Stepdog

by Nicole Galland

  “No, you’re going to let her die because you’re not going to give me the vitamin K,” I said.

  “You think I’m joking,” he said, repressing anger. “She really will die if you don’t do the right thing.”

  “She really will die if you don’t do the right thing,” I corrected him.

  Somehow during this standoff, the food had arrived, and the drinks, too, but neither of us had noticed. “Sara will never forgive you,” he warned. That was the thing he was counting on: that I’d do whatever Sara said, even if Sara wasn’t thinking clearly. I could sense something inside of him approaching panic. Until that moment I thought he must be bluffing about the rat poison. Now I wasn’t sure.

  “I can handle Sara,” I said. “The only thing I can’t handle is being tailed, so you’ve got to stop, mate, or I am going to hit you with a hammer. Okay? The dog will be dead, so there’s no reason to chase me.”

  Long pause. He was horrified.

  “So,” I concluded. “Unless there’s anything else, I’ll head back to my room to get some sleep. Thanks again about the rat poison. Enjoy your margarita and safe travels back to Boston.” I pulled a twenty out of my pocket, slapped it on the table with a victorious smile at Jay, turned, and walked out of the restaurant.

  Chapter 28

  My hands were shaking as I opened the restaurant door. The cold wind pushed me through the dusk, along the sidewalk, back toward the hotel.

  My phone rang. That didn’t take long—Jay must have called Sara before I was even out of the building. “Sara love,” I said into the phone, lighthearted for the first time in days.

  “What are you doing, Rory?” she said, nearly frantic. “Go back inside and tell him you’ll give her to him.”

  “Remember back in Boston how I used to feed her fish and chips?” I said.

  The briefest pause. “What?”

  “Fish and chips.”

  “You never did that, what does that have to do with anything? What are you doing? Just give her to him.”

  “Right, I never did that because fried food makes her sick.”

  “So? Rory, are you listening to me? Go back to Jay!”

  “You know what I did in North Carolina, as soon as she was in my car? Eejit that I am, I bought her a whole bag of chips, and she wolfed them down and then she puked her little guts out right away.”

  Silence. Then the penny dropped, and I heard a gasp. “Really?”

  “Same as that,” I said, grinning. “According to Jay, if she expelled it within the first hour, she should be fine.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, “I’ve never been so grateful to you for not listening to me! Did you tell him?”

  “No.” I laughed. “He’s completely freaked out right now.”

  “But that means he’ll keep following you.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “Honestly I don’t give a shite what he does. I don’t think he’d stop following me now anyhow, the bloke’s completely mental, Sara, he’s out of control. If he really did poison her, he deserves to stew in it a while. And I’m too wired up now to sleep, I’m going to keep driving for a while. I’ll call you in a bit and we’ll figure out where I can stop next. Love you.” Wow, I could feel the adrenaline coursing through me, and it felt great.

  I was back in the car park by now, walking in big, determined strides, master of my universe for the first time in days. I unlocked the car remotely and opened the hotel room door.

  Cody was waiting for me. I pushed the door inward and immediately she was ready to jump up on me. I pushed her off. She swooned into tarty dog. “Get up,” I said. “Cody, get up. Where’s your leash? We’re going.”

  I briefly contemplated staying the night to rest, but—although I still needed a bite to eat—I felt better than I had in days, and I wasn’t likely to sleep well in a strange room anyhow, so I might as well get more miles behind me. Jay must have been getting worn down as much as me. Even if he insisted on following me, he’d be fading. But he had to be out of tricks now, right? He’d put the tracker on back in Boston, and he’d come up with the rat-poison gambit in North Carolina. Anything else now would require starting from scratch. He seemed like a man who liked his creature comforts, so hopefully, even if he was off-kilter enough to keep pursuing this, he’d go back to Boston first to regroup. We’d be in L.A. by the time he could try anything new. If he had actually fed her rat poison, he’d assume that she was dead. And he’d deserve whatever grief he felt for it.

  As I mused on all of this, my hands were working almost of their own accord. I packed up my rucksack, grabbed Cody’s food, her bowl . . . I clipped her lead to her collar. She was very excited that something exciting was happening, hopping around the room, straining at the leash, her gaze glued to my face for clues about our exciting new adventure. Her tail, as always, was wagging half the rest of her body. She looked really alert. Probably thought food would be involved.

  Took me just a few minutes to get out the door. I tossed my backpack onto her bed, signaled her onto the passenger seat, closed her door, moved around to slide into my seat, glanced in my rearview mirror. In the lights of the parking lot I saw Jay, his long straight coat slapping awkwardly against his legs in the wind, walking briskly toward the Lexus, which somehow I hadn’t noticed earlier. He got in and started the engine. Oh, for fuck’s sake, he was going to keep tailing me. Leave behind whatever he had at the hotel and just drive. The wanker! He didn’t seem the type to get violent, but it would be really aggravating to have him on my arse. Tulsa was the first city I’d hit that was on Sara’s original map, so from here out, I had some idea where I was going—once I got back to Interstate Highway 40, there’d be little opportunity to get away from him.

  Car had a full tank. Dog was fed, although sadly I wasn’t, but I could probably remedy that soon. I pushed the car to ninety, hopefully it wasn’t low on oil. I could probably drive three or four hours before refueling. I glanced over my shoulder to see if he was coming, but there were too many cars, too many headlights, to have a clue. I was pissed off, but resigned, not panicked: if he wanted to follow me, then let him, I’d just have to be on guard.

  But I really did not want him to follow me.

  I called Sara. “Go ahead and tell him,” I said. “You’re right, I don’t want to give him an actual reason to feel justified to follow me.”

  “I’m on it,” she said.

  Tulsa ended as abruptly as it had begun, and I was immediately back in rural territory, two lanes in each direction with a grass meridian and intermittent sprawl. The treetops cha-cha’d recklessly in the wind, while a rising full moon looked on as cool and placid and immovable as Jay on his boulder throne back on Peters Hill. Maybe the full moon accounted for his lunacy.

  Sara called back. “I should have predicted this,” she said, “but he says he thinks you’re lying and that Cody’s only chance of survival is if he hunts you down and gets her away from you.”

  I kept myself from screaming while I had Sara on the phone, but I did let rip an irritated, throaty aaaaarrgh.

  “Sorry. I tried,” she said. “Maybe if you’d told him in the restaurant—”

  “Well, I didn’t,” I said sharply. “It’s my fault, I get it. Thanks for trying.” Heavy sigh. Really pissed with myself and him now. “All right, I’ll call again in a bit and you can tell me what we’ve got for hotel options.”

  The angled moonlight limited what I could make out, but the woods here seemed less dense, scrubbier than before, with the horizons a little farther away, and the lanes of each road maybe a handspan wider than before. There were dozens of cars in the few hundred yards behind me; I’d never know if one them was his until he was right on top of me.

  “Fuuuuuuuck!” I screamed into the ceiling, so aggravated that my body stiffened straight with early-onset rigor mortis. My arms shook from clenching the wheel and my right foot floored the accelerator. The car whined and then shifted into a higher gear. Cody very tentatively tried to lick my cheek with
one of her Little Match Girl kisses.

  “Stay away from me!” I barked at her. Startled, she sat down abruptly on the passenger seat, huddling against the back. “Do you know how insane my life is right now, Cody?” I demanded. “Do you know why it’s insane? It’s insane because of you, Cody. You bring out the crazy in people.”

  I turned on the radio and was surprised to find a classic rock station, which helped me to stop obsessing on what I couldn’t see in the rearview mirror. Alto called to check in on behalf of everyone. For simplicity’s sake, and because I could not have told him the truth without mocking the very words coming out of my own mouth, I just told him we were grand and all was quiet on the Western Front. I really hoped he’d take his newfound organizational skills and apply them to something more meaningful than a pet abduction.

  I’d gotten back on Highway 40, which looked like Highway 40 everywhere else. Of course, judging all of Oklahoma by what was near the federal interstate was like judging Ireland by what was near the Galway Road. Authentic culture lay elsewhere. I passed a sign for Oklahoma City limits, and absolutely nothing changed—I could have been on a freeway in New York State. I drove miles seeing no change at all, just lush acres of frenetically waving treetops, a sickly hue in the road lights. A road sign said that downtown was twenty-one miles away. So different from Tulsa, which had sprung up immediately out of the earth. A few minutes later, I saw a single tall building on the horizon, night-lit, promising that there was in fact a city up ahead. Moments later I zoomed by trailer parks on both sides of the road, well lit and neat, and then the start, very gradually, of urban sprawl.

  The phone binged at me. Sara.

  “Where are you?” she said anxiously. “I thought you’d call back by now.”

  “Sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, “I was focused on getting on the road—”

  “Are you driving now?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’ll need to stop to rest—”

  “Not right now I don’t,” I said. “I’m wired. I just want to push on through so I can throw my arms around my sweet girl as soon as possible.”

  “Your sweet girl wants that, too, but you’re on an adrenaline high and you’ll crash soon,” she said. What a mood wrecker. “So promise me when that happens, you’ll pull over onto a service road and nap in the car. If you can do that without his seeing you, maybe he’ll pull past you on the road and you’ll end up behind him.”

  “We still on for the Grand Canyon?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “But let’s get you safely to morning first. If you won’t stop in Oklahoma City, then you’re heading off into a whole lot of nothing. You’ll probably hit Amarillo a little after midnight.”

  “Fuck that,” I said. “I’m up for hours now. What’s after that?”

  She wasn’t happy about this. “If you will please stop for a nap along the way, I think you’ll arrive in Albuquerque around dawn. I’ll find you a hotel there and you can take a breather, get some proper sleep. There’s really no reason for you to push yourself so hard. I know it’s probably creepy having him on your tail—”

  “It’s not creepy, it’s fucking irritating is what it is.”

  “I get it, it’s unpleasant,” she said. “But don’t let that push you beyond what’s safe, okay? I’d rather wait a day to see you and know that you’ll be in good shape. Are you sure you won’t stop in Amarillo?”

  “Text me the Albuquerque address and I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Love you.”

  “Please drive safe. Everyone I love is in that car.”

  Oklahoma City—at least from what I could see, at night—was hardly a city, really, just the one skyscraper and a handful of other tallish buildings. I passed it in a moment and drove on.

  I’D ALWAYS HEARD Texas was like another country, and sure enough, as soon as we crossed that border, there were changes. The landscape became western-looking, the outline of mini-buttes and canyons-in-training here and there. But more than that, the vegetation immediately shortened and flattened, enough that I could tell the difference even in the moonlight.

  We drove by a large stockyard with thousands of head of cattle. And then a meat processing plant. And then empty silence. A while later, a wind farm, the huge turbines making skeletal silhouettes in the moonlight. Otherwise, nothing. For an hour, easy. Just highway and moonlight and open plain, and too much time to think. About all sorts of things.

  Or just the one thing, obsessively.

  In the monotonous tension of the nightscape drive, the one fact that now became swelled to take up my entire cranium . . . was that they had been lovers.

  I could imagine them on a domestic level, no problem. Could imagine the harmonies and discords, how orderly their place would be, how organized, and highbrow, but then again the tension of two deliberate, strategic thinkers, one always trying to control the other, one always trying to evade control. That was all as clear as the subtext in a Chekhov play. I could even see their bathroom in all its tasteful his-and-her-ness. All of that was some other reality that she had decided to leave, and with me she’d found her other half, not a warped reflection of herself as he had been, but a complementary partner like the Chinese symbol with the two fish. None of that distressed me.

  What distressed me, naturally, was the sex.

  Because I’m a man. And men are horny little pigs, and tend to think about sex a lot. Especially when we’re in a new-ish relationship with a gorgeous bird who really makes us step onto the pitch and try to be our best self. As Sara always did. I’m a gentleman, or try to be, and as I’ve said, the Irish are a shy race underneath all the bluster, so I’ve spared you all the times I’ve thought about sex and Sara in the same beat. But believe me: it’s loads. The curve of her hip, the weight of her breast in my cupped hand, the scent of her hair, the place on my leg where her feet pressed against me when we were making love.

  And I knew how she made love. Not just with my mind and heart did I know that, I knew it with my body. So imagine me, with my mind and heart and body, stuck all alone together in a car with hundreds of miles of prairie and nothing to do but obsess on how some other man—that other man specifically—could know her just as well as I did. With florid detail and abandon, I began to imagine them together, and then stopped myself in disgust, and then started again, with some variation on the theme, seeking some obstacle I could live with, something that kept their intimacy from being as pure as ours—maybe he always took her from behind, or made her keep her eyes closed.

  That only made it worse, because then the terror of imagining them happy was replaced by the rage of imagining her bullied and coerced by him, and soon my palms were sweating and I was grinding my teeth and panting and ready to kill the bastard for acts only ever perpetrated between my ears and at my own direction. In my imagination I was beating the crap out of Jay with the glorious knowledge that the greater my violence, the greater my virtue.

  I was shaken from this righteous vengeance by the dog, awakened, yawning loudly behind my head from the backseat. I started in surprise. She was uninterested in the vengeance I was wreaking for her owner’s sake. She plopped her chin down on my shoulder and sighed, as if to ask when we could change the channel because this moonlit-plains show was getting really dull.

  My kneejerk reaction was that of a father when his kid walks in on him while he’s watching porn. Really. I was embarrassed, same as that. I was so relieved when she yawned again: she hadn’t noticed what I was up to! She hadn’t witnessed any of my dirty thoughts. The horrible nasty secrets that actually defined my character, that I was lecherous, and insecure, and jealous, and capable of violence. That I could hate. She had figured out none of this. I’d fooled her. Ha! I was still Rory the Hero, the soundest bloke west of the Atlantic, and she adored me no matter what evil I got up to between my ears. Dogs are pretty good that way.

  “Want a treat?” I offered.

  ’Course she did.

  AS SARA HAD predicted, I found my eyes
getting droopy, so I exited onto the service road, and then the shoulder of the service road, and napped as best I could under the circumstances: I was in a ridiculously small car, so full to the gills that my seat could not recline. The only emergency Sara had not packed for was camping out, so there were no blankets or cushions, and anyhow it was too chilly outside to fall asleep there. But for a few restless hours, with the door locked and Cody sometimes snoring beside me, I was able to get a bit of a kip, full of dreams involving highways or dogs or Jay trying to cop a feel from Sara. Jay either passed by without my knowing it, or had given up the chase—there was no sign of him at all. Eventually the moon was so high and bright, it made it impossible even to doze, so I slapped myself awake and pulled back onto Highway 40. From here to Albuquerque, it would just be an awful, boring nighttime slog.

  I saw a sign for Elk City, checked the gauge, and refueled at a small all-night station off the interstate. I got a coffee but all the so-called food was too disgusting to consider eating. Here’s good news, though: no sign of Mr. Baldy.

  In the moonlight, everything looked like flat-out desert. That had happened so suddenly! Somehow between Tulsa and here, I’d hit the Old West, real Lyle Lovett country, but it had happened after sundown and before the moon was high enough to see by. The wide expanses were now filled with unfamiliar shapes that I imagined to be all the exotic western-sounding plants I associated with the American West: hickory, sage, mesquite, prickly pear, Joshua trees, yucca plants. Not that I’d know any of them on sight, but I liked the names.

  Cody turned restlessly on her bed, sighed, sulked, started to eat a bully stick, tossed it dismissively into the seat beside me, thought better of it, worked her way carefully forward to retrieve the bully stick, disappeared into the back again, finished eating it, drank water, sighed tragically again, and then yawned—which might mean she was queasy.

  “Don’t throw up,” I begged.

  She was delighted that I was speaking to her again. Immediately she inched forward on her belly, like a mobile Sphinx, and proceeded to try to get my attention by rubbing the side of her head against my upper arm. I could see in my peripheral vision that she was looking up at me endearingly.