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The maids have stopped vacuuming the floor and are now making the bed.
“What about them?” I ask.
Kala smiles. “I’m betting on your father missing a step.”
Not knowing what she means, I get up and follow her into the room, and I am astounded when she begins to speak to the housekeeping staff in what I assume is the native tongue.
After less than a minute of conversation, Kala is browsing on the housekeeper’s phone.
I watch haplessly but impressed. “Send an email to my sister. No, to Torben. No, to the media in Gravenland…” I list five more suggestions, desperate to let anyone and everyone know that the king and queen have trapped us here against our will. We must take full advantage of the limited access to the outside world.
However, everything I suggest is batted aside when she opens her Facebook account. Kala’s face goes pale.
“Kala, what’s wrong?”
She doesn’t answer, but fixes a stony look, then closes the browser and hands the phone back to the housekeeper.
“What are you doing? What happened?”
“Thank you,” she says to the housekeeper, but her grateful smile is not genuine.
When the housekeepers leave our suite, Kala can’t look me in the eye.
“What happened? What did they say? Did you message my sister?”
Kala’s voice is thin when she answers, as if all the oxygen has been sucked from her lungs. “No. I didn’t get a chance to message your sister.”
Perhaps I’m overreacting, but I’m upset at the lost opportunity. “What do you mean you didn’t get a chance. That was our chance!” I say, gesturing toward the door where the housekeepers just left from.
“I…I need a moment,” she says, then goes to the freshly made bed and curls up in the blankets, bathrobe and all.
“A moment for what? Did you tell anyone what’s happening? The media?”
Her brow furrows in annoyance. “Etienne. I need a minute to myself. I don’t want to discuss this any further.”
I don’t move a muscle.
“I deserve to know why my wife is not following our agreed-upon plan to get the hell off this rock!”
Kala slides her gaze to me, then says softly yet coldly, “When you stand like that and shout at me, you look just like your father.”
I’m so stunned and alarmed by this that I simply stare at my wife, who then turns away from me and tugs the blankets up around her shoulders.
Well. That’s it, then.
I glance outside and see the rain has let up.
Without thinking it through, I march downstairs to the beachside bar and order the bartender to line up shots of his best rum.
If my wife won’t talk to me, I’ll speak to the bottom of a glass.
26
Kala
When Etienne finds me a few hours later, running on the beach, he smells like a rum distillery.
Now that the sun is out again, I’ve spent the last few hours jogging and mentally unpacking what I saw when I opened my social media. Unpacking things I thought I had already unpacked, processed, and put away.
