“I can’t catch a fucking break!” The tremor in his voice is the one I heard at the lake that night. After I told him we didn’t have capital-R relationship potential. “I needed to be alone with her. Alone.”
Max.
“Alone with who?” I ask.
“My fiancée.”
“I’ll leave you alone. I swear.” I want to sense her, not that I would’ve believed that was possible in my past life. But I only sense my own raw adrenaline.
“You ruined everything!” He gropes me roughly, his shovel-size hands slowing around my hips. I yell out.
“Shut the fuck up,” he says. He rips my cell out of my pocket. “Who’d you call?” His eyes are wild, darting.
“No one. It’s dead.”
He tries to power it on. When he can’t, he seems satisfied. But he doesn’t hand it back to me. Instead, he tosses it onto the ground and smashes it with his heel.
He lunges at me, and I’m too unsteady on my feet to move aside. He gets into my other pocket, comes out with Max’s keys on a photo key chain, Will and Race in miniature, smiling giddily.
“Holy shit,” he breathes. “These are hers.”
He assesses me in a new way. Like a butcher deciding where to make the first cut. “They sent you!” He looks beyond me, to the dirt road unpopulated save for the birds and the trees. He grabs me by the shoulders, the keys digging into my flesh along with his fingers. “Who sent you?”
“No one.” Was that the right answer? The wrong one?
“Why do you have these then?” He shakes the keys by my ear.
“They were in the truck. I just grabbed them. Didn’t think. I didn’t know whose they were.”
He’s not so much convinced as he is thrown off. He pockets them.
“They’re your fiancée’s?” I ask.
“I have to figure out what the hell to do with you now.” He’s pacing, churning up clouds of dirt as the sun gathers its remaining light and fades away.
“I’ll stay out of your way. I promise.”
“She’s not well,” he says, seemingly to himself. “She needs some time. That’s all. Time away from the rest of the world. She’ll be fine then.” “Max?” I blurt. Shit.
His feet stop short. “You know her?” The stench of paranoia rolls off him again, hits me square in the face.
“You said her name,” I lie. “Before.”
I can’t tell whether he believes me. Max. Show me Max.
Sighing, he rakes his fingers through his hair. I see a sheathed knife at his hip.
It’s all too much. I can’t keep the roiling in my stomach down. I throw up.
He jumps out of the way. “You’re fucking disgusting!”
“Sorry,” I gasp. I’m bent over. If not for my hands on my knees, I’d be facedown in the dirt. Everything sour in me is in my throat, on my lips, on my shirt. I spit the last of it out and wipe my bottom lip with the back of my hand. “I can help Max. You said she’s sick. I have medical training.”
He snorts. “You can’t even help yourself.”
“It was the ride in the truck that did it. I’m okay. But if Max is sick and you’re way out here …” The desolation of the place tries to fill in its own unhappy ending. I have to pick new words to have any hope. “I can help.”
“And if you can’t?”
“I can. I will.” Can I though? It all feels like too much. The knife in the sheath. No sign of my sister. My sour insides soaking into the earth. “She’s alive,” I breathe, my fists pressed against my mouth, “isn’t she?”
“Of course she is.” He hawks and spits. “Who do you think I am?”
A monster. A fucking monster. I will destroy you.
“Where is she?” My eyes dart all around, landing on nothing that says Max.
“She doesn’t need you bothering her. You’re a mess.”
“Please.” I don’t mean it to come out that way, but there it is. Clearly the level of my pleading puzzles him. “I’ll prove myself to you,” I try to explain. “I can see you’re in love.”
“What do you know about love?” he says.
“I know it’s precious and rare. If she’s feeling sick, you want her to get better, don’t you?”
“Obviously. I don’t want to be engaged to a dead girl.” The way he says dead girl, like the words are heavy chess pieces he’s slamming down on the board, chills me.
“Where is she?” I say.
“For a nothing little stowaway, you sure are nosy.”
“Just let me see her.”
He spits at my feet. “She’s not some carny freak you can gawk at.”
“I swear to God, if you’ve hurt her …” I start, hearing my mistake in real time. I back away.
“Then what?” he snarls. “Then what?”
He lunges toward me and I launch into a run, aiming for the nearest building, but he’s on me, yanking me by my hair. He tugs my head back so hard that I feel a snap in my neck. I claw at his hand. I wing my elbows behind me, hope to slam into his face.
Still clutching my hair, he hooks an arm under mine and anchors his palm to the back of my head.
“If I let you live,” he says into my hair, “you don’t get to make the threats.”
He twists my arm so far back I’m sure something’s broken. I’m on the verge of blacking out when he releases my wrist, my hair. My face is drenched in eye-watering pain. I fall to my knees.
“I could kill you in a second,” he says.
You already did. I won’t let you do it again.
“Maxine!” I scream. “Where are you?”
He’s laughing. “Go ahead. Yell your head off. Nobody’s gonna hear you but the birds.”
I lurch away, my legs pumping with blood, and run. I crest the dusty hill and stumble onto a creaky porch. My right leg breaks through a rotting floorboard. The wood splinters and bites and claws my leg, swallowing it past the knee.
He just laughs and laughs. “Maybe getting rid of you won’t be as complicated as I thought. You’ve been here five minutes and already you’re puking up your guts and burying yourself.”
I anchor my hands on the stronger edges of the porch and heave my trapped leg out of the hole. I hear something scuttle away in the dirt below the porch. My leg weeps blood from several places but I push on. More carefully now, I get to the door of the cabin and shove it open.
“Max?” I call.
Nothing but a faint rustling that might be the sound of the wind through the trees outside. The cabin is dark and close. I can make out a cot in the corner, a trunk at the foot of it.
“Maxine!” I say, hoping against hope for her voice in return.
I push deeper into the cabin. My footsteps creak the wooden plank floor and send up clouds of dust. Something in the corner squeaks and then flies at me. I scream and duck and cover my head. A bat. It wriggles through a crack in the wall, flapping its way outside. My heart beats faster than those furry translucent wings. Blood throbs in my throat.
He’s in the doorway, blocking the light. “Real tough, huh?”
“Just let me see her,” I whisper. As if taking my voice any louder will elicit sobs. “I’ve got medical training.”
“Bullshit. If you don’t tell me why you’re really here, I’ll get rid of you before you can say a prayer.”
I want to cry. But I have to play this game. One move at a time. “I saw you in the parking lot. At your place. The way you were putting the boxes in your truck … and then when I talked to you … I don’t know … you seem confident about who you are. About what you want out of life. I wanted to borrow some of that. I’ve got nowhere to go. Nothing to lose. No one to care that I’m gone. Just tryin’ to survive.”
Now he’s grinning like he’s watching a sitcom. “Shit, you’re plum crazy.”
“Let me stay. I can be useful.”
“Get on your knees.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Get on your fucking knees.”
My lips clamp
together. I can’t do this. I shake my head, the motion churning my stomach again, making the lump on my temple throb more painfully. “I don’t want to do that,” I say. My throat tightens.
He makes a sound halfway between a belly laugh and a roar. “You think what you want matters? You shoulda hitched a ride with somebody else then.”
I can’t get to Max if he kills me.
His big hands on each of my shoulders, he shoves me down hard, forcing my knees to buckle. As my kneecaps hit the dusty floorboards, sending currents of pain through my legs, he grunts. The next sounds I hear will be his belt unbuckling, his jeans unzipping.
Max. I’ll do whatever I have to for you.
“Now,” he says, “pray for mercy.”
My throat relaxes.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know God.”
“It’s not that,” I say.
“Then let me hear you pray. Let me hear you beg for your sad little life.”
And I do it, for the first time in my life, there in that broken-down, abandoned cabin that even flying rodents see fit to escape. I pray. Keeping my eyes downcast—the warped floor, a beetle scuttling past, my linked hands hanging down in front of me like afterthoughts—I pray.
After a while of my looping, rambling pleas—to an omnipresent power or to this sick man, I’m not sure which, and I’m not even sure of the difference in this moment—he silences me with a finger to my lips.
“Aw,” he says, almost tenderly, stroking the curve of my jaw and ending at the tip of my chin, his fingers rough and calloused, “you’re just a little ole fly. And I’m gonna love pulling off your wings.”
28
HARPER
He tells me his name is Chris. I tell him I’m Linnea. He leads me along a hard-packed dirt trail—narrowed by encroaching prickly pear cactus and rosinweed—to a cabin on the other side of the hill. Our steps scare a cottontail out from a mesquite bush. It darts behind the cabin fast. Every cell in my body is telling me the last thing I should do is duck into another building with this man, but my brain keeps saying Max.
It’s dark in here. He goes to the corner, stoops to light a rusty lantern, and holds it up so it throws off its watery light.
I gasp. Max is stretched out on a low, narrow cot, an itchy-looking army-green blanket bunched up at her feet. Her eyes are closed. Her chest rises and falls gently, and once I see that, I can breathe too. She’s alive. That’s all that matters. That’s everything.
I kneel beside the cot. Her face is sweaty; damp hair clings to her forehead. She is pale, so pale. Even her lips are pale.
“Max,” I whisper, patting her cheeks gently.
“Let her sleep,” he says. “She needs to rest.”
I find her hand—a tight fist. I unclench it enough to squeeze her fingers, to offer proof I’m here. I whisper her name once more. She turns her head as if she’s seeking my voice. She whimpers softly.
He’s drugged her.
“Harper?” she says, her voice a scratch in the sand. I want to say, “I’m here, I’m here!,” but instead I grip her hand more tightly and murmur that she’s going to be okay. She shifts her weight on the bed and something rattles. I see it then, a rusty chain locking her other arm to the bedrail.
“Oh my God,” I say. “What is this?”
“She needs to stay safe.” He rests his hand on the hilt of his knife. “You heard her, she’s hallucinating.”
“What are you talking about?” I forget who has the power. His energy shifts. A bull lured by the red cape. “I mean,” I backpedal, “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Harper,” Max says, her eyes still closed, her voice still weak. “Where were you?”
“She keeps asking for her sister,” he says with dismay. “Her dead sister.”
“She needs a doctor,” I say.
He makes a noise in his throat. “I thought you were the doctor.”
“She may be severely dehydrated. I can’t give her IV fluids.”
“She’ll be fine. This place is good for girls. Especially ones with fucked-up families. The clean air, the quiet. It brings them back.” He skims his knuckles over her cheekbone. I don’t want him touching her. I glance at the knife at his hip. I imagine grabbing it, sinking the blade into his neck.
“Ezra?” she mumbles.
“Ah, see?” He snatches his hand away from Max and kicks the nearest wall. Sawdust and dried insects crumble down from the rafters. “How are we gonna make a new life together, Max,” he screams, “if you won’t leave the old one behind? How can our love survive that?” And then he turns to me. “You see that? That’s what she’s sick with! Not something an IV’ll fix. That.”
“What?” I ask.
“She asks for him.” Now he’s pacing the short length of the cabin as if he’s caged. I’m worried he’ll mistake one of us for his jailer.
“That’s only because you’ve frightened her. Unchain her. Let me help her and she’ll forget all about him.” I swallow hard and add, “Whoever Ezra is.”
There’s a chillingly long moment in which he seems to think. Then he mutters something about this day needing to end already.
“You smell like puke.” He hurls a shirt at my face. “Put this on.”
I hesitate.
He laughs. “You waiting for me to turn around? Fine. There ya go.” I swap shirts fast. He grabs mine, tosses it outside. The peasant blouse he gives me—elastic neckline broken off one shoulder—smells stale. Like this place. If it was Max’s, I don’t recognize it.
Next he hurls a musty sleeping bag at me that I don’t bother unrolling. I’m wrecked with fatigue, but I sit up, spine against the crude tongue-and-groove wall, and watch Maxine breathe. On a cot at the other end of the cabin, Chris sleeps in snatches. Every time I move, he wakes. Exhaustion or no, it’s not like I’d be able to let my guard down enough to sleep with the dragon curled under the same roof.
As I hold vigil over my sister, I assess my own body: the arm he twisted doesn’t seem broken, just bruised and sore. I can’t feel hunger anymore, so that’s a plus. I’m thirsty, but he made me take a few sips of water before he turned in, so I suppose dehydration isn’t imminent. I’m weak, of course, but how much of that is thanks to this impossible day, this impossible situation, or … Linnea’s friends had warned me that I needed to take “my” (her?) meds or I’d get sick.
“It’s been a whole year,” I’d pointed out.
“Forever,” Julie had said. “That’s how long a heart transplant patient has to stay on the anti-rejection meds. Every day of forever.”
The morning when Shelby called me, panicked about Max (my God, was that only yesterday?), before I drove to the house, I had grabbed a carton of OJ from the fridge—didn’t bother looking for a glass—and swallowed one pill from each plastic prescription container, just like Alma showed me (“Make sure you take all three,” she stressed). More out of scratching a better-safe-than-sorry itch than anything else. I hadn’t taken the pills with me. I’d thought I’d be back.
Every day of forever.
I want my forever back. I’m sick of this tour through someone else’s.
All night while I watch my sister breathe I spin vivid fantasies of getting Chris’s knife and plunging it into his chest, even though when I try to imagine what that might feel like, to send a blade through someone’s heart, what kind of force it would require—physical and mental—I doubt I’ll be able to follow through. One blip of hesitation, and I’d be the dead one.
Even if I could be quick enough and ruthless enough to murder him in cold blood, I wouldn’t have gotten the chance anyway. Before he settled in, he pulled the knife off his belt and slid it under the mattress.
Somehow, the sun rises in the morning, feeble early rays setting light to the window quilted in cobwebs.
Somehow, we have all survived the night.
29
HARPER
“Chris,” I say, “she doesn’t need to be chained like that.” You do, tho
ugh.
He’s trying to loosen a bolt at the base of a water pump at the bottom of the hill. The wrench keeps slipping. “She was getting up. Sleepwalking,” he says. “It’s so she’ll be safe. There’s snakes out there, you know.”
“I’m here now. I’ll watch her.”
“Oh, sure, now I suddenly trust you. Like magic.”
I guess I’m the naive one, thinking he’d let down his guard after I sobbed and prayed at his feet. “There’s no reason not to trust me.”
“Mind your own fucking business, how about that?” He progresses to slamming the wrench against the bolt.
“She knows how to avoid snakes. And if it’s sleepwalking you’re worried about, there are ways to prevent that.”
“Like what?” He squints up at me from where he squats. The sun is in his eyes. I picture slamming his face against the pipe, over and over and over, until Max and I are free. But I know I’d only get one chance, and that wouldn’t kill him—would only enrage him—and then he’d be on his feet and there’d be no amount of praying that could earn me mercy.
“You can lock the cabin at night,” I suggest.
“Good idea.”
“Great,” I say, forcing cheer. “So where’s the key? I’ll unlock her now.”
He’s back to work, grunting at the plumbing. “Never said that.” I want to scream. I shift my weight. “But it doesn’t make sense—”
He throws the wrench down. I wince, thinking it’s coming at me. He takes his knife out, sends the tip of the blade into the gummed-up crevices around the bolt. “Like I said, not that it’s any of your business, but Max needs to get her old life out of her system. It’s a disease. An addiction. It’s hurting her. She needs to ride it out, ’til she realizes where she belongs.”
“She’s not a horse you can break!”
He stands up. We’re eye to eye. His voice is quiet. “She’s not a horse, no, but ‘breaking’ is exactly what she needs. And I’ve broken enough horses to know how to do it.”
Borrowed Page 17
