“I have no idea,” I said.
“You were hard to find,” Madison said to Sarah. “It was a matter of luck that I found you at all.”
“Maybe that’s it,” Sarah said. “Now that I’m back in the picture, in Olive’s life, I’m a threat to him again.”
Madison nodded. “He must know you’d help me wrangle custody away from him.”
“Yes, but why wouldn’t he simply work through the courts?” I asked. “Why is it so important to him to track you down here?”
Sarah held up both hands, perplexed.
“We don’t have time to talk about this right now,” I said. “He could be here any moment. I think Teresa phoned the police, but who knows how long it will take them to find us. We need to get out of here. This is the first place Aaron will come looking. We can follow one of the deer trails to the road and try to catch a ride. It’s not safe to head to your van because we’d have to go right past the barn.”
“I’m sorry I got mad at Dad,” Olive said.
“What are you talking about?” Madison asked her. “You should be mad.”
“I shouldn’t have told him I was going to live with you,” she said. “If I hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have got so mad and locked me in the cellar or tried to drown Evie or hurt Nathan. Then that lady, Teresa, wouldn’t have heard me or come over—she wouldn’t have said you were here.”
“None of this is your fault,” I said.
Maddy’s face brightened. “You told him you’re going to live with me?”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” I continued. “Your father is . . .” I had no words to explain him. “He’s dangerous,” I said. “But I’m not going to let him hurt you or Evie or any of us.”
“Me neither.” Madison squeezed my hand and let go.
Olive didn’t respond. She looked out the window as if resigned to the fact that there was little we could do to protect her. I felt the real weight of my failure then. I had spent more time resenting Olive’s presence than getting to know her, and had completely misread what was going on between her and her parents. Worse, I had supported Aaron’s agenda, standing between Olive and her stepmother and the help Olive needed. I had foolishly projected my ugly experience with my mother onto her. It had been my job to protect her, and I had failed. I wouldn’t fail her again.
“We need to go,” I said. But as I reached for the doorknob, we heard the distant rumble of a vehicle’s motor turning over, sputtering to a stop, then starting up again. This time, it kept running.
“Shit,” I said. “Aaron got out of the barn.”
35
As we heard Aaron’s Jeep heading down the hunt camp road toward the cabin, I clung to Evie and turned to Madison and Sarah. I saw my own panic mirrored in their faces.
“What are we going to do?” Olive asked.
“There’s three of us against him,” Madison said.
“But we’ve got the girls to protect,” I said. “He knows he can use them to get us to do whatever he wants. He made me drive and threatened Evie all the way here so I would cooperate.”
“Asshole.”
“In any case, how are we going to stop him?” Sarah held up both hands. “Hurl rocks at him?”
No, not rocks, I thought. I opened the cabinet and took down hunting knives, handing one to each of the women and to Olive. Of course, knives were only useful at close quarters. I would have to be almost in Aaron’s embrace to use one, and he was stronger than I was.
“Hold Evie for me, will you?” I asked Olive. She pocketed the knife and took my baby from me.
I fumbled in my purse for my keys. My hands shook as I unlocked the gun cabinet and took out my father’s rifle and a box of cartridges. I opened the bolt and started loading the gun, pressing the rounds into the magazine.
“You’re going to shoot Dad?” Olive asked, her voice rising in alarm.
“I’ll only use the rifle to defend us,” I said as I loaded the final cartridge into the chamber. I glanced at Sarah. “But he did say he was coming here to finish the job he started years ago.”
Sarah touched a hand to her throat. “He said that?”
I gripped the rifle, aiming it upward as I pulled back the curtain on the window to see Aaron’s Jeep roar around the corner, plowing down small trees, bouncing over rocks and leaving a flattened swath of grass and bush behind it. “You’ve got to get out of here,” I said to the women, stepping back. I pulled a soother from my bag. “Here,” I said to Olive. “Keep that sucker in Evie’s mouth. It will keep her quiet. Hold her close. She knows you. She’ll feel safe with you.” I lifted my chin toward the back door. “Get out of here,” I whispered to them all.
“You’re not coming with us?” Olive asked, hugging Evie.
“I’m going to buy you some time.”
“Then I’m staying with you,” Madison said.
“No. I need you to take care of the girls.”
Madison nodded, a pact, mother to mother. “We’ve come a long way in twenty-four hours, haven’t we?” She grinned, and for a moment I almost liked her.
“Follow the path that leads to the outhouse,” I said. “Keep going. You’ll see a clearing. At the far edge, you’ll find a tree stand, like a tree fort, but hidden. You won’t see it at first, as it’s camouflaged. Hopefully, Aaron won’t see it either, should he come looking. Don’t come down, out of hiding, no matter what. I’ll call when it’s safe.” When the police arrived, I hoped.
“What are you going to do?” Madison asked.
I lifted a shoulder. “I’ll stall,” I said. “Try to keep him talking until the cops get here.”
“That shouldn’t be hard,” Madison said. “But you said it yourself. He’s dangerous, Kira.”
I held up the gun. “I’ve got this if I need it.” Though I couldn’t imagine using it on him.
Madison put a hand on my arm. “You don’t have to do this.”
I kissed Evie’s forehead as Olive held her. “Yes, I do,” I said. My actions had led us to this. I needed to make it right.
I peered out the window again as the Jeep reached the clearing in front of the cabin. Aaron got out of the vehicle and banged the door shut. “Kira?” he called out. “I know you’re in there. I saw you at the window.” He stepped around to the front of the Jeep. “So this is your father’s cabin? Not much to look at, is it?”
I gave Olive a quick hug and kissed Evie one last time. “Now go,” I said.
Madison put a hand on Olive’s shoulder as they followed Sarah out the door. When Evie started to fuss, holding her arms out for me, Olive plugged the soother into her mouth, then hurried down the trail to the outhouse behind the cabin, ushered by the two women.
“Kira? Vicki? Maddy?” Aaron called again, his voice closer now. “Come out and talk. All I want to do is talk.”
I closed the back door quietly, then crossed the cabin and stepped out onto the front porch. “That’s far enough,” I said, holding the rifle upright with both hands.
He strolled toward me. “You know it isn’t really over between us. I’m the best thing that ever happened to you. Look at what you came from.” He glanced at the ramshackle cabin, with its broken windows. “And think of where you live now. Where we live.”
Asshole, I thought. Did he really think I would stay with him for his money? “Stop right there,” I said.
He laughed. “You don’t even have the guts to point that rifle at me.”
I cocked the gun, and he jumped a little. “Don’t come any closer,” I said.
But instead of frightening him, I had only managed to piss him off. He clenched and unclenched his fists as he slowly climbed the stairs. “How dare you,” he said. “How dare you presume to threaten me? Or think you’re better than me. You’re nothing. You were lucky I took any interest in you at all.”
“Stay back,” I said, stepping back myself. “I will fire if I have to.”
“Put that thing down,” he said, as if chiding Olive or Evie. “You’re not going to use it on m
e. I know how you feel about guns.” He backed me into the cabin wall and pressed the muzzle down before tucking a finger under my chin. “I thought we had come to an understanding back at the summer house. I guess I was wrong.” He softened his voice and put a hand on the back of my neck to bring me close enough that our foreheads touched, the gun at an angle between us. I struggled in an attempt to get out of his grip, but he held firm. “I loved you,” he whispered. “I gave you everything—a child, a home, a life, everything you could want—and you threw it all away.”
I finally broke loose and slammed the butt of the gun into his stomach. He grunted and bent over. Then, regaining his footing, he backhanded me to the porch deck, sending the rifle flying from my hands. I shook off the shock and the sting, then searched the floor for the gun, but he’d already grabbed it and was aiming it at me.
Shit.
I stood, pressing myself against the wood of the door. Glass, shaken loose from the window, tinkled to the deck at my feet.
“Vicki?” Aaron called past me. “Vicki, I know you’re in there. I know you’re all in there. I heard Evie crying. Come out. We need to talk.” He weighed the gun in both hands. “All I want to do is talk. You hear me?”
“Sarah doesn’t want to speak to you,” I said.
“Well, that’s a shame. We have so much catching up to do.”
“What are you really after?” I said, to keep him talking. “Why drag Olive and Evie and me out here? What does Sarah have over you?” I squinted at him. “What are you afraid of?”
“Are you trying to piss me off?” he said. He looked behind me, through the gaping hole in the window to the dark cabin beyond. “Vicki, come out here now.”
I tried to block him from looking through the window, but he took my arm, wrenched me away from the door and threw it open. “Vicki? Madison? Olive?” When he saw that the cabin was empty, he turned back to me. “Where are they?” He lifted the muzzle of the rifle to my chin. “I said, where are they?”
I wouldn’t help him find them. I wouldn’t. Desperate, I tried to grab the rifle from his hands. When I couldn’t jar it loose, I put a foot behind his and, tripping him, shoved Aaron backward off the deck to the ground below. But he didn’t drop the rifle, as I had hoped, instead clinging to it with one hand even as, winded, he struggled to right himself. Beyond him, I saw the ghost of my young self standing at the forest edge. She nodded to the side, then turned abruptly and disappeared into the bush. Before Aaron had a chance to recover, I jumped off the porch and raced across the clearing, following my fetch into the woods, hoping I could lure him away from Olive, Evie and the two women.
“Stop!” Aaron cried out, but I was already hidden from his view in the dense cedar bush.
There was a rifle blast, and I instinctively ducked, but I didn’t stop running. I sprinted down the worn deer path that my father and I had taken that last day, bullying my way through brush at the corners, taking branches to the face and pushing on, leading Aaron away from Evie, away from Olive. I heard him crashing into the bush behind me, like a bear charging after prey.
“You can’t run forever!” he shouted. He should have known better. I could run forever, pretty much. I was an endurance runner, a marathon runner. But then, so was he.
I sped up, and the girl, my young self, was there again, running down the path ahead of me as I had that day after hearing the shot in the forest. The girl looked behind her, through me, then continued on her way, around a corner, bounding ahead just like a deer on a hunt.
But this time, I was the hunted.
36
My fetch led me down the snaking path through the forest, leaping over windfall, pushing through low branches. I raced now, running harder, faster than I ever did in long-distance races, spurred on by the sound of Aaron trampling through the bush behind me, his feet cracking twigs. I scrambled over roots that cluttered the dark forest floor, instinctively heading toward the light of a clearing up ahead. On reaching it, I circled around it, keeping to the bush so Aaron wouldn’t catch me exposed.
When I reached the far edge of the clearing, I heard the crack of the rifle and time seemed to slow. A flock of cedar waxwings lifted too leisurely from the trees into the sky, and I felt the spray of dirt as the bullet plowed into the ground near my feet.
“Stop or I’ll fire again!” Aaron cried.
I was sure his aim on that shot was a fluke. I doubted Aaron had ever fired a gun before, other than in the video games he played. But he was close enough now that he didn’t need to be a marksman to hit me. I stopped and held up both hands.
“Come out of the bush.”
I turned to face Aaron, peering at him through low hanging branches, and in that instant, I realized where I was, where my child self had led me: to the clearing where I had found my father’s body. This was the spot, right here, where I had started running all those years ago, and I had never stopped.
It had changed. The surrounding maples and cedar were taller and, of course, the circular clearing was thick with grass, fireweed and milkweed, and was not covered in snow as it had been on that November day, but this was the place.
“I said, come out!”
I stepped forward over windfall into the clearing, and as I did so, past and present merged. I was that kid dressed in camouflage, jittery and nauseous, my chest tight, looking down at my father’s body. The pool of blood that oozed from behind his head onto the fresh snow. I braced my hands against my thighs to throw up, tasting the bitter coffee I’d had at lunch that day. I spit. Spit again. Then I looked up, blinking as I tried to get my bearings. I didn’t feel right, like I wasn’t myself, like I was rising above everything and watching a video of myself.
Aaron said something, but his voice seemed so far away, he seemed so far away, as if I were viewing him through a pinhole camera. In that instant, I was unsure who I was: was I that scared girl in the past or this terrified woman in the present? My sense of self expanded, diffused to encompass everything around me, as it so often did when I ran. As if looking down from above, I saw a woman—myself—and a man—Aaron—standing on either side of the clearing in the July sunshine, and between us was the girl I had once been, standing over my father’s body sprawled in a circle of snow, a halo of blood around his head.
“I said, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
I snapped back inside my own skin and found myself back in the present. Aaron was facing me across the clearing, gun in hand, and my father’s body was gone. Staring at the empty spot where he’d died, I experienced one of those rare, exquisite moments of clarity, and I finally understood why the ghost of my young self had brought me here. I had been so careful to hide this part of myself in the forest. I hadn’t had the maturity to face my past. But now there was no outrunning it.
“I asked you a question!” Aaron roared. “What the fuck were you thinking, taking off on me like that? Do you want to die?”
“When I told you I was pregnant, you said you knew me,” I said, my eyes still on the spot where I’d found my father’s body. Then I looked up. “Do you remember that?”
Aaron seemed confused. “What?”
“You said you knew me. And I felt like I knew you too, because I did. You were so familiar. I thought, at the time, we were soulmates.”
Aaron lowered the rifle and I dropped my hands as an expression of relief crossed his face. For a moment he almost looked like my old Aaron again. “We are soulmates,” he said, and his voice took on that silky quality of reassurance that I had always loved. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that it was his salesman’s voice, that he used it on his clients as well. “We belong together,” he said.
I shook my head at his audacity, that he could still believe that. I crossed my arms. “You know, you always order my meals at restaurants,” I said.
He laughed a little at the subject change. “What?”
“You never let me order for myself. Why is that?”
“I don’t know. It seems like the
gentlemanly thing to do. And you often don’t know what half the items on the menu are.”
“And you pay all my bills, my credit card, give me an allowance.”
“Are you complaining?”
“Why didn’t you leave some of that to me? At very least, I could have taken care of the household bills.”
He shrugged. “You weren’t used to handling finances. You had never lived on your own before we met.”
“Yes, exactly. You kept me dependent on you, just like my mother did. And I let you. I even thought I wanted that. Because it was all I’d ever known. I didn’t think I was capable of taking care of myself, or Evie. I didn’t think I was capable of making it on my own.”
He laughed, as if we were just reminiscing about old times. “You weren’t. And you had no idea how to be a parent. I had to teach you how to diaper your own baby, for Chrissakes.”
“I honestly believed the only thing I was any good at was running.”
“And you are.” He took a step forward, carrying the rifle in one hand. “Babe, you could go back into competition right now and I would support you. I would take care of everything. I’ve always said you could be a contender.”
Just like my mother had wanted. “And you would take care of me and Evie, keep us safe, as long as I am obedient to you. As long as you are in control.”
“As long as you don’t leave me.”
“That was what my mother was afraid of,” I said, more to myself than to him. “That I would leave her. She was so afraid of it that she lied to me about my father, just like you lied to Olive, to me, about Madison and Sarah. My mother was so afraid of losing me that she couldn’t bear the thought that I could love anyone else—my father, or even myself. And my father died because of it. Right here, in this clearing.” I tilted my head at Aaron. “The thing is, by hanging on so tight, my mother lost me. I couldn’t really love her in the end. And now you’ve lost me too, Aaron. You’ve lost all of us. Evie, Olive, and me.”
“No!” Aaron’s anguished cry rang out across the forest and he swung the gun up to aim at me again.
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