The Blue Hour (44 page)

I opened my eyes. I saw the inspector staring at me with concern.

“Would you like some time to think about all this,
madame
?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I want to go home. Where do I sign?”

AT FOUR THAT
morning I sat up in bed. I could not remember a single detail of the nightmare that snapped me into consciousness. All I felt was a dangerous, oppressive presence. Undefined. Entombing me.

But then I opened my eyes and found myself in this heavily over-upholstered hotel room. Hours earlier, upon being checked in here, I was brought upstairs to find the two suitcases that had been dispatched from Essaouira. It was a shock to see all my clothing intermingled with the garments of my vanished husband. Whoever had packed up our room had not separated his from hers. It took me just ten minutes to repack all of my clothes and lay out the items I would need until the flight tomorrow. While handling Paul's items I didn't feel rage or trauma. Just a profound numbness. Assistant Consul Conway—she insisted I call her Alison—had accompanied me to the hotel in the unmarked police car that the inspector had ordered after I signed the official statement and also posed for a photograph with him, showing the world “Case closed.” I had extracted one request from the police—that the photo would not be released to the press until I was en route to the States the next day. I didn't want stares at the airport. I wanted to be home by the time it was revealed that I'd emerged safely.

“You handled that all very well back there,” Alison told me after we reached the hotel and the management offered us tea while the room was readied. “They wanted to wrap this up quickly, without fuss. They're pleased you played ball.”

“What else was I going to do?”

“After an experience like yours . . . well, most people would be already showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. I am very impressed that you didn't break down in front of the inspector and were so contained.”

“I've had several weeks to sort through the worst of it. And I need you to do me a favor.”

I explained about the desert family who took me in. I told her the vague location of the oasis that they were calling home right now. I gave her the remaining forty thousand dirhams—and asked her to perform a minor miracle and get the money to them.

“I can't promise anything, but I will try,” she said.

“I don't want the law involved. They're a bit wary, I sense, about anything to do with the government.”

“Berbers?”

I nodded.

“It will be an interesting challenge finding them,” she said.

“May I ask you a direct question?”

“Of course.”

“Have the police conducted a search of the desert near to where my husband was last seen?”

“Absolutely. And they've found nothing so far.”

By “nothing” I knew she meant: no body, no desiccated corpse, burned by the sun, fed upon by vultures.

“And that tour guide who saw him . . . he clearly identified Paul?”

“I read the report from the Ouarzazate Sûreté. He described a Caucasian male, around two meters tall—that's six-foot-three—thin, with long gray hair and several days' growth of beard. Does that sound like your husband?”

I shut my eyes and again saw his hair slapping the shoulders of his white shirt as he raced in front of me for the bus in Ouarzazate, my entreaties to him to stop only accelerating his pace.

“Yes, that sounds like him.”

“Of course there could have been another Caucasian male of the same age and build and hairstyle who went out hiking in the desert that day. And I did check with my colleagues at all the other Western consulates and embassies here. There was no one of that description missing.”

She chose her next words with care. “You still do maintain that you saw him on the streets of Ouarzazate, later that same day, several hours after he allegedly disappeared?”

“I saw what I saw. But what any one of us sees . . . is that ever the truth? Or is it just what we want to see?”

She considered this for a moment.

“Trust me—and I know this, because I lost my sister five years ago in a car accident in which I was the passenger—it's when you are beyond the initial trauma that it jumps up out of nowhere and grabs you by the throat. Don't be surprised if, now that you are out of danger, it begins to get tricky for a while.”

At four that morning the trickiness had begun. That sense of a dark force in the room with me, about to encircle me and wreak havoc. But I couldn't pinpoint who or what it was. What I found myself doing, after getting up and pacing the room, was throwing on some clothes and heading downstairs with the suitcase containing all my husband's clothes. I went out to the street, passing a homeless man lying near the gutter, his clothes threadbare. I put the suitcase in front of him and handed him five hundred of the thousand dirhams I'd held onto for tips and incidentals. His eyes went wide when he saw the sum of cash I pressed into his palm.

“Why me?” he asked in French.

“Why not you?”

Back in the room I ran a very hot bath and sat in it for the better part of an hour. A long soak, during which I started to cry and couldn't stop until I was so wrung out that, after drying myself off, I forced myself back into bed with the hope that sleep might overtake me again. But I was wired and very wide awake. So I turned on my laptop and saw that Morton had answered the dispatch I'd sent to him after checking into the hotel, informing him that I was alive and would definitely be landing tomorrow (now today) in Buffalo at 8:10 p.m. I also mentioned that Paul was missing, presumed dead. Morton's reply was all business:

Will be at the airport. Very glad you are out of harm. Re: Paul. You should know that, under NY state law, a missing person cannot be declared dead for seven years. But there are some legal things we can do to protect you. More when we meet. Best—Morton. PS—I can finally sleep now, knowing you are okay.

Trust Morton to practice ultrapragmatism at a difficult time.

The rest of the day passed in a strange blur. An unmarked police car picked me up at the hotel, as arranged, at 9:30. At the airport I was checked in and brought through a special security line by the two officers charged with getting me on the plane. A representative of the airline met us at this checkpoint and escorted us to a private lounge. The cops stayed with me until the flight was called, bringing me to the gate and ensuring that I got on the plane. They wanted to make sure that I was leaving the country.

Eight hours later I was in front of an immigration officer at Kennedy Airport in New York. I had expected to be bombarded with questions—but it seemed that my “gone missing” status hadn't been filed against my name on the Homeland Security website (or maybe the US Consulate in Casablanca had already arranged for it to be pulled). The officer scanned my passport and asked me how long I had been out of the country. I said six, seven weeks.

“Were you only in Morocco?” he asked.

“That's right, just Morocco.”

“Were you working?” he asked.

“Just traveling,” I said.

“That must have been quite an adventure.”

“Indeed it was.”

Three hours later I landed in Buffalo. Morton was there to greet me. He gave me a paternal hug and told me I looked a lot better than he expected to find me.

Morton being Morton, he didn't push for details. On the way to my house he told me that the
Buffalo Sun Times
had reprinted international press service reports about my being found alive and well in Morocco. He showed me the clipping, which featured that official photograph of me shaking the hand of Inspector al-Badisi in Casablanca and looking shell-shocked. Morton said that there had been several calls at my office for interviews from former colleagues on the
Sun Times
.

“I took the liberty of telling them you wanted to be left alone,” he said.

“That was the right call,” I said.

That first night I was back I found I couldn't cope with the sight of all the detritus of my life with Paul spread around our dusty, shadowy house. Sleep evaded me. The next morning I called the manager of a downtown hotel whose accounts I helped straighten out. I asked him if he could give me a rate on one of his apartment suites for a few weeks. He came back thirty minutes later with a very reasonable price. I moved in that afternoon. I then contacted my doctor. She told me to get in to see her immediately. Dr. Hart had been my physician for a decade. A smart, no-nonsense woman in her late fifties, direct, canny, but also sympathetic. I could see her take in my face when I walked into her office. I asked if she had followed my disappearance in the press.

“Of course,” she said, “not that there was much in the way of detail, except that you and your husband had gone missing. And then I saw the report yesterday in the paper that you'd been found.”

I told Dr. Hart about the insomnia and the sense of oppressive darkness that had taken hold of me the last few nights. I came clean with her about Paul's betrayal. I also told her about the abduction and rape. But I stopped short of revealing what I had done in response to this attack. That was a secret that I knew I couldn't share with anybody. Not just because the Moroccan authorities had conveniently excised that denouement from the narrative, but also because a secret shared (even with the most trustworthy of friends or professionals) is no longer a secret. Even Alison Conway—who clearly knew the truth of the matter—gave me some advice, after checking me into the hotel.

“Speaking off the record . . . if I were you, I would be very selective about what you reveal about things that happened in the desert. The Moroccans have made it easy for you. They have provided an official version of events on which you have signed off. Silence on everything else might be a wise strategy.”

I agreed with her reasoning. But by the time I saw Dr. Hart—only seventy-two hours after this conversation—I still had ongoing flashbacks of the rape and of reaching for the jerry can. In relentless slow motion, I relived the moment I grabbed the lighter from his accomplice's hand and tossed it on his gasoline-drenched body. And how—I'll admit this now—a huge sense of furious vindication came over me as I watched him ignite and writhe and scream in agony.

Ben Hassan might be a bloated moral black hole of a man—but he did touch a very exposed nerve when he pointed out that, like him, I had killed to stay alive.

The thought was hardly comforting. It was stalking me day and night. Especially the night. In fact, all night.

Over the next week I endured an entire battery of tests. I got lucky on several fronts. No parasites parading through my system. No sexually transmitted diseases. The gynecological exam showed nearly full recovery from internal trauma. I did not have a burst eardrum but had suffered a sort of concussion to the ear canal, which would subside in a few more weeks. A CAT scan did not point up damage to my left cheekbone. Nor did I have a dreaded “zygomatic fracture” of the eye socket (as the specialist called it), even though I still had a dark ring beneath my left eye. The dermatologist whom I saw next said that, though the facial scarring would largely heal, there might be some subtle but potentially discernible reminders of the damage done to my legs.

When my friend Ruth flew up to Buffalo the weekend after I returned, I put her up on the sofa bed in the living room of my hotel suite. I told her just about everything that had happened in Morocco, leaving out that one crucial violent detail. She listened wide-eyed and horrified, amazed by my fortuitous rescue and survival. When I mentioned that sleep was now an issue, she said, “You're back in the land of pharmapsychology. And you need to sleep. So ask your doctor to prescribe some pills. If I may say so, you should also consider talking to somebody professionally who can help you—”

“What? Find a degree of
acceptance
about what happened?
Closure?
I know that talking to a shrink can more than help. It's just—”

I broke off, not wanting to complete the sentence. Because what I would have said was, I am not going to sit in a therapist's office and somehow fail to mention that I burned my rapist alive and, in the moments before his accomplice kicked me in the head, I felt a frightening sense of avenging triumph. Still, I did accept Dr. Hart's offer of an antidepressant that also served as a sleep aid. She told me it might take a week for its efficacy to be felt. Actually it took ten days, during which that ongoing sense of foreboding stalked me. There were the flashbulblike memories that popped into my consciousness without warning, and left me seriously skewed.

But then sleep finally took hold.

I threw myself into work. Twelve- and thirteen-hour days. A rigor and a determination to function and cope and keep moving forward that saw me land a big corporate account—a chain of upstate New York hardware stores—the month after my return. After six weeks at the hotel, I moved back home. But it took another ten days before I finally walked into Paul's studio. On the drafting table where he worked was the package that I had sent back to my office from Casablanca. Morton had brought it with him to the airport on the night I arrived back, and I had tossed it into the studio when I got home. Now, all these weeks later, I finally opened it, staring down at the notebook he'd left at Chez Fouad, forcing myself to open it and turn the pages, looking at his accomplished, intricate take on Essaouira and
la vie marocaine
. Seeing them all again slammed home the loss, the betrayal, the guilt, the horror of his disappearance, the horror of what was visited on me there, the fact that I was alone in our house, ruing so much, trying to keep the ongoing trepidation and rage and sadness at bay, and now, I broke down and cried for a good half an hour, the accumulated grief rushing forth.