Ransomed Dreams (7 page)

The girl nodded. “It was an attack at the grand opening of your women’s job-training center. You got hurt, your arm and ribs. Your close friend Reina, your coworker, died. Señor was struck. The assassin got away.”

“Right. Well, Luke—Señor Traynor—protected me that day. He shielded me so that I did not get hit. And then he got me to safety.”
And then he took care of me for weeks and weeks.

“He was your bodyguard?”

“No, just a . . . a diplomat. He worked at the embassy too.”

Mercedes’s eyes were still large, but curiosity had replaced the fear. “So he is a hero?”

Sheridan couldn’t help but smile. At this point she’d go with whatever helped the girl understand. “Something like that.”

“You owe him your life!”

“Yes, I do. I will always be grateful to him.” She paused and parsed again. “About the hug. Unfortunately he came to report that my father had a stroke and is most likely dying. Therefore, I was upset.” Inwardly she flinched at the half truth of what had caused her distress, but she didn’t want to get into familial dysfunctions. “Señor Traynor knew that, and so he hugged me—”

“Oh, señora! I am so sorry! You must go to your father!” Mercedes’s resemblance to Padre Miguel could be uncanny.

“Yes, I think I must, but I don’t believe that Eliot is up for travel. I’ll contact the nurses who helped us out when we first came here. They can work shifts at the house—”

“No! No! I can do it. I can take care of señor. Please, señora, please! Let me do this for you.”

“But you do so much already, Mercedes. I wouldn’t want you to shoulder the entire burden yourself.” Even as she spoke the words, she thought of the girl’s history. The eldest of a brood raised by a widowed mother, Mercedes had matured early in life. She was totally capable of caring for Eliot and their household. In reality, she probably already did more than Sheridan.

“Señora, you know Javier will help. He can sleep there, and I can sleep here so nothing looks inappropriate. And in the daytime he’ll drink coffee with him and play chess and drive us places. You agree that señor likes having him around.” She smiled knowingly. “Right?”

Sheridan caught her meaning. Eliot did not easily welcome visitors, nor did he particularly care for interacting with the locals, even the nearest neighbors. He avoided going out beyond the enclosed courtyards. On Saturday evenings, when villagers gathered on the square and music filled the air, he never joined Sheridan as she watched from the balcony, basking in the merriment floating up from a block away. Whenever she suggested they might go down the hill and join in, he rebuffed the idea.

But he enjoyed the company of Javier, the gentle artist who adored Mercedes and was an above-average chess player. On particularly bad days, it was only the sight of the flirting couple that calmed Eliot.

It might work. It just might work. All she had to do was convince herself that Luke’s hug did not awaken old feelings and that she could leave the cocoon without falling apart at the seams. And then all she had to do was convince her husband that he could get along without her for a few days.

Which was probably tantamount to persuading both of them that the sun rose in the west, pulled by six oxen with purple bows on their tails.

Chapter 12

“You can’t be serious.” Eliot squinted at his wife. She had just breezed into the house, at least half an hour later than promised, and announced she was going to Chicago after all. “Why on earth?”

“Eliot.” Sheridan slid into the armchair across from him at the desk. “She’s my sister.”

At least his wife had invoked the name of Calissa and not the smutty-mouthed coot known as her father.
Bottom-feeder
did not begin to depict the man. Harrison Cole crept through life at a level lower than slime. It always had and still baffled Eliot that Sheridan was connected to him, biologically or otherwise.

She waited, that look on her face, the one she’d acquired over the past year, the one that snarled his insides. It pinched her mouth, her eyes, her forehead and reminded him that their life had been irrevocably changed by circumstances nowhere near their control. And there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

Twelve years his junior and his second wife, Sheridan had been called his “trophy wife.” She was without question attractive, but not in the showy way that phrase indicated. When she first heard the reference, she had laughed until tears ran down her face. She insisted that the only times her appearance had turned heads was when she was a towheaded two-year-old. Athletic and taller than average, she embodied the healthy glow of a Midwestern girl. The hint of Spain in her fine complexion and dark eyes blended into oblivion unless one studied her closely.

Neither could her personality support the “trophy” label. She was far too devoted to good works, far too intelligent and real. A good thing it was for him. A flibbertigibbet would have hightailed it from the hospital long before the morphine dissipated from his pathetic body.

But there were moments when, like now, that look came over her face and he felt a stab of fear. Was there an end to her rope?

She had said something.

“Pardon?” he asked.

“I said, do you want to go with me?”

“Good heavens. Why would I want to go all the way to Chicago in order to watch Harrison Cole die?” He heard the peevish tone in his voice. It was another recent development. Like the incessant pain, it had become part of the warp and woof of his existence.

“Well, Eliot, that’s probably not exactly the question, is it? I believe the question is, are you up for a trip in order to accompany me to a funeral because that’s what husbands and wives do for each other?”

He smiled grimly. At least in all the recent upheaval, Sheridan had not lost her candor. It was one of the characteristics that had first piqued his interest in her, the one he could trust the most.

The one that promised she would warn him of any rope ending.

“Eliot?”

“Touché. We both know I have not been up for husbandly duties for quite some time. I am certainly not up for a trip to accompany you to a funeral.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. But that’s just the way it is.”

That’s just the way it is.
How often she summed up their life with that pointless phrase.

“I’m sorry too,” he said. “But do you honestly think you’re up for it? You still look over your shoulder when we go into Mesa Aguamiel.”

She shrugged. “I have to try.”

“Right now?” Struggling against the anxiety thrumming in his head, he grasped at straws to keep her at home. “We have quite a bit of work to do over the next few weeks.” Sheridan played an integral role in his work. With her help, he was writing a book, a mix of U.S. history in Latin America, his experiences growing up an ambassador’s son, and his own diplomatic career. His agent expected to see a large section of it soon.

“Mercedes can help.”

“Mercedes?” He nearly barked the name. “Her English is progressing, yes, but I doubt she’s literate enough to write or to proofread.”

“She’s not bad. And so much of what you and I do together is dialogue about what and how you want to write. If you converse in Spanish, she can take notes.”

“Meaning that, on top everything, I’d have to translate!”

“You’ve been translating since the midwife placed you in your mother’s arms in Mexico City. Language is not your issue.”

True enough. He’d spent most of his life not speaking English. His parents did not settle in their home state of Connecticut until both were in their seventies. Eliot had grown up in Latin American countries. Except for a brief time with his parents in D.C., his stateside stints added up to a grand total of two: Harvard and a hospital in Houston.

Sheridan leaned across the desk. “Your issue is health, Eliot, and Mercedes is perfectly capable of administering your meds. She knows how to exercise your legs. She’s a better cook than I am and already takes care of most of the housekeeping details. Javier will do whatever you need him to do.” She paused. “I only want ten days.”

The stab of fear escalated into a tidal wave of terror. Clenching his fists on his lap, he rode it out, avoiding her eyes and silently cursing the shooter and his choice of bullet that fragmented upon impact with his shoulder blade. It damaged nearly every organ, bone, and nerve in his body. It should have killed him. Why hadn’t it killed him? Death would have been preferred to the incessant pain, the unending weariness. The need—for crying out loud, at his age!—for a walker.

Eliot felt the compress of a cool, damp cloth on the back of his neck.

“Take some deep breaths,” Sheridan said.

He did so and tried not to think of depending on Mercedes and Javier to intuit his needs. Even worse was the uncertainty of Sheridan in Chicago with her father. If he remained in a coma, then he wasn’t talking. A good thing. Sheridan didn’t need to hear any tommyrot from the old man.

She said, “I don’t want to go, but I have to. It’s just the way it is. Luke is staying down at the inn on the square. We can get a flight out late tomorrow morning.”

Sheridan had to be the only woman on the face of the earth who could pack on a moment’s notice. She never wondered what to wear. She probably still followed her lifetime practice of keeping her passport and other essentials in a bag, ready to go. No doubt she would be gone by morning.

He was out of arguments.

“Luke gave me a cell phone,” she said. “Mercedes can call me from Mesa Aguamiel whenever you need to. I’ll leave messages with Mercedes’s aunt. She can call me too. Her family and friends are always coming and going between towns. We will stay in touch fairly easily, considering Topala still hasn’t quite made it into the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first.”

She had it all planned out. He had nothing to say.

“Ten days, Eliot. That’s all I need.”

“And if he doesn’t die within the designated time frame?”

“Then Calissa can handle things by herself. I’m in and out of there.” She paused. “You are going to be just fine for ten days.”

He doubted that. With his entire being he doubted that.

Chapter 13

On the highway to Mazatlán, Mexico

Sheridan gazed out the side window of Luke’s rental car. The passing brush melded into a fuzzy streak of browns and greens. What she saw more distinctly was Eliot’s blank face as he expressed a civil good-bye. No amount of hand-holding or promises to bring back pizza packed in dry ice from Gino’s East coaxed even a “safe travels” from him. An “I love you”? Forget it.

Maybe it was more fear than the anger she assumed he hid. Despite hints of improvement, the post-trauma debris still cluttered their reactions to even the smallest of daily challenges. A change of routine? A major ordeal. She was nowhere near being completely free of fears, and it was harder for him.

Luke cleared his throat, breaking the silence that had ridden with them for the forty minutes since they’d left Topala. “He’ll be all right.”

Luke’s ability to read her mind did not lower her blood pressure. “Give it a rest, Gabe. I’ll deal with this myself.”

“It was that bad?”

“It was horrible. You know, nothing ever used to rattle him. He was the quintessential peacemaker. So collected, so in control. Now he obsesses over how papers and books are positioned on his desk.”

“That’s the thing: his desktop is a big deal because he’s no longer in control of other things. Not of an embassy, not even of his own ability to walk from the courtyard to the kitchen. Your leaving forces him to face the issue, to face what he’s lost.”

“Tell me, what would you do under the circumstances?”

“If I were physically disabled and not able to engage in the only work I’d ever known? No contest. I’m thinking beach scenes with a bevy of beautiful nurses and flowing tequila.”

“Good grief. Save your flippancy for the boys. I’m not buying that scene. It’s not you in the least.”

He braked behind a slow-moving pickup truck, waited for several oncoming vehicles in the two-lane highway to go by, and pulled out to pass the truck. He eased the car back into their lane and finally spoke, his voice whispery. “No, it’s not me. I’d probably want to crawl into a hole and not talk to anyone.”

“Like Eliot.”

“Yep.”

“And if you were married, what would you want from your wife?”

They sped another distance down the highway before he replied. “I’d want her to stay right beside me.” Again he put words to Eliot’s attitude.

“But why?”

“Because she would be my only link with sanity.” He rasped as if the words strangled him.

His rare display of emotion dismayed her. She protested. “But you said he’d be all right.”

“He will be. He just won’t have an easy time of it.”

“No way. You can’t lay that responsibility on me, that I’m his only link with sanity.”

“I’m not. It just is.”

She sank back against the seat and looked again out the side window.
Men.
She should have been a nun.

For a time she had pondered the option. It was her mother’s influence, of course. Ysabel’s impassioned voice had echoed after her death, a rhythmic throb in Sheridan’s teenage heart.
“Jesús is calling
.
”
Ba-boom.
“Jesús is calling
.
”
Ba-boom.

But there was another theme that Ysabel had instilled into the life of her youngest. Time and again, through her actions and words, she reminded Sheridan,
Remember to help the helpless women who live in poverty. Give them tools; give them hope.

Ysabel had never shared details from her own experiences growing up in poverty in Venezuela, scraping by as a young adult by working in a café in Caracas because there was no other option. In what was left unsaid, though, Sheridan understood that for her mother, being poor and without education led to unspeakable horrors. It was a common story repeated in every language, in every nation.

Sheridan went to college in Chicago and lost herself in the field of social work and volunteerism. The voice of Jesús and the convent idea faded, replaced by the flesh-and-blood reality of helping others.