Swerve

by Vicki Pettersson

  I wince. “Yes.”

  Lacy shakes her head, points to the door again. “Out.”

  I don’t remember moving. All I know is that one moment I’m standing atop bright blooms and black chains, and the next I’m at the counter that Lacy thinks she owns. I could slap her twice before she backs away. “Give me the map.”

  The face I should have already hit now twists. The diamond sparks as her nostrils flare. “I ain’t giving you nothing, ’cept one last chance to walk out that door.”

  I run my hands over my head and have to fight not to pull at my hair. Another old feeling comes back to me, another blast from my dusty youth. It’s an urge to respond as I did to those barren schoolyard taunts, long before I worked in health care, before I swore to do no harm. Instead, I clench the phone in front of me, preventing fists. “Okay, I’m gone. But just tell me what the man who gave you the map looked like. Any defining features? Did he give you a name? Anything?”

  Lacy shakes her head side to side, so slowly, so considered, that this time her earrings don’t sway. I remember that Henry is next to me, hanging on every word. I feel his gaze still raking my body, breaking it into usable parts. I feel Lacy noting that too.

  “Lacy,” I say, closing my eyes, searching for control.

  “What?”

  Ore whore, ore whore, ore . . .

  My eyelids flip open. “Give me the fucking map!”

  The curse whips out, a lash of fury so loud that Lacy actually takes a step back. Then a matching tempest flares in her eyes, though instead of forming fists, she reaches for the phone.

  I hold up my hands, surrendering as I back away. No way will anyone in this diner forget me now. And I know small towns. The sheriff can be here in moments. I can’t imagine a worse way to blow the bulk of the next twenty-four hours than trapped in county jail.

  I pause just long enough to toss some cash on the counter next to the pie with a crater carved in its red middle. Fifties music blares, telling me to return to sender, but instead I find myself fleeing under the heavy weight of Lacy’s exacting stare, under Henry’s thunderstruck one, and just as Malthus had intended all along: totally empty-handed.

  I see exactly how this is going to go now.

  Bursting from the diner in a near-run, I have to fight to control my limbs, my reeling mind. It’s hard when I’m as hot on the inside as it is outside, and when the summer heat attacks once again, I feel like I could ignite. I’m such an idiot, I think, my thoughts red, all my long-dormant rage turning inward as I begin to pace.

  I wonder what I could’ve done differently, what I can do next. Only now can I see how I fell right into Malthus’s trap. He never had any intention of letting me leave that diner, or Baker, unnoticed.

  I cover my face with my hands, breathing deeply, trying to regroup. I feel watched—either by Malthus or by someone in the diner—but I don’t care. I just block out the searing sunlight, reducing my five senses to four. It might appear to an onlooker that I’m about to cry—but that’s a thought that’s laughable in itself.

  I once told Daniel this during scrub-up, just off-handedly mentioning it in order to reassure him that the eight-year-old trauma victim we were about to operate on wouldn’t affect me, not professionally. Not the way he thought.

  He was startled by my words, though, and he angled himself to try and force my gaze. Only then did I remember that people didn’t say such things, which made me regret saying anything at all. The water steamed, his hands reddening as I watched, yet he held them steady beneath the gushing stream of water, as if that could hold me steady too. I appreciated it, but I still squirmed beneath his worried gaze.

  “What do you mean you don’t cry?” he asked softly.

  “I mean tears will well in my eyes if you pinch me, but that’s just a reaction to physical discomfort. I’ll tear up if my eyes are too dry or if I’m facing a cold wind or something like that, but my eyes don’t get moist just from emotion.”

  “Never?” he pressed, amazed.

  I shook my head. “I can’t remember the last time.”

  That’s a lie. I can bring back that shattered night in razor-edged detail, right down to the scent of blasted sulfur and the hot spatter of my father’s blood on my skin. Yet it’s as if that experience somehow cauterized my tear ducts, searing them so that they remain forever divorced from my emotions. I haven’t shed a tear in the eighteen years since. Not when my mother died. Not even when Abby was born. I’d worry about the latter except that I also remember eventually taking great pride in her fierce, lusty newborn wails.

  That’s right, I thought, staring into that perfect, pink face. Rage against the world for its injustices. Rail against all that’s unfair. Weep for us both.

  Yet I hadn’t been sure enough of Daniel at this time—or convinced that he was sure enough of me—to say any of that. And when he finally moved, pulling hands as red as lobsters from beneath that streaming water, he shook his head as he stared down at me. “Why, that’s just . . .”

  Unnatural, I thought. Unfeminine, unbelievable, unattractive. I looked away, but Daniel reached out, and in a move that’s since become habit, pressed his fingertips along my jaw and forced my gaze back to his. “Incredible.”

  Yes, I have a past that can rear up to send me into spiraling silences. Sure, I take the graveyard shift for the sole purpose of turning the hated darkness of night back into day. But Daniel’s acceptance of all that is how I face down the censure I see flickering in Imogene’s gaze. It’s how I combat my mother’s intrusive, ghostly scorn. And it’s why I can think of the future with hopefulness rather than the black bloom of emptiness that’d been there before, as dark and deep as an abandoned mine.

  With Daniel at my side, why would I ever need to cry again?

  Exhaling hard now, I empty the hot breath from my belly and try to be present, try to think. Daniel claims I’m at my best in an emergency, so I recast this crisis and pretend I’m in the OR.

  What’s the diagnosis for someone who has attracted a madman? What’s the cure, I wonder, when being chased by pure evil?

  I glance over to find that the stray terrier has settled into the shade provided by my car. Attuned to threat, it tilts its head the moment my eyes alight on its wiry fur. I have a sudden vision, a flash of me showing up to the estate, Daniel safely at my side, and this drooling black mutt tucked beneath my arm. Imogene Hawthorne has something called an Affenpinscher that she carries that way. It, too, is wiry, though inbreeding has given it a superiority complex this pitiful creature will never possess. It snapped at me every time I looked at it.

  “Purebred,” Imogene said then, staring directly at me with her arctic eyes. I didn’t blink, so she decided to elucidate. “Those with superior pedigree possess a sensory perception that operates on a plane ordinary beings cannot begin to intuit.”

  It was a lot of words for a simple put-down, and they all came back to me under the steady gaze of the skinny, dehydrated, flea-bitten beast hunched in the shade of my car. This dog might not exist on the same rarified plane as Imogene’s fanged furball, but I bet its shit smells the same on her antique Persian rug.

  I bend to it, holding out a hand, but the move shifts the terrain and brings the background into relief—specifically the thick screw piercing my rear tire. It’s kissing the treads right where they meet the sidewall, its angle precise, thoughtfully placed to cause a blowout at seventy miles an hour. The dog remains put as I reach out and test the screw’s depth, and after a moment, one of us whimpers.

  I see exactly how this is going to go now. Even if I can get Lacy to give me the map, changing this tire is going to eat up precious time, and Baker is only the second stop of Malthus’s scheduled five. For each step I take, Malthus will push me back another two. The twenty-four-hour deadline will march on, and instead of moving closer to Daniel, I will inadvertently end up moving farther and farther a
way.

  I drop my head, and a hand seizes my shoulder.

  Whirling, jerking back at the same time, I almost fall right on top of the dog.

  “Whoa, hold on there!” The man from the diner—Henry?—catches me in strong arms. I yank away, and he holds up his hands, easing back like I’m the one to fear.

  Palm to my chest, I stagger to my feet and relearn how to breathe.

  “Sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  I take a moment, braced against the trunk of my car, then finally look up. “I’m sorry too. I mean, for—”

  I motion back to the diner.

  “I know.” Henry smiles, and it’s almost startling. The expression changes him completely. He suddenly looks fresh out of high school, and I picture him on the television show he mentioned, a ghost hunter in a robe and mortarboard cap. I bet it would get good ratings. “I could tell that wasn’t really you.”

  “You could?” I swallow back hot surprise, but know I still sound suspicious. Is someone actually being kind to me?

  Has it only taken three hours in Malthus’s desert for me to be surprised at that?

  “Sure.” He shoves his hands into the front pockets of his jeans as he shrugs. “Too weird.”

  I jerk my chin at the giant plate-glass window where Lacy is leaning across a booth to glare into the lot. “What about her?”

  “She’s not happy,” Henry admits, but his smile widens. “But she gave me this.”

  “Oh my God.” I snatch the map from Henry’s hands, rude and greedy.

  He just continues to smile.

  My hands, so steady with a scalpel, reliable at work, shake as I open it, and sure enough, there is a big, black X staring back up at me. A dead man’s eye. I shake off the thought as I look back up at Henry and exhale so loudly that his smile swerves into a laugh. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Based on our short history? Let’s just settle on a friendly handshake,” he says, offering his palm.

  “Thank you.” I take it. It is warm and large and firm. His strength and kindness wash over me. “So much.”

  Henry just waves, then tucks his hands into his front pockets as he turns and heads across the street toward the motel that might or might not be haunted. I smile after him, even though I can still feel Lacy’s eyes on me, watching and judging behind the diner’s sun-seared glass. I sense the weight of someone else’s regard as well, and it’s even hotter than the tricky pilot light inside of me. However, between the dog that saved me from a seventy-five-mile-an-hour crash and the man now disappearing in the center of that sagging motel, I am momentarily fortified.

  I may not be able to cry, but I can fix what has been broken. I’ve done it before. And then I will drive on.

  I do not want to get out of this car.

  It takes me an entire hour to change the tire, and when I finally exit Baker I am so grimy I feel like I’m taking half the shitbox town with me. Sweat-soaked, I gorge on a bottle of water I scored from the adjacent convenience store, downing it so quickly that it sloshes in my stomach as I gain the on-ramp. At least the highway is now absent of its heat haze. The sun has tucked itself into a rocky pocket, and a robe of purple lays over the heavy shoulders of the distant Cronese range. A hushed pink stain sweeps the sky above it, but in between those sherbet mountains and me are miles of low, ratty brush that turn the desert into Martian terrain.

  “You can get lost out here, baby doll.” My mother’s voice, wispy with dreams and dehydration, rises to fill the silence. These were her words the day after she dumped our clothes into black plastic bags, folded those into the trunk of our old Chevy Caprice, and started driving. We were middle-thick in the desert by then, speeding through the anus of Death Valley. I remember being spooked by the name. I didn’t know yet that it was the unnamed places that you had to worry about.

  “I don’t want to be lost,” I said, my voice still high and amorphous, unharnessed so that it was easy for my mother to continue on like I hadn’t spoken. This was the beginning of her not-hearing. It was right before the not-caring that followed.

  “Ain’t nothing to anchor yourself to out here,” she said, voice as airy as the wind outside our windows. “Nothing at all to weigh you down in these crevices and cracks. Why, I bet we could probably just float away. . . .”

  I wanted to ask what she thought was anchoring us down anyway. Our home was gone, the postage stamp pastures repossessed, soon to be auctioned off. I knew this because I was there, hiding behind the couch as the insurance agent patiently explained that there was no provision in the policy for suicide. Not that it mattered. You couldn’t exactly have a horse farm with no horses.

  We began driving the next day. My mother refused to tell me where we were going or how long before we got there, and it wasn’t until we’d slipped in and out of three increasingly dusty towns that I realized we weren’t actually going anywhere. We were just leaving.

  The Mojave Desert asserted itself like a striking rattler. A grave-dry arroyo herded us toward a mountain range that then dumped us onto two-lane Route 6. Not long after, a hundred-year-old mining town popped up like a grizzled specter, pockmarked and defaced. We stopped to fuel up and stretch our legs at a sandy service station on Main Street, which was where we met Mr. Waylon Rhodes.

  “What’s Mizpah?” my mother asked, jerking her head at the station sign over his head, absolutely no curiosity in her voice. A greasy lock of hair slid over her forehead, and I resisted the urge to reach up and tuck it back behind her ear. It made her look forlorn, and somehow indecent. I smoothed my matching black hair down behind my own ears instead.

  “Why, that’s what Tonopah is famous for. Our silver mines. Mizpah was the biggest.” Waylon’s baritone was as broad as the blue sky above and as rough as the scarred earth below. I edged back toward the car when he looked at me.

  Imogene Hawthorne would say that my sensory perception was attuned to a plane my mother could not intuit.

  She sent him a single-eyed squint over the rusted hood of the Caprice, sweat dotting her hairline, her shirt sticking to her back where it’d touched the seat. “So why, if them mines are so famous, ain’t I never heard of Tonopah before?”

  “Well,” Waylon drawled, putting on an accent I didn’t even know they made in central Nevada. “We’re more famous for our legal brothels now.”

  I didn’t know exactly what a brothel was, but I could feel Waylon’s eyes on me, searching for a reaction, and I kept my gaze down, kicking dirt with the toes of my Chucks. His laughter oiled the air at that. Then his attention shifted to my mother. I looked up too.

  She felt Waylon’s gaze on her too, but in a different way than I had. Without even moving, she bloomed under his eye, and suddenly the two of them appeared closer, a wildflower pressed up against a dead mesquite. For a moment she looked like her old self, the woman my dad had left sleeping in bed while he embarked on a midnight bloodbath. Then she arched her back, sucked in a great gulp of the dry desert air, and turned back into a husk of herself. “I’d sure like to see them mines.”

  The Caprice didn’t see a full tank of gas for another eight years.

  Right now, I stick to a steady seventy-five miles an hour, even as other travelers bolt past me, racing one another to separate destinations. Even an ambulance whizzes by in a rocking gust, right past Zzyzx Road, a sharp-as-shears moniker for another path leading nowhere. There are a lot of them out here: Arrowhead Trail, Rasor. I focus on the ambulance’s taillights as if they’re all that’s anchoring me to the road, but it’s soon gone too. It was a good reminder, at least. Mine isn’t the only emergency in the world.

  It’s after eight by the time I roll up to Malthus’s second appointed stop, now over four hours after Daniel’s disappearance. I turn off the engine, and the burgeoning night rushes to press oily fingertips against the windows, peering in. I have the sudden urge to fill the
newborn hush with a scream. Dusk is no more than fifteen minutes away.

  “The Rock-A-Hoola Water Park.” I say the words aloud to cut the silence and stop the scream, and because I still can’t quite believe that this is what was buried beneath the tight X on the second map. I am parallel to the main highway, and a nine-foot fence looms between it and the access road I had to take to reach the abandoned park. The dual curbs that mark the park’s entrance look like deserted islands, and its graded lot is the size of a football field, flat and only partially paved.

  The water park itself is just a smattering of crumbling pastel cubes with lidless doorways that note my arrival with unblinking gazes. A lumpy man-made hill rises behind them, concrete pillars—the scaffolding that once held slick blue waterslides—spiking from its rugged back. The slides are long gone, likely salvaged and sold for scrap, so what remains looks like the ribs of a beached whale, stripped of its blubber and gnawed on for good measure. I must look like an ant from the top of those dusk-fogged hills.

  I do not want to get out of this car.

  I must get out of this car.

  Instead, I feed the dog next to me another Slim Jim.

  Yes. The dog.

  The stray mongrel has taken my place in the passenger’s seat and doesn’t look eager to relinquish it anytime soon. I know, I know. The last thing I need is to take care of something else. But one moment I was having a daydream of arriving at Lake Arrowhead with this mangy, panting beast in tow, and the next—after the tire was changed—I was suddenly coaxing the dog inside the car with whistling noises and a processed meat snack. It doesn’t make sense, but I give my hopefulness, and myself, a pass considering the rest of my day.

  Feeding the little terrier another rope of jerky, I watch the sky shrug off one more layer of light. My belly cramps with cherries and nerves. The sense of abandonment is total out here, but that’s dead wrong. I am neither alone nor forgotten.