Swerve

by Vicki Pettersson

  then I’ve never been more so.

  Daniel doesn’t stab me with the syringe. I expect it—he holds it aloft like a threat—yet instead he whirls and heads back to the truck, leaving my heart thumping in my throat as he strides away.

  I stay where I am, thankful for the distance, though I stare as he clambers into the passenger’s seat and starts fiddling with the storage bench beneath the bunk. He pushes the mattress aside, grunting with the effort, and I lean forward, lifting my hands to block the sun. I try to blink, but my eyes are sandblasted by dryness and heat, so I bend my head, just briefly while he’s still away, and close them.

  When I reopen them, I catch Daniel in a half-turn, yet the knowing part of me, the forward-thinking part, cracks inside my head. I blink again, but the mirage is still there . . . a tangle of knobbed knees and tanned legs ending in pale pink shorts.

  Something wild and cornered roars in me, and I feel the echo of it lower, in my chest, but I keep my gaze wide and pinned on Daniel and the four limbs now sprouting from his arms. Daniel eases down the semi’s deep steps, and then he turns to face me fully.

  The syringe is pointed directly at the carotid artery in my daughter’s neck.

  The past sixteen hours flash, and the bright bulb of understanding pops—that head/heart call-and-response—­reordering events in my mind. This is why “Malthus” never mentioned Abby. It’s why he never referred to anything outside of me or my selfish nature, and the relief I felt at that now comes back to taunt me. Fool.

  No one exists in a vacuum. Everyone has at least one vital connection to the planet, either through blood or love. His is through blood. Through everyone he kills.

  And mine?

  I strain to see my daughter’s face, but her hair is forest wild and splayed so I can’t see her features, which panics me. As if that alone can erase her from existence. Yet the tangled strands are damp with sweat, and that gives me hope. I think I see her chest moving. I think.

  “Please . . .” I finally, barely, whisper.

  Daniel smiles. The desert floor quakes beneath me.

  “Wow,” he says, devouring my expression. “Look at you. You’re just going crazy inside, aren’t you? Do you even feel your feet burning?”

  I don’t even remember standing.

  “You’re shaking too. That’s strange. I mean, she’s such a little thing.” He bounces, jiggling Abby so that her little limbs flail.

  I feel things unsnap inside of me, careful stays and long-closed latches come undone, and the thing I’ve buried deep, the killing thing, the thing that makes me a liarliarliar rises, sensing release.

  Oblivious, Daniel goes on.

  “A little person . . . so much like every other little person out there. She’s done nothing of import yet, and likely won’t. I guess every mother convinces herself that her offspring is unique, a special snowflake . . . but when they’re this young? They’re still unformed. Still empty and pliant, as interchangeable as a set of tires.”

  I see my bound hands curling into fists. I see myself lunging, intercepting the syringe and plunging it through the place where Daniel’s heart is supposed to be. I see my hand pressing on the hidden panel in the semi and a gun dropping down, fitted perfectly in my palm. I place the barrel in Daniel’s ear and I squeeze off a shot that scatters that psychotic brain over the high desert and I don’t even blink.

  But that’s all in my mind. Outside, I just bake in the sun and pray. Please, let him have big plans for me. Something bigger than crucifixion or vehicular manslaughter. Please, God, let him have a horrible use for me that is worth keeping my daughter alive.

  “Why, you look positively feral, Kristine. Like you could literally attack. Not a great idea under the circumstances, but still. Impressive. Interesting.”

  It should worry me that he sees this, but instead I feel a snarl rise like a charge from an electrical current. A switch was thrown inside of me as soon as I spotted Abby. Let Daniel have his tools and plans and maps and scalpels . . . I can tear him apart with my teeth and nails. I will consume him in small, even bites.

  But I can’t do it without causing Abby grievous harm . . . and Daniel knows it.

  “It’s okay,” he says, smiling as me like he used to. He is happy again, taunting me, angling the sharp needle toward the soft, smooth flesh at Abby’s neck. He winks coyly. “As you might suspect, I’m very fond of animals.”

  And he plunges the needle deep.

  I am a rocket, launching from the hot earth, boosters roaring red, but Daniel is ready for me. He falls back and braces against the truck, and the straight kick to my chest drops me flat. My heart stutters, but jacks right back, pumped by the sight of Abby. My eyes never leave her, and if pain means you’re alive, then I’ve never been more so.

  Daniel drops her. He just lets his arms fall so that her limbs tangle and her body thuds, and then he steps over her, even as I scramble forward.

  “Interchangeable,” I hear him mutter as he returns to the concrete table.

  Bramble and gravel scrape my palms and knees, stabbing my forearms as I face-plant, but I immediately rise again on a tripod of flesh. My bound palms slow me, Daniel’s laughter is a ­hollow-train echo in my ears, but my daughter’s legs and hair and face are ten feet away, no five, then they’re looping up beneath me, weight familiar and rightly balanced in my arms. My unsafe arms.

  I bow my head to her and hold and rock, rock and then relearn how to breathe, but only after I feel the soft puff of her breath feathering my neck. It’s faint, but it’s there. I have to smooth back her hair, sweaty at the hairline, with my forearms and blow aside errant strands, but I finally see the familiar features I’ve already memorized—the tight, bow-like mouth, the flushed cheeks, and curling wisp of her black lashes. Whole, intact, perfect. Her eyebrow has not been carved away. Nothing vital is missing.

  But her neck—oh no, her neck, you bastard—is littered with needle marks.

  “God, God . . .” I press my lips to the injuries and wish I could just suck out the venom, same as if she’d been ambushed by a snake.

  The one I brought into our home.

  Maybe it’s the tape binding my hands, or maybe it’s the needle marks on the column of my baby’s neck, stamping a trail all the way into my past, but I am suddenly whisked back to a not-quite-abandoned mineshaft, absent of today’s searing sun though just as hot, stuffed with open candles, and the lung burn caused by spent fuel.

  The old opium den had been repurposed. A new designer drug had taken over with the new millennium, and new addicts filled the old niches and bunks. Like Abby today, I was not there of my own will. I stared at the fire topping the black, oily kerosene wicks and willed myself someplace else. I thought instead of the damp, cool stalls of the horse farm, which helped me ignore the pinch of the needle forced into my arm. I recalled the waft of fresh-cut hay and that helped blow back the hot salami stench of Waylon Rhodes’s breath on my face and neck and finally my chest. Then my brain unhinged and I soared.

  My mother was never there to suck the sting away.

  “So dramatic,” Daniel says now from his square of shadow on the bench, and I startle, realizing I’d fallen still. He watches me over the top of that final water bottle, neck now dotted with perspiration like he has a fever, eyes cut in a hard squint, even beneath the brim of his cap. The water is not all he is drinking up.

  “What did you give her?” I ask, trying for a normal voice, but it comes out like a wisp of steam. Daniel can see right through it . . . and through me too. Like I’m made of glass.

  And I am. When it comes to Abby, I am infinitely fragile.

  “Versed.”

  I go light-headed with one great sigh. The sedative is safe . . . if the dosage is properly monitored. I try to gauge via her breath exactly how much of the drug pulses through her sixty-five-pound body.

  “Aren’t you go
ing to ask what happened to Maria?”

  The wild thing inside me now howls, but holding Abby, I don’t answer. I know damn well what happened to Maria, and if I stop to think about it, I might just cease moving altogether. I can feel fear already slowing me down. Giving up would be so easy.

  But I can’t give up. Abby is here. So I just pray that Maria’s death was quick and painless, driven by a need to grab Abby and hurry to me.

  I count the tiny holes in Abby’s neck.

  I keep praying in puzzle-piece fragments.

  And I focus on a way to get that gun in my hands.

  I can still hear the sizzle.

  We’re headed to the estate, just as we planned from the beginning. I think I’ve known this all along. The Fourth of July is Lake Arrowhead’s biggest holiday, and Daniel will want an explosive end to his treasure hunt. Maybe something he can commemorate annually for years to come.

  Daniel, I know now, wants to take me out with a big bang.

  I simply can’t get to the gun. I’m hunched over on the back bunk, and Daniel has rigged the storage bench so that I’m wearing bicycle chains on my wrists, my custom shackles. Abby is chained too, her restraints welded to the rig’s back wall, but at least I get to hold her . . . though Daniel’s not allowing it for comfort. I can tell because there’s a sneer in his gaze as he watches through the reflective square of the rearview mirror. He knows how much it’s going to hurt when he makes me let her go.

  Hurting is what he does.

  Yet there’s an upside to my daughter being drugged. Besides being a sedative, Versed is an amnesiatic, which means Abby very likely won’t remember much of the past day’s journey while under the influence of the drug. My mind still spins with questions: How did he seize her? Did she know what was happening? Did she struggle and try to run off ? I finally give up and just hope Abby was drugged the entire way.

  Daniel uses a back entrance to climb from the desert into the sky, approaching Lake Arrowhead from the quieter east side. The road stitches back and forth in a slow switchback journey, allowing Daniel to altogether avoid the Los Angeles crowd fleeing the smog and congestion from the mountain’s other side. The only travelers we risk encountering now are those continuing on to the even more reclusive Big Bear.

  I glance over the metal guardrail at the undulating vista, spread out around us like a picnic over a blanket. We’ve moved out of the greater Mojave, for which I should be thankful, but every minute we continue uphill is a rise into a world that I don’t know. Trees with cones now crowd the landscape. Needles pad a ground that actually cools underfoot. These mountains sport ever­greens that can be turned into timber or used as paper, fauna with a purpose, and most of which I can only guess at. Where the arid desert makes me feel small with its vast openness and stretching sky, this terrain dwarfs me with its unending layers of life.

  Then there are the animals. Deer and elk. Bears. Things that can survive snow and cold. I know why the desert creatures have their scales and their shells, but fur hides the fangs and claws up here, and the trees whisper when rustled, their mildewed secrets scenting the air.

  The answer to how Daniel grew into what he’s become is in that wind song. The sweeping winds that rocked the desert kept me from being able to see this before, but my eyes are open now. The terrain reveals it to me with bright green urgency.

  “You started with animals,” I finally say.

  Through the mirror, his eyes find mine. After a moment, he nods. “You can’t just fall into this line of work, Kristine. I had to study very hard to become the great surgeon I am today.”

  I feel my fingers clench and have to actively unwind them from the warm roots of Abby’s hair. “My God. Your father was a vet.”

  It was just a dry fact before, one I connected to Daniel only because it was proof that healing hands ran in the family, and because it was another bond between us. Both of us were young at the time of our respective fathers’ deaths. Yet now it blooms like an ache . . . the knowledge that the senior Dr. Hawthorne had a home office. The way Daniel had made a point of showing it to me the last time we visited. Imogene had long turned it into what she called the “billiards parlor,” but Daniel had ignored the pool table entirely. The green felt looked like it’d never been touched. Instead, he lingered over an old bloodstain on the wood paneling encasing the wall. He ran his fingers over the antique medical cabinet still outfitted with apothecary jars and jabbing instruments.

  Nostalgic, but not for the reasons I imagined.

  “Father said touching the animals made him feel connected to the greater world. That in working on them he felt more a part of it.” Daniel smiles. “He was a hundred percent right.”

  As foreign as this new-Daniel is to me, it takes very little to imagine the passage of instruction, father to son. It’s so clear that I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. “Oh God . . . he mended the animals you tortured.”

  “While I watched,” Daniel says, words so cool for someone so hot. A psychology class I took as an undergrad covered the phases in a killer’s cycle, the trolling and luring and killing. The cooling off period. And right before the next killing? Agitation. Escalation. Loss of control.

  Yet serial murderers reportedly always had some sort of childhood trauma, and I just couldn’t see the senior Dr. Hawthorne caring for animals, yet abusing his own son.

  “It pleased him to heal them,” Daniel continues, and he shakes his head, whether at me or his father I can’t tell. “So I started leaving him little gifts. A squirrel. A rabbit. Dozens of birds. He worked so hard. Sweated so much. He never complained about the long hours or the blood or the number of animals I brought him.”

  Because he knew, I thought. He goddamn well knew what his son was.

  Again, I have to loosen my grip on Abby.

  “Then one day he asked me to watch over a baby hare while he went outside to get his doctor’s bag, the one he traveled with. I knew it was a test. After all, he left his cigarette right there.”

  I don’t say a word because Daniel is right there too. I can hear it in the drift of his voice, the aural equivalent of something floating out to sea. His psychosis strains his features like bone poking through too-thin skin.

  “Do you know,” Daniel says, “that they sound just like babies when they cry? Pitched high, more of a squeal than a wail—I’ll show you if I get a chance—and loud. His car was in the barn, far away. Yet I saw movement and looked up.”

  “He came back. Because he knew.”

  “No.” Daniel stares at me through the sliver of glass, and waits.

  It’s like being startled awake in that hotel room again, awareness accompanied by another instant of panicked dislocation. In instances like these, heartbeats pass and pound, and nothing makes sense until it suddenly does, and you know.

  His mother.

  Imogene had refused to enter the workroom on my first visit, and when I asked her later if she ever played pool—making polite, if stilted, conversation—disdain practically dripped from the tips of her lashes as she stared back at me. I never enter the workroom.

  Not the billiards room that time. The workroom.

  Daniel watches me put it together and finally nods. “There was this look on her face, disbelief, but absent of all surprise. She should have been staring at me like she’d never seen me before, but instead she came in and stood right next to me, so close she must have smelled the singe as she peered down at the rabbit’s remaining eye.”

  Daniel smiles when I shudder.

  “I know. I thought she was going to yell too, but instead she just drew the cigarette from my hand and took this long, hard drag. I can still hear the sizzle.”

  I don’t want to ask. I don’t want to know what happened next, but Daniel’s gaze has fallen some, and I’m afraid he’s viewing Abby through the mirrored square. “And then what?”

  “Then
she exhaled the smoke in my face.” He pushes out his lips in imitation before his expression falls flat. “And then she turned the ember on me.”

  I see it too. Imogene floating to his side, same as the smoke, her knowing gaze filtering through him as well, reaching down and wrapping itself around his lungs.

  “Do you know it’s the only time I remember her touching me?”

  What did you do, Imogene? I think, as he goes stony and silent. What exactly did she make him feel all those years ago? What the hell has landed me in chains with a drugged child as we’re both lifted into the wilderness of the Inland Empire?

  “I thought you loved your mother,” I try, my voice a loud whisper.

  “Oh, I do.” Daniel never looks from the road. “I love her to death.”

  I’ll only get one shot at him.

  We arrive at Lake Arrowhead just past noon, veering from our thoroughfare onto a two-way road that snakes along the lake’s north rim, bypassing the main village altogether. The shadows from ponderosas dapple the asphalt, snipping away at the sunlight so that I feel more trapped than ever hunched over in my bunk, curled around my daughter.

  There’s only one four-way stop on the way to the estate, and I can see the drivers in their minivans and midsize cars staring up at the semi’s stunted cab, wondering what we’re doing here, though they’re not so curious that they’ll remember this moment. Not until it’s too late. So I look past them too, and catch a fleeting glimpse of the village, tents and tables set up for the holiday, lots stuffed with vendor carts selling flossed clouds of pink cotton candy, sugared nuts, and popcorn with so much butter it coats the roof of your mouth.

  Daniel catches the direction of my gaze and smiles. “No wind. It’s good luck. They’ll be able to dock the fireworks in the middle of the lake.”

  Yes. Let freedom ring.

  We continue on, another five minutes on an upward loop, where every once in a while there’s a break in the trees and I catch a flash of glinting blue. The midday sun sends fractured light out over the lake to coat the choppy waves in a radiant stain. Daniel is right. A handful of boats surround a floating dock anchored in the lake’s middle. I spot the blue and red strobes of a police craft tied to one side just before the pines thicken again and a green curtain closes on the scene.