by Paul Pen
“He’s not at his best,” she said, casting out the gloomy thoughts the surroundings evoked. “Well, not him or any of us. I won’t bore you with our life story, but we’re not on vacation. We’re trying to make it seem like we are, but really we’re moving. We’re leaving Seattle. We’ve been through a difficult time, especially my husband, so please forgive him.”
She hoped Mara would take over, respond with some kind of understanding, but she didn’t. Some subtle changes in her expression were insufficient for Grace to be able to interpret her emotions. Fear, anger, sadness, helplessness. All or none of them were possible in the depth of her peculiar gaze. When the trees breathed their indecipherable message again, Grace thought she saw a flash of hatred in those eyes. It quickly went out—it must have been a reflection from what remained of the moon in the sky.
“The idea was that by moving we’d leave behind all the bad things that’ve happened to us recently,” she went on. “Everything was going so well today . . . until you appeared.”
Mara looked away and blew on her cup.
“Sorry, that came out wrong. But you know what I meant.”
A few more seconds passed before Mara accepted the apology.
“Sure, don’t worry. I’m not having a great time, either. Is anyone?” She narrowed her eyes in the steam from the tea. “I’ve even thought about taking more extreme measures . . .”
Grace thought she understood what Mara was referring to. In her mind, the profound sadness the young woman exuded, her aura of loneliness and abandonment, and these extreme measures she said she had considered taking all flowed toward a simple explanation. She took one of Mara’s hands in her own, offering support.
“You’re not going to tell me you threw yourself in front of us on purpose, are you?”
She was surprised at herself for asking the question without hesitation, but it had suddenly seemed logical to her that Mara may have intended to take her own life.
“No.”
The denial was so emphatic that Grace felt ashamed that she’d imagined the story without enough consideration, giving in to her caring instinct as if deep down she enjoyed other people’s dramas because they enabled her to help and feel fulfilled. She released Mara’s hand, not knowing what else she could say to excuse her audacity.
“It’s ready,” Frank broke in, indicating the tent he’d put up on the road. “All yours.”
He said the words into the air, without looking at Mara.
“Frank, is it really necessary?”
Joining her husband, Grace could see the inside of the tent through an open zipper in the fabric.
“Well, to be honest, it’s not bad.” She invited Mara over. “You should get some good rest in there. The bag’s thick and comfortable, and it won’t get much colder than it is now. Oh, and wait a second.” Grace disappeared into the motor home. She returned with three cushions she threw inside the tent. “So you’re even more comfortable. And if you need anything in the night, just ask. This is our house right here.”
“The door will be locked all night,” Frank said.
He caught Grace’s hand before she could pinch his back.
“And if I need the bathroom?” asked Mara.
As she finished her tea, her eyes searched for Frank’s. He shied away from her gaze. Without answering the question, he went back into the RV. Her husband’s stubbornness, his impolite behavior, annoyed Grace. Then he returned with a roll of toilet paper in his hand. He threw it into the tent with more force than he used playing baseball with Simon.
“There you go,” he muttered without looking at Mara. “And everything around us is the bathroom.”
With an exaggerated, almost mocking arm movement, he encompassed the whole landscape.
16.
Frank finished stretching a bottom sheet over the sofa where the children would sleep. While they changed into their pajamas, he and Grace had discussed whether it would be safe to extend the living room module when the vehicle was less stable because of the flat tires. They concluded it wouldn’t be, so the sofa was unfolded just halfway, until it met the kitchen sink unit. Even so, it was a decent enough bed for Audrey and Simon to share. Frank took a bedspread down from the top compartment.
“And this is to go on top of you.”
He laid it out on the sofa.
The children thanked him from their seats at the dining table. Audrey was spreading an antibiotic ointment on Simon’s absent eye, which still needed to be treated daily. Grace helped him some nights, too, but Frank couldn’t bring himself to do it. Just the smell of the ointment made him feel unwell—it was the smell of his own guilt. Nor could he touch the wound with his fingers, or face the void behind the eyelids. He couldn’t bear seeing the reddish color of the flesh in the place where his son’s sparkling eye should be, full of life and innocence. The most Frank managed to do was blow on the wound when it itched. Without looking at the hole in Simon’s face, he blew until the burning sensation stopped, the boy’s hands gripping his T-shirt to fight the temptation to scratch himself.
“Done,” said Audrey.
She screwed the lid back on the tube of ointment and rearranged the patch her brother wore to bed. The one he’d worn in the day had been left on the table.
“Come on, both of you to bed now,” said Frank.
He waited for them to climb onto the sofa so he could get past. In the bedroom, Grace was pulling back the sheets on the double bed.
“Remember what we were thinking, about whether she threw herself in front of the RV?” she asked. “Talking to her, I got the feeling we might’ve been on the right track. But not to sue us or anything like that, more to . . .” She indicated to Frank to unfold his side of the bed. “She seems sad. Really sad, capable of doing something crazy, to herself, even.”
“Suicidal?”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” she confirmed. “Seems it.”
Audrey’s voice interrupted them.
“Mom, that’s prejudice,” she said from the sofa. “What does seeming suicidal mean? That only exists in the closed minds of people who want to simplify others’ pain instead of thinking about how we could help them.”
Out of her sight, Grace nodded with feigned gravity in response to her daughter’s rebuke.
“It’s a serious problem we experience in school because of bullying, for example,” continued Audrey. “What we have to keep in mind is that anyone, facing certain circumstances, could end up committing suicide. In fact, you have to be very brave to do it.”
“Cowardly, more like,” Frank said.
“No, Dad, don’t associate suicide just with weak, crazy, or sad people, because it’s not like that. If we think like that, we never help the people who need us—we only push them to the point of no return. And Mara seems fine to me—frightened by what happened, but that’s all. Did you hear me?”
“Yes, honey, we did.”
Grace rolled her eyes. When she sensed Frank was about to laugh, she admonished him with a conspiratorial look.
“Either way, I’m not happy,” she whispered more quietly, sitting on the edge of the bed. “What if something happens? I don’t know how many times I’ve heard stories of people who seem OK after an accident but then they collapse and die from undetected injuries.”
“That would happen even if she was in here.”
He sat next to her.
“Oh, I don’t know, Frank . . .”
Grace looked around the room as if she could find a solution on the shelves, mirrors, or cupboards.
“I’m going to take the iPad out to her,” she finally said. “In case she gets bored, she can watch a movie.”
Frank grabbed her wrist.
“You’re not going anywhere. We’re safe in here. Our children are safe. That’s all you should worry about.”
“You’re a good father.” Grace rested a hand on his face. “And you know what?” She moved her lips closer, as if to tell him a secret. “I find it very masculine and exciting
when you protect your female and litter.”
“Pleeeease!” yelled Audrey.
“What did I just hear?” asked Simon, as horrified as his sister.
Grace covered her mouth, and shame flushed her face red. She took refuge on Frank’s chest while the children yelled on the sofa.
“Cover my ears!”
“Format my brain!”
“Cover them! Or pull them off!”
The two of them kicked their legs under the bedcover.
“Help, Mom, we can’t unhear what you just said,” cried Simon. “You’re like a Taylor Swift song!”
“Hey, hey,” Audrey cut in. “A bit of respect for Taylor Swift, please. She’s a singer, songwriter, and supersmart businesswoman.”
Simon responded by singing the chorus to “Shake It Off” at full volume until his sister, laughing, joined in. Grace came and sat with them on the sofa, guffawing as well, singing along with them but hiding her red face with the bedcover. Even Frank hummed the part of the lyrics he knew, forgetting the problem they faced for a second and enjoying his family’s explosion of joy. Then he glimpsed the tent through the bedroom window, and lost the desire to laugh.
17.
An idea prevented him from sleeping. Or rather, an urge: to grab the steering wheel, start up the motor home, and drive away.
Escape.
Get away from the threat that was lying in wait for him and his family outside. Leave it behind them. Forget about it. Deny its existence. If only the threat hadn’t been cunning enough to puncture the tires and thwart their escape.
Frank couldn’t close his eyes for more than a few seconds. Beside him, Grace was asleep. Her breathing hadn’t slowed as much as it did when she slept safely in their bed at home, but a subtle spasm under the sheets told him she was now dreaming. A few minutes ago, she’d stopped scratching the pointed hairs of an eyebrow. Simon had been snoring for a while, finally regaining his usual carefree state after the shock of the accident. It hurt Frank to see his son frightened—the child who’d coped so well with the loss of his eye, the hospitalization, the recovery that was still ongoing. His brave little boy. Audrey was sleeping in silence, as she always did, as if she didn’t want to offend anyone with the sound of her breathing, as cautious in her dreams as she was in real life with her views and the way she treated others.
Frank closed his eyes again and concentrated on his family’s hypnotic symphony. He tried to lose himself in it, to slip into sleep. The presence outside invaded his thoughts. The feminine silhouette in the headlights. An intruder on the road, an intruder in his head. He thought about her with such intensity that he began to believe she was inside. Hidden in a corner of the room. Watching them sleep. Waiting for the right moment. He imagined her crouching in a corner, crawling around the bed, climbing the sheets, climbing the walls. Dropping from the ceiling to end up sitting on his chest like an incubus, cutting off his breathing with her weight. As if Frank was the woman in Fuseli’s painting. He saw her turn her neck to seek the approval of a dark presence that had appeared at the entrance to the room. Except that presence was also Frank, and it fixed its red eyes on him, hypnotizing him at once. Helpless, he watched the incubus savage his family while he could only beg for forgiveness and plead guilty to having caused the situation.
Frank opened his eyes feeling himself choke. He grated his throat as he took in air. He didn’t know how long he’d slept, but he was waking from an endless nightmare. His back was soaked in sweat down to the elastic on his underpants, his T-shirt twisted around his body.
Then he heard footsteps outside, and he thought he was still dreaming. But the crunch of the gravel on the road sounded too real. As real as the crickets’ chirping, as the whistle of the wind through the pine needles. And as real as the shudder that cooled the sweat on his back.
Frank got out of bed, listening to Grace’s breathing. He went to the window, fearing he would come face-to-face with the intruder on the other side watching them from outside as she’d done inside in the nightmare he was beginning to forget. He peered out with his stomach tightening. He could still hear the footsteps, but he couldn’t see Mara. What if it wasn’t her walking outside?
Following the crunch of the gravel, he went around the bed to the window on the other side.
Then he saw it.
The flash.
A bright beam that turned into a circle of light on the ground, a few steps from the RV.
A flashlight.
It had to be someone else—neither they nor Mara had one. And they’d all lost their cell phones in the darkness. The bright spot slid along the ground, searching for something. Frank followed the beam of light from the bottom to the top, toward the source. It wasn’t a flashlight, it was a cell phone. He stopped breathing when he recognized the black-painted fingernails that held it.
“It can’t be . . . ,” he whispered to himself.
In a flash, Frank also recognized the pink cotton of Grace’s pajamas. It was Mara. He had to contain the urge to yell at her for not telling them she had a phone. All this time they could have made the emergency call that would have gotten them out of there, but she’d preferred to continue with her sinister plan, whatever it was. He imagined the inside of her purse, the phone lying next to the knife while she assured them she’d lost it in the collision.
“What’re you doing?” Frank murmured to the glass.
Mara combed the ground with her beam of light, like a night creature sniffing its way forward. After searching for a few seconds, she stopped. She bent down. Frank strained his eyes so much his head hurt, unable to make out what she’d picked up. Out there, she must have felt the force of his gaze on the back of her head, because she turned toward the motor home. Realizing she was being watched, she stood there, watching as well. Until she illuminated her face from below. And smiled. Her grimace was as horrible as the one Simon had carved into a pumpkin last Halloween.
“What the . . . ?”
On the other side of the glass, Mara held up the object she’d picked up from the ground. It was the ziplock. With the four cell phones in it. She waved it in front of her face, creating new shadows that distorted her features. For an instant, Frank thought it was the end of their nightmare. The cell phones had been found. With a tiny signal from any network, they could call 911.
But Mara gripped her phone in her teeth, the light pointing at the ground. She opened the bag. She threw the first cell phone into the trees on the right-hand side, lost forever in the precipitous vegetation.
“Fuck. No,” Frank whispered through his teeth, his lips brushing against the window.
He spent a few seconds calculating whether he would reach her in time to stop her if he ran out there. Whether it was worth waking the whole family and scaring them with the intruder’s strange behavior. During those seconds, Mara threw the next cell phone in the opposite direction. It would fall among branches, rocks, dead leaves. She did the same with the third, which was Audrey’s. The last one she threw still in the bag. When she’d finished, she brushed off her hands like someone satisfied to have completed a task. Frank hadn’t even finished calculating—there was no point anymore. The light went out.
The sudden darkness stunned Frank, who found that he was breathing more loudly than Simon was snoring. He dried pellets of his saliva from the glass. In the same way that Simon grabbed his own T-shirt to stop himself from scratching his eye when it itched, Frank grabbed the window’s handle, fighting against the desire to go out after the woman. He closed his eyes to banish the images of what would happen if he went out to confront her.
At that moment, he wished with all his heart that he had run her over. That she’d died from the impact so he wouldn’t now have to face this situation.
A buzz in the darkness, the sound of the tent’s zipper closing, reminded him that she was still alive.
Right there.
Right outside.
Frank scratched the handle, knowing he was going to let go of it.
Suppressing the furious rush his legs were demanding from him, he tiptoed through the motor home to avoid waking his family. He opened and closed the door with the same delicacy. He trod barefoot on the damp road. The shiver that started on the soles of his feet intermingled with the tingling that emanated from his stomach, his neck, his lungs, the heart that accelerated as he approached the tent.
He lowered the zipper little by little to avoid making any noise. He fought against another tingling sensation that disgusted him, the one originating in his crotch. Each click of the zipper triggered images of other zippers, on pairs of pants, which had made the same noise as they were unzipped. He fought against the onset of an erection that made him feel ashamed, one of those erections that are filled as much with premature remorse as with desire. He hated himself for associating the sound with the memory of his penis trapped in the suit pants he would have worn to work that day, his desire about to explode, waiting to be freed and to feel the warm breath of the woman whose mouth awaited it.
Frank finished unzipping the tent, opening the door to his darkest secret tooth by tooth. Inside was the woman to whom the mouth of his shameful memories belonged. Seeing her, every trace of inappropriate excitement disappeared, and he went as soft as the flesh of a corpse floating in water. The stiffness moved to his neck.
“How long have you been following me?” Frank whispered.
“You haven’t lost that scared look on your face since you realized it was me,” she said. “I don’t know how your wife hasn’t noticed something’s up, considering how tense you’ve been. But shut that mouth, I’m not an apparition. I’m flesh and bone, just like when you were fucking me.”
Mara was kneeling on the sleeping bag, her legs bare. She’d taken off the pajama pants. Frank remembered other times when, like now, they’d been together in their underwear, just after leaving the rest of their clothes scattered around the floor of her apartment. Mara stood so that their eyes were level—she could stand upright in the tent. He spoke while bent over.