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Catalina
The jungle is dark and thick and lonely.
Over the past year, I’ve made this harsh journey dozens of times, but it never gets any easier—in fact, every step I take grows heavier and harder.
I’m a mother without a child, a partner without her man; I’m lost in a sea of sharp tangled vines and impenetrable blackness. The future is unseeable, even on a small, familiar trek like this. Will my light at the end of the tunnel still be waiting when I arrive? After we’ve shared our tiny fleeting moment together, will I ever be able to return again?
I’m risking both of our lives just to get a sliver of bliss... but this isn’t just any sliver of bliss. It’s primal; maternal; necessary.
I’ve escaped my captor to go see my baby, and if I’m found out before I can sneak back into my cage, then we’re both as good as dead.
Howler monkeys wail through the jungle canopy above. Earlier in the night, the white light of a crescent moon had washed through my locked bedroom window, but now, it’s all but gone. A small pencil thin flashlight is my only source of illumination. Spiny branches scratch along every inch of my body as I push through the pain and the fear and the uncertainty, until, finally, after what seems like hours, I see the faint glow of an orange bulb swinging outside of a deep jungle outpost. My heart expands in a Pavlovian response; the howler monkeys vanish as my ears rush with blood. It hardly matters how tired I am, I sprint the entire remaining distance.
“Lady...” I whisper, rapping my knuckles against the weathered steel door. Despite the loudness of the jungle behind me, every sound I make seems to echo endlessly through the air, like a grand beacon exposing my location to every enemy I’ve ever feared.
There’s no response.
I try knocking a little louder. My big heart races and the blood that was in my ears is called on to support my heaving chest.
Come on, Lady. Answer. Please.
I ball up my fist and cock back my arm, emotion taking over any attempt at subtlety. These treacherous journeys of mine are too hard to go unrewarded. My mind might shatter if I go too long without seeing what I came to see, without holding what I came to hold, without soothing what I came to...
Before I can slam my fist against the door, a quiet click freezes me into place. I stand, hand raised in the suffocating night air like a tragic Greek statue, as the doorknob begins to rattle, free from my touch.
“Lady?” I shake away the fear and try my best to put on a calm demeanour. Fear is infectious, and the last thing I want to do is corrupt the pure innocence that should be waiting for me on the other side of this creaking door.
“Ms. Catalina?” A flood of relief bursts over my trembling heart at the familiar voice. The first hug of the night goes to the kindly old maid who is risking her life to help protect my child.
We don’t linger on each other for long, it’s too dangerous to waste a single second. “In, in,” Lady waves me inside. She shuts the door behind us and the clanging metal echoes through the damp cement box.
“How is he?” I ask, almost unable to—anything worse than a ‘magnificent’ might kill me.
“He is fine. I make sure he gets enough sleep so that he will be awake when his mother arrives.” Lady is a saint and one of the few saving graces I’ve been able to find in my life since a certain vicious Angel tore it to shreds.
His shrapnel green eyes and faintly dimpled smile creep to the front of my mind, but I quickly push his image back down into the depths of my consciousness. He’s the last person I need to be thinking of now. Our son is most important—and, if there were a second most important character to focus on, it wouldn’t be Angel, but, rather, his evil younger brother, my current captor, Dante Montoya. Any slip up around the wicked prince means misery for me and everyone I care about.
I can’t let that happen.
Lady is decades older than me and not quite as fast as I would prefer. I won’t have all night, and the only thing keeping me from sprinting ahead of the saintly old maid is the fact that I don’t know where we’re going.
This old jungle outpost has underground tunnels that lead to every corner of Colombia. From what I’ve been told, it was built during the revolution to ferry spies and soldiers off to their missions; after that, it was used to smuggle drugs and weapons and people. Now, it’s abandoned, and the only people who know its twists and turns are those who’ve taken an oath to safeguard my precious Oscar.
My son. Oscar Luis Alzate.
Oscar Luis Alzate-Montoya.
Those who have sworn to protect him make sure to change his location every night, just to be safe. It kills me to not know where my baby is at any given hour, but I also know it’s for the best. If I don’t know, then no one close to Dante will know, and the further that monster is from any knowledge of my son, the better. In fact, he doesn’t even know Oscar exists... and I plan to keep it that way.
“This way, dear,” Angel’s old maid shuffles ahead through the dripping cement tubes and under the flickering fluorescent lightbulbs until we reach a crossroads. We go a different direction every time I visit, and tonight’s no exception. Lady turns down an entryway I’ve never been through before and we pick up speed as the ground tilts downwards.
“How has he been?” I ask. My chest is heaving and my breaths are stilted from exertion but I need to know. A mother always needs to know.
“Good, good,” Lady assures me, keeping her eyes forward, constantly on the lookout for danger. She’s a g
ood woman, and I’d trust her with my life; but more importantly, I’m trusting her with my infant son’s life. “He’s healthy and active and learning more every day.”
