by Paul Pen
“It would’ve been clear it was mine.” Frank gestured at the letters on his corner caddy. “If she wants revenge on someone, it’s me. For hitting her with the RV, must be.”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. We have to get out of here, Frank. We have to go, right now. Clean yourself up. We’ll walk if we have to.”
Frank rinsed his injuries in cold water, thinking about what to do. Trying to find more excuses. Grace passed him the large towel so he could press it against the cuts on his testicles, and a smaller one for his face.
“Mom?” Simon’s voice came from outside. “Dad?”
They fell silent, their muscles tense.
“Someone’s coming,” the boy added.
Grace looked at Frank with eyes wide open, afraid of the deranged woman who for no apparent reason had it in for her family. He looked at her with eyes just as wide, his fear caused by the real threat, the threat of the truth coming back to ensnare him after all. A final drop fell from the showerhead into the pool around the drain. Frank observed the circular waves it made on the water’s surface, a subtle alteration that sent everything out of balance.
Audrey’s untroubled yell confirmed his worst fears.
“It’s Mara!”
Grace dropped the towel she was pressing against Frank’s face. She left the bathroom.
“Grace!” he yelled. “Honey, wait!”
The whole motor home wobbled under her footsteps. Frank slipped as he got out of the shower.
32.
Grace climbed down the steps, hearing Frank slip in the bathroom and curse. She recognized Mara’s silhouette in the distance, in the darkness, approaching the motor home’s field of light. When she reached it, Grace could also see her ruined clothes, her purse, bloodstained. She heard her labored breathing.
“It . . . it was Earl,” Mara said. “That old man tried . . . he wanted . . .”
She broke down in tears while she continued to limp on. She showed them bruises on her arms, marks on her pants.
“Oh no,” whispered Audrey.
She got up from the table and ran to Mara before Grace could stop her. She received her with a delicate hug, separated the sweaty hair from her face.
“What did he do to you?” Audrey inspected her face, her body. “You’re covered in cuts and bruises. Are you OK?”
Simon wrinkled his nose.
“Earl? It can’t be.”
He also got up with the intention of going over to them, but this time Grace reacted in time to catch him. She pulled on his T-shirt neck and they walked together. She protected the boy with an arm over his shoulders, keeping him close.
“He did that to you?” Simon asked as they approached.
Two paces before reaching her, Grace stopped. Keeping a certain distance would be safer and make it easier to hide her nerves. Her main concern was for Audrey to come away from Mara. Having accepted Mara’s role as victim without hesitation, the teenager was continuing to show affection and devotion to her. From up close, Grace examined the damage to the clothes she’d lent her that morning. The blue-striped T-shirt she’d worn for the last time at a beach picnic with the kids was now covered in dried bloodstains. The jeans were now a pair of torn shorts. Grace preferred not to think about the implement she’d slit the garment with, or where she had it hidden right now. Forcing herself to hide her fear, Grace suppressed the screams that tickled her throat.
“What happened, Mara?” she asked, and she swallowed. She also held out a hand, inviting Audrey to come to her and Simon. “Come here with your brother, honey, let me take care of her.”
But Mara closed her fingers around the girl’s wrist, not with force but as a warning. She must have sensed Grace’s unease after all. Grace looked her in the eyes, establishing a silent dialogue in which they each tried to decipher what the other woman knew. If Mara squeezed harder on Audrey’s wrist, her guise as an innocent victim would be gone. If Grace leapt to her daughter’s rescue, she would reveal that she knew Mara was lying.
“You were right not wanting to go with him, then,” said Grace. “We’ll take care of that, don’t worry.” Deciding to take the risk, she went close and, crouching, pretended to examine one of the cuts on Mara’s legs. Perhaps surprised at her willingness to help, Mara let down her guard and released Audrey to point out the injury’s course, winding up toward her groin. Grace took her chance. She grabbed her daughter and pulled her away.
“Leave us alone!” she yelled, retreating backward, dragging Simon with her as well.
“What’re you doing, Mom?” Audrey pulled her arm away to free herself.
Grace fixed her eyes on Mara.
“Get out of here.” She said it with all the fear she’d been containing, with all the force with which she intended to protect her children. “Leave us in peace.”
“Mom, what is it? We have to help her.”
“I knew it. Earl didn’t do anything,” concluded Simon.
“Why’re you here?” Grace blinked to get the sweat out of her eyes. She had both hands busy with the children. “What the fuck do you want?”
Grace never cursed, which was why the word sounded so violent on her lips, so cutting on her tongue.
“Mom, why would you say that?” Audrey scolded her.
“Go inside,” she ordered, whispering through her teeth. “Lock yourselves in the RV.”
“No, I’m going to—”
“Get in!”
If Grace never swore, she was even less likely to shout at her children. Audrey sensed the seriousness of the situation, and her attitude changed. She cooperated, taking Simon with her. Holding hands, they ran back to the motor home, as if escaping a fire. Halfway there, they saw Frank, who had finally come out. Grace saw her husband limp—the fall in the bathroom must have been more dramatic than she’d imagined. He was wearing jogging pants and a sweater without a T-shirt. There were splashes of water on the clothes, and blood. His hair was still wet. The cuts on his face weren’t bleeding, but they stood out in dark red.
“What happened to you?” Audrey asked.
“Dad, you’ve cut yourself.”
“In!” yelled Frank. “And lock it from the inside. The windows, too.”
Simon hid in his sister’s chest, and they climbed into the vehicle together. Obeying her father, Audrey closed the door. Grace heard the locks being activated from inside. The turn signals blinked twice. Then the two open windows were closed and the children scurried around inside, no doubt looking for a place where they could see what was happening.
When she had him close, Grace held Frank around the waist. His body was giving off heat from the rushing and moisture from his recent shower. And there was also another strange vibration she was unable to identify. There was something in his face she didn’t recognize, an unusual mutation she found disturbing. She attributed it to the cuts—it must have been that. After so many years, she knew all of Frank’s expressions.
“Look what you’ve done to my husband.” Grace held his chin. “Look at this face and tell me how you feel, look what you’ve managed to do with your soap.”
Mara took the accusation without blinking.
“Maybe . . . maybe it wasn’t her,” said Frank. “The blade could’ve gotten stuck there somehow.”
“And the tires?” Grace aimed the question at Mara with her chest puffed out. “What did you do to the tires?”
“It might not . . . ,” Frank stuttered beside her.
“You slashed them, deliberately.” Grace felt as if she were drowning in her own indignation. “The wheels didn’t blow, you punctured them. To strand us out here. To punish us when you realized you wouldn’t get anything from our insurance because it was your fault.”
Mara’s expression remained unchanged despite the barrage of accusations. She just listened with unsettling composure to everything Grace threw at her. Unmoved, she looked at Frank and crossed her arms, as if expecting something from him.
“They might’ve blown,” he s
aid, “when I hit the brakes, the wheels . . .”
Grace shook her head, unable to understand Frank’s attitude. There was no reason to hide anything now, he didn’t need to protect her from the truth, and now even the kids knew how dangerous the stranger in front of them was. It was time to hit back.
“Frank, it was her. The tires were slashed with a knife.”
They had just discussed it, before his shower—they’d both agreed. It made no sense for him to deny it now. And yet, he made another argument in favor of the flat tires happening by chance.
Mara let out an exhausted sigh. She told Frank to be quiet.
“It was me, Grace,” she confessed. “I cut them. I did it. With this.”
She took a kitchen knife from her back pocket, one of the dangerous ones that were more like weapons. It came out of the same flower-embroidered pocket where Grace, at that picnic, had kept a Starburst for Simon. The waning moon shined its light on the metal, and the gleam ran down the knife as if showing off its blade.
Grace took a step back, hiding behind Frank.
“Stay calm,” she whispered. “Please, stay calm. There’re children here.”
“I am calm,” said Mara. “Really, I am, Grace. It’s your husband who’s the nervous one. He knows why I slashed the tires. He’s done some things, too.”
Frank’s shoulders went up and down in time with his breathing, which accelerated all of a sudden.
“He hasn’t done anything to you,” Grace blurted out. “You showed up out of nowhere on the road. It was you who was careless.”
“Trust me, Grace. You husband has done some things.”
“He hasn’t done anything. He wanted you to sleep outside to keep us safe. He tied the zipper to protect his family. And seeing what’s happening”—she pointed at the knife Mara was brandishing at them—“he was right to do so. How naïve I was. Always believing everyone’s good. That’s why I took you in, took care of you as well as we could. None of this would’ve happened if I’d paid more attention to my husband.”
Mara smiled in a way that Grace couldn’t interpret, an expression between pity and pleasure. It conveyed an insolence that offended her.
“What the fuck are you laughing about?” she said, the swear word once again strange and powerful in her mouth.
Mara looked at her husband.
“Come on, Frank. Are you really not going to say anything to your wife after all this? Look at you, look at us. What else needs to happen?”
The new register in her voice confounded Grace. It was as if she was speaking to a different person, as if a close bond of trust had just been established between them. It was also the first time she heard Mara address Frank by his name. And the familiarity with which she said it was inappropriate. Grace stepped out from behind his back and faced him with a questioning look.
“Frank?”
His eyes escaped to the ground. To the motor home. To Mara. When they returned to Grace they were bright, reddened. His forehead was as furrowed as it was when he cried.
“Honey . . .”
“Frank, what’s happening? You’re scaring me.”
He bit his lip as if struggling not to retch, as if he knew that when he opened his mouth something dreadful would come out from inside him.
“Come on, say it,” Mara weighed in. “Don’t think about it. It’s time, Frank. You’ve owed it to her for so long. The kids won’t hear anything. They’re in there with the windows closed.”
Mara moved the knife so that the moonlight reflected on Frank’s face. He covered it with his hands, hiding behind a mask of fingers. He took a deep breath, as deep as the regret that caused it must have been. As final as a surrender. Frank opened his hands, revealing his face as if removing a disguise.
“I’m sorry, honey. I’m so sorry. I never wanted to hurt you.”
Grace remained silent.
A deep silence.
The kind of silence that precedes the worst news.
“I slept with her, Grace.” Frank lowered his head. “I was sleeping with Mara for a few months. But it’s over, I promise, it won’t . . .”
Grace saw that Frank was still moving his mouth, but she could no longer hear. Her ears must have become blocked, the way they had when they drove up into the mountains, because she could only hear her own breathing. Her heart beating. Sounds that confirmed her body was still functioning even if her soul had received a fatal wound. She read the word love on her husband’s lips several times, but all of a sudden she didn’t know what the term meant. She had thought she’d known for the last twenty years. She had proudly explained its properties to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, of people, in dozens of videos about marital happiness, but nothing she knew about love was remotely like what Frank had just confessed. Frank, the man who once recorded “You Were Meant for Me” on both sides of a cassette for her.
“What?”
Her devastation was reduced to a monosyllable. It was a while before she could say anything else. When her ears unblocked, the owls were still hooting and the pine cones still falling. The world hadn’t stopped, but it could never be the same again. Because the question Grace asked next was consistent only with a distorted reality, a different universe to which she didn’t want to belong.
“You slept with this woman?”
Frank lowered his head again to concede.
“So you know her?” Grace was gradually regaining her senses. “You’ve known who she was since yesterday and didn’t say anything? How do you know her?”
He locked his hands together behind his neck and turned away without saying anything.
“Tell her, Frank,” Mara intervened. “You’ve started, now tell her everything. Do you want me to say it? I’m not going to keep quiet any longer.” She granted Frank a few seconds of silence that he opted not to use. “Grace, I was the one who sold you this RV. I’m the saleswoman from the dealership.”
Grace blinked several times, trying to remember that spring Saturday when Frank went to collect the motor home.
“Is what she says true?”
In the twisted reality to which Grace now seemed condemned to belong, her husband, the father of her two children, nodded.
“Frank, please . . . Frank, what’s happening?” Grace didn’t recognize her own voice—she’d never heard herself speak like this, through her nose, through her eyes, through profound pain. “She’s . . . what? A crazy lover of yours? I don’t know what I’m saying, Frank.”
And yet she was beginning to see things more clearly.
“She’s here because of you? It was you who brought this here.” She gestured disdainfully at Mara, her grotesque appearance, her knife. “Near your family? Your children?”
She breathed. Her thoughts were whirling around in her head, in her heart. She grew dizzier as she sensed another revelation on its way.
“It was no coincidence that you were on this road,” she said to Mara. “You wanted to stop the motor home, you wanted to . . . and that’s why she slashed the tires, that’s why she stuck the razor blade in your soap.” She was addressing Frank now. “It was your soap. She wanted you to cut yourself. Why? Out of spite? What is she, a fucking lunatic?” Her mouth was eager to let out all the curses she hadn’t used in her life. “You slept with a crazy woman who wants to take revenge by harming the whole family? Oh no, Frank, please, no. No, no, no, no, no . . .” A realization had made her entire body turn cold, and she felt her blood rush to her feet. Her face must have paled badly because Frank’s mouth opened when she faced him to ask, “Is it her? Is she the one who was coming in the house?”
Frank’s tongue clicking was the most terrible confirmation. He looked at her unblinking, fighting back tears that finally overflowed. She also felt tears run warm down her pallid face. She turned to Mara.
“Was it you?”
Mara nodded. And then Grace remembered her superstition about the motor home. The idea that the vehicle was the source of all the bad things that had happened to t
he family since they’d bought it, an idea she had tried to dismiss as a senseless superstition but which now took on a whole new meaning. It wasn’t that the motor home was cursed. It was that her husband had started sleeping with the unbalanced saleswoman who’d sold it to them.
“And you knew?” She faced Frank again, fearing the dark, heartrending place where her deductions were leading her. “You knew all the time? You knew she’d taken the ferrets but you let your daughter suffer? You watched her cry all those days without saying anything? You let her blame me for leaving the door open when you knew it was her . . .” She indicated Mara. “And you. You put something in my shampoo, like you did now with the razor in the soap. Oh my God, Frank, this can’t be real . . . you watched me breaking out with marks all over my head, losing my hair . . . you watched me cry in front of the mirror with tufts of it in my hands and you held me to console me. You said yes when I asked you if it could’ve been Audrey.” She held her hand to her mouth as she realized this. She dried her eyes with her forearm. “Frank, please, tell me you went to speak to Bob to get him to keep a closer watch on our street.”
He didn’t move.
“No, of course you didn’t go. Why would you if you knew who was responsible for everything? All you would’ve achieved would be for them to catch your lover breaking into the house, and I’d find out about everything. You would’ve called her in secret to negotiate with her, right?
“To beg her to stop. You were bored of fucking her but she wanted more. Is that it? And you started getting scared because she kept coming in the house. She was threatening you by playing games with us, with your family. You were really scared. And that’s why you went and bought a gun. Without telling me anything, because you couldn’t explain it. According to you, no one was coming in the house—it was all the ferrets’ fault. And as anti-gun as you’ve always been, you buying one made no sense. But you did, because only you knew there was a dangerous woman coming for us. And then Simon . . .”