Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
She very nearly turned around twice.
The first time was at her own front door, standing on the outside of it with the key still in the lock and the case pulling heavy at the end of her arm and the apartment dark and warm and blameless behind her.
Every reason to stay exactly where she was arrived at once, and each one was loud, and each one was entirely reasonable.
She could go back inside. She could put the case on the high shelf and turn the card back over and delete the photographs unopened and teach sourcing to eleven half-conscious undergraduates until the contract quietly failed to renew in the spring, and no one anywhere would ever know she'd stood in this doorway and considered anything else.
The second time was at the gate, with her thumb hovering over the button on her phone that would refund the whole thing in a single tap and hand her back her ordinary Tuesday. That would have been the end of it, cleanly, with no one the wiser.
Both times she made herself take the next step forward before the reasonable voice could finish its sentence.
The second time, the agent took her boarding pass and the machine chimed green and the jet bridge swallowed her, and somewhere in the walk down that cold corrugated tube she understood that there was no longer a version of the night where she'd stayed home.
The decision was behind her now, left at the gate with the reasonable voice, and it was a relief to be out of reach of it.
Three hours of recycled cabin air and a seatmate in a golf shirt who wanted very much to tell her about a timeshare he part-owned near Cancún, and she let him, because listening to a stranger's timeshare was a good deal easier than sitting alone with her own company at thirty thousand feet.
She kept the loupe in her pocket and her hand near it, and between the man's paragraphs she took out her three sheets of legal paper and read them until she had every line memorized, arrows and abbreviations and all.
She was careful not to let her eye settle on the cluster of glyphs she still couldn't read.
She knew herself far too well for that. Give her that puzzle and an hour of forced stillness and she'd spend the entire descent building it a meaning out of nothing, and then she'd have to spend a week tearing the meaning back down.
Somewhere out over the flat dark of the Gulf, with the timeshare man finally asleep against the window, she made herself sit still and name the thing she was actually afraid of, because she'd learned a long time ago that a fear you couldn't name ran your whole body from behind a curtain.
It was not Hartmann. It was not even the gray men he worked for, though she was afraid of those in the ordinary animal way that a person is right to be afraid of anyone who can reach into her phone from across a border.
What she was actually afraid of was the small cool weight of the loupe in her pocket.
It was the possibility that she would crouch down over the slab in some concrete room and lift the glass to her eye and see, with all the old certainty, the very thing she'd seen in the photographs — and be wrong.
Wrong again. That the one instrument she had ever fully trusted in her life, her own eye, had broken quietly two years ago and had never once been properly tested since, and that she was about to test it at last, without warning, in front of the only two people left on earth who loved her.
She would honestly rather have faced the gray car.
Villahermosa came up out of the green like something the jungle was tolerating for now and had not yet decided to keep.
The heat met her on the jet bridge before she'd fully cleared the aircraft, wet and total and immediate, closing over her like water.
By the time she'd crossed the terminal her shirt was stuck flat to her back and her glasses had fogged white and slowly cleared.
Through the terminal glass the sky was that flat, bright, pressing white that means the rain has already decided to come and is only working out the hour.
She was standing at the taxi rank with the case in her hand, scanning the crush of drivers and reuniting families and men holding up paper signs with strangers' names on them, when she noticed the car.
It was nothing at all. That was precisely what made her notice it.
It was a clean gray SUV, parked squarely in a place where cars were not permitted to park, at the mouth of the rank where a uniformed man should have moved it along within the minute.
There was no driver leaning against the fender.
There were no hazard flashers going. The windows were up.
The air above the hood shivered with heat, which meant the engine was running and the cabin inside was cool, and it had been running, cool and closed and patient, for some while.
As she watched, the front passenger window slid down exactly two inches, held for a moment, and slid back up.
No hand appeared at the gap. No cigarette.
No arm reaching to adjust a mirror. There was no reason for the window to have done that at all, except for the single reason she understood completely and instantly.
Someone in that car was letting her know that she had been seen.
I see you. And I want you to know that I see you.
Elena climbed into the nearest waiting taxi and gave the driver the name of Logan's hotel. She watched the side mirror the whole way out of the airport loop, and the gray SUV did not pull out behind her. It simply sat there, cool and closed, and let her go.
That was worse than if it had followed.
It didn't need to follow her. It already knew where she was going, because a courteous man in her hallway had known the name of Logan's town and the fact of her sister's flight, and a company that could reach that far had certainly reached the length of one hotel booking.
We like to keep things orderly, Hartmann had said, standing in her half-lit corridor in that even, unhurried voice.
This was what orderly looked like from the inside of it. This was the demonstration.
There was nothing here she could photograph.
There was no threat she could carry to anyone.
There was only a window that had come down two inches and gone back up, which would sound, in the retelling, exactly like a tired woman who had watched too much television on too little sleep.
That was the whole design of it. The message and its own deniability delivered together, in a single gesture, so that the thing that frightened you was also the thing that would make you sound paranoid for being frightened.
The drive into the city took forty minutes through a low landscape of raw concrete and bright hand-painted signage and standing water lying flat in every ditch and gutter.
Vendors sat out the heat under blue tarps.
A billboard for a phone company had peeled loose at one corner and hung folding on itself in the wet air.
Schoolchildren in white shirts walked single file along a shoulder that had no sidewalk.
Twice the driver slowed almost to a stop where the road had simply given up being a road and become instead a series of quick decisions about which craters to take at speed and which to steer around.
She rolled her window down in spite of the heat, because she wanted the place to be real against her skin. She was two thousand miles past the point where she could still pretend to herself that she was only thinking about coming.
The driver caught her eye in the rearview mirror. "?Aquí por trabajo?"
"Sí," she said. And found, a little to her own surprise, that she meant it plainly, in a way she had not fully meant anything in two years.
"?Arqueóloga?" He'd taken in the aluminum case on the seat beside her. "Las ruinas, ?no? Palenque. Comalcalco."
"Algo así," she said.
"Mucha lluvia esta semana." He tipped his head toward the white sky pressing down over the rooftops. "Cuídese."
Take care of yourself. She thanked him and let the city slide past the open window, hot and loud and completely indifferent to her.
Her phone buzzed against her leg. It was Logan: Tell me you landed. Then, before she'd even lifted the phone to answer, a second line arrived on top of the first: Rosa says you landed. She has already reorganized my entire operation from a hotel room. Send help. Or beer. Beer is help.
She typed back, Twenty minutes out. Then, because the heat and the gray car and the sheer impossibility of the whole day had loosened something in her that usually stayed bolted down, she added: Don't let her touch the slab.
The reply came back at once. Wouldn't dream of it. That's your job. Apparently it's been your job for four thousand years. No pressure whatsoever.