Michael tightened his grip on my fingers and pressed his lips through the bars against mine. When he pulled away, I felt like I was going to die.
“I will come find you Lisette. I swear to God I will. Now go, please!”
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t let go of him, and when he tried to pull away, I held tightly to his fingers until my knuckles dug against the gate.
Michael turned his head back to Frank.
“If you let her die here at the gate, then you have failed Paula. You say you did this to repay a debt, so do it. Get her away from the gate and somewhere safe,” Michael shouted at him.
Frank picked up his phone and within seconds, his friend emerged from the Canadian border station. The man was muscular and solid like a tank. He pried me away from the bars and there was no chance that I was going to be able to struggle against him. I screamed, and kicked, and cursed. And when I actually started to choke on my own screams, I looked in silent defeat across the gate as I saw the flashing colors of police lights coming into view of the horizon. I watched as Michael, Adam, and Rob took off running toward the trees that lined the main road and stretched out onto the hillside. Just before he disappeared from sight, Michael stopped and turned to look at me.
I’ll find you. Those were the words that he promised, and they were the only words that I heard over and over again in my head.
I had stopped fighting against the guard once I saw that the guys were gone. I let myself be carried silently away as I heard the police cars come to a screeching halt on the other side of the gate. There was some sort of heated verbal exchange, and one of the cops asked who the woman was that was being carried away on the Canadian side of the border. I heard a few of the border patrol guards lie and tell them that I was a refugee trying to escape persecution. From the sounds of the de-escalated conversation, the cops seemed to believe them. They asked about where the guys had gone, and Frank played stupid. I heard a couple of gunshots and for a second, I wondered who had fired first and which side had been shot—the cops or Frank and the guards. But then I realized that I didn’t care. Michael, and Adam, and Rob were safe. They had run into the woods before the cops had seen them. That’s all that I cared about. That, and the fact that I was here in another country all alone, without Michael.
My body felt like dead weight and I let my head flop against the guard’s chest as he carried me. He was Canadian, I think. I guess he had to be to work on this side of the border. I trivially wondered how he and Frank had become friends. But then I realized once again that I didn’t care. The list of things that I didn’t care about was growing.
“Aren’t you going to ask where I am taking you?” he asked as he looked down at my blank face that stared up at the cloudy sky above me. The daylight was coming now, and I thought about how stupid the concept of “countries” was. The entire planet lived under the same sky, and the sky didn’t care which imaginary lines were drawn on the ground beneath.
“No,” I said. “I don’t care where you take me.”
The man seemed shocked at that. It was a strange kind of shock that rested on his face. Instead of being cold and aggravated like he was when we were at the border, he seemed softer now.
“How can you not care?” he asked with something that resembled pity clinging to his voice. “You are a beautiful young woman who has just been abandoned alone in a foreign country. Your lover is on the other side of the border and you are being carried away by a strange man who you don’t know, and who tricked you into coming across to Canada. Any woman in her right mind would be terrified at this prospect.”
I let my eyes roll around in my head before shifting my stare from the blueish sky to the man’s blueish eyes.
“Maybe I’m not in my right mind anymore,” I said.
I stared at him long enough to make him uncomfortable.
“You’re not well,” he said under his breath as I laid my head against his chest and closed my eyes. “I can’t just set you at the side of the road in this condition.”
In the past, my dreams about my mother often gave me a sense of peace or purpose. There were a few that were unsettling, and a couple that made me think there was a clue to be uncovered or a mystery to solve. But for the most part, they made me feel comforted and steady.
This time, I didn’t even realize that I had fallen asleep. It was crazy to have fallen asleep in the arms of a stranger who carried me down a cold street to some unknown destination. I had read a science journal article once about how the brain will shut itself off in self-preservation if it encounters a pain that is too much for it to process and tolerate. That’s what happens when people are involved in some sort of horrific and painful accident and the reason why they don’t remember feeling the pain afterward. I think it might also be what happens when people die. I hope that was what happened when my mother died—I hoped that she didn’t feel any pain.
I guessed that’s what happened to my brain while I was being carried. Sure, I had been through terrible things before. Things that would be considered much more terrible than this. But this was an entirely different kind of terrible. This was the kind of terrible that comes when you think that you are so close to getting what you want and finally being free, only to have the happiness gutted straight out of you, and to be left with nothing but unknowns. This was the worst kind of terrible there was.
When my brain shut off, everything else around me seemed to just dissolve away as if it had never really existed at all. I no longer felt the steady rhythm of being carried that was caused by the man’s footsteps beneath me. I no longer saw the moving clouds above me. And I no longer felt the pain of losing the man that I was so desperately in love with that it pulled the very breath out of my lungs. Instead—I saw my mother.
She tried to comfort me in my dream, but that only made it worse. That was how I knew it was bad. My mom would tell be to be strong, and to be brave, and that I had to toughen up and forge ahead. She would tell me those things even in the most dire of circumstances because she knew it’s what I needed in order to keep pressing on. But this time, she simply said, “It will be okay” and hugged me in that weird way that only happens in dreamscapes, where your mind wants to feel the embrace but really can’t because it isn’t truly there. My mother wouldn’t have said that to me if she thought there was any hope left, not even my dream mother.
This dream wasn’t a message of comfort or strength or hope. This message was one of defeat.
When I finally opened my eyes, I looked around without moving my head. It was too much to take in and I had trouble processing all of it—the soft white fabric that was touching my skin, the glowing light of candles that was flickering against the walls, even the smell of a robust coffee that wafted on the air in ribbons of rich scent.
I had no idea where I was, or how I had gotten into these pajamas, or what had happened to me at all. I was confused and teetering between being numb and feeling way too much at once. I was just about to lose myself into a fit of sobbing when I thought about Michael being too far away for me to get to, when I heard a voice next to me and turned my head to see who it was.
“Don’t be afraid,” the man said. “I didn’t do anything to you aside from put you into pajamas and lay you in this bed.”
It was the border patrol guard and he looked entirely different now that he wasn’t in his uniform anymore. He was in jeans and a T-shirt, and he looked more like a normal guy now.
“Where am I?” I asked as I sat up in the bed and took the coffee cup that he was handing me.
The coffee smelled delicious, and strong. I suddenly felt my stomach growl and remembered that it had been quite a while since I had eaten anything.
“You’re in my home,” he said as he looked at me.
His expression was hard to read.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you were borderline delirious and hysterical, and you had nowhere else to go.”
I started to open my mouth to say thank you, but then I remembered that he was the one who called me through the gate to begin with. This man tricked me into being separated from Michael, and then he carried me away from the gate at his command.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
“I already just answered that,” he said.
“No, that’s not what I meant. I mean, why did you trick me into coming onto Canadian soil? And then why did you pull me away from my friends?”
“I tricked you because I owed Frank a favor,” he said simply, as if it was an easy cut-and-dry question. “And I pulled you away because after my favor was paid, I chose to listen to your friend’s request and save your life.”
“You didn’t save my life,” I growled at him. “You killed me.”
