“Okay, I see. Sorry,” Galileo interrupted her. “If you can’t even talk Spanish properly, I don’t know how you’ll manage in English. What a mess! What are we going to do with you?”
They spent the night in a motel for truckers next to the highway. The room was filthy but had a hot shower. Galileo told her to get washed, say her prayers, and go to sleep in the bed on the left. He always slept nearest to the door; it was one of his little obsessions. “I’m going out for a smoke, and by the time I get back I want to see you asleep,” he said. Evelyn obeyed as quickly as she could. She showered rapidly, then crept into bed fully dressed and wearing her sneakers. She pulled the bedcover up to her nose, pretending to be asleep and planning to escape the moment he touched her. She felt very tired, her shoulder ached, and her chest was tight with fear, but she prayed to her grandmother and that gave her strength. She knew her grandma would have gone to the church to light candles for her.
After more than an hour, Galileo returned. He took off his shoes, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. Evelyn heard the toilet flush, and out of the corner of her eye she saw him come back into the room in his shorts, undershirt, and socks. She got ready to leap out of bed. Her stepfather draped his trousers over the only free chair, bolted the door, and switched off the light. The blue reflection of a neon sign with the motel’s name shone in through the net curtains, and in the semidarkness Evelyn saw him go down on his knees next to the bed he had chosen. Galileo Leon murmured prayers for a long while. By the time he eventually climbed into bed, Evelyn was sound asleep.
Lucia, Richard, Evelyn
Upstate New York
Richard
Brazil, 1987–1990
They left the motel at nine with only a coffee inside them. They were all hungry, so Lucia demanded they have breakfast somewhere: she needed hot food on a normal plate, not in a carton with chopsticks. They ended up at a Denny’s, the women tucking into a banquet of pancakes while Richard stirred a bowl of insipid oatmeal. Leaving Brooklyn the day before, they had agreed to stay apart in public, but as the hours went by, they forgot their caution. They felt so comfortable with one another that even Kathryn Brown had been incorporated into the group without a fuss.
The road looked in better shape than on the previous day. During the night there had been only a light dusting of snow, and although the temperature was still several degrees below freezing, the wind had dropped and the snow had been cleared from the highways. They could travel more quickly; if they kept up the same speed, Richard calculated they would reach the cabin around midday and would have plenty of daylight in which to dispose of the Lexus. However, an hour and a half later, as he was driving around a bend, he found himself a hundred yards from the flashing blue and red lights of several police patrol cars blocking the route. There was no detour, and if he did a U-turn he would only attract their attention.
The contents of his breakfast rose into his mouth, filling it with bile. Nausea and a phantom return of his diarrhea panicked him. He felt in the top pocket of his jacket, where he normally kept his pink pills, but could not find them. In his rearview mirror he saw Lucia crossing her fingers for luck. In front of him were halted vehicles, an ambulance, and a fire engine. A highway trooper motioned for him to join the line. Removing his balaclava, Richard opened the window and asked him in the calmest voice he could muster what was wrong.
“A multiple pileup.”
“Any fatality, officer?”
“I am not authorized to give that information,” the trooper replied, and walked off.
Richard collapsed with his head on the steering wheel, waiting with the other drivers and counting the seconds. His stomach and esophagus were on fire. He could not recall having had such a ferocious acid attack as this before. He was afraid his ulcer might have burst and he was bleeding internally. It was just his rotten luck that he would run into a traffic pileup right at that moment, when he had a dead body in the car trunk and desperately needed a toilet. What if it was appendicitis? The oatmeal had been a mistake; he had forgotten it loosened the bowels. “If these damned cops don’t clear the road I’m going to crap myself right here. That’s all I need. What’s Lucia going to think: that I’m a wreck, an idiot with chronic diarrhea,” he said aloud.
On the dashboard clock the minutes went by at a snail’s pace. All of a sudden his cell phone rang.
“Are you okay? You looked as if you passed out,” Lucia said, her voice reaching him from another planet.
“I don’t know,” he replied, raising his head from the wheel.
“It’s psychosomatic, Richard. You’re nervous. Take your pills.”
“They’re in my bag in your car.”
“I’ll bring them to you.”
“No!”
He saw Lucia climb out of one door of the Subaru and Evelyn out of the other, Marcelo in her arms. Lucia approached the Lexus with a completely natural air and rapped on the window. He lowered it, intending to shout at her, but as she handed him the pills one of the patrolmen came striding over.
“Miss! Stay in your vehicle!” he ordered her.
“I’m sorry, officer. Do you have a match?” she asked him, making the universal gesture of raising a cigarette to her lips.
“Get into your vehicle! You too!” the man shouted at Evelyn.
They had to wait thirty-five minutes before the accident was cleared, the Subaru with its engine on to keep the heating going, the Lexus an icebox. Once the ambulances and the fire engine had departed, the police allowed the cars lined up in both directions to get going. As they passed the accident they saw an upturned van with its four wheels in the air, an unrecognizable car with a completely crumpled hood that had rammed into it from behind, and a third car piled up on the second. It was a clear day, the storm had passed, and perhaps none of the three drivers involved had considered the possibility of black ice.
Richard had taken four antacid tablets. The taste of bile remained in his mouth and his stomach was still burning. He drove hunched over the wheel, bathed in a cold sweat, his sight clouded with pain, increasingly convinced he had internal bleeding. He warned Lucia on his cell phone that he could not go on and pulled up at the first stop he found. She came to a halt behind him just as he was opening the door and vomiting spectacularly onto the road.
“We have to get help. There must be a hospital somewhere near here,” said Lucia, handing him a tissue and a bottle of water.