Held Up

by Christopher Radmann

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

How far do you go to rescue your child? Paul van Niekirk, a successful white South African is held up at gun-point when driving his new BMW. He's dragged out and his abductor drives off in his car. It's an everyday carjacking. Except his nine-month old daughter is in the back seat. As a pacifist, Paul is reluctant to carry a gun, but he descends into the heart of darkness of his country determined to find his child. He uncovers a criminal gang involved in people trafficking and discovers in himself a capacity for violence. When the trail goes cold, he is on the verge of losing everything but finds redemption in the most unlikely circumstances. Moving from the enclaves of Johannesburg's northern suburbs to the throbbing heart of Soweto's informal settlements, Paul is forced to confront the changing political and social landscape of the new South Africa, questioning his own values as his perfect life crumbles around him.

Release date: July 19, 2012

Publisher: Headlline Digital

Print pages: 251

Sample

Held up. Paul van Niekerk is being held up.

He is sitting in his new baby, his bright shining-white 318i BMW, at the traffic lights, trapped in a queue of cars. Now this.

There is a gun. In South Africa there is always a gun. Paul does not have time even to wince as the hand tightens on the trigger.

From the BMW dealership in Midrand outside Johannesburg, Paul has cruised with perfect climate control into this. The snub-nosed gun is right beside his head. The black barrel gleams in the sunlight and its round mouth gapes with obscene promise as it taps once on the glass. There it is: nightmare horror on the other side of his closed window. For who, in South Africa, in their right mind, drives with an open window? And now there seems to be no air, and Paul is suffocating in his own surprise. And his lap is suddenly warm and moist.

Paul tries to think. He is paralysed, yet trying to think. His blood beats like a drum, pounding through his head. He can barely hear. He can barely breathe.

Through the shimmering exhaust fumes, through the clench of his fingers on the steering wheel, through the split second of the urgent tap right in front of his nose as he stares at the window, he thinks: I am being held up. I am stopped. If I move I might die. If I don’t move I shall die.

The moment has a profound depth. Paul knows with palpable certainty that he will not even flinch as the gun explodes the window and shatters his face. In a burst of blood and faster than sound, his last thought will be teeth and brains, a blossoming pearl of lead. The world will implode. Anything has become possible. Anything is good or bad. He is stuck, thinking.

The gun gestures downwards. Maak oop. Open the window. The blunt command comes from outside.

Paul tries to obey, but his hands, out on a limb, are numb. They have become part of the steering wheel, fused with the expensive leather. The final tap against the glass is decisive.

Paul’s hand presses the button. Nothing happens. Paul’s eyes swivel from the hand and the gun, from death to the button on the door handle. His fingers, far away on some holiday perhaps, miraculously make more certain contact and the window purrs past his nose.

He cannot blink. The transparent curtain unveils the heat and the stink of outside. With dramatic grace, it unpeels the horror.

Even the window is afraid, thinks Paul dumbly as it retreats into the metal snugness of the door. He can’t stop staring at the slit through which the window has disappeared. The dark divide seduces his eyes. And, of course, you don’t look at them. These wild Africans. With their guns – their beloved AK47s and ready revolvers.

Am I racist? The glimmer of a question, that hard-wired thought, flickers through his marvellously intact brain. Paul almost feels the thought bounce off the sides of his skull. The barrel touches his temple.

It is so gentle.

Hande agter jou kop! The voice is urgent, but not aggressive. Hands behind your head! Stadig! Slowly!

I am being held up. Paul still cannot move. He has read about this, this. . . stasis of fear, a profound paralysis induced by terror. But is he terrified? Is he paralysed by fear?

For too long now he has been held up within his own white skin. Talk about stasis. How can he, a white man, act decisively when in this country a brotherhood of white men has acted so decisively? How can he take charge when his race has dominated for so long? Dominated so insidiously, so destructively. Why, looking in the mirror, he should probably shoot himself. So this stasis is nothing new. His mind jars.

For how long has he been forced to sacrifice the name of action for the sake of principle?

And now the gun. The gun at his head.

In the seconds split by terror, fractured by fear, Paul feels another gun.

This time there are supposed to be guns. It is the army. The exclusive privilege of every white South African male. His mind is conscripted by the past as his flame-haired corporal – Korporaal! – screams at him. He screams. Yes, it is not too effeminate a term. He screams in Paul’s face. There comes wet Afrikaans spit and abuse, as Paul is a conscientious objector. He is a rare breed, an endangered species. Possibly about to be culled.

A paradox. A man unmanned.

Carefully, conscientiously, he has objected to his body being called up to serve the system. He has registered his distress, again not too effeminate a term. His distress at having to learn to bear arms against a sea of troubles. How can he shoot? How can he hold up a gun in the name of the National Party? How can he, by such impossible actions, help to secure another strut in the architecture of apartheid?

And so Korporaal Krause screams in his face. Fokken poes, the man screams.

Paul stands to attention, rigid. He was ready for this.

To be called a fucking cunt in Afrikaans. To be emasculated in the language of apartheid, with its sharp consonants and crushed vowels. He, a man, standing up for what he believes to be right, is called a cunt. Moral rectitude is debased in sexualised, reproductive and female terms. When did conscience become cunt-sense? Paul almost grimaces, it is so ridiculous.

Korporaal Krause must sense his desperate amusement.

For here comes the gun. Underpinning the verbal abuse comes the cold metal, an R4 assault rifle.

Is it loaded?

The rest of Paul’s platoon stand rigid. Forty-five men. Holding their breath. They know Paul. Paul, the man who with two other men in Bravo Kompanie has started basic training with a broom. Going through all the manoeuvres on the parade ground holding a stupid broom. He is not a bad man, just a stupid man with a stupid blerrie broom. They want to laugh. They do laugh at the incongruous sight. They laugh at his humiliation and laugh to keep their own humiliation at bay. They laugh too because they know that they could not do what he does. Skitter van Niekerk. Rifleman van Niekerk. That is his ironic rank in this perverted system.

The flecks of spit feel cold on his face. Korporaal Krause is not as tall as Paul. The Afrikaner has to tilt his head and stand on tiptoe to face up to him. The rifle comes snaking up under his chin. Korporaal Krause’s hands brush his chest as he holds the assault rifle, and its delicate tip touches Paul under his chin on the soft skin, so recently shaved at 5.20 a.m.

Paul swallows, a reflex action to the searching kiss of the R4.

This blond Afrikaner will not shoot. Paul has heard of insane officers, mad majors. But this korporaal’s actions are calculated. He is insulted. Paul senses the man’s outrage.

Maybe he will shoot?

Ek vra nie weer nie, the korporaal whispers.

The touch of the rifle becomes an uncomfortable lump in his throat. Paul cannot swallow.

And then Paul knows that maybe this man will shoot. Make an example of him. And his wry self-righteousness yields to the immediate threat. His arms go lame, his legs suddenly limp. He sinks on to the thorn of the rifle, pinned upright by the spike of hard metal.

This stasis of metal. This shock of uncertainty. Stuck in his white liberal skin.

Paralysis.

But is he paralysed?

And now he is being held up once again. This time, the stuff of urban legend. Yet another dinner-party-conversation set piece. And this very scene he has visualised a hundred times. A hundred thousand times. His car or his wife’s car. The gun. The agonised and protracted wince before the bullets. There were always bullets.

They took the car and they shot you.

They didn’t take the car and they shot you.

You cooperated and they shot you.

You tried to stop them. They shot you.

Pumped lead into your soft white head. Blasted your brains out, so you dropped dead.

They held you up – then they dropped you. Bang.

He wonders if you ever hear the sound. He wonders if a word like bang can express the death that smashes from the perfectly round metal mouth? The mouth that now kisses his temple.

Ek vra nie weer nie. I won’t ask again, said quietly, almost whispered. Is his assailant afraid that he might be overheard? So different from the spitting screams of Korporaal Krause. No point to prove. Nothing conscientious about this, and highly objectionable. Here in the middle of the midday traffic. Surrounded by gleaming cars, bright windows that burn with the sun and blinding disinterest. Uninterest.

Who would give a damn? Who could? Try to help and you end up dead. Bloody fool.

Paul’s hands find their way to the back of his head. One clasps the other with rough relief. Aren’t your hands supposed to sweat?

Another black arm snakes into the car, the handle clicks and the door springs open with appalling enthusiasm. The intruding hand jerks. Uit. Klim uit. Get out. Nou!

This is it. Paul knows that he cannot move. He will be shot where he sits. The blood that pounds through his body will gush into the soft leather of the seat like a sigh, seeping through the bullet-torn perforations. The bullets will have ripped both him and the car seat to shreds. He and the seat: seamless, in a scarlet pool, crimson. Yes, the accusation: crimson – a bloody crime. His body screams out against the crime, committed in warm blood.

Has he gone mad? The memories, the fear, and now the warm, wet crotch. Just like the army. Is this a war?

The free hand, the unencumbered black hand, grips a chunk of his hair and rips. Paul is half pulled from the car before the strands tear free from his scalp. For one second he comes face to face with the black man. So ordinary. The shining skin, the flat nose and thick lips. The hair is short, kempt. The face is impassive, like a wooden mask. It is beautifully polished, any one of a million, million African statues: sculpted faces that scrutinise tourists with dark disdain beneath an impossibly blue sky. Black heat that almost sings. Paul feels blinded.

But their eyes meet.

Paul slithers unheroically out of the side of the car. It does not happen in slow motion. No. It is quick and sudden. He is simply born, yielded up by the uterine car. His seat belt zithers loose; it is a limp umbilical cord. And he is a foetal man, half coiled, half kneeling on the hot road. A pink prawn.

He is kicked aside. A rib snaps with a wheeze and he rolls to one side. The car door slams, the engine roars.

Hissing tyres, and gravel flicks at his head from the side of the road as the car jumps the queue. There is a brutalised engine, diminuendo. Gone.

That’s that.

Gone.

Half a dozen cars pant with fear and relief.

Now worms. White, wormlike hands, helping hands, emerge from the surrounding cars. Brown hands too. This is the new South Africa. Brown hands help white. Heels scrape on the tarmac and shuffle closer. Voices shimmer in the midday heat. Ag shame. You orlraait? Hau, this is not good. Fooi tog. Kaffir. Die nuwe Suid Afrika. Ag shame, man. The new South Africa! You orlraait? Hau, man. Particular and political expressions of sympathy and concern – safe from the recent past. Unearthed. The rock has rolled and there seem to be worms. Possibly delirious, Paul is helped to his feet.

Eyes flinch in case they missed the shot. But he is whole, although there is blood dripping from his scalp. A few nasty rivulets run down the side of his face. Really dark, more purple than red. Weird. Voices murmur into cell phones. Yebo, yes, ja. Hijacking. On-ramp to N1. Midrand. Flying squad. N1. One man. Black – ja, sorry man, but that’s a fact. True. Gone. Buggered off with the oke’s BM. White – the car. Him also. White. No. Not shot. You aren’t shot, hey? No, he isn’t. White. Blood – from his head, man. But not shot.

Paul stands and stares. Cars are already on the move. Wheels susurrating past. Mesmerising black circles rotating the road. Paul watches them dig into the tarmac and send it sliding behind them. That is how it seems. He is dizzy. He can’t really hear much. The cars seem now to be tiptoeing. Almost embarrassed. Tiptoeing off stage into the wings – flying off.

Side windows are sealed. They shine. The harsh sun and the merciless blue of the highveld sky. Sealed windows. They – we – are meals on wheels, Paul blinks. Mobile lunch boxes. Metal picnic hampers. Takeaways for those who starve, who do drugs, violence, adventure. Who knows in South Africa?

And then he realises that his baby girl is still in the car.

What makes him remember?

What made him forget?

His guts fall through a cavern in his body in a whispering instant. His baby girl, Chantal, is still in the car. She is now a whole world away and moving fast.

He wants to run. He must run after her. The impulse is ripping his intestines. They are caught in the slammed car door and being driven off at an impossible speed. Paul van Niekerk is disembowelled by the horizon.

He staggers towards the robots that flash green-orange-red. He feels like an astronaut on some strange moon. His head balloons like a glassy bubble as he tries to shout her name, her soft name. His daughter, his beloved daughter.

How long did they wait for her? And now she is gone in an instant. Just like that.

Their little longed-for miracle. Now miraculously vanished.

Almost as miraculously as when she first appeared from out of her mother’s body. The first time he held her up to her mother. A water birth; he was there. After all the medical attention, they wanted a natural birth. What could be more natural than water? Chantal was born to the world in soft water and held up to her mother by his very own hands, now suddenly a father.

They wept as she was delivered to them. The archaic phrasing, delivered of a child. Come from somewhere else, from heaven. A deliverance.

Claire lying back in the raised bath at the Marymount Hospital, Johannesburg, which specialised in water births. As natural as possible. No more test tubes, no more screenings and charts and sperm counts and statistics and injections. No, their fears had become warm flesh. Chantal had taken root. She was alive.

Mother and daughter doing well.

Claire lying back exhausted. Somewhat hoarse. Giving voice before giving birth. Paul was amazed at how vocal and primal the entire experience had been.

He was used to Claire crying out during their lovemaking. She was rather carefree when it came to expressing her passion. But these grunts and gurnings and gasps had been of a different order. And order was the order of the day.

He was ordered here, there and everywhere. The midwives kept him busy. He was a mere man, an appendage. Moderately useful (certainly nine months ago), but an appendage nonetheless. He was instructed, Here, help fill the birthing pool. Run the taps. Watch the cold water. Is it warm enough? Check. There is the thermometer in the pool. What does it say? Quick. Now rub her back.

Paul was quick. Paul rubbed her back.

Rubbed his wife’s back as the water filled the pool – actually, more of a bath. Rubbed his wife’s bare back as she crouched with her backside in the air to slow it all down. But Chantal was in a hurry. Did not want to be slowed down. After waiting and waiting to be brought into existence for all those years, nothing was stopping her now.

Nothing will stop her now, Claire managed to smile at him from somewhere beneath her pain. And Paul, far away, on the other side of the world, stuck in his lumpen gender, beamed and rubbed for all he was worth.

He wanted to laugh out loud. His pregnant wife was naked, with her bare bottom in the air, panting and heaving and trying not to crawl over the bed and up the wall. He rubbed her back and murmured sweet nothings. His deep voice strove to be hushed and low in this most female of spaces.

Then the uniformed midwives nodded and he brought his wife from the little bed on the one side of that cosy room to the raised bath several shuddering metres away. They made it, he and Claire, together, across the aisle of space and time. Claire walking as though on shattered glass, as though she might actually levitate out of the bulging pain that dragged at her belly, below her belly, out of her utmost, innermost self. And Paul supported her, stalwart at her side, easing her over every centimetre, his resonant voice, now soft, urging her on. Whispering her over the final millimetres as she began to panic.

Was this the right thing? Could she do this? She couldn’t do this. Paul!

Darling. His anxious eyes. His firm arm, helping her.

Darling, you can do this.

Keeping his voice sure and steady as she wavered. God, who wouldn’t waver? Paul supporting her in amazement at the power of the here and now. His blonde, beautiful wife caught up in the biology of the moment. Ancient, but here, as old as the hills, but now. All-consuming. Their entire lives lifted up to this moment, now, as Claire panted through the pain.

She clambered, a pink ape-woman, into the deep bath that was raised up to bring her to their level. But she had found her own level. A grateful flick of her eyes that caught at his heart, then she was puffing and panting again, disappearing to some new, primitive plateau. Claire was digging through geological layers of pain and flesh to emerge triumphant with her treasure, their treasure, the flesh of their flesh.

He could only watch.

They gave him a net, a little scoop. He felt like a child on some strange seashore. Whilst the tides of Claire’s contractions ebbed and flowed, grunted and groaned, he played safely on the shores of existence, scooping up little bits of past meals. There had been no time for an enema. Their child was in a rush to be born. Just as Claire, it would turn out, had pushed her way quickly into the world.

Mid-scoop, Claire reached out and grasped his arm. Don’t let me go, she said. Don’t ever let me go.

He had left the scoop and held her arm. He did not let her go. He held on for dear life, for his dear wife. But the contractions had pulled her loose. She wavered and slipped. She was gone into herself, into her pain. Paul lost her to the tides of pain that pulled her away, that made her eyes unseeing and her ears deaf to all but her own panting and her screams. She groaned and shuddered from a different world.

Chantal crowned.

Paul saw a piece of his daughter for the first time. A sliver of white hair amidst the black as Claire gaped wide.

When they said, Push, it is time to push, Claire did not hear them. Then the moment passed, before it returned with redoubled intensity. This time, Claire pushed. With an almighty heave and a tearing gasp, Chantal was born. From an impossible mound in the middle of his wife, a wondrous midden of uterus and guts and amniotic fluid and blood and flesh, there slid out into the oily water their own pink prawn. The love of their life.

There were stunned tears. The adrenalin burst and the shock of relief sank deep. Chantal’s first sound, a wavering, watery cry, amidst their crying. Then Paul was offered the surgical scissors and he cut the tough cord, forever freeing Chantal. Through the pain, through the gasping storm and through the water she had come.

Now she is gone.

Nine months with them, now their baby is gone. Nine months inside Claire, nine months in the wide world with her mother and father, now she is gone.

He tries to shout her name, but he chokes. He rolls in the hot sun and spins through the cars that move away. Chantal has been ripped free. Some other cord has been cut. His mind tears. The afterbirth, it seems, drags from his scalp. He clutches at his torn hair and he gasps. He moans. He seems to beat at his head. As though to beat the thought of his stolen daughter back in. Birth in reverse. His head is bursting, but it is empty. He hits himself. There is no one else to hit.

A large Afrikaans man restrains him. His meaty hand catches Paul on the shoulder. Wag, my seun. Wait, my son. The hand is gentle. The beard moves again in a fatherly fashion. It’s Paul Kruger. Straight from the history textbooks. The beard moves and Paul hears sounds. The police, they’ll be here soon. The bearded man’s great hands grasp his arm, restrain him. He must not beat in his own head. The man leads Paul by the arm back towards his bakkie.

Most of the other cars have slunk away.

There is one black woman yammering into her cell phone, her car pulled off at the side of the road. Another, older woman, her car also dislocated from the streaming traffic, stands anxiously by.

She comes over to them, shaking her head. She’s in shock, the older woman nods in concern at the cell-phone woman.

Paul struggles to make the connection. He feels as though he is still running down the highway. He feels as though he might still tear through time and pull Chantal back from the brink. Yet he has just been unravelled, like a woman. Never before has he felt what it must be like to be a woman, the world dropping from his insides, pulled inside out. Not thrusting, but feeling, giving, having to give.

That black lady’s been hijacked before, says the woman. This has sent her a bit mal. She looks at Paul. You all right? Her eyes appraise him.

He will be better when the blerrie police get here, if they ever do, says the Afrikaans man. Come, he leads Paul to the driver’s seat of his bakkie. I’ve got a dop for you.

Paul stands blankly, holding his stomach. Can he ever sit in a car again? The man guides him into the seat. Paul sinks into the cockpit of despair.

The man reaches past him, down the side of the driver’s seat, and pulls out a small flask. He grins as he unscrews the cap. Just a doppie, he offers Paul the silver flask. I sometimes have just a klein doppie. Mostly to survive the kaffir taxis. It’s my own witblits – my own white lightning home brew.

Paul reaches out to the flask. It is like a baby’s bottle. His hands shake uncontrollably.

The man pretends not to notice. He takes Paul’s fingers and closes them around the little cylinder. Then he thinks better of that idea and raises the flask to Paul’s lips himself.

It’ll do you good, he says. Gee jou ’n bietjie krag. Put some fire back in your belly.

Paul chokes as the liquid flames sear his throat. The man chuckles. That’s the stuff. Kolskoot. One more dop. Paul splutters again. His intestines twang off the edge of the world and leap back inside his body. They seem to snap back audibly.

Does she want a dop? The man gestures to the woman still sobbing into her phone. He seems to have taken on the role of parish priest, offering an impromptu communion.

I’ll check. The older woman totters off on high heels.

They wait.

Paul still shakes. He can’t stop. Stress, the beard jerks in the direction of Paul’s fluttering hands. I had it in the army. On the border. When I shot my first terroris. He is trying to make conversation; it is kindly meant. Just after I shot the bliksem. . .

Paul’s stomach writhes and he throws up over the man’s steering wheel and dashboard.

What made him forget?

His wife does not take it well. How can she? Her daughter – their daughter – has been taken. Well, what can she say?

The police car drops him off at Claire’s work. A plush place, a house in Morningside. She works for an educational NGO. Running Saturday-morning classes for township children. Trying to give them something more than they have got: a future. The black parents she meets are desperate. The township schools are no good. The kind legacy of apartheid. The parents’ hunger, their desire to establish a future for their children, is truly humbling.

She is not expecting him. She has no clue. She is hard at work somewhere in the house.

He gets out on the pavement and thanks Sergeants Dhlamini and Rapele.

The statement at the Midrand Police Station took an age. Rank with a heady eau de cologne of sweat, piss and puke, he dictated a clear statement, and watched in disbelief as the duty sergeant chiselled each word on to the form. Three times his voice, still rich and resonant, had to make clear that his name is Paul Owen van Niekerk. Eventually he offered to fill in the relevant sections himself. No, the sergeant carefully and unhurriedly explained to Paul Owan, hau, sorry, Owen van Niekerk, that that was his job. The sergeant formulated another word and seemed to step back from his creation with genuine pride. Paul felt like ripping the Bic pen from his hand and screaming.

Each second that slipped by took Chantal Claire van Niekerk further and further into South African obscurity. What if she were abandoned at the side of a dangerous road? Thrown from the car – his mind jarred there, fortunately. And she would need her bottle. She would need a nappy change. She has been chuckling recently and is on the verge of saying Dada. She might be crying.

Occupation? The sergeant’s pen quivered.

Paul stared at him. Chantal. . .

Professional? Business? Self-employed? the sergeant started to ask.

Teacher, Paul said, then shook his head. That was last year.

Advertising, he said. Copywriter, with BB&P. Badenhorst, Brown and Patel. In Sandton.

BB&P? the sergeant repeated.

Paul leant against the counter as his world tilted and threatened to tip him off its edge.

Now, the two kindly policemen reverse their car and Paul presses the intercom buzzer at the imposing security gate with its crown of razor wire.

The early-afternoon sun throbs on his scalp. There is a lawnmower meditating somewhere, humming a gentle aum. He can almost smell the incense of freshly mown grass: rich, sweaty sweet, essentially green. He coughs drily. A voice crackles beneath his thumb. Hello?

It’s Paul.

A cheery howzit, metallic. His wife’s boss, also called Claire. The electric gates crank open. The brick driveway shimmers redly all the way up to the front door. The windows regard him as windows always tend to: impassively.

Behind him, the police car saunters off to a world of crime. The two policemen wave.

Paul has to think, consciously think how to move his feet, to lean forward, to move. An inertia, something more terrible than fear or horror, holds him back. He carries something so utterly dreadful to his wife. What could be worse? Our child is dead? That is at least decisive and final. But, our child is gone. . . I know not where. . . And worse still. I let her go. I did not fight for her life. There was a gun. I opened the window. I was dragged from the car. It drove off. I never even called goodbye, my little pet. I never thought about her until she was gone. Now she is gone. And I place this news at your feet. I sink you in it up to the knees. Our daughter ripped from the loins of our love. What is happening to her right now? In this land of ours. Our rainbow nation. Our tiny pot of golden joy.

The front door opens. Claire the boss calls out. Come on, man. I have to close the gate! Behind her is Claire, his wife.

She steps past Claire. My God, can she know? Can a mother know? She runs down the redbrick path.

It is Paul who stalls. He cannot move forward, only down. His legs buckle and he sits slowly on the steaming drive, the hot bricks biting through his damp trousers. The gate cannot close.

Claire stops before she gets to him. Cautious. A mother’s instinct. Her hand flutters to her face, her other reaches out to him. Past him.

Chantal!

Their daughter’s name is a bleat. He almost does not recognise it. His wife barks again, like some wild deer.

His voice is speaking. He feels it in his throat somewhere. Words, masculine and guttural. There is a rumble. She is shaking his head. Her icy hands clutch his face and she shakes him. Chantal. Chantal. Chantal. Hysterically.

Like the time she locked Chantal in the car. Such a simple mistake when you are forever having to fiddle with locks.

Always such a palaver, this locking and unlocking and relocking in South Africa. Keeping things safe. The few who have, keeping things safe from the many who have not. And so this rhythm asserts itself. Security gates across gated complexes that are buzzed back, often by guards or by remote control, beeped from the car. The unlocking of car doors to get out, the relocking of the car. The unlocking of security gates across front doors. The unlocking of front doors and quick rush to the panel to disarm the alarm. Then the locking of both sets of doors, just to be double safe and secure. Unlock and relock. Unlock and relock.

And so it was with Claire’s old Honda Ballade that she unthinkingly locked by depressing the little knob then slamming the door shut with Chantal and the keys inside. Force of habit. The usual, safe rhythm and ritual now a shocking aberration.

Paul was not there. He was taking an afternoon football practice. And there was Claire standing with all Chantal’s things, but no Chantal. The tiny baby trapped in the car.

No matter how she beat at the door, how she tugged at the metal, the car remained closed. Claire was frantic that Chantal would begin to scream. That she would see that this was no game and would stop gurgling to herself and jerking her little legs in that happy spasmodic way. The sun was beating down and the car was already beginning to get hot.

Claire hurried inside and called the breakdown people. They were on the road, the operator said. It would be a while. My baby, Claire gasped, my baby. They would be there quick as they could, the op. . .