House Arrest (8 page)

“At least sit with me,” I say, because I feel comfortable at this table.

“No,” he says, his voice firm. “I prefer to wait for you in the lobby.”

When I finish my coffee, I join him. He rises as he sees me coming, extending his hand. He wants to know if everything is all right. If there is anything he can do to make my stay more comfortable. I am certain that under other circumstances he would invite me out for coffee, perhaps to his house to meet his wife. He is trim and fit and tells me he bicycles each day. Not because he has to, he assures me, not because he cannot get gasoline for his car, but because he wants to stay fit. He pounds his chest and it is tight as a drum.

The two men who accompany him are also fit, but they are much younger so it is less impressive. They are also more frightening behind their reflector shades with guns strapped to their hips. Major Lorenzo doesn’t wear a weapon. He doesn’t wear reflector shades. “So,” he says, “we are trying to move forward. To get you back as soon as we can.”

“Yes, I suppose that would be best.”

“There are, however, some delays. Technicalities that hopefully we will clear up soon.” I ponder pressing him,
asking him once again for the reason I am here. Yet I think it is better if I don’t push him. He has been so considerate of my needs, providing me with a room with a view. He does not wish to disturb my coffee. He has been so kind, really, and yet I have this sense that I would not want to cross him, that it might not be the right thing to do.

“So,” he says, “have you spoken with your daughter?” His daughter is sixteen, he tells me, and she wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up. “Do you have a picture?” he asks. Fumbling in our wallets, we produce pictures of our children, both apologizing that the photos are old. His daughter has crooked teeth, which Major Lorenzo says already have braces and that she is taller than he. Then he gazes at my snapshot of Jessica. Like Isabel, he says that she looks just like me, which isn’t true so I know that he is being polite. And this makes me wonder if there isn’t something that he too wants from me. A confession or the whereabouts of the disappeared. But the truth is, and perhaps Isabel has seen to this, I have no idea what happened to her. I have no idea where she is.

Though it is only five o’clock in the afternoon, I find I am suddenly tired after he leaves. There is nothing really that I want to do, and I seem to have no energy for anything anyway. It is as if I have somehow been drained of my strength. I go up to my room, thinking I’ll lie down for a moment. My head rests on the soft pillow. My hands grope at the cool sheets. The room is darkened, the French doors closed. Outside there are shouts, laughter.

I do not remember falling asleep, but soon I am dreaming. I am in a jungle where howler monkeys shake the branches overhead. Blue morpho butterflies loom. A capybara lumbers through the woods. Suddenly the sky darkens and turns a
winter’s gray. At first only a light snow falls, but then it gets heavier, thick and billowy.

I grow smaller, more compact. I’m in a snowsuit, heading into the jungle where now the snow falls densely. The jungle becomes a forest. My hands wear mittens, a scratchy scarf covers my face. I find a trail of human tracks and I follow these through the snow.

O
NCE WHEN I was a girl, there was an ice storm, and for days we couldn’t go to school or drive to the store. We skated up and down the street, but mostly Lydia and I stayed inside, where we played games. We pretended our beds were continents, the floor a roiling sea. For hours we jumped from bed to bed, never touching the floor, where we’d drown.

We played trading places, though we didn’t look anything alike. Everything about her was long, even her fingers and her nose; even though I am older, I am small, round, and brown, like an acorn. But for a day I was Lydia and she was me. We put on each other’s clothes. Hers were too big and I had to roll them up, and her ankles showed when she wore my pants, as if she had just outgrown them.

We switched beds. I did her English homework and she did my math. She could do math fractions in her head while I wrote an essay on why I liked to ice skate (which is what she liked to do). She liked to get out on the ice and twirl, and she
never fell because she had strong ankles, but I tripped over my feet, bruised my bottom on the ice. Still, I wrote how I loved to feel my feet beneath me as they glided, how I loved hot chocolate and rosy cheeks, when in fact I’ve always been someone who loves warm, open places, surf pounding the shore.

I called her friends and made dates and she called mine. When our father hollered for Lydia to come downstairs and set the table, I came. He got so angry it was almost funny to see, the way his face wrinkled up and his eyes set their sights on me as if he’d hit me, but he never did. Instead he shouted, I didn’t call you, I called Lydia.

I told him, Daddy, I’m Lydia today, but he didn’t think that was funny. He didn’t find it funny at all.

My father didn’t like to be in the house, which our mother had furnished from a Sears catalog. He wanted to be at the office or in his “studio,” which was the unheated garage. He ran a small manufacturing firm, before it went bankrupt, that made plastic ashtrays, ice packs, and plastic handles for hamburger presses. The ashtrays had three designs in them that he’d drawn himself—horses, dogs, antique cars. Perfect for the sporty set, he’d joke. He had schemes for other things he wanted to do—refrigerator magnets, party balloons.

In the garage during the warmer months our father painted. He painted mostly seascapes, landscapes, and cities from postcards—usually Paris in the rain. Lydia and I would go out there in the summer and he’d give us a brush and some paint and we’d try to copy his paintings on pieces of paper he’d tack to the trees. Whenever Lydia asked him to paint us, he always said, “I don’t do people.”

When it was cold, he tried to paint in the basement, but he
complained that we bothered him too much. “There’s not enough room here,” he’d say to our mother of the two-bedroom ranch house they’d never pay off.

The January of the ice storm, there was a thaw and the thaw brought rain. It rained and rained, and as the temperature fell the rain glazed the trees, the power lines, the roads. Lydia and I saw fairy castles in the glass and pretended to be snow queens while our father tried to break up the ice in the driveway with a pickax, whacking like a prisoner trying to escape. But the driveway was too long and the ice too thick, and once he had broken it up there was nowhere to go.

We dressed up in long cotton skirts and our mother made grilled cheese sandwiches. We ate them in front of the fireplace with pickles and potato chips. The sandwiches were hot with thick, runny cheese, and the pickles stung my tongue. When we were done, our father said to carry our dishes back to the kitchen. Lydia never wanted to carry heavy things because she dropped them, so I loaded up the tray. But when I passed our father on the three stairs that connected the living room to the kitchen, he said, “Maggie, you’re going to drop that tray.”

“I won’t,” I told him.

His nostrils flared; his jaw was set firm. “Yes, you will.” Even as he said it, I felt my foot tangling in my skirt. The tray grew heavy in my hands, tilting as the dishes slipped forward. I listened as the dishes tumbled down the stairs, shattering on the floor. “You see,” my father said, as he walked away, “I told you you would.”

T
HE RINGING of the phone wakes me and for a moment I am not sure where I am. My surroundings aren’t familiar and I cannot recall what city I am in or how I got here. Then I hear a voice, speaking Spanish to me. “I’m afraid I’ve woken you,” the voice says apologetically, and I know it is Major Lorenzo. I struggle to sit up.

“It’s all right. I should be getting up.” I reach for my watch, which is on the nightstand, and see that it is only eight o’clock in the morning, but I have been asleep since the previous afternoon. There is a hollow pit in my stomach and suddenly I am very hungry.

“There are some people who would like to see you.”

“Oh,” I say, “are they here?”

“No,” he replies, drawing out the word, as if this thought never would have occurred to him, “we are going there.”

“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” I tell him. I am about to get up, to shower quickly, but as I lie there, I am struck with the odd feeling that I have not been alone, as if someone has
been in the room, watching me. Looking at my belongings, at me as I slept. I am warm, sweating, as I get up and go through my things. My head seems to be reeling, as if I have fallen into a dead sleep. I open drawers, peer into the closet. Scan the walls for holes, hidden cameras. Everything seems to be in place, as I left it. When I close my eyes, I can almost hear another person breathing, yet I know no one is there. Still I undress in the bathroom, where I take a cold shower; I put on my clothes before leaving the bathroom.

That is when I notice the frog. It is a small, green frog, wedged between the wall of the bathroom and a window that must have once opened onto the outside. How the frog got into my room, let alone into that wedged place between the window and the wall, I’ll never know. But it makes a deep, guttural sound. The window is locked shut, so I’ll try to find a maid to let the frog out.

As I leave the room, I see a maid and signal to her, but she just looks at me, then scurries away. I hear her whispering to another worker in the corridor as I walk by. They know, I tell myself. Everyone knows who I am. And what I have done.

Major Lorenzo sits in the lobby, leaning forward, speaking with his aide, who even inside wears his reflector shades. I have yet to see his eyes. Major Lorenzo is dressed in perfect military attire and looks like a man who is going somewhere. As soon as he sees me, he stops talking and rises. So does his aide, and people turn, looking my way, since there aren’t many men around in reflector shades with semiautomatic weapons strapped to their waists.

Major Lorenzo extends his hand and I notice that he smells of after shave. Canoe? Old Spice? Some brand my father used
to wear. “Well, Maggie,” Major Lorenzo says, calling me by my first name for the first time, “I’m sorry we disturbed you.” He motions for me to sit down.

“It’s all right,” I tell him, “I have things to do.”

Both men give me quizzical looks, wondering what that could possibly be. I shrug, pointing to my nails. “A manicure,” I say, and they laugh. Major Lorenzo has coffee and toast waiting for me and he sits beside me impassively as I gobble it down.

Stepping out into the plaza, I am blinded by the light and the heat of the day. In the short time I have been here, I find I am growing accustomed to drawn shades, the subdued light filtered through them. Major Lorenzo holds my elbow as I step down from the curb, as if we are on a date. Perhaps now we will go out for coffee, have lunch at El Colibrí. I feel the sturdy cobblestones beneath my feet. Solid ground.

People saunter past—full-bodied women move in languorous steps as if they have just risen from their beds. Men strut; others mill about, smoking cigars. Suddenly I am gripped with the urge to run, to dash away, to lose myself in the throngs. I’ve seen this in my dog. Sometimes he gets out and races down the street and I know that what he wants to do, what it is in his heart to do, is to run away.

But I do not break free. I do as I am told. Major Lorenzo opens the door to the plain beige car I traveled in before. His aide waits until I am comfortably seated inside. Then the two of them sit in front, Major Lorenzo with his arm draped over the back of the seat, turning to me from time to time. “Is it too much air?” he asks as he did when he first brought me here. “Did you have enough to eat?” I am torn between feeling like a visiting dignitary and a truant child en route to
some official reprimand, my disgruntled parents in the front seat.

We drive inland, away from the sea, and this disappoints me, since I was hoping we would follow the water. I want to take deep breaths. Instead the air grows heavy and thick. We move swiftly down the winding roads that lead away from Puerto Angélico, twisting so many times that I am not sure whether we are going to the east or the west.

I have always had a good sense of direction, but now I cannot seem to get my bearings. I try to find markers so I’ll remember the way—a billboard, a sports arena, a road sign, but everything seems generic, nondescript, though I know I have never taken this road before. Isabel never brought me this way, so there cannot be much of interest here.

Bloodred mariposa and wandering primrose cling to the median strip, but along the sides of the road the vegetation is thick, junglelike. Once again there is that sticky-sweet smell of overripe fruit. Palmettos, banana trees arch across the road. Perhaps there is a rain forest they want me to see. Something for the ecotourist market. A secret jungle joint-venture hotel, an inland lake resort about to be opened. Or perhaps there is an important person who wants to meet me. I think of all the houses of El Cabalio—the hunting lodge, the
finca
. He thinks I have information to share with him. I will tell him what little I know and they will let me go home. I picture a veranda by a pool, a cold luncheon plate of shrimp and little crabs from the sea.

We become trapped behind the back of a bus. Diesel fumes spew into the car and Major Lorenzo grows impatient. He tells the driver to lean on his horn, to drive up on the sidewalk. He must not want to keep whomever it is waiting.
For the first time the aide puts on our siren and the bus pulls over to the side of the road so we can speed by.

Soon the vegetation drops back, the road widens, and we turn off onto a dirt road lined with cinder-block buildings, institutional structures that sit on dry, burned-out fields, and this does not appear to be where the head of a small island nation would live. It doesn’t even seem to be where he would work. And then I see the barbed wire around the buildings, the bars on the windows. These are prisons, and I know because I have written about this in my guidebook—that they are full.

It occurs to me what has not exactly occurred before. That anything could happen. That they could lock me up and lose the key. “Where are we going?” I ask Major Lorenzo, my voice trembling.