Detour

FORTY-FIVE

She needed to dream tonight.

She’d noticed the looks from Tomás. The fact she’d received no dinner for the first time she could remember. The frazzled look on Galina’s face, and her trembling hands.

She’d kissed Joelle good night in a way that really was good-bye. She’d said her prayers, confessed her sins. She’d made peace with it.

She needed to dream.

If she was lucky, this dream would involve being woken in the middle of the night, not by a gun muzzle, not by the sharp blade of a knife, but by Galina’s soft whispers.

It would involve Galina quietly opening the lock that chained her leg to the radiator. Whispering directions into her ear. Then slipping silently out of the room the way people do in dreams.

It would involve standing up and padding softly through the door.

Slowly making her way down the empty hall and then pushing open the door to outside, the way she did once before.

It would certainly involve following those directions whispered into her ear. Walking not into the jungle, but the other way entirely, down past the back pens where chickens were nervously pecking at the ground, then onto the one-lane road.

She would walk down this road as if floating, her feet barely touching the ground. She would walk without looking back. Without fear or rancor.

She would come around a bend, and a car would be waiting there for her. A midnight-blue Peugeot. Its engine would be softly rumbling, and its driver would slip out of the front seat to greet her, making sure to put a finger to his lips.

He would reach into the car and pull out a bundle of blanket and hair. Her baby daughter, whom he’d gently place into her arms.

“Thank you,” she’d whisper to Pablo.

Thank you. Thank you.