That night, after a meager dinner that she all but choked down, and more talking and planning (and fretting) with the others, Edie stole to her pallet to be alone. It was too dark to read; she didn’t think she’d be able to focus on the story, anyway, though she had not, despite everything, stopped longing to know what would happen to Anne Elliott in her long-ago time so different from Edie’s own.
Marta had given her not just a spare pair of socks but a fresh, unworn pair, still wrapped in its little cardboard sleeve with the Canteen logo. “I was saving these for a day when I really needed a pick-me-up,” she had said, smiling a little. “I think today’s the day.”
Edie took them, lifted them to her nose. Unblemished cotton. A hint of the perfume Marta must have been wearing the day she bought them. Edie was probably supposed to argue with Marta, try to give back this gift, but she didn’t have the energy. “Thank you,” she said.
“Try to get some sleep tonight.”
She lay back now, slid her finger under the lip of the cardboard sleeve. The glue separated with a satisfying little rasp. She unfolded the socks. It was a shame, in a way, to sully them on her disgusting, unwashed feet. Nonetheless, she rolled one up over her toes, heel, ankle. She could just about melt with the pleasure of it. Then the other foot. These were the socks, she promised herself, that she was going to find her way home in. It was a comforting thought.
She allowed herself, then, to think about Jesse. She was an old hat now at grief, but this was a different sort of grieving than she’d done—was still doing—for her mother. That was the grief of the routine, the everyday, grief that leveled Edie as she toweled a dish dry or when she caught the scent of honeysuckle on an evening walk. This grief for Jesse was the grief of mystery, of having the story suddenly halt but not really end. Would they have stayed together? Married? Would they have chosen one day to have a child, a child conceived not in self-destructive anguish but love? She would never know now. She’d never see his slim hands pick out another song on the guitar. She’d never rake her fingertips through the dark curls on the nape of his neck, or bristle at his insecure bluster, or groaningly cover her head with a pillow when he cued up his tablet in the dark of night, writing down the dream gibberish that may or may not eventually become a song.
She was restless, not sleepy at all, so by feel she packed what was left of her belongings, sliding the book into the bag, too. There was no way to know what would happen tomorrow, where she’d finish the day, how much living she had left to do. But she’d like, if possible, to finish Persuasion before her time was up.
Nineteen
They loaded, as they’d done a couple of weeks ago, in two vehicles: June, Violet, Randall, Edie, and Berto in the lead car; Joe, Andy, Marta, Wes, and Ken following behind. The hostages, once again, were zip-tied, and June didn’t bother to offer an explanation, make an excuse. Marta, wrists chafing against the neon orange plastic, view obscured by a blindfold, passed the time by imagining a zip-tie general store: Ruby City Old Country Zip Ties. After today, God willing, she would never again wear a zip tie.
What would her boys think if they could see her now? Would they be scared for her? Proud of her? They’d not yet grown into the men she hoped they’d be. They were spoiled, no doubt about it, and Sal had picked up on his father’s habit of speaking to her with harsh impatience, and Enzo—maybe this was a consequence of being the younger twin?—had a frustrating vagueness, a lack of initiative or direction about everything from what he wanted to eat (“I don’t know, Ma, anything’s fine”) to what he wanted to do with his life (“I don’t know, Ma, anything’s fine”). But they were hers. She loved them. She would love them no matter what they did or who they became, and yet she also believed that goodness resided in each of them, and someday, perhaps, she would help them access that goodness. If Marta could make it through this experience, then she had the courage to face her husband, and she could finish the work of raising her boys to be decent men.
It had not been as hard as she’d feared it would be to convince June to bring all of the hostages along. “The only way I’m going to be certain they’re OK is if they’re in my sight,” she’d said this morning, after June came to her with news of the journey east to contact David, exactly as Violet had told Edie she would.
“What if we just bring Feingold? Will that be enough?” June asked. “I hate to take two cars. Gas is precious for us out here.”
“No,” Marta said. “We all go, or I don’t go.”
June had stared at her for a silent few seconds that felt like much longer, probably biting back some threat that she really didn’t have to make, flanked as she was by armed guards. In the end, she shrugged. “Fine. Violet, let’s bring Joe and Randall, too. Will you go get them?”
“Anyone else?” Violet had asked.
“No. I think five and five should be safe enough. We’re all friends here.”
Yes, a guard for every hostage certainly seemed safe enough, especially when each of those guards was toting a semiautomatic rifle. Marta, contemplating this, hoped that Violet knew what she was doing, because she certainly didn’t know the group she was depending upon to execute her plan. Berto—well, he was strong enough, and his grief could maybe be channeled into a useful rage, but for now Marta just hoped that he wasn’t in the lead car sobbing, as he’d done throughout most of last night. Ken, to her right, was bouncing his leg so hard that Marta kept having to touch his thigh in a friendly(ish) stopping gesture. He would stiffen, stop—and then, a few minutes later, start again.
The car slowed and veered right—Marta was pushed into Wes—accelerated, slowed again, and swung left, pushing her into Ken. Then the terrain got very bumpy. She lifted her bound hands to tweeze the bridge of her nose, fighting the rise of her gorge, and Andy snapped from the front passenger seat, “Don’t touch your blindfold! I see you back there.”
She dropped her hands back to her lap. “I wasn’t—I’m sorry.”
Wes’s shoulder pressed into hers. She returned the gesture. Please let him get through this, she thought. This dear, extraordinary young man. Please let him be safe.
An endless time later, during which the terrain seemed only to worsen and worsen, the vehicle slowed again, made another left, then twisted and turned uphill enough times that Marta lost any remaining sense she had of the shape of their travels. Soon gravel was grinding under their wheels.
“Almost there,” Joe said.
And finally, the car stopped. The engine died. Marta waited.
“You can come out of your blindfolds now,” Andy said.