At the doorway, she stopped, not because he allowed it, but because her body made one final involuntary movement of its own. Her eyes went to the small framed photograph that had jumped off its nail when the door burst open. It had gone crooked.
Her mother. Young. Standing in this same garden, laughing at something outside the frame. Roses along the left wall behind her, fully bloomed.
I am sorry, Daniella thought. She was not entirely certain who she was saying it to.
Then the doorway took her in, and the street outside was bright and entirely without concern for what was happening, and somewhere inside the house, Marcus was still looking at the wall.
The car was dark inside and smelled of synthetic material and old cigarette smoke. She was placed in the back seat between two men, their shoulders against hers, and the door was closed with a quiet, final sound. Through the tinted window, she could see the front of the house. The gate hangs at its angle. The earth where the roses used to be.
No one came out after her.
She pressed both hands flat against her stomach and looked forward and breathed, because breathing was the only thing that remained entirely her own.
They drove for close to an hour. She did not count the turns. She watched the town disappear behind them, the familiar streets, the baker's shop, the Civil Registration Office where she had sat that morning on a hard wooden bench in a white dress waiting for a man who never arrived, and then the outskirts fell away as well, and there was only the road ahead and the dark interior of the car and the low exchange of voices in the front that had nothing to do with her.
Then the car slowed.
Four large vehicles were parked ahead on a wide, empty road. Expensive vehicles. The kind that did not exist in her town.
They stopped. She was helped out, assisted, as though she were someone invited, as though the evening were something other than what it was, and walked forward toward a man standing in front of the other vehicles with his hands behind his back. Well-dressed. Older. He watched her approach with the same impersonal assessment she was beginning to recognize, the look that registered component parts and their potential uses, never the complete, specific human being standing in front of it.
The man from the first car spoke. "Gustavo. We were unable to collect from Gabriel Montenegro, there is nothing left to collect. But he gave us the daughter. Liver, kidneys, heart, it more than covers the outstanding amount."
She heard the words. She understood them one at a time. Arranged together they described something so vast and so cold that her mind refused to absorb it directly.
Liver. Kidneys. Heart.
Not a debt being worked off. Not a night of whatever she had feared. Her body, the body that was keeping her alive, the body that was keeping her child alive, was taken apart and assigned a monetary value.
The man called Gustavo looked at her for a moment, then gave a single nod. She was guided to a different vehicle, larger and darker, and placed inside, and the door closed, and this one smelled of nothing at all, which was somehow more disturbing than any specific smell would have been.
The cars began to move. All four of them, pulling away together into the night.
Then hands reached across from the seat beside her and brought a blindfold down over her eyes, and the last thing she saw before the dark was her own hands in her lap, fingers laced together over her stomach, her knuckles pale.
What about my baby, she thought, in the complete darkness.
What about my life?
No one answered.
No one had answers...
The car moved forward into the night, and somewhere behind her, becoming smaller and then gone entirely, the town went to sleep without her.