The Jaguar

7

After sunrise someone knocked on her door and Erin rose from a deep sleep and sat up on the bed. She had no idea where she was. She touched the long white nightshirt that she wore but that did not belong to her. When she looked out and saw the palm trees swaying in the orange light and the water glittering between the mangroves she remembered, and her heart tried to climb out from its cage inside her.

A woman’s voice. “Desayuno.”

“Yes, breakfast, thank you.”

The lock whirred and clunked and in walked not a woman but a slender teenage boy with a golden pompadour and a shy smile. He held a folding stand in one hand and with the other he balanced a large waiter’s tray over his shoulder. The tray was stacked with stainless-steel warmers that clinked as he crossed the room. At the table he set the tray on the stand and took his time arranging her meal. He changed his mind twice on the placement of side dishes. With a flourish he snapped the napkin and folded it into a loose scallop and set this to the left. Then the flatware.

Erin caught the scent of the meal as it went by and thought it was the best breakfast she’d ever smelled. Her stomach moaned and gurgled. She watched him pour the coffee and the juice. Last he lifted the warmers and stacked them on the tray, then with a matadorial flair swept up the stand and smiled shyly at her again on his way out.

She ate piggishly, slopping the ranchero sauce onto her nightgown and shoveling down fast the tortillas heaped with sweet preserves. She drank the juice and sighed with the pleasure of it: tangerine. She finished it and held her free hand to her belly.

She drew a bath and dried off the derringer and set it on the deck of the beautifully tiled Roman tub. She lifted off the nightshirt and threw it over the shower curtain rod. Her right upper calf still stung from where the taped gun and cash had rubbed and pulled. She disliked guns and the sounds they made. She floated freely in the great deep tub listening to the amplified slurp of the bathwater going in and out of her ears. In these sounds and in their echoes she heard melodies as she had always heard them, the gifts of her nature coming from a universe that, even as a small girl, she had understood was made not only of matter but of music. Straight above her was a raised plaster ceiling painted with the likeness of a young Mayan woman looking down on a warrior who knelt before her. She was long pregnant and she held an urn but Erin could not see into it. This brought tears to her eyes and terror to her heart so she sat up suddenly in the water and slapped herself in the face, hard. You will not come apart. You cannot come apart. She slapped herself hard again.

She dressed in new clothes from the wardrobe, pulling off the tags as she went. They were designer garments, fashionable and well made. She was slender and long-legged and flat-chested but the clothes fit right, even the sandals. The clothes were in colors she liked. She lifted the blouse and stood sideways to the mirror and wondered if they knew.

She pushed aside the breakfast dishes and sat for a long while at the table by the window. She had been to Cancun twice in her life and this place reminded her of it. She and Bradley had stayed at the Camino Real and snorkeled at Isla Mujeres and rented a jeep to drive to Chichen Itza and Tulum. The jungle around Cancun looked like this jungle, only flatter. She remembered the cloud-muted sunlight and the heat. This morning’s light was filtered by clouds too and when she touched her hand to the window she could feel the warmth of the day already on the glass.

She reached to open the window but it was not made to be opened. She picked up one of the stainless-steel plate warmers and flung it hard against the glass, to no effect. She lifted a chair and threw it against the glass hard but the glass, if it was glass at all, was very heavy and did not break. She turned and ran to the door and lowered her shoulder and tried to knock it down. She kicked it and hit it with the sides of her fists. She screamed and cursed for anyone to hear and was answered by dead silence. In the bathroom she vomited. She paced the perimeter of her quarters several times, then squeezed into the corner between the wall and the bed and pulled the colorful woven bedspread down over her, curled into a ball on the floor and wept.

Hours later she awakened and threw off the cover and stood. She saw that the breakfast dishes were gone and a light lunch had been left in their place. The chair was back at the table and the plate warmer had been picked up from the floor by the window. She was a heavy sleeper, but she was surprised to have slept through all this. Or maybe not, she thought. You don’t get kidnapped every day. You don’t see your husband beaten bloody by drug traffickers. She looked outside. From the sun she guessed it was closer to evening than morning. She wondered if the breakfast had been drugged but that made little sense. There was a vase of fresh cut tropical flowers on the table.

She walked the room again and felt the sudden rush of abandonment. She’d never felt abandoned in her life. Not for a day, not for an hour. She had never really even been alone, either. And you have to be alone to be abandoned, she thought, although they were not the same thing. She wanted someone to talk to. And someone to listen to. Maybe if she divided the lunch into two meals and set a place across from her someone would appear and they could lunch. To lunch, she thought. A verb.

She stood for a moment in front of the Hummingbird. It was a beautiful instrument, large and resonant and aesthetically dazzling. It looked fairly old, as did the case. She reached for it, then stopped herself. She felt like Pandora, or maybe like Eve herself, confronted with a thing of temptation that had been forbidden to her. But why forbidden? Who had forbidden it? Herself? Some distant God? She had no memory of the forbidding. In fact, she thought, it hasn’t been forbidden; it’s been offered.

She picked it up and sat in the handsome leather chair. The strings were new and out of tune. She tuned it and played softly without singing, letting her fingers chase down the music as her ears heard it. The sound led to the feelings and thoughts, and she fetched the paper and pen from the desk and set them on the table in front of her.

Hours became minutes as they always did. There was terror, anger, shame, even hope. She tried to slow the rush of emotion enough to capture the last two days with words, not so much capture as synopsize, sketch, represent. Notes into music. Thoughts into rhyme. Later could come the clarity and the accuracy, the shading and wit.

Later, lost to all this, Erin heard another knock on her door.

“Go away! Marcharse!”

“Mr. Armenta will be here in one half hour.” It was the soft high voice of the room-service boy.

“For what? Why?”

Silence.

Think. She put the guitar back in its case and pulled off the three sheets of paper upon which she had written, then put the pad and pen back on the desk. The lyrics she stashed under the bed.

Think. She found a blue dress and bit off the Bloomingdale’s tag. It was modest and fit loosely around her middle. Then a pair of new sandals. She turned sideways to the mirror to see her profile and she pulled her stomach in again and when she felt the tears starting up she whacked herself on each cheek and this helped.

From the wardrobe she retrieved the used medical tape and in the bathroom she hiked up the blue dress and used its fading adhesive to fasten the derringer around her unchafed calf. She brushed her hair and pulled it back into a pony tail. She thought for a moment, then changed her mind about the gun and removed it and put it and the tape back where they had been.

Five minutes later she heard the whir and clunk of the door lock and Armenta pushed into the room. He wore a black open-collared dress shirt instead of the Pacifico T-shirt, and a pair of wrinkled linen pants instead of the shorts. His hair was still a mess and his face still unshaven and jowly and his eyes haunted. His sandals were a burnished orange color, similar to that of a sunburst Gibson ES-335 guitar. His matching belt was tooled with crocodiles. Three phones hung from it: one satellite and two cell phones, she guessed.

“I will show you my home.”

“Let me go.”

He wagged a thick finger at her and shook his head slightly. “You will now see my home.”