Mercifully, Max has stopped talking. She uses her free hand to cover her eyes. She’s crying. I want to cry, too, but I can’t spare the energy. Her fingers grow taut and she claws her face with her nails.
He bounds over to her, grips her wrist. “Whoa! Why would you hurt yourself like that?”
She looks at him with such naked hatred that I’m worried he’ll kill us both and be done with it. There are scratch marks around one eye and down her cheek.
“Why would you hurt me?” she throws back at him.
When he seems confused by that, she says, “You took me away from the boys. They need me.”
“Our boys need you,” he says.
“What boys?” she spits.
“The boys we’ll have together. You’ll be their real mother. Not a babysitter like you are now.”
Maybe he’s too delusional to see the revulsion in her eyes. He caresses the inflamed skin on her face, looks at her with tenderness. “I’m trying to make a life with you. I can’t do that until you leave the old one behind.”
“She wants that too,” I assure him. “Give her time.”
Max makes a strangled sound.
He stands up straight and speaks only to me. “Let’s go.”
We’re deep in the woods. He’s behind me, pressing a hand to my back to keep me walking. I’m trying to hide how weak I feel, trying to disguise my shortness of breath as vigor. Under our feet, the crunch of dead leaves. Above us, the fragile, feathery, pale green of new growth. Around us, the bright, soft smell of spring.
I imagine the trees swallowing me up, the roots taking my bones and the leaves taking my breath. If it were just my life at stake, it wouldn’t be so tragic, dying out here. But it’s Max’s. And, though I don’t understand it or maybe even fully believe it, it’s Linnea’s life, too.
He grips my shoulder. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
Birds. Bugs. Breeze.
“Is that a helicopter?” he says.
My heart leaps. Could it be … a rescue? Until I hear what he means. A faint flapping. The old camp flag at the main building. Maybe I should stoke his paranoia. But maybe that’d convince him to kill me now, prevent me from talking. I tell him it’s the snap of flag. He seems satisfied and presses me onward.
I know there’s no food run. We’re going away from the truck. Away from the world.
“Stop,” he says when we reach an old gnarled oak with an archery target on its trunk and a tire swing hanging from a massive branch.
“What are we doing out here?”
“Max is worse since you showed up. Crazy. Always dredging up the past.”
A woodpecker jackhammers a tree nearby. There’s the sawing of a cicada. And always, birds. Our father was an amateur birder. He loved to take me and Max out on watching expeditions. “The male cardinal’s a very involved dad, you know,” he’d whisper. “He carpools, runs to the store for milk, and sews Halloween costumes for the chicks.” And we’d collapse into giggles. The memory lands in the middle of my chest, its beak and talons tearing a hole in the past and tossing me back into this day. Today could be any spring day in Texas. If I hadn’t just heard my own death sentence.
“She’ll be okay,” I say. “She just needs more rest.”
He shakes his head. “You made me cheat on Max. You’re making her hate me.”
“She loves you.” Please God, don’t strike me dead at the lie. “Besides, she doesn’t even know about …” I can’t say it, can’t name what I let him do so I could stay alive. “I didn’t tell her.”
“She can read me,” he says. “See my guilt. She’s smart that way.”
“She doesn’t know, I swear.”
“Shut up now. It’s time for purification.”
He grips the hilt of his knife. I run.
One, two, three tree-lengths away. My lungs crowd out my heart. A tree root trips me. I push myself up on my hands, but he grabs my hair, yanks my head back.
He’s not even winded. He’s laughing.
“Little bit of a thing like you,” he says, his arm hooked around my throat, his pulse seeping into my skin, “trying to squirm away.” He presses his lips against my ear, as if he’s worried about eavesdroppers. “Haven’t you figured out there’s nowhere to go?”
He releases me. The truth of his words presses down on me. I collapse. I’m so tired. Tired enough to give up and give in on this mattress of leaves?
“Time to get right with your god,” he says.
I’m not dead yet.
“God sent me a dream,” I gasp.
“The likes of you?” He squats, jerks me up to my knees. “Your dreams aren’t god-borne.”
“In the dream, you’re praying over a meal. A meal I cooked. You and Max are holding hands. She looks happy, serene.”
“So?”
I’m facing him now, and there’s the merest hint of uncertainty in his eyes that belies the so. And maybe there’s a petal of curiosity too. For the second time, I can detect a trace of the boy before the beast.
My pulse is fast, my thoughts faster. “You can’t go back into town. You said so yourself. They’re looking for you. You and Max will starve before you can make your new life together.”
“I can take care of us.”
“I can cook. I know things.” The part of me that’s not me knows things. It hits me all at once, like a brain-freeze after a too-big swallow of milkshake. It wasn’t much scrawled in the dirt. It was mush. As in mushroom. “I can forage out here, turn it into meals. I’ll help you and Max be who you want to be.” I pause, bite my lip. “God told me.”
He scoffs. “Get God out of your filthy mouth. God didn’t tell you anything.” He chokeholds me again, puts the knife to my neck. The cool tip scratches my skin. He says something unintelligible. I think it’s in another language. The pulse in my ears makes it hard to hear.
Something reaches up inside of me. Some last fist of strength. “God came to me in a dream! He told me about you, Tyler.”
The knife falls away.
“What did you call me?”
I’ve either saved my life or hastened my death. Too late to back down. “Tyler.”
His arm falls away next. I breathe.
I can’t read all that’s in his face. His eyes are moving rapidly, like he’s in REM sleep.
After a long beat of silence—plenty of silence for him to reach into and slice my throat with—I say, “How would I know who you are if God didn’t tell me?”
“The devil talks too,” he says coolly. “You go ahead and cook for me, girl, and I’ll decide which one is talking through you. God’s knife of righteousness won’t spare Satan’s mouthpiece.”
Little does he know that he may not get the pleasure of a righteous killing. This body may stop my heart before he gets the chance.
33
HARPER
He is at my back as I push past the wooden door’s warp and step into the building that houses the cafeteria and the kitchen. Much bigger than the cabins, it sits at the top of a hill noisy with wildflowers. I scan the ceiling beams for bats. It’s quiet. There’s a linoleum floor in here. A sink, too, but it looks inoperable.
Three long tables fill the eating area, upside-down chairs resting on top. Even though the ceiling is higher than the cabin’s and there are lots of windows, it’s eerie in here. I wonder if I’ll hear the silverware-clink and mealtime murmur of ghosts of campers past.
He pulls a chair down, arranges himself in it like a lizard sunning itself on a rock. Leaning back like they tell you not to do in school, he hooks his fingers behind his head and says, “Go to town.”
I move to the kitchen area. He can still see me from the caf through the wall cut-out. And I can feel him watching me.
There’s an avocado green fridge wedged into the corner next to a giant gas stove with eight burners and a griddle. The fridge is unplugged, the black cord snaked around to the door to keep it from shutting. I check anyway. Empty. Not even a
box of baking soda or a shriveled lemon.
Although I’m exhausted and wobbly—the adrenaline chaser after being held at knifepoint—I zoom through the cupboards. Avoiding dark drifts of rodent turds, I gather up the pitiful things remaining: a half-empty (or half-full, depending on your mindset) metal canister of cornmeal, a bottle of cloudy maple syrup, three cans of beans, two of evaporated milk, one of tuna, and, way in the back next to a cheeseless, mouseless trap, a bulging can of something so old the label is worn into illegibility. I line up all the sorry spoils on the counter, not sure what to do with them other than stare. Especially since I don’t find a can opener.
Now what?
“What’s for dinner, honey?” he calls from his seat. As if we’re playing. As if he hadn’t had every intention of killing me minutes ago. I hate him so intensely that I feel light-headed. Or maybe it’s me that I hate the most, for my failure to see the homicidal psychosis under his sweet, guileless Southern facade.
I remember the few nights I’d met “Tyler” to hang out, how safe I felt with him. How his slow, easy drawl relaxed me; how the way he looked at me—with interest but not intensity, not a hint of possessiveness—made me feel more my age than when I was with Ezra. Ezra, serious, responsible Ezra. With Ezra I felt thirty-eight instead of eighteen.
But I love Ezra. Loved Ezra. Maybe I was confused about how I felt about myself around Ezra, but I was never confused about how I felt about him.
Like an unknitted shadow determined to reattach more tightly, Chris/Tyler/Monster is standing next to me now. He rubs his hands together as if he’s starting a fire. “I have no food allergies, but you should know I don’t love onions.”
“How about mushrooms?” I ask.
“Yeah, they’re good. What’re you gonna do, order a pizza?”
“Just thinking about what’s out there.”
He slips into an Irish brogue and says, “This is Bear Grylls, stranded in the treacherous wilds of the Texas Hill Country. Tune in to see if I find enough food to feed my obese film crew, or will they have to shred me like jerky?”
“You’re in a good mood?” How can someone be on the verge of murder one moment and Mr. Fun Guy the next?
“Why wouldn’t I be?” He drapes a sloppy arm around my shoulders. The weight of him nearly buckles me. “I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.”
“Okay, I’m ready to forage.”
“Like a doomsday prepper?” he asks.
“Exactly like that.”
Who do I think I am? I can’t cook. I’ve never even scrambled an egg.
I hope she can. I hope I don’t get in her way.
Somehow, I find edible things in the forest that I’m able to name only for a second, like there’s a wispy bit of skywriting tugged along the horizon of my brain, there for a moment, then poofed against the sky the next. But it’s enough to know which berries are edible, which leaves are tender, which shells can be bashed open with a can to yield pecan-meat.
There’s no room for celebrating, though, because he is always there. Watching. Waiting. Silent. No less intense for his lack of words—perhaps even more intense, with hunger.
34
HARPER
Somewhere in the rest of the world, I’m pretty sure it’s Friday. But here, in this ghost camp that God has forsaken, it’s just the next morning. It’s overcast. I’m on the trail, cardboard box in tow, foraging for grub.
He’s nearby, peeling the bark off a tree, nibbling on it like a curious fool. I feel his energy, coiled, ready to strike. The fact that he can go from inconsolable to jovial without segue makes him scarier.
I pass a live oak with a trunk of mossy green. I double back and duck under its lowest boughs. At its base, congregated like gossipers, are jaunty-capped mushrooms.
My palms go crazy—itchy, prickly, burny crazy.
I stoop, I dig, I gather. I feel him watching, but I try not to care.
A few hours later and I’m gathering mushrooms again, transferring them from the cool earth to the sad box. It’s even more overcast now. The kind that makes you swear the sun never was.
I move to the other side of the tree, the mossier side. When the sun’s out, this is probably the shadier side. I pick up a stick and dig around at the base of the trunk. Huddled in a cul-de-sac of roots, are some paler, thinner, more densely clustered mushrooms.
As if I’m a human divining rod and these little growths are gold, my palms flush with heat.
I pull up the mushrooms and lay them in the box, being careful not to let them touch the ones I already gathered. I squat there for a minute, seeing my plan take shape.
His feet pulverize fallen leaves as he makes his way over. He stands over my shoulder. “Hurry the hell up. It looks like rain.”
I straighten up. “I’m ready.”
“I’m gonna get us out of here,” I say to Max. You, I correct in my head. I’m going to get you out of here.
We’re locked in the cabin, just the two of us, after all three of us ate sautéed mushrooms. I don’t shape my plan into words, in case he lurks outside.
Maybe because he was pleased with me that I foraged and cooked, I was able to convince him to unchain her for the night. In the dark, she’s poking at the walls, at the door, even though I warned her if he hears he’ll shackle her to the cot again.
It’s funny, but she reminds me of me now. Stubborn. Ignoring sound advice. Scoffing at reason.
“I’m sorry,” she says when her feet stop moving.
“For what?”
“I’ve been thinking about Race, about Will, about my mom. I haven’t been thinking about you. Not in the same way. It’s so fucked up that you got pulled into this.”
“I hitched a ride on his truck. I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘pulled into.’” I bite my lip, deliberate, take a deep breath for courage, and say it before I chicken out. “Besides, it’s really my fault anyway.”
“What? Not true.”
“It is.” I sob and surprise myself with it. Damn, here are the tears. Mom used to say tears were little liquid truth tellers. I try to staunch them and end up making a weird honking noise.
She sits beside me on my cot, puts an arm around me, pulls me to her. “That was the least feminine sound I’ve ever heard.”
I laugh and surprise myself with it.
“He was crazy before you got here,” she says. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
“What then?” Her arm’s still around me. I want to collapse into it.
“If I had listened to you,” I say, “if I hadn’t taken Ezra for granted, if I hadn’t gone out to do some harmless ‘fooling around,’ I never would’ve met this bastard, and none of this would be happening.” At least not to us.
And then her arm’s not around me, and she’s not beside me on the cot anymore, and I have nothing to collapse into other than the well of my fears and regrets.
“I can’t do this,” she says, on the other side of the room. “I can’t go there.”
“Then how do you explain it?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” I feel her pacing in the dark. “But you’re not Harper. I know Harper. You have a bunch of memories that were Harper’s—like accessories, really—but you’re not her. My eyes don’t lie.”
I’m tired, so tired, in my head as well as my body. I’m trying to formulate a response, but she gets there first.
“Can’t you just be her?” she says. “Just be Linnea? Can’t I like you for her? Can’t we make that a new start?”
“Yes, we can.” The part I don’t say is that the end, at least for me, is almost here.
Saturday.
If this were a regular Saturday, the boys would be watching cartoons while I slept. Around noon, the smell of bacon would coax me out of bed. Mom would marvel aloud at how anyone would want to miss out on the best part of the day. Max would roll her eyes in solidarity, even though she’d have been up for hours helping Mom w
ith brunch.
Despite his joke that he wanted eggs benedict, hollandaise on the side, there are mushrooms for lunch again, sautéed in the big heavy skillet on the big heavy gas stove that he brought to life with his lighter. My hands are doing the cooking, I guess, but they’re hands that look nothing like mine (they’re smaller, for one), and it’s a trippy disconnect.
I only cook the mushrooms that “I” know are okay. I’m not 100 percent sure about the skinny ones. I have to be sure first. I have to do this right. I can’t pull the weapon until I know it’s a weapon.
Now I’ve got the mushrooms—routine and very much non-routine—in the kitchen, sitting on the drying rack, segregated. Part of me mistrusts the knowledge that the other part of me is sure about.
I decide to take a tiny tiny—whisper-tiny—bite of the one I’m pretty sure is poisonous. My cloudy subconscious, weighty with someone else’s knowledge, knows enough to know that I can’t die from a minuscule shred of it, and if it is as toxic as I think, in a few hours I should feel something.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I do it. Just the sliverest of pieces, so small I don’t even have to chew. It’s spongy and dry. I swallow.
Okay, and one more sliver.
I know it’s too soon to feel anything physical, but I feel something else: hope. How ironic: downtrodden girl feels hope after tasting her first killer mushroom.
The door whooshes open. He’s whistling. I have the irrational urge to cover up my gathered prize, but that would arouse suspicion.
He stomps up behind me. “Mushrooms again. What a surprise.”
“They’re plentiful around here.” I force the words out. Sound nonchalant, stupid.
“Ready for a side of rabbit?” he asks.
“You caught one?” Opening cans without a can opener was one thing. Skinning a rabbit, quite another.
“Not yet. But I made a trap.”
“Oh.”
He suddenly lurches toward me. At first I have no idea what he’s doing. But then I realize he’s hugging me. Savagely. Maybe the only way he knows how.
Borrowed Page 19