Don't Look Back (23 page)

It would have been good if they could’ve opened a window.

Claire stared off into the middle distance, clicking the backlight of her dive watch on and off, on and off, the bluish luminosity mapping onto her chin and one drawn cheek. Eve poked at the blister on her left heel, wishing she had more of the sap Fortunato had squeezed from that plant.

Lulu broke the long-standing silence. “Check the phone again.”

Claire paused from her watch clicking to power up Jay’s satphone. The toilet flushed in the other room, and Sue staggered out, leaning on the wall, Harry rising to aid her. He eased them both to the floor, and she lay with her head on his thigh.

Claire thumbed the phone back off. “Still nothing,” she said.

“There is no point in checking every five minutes,” Neto said. “Not in this storm. Turning it
on,
turning it
off,
this is just running down the battery.”

“It’d be nice if we could charge the goddamned thing,” Will said.

“I’ll have Fortunato fix the generator in the morning—”

“In the morning,” Harry said, “we’ll be gone.”

“Gonna hopscotch across that bridge?” Claire asked. “Piggyback me and Will? ’Cuz I promise you one thing: I can’t swim across a river that fast. And he sure as hell can’t either right now.”

Eve looked up. “We’ll get out of here together.”

“You
say
that. And maybe you even think it’s true until it comes down to it and the rest of you can … I don’t know, run or swim and get back to safety. And I can’t keep up. It’s a different conversation then. Trust me.”

“We’ll stick together,” Eve said, more firmly.

She looked to the others for confirmation, and Lulu and Fortunato nodded. Lulu’s stare found Neto, and he said, “We will wait here together until the storm passes. The water level will fall, and we will take the Jeep down to the shallow part of the river and drive across. All of us.”

“Between us and that crossing there are
miles
and
miles
of storm-battered road,” Claire said. “What if it’s blocked?”

Lulu said, “Then we’ll unblock it.”

“What if that path by the wrecked bridge is washed out?”

“Then we’ll four-wheel it,” Harry said. “What choice do we have?”

Sue lifted her head. “When will the storm end so we can go?”

Neto looked at Fortunato and waved a hand, palm up, ceding the stage with acid deference. Fortunato cleared his throat and said, “Tonight is worst night of rains. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe one day more.”

“Oh, God.” Sue wearily pulled herself up, then shuffled to the bathroom. “Gotta go again.”

Eve said to Harry, “You make sure—”

“I know, I know.” Harry raised a water bottle. “That she stays hydrated.”

“And don’t share that bottle.” Eve rose, walked to the end of the bed, and checked the ice pack wrapped around Will’s ankle. “Has it been twenty minutes?”

He set his jaw, spoke through the bars of his teeth. “Feels like it.”

Claire checked her watch. “Yes.”

Eve removed the ice, took note of the eggplant hue blooming beneath the skin. “It’s gonna get colorful.”

“I figure by tonight it’ll look like a Monet.” Will tapped the pack of antibiotics against his knuckles, an agitated tic, then flipped it onto the nightstand next to the flashlight. “Sue can have the bed. It’s her bed. My ankle hurts the same whether I’m on the floor or on a mattress.”

They’d been over this. Eve ignored him, pinched his toe. “Feel that?”

“Youch.”

She released. The skin went from pink to white and back to pink. “Nice capillary refill.”

“Thanks. Nice eyes.” He tried a smile, but it grew shaky, and he looked away and took a deep breath. “The pins and needles are back,” he said. “Is that bad?”

“It’s not great.”

“On the continuum between ‘bad’ and ‘not great,’ where is it?”

“Between ‘let’s see’ and ‘worrisome.’ Depends how it progresses.” Eve finished winding the bandage around his ankle and returned to her seat on the floor.

Sue reemerged from the bathroom, and Harry helped her down again so she sat propped beside him. Her stretched-out Friends of the Omaha Public Library shirt was grimy with dirt from Jay’s grave. She covered her eyes and wept for a time. “I’m so exhausted. So, so worn out.”

“Drink water,” Eve said.

“I can’t. I’m sick of water. It’s going right through me anyway.”

“Listen,” Claire said. “We’re past whining here, Sue. Look around. We’ve all got plenty to bitch about. But our job? Right now? Is to not fucking whine.”

Sue drank her water.

Harry’s beard had come in more, a white, tough bristle. He glowered at Claire. “You watch how you talk to her.”

Sue lowered the bottle, wiped her lips. “I’m sorry,” she said. “She’s right. I’m just scared.”

“It’s okay, honey.” Harry stroked his wife’s hand. “We’re
all
scared.”

Sue’s eyes were leaking. “I’m not an exceptional person. I know that. I haven’t … I haven’t done anything special with my life, really. But I want to live as much as if I’d cured cancer or if I was Bill Gates or Condoleezza Rice or … or someone who mattered.” She looked peaked, her face crumpled, marionette lines showing at either side of her mouth. “I just don’t want to die here.”

“No one is dying anywhere,” Neto said.

“Except Jay,” Will said.

Moths beat at the windows.

Will worked his lower lip between his teeth. “You could take everything I worried about before—hell, everything I
cared
about, too—ball it up, and throw it away.” He glared at his foot as if it had betrayed him. “This is awful. All of it. But at least it’s real. At least we’re down to the gut-check basics. Us versus nature. Us versus
him.
”

A frog had somehow made its way up to the outside windowsill. Its throat bulged, and it shot its improbable tongue out, suctioning in a white moth. Eve watched with a blend of repulsion and fascination as the tongue launched again and again, picking off the moths.

It would be midnight at home now. She pictured the glow of the night-light across Nicolas’s sleep-smooth cheek, one arm hugging the blankie he no longer admitted to needing.

“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t care about my mortgage. Or my job. Or how low my checking account is. I care that I’m there when Nicolas wakes up. That I make him breakfast. That’s all. Him and being alive. And, I guess,
remembering
that I’m alive when I am. Because, Christ, we can’t take it for granted.”

Claire gave a feeble smile. “But we
do.
And if we get out of here—”

“When,”
Eve said.

“When we get out of here, we’ll all go around with our new perspective and fresh resolutions, stop and smell the roses. But then it’ll go back to how it was.”

“No,” Eve said.

“A little at a time.”

“No.”

“We’ll convince ourselves that, gosh, our schedule is just wearin’ us down,” Claire said. “But really, we can’t live that full
because
it reminds us of being alive. And that reminds us of being not-alive, too, someday. And that’s hard to look at.” She flicked dirt off her thigh, gave a low snicker. “So we look at home-makeover shows and YouTube videos about sneezing pandas or pigs that befriend fucking kittens. And you can make every promise to yourself here, or to God, but when we’re home a month, a year, you’ll see. You’ll see.” She released her braces at the sides and curled over, bunching her jacket into a pillow. “I’m gonna get some sleep.”

Eve sat with her back to the wall and Claire’s words burning in her gut.

Soon Will’s breathing evened out to match Claire’s, and then Harry drifted off as well, exhaling with a faint whistle. Sue and Lulu went next. Fortunato kept his eyes fastened on the door, and Neto, too, remained up, tugging repetitively at his black curls.

Waiting there in the room filled with the sough of sleeping bodies, Eve felt the most comprehensive aloneness she could have imagined. On the sill the rain-sleek frog gorged itself on moth after moth. They kept coming, drawn to the faint glimmer of the glass, an unending massacre. The horror of the frog matched the horror mounting inside her. This was the way it was now and the way it had always been, even before, even as she’d dutifully steered her Prius into the employee parking spot each morning, even as she’d pushed her supermarket cart past counters stacked with neatly packaged cuts of meat, even as she’d plugged into her iPod and climbed aboard the StairMaster most afternoons, ascending to nothing. She’d known, of course. But she’d let herself forget, and in that Claire was right. All the layers they’d built, roads and regulations and spotless hospital whites, they were there to aid the forgetting. But the jungle laws had always run beneath it all, a molten stream under the bedrock.

A movement at her side startled her. Neto, squatting, blocking the glow of the nearest lantern. He reached out and gripped her forearm, and she realized that here, under these circumstances, he could do or say anything to her. For some reason her next thought was of Rick and how, despite all his shortcomings and blind spots, he’d not once made her feel physically unsafe.

“When you’re a man,” Neto said, his voice restrained so as not to wake the others, “you worry about taking care of your own.” The faint light flickered in his pupils. “Lulu and I, we want to start a family of our own. So as a man you think about protecting what is yours. Money. The business. Your reputation. A different set of responsibilities perhaps than a woman has.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. He scratched at his cheek with a slender finger. “But what you said is right. Theresa Hamilton—she
did
deserve better.” He swallowed again, hard. “I am ashamed of myself.”

Before Eve could react, he padded quietly back to his spot by the door. She wet her lips, which had gone dry. Neto settled into position and did not look over at her again.

Turning away from the frog on the windowsill, she lay on the floor and put her head down for the first time in thirty hours. She fell asleep to the boom of thunder and the
thwack
of that elastic tongue firing again and again, feeding an unslakable appetite.

Chapter 33

They had left their brother behind. Exposed in the mud. To rot like a dog. They had no honor. No respect even for their own.

This heightened Bashir’s resolve. True, it had been unwise to bury the body in the jungle. But it was prudent to remove it a safe distance from his canyon. In the soft, yielding spot in the jungle floor he had scouted earlier for this purpose. It had seemed far enough away from his house, as far as was convenient tonight, given the storm. But he had been spotted, and so the corpse had as well. He should have disposed of it properly, as he was doing now. There could be no evidence left behind. Not a single bone. The conditions had made him careless earlier tonight, but he knew now that there was no room for carelessness.

Now he was at war.

He ran up the mountain as he had in his days in the camps. Every muscle straining to burst through the skin. No shoes so he could feel the earth. The soles of his bare feet conditioned like leather. Rain washed him. He drove upward through the black of night. Yoked to the palm-frond sled behind him. Straps indenting his chest, his shoulders. Dragging deadweight. Behind, the wrapped corpse knocked against tree trunks, splashed through puddles. The taste of bile singed the back of his tongue. Another man would have sunk to his knees. Would have wept from the pain. Given up. But Bashir, his will was inexhaustible. It was a thing of legend. He had once navigated the Toba Kakar range with a shattered femur he’d wrapped with horse reins stolen from a stable. His pain was the decree of Allah, praise and glory be to Him.

He passed the rotting bird-watching tower that embraced the mighty white cedar. A barricade of fallen trees blocked the east fork. But that was fine. He was going west.

At the cemetery he paused and took a knee. Panted. Each breath gave a faint rasp. He was not in the condition he had once been. The extra weight cost him. He would overcome his exhaustion, though, as he overcame all matters physical.

Tombstones tilted from the earth around him. He blended in among them. Another herald of the dead. Another thing of stone, worn but undiminished.

From one loose pocket, he pulled a miswak twig precisely one hand span in length, as was prescribed by the Prophet,
salallahu alayhi wasalam.
He picked at his teeth, then chewed it to sweeten his breath. This morning he had cut it fresh from the arak shrub outside his front door. When he’d first flown to Mexico, he had smuggled arak seeds in the cuffs of his pants. A solitary comfort of home that he wanted to carry into his new life.

He had first arrived in the southernmost state of Chiapas with a list of contacts that al-Zawahiri had given him to memorize. The plan had been a grand one. To build a factory of death. An assembly line from which suicide bombers would be launched north into the heartland of America. These fine young brothers and sisters would be motivated bombers who understood jihad to be an individual duty. They would be trained and expert. A cut above the Waziristan widows the Taliban made sloppy use of. They would be paired up, sent in twos to increase morale and kill radius. They would love death as Americans loved life.

It would be a glorious sight. Hundreds of holy warriors marching into schools, cinemas, shopping malls, turning them into graveyards. Reducing taxpayers to cargo carried out in caskets. These warriors would speak in the only language Americans understood. Messages with no words, written in blood. Messages that scorched the ground beneath their feet. They would stride to Paradise on a path cushioned with burned flesh, irrigated with blood, paved with skulls.

At this image Bashir felt the hand of the Prophet lift him from the fertile cemetery dirt to his feet. He ran with renewed vigor, the weight of the corpse turned to a feather at his back. Allah guided his steps. Bashir basked in His radiance. He felt love in his chest, warming him against the rain, numbing him to the dozen pains of his body. This love was discipline and virtue. It was respect and dedication. It was everything Americans were not. He despised their entitlement. Their arrogance and greed. Their rank hypocrisy. They fattened themselves on oil as they railed against despots they had once installed. They decried the deaths of their own and preached human rights as they tightened their embargos, strangling off food and medical vaccines, killing hundreds of thousands of Muslim children.