The Only Child

by Andrew Pyper

  She gets directions to the nearest pharmacy from the concierge and makes her way across Erzsébet Square, where the pathway has been lined with temporary wood kiosks forming an early Christmas bazaar. Students, tourists, and locals jostle Lily in the tight space. Along with the folk art and handmade jewelry, there are stands selling cakes, sausage sandwiches, and mulled cider. The smells make her stomach flip.

  She stops in the middle of the crowd, the events of the day forcing their way to the front of her mind. The doll in the corner of the cellar. The glimpse of silver teeth. A piece of a madman’s memoir left for her on the other side of the world from where she was only two days ago, pages with Look into the horses’ eyes handwritten on the back of their envelope.

  A meaningless direction to anyone but Lily. It returns to her mind the memory of being carried from the cabin on the back of a white animal, one that left tracks that the Native American hunter she visited in Anchorage guessed to belong to a horse. Only a coincidence on the face of it, but Lily feels she can make it more than that if she just looks harder, goes further. A connection that’s out there, waiting for her.

  You don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do you? her inner voice asks before answering its own question. You don’t have a fucking clue. And it’s going to get you killed.

  For the first time since leaving New York, the possibility that she’s leading herself to her own end strikes her. Up until now, she’s been in some form of self-delusion, a padded cell protecting her from the obvious. She’s seen this before in her practice. Sometimes proximity to a horrific act lends a sense of immunity. It’s why certain plane crash survivors take up skydiving, or war zone soldiers request additional tours of duty.

  But even now she can’t shake the idea that it’s not Michael who will hurt her. He has a plan for her. And if his plan was merely to destroy her, he would have done that already.

  There are many ways to die, her voice counters. Some come fast, some come in time.

  She’s here to find him. To follow the pull of her bones for once, her overlooked heart, to determine if he belongs to her by blood or not.

  And what if he does kill her, what would it mean?

  Tell me what the world would look like if you had never been born, Dr. Edmundston says, his voice coming to her from out of nowhere. Not his ghost, but one of his preferred lines of examination in client interviews she’d sat in on when she first arrived at the Kirby.

  Then Edmundston asks the question directly of her.

  Would anything be lost, Lily—anything at all—if you ceased to exist?

  It makes her think of the baby.

  She hadn’t really thought of him for a good while now, but today Jonathan is with her. His pink face, the tiny hands grasping the air, reaching for her on the other side of the incubator’s glass.

  The pregnancy was something she went through alone for a few reasons. The first was that she had few close friends she could call on to go with her to prenatal classes or fetch the ketchup potato chips she had nocturnal cravings for. But what isolated her even more was embarrassment: a grad student having an affair with her married professor becomes pregnant and decides to have the baby. The most transformative moment of her life could only be preserved from cliché if no one found out who the father was.

  “I can help,” the professor had said when she told him. “With money, I mean. To handle things.”

  “Handle things?”

  “I meant only—”

  “I don’t want any money.”

  He frowned. “Of course it’s your right, but I wonder how public you intend to make all this?”

  “It isn’t a question I’ve considered.”

  “No. Well. Could you? Consider it, that is. From my point of view?”

  He made it easy to walk away. It took this moment, however, for Lily to realize she’d never had much affection for the man, their entanglement built upon mutually satisfying manipulation more than attraction.

  The fact was she didn’t care about him. She was surprised to find that she wanted to have the baby as much as she’d been surprised to find herself pregnant in the first place. The whole thing made her happy in the most uncomplicated way. She presumed motherhood to be a series of obstacles one overcame in the name of duty or mindless biological imperative. For someone who saw emotions as thorny growths to be pruned, Lily’s feelings toward the life inside her arrived instantly, inarguably.

  On the day she learned she was carrying a boy she named him Jonathan after the father she’d never met.

  Even when her ob-gyn shared her concerns about the fetus’s progress, Lily’s usual pessimism was swept aside by breezy good spirits. If the baby was smaller than normal, well, so what? So was she.

  Once Jonathan was born the news was worse.

  A hole in his heart, the doctors told her. The valves so underdeveloped they couldn’t pump the blood fast enough, the tiny muscle swamped. If he were older, stronger, there were long-shot procedures they might have tried, but as it was there was nothing they could do.

  “Nothing they could do,” Lily would find herself repeating over the years that followed her child’s four days of life. She tried to wring some comfort out of it, prevent her grief from running away with itself by returning to the fact that his death was a foregone conclusion, with nobody to blame.

  A hole in his heart now a hole in hers.

  A trembling takes hold of Lily. She feels cold to the bone. Her fashionable leather jacket wasn’t made to fend off the frigid drizzle of an Eastern European autumn. One of the bazaar’s stands just ahead is selling bright red wool mittens and toques and she buys both. A hanging mirror reflects a queasy elf back at her.

  It also reveals a man.

  He is three stands behind her, studying sticks of maple candy in the offhand way of someone pretending interest. It’s not Michael, it’s not anyone she’s seen before. A cleft chin, thin lips, wearing a black parka. It’s not his looks but the absence of expression that fills her with fear. An aura of cruelty.

  He glances her way, catches himself in the mirror—and Lily looking back at him—grabs three candy sticks, and fishes in his pocket to pay for them.

  Lily rejoins the bazaar’s stream of people, crosses the square, and runs against the light at the street on the far side. A delivery truck skids to a stop a few feet short of her, its driver rolling down the window to shout Hungarian curses. Down a narrow lane she spots the pointed spires of Szent István Bazilika. But when the lane opens onto the broad cobblestone square in front of the church, Lily sees she’s made a mistake. If the man is following her, it will take her too long to cross the open space before he spots her.

  There’s a Starbucks on the corner and she slips inside, pushing her way through the crowd to the bathroom at the back. From here she can look through the windows at the basilica steps. The sound of American tourists ordering personalized lattes drowns the beating heart in her throat.

  A moment later she sees the man.

  Not running, but striding into the square. When he doesn’t see her he pauses, his eyes passing over the storefronts. He lingers on the Starbucks so long Lily wonders if he can see her flattened against the wall.

  Now it’s his body that communicates violence. Something in his sure gait, arms rigid at the shoulders.

  He’s not the police. He wants to destroy you.

  He heads up the basilica steps to the right and through the open doors. She has to move. Now.

  Lily keeps her head down as she leaves the café and starts back the way she came.

  Don’t turn around. If you do, you deserve whatever you get.

  She turns around.

  The black parka man steps out of the basilica and scans the square on all sides. Freezes when his eyes find her. His hand slips into the pocket of his parka and pulls out a gun.

  Lily runs as fast as she can, her bitten leg sending electric shocks of pain with every pounding stride. She envisions the superior pace of Black Parka compared
to her and glances back to confirm him starting down the same side street, eighty yards behind her, maybe less.

  When she makes it to the street, she holds her arm high, hoping for a cab, for anybody to stop. A car without any sign on the roof pulls over. It could be one of the illegal taxis she read about in the guidebook. It could be someone working with the man in the black parka.

  On impulse Lily gets in the backseat. Before she can look in the rearview mirror at whoever’s driving, the car lurches forward.

  Outside the window, Black Parka slows his run to a walk as he returns the gun to his pocket and watches her pull away. She’s expecting him to shout some profanity, or raise his middle finger. But he does nothing.

  “Where you go?” the driver asks in English.

  “Just drive,” Lily answers.

  She pats her hands over her leather jacket and feels her passport, wallet, and phone inside—everything she needs. She won’t return to the hotel. Black Parka might be waiting for her. She can always buy more clothes, a new bag. The only thing she regrets leaving behind is Michael’s pages.

  13

  * * *

  It has all the qualities of a dream, but Lily is awake. She’s done this before. Used self-hypnosis to reach back and pull up this childhood memory. Aside from the pills, it’s the only therapy she’s applied to herself.

  “You’re counting back from a hundred,” Lily says to herself, trying to block out the sounds of television and what may be the shrieks of lovemaking from outside her door in a cheap hotel near the Keleti train station. “When you get to one, you will be who you were that day. You’ll remember.”

  Hypnosis can sometimes elicit new pieces of a memory from a witness. The trouble is, just like the witnesses she’s seen it tried on, every time Lily has done it she’s gotten a different version of events.

  “One hundred . . . ninety-nine . . . ninety-eight . . .”

  * * *

  “ . . . THREE . . . TWO . . . ONE.”

  She’s flying.

  Her arms encircle the neck of a creature that pounds through the snow, the steam of its breath blown back against her face. She holds on tight but somehow knows she won’t fall. She is tethered to the animal by a force as sure and unseen as gravity.

  The cold wind makes it painful to open her eyes, and when she does it’s only to catch a tear-jellied glimpse of the dark woods they pass through. The monochrome birches grow so close together she’s certain the animal will knock into one and a branch will rip her from its back, but it never happens.

  She travels further back into the memory now. Coming out of her room in the cabin sometime after the monster left. How she used dish towels and a bucket of snow to smear the blood around on the floor. Her mother’s lifeless eyes wide open. The nostrils, forehead lines, lips—anything that could move was twisted as if by a funhouse mirror, inhuman and fierce.

  Lily stood. Put on her boots and coat against the frigid air that now filled the cabin, its temperature the same as outside. She walked out with the idea of following the trail, but she’s lost within minutes of entering the trees. The forest has crowded in around her. The icy crust atop the deep snow cuts into her thighs each time she plunges her feet forward. She hasn’t gone far, but when she looks back the cabin is obscured from view. And now her fatigue washes over her. A tingling warmth she ought to resist, but how can she even begin to do that?

  Hypothermia. Her mother had warned her about this, how the cold can seduce you into believing it’s something else, the snow a warm bed you can lie down in.

  Sleep.

  The warmth curls its tail around her, whispering.

  Sleep. Time . . . to go . . . to sleep . . .

  She lies down even as she reminds herself that lying down will be the last thing she’ll ever do.

  . . . it’s time . . .

  There’s something strong lifting her. Swinging her up by the ankles as she’d once seen a mailman do with the tied end of a sack of packages. Except the back she lands on is much broader than a man’s.

  She doesn’t open her eyes. But when she thinks about it, she knows this is not a human being. It can’t be. The thing in the cabin had stood on two legs. The creature gives her a second to wrap her arms around its neck before beginning to move.

  Its speed builds so smoothly she doesn’t notice how fast they’re going until she blinks her eyes open and sees the snow-dappled trees flowing past, churning and cottony as the wake behind a ship. The animal rises and falls in jerks at once violent and predictable, galloping on four legs and then faster until she’s sure they’ve launched into flight.

  There must be a stretch of time when she falls asleep. Or maybe she simply can’t remember how the animal comes to a stop and lays her on the ground. Yet that’s where she ends up, sitting straight and feeling something biting her buttocks. She rolls onto her side and sees she’s sitting on gravel at the side of a logging road that glows gray to the horizon.

  Whatever carried her here is gone.

  A hint of its presence remains in the cold air. But not something to see, not its smell. It takes the girl a while to identify it as a disembodied voice.

  A pair of eyes come toward her, pale and enlarging. A truck’s headlights. It slows when it spots her.

  This is a distraction from her trying to remember what the voice had said. The thing that had saved her but had not arrived in time to save her mother.

  The truck crunches to a stop in front of her. The driver’s-side door opens and she hears country music. A man wearing heavy boots comes out.

  “It wasn’t a bear,” the girl says before the man from the truck can hear her.

  It was me, Lily. It’s Michael’s voice, whispering inside her head. I came for you.

  The man from the truck stands over her. He says, “Jesus H. Christ.” He says “cold” and “hospital.”

  I wasn’t the monster. I didn’t kill your mother.

  The driver lifts her and puts her into his truck. She’s curled up like a coil of rope, bathed in the warmth of Randy Travis on the radio and the burning air of the heater vents.

  It was me. I was the horse.

  14

  * * *

  After a night of little sleep spent fully clothed atop the polyester bedspread, Lily rises with the same thought tumbling around her head that she had when she lay down. Black Parka must be connected to Michael. And more than this too. Did the voice on the crank call she received before leaving New York belong to him?

  She tries to think of the ways she might be wrong. Maybe Black Parka was one of those human traffickers she’s read about, on the lookout for her “type.” Maybe he was a thief who identified her as traveling alone, a thick clutch of euros in her pocket.

  None of these alternatives stick. He was hunting her. And the look of him—his size, the intensity of his gaze—suggested a professional. The gun. An assassin.

  The old Lily would be heading down the stairs of the shabby hotel now and hailing a taxi to the airport to take the next flight back to New York. But the old Lily wouldn’t have found herself in a shabby hotel in Budapest to begin with. And the new Lily isn’t going back. Not without the knife. Not without knowing what Michael knows about her mother.

  She crosses the street and enters the station, checking to make sure she hasn’t been followed. The first train to the town of Eger leaves just after ten. From there, she can take a bus to the village of Szilvásvárad. Home of the Lipizzaner Horse Museum and stud farm. Look into the horses’ eyes. Michael wants her to follow him, promising her a gift—of the knife? of knowing who her mother was? of himself?—and the only way she knows how is to pursue the story he tells. Szilvásvárad was where Dr. Eszes took Michael to be hidden. Where she hopes to hide while finding some new piece of him.

  She buys a cheap knapsack and a fresh T-shirt, and drinks three espressos in quick succession served by a man who shakes his head at her as if she was refusing his advice each time. Once she’s boarded, the train pulls away and she bl
inks out the window at the receding city, half expecting to see someone running after her.

  Soon it’s only countryside, with tiny cottages that want a coat of paint. In one of the yards a little girl watches the train pass. Straight dark hair and a severe expression even with her face at rest. She could be Lily at that age. When the elder Lily smiles and waves, the girl doesn’t wave back.

  Lily’s childhood flashes as single words against her closed eyelids: orphan. Small. Alone. A narrative that embarrassed her with all its suggestions of Dickensian deprivation. While not happy years, she knows she’s relatively lucky to have escaped the series of foster families without any particular scars aside from general neglect and the absence of anyone to put themselves forward as her primary guardian. As a result, she assigned her primary guardianship to herself. Her intelligence gave her what she needed to slip through most situations, excelling at school while managing not to attract the attention of the most toxic bullies.

  Some people even liked her, boys and girls both, and she liked some of them back. But she had perfected the maneuvers that took her out of all candidacies for best friendship. She missed her mother with a permanent ache in the gnarled, twisting way a child grieves for the only parent it’s ever known. But mixed with the sadness was the frustration of not knowing what it was Lily was sure her mother had intended to reveal to her. The cabin was a retreat from creditors, possibly the law, but it was also a place where her mother planned to teach her things.

  “You have to be ready,” Lily remembers her saying. “You’ve got to use what’s in you and what you can take from others—take from me—and make it your own.”

  Lily disobeyed her mother once when she was told to stay in the cabin. Instead she’d followed her down the narrow path to the trailer. When Lily got there she found her mother lying on her back, looking at the sky. The position of her body suggested she’d been moving the moment before being spotted, as if she’d been not resting but rolling on the ground—or pulling herself out from under the trailer—a second earlier and had frozen at the sound of Lily’s footfall.