The girl is stopped in midair, on her way to landing in the pool. The water sparkles beneath her feet. The sky is brilliant blue-dazzling, unadulterated. Scant seconds before this frozen image, there would have been the sound of slapping feet on the wet pool deck. She has such a joyous expression on her face. She is thrilled to be jumping into this water. This girl wears her hair in pigtails. Even though there is joy on her face, something in her eyes says she’s not 100 percent sure about hitting the water. This apprehension is not enough to make her pause. She smiles and trusts it’ll be all right, and jumps anyway.
This picture, obviously captured by someone standing in the pool, also catches an older, taller girl, standing on the pool deck waiting. She stands on the pale-green tile beside a wooden deck chair. The girl is wearing a one-piece pink swimsuit and she entertains no uneasiness. She will jump a bit higher and will land farther out into the water than her sister. Towels piled on the chair back. Perhaps she was supposed to be jumping along with the jumping girl, but no, she wants all the picture-taker’s attention. She waits to say, Hey, look at me. Slap, slap, slap, slap, and she will be airborne above the water, landing gleefully with a splash, hoping the lifeguard doesn’t bust her for running on the deck. Hoping whoever is there watching, sees her jump. There are a few other people reclined in deck chairs along the pool’s edge. He can tell by the way they lounge, they are very relaxed, and it is very likely a hot day. He knows these girls. He knows their hearts. He knows them at a level beyond knowing. But he cannot say their names. No matter how much he wants the scene to move beyond frozen, it will not budge. One girl hangs in mid-flight, her face happy and innocent, and the other girl waits on the deck-waits for her turn to show how well she can jump and how big a splash she can make. The sun is hot. The sky is clear. But there is no splash landing. No laughing-giggling-coming-up-for-air. No screaming: Let’s do it again! Let’s do it again! Nothing moves.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
They find him on the north coast of Morocco. He washes up on a beach near the village of Tetouan. The ocean deposits him on the sand and the waves push him up and roll him over a couple of times before leaving him alone. Alerts had been sent to all the hotels and resorts along the coast. A group of children finds him. One of the children, a girl named Aabida, points into the ocean and shouts:
“Eskoot, Aabida,” a boy says.
Columbus hears seagulls. Can’t open his eyes. Thinks perhaps those voices are angels speaking the language of angels. He’s in heaven. The air is warm. The light is bright. Angels with the voices of children.
There is a strange sort of sacredness, a holiness reserved for the presumed crazy. Columbus is not just another Spanish national on Moroccan soil. He’s a pitiful crazy person in trouble. His country becomes irrelevant except this is where he must be returned. Columbus is unconscious but stable when the medics arrive. He is transported to Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the northeastern tip of Morocco, and then by boat to Algeciras. He is back in Sevilla the next day.
Two days later he opens his eyes and sees he is back at the institute in Sevilla. He sees Tammy first. She smiles at him and he starts to scream. He’s horrified. He lived through the Strait of Gibraltar, through the memory of his dreamed daughters and his perhaps wife, for what? To arrive back where he started? To go through so much and not move? Tammy takes it personally, goes on stress leave, doesn’t come back for a week. Columbus is restrained and eventually sedated. The alprazolam takes him halfway back to his pleasant adrift-at-sea dream. He recalls the hazy faces of his dreamed family. Rashmi, Chloe, and Jane. He drifts back to this life with three women, life with his three girls.
Dr. Balderas told Consuela to go home on the morning of the third day. She’d been reading Malory’s version of the King Arthur story to Columbus. In the hallway, she sighed and paused, recognized how tired she was, and went home.
Dr. Balderas, who has been reviewing Columbus ’s chart, glances over the lip of the clipboard at his patient. “Good morning. How do you feel?”
Columbus could give a flying fuck. He just wants to drift in the almost memory of what is, perhaps, his life.
“Do you know who you are?”
“Yesh,” Columbus says. His mouth is not responding. It won’t form words quickly enough. Won’t follow his thoughts.
“Can you tell me who you are?”
Columbus sighs. You ought to know, he thinks. “Yehhh,” he says finally, inside an exhalation.
“What’s your name?” He leans in closer. He’s hoping Columbus will say something other than Columbus.
“King Ah-thur.” Columbus closes his eyes, exhausted. Slowly, he turns the side of his face into the pillow.
Dr. Balderas is confounded. He has no idea Consuela was reading Columbus the Malory. He has no idea what to think, except that his patient is still delusional and that alprazolam is an effective sedative. Columbus is certainly sedated.
“What happened?” She glares at Dr. Balderas. His forehead is sunburned.
He takes his reading glasses off and places them quickly on top of the papers on his desk. “He came to and was extremely agitated. He would not stop screaming. He was hysterical.”
“So he’s pumped full of drugs again?”
“We had no other option.”
“He was already restrained. Did he say anything? Anything at all?”
“Nothing but screaming. I have no idea what he went through out there in the strait. It’s a minor miracle he survived. And I am accountable. I’m responsible for this. It’s not going to be pretty when I get in that room with the board. They’re going to want to talk to you, too.”
“It’s not your fault. He duped all of us.”
“It was my idea to go to the beach.”
“It was a good idea.”
Consuela spends as much time with Columbus as she can. She reads to him for an hour each morning, and then pushes him in a wheelchair down to the pool. Each day for a week, and then two, and then three.
Pope Cecelia dies in the second week of his withdrawal into silence. Consuela finds her in the morning, a peaceful smile on her face, eyes closed, hair like a mane-almost like it’s been brushed and arranged on the pillow. After the first gentle nudge, Consuela knew. She decides to sit for a while before letting others know. She needs to do something to make grace around this passing. So she sits quietly with the pope. I can give you an hour, Cecelia, she thinks. There will be no white smoke over the Sistine Chapel when a new pope is chosen. There will be no new pope to replace Cecelia. There will be just one less patient.
Cecelia’s family claims her body and belongings. The duty of gathering Cecelia’s life, at least her asylum life, into three cardboard boxes falls to Consuela. She is surprised to find a Hafiz ghazal in Columbus ’s handwriting on a piece of paper with well-worn fold lines. She knew they’d talked occasionally, but this implies an intimacy beyond casual conversation. Good for you, Cecelia.
Consuela begins to struggle with her hope around Columbus. She had hoped the sound of her voice would draw him back, or the hollow sound of the pool room would spark a connection to the present. But he does not speak. Even when they back off on his medication, he remains silent… eats without looking at his food, stares straight ahead. He’s turned inward. He eats and goes to the bathroom and sleeps, but it seems his life is elsewhere.
