Swerve

by Vicki Pettersson

  The road forks after that, crawling up over two more blinds on the zigzag slope, causing Abby to twitch and shift in my arms. I cradle her tightly until she stops whimpering and when I look up again, the black iron gates of the Hawthorne family estate are swinging into view.

  The first time I watched Daniel punch in the gate code, I’d wondered at the family crest centered in wrought iron, marveled at the supporting marble columns, and realized that it wasn’t just money I was seeing. My only reference to this sort of wealth was eighties nighttime soaps and magazines so glossy that nothing seemed real. There was something else here that I wouldn’t ever be able to name. Like learning a foreign language, I’d always have an accent marking me as an outsider.

  As we pull to a stop at the keypad this time, the squeal of the brakes reach inside me to rub at every nerve. My throat tightens, threating to cut off my breath, but it can’t keep the creak of the gates from slithering inside to file at my lungs and heart. The wide slanting lawn pops up, a distracting emerald burst, before the guesthouse slides into sight. With its lakeside view and accompanying dock, I had initially mistaken it for the main house. I cringe now, remembering the way Daniel responded, his born-with laugh filled with knowledge I’d never have.

  And then, of course, there was Imogene. Autocratic and stiff-lipped, wealth was her native tongue. She sussed out my trailer park pedigree and mining town roots with a single once-over. Imogene, who sat up straight and spoke through her teeth and snuck sidelong glances at me over an odd lunch of leek soup, clearly wondering why I was breathing her rarified air.

  Imogene, who now waited for us somewhere inside with no idea that her son had come to kill her.

  Daniel swings hard, taking the gravel path meant for service and deliveries. I wonder where the groundskeeper is. I know there’s a live-in maid and Imogene employs a personal assistant too, but right now the grounds are still. As, I’m suddenly sure, they have been for two weeks straight.

  I survey the smooth stone walls surrounding all three earthen sides of the twenty-acre estate and try to imagine climbing them and dropping into the wilds of the San Bernardinos with Abby clinging to my back. Then I sweep Abby’s matted hair from her reddened cheeks, and the nervy scrape of reality floods back in. I am chained up with a serial killer and my unconscious daughter.

  I turn my mind back to the hidden gun.

  Beneath the long shadow of the massive house, Daniel aims the rig at a charmingly rustic barn. The doors gape wide like an oversize mouth, and darkness beckons us forward. I shut my eyes as we roll inside, but still feel the gloom sink in around us. I open them again when Daniel drifts to a stop in the barn’s middle, and seconds later velvety silence floods the semi’s cab.

  In that terrible moment, Abby stirs.

  “Mommy?”

  No.

  Daniel swivels, and I immediately shift her in my arms, blocking her body with mine. If he’s going to stab her, he’s going to have to go through me to do it.

  Daniel’s good eye glitters improbably in the dark. “Oh, excellent. You’ll have some company until I get back.”

  He doesn’t seem surprised by her waking. Perhaps he measured out that Versed precisely. Perhaps he wanted her to be conscious as soon as we arrived at the estate. Wants her fully aware of whatever he has planned next.

  He knows my thoughts—of course he does—and smiles, but his pale skin has gone ashy in the depths of the barn, and it’s so shadowed it doesn’t even look like skin anymore. As he places his hand on the door, he says, “Sit tight. Hold your daughter. After all, these are your last remaining minutes together.”

  He doesn’t bother studying what his words do to me. He already knows that too.

  I jerk at my restraints after he climbs from the truck, timing it to coincide with the slam of the door. The entire cab rocks, but Daniel doesn’t look back. There’s more length in the bicycle chain than I thought he would allow, but not so much that I can reach the gun, and I don’t test it again. No point in injuring myself before I try—

  “Mommy?”

  My attention arrows down.

  “Yes, baby,” I say, again thinking, NoNoNoNoNo. . . . I do not want her awake. Not now. “Yes, Mommy’s here.”

  Abby’s eyes open, flicker, and finally touch on my face, butterflies landing.

  “Daniel took me,” she croaks, and I watch the memory hit her like a wave, a tsunami that softens her butter cheeks, furrows her wide, smooth brow and sends tears crashing over her face. I lower my forehead to Abby’s and close my eyes. I rub my lips along her cheeks and taste the heat and salt and moisture of her tears. Tears, even bittersweet, that I can never manage. “He hurt Maria.”

  As Abby continues to shake in my arms, I lift my head to catch Daniel digging through an old traveling chest pushed against the far wall. The stalls cutting through the middle of the barn are all empty, the smell of hay just a dry memory, but he’s gathering tack together—stiff harnesses and halters, cracked reins. Equipment meant for large animals . . . and I already know what he does to animals.

  I let my gaze drop, searching the cab for something sharp, anything with angles. Everything is plastic and leather, smooth or woven . . . everything except the syringe. It’s tucked into the netting alongside the driver’s seat, and if I stretch—if I do it before Daniel turns back around—I think I can reach it. I know just by eyeballing it that it holds enough Versed to put someone Abby’s size to sleep.

  Permanently. Peacefully.

  “Is he going to hurt us too?” Abby asks, and her voice pops the bubble of my dark thoughts. I look down into eyes that lay soft and steady on my face. Her trust breaks my heart.

  Do I say yes to a question that makes a lie out of all my lifelong promises to protect her?

  Do I do nothing until it’s time to hand her over to a man who will make her scream and compare the sound to a hare’s?

  “Daniel is . . . not who we thought he was, sweetie,” I finally manage. My voice is hoarse, stripped like bark from a tree. All my insides are exposed in those words.

  “A bad guy,” Abby says, hearing it.

  “Yes.” I don’t hesitate this time. “Very bad.”

  “I knew it.”

  That jerks my attention back to her. “What?”

  “I could tell.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “It’s the way he watches you.” She fights a yawn, her trust in me complete. Something dies inside of me. “Quiet, but twitchy. The way Maria’s cat watches birds out the window.”

  I can’t believe it. Abby has somehow intuited what I should have seen all along. But then, she is not faulty, is she? She is not broken.

  A loud clang sounds in front of me, and I look up, startled. Daniel has slammed the traveling chest shut and is bent, gathering up the chosen equipment. Inside, I begin to shriek. Outside, I reach for that syringe, accidentally pushing it away with the stretch of my fingers, with my haste. I whimper, and trace the netting until I feel the syringe and try to drag it toward me by the tip. It slips to the bottom of the wide, black netting and lodges there.

  There’s no time to cry about it, not that I would. Daniel is headed back, and as he nears, I shift so that Abby is behind me. My body blocks hers now, and the confines of the small space actually help. Her young, gummy limbs can curl into improbable angles, minimizing her, and that’s what I need right now. “I want you to close your eyes and pretend you’re asleep, Abby. Can you do that for me?”

  She doesn’t say yes or no. She doesn’t even bother nodding or shaking her head. She just searches my face like she’s diving deep, going spelunking, exploring my soul. Then she closes her eyes.

  Daniel is five feet away, reins dragging behind him.

  I look up, bicycle chain clanking.

  He is on the steps, rocking the semi.

  I take stock of my weapons. Knees, elbo
ws, teeth. It’s not much. The rest of me—my long torso and legs—will be occupied in defense of Abby.

  Daniel presses his nose against the window and shoots me that ashy smile.

  I’ll only get one shot at him, I think, just as the door swings open and Daniel is back.

  It’ll empty you right out.

  He holds a horse collar in his left hand.

  I know exactly what it is because I used to help my dad harness up, working next to him in the near-dawn silence, a dance of nimble fingers and soft tut-tuts, met by a warm muzzle or a cloud of musky breath. There was no place more peaceful than the stables on a cold morning. Later, for me, there was no place more violent.

  I never spoke of this to Daniel. Yet I get the feeling that my arrival at this estate, in this barn, is no mistake.

  He spreads out the lengths of leather on the passenger’s seat, sorting through the tack and pretending to ignore me, but his awareness is coiled in the outline of his shoulders. He’s so steady-handed that I know he’s envisioned this scenario many times in his sick daydreams. I also know he has the knife on him somewhere, and that’s what I watch for, anticipating the moment he breaks for Abby.

  He sighs and turns . . . no blade in sight. His eyes glide over Abby, a look I feel as it passes me, the surging emptiness of a black hole. It’s like he’s staring at a mannequin—no, worse. A gum wrapper. Refuse to be disposed of, or not. Still, I can see he’s convinced that she’s asleep.

  Don’t move, baby. Please don’t move.

  But then Daniel’s fingers tighten around the padded collar and I know he’s the one I need to keep still.

  “You never told me what happened,” I blurt, deliberately vague. The only way to pull his attention away from Abby is to make him wonder. As his deep, glittering gaze wanders up to meet mine, I need him to ask . . .

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When your father left here,” I jerk my head at the barn. I can smell the hay now that the door is open, and it brings back a memory of gunpowder too, but I push that away for the present violence. “After he returned to his workroom. After your mother caught you with the rabbit.”

  Daniel’s brow corkscrews downward like I’m speaking in tongues, as if he’s wondering how I know this. Does he even remember telling me?

  I feel my windpipe go tight, and I go on before I can choke on my growing fear. “Did they discuss it? Did she tell him what you’d done?”

  He rubs his thumb over the soft underside of the collar, a caress that looks anything but gentle. I can see how it might easily be wrapped around tiny limbs, how the lambswool cover will keep it from leaving a mark. I watch the circling thumb, looking for a quick clench, but he finally answers. “No. Mother had already left. But he knew she’d been there. Her perfume always lingers like a poisonous cloud.”

  He looks right through me, and I struggle not to shudder.

  “She left me alone in that workroom, standing over that hare like I was the only one in the family who knew how to inflict pain. It made me want to find her and drag her back and make her tell him what she’d done.”

  Sure. What she’d done.

  “Because he knew what you did? That you were the one who hurt the rabbit?”

  “Oh, yes. He cried and cried over it too. You wouldn’t understand, of course, being that you’re so broken that you can’t ever manage tears, but crying is very cathartic. In some cases”—he slowly shakes his head—“it’ll empty you right out.”

  When I was a kid, back before I was old enough to get a job, I used to search Tonopah’s surrounding desert for glass bottles and tin cans. I’d turn them in to the recycling center for money, nickel-and-diming my way to a meal. Using an old laundry bag as a backpack, I’d circumvent Main Street so I didn’t run into kids I knew, then head out to the heaviest cluster of mine shafts dotting the sun-fractured hills.

  I quickly found that as much as I loved the sweet melt of chocolate and peanuts in my mouth, I loved having bought it for myself even more. The food I purchased from bottles and blasting caps was something my mother couldn’t keep from me. She couldn’t use the money I hid in my socks for drugs because she was so strung out she didn’t know it existed, and with each laundry bag redeemed, my satisfaction grew. My mother may have had her heroin dens, but I was addicted to independence.

  Of course, I had to venture farther and farther afield to feed my habit. One day I rounded a limestone outcropping so fast I startled a rattler settled in the shade, digesting its lunch. Despite its bulging middle, it swung into an improbable coil and shook its tail, maraca-fast. Its black eyes were small, but they fastened like crosshairs on my bare, tanned legs.

  No rattle echoes throughout the cab of the semi now, but the warning is there, just as with that snake. The promise of death sits at attention and I don’t move a muscle. I pray to God that Abby stays still behind me.

  Daniel flicks his left thumb against the metal hames. Flick and clink. Flick and clink. And again.

  Finally, he says, “My father emptied himself out before me, and he kept crying long past the time he should have stopped, and the whole time all I could think was, ‘Is this going to make her come back? Will this surprise her?’ ”

  I’m still pretending to be a living statue, still watching for the venomous strike, so for a moment I don’t understand what he’s saying. I frown. “Surpr—?”

  “I thought,” he continues, over me, “I bet she won’t just turn around and walk away this time.”

  I flash back again on my first visit with Imogene, the house tour that had me spotting the dark stains on the wall, an old splatter, and later Imogene’s soured expression. I never enter the workroom.

  I try to shake my head. It comes out as a spastic jerk. “Oh God. Oh my God. You . . . you killed your father—what? To get your mother’s attention?”

  He looks away. “I kill everything to get her attention.”

  The admission costs him. He deflates just a little, and now I can read a bit of his mind. He is more human in that moment. Not quite so evolved.

  The flicker of uncertainty is an opening, and I lunge for it. “I understand, you know. I know what it’s like to stand right in front of someone and still not be seen.”

  Daniel scoffs at that. “I’ve always been seen.”

  But what had he said before? “Yes, but she turned her back anyway.”

  Daniel’s eyes regain their focus as they return to mine. “She won’t turn away this time.”

  This time I don’t try to finesse it.

  The hame chain on the collar rattles when he lunges.

  He expects me to fall back but I’ve been thinking ahead, and I rock forward instead, using up all the slack in my chain to greet the center of his face with the span of my forehead. It’s a perfect header and he falls hard between the chairs, back nailing the console with a crack. His knees buckle while I reverse to tuck mine in tight.

  Daniel needs leverage in order to right himself, and when he sits up I uncoil like a spring, whipping my thighs out once, and again, striking that forward leaning face, and then his chest. I ignore the burn of my abraded leg and revel in his hollow grunt. I kick until his hands fall slack, and his head lolls against the windshield, and he’s out.

  The slumbering thing inside of me beats its fucking chest.

  Now I need the keys.

  Daniel is slumped too far away for me to reach, so I wrap my bare feet around his pant leg and try to pull at him that way, but I can’t get a grip. “Abby?”

  The good girl, she doesn’t even move.

  “Abs, sit up. Hey! Hurry. I need your help.” Immediate and swift, she does. She is chained like me, her restraints soldered to the other side of the bench, but if she stretches . . . “You can reach him. I need you to pull him to me.”

  She whimpers instead.

  “Abby!”

>   Her head snaps around like I’ve slapped her, dazed fear clearing from her eyes like a hazy film of steam being wiped away.

  “Pull his legs.”

  She uncoils from the bench and when I see how small and thin her little limbs look compared to his, to mine, I almost yell for her to get back, to move behind me. But goddammit I need those keys.

  “They’re in his front right pocket.”

  Right where he always puts them.

  Abby tries, but Daniel’s wedged oddly between the seats and beginning to stir. I kick at his left leg, but the swing misses. He’s too far away.

  “Brace your legs against the driver’s seat and pull. Hurry.”

  She grips the cuff of his pant leg, her fingers whitening at the knuckles, and extends herself fully, then yanks. A jarring slide sends him crumpling to the floor and he moans.

  “Pull, Abby!”

  She keeps on and I reach down to bend his knees, and then he’s prone on the ground before us.

  “Now reach into his pocket.”

  The shake of her head is automatic as she gives a soft cry.

  “I can’t reach it from here, Abs. Please.”

  She’s quivering so hard she could be standing naked in the Antarctic, but she does as I say and slides one hand into the gaping pocket, careful not to touch his body. I hear a jingle, and feel something glint inside of me. I lean forward as far as my chains will allow.

  Abby slowly withdraws the keys.

  Daniel’s right hand whips out and clamps down on her wrist.

  She squeals, drops the keys, and tries to back away, but his grip tightens, a boa constrictor around a mouse.

  “Abby! Abby! Keys . . . your other hand!”

  But she’s frozen, literally scared stiff, and even her little voice comes out petrified. So I center myself on the bench, kick Daniel’s knees wide, and stomp down on his crotch with my full weight.