Girl on the Run

by Abigail Johnson

  My grandmother, a trim woman who looks to be in her early seventies, rises to her feet behind a heavy oak desk. She has sleek silvery-blond hair turned under at her shoulders and held back in a headband that matches her blouse. A pair of reading glasses hangs from a delicate chain around her neck, the only visible concession to her age. “Now,” she says with quiet menace, “give me the ring.”

  “I don’t have it,” Mom says, and my hand automatically flies to my chest, seeking the ring I no longer had, the one I’d left for my sister.

  “That’s a lie.” Soft, smooth-looking cheeks that might even dimple if she smiled, quiver. “You’d never sell it.”

  “Because you know I loved him.”

  “Because you’re a fool who believed a foolish boy.”

  “Is that what you think?” Mom half whispers. “That Derek lied to me? He gave me that ring.”

  “It wasn’t his to give! When Mr. Abbott’s mother died after Derek and Laura were already married, it was understood that the ring would be given to their daughter. Only Laura gave birth to”—her lips curl back—“an unsuitable child, so now it belongs to me.”

  Between the pain and my grandmother’s nasty words, I have no idea how my mom is still upright. Only when watching closely can I see the faint trembling in her left leg, which she’s forcing to bear all the weight from her right. But she’s not panting that I can hear. She’s standing like the house itself would fall before she would.

  “I never wanted it, couldn’t wear it without drawing attention. But he told me that his grandmother was the only kind person to ever come from the Abbott line and that we were going to change that. Our child would change that.”

  “Your child.” Mrs. Abbott scoffs. “You never got to…” Her mouth stills, and her eyes, previously narrowed, drift open and distant. “No,” she says. “He can’t have been that foolish.”

  “I wanted to name her Grace after her great-grandmother, but Derek…” Mom’s shaking increases in intensity. “I know now why he didn’t.”

  A tear slips down my cheek.

  “You—you—”

  “Her name is Katelyn, and she is magnificent. And you”—my mom leans forward—“will never play a role in her life.”

  “Where is she?”

  I can’t see her face, but I imagine my mother is smiling.

  “Where is she?” my grandmother repeats, so loudly this time that Malcolm and I both start. “You took my son from me. You will not take the only good part of him I have left.”

  I think of my sister and the utter disdain this woman has for her, and grind my teeth together.

  “I didn’t take him from you.”

  “You’re the reason he’s dead. He ran after you, and you pushed him—”

  “I was trying to get away!” Mom half stumbles a step forward. “To make him let go. I was at the top of the stairs, and he had ahold of my arms. And when I jerked them free, he—he—” Mom’s voice chokes off, sobs racking her body.

  “No, no, you don’t get to cry for him. You took him, ruined him, and you don’t get to cry. Is that what you came here for? Forgiveness? If so, you’re a greater fool than he was.”

  It feels like it takes ages for Mom to stop crying, to pull herself back from that night, and I see the effort it’s costing her. I see so much, and I see it in ways I haven’t before. The life she already gave up to save mine. The years of running and hiding that fact from me so I wouldn’t have to grow up scared. I see the way she kept my father near me as best she could, the only way she thought she could. I see the normal life she tried to give me, I see the lengths she has gone to and the ones she’s still going to. For me.

  She may not be crying now, but I am.

  “I only want the truth,” she says. “Not for the world, I don’t care about them. I’ll tell the police whatever you want, confess to anything. I want the truth for my daughter, for Derek’s daughter. He was a coward who couldn’t stand up to his parents when they forced him into a marriage he never wanted, but he loved Katelyn from the moment he knew she existed, and he loved me too. You know that. Tell her the truth, and I’ll stop running.”

  “You’re already done running,” my grandmother says, reaching to open a drawer beside her. “My husband may not have lived long enough to see this day, but we both knew how it would end. Not with confessions, not with police, but with justice.”

  The small gun she points at my mother is black, and so matte it seems to suck light. And I’m screaming, barreling into the room, promising the ring and myself and anything else my fear-frozen brain can think of.

  But it’s too late.

  My grandmother gasps at me, arm slipping, and fires at my mother in that single breath.

  I become nothing as the bullet hits my mom.

  There’s no sound.

  No sight.

  No senses at all.

  I push forward as though I’m moving through wet cement. I’m running, but the air pushes back. It won’t give, won’t let me reach her.

  And she’s falling backward, her hair floating up to hide her face, her arms drifting forward.

  Fire.

  It starts in my throat, tearing from my lungs, piercing my ears.

  Screaming.

  I’m screaming.

  She hits the ground, and I’m miles away, so far away. I see her skull thud against the wood floor, see it push her back up so that she slams down a second time.

  I slip.

  I slip on her blood.

  Blood from her leg, which had been pooling while she traded her freedom so that I would know I was loved.

  Blood that gurgles up from high on her chest and trickles down over her shoulder.

  I’m hurting her, I have to be hurting her, when I reach her, grab her. “Mom. Mom. Mommommommom.”

  “It’s okay,” she says. She’s still lying to me. I can feel her lies sticky and wet on my hands. “It hit my shoulder, Katelyn. Look.”

  I look, but all I see is blood.

  Mom’s short, sharp breaths come into focus. Sneakers thudding across the floor, squeaking and skidding. A lamp crashing to the floor.

  My grandmother yelling.

  Malcolm grunting.

  And a second shot.

  This time, there is sound.

  The clatter of the gun as it falls to the ground.

  The thud from Malcolm’s body hitting the floor.

  The cry from my grandmother as he nearly takes her down with him.

  Malcolm rolls his head toward me, and I see a dribble of blood escape from the corner of his mouth.

  Blood. I’m drowning in it, and it’s almost as though I can taste it flooding my own throat. I’m choking on it.

  Mom’s hand finds mine and she seizes it, forcing my attention to her. “Call 9-1-1.”

  I lunge for the landline phone that Malcolm and my grandmother sent crashing to the floor when he tried to take the gun from her. I grab the handset and use it to tug the base toward me. I’m cradling it to my chest as I scramble to reach Malcolm.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I tell him even as his blood starts to soak into my jeans. “You’re fine. I’m going to get help.” I fumble to right the base in my lap with one hand, since my other is wadding up a throw blanket from a small couch and pressing it against the wound at his side.

  I jam at buttons and listen to the ringing, ringing, ring—

  Silence.

  My grandmother stands by the wall, the ripped-out phone cord hanging from her hand.

  “No,” she says. “That’s not how this ends. He stays right there. He broke in with your mother, and they attacked me.” Her light-blue eyes grow clearer as she speaks. “She’ll go to prison this time, both for killing my son and attempting to kill me. She realized how close the investigation was getting and decide
d to come after me, seeking revenge for a life forcibly lived in the shadows. My investigator was here when they broke in; he witnessed everything, so he can corroborate my statement to the police.” Malcolm coughs up more blood. “Of course, he’ll have to die,” she adds, glancing at him. “But that shouldn’t take long.”

  My limbs turn to ice. “You can’t—I’m here. I saw what happened.” But even as I speak, the doubts creep in. Not about the truth, but about who will believe it. My mother was condemned because of the story the Abbots spun, and Malcolm could be all too easily painted with the same brush as his father. If the investigator will lie for my grandmother, together they can make this night look like whatever they want. It’ll be my tainted word against theirs.

  Malcolm will bleed out on the floor. I’ll lose Mom.

  The gun is in my hand before I consciously decide to reach for it. I’m trembling so badly that I can barely keep it aimed at the woman threatening to take everything from me.

  I expect the protests, the pleas, when they come, but not from my mom.

  “No, Katelyn. No.”

  I’m still staring at my grandmother’s ashen face when I answer my mom. “If she dies, then we can run again, hide again. I can call for help for Malcolm, and we can leave. It’ll be better this time, because I’ll know. I won’t mess up, and I can help.” My finger slides to the trigger. It’s still warm. My hand steadies. “I won’t let her take you.”

  “Look at me. Right now.” Mom’s not yelling or even raising her voice. She’s calm and all the more compelling for it. I tear my gaze away from my grandmother and look to where my mother is pushing herself up into a sitting position. Her features pull tight as she moves, but her voice betrays none of the pain she must be in. “I have lived your entire life with a death on my conscience.”

  “But you didn’t mean for him to die. It was an accident.”

  “That was the worst night of my life. Seeing them, seeing her. And he didn’t defend me, just let me stand there crying as his mother…” She shudders. “It was too late when he tried to come after me, apologizing for being a coward who wasn’t free to be with the person he loved. I couldn’t think, couldn’t see. I actually thought I might lose you that night, because I felt like I was dying. And I pushed him. Not to hurt him, but I pushed him. He’s dead because of me. Every day for the past nineteen years, that’s what I live with. That moment, watching him fall. I don’t want that for you.”

  Malcolm’s lips are moving, and his eyes are wide with terror. He knows what’s happening to him. And I can’t think, I can’t.

  “I don’t want to lose you again,” I tell Mom. Salty tears trail down my face and into my mouth.

  “Never,” she says, inching toward me. “But I’m willing to pay for what I did, and I can’t live knowing I’m the reason you took a life.”

  A sob racks my body as I force the gun to my side.

  “Good, baby. Good. Now give it to me.”

  I let her slip the heavy weight from my fingers.

  “There’s another phone in the kitchen downstairs.” Her lips turn white as she rests the gun on her thigh with her injured arm. She keeps it trained on my grandmother so she can take over for me and hold pressure on Malcolm’s wound with her good arm.

  She looks like she’s seconds from keeling over, but glancing at Malcolm, I realize that just means I’ll have to run.

  “I can do it,” she says, and her word is all I need to push to my feet.

  I dash out of the room, skidding into the wall across from the door, my feet momentarily tangling on the rug running the length of the hall. I’m painfully aware of every thudding beat of my heart.

  Racing down the stairs, I feel the railing grow warm under my palm from the friction. I leap past the final three steps and start sprinting toward the kitchen. My footsteps echo loudly in the living room. My ears are throbbing, and my ribs are screaming. I don’t hear my attacker until arms reach out of the darkness and grab me.

  I scream for my mother. It’s the only thing I can think to do. A meaty fist swings at my head, but I have so much momentum going that I topple us both forward, slamming us into the island.

  There’s a butcher block of knives on the counter, and I grab for it with both hands, twisting and smashing it down on his head in the same motion. I catch him right in the temple, and he goes down hard. The smack of his head hitting the stone floor nearly empties my stomach.

  The bounty hunter lies motionless, and I’m whirling, jumping at every shadow in the kitchen as my breath whips in and out of me, loud, loud, loud. No one else comes at me. I don’t know where Blue Eyes is or if he’s even here. I yank the phone off the wall so hard it clatters to the floor and skitters up next the bounty hunter, but I don’t even hesitate as I dive for it.

  9-1-1.

  My hand is sweaty, sticky, when I lift the handset to my ear, and I can’t think about the red streaks.

  Mom’s blood.

  Malcolm’s blood.

  Mom’s bl—

  “Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

  “Please send help. My mom and my friend have been shot. There’s so much blood. Please.” I lift my gaze to the ceiling and whisper words that have never hurt so much. “He’s dying right now.”

  “Are you in danger?”

  “I—”

  The gunshot jolts every bone in my body. I drop the phone and run upstairs.

  Run.

  Run.

  Run.

  I fall and run, slip and run. I grab the doorframe and swing myself inside.

  The pool of blood beneath Malcolm has stopped growing, Mom is slumped over on her side, and my grandmother lies on the floor with a hole where part of her head should be.

  One Year Later

  Sometimes just before it’s going to rain, when the air grows heavy and the clouds hold their breath, Mom will rub her leg. The wound is long healed, but the ache resurfaces. The one in her shoulder too. No one who meets her now would notice the limp except on the wettest days, but I see it.

  It’s only when I’m close enough to hug her that the scar tucked up in her hairline is visible. It stretches across her temple and disappears behind her ear. Not that big, considering how much it bled, but they always say scalp wounds bleed the most. I’d say they’re right, other than for gunshots to the gut.

  When the EMTs arrived that night, I was the one they circled first. We watched the movie Carrie on Halloween a few weeks ago, and during the scene when the bucket of blood is dumped on the main character, Mom told me that’s what I looked like. None of it was my blood, though.

  I’d thought Mom and Malcolm were both dead. They should have been. I’d collapsed between the two of them, burying my face in Mom’s bloodied chest and clutching at Malcolm.

  But of the four of us left alive that night, I was the one with the most claim to that status.

  I had various cuts and bruises, a mild concussion, and a sliced-open forearm, but nothing that kept me in the hospital for long. Not as a patient, at any rate.

  Mom and Malcolm didn’t fare as well.

  Her running days are over, figuratively and literally, and she still has a bullet in her shoulder. It migrated too close to her heart to safely remove.

  When I’d screamed out Mom’s name downstairs, she’d forgotten about the hole in her shoulder and the gaping wound in her leg. She’d even forgotten about my grandmother. And she tried to army-crawl after me.

  My grandmother saw that as her opportunity to grab the eight-inch bronze statue of her late husband off the shelf and try to bash Mom’s skull in with it. She got in only one hit before Malcolm, tapping into a reserve of strength the doctors say should have been physically impossible, dragged himself to the gun and shot her.

  We still don’t know for sure when his ribs broke or whether it was his last-ditch effort to s
ave my mom’s life that finally snapped them, but they did puncture his lung, which led to a host of respiratory problems, including a near-fatal bout of double pneumonia. The gunshot did the most damage, though, and he had to endure a number of surgeries to put his insides back together again. He was skeletal and fully bearded when they released him from the hospital, but they did release him. Mom too. And not into police custody either. That was almost more shocking.

  Derek Abbott’s death was ruled an accident.

  Malcolm wasn’t arrested for cybercrimes.

  And I don’t have to live with the burden of having taken a life, since the bounty hunter made a full recovery in time to stand trial for everything he, Blue Eyes, and my grandmother’s investigator conspired to do.

  We met with various authorities numerous times, but always by choice. I still don’t know what handcuffs feel like.

  All because of Laura, my father’s widow.

  And Grace.

  It was a big news story when our grandmother died and the manhunt for Derek’s accused killer came to an end. Unlike my mother, Laura didn’t try to hide the truth from her daughter when she asked. Grace remembered meeting me, and to everyone’s surprise, she didn’t view me with anything close to animosity. She came to visit me in the hospital to thank me for giving her our great-grandmother’s ring.

  I cried when she said she made her mother come forward with the truth of what happened the night our father died.

  I sobbed when she hugged me.

  And I completely broke down when she told me she’d rather have a sister than keep an inheritance all to herself.