What the hell did they want from her? She didn’t think they even knew her father. One thing she was sure of, her father would never let her be treated like this. Not her own father, who’d written her such cool letters and sent her lucky Julio. Losing Julio was a sign; the golden birdman knew better than to go with these crazy people.
They were putting stuff in her food, but she could never catch them at it. A bowl of canned spaghetti, heated in a motel microwave, tasted bitter, but she couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that the nights passed quickly in a kind of foggy haze, a whirling blur. She wasn’t sleepy, but she slept long and hard, and woke befuddled, with the coppery taste of metal filings in her mouth. She tried not eating, but still she slept. And she had to drink, didn’t she? You couldn’t live without water. She lost track of days, and no one ever let her turn on a TV or even a radio. She couldn’t trust the food or the water and she couldn’t trust Ana, in spite of her small unexpected kindnesses, the secret gift of a candy bar or soft drink. She couldn’t trust Jorge.
When Jorge told her to strip to the skin, she’d thought, This is it, here it comes. She wasn’t a little kid; she wasn’t naive. She knew what happened to girls dumb enough to get into cars with strangers. Tears welled in her eyes; she hadn’t thought they were strangers. She’d thought they were her father's friends. She’d never imagined a woman would bait a trap for her.
Then Ana had appeared and practically shoved Jorge out of the room. But her orders were the same: Take off your clothes. “Why?”
“So you can wash, baby. What do you think?”
So she’d taken a shower in the scummy stall, and Ana hadn’t even let her pull the rotting curtain. Not that she was that shy or modest or anything, but it made her angry, made her jaw feel tight and hard, to be so helpless, without any protection except her anger. While she scrubbed her hair, Ana started to talk.
“Pay attention,” she said. “We’re all going to dress up, for photos. We’re gonna be polite and happy, one big, happy family. You’re my little girl, and I’m gonna dress like your mama. You’d like it if I was your mama, right? I’d be a good mother to you. Jorge's gonna be your daddy, and that's what you’re gonna call him, you understand? And then we’re gonna keep on acting real nice, all the way through the airport.”
She glanced up hopefully. Jorge had a gun, an ugly gray automatic, but you couldn’t bring a gun into an airport.
Ana said, “Oh, baby, I know what you’re thinking, but get it out of your mind. If you try anything at the airport, it's not you who's gonna suffer, you know? Oh, yeah, you can say something to a cop, a security guard. Go ahead, it might get you off the hook. But your mother, your brothers, they’re dead soon as I press a button.”
“You can’t do that.” Jaime, her youngest brother, barely eight years old, was a pest, always wanting to play stupid card games. But he was so little. He hadn’t had any kind of a life yet, and he hadn’t done anything wrong. He hadn’t trusted the wrong people.
“Don’t you watch TV? Don’t you know what can happen in the world, baby? Right, I can’t do that. Nothing can happen to you, baby. You’re home in your little bed, safe and sound, right? None of this ever happened. Here, put these on.”
How, Paolina wondered, could this stone-faced bitch be the same woman who smiled when she handed her a Milky Way?
The blouse was ruffled and too big. The loose pants came all the way up to her waist. They wouldn’t let her wear any makeup, no lipstick at all. Ana tried to curl her hair, but that, at least, defeated her. It stayed defiantly straight, so Ana tied it in a ribbon, like she was a poodle or something. The shoes they gave her were too big. When she almost fell out of them, Ana took her to the bathroom and wadded up toilet paper to stick in the toes.
The photos were taken in a busy shop, people going in and out, nobody paying attention. If she’d screamed, nobody would have cared. Ana gave her a glass of orange soda before they drove to the airport, and then she was on the plane and she wasn’t sure how she’d walked down the jet-way much less how she’d gotten belted into her seat. The middle seat, with Ana at the window and Jorge guarding the aisle.
When she whispered, “I’m gonna be sick,” Ana rummaged in the seat-back pocket till she found a paper sack. When she had to go to the bathroom, both Ana and Jorge went along. Ana, in front, checked the bathroom before she went in. Jorge used it afterwards to make sure she hadn’t left any messages scrawled on the mirror. When they returned to their seats, she got the window, which was better. At least she could rest her head against the metal wall and fall asleep.
She could hear them talking, a flood of quick light Spanish. That was one thing she had over them. Ana had no idea how good her Spanish was, and Jorge thought she was practically a gringa, a dummy who knew little more than high-school Spanish, just because she’d never lived in a Spanish-speaking country. Which was funny because her mother's house was a Spanish-speaking country, for sure. She closed her eyes, kept still, and listened.
And that's when she heard Ana tell Jorge how gullible she was, how she’d believed her about the button she’d punch and the threat to Jaime and her mother. Paolina had to relax her face and keep her breathing steady because she wanted to jump out of her seat and scream, tell everybody on the plane she’d been abducted.
The steward's voice said they’d be landing in fifteen minutes. All electronic devices should be shut off.
“Let her sleep,” Jorge said. “They’ll pick us up as soon as I call.”
She could get away. She could escape. The words sang in her head like a song. But who could she trust? Which grownup on the plane would believe her? Who, on the ground, would listen to her? She looked like a little kid, a baby. What would happen if she told people that these weren’t her parents, that they were kidnappers? Kidnappers who seemed so nice, who carried her passport, who had passports themselves with the same last name they’d picked out for her. Who would believe her, one against two, a kid against grownups?
The song in her head dropped to a minor key. She knew no one in Bogota. The man she’d visited when she was ten, the man Marta had told her to call “Grandfather,” was dead. She’d never known his full name or address. To claim kinship with a druglord would be asking for trouble, but to remain a captive was accepting disaster.
She stayed docile and dumb during the landing and the long wait to deplane. It wasn’t an act, the stolid stupidity, not really, because she didn’t know what to do. While they waited for their luggage in the terminal, she watched everything. The clock overhead, the sets of double doors that opened into darkness, the cars that passed, with their headlights gleaming. She read the signs: BANO, CAMBIO, AUTOBUS, TAXI .In Boston she knew so many cabdrivers, drivers who worked with Carlotta, who worked for Gloria. Sometimes, when she was walking home from school, a familiar cabbie would toot his horn and offer her a free ride.
She couldn’t hail a cab, that was for sure. By the time she got the door open, Jorge would grab her. She let her head nod as though she were sleepy, answered in dull monosyllables when there was no choice other than response, but her eyes were watching and her mind whirring so quickly she felt like she might burst apart in a shower of sparks. She concentrated on breathing, in and out, deep and strong. She flexed her toes in her shoes. If only they’d stay on when the time came to run.
When the moment arrived, she moved without thinking. They were waiting outside. The night air felt crisp, almost like the first days of fall, but it smelled different. Her show of sleepiness and docility must have been convincing, because Jorge barely had his hand on her shoulder and Ana was busy with the luggage. When the bus stopped and the doors yawned, she kept her head down, her eyes half-closed. She seemed to pay no attention, but at the very last second, when the back doors were already closing, folding into each other, she wrenched her whole body, squirming out from under Jorge's grip, and dove through the narrow opening, scraping her arm.
She could see Ana pointing, her mouth opening and closing. Jorge hammered on the door, yelling, and she was terrified, terrified the driver would open the door. She knew what it meant now, when someone said their heart was beating so hard it felt like it would crash through the wall of their chest.
Time seemed frozen. Then, like a man with a schedule to keep, the bus driver pressed his foot to the floor.