CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ELIZABETH
Even as Sherman struggled through a difficult first year of life, I realized that my obligation to my brother would be lifelong, a Bradford commitment, unyielding, irrevocable, to continue through eternity if only genetic research could solve the immortality problem. Sherman was quiet and distant from birth, an ailing infant who didn’t cry, who seemed always surprised. What’s happening with this new life? How did I get here? Would you kindly put me back?
We made natural companions, Sherman without friends because he couldn’t make them and didn’t need them, me because my peers didn’t like me. And Sherman took instruction, believed in me, a fountain of all wisdom, although I was in most ways more ignorant than my gecko. I took Sherman through his first years by the figurative hand, he willing, even eager, to be led.
“Your brother trusts you,” my mother told me. “You know what that means?”
Uncle Henry had a different take on the matter. “Your brother can’t make it on his own, but he’s still a Bradford and it’s important that he act the part.”
“Or at least that people believe he’s acting the part?”
“Well put, Lizzy. In our world, it’s the show that counts.”
On this afternoon, the show is all wrong. I doze off, drift into a dream of my brother, his voice, begging for help and me unable to find my shoes or my phone or my coat, then wake suddenly. Unwilling to risk another dream, my duty shirked, I throw off the blanket, rise, and begin to pace. I drink a little water, chew on one end of a Slim Jim, the chemicals foul on my tongue, use the bucket strategically placed in a corner, try to interest myself in one of the movies on the tablet, an old comedy, every laugh-line telegraphed.
I want the night, escape, imagining myself slipping through the open window, tracing the miles to Baxter, knocking on the door of our temporary residence. Hey, it’s me. I’m home.
Implacable, almost defiant, the day will not retreat, the light over the window a thin line, unchanging, eternal. I’ve knocked hard on the stairway door with no response and I have to think I’m alone in a house that’s supposed to be unoccupied, Tashya unwilling to chance a visitor to the park glimpsing her through a window. Not with just days to wait before the payoff. Right?
Wrong. Tashya’s footsteps on the stairs are all wrong. They lack her customary deliberation, that display of self-control, I’m in charge here, no detail untended. She’s rushed now, frustrated, her concern visible in her tight mouth and raised shoulders, the first sign of emotion yet displayed. Yes, Tashya does have feelings. Not compassion, surely, or empathy or kindness or generosity. Fear, though, or at least anxiety, some domino that failed to fall.
“We must leave.”
The gun in her hand precludes any protest, or even negotiation, off you go and keep your big mouth shut. For once.
And I do go, and do keep my big mouth shut, up the stairs, through the kitchen and out the door. There’s a U-Haul van parked close to the house, side door open, the man behind the wheel turned away so I cannot—and better not—see his face. I clamber aboard without being asked, into a closed space without windows, a bulkhead between the cargo area and the front seat hiding the driver.
Tashya climbs in behind me and slams the door. From overhead, a small light provides a thin illumination that’s somehow as threatening as total darkness. The van moves before I find my balance, tipping me onto a thin mattress that covers most of the metal flooring.
I want to remain silent, the ever-brave Bradford refusing the consolation of speech, but the obvious interruption in the plan Tashya and family have concocted dissolves my reserve. I am no longer Sherman’s protector. I’m a fifteen-year-old girl out of her element, dropped into the very world the Bradford fortune was meant to preclude.
“Tashya, what’s going on?”
No answer, only the insect hiss of revolving tires on dry pavement, the sudden silence of the van stopped. At a light? A stop sign? I’m as blind to the outside world as I was in the basement, even more so with no streak of light to offer hope, however slight. The van picks up speed, accelerating onto what must be a main road, and we’re both rolled about, me and Tashya and her gun. She sits with her back against the bulkhead as I cling to the mattress, feeling the metal floor of the van through the thin material. The words come back to me, the toddler’s prayer: And if I die before I wake.
The van moves to the right and slows, traces a series of turns, finally stops altogether. A moment later, I hear the latch on the driver’s door snap open, then the door slam shut. We’re alone.
“It’s out there,” Tashya announces.
“What’s out there?”
“Your kidnapping. It’s gone . . . viral, yes? Entire city looks for you.”
I’d already concluded that everybody was looking for me. Stupid, actually, if quietly paying was the intent from the outset. If Tashya told the truth about her family’s past, if the FBI identified the pattern.
“When will you demand payment?”
“There is problem.”
The fear that grips me centers in my gut, the tightening claws of a raptor. Do I at some point become more trouble than I’m worth, an infected appendage, amputation the only remedy? This is a question I’ve asked myself before and will probably ask again. Assuming I live long enough.
I listen quietly for a time. We’re in a parking lot, no doubt, probably at a rest stop on the interstate. I can hear the voices of people walking by, a child crying, a woman talking rapidly with no returning dialogue, a horn sounding, an engine starting, revving up, dying to an idle. And only the thin wall of the van separating me from normal life, the everyday, taken-for-granted world I rejected as too ordinary to acknowledge.
“Tell me about the problem, Tashya.”
“There will be a delay.”
“Why?”
“Does that concern you?” Tashya’s face continues to betray her anxiety and I realize that just because she’s the face of the crew that took me doesn’t make her it’s leader. Or even very important, and it’s possible that she fears Quentin’s fate. I can’t bring myself to believe she’s worried about Elizabeth Bradford.
I should do it. That’s what I tell myself. Pound on the side of the van and scream for help. There’s no one behind the wheel, no one to drive away and Tashya won’t shoot me. Not with no hope of escape, not in a death penalty state, kidnapping, however vile, the lesser offense. Yet when Tashya’s eyes narrow and she raises the barrel of the gun in her hand, all that Bradford resolve peels away and I’m a three-year-old child, afraid of the dark, the devil under the bed, the skeleton in the closet.
“Tell me, Tashya.” I want to ask what she’s so afraid of, but I don’t. “Why the delay?”
“Always in life things happen at random. You cannot anticipate everything, no matter how long and hard you are planning.”
“You sound like my mother.”
That gains me a thin smile. “First stop for ransom Bitcoin . . . closed down by police in Albania. For why? It does not matter. We must find a new first destination. Safe destination, yes? This will take some days.”
“How many?”
“We are hoping two or three.”
The driver’s side door unlocks and I hear our driver slip behind the wheel. A few seconds later, Tashya’s phone rings. A heated conversation follows—I can hear only Tashya’s end—but I find myself asking a question. Is the person on the other end, almost surely the driver, so familiar as to be unwilling even to have his voice recognized?
Then we’re moving again.
“You are going to call parents. You will say this.”
Tashya takes a sheet of yellow paper from the inside pocket of her jacket and passes it over. The hand-printed message, written as lines of dialogue, seems oddly foreign, as though even the roman alphabet has been learned, not imbibed.
I am good.
There will be a small delay.
“You will not wait for reply. You will not add anything. You will not respond to anything that is said. So far, Elizabeth, I have been . . . considerate. This does not have to continue. I have troubles and do not need more. Say the words, hand me the phone. That is what you will do.”
My mother answers the family phone, likely because no more calls are expected and she’s the only one to persist. I stumble at the sound of her voice, reality now my gecko’s tongue curling around a cricket. I may never see her again.
I catch myself up, read the message, hand the phone to Tashya, who slides it into a phone wallet. Mom’s voice lingers, hers the arms to which I fled as a toddler, no longer a safety net, only a memory of another time that might have been another lifetime. I’ve got it now, I tell myself, it’s Quentin they fear and not his body discovered by a hiker’s beagle. Tashya and her crew followed us to Baxter because Louisville didn’t present the opportunity they sought. A long shot? Undoubtedly . . . until they happened on Quentin and his hideaway in Ulysses S. Grant State Park.
“You are thinking what?” Tashya asks. “To escape?”
“No. I’m still hearing my mother’s voice. What she said before you took the phone away.”
“And what is this?”
“We have the payment ready.” I’m lying, but Tashya only shakes her head. “Nothing to say, Tashya? What happened to the tried-and-true formula? Two demands, payment in Bitcoin, ransom sent, hostage released?”
“This is still to happen. Only the delay.”
The delay is in her response and I know what troubles her and her unseen allies, the family gangsters here and abroad. Maybe Tashya and Quentin came together in a private situation, nobody the wiser, his role in this drama unknown and unsuspected by friends and acquaintances. But its far more likely that they initially found each other in a public setting, that there followed a brief courting based on sex, money, or both, that they were seen together, Quentin and this older woman with her foreign accent.
And now he’s vanished.
I’d been imprisoned in a cottage occupied once upon a time by Quentin and the kidnapping is public knowledge, my photo on every TV set, on every phone screen, the entire city looking for me. That must include the official lookers, the police.
We’re on the interstate again, the unyielding buzz of the tires especially loud. The van isn’t insulated and the composite panels covering the sides and the back rattle softly. Trucks seem to pass in slow motion, the roar of their engines felt as well as heard.
We ride for another twenty minutes, from the interstate, over a pair of lesser roads, finally onto a dirt road, the van’s hard suspension jolting through the potholes. The van slows, then stops, and the man in front shuts off the engine, the constant hum replaced by the chitter of crickets. The door opens, shuts, and I hear footsteps retreating. Tashya sits across from me, her expression firm. Nothing’s changed here and I’ll do what I have to do.
“I know what it’s like,” I tell her, “to live for a family. You can’t fuck it up. You just can’t. There are, after all, expectations, especially for the entrusted.”
“You are misunderstanding, Elizabeth. Mistakes, yes, but not by me. I am here for repairs. And for making decisions others are afraid to make. Two days, three at most. Then we are gone.”
Not all that long ago, Tashya would have added, “And you are released.” Not this time, and I have to wonder if the message she’s sending is a threat. Become a pain in the ass and the joke’s on you. Or is she simply tired of my voice, of my repeating a message already looping through her mind? But I’m sure of this, though I can’t put a finger on the probability: if the cops stumble on Quentin’s relationship with a suddenly arrived foreign woman fifteen years his senior, it’s only a hop, skip, and jump to my prison. And that, for Tashya, would be the worst outcome imaginable, me rescued, the ransom unpaid, and her to explain the failure. Assuming her future doesn’t include spending the rest of her life in an American prison.
Five minutes later, the driver’s side door opens, closes, and Tashya’s phone rings. I think I know what they’re doing. I think they’re looking for a new place to keep me until the ransom is paid. Tashya’s tone is sharp, impatient, anxious. The truck starts an instant after she ends the connection and the vehicle begins to move, retracing steps, the rutted lane first, then a back road, then some sort of intermediate highway, then the interstate, the van moving faster with each transition. Tashya doesn’t speak, most likely because there’s nothing left to say, but I watch her gradually relax and I know we’re headed back to Quentin’s cottage, to my basement prison. And I know that Tashya has resigned herself to whatever course of action keeps her safe.
I have to get out.