by Paul Pen
“Can your car be fixed?” he asked.
Grace caught up and hooked an arm around Frank’s, as if he needed to be calmed down.
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “I tried starting it a ton of times until the battery went. It’s dead.”
“Then we’ll take you to the junction at the beginning of the road. There’s a restaurant and a motel. A Super 8. You must’ve seen it before you turned off, there was no other way to reach this road. If you don’t have any money, I’ll pay for your room at the motel. I’m very glad you’re all right and that it was all just a scare. Luckily, I reacted in time and my wife’s been able to dress that wound.” He felt Grace interlock her fingers with his to make him relax. “But we have our plans and we don’t want to change them just because you appeared so carelessly in the middle of the road. Now let’s go.”
“I’d like to find my cell phone, at least,” she said. “I don’t want to go without it.”
She indicated the place, some distance away, from where a recurring clicking sound was coming. The children were talking to each other, the touch of irritation in their voices suggesting they hadn’t found anything yet.
“If you had yours in your hand, it would’ve broken with the impact. It could be lost in the bushes. There’s no point in staying for that—it’s more important that you get some rest and see a doctor. You can call one from the motel or restaurant.”
“I don’t have insurance.”
“So I heard,” said Frank, “but that’s your problem, not ours.”
From the sudden flash in her eyes he knew his words had hurt her. Grace squeezed his forearm twice, the number of syllables in Be nice, but all he did was point at the front of the motor home, instructing her to walk toward the door.
“Kids!” Frank yelled at the children. “Come on, get in! We’re going!”
“Should we search for the cell phones or get in the RV?” Audrey’s face was little more than a pair of intermittent eyes in the orangey halo from the sparks. “Make your mind up, Dad.”
Frank scraped his tongue against his teeth. They could hope they would find the cell phones and then wait for help to come, or they could just take the girl away and get it all over with.
“Get in,” he said.
“And leave the cell phones out here? Dad, I have photos from the Twenty One Pilots concert on there I haven’t uploaded yet.”
“And I finally made it past level three-fifty-six,” said Simon.
“Get in.”
The children sought their mother’s empathy, but she shook her head and tipped her chin at the door. Audrey climbed onboard with her arms crossed, leaving a trail of little hollows in the sand behind her, dug by her heels with the furious impact of her footsteps. Simon’s anger tended to veer toward melancholy, and he got in the vehicle with his shoulders slumped. His mark on the road was two parallel lines from his feet dragging themselves along. Letting Grace go ahead of him, Frank followed them on without looking at Mara, who was standing by the retractable steps like a shy guest.
“Get in, girl,” Grace said from inside, after asking her if anything hurt or if she needed help. “Have you ever been in an RV?”
“No, never,” came the voice from outside. “And I’ve been really curious to see one.”
Frank shut the laptop he found on the sofa with such force that Audrey warned him he was going to break it. He pushed the children ahead of him toward the bedroom at the back. With the remote control, he switched on the television. He played the first thing that appeared in the list and turned up the volume, then ordered his son and daughter to sit on the bed and stay where they were.
“Is she dangerous?” Audrey asked.
Frank went out without answering, wishing there was a door to the room that he could shut. At the motor home’s entrance, Grace was inviting Mara to sit on the sofa. Mara observed the vehicle’s interior with fascination.
“This opens up to make more space,” Grace explained about the extendable living room module, “so you don’t have to walk sideways like we are now. Do you like it?”
“It’s amazing. It’s like a real house.”
“Or even better. A lot of people spend their entire lives in worse houses than this.”
Mara looked serious. While Frank knew there were no bad intentions in his wife’s comment, he also knew the face their guest was pulling would make Grace think how offensive her remark might seem if the girl was one of those people who lived in a house that wasn’t as nice as their motor home. Grace squeezed her ponytail in an embarrassed gesture. With her eyes, she asked Frank if she’d put her foot in her mouth. He shook his head, but Mara’s gloomy expression must have disturbed his wife, because she examined her from top to bottom with renewed surprise. Her eyes, suddenly filled with suspicion, stopped on the purse. A silent alarm went off around them, as if she’d imagined it contained a handgun.
“Come on, let’s go,” she blurted out.
Frank welcomed Grace’s urgency—at last they agreed they needed to get rid of the girl. The family would be much safer without an intruder in its midst. Everything would be better without her.
Frank sat at the wheel and put on his seat belt. From the passenger seat, Grace turned toward the sofa.
“Ready, Mara?” Her voice had recovered its usual innocence. “Great, just wait till you see how lovely the views are from up here.”
14.
The motor home rocked as it reversed. The lurching repeated when it went forward. The rear of the vehicle seemed unstable, leaning too much to the left.
“No . . . ,” said Frank.
“What is it?” Grace asked.
A premonitory fear knotted his stomach. He replied that he didn’t know, he had to check something outside. He headed to the rear wheels on the driver’s side, where Mara had just been sitting. He hoped he could throw out the suspicion growing in his belly, but as he crouched down, his fears were confirmed. Both wheels were flat on the ground. He ran his finger over a wound in one of the tires, a cut through which the air had escaped. While he wanted to persuade himself that a sharp stone could have caused a flat like this when he jammed on the brakes, he soon discovered an identical cut in the adjoining tire. The same length, the same serrated appearance. He felt both of the slits, imagining what kind of cutting edge, knife, or penknife could have made them. He knew who owned the hand responsible for them.
“So?” Grace had stuck her head out through the driver’s window. “What is it?”
“The wheels are totally deflated, as if they exploded.”
“From braking so hard?”
“I guess so. And swerving. A lot of pressure on the tires.”
He lied to Grace to avoid frightening her. Her or the children. He climbed back into the RV, brushing brake dust from his fingers. Inside, Grace asked him if it was normal for a pair of tires to give way under pressure like that. Suppressing the tremor that was rising in his throat, Frank suggested that it was possible. He tried not to look at Mara, who was watching the scene from the sofa.
“So where do we have the spare?” Grace asked.
“This isn’t a car. It’s not so easy to change a tire, and most RVs this size don’t have one onboard.”
“Seriously?”
“Even if we’d brought one, I wouldn’t have been able to change it without getting help. So why bother?” His voice was firm again because this, at least, was true. Before buying the motor home, he had read that a driver had been seriously injured trying to change a tire, and since then, most companies avoided potential accidents and lawsuits by not including a spare with the largest and heaviest vehicles. It meant users were obliged to call for professional help. “And both have blown on us.”
“Just great, Frank.” Grace crossed her arms.
“It’s an RV thing. Look it up on your cell phone. You’ll see I’m right.”
“Very funny, Dad. With what cell phone?” Audrey said from the bedroom.
Frank breathed in. He steeled
himself to confront Mara without revealing his fears to Grace.
“As you heard, our tires are flat.” He studied the cold reaction in her eyes. “So if we want to move from here, we’re going to have to fix your car. Where did you say it was?”
“A little way ahead. But there’s nothing we can do, it won’t start.”
“We’ll both go. Maybe we can push it back here. If it’s just a battery problem, I have jumper cables. And I have gas.”
“I don’t think . . .” Mara was getting up from the sofa slowly. She appeared to need some time to think. “We’re not going to be able to push it uphill.”
“There was a slope?”
“Yeah, quite a big one.”
“Well, we’re going to take a look anyway,” Frank insisted. “We’re certainly not going to fix anything sitting here.”
He narrowed his eyes, challenging her to make up another excuse.
“Maybe . . . I don’t know . . . maybe we can try.”
Frank smiled.
“Shall I come with you?” Grace was rolling up her shirtsleeves. “It’ll be easier to push between the three of us.”
“No, honey. You stay here with the kids.”
“The kid and the young adult,” Audrey corrected him.
Frank led his wife to the back of the motor home as if she were a third child. Simon and Audrey watched from the threshold of the nonexistent door, ignoring the television show on the screen.
“And lock the door when we’re gone.”
“Here we go again,” whispered Grace. “Don’t frighten the kids as well.”
Simon pointed to the front.
“Dad, something’s up with her.”
Frank heard the convulsion before he turned around. When he did, he saw that Mara was holding her hands to her throat, squeezing it as if she were trying to strangle herself. From the sofa, she looked at them with tears in her eyes, guttural sounds emanating from her throat. Her body shook with spasms.
“What’s wrong?” yelled Grace.
She ran to help, and slapped the other woman’s back as if she were choking on food. Mara slapped her own chest, a desperate action that alarmed Frank. He stood in front of Mara without knowing what to do. Her neck was enlarged and her face had turned a bright red color that was beginning to purple. She was really suffocating.
“What’s going on now? What . . . what do I do?” asked Frank.
Frank grabbed Mara by the shoulders, shaking her. Grace lifted her by the waist. Neither of them knew how to help her until she hugged herself, reminding them of the Heimlich maneuver. It was Frank who performed it, imitating what he’d seen in movies. Instead of something flying out of the mouth like in those films, Mara’s throat cleared itself inward. First she swallowed, and then air flowed through lungs that contracted and expanded at a frantic rate. Each breath sounded painfully rough. She wriggled out of Frank’s arms as if they were dangerous snakes and lay down on the sofa.
“What was it?” Grace asked her.
“I don’t know.” Mara dried her eyelashes, her nose. “Something that came from inside got stuck in my throat. It was like wanting to throw up and not being able to.”
“Like I said. Who knows what you’ve broken in there.”
“You need a doctor, that’s for sure,” said Frank. “Take a few minutes to recover and we’ll go get your car.”
He wasn’t going to let up in his efforts to get her out of there, away from his family.
“I don’t think I can walk . . .”
“Sure you can.”
Grace pinched his back twice to disapprove of his comment. Be nice.
“Now that you mention it,” Mara added, lying face-up on the sofa, a forearm on her brow, “I don’t have the key.”
“What do you mean you don’t have it?”
Frank didn’t fail to notice that she remembered this detail right after almost choking to death.
“I had it in my hand, like the cell phone. When you hit me.”
“When you appeared on the road,” Grace elaborated.
“It must be out there on the road, in the dark.” Mara aimed her next remark at Frank, repeating an argument that he had used against her before and that was now convenient for her. “It could be lost in the bushes.”
He clenched his teeth, containing his rage.
“Fuck!”
He turned around to avoid looking at the intruder. Grace held him by the waist and guided him to the bathroom. At the entrance to the bedroom, Audrey had her hands over her brother’s ears after the swear word.
“Frank, seriously, it’s nothing to worry about,” his wife whispered. “Let’s do what I said and that’s that. We’ll take her in for one night, she can have a good sleep, and tomorrow when the sun comes up, when there’s light, we’ll search for the cell phones and her car keys. Don’t make things more complicated than they need to be.”
His wife’s words exuded calm, trust in the goodness of strangers. Frank wondered whether to tell her about the wheels. Let her know that the woman she was so keen to help had gashed their tires for the sole purpose of keeping them there. And that in her purse, right near the kids, she must still have the knife she’d used. That everything was part of some sinister plan to stay with them tonight.
Frank looked at his children. Simon was clinging to his sister, rubbing one foot against the other, frightened like the small child he was. The moment they and Grace knew about the wheels, terror would flare up. Frank would no longer be able to control the situation. And things would happen that he could still prevent if they kept calm. If he managed to think with a cool head.
“You’re right,” he said, stifling other words.
He ruffled Simon’s hair, pinched Audrey’s chin with his knuckles. He would never forgive himself if anything harmed his son and daughter.
“I love you so much,” he said. “More than anything in the world.”
They both looked down at the floor, embarrassed.
Mara coughed.
“It’s decided.” Grace took a set of sheets out from a compartment above the sofa. “You’ll stay with us.”
Frank snatched the sheets from her hands and returned them to their compartment. Without giving an explanation, he went outside. From the window over the kitchen, Grace followed his movements. Mara also peered out. Frank opened the side trunk at the rear—the space the people at the dealership had called the basement. From amid the luggage, he pulled out a long bright-green bag by its handles. He also took out another, fatter, bag. He emptied the contents of the green bag onto the ground on one side of the road, in view of the two women, and started to put up a tent.
Grace quickly went out, and Mara followed her.
“She can sleep on the sofa, Frank.”
Without answering, he fitted some poles together.
“Come on, she needs a good rest,” Grace insisted.
He continued with his work, spreading out the fabric.
“She has to recover.”
Frank inserted tent pegs into the holes in the fabric, one by one.
“Frank!”
He dropped the rings he was holding. He approached Mara and pointed a threatening finger at her.
“You’re not going to sleep near my family. I’m very cautious with strangers.”
Frank returned to his task, ignoring Grace’s complaints. When his wife accepted that the tent was going to be the only option, she changed tack, worrying as ever about keeping others happy.
“It’s a very good tent, to be fair. It cost us a ton of money. The sleeping bag, too,” she said. “You’ll sleep very comfortably, you’ll see.”
Frank shook his head, unable to believe that a day that had started with the promise of a great trip and a better future had turned into a disaster. He howled with pain when he pricked himself with a peg.
15.
Grace twisted the string on a teabag around a spoon, which she used to squeeze the last drop of chamomile out. She breathed in the aroma, which made
her think of a sunny field, so different from the wooded darkness that surrounded them. She had prepared the infusion using the kettle, considering whether they should start limiting their use of the most power-hungry appliances. As a precaution, she had turned off the device as soon as she heard the first bubbles, though she remembered they had enough self-sufficiency for several nights. Frank had made sure of it because their trip included overnight stays in isolated places where they wouldn’t have a chance to connect to power at a campsite, just as they wouldn’t have tonight even if they had reached the hot springs. There would be nights when they’d be dry camping or boondocking, terms that Frank used to show he’d learned some RVer jargon. In any case, tonight they might not even have to spend the whole night on the road. With a bit of luck, another car would drive past in the early hours and they could ask for help before dawn.
She took the infusion to Mara, who was sitting on a folding chair on the road. Before taking the first sip, she wrapped her hands around the cup to make the most of its warmth. She was wearing some pajamas that Grace had lent her. The clothes that were dirty and torn from the accident were in a heap next to the chair, her purse weighing them down.
“Ha, they look better on you than on me,” Grace said about the pajamas. “They don’t fit me like that at the top.”
Returning the compliment, Mara remarked how nice Grace’s hair was.
“You don’t know how much I appreciate you saying that,” she admitted as she unfolded another chair. “I almost lost it all.”
Frank, still pitching the tent, let out a disapproving snort—he probably wasn’t liking the fact that they were getting along—but she really was grateful for someone saying something nice about her hair after so long. Grace also was clear in her mind that being good to people is the best way to make sure they’re good in return.
“Don’t mind my husband,” she whispered. “He does it to protect us, me and the children. It’s not that there’s any danger, I know you’re harmless, but he does it to set an example for the kids. It’s true that we’re alone, at night, in the middle of nowhere . . .”
She looked into the abyss of darkness beyond where the light died. Pine branches swayed in the wind, rubbing together in a whisper, as if the forest were revealing some secret to her. Or warning her of some danger.
