“Can you see me?” she said.
“Mostly.” He placed a hand on the top of her foot but otherwise didn’t move.
“I need you to see me. That’s all I want, nothing else right now.”
“Okay.”
She took a minute to compose herself. She didn’t have a firm grasp on what she was doing here, only that it was mandatory in some way. Essential. “I told you about Widdy.”
“The girl in Haiti, yeah.”
“The one I got killed.”
“You didn’t—”
“I got her killed. I didn’t kill her myself,” Rachel said, “but she was right—if I’d let them take her four, even two hours, earlier, they wouldn’t have been as crazed. They might have let her live.”
“What kind of life, though?”
“That’s what she said.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” She took a deep breath, felt the warmth of his hand as he stroked her foot. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Caress me.”
He stopped. But he kept his hand there as she’d hoped he might.
“I told you that she wanted to go to them and I talked her out of it but later they found her.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“And where was I during that?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out for a bit. “You never told me,” he said eventually. “I always assumed you two got separated somehow.”
“We were never separated. Not until the end anyway. I was right by her side when they found her.”
“So . . . ?” He sat up slightly.
She cleared her throat. “The leader of the . . . pack, no other word for them, was Josué Dacelus. He’s actually quite the crime kingpin there these days, or so I’ve heard, but back then he was just a young thug.” She looked across the bed at her husband as the night rattled the window casings in the old house. “They found us just before sunup. They pulled Widdy from me. I fought, but they pushed me to the ground and spit on me. They stomped on my back and punched me in the head several times. And Widdy wasn’t screaming, she was just crying, the way a girl that age would cry over a dead pet, you know? A hamster, say. I remember thinking that’s what a girl should be crying over at eleven. And I tried to stop them again, but, man, it just infuriated them. I might have been a white woman with press credentials and that made raping and killing me a far riskier proposition than raping and killing Haitian girls and Haitian ex-nuns, but they were ready to throw that caution to the wind if I kept it up. I’m looking at Widdy as they’re pulling her away. And Josué Dacelus slides the barrel of his filthy .45 into my mouth and he moves it back and forth and in and out over my tongue and my teeth like a cock and he says, ‘Would you like to be good? Or would you like to live?’”
For a moment, she couldn’t go on. She just sat there with the tears falling on her body.
“Jesus,” Brian whispered. “You know you couldn’t have—”
“He made me say it.”
“What?”
She nodded. “He pulled the gun from my mouth and he made me look at her as the men dragged her off and he made me say the words.” She wiped her cheeks and pushed the hair out of her face in the same motion. “I. Would. Like. To. Live.” She lowered her head, let the hair fall back in her face. “And I said them out loud.”
When she raised her head a minute or two later, Brian hadn’t moved.
“I wanted to tell you that for some reason,” she said. “Some reason I haven’t figured out yet.”
She slid her foot out of his hand and got off the bed. He watched her put her underwear and T-shirt back on. The last thing she heard as she left the room was his voice as he whispered, “Thank you.”
33
THE BANK
The baby’s crying woke her.
It was just after sunup. She went down the hall as the cries lessened and found Haya removing Annabelle’s diaper on a changing table beside a crib. Brian or Caleb had even thought to hang a mobile above the crib and paint the walls pink. Haya wore a Green Day concert T-shirt Rachel recognized as Caleb’s over a pair of plaid men’s boxer shorts. Judging by the dishevelment of the bedsheets, Haya had tossed and turned through the night. She dropped the soiled diaper and wipes into a plastic bag at her feet and pulled a fresh diaper from a shelf below the table.
Rachel retrieved the bag. “I’ll throw it away.”
Haya gave no indication she’d heard her as she placed the fresh diaper on Annabelle.
Annabelle looked at her mother and then over at Rachel and kept looking at her with her warm dark eyes.
Haya said, “Do women in America keep . . . secrets from their husbands?”
“Some do,” Rachel said. “Do women in Japan?”
“I do not know,” she said with her usual stop-and-start cadence. And then, quite smoothly: “Probably because I’ve never been to Japan.”
A wholly transformed Haya stared back at Rachel suddenly, a Haya marinated in cunning and curdled wisdom.
“You’re not Japanese?”
“I’m from fucking San Pedro,” Haya whispered, eyes on the doorway behind Rachel.
Rachel went to the door and closed it. “Then why are you . . . ?”
Haya exhaled so hard her lips flapped. “Caleb was a mark. I knew he was a con man the day I met him. So I was always stunned he never picked up on my bullshit.”
“How did you meet? We all suspected like a mail-order bride thing.”
She shook her head. “I was a hooker. He was my john. The woman who ran the escort service would always tell someone who’d never been with me that I’d only been in the country three weeks, I was very new at the business, etc.” Haya shrugged. She lifted Annabelle off the changing table and gave the baby her left breast. “Drove the price up. So Caleb shows up and right away it doesn’t make sense—he was too good looking to pay for it. Unless he was into violence or severe kink and he wasn’t. Not even close. Straight missionary style, very tender. Second time he came around, he talked after about how I was the perfect girl for him—knew my place, knew my role, didn’t speak the language.” She smiled ruefully. “He said, ‘Haya, you can’t understand me, but I could fall in love with you.’ I looked at his watch, his suit, and I said, ‘Love?’ Gave him a real searching, lost-child look, pointed between me and him, and said, ‘I love.’” She stroked her baby’s head and watched her suckle. “He bought it. Two months later he paid the owner of the service a hundred grand to steal me away. I’ve been watching and listening as him and Brian put this scam together ever since.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because I want my end.”
“I don’t have anything to—”
“Is Caleb dead?”