James Siegel - Detour

In the end she said what mothers say. What they’re allowed to say. Even to revolutionary daughters who’ve gone to the hills.

You’ll be killed, Claudia. They’ll call me to pick up your body. Please. Come back. Please, I’m begging you.

But Claudia dismissed her pleas—the way, as a little girl, she had scoffed at wearing rubber boots in the rain.

Then I can’t feel the puddles, Mama.

Claudia, above all, was a girl who wanted to feel the puddles.

Her father was devastated. He threatened to go to the policía, to haul her back home. You should’ve known, he accused Galina, you should’ve known what she was up to. Galina knew he was speaking out of frustration and wounded love; he knew that going to the policía was dangerous, and going after Claudia useless, since he wouldn’t begin to know where to look.

So they sat in their private cocoon of pain. Waiting for a spring that might or might not come.

Occasionally, friends would pass on messages. It’s better if she doesn’t call you, a certain young man explained, a fellow traveler from the university who sported a four-inch goatee and wore a black beret in the fashion of Che. She’s all right, he told them. She’s committed.

Galina was committed too. To seeing her daughter’s face again. She needed to touch her; when Claudia was a child, she’d settle like a nesting bird in the billows of her dress. I’m a kangaroo, Galina would whisper, and you’re in my pocket.

Now her pocket was empty.

One day they received another message from the young man.

Be at such and such a bar at eight tonight.

When Galina asked why, he said just be there.

She didn’t ask again.

They dressed as if going to church. Wasn’t this, after all, what they’d been praying for? They arrived hours early. The bar was uncomfortably dark and seedy, patronized mostly by prostitutes and transvestites.

They waited an hour, two hours, three. In truth, Galina would’ve waited days.

Then she felt a tap on her shoulder, no, more than a tap, a warm hand alighting on her shoulder like a butterfly. She knew that touch. Mothers do. It had her blood coursing through it.

How did Claudia look? Ragged, thin, sick?

If that had been the case, maybe they would’ve been able to talk her back—the way you talk someone down off a ledge. Maybe they could’ve simply lifted her off her feet and carried her back home.

Claudia didn’t look ragged. Or thin. Certainly not sick.

She looked happy.

What’s your greatest wish for your children?

The wish you end each nightly prayer with?

The one you whisper to yourself when they tell you to blow out the candles for another birthday you’d rather not be celebrating?

I wish, you murmur, for my child to be happy.

Only that.

Claudia looked radiantly, unmistakably happy.

Was beaming too strong a word?

If she’d been in the throes of first love before, now she was clearly in the midst of a full-fledged affair. One look at her, and Galina knew they’d be leaving without her.

Claudia kissed Galina, then her father.

The three of them held hands, just like when Claudia was four and she’d coerce them into another game of dog and cat. Claudia was always the cat. And the cat was always captured.

Galina asked her how she was.

But she already knew the answer.

“Good, Mama,” Claudia said.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Galina asked, then began doing what she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. Crying, crumbling, falling to pieces.

“Shhh . . . ,” Claudia whispered, daughter-suddenly-turned-mother. “Stop, Mama. I’m fine. I’m wonderful. I couldn’t tell you. You know that.”

No. All Galina knew was that Claudia was her heart. And that from now on life would consist of hurried meetings in transvestite bars and furtive messages from friends.

Claudia told them little of anything specific. Where she was. Whom she was with. She mostly asked about home. How was her cat, Tulo? And her friends, Tani and Celine?

For their entire time together, Galina refused to let go of her hand. She must’ve thought, in some primitive part of her brain, that if she never let go, Claudia would be forced to stay with them. That as long as they were touching, they couldn’t be apart.

She was wrong, of course. Hours flew by, the opposite of all those days waiting to hear from her when she’d felt stuck in time.

Claudia announced she had to leave.

Galina had one last, enormous plea left in her. She’d been practicing it as Claudia asked about home, about relatives and schoolmates, as Galina sat and held her hand like a lifeline.

“I want you to listen to me, Claudia. To sit and hear everything I have to say. Yes?”

Claudia nodded.

“I understand how you feel,” she began.

She did understand. It didn’t matter.

“You think I’m too old. That I can’t possibly feel what you feel. But I do. There was a time, when I was very young, that I was just like you. But what I know, I know. FARC, the USDF—it doesn’t matter. Both sides are guilty. Both sides are blameless. In the end they are each other. Just as innocent. Just as murderous. And everyone dies. Everyone. I’m asking you as your one and only mother in the world. Please. Don’t go back to them.”

She might’ve been speaking Chinese.

Or not speaking at all.

Claudia couldn’t hear her, and even if she could, she was incapable of understanding a word.

She patted Galina’s hand, smiled, the way you do to those already claimed by senility. She stood up, embraced her father while Galina remained frozen to her chair. Then Claudia reached down, put her head in the hollow of her neck.

“I love you, Mama,” she said.

That’s all.

On the way home, they sat in complete, numbing silence. They’d dressed as if going to church, but they returned from a funeral.

There were just a few messages from her after that.

From time to time the boy from the university called with news. Every time Galina opened the paper, she held her breath . . .

THE DOOR CREAKED OPEN.

Galina stopped talking.

Tomás—one of the guards—nodded at her, motioned for her to get up.

Joelle was out of danger now. Joanna would have to give her back, return to her room.

“What happened to her?” Joanna asked Galina, transferring Joelle to her, suddenly desperate to know the ending. “You didn’t finish the story.”

Galina simply shook her head, pressed Joelle to her chest. Then she headed to the door.

TWENTY-SIX

He didn’t know he was alive and kicking until he realized that’s what he was doing. Kicking. Moving his legs back and forth in an effort to put out the fire that was crawling up his skin.

He must’ve passed out from the smoke. He remembered the wall of flame bearing down on them like an act of God. Maybe it wasn’t an act of God—because he seemed to remember he’d prayed to God just before everything went black and here he was alive.

So maybe he and God had made up. Maybe God said enough with numbers and equations and risk ratios and let’s try blind faith for a change, okay?

He wasn’t actually on fire. Not literally. His pants, what was left of them, were smoking. And the skin poking out from their tattered remnants appeared baby pink—the telltale sign of first-degree burn.

Somehow they’d made it past the line of kerosene.

Everything to his left was a charred, smoking black. The wind had taken the fire in a single direction. Meaning Miles was right. They’d headed toward the fire and won.