This Is Not Your City (24 page)

A few days after Aaron's first birthday, Wil had quietly suggested they might try for another child. He refrained from saying a better one. Aaron's birth had taken three rounds of IVF, years of trying for a baby in every old-fashioned way they knew how. Adoption, Wil suggested, but Lucinda shook her head. “I'm tired,” she said. “I don't think you understand how
tired I am.” Any object as incapable as Aaron—stones, sticks, cinder blocks—needed nothing. Aaron had a body's necessities, a blind kitten's, a featherless bird's, the naked pink jelly-bean of a marsupial baby. His needs were complex and his inability to meet them total.

Once, at work, Wil overheard his nurse anesthetist wondering aloud why Aaron hadn't been aborted. “We didn't know,” he explained to her. “There was no way to know until after he was born.” Later he wondered if he should have fired her, told her they would have kept Aaron either way, that he was their child and that was enough. He wondered if that was what Lucinda would have said, if she would have meant it. If he had known, he would not have wanted his son, this particular son. He knew this about himself, and thought that if he could ask Lucinda how she felt he would know a great deal more about her, about her long, mysterious days at home.

The next day Lucinda and Wil both showered, put their hostage outfits back on. They each drank a cup of tap water. They'd decided to husband their resources, the Perrier, the Evian in the mini-fridge. Everything in the room still worked except the television. Lucinda even blow-dried her hair. “We could write our postcards,” she suggested. “No sense putting it off.”

“Because we've got nothing else to do, or because we're going to die?”

Lucinda threw a pillow at his head.

“Are we really doing twenty-one for Aaron?” he asked.

“I said I would. One for every day of the trip.”

“You know he won't—”

“I know. I said I would.”

Aaron had been born with his brain unfurrowed, lissencephalic, as slick and smooth as the greasy inside of a shell. The MRI confirmed the lack of creases and ruts, troughs or ridges. Knowledge must live in the washes of the brain, Wil decided when the doctors told them that Aaron might or might not learn to swallow. They received printouts of the MRI, filed them away in an accordion folder penciled “Aaron, Medical,” in the basement. By six
months the paperwork had exploded into a second folder and Wil, refiling, had taken one of the black-and-white pictures. He kept it folded in his wallet. Every day since Tangier he had imagined taking it out at dinner, over the appetizers, shrimp cocktail, mussels in a white wine curry. They cracked shells, pried the gray flesh out with narrow forks, and Wil imagined opening his wallet. This, he imagined saying, is my son. His name is Aaron. He has eyes the color of wonder and a brain as slack and damp as an oyster.

They divided the postcards into stacks, enough for Wil to write to his staff, the dental hygienists and the front office, to his relatives and to a handful of mutual friends. Lucinda took enough for her family, a few neighbors, twenty-one for their son.

“Which do you think for my sister?” Lucinda asked. “A pyramid or a Sphinx?”

“Pyramid,” Wil answered, and wrote to his own sister. He picked a photo of the Biblioteca Alexandria and wrote:
Dear Joan, The trip has been amazing. We're currently being held hostage by pirates, but if you receive this it means the situation's sorted itself out just fine. Hope you weren't worried.
He was almost out of room.
The food's been great. Love, Wil,
he wrote, and looked up her address in the notebook Lucinda had brought.

Lucinda wrote doggedly, flipping over new cards long after Wil had finished with his. She kept putting the pen down, shaking her hand out, cracking her knuckles. It looked both theatrical and weary. The sun was dropping and Wil flipped on the overhead switch for his wife. Nothing happened. He tried the bedside lamps, the bulbs over the vanity mirror, the bathroom light. “I'll finish these on the balcony, then,” Lucinda said, gripping her pen more tightly. “While there's still a little sun.”

She sat on one of their two lounge chairs and Wil thought about joining her, wondered if he was welcome. The sea was quiet, the showy sparkle of the sunset giving way to darker blue and black, faint slashes of light on the swells rather than a field of sequins. There were walls on either side of the balcony, two thirds of the height to the deck above. Wil thought that could be a project for tomorrow, climbing over or around the partitions, sharing crackers with their neighbors and planning a resistance.

The room was hot and Wil kicked the comforter to the floor. He heard Lucinda trip on it as she came to bed, late, the night nearly moonless outside. He heard her start to pull the drapes, and asked her to leave the doors cracked open. “We need some air in here,” he said.

Lucinda slept late the next morning, the third of the lockdown, and Wil was restless. He ate a whole packet of gummy fruit snacks by himself, then felt guilty. He re-read the ship welcome magazine and the list of ship's programming for February 11th, the day before the hijacking. There had been a lecture on the desert of Wadi Rum he had meant to attend and forgotten. The room was bright, but Lucinda simply rolled over, pushed her head farther into the pillow. Her postcards were stacked on the vanity, rubber-banded neatly. Wil flipped through them: her parents, her sisters, Aaron's homecare aide and physical therapist. Twenty-one for Aaron.

There were other, simpler ones.
Passed through the canal today,
she'd written on a picture of Al Isma‘iliyah, at the southern end of the Suez.
Hope you're well. Love, Mom.

Wil put them all back in order, the corners squared and the rubber band tight. He waited for his wife to wake and when she did he gave her two snack-size bags of potato chips and told her they had more. They didn't, but he'd appointed himself head of rations, and she didn't have to know. He dug through their bags and found a squashed granola bar, a bag of something called Meganuts from a market stall in Cairo, a spare box of TicTacs in Lucinda's toiletry bag, a long rope of beef jerky in his carry-on from the plane. He piled the new food into the gift basket and held the jerky up like a trophy. “A whole new food group,” he announced.

“I'm staying in bed today. I'm conserving energy. A body at rest requires minimal calories.”

“Suit yourself. I'm thinking about swinging out over the edge of the balcony and planning a resistance movement with the neighbors.”

“Good luck. The Robertsons are what? Eighty-something at least and the Schullers are three thousand and six.”

Lucinda, as she said she would, napped most of the afternoon, and after sunset could manage only a confused doze, slipping in and out of dreams. She woke up at one in the morning certain that she was going to die. She would perish 120 kilometers off the Cape of Guardafui in the Arabian Sea, and her body would never make it home. She swung her feet off the side of the bed and felt in the instant they touched the floor that it had to be true.

“We're going to die,” she whispered to her husband.

Wil exhaled, a burbling sigh that squeezed through the congestion in his nose. He turned away and did not wake up. His head tipped backward of its own accord, lengthening and baring his throat. The Adam's apple was tight and round, pushing against the skin. He hadn't shaved since the hijacking, and his throat bristled blond and white along and below his jawline, patches of rough scattering almost down to his collar. She had only ever known him meticulously clean-shaven. Lucinda looked down at her husband, asleep in the bed that was bolted solidly to the wall and floor. She wanted to ask him who he was. I've realized you're a mystery, she wanted to say. I've lived ten years surrounded by strangers. My funny husband and my unknowable son.

Then she thought, the postcards. The postcards for Aaron. They were still sitting in a stack, neatly addressed to their house in Overland Park. If she and Wil had made it home, she thought, they probably would have beaten the postcards. They would have picked Aaron up from the Sunflower Home in Olathe and strapped him into the van and said, don't worry, your presents are on the way. Postcards and magnets and a rubber model of the Sphinx and a plush camel and a plastic cruise ship. Baby toys, she would apologize. I know you're ten but I don't know what else to get for you. I don't know what you want.

She picked up the cards on the vanity, separated out the ones to her son, and walked to the balcony. She ripped the postcards in half, one by one, and scattered them; they fluttered and fell, caught by the railings and walls of balconies below, by updrafts and breezes. They flew and sank and one by one they disappeared. She was going to die, after all, and did not want anyone to see these postcards, to read them or touch them or feel they knew then something about her, about the boy she meant to send them to.

If there was to be at some point a separation of sheep and lambs, wheat and chaff, the passengers who would be spared and those who would be executed, she thought she and Wil should volunteer themselves. They were qualified hostages, years of experience. They wouldn't protest. They could be shuttled and shuffled
and they would do it with, if not love, a numb contentment. In the language of her homecare support group, the cruise had had a special name, “respite care,” not for Aaron but for her, a term created to make the caregivers feel less guilty, to remind them that their own sanity was of importance. Sitting in another room and reading a magazine while someone else listened to your child scream was respite care. Going to a matinee while someone else suctioned out his aspirated saliva was respite care. Her support group had been jealous only of the money that allowed such an extravagant trip; they did not question the necessity of departure. Respite care, they knew, made you infinitely less likely to smother your own child, to hit them, hurt them, hasten them out of this world. Only Lucinda had looked askance at the idea, its implication of necessity, its acknowledgment of her darker desires.

Late the next afternoon, the fourth, the phone rang. Wil answered it, tried to steel himself for a piratical summons, for a foreign accent that would command his presence at a great slaughter of the rich and elderly. But it was only Kristina. “Arrangements have been made,” she said. “An agreement struck.” She came down hard, ringingly, on the “struck,” proud to know the word, to deliver such fine news to her huddled charges. “We are headed for the Seychelles, not Mombasa. A little farther east, perhaps thirteen hours. You will be able to disembark by tomorrow morning.”

“What happened? What's the agreement?”

“I am afraid I can't give any details, Mr. Voorhuis, and I have many more calls to make.”

“So it's over, just like that?”

“More or less. We hope you understand that Gilded Hemisphere Lines is very grateful for your patience with the situation.”

Wil found Lucinda hunched over on the end of a balcony lounge chair where she'd spent most of the day, her hands wrapped under her elbows. He fit himself in behind her, his legs on either side, his chest pressed against her spine. “We're headed for the Seychelles,” he said. “We'll be off the boat by tomorrow morning.”

“Who called?”

“Kristina. We're all going to be fine, Lucy.” She said nothing, and he wrapped his arms around her chest. She didn't turn to look at him.

“We'll be home day after tomorrow,” Wil said. “I'll bet you anything. The cruiseline will be desperate to get us all back to our own countries before we can talk to the press. We'll be in the Seychelles tomorrow morning, then a flight to London. A transfer to Newark, or a direct to St. Louis. A hop, skip and a jump to Kansas City.” Her silence pushed him on. “We'll pick up the car at long-term parking, go get the kids. All eight of them. God, it's amazing, the triplets—I have to say, I was none too excited about miming when they started it up, those glass boxes and invisible ropes, but by all accounts they've got real talent. Even in those little berets, striped shirts like a chain gang. And our youngest—”