Love Her Madly Page 15

  Down to my wet bikini bottom, I moved more carefully. The horror of my situation was threatening to shut me down completely. The dark jungle was more terrifying than any nightmare I’d ever suffered. I knew every step in the darkness risked disturbing deadly, poisonous creatures, and a million other torments. Branches carved deep gashes into me, and I sensed that my skin was crawling with insects. The jungle pulsed with the clamor of wholly unwelcoming species. The noise would periodically quiet, only to rise again in a deafening roar of clattering wings and feverishly twitching membranes. I cowered and covered my ears, waiting for it to pass, trying to think of anything but where I was, trying not to feel my skin where it tickled from god knows what touch, or the burn of the ants that were savaging my feet, or otherwise register any sensory information about my increasing collection of wounds.

  In the jungle, I forgot about Cyn and I forgot about the men. If one had suddenly popped out in front of me, I think I would have welcomed the distraction. My fear receptors were saturated beyond capacity. On the brink of losing it, I forced myself to take step after step, graced by the sudden fantasy that I was moving through snow; a photonegative snow world, where black was white and hot was cold. I forced myself to believe in the snow. I told myself that the snow was deep, which was why walking was so difficult, but it was pure and white and there was nothing in it that could harm me. The pain didn’t go away, but after a while, pain is just the same message over and over. I could ignore it. My imagination, on the other hand, could undo me. Call it a feat of concentration or a holy hallucination, but for a few crucial moments, there was only me and deep, soft snow.

  My polar survival fantasy kept me lifting left after right, and I eventually arrived at the base of a small plateau. I grabbed roots and vines and climbed. As I pulled myself up to the top, the collected jungle chorus was rising into another frenzy of deafening vibration. I fell into a squat and covered my ears, clenching my eyes shut. I reminded myself that I was on a small iceberg, and that if I snowshoed far enough, I would reach the water and I could take an icy plunge, erasing everything. When I eased my hands off my ears, the jungle was quieter. I opened my eyes and saw that I was kneeling on the edge of what might have been a trail. I crawled onto it and brushed myself off frantically, head to toe, in a fitful spasm. I still felt things crawling on me, but not being as closely surrounded by a crush of hostile life was a monumental improvement.

  I edged along the trail, moving quickly but still freezing at every sound like a hunted doe. The trail seemed to twist on forever. I startled at shadows and at the ground, which now that I could see it illuminated by patches of moonlight, appeared to be slithering. The path grew sandier, and I prayed that I wouldn’t find myself back at the sunset cove. Up ahead, moonlight poured onto the path, I rushed toward it. Nothing can compare to how beautiful the shimmering water looked to my eyes at that moment. I advanced onto the beach and saw a depression in the sand where a boat had recently rested. Jorge had left us. Maybe they all had left us.

  I stared across at the twinkling lights on the mainland. The jungle swayed ominously behind me. The island was so small. If the men were looking for me, they would find me on the beach. It was only a matter of time.

  I wanted very badly to scream, but there were many reasons not to. Instead, I tried to access my brain—at that point, a very dicey proposition. I was fairly sure that tides changed every twelve hours, and it’d been sunset when we’d crossed. I didn’t have the foggiest idea what time it was. The sky was inky black in all directions, no hint of sunrise. I couldn’t fathom idly waiting for the tides to change while Cyn needed my help, and I couldn’t for a second stomach the idea of hiding in the jungle, waiting to see if the men would hunt me down.

  That left only one option.

  I ripped open the Velcro on my sandals and kicked them off. It had taken about twenty minutes to walk across the channel. It couldn’t be that far, even if I would be coming from a slightly different point on the island. I’d also have the waves to help carry me in toward the end.

  I began to do a few basic stretches, trying not to think about rip currents, or jellyfish, or sharks. At the thought of the latter, I felt my resolve weaken. I had greedily consumed countless shark documentaries in my short life, never thinking that they would come back to haunt me at my darkest hour. I took a deep breath and tied my hair into a fat knot behind my neck as I waded out into the water, the salt igniting my lacerations.

  Then I began to swim.

  At the start of my crossing, the wind had stilled and the ocean was calm. I employed my basic crawl, a stroke as second nature to me as walking. I would count off fifty strokes and stop to check my orientation. There was a bright orange light on the shore that I made my beacon. Any thoughts that rushed to my head of sharks, or disappearing brothers, or missing friends were quashed. My job was only to count strokes and keep breathing; habit took care of the rest.

  After my sixth cycle of fifty, I began to worry. The land wasn’t getting any closer and the wind had picked up. Waves began to slap my face when I tried to breathe. Each time, I’d have to stop and tread water for a few moments, giving my imagination the opportunity to conjure up some choice Jaws scenarios. Dorsal fins phantomed in and out of my peripheral vision, scaring me back into motion. Eight more sets of fifty and I caught my second wind, but I still didn’t seem any closer to shore. The thought that I might be trapped in a current that could whip me around the island and out into the Pacific, never to be seen again, shot me full of fresh terror. Using the extra burst of adrenaline that came when I pictured my skeleton picked bare by barracudas, I kicked into a sprint. I stopped counting after one hundred strokes. Waves were slapping me, my hair was wrapped around my neck, and to my horror, one of my feet began to tingle with an incipient cramp. I rolled onto my back and floated, trying to relax and rest my foot. Floating, I saw the moon and the shadowy eye sockets of the goddamn man in it, very small and very far away. I bobbed on the choppy waves, newly conscious of my exhaustion. I could hardly feel my shoulders, and my upper arms felt like logs. As I flipped over to continue the swim, I noticed that one corner of the sky had begun to blush ever so slightly. No night is ever truly endless.

  Either the muscle in my foot relaxed or I got used to the pain. I kept pushing forward, and before long, land was not looking so impossibly distant. My knee hit a sandbar, and I collapsed there, gasping for my breath. The shore directly before me was undeveloped, rocky headland backed by jungle. My orange light was far off to the right, illuminating a stretch of empty beach. Further along, almost beyond the reach of the light, I could make out the faint outline of boat hulls on the sand. Hopefully, that meant people were sleeping not far away. I got to my feet on the sandbar. The water was shallow enough that it was easier to wade along it than swim, and I dragged my exhausted body toward the light. As if in answer to my wishes, I saw a cluster of electric lanterns appear on the beach: fishermen, heading out for the morning catch.

  I began shouting for help as I sloshed toward them along the sandbar. The fishermen swiveled in confusion, not understanding where the sound was coming from. When they finally spotted me beyond the surf, they began to call out. I was so wrecked and so full of relief, that I can’t be certain what I was shouting. I’m sure it included the words “police,” “boat,” and “help.”

  A few fishermen rushed into the water, and I flung myself off the sandbar and began swimming for the shore. Two men helped carry me onto the sand.

  In my confused state, what I wanted was for them to take me right back over to the island in their boat, and to help me find Cyn. The fishermen gathered around me on the sand as I raved and pointed. Examining their shadow-lined faces in the darkness, I wasn’t sure if they understood anything at all. I kept repeating “¿Comprenden?” over and over until one of them lifted me and carried me up to a beach shack where there was an electric light and a phone.

  They took a look at me in the ligh
t, with my cuts and bruises and undoubtedly wild look. I saw one of them cross himself. Someone forced a bottle of water to my lips and told me to be calm. I emptied the bottle and in an instant, felt a million times stronger. I sat up from the couch where they’d placed me and began re-pleading my case. As they stared at me in wonder, I explained that my friend had been taken by strange men, dangerous men, and that it was up to me to save her. I pointed at the phone and told them to call the police.

  With all of that out, I closed my mouth and lay back in exhaustion, waiting for my wishes to be put into action. Instead, to my horror, everyone in the room began to argue at once. No one made so much as a move toward the phone. Instead of waiting for a consensus to be reached, I resolved to make the call myself. I stood up and headed for the phone. The room went spinny, and streaks of red and black raced across my vision. Lost in their debate, my rescuers didn’t notice I had moved. I saw my finger graze the handset of the wall phone, then everything went dark.

  When I came to, it was daybreak and the rain was pouring down. I was in the back of a covered pickup truck. A young woman was sitting on a bench near my head. Two men and another woman with a baby also gradually came into focus. They weren’t speaking, and they looked tense. The car hit a bump and I felt a wave of nausea. I closed my eyes.

  Cyn was there in the cab with me. I hadn’t turned my head, and I hadn’t seen her, but I knew she was lying there beside me. I could smell her. If I wiggled my fingers, I was certain to touch her arm, but I was too tired. They must have rescued her, or maybe she swam away, too. I wanted to tell her that I couldn’t wait to hear what her story was, that I was so glad she was safe. I could tell her later. I closed my eyes and relaxed into unconsciousness.

  The sound of the rotating fan was the ocean, and the pages of my chart fluttering in its wake, palm leaves, swaying in the breeze. When I opened my eyes, or I guess I should say, my eye, since one was so badly scratched they had taped it closed, I was amazed to discover myself not beachside, but in a hospital bed. There was someone in the room, a woman.

  “Where am I?” I asked in English. Before I could try again in Spanish, the nurse rushed out of the room. She returned with a handsome doctor in his midthirties. He addressed me in English.

  “Hello, I’m Dr. Bayer. You’re in a hospital. Do you remember your name?”

  “American?” I rasped. My lips, when I explored them with my tongue, were broken and cracked, and the parts that were intact felt like plastic. The nurse offered me a sweet, fruity fluid through a straw.

  “I’m American, yes. You’re in a hospital in San Jose. Do you remember your name?”

  “Gloria Roebuck. My friend, where is she?”

  He looked at the nurse, who shot him a “no idea” look.

  “We’ll check on that,” he said.

  “We came together.” I insisted. “Cynthia Williams. A blond girl. My age.”

  Dr. Bayer stared at me with concern, but no understanding manifested on his face. The painful thought that I had imagined her in the truck cab with me snaked across my mind. Had she really not been rescued?

  “If she’s not here, you have to find her. She was with me, on the island. Some men took her. She’s out there all alone.”

  Based on how my luck was going, I expected the doctor to ignore me or sedate me, but instead, he came closer, interested. “Your friend is also an American?”

  This small display of understanding almost made me break down, but I was finally getting somewhere.

  “Yes. We’re students. We went to that island, the haunted one near Playa Tortuga, with some local guys, Hector and Marco.” I paused, since the doctor had produced a pad and began taking notes. “There were noises, like gunshots, and they spooked our friends, and it was just the two of us alone, and then these men came, and my friend . . . I tried to make her come with me, but she wouldn’t. The men, they took her.”

  The memory of her expression at the moment when she told me to go appeared from within my memory, as perfect as a Polaroid. Everything that had hurt me that night, and all that I’d suffered was dwarfed by the helpless confusion I suddenly felt. It occurred to me that there was a chance I would never get to ask her why.

  The thought broke me.

  I lost it.

  I was sedated.

  When I awoke, I was confronted with a plate of chicken, rice, and beans, and the first of many cops.

  You know the rest.

  Part II

  What Happened After

  Seven Years Later

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Glo

  The coffee mug slipped from my wet hand as I rinsed it, shattering a dish resting beneath it in the sink with a jarring crash. I reached instinctively for the broken plate, as if my quick intervention might somehow undo the damage. My sudsy fingers fumbled across the razor-sharp edge of cornflower-blue porcelain, and I jerked my hand back with a yelp. I looked down and watched a stream of crimson rush across my palm. There was a crescent-shaped gash across my finger just above my wedding band, long but shallow. I thrust the digit under the faucet and cringed as a deeper pain ran up my arm.

  “Everything okay?” Raj’s voice rolled in sleepily from the living room.

  “There’s been a casualty. A bread plate. I think we’re down to five.” Not too bad, I thought, wincing as I applied pressure with a paper towel. Only three dishes of that size lost in the three years we’d been married. As long as we didn’t plan to throw any dinner parties, we’d be good for another two years at least.

  “You’re bleeding,” he observed, looking up from his phone as I crossed through the room. He rose, preceding me on my way to the bathroom.

  “Let Dr. Raj get you a Band-Aid.”

  The bathroom was still steamy from my shower. He set aside the tampons that I had forgotten to stash underneath the counter, and in their place, snapped open the first aid kit. In a few days, I would need to go to the pharmacy for another month of birth control, a task I was reluctant to do. The previous night, as my pelvic muscles twisted like taffy, we discussed it again. Or I discussed it, and Raj gazed out the window with a look of studious consideration, humoring me. I knew his position. There was no reason to rush into starting a family. He’d only just gotten his theater company on its feet, and while he brought in a respectable amount of money through his jobs as an actor and voice-over artist, playing a know-it-all beaver on a show aimed toward preliterate children, my salary was by far the more regular. Why not wait until we established ourselves a little more comfortably?

  Because the timing was as good as it would ever be. Before we got hitched, we wisely had the whole “kids or no kids” talk and had decisively pointed our compass toward the horizon that read “Kids: at least one, not too many.” Now we were three years married, seven years as a couple, and Raj’s paternal appetite had apparently dissolved into the ether. I sensed that if I was foolish enough to wait for him to feel really, really ready, it would be long after my eggs had become pocked and dusty, tucked away in the dark like a forgotten string of freshwater pearls.

  He excised a Band-Aid from its wrapper and pressed it against the cut. I flinched.

  “Sorry. Okay?”

  I nodded. He carefully wrapped the Band-Aid around my finger, making it snug, but not so tight that it would begin to purple and ache. Then he kissed it. All of this care, this kindness, came so naturally to him. It was as if every moment he was flaunting his ideal qualities as a father, perpetually acing auditions for a job he claimed not to want yet.

  “You have blood on your blouse. Maybe that’s good for court? Sends a strong message?”

  “No court today. Just meetings.” I removed my blouse and pulled out the stain remover, dabbing it on the mark. I looked up to see my husband giving me wolf eyes.

  “Morning meetings?” he asked.

  “Did you perhaps miss the huge box of tampons on the co
unter?” I watched the mischievous glow fade from his features at the reference to my meddlesome uterus. He balled up the bandage’s wrapper and kissed me behind the ear.

  “Drats.”

  “It’s not a permanent condition,” I reminded him, standing up a little straighter. His eyes lingered on my body as he slipped out the door. I did love the way he looked at me. He was around stunningly beautiful actresses on a daily basis, but not once did I ever see him give any of them what I thought of as my look. There was only one other person who had ever made his eyes shine like that, and she was long gone.

  My eyes slipped down to the small makeup case where I kept my only souvenir of Cyn, her silver necklace with the star shaped charm. She’d been wearing it the morning we met at orientation, and I’d coveted it even then. Now that it was mine, I never wore it, but sometimes, in late January when my thoughts were inevitably pulled back to that cove, I would take it out and look at it. Sometimes I would shed a tear or two for the girl who had vanished from the planet without a trace.

  The Costa Rican police didn’t find much to help clear up the mystery. While I had been lying dead to the world in my hospital bed, it had stormed for hours, washing away all the footprints and scattering anything else that might have passed as evidence. The most monumental discovery was a handful of fresh bullet casings and a nearly empty diesel fuel tank. No one knew what exactly to make of it, but an FBI guy let it slip to my dad that the US government had been tracking drug-smuggling submarines in those waters for some time. They hadn’t found one yet, and didn’t want to alert the public that they were nosing around, lest word get back to their targets. The logical presumption was that the brothers had the misfortune of crossing paths with the smugglers, and died for it. Cyn likely suffered a similar fate. But I knew it had to be worse. It was always worse for women.