Lost Girls (10 page)

Aleksandra turned away from the slot in the door, hearing light snoring behind her, and reached down to pet the head of Jill Bishop. The girl’s hair was soaked with sweat, as hot as the walls that radiated around them. She had been sleeping a great deal lately, if you called whimpering and shivering sleeping.

Aleksandra had entered law enforcement after serving in the Polish army, where she attended Land Forces Military Academy. She was educated in the effects of prolonged stress in battle and knew about the body’s common biological responses. The terror of battle raised blood sugars at the same time it debilitated the body’s ability to digest. When the spleen began to expedite red blood cells to produce more oxygen, high levels of cortisone and adrenaline were pumped into the circulatory system. If the encounter ended quickly, the body’s countermeasures stood down. If the encounter was protracted, the body’s biological responses, some fourteen hundred altogether, would mutate to meet the undue stress. Over time those transformations would begin to take a physiological toll; the person would begin to experience involuntary muscle contractions, nervous tremors, fatigue, intestinal maladies. Eventually he or she would forget things, lose problem-solving abilities, confuse what was vital with the trivial.

The sleeping girl was almost there, she thought. The sleeping girl was shutting down.

Aleksandra wiped her hands on her T-shirt and stood again, put her eye to the hole in the door, and looked around the cellar. Then she heard footsteps in the corridor, one person, coming toward her.

The girl behind her rolled over, moaned, then gasped loudly for air. A second later her breathing returned to normal, and the slow smooth snoring resumed.

The footsteps were getting closer. Aleksandra’s heart began to pound.

She tried to control her emotions, head pressed tightly against the wooden door.

Aleksandra thought once more about destiny. If there really was such a thing, then what was to be her destiny today?

She sometimes envied the sleeping girl behind her, would not have minded curling into a ball and sucking her thumb for a day. But then she thought of a young redheaded girl on a ship all those months ago, buried now not far away in the recesses of the castle’s foundation. She didn’t want to end up like her. She didn’t want these despicable men to decide her fate.

She heard boots scratching dirt—they were only a dozen meters away, would be visible in a moment’s time—and then suddenly the man with green pants was at the door and she felt her heart pounding in her chest.

Destiny once again flickered through her thoughts. To believe in destiny was to admit that all that had happened was preordained, that every victim in life was born to suffer their fate, born to come to ruin on a particular day and time. It was such an unfair scenario, and yet could it be that destiny worked in opposing directions? For both good and bad? If destiny had brought her here, could it also have brought the man in green pants to her rescue?

His hand went to the slit in the door and through it he pushed a small cylinder. Then he turned and walked away.

Oh my God, oh my God.
Her lips formed the words without sound.

She kept her eye on him until he was gone, then she slid back to the door, until she was sitting in the dirt and facing her spent cellmate. Aleksandra reached for the cylinder and unrolled it, heart pounding, tears welling in her eyes.

It was a single cigarette paper wound around the stub of a lead pencil.

It was almost too hard to believe. They had a real chance now. They might yet come out of this alive, she thought.

She knew she had no control over what the man did with the paper once he left here. Who he saw and what he did with it was completely up to him. She could only pray that he was as wise as he was compassionate. That he would know who to give the note to. That they would call the phone number in Warsaw that she would write.

She held the pencil stub in one shaking hand and tried to think of what to say. She had never really prepared herself for this moment, never really believed something like this might happen. Now that it had she could only wonder how to reduce these months of hell to the size of a cigarette paper. What words to use when your life hinged on every one.

She actually smiled for a second, realizing she didn’t even know what language to write in. She could express herself in three languages, but not well enough to risk making a mistake. Not with something as important as this. Probably it wouldn’t matter if it were in Polish. Probably it was more a matter of whom the man in green pants gave the note to rather than what it said. The right person would know how to get it translated.

Water struck the fragile paper and she realized she was crying. She held the delicate paper away from her face and blew upon it gently. She mustn’t destroy it. There would be no other chance.

When she got herself together, she put it on her knee and started to write.

Nazywam si
Aleksandra,
I am Aleksandra….

It was silent and eerily so, a thousand-foot stretch of runway cut out of the dense mountain jungle. There were no buildings, no lights, no windsocks. Only this strip of tarmac that was old and cracked and hot as a frying pan under her feet.

Tangles of vines and withering palm fronds lay on glimpses of old fencing; once there had been deer and wild boar to worry a taxiing pilot, but the wildlife was all gone from Haiti, decimated like the island’s forests and plantations.

Two white-necked crows scanned the runway for vertebrates. A Haitian man poked his machine gun like an angry finger in her face.

The truck that brought her here had disappeared in a blur of black and green vegetation, a gate or hole or section of open fence that was beyond her line of sight.

If Aleksandra had been here she would have told her to remember where the truck entered the jungle. To run for that place if anything happened.

But Jill wasn’t thinking about running. Even walking was difficult, as she was shaking badly. The move from the cellar was entirely unexpected. It was the trip she had been dreading all these months in confinement.

She knew that something bad would follow what Aleksandra had done. She knew that Aleksandra would be taken to the red room and that something terrible was going to be in store for her as well.

She missed her brave friend and wished she were here now, she wished that they were going away together now. She couldn’t imagine how she would have survived the past month without the Polish girl, how she would have managed alone with her thoughts, always ignorant of what was happening around her. She wondered if possibly Aleksandra was dead.

Dead like the man in green pants whom they shot in front of the cell door. It had taken an afternoon for the man to finally die. He just lay there and moaned, crying out and speaking names in a language she did not know.

It was the first time she had ever seen her friend Aleksandra cry, the first time Aleksandra had been shaken to the point of losing control.

Then Bedard came for her and he took her away. And Jill could hear her friend’s screams all the way down the corridor.

This morning the guards had come for her, but instead of the red room they brought her to this airplane. She would never see her parents again. Not if she left this island, she knew.

Looking back, Jill’s life had been easy until now, her sacrifices few. She had taken the time to volunteer, feeding the homeless, decrying war and poverty and discrimination. But in the end she was just like the rest of her contemporaries. She thought she could identify with suffering, when nothing was further from the truth. She had been deluding herself. Up until now she had not the slightest idea what kind of suffering went on in the real world.

The airplane was small, an old commuter. You could still make out the traces of the red and blue logo across the tail, the snags of once colorful carpet clinging to rivets on the aluminum steps that led up to the ominous outline of an open door.

The interior was dark but for a single ray of light escaping the cockpit. A black man wearing a dirty white T-shirt sat behind the controls.

Philippe, the oldest and fattest of Bedard’s security guards, mopped his brow with a filthy kerchief, occasionally wringing out the sweat, which sizzled on the hot tarmac. His machine gun was cradled carelessly over the crook of his arm, and he scratched unconsciously at his crotch and under his arms.

Aleksandra had always said that Philippe was the weak link among the guards. Aleksandra said if she were ever alone with him she would kill him and go hunting for Bedard with his weapon. Jill never doubted that she meant it.

Something popped like a firecracker and everyone jumped. Philippe swung his weapon toward a puff of black smoke lingering over the right wing. A moment later there was another pop and the propeller turned a half rotation, then it caught and the engine ratcheted to life. Jill watched it turn until it was only a blur and the plane began to vibrate on its bald rubber tires.

This was a big crossroads, she knew. This was the last place she would ever have been seen, here on this island shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Philippe said something and she turned to see him leering at her. He extended the barrel of his machine gun and pressed it against her breast. Then he grinned, exposing a gold tooth, and nodded toward the stairs of the aircraft.

“Move,” he commanded. “Move, move, move.”

Jill knew that Aleksandra wouldn’t have wanted her to set foot on that plane. Aleksandra had always said that their best chance for escape would be when they were being moved from one location to another. Jill knew that Aleksandra would have been pleased to see that Philippe was their guard. She knew that Aleksandra would have seen this as a chance to escape. Aleksandra always thought she had a chance to escape.

But Jill was not Aleksandra.

“Move,” Philippe barked again.

Jill looked once more toward the jungle, toward the spot along the fence where the truck had disappeared. Then she took a deep breath and held it.

Philippe raised the barrel of his machine gun until it was level with her head. There was a moment of uncertainty before Jill released her breath and the muscles in her face relaxed. She looked at the plane a long moment, then nodded her head in resignation, taking a step forward.

Philippe relaxed, pushed the kerchief against his neck, scratched his crotch.

Jill had spent these last few months thinking about her childhood. Thinking about all the years leading up to this nightmare. Any girl in her position would have: all would have tried to put this into context.

Why, they would have wondered, had it happened to them of all people? Why not someone else, why not the girl standing next to her in that market square? Perhaps some saw it as part of their god’s bigger plan.

Jill, who had been raised Catholic, thought not. No true god would permit such an outrage. No true god would permit men to disgrace what he created.

It had at last become easy for her to empathize, to imagine the horror of poverty and starvation and slavery. She understood the agony of being torn from family. She understood the hopelessness of an uncertain future. She knew that every day that separated her from her old life she had changed as a person, was moving away from who she once was. And you couldn’t go back, you could never go back. Even if you were rescued you could never become that person again.

She put a foot on the step and climbed toward the door, strands of blond hair sticking to the sides of her face. Her mother was near. She sensed it. Carol Bishop would never have stopped looking for her daughter. She would never have taken no for an answer from the Dominican government. For all Jill knew, they were already in Haiti and hours away from finding her. Perhaps that was what prompted the guards to move her from the castle.

It didn’t matter now. All was for naught. She would never again be this close in time and place to her parents and what she considered the last day of her life—the day the cruise ship
Constellation
left her in Santo Domingo.

She neared the door and felt the stairs bounce under her feet. Philippe was behind her, still yelling something unintelligible.

The pilot was starting the other engine.

The hull of the plane stank of dead rodents and moldy carpet. The seats had been removed but their outline was still visible where they had once rested against the filthy metal walls. Near head level, where cargo would have been stored, were open bins filled with fruit rinds, mango pits, and rusty tools. Threads were left hanging from rivets beneath a line of badly scratched windows.

She was made to sit on the bare metal floor. The craft rumbled, shifting to the right and turning on the runway. The roar of the engine was deafening in the sweltering cabin; muffled shouts rose between the pilot and the guard and then the door was pulled closed.

Jill looked down at her hands. Philippe sat opposite her, machine gun on his lap. He eyed her hungrily. Never had she been alone with any of the guards before.

The plane began to inch forward, tires dropping in and out of ruts in the tarmac. The engines provoked a spine-numbing vibration throughout the hull. The plane picked up speed making its run, and Jill could feel the craft grow light under its wings. Moments later they were airborne and the plane banked steeply, causing her to pitch forward in the direction of Philippe.

Jill craned her neck to look through the cockpit and caught a glimpse of green mountains before they entered blue sky.

Jill rested her head facedown between her knees and saw the initials JMS scratched on the metal floor between her thighs. The initials were followed by a question mark and the year 2002.

Who was JMS, she wondered, and where was she now? Would she be alive or would she be long dead? And if she was alive, what had she been made to do?

Jill wasn’t a virgin before the family cruise to the Dominican Republic, but neither was she experienced. She did it with a boy one Sunday afternoon on the rec-room couch in her parents’ house. She could still remember the smallest details of the day. They had just returned from the movies and found a note from her parents telling them they were out with friends. Money for pizza was clipped to a Domino’s coupon and left by the telephone. They turned on a movie, a horror movie, but he was soon kissing her and his hands were on the buttons of her blouse.

Try as she might, she could not speak, mesmerized by his fingers, willing each to find another button and then another. Only when he began to lift her bra did she utter a sound, but the sound was not a no and she groaned when he put his mouth on her.

It was laughable now, the dreams she’d once had, just fucking laughable. She had imagined finishing college and volunteering in some third-world country. She and the imaginary boyfriend who would accompany her to some impoverished village, they would work in an improvised hospital by day and make love in their tent by night. They would return to America and then they would get married and buy a home in Oak Park near her parents and write papers and get published. She would have a room for an office to organize her philanthropic endeavors. There would be candles in the bedroom, a husband’s cologne on the pillows.

She’d made a frivolous vow to herself one night in the cellar. That she would give up men for the rest of her life if ever she got out of here. She would do anything not to be touched by one again, even join an order, in spite of her distaste for religion. She would have kept the vow, too, but none of that was ever going to happen. By the time she’d be old enough to drink alcohol she’d be secondhand goods, and that was if she was lucky enough to survive.

A boot kicked her sandal and she looked up at Philippe. His wiry hair was going gray around the temples. He was sweating profusely, khaki shirt ringed at the neck and underarms. He was talking to her, rolling a joint between long filthy fingernails. He put the joint in fat worm-colored lips and lit it with a yellow Bic. Then he put the lighter away, patted his forehead again with his dirty kerchief, and lifted the machine gun off his lap with his free hand and waved it in her direction. He spoke to her in Creole.

“He wants you to undress,” the pilot said.

Jill glanced at the cockpit and saw the pilot turned in his seat.

The cabin was filling with the pungent aroma of marijuana.

“He says he wants you to undress and if you don’t he’ll throw you out of the plane.”

Jill stared back at Philippe in horror.

The guard locked eyes with her, and waited.

Jill kept her eyes on him, never blinking, until he looked away. Then she put her head down on her arms and closed her eyes.

Philippe took a deep hit off the joint and laid down his machine gun, stood, and walked to the door. Sunlight glared off the pilot’s windshield, the plane leveled off, the sound of the engine diminished. Philippe grabbed the stainless-steel latch and yanked the door back.

Sunlight blinded them as air rushed into the cabin, sucking everything loose from the floors and pitting their bodies and faces with sand and dirt. Clothing, paper, Philippe’s roach all flew out the door; it took a full minute before the cabin cleared and they could lower the hands that were shielding their eyes. There, beyond the open door, was an azure sky and fresh sweet air, far below it a diamond-studded ocean.

Philippe spoke again, pointing at her once more, grabbing his shirt and pulling it up over his fat belly, wanting her to mimic him, to strip. She looked at the open door and stood.

Slowly she moved her hands to her waist and grabbed the bottom of her blouse.

Philippe watched her eagerly as she undid the buttons and dropped the shirt to the floor. He pointed, laughing, as he nodded toward the pilot. Jill unzipped her skirt.

Philippe made kissing sounds, put his lips together, smacking them.

Tears streaked down Jill’s face as her skirt fell to the floor.

She stood there, hands balled in trembling fists. Philippe was watching her closely, his eyes sliding up and down her body.

Jill fought for balance as the plane pitched through turbulence; the pilot was turned in his seat looking back at her through the cockpit door.

Jill’s long blond hair whipped about her face, rising from her shoulders in the rush of warm wind. She looked down at her body and for the first time in a month she smiled. Then she stepped toward Philippe, reached behind her back, and undid her bra and dropped it in his lap. Then she sidestepped him and walked out the door.