“Morning, sunshine,” said Pablo’s quavering voice.

The second I had opened my eyes, they’d met with his. Pablo was sitting by my side, leaning uncomfortably on the edge of the bed. He looked tired. Exhausted, even. His eyes were red and kept fluttering shut. He kept stifling his yawns, and his wrinkles seemed so deep, it was as if he’d aged a few years overnight.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Half-past six. You slept for fifteen hours straight,” he said, and smiled timidly. “That’s almost two full beauty sleeps.”

“Then I’m almost twice as beautiful now,” I chuckled softly.

He graced me with a kind grin that lasted no more than a second, before his tired gaze swept past me and across the wooden floor, and his trembling thumb grazed across the palm of my open hand.

For a second the thought had crossed my mind. Maybe this could all have been a nightmare. Maybe I’d wake up and spend another day by the pool sipping on a spicy mango gin instead of dealing with the consequences of my actions.

But alas, the dull pain in my arm, like a light burn that ran from my elbow to my wrist, reminded me that it hadn’t been just a bad dream. I winced, and clawed at the sticky, blood-speckled bandages on my left arm, which tugged on my tender skin.

“Take it easy, Gordita. You’re going to pull out your stitches,” said Pablo. He laid his hand on my forehead to check my temperature, and gently pushed my hair out of my face. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay. Just a bit sore, that’s all.” I stared down at my arm and shrugged off yesterday’s tragedy as if it were nothing but an embarrassing injury. “How about you?”

He pinched his lips but didn’t answer. He just stared off into the distance, at the small pile of empty blood bags strewn on top of the vanity.

“Do you remember anything about last night?” he asked.

“Not much, really,” I shrugged.

I could recall most of what had happened in the bathtub, right up until Oso and the doctor barged back into the room and tried to lift me out. When I was torn away from Pablo’s arms, my eyes glazed over and everything became a blur.

From then on, all I could remember were a few confused fragments. Unknown faces bent over me, strangers’ eyes staring into mine. Screams, voices arguing, my own name being called out and echoing in my head. Blinding lights, red blotches, and a smothering blanket of darkness.

“Good,” muttered Pablo. “It was terrifying.”

“It was,” I whispered. “I was bad tripping, big time. I even saw my mother’s face. I could hear her talking to me. Ana was there too.”

“It wasn’t a hallucination,” he whispered. “I heard Ana too.”

I whipped my head around so fast, I felt my neck pop.

“What?”

“She left yesterday night. She panicked when they took her out of the room. That’s what you heard,” he explained, and bit his lip. “It wasn’t just in your head.”

“Where is she now?” I asked.

“At this time, she should be on her way home, I guess,” he shrugged, glancing at the golden watch on his wrist.

“What about the other girls?”

“They’ve been gone for a while. Their ransoms were paid on day two. I suppose they’d be back in the US by now.”

He looked away, probably once again expecting my wrath to rain down upon him, but I smiled. I wasn’t angry. I felt elated by a sudden sense of relief. My friend was gone from this wretched place, her suffering was over, and I could now keep going knowing that she was safe and free.

“She saved my life, you know,” I told him with a mournful smile, as a small tear pearled up in the corner of my eye. “I stopped when I heard her.”

“Then I owe her a lot,” he answered softly.

“So do I. She’s always given me so much. It’s almost funny when you think of it. It’s like she had to do one last thing for me.”

I let out a miserable chuckle, and Pablo’s throat twitched with a sorrowful gulp.

“Well, technically, it wasn’t the last thing,” he said. “She left you a gift, too.”

He dug his hand into his pocket, and pulled out a small necklace. Its thin gold chain flowed like silk between his fingers, and its little pink, round stone nestled comfortably in the palm of his hand.

I knew the necklace. Ana had gotten it when she was seven, as a gift from her grandmother, shortly before she passed away from cancer. The stone was rose quartz, and it meant eternal love. And Ana loved her necklace more than anything else she owned.

I had never seen her without it, except once in third grade when someone grabbed it and yanked it off her during a heated game of tag. She hadn’t worried about the sore, red line that the hit drew across her neck, she didn’t worry about the pain she felt with every breath. She worried about the necklace, that had slipped into a storm drain. She cried for hours, she was inconsolable, and so that same afternoon, I spent the whole recess trying to get it back.

With a lot of patience and a small twig, I’d managed to retrieve it and give it back to Ana. The kids in school spent the rest of the year calling me Sewer instead of Sarah, but the memory of Ana’s smile, still etched into my mind years later, made up for the bullying a thousand times over.

“Does she know I’m alive?” I breathed.

“No. She asked for us to bury it with you,” he explained, and his voice cracked. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to honor that demand too literally.”

Tears dripped silently from the bottom of my eyes. This necklace was Ana’s most prized possession. She wore it when she slept, when she showered, and when I would tell her to take it off, she would argue she’d feel naked. I’d joke the necklace was fused into her skin, that it was like a part of her. One day I was gently mocking her and told her it was where she kept her brain, and she answered that it was where she held her heart.

Her cold, tiny, dead heart, she called it. I never understood why. Sure, she had a dry sense of humor and a short temper, and a resting bitch face that would freeze your blood in your veins. She’d get into fights a lot, while I’d stand back, hold her shoes and earrings, and cheer her on. The same people who called me ugly and boring would always call Ana mean and crazy. To me, she was the most caring, loving person I ever knew.

“Do you want to keep it?” asked Pablo, pulling me out of my thoughts. “I can store it somewhere if it’s too... painful.”

“No, of course I’ll keep it,” I sniffled.

He smiled tenderly, and leaned in to place the little jewel around my neck. When the chain clasped shut, I snapped. I sobbed uncontrollably onto Pablo’s shoulder, and he wrapped his arm around me, pulling me into a soothing hug. He pressed his soft lips against my bare collarbone, where he left a couple of gentle kisses.

“I got you a small gift too,” he whispered in my ear. “I ordered it a little over a week ago, and it just arrived in the mail yesterday.”

He let go of me, and I have to admit I wished I could have lingered a little while longer in his embrace. He pulled out a small booklet out of his pocket. It had a red leathery cover, was titled with a couple of lines in a language I couldn’t understand, was decorated with a pretty golden emblem, and was small enough that it easily fit in a single hand. I cocked an eyebrow, and bent over to look at it.

“What is it?” I frowned.

“It’s a passport,” he said. “Have you never seen one?”

I opened the first page. The passport belonged to a young woman I’d never met. Her name was Emilia Mária Kovács and she was born in Budapest on August 29th, 1998.

“Who is this girl?” I asked, “Did you kidnap her too?”

“Gordita,” he chuckled. “Take a better look at it.”

My eyes trailed across the picture of Emilia. She had thin lips, a straight nose, and large brown eyes, one of them which seemed somewhat lazy. She had nice cheekbones, but I figured she could do with losing a little bit of fat around the chin. Her thin eyebrows and curly brown hair were a bit messy, yet still better than mine. She was neither pretty nor ugly, she didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary.

Yet, the sight of her face still made me squint. There was something about her that my exhausted brain couldn’t quite get. Maybe she looked familiar. I wondered if we’d ever met.

“Are you okay?” asked Pablo. He let out a nervous laugh.

“I don’t get it,” I shrugged. “Who is she?”

“Gordita, it’s you.”

My lips parted to answer, but the words wouldn’t come out. I looked at the picture again. Maybe we did look similar, like we could perhaps be cousins or maybe even sisters. But Emilia Kovács wasn’t me, and I would never be her.

“She doesn’t even look like me,” I mumbled.

“Of course she does,” he snorted, and stared at me as if I was insane. “It’s literally the picture from your old passport, I just had it photoshopped a bit. Are you alright? I’ll call the doctor for a small check-up. And– wait, what was your maid’s name again?”

“Mafer,” I said. I started to wonder if he only pretended to forget her name because he knew it played with my nerves.

“Mafer!” he shouted, leaning away from me, “I need your opinion.”

Her small figure peeked around the bathroom door, and her sunken eyes lit up as she saw me. Her hair was messy and her uniform was stained red and brown at her knees. She looked like she’d been through Hell and back, and all I could think of was that she had just spent the night scrubbing away the mess I’d made. She settled down her dirty sponge on top of the vanity, and quietly walked up to the bed.

“Does this look like her?” he asked, as he snatched the passport from my fingers and held it up by the side of my face.

“Yes,” she answered timidly. “Just with darker hair.”

“See? All we need to do is change your hair color and boom- you become Emilia.”

Mafer took a tiny step back and discreetly blew me a kiss. I smiled at her, and she mouthed out the words: Are you okay? I nodded back quietly, looking past Pablo’s shoulder and into her sparkling eyes.

“Gordita, are you even paying attention?” sighed Pablo, before he turned around to look at Mafer. “There’s a box of hair dye somewhere in the house. Ask Luisa if she’s seen it, she probably knows where I left it.”

Mafer bowed and left the room, and Pablo turned around to look at me.

“Pablo, I haven’t agreed to this,” I told him. “I haven’t even decided if I want to become this Emilia.”

“What?” He frowned. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“It’s just- I don’t know.” I stammered. “It’s a lot.”

“It’s not. It’s just a new identity,” he said with an unsettling calm. “A new beginning. No more trouble with people finding out about you and everything that happened–it’s like you’ve never been kidnapped. You can meet new people, tell them your name is Emilia, and that we met at a party. You can go out, you can travel, if that’s what you want. You’re free, basically.”

“So I can just walk out the door, leave and build a new life?”

“Well, not exactly, Gordita. I still have to watch over you. I need to make sure you’re playing within the rules. ”

“So I’m still shackled to you for the rest of my days,” I sighed desperately. “I wouldn’t call that freedom.”

“You can call it what you want,” he shrugged. “Oso can keep watch on the few days you’re fed up with my face.”

“Great,” I muttered, “So I’m shackled to Oso.”

Pablo rolled his eyes and rubbed his temples.He took a few seconds to gather his thoughts, before he began to shake his head in a slow, dramatic motion.

“What do you want from me?” he pleaded.

Anger slowly built up inside of me. It made my blood boil and my wound itch. I knew this wasn’t the right time to antagonize him again, and that it never really was, but the feelings that had me backed up in a corner the night before were still true.

“I want to leave, Pablo,” I answered. “I want to leave you, leave the house, build myself a new life and never have to think about you ever again.”

“You know, Gordita, this is heartbreaking,” he scoffed, “It’s like nursing a bird back to health just to watch it fly over and over into your bedroom window.”

“You know, there’s an easy way to stop the bird from flying into the window.” I mumbled, “You open the fucking window. Let the damn bird out.”

“You know that I don’t have that choice, Gordita,” he said. His forehead wrinkled up and his eyes darkened. “You became a danger to everyone here the very second you saw my face.”

“If I’m so dangerous, why would you even tell me your name?”

Now that I thought of it, it could have just been a fake name. But perhaps Pablo was indeed just clinically insane, and I had just pointed out one of his biggest mistakes. He curved his neck and arched his brows, and stared at me with a cocky look on his face.

“Letting you go was never part of my plans,” he answered.

His hands strained and twitched as if he was holding himself from wrapping them around my neck, and I wondered if he was thinking of either trapping me in a passionate kiss or strangling me to death.

“You know, Pablo,” I gulped, “you scare the shit out of me.”

“If that’s what keeps you in check, then let’s keep it that way,” he shrugged. “You don’t have to take the passport if you don’t feel up to it. The alternative is to stay hidden here, as you have been for this whole time.”

He leaned over towards me to take the passport out of my hands. I grasped it tightly and slid it under my sheets, out of his sight and his reach.

“I need to think about it,” I said.

“Please do,” he answered. “I’m allowing you to be born again. I really didn’t think that this would be such a hard choice for you to make.”

“It’s not,” I replied. “I’m just not sure if it makes sense.”

There were so many ways that this plan could go wrong. Both for me and for Pablo. But, given that I didn’t have much to my name, he was the only one who had everything to lose.

“I’m just a human,” he said. “Not all my ideas make sense.”

“What’s the real reason, Pablo? Why are you doing this?”

He straightened his back and looked down at me. Pablo seemed quite upset that I’d even doubt the success.

“Because I make the rules here, and I just changed them,” he seethed.

The air between us was so thick with tension, that you could have cut through it with a knife. There was a quiet knock on the door, and Mafer walked in.

“Ah!” cheered Pablo, who all of a sudden was riding on the higher end of his emotional rollercoaster. “Here comes the capillary genius.”

Mafer smiled timidly and walked up to the side of the bed.

"Brasilia deep brown," read Pablo on the side of the box of hair dye that she had put into his hands. “Sounds fun, doesn’t it, Gordita? Should we do this?”

I bit my lip. Once again, Pablo had only left me with the illusion of a choice. He’d made this decision for me a while ago, when he ordered the passport. If I didn’t agree now, it was only a matter of time before loneliness and insanity would convince me. And so, I just nodded silently.

“Great, get over to that vanity,” he told me, pointing at the other side of the room. “Mafer, we only need a new hair color. Please don’t attempt any styling today.

She blushed in shame and bowed her head. She spun around and cleared off the table, taking the discarded medical equipment out of my sight.

Pablo held his arm out to help me out of bed. Only once I was standing on my feeble legs, did I realize that I wasn’t wearing the swimsuit anymore. Instead, all I had on was a simple nightie.

“Did you change my clothes?” I asked, glaring into his widening eyes.

“Yeah– uh, they had to take off the swimsuit,” he stuttered. “But I promise I didn’t look. I let your maid do it. You know– since she’s, uh... already seen you naked.”

I turned to Mafer, who reassured me with a smile and a nod. Since the three of us were now embarrassed, we enjoyed a brief moment of silence as Mafer began to gently brush out the tangles in my hair.

Pablo let himself fall on top of the mattress, and grabbed the passport from under the sheets. He kicked up his feet and settled his dirty boots above the covers.

“Don’t put your shoes on the bed,” I huffed.

“Mafer, once you’re done with her hair, you can change her sheets,” he ordered.

He briefly flicked through the pages of the passport, as he stared at me with a smug look on his face.

“Anyways,” he declared. “Let’s review the information, shall we? Your name is Emilia Mária Kovács. You were born on August 29th, 1998 in Budapest, Hungary. Huh, you’re a Virgo. Interesting.”

“No one is going to believe that,” I mumbled.

“Don’t worry,” he chirped. “People here don’t really care too much about astrology.”

“I’m not talking about that,” I sighed. “I’m talking about the fact that I’m supposed to be Hungarian. I don’t speak Hungarian. I don’t even know anything about Hungary.”

“Well we’re in luck,” he answered, “because Hungary is one of those countries that no one knows anything about, let alone the language. I mean, who learns Hungarian? It’s even dumber than trying to learn German.”

Mafer and I exchanged a few confused glances in the mirror, while a confidently off-his-rocker Pablo snapped the passport shut.

“I’ve already told people I have a girlfriend named Emilia and we met at a party a few months ago, so you’ll have to stick to that,” he kept on explaining. “But aside from that, it’s just a blank slate. For everything else, you can come up with your own backstory. You can make it nicer than the real one.”

He smirked, and for a moment I wondered if this had all been an elaborate ploy to finally get a girl to present herself as his girlfriend. However, hiring an escort would have been cheaper, safer and much easier. Maybe he hasn’t thought of that, I told myself, perhaps I should suggest it to him.

Although my mind had briefly trailed off toward more innocent thoughts, the severity of the situation dawned upon me again. Pablo saw this as a game, and it could prove to be a very dangerous one for me.

“What happens if someone finds out it’s a lie?” I asked.

“Then I’ll take care of them,” he said. His casual tone sent chills down my spine.

“And then what happens to me?”

He took a break from playfully tossing the passport in the air, and his gaze met mine through its reflection in the mirror.

“If you’re going to break my trust again and cause a mess,” he shrugged, “then I’d rather just keep you in this room.”

“I won’t, Pablo,” I said, as words nervously scrambled at the edge of my lips. “But, what if someone recognizes me from a picture or something?”

“That won’t happen, because we’re drastically changing your appearance.”

“It’s just a hair color, Pablo, it won’t fool anyone,” I groaned. “Who do you think I am, Clark Kent?”

“I think you look different enough,” he answered. “Besides, it’s not like anyone is looking for you.”

I stared at the mirror in front of me, and suddenly I couldn’t recognize myself. The girl sitting in the chair, with a maid applying dye to the tidy strands of her hair, with the sunken cheeks and weary stare, she wasn’t Sarah Kennedy. Maybe I had lost weight, or my nose hadn’t healed straight, or maybe Pablo was right and all we really needed was to make me a brunette.

I didn’t exactly look like a stranger. Most of my features were still the same. But if Pablo told the truth and my face wasn’t plastered everywhere, across milk cartons, supermarket doors and the national news, then it was unlikely that someone I’d never met would recognize me.

“Here, Gordita,” said Pablo as he dropped the passport in front of me. “Remembering all the information shouldn’t be too difficult. Mafer, are you done yet? We’d like to have some privacy.”

She finished a few touch-ups before she left the dye to settle in and left the room. Pablo leaned against the vanity and stared at me silently.

“So, who knows the truth?” I asked, letting my finger trace the golden letters on the cover of the passport.

“Just assume no one does,” he answered.

“Why?”

“For the same reason you slow down in front of a speed camera,” he sighed as he sat down in the chair beside me.

I frowned. The meaning of his smart words was a little lost on me. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep; or the fact that I had never gotten my driving license; or maybe, just maybe, he was just a bit too wacky for me. He rolled his eyes at my confusion.

“You slow down in front of the camera because you don’t want to get caught, right?” he said, “But what if you know the camera is somewhere out there, yet you’re not sure exactly behind which tree?”

He stared at me intensely, as if he was waiting for an answer.

“I’d drive slower the whole time?” I answered hesitantly.

“Exactly!” he said, slapping his knees

“I still don’t get it.”

“Right. You ruined my metaphor anyway,” he groaned, “Listen. You can trust me, but I still don’t know if I can trust you back. There are some people who know, but they are the people I trust the most. While I’ll never know exactly what you’ll say to the people you’ll meet, I can just hope you’ll be more careful about who you confide in, if you think there’s a chance it might get back to me. So, basically, trust no one but me.”

“Understood,” I breathed.

“Good. You’re a clever girl, I know you can do this.” he whispered.

“So when do I begin?” I asked. “When do I start meeting people?”

“Whenever you feel like it,” he shrugged, scratching away at a dried drop of blood on the edge of the vanity. “We’re having a small gathering tonight, but I’d honestly suggest you rest for a bit.”

“How many people?”

“Just four or five. Not too many. It’ll be a calm evening.”

“Then I’ll come,” I said.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea?” he mumbled, raising a single eyebrow at me.

“Yeah, I mean, I’d rather start with just a few people than a massive party.”

“Fair enough,” he grinned, and wiped a smudge of dye off of my cheek. “You can come downstairs if you want to. But please don’t push it. If you’re uncomfortable, just leave, okay?”

He stood up and left a chilling kiss on my forehead.

“I have some work to catch up on. I’ll see you tonight. Good luck with your rehearsals,” he said, tapping the cover of the passport with his fingertip.

He walked out of the room, and while I waited for Mafer to come back, I was left alone with the brand-new passport, the unfamiliar reflection of my face in the mirror, and my best friend’s heart hanging around my neck.

I tried to repeat it to myself, over and over. My name was Emilia Mária Kovács. I was Hungarian, born on August 29th, 1998 in Budapest. I met Pablo Juarez at a party and became his girlfriend.

And the rest was a blank slate.

Born Again

0 Comments