by Paul Pen
“My car key!” yelled Mara. The children turned their heads, the loud voice alerting them, but they returned their attention to the road as soon as they heard that she hadn’t found a cell phone. Frank did approach Mara, relieved. Having the key could change the situation. Maybe he could persuade her to leave his family in peace, that they could resolve the problems between them without harming anyone else. When he was within a pace of her, Mara showed him what she had in her hand.
“Oh no, it’s just a stone,” she said.
She gave him a look similar to the one she’d given him the day she’d pretended to be surprised to find that the document she’d used as an excuse to draw him to the dealership had, in fact, been signed. In the smirk she gave as she threw away the little rock that looked nothing like a key, Frank could see how much she was enjoying toying with him, whether with a zip tie or a stone. He had to clench his jaw to prevent himself from opening his mouth and separate himself from her to avoid giving in to any other instincts.
He fled to where Simon was and helped him search while Audrey despaired a few paces in front of them. They continued their fruitless search until Grace announced that breakfast was ready.
They served it outside, by the door, on their folding camp table. They didn’t bother to extend the awning. Mara ate one of Grace’s omelets with relish, barely breathing between mouthfuls. It turned Frank’s stomach to see her sitting at the table as an unwanted guest at one of the family breakfasts he cherished as some of the best and most intimate occasions he shared with his wife and kids. Grace, Simon, and Audrey, his most precious gifts, couldn’t share a table with the woman who represented his worst vices. It was such an indecent scene, so wrong, that Frank lost his appetite. He had to sip coffee to help down the food, which fought its way with difficulty through his tight esophagus while Mara chewed merrily, cutting pieces of omelet with her fork and feeding them into her mouth before she’d swallowed the previous mouthful. Sickened by the churn of her mouth as she ate, all Frank wanted to do was get rid of her.
“Feeling better now, huh?” he asked her when she’d finished. “You and I could walk to the main road, now that you have all this energy from breakfast. We’d reach the phone at the restaurant in about four hours.”
“Seriously, Frank?” Grace moved a bowl of Froot Loops closer to Simon so the drops of milk he spilled with each spoonful didn’t go on the table. “How’s she going to walk for four hours?”
“No chance,” Mara added. “So I’m not going to be able to go yet. How annoying. Unless you can think of anything else we could do.”
The slanted smile that wrapped up the sentence reminded him there was the option to confess.
“There’s no need to do anything crazy—the keys will show up as soon as we start searching again,” said Grace.
“Or even better, the cell phones will.” Audrey was picking at pieces of bell pepper in her omelet. “I haven’t been able to post photos of anything that’s happened.”
“More coffee, Mara?”
While Grace filled their cups, Frank thought about walking to the main road by himself. Leaving the family alone with Mara for four hours certainly wasn’t an appealing option. He sipped his hot coffee while he weighed whether his wife could go with him. No, that would mean leaving their children with a stranger. Perhaps it could be Grace who went by herself, while he would stay to look after the children and watch over the intruder. A stupid idea—no husband would make his wife walk for hours like that. He swallowed with difficulty as he pondered whether Simon was old enough to walk such a distance. He was too young, without a doubt, but perhaps Audrey wasn’t. But what kind of father would send his teenage daughter off alone down a road in search of help? Having exhausted every possibility, Frank set his cup on the tablecloth with such force that he splashed his arm.
“Goddamn!” He slapped the table as he stood. Turning away from his family, he looked down the road as far as he could see. “Doesn’t anybody ever come this way?”
The trees, the earth, and the mountain muffled his furious yelling, silencing it like an unwanted interruption in the harmonic melody of the birdsong and the whisper of the trees.
“You said yourself it was Idaho’s best kept secret,” he heard Simon say.
21.
Sitting on a chair by the side of the road, now dressed in his polo shirt and chinos from the day before, Frank unfolded the road map he’d found in the motor home’s document folder. It was a plastic folder decorated with the same logo that was embroidered into Mara’s uniform, the one that ended up down at their ankles that day in the hut. Frank opened his legs and extended his arms to spread the paper out. Looking over the edge, he was able to keep watch on Mara, who was sweeping around the tent with a broom as if it were her home, as if she intended to install herself there for some time. Frank grew anxious when he imagined the lengths to which Mara could go to have her revenge. He searched the map for the nearest towns, trying to imagine from which one it was most likely somebody would come.
“Is that what maps used to be like?” asked Audrey.
She’d penetrated the thicketed ditch at the roadside, the vegetation reaching her waist.
“Yes, sweetie, it is,” he replied, struggling to keep the enormous sheet of paper taut. “This is what they were like.”
“And how do you find the places? Where do you enter the address?”
“They don’t work like Google Maps. You have to search for the right square using the rows and columns that—”
“Shut up, shut up, I don’t want to know.” Audrey wiped the sweat from her forehead with her wrist. Her hands were full of torn stems. “I was born in the era of cell phones. And that’s why I want my cell phone.”
She threw away the handfuls of vegetation and continued the search, making her way through the undergrowth like a farmer harvesting crops. Simon had accepted his father’s pessimistic prediction as a certainty, giving up on the phones when they finished combing the road surface as far as it would have been feasible for the handsets to fly. At any rate, the boy only wanted his cell phone to keep leveling up in his video game, and now he’d discovered that the road offered other entertainment options that were just as fun. After collecting stones, branches, and pine cones, he was erecting a castle next to the RV. Having lain the foundations, he went off looking for new construction materials around the area. When he went up to Mara, Frank lowered his map.
“Do you want this?” She offered him a peg from the tent. “You could use it as a flagpole.”
“Thanks, but I want to build it just with things from the forest.”
Simon tried to push away the tool Mara was holding out to him but miscalculated, his hand cutting through the air.
“It’s my three-D vision,” he explained. “I’m still getting used to it.”
“What happened?”
The map’s paper crackled when Frank’s fists squeezed shut.
“A medical thing,” Simon replied.
It was the answer his parents had taught him to give. With that, the boy walked away and collected dry pine cones scattered around the road. On the opposite side, Audrey groaned.
“I pricked myself on something!” She put a finger in her mouth. “And I’m getting filthy with these plants! Some kind of milk comes out of them when I cut them!”
She showed Frank her dirty, sticky hands. Blades of grass were stuck to her skin, which seemed glazed with glue. Petals from yellow, white, and purple flowers decorated her forearms. Audrey sneezed. Then she cried out, angry at nature in general.
“Quit searching, honey. It’s not worth it.”
Grace came out of the motor home, alerted by their voices. Discovering that the racket was just Audrey having a tantrum, she positioned herself next to Frank’s chair. She stroked the back of his neck, closing the book on her anger over the zip tie.
“Sooner or later someone’ll have to come by here.” The way the sentence trembled in her throat betrayed a certain amount of doubt as
to whether it would really happen. “And if no one does, luckily we have a house right here and enough food for a week if needed.”
“I’ll die,” Audrey said from amid the bushes. “If we’re going to be here for a week, I’ll die. I’m not Mabel Pines from Gravity Falls. Look how my first day in the wild’s going.”
She showed them her dirty arms.
“We’re not going to be here seven days,” said Frank.
Grace considered Mara, as well. Raising her voice, she suggested to Frank that he help Mara sweep, that she shouldn’t be exerting herself unnecessarily.
“It’s fine. It’ll keep me busy and make the time pass more quickly.” Mara rested her gaze on Frank. “Until your husband decides when we’re leaving this place.”
“If only it was up to him,” said Grace, unaware of the hidden dialogue between them. “But on this occasion, we’re in fate’s hands. Are you OK? Really?”
“Seriously,” Mara assured her. “A bit weak, nothing else.”
“Is there something I can . . . we can do to help you feel better? Anything.”
Mara’s expression darkened, as it had each time she made a malicious remark.
“Do these RVs have a bathtub?” she asked. “I could really use a hot bath, get rid of all the dirt from last night.”
There was the venom. The provocation, the lie. She knew full well what there was or wasn’t in a motor home—she’d been selling them for years.
“I guess we all like hot baths—that’s why we were on our way to the hot springs, right?” Grace noted. “But all I can offer you in there is a shower. I don’t think there are RVs with a bathtub. Did you see any that had one on the internet?” she asked Frank. “Or when you went to buy it at the dealership?”
His offense at the way Mara was mocking him, mocking his wife, prevented him from articulating a single word. He just shook his head.
“But hey, the Idaho guide said there’re still a lot of unknown hot springs in these forests,” Grace went on. “So who knows, we might have a huge natural bathtub right there and we don’t even know about it. If you want to go take a look . . .”
“I’ll make do with a shower,” Mara concluded.
Grace invited her to go into the motor home, but Frank went in before them. He earned an admonishing look from his wife for his paranoia about the stranger being dangerous. He justified his presence by turning on the water pump so the shower would have pressure, but Grace reminded him that everything was ready, and the boiler was also on—she’d just washed the dishes.
“It looks even bigger and nicer in the daytime.” Mara contemplated the living room with her mouth open, exaggerating a false amazement that irritated Frank. “It must be lovely traveling with your family in a remote place like this,” she said to Grace. “You and your loved ones, lost amid nature, without needing anything else. How lovely. If only I had the chance. You’re a beautiful family and you have a wonderful life.”
Frank wished he could tell her to shut up.
“Well, we have our bad patches, too, you know,” said Grace, opening up to this stranger who was laughing at her. “I told you a little last night. And the most recent thing was . . . an accident involving the boy.” She finished in a whisper, as if lowering her voice would make what happened less serious.
“The eye?”
“Yeah, a terrible thing,” murmured Grace.
Frank could sense his wife trying hard not to look at him, so her eyes wouldn’t betray her and reveal that she still blamed her husband, as much as she insisted to him that it had been an unfortunate accident.
“But there he is, running around.” Mara gestured at Simon through the kitchen window. “He seems happy, healthy.”
“He’s a very brave boy,” Frank broke in.
He took a towel from a cupboard, remembering they were there to use the bathroom, not chat about his family life and his son. Mara accepted it with a slanted smile.
“And you can’t complain about your husband, either,” she said to Grace. “Finding a good man isn’t easy these days.”
“That I have no doubts about—I’ve been very lucky in love. I even make a living from telling people how good we have it.” Grace kissed him on a shoulder, rubbed his chest as if bragging about what a good husband he was. “And you? Have you been unlucky with guys? If we’re going to spend this much time together we may as well get to know each other.”
“Very unlucky,” answered Mara, keeping her eyes on Frank’s.
“You’ll find the right man,” Grace said, with the ease with which one wishes somebody else something one has achieved. “And we’ll go out so you can make yourself at home. The bathroom’s the door on the right. It’s a normal shower, there’s no trick to it. If you need help, just yell.”
“It’s my first time in a motor-home bathroom. I hope I don’t slip.”
Frank’s saliva soured.
“Don’t worry, it’s so tight in there you can’t fall,” Grace said before going out.
Outside, Frank struggled to breathe. The effort of remaining passive in the face of so much provocation, so many veiled insults aimed at him and his wife, was turning into a knot of anxiety that compressed his chest.
“Are you all right?” asked Grace. “You don’t look too good.”
“Do you think it’s safe to leave her alone in there?” he asked, blaming his unease on his concern for their safety. “With all our belongings?”
Grace held her hands to her cheeks as if she were Munch’s The Scream.
“Oh no! She’s going to steal the iPad!” she joked.
She burst out laughing, but the pressure in Frank’s chest only increased.
22.
Mara looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t like the face she saw, her dark expression. It didn’t belong to her. The pearl gray of her eyes that had always defined her unusual beauty was now a concrete gray. A sewer gray. She gripped the sink, fearing the onset of another panic attack. The kind that had besieged her since she found herself unable to cope with Frank abandoning her, since the bastard changed her forever. With his selfishness. His lies. With his lack of humanity. With the way he left her, as if she were disposable, just a girl he’d fucked a few times and now wanted to disappear. A secret to be ashamed of, to hide like a cat buries its excrement. An embarrassment to run far away from, taking his perfect family with him. His two children. His wife. The same wife he never remembered when they rolled around naked on the floor of her apartment. The same wife Frank did not have the decency to mention until Mara discovered the truth herself. He had always maintained the lie he told at the dealership, that he was divorced, but one Sunday afternoon Mara was spending on the sofa browsing YouTube, out of curiosity she clicked on a channel about marital happiness. The channel was called Gracefully and, judging by the titles of the videos and thumbnail images, she guessed it would be one of those channels where a satisfied wife recorded, edited, and shared her exemplary life with thousands of subscribers. This woman, for good measure, was called Grace, guided toward perfection from the day she was born. This kind of channel was the very opposite of what Mara would normally consume. After what had happened with her parents, she’d never believed in partnership or love—sex, yes, she believed in that, as an absolute and indisputable pleasure that always worked, provided it wasn’t complicated by feelings or false promises. But she wasn’t above taking pleasure in spying on the lives of people who repulsed her, so she played some of Gracefully’s videos. The first recounted the youngest son’s visit to the dentist. In the next one, Grace was making her own Christmas decorations. Amazing.
In the third video, Mara saw Grace’s husband bringing her breakfast in bed on her birthday while the children jumped on the sheets to wake her up. When she saw the face of the man carrying the tray of toast, eggs, orange juice, and a flower, the laptop slid off Mara’s knees.
Now she turned the faucet in the RV’s bathroom. She splashed water on the back of her neck. Remembering Frank’s first li
e triggered a torrent of thoughts that usually ended in a panic attack.
The crisis the day before in the rest stop bathroom had been major, and she didn’t want it to happen again. Or to throw up again. She regretted the way she’d responded to that lady, how unpleasant she’d been to the daughter, who wasn’t to blame for anything. Brit and Bree. We all deserve a clean restroom. She looked at herself in the motor home’s mirror in the same way she’d looked at herself the day before: disgusted. Struggling to recognize herself in the reflection, searching those eyes for the self she’d started losing as a result of Frank’s deception. The deception that turned her into something she had never wanted to be. Into the other woman. The lover. The other women. The lovers.
The fling she thought she had been having with a divorced man was, in reality, a prolonged affair behind the back of a wife who loved him, perhaps as much as her mother had loved her father until she discovered the truth about him. With his lie, Frank had turned Mara into one of the women who had ended her mother’s life, women she detested even though they were not really to blame for anything.
Only her father was to blame. It was he who sneaked out in search of other kisses, other embraces, other bodies, while her mother merely loved him blindly through more than thirty years of infidelities. Three decades of lies that stripped their marriage, their family, and their entire past of any meaning when the truth finally came to light. Because truth never dies. Even if you kill it. Truth always emerges. Even if you drown it.
One of those lovers had revealed the truth about Dad, who in thirty full years had never mustered the integrity to be honest with the woman who most deserved it. The disclosure of that affair was followed by others, so many that Mom was unable to find a single year of their marriage, not even the first, when she had not shared her husband with other women. And the life she had lived then seemed so false to her that she no longer wanted to live it. She said goodbye to Mara with an apology, asking her to make sure that no man ever made her feel as miserable as her father had made her mother feel. She wrote it in a note she left on the bedside table under two empty brown bottles. Mom died faceup on her side of the bed, the other half as empty as it had always been, even when Dad slept beside her.