by Paul Pen
“I don’t have the key,” said Mara. “I lost it when they hit me.”
“I actually swerved out of the way. My wife’s hand was all she hit,” Frank corrected her. “You could take her to the junction on the main road, where the restaurant is.”
“Did you eat at Danielle’s?” asked Earl. “Incredible cheesecake.”
Frank explained that the girl didn’t have insurance or AAA, but that she could call someone from the restaurant or the nearby motel. It was a situation she had to resolve by herself. Neither he nor his family wanted to waste any more time on the matter.
“Can you take her there?” persisted Frank.
“Sure can, I was heading there myself. But what will we do with you and the beast?” He gestured at the motor home.
“Frank, you go with them,” said Grace. “Call AAA as soon as you arrive, and I’ll wait here with the kids. We’ll be fine.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, Mom,” said Audrey.
Simon confirmed that it frightened him, too.
“Would you mind making the call for me when you arrive?” Frank shook Earl’s right-hand stump. “My name’s Frank. These are my children, Audrey and Simon. You already know my beautiful wife’s name. If you get in touch with the breakdown service, we’ll wait here for someone to come help us. We’re in no hurry.”
“And this is Mara,” Grace added, giving Frank a harsh look for not introducing her.
“Could you make the call?” Frank asked again.
“Sure, as soon as I’ve finished my cheesecake at Danielle’s.” Earl stuck his tongue out at Simon. “All right, I’ll call first. Even though I’m hungrier than seven wolves.”
“Thanks a lot, Earl. My family and I are very grateful.”
“So I’ll just take the pretty young lady?”
Frank fixed his eyes on Mara.
“Yes,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Just her.”
Despite his defiant look, Frank could feel his heartbeat in his neck. If Mara felt cornered, if she sensed she’d lost the chance to force him to confess, she might let the truth out herself. The saliva turned bitter in his throat when he thought of Mara as a scorpion surrounded by fire, but he resisted the urge to swallow to avoid showing even a hint of weakness. She bit her thumbnail. The changing furrows on her forehead suggested internal scheming. She looked at him, at Grace, and at Earl. Her visual trajectory ended at the children. Simon had his arms around Audrey’s waist. Mara centered her attention on them for most of the duration of her analysis.
“Grace,” she said after deliberating.
Frank stopped breathing.
“Can we talk, you and me alone? Inside the RV?”
“Inside?” Grace frowned. “Now?”
“There’s no need to go anywhere,” Frank intervened. “You can talk to all of us.”
“It’s about . . .” Mara stuck her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. “It’s a girl thing. I’d rather we talked alone.”
“Oh, please,” Audrey blurted out. “There aren’t girl or boy things—all human beings understand the feelings of other human beings. Honestly, you older people have to start getting over these prejudices, open your minds a little. It’s almost 2020.”
“You heard Audrey.” Frank had never been so happy to hear one of his daughter’s lectures. “You can talk right here.”
“Grace . . .”
Mara looked at Frank, straightening her back like a soldier presenting arms. Her temples pulsed from the pressure with which she was clenching her jaw. She wet her lips, preparing to say something important.
Then, spontaneously, Simon separated himself from Audrey and went to hold Frank’s hand, in silence. He stood next to his father, waiting for the stranger to speak. Mara’s shoulders relaxed.
“I’d rather not go with the gentleman by myself,” she finally improvised. “Why don’t you go, Frank? You’re a man, like him. You won’t be in any danger. You won’t—”
“What’re you implying, miss?” Earl interrupted. “Don’t you go there, because I haven’t insulted you. I wouldn’t harm a fly. And I’ve been unlucky enough to have been a victim of that thing you’re referring to—yup, it happens to us men, too—and it’s no laughing matter.”
Grace held a finger to her lips again, asking him to be careful with the subjects he spoke about in front of the children.
“So, miss, decide if you want to climb on my horse, because this rider has a long way to travel but no desire to be insulted.”
Earl opened the door on the passenger side.
He waited for Mara to get in.
“Miss?”
Nine eyes focused on her, waiting for her decision.
Mara took a deep breath.
And a step back.
Earl snorted and closed the door.
“You can count on that call,” he said to Frank.
“Frank, come on, you go with him, go with the gentleman,” said Grace, trying to find a compromise to ease the tension. “Mara can stay here with us. We’ll wait for you here, it’s fine.”
“No, Grace, no.” Frank was surprised at the gravity in his voice. “Enough now. We’ve already done everything we can for her, and now she has a chance to fix her problems with her car, her insurance, or whatever. Our friend Earl here is offering the exact same help she needed when she tried to stop the RV. Why doesn’t she want it now? We’ve been waiting since yesterday for someone to come by and help us. And here he is. His name’s Earl. A great man who served the country, who we have no reason to distrust. She’s going with him. We’ll stay and wait for the help they’re going to request for us. Problems over. Everything taken care of.”
He knew the real problem wouldn’t disappear just because Mara traveled a few miles west, but it would buy him some time.
“Should I go?” asked Audrey. “You haven’t considered me, but I’m a young adult perfectly capable of contributing in a situation like this.”
“I want to go, too! I like the man, and between the two of us we’ll make a whole body. We can be pirates in the forest.”
Simon’s enthusiasm made Earl laugh, but Frank snorted at the stupidity of the idea. Imbued with a mixture of desperation and bravado, he went to the tent and took out the bag containing Mara’s dirty clothes. He also picked up her purse. He thought about asking her to open it—to show everyone the knife, the cell phone, to get her to explain why she had them. But he was afraid she must have foreseen the move and hidden them somewhere else, the way she’d hidden her purse last night before Frank visited her in the tent. It would be a masterstroke in making him look paranoid. He handed her the belongings, shoving them against her chest.
“I . . . I have to get changed. These clothes are your wife’s.”
“It doesn’t matter, take them. You’re not going to wear your torn clothes all covered in dirt and blood.” With ulterior motives, he appropriated the words Mara had used earlier. “For the inconvenience caused. And take this hundred dollars”—he took the bills from his back pocket—“in case something comes up. It’s our way to say sorry, us to you, for appearing in front of you on the road in the middle of the night.”
Frank could almost feel the heat from the rage that turned Mara’s cheeks red, how much the money offended her with the obvious double meaning it encompassed.
“No . . . really . . . I should . . .”
She was left without excuses for refusing Earl’s help. The dark intentions of some deep scheming returned to her eyes. Her tongue would be fizzing with the desire to blurt everything out. Frank remembered that it had been Simon who’d disarmed Mara before, so he went over to the boy. And to Audrey. He hugged them from behind, forming a perfect family photograph in front of her, a dad with his daughter and son. He challenged her to be cruel enough to destroy their relationship right there, malevolent enough to hurt two innocent children, to throw the terrible truth about their father in their faces—a truth that would be like an acid that would disfigure them for life.
“What’re you doing, Dad?”
“It’s for the best, Mara,” Grace concluded. “The sooner you start dealing with your stuff, the better. And please, get a doctor to take a look at you. With the shower and sweat, those butterfly bandages on your eyebrow are coming loose. A blow that doesn’t hurt on the outside can be very dangerous inside. I don’t care about the jeans. I have moving boxes full of clothes traveling to Boston right now.”
It annoyed Frank that she’d revealed their final destination.
“It’s the best option,” Grace added.
“It is,” Frank said. He rested a hand on Mara’s shoulder, pressing her to move, to get in the truck once and for all. “And please, Earl, don’t forget to make that call for us.”
Mara turned around.
“It won’t be necessary. If I go with him, I’ll call for you, don’t worry. Let him eat his cheesecake as soon as he arrives. We’ve put him through enough trouble already. And anyway, I owe you, for giving me somewhere to sleep, for the clothes, so I’ll take care of the call. It’s the least I can do.”
She gave Frank her characteristic half-smile.
Frank approached Earl and whispered in his ear. “You call.” He squeezed his shoulder as if congratulating him for some romantic conquest while they drank a few beers together, trying to strike up a classic male connection. A connection through which he communicated that he didn’t trust the girl, just as he knew Earl didn’t after she offended him by implying that simply because he was a man, he might want to have his way with her in his truck. “You call.”
Earl agreed with a slight nod.
“Jump in, miss.”
He opened the passenger-side door for the second time.
Mara walked with short paces. She turned her neck from side to side, searching for an excuse to cling to.
“Great, Mara,” said Grace. “It’s about time you saw a doctor.”
She climbed into the truck. Hugging her purse and dirty clothes, she sat on the seat’s edge, as if still trying to find a reason to get out. To stay. To make him confess. Frank closed the door with a force equal to his desire for her to disappear.
“Watch it, cowboy,” Earl complained. “This old mule doesn’t take kindly to beatings. What it needs is love and affection.”
He stroked the steering wheel with what remained of his forearms. Then he stuck one out the window.
“High five,” he said to Simon.
The words and the nonexistent hand made the boy laugh. He lifted up his patch before slapping the stump.
“We can do everything!”
“Sure we can, kid.”
The rest of the family said goodbye to Earl and wished Mara luck. Close together, their arms over one another’s shoulders, they waved to the truck. Frank felt the knot loosen in his chest. He began visualizing it as a harmless piece of cord that would end up dropping to the ground at his feet.
Then Mara turned her head in the cab.
Through the mottled skin that was the rear window, between the changing patches of sun and shade, she fixed her gaze on Frank’s.
This isn’t over, her eyes said.
This is far from over.
The dust the wheels raised hid the truck. When the cloud of dirt cleared, the vehicle was gone. The sound of the engine gradually moved away, fading until it dissolved into the birdsong.
26.
“So, you were all on your way to the hot springs?”
Mara didn’t bother to respond—she barely noticed the old man’s voice. She reduced it to some annoying interference among her tangled thoughts. She touched her cheeks with the back of a hand. They felt hot. Rage was burning her inside. She shuffled closer to the window in her seat, hoping the air would cool her, soothe her. She bit her thumbnail, ignoring the pain, angry with herself. Unable to comprehend why her courage had failed her. Why she hadn’t confronted Frank. Once again, he’d gotten rid of her. His words had confused her and dragged her into this rust bucket driven by a mutilated old man intent on striking up a conversation. Idiot. What an idiot she’d been. She hadn’t come all this way so Frank could just get rid of her again, at the first opportunity. A fool, that’s what she was. A fool. Only a fool would keep quiet like she had. She should have spoken, she should have revealed everything before climbing in this damn truck with no suspension that was wrecking her spine.
The children. It was because of the children. She couldn’t say anything in front of them. What kind of person would she have become? Simon had gone to his father, held his hand, as if he was his oracle and sanctuary. That feeling—the young child’s love for the father he sees as an infallible hero—is unique, precious, and, sadly, fleeting. The child no longer feels it when he’s older. But while it lasts, it’s one of the miracles that gives life meaning. Mara couldn’t destroy that with her words. She couldn’t be the one to take away a father’s superpowers in front of the boy who loved him most. It had to be Frank who took off his disguise in front of Grace. And the two of them together, as a married couple and parents, would explain to the children that Dad’s costume was always a sham, that he was never the superhero, but the villain. But now Mara’s rage was threatening to consume her, to make her lose any principles she had. What had just happened couldn’t happen again. She wouldn’t pass up the next opportunity. The truth would defeat any indecision. And that woman would know what her husband did when she wasn’t looking. She needed to think. She needed silence to think.
With his stump, the old man turned up the music.
He tapped the steering wheel to the rhythm of something by Air Supply. Orchestral arrangements and hyperbolic lyrics about love were the opposite of what Mara needed. Restless, she shuffled in her seat. She looked out the window. She turned around. The road wound off behind them, farther and farther away from Frank.
“A beautiful family, huh?”
“Beautiful?” Just what she needed to hear. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I can’t recognize a beautiful family when I see one?”
Mara shot the old man a look. Behind him, the speed they were traveling at turned Idaho’s wooded landscape into a flurry of green and brown sprinkled with golden flashes of sun. A flurry that, with every second, increased the distance between her and Frank. Between Frank and the truth. She couldn’t allow it. She had to do something.
“Stop,” she said.
“What?”
“Stop the truck. Hit the brakes.”
“What the hell are you saying, miss? It’s still a long way to the junction from here. I can’t even smell the cheesecake yet. You young people, you’re always so impatient. Can’t you just enjoy the scenery and the music?”
He turned the volume on the car stereo up even louder. The music occupied space in Mara’s head that she didn’t have right now.
“I’m asking you to stop.” She was trying hard not to shout. “I have some things I need to take care of back there. Things that’re none of your business. Let me out here. You drive on and we’re done.”
“But I agreed to take you, miss. To call someone to help that family and help you with the situation you’re in—no insurance, no AAA. You young people—”
“I have insurance,” she cut in. The old man stuttered without ultimately saying anything. The perplexed look he gave her amused Mara so much that she decided to keep it there with a string of confessions. “I’ve got everything. I’ve even got my phone.” She undid the twist locks on her purse and showed it to him. “And I also have the car key. It’s here.” She stroked her belly, causing even more confusion. “As you can see, you don’t know anything. You don’t understand anything about what you’ve seen or who you stumbled across.”
“How can I let you go back? What will that family think of me?”
“What do you care what some people you don’t even know think? I’ll just tell them you kicked me out of the car, that you turned out to be less friendly th
an you seemed.”
“I do care, miss. I don’t know where you’re from, but around here we value a good potato and a little thing called dignity. And we try to help each other. I’m not going to allow you to get out here alone on this God-forgotten road where not even the ants come. It’d be irresponsible for me to do that.”
“Stop! The! Truck!”
The screaming and the strange cadence in her words set off the first alarm on the old man’s face. The blemishes of old age curled around his eyes when he frowned. He was beginning to realize Mara was serious. A Vietnam veteran was perhaps struggling to understand how a woman he only knew to refer to as miss could be threatening him. That she might be dangerous. His reaction was to step on the gas.
“What’re you doing?” she asked. “I’m telling you to stop.”
The old man maintained the pressure on the pedal.
“If you prefer, I can tell them another version. That you were the sexual predator I feared you were. I’m sorry, honestly, I couldn’t think of another excuse not to go with you. But if you keep accelerating, I won’t be sorry anymore, I’ll enjoy telling them I wasn’t wrong. That you attacked me and I managed to escape. I’ll ask for help again and they’ll give it, with better reason than before.”
“Why would I do that? What the hell are you saying?”
The old man accelerated.
The engine rebelled.
And Mara had no option but to pull out the knife.
“Hey, hey, hey, easy, easy.”
“Stop,” she ordered.
She brandished the weapon in the old man’s direction, toward the tangle of white chest hair that poked out from the overalls. He swerved in the opposite direction, as if he could escape the blade. Mara had to grab hold of the dashboard so she wouldn’t lose her balance.
“What’s your problem?”
“I told you, you don’t know anything. And it’s not your concern. Let me out.”
The old man swallowed, gestured at the knife with his chin. “What’re you going to do with that?”