“It’s pronounced astonished. And I am.”
“He has a point, Fiona,” Alex chimed in, steepling his fingers as he leaned back in his desk chair. “It’s about time men were raped. Why should women bear the entire raping burden?”
I glanced askance between the serious visages of my husband and Alex, and sputtered, “How about no one is raped? How about that? How about: no more rape, period.”
“Motion passed, no more rape,” Greg announced. “And no eating Irish babies, either.”
I narrowed my eyes on him, not missing his reference to Jonathan Swift’s infamous satire, A Modest Proposal. He mirrored my expression, squinting his eyes, and a subtle smile lingered over his lips.
Troublemaker.
Alex nodded and hit his desk once with his fist, as though he were a judge. “Excellent, we all agree, no rape. So . . . we good with Egypt?”
CHAPTER 14
Dearest Husband,
I don’t think I loved you the way I love you now when I said, “Yes, I’ll marry you.” Back then I thought I knew what love was, what love was supposed to be. But each and every day you show me it’s so much more.
-Helena
Letter
Ontario, Canada
Married 10 years
Present Day
Fiona
“It’s dying, Greg. The Jeep is on its way out.”
“Shhh.” He pressed his index finger against my lips and said in a harsh whisper, “She’ll hear you.”
I ignored his silliness (for the most part), but I did give him a faint smile. “There’s no resuscitating it. The Jeep needs a new radiator and we obviously don’t have the parts. All we can do is wait for it to cool, keep adding water, and see if it starts in an hour.”
I cleaned the grease from my hands with a rag I’d found in the trunk, and used my wrist to wipe the sweat from my forehead. We were a good ten or so miles from the new vehicle Alex had arranged, and still on the outskirts of Nigeria’s most populated city. We’d been driving all day—mostly in silence—and the sun was setting; Enugu on the horizon, streaks of orange, purple, and fiery red painted the sky.
Neither of us had reintroduced the topic of Grace not wanting to play soccer, my alleged overcompensation for the lack of normalcy in my childhood, or Greg’s bullying proclivities. Mostly, we stewed in our own thoughts. If his deliberations were anything like mine—and I suspected they were—he was focusing on maneuvering through the next forty-eight hours, making it safe and sound back to Chicago, and freeing the hostages in the process.
“When the time comes,” Greg stroked the hood and sighed mournfully, “will you give me some time to say goodbye to the car?”
“Do you need some privacy now? Slip inside the driver’s side door and I can cover it with a tarp, give the two of you a minute?”
“No. Not now,” he responded solemnly. “I’m going to drive it to a cliff, shoot it while it’s not looking, then push it into a lake.”
My faint smile became a full one. As though pleased with himself for making me smile, Greg stood a little taller, his eyes lingering on my mouth.
“Good plan. But do we want to stay put and wait?” I asked, eyeballing the road behind him. “Or should we grab our gear and make a run for it?”
“A literal run for it? You mean run the last twelve miles?”
“Is it twelve? I thought it was closer to ten.” I was undecided which course of action would be best.
Greg scratched his neck and studied the horizon. “It would take us two and half-ish hours by foot, if we ran the whole way, but if we can get the Jeep running we’ll save both time and energy.”
“But if we can’t get the Jeep running, then we’ll have wasted an hour.”
“True.” Greg bobbed his head from side to side, his eyes moving over my shoulder. “But I think we have to risk it. Two Oyibos running together on the side of the road will be conspicuous no matter the time of day. We should wait until nightfall regardless.”
His logic made sense.
“Fine, but we can’t stay by the Jeep. We should push it off the road at least, and cross to the other side, hide in the grasses for an hour.”
Greg was already moving, releasing the emergency break, and motioning me over to the driver’s side. “Agreed. You steer, I’ll push.”
Once we finished maneuvering the Jeep some ways into the tall grass, we grabbed our gear and jogged to the opposite side, careful to remain hidden.
“As long as we stay within a quarter mile of the road, we should be safe from snakes.” Greg stamped his feet before he crouched to the ground, removing his backpack.
“Good to know,” I said. But what I was thinking was more like, filet of snake actually sounds really good right now.
My stomach rumbled. Loudly.
Greg lifted a single eyebrow as I sat next to him. “Hungry?”
“Actually . . . yes.” The realization was surprising. I hadn’t been hungry for the last two and a half months, not since just after Christmas. And I didn’t have a headache.
“We have First Strike rations in my bag.”