—
Everyone expected her to catch the next flight to America, to head home and lick her wounds. Concerned, faintly patronizing emails came from around the globe. Friends, family, colleagues. The only one she really appreciated was from Bob.
“Here’s my take,” the email began, followed by a bullet-pointed list of threat assessments for the area, best practices for journalists, and how the actions she’d taken racked up. It was lengthy, a display of Bob’s precise attention to detail and fine-grained nuance. And pedantry. It concluded, “Yes, you could have done better. But we both know that most of the journalists we admire take far bigger risks. What happened was not your fault, except insofar as you were doing good reporting and pissing people off.”
It wasn’t true, of course. She didn’t have anything to report, not even enough of a handle on the area to know who had kidnapped her, and why. When the Colombian military had showed up at the clinic where she was being treated for cracked ribs and the early stages of pneumonia, they’d been up front about their annoyance at her presence in the region, her inability to answer even their most basic questions about who’d been holding her, and what their relationship was to Jefferson.
Nevertheless, Bob had suggested she put together a pitch for a story about her kidnapping and what the situation in Norte de Santander said about the coming peace deal. “Remember the old New York Sun style guide,” he said. “A reporter can’t begin a story with the word ‘I’ unless they’ve been shot in the groin. And since you haven’t been shot in the groin, the piece has to be about the peace deal, not you.” She didn’t know what her story said about the peace deal, but she bullshitted a few hundred words, sent them to Bob, who revised them and sent them to an editor at The New York Times Magazine. Who emailed her directly to say she was interested. It was the best break she’d ever received in her career, and it depressed her.
“Take what you can get,” Diego told her at a Japanese restaurant in Bogotá, where he’d flown out to see her. “You deserve it.”
“It’s quite a way to earn a story,” she said. Though she hadn’t earned it, not yet. Her pitch was bullshit, but her story couldn’t be. She had more reporting to do.
“You know,” Diego said, “I’m the guy who found out they were holding you. If only you’d had the good sense to stay kidnapped for a day or two, the Colombians would have rescued you—”
“Or got me killed trying to rescue me.”
“—and I would have been the knight in shining armor responsible.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Of course you had to go rescue yourself,” he said. “That’s very on brand, Liz.”
“I didn’t rescue myself,” she said. “I wasn’t worth keeping.”
“I think I still deserve thank-you sex.” It was only partly a joke.
“They broke my ribs,” she said. It was only partly a rejection, leaving the future more open than she’d intended. But perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing. And she did accept his offer to convalesce at his place outside of Medellín, which is where she finally broke the news to her mother that, no, she was staying in Colombia. She wasn’t going home.
She did it over Skype. First, she carefully applied makeup to conceal the remaining traces of bruised skin. Then she angled the camera on her laptop so the mountainside would be behind her, a calm, beautiful scene that might help explain an attachment to the country. And at the time they’d agreed on via email, when her sister would be free and when Uncle Carey was generally most lucid, she dialed up her mother.
On the screen were her mother, her sister, and in the bed behind them, Uncle Carey. He’d lost maybe seventy pounds. After the initial Hellos and Oh, my god, Liz, it’s so good to see yous, as well as the initial tears from her mother and the initial detailing from her sister of How Worried Everyone Was and How Awful It Was, her sister trained the camera on her iPad on Uncle Carey so they could show her to him. His eyes seemed to light, and he made an incomprehensible grunt that both her sister and mother would later make much of. In the past weeks, there’d been less and less of Uncle Carey every time Lisette did this, which was one of the reasons she rarely Skyped anymore. They told her excitedly that these days his eyes only lit for her and for her sister’s babies. What might he do when he saw her in person, not over a video screen? And how soon could that be?
Lisette didn’t know how to tell them. When his eyes lit, it moved her, yes. It really did seem as though the man he had been was calling her through the cage of his dying body and failing mind. But that idea frightened her too much to dwell on, and she told herself that whatever was left of Uncle Carey was gone. His mind had totally deteriorated to a few randomly firing neurons. That wasn’t the real Uncle Carey. The real Uncle Carey lived only in her memories. And the Uncle Carey of her memories had told her to be somewhere else when he died. Somewhere awesome. He would have thought of her kidnapping and escape as an adventure. He would have thought Colombia sounded awesome.
“I’m not coming home.” She just blurted it out. Bad news is easier done with quickly.
“Jesus, Liz,” said her sister, managing to sound both unsurprised and deeply disappointed.
Her mother, on the other hand, simply looked down at her hands.
“You come home after something like
