“Honey?”
“Mom, are you at my house?”
“Where else would I be?”
“Is everything all right there?”
“All right? What do you mean?”
“Listen, I need you to do something, and it’s going to sound strange: I need you to pack a bag with a couple of days’ clothes for you and George, and all his meds, and take the dogs and some food for them, and go get George at camp, and—”
“Oh my God is he okay?”
“Yes. But I need you to take him someplace where no one would look for him. Or for you.”
Elaine doesn’t respond for a few seconds. “Honey, you’re scaring me. What’s going on?”
“John has been kidnapped.”
Elaine gasps.
“It’s not clear to me exactly what’s going on,” Ariel continues. “If this is about John, and ransom money, or if it has something to do with …”
It wouldn’t surprise Ariel if her phone is being monitored, now that she has shared her concern with the embassy, which is probably not different from alerting the CIA. Every communication is vulnerable to interception or manipulation, recorded and archived, stolen and leaked, broadcast to the whole world. Any phone call, any email, any end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, any dick pic or booty call or inside-trading intel or ransom note. There’s no longer any privacy, certainly not on any cell phone. Ariel has to assume that someone, somewhere, is listening.
“Or if it has to do with something else,” Ariel says. “Someone else.”
“What are you talking about?”
She’s talking about the long-buried secrets of powerful men.
“Please don’t go to a hotel, Mom. Don’t go anywhere you’ll need to pay by credit card. Don’t use my landline to make the arrangements. Don’t use your cell either.”
“Then how am—”
“Ask Pedro.” Ariel has a quick unpleasant vision of Elaine wandering around the field, asking random Latino men if they’re the one named Pedro. “You know who Pedro is, Mom? He always wears a pale straw hat, he’s about five-five—”
“Yes, Dear, I know who Pedro is.”
“Okay good. Ask to borrow his cell, and use it to call a friend.”
“Who am I going—”
“Just figure it out!” Ariel yells. Then, softer: “Please just find a place, Mom, but don’t tell me where you’re going. Don’t tell anyone except the person you’re going to visit, and even then not using your own phone. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
Ariel can hear a dog barking, sounds like Mallomar. When Ariel talks on the phone, the brown dog listens attentively, head cocked, and occasionally he tries to talk back. That’s what he’s doing now.
“What should I tell George?”
“It’s July Fourth tomorrow,” Ariel says. “There’s no camp, so you two are going on a fun adventure. Maybe to visit someone with a swimming pool?” Where Ariel lives is not the kind of place where Elaine would know anyone. But an hour away is a different story.
“I guess I can figure out something … But why am I springing this on him?”
“Turn off the water in the house. It’s a good enough reason.”
This will be understandable to George. It happened a few years ago, their well ran dry, and it took Ariel a few days to get everything sorted, to get that guy—that bastard—to come out in the winter and dig a new well, farther from the house as per new code, and then another few days for the plumber to install the hookups, and in the meantime it was hard living without running water, so eventually Ariel and George and the dogs decamped to a vacant room at a friend’s house, where George slept in a sleeping bag on the floor, like camping indoors. A memorable experience.
“Go to the cellar, find the main valve.”
“Main valve? I don’t know what that means.”
Elaine lives in a golf-course condo with a resident manager, and porters, a place where she can pick up the phone and say the toilet is clogged, the radiator is cold, and a man will show up wearing a uniform with his name embroidered on the chest, lugging a toolbox, and maybe he’ll need to go to the hardware store for a part, and ultimately Elaine will fork over a folded twenty and he’ll reply, “Thank you, Mrs. Winston,” carting away whatever mess accompanied the repair, wrapped up in someone else’s discarded newspaper.
This was how Ariel used to think the world worked: not that you yourself knew how to do household things, but that you called people who did, and when they were finished, they thanked you. This was how her childhood had worked, and her college dorm, and her apartments in New York, living with other young women, then by herself, then with her first husband.
“Oh Honey, what have you gotten yourself into?” Once again, the same old assumption: that it’s Ariel’s fault.
“I can’t explain now, Mom. Can you just, please, do this for me? I’ll tell you all about it later.”
Ariel can hear her mom breathing heavily, maybe sniffling.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
“No, I am definitely not okay. I’m scared out of my wits.”
“I’m sorry.” Ariel wishes she could reassure her mother that there’s nothing to worry about, but that would be counterproductive. And maybe not true.
“Okay, I’m in the cellar.”
“The main valve is a red knob coming off a pipe, near the pump on the cellar floor; it has a piece of red yarn tied around it, plus a hangtag that says MAIN VALVE. Do you see it?”
“Yes.”
“Now close the valve—”
“Which way?”
Ariel raises her right hand to remember. “Turn to the right, clockwise.” As with car pedals, her body just knows it, but not necessarily her mind. “After the main valve is closed, there will still be a small amount of water flow in the pipes, and a single flush in the tank of each toilet, but after that the tanks won’t refill, you won’t be able to flush anymore. Show the empty faucets to George.”
“You want me to lie to the boy?”
“Want? No, Mom. I don’t want my mother to lie to my child. I also don’t want my husband to be kidnapped in Portugal. What I want is for you and George to be safe, for my kid to not be terrified, and this is the plan I’ve come up with, and if you have a better idea, please, by all means: I’m all ears.”
*
Buying a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse was not the most rational of the many life-defining decisions that Ariel made during that momentous year. In fact it was irresponsible, like purchasing a vintage car when you don’t know what a transmission is. If you have neither patience nor money nor knowledge, complicated old things are not sensible choices.