Page 28

Chapter 28

?Maria

Maria’s body relaxes back into the airplane seat. The cabin doors are sealed and they are taxiing around to the runway, due for takeoff in less than ten minutes. She has made it.

She has somehow made it out of there alive.

She thinks back over the last forty-eight hours, her face still bruised, her muscles still aching, cuts and abrasions hidden now under a thin cashmere sweater she had bought from an airport boutique.

She somehow managed the swim, a swim she would later, from the safety of the US embassy business center, calculate had been more than a kilometer. Somehow she managed it in her own breathless fashion. And when she saw an empty stretch of public beach, she waded back to shore and, steering clear of the main road, made her way along the wild coastal path following signs to the Gorda ferry port.

Thankfully the blood had been washed from her during the swim, but Maria was aware there was no way she would be able to take a ferry as she was; she had no money and she was soaking wet, covered in bruises, and shuddering with cold now that the sun was finally setting. She carefully picked her way through the undergrowth that was concealing her progress to take a peek at the shoreline beyond. A couple of evening swimmers dotted the water, their towels and bags left on the sand. She did not break cover yet, though; the single swimmers she saw were so solitary that they would easily notice her slipping from the cover of the trees to deftly take their items. She did not need more people chasing her.

She was certain the people she was running from would be looking for her at police stations and harbors. But she doubted they would have thought to cover the busy tourist ferry terminal—after all, how could she possibly go there without drawing attention?

Maria continued along the coast until she found the perfect opportunity: a mother with three children running and playing in the waves, the woman’s attention split among too many potential dangers to notice Maria.

Maria had been there as a nanny many times. Caregivers were easy targets—she knew herself; if more than one kid was having a frantic half hour, you’d be lucky if you noticed that your beach towel back there was on fire.

She waited until the oldest of the woman’s children, a four-year-old, dashed screaming into the foaming waves clearly intent on making his way out to a raft that was definitely not a child’s distance away. The mother grabbed one toddler and firmly ordered the other not to move, then stumbled into the waves after the adventurous swimmer.

Maria slipped from the undergrowth and walked calmly but purposefully in the direction of the woman’s beach spot, careful to keep a calm relaxed pace and pass as a sunset walker from some neighboring resort.

As predicted the swimming emergency metamorphized into a game in the water. The mother to her credit subverted the danger and somehow got the child to willingly stay in the shallows. But her attention was firmly locked on her brood as she tried to playfully negotiate an end to the increasingly post-sunset swim.

As Maria passed the family’s array of towels, she did not break step, bending only to hitch the woman’s woven bag onto her own shoulder and grab a thick sweatshirt from over the arm of the pram. Then she was away, seamlessly continuing her walk along the beach, listening behind her as the sounds of family life faded, all the while expecting a hand to roughly grab her and spin her around. But no hand came and the world continued to spin. Once she had made it around the curve of the beach, she slipped back into the undergrowth to inspect her haul.

A wallet with cards and eighty dollars in cash. In her head, Maria promised the woman she would leave the wallet in a public spot, use only the cash, and return the rest to a lost property.

She removed her torn wet polo shirt and slipped on the woman’s warm sweatshirt. Her shorts were still wet but partially covered now by the thick sweater. She dug around in the bag and came up with a cheap pair of flip-flops, a worn sun hat, and a children’s snack bar. She tore into the wrapper and inhaled the cereal bar, its oats and dried fruit hitting in a way she had never thought possible, all the magic of life suddenly present in the nutty tang of it. She let out a moan of enjoyment. It had been days since she had last eaten.

Snack devoured, Maria crumpled the wrapper, returned it to the bag, slipped on her new shoes and the sun hat, and headed toward the road.

She managed to buy a ticket and slip onto the ferry hiddenamong the passengers of a large American cruise ship returning to their ship in Tortola after a day trip. Sun hat pushed down to avoid the cameras she was certain would be across the ferry port, she boarded the ferry back to the main island.

It was easy to buy a flight home using online banking at an internet café. Her next move was harder, however. Having left her passport back in that house, she needed emergency travel documents to return to the US, and even after she applied for a replacement passport the process required a two-day wait. So wait she did, for forty-eight terrifying hours, in a cheap airport hotel. She checked her emails for evidence of who these people were and what they wanted from her, but all correspondence from the company that had hired her had disappeared from her email account. There was no paper chain. If she had died in that house, if her body had washed up on the shores of Gorda, it seemed unlikely anyone would have been able to identify her. They had made sure no one knew where she was or who she had been working for.

And yet now she is free. She is safe, she reminds herself, aboard a five-and-a-half-hour flight back to New York. Safe.

She thinks of her apartment, the tiny place she shares in Brooklyn with her now pretty much estranged best friend Freya.

The idea that Freya won’t even have missed her yet is an unsettling one in Maria’s mind, but then everyone thinks Maria is nannying right now. Nannying at some rich person’s holiday home in paradise. How could they possibly know what occurred over the past week?

As the plane roars its way down the runway and lifts, engines deafening around her, she thinks of how the people who held her captive arranged everything perfectly, only emailing her the final address the day after she arrived on Tortola, so that no one but her would know the exact location of the house. But she remembers—and once she is back home and recovered and absolutely certain she’s safe she will tell somebody what happened out there. By then the bodies will be gone, she doesn’t doubt, and her crimes will be as hidden as theirs.

The plane levels out high above the islands and Maria lets out a long-held sigh, tension slowly releasing from deep inside her.

She will get back to that apartment, she will tell Freya, at least some of it, and over the next few days she will find a lawyer, and she will make sure those people can never hurt her again.

—

Except Freya is not at the apartment when Maria arrives at the door eight hours later. And Maria does not have a new phone yet. Or a key.

Freya’s absence is not unusual. Maria and Freya met at Cornell the day before their first class commenced; they were in the same med intake. And Freya is now in her third year, her hours even more extreme to Maria’s now “outside” eye than they were when she herself was living through them. The pair rarely sees each other most days and when they do, Maria can often sense Freya’s discomfort around talking about anything, especially the career that Maria abandoned with such seeming ease.

Perhaps even back then Freya felt that age-old twinge people get when something, namely Maria’s altered career path, seems too good to be true.

And wasn’t that instinct borne out spectacularly in the end, Maria muses, as she makes the schlep down to the super’s apartment to request a spare key. Her own key and phone no doubt now in some unknown landfill in the British Virgin Islands.

Best not to wait for Freya to get back. God knows when she might return home.

The super obligingly lets her into her own apartment, clearly pleased to have the opportunity to interrogate Maria once more on the habits of the rich and famous. Maria customarily bats him off with a few choice anecdotes but has neither the will nor the energy to do so today. Sensing a new frostiness to Maria, he soon disappears back to his own apartment.

—

Her apartment smells like home— well, not her childhood home, but her New York home: the scent of cooking spices, laundry detergent, and Freya’s calming shower gel. Freya obviously came back to the apartment and went out again not long before Maria’s return.

Maria tries not to let her thoughts pull back to memories of her childhood home, her parents, long gone now, or the uncle who took her in for those final years of high school.

She tries not to think of them most days, but now more than ever she is not in the mental space to reminisce about lost loved ones.

Her uncle and herself rarely speak. She loves him and he her, she knows, in his quiet way. But they are not close, each reminding the other of what was lost. No, Maria is alone, and will be until she chooses to have a family of her own, or chooses not to.

She wanders from room to room in the apartment looking at everything as if for the first time, so certain she was that she would never make her way back here again.

Her room, just as she left it: a few unpacked items that never made it into her case, spilled makeup powder on her dresser, the last book she finished before the contract came through. And on the edge of the bed some folded towels Freya must have laundered and returned to her room. A gesture so potent in its everyday kindness that it makes Maria let out a throaty sob. Eyes blurring, she takes in her space, her things, the pictures on her walls, her possessions, things she used to care so much about, each item now seeming alien to her somehow. She rises and wanders to her dresser, the bottles of face cream, scents, nail polishes, strings of beads in all colors and styles all as if someone else’s.

The feeling opens a worrying question in Maria’s mind, the question of whether she has now outgrown her old life, if what she has witnessed has made her real life seem ludicrously na?ve by comparison. She heads over to her DSR camera hanging by its strap from her door handle and sits down heavily on her bed.

She flicks on the power and scrolls through her old photos. She’s always thought of herself as having a bit of an eye, spending hours on weekends wandering the streets of Manhattan and catching moments, but looking back now magic no longer glitters through her hard-won photos, only people trying their hardest to live their lives. Maria tries to shake off the thought but it sinks deeper into her and expands. There is no escapingit.

The truth is, the world is not the place Maria thought it was before she left. The world is a place where you can die, where you can be killed and you can kill and everything will carry on as normal—without you—without them.

She winces at the thought of the two men who tried to kill her, the men she subsequently killed. But wincing does not stop the memories from coming. The memories of the rooms, one after another. And the people she did not see, but who watched everything she did. She tries not to think who they were and what it was for, she tries to push away the questions of how many people died in those rooms before her, of what it was all in aid of.

She wondered back there, between bouts of terror, back under the house, if it was just a kind of gladiatorial game for someone’s sadistic amusement or if it had some larger significance? An experiment perhaps—but to prove what hypothesis?

The sound of the fridge clicking on in the kitchen shakes her from the thoughts. She is still hungry. Two days in she still has calories to make up, and even the thought of the fridge and what it might contain in spite of Freya’s restricted diabetic diet is enough to get her up and moving.

In the kitchen she eats her friend’s food, and when she’s full she gathers some clean clothes and a towel from her room and heads to the bathroom. She runs a deep hot bubble bath and lies in it, certain in the knowledge that she cannot live here anymore; she can’t slip back into this old life after what happened to her. She cannot pretend everything is the same when she has pressed up hard against the invisible line between living and not.

But she has savings, she has a lot of savings, from three years of living among the kind of people who could do this to someone. She could move, perhaps move out west, near her uncle? Perhaps a quiet life could work for her now. But she somehow doubts it. She needs to fill the silence that brings on remembrance, not encourage it. Because when her thoughts are free they run like lightning straight back into that basement in Virgin Gorda, they fly through those rooms right back to the final one, and they find her curled fetal on the floor, ready to let the pain take her and for it all to end.

The thought is interrupted by a knock on the door.

Maria’s eyes fly through the open bathroom door to the hallway. She shifts in her warm bubbles and hugs her knees close. The knock comes again.

“Hello,” she calls, and tells herself it’s not them. It can’t be, they couldn’t follow her, could they?

“Hey,” the voice comes back with barely covered disinterest. “Sign for a package: Freya Samuels?”

A wave of relief swims through Maria with such force, a chuckle erupts from her. “Oh, okay. One second. I’ll be right there.”

Maria rises, wraps a towel around her wet body, and pads to the door. She checks through the peephole, sees the package, and opens the door.

He grabs her.

A hand instantly over her mouth, her wet feet slipping and skidding back into the apartment as he drags her and slams the door behind them.

She tries to scream, to bite, but nothing gets past his thick leather-gloved hands. She struggles, but he is stronger. He steers her back toward the bathroom, toward the tub that moments ago was so relaxing, the tub full to the brim with warm bubbly water, and she knows his plan.

And that’s when her old friend kicks in once more. The friend who has always saved her.

She stops struggling and lets her body go limp. When the momentum he has been using against her is no longer necessary it suddenly pivots him forward. Maria is momentarily loosened from his grip as he grabs for the doorframe with one hand, the other still tight around her mouth. She dips to the floor and skids back away from him. She runs to the front door, grabs the baseball bat Freya’s ex-boyfriend bought them for self-defense after a homeless guy was found dead in the building’s stairwell a year ago, and swings it wildly at the back of the stranger’s head.

—

Once Maria has cleaned up the floor where he fell and moved him to her bedroom, she washes herself again, dresses, and heads out onto the street to find what she’s looking for. She is not worried the man will wake. He’s dead now. She took one of Freya’s old diabetic syringes from her used sharps box and filled it with air. She made sure he would not bother her again.

When she gets to the homeless shelter on East 30th Street her plan solidifies. She pays the men generously for their spare items of clothes until she has a full outfit, which she bundles into a carrier bag, holding her nose, and takes back—to much consternation—on the subway system.

Back in the apartment she changes the man, careful to match the colors of his original outfit she knows would have been caught downstairs on the entry hall cameras.

She pulls the mobile phone from his pocket and uses his lifeless face to unlock the screen and change the password.

Then checking the halls are clear, and for the first time in her life pleased that her building has no CCTV in the hallways, she hauls the 160-plus-pound man along the hallway to the unused stairwell.

—

When Freya returns to her apartment that night everything is as she left it. Which is why she finds it so incredibly odd that all of her chicken is gone. She is sure she had a full container when she left that morning—but her hours were long and everything is stepping up at the hospital now that they’renearing the end of the year. She checks Maria’s room, but everything there is as it should be.

Of course Maria did not eat her chicken. Maria is halfway across the world in some amazing resort or other with some new employer and their ungrateful spawn—she’s not sneaking around their shitty Brooklyn apartment stealing chicken chunks in Cajun spice.

—

It will be another three days until the smell from the unused stairwell alerts a neighbor to the dead homeless man lurking down there, and a minor police investigation into said death ensues. A query is briefly raised by Freya when she overhears the super charting his own movements the day the man entered the building. The super mentions that he had let Maria into their flat a few hours prior and then done maintenance work for the rest of the afternoon. The police ask Freya if she can contact Maria, but when both Freya and the officer involved attempt to call, their calls go to voicemail. But not before the international call tone sounds. Maria, to all intents and purposes, is still in Gorda.

And in a sense that none of them could possibly ever understand, and is of course purely metaphorical, Maria always will be Still in Gorda.

In reality, Maria is on a flight to London. A string of messages on the dead man’s phone led her right back to the woman with the too-tight chignon. An office in Mayfair, an address, a name.

Maria verified her own death on the man’s phone, confirmed the job was done, but it would only be a matter of time before the man does not show up where he is expected and Maria’s story will begin to unravel.

But for now, she has a momentary advantage, and the savings she’s been accumulating for her future to fund it.

The people who hired her to go to that house want her dead now, and it seems unlikely Maria will be allowed to move on with her life until certain conversations have taken place.