Page 99 of The Crush
I flip through the pages slowly, lingering here and there, frowning over each and every headline she had clipped and saved between these pages. There aredozensof articles, on Escobar but also on other high ranking members of the cartel. On operations in other countries and in the US. On the devastation they’d brought to the communities they were treating as a battleground. On new legislation and on all the politicians who were eager to step over the drug epidemic on their way to the podium.
In each one, there are highlighted and circled passages, notes in the margins. The handwriting a perfect match for all the other pages about all the other things I would have expected to find inthe diary of a teenage girl—right up until she’d opened to that first clipping of newspaper print.
“Are you frowning because they’re stupid?” she asks, watching me read an article and its accompanying theories, its guessed-at connections that I know to be correct.
“Because they’re smart,” I assure her. Because they’re smart andinformed. Clear evidence of just how closely she’d been reading, how much she’d understood.Christ, there’s so many.Things I’d forgotten about and things I wish I could. Enough that I suspect if I continue I will find eight years of DEA operations chronicled between these pages.
“Isabel, why did you read all this stuff?” I murmur, confronting one grim headline after another. “Why would you want to?”
I hate thinking of her seeing these things, knowing about them. Hate that she’d tried to tell me about this and I hadn’t listened. Hadn’t wanted to hear it.All these things you’re trying to keep from me? I already know about them, Danny. I always have.
“Because… It’s not like I’m fascinated by the cartels or something. And I know it must look…” Her hands twist in her lap, worry scrunching her brow as she studies my face. “Maybe I shouldn’t have shown you, but you keep saying you don’t want toput things on me, and…I wanted you to see that you wouldn’t be. Youneverhave.”
“Isabel…” I try to reason as if I could change the past. “You were a teenager when I left. You were a kid.”
”Iknow,” she says, a hint of frustration in her tone now, too. “That was the problem. No one would talk to me about it. You left, and all I knew was that it was bad, that what you were doing was dangerous, but no one would tell me anything. So I…” Shelooks back down at the open diary in my hands. “I went looking on my own. In the papers. On the news. Because it helped in a way to at least knowsomething. Totryto see if you were okay.”
Part of me understands what she means. I would’ve done the same if she’d really left me tonight. I would’ve searched for a sign of her in every piece of gossip that came my way, in every phone call from my dad after I’d run, too, because I wouldn’t have known how not to look for her. Even if I knew I couldn’t have her.
“I thought if I could only see your name,” she continues from beside me. “If I could see you in a picture or in a broadcast…then, at least, I’d know that you were okay.”
I shake my head again, feeling to blame not only for what she’d read in these stories but also for the futility of it. “I wasn’t—there wouldn’t have been anything to find. Most of what I worked on never made the papers,” I confess. “I wasn’t even sent to Colombia until after Escobar was killed.”
“Where were you?” she asks, and she doesn’t sound disappointed. Only interested.
“A lot of places,” I reply, hesitating again briefly to watch her reaction before I start listing, “Panama, Costa Rica, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico, a few other places in Europe. Anywhere they wanted me. They kept pointing, and I kept saying yes.”
“Until you didn’t?”
My fingers are wrapped around the edges of her diary, holding on because I’m still too scared to let go of my own secrets. This one in particular. “Isabel…you don’t want to hear this.”
“I do. You can tell me,” she says, tone adamant as she shifts closer. “You were in Colombia after Escobar? Then you were working on Cali.”
I nod, already less shocked to hear her easily say the name than I would have been an hour ago. “I was only there for a few months, then…”
“Something happened?” she guesses. “That made you decide to quit?”
“I didn’t,” I say, hoping that once she knows the truth she’ll keep looking at me like she is right now. “I didn’t decide. They did.”
Her face scrunches in confusion, head tilting. “What do you mean?”
“I wassenthome,” I say at last, waiting to see the change in her. “They suspended me. Indefinitely.”
Her lips part, her eyes closing briefly as she starts to understand. “You didn’t want to be done.”
“Not then,” I confirm for her. “But the way I left things, I figured they weren’t going to let me go back anyway, so…I’ve been trying to be done.”
“What happened?” she asks. “Why were you suspended?”
Tell her, I think, because what’s the point in hiding now?Tell her and then we both can know.
“I had been asking to be assigned to Colombia for years,” I start, her eyes widening slightly when I do. “I wanted to work on Medellín, but I was willing to pay my dues in the meantime. Whatever got me closer.”
“To what?”
“To whatever would make it stop, I guess. I knew things were ramping up with Cali, and I knew they wanted some fresh blood on the ground after Escobar, but…” I can still remember getting the orders, the way I’d told myself it was a good thing even if, in that moment, my first instinct was to hurl them back.
“Everyone kept saying how brutal they were, and I don’t think I believed it. Not like I should have,” I say slowly, my voice unsteady when I continue. “There’s a river. The Cauca River, and they…Calilikes to use it to erase people they feel don’t have value.”
