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The living room is piled with baby toys—colorful alphabet blocks, a toy telephone, an army of yellow and red dump trucks and garbage trucks, a stuffed whale.
I sprint toward the living room and to the door I assume leads outside.
Behind me, from the hallway, I hear the piercing wail of a baby crying. Then I hear a loud thump as if the man’s fallen. Then a low swear. So yes. He must’ve tripped again.
I run through the living room, jumping over an alphabet-block tower and dodging a red dump truck.
As I pass the couch I startle. There’s a gangly teenage girl there, dressed in a black bikini top and cutoff jean shorts. She has short, curly brown hair and cheeks that still haven’t lost their baby fat. She’s all arms and legs and big eyes. She’s lying upside down, her legs propped on the back of the couch, reading a book.
When I step on a baby doll and it cries, “Mama, mama,” the girl looks up from her book.
“Finally. I’m starving. Can you make banana pancakes?”
I stop at the front door, my hand on the cool metal doorknob.
This teenager knew I was here?
She expects me to cook for her?
“Why are you in your underwear? Where are you going?”
Oh gosh. She’s in on it. The teenager is a delinquent, following in her criminal father’s footsteps.
But then again, maybe not. Maybe she doesn’t know the truth. Maybe she’ll help me.
“Your father has kidnapped me,” I say, my voice urgent and low. I dart a look back at the hall to make sure he isn’t coming yet. “If you call the police and turn him in, things will go easier for you.”
“Dad!” the girl shouts, sitting up and dropping her book. “Mom’s acting crazy!”
There’s another bang and the crying of the baby grows more insistent.
Mom?
Mom?
“Becca, can you get Sean?” the man yells, his voice echoing down the hall.
He’s coming.
He’s coming for me.
I can hear his footsteps on the wood floor. He’s getting closer.
And that’s when I decide I’m not sticking around any longer.
I fling open the door and sprint into the bright light of the day.
10
The heat hitslike the door of an oven yanked open. It blasts me with broiling temps.
The sun presses down and the heat singes my lungs as I draw in a quick breath. I’ve not felt heat like this before. Geneva in the summer has a gentle sun that strokes your skin and warms your blood, the wind brushing coolly over your cheeks. It’s a gentle warmth, like the cooing of a mother to the baby in her arms.
This?
This heat is a marauding army of sun and heat and humidity. It presses over me, cloaking me in a sweltering sauna. There’s no cool breeze. No dry air. No soft, gentle sun. No.
There’s only the loamy, salty, wet-aired humidity of ...
