If We Survive

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Meredith was the first to move. She stepped up to the tomb. Palmer held out his hand to her and she took it. He held her steady as she put one leg over the side of the coffin, then the other. She climbed in and lowered herself down until she was out of sight. Nicki came forward next. I could see the fear in her eyes even in the shadows. Palmer helped her over the side as he had Meredith. Again, I watched her as she sank down into the stone box. Jim took a deep breath and followed.

Then it was my turn. I swallowed hard as I approached the tomb. I had this idea in my mind that I would look over the side and see Meredith and Nicki and Jim in there all huddled together with a long-rotten corpse lying close beside them. I stepped up to the side of the coffin and looked down.

I breathed a sigh of relief. In fact, the tomb had no bottom. It hid an opening onto a stairway. The stairs led down into a darkness lit only by a dim, red, wavering light.

I climbed over the edge of the tomb and lowered myself onto the first step. Then, clutching a metal railing to keep myself steady on the narrow stairs, I made my way down.

My sneakers touched a rough stone floor. The darkness was even deeper down here than in the church above, but by the small flickering red glow I could make out the silhouettes of Meredith, Nicki, and Jim standing nearby, their eyes gleaming. As my eyes adjusted a little, I could see they were standing at the entrance of a shadowy maze of vaulted corridors. I could see the halls going off into darkness in all directions.

Another moment and Palmer stepped off the stairs and stood beside me.

“What is this place?” I whispered.

“Catacombs,” he said softly. “They’ve been burying people down here for five hundred years.”

Now I heard stone grating on stone over my head. I looked up just in time to see the dim light of the church disappearing up there as the little priest—without any help at all this time—pushed the great slab of the coffin lid back into its place.

Palmer whispered, “This way.”

We all followed him into the corridors.

We wound down one stone hall and then another. In moments, I had lost my sense of direction. I had lost my sense of the world outside. Out there, in the light, it was warm with summer. But here, it was dank and cold. The chill that I’d felt in the church upstairs grew deeper with every step we took. It seemed to creep under my skin and into my bones.

We took another turn. The wavering red glow grew brighter. In its flickering light, I looked at the catacomb walls. Now and then I’d see a little alcove in them. Some of the alcoves were empty. Some held what looked like coffins. In one, there was all that was left of a skeleton, grinning out at me through the red glow. Its hollow eyes spooked me as we went past. Then it was gone—and I told myself it had just been my imagination. But a few yards on, there was another skeleton lying embedded in the wall. Generally, I kind of think skeletons are cool. But it turns out I don’t actually like sharing space with them.

At last, we turned a corner and came into a more open area—a sort of room where the various corridors came together. There was a large heater set against one wall here. A large electric fire was flickering in it, warming the dank air and giving off a bright red light. Nearby, there was a watercooler with a stack of paper cups beside it. And there were sleeping bags rolled up neatly in one corner, as if the space had been prepared for us as a place of rest.

“All right,” Palmer said. “We’ll be safe here for a while.”

I glanced over at him. His eyes glowed with the reflection of the heater.

“How did they know?” I asked him. “How did they know we would be coming?”

He shrugged. “It’s a hard country with a lot of trouble. They knew someone would be coming, they just didn’t know it would be us.”

I was about to ask another question, but suddenly I didn’t have to. I understood. The church was a sort of safe haven for people in trouble with any of the various violent factions in the country. Palmer had known about this just as he’d known about the temple in the jungle. Just as he’d known about the village where we found protection and food.

I guess there’d been no time for me to think about it before because only now, dimly and for the first time, did I begin to get a sort of picture of Palmer, an idea about who he was and how things had been for him these last couple of years.

He knew about these places—these secret safe havens around Costa Verdes—because he had been using them himself. Hiding from the authorities. Running guns to the natives so they could protect themselves from slaughter. Smuggling people to safety when they were in danger of being captured or killed. Fighting both the government and the rebels who opposed them—because one side was just as evil and murderous as the other.

Chased unfairly out of the Marines, Palmer had come to this hard and terrible country to hide away from the world and nurse his bitterness. I think he must’ve wanted to disappear, to stop being part of the human race that had treated him so badly. Instead, he had ended up helping the local people, protecting them when they had no other protector. Because he couldn’t stop himself from doing that, I guess. He was still the same man who had joined the Marines to protect his country. Hard as he might have tried, he couldn’t run away from his own nature, his own soul.

“There were people outside on the street,” I said. “In the plaza outside the church. They saw us coming in here. Won’t they tell the rebels?”

Palmer shook his head no.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because they don’t believe in the rebels anymore than they believe in the government,” he said. “But they believe in this place.”

“Yes,” said Meredith. “I’ve seen that. They do.”

“Fernandez Cobar says religion is the great oppressor of the people,” Jim said—but he didn’t say it in his usual way, as if he were trying to start an argument. He murmured the words softly, almost as if he were talking to himself. “He says people won’t be truly free until all the churches are destroyed.”

“Yeah, I bet he does say that,” said Palmer with a tired smile. “There’s a power here he can’t get his hands on and he can’t stand it. The old government was the same way. They murdered any priest who spoke up against them.”

“They always do that,” said Meredith. “It’s always the voice of God they try to silence first.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Tyrants,” said Palmer.

I expected Jim to start making some sort of argument or other. I expected him to tell us again about what a brilliant guy Fernandez Cobar was and how he’d written a book and articles in the newspaper and so on. But to my surprise, Jim didn’t say anything. In fact, I thought I saw him nodding a little.

“That’s why the rebels will suspect we came here, whether people tell them so or not,” said Palmer. “They’re sure to come in and search the place any minute. I’m going back to the stairs to listen and make sure Father Miguel doesn’t get himself hurt.”

“You want me to come with you?” I asked.

He shook his head quickly and was gone into the shadows.

Left alone, Nicki, Meredith, Jim, and I turned and looked at one another in the flickering red light from the heater. The expressions I saw on their faces were grim: blank and exhausted. They all seemed to be wondering the same thing I was: How in the world had this happened to us? We had only come here to build a wall. We had been ready to go home. We had been laughing, kidding around in the cantina one minute… When was it? Three days ago? Four? I had lost count. And suddenly—so incredibly suddenly—there was nothing but death and brutality all around us—a kind of danger none of us had ever known before.

The people I saw looking back at me through the darkness were not the same people they had been back in the cantina. I mean, sure, it was still Meredith and Nicki and Jim—of course it was. But it was not the same Meredith and Nicki and Jim. They had changed. Or maybe it was I who had changed. Or maybe it was all of us.

Nicki let out a long sigh. As she passed close to me, it sent a pang through my heart to see the bruise disfiguring her pretty face. She moved to the wall and slid down it wearily, sitting on the floor. Meredith gave a little groan and joined her. Jim settled onto the floor cross-legged. I poured some water from the cooler and drank a few cups greedily. Then I joined them, sitting down next to Jim.

There we sat, it seemed a long time. We went on looking at one another, too tired to do much else, too weary even to speak for a while.

“Amazing,” said Nicki then.

And the rest of us nodded. We all knew what she meant.

“What happened to you?” I asked her. “What happened to your face?”

“Oh,” she said—as if she’d forgotten all about it. “Don’t you like it? It’s the latest look. All the kids are into it. I call it: getting punched in the head by a rebel guard.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or not. I mean, it wasn’t like Nicki to make a joke about something like that. She was more the complain-and-pity-herself type.

“A guard punched you?” I asked.

Now, even more surprising, she smiled at me in the halfdarkness. It was a lopsided smile of… pride, I think it was. She was proud of herself and her eyes were gleaming. And she said, “Yeah. He got mad because I cursed at him.”

I have to admit, that was more surprising than anything. My mouth actually dropped open. Was this our Nicki talking? Our bawling, screaming, please-don’t-hurt-me-I-want-togo-home Nicki?

“Really? You cursed at a guard?” I asked.

She turned to Meredith for confirmation. “Didn’t I?”

“She did,” Meredith said with a small smile. “I was shocked,” she added, not sounding very shocked at all. “I’ve never heard such language in my life!”

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “One of those guards with the machine guns? You cursed him out?”

“He was disgusting,” she said. “The way he was treating us. The things he was saying. I told him exactly what I thought of him.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m not sure that was very smart, but it was definitely very brave.”

Nicki looked down at the floor. I couldn’t tell for sure in that red light, but I thought she was blushing. Then she lifted her gleaming eyes to me and said, “It was because of you, Will.”

Really. She said that. I’m not making this up. “Me?”

“Yes. Because of the way you stood in front of me when we were attacked by that alligator.”

“Crocodile,” Jim said softly. “Or maybe a caiman, I’m not sure.”

“Oh, like, whatever, okay? Giant-reptile-going-to-eat-me,” said Nicki, rolling her eyes. It was kind of hilarious hearing her talk like that—talk just like the Nicki we knew before—here, in this skeleton-filled catacomb, with the gunmen all around us, looking for us everywhere and us with no idea how we were going to get out and get away. “After I saw you do that,” she went on, “I just thought, if Will can do something like that for me, just, like, totally risk his life for me, then I should at least be able to stop screaming and crying all the time and making poor Meredith take care of me like I was a baby.”

“You mean, me standing in front of the croc… the cai… the scaly green people-eater made you stop being afraid?”

“Oh no! Are you kidding? I’m still way afraid. Right this minute I’m so scared I think my head’s going to just come off and roll down the corridor and then explode. I mean, did you see those skeletons in the walls back there?”

I laughed. She didn’t sound afraid to me. “I saw them.”

“I’m still way afraid,” she said again. “But I just thought maybe I could stop acting so afraid. You know? I just thought, even if I wasn’t really brave, I could start pretending to be brave so the rest of you didn’t have to listen to me throwing a fit every five minutes.”

“Yeah, but I mean… that is brave,” I said. “I mean, like, we’re all scared, right? We’re all just trying to act brave.”

“Oh… well… really? I don’t know…,” said Nicki. “I don’t think Meredith is afraid.”

I looked at Meredith. We all did. She was sitting against the wall, her head tilted back. She was gazing up into the darkness above us. When Nicki spoke her name, she glanced our way, but didn’t say anything.

“No,” said Jim. “You’re right. Meredith isn’t afraid.”

“No,” I agreed. “She’s not.”

“You should have seen what she did!” Nicki burst out. Her voice was animated and bright, as if she was describing some cool scene in a movie. “When the guard punched me? We were in that horrible, awful cell. And the guard hit me so hard, I fell down. I mean, I was, like, lying there against the wall, almost unconscious—all, like, dazed. And the guard gave this horrible laugh and he started to come toward me. And Meredith stepped in front of him. And he, like, grabbed her arm? And she just stuck her finger in his face and started screaming at him in Spanish—I mean, like, giving him a lecture, like he was five years old or something. And all the time, the guy is holding a machine gun, right, and grabbing her by the arm and ready to punch her too. Only he didn’t. It was, like, he didn’t dare.”

I laughed. I could imagine that. “What’d you say to him?” I asked Meredith.

She tilted her head to one side a little. “I just told him that if his mother could see him hitting a defenseless woman like that, she would die of shame,” Meredith said. “I told him Nicki might be his sister. I said, ‘How would you like it if someone treated your sister like that?’”

Jim laughed too. “How did you know he even had a sister?” She shrugged. “He knew what a sister is,” she said. “That’s the point.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He didn’t say anything!” Nicki said, practically giggling with glee. “He just finally sort of threw her aside and slunk out of the cell, grumbling.”

I shook my head. “That’s amazing. That’s an amazing story.”

“It is,” Jim agreed.

“It was even more amazing to be there,” said Nicki.

We all fell quiet for a minute. I could see the scene in my mind: Nicki lying on the dungeon floor… the guard looming over her… Meredith wagging her finger in the guard’s face, ignoring his gun, lecturing him about his sister as if he were five years old…

“So why aren’t you afraid, Meredith?” I asked. I looked at her. The red light from the heater played over her pale, still features. She turned aside a little, kind of rolling her eyes and smiling to herself, as if I’d said something ridiculous.

“No, really,” said Nicki. “I want to know too. Why aren’t you?”

“Stop it, you guys,” Meredith said. “You’re talking total nonsense.”

“No, actually, they’re not,” said Jim, like a teacher correcting a mistake. “We can all see that you’re not. We saw it from the beginning in the cantina.”

“The rest of us are all terrified all the time,” I said. “Maybe we’re trying to be brave, or to act brave, or do what we think is right or whatever. But we’re all afraid all the time. I know I am.”

“So am I,” Jim said.

“You know I am,” said Nicki.

“But you,” I said to Meredith, “it’s like it makes no difference to you how things turn out. It’s like you’re…” I hesitated a moment because I remembered the word that Palmer had used when we were in that old temple, when he was whispering to her in the dark. I didn’t want her to know that I’d been awake, that I’d been eavesdropping on them. But there was no other word to describe her. So I said, “Fearless. You’re fearless.”

I stopped there. We all stopped. We all waited, watching Meredith.

And Meredith—she just sort of gazed off into the flickering shadows, her features still, her eyes set on something far away we couldn’t see.

Finally, not turning to us, not even talking to us it seemed, but just talking into the darkness around us, she said quietly, “I had a sister. Her name was Anne. She was five years older than me. I think she was… the single sweetest, gentlest, kindest person I’ve ever met in my life. I never saw her get angry. I never heard her say an unkind word. Really. I’m not just, you know, exaggerating or something. She really wasn’t like other people. She was better.

“And, of course, I worshipped her. You know, little-sister style. She was nine, I was four. She was twelve, I was seven. She was sixteen and I was eleven. And I just wanted to do whatever she did, follow her around everywhere she went. And nine out of ten times, she let me. She let me tag along—to the mall, to get pizza, to the movies—even when it annoyed her friends, which was, like, always. She would tell them, ‘Oh, let her come, she won’t bother anyone.’ Which almost certainly wasn’t true. I must’ve been a terrible pain in the neck to her, but she never let it show. Really. Never once.”

I saw the light gleam red on Meredith’s cheek and I felt my throat get tight as I realized that she had started crying. It was a strange kind of crying. Her expression didn’t change at all, the way it does with most people when they cry. Her features remained still, distant, sort of serene. Even the calm tone of her voice remained the same. The tears just streamed steadily down her cheeks as she talked. Now and then she moved her hand to wipe them away or she sniffed a little.

“When I was really little?” she said. “I used to think sometimes that she was secretly an angel. I really did. She would come into my room at night, when it was time for me to say my prayers. And she would tell me, ‘Kneel down, and put your hands together, and point your soul toward the light of God.’ And I would sort of steal glances at her while we were praying and she’d have her face lifted up, and her expression would be so still and peaceful, I would think: She’s going off to the angel place. You know? Silly. I must’ve been three or four. You know the way little kids think.”

The tears kept streaming down her face in the heaterlight. But her voice continued quiet and unshaken.

“I was fourteen when she got sick. She had to come home from college. She’d been gone a year, and in that time I’d become this sort of… awful teenager. Always grim and complaining about everything. Nothing was any good. Everything was a ‘bore’ or a ‘disaster’ or a ‘waste of time.’”

I had a hard time picturing Meredith ever being like that, but if she said she was, I guess she was.

“Whenever I could, I’d go online and chat with Anne about… you know, whatever was upsetting me that day. She was busy with school and her new life, her new friends, studying and all that, but she’d still make time for me. She was the only one who knew how to make me feel better. In fact, when she got ill and came home from school, I was, like, ‘Oh good, now I’ll have her around again until she gets better.’ I didn’t realize how bad it was. I didn’t realize she wasn’t going to get better, not ever.”

She drew her sleeve across her face, drying her tears, wiping her nose.

“But she knew. Anne knew. And she never changed. The whole time the sickness ate away at her, she was the same as she always was. They had to give her chemo. She lost her hair—her beautiful, beautiful red hair. She got so thin… so thin and gray… but the way she was—that never changed. She was still Anne the whole time. Still my same sweet Anne.”

Meredith turned and looked at us in the red glow of the heater. The light shone on her wet cheeks.

“That’s what she said to me at the hospital, in fact… She had to go into the hospital at the end. And the very last time I visited her there, she said to me, ‘Don’t be afraid. Nothing has changed. I’m still who I am.’ A few hours after that, she was dead.”

Meredith shook her head as if to clear the old images from her mind.

“You think it makes no difference to me how things work out for us?” she asked. “That’s not true. It makes a big difference to me. I don’t want to die in this horrible place. I want to go home just like the rest of you. I want to see my mom and dad again. I want to meet my husband and get married and live in a big rambling house in the middle of nowhere and have more children than you’d think anyone would. That’s what my sister wanted too. I just know that… the things you want don’t always happen… sometimes terrible things happen instead… I’ve seen that with my own eyes… And you’re right: since Anne died, I’m somehow not afraid of it anymore. I don’t know exactly why. I can’t explain it really…”

Her voice trailed off. She leaned back against the wall and looked off into the surrounding dark again.

“I don’t get it,” said Jim after a moment. “I mean, when you see something like that happen… like what happened to your sister… shouldn’t that make you more afraid?”

“Maybe…,” Meredith said. “Maybe it should. But it didn’t. I’m just telling you how it is.”

Jim leaned forward over his own crossed legs, like a student asking a teacher a question. “Is it because you’ve seen the worst that can happen and it’s not so bad?”

Meredith shook her head. “No. No, it’s not that. It was bad. Losing Anne broke my heart. It still breaks my heart.”

“Is it because she’s in heaven?” Nicki asked. “I mean, are you not afraid because you know, if you die, you’ll see Anne again in heaven?”

Meredith took another swipe at her damp cheeks. “Well… I do know that. But no—no, that’s not it exactly either… Like I said, I want to live a full life before I die just like anyone.”

“Well then, I don’t get it,” said Jim again. “I don’t understand why seeing your sister die would make you fearless.”

But I did. I didn’t say anything, but I understood. I thought back to those terrible seconds when we were being taken out to face the firing squad. I remembered how I had looked at Meredith—and at Nicki—and at Jim—and even at the gunmen who were going to kill us—and I had thought how beautiful they all were, how beautiful they were all meant to be. Maybe not the rebel who was going to pull the trigger and snuff out an innocent life, but the man inside him who wanted to fight for justice and be a hero to his people. Maybe not the Jim who thought that fancy ideas and good intentions were the same as true goodness, but the Jim who wanted to think great thoughts and make the world better with them. Maybe not the Nicki who was vain and silly and weak, but the woman inside her who was so full of kindness and practically exploding with the joy of being pretty and alive. Those were the beautiful parts of them.

Their souls, I mean. I think in those moments, when I was so close to death, I was seeing their souls, the souls God had given them. And their souls were beautiful. And what Meredith knew, what Meredith had learned when her sister died, what her sister had taught her when she was dying, was that good things might happen to you in life or bad things might happen, sometimes terrible things, but no matter what happens, your soul is your own. It’s in your power to point your soul toward the light of God, and no one and nothing— not even a man with a gun, not even death, not even the devil from hell himself—can stop you.

That’s why Meredith was fearless. Because as long as she remembered what her sister had shown her, nothing that happened could ever hurt the most important part of her, nothing that happened outside herself could ever make her less than what God had meant for her to be.

I was about to try to tell the others this, to try to explain what I was thinking. But just then I sensed something nearby us in the darkness. And I turned and saw Palmer.

I’m not sure how long he had been standing there. Awhile, I think. He was just at the end of the corridor, at the edge of the little room we were in, at the edge of the brighter light from the heater. He was standing half hidden in the shadows. And he was gazing at Meredith.

Gazing is the right word. He seemed to be completely lost in the sight of her. I don’t think I’d ever seen a man look at a woman like that, not even in the movies. In fact, it wasn’t anything like the way men look at women in the movies. It was deeper, more serious than that somehow. His wry smile was gone, the mocking laughter in his eyes was gone. He stood and gazed at her and I could almost feel the heat of his sadness and his longing. He looked as if he wanted to somehow reach down into his own depths and draw out the very substance of himself and offer it to her in his two hands. He looked like he wanted to join his heart to hers forever.

Then the moment was over. He seemed to blink and shake off his trance. He stepped out of the shadows, stepped into the room, into the red light. The others noticed he was there for the first time and when they turned to him, they saw the Palmer they knew: relaxed and indomitable, the wry smile back on his lips, the mocking look back in his eyes.

Jim and Nicki watched him, waiting to hear what he would say. And out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Meredith quickly and secretly swipe at her cheeks one last time to make sure all the tears had been dried.

“All right,” Palmer said. “The soldiers have come and gone. Father Miguel is a little guy, but he’s tough as nails and he faced them down.” He moved his eyes over each of us in turn, hesitating only slightly when he looked at Meredith. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “Get some rest,” he said. “We’re gonna wait for the rains to pass.”

“Then what?” asked Jim.

“Then,” said Palmer, “we make a run for the border.”