Part I
THE RANSOM
CHAPTER 1
Simone
Your children are only ever on loan to you. Simone glimpsed this phrase last month on a billboard in London advertising a film and then spent the rest of the day arguing in her head with it. Of course that isn’t correct, she had thought. If you do it right, your children are yours forever.
But it has plagued her in the way things sometimes do when they contain an uncomfortable truth. And so Simone is thinking of that billboard once again now as she sits cross-legged on a motionless baggage carousel in Del Rio Airport, Texas, waiting to go and meet her daughter, Lucy, who’s spent the summer here.
Everybody else’s cases have come and gone. Simone’s is, a jaded attendant told her, ‘Probably somewhere here, but honestly? Could be on the moon,’ and Simone had to do something she only recently learned at the age of forty-three: hold her tongue.
She opens a note buried deep in her phone – she’d be mortified if anybody ever found it – on which she has written the days of August to cross off. Just a simple list, no app or fanfare.
1 August – X
2 August – X
And now it’s the thirty-first, and she ought to be seeing Lucy right now, except Simone’s flight was delayed three times over, she arrived in Atlanta late, missed the connection. And her bag is on the moon, and it is ten past ten at night, the airport sleeping. The only person around is a porter cleaning the floor back and forth in rhythmic strokes. She sends Lucy a text:Landed late! I think I should just grab an airport hotel?
Her phone rings immediately. ‘The lodge is remote check-in,’ Lucy says the second Simone answers. This is how they begin conversations: in the middle. They end them there, too, their sentences understood and finished by the other. They have always been this way, right from when Lucy learned to talk.
‘That will be so late for you,’ Simone says, thinking painfully of her phone note ticking into September but hiding it, ‘just come tomorrow. Get some sleep. I don’t even have my bag yet; it’s lost somewhere,’ she adds. She pauses, listening. ‘What is that?’
‘Fargo.’
‘Movie or series?’
‘Movie,’ Lucy says, just a note of disparagement in her voice. Simone’s daughter, aspiring actor, is never not watching something she would call seminal, always with the same battered brown notebook and pen out. Lucy continues: ‘Airbnb don’t care when you check in,’ and Simone hears the movie go off, motion begin in her daughter’s voice, footsteps, doors closing. ‘Besides, it’s only ten or whatever.’ A pause. ‘Has it been a nightmare? I feel so bad if it’s been …’
‘No,’ Simone lies. ‘Just sitting around waiting. Not half as boring asFargo.’
‘Touché! It’ssupposedto be boring. Because it reflects the bleakness of – No,’ Lucy says, and Simone can just see the hand her daughter is holding up. ‘We’ll talkFargolater. Go find that bag.’ A pause. ‘And I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I appreciate you coming.’
Simone smiles into the phone; her daughter shows only her this vulnerability. She cares, very much in fact, and is afraid to show it.
‘They have no idea where it is. Said it could be on the moon.’
‘How stupid. Demand they go to the moon.’
Simone lets a laugh out. Lucy is so like Simone was years and years and years ago, full of verve and offbeat obsessions and humour and (sometimes) explosions of temper. Life and Damien and running a restaurant mellowed Simone out, but nevertheless something about this similarity fills her with happiness. She always figured her own messy childhood made her the way she is, but not so: Lucy’s childhood has been charmed, and look.
‘Anyway, I’m getting a cab now,’ Lucy says.
Simone notes the half-American lexicon,cab, born out of a summer spent over here. Or maybe she’s always said ‘cab’, and Simone just hadn’t noticed until now. ‘Let’s do it,’ she says.
‘I’ll see you at the lodge, and I’ll stop, and get you food?’
‘No need,’ Simone says, thinking how Lucy is a kinder teen than most, and they hang up. Just then, like a sign, the carousel starts up again, juddering Simone to standing, but no bags come.
She looks for the porter, but he’s gone. She stands around, watching the conveyor belt deliver no bags to no people, then wanders to a nearby vending machine. She’s just pondering the American snack selection – mediocre, but why do things always seem more exciting when purchased overseas? – when a lone employee drifts by with an overstuffed burrito in one hand. She knows just from looking that despite its arrogantly large size, it is bland, the tortilla completely unbrowned, for starters. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says to him. ‘I’ve lost my case, I bet you can’t help, but …’
‘I’m Border Patrol,’ he says, but he does so apologetically.
‘I’m going to meet my daughter – God, I just want to get there. I’m so late already. I’ve missed her so much,’ she garbles.
‘Let me see what I can do,’ he says. He brings a radio out, says through the burrito, ‘You’re meeting tonight?’
