7. Perspective: Quito (12 years previously)

1     She is eighteen years old, sitting on a hotel bed alone.

1.1   Urban South America: the armed men in the streets and the bright blue mountains, pollution smelling like beasts in the wet heat.

1.2   In the next room, she hears him humming as he packs.

2     She stares at her chubby, mosquito-bitten arms. A blemish on her knee is clouded maroon; she can smell her sneakers.

2.1   “Oh, you’ll be a heartbreaker someday,” he would say. “Mark my words.”

3     Her briefcase is open, empty, beside her. Although the nightstand drawer is shut, she can picture the unruly pile of dollars there, the chore waiting to be done.

Her shoulders move, frightened, when he opens the door.

He stands in the doorway, his face maneuvering. His hand reaches back again for the doorknob. Then he stops and grins as if he’s just now seen her.

“Whoa, puddytat, we said no long faces.”

She looks up as far as his open collar, his neck grained scarlet. A plain iron chain there bears a medical tag warning of an allergy to penicillin, and it seems now related to the stifling heat – as if both are components of a term of punishment.

“I could come with you,” she offers. Her ankle fidgets.

“Well now. All’s I can say, you sure don’t know my wife.”

He sits on the bed and takes her briefcase in his lap with studied tenderness, like the toy of a beloved child. She turns away sharply, squints out the window at the sky. A chalky line spreads there where a plane has gone.

She says, “We’ll work, though, one last time tonight?”

4     She loved that man as teenagers do, too hard, to her cost.

4.1   But he was killed, in the usual way. The blood showing oily against the asphalt, the sirens making the sound of fearful distance: everything grows cold.

4.2   She lay in the grit and could not reach him. She was reaching in her sleep.

5     Her father came to the hospital.

5.1   In him, every gesture was begrudging, suspicious. He was like a tiny, vigilant crab.

5.2   He said, “You’ve had an adventure,” in his dim, couched voice. Her face was bandaged, her jaw wired, she could not answer. She watched him shuffle off and whisper with the nurse.

5.3   “They’d have had you looking like King Kong, had I not come in the nick of time,” he said ever after.

6     Then she went to work with him.

        •  It so happened he needed someone suddenly.

        •  It so happened his last assistant had died – been shot.

        •  It happened in a parking lot, the woman bled to death, it only lacked Denise to lie unconscious at her side.

Denise would not admit that was strange.

“You mean it’s not a coincidence,” Dad said to her shut face, laughing.

6.1   They lived and worked twelve years together in that same loveless, bickering vein.

7     When her father was killed, Denise felt a flicker of psychosis.

7.1   Who knows why things happen, everyone knows why some things happen.

7.2   She lay in the grit, in his blood, in the hotel parking lot.

She cradled him spoon-fashion, like a wife.

8     Eddie would die, too, without learning the above facts.