Exiled (A Madame X Novel) (13 page)

What time is it? Morning? Night? I don’t know. I glance at the clock on the bedside table: 5:05 a.m. Fifty-two minutes since the first knock on the door.

In the car, then. Logan’s Mercedes SUV. Radio off, heat on. The air outside has a chill to it, and the interior of the SUV is cold. It is still dark.

A long, long drive in silence. Logan drives with his left hand, holds my hand with his right, fingers tangled. Eventually I lean my seat back and drowse, but do not let go of his hand.

I wake up, and we are parked . . . I don’t know where. Nothingness as far as I can see. The sky is gray now, a tinge of orange-pink on the horizon. A building off to my right, long, high, impossibly large. Blue lights in lines and rows all around. To my left, an airplane. A jet, but not a large one. Small, only four or five windows, and an opening with a staircase that can be rolled away. Lights blink, and engines roar.

Logan opens my door, and someone else fetches the suitcase from the trunk. Up the stairs, Logan’s hand on my back. The interior of the jet is luxurious. Six pairs of seats, in rows of two, an aisle between. Each seat is deep, upholstered in creamy leather. Plush carpeting. A huge television. A woman in a uniform, waiting, hands clasped behind her back.

“Welcome, Mr. Ryder. My name is Amanda. It will be my absolute pleasure to serve you and your guest this morning. Please, be seated. Can I get you coffee, to start?” Her voice is bright and cheerful.

I take a seat in the middle row, against the window. I only pay partial attention to Logan talking to the flight attendant. A mug is pressed into my hand; tea, piping hot. He has coffee when he sits down beside me.

“Isabel?” His voice, sun-warm, worried. “You haven’t said a word in a long time.”

“It’s all too much.”

“Sleep, then. We have a long flight ahead of us.”

I should ask where we’re going, but I don’t seem capable of curiosity at the moment. I watch dawn break out the window as Logan speaks with the captain, discussing flight patterns or something like that. Logan buckles me in. The plane taxies, and then velocity presses me into my seat, my stomach sinks, and we’re airborne. Up, up, up over the clouds.

When we are no longer climbing, Logan unbuckles me, places a pillow on his lap, takes my now-cold tea from me, and pulls me to lie on his lap.

I float, drift, sleep.

I wake up in Barcelona, Spain.

A
silver convertible BMW is waiting when Logan leads me out of the plane.

At first, nothing registers. Not when Logan inputs an address into the navigational system. Not when we leave the airport behind. It is hot, and the wind in my hair is soothing.

Nothing on the drive away from the airport registers as familiar.

But then, after what feels like an eternity, something flickers inside me. Like a lightbulb being screwed into a lamp whose switch has been turned on, so that the bulb flickers to life, dies, flickers again. The sea is to our left. The beach, separated from the road by a wide swath of dune grass. To our right, white condo buildings, three and four stories high, screened in by palm trees and bushes. This is what causes the flicker, the dim gleam. The sky is wide and endless and blue, dotted and hazed with clouds. There are people on the beach, families and couples and singles. A cyclist, a group of them. Someone running on the side of the road.

I know this place.

I have been here.

I have driven down this exact road. I have seen this condo before, that hillock of dune grass–covered sand leading down to the azure rippling waves of the Mediterranean. I do not remember, not precisely. I just . . .
feel
it. In my bones and my blood and my soul, I feel it. It is not painful, as I expect it to be.

It is . . . soothing.

Comforting.

I have never felt at home, before, but the sea, the sun, the sand . . . it feels familiar.

Logan pulls off the main road onto a smaller side street, which in turn leads to a narrow avenue wreathed in shadows cast by a bower of tall trees. A few meters down this avenue, and then into a driveway leading to a condo building. There is a keypad; Logan consults his phone, taps in a few numbers; a gate trundles aside, admitting us.

Reception, Logan speaking in halting, uncertain Spanish. Mangling it.
“There is a holding for one rooms, please, under name of rider.”

The receptionist, a woman, puts on a strained smile, attempting to decipher what he’s saying.

Without thinking, I cut in, speak the first words in many, many hours. In Spanish.
“We have a reservation, I believe. Under Ryder, R-Y-D-E-R.”

Logan stares at me, stunned. “You speak Spanish?”

“Apparently.” I duck my head. “I figured it out with Caleb. He said something, telling me a story about how we met, one of his lies, or maybe the truth, I don’t know. He said something in Spanish, I could understand it. He said something else, and I understood that too.”

“So just now, I was—”

“Making rather a mess of it, yes.” I try to smile, to lessen the sting of the insult.

He just laughs. “Yeah, well, I used to speak it sort of fluently, but that was twenty years ago, and it was street-level Spanish—Spanglish more than anything. Enough to know when I was being insulted by my Hispanic buddies and insult them back.”

“Much different than what is spoken here, I presume.”

“Yeah, I’d guess.”

The receptionist has our keys, speaking to me now, runs a spiel about incidental charges and room service and the elevator, hands me the key. I realize, as Logan carries the suitcase and leads the way to the elevator, that the receptionist was speaking rapidly, and that I followed her effortlessly, without even realizing she was speaking Spanish. How is that possible? I didn’t even know I knew it until very recently. It has been six years, at least, but I am perfectly fluent.

The human mind is a strange and mysterious thing, I think.

Logan swipes the key card, shoves open the door. The room is bright, sunlight coming from outside, through the sliding glass door. Evening light, golden-crimson sun settling into the sea.

I move as if in a dream to the door, slide it open. Step out on the balcony.

Waves crash.

A seagull haws.

Chatter, in Spanish:
Mama, Mama! I made a sand castle, come look!—No,
mijo
, it’s not time for supper yet, you just had a snack—She was talking about her cousin, who went on holiday to Greece last winter, and met a much older man. She’s still seeing him, I hear . . .

Oh, the ocean.

The soft, steady crash of waves on sand. The way the blue ripples endlessly, curling into white and breaking on the shore. The wheeling of gulls, tipping on a wing to flutter to the sand, scooping up some prize, yipping in triumph, defending against other thieving gulls.

The flicker in my mind brightens.

Whiteness.

*   *   *

T
he sun is hot, blazing hot. Baking my shoulders and the top of my head. My feet are cool, though. The waves crash and wash up over my feet and calves, licking up to my knees. I am sitting in the dark brown wet sand at the water’s edge, digging a hole. Digging, digging, digging. It’s futile, of course. The ocean rushes up and over me, into the hole, filling it and caving in the edges, smoothing away the hole so there’s barely even a divot remaining. And then I dig, dig, dig all over again, watch the hole vanish as if by magic. Behind me, a sand castle sits half ruined, partially obliterated by my own feet, after an hour of careful, painstaking construction. I was a giant, of course, and the castle was full of nasty little mortals. They had to be crushed, of course. I am hot enough to consider going in the water now. It will be cold, and the salt will sting my eyes and crust my skin when I get out, but it’s worth it to cool off.

Behind me, I hear a giggle. It’s a low, soft sound. Happy, delighted, amused. Mama. I stand up, brushing sand off my butt and hands. Turn, watch Mama and Papa. She is lying on her back. She is lovely, so elegant. Sexy. I learned this word at school recently, and I think my mama is sexy. Her bathing suit is rather small. I would never wear anything like that, I would be too afraid of people seeing me in my underwear. That’s all it really is, Mama’s bikini. She looks like a supermodel, I think. Her hair is loose, because it’s always loose unless she’s washing dishes. It’s so long it comes down to nearly her bottom, and it’s black as a crow’s wing. Straight, thick, glossy. Her tummy is flat, but her boobies are big, and so is her butt. I’ve heard kids talking at school, and that’s how women are supposed to look, they say. I wonder if I will look that way? Probably not. I’ll never be as beautiful as Mama.

She’s laughing because Papa is kissing her. She’s lying on the big
blanket Abuela made by knitting. Or crocheting? I don’t know. She made it before I was born, and we always bring it to the beach with us. Mama is on her back, one knee up, the other leg straight out on the blanket. Papa is lying almost totally on top of her, like I saw them doing that one time by accident, only this time they have their clothes on. He’s kissing her, all over. All over. Her mouth, her neck, her shoulders. She’s laughing and laughing, telling him to stop, but not really. She doesn’t actually want him to stop, I can tell, so I’m not sure why she’s saying so. She’s slapping his shoulder with one hand, but her other hand is in his hair. Adults are confusing. She tells him people are watching, that I’m watching.

He just says, “Let her watch, then, my love. She will see that her parents are in love.”

More laughing, more kissing.

Yuck. But it’s not yuck. I used to think it was gross when they kissed like that, but I’m old enough now to know that it is supposed to be romantic. Luisa’s mama and papa don’t kiss at all, she said. Sometimes they even sleep in separate rooms, because they argue so much. So maybe I’m lucky, because my mama and papa are in love and kiss each other and make each other laugh, and sleep in one room every night, and sometimes I hear them laughing and making lots of weird sounds late at night. I think that’s having sex. Luisa said she saw her mama doing that with a man who wasn’t her papa, and that’s just weird. I’m not sure what sex is, but I know men and women do it together when they are in love, and maybe when they aren’t, too. I’m not sure.

I am very hot now. Too hot. And Mama and Papa are just kissing now. No laughing. No saying
stop
. Just kissing, their faces so close, tilting their heads this way and that, Mama’s fingers in Papa’s hair, as if she’s afraid he’ll stop and she doesn’t want him to get away.

So I go in the water. Tread out through the waves, up to my hips, and that’s where I stop. I have to jump in now. But it’s cold, and I always have to tell myself I’m brave enough to do it. Sometimes Papa will run up behind
me when I’m not paying attention and throw me in, and laugh, and tell me I have to just do it, or I’ll think myself out of jumping in.

I look back, and Papa is still kissing Mama. But now she has her foot around his leg, and I think they will be kissing for a very long time.

So I jump in. Just jump. Deep breath, and jump. The water is cold, shockingly cold at first. But then I’m swimming under the water and I’m already used to it, and it feels wonderful.

I swim for a long time, chasing waves and pretending I’m a surfer like I saw on TV. I don’t notice anything, forget everything but the water and the waves and the sun. I glance back at Mama and Papa, but they’re sleeping. Under a blanket, even, which is weird considering how hot it is. But we’re totally alone on this part of the beach, so who cares? Adults are weird, and I don’t bother trying to figure out why they need a blanket in the summer.

It isn’t until I feel the water start to surge and pull that I notice anything is amiss. I look up, and suddenly the sky is gray, and it looks heavy, as if the clouds are full of pencil lead and might break open. It is windy, too, and the waves are big. Too big. They crash over me, push and pull me, knock me under. I surface, kicking and pulling with my hands as hard as I can. I am a good swimmer, a regular old fish, like Papa says. But the waves are so strong, and I’m getting farther and farther from shore. A riptide, I think.

I finally get a breath, manage to spit out the salty water, and scream.

But I only get a little scream out before another wave pounds onto my head and spins me in a somersault, twisting me under the water until I don’t know which way is up. I surface again, flailing now. I am very afraid, suddenly. I am having trouble breathing, and my legs and arms are tired, and the glimpse of shore I get through the smashing waves is far, far, far. I try to scream. Choke on water, spit it out, coughing, and scream again. Kick, kick, try to move with the waves, like a surfer. Like a fish, or dolphin. But the waves hit me like fists, over and over, and I am struggling, but
weakness is like a heavy blanket tangling me up. Making it hard to kick, to pull with my hands.

To stay above the waves.

I can’t. I am under. Not breathing. Trying to swim, but I can’t. Fear is a knife in my heart. I’m not going to make it back up this time.

And then I feel a hand. It wraps around my hair and pulls HARD. My head breaks up over the surface, and then there’s an arm under my armpits and a shoulder against my face.

“I’ve got you,
mija
,” Papa says. It’s Papa. “I’ve got you. You’re all right. Kick your feet, okay? Kick with me.”

I kick. I’m choking on the water, but now Papa’s arm has me lifted up above the water, so I can finally catch my breath. I’m so tired. I try to kick, but my legs won’t work.

“I can’t, Papa.” I sound small, and weak, and afraid.

“You have to, Isabel. The storm is coming. You have to kick . . . you have to help.” He sounds out of breath too.

I look around and see that we are very far from shore, still. The sky is so dark it is almost like night, and there is rain pattering and pitting on the water, tickling my face, warm, and blowing in sheets by the wind. The wind, it is angry. The waves are like mountains.

I kick. I kick as hard as I can, to help Papa save us both.

“That’s good,
mija
. Keep . . . kicking. We’ll make it. Just keep—keep kicking.”

It seems like we swim forever, Papa’s strong arm under me, keeping me above the waves. I feel his legs kicking hard, tirelessly, ceaselessly, scissoring over and over and over. His other arm pulls, stabs out, pulls. He’s gasping rhythmically, breathing hard. He’s tired, too.

And then I feel sand under my toes. I put my feet down. “Papa, we made it. I can walk now.”

He lets go, and I splash. It’s at my chest, and the waves are big, and
strong, but Papa is so tired. I can see it, in the way he staggers to his feet. I am brave. I am strong. I will walk the rest of the way. But the waves keep hitting me, and I have to grab on to his hand for balance, or I will fall and go under.

The rain is falling very hard now. Like warm bolts hitting my head and my shoulders. It is raining so hard now that even walking is like swimming.

Papa glances down, sees me struggling to keep up. He lifts me in his arms, like a baby. I don’t mind. I am tired, so tired, and fear is still worming through my blood, making it hard to breathe or to think or to move.

I feel him set me down, and Mama’s arms are around me, her wet hair against my cheek, and she’s crying. “Oh my baby, my baby. I thought I’d lost you.”

“Papa saved me, Mama.”

“I know. Your papa is very brave.”

I open my eyes to see her looking up at him. Her eyes shine, and I can see tears on her face even though the rain is running all over her. Papa falls heavily to the sand beside us, puts his long strong arms around both of us, and we all just sit there in the rain together, breathing and glad to be alive, and on the shore.

Thunder booms like a cannon, and lightning lights up the dark gray skies.

“We have to go,” Papa says. “The storm is getting worse.”

We take Abuela’s blanket, our now-sodden towels, the cooler full of juice and wine and crackers and cheese, and run for our car. We get in, wet still.

When we are almost home, Mama lays her head on Papa’s shoulder. Swivels a little to look at me.