Don't Turn Around

by Jessica Barry

  Secretly, she hoped she’d have tons of trick-or-treaters this year. She’d even bought a pumpkin and placed it on the doorstep, and she’d make sure to keep the lights on to let everyone know she was home. She wanted to open the door and find a whole gaggle of them waiting, plastic pumpkin pails outstretched, stiff-limbed and red-cheeked in their plush costumes, little unicorns and cowboys and fairy princesses and dinosaurs. She wanted to see the parents standing behind them, exhausted and sore-footed and already worrying about sugar highs and late bedtimes but delighted nonetheless, and she wanted to picture herself among them in a few years, her own little one dressed as a pea pod or a My Little Pony or whatever she wanted to be.

  She was pregnant again. She’d taken the test earlier that week, crouched on the cold floor of the master en suite, watching the two blue lines take shape. She’d booked a doctor’s appointment that day, and sure enough, the bloodwork had come back positive. “It’s early,” the doctor had said, “only a few weeks.” He had been her doctor for the past two years. He didn’t need to warn her about getting her hopes up.

  She tossed a bag of Snickers into the cart before thinking twice—too many kids with peanut allergies these days—and swapping it for a bag of 3 Musketeers. She bought a new mug to replace the one she’d broken the other day, and a few rolls of paper towels, and a tube of toothpaste. She steered the cart as if on autopilot: she knew the aisles by heart.

  She studiously avoided the baby section, but she’d forgotten about the dangerous no-man’s-land displays leading up to the checkout. The Christmas decorations were already out, and there was a bin full of plush toys next to the register. Most of them were a strange, mildly sinister version of Santa Claus, but there were reindeer, too, and polar bears wearing little striped scarves.

  It was the polar bear that got her in the end. She’d had a stuffed bear as a kid, brown with nubbly fur and black bead eyes, and she wanted her baby to have a bear, too. She grabbed one and tossed it onto the conveyor belt next to the paper towels. When she unpacked the bag at home, she held the little bear in her hand and stroked its soft white fur before tucking it away in a drawer in the spare room. The nursery room, as she secretly thought of it.

  She didn’t show it to Patrick when he got home from work. They were both holding their breath separately, tiptoeing around the tiny seed sprouting inside of her, worried that one move might suddenly change everything. Neither of them had so much as used the word “pregnant” yet for fear of jinxing it. Instead, they called it her “situation” or her “condition.” The stuffed bear was tempting fate. She knew that, and she knew that’s how Patrick would see it, too. So the bear stayed in the drawer.

  Ever since that video went viral, he’d barely had time to take a breath. He was excited about the pregnancy, of course—he cried when she told him—but his attention was being pulled in a million directions. Just last night, he flew to New York for an interview on the Today show. Normally, she would have minded him being away so much, but she was happy for him. The truth was, she didn’t feel like he was leaving her on her own. She had her baby with her. And she knew, deep in her bones, that this time her baby wasn’t going to leave her.

  Every morning, she would take the bear out of the drawer and hold it in her arms. She would imagine it nestled in the crook of her baby’s neck or held tight in her fat little fingers. (She had decided the baby was a girl. She hadn’t told Patrick that, either.) Her daughter would give the bear a name one day—something simple, like Snowy—and she would cry when it was lost and yelp with joy when Rebecca found it lodged underneath the sofa. She imagined rubbing a smudge of dirt out of its white fur before handing it to her daughter, and the little girl smiling up at her, her eyes the same cornflower blue as Patrick’s.

  After a few minutes of this, she would force herself to push the bear back in the drawer for the rest of the day. She had to mete out these moments of joy, in case they were stripped from her. They had been before. She told herself she was doing it to mitigate her own potential grief, as if grief were a river that could be dammed and contained and not a vast, wild, untamable ocean.

  But deep down, she knew that this time the baby wouldn’t be snatched from her like the others had been. This baby—her little girl—would be hers to keep.

  Outskirts of Yeso, New Mexico—130 Miles to Albuquerque

  “C’mon, baby,” Cait muttered. Rebecca watched the needle on the speedometer climb. Soon they were up to seventy. The truck kept pace behind them, the headlights filling the cabin with a bright, harsh light. It caught every nick and groove on the windshield, turning it milky and opaque.

  A sudden, sickening crunch of metal on metal. The truck made contact with their bumper, sending them fishtailing into the hard shoulder.

  “Fuck!” Cait jerked the wheel into the spin. The tires skidded, sending up a hail of dust before finding a grip on the pavement. The truck’s headlights dropped back. Cait floored it. The engine strained.

  Rebecca glanced in the mirror again. Nothing but the pickup’s haloed headlights, coming up again fast.

  Another jolt as the truck hit them. The Jeep groaned as the wheels shuddered off the rumble strip.

  Rebecca made a sound that was somewhere between a sob and a whimper. She scanned the horizon. Nothing but scrubland and the long flat ribbon of road and the vast black sky. No cars they could signal for help.

  There was no way out.

  Rebecca had known it as soon as the headlights appeared, though in the dark it was impossible to see its shape. Still, she’d known. It was the same pickup truck that had run them off the road a hundred miles back. And it had come back to claim her.

  She’d thought she had more time than this. She hadn’t thought the wheels would click into motion so soon. But looking back at the headlights bearing down on them, she couldn’t deny it any longer: her time was up.

  In that moment, she wished she could pray. She wished she could believe in something, anything, that would deliver them to safety.

  But she couldn’t. That’s why she was out here on this road. Because she knew there was no miracle waiting for her, no matter how hard she prayed.

  She imagined herself back in church, the smells of incense and wood polish, her mother kneeling next to her, her hands tightly clasped. Her mother had believed in miracles all the way through her illness, had bought into any quack theory she came across, filled the house with candles and crystals and tea that stank of sulfur and made her retch when she drank it. “I can feel it working!” she’d declare after each new cure, her eyes feverish and too big in her skull, but she didn’t feel better, not really, and even if she did, she didn’t get better. After she died, Rebecca’s father gathered all of it up and threw it in the garbage without a word.

  The truck nudged the bumper again. The crunch of glass as a taillight was punched out. The truck was toying with them. Taking its time. It was enjoying itself.

  She peered through the windshield, trying to catch a glimpse of the driver’s face. There was nothing but darkness beyond the glass.

  Two Months Earlier

  The message from her editor was short and to the point: “We have a problem. Call me.”

  Cait dialed the number she’d left, already sick with dread. The editor picked up on the first ring.

  “I’ve got some bad news.”

  Over the previous twenty-four hours, Patrick McRae’s speech had gone viral. It now had over three million views and counting. People were describing it as a “star-making turn” and heralding him as a hero. “Patrick McRae’s Powerful Response to the Me Too Era” was the headline in The Wall Street Journal, and Fox News pundits declared him a savior. “Finally,” they sang, “somebody is willing to stand up and talk some common sense.” Op-eds sprang up like dandelions: “Majority of Women Agree with McRae, Polls Show.” They didn’t need to add that the majority of men did, too. That was a given.

  Cait had watched the explosion with something akin to awe. All this over something she
’d written in twenty minutes for a website that mainly published articles about ten-step skincare routines? It was a national news story, the launch pad for a man’s entire political career, and she was still pouring dollar drafts during happy hour. There was a part of her that thought it was funny. The whole thing was absurd, really. Like something out of a farce.

  She knew from the tone of her editor’s voice, though, that she was about to lose her sense of humor.

  “We’ve been hacked.”

  “What do you mean?” She already knew what it meant.

  “They know your name, Cait. I’m so sorry.”

  And just like that, Cait’s world as she knew it came to an end.

  She shut down her Twitter and Instagram accounts immediately, but not soon enough that they weren’t already flooded with messages. Her Twitter feed was full of trolls telling her to drop dead, but somehow the Instagram comments cut her more deeply. Strangers posted comments on old vacation photos, calling her fat and ugly. “I can’t believe Jake Forsythe had sex with THIS,” one of them said. “He must have been blind drunk.” “No wonder she made up all of those LIES. How else would a dog like her get any attention?”

  She felt the same familiar emotions flood through her. Shame. Anger. Shame. Despair.

  There was already a 4chan subthread dedicated to her. 4chan/Caitlyn_Monaghan. She scrolled down to the comments, trying to conjure up some of the anger she’d felt the last time around, but seeing her name splashed across the page, all she felt was fear. Tens of thousands of strangers, baying for her blood. There were people asking where she lived, where she worked. “Let’s find this bitch and make her pay.”

  She knew then that this would be different from the first time around. The article she’d written was no longer just some stupid clickbait to be hate-read and forgotten. They knew who she was now, and they hated her more than ever.

  This was big-time. This was dangerous.

  Outskirts of Vaughn, New Mexico—128 Miles to Albuquerque

  Cait’s eyes were locked on the rearview mirror. The pickup was a few lengths behind them now, still close enough to pick up the glint of the Jeep’s rear end in the headlights. They needed to get some distance between them, fast.

  The fork in the road was getting closer. Cait’s mind whirred. If the driver was after them specifically—and she was sure now that he was—he might know the route she took to get to Albuquerque, in which case he would expect her to stay on 60 and head through the center of Vaughn. She remembered the place, a decent-size town, a couple of motels, a few gas stations.

  She might be able to pull into one of those gas stations and call for help, but if the guy in the pickup was carrying, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get inside quick enough to save them from getting shot. She flicked her eyes back to the mirror. He was dropping back, waiting to see what she would do.

  There might be side streets in Vaughn that she could hide down, though from what she could recall, the place was pretty sprawling, and flat, too, the buildings mainly single-story concrete boxes hugging tight to the ground. Hiding the Jeep would be a tall order, even in the middle of the night.

  She could drop south onto 285 or 54. She could head north on 54 toward Santa Rosa. She could stop and swing around and play a nasty game of chicken with him, use the Jeep’s steel frame as a weapon, catch him at his own game.

  She glanced over at Rebecca. No, she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t risk this woman’s life. Not when Cait knew that whoever was driving that truck was after her, and her alone. She’d thought she would be safe. They couldn’t trace the plates to her, and she’d been careful to check that no one was tailing her when she left Austin. But they had tracked her down just the same, and now they were hunting her like a dog.

  She had only one option. She had to make them disappear.

  “Do you trust me?”

  Rebecca looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you trust me?” Cait asked again, and this time Rebecca nodded, just once.

  Cait killed the lights and punched the gas. The road in front of them went black, just a faint outline in the dark that Cait had to squint to see. The taillights were out, too, but the brake lights would come on if she used them. Which meant she couldn’t use them.

  “What are you doing?”

  Cait’s eyes were locked on the mirror. He was dropping back a little farther. She’d confused him, at least for a second. Good.

  “Hold on.”

  She took the turn onto 54 hard, leaning into the curve without touching the brakes. Gravity pushed her against the door before the road straightened out, and she floored it.

  Just like that, he was gone.

  Two Months Earlier

  4chan/Caitlyn_Monaghan

  Anonymous: Love that the bitch is getting the attention she deserves. She is a national discgrace.

  Cucks_Suck: Patrick McRae should be President after calling her out for the trash she is.

  TruePatriot368: she should be in jail for trying to ruin an innocent man’s life. I swear to god one day that girl is going to pay for what she did, just like all the little lying bitchs should pay.

  Anonymous: I know where she lives. Maybe somebody should pay her a visit.

  Underneath was a screengrab with her home address.

  “No phones behind the bar.” Cait swallowed the bile that had risen in her throat and looked up to see Stacy scowling at her from the manager’s office. She raised a hand in apology and slipped her phone in her back pocket.

  Since her name had been leaked by the hackers, her life had gone berserk. She’d been hounded by the national media—The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time—and invited on the Today show and The View. She turned them all down, and when they kept calling, she changed her phone number. Her editor got back in touch to say that her piece had gotten another wave of traction, this one bigger. “Our server crashed, twice!” she had written, unable to hide her delight, though she had tossed in a half-hearted “Thinking of you” at the end.

  The editor asked if Cait would write another piece for the website, and she wasn’t alone. Editors who had ignored her emails from a few months back suddenly flooded into her inbox. They all feigned interest in the pitches she’d sent, but really, they wanted to know one thing: would she write a response to Patrick McRae, and could they publish it? Cait could imagine the ad revenue signs flashing in their eyes, like a cartoon dog’s at a slot machine. “No, thank you,” she typed out, over and over. “I’m focusing on other work.”

  The only people who didn’t want a piece of her were the Sisters of Service. “I think it might be good if you lay low for a couple weeks,” Lisa said to her. “It’s too dangerous to have you out in the lot right now.”

  Cait had begged her to reconsider, even though she had known deep down that Lisa was right: she was a liability. But her work with the Sisters of Service was the only thing of value she did in her life, and it felt in darker moments like the only thing keeping her tethered to reality. She didn’t know what she would do if she lost it. Eventually, Lisa took pity on her and gave her a desk job back at the office. “We could use your writing skills in our communications department,” she said, making it sound like a promotion rather than a banishment.

  And so, for a few days, the situation felt manageable. The calls stopped. Her work at Sisters of Service continued. She kept turning up to the bar and slinging beers, and when her shift finished, she went back to her apartment and locked the doors and felt a moment of something approaching calm, or maybe it was just exhaustion.

  But now all of that was gone. They knew where she lived. They could be at her apartment right now, breaking down the door and trashing the place. Or worse, slipping in unnoticed and hiding. They would wait until she went to sleep and then they’d slither out from under the bed and murder her. Or worse.

  “I need to go on break.” She didn’t wait for the other bartenders to answer, just pushed past them and ran through the staff door and o
ut the back entrance into the muggy night air. It was late October, but Austin was under the spell of an Indian summer, and temperatures had been in the nineties all week. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and sent a text to Alyssa: “Can I crash at your place tonight?”

  She smoked a cigarette while she waited for a response.

  “My sister’s in town so she’s already claimed the couch but you can bunk with me if you want? Are you okay????”

  Cait closed her eyes against the response. She saw herself arriving at Alyssa’s apartment after her shift, sweaty and tired and smelling of stale booze, and the two sisters looking at her with pitying eyes. She couldn’t face it. “Don’t worry, everything’s fine—but I’ll just stay at mine tonight. Have fun with your sister!”

  “Let me know if you change your mind! Drinks next week?”

  “Def xx”

  She shoved the phone back in her pocket and made her way back to the bar. Stacy was waiting for her, arms folded, mouth turned down into a deep frown. “You need to ask permission before you go on break. You can’t just leave the bar like that.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. It was kind of an emergency.”

  Stacy didn’t soften. “I don’t care if it was an actual emergency. You still need to ask permission. I know you think your shit doesn’t stink because you took in the most money last week, but there are a dozen girls who would kill to have your place behind that bar.” She reached up and tapped the brim of Cait’s Stetson hat. “Use that pretty little head of yours, will you?”

  Cait had to shove her hands in her pockets to keep from punching Stacy. It was moments like this when she wished the boss had never caught JB pleasuring himself in the manager’s office. He was a creep, sure, but a lazy one, and she’d take being managed by a lazy creep over being micromanaged by Stacy any day.