanna’s turn. All she could come up with was New York. The city she lived in, the one she was aching to return to.

The door opened and Galina walked in.

It was a measure of Joanna’s desperation that the sight of her kidnapper gave her a rush of—what? Pleasure? Relief? Simple familiarity?

Maybe it was because Galina appeared different than the last time Joanna had seen her, when she’d solemnly informed her about Paul’s failure to come through. She seemed more like the other Galina now—the one you wouldn’t mind hanging out with on a sunny bench in the park.

She motioned for Joanna to come closer—she had something to tell her.

“We’ve heard from your husband,” she whispered, and squeezed Joanna’s hand. “It’s going to be all right.”

And Joanna’s heart, spirit—whatever that thing is that allows people to occasionally walk on air—surged. Not just because of the news. No.

Galina hadn’t come to the mountains alone. One of the guards—a shy boy who looked all of thirteen—entered behind her.

He was holding Joelle.

TWENTY-THREE

They’d traveled over the Williamsburg Bridge, then through the Lincoln Tunnel, headed to a place somewhere outside Jersey City. It was five o’clock. They were on a mostly empty road flanked by fields of swaying cattails. High as an elephant’s eye. The lyrics were from Joanna’s favorite musical, Oklahoma! They’d attended the revival on their last anniversary, Paul told Miles.

The word last stuck in his throat.

It was three days and eighteen hours since he’d left his wife and child.

The swamp was throbbing with the steady hum of insects. Still, you could hear the Major League scores clear enough. Miles was listening with rapt attention.

“Baseball,” Miles said, “is the hardest sport to handicap. Brutal.”

“You mean bet on?”

“Yeah, bet on. You’ve got to give runs, two, three, depending on the pitcher. The worst team in the world wins sixty times a year. Go figure. It’s a sucker’s bet.”

“You bet on sports?”

“Well, sure. Penny-ante. You know, twenty, thirty dollars—just to keep things interesting. It’s my little rebellion against prescribed living. Orthodoxy has little rules for everything. It can drive you nuts.”