Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors

by Livia Llewellyn

  You stare at the silhouette of his head, dark against the dirty brilliance of the window shield. One callused hand rests on the steering wheel, one hand on your mother’s shoulder. His fingers play with the gold hoop at her ear, visible under the short pixie cut of grey-brown hair. She turns to him, her cheek rising as she smiles. They remind you of how you and Jamie must look together: siblings, alike and in love, always together. Father and you used to look like that. Now you and he look different. You clench your jaw, look away, look down.

  “It’s not even noon, we should be able to make it to Lake Mills by this afternoon—”

  Your mother interrupts him. “That far? We’ll never make it to Windy Arm by then, it’s too far.” So that’s your destination. You’ve been there before, you know how much she loves the lake, the floating, abandoned logs, the placid humming of birds.

  “Not this time, remember? We’re taking Hot Springs Road over to the logging roads. Tomorrow we’ll start out early, and we should be there by sundown.”

  “But there’s nothing—wait, isn’t Hot Springs closed? Or parts of it? I thought we were going down Hurricane Ridge.” Your mother looks confused. Evidently, they didn’t make all the vacation plans together. Interesting.

  “It’s still drivable, and there won’t be any traffic—that’s the point. To get away from everyone. Don’t worry.”

  “Aren’t we going back home?” Jaime asks. “Where are we going?”

  “We’re not going all the way to the end of Hot Springs, anyway,” Father continues over Jamie. “I told you we’re taking the logging roads, they go deeper into the mountains. We already mapped this all out, last week.”

  “We didn’t discuss this.” Your mother has put on her “we need to speak in private” voice.

  “Take a look at the map. June has it,” Father says.

  “I don’t need to look at the map, I know where we planned on going. I mean, this is ridiculous—where in heaven’s name do you think you’re taking us to?”

  “I said we’re going all the way.” His hand slides away from her shoulder, back to the wheel.

  “All the way to where?”

  “All the way to the end.”

  The map Father gave you to hold is an ordinary one, a rectangular sheaf of thick paper that unfolds into a table-sized version of your state. Jamie scoots closer to you as you struggle with the folds, his free hand resting light on your bare thigh, just below your shorts. His hands are large and gentle, like the paws of a young German Shepherd. You move your forehead close, until your bangs mingle with his, and together you stare down at the state you were born in, and all its familiar nooks and crevices. In the upper corner is your small city—you trace your route across the water and up the right-hand side of the peninsula to Port Angeles, then down. The park and mountains are a blank green mass, and there are no roads to be seen.

  You lift the edge of the map that rests on your legs, and dark markings well up from the other side. “Turn it over to the other side,” you say.

  “Just a minute.” He holds his side tight, so you lift your edge up as you lower your head, peering. The other side of the paper is the enlarged, fang-shaped expanse of the Olympic Mountain Range. Small lines, yellow and pink and dotted and straight, fan around and around an ocean devoid of the symbols of cartography, where even the logging roads have not thrust themselves into. You can see where your father has circled small points throughout various squares, connecting each circle with steady blue dashes that form a line. Underneath his lines, you see the lavender ink of your mother’s hand, a curving line that follows Whiskey Road to its end just before Windy Arm. Over all those lines, though, over all those imagined journeys, someone has drawn another road, another way to the interior of the park. It crisscrosses back and forth, overlapping the forests like a net until it ends at the edges of a perfect circle—several perfect circles, in fact, one inside another inside another, like a three-lane road. Like a cage. The circles encloses nothing—nothing you can see on the map, anyway, because nothing is in the center except mountains and snow, nothing the mapmakers thought worth drawing, nothing they could see. The circles enclose only a single word:

  Χάος

  Someone has printed it in the naked center of the brown-inked circles, across the mountains you’ve only ever seen as if in a dream, as smoky grey ridges floating far above the neat rooftops of your little neighborhood, hundreds of miles away. Letters of brown, dark brown like dried-up scratches of blood—not Father’s handwriting, and not your mother’s.

  “Do you see that?” you ask Jamie. “Did you write that?”

  “Write what?” He’s still on the other side of the state. He doesn’t see anything. He doesn’t care.

  You brush a fingertip onto the word. It feels warm, and a bit ridged. “Help me,” you whisper to it, even though you’re not sure to who or what you’re speaking, or why. The words come out of your mouth without thought. They are the same words you whisper at night, when Father presses against you, whispering his own indecipherable litany into your ears. Your finger presses down harder against the paper, until it feels you’ll punch a hole all the way through the mountains. “Save me. Take me away. Take it all away.”

  The word squirms.

  Goosebumps cascade across your skin, a brush fire of premonition. As you lower your edge of the map, Jamie’s fingers clench down onto your thigh. Perhaps he mistakes the prickling heat of your skin for something else. You don’t dissuade him. Under the thick protection of the paper, hidden from your parents’ eyes, your fingers weave through his, soaking up his heat and sweat; and your legs press together, sticking in the roaring heat of engine and sun-soaked wind. Your hand travels onto his thigh, resting at the edge of his shorts where the whorls of your fingertips glide across golden strands of hair, until you feel the start, the beginning of him, silky soft, and begin to rub back and forth, gently. His cock twitches, stiffens, and his breath warms your shoulder in deep bursts, quickening. You know what he loves.

  “Do you see where we’re headed to?” Father asks.

  Hidden and unseen, Jamie’s hand returns the favor, traveling up your leg. You feel the center of yourself unclench, just a little. Just enough. Raising the map again, you peek at the word. After all these years and so many silent pleas, has something finally heard? Face flush with shock, you bite your lower lip so as not to smile. You stare out the window, eyes hidden behind sticky sunglasses, watching the decayed ends of Port Townsend dribble away into the trees, watching the woods rise up to meet the road, the prickly skin of an ancient beast, slumbering and so very, very ready to awaken.

  You want to believe, but you shouldn’t. Belief is an empty promise. Belief just leads back to the void. You shouldn’t want to believe, but you will. This time, just this once, you will.

  “Yes,” you say. “Yes, I do.”

  The beginning of a journey is always deception. The beginning always appears beautiful, as a mirage. Once you fold the map away, there’s laughter and music, jokes and gentle pinches, and the heady anticipation of traveling someplace new, all of you together, a family like any other family in the world. Sunlight drenches the windows and you laugh at the sight—so many prisms and prickles of color, glitter-balling the camper’s dull brown interior into a jewelry box. After half an hour, your mother unbuckles her seat belt and makes her way across the porta-potty, wedged in between the small refrigerator and the tiny bench with its fake leather cushions that hide the bulk of the food.

  “Something to eat—a snack? We had lunch so early.” Your mother raises the folding table up, fixing the single leg to the camper’s linoleum floor, then pulls sandwiches and small boxes of juice from the fridge, passing them up to Father. She’s a good wife, attentive. Jamie drinks a Coke, wiping beads of sweat from its bright red sides onto his t-shirt. You pick at your bread, rolling it into hard balls before popping them into your mouth. The camper is traveling at a slight incline, and the right side of the highway peels away, revealing slopin
g hills that form the eastern edge of the Peninsula. You think of the ferry, of all that cool, wide ocean, waters without end, in which all things are hidden, in which all things can be contained.

  “Can we stop?” You point to a small grocery stand and gas station coming up ahead to the right, overlooking a rest stop and lookout point.

  Your mother points to the porta-potty. “You need to go?”

  “No.” You feel yourself recoil. “No, I just—I just thought we could stop for a while. I’m getting a little queasy.” It’s true, you get carsick, sometimes. You think of the curved slope beyond the rest stop, and how easy it’d be to slip over the rail guard as you pretend to be sick. You think of the water, so close you can almost see it. “While we can.”

  Your father doesn’t slow the camper. “Sorry, June-Bug. We need to keep going.”

  You nod your head. “Sure. No problem.” You think about what you’ve just said, and decide that it’s not a lie. Running away would mean you didn’t really believe that the word moved, that something out there in the mountains is weaving its way to you, some beautiful, dangerous god coming to save the queen. You want to stay. Just this once, you want to see your miracle.

  Outside, 101 splits off, part of it flying off and up the coast to Neah Bay as the newly-formed 112. Now the landscape morphs, too, sloughing off yet more buildings and houses. A certain raw, ugly quality descends all around. The highway curves away, and with it, the store, the land. You’re going in a different direction now. No use to think of ferries and guard rails anymore.

  Jamie pulls out a deck of cards. They fan out and snap back into themselves as he shuffles them again and again. Your mother leans back against the small bench, watching him deal the cards. Go Fish—their favorite game. You’ve never liked games. You don’t believe in luck or chance. You believe in fate.

  Reaching to the floor, you pull a fat book out of your backpack, and turn the pages in an absentminded haze, staring at nothing as words and illustrations flow past. Ignore her, you say, ignore the two small feet, bare and crowned with nails painted a pretty coral, that appear between you and Jaime, and nestle in cozy repose at his thigh. You press yourself against the edge of the seat, forehead flat against the window, legs clamped tight, ignoring the low hum of their voices calling out the cards. It’s not as if you hate your mother—you have long talks with her sometimes, she’s a good listener. And she’s never touched you, never like that. Sometimes, she even comes to your defense, when you can’t—just can’t do it anymore, when you’re tired or sick or just need a break, just need an evening to yourself, to sit in your pink-ruffled bedroom and pretend you’re a normal girl in a normal world. Still, though. She’s your mother, not your friend, and Jamie is her favorite, just as you are Father’s favorite. Sometimes you wonder if Jamie might love her more than you. That would kill you. It would be like, she’s rejecting one half of you for the other, without any real reason why.

  “Where did you get the map?” Why did you ask her that? You curse yourself silently. Always too curious, always wanting to know everything, and more. Like father, like daughter.

  Your mother looks up from her cards, mouth pursed. Clearly she doesn’t like being reminded of the map, and doesn’t want to answer—or she’s going to answer, but she’s buying a bit of time. It’s her little not-so-secret trick, her way of rebelling. Jamie does the same. Like mother, like son.

  “It’s just a regular map,” she finally says, adjusting her hand as she speaks. “I don’t know where your father got it. Maybe the car dealership? Or the 76 station on Bridgeport.” She lays down a card, as you wait for the shoe to drop. Your mother is often more predictable than she’d care to admit.

  “Why do you want to know?” she asks.

  “Never mind.”

  Your mother sighs. “You know I hate it when you say that. Why did you ask?”

  Jamie looks up from his cards. “She wants to know who drew the third map and the circle on it.”

  “The third what?”

  “Jamie.” Your voice is calm, but the biting pinch of your fingers at his thigh tells him what he needs to know. “Nothing, I meant nothing,” Jamie says, but it’s too late, he’s said too much.

  “Did you draw on the map?” Your mother’s voice is hushed, conspiratorial. Together, your heads lean toward each other, voices dropping so that Father won’t hear.

  “No, I swear. I thought someone had drawn on it. That’s all. That Father drew over it, where we were going to go, and someone else drew another map over those two.”

  “Juney, there’s no third map—there’s no second map. What are you talking about?”

  “I—”

  Now you’re the one who’s said too much. She places her cards on the table, and holds out one hand. The diamond on her wedding ring catches the light, hurling tiny rainbow dots across your face. “Let me see it.” Her voice is low. You realize she’s not just angry but afraid, and it unsettles you. Your mother is often cautious, but never afraid.

  “I didn’t write on it, I swear.”

  “I hope to God you didn’t. He’ll kill you—”

  “What’s going on back there?” Father, up in the driver’s seat.

  “Nothing, honey. We’re playing Go Fish.” She motions for the map. You pull it out from underneath your jacket, and hand it over. Your mother opens it up, spreading it across the table. Cards flutter to the floor. She stares down, hands aloft as if physically shaping her question with the uplift of her palms. From where you sit, you can see what she sees, upside down. You look up at the front of the camper. Father’s sea-green eyes stare back from the mirror, watching.

  “Sonavubitch,” she whispers.

  “What do you see?” I don’t want to know, but I have to know. What map does she see?

  “June.” She throws up her hands, as if exasperated. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I see my map, which obviously your Father can’t see because he obviously is ignoring everything we’ve been planning for the last two months, but there is no second or third set of drawings here.”

  “How can you not see that?” You know you see the lines, drawn over her directions and Father’s. You know you see the word in the circular void. It’s right there, on the paper, right in front of her. And, you know you don’t want her to see, you want it to be your destination, the secret place only you can travel to. But you place a trembling finger onto the middle of the circle, just below the word. You have to confirm it, that your map is unseen, safe. “All these new roads, leading to this circle in the middle, leading to this word—”

  Your mother raises her hand, and your voice trails away. She stares down, her brow furrowing as if studying for a test. You want to believe that the small tics and movements of her lips, her eyelids, are the tiny cracks of the truth, seeping up from the paper and through her skin. Her fingers move just above the lines, and then away, as if deflected from the void in the middle. She moves her fingers again, her eyes following as she touches the paper. Again, deflection, and confusion drawing lazy strokes across her face, as her fingers slide somewhere north. Relief flares inside you, prickly cold, followed by hot triumph. She does not see your map. She sees the route and destination only meant for her.

  “June, honey.” She leans back, thrusting the map toward as if anxious to be rid of it. “It’s just coffee stains. It’s a stain from the bottom of a coffee cup. See how it’s shaped? Probably from your father’s thermos.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t see it until now.”

  “All that fuss for nothing. What were you talking about, anyway—what, did you think it was some mysterious, magical treasure map?” She laughs in that light, infectious tone you loathe so much—although, the way she rubs at the small blue vein in her right temple reveals a hidden side to her mood. “Come on, now. You’re not five anymore, you’re too old for this.”

  “Ah,” you say, cheeks burning with sudden, slow anger. She’s done this before, playing games with you. Long ago, l
ike when she’d hide drawings you’d made and replace them with white paper, only to slide them out of nowhere at the last minute, when you’d worked yourself into an ecstatic frenzy of conspiracies about intervening angels or gods erasing what you’d drawn. You’d forgotten about that part of her. You’d forgotten about that part of yourself.

  “It just looked like,” you grasp for an explanation, “it just looked like you’d drawn your own map of our vacation, and Father drew another, and the circles looked—I mean, look….” The explanation fades.

  “Sweetie, calm down.” Your mother tousles your hair, cropped like hers. She appears bemused now, with only a touch of concern. She doesn’t believe in miracles or the divine, and sometimes she thinks you’re a bit slow. “Honestly. You read too much into everything, and you get so overexcited. That’s your father’s fault, not yours. All those damn books he gives you—”

  “I’m sorry,” you stutter. “It was stupid, I know—it’s so bright in here. The sun.”

  “Are you feeling all right?” She places a cool palm against your forehead. She does love you, as best she can, in her own way. “Maybe we should have stopped. Do you want some water? Let me get you some water.”

  “Don’t tell Father,” you say, touching her arm with more than a little urgency. She pats your hand, then squeezes it.

  “Of course.” A flicker of fear crosses her face again. “Absolutely not.”

  As your mother busies herself in the fridge with the tiny ice-cube tray, you fold the map back up, turning it around as you collapse it into itself. Your hand brushes the surface, casually, and you close your eyes. The paper is smooth to your touch. It’s just our secret, the circle, you tell yourself. It’s between us, between me and the void. That’s what you call it: the void, that black, all-enveloping place you go to whenever Father appears in your doorway, the place where you don’t have to think or remember or be. After all these years of traveling to it, perhaps now it is coming to you.