This Is Not Your City (23 page)

Wil had once planned to be a doctor, but had transferred to dental school after one semester. “I decided I didn't want that kind of responsibility,” he told Lucinda on their first date, drinks in the Plaza in downtown Kansas City. He did a lot of elective oral surgery procedures for which patients paid out of pocket. It was an excellent living, but it would still have been useful for their son to have a doctor for a father. There would have been a camaraderie in the hospitals, the sympathy textured with less condescension, more empathy. Wil had tried, sometimes, when Aaron was in the NICU. “I was in med school for a year,” he'd say. “Oral surgeon, now. I can tell you the tongue's as finicky as a spine. Just a tangle of nerves.” It made the doctors trade looks over Aaron's head. Lucinda had waited for Wil to catch on, to feel the blush of his own embarrassment, but eight months in, Aaron still in intensive care, Lucinda on an indefinite leave of absence from her job with an insurance firm, she finally asked him to stop. Over cheeseburgers in the hospital cafeteria, she tried to explain the vast distance between a pediatric neurologist and a man who extracted wisdom teeth twelve times per week, however much they might share in the materials of the body, the blood and the white solidity of skull or tooth or jaw.

Wil convinced Lucinda to take a camel ride on the Western Plateau and snapped picture after picture while she swayed uncertainly on the animal's hump. The camel smelled warm and dusty, its hair faintly oily like sheep's wool and full of grit. Lucinda wound her fingers around the tasseled reins and into its brown coat, squeezed her legs tighter. She was wearing white linen against a blue sky, the sand-colored pyramids of Giza ranged behind her. Wil paid the Egyptian photographer for two Polaroids, fitted into paper sleeves that framed the pictures with
Camels!: An Egyptian Tradishon
. “Lovely,” the camel-keeper said, as he helped Lucinda back to earth. “How many camels for your woman?” he asked Wil.

“Twenty,” Wil said. “You can have her for twenty.”

The camel-keeper frowned. “It was a joke. You are supposed to be offended.”

There was a second shore excursion to Alexandria and its new library, glass and steel built with UN money. The tour lasted two hours, which gave Wil time to come up with sixteen ways to burn the building down. “I shall incinerate the common heritage of man,” he whispered, as the tour guide ushered them past a bank of computers.

“Stop,” Lucinda said. Between the information about modern methods of moisture control, about the Greco-Roman heritage of El Iskandariya and the causeway that linked the Cape of Figs to the old Pharos Lighthouse, about their expanding multitude of brilliant children, it felt like more knowledge than she could handle. She kicked Wil in the shin when he spoke about their son, a boy with straw-colored hair like his mother's and wide, shining eyes like no one they'd known. Lucinda apologized after dinner, because Wil had for once said no more than what was true.

It was the first real vacation they'd taken since the birth, and of course everyone had asked what they were doing with Aaron, what arrangements they'd made, as if he were mail to be picked up or a plant to be watered. There's a good facility in Olathe, they said, wondering how to explain without feeling like they'd taken their son to be kenneled like a dog. They'd been looking at the facility anyway, worrying about a time they might no longer be able to care for him. Children with more awareness, they'd been told, should be eased into institutionalization. With Aaron, nobody knew. He followed things with his eyes, sometimes. He smiled at people who entered his field of vision. He had learned to swallow, eventually, and to roll over unassisted. He was ten years old, and no one had any idea how long he might live.

Sometimes Lucinda could spend an hour touching the soft bottoms of his feet, the distinct whorls of toe prints that walking had never rubbed away. His feet were beautiful and very wrong, marked with raised patterns never meant to last. Once a year she would ink his feet, press them to a piece of white posterboard. She hung the prints in a long line down the basement stairwell.

The afternoon the ship entered the Suez, the Voorhuises kept to themselves, took photographs of each other, singly, posed with the brown geometry of the canal, the tall, vertical walls. One of
the leisure coordinators saw them and offered to take a picture of them both together. They put their arms around each other's waist and smiled. At the moment the leisure coordinator snapped the picture, a maintenance crew appeared on the crest of the shore, on the Sinai side, above Lucinda's left shoulder. The coordinator handed the digital camera back to them and watched them call up the shot. “Is it okay?” she asked. “Do you want me to try again? Are you enjoying yourselves?”

“Yes. No. Immensely,” Wil answered, and the leisure coordinator left them alone.

Out the other side of the Suez, skirting the Saudi peninsula, Lucinda imagined she could feel the spray of the Red Sea coating her skin with a layer of brine so salty a lick across her hand would make her lips purse with the bitterness. She could feel it crust along her hair, brackish and saline, and she showered morning, night, and midday. She and Wil spent two hours on a sunny afternoon inside the ship's boutique arguing over souvenirs and postcards: who to send to, which pictures, how many, how much. They bought nearly fifty cards, and they knew they looked green, like people who never traveled sending mail to everyone they'd ever met because there might not be an opportunity like this again. This was essentially true, and Lucinda only had the energy for so much deception. That evening they ate room service, the sliding doors open and the table wedged halfway through. Wil ate on the balcony and Lucinda inside and the wind yelped through the open space. The evening after that, 120 kilometers off the northeastern tip of Somalia, in the Gulf of Aden, the ship was hijacked.

“Pirates,” the chambermaid told them. “We're asking everyone to stay in their staterooms until the matter is resolved.”

Wil laughed and the chambermaid stared. “Wait,” Wil said. “Really?”

“The nonessential staff has been assembled in the main dining room, and we're asking everyone else to stay in their quarters.”

“We'll just sit tight then,” Lucinda said.

“Yes, please. Sit tight. The passengers may be ... mustered, later, in the dining room, according to demands. We will come
and tell you if you need to leave. It might be good to be ready.” Kristina, the maid assigned to Ocean View Suite D147, was tall and blond, her English polished. Wil thought it was a mark of the quality of the cruise line that they employed such handsome, educated women, who wore lapel pins of the flags of countries whose languages they spoke. Kristina's pins ran along the base of her white collar, just above her tailored black dress. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, the United Kingdom. Still, she used words like “muster” uncertainly, as if she'd recently been briefed, as if she heard herself now saying things she had never thought she'd need to know.

“We'll bring you more details as we have them,” Kristina said. “Do you need anything?”

“No, we're fine,” Lucinda said, and when Kristina was gone Wil started to laugh again.

“It isn't funny.”

“Of course it is. Pirates. This'll be something for the Christmas letter. ‘Lucy mouthed off to one of their parrots and got beaten with a peg leg.'”

“Wil.”

“Pirates, Lucy. What else are we supposed to do?”

They had woken an hour earlier to a sound low and piercing, a painful boom that rattled the room. It sounded twice more and when the sound died away Lucinda and Wil were both sitting rigidly upright, startled out of sleep so quickly they each thought they could hear the other's heart hammer. The ship was grinding beneath them, a thrum that increased in frequency until there was a strange vibration in the feel of the air, the floor beneath them, the walls and windows. The ship steered sharply portside, but was so large Lucinda and Wil could only mark the direction by poking their heads out the sliding doors and examining the shifting wake behind them. There was obviously something to be gotten away from, but it seemed impossible that the
Wavecrest
could be maneuverable enough, quick enough to do it. Between and after the booming noise was a lighter crackle, more familiar, the weaponry of video games or films. They tried to wonder in the quieter spaces if someone was simply watching a movie too loudly next door.

“An acoustic—bang. Bam. It is used as a deterrent,” Kristina had been able to tell them when they opened the door to her. They were wrapped in plush
Wavecrest
bathrobes over their pajamas, Lucinda rolling her bare feet backward and forward on her toes. “The ships in this area all carry them.”

“But what does it do? The booming noise?”

“It is loud. That's what it does.”

“It's not a real weapon.”

“Not a weapon, no. A deterrent only.”

“And it hasn't deterred them.”

“Please remain calm.”

“They have weapons? Real ones?”

“It is a temporary situation, madam. They are only pirates. Somalis. They have been hijacking UN relief ships for rice. There has been a lot of food coming through this region, after the tsunami.”

“But we're not carrying rice.”

“No. This is a new thing for the pirates. We assume they want money. Please don't worry.”

Wil and Lucinda dressed with a faint sense of excitement. They pondered the appropriate footwear for a hostage situation. They turned on the bedside lamp, brushed their teeth in the bathroom, and were modestly surprised to find that their room functioned the way it always had. Wil sorted through the minibar, the gift basket that had been placed on their bed at the start of the cruise, and they shared an orange and a packet of cheese crackers. They were still hungry, but thought they should ration. They watched the water outside, the whisk of large speedboats skirting the side of the
Wavecrest
beneath them, the faint smell of smoke. They could see small people, clearly armed, porcupined with the slight black quills of weapons six decks below their balcony. But the pirates didn't do anything, just patrolled around and around, and sooner than Wil and Lucinda expected, the novelty had worn off. “Would it be wrong to watch television?” Wil asked.

At noon they split a packet of cashews and turned on the wall-mounted television set. There was nothing but static, the first sign within the room that anything was amiss. Lucinda
checked the telephone and heard no dial tone. Every so often there was the sound of footsteps moving quickly down the hall outside. The soft carpet made it impossible to tell whether they were Kristina's sensible heels, the sandals of a wayward passenger, the heavy boots of a Somali pirate. Lucinda gathered all the cups and glasses in the room, the ice bucket, the flower vase, to fill them all with water from the bathroom sink. It was what you did during tornado season, or before a bad blizzard that might freeze the pipes. It might as well be done during a pirate attack. She lined up the plastic bathroom cups and wine glasses along the vanity counter in the main room, left the vase by the toilet so it could be used for flushing. Lucinda wondered if it would be rather cavalier to take a shower. They might still be mustered. They might still be killed.

Midafternoon they both took out books and started to read, Lucinda a mystery and Wil a historical novel about naval warfare. Lucinda opened the balcony door. “It's too stuffy in here,” she said. “And the glass would hardly stop bullets anyway.” At dinner time they ate raisins and Oreos and went to bed immediately after sunset. “I'm going to shower tomorrow,” Lucinda said. “I don't care. I need something to do.” They lay in bed and listened to the silence. The buzz of the speedboats had stopped, and Wil wondered how much fuel the small boats carried, how far offshore they all were and where they were headed. Lucinda thought she could hear the rustling of other passengers, imagined tapping out urgent messages room to room in Morse code. She wished she knew Morse code. She imagined the pirates dismantling the diving board at the swimming pool on deck eight, tying it down over the starboard railing like a seesaw and forcing all 316 passengers off it one by one. She waited for the splash of falling bodies.