by Zan, Koethi
I felt the panic surge up from my stomach, penetrating my rib cage, filling my head. I started to feel dizzy, all the familiar signs. How could I, after all my precautions, have fallen for something so obvious? She had told me once, years ago, in the cellar, that no matter where I went, no matter what I did, if we ever got out of there, one day she would kill me. I had been shutting her out then, knowing I had to keep my focus, but now, now she was my focus. And I was riveted.
I tried desperately to read her eyes. She was going much faster down this dirt road than the economy-class rental car seemed capable of handling. She’d specifically requested a stick shift, so even if I could somehow disable her, I’d be stuck, never having learned to handle a clutch.
Her eyes stayed trained on the road. She didn’t answer me. She seemed transformed from the person I had been traveling with—that woman who had kept me at a distance, a space in which I felt very comfortable. I had thought the deep anger had dissipated, supplanted only by a vague but pervasive disdain. I had clearly been wrong.
The car bumped along the road so hard, I thought my head might hit the roof.
“Tracy,” I stammered, “Tracy, I’m sorry, really. I don’t—”
“Shut up,” she said tersely, steering hard to the right to avoid a gaping pothole. “Not right now.”
I shut up. I gripped the door handle and considered whether to jump out of the car. I thought about how fast I could run and where I could run to. Not very far, but at least I had my bag with all my ID and credit cards. I grabbed it and wrapped its strap around my wrist several times, so it would stay with me if I got up the courage. There was high brush on the side of the road, but I thought if I held up my arms, I could avoid most damage to my face, and I could roll on my back into the weeds.
I was afraid to jump, but I was more afraid of the look on Tracy’s face.
Finally, I forced myself to pull once, gently, on the metal door handle just enough to unlock the door. I closed my eyes, and started to count. One, two, three …
I didn’t have the nerve to do it the first time.
I checked the speedometer. It felt as if we were going eighty miles per hour, but we were barely touching forty-five.
I looked out at the road. There was a spot of soft-looking grass up ahead. That was my chance. I would open, jump, and roll.
On three, two, one … I took a deep breath and popped open the door, propelling myself outward as far as I could. It felt as if the wind whipped me back, but I knew it was just the feeling of the car’s trajectory moving forward.
I heard Tracy yell, “For chrissakes!” as she slammed on the brakes.
The car rambled on for several more feet, and the brakes emitted an ungodly wail as she slowed to a halt. Tracy jumped out of the car, and I could hear her running toward me.
It took me longer to get up than I had anticipated. I didn’t think I was hurt, but the fall had disoriented me. Slowly I made it to my feet and started running as hard as I could down the dirt road. Tracy was fast, though. Much faster than I was. Within four or five strides, she was right behind me.
I could hear myself screaming, but it felt unconnected to my actual body. As if it were coming from someone else entirely. I was still clutching my bag. Even in my fear I was rational enough to know I’d need that when I got to town. Tracy was yelling something at me, but I couldn’t make it out over the din of my own screams. We were both panting loudly, almost in sync. After no more than a couple of minutes, I knew I couldn’t run much farther, but to my relief she dropped off even before I did. I kept walking as fast as I could, trying to catch my breath and think of what to do next.
“What the fuck? What the FUCK?” was all Tracy was saying, I realized, over and over.
“Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me,” I said. I was almost delirious. Tracy was closing in on me. Her fingers were inches from my arms when my eyes fully focused on her. I screamed again—this time it was more of a howl of fear—and she shuddered and stepped back. She stood stock-still in front of me, not moving an inch in either direction.
She spoke calmly. “Sarah. Sarah, stop it. I am not going to hurt you. I’m not sure what you’re thinking, but whatever it is, you are wrong.”
I was crying as hard as I ever had before. Snot was running out of my nose and down my face. I sobbed so hard I couldn’t catch my breath.
Tracy still didn’t step toward me; she just said reassuringly, “I am not going to hurt you. I would never do that, Sarah. Just calm down.”
I could see the fear on Tracy’s face. I wasn’t sure why she was the one who was afraid now. She had probably never seen me this way, not since the cellar anyway. Maybe it was bringing it all back to her.
She didn’t take her eyes off mine. Then she closed hers to prepare for what she was going to say. She inhaled deeply.
“Listen, I know years ago I said a lot of crazy things. Let’s face it, we were all crazy back then.” She paused. She seemed to want to say this exactly right. “And I know that, even now, my feelings about you are not one hundred percent rational. That might not ever change, but I want you to know I am not the same person I was down there. I do understand, on some level at least, why you did what you did. For the most part. I’m not saying we can be best friends or anything, but …”
I didn’t know what to say. She paused again, shading her eyes from the sun to see me better, waiting for a response I could not give.
I was starting to breathe normally, and I wiped my nose on my sleeve. I dropped to the ground on the side of the road, rubbing my eyes, thinking about what she said. Tracy hung back, still watching me, keeping her distance.
I wanted to say something to her, but I couldn’t find the words. I wanted to say I was sorry, that I was a different person now, too. But I wasn’t sure if that was really the case. Instead, I just nodded slowly. All I could really feel sure of was that she wasn’t going to kill me. That I had gotten carried away with my own fears and was once again misreading the signs around me. Would I ever be normal?
Without another word, we started walking down the road back to the car, which was still running. Once inside it, Tracy put the car in gear and stepped on the gas. She looked sadder than I’d ever seen her, lost in her own thoughts. I just looked straight ahead, still sniffling.
Tracy drove carefully as she turned down another dirt road, no more than a path really, barely wide enough for a car. Tree limbs brushed the top and sides of the car as we passed through. Finally, the road ended in a patch of grass, and she pulled off to the side.
“We walk from here.” She turned off the engine and got out. I followed, holding on to my purse, the strap still wrapped tightly around my wrist. I stumbled as I stepped out onto the grass, then walked forward about fifty yards.
I could see water sparkling in the distance, and I realized we were at an abandoned campsite of some sort. The grass had grown up around the old fire pit, and the open areas were strewn with garbage. I checked my cell, noticing that it was getting late. The sun would be going down soon.
I looked around. It was beautiful, if you could look past the scattered debris. The trees were luscious and green as they are only in the Deep South or the tropics. The air was not as oppressive as it had been in the city. The breezes over the lake had broken the humidity.
We were quiet for a few moments, looking across the lake at the setting sun, and finally I had to ask.
“Tracy?”
“Yeah?”
“What are we doing here?”
There was a long pause before she answered.
“This is where my life changed.”
I waited patiently for her to continue. I knew Tracy had to tell stories in her own good time. Finally, she motioned for me to follow her, and we walked down to the edge of the water. The sky was streaked with orange and pink, colors that were reflected from the lake, hitting the water and glistening up at us.
“Right out there.” She pointed.
Again, I waited.
“That’s where he did it. Where the Disaster happened. Where Ben died.”
Of course. I put my hand to my mouth. I wanted to comfort her, but that was not a skill I had developed in all my solitude. I realized I had let my own incapacity to recover from my past shrink my world so that it was big enough for only me. It was hitting me now, really for the first time, how being fucked up can turn into a form of narcissism. So that I barely even acknowledged that others might need something from me.
With what I knew was a wholly insufficient gesture, I took a step toward her, but she waved me off.
“He walked into the lake somewhere along here.” She pointed to a small beachlike area about twenty feet from us. “They found some shoeprints in this direction; his tent was back in those trees. He’d been living out here with a couple of our friends who were homeless. He stayed out here with them, drinking beer. One of them had a guitar. I used to come out here too, a couple of nights at a time. It was quite a party.
“And then one night, late, after the other guys had gone to sleep—or passed out, more likely—he got up and headed into the lake. Just went in and kept going. One of his friends heard a splash and tried to run out to save him.
“But there was no saving him. Ben just went right under and didn’t come back up. They dredged the next day and found his body. He had weighted himself down with some iron chains he’d found. No doubt about it. He meant it.
“I come out here every couple of years. I try to talk to him. Try to ask him why he did it. It’s hard, but I feel closest to him here.” She stepped into the water a few inches, then walked in deeper, slowly putting one foot in front of the other. For a second I wondered if she too was going to keep going. She seemed defeated in that moment, her shoulders slumped, eyes downcast, mouth slack.
“I shouldn’t have left him alone. I shouldn’t ever have left him alone. At that time I was so deep into the club scene, looking for an escape. But it didn’t help. And then I wasn’t around, and I lost Ben. The only one I ever loved.”
I said nothing. I knew from experience there isn’t anything anyone can really say to help you through your grief. You just have to let the pain wash over you over and over again, until the tide of it drifts back and away, slowly and gradually. I stood there quietly, looking out over Lake Pontchartrain and the sunset dazzling before us.
I also knew, without her saying it, that the chain of events that started here ended for her in Jack’s cellar. If Tracy’s grief hadn’t driven her to take that hit of heroin, would she have ended up as Jack’s prey? Seeing her now, I wondered which was worse—all that Jack had inflicted on her, or this?
We stood there for a long time, until it got late enough for me to get nervous. It was getting hard to see clearly in the dusk.
Then something nearby stirred. It wasn’t much more than a crackling twig, but suddenly all my nerve endings were prickling. I looked at Tracy, who was still lost in thought, sitting on the ground now, hugging her knees.
There was the sound again. This time I could tell Tracy heard it. I was startled by how familiar all her bodily signals were to me. As if we were still down there. We listened, without any sign to each other, but I knew we both knew. Just like when we were in the cellar and our bodies tensed when we heard Jack’s car approaching from the bottom of the driveway. The way the muscles in the back of our necks and the set of our jaws tightened almost imperceptibly when he entered the house. We both waited, alert, listening for it again.
“Tracy,” I whispered. “Can we go?” I looked at my phone, automatically making my usual check. Tracy nodded and got up, fast. As soon as we got into the car, she hit the button to power-lock the doors. I hadn’t even had to ask. She turned on the lights, and we drove, slowly at first, then eventually faster and faster, out of the camp.
There, up ahead of us on the road, we saw the shadowy figure of a man. Tracy hit the brakes, and we both uttered a sharp cry at once. He was wearing a plaid shirt, unbuttoned, with a white T-shirt underneath. He had long hair and a goatee. He spread his arms wide—I couldn’t tell whether it was a sign of surrender or attack—and started moving toward the car.
I double-checked that the car doors were all securely locked and quickly looked around to make sure there was no one else out there. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move and watched in horror as another man rushed out of the shadows. He ran straight to the car door on my side and pulled on the handle.
Tracy and I screamed in unison, and she gunned it, her foot pushing the gas pedal all the way to the floor. The man in the plaid shirt dove into the bushes on the side to avoid being plowed down. Tracy drove faster, even long after we’d lost sight of the men in the rearview mirror. The car bounced hard as the tires hit every bump in the uneven surface. I closed my eyes and took deep, measured breaths, counting quietly to myself.
Tracy didn’t slow down until we were within the city limits. We stopped under the glaring lights of a Chevron station to refuel, and then she drove on until she spotted a Waffle House. We took a booth in the corner and ordered coffee, sitting in silence, as we waited for our hearts to stop pounding and our heads to clear.
CHAPTER 24
Two days later Tracy and I got off the plane together in Portland. I was beginning to feel like a seasoned traveler. No panic attacks. I’d learned to cope. I bought a little rolling suitcase I only allowed to be gate-checked. I wore a smaller bag crosswise over my chest. I kept my valuables in its zippered interior pocket that I checked every half hour on the dot. My physical belongings, at least, were safe with me.
Tracy and I had hardly spoken since New Orleans, though I didn’t understand why. I wondered if she was embarrassed by what she had told me, regretting it now that we were away from the site of her painful past. Or maybe she had been looking for more of a response from me—understanding or commiseration, something I didn’t know how to show. And maybe, no matter what she said, she still couldn’t disentangle the past from the present any more than I could.
At any rate I was not, I told myself, eager to rekindle some relationship with Tracy. Yet even as I thought this, I knew I really didn’t believe it. I couldn’t stay in my bubble anymore, and oddly, I didn’t want to.
Still, it was surreal being with her, out in the world like this, without any walls to contain us. Yet here she was, here I was, and we were in Oregon. We never would have believed that anything could make us come back to this part of the world.
I pulled out my phone to do my check, to distract myself. I saw I had another message from Dr. Simmons and thought a busy public area would be as good as any place to call her back.
She answered right away. “Sarah. Where are you?”
“I’m taking a vacation, Dr. Simmons.”
“Sarah, Jim and I have spoken. Where are you? Is everything okay?”
“I’m fine. Listen, you’ve been enormously helpful. Really. But I have to figure out a few things on my own. And then we can discuss them. At length. In elaborate detail.”
“I understand. I just want to tell you that it’s not all on you. It’s not all your responsibility. Remember that.”
I stopped. The wheels of my suitcase glided to a slow halt on the smooth floor of the airport. Dr. Simmons always did manage to touch a nerve.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Just that. Just that I know you put a lot of pressure on yourself. And in this case, there are a lot of other people bearing the burden of keeping Jack Derber in jail. It’s not all on you.”
“Well, of course I know that,” I said, perhaps a bit too quickly.
“Okay, then. That’s all I wanted to tell you. Have a great trip. Call me when you get back. Or sooner if you need me.”
I hung up, staring off at the illuminated sign of a barbecue place. Dr. Simmons was right. I didn’t have to bear the whole burden, but that wasn’t the whole story. Even if I hadn’t been responsible for everyone else’s pain, I did have a duty to Jennifer. I owed her something m
ore.
My thoughts drifted back over the familiar territory of our abduction. If only I hadn’t persuaded her to go with me to the party that night. She’d had an exam to study for, but I had pushed her to go out. I can still picture her face as she hesitated, then relented for my sake. If only I hadn’t pushed. Where would we both be now?
I was doing it again, I told myself, as I shook my head to clear my thoughts.
Tracy glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, as she headed straight for the exit. “Dr. Simmons?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know why you still see her. She’s basically an instrument of the state.”
“You mean, because she works with Jim so much?”
“I mean, because doesn’t the State of Oregon still pay her? And because she saw all three of us at the beginning. Come on, Sarah. They are keeping tabs on us. To make sure we don’t go before the legislature again to demand compensation. I started seeing a private shrink immediately. I only see Dr. Simmons once a year to keep Jim off my back. A check-in, he likes to say. Which is, I’m sure, exactly right. I’m sure he checks in. I’m sure it is a total pass-through situation.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, Sarah. I’m sure she tells the FBI everything, and they have put us into some massive database of theirs. One day, you can rest assured, they’ll be calling on you to be a secret trained assassin. They’ve probably planted some kind of microchip in our brains. Whatever Jack Derber couldn’t achieve, they probably can.”
I couldn’t tell if this was Tracy’s attempt at dark humor, or if the world truly did hold more horrors that I hadn’t considered. I needed to think about that one later, I decided, and shelved it in some inner recess of my brain.
Our first stop was Keeler, Sylvia’s town. I wanted to see if she’d been home, or at least what was filling up her mailbox.
We drove slowly down the street past Sylvia’s house. Nothing had changed. The mailbox was jammed full. The postman had tried to close it, but it would shut only halfway. We pulled up close, and I jumped out, looking around to make sure no one saw me.