The Only Child

by Andrew Pyper

  “Right,” she says, and opens the booklet to her photo, the exact same stern image that’s in her existing passport.

  “You’ll need access to cash. And some local currency for the bus.” He hands her a folded wad of Romanian bills and, wrapped inside it, a bank card with a PIN number taped to the back. “It’ll take you to Bucharest. From there, get to the safe house. Do it in multiple transitions so it’ll be harder to track you.”

  Lily pockets the money and looks in the rearview mirror. Nothing there a moment ago but now an ancient passenger bus belching diesel clouds comes leaning around a bend. The two teenagers stub out their cigarettes, saunter across the lot to the bent sign that marks the bus stop.

  Lily pulls the handle and her door opens but she doesn’t get out. The bus wheezes to a stop at the side of the road and the door opens. The teenagers get on while looking back at her.

  “I’ll see you,” she says, and gets out in a rush.

  She boards the bus without looking back and takes a seat on the opposite side from where the Mercedes is parked. All measures she hopes to prevent her from seeing him, from feeling the vacancy he’ll leave behind once he’s gone. But as the bus squawks into gear she looks out the window and finds him, his smile not quite holding on his face, though for her sake he keeps working at it until the bus rounds the next turn.

  39

  * * *

  As Lily bounces along the potholed road through farming crossroads and intermittent patches of forest, she wonders if this is how her mother felt after she’d made the decision that took her to the Alaska cabin. Like her, Lily had sided with the hunters, put her trust in men she didn’t really know instead of the one who would do anything to keep her safe.

  Was it the right decision that happened to have the wrong outcome? Or should she have chosen Michael from the beginning, recognized that her fate was bound to his no matter what?

  What’s known is that her mother’s decision had left her alone with Lily at the very end of the world. Even though Lily was only six she remembers her mother starting to teach her the things she would need to survive the game she was born into playing. Introducing her to the way to clean and load the .25-06 Remington kept next to the broom by the front door, for one thing. The color of clothes to wear to be camouflaged in the forest at different times of year. The route of the hidden path that led to the rusted trailer down by the creek, what she called the secret place.

  Lily assumes it was meant to be where she ought to run and hide if either Michael or the hunters came. She remembers her mother putting boxes in the trailer Lily guessed to contain cans of food and rinsed-out milk jugs of water. It didn’t make much sense to her when she thinks of it now: no matter how much food and water was stashed away in the trailer she would have to come out eventually, and where would she go when she did?

  “If you see bad things happening, this is where you go,” Lily’s mother told her at the trailer door. “You come here without mommy, you come no matter what. Okay?”

  Lily wanted to hug her mother instead of listening to this frightening talk but she’d nodded her understanding, even then equating adulthood with the control of one’s fears.

  After she died, Lily hadn’t gone to the trailer but had done precisely what her mother told her not to do and wandered off into the trees. The secret place blotted from her mind by panic, by the images of the monster over her mother’s body.

  And then the white horse had come.

  * * *

  AT THE BUCHAREST AIRPORT SHE chooses a KLM direct flight to Amsterdam for no other reason than it appeared alphabetically first on the departures board. It’s night when she arrives. The fear that clings to her, the shifting time zones, the lack of sleep—all of it conspiring to deprive Lily of any sense of the hour. She knows she has to rest or she’ll start making bad decisions, and she’s made enough of those already.

  She takes a room at the Ambassade Hotel in the old city. Even in her condition she registers how lovely this place is, the widening circles of canals she crosses on arched bridges, the young and old on bicycles, the ornate lanterns coloring the streets of stone. It’s a fairy-tale city, and as with a fairy tale told before bedtime it helps Lily sleep through the night and most of the next day. She eats in her room, watching the passing boats through her window, reaching her mind out to Will to see if she can sense whether he’s found Michael or not, but nothing comes.

  The next day she buys a ticket for a flight to New York. She knows there’s no way she could return to her apartment, but it’s her reflex starting point. It’s also where she’ll plug in the USB stick Will gave her and find out where the safe house is. She could do the same thing at the airport, but she wants to put at least an ocean between herself and Michael to prevent him from reading her.

  When her flight is called she finishes her coffee and drops it along with an issue of the Guardian into the recycling bin, the horrors of the wider world too remote to make any sense to her now.

  Lily takes her seat in the center row. She immediately closes her eyes. Not falling asleep, just trying to hold on to the sense of escape as the 747 roars down the runway and launches into the sky. It’s only when she plugs in the earbuds the flight attendant gives her that she notices it.

  An envelope poking out from the magazine pocket in the seat ahead of her. Even after she pulls it out she doesn’t open it until the map on the screen shows their position over the North Atlantic. With the idea of the cold water thirty thousand feet below her she unfolds the paper and reads.

  Dear Lily,

  This will be my last correspondence with you. It saddens me that the purpose of my writing has shifted so dramatically from self-revelation to the promise of vengeance, as I was enjoying the way the space between us was narrowing with each meeting. This is how it felt for me, anyway.

  I can see now how unlikely it was that you and I could have been—been what? What was the nature of the relationship I sought for us to have? Plainly not the father-daughter who might dine together, attend the theater, share discussions of our everyday ups and downs. But we could have had something. Our own accord. Our own kind.

  But that is over now.

  I will kill you, Lily.

  Why is it important for you to know? Because I want every last second of your life to be so scalded by fear that you will come to prefer death by your own hand over deliverance by mine. Yet you will lack the opportunity, if not the courage, to end it that way. Part of you will hold on to the chance that I will show mercy at the end, that despite the evidence for cruelty I have demonstrated you will be different, there will be a word you can say that will give me pause. You would be wrong to think this.

  One mistake.

  If I had to put into words the expression on the faces of the thousands I have fed upon as their lives drained away, the meaning behind the “death mask” that the psychopaths you once tried to categorize lived to see again and again, it’s not merely horror, it’s the wish to have done one thing differently. To have taken a different way home. To have not accepted that invitation to come upstairs. To be born in a different place at a different time, to be anyone else so as to avoid the crushing fact of the now.

  Your mistake, Lily, was entrusting a group of cowardly mercenaries over me.

  You may try to tell yourself that your affections for the one with the scarred face pulled you over to the side of good. But he seeks me as his prize, not you. You are a way to the monster and nothing else. A fuck, perhaps. No man will refuse that if it comes along with the deal.

  No matter where you go, I will find you. You will never lose me, and I will never be far.

  Consider this moment for example.

  I am onboard this aircraft with you.

  Look around you, or not. Try to find me, or not.

  You might think, after all this time of killing, that there is no novelty in it for me anymore. But killing you, my only child, how you will first try not to scream, then not stop screaming, and finally fail to
find the air to give it voice—it excites me, Lily.

  Yours,

  Client No. 46874-A

  PART 3

  * * *

  Unbound

  40

  * * *

  Once they touch down and everyone is jamming the aisles so they can wait in an unmoving conga line for another ten minutes, Lily does what she told herself not to and looks for him.

  He’s on the plane, but she can’t spot him. He wants to stretch her terror tight before making his appearance, which could be in the terminal, could be anywhere.

  Once she’s off the plane, she considers heading straight for the bathroom and hiding in one of the stalls but can only picture him leaning against the opposite wall when she came out. Going forward is the only strategy that can give her time. Constant movement.

  Figuring he’ll expect her to take a taxi into the city she heads for the shuttle bus instead. There’s a terrible five minutes when she’s sitting at the back waiting for the driver to close the door, watching the passengers show their tickets one after the other.

  She sinks in her seat and peers out her window.

  Go, she mentally urges the driver. Just . . . fucking . . . go.

  A moment later the doors sigh shut and they’re moving, joining the flow of traffic on the curving lanes and onto the expressway. Even now she looks for him. Every Town Car a rear window to be lowered to show his face. Every rental a horn to be tooted as he drove up next to them.

  She gets out at Penn Station. She figures that going by bus lends the advantage of jumping from one to another, not to mention the presence of witnesses. He’ll want to be alone with her. If pressed he’ll do it fast and in front of hundreds, but he would prefer to savor it, just the two of them.

  When she stands at the ticket window Lily takes a moment to decide where to go first and picks the milk run to Buffalo. At some point she’ll have to find a computer to discover where the safe house is but right now it’s time to move.

  She dozes for a stretch after Utica and when she wakes decides to go all the way to the final stop. There, in the Buffalo station, she buys a chocolate donut and a can of Hawaiian Punch, and borrows a laptop from a pierced girl in a Dead Kennedys T-shirt. Once she downloads the one file on the USB stick she turns the screen away so that she’s the only one who can read what’s there.

  18 DAWSON DRIVE, FARO, YUKON TERRITORY, CANADA

  Lily brings up a map and enters the address, reads the Wiki entry that appears under the town’s name. A mining outpost about a five-hour drive northeast of Whitehorse, once thriving but now mostly abandoned.

  She returns the laptop to the pierced girl and heads into the bathroom where she flushes the USB stick into the sewers. Where she’s headed is in her head alone now. There’s no way to find her unless you could fish the address directly from her brain. Starting now, she knows the one after her is working to do exactly that.

  41

  * * *

  She crosses the continent on the Trans-Canada Highway, first through the endless dips and rises over the hunchback of Lake Superior and then across the flats of the prairies, the snow-dusted fields stretching to the horizon until it gives up and lets the gunmetal sky take over. Lily gets off only to use the bathroom or buy convenience store food, urging the bus to go faster past the signs for Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat, names she’d find funny if she wasn’t so scared.

  At Calgary she decides to fly the rest of the way. Once she lands in Whitehorse there’s no option other than to acquire a vehicle. She heads to a bank downtown and secures a certified check that buys her a used Ford F-150 pickup. After she grabs extra jerricans of gas, water, and a box of granola bars she’s out of there, speeding north.

  Her lack of sleep has her seeing things. A figure running alongside her truck through a burnt forest. An animal—a white horse—standing in the middle of the road as she comes over a rise. The worst of them all is when she spots the girl. A tiny body in an unzipped winter coat lying at the side of the road. But as she nears, she sees it’s not a girl, not her six-year-old self, but a gutted bag of garbage.

  There’s little snow given the time of year and when she turns off onto the road to Faro she’s grateful for it. How had her mother managed in country like this, through whole winters like this? The answer was she never left. Once the snow came the two of them lived on canned food and powdered milk, choosing sanctuary over access to the world outside.

  It still wasn’t far enough. Even there, the monster had found them.

  She comes into town in darkness, her headlights revealing the power generator building, the grocery store the only operating tenant in the strip mall, the rows of town houses built in a rush years ago. There’s only a handful of windows with the lights on inside. One of them shows the outline of a woman who looks out at her with curiosity.

  Even in the dark Lily can see that the town was constructed and vacated with equal haste. The residences virtually identical in appearance, the few amenities—the baseball diamond, gas station, school—all closed. She finds the address without having to look for it. One moment she’s doing a circle of the town’s perimeter and the next she’s on Dawson Drive. Number 18 the same unloved unit as the others with the sole exception of a working yellow bulb over the number.

  She parks in the back. There’s only two other vehicles there with hers—another pickup and an older Jeep Cherokee—and judging from the neat carpet of snow around them neither has been recently used. She steps out of the truck and locks it. The automatic beep of its horn startles her so badly it almost brings her to her knees.

  Once inside she spends a minute debating over whether to turn on the lights. Even if Michael has beaten her here, she can’t defend herself very well standing unarmed in the dark. The thermostat is set to fifty-five degrees. She cranks it to seventy.

  It’s a sparsely furnished two-bedroom unit with some basic cooking utensils and pans in the kitchen and a single towel in the bathroom. The only remarkable things about the place are the weapons she finds in the master bedroom’s closet. A Sauer hunting rifle, Beretta handgun, a Mossberg 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, along with ample ammunition.

  On the kitchen table, just as Will told her, there’s a satellite phone with one number programmed into it. She dials without thinking.

  “Lily?”

  She’s so surprised to hear Will’s voice—to hear someone address her by name—her throat tightens. “You’re alive!”

  “I lost him. I was close and I lost him. He must have dug the GPS out of his arm somehow, because he—”

  “Where are you?”

  “Chicago.”

  “Why there?”

  “It’s the best place to fly out of to get to wherever you are.”

  She tells him where she is. How Michael was on her flight from Amsterdam but that she hasn’t seen him since.

  “Don’t go outside,” he says. “Don’t do anything. I’m coming.”

  Lily moves her eyes from the front door to the curtains pulled over the living room window to the back door.

  “Will?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Hurry.”

  42

  * * *

  Frozen waffles. A dry bowl of Froot Loops. A can of fruit cocktail.

  Lily’s breakfast is a five-year-old’s dream and she eats it hungrily, coming away with a sugar high. Next up, a shower. She watches the water spiral down the drain, the days of travel peeling off her in discolored suds.

  There’s no clothes in any of the drawers so Lily is forced to put what she was wearing into the wash. It’s how she ends up catching sight of her naked self in the mirror loading slugs into the shotgun.

  Well look at you now, her inner voice congratulates her.

  That’s when the doorbell rings.

  There’s no way Will could’ve gotten here from Chicago so fast.

  Lily wraps a towel around herself and, bringing the Mossberg with her, goes down the hall to stand five feet from the door. The s
hotgun leans against her shoulder and the barrel is set dead center.

  “Who’s there?”

  She hears something from the other side but it’s too quiet to make out.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Jim,” a male voice says, louder this time. “Jim Hurst. Your neighbor? I’m at number fourteen?”

  Lily tiptoes to the window, pulls the curtain back an inch. She can’t see anything other than a single set of boot prints leading up the walk.

  She returns to the door and readies the shotgun again. Stepping forward she unlocks it.

  “Okay. Door’s open.”

  Nothing happens. Then she notices the knob turning. With a nudge, the door whispers open.

  “Oh shit,” the man says when he sees Lily holding the shotgun.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Divorced.”

  “I mean is there anyone with you out there?”

  The man looks at the empty street. “Out here? No.”

  “Okay,” Lily says, and lowers the weapon. The man’s attention diverts to the fact she’s wearing only a towel.

  “Maybe I came at a bad time.”

  “It’s not the best.”

  “I just noticed your vehicle out back and wanted to say hello,” he says. “We don’t get many new people here at this time of year. Or any time of year.”

  Lily says nothing.

  “So. You need anything, like I said, I’m down at number fourteen,” Jim Hurst wraps up, reaching for the doorknob.

  “I appreciate that,” Lily says, then remembers she needs to be invisible. “Jim, would you mind not telling anyone else I’m in this unit? My husband is coming, and I want to surprise him.”

  “Surprise him,” the man repeats before he closes the door. “Bet you’d be good at that.”