Thankfully the blood had been washed from her during the swim, but Maria was aware there was no way she would be able to take a ferry as she was; she had no money and she was soaking wet, covered in bruises, and shuddering with cold now that the sun was finally setting. She carefully picked her way through the undergrowth that was concealing her progress to take a peek at the shoreline beyond. A couple of evening swimmers dotted the water, their towels and bags left on the sand. She did not break cover yet, though; the single swimmers she saw were so solitary that they would easily notice her slipping from the cover of the trees to deftly take their items. She did not need more people chasing her.
She was certain the people she was running from would be looking for her at police stations and harbors. But she doubted they would have thought to cover the busy tourist ferry terminal—after all, how could she possibly go there without drawing attention?
Maria continued along the coast until she found the perfect opportunity: a mother with three children running and playing in the waves, the woman’s attention split among too many potential dangers to notice Maria.
Maria had been there as a nanny many times. Caregivers were easy targets—she knew herself; if more than one kid was having a frantic half hour, you’d be lucky if you noticed that your beach towel back there was on fire.
She waited until the oldest of the woman’s children, a four-year-old, dashed screaming into the foaming waves clearly intent on making his way out to a raft that was definitely not a child’s distance away. The mother grabbed one toddler and firmly ordered the other not to move, then stumbled into the waves after the adventurous swimmer.
Maria slipped from the undergrowth and walked calmly but purposefully in the direction of the woman’s beach spot, careful to keep a calm relaxed pace and pass as a sunset walker from some neighboring resort.
As predicted the swimming emergency metamorphized into a game in the water. The mother to her credit subverted the danger and somehow got the child to willingly stay in the shallows. But her attention was firmly locked on her brood as she tried to playfully negotiate an end to the increasingly post-sunset swim.
As Maria passed the family’s array of towels, she did not break step, bending only to hitch the woman’s woven bag onto her own shoulder and grab a thick sweatshirt from over the arm of the pram. Then she was away, seamlessly continuing her walk along the beach, listening behind her as the sounds of family life faded, all the while expecting a hand to roughly grab her and spin her around. But no hand came and the world continued to spin. Once she had made it around the curve of the beach, she slipped back into the undergrowth to inspect her haul.
A wallet with cards and eighty dollars in cash. In her head, Maria promised the woman she would leave the wallet in a public spot, use only the cash, and return the rest to a lost property.
She removed her torn wet polo shirt and slipped on the woman’s warm sweatshirt. Her shorts were still wet but partially covered now by the thick sweater. She dug around in the bag and came up with a cheap pair of flip-flops, a worn sun hat, and a children’s snack bar. She tore into the wrapper and inhaled the cereal bar, its oats and dried fruit hitting in a way she had never thought possible, all the magic of life suddenly present in the nutty tang of it. She let out a moan of enjoyment. It had been days since she had last eaten.
Snack devoured, Maria crumpled the wrapper, returned it to the bag, slipped on her new shoes and the sun hat, and headed toward the road.
She managed to buy a ticket and slip onto the ferry hidden among the passengers of a large American cruise ship returning to their ship in Tortola after a day trip. Sun hat pushed down to avoid the cameras she was certain would be across the ferry port, she boarded the ferry back to the main island.
It was easy to buy a flight home using online banking at an internet café. Her next move was harder, however. Having left her passport back in that house, she needed emergency travel documents to return to the US, and even after she applied for a replacement passport the process required a two-day wait. So wait she did, for forty-eight terrifying hours, in a cheap airport hotel. She checked her emails for evidence of who these people were and what they wanted from her, but all correspondence from the company that had hired her had disappeared from her email account. There was no paper chain. If she had died in that house, if her body had washed up on the shores of Gorda, it seemed unlikely anyone would have been able to identify her. They had made sure no one knew where she was or who she had been working for.
And yet now she is free. She is safe, she reminds herself, aboard a five-and-a-half-hour flight back to New York. Safe.
She thinks of her apartment, the tiny place she shares in Brooklyn with her now pretty much estranged best friend Freya.
The idea that Freya won’t even have missed her yet is an unsettling one in Maria’s mind, but then everyone thinks Maria is nannying right now. Nannying at some rich person’s holiday home in paradise. How could they possibly know what occurred over the past week?
As the plane roars its way down the runway and lifts, engines deafening around her, she thinks of how the people who held her captive arranged everything perfectly, only emailing her the final address the day after she arrived on Tortola, so that no one but her would know the exact location of the house. But she remembers—and once she is back home and recovered and absolutely certain she’s safe she will tell somebody what happened out there. By then the bodies will be gone, she doesn’t doubt, and her crimes will be as hidden as theirs.
The plane levels out high above the islands and Maria lets out a long-held sigh, tension slowly releasing from deep inside her.
She will get back to that apartment, she will tell Freya, at least some of it, and over the next few days she will find a lawyer, and she will make sure those people can never hurt her again.
—
EXCEPT FREYA IS NOT AT the apartment when Maria arrives at the door eight hours later. And Maria does not have a new phone yet. Or a key.
Freya’s absence is not unusual. Maria and Freya met at Cornell the day before their first class commenced; they were in the same med intake. And Freya is now in her third year, her hours even more extreme to Maria’s now “outside” eye than they were when she herself was living through them. The pair rarely sees each other most days and when they do, Maria can often sense Freya’s discomfort around talking about anything, especially the career that Maria abandoned with such seeming ease.
Perhaps even back then Freya felt that age-old twinge people get when something, namely Maria’s altered career path, seems too good to be true.
And wasn’t that instinct borne out spectacularly in the end, Maria muses, as she makes the schlep down to the super’s apartment to request a spare key. Her own key and phone no doubt now in some unknown landfill in the British Virgin Islands.
Best not to wait for Freya to get back. God knows when she might return home.
The super obligingly lets her into her own apartment, clearly pleased to have the opportunity to interrogate Maria once more on the habits of the rich and famous. Maria customarily bats him off with a few choice anecdotes but has neither the will nor the energy to do so today. Sensing a new frostiness to Maria, he soon disappears back to his own apartment.
—
HER APARTMENT SMELLS LIKE HOME—well, not her childhood home, but her New York home: the scent of cooking spices, laundry detergent, and Freya’s calming shower gel. Freya obviously came back to the apartment and went out again not long before Maria’s return.
Maria tries not to let her thoughts pull back to memories of her childhood home, her parents, long gone now, or the uncle who took her in for those final years of high school.
She tries not to think of them most days, but now more than ever she is not in the mental space to reminisce about lost loved ones.
