She wrote the number. Mrs. Ratzibungen stared at the shakiness of her fingers with the pen. Twice she dropped it and had to pick it up.
“I vill put it through to you upstairs,” she said, softly.
“Thank you.” Natasha hurried back around to the elevators and up to her room. The hall was empty and quiet, no one stirring. Certainly there would be open phone lines now. Certainly she could know for sure, for good and all, that Michael was safe. Alive. Himself, as she could learn all over again to be herself.
Sitting on the bed waiting, she kept shivering and trying not to let her mind run. But it was running. Not about Faulk, now, but about possible pregnancy, the varieties of venereal disease, the ways people were deformed or scarred by such calamities, or died from them. And each thought was woven over the image of Nicholas Duego towering above her.
Could one report a rape the next day? Whom would she report it to, here? No, she had decided definitely not to do that.
She had never consistently taken the pill. There had been the others, and after Mackenzie there were those strangers, and of course there was Mackenzie, too. And Faulk. And nothing had happened, and her last period had ended more than a week before she left for Jamaica. “Oh, God. Please. Help.”
The call would not come. She felt certain now. She believed that the news, whenever it should reach her, would be bad. A punishment. More of this hell that had enveloped her. A voice from her life in the world came to her, accusing, judging: You deserve it. It’s you. She shook her head and closed her fists in her lap.
“No,” she said aloud. “It is not. It is not.”
She heard Constance moving around next door.
At last, startlingly, the phone rang, and she dropped the receiver trying to bring it to her ear. “Hello?”
“Baby.” His voice went over her like air for someone suffocating.
“Oh, Michael — oh. Oh, my God. Michael. Michael.”
“I’m all right. I didn’t even know it was happening. Clara called me with it. I was up on Fifty-Fourth Street in the hotel room. A long way away.”
“I’ve been lost, Michael. I’m lost.” She sobbed.
“I’m so sorry, honey.” He went on to tell her about how he woke up and it had already happened and how clean the sky looked out his hotel window. As she listened, she experienced again the sense of him as being innocent, less worldly than she.
“Have you been able to get through to Iris?” he asked.
She could not stop crying. A part of her wanted to tell him what had happened, blurt it out — but then the breath for speech itself was gone. Wouldn’t it mean that he would come to know more than he would understand? He would have to know everything.
“Natasha,” he said. “I’m all right, honey. We’re fine. You’ll be back here in no time, and we’ll be together.”
“Oh, yes,” she got out, sniffling. It occurred to her that the anxiety regarding what he would come to know of her past must stem from something existing between them as a couple. The disorienting sense that she was the one who was older came rushing back, and the lightness of his voice — that boyish unaware brutal confidence — frightened and depressed her. She felt this in a second, and it was obscurely some failure on her part.
“Enjoy the water,” he said. “And the sun and fresh air and try to put it out of your mind. It’s over. I’m safe. We’re safe. If we let it make us less than we are, then they win. Nothing good can come from dwelling on it, right? We’re okay. Call Iris.”
“It’s hell,” she said to him. “I want to come home. Can’t you or Senator Norland do something to bring people who got stuck overseas home? I was important to him. He tried to discourage me from leaving. I was important to him. Can’t he do something?”
“I’m sure if he could, he would.”
“I want to come home, Michael.”
He said, “I know. But, honey — stop that. Stop talking like that.”
“I can’t help it.”
Perhaps thirty seconds went by with only the small sound of static through the line.
“You there?” he said.
“Do you — do you want me to call you back after I talk to Iris?” she asked.
“I’ve gotta go to the train station in an hour or so.”
“Okay.”
He murmured, “We’re okay, darling.”
“I miss you,” she said, and felt it, a physical pang, like something molten being poured into her bones. It stopped her breath. She would never love anyone so much. “Michael!” she burst forth in a moment’s terror that he would hang up before she could tell him that. But she had said the words. There were no other words. “I love you,” she told him. The tears kept coming.
“It’ll be all right, sweetheart. I’m out of there. And soon we’ll be together in Memphis.”
“Yes,” she got out. “Yes, darling.”
He was gone. She put the handset back in its cradle and lay over on her side, facing the window and the French doors leading out onto the balcony, still seeking to compose herself, working to beat back the images that kept repeating in her thoughts. Constance had come out on her own balcony next door. The older woman’s shadow was on the green tiles there. A silhouette that held a glass up and drank. “Is Michael all right?” Constance called.
“Yes,” Natasha said loudly, and then she repeated the word in a near whisper. “Yes.” She sighed, feeling momentarily released, the first real sense of things working out all right moving through her with a surge of near elation, until she stirred on the bed and felt the discomfort in her hips and between her legs.
After a few seconds, Constance’s voice: “I myself never thought otherwise. But we’re grounded, you know. Stuck here.”
Natasha did not answer.
“Want some orange juice?”
She watched the shadow-shape drink; the head back, tilted to the sky. She got up from the bed and stepped out. You could tell it to a friend. You could say it to a friend. The other woman was in her Japanese robe, holding the glass at her hip and gazing off into the measureless distance. The sea was ablaze with morning, and in the brightness it was difficult to see her face.
Constance looked at her. “How do we feel?”
“Fine.” Now Natasha would say it.
“You look awful. You been crying?”
“Yes, hasn’t everyone?”
“This has done something to you. Michael is safe, right?”
“I just talked to him.”
“Hey,” Constance said. “So it’s over. Everyone we know is safe.” She leaned on the rail with the nearly empty glass in her hand and stared. “I mean, right?”
“Yes.”
“Right.” Constance gave forth a small derisive laugh.
“Constance?”
“I saw you on the beach,” she said evenly. “I came looking for you. And I saw you.”
Natasha waited, a freezing at her heart. Then: “You — what?”
The older woman nodded and with a furious motion tossed what remained of the orange juice over the railing. “That’s right. I saw you. I saw you and that Cuban guy, whatever the fuck his name is. Lying on the sand going at it.”
Abruptly, Natasha felt the chill under her heart as a kind of strength. She looked directly back into the other’s eyes. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what you think you saw.”
“Are we really going to do this?”
“Yes, why don’t we go ahead and do this, as you put it. Let’s do it, Constance.”
“Well, I saw you.”
“You said that.”
“He was on his back and you were leaning over him, kissing him. Deep.”