Abby tries not to move as her hair drops in piles atop the tarp and scatters over her knees, but she’s shaking uncontrollably now, which makes me want to dart to her. Yet there’s still a Jacuzzi tub to navigate, and then another ten feet beyond that. If Daniel turns and sees me now, those shears in his hand can instantly shift, from cutting to stabbing.
“Now, I don’t want you to worry,” he goes on, raising his voice over her whimpers. He thinks I am tied in the guesthouse, helpless to do anything but watch. This bathroom floor is his makeshift pulpit. He is speaking to me. “Death is just another life event. Do you understand what I’m saying, Abby? Your life means nothing. And neither will your death. You are, just like most people, totally inconsequential.”
Finished, Daniel leans back on his palms, a clump of hair in his left hand, scissors in the right. My daughter looks plucked, like a bird with no feathers. Daniel sighs and throws her hair aside, then reaches out to steady her shaking chin with his fingertips. I freeze too.
“Some final advice, Abby . . . don’t hang on to life like a dog with a bone. That’s inelegant. Instead, let death come for you. You can feel it, I’ll make sure you feel it,” the smile is in his voice as he raises the scissors, “but then you have to let it go.”
“You first, asshole.”
Daniel must think that Abby is the one who has spoken because his eyes remain fixed on her as I loop the rope over his head and give a hard, satisfying jerk. I’m okay with that. I want hers to be the last face he ever sees.
His hands claw at his throat and he begins to thrash beneath me. I have leverage on my side, but he has strength, and he has not spent the last twenty-four hours being physically and emotionally abused. His fingertips find my burned wrists and dig there, scoring my flesh as he twists and flings me down, fighting for purchase.
All I need to do is keep to his back, directly behind him. He reaches to grab for my face, so I cross my wrists and pull harder. Daniel was right. All of my yoga classes and weight training and running on a treadmill were futile. I was going nowhere, running and lifting and fighting for nothing . . . until now.
I push against the cabinets with my heels, dislodging the tarps and exposing all that hard marble as I backpedal, trying to pull Daniel away from my daughter. Abby’s wails accompany the jazz horns, and in the exposed marble of the bathroom she sounds both near and far away. I realize I am distancing her from me as well as Daniel. I need to be alone for what comes next, back with the ghosts that sweep along on deadly, billowing upcasts in the mines.
Daniel growls so loudly that the sound knocks backward into my chest. His flailing gains new purpose, and while his right elbow misses me, it tells him where I am. He immediately arrows back his left, and it lands home in the center of my rib cage. A pained explosion of breath sends the back of his hair up in a puff, and my grip loosens. He follows up with a headbutt that has me tasting tin, but we’re too close for it to knock me out, and I’m too hot to care. He kicks out, and Abby yelps. The sound boomerangs back to pulse through me, and I thrust my hips forward behind Daniel and knuckle that rope.
Daniel gurgles, and his face goes purple beneath me. His eyes are beginning to close. He’s no longer scrabbling at me, but is instead slapping the floor with open palms, probably wondering which way is up. I’m about to flip him to his stomach and show him, when I hear the scrape of metal across marble. I only realize that he’s holding the scissors after he thrusts his body to the side, leaving my long body exposed to the shears.
His arm lifts, and silver flashes in the pretty, fractured light. I shut my eyes and tell myself, no matter what, to hang on to that rope. His shoulder rotates and his arm pistons down. I brace and wait for the burn.
Jazz scats and skitters along my limbs. Goose bumps rise. Daniel jerks beneath me.
I open my eyes to find Abby bent forward, Daniel’s wrist pinned beneath her chained hands and knees. It may be surprise more than weakness that has his fingers falling open. I look into Abby’s face as the scissors clatter to the floor, and I’m surprised too. For a moment she seems so far away. Then I blink, and she snaps back, and the jazz roars, and I flip Daniel to his stomach.
“Not so inconsequential after all,” I hiss in his ear, and outside of his beloved jazz, it’s the last thing he ever hears.
I give a laugh that sounds like a cry.
I don’t pull much longer. I, too, have learned in the last twenty-four hours that there is strength in letting go.
“Mommy?”
Abby’s been saying my name for a while. Sprawled over the bathroom floor, I have been staring down at Daniel’s back, and at the rough rope cutting into his neck. I am trying to feel something, but I don’t. So I blink and return to Abby, return from that far off place where I needed to go in order to set her free.
“Baby.” My voice wheezes as if the rope had been wrapped around my neck. I hold out my arms, but for a moment it looks like Abby won’t come. The hands that so ably kept those scissors from ripping at me remained clutched to her chest, worrying and threading each other like tatting lace.
Then I realize she’s tied up; she can’t move any farther away from the cabinet. I’m the one who has to come all the way back.
It shifts something inside of me, and suddenly I’m throwing myself at my daughter, and then we’re both sobbing as I take a mother’s inventory, only pulling away after I have accounted for all limbs. My fingertips are sore, my wrists burned, my earlobe shorn, leg scraped from thigh to ankle, and I’m pretty sure I have a concussion, but I pull and tug and finally use the scissors to cut her bindings loose. I don’t look inside the doctor’s bag. I don’t want to know what Daniel planned to do.
“Mommy . . .”
I nod, but keep working, and I don’t look up until I feel Abby shift.
“Don’t look at him, baby,” I say, and gently tilt her head back my way. “Just look at me.”
When I free her, I can’t help it. I check for injury once more, find only rope burns at her wrists and ankles, and then yank her into another smothering hug that has us both rocking back and forth.
“He cut my hair.” Muffled by my shoulder, her voice trembles. I force a smile as I pull back, cupping her cheeks between my palms.
“Yeah, now you’re just like me.” Dropping my hands to hers, I pull her to her feet. We both wobble. “Wanna know what else makes you like me?”
Teary eyed, Abby nods.
“You’re strong.” We are both so incredibly strong.
“Come on.” I guide Abby out of the bathroom, careful to block Daniel’s body from view. Duke Ellington’s voice swells as I shut the master bedroom door behind us.
My first instinct is to call for help, but by the time I reach the second floor landing, it’s clear that Daniel has relieved the grand home of telephones. He probably removed them before returning to Las Vegas two weeks ago, just in case his mother managed to get free.
We curl down to the ground floor with its wall of window, each bearing witness to the black lake. It’s full dark now, but dozens of boats have settled in for the fireworks show, and the bobbing lights dot the smooth surface like giant fireflies.
However, a larger glow in the foreground has begun to eclipse those dainty lights. It hasn’t flashed over, the guesthouse windows have yet to blow, and the lawn remains silent and dark, but I catch a whiff of smoke at the same instant I realize I left Daniel’s phone on the bed inside. That’s okay. The fire marshal and police are on the lake. We can wait for them to notice the fire.
“Fuck that,” I mutter, and wheel Abby to the front door. “Come on, baby. Back to the barn. We’re getting out of here.”
I hate the idea of climbing back in the vehicle that’d been our prison, and Abby stiffens at the sight of the truck too, but the sheriff ’s station is just downhill, and this is the fastest way off the property. I’m leaving now.
“Not
long,” I tell Abby, but as I climb to the driver’s seat, I know I am reassuring myself as well.
The keys aren’t there. I stare for a moment, but think, Of course. Daniel took them with him. They’re in his pocket, in the house. I don’t want to go back in there, and I already know Abby will buck at the thought. It’s a horror-film move anyway. Nobody who goes back in the house ever lives.
I climb back down and meet Abby’s hopeful gaze with a too-bright look. It twists wrongly and I drop it. “Not even a horse to ride out on,” I joke, but neither of us smiles.
I take Abby’s hand in my own and head back to the front of the barn. The estate walls are insurmountable, and the foliage of the encroaching forest is thick beyond that. We can leave the way we came in, walk down the winding lane that led up to the estate from the village below, but there aren’t any lights or sidewalks on that swerving road. I didn’t just fight to the death for us to be taken out by some unsuspecting driver and a tight bend.
A shot rings through the night just as we clear the barn. Abby yelps and I jerk and the sky rips open with silver sparkles. Light scissors overhead, and while the sight is thunderous and sensational and beautiful, it is also impossibly ordinary. It’s the first normal thing I’ve seen in over twenty-four hours, and it feels like a dream. I can’t help it. I give a laugh that sounds like a cry.
Dozens of boats stud the lake, but the firework dock at its center glows red and blue. That’s where I want to go. I want to get off this estate before the guesthouse burns to the ground. I want to skip out of here in the boat on which Daniel intended to flee. I want to use the lake where he drowned his father to extinguish the heat inside of me once and for all. I want to reach those police boats and safety on my own terms. And I want to do it before the last bright bloom falls from the sky.
“Let’s go,” I tell Abby, and hand in hand, we run down the great, sloping lawn.
I stretch for it with my burned wrists.
Of course, the key to the old Paceship is back with Daniel, tucked in his pocket too. Damn it. Disappointment washes over me, but then I spot the neighbor’s open skiff tied to the other side of the dock and almost laugh. I’m exhausted and injured, but you know what? I’m alive. I can damn well row to the police at this point.
I tell Abby to grab two life jackets from the antique vessel while I untie the rowboat. It bobs in stop-motion on the fractured water, each overhead burst ricocheting off the waves like cannons. I can feel the heat and smell the smoke of the guesthouse burning behind me—but I wait to look at it until after I’ve unmoored the skiff and pushed away with my paddles. Until Abby is safely tucked into the fore and the shoreline is receding behind me.
I turn just as the windows explode and the rooftop becomes engulfed in flames. It blazes so suddenly—so hot and bright and loud—that it surprises me. Like it’s a real accident. But after a moment, I think, No, the home is just burning. Burning and free.
Like me, says the person inside of me who fought Daniel.
Shhhh, I tell her. Go back to the mines.
The mines. That’s what got me out of that house. I wasn’t just thinking about climbing out of the Lumbago and leaving Waylon behind. I was leaving all of it behind. The misguided conviction that I had the power to save my mother, who didn’t want to be saved. The sense that I was inferior to the Josie Scotts of the world. The yearning for someone I loved, my father, to have seen me standing before him and simply chosen instead to stay. Even Daniel,who’d never really existed as I’d wanted him to . . . though I damn well wasn’t going to blame myself for that one.
Yet my mother’s voice, which has always haunted me, has been completely silent for the length of this journey, and I think I know why. I think it’s because I’m facing all of it squarely now, and I can clearly see it wasn’t my fault that one violent night led to another and then another still.
I’m about to turn my face to the blistering sky, turn my mind to what happens next, when something takes shape on the wide sweep of lawn. I think it’s only shadows at first, maybe drifting smoke, but then it flashes in front of the burning guesthouse and stills. The dance of flames liquefy the solid silhouette at the edges.
Then he roars.
He rages without sound. He rages because he has been choked to death and still lives. He rages because he is molten.
I begin rowing as fast as I can.
“Abby!” I shriek over the sound of whistling rockets, but I don’t know what else to say after that. Even over the deafening concussion of fireworks above, I can still hear the outboard motor rumble to life.
I glance over my shoulder as I row. We’re at least a hundred yards away from the periphery of vessels clustered in the lake’s center, and while the sky continues to explode brilliantly, the attention of all those closest to the Hawthorne estate is pinned there. Their eyes spark in the flames from the hillside as tiny bombs shake the sky overhead, yet they’re blind to what’s right in front of them: Abby white-knuckling the bench in the fore of the tiny skiff, and me, paddling furiously. So I’m the only one who sees the fear climb back into my daughter’s face, and as her mouth twists into a silent O, the taste of freedom sours in my mouth.
Should I tell her to lie down in the bottom of the boat? The nose of Daniel’s boat is pointed directly at us now. We’ll splinter to pieces if he doesn’t slow, and I already know he’s never going to do that.
Should she jump? Should we both? No, he’ll see it if we do, and he’ll just angle his motor’s blades to chop over our bobbing heads.
“See that?” I yell at her, and point at the red-and-blue beams of the police vessels bobbing in the lake. Silver and gold spirals rise in the air, illuminating her way. “You have to swim there.”
“No—”
“You’re safer in the water!” You’re safer away from me.
“No! Mommy, no—!”
But she is. Same way I’d have been safer far, far away from my mother . . . though she’d never cared enough to say so.
I do care . . . which is why I have to remind myself that Abby is a great swimmer before I tilt the skiff and bump her shoulder at the same time. I dump my daughter into the churning lake, and by the time she surfaces I’m well out of reach. I have to tell myself I am not turning my back on her. I am, instead, pushing her toward the light.
I’ve angled a hard right to draw Daniel’s speeding boat away from Abby, but I’m afraid it’s not enough . . . and equally afraid that I’ll give in to impulse and reach back and grab her just to hold her close one last time. So I reverse instead . . . and head back to the estate.
Daniel doesn’t realize it. The bow of his boat is riding high, and while the water reflects the colored whorls trimming the night sky, the landscape goes inky in between blasts. I square up and stop rowing, breath caught in a time lapse between my mouth and chest as Daniel bears down on me. He’s crouched over the captain’s chair, holding fast to the mahogany steering wheel. The boat is old, yes, but it’s solid birch and huge compared to the skiff I’ve stolen. We are like a bull and matador out here, though I don’t have or need a cape. Daniel only sees red when he looks at me.
The force of the crash reverberates through the waves.
I try to time my jump, but it’s nothing like in the movies. I am exhausted, and the fact that I gain any air at all is due to the force with which Daniel slams into the rowboat’s hull. My spine jars along with the resounding crack of wood, and for a moment, as I sail, I think I see him too, a backlit starfish suspended in the night air. Then I disappear into the black lake.
I try to stay down. I need the weight of water between me and the flying debris, but my life jacket’s tug is insistent, and sure enough, the blunt slap of something large cannonballs off my thigh. The force pushes me lower, and I swallow water going down.
There is no silence or reprieve beneath the waves. Light and explosives drum overhead in a climactic fin
ale—it’s so loud now I can’t even be sure anyone noted the crash—and I breach a surface choppy with waves, gasping beneath a sparking sky.
My wooden dinghy is gone. Bits of it float and bump me, but I push them away and look for bigger shadows. I find them in the ripped hull of Daniel’s vintage boat. It seems to be in two large pieces now, both tilted on end like swizzle sticks, and each taking on water fast.
Treading water and spinning about myself, I scan for movement. The lake is night-numbed and cold from the mountains, the frigidness magnified deeper by my feet. The rocking waves are oiled with spilled gasoline. It sits sharp in my nose, and I spit and hope the police vessels, or anyone, will take notice and head our way. At least Abby was far away at impact. I imagine her swimming for the nearest boat or dock, and pray—please God—that she’s already there.
Glancing down, I consider removing my life jacket, but the bright orange color and reflective strips are all that make me visible to approaching crafts, and once the fireworks stop, the lake will go dark. Meanwhile, there’s an island a few hundred yards away. Kicking hard, I stretch for it with my burned wrists. Despite my body’s aching protest, my heart gives an approving thump. I am still alive, I think, just as the fingers close around my left ankle.
Daniel rips at me with his bare hands. He doesn’t let go when I kick or when he’s forced to surface, closer than I think. He pops up during a series of overhead flashes, and his image burns like a negative against the throbbing sky. Then he’s gone, back under again and dragging me with him.
Something strikes me in the back of the head, and I flail for it, for anything to keep me above the bouncing waves. Yet Daniel coils about me, determined, and I feel a sharp pain in my right thigh, and realize, he’s fucking biting me.
Swerve Page 24