CHAPTER 13
Simone sees from the collection of missed calls and texts that Damien has now boarded a new flight. She sighs. If she is arrested at the border, it’s better he knew nothing, and clearly he has decided to get to Texas as soon as possible anyway.
Still, she traces a finger across his messages – Where are you?
– and feels a sympathetic lurch right in her gut.
She replies with only two words: I’m safe.
The turmoil he must be going through. What would she do if she were him?
She would be seething, she thinks. She’d fly to Texas and she would probably tell the police.
Would she? If she knew it might jeopardize the rescue?
She doesn’t know. What she does know is she’d give him hell.
Simone leans her head against the window and looks up and out into the blackness.
The air con switches off and a heater begins to exhale.
She draws her legs up to her chest on her little two-seater, near to the back, and puts her chin on her knees like she did while she was a child.
She listens to the sound of quiet breathing around her, tinny noises from headphones, the crinkle of a newspaper in one tourist’s hands.
The coach doesn’t leave for a very long time, and Simone sits there, her body as small as possible, and thinks about Lucy.
When it departs, it lurches this way and that with little jolts, and Simone could almost sleep but doesn’t.
She puts a palm on the window instead and thinks that, somewhere, Lucy might have her own hand out, too, reaching for her mother. I’m coming, she thinks. I’m coming, and I’m doing everything I’ve been told to.
A soft clear of a throat in front of her, and a man turns around to look at Simone. ‘Hard to sleep on these things, isn’t it?’ he says. Simone is surprised to note his accent is also British.
‘You’re English?’ she asks him. She can see only a slice of his face through the gap between the seats. Brown eyes, hair that’s gone fully grey.
‘Yes – Manchester,’ he replies. ‘You?’
‘London.’
‘Over for long?’
Simone turns away from him, a friendly man who probably means no harm, but Simone’s system is on overdrive. ‘Not long,’ she says faintly, hoping it’s the truth.
‘Funny place for a vacation, Texas,’ the man remarks. Vacation. The word is dissonant to Simone. A British person wouldn’t use it. There’s suspicion everywhere, but it makes Simone stop talking.
The man seems to get the message and turns away too.
The coach begins to slow, brightness up ahead. They must be at the border crossing; a sign says DEL RIO.
Wide, flat highways become dotted with the unreality of floodlights, official-looking buildings and gantries.
Traffic filters off into designated lanes and locations, and Simone watches, blinking in the sudden glare, trying to glean whatever information she can; her outbound trip is less loaded than inbound, and she needs to use it to learn what she can about the crossings.
They join a queue along a suspended freeway.
It’s busy, even though it’s night-time. At their booth there are three Border Patrol officers who sit in hatches, checking passports.
Two of the three vehicles in front of them are pulled away from the road and searched; each takes less than five minutes, and all Simone can see is an officer getting on and then off and thinks about her odds: 66. 6 per cent.
Eventually, their coach reaches the hatch, their driver says something in a low voice, and they are pulled over, too, off the freeway and into a side road.
Simone cannot – cannot – comprehend that on the way back she will have something illegal with her. And maybe the security will be different coming from Mexico into America. Maybe it will be worse. Maybe it is better not to know.
It’s certainly easier not to think about it now. About the fact that it might be drugs. About what drugs mean to her.
‘All tourists?’ one of the Border Patrol officers says, walking up the three steps at the front of the coach.
Simone wilts like a dead flower at the back, trying to turn invisible, then has to forcefully stop herself.
No. Act naturally. Don’t arouse suspicion now, long before you’re actually suspicious.
She briefly wonders if she has yet committed a crime, and she tells herself that she hasn’t.
There’s something good about that, something edifying. Like proof she hasn’t changed.
‘Yes,’ the coach driver says, a man wearing sunglasses even though it’s dark.
‘Passports,’ the officer says, then walks down the aisle slowly, Simone trembles and shows hers. She can hear every minute thing happening. The hum of the fan in the tiny toilet. The officer’s boots sticking on linoleum.
She holds her passport out, and he flicks his gaze to hers, eye contact fleeting.
He nods, turns and departs, and that’s all.
That’s all. If the luggage bay at the rear of the coach was searched, she doesn’t know about it.
It was mercifully quick. Maybe she will get away with it.
She tries to imagine it: arriving back with whatever is in the bag.
Then getting Lucy back. Then leaving Texas, leaving America, and never returning.
The officer leaves. The coach departs again with a squeak of a handbrake. An elderly couple across the aisle from Simone lurch slightly in their seats, unprepared.
Back on to the highway, this time in Mexico. Funny, the day she was taken from her parents by a social worker waiting outside her school kind of felt like this one. Unfamiliar roads, no idea of what’s next.
And that’s that. From one country to another. They leave the brightly lit crossing and head on to a road with no street lights. The coach illuminates a small patch in front of them, but everything else is just darkness. They could be anywhere.
Each seat has a small reading light. They create miniature tableaux of people: normal people. Holidaymakers. Couples. The family, right at the front, with the toddler. Simone’s heart turns over as she looks at them.
Right after her RADA audition, Lucy arrived in their kitchen and put her elbows on the counter, rocking slightly on her feet as though in character.
Simone, preparing coffee at a Tassimo machine that Damien had bought her as an extremely misguided Christmas present and which she felt she had to use, watched her, wary; she could tell news of some kind was coming.
‘The singing probably is a real sticking point,’ Lucy said. She dropped her head, then looked right at Simone again.
‘Yeah. But you don’t even want to be a singer.’
‘They have this thing about all-rounders.’
‘Like wanting a chef who can chop but also, I don’t know …’ Simone said, distracted by espresso spluttering everywhere.
‘Swallow knives,’ Lucy finished with a laugh.
‘Right!’
‘If they do offer, though,’ she said, her voice slow and low, ‘I think I will probably live here.’
The espresso finished, and, suddenly, the kitchen was silent. Simone perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised, but was.
She didn’t know what to do, so, delight running through her veins, and not wanting to show it, she added cold milk to the espresso.
‘Don’t you want to steam that?’ Lucy said flatly.
‘Because it’s so convenient to stay home?’ she asked her. Dishes was three doors down from RADA. She poured the coffee away, started again.
‘Yes and no,’ Lucy said.
‘Has something happened?’
‘Call it a loss of confidence,’ Lucy said lightly.
Simone watched her daughter closely. She was taking the Tassimo pods and stacking them on the kitchen counter, where they kept toppling.
‘A loss of confidence?’
‘Just don’t fancy living out. I mean,’ she said, then gestured to their sunlit kitchen: Velux blinds, bifold doors, brass fittings.
Their eyes met again, and Simone wonders now if she pretended easily enough.
But, beneath that, she wonders why Lucy suddenly wanted to stay so close to home.
She’d already chosen a hall of residence at RADA, then intended to cancel it.
Simone had asked her a few times for her reasoning.
Was it wanting to be close to the restaurant?
Was it a preference for their Victorian townhouse, not halls?
But now, in the light of everything that’s happened since, it suddenly feels sinister. Lucy wanted to stay close to home: why?
She sits there, knees drawn to her chest, thinking dark thoughts.
She doesn’t sleep but, nevertheless, suddenly it’s 4:02 in the morning.
This is the precise time that Lucy was taken, or, at least, Simone thinks so.
Motherhood always plays out in the small hours.
Night feeds, waiting up for teenagers, the lot.
Now fear flashes over her in fine needles of regret.
A betrayal by her. How can she not have woken properly?
Lucy won’t have gone quietly, would be harder to kidnap than some people.
Would’ve kicked and screamed, Simone is sure of it.
Adrenaline fires into her system. Twenty-four hours post. It’s a physical reaction.
The softly rumbling coach jiggles her head to her knees and she lets it, trying to shake the thoughts out.
But, still, the mind won’t let her forget or think nothing. It all plays out, the version where she woke up and stopped it. The version where she told the police.
No, she tells herself. Get a grip. You’re here, and these are the cards you have been dealt. All we can do in life is choose to play them as best as we can.
But, for once, she doesn’t believe it. Something deep and wise is telling her that she cannot just do this one thing and have that be the end of it, but she isn’t ready to listen, can’t, not yet, not yet.
Hour five, six, into Simone’s time on the coach, and something begins to happen. Her body starts to power down. Sleep comes eventually for even those who fight it.
She leans her head back against the window and lets the black scenery whizz by and she thinks of her daughter and how scared she must be.
Of her husband, flying solo, terrified. A few tears begin there, alone on a coach in the middle of fucking nowhere, and Simone lets them roll down her face like English raindrops.