broken one of Ruiz’s fundamental rules: when under stress always remember to breathe.
Back in my room, I tip the contents of the calico bag onto the bed. There is a pocketknife with one broken blade and the other intact, a small mirror, a medicine bottle full of sand, a charcoal drawing of two children and a battered circular biscuit tin.
Every object is significant. Why else would he carry them? These are the wordly possessions of a sixteen- year-old boy. They can’t possibly breathe life into his lungs or tell me his fears and desires. They aren’t enough. He deserves more.
The biscuit tin contains a tarnished military medal and a black-and-white photograph folded in half. It appears to show a group of workers standing in front of a factory with a corrugated-iron roof and wooden shutters on the windows. Packing crates are stacked against the wall, along with drums and pallets.
There are two lines of workers. Those in the front row are sitting on stools. At the center is a patriarch or the factory owner in a high-backed chair. Ramrod straight, he has a stern countenance and a far-off stare. One hand is on his knee. The other is missing and the sleeve of his coat is tied off at the elbow.
Beside him is another man, physically similar, perhaps his brother. He is wearing a small fez and has a neatly trimmed beard. He also is missing a hand and his left eye appears to be an empty socket. I glance along the two rows of workers, many of who are maimed or crippled or incomplete. There are people on crutches, others with skin like melted plastic. A boy in the front row is kneeling on a skateboard. No, not kneeling. What I first imagine are his knees, poking out from beneath short trousers, are the amputated stumps of his thighs.
None of the workers is smiling. They are olive-skinned men with blurred features and no amount of magnifying will make the image any clearer or the men appear any less stiff and glowering.
I put the photograph back in the tin and examine the rest of the curios and ornaments. The charcoal drawing is creased at the corners. The two children, a boy and a girl, are about six and eight. Her arm is around his shoulders. She has a high forehead and a straight part in her hair. He looks bored or restless, with a spark of light in his eyes from an open window. He wants to be outside.
The paper is soft in my fingers. A fixative has been sprayed on the charcoal to stop it smudging. In the bottom left-hand corner there is a signature. No, it’s a name. Two names. The drawing is of Hassan as a young boy and his sister, Samira.
Lying back, I stare at the ceiling and listen to the deep night. It is so quiet I can hear myself breathing. What a beautiful sound.
This is a story of parts. A chronicle of fictions. Cate faked her pregnancy. Brendan Pearl ran her and Felix down. Her doctor lied. Donavon lied. An adoption agency lied. People are being trafficked. Babies are being bought and sold.
I once read that people caught in avalanches can’t always tell which way is up or down and don’t know which direction to dig. Experienced skiers and climbers have a trick. They dribble. Gravity shows them the way.
I need a trick like that. I am submerged in something dark and dangerous and I don’t know if I’m escaping or burying myself deeper. I’m an accidental casualty. Collateral damage.
My dreams are real. As real as dreams can be. I hear babies crying and mothers singing to them. I am being chased by people. It is the same dream as always but I never know who they are. And I wake at the same moment, as I’m falling.
I call Ruiz again. He picks up on the second ring. The man never sleeps.
“Can you come and fetch me?”
He doesn’t ask why. He puts down the phone and I imagine him getting dressed and getting in his car and driving through the countryside.
He is thirty years older than me. He has been married three times and has a private life with more ordnance than a live firing range but I know and trust him more than anyone else.
I know what I’m going to do. Up until now I have been trying to imagine Cate’s situation—the places she went to, what she tried to hide—but there is no point in calling the same phone numbers or mentally piecing together her movements. I have to follow her footsteps, to catch up.
I am going to Amsterdam to find Samira. I look at the clock. Not tomorrow. Today.
Two hours later I open the door to Ruiz. Sometimes I wonder if he knows my thoughts or if he’s the one who puts them in my mind in the first place and then reads them like counting cards in a poker game.
“We should go to Amsterdam,” he says.
“Yes.”
BOOK TWO
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.—HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
1
In our second year at university in London Cate missed a period and thought she was pregnant. We were synchronized—same time, same place, same moods. I can’t remember which of her bad boyfriends had breached her defenses, but I remember her reaction clearly enough. Panic.
We did a home pregnancy test and then another. I went with her to the family planning clinic, a horrible green building in Greenwich not far from the observatory. Where time began, life ended.
The nurse asked Cate some questions and told her to go home and wait another seven days. Apparently, the most common reason for a false negative is testing too early.
Her period arrived.
“I might have been pregnant and miscarried,” she said afterward. “Perhaps if I had wanted it more.”
Later, apropos of nothing, she asked, “What do they do with them?”
“With what?”
“With the aborted babies.”
“They don’t call them babies. And I guess they get rid of them.”
“Get rid of them?”
“I don’t know, OK?”
I wonder if a scare such as this, a near miss, came back to haunt her during the years of trying to fall pregnant. Did she tell Felix? Did she wonder if God was punishing her for not loving the first one enough?
I
We were working during the Christmas break at a ski lodge in the French Alps in the shadow of Mont Blanc (which didn’t ever throw a shadow since the clouds never lifted).
“Have you ever seen a Sikh ski?” I asked Cate.
“You can be the first,” she insisted.
We shared a room in Cell Block H, the nickname for the staff quarters. I worked as a chambermaid five days a week, from six in the morning until mid-afternoon. I rarely saw Cate who worked nights at a bar. She practiced her Russian accent by pretending to be Natalia Radzinsky, the daughter of a countess.
“Where on earth did you sleep with Barry?” I asked.
“I borrowed your house key. We used one of the guest suites.”
“You did what?”
“Oh, don’t worry. I put down a towel.”
