He thanked her when he handed it back to her, and after she was gone, he went to his office desk and pulled out the wedding picture from his first marriage. The divorce had been amicable; he was still friends with Amelia. More or less. He saw her often because of Marc. But she fell out of love with him when she fell hard for another professor at UCLA. When they’d been married, she had hated more and more each month the way their lives were increasingly linked to Katie’s, and what Amelia referred to dismissively as that whole Hollywood cabal. They were an inside, gated world, she said, one that depended upon the neediness of places like Rockville, Illinois （where Amelia had been born and where her parents and siblings still lived）。 When he pushed back that UCLA was the epitome of an ivory tower, she’d asked him if it ever creeped him out that every time his kid sister was in public, strangers’ eyes would slither over her like spiders. They craved her: her beauty, her money, her status. And she ate it up, Amelia insisted. They all did. Actors and actresses. They devoured their fans’ longing. It was the air that they breathed and the food that they ate. He defended Katie because Katie wasn’t like that, not at all, but he had to admit that narcissism and self-importance marked a lot of the business. It was the armor that lots of actors and actresses wore, because the only thing Movie Star Confidential liked more than a movie star at the top of his game was one who had fallen hard off that pedestal and shattered into a million squalid pieces. God, to catch Katie Barstow out and about without makeup? It was like spotting a rare and exotic bird landing on the handle of your shopping cart in the parking lot while you tossed your grocery bags into the back seat of your car.
He supposed he was at least as responsible for the marriage burning out as Amelia. It wasn’t that the professor was so magnetic; it wasn’t that he himself was so repellent. But, Billy knew, back then he had not been especially communicative. He knew now he should have listened more and he should have talked more. Amelia said he was—and this was the expression she used—shut down. She said he was so shut down that some days it was like living with a stranger. She never knew what he was thinking and he never told her when she pressed. They’d been married two years one day when Katie was visiting, and his sister had kissed six-month-old Marc and said something silly about how he’d never be locked in a closet, no, never, and Amelia had asked her what in the name of holy hell she was talking about. Until that moment, Billy had never, ever told Amelia about the closet.
* * *
.?.?.
It was still dark inside the hut when they came for him, waking him roughly, but when they brought him out into the boma, he saw the morning sky was rolling in like the tide. There was a shimmering band of orange to the east, and for a moment he studied the silhouettes of tree branches, some pendulous and some haggard, all potentially lethal. You just never knew here.
He could see by the light of the fire in the center of the boma that Terrance had been beaten too, his eyes slits, one cheek swollen, and a gash on his chin. Had he ever played a boxer? If so, his was that face after a fifteen-round TKO. But Katie, thank God, looked fine. Tired and scared, but it didn’t look like she had been hurt. Neither she nor Terrance was bound, and Billy was relieved that they didn’t seem to have any plans to tie him up again, either. The guard told him not to speak—not to say one single word. Billy nodded, supposing that Margie and David would be escorted from their huts any second now, but when a minute or two had passed and there was no sign of his wife or his friend, he started to grow anxious.
“Where’s Margie?” he asked. “And David?”
Instead of answering him—or, perhaps, it was an answer—the creep jabbed him in his back with the butt of his rifle, hitting with surgical precision the spot that was most wounded and tender, and sending him to his knees with a gasp. He looked up, a beaten dog, confused, and one of the other Russians came over to him and squatted like a baseball catcher in front of him. He spoke very quietly.
“Your wife is fine. But she had a miscarriage. She’s safe. She’s in a house outside the reserve with running water and clean sheets. Do you understand?”
He absorbed the news: his wife was alive, their baby was gone. The kid. No, the kid wasn’t gone. Gone was the wrong word. The kid was dead.
But Margie was safe. No, she was alive. Again, words. There was a difference, and the difference mattered. She wasn’t safe. None of them were safe. “You’re sure she’s okay?” he asked, the short sentence catching in his throat.