by Gwen Florio
A hand clapped across her mouth; another grabbed her wrist and jerked her farther in. A voice hissed into her ear.
“Not a fucking word.”
Lola tried to scream anyway.
Only a whimper escaped. Her captor yanked her against him, his arm like an iron bar across her chest. She kicked against his shins and stomped at his feet. He wrapped one of his legs around hers. Lola realized he’d wedged himself into the claustrophobic space, the walls holding him upright no matter how she struggled. She had no hope of knocking him off balance, of staggering free into the main canyon where the guide and the girls and the other tourists ambled, ignorant of her desperate struggle. She bit at the wide hand over her mouth. His fingers smashed her lips against her teeth. She tasted her own blood. Her heart slammed against her ribs, so hard that she thought her captor must feel it.
“Listen to me. Are you listening?” The voice spectral, unrecognizable.
Lola tried a yes, and a few other words besides. The hand clenched still tighter over her mouth. She settled for a ghost of a nod. She wrenched her head against his grip, trying for the slightest glimpse of his face. Look first at the eyes, Charlie always told her. The color, the shape. Too many bad actors got away because their petrified victims couldn’t provide a decent description. He didn’t want Lola ever to find herself in that position. She would laugh at him when he said such things. Now his words rang in her head. But she couldn’t move. The man’s grip was too strong.
Her mind flashed on the possibilities. Did this person want to rob her? Rape her? With people only a few yards away? She’d heard of such things, women pulled into stairwells, doorways, their disbelief that something could happen in so public a place working to an assailant’s advantage.
Her terror expanded beyond the personal with the man’s next words. “You don’t belong here. You and your man and your white child. The spider? Just a warning. It will get worse. Not just for you and yours, but for everyone. You think you know about bombs. Not firsthand, you don’t. Get out before you learn.”
Lola’s brain seemed cleaved in two, one side all silent screaming panic, the other ticking off things to remember. He knew about the tarantula. It hadn’t just wandered into the girls’ room by accident. He’d been in the house.
Lola moved her head a millimeter.
“Tell anyone, especially that cop husband of yours, and your little girl … You understand?”
Lola stiffened. Anger shouldered fear aside. Anger, and a kind of despair. The man in Wyoming who’d wanted to hurt her had endangered Margaret, too. She’d sworn to Charlie—and, more important, to herself—that she’d never risk her child’s safety again. And now this asshole was putting her back in that place.
If you touch her, I will kill you, she said into his hand. No sound emerged.
He seemed to be waiting for assent. Lola granted him another head-twitch.
“Now go. Get out of Arizona.”
The hand gone from her mouth. A sharp shove to her back.
She stumbled into a shaft of sunlight. Fell to her hands and knees in the powdery sand. Her head spun. With freedom, fear returned, the knowledge of what could have been—her neck snapped, her breath choked off, the divide between life and death a matter of moments—coursing through her body in shuddering waves.
A voice wound its way around the canyon’s walls and found her.
“Mom?”
“Oh, no,” Lola whispered. He was still in there, and the girls were coming close. She pushed herself to her feet. Wiped her hand across her mouth. It came away streaked with red. She licked swollen lips, ran shaking hands through her hair, dusted the sand from her knees. Staggered toward the sound of her daughter’s voice.
“Margaret, wait.” The words came out in a croak.
Margaret and Juliana rounded the corner at a trot, the guide following at a sensible walk. “Thought we’d lost you,” he called. “You don’t want to go back that way. It’s full of rattlesnakes. And a little ways in, it drops off about twenty feet.”
Lola ranked rattlesnakes with tarantulas, but at the moment thought she might have welcomed an honest jab from a creature simply trying to protect its space rather than a human who’d gone out of his way to threaten her. She spread her arms, trying to stop the girls with a hug, thankful for the canyon’s dim light. Margaret dodged away, suspicion in her eyes. “Mom? What’s wrong?”
Behind her, Juliana. “It stinks in here.”
Lola wondered if she’d peed herself in fear. She sniffed but could smell only the scent of the man’s hand across her face. She shifted her legs. Her pants were dry. “Caves smell funny,” she managed. “This place is more like a cave than a canyon.” She turned toward the blackness of the cleft. She cleared her throat, raised her voice, and spoke toward it. “I think the heat got to me for a minute. Nothing’s wrong. Not a single thing.”
TWENTY-FIVE
The shadows wavered before the opening in the rocks, blocking my escape. Teeth flashed in skull-like grins, bright in the cool dimness. My lungs constricted.
“Leave me alone.” I squeezed out more words. “There’s no killing this time. You saw it. I just tried to scare her. She’s fine.”
As soon as I’d heard about the trip to Antelope Canyon, I made my plan. I had to drive like hell to get there ahead of them, scared to death she’d recognize my car when I passed them on the road. I tipped the guide extra to let me in without a tour. “I’ll be a while,” I told him. Then added another couple of bills.
Even then, it almost didn’t happen. But she made the mistake of wandering away from everyone else.
They say criminals get a taste for it, the power they have over their victims. That the tangible fear, the begging, brings on a rush, one that makes it easier the next time, seduces you into upping the ante. Maybe that first time, you just give someone a scare. Hurt them a little the next, more still the time after that. Until finally you find yourself with your hands around someone’s neck, a wild surge within as the writhing beneath you stops.
Maybe.
I don’t see it. When I grabbed her and pulled her into that crevice, she trembled so hard in my grip that I thought she’d shake right out of it. I had to bite my tongue to keep from apologizing to her. And the things I did say, about her child. If someone had threatened Juliana that way, I’d have killed him. I could feel the same impulse in her, the way the trembling stopped and her body tensed at my words. Her jaw clenched against my hand covering her mouth.
“Forgive me,” I wanted to say as I shoved her back into the main part of the canyon. Then I fell to my knees in the sandy soil and threw up.
Juliana’s voice reached me a few moments later. “It stinks in here.”
Now they’ll find me, I thought. Which, to be honest, would have been a relief. I waited for the woman to denounce me, for the guide to call the police. In jail, I’d be safe. Nobody could make me do anything. Maybe all this craziness would fizzle out. No more killings.
Then, the guide. “That’s funny. These look like coyote tracks. Two pairs. Let’s get out of here.” I’d always loved the fact that only Navajo guides staffed our sacred places. Now I could have used a white guide who didn’t share our belief about Coyote.
Somehow, Shizhé’é and the truck driver had gotten behind me. I heard them back there, deeper in the rocks, chortling and jostling for position, anticipating my humiliation, so excited that they loosed their hold on my lungs. I sucked in oxygen, the first full breaths I’d taken in too long.
Then the voices outside faded. Shizhé’é and the truck driver gabbled their disappointment. I fled up the ladder, gaining strength with every step away from them, sprinted to my car, and drove home as fast as that junk heap would take me. Because just in case this wasn’t enough to scare her off, there was one more thing I had to do.
TWENTY-SIX
“Too fast, Mom. Mom!”
“And too hot, Auntie Lola.”
The girls’ voices glanced off Lola’s consciousness and slid away. She gripped the steering wheel tighter in sweating hands, stomped the accelerator, and watched the needle quiver past ninety, ninety-five, frantic to gain distance. She swerved around an elephantine RV, cutting back into her lane in time to miss an oncoming pickup by inches. Horns blared. Copper dust filled the cab. Lola sucked it in, grateful for the grit on her tongue, for the heat that blazed against her skin, for any sensation that reminded her she was alive and safe, free of the harrowing moments in the canyon.
“Please, Mom?”
The tearful words pinged somewhere deep within her brain. Margaret had inherited her mother’s imperious and brusque manner. She was a child who employed demands instead of requests, one who would eyeball a dish of ice cream as it liquefied on the counter, refusing to ask for it, waiting for someone to bestow it upon her. She’d mastered thank you early, but please was a work in progress. As for tears, Lola had seen her child’s chubby hand red and swollen with a bee sting, her bare foot sliced open by broken glass, her whole body bruised by a fall from Spot, without releasing the moisture that glistened in her eyes. Before the moment’s import fully hit, Margaret screamed, “Please!”
Lola worked clutch and brake so abruptly that the truck skidded across the road and spun back before lurching to a stop on the shoulder. A final mushroom cloud of dust rose, cloaking the passing vehicles. One of them backfired. Lola jumped. A glimpse in the rearview mirror of the two staring faces in the back seat convinced her not to turn around and face the girls. Terror fled, or at least receded. Shame flooded the space it had occupied. She fought for words to explain her inexcusable behavior.
“The sun.” Then why hadn’t she simply turned on the air-conditioning? “Something spooked me,” she wanted to say. But she’d already frightened the girls badly enough. She hawked up a gob of dust and spat through the window, rolled up the windows, and belatedly turned on the air. She reached for one of the gallon bottles of water, unscrewed the cap, drank directly from it, and ordered her voice to behave.
“The truck. I think there’s something wrong with the wiring. I couldn’t work the windows, couldn’t make it slow down. Thank God I finally got it stopped. I’m so sorry I scared you. I was scared, too. Are you all right?”
She finally turned, but looked only at Juliana, knowing that if she met Margaret’s eyes, they would radiate a single message, a word Margaret had learned while still a toddler: Bullshit.
Juliana made a motion that could have been a nod. The girl’s front teeth caught her lower lip. Doubt shone through the red dust filming her brown skin. “My dad’s truck is brand new. How could something be wrong with it?”
Lola threw some praise her way. “That’s a very smart question, Juliana. We’ll let your dad know about it as soon he comes home tonight. And I’m going to drive slowly the rest of the way home.” Give them a task, she told herself. Make them allies. And then distract them with the thought of something enjoyable.
“I want you girls to pay very, very close attention to the sound the engine makes. Your ears are younger and sharper than mine. The air-conditioning seems to be working again, but if you hear the engine rev the least little bit, I want you to holler and let me know. Okay? When we get to town, I’ll stop at the gas station and ask someone to look at it while we get ice cream.” And the minute I’m back in cell range, I’ll call 911.
The man’s voice echoed in her ears: Tell anyone, especially that cop husband of yours, and your little girl … You understand? Lola understood. She should tell Charlie. But Charlie would insist upon action. He’d think he could keep them safe. Lola couldn’t afford to take a chance he’d be wrong.
“Ice cream would be nice,” Juliana allowed. Lola caught the movement of Margaret’s head signaling grudging and belated assent. She gave silent thanks to the Creator she wasn’t sure she believed in, adding an apology for the string of lies she’d just uttered. At least her next words, she thought, would be the truth.
“Just think how happy Bub will be to see us when we get home.”
Margaret’s nod became more emphatic.
Lola kept her promise, driving at barely more than a crawl, hoping the girls didn’t notice how often she scanned the rearview mirror for any signs that the attacker they didn’t know about might have pursued them. And she lightly goosed the engine a couple of times, just to give the girls something to do, tapping the brakes when they yelled a warning, issuing fulsome reassurances that whatever had ailed the truck seemed to have been only a momentary problem. Her efforts at soothing them had the benefit of easing her own pulsing tension, so that when they arrived home, hands sticky from dripping ice-cream cones, she was just as dumbfounded as the girls to find that Bub was gone.
Lola paced the kitchen, oblivious to the efforts of everyone in the household to calm her.
Charlie followed close behind, the flat of his hand at her back as though to steady her. She twisted away. The girls pored over a map of the reservation, drawing X’s over sites they thought might appeal to a dog. “Anywhere with water,” Juliana said knowledgeably. Margaret scowled at the map, searching for nonexistent bits of blue. “That’s hardly anywhere at all.” Thomas’s car coughed in the distance. He’d volunteered to drive the local roads. Edgar put a hand over his free ear and spoke into his telephone. “Border collie. Three legs. Can’t miss him.” And Naomi offered a tall glass of her special lemonade. Lola waved it away with a chopping motion.
“I want to stay clear-headed.”
Naomi cut her eyes toward Edgar. Lola rolled her own in response. How was it possible that Edgar remained oblivious to his wife’s drinking? Or, at the very least, that Naomi believed him oblivious? Edgar said a few more words into the phone, clicked it off, and turned to them. “I’ve called all of the neighbors, at least the ones who have reception.” Lola knew that wouldn’t be many. Cellphone reception was a joke on most of the vast and empty reservation, while landlines, quickly becoming a thing of the past in other parts of the country, had never been installed at all in many parts of the Navajo Nation.
“Nobody’s seen him,” said Edgar. “Not alive and not—”
Lola flung up her hands to stop the words he’d been about to utter. She couldn’t bear even the brief thought of Bub’s limp carcass beside the road, a victim of one of the trucks from the mine, whose relentless stream of traffic had barely slowed despite the bombing.
“I know.” Edgar acknowledged her fear. “But it’s a possibility we have to consider. Along with coyotes, rattlesnakes, things like that.”
“We have those in Montana, too,” Lola reminded him. “As well as plenty of trucks. And somehow he’s managed to keep himself from getting killed. I never should have left him alone.”
Edgar’s face telegraphed what he knew better than to say. He’s just a dog.
Lola stopped pacing, braced her hands against the counter, and addressed his unspoken logic. “You have to understand. He’s more than just a pet. I owe him—” Her voice caught. Bub had twice saved her life, once by attacking a man who’d tried to kill her, and again by leading Charlie to a trailer where she’d been held at gunpoint. She’d been pregnant with Margaret then, even though she hadn’t known it, so Bub in fact had saved both of them. And in Wyoming, the man who’d threatened Lola had nearly killed Bub. The dog had lost his leg as a result of the first incident. The second had made him even more fiercely protective of her, a feeling the third incident did nothing to dispel. It was a feeling Lola returned with equal intensity.
“You owe him what?”
Everything, Lola wanted to say. But she knew he wouldn’t understand. Edgar didn’t wait for her answer. “He probably just ran off.”
“Maybe. If someone came home and left the door open, he might have tried to find us … ” Lola began. But even as Edgar began to shake his head, she ad
ded, “No. He would never do that. He’d wait forever, right where I left him. There’s only one way we’re going to find him.”
Naomi lifted the glass she’d prepared for Lola and drank deep. “And what’s that?”
“When we find the person who took him.”
Lola stared directly into Edgar’s eyes as she said it, an act of impermissible rudeness. Maybe he was just being polite when he looked away, but she didn’t think so.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“I don’t believe this. First the spider. Now the dog. It’s obvious you think Eddie had something to do with this. Is there no end to the evil you’ll accuse my family of?”
Charlie’s fury was no less fearsome for being of necessity sotto voce. They sat upright in bed, an acre or so of sheets between them. Even in the gentle glow of the bedside lamp, she could see the muscles in his face stretched taut, the skin whitening around his lips.
“I didn’t accuse anybody of anything. Jesus, Charlie. You say you want me to be a badass reporter, but only if you approve. You don’t want me questioning anything that makes you uncomfortable.“
“You looked right at my brother. You might as well have pointed your finger at him. In the middle of this bombing mess, the man came home from work to help you. Just like with the spider.”
“Hush.” Lola glanced at the wall shared with the girls’ room. Margaret, her daughter who never cried, who even in the midst of Lola’s wild drive earlier had only hiccupped a brief sob, had wept for nearly an hour before falling into an exhausted sleep, her body convulsing against Lola’s, heedless of her mother’s whispered reassurances. “We’ll find him, Margaret. We won’t leave this place until we do. We will not go home without him. I promise you.”
Below her own words lurked those of the man in the canyon. Get out. But they couldn’t leave now. Dread pressed tight against her chest. “I promise,” she managed again.