Swerve

by Vicki Pettersson

  I turn my head to look out the window and have to squint at even the small amount of late afternoon sun. When my vision evens out, I see that his family’s estate home looms in front of me, atop the long and sloping lawn. It stands erect, a guard with eyes that grow more luminous in the nearing advent of dusk. “—re’s Abby?”

  Where’s Abby.

  Daniel purses his lips at my dry croak, then rises and disappears into a room behind me, obviously a bathroom. The sink runs for a moment before he returns with a water glass. Looming, he tilts it to my lips. The barrel of the gun caresses my shoulder.

  I jerk my head despite my thirst and the pounding in my skull, causing the water to spill down my chin. “Where the fuck is she?”

  He places the water on a coaster atop the nightstand, then looks at me solemnly. “I’m afraid she’s all tied up at the moment.”

  Tucking the pistol into his waistband, Daniel moves behind me and begins scooting my chair across the floor. He swivels it side to side, rocking me forward until I’m situated in front of the antique vanity and the room is reflected behind me: a four-poster bed and bureau in matching mahogany, a quaint stone fireplace, lake-facing windows framed in damask. Daniel bends and stares through the mirror as if positioning me just so, though I’ve no idea why. All I see is the window across the room, and the adjacent console holding a flat-screen TV. Finally satisfied with whatever he sees that I don’t, Daniel straightens and then crosses his arms.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  I’ve never been in this particular room before, but the private dock is reflected behind me, and the bow of a vintage skiff bobs next to it. Daniel once mentioned it, wistfully, as belonging to his father, the man he murdered. “The guesthouse.”

  He inclines his head, giving the slightest of nods and flicking at my chopped hair. Gaze dropping to my chapped mouth, he stares at it for a long time before he finally blinks and sighs. “I gotta admit, I don’t know what I ever saw in you.”

  Digging into his pockets, Daniel pulls out the keys that Abby and I took from him in the semi. I jolt as they clatter on the vanity in front of me, which makes him smile. He tosses his phone on the bed behind us, then withdraws the gun from his waistband. I stiffen, though I don’t think he’s going to shoot. Instead, he’s setting the scene, like we’re on a movie set. It’s a killing tableau.

  He tilts his head as he jerks the gun’s slide, releasing the magazine but leaving one round chambered. Watching for my reaction from the corner of his good eye, he says, “Don’t worry, it’s not for Abby. Mother needs it.”

  “She knows we’re here.” It’s not a question. After all, Daniel disappeared for three days, panicking after he impulsively killed a man in the OR. Yet that was two long weeks ago. “This is where you came when you disappeared.”

  “I blacked out,” Daniel confirms, then screws up his mouth in distaste. “I hate it when people say that, an excuse to absolve them of their actions. I don’t want to be absolved. I don’t need to be. Yet one minute I was leaving the hospital wondering if I was going to be caught, caught by you, and the next minute I’m home, at the gates.” He blinks, as if still unable to believe it. “Then at her bedroom door.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Then, suddenly, over her bed.”

  I frown. “But she called.”

  She wouldn’t stop calling—at the rest stop, on the way to Baker. Again, while I approached a bloody ambulance in the abandoned water park.

  “No, that was Crystal. That was her role, you see? She needed to know where you were, what you were wearing, in order to time the stops and pick you up. She had to be able to recognize you when you stumbled out of the water park.”

  “But I spoke with—”

  “Crystal.”

  Crystal. That’s why I’d heard traffic in the background when speaking to “Imogene” in Baker. It’s why she’d sounded so falsely cheerful and affected when she’d heard my voice—when she’d been prompted to call—all the way back at the rest stop. And it was why Crystal had stared off into the distance, imagining as far as she could down two very different paths, before allowing me into her truck.

  “Crystal did a fair job of imitating my mother too. I made her practice. Then again, she had incentive.”

  She’d had a family.

  The disgust on my face has Daniel shooting me his poster-boy smile. It’s not as handsome draped across this psychosis.

  “Is Imogene still alive?” I ask.

  “Of course. In fact, she’s away on a spa weekend with her soon-to-be daughter-in-law. So thoughtful of you to arrange it. All her friends know she can’t be reached. You two are bonding.”

  Imogene Hawthorne bonding with me. A laughable thought . . . were it not for the circumstances.

  “So, what’s the plan? I kill my daughter and your mother, thereby eliminating any threat for your affection, but when you’re not, I don’t know, thankful enough, I lose my mind and try to kill you too, before offing myself in . . . what? A classic ­murder/suicide?”

  “I am shot and lose a lot of blood,” Daniel confirms, then meets his own gaze in the mirror. “I barely escape with my life.”

  He tries on a look of wonder, rearranging his features into an amalgam of shock, disbelief, awe. It looks beautiful on him. I would believe it. I did believe it for so long.

  Then he glares at me and the lovely veneer falls away. “Do you want to hear how I’ll make my escape afterwards? So you don’t worry, I mean?”

  I’m silent, but he jerks his head over his shoulder anyway. “I’ll be leaving by boat, which was fortunately gassed up for the night’s celebration. I’ll have tried to save poor, dear Abby from you, but in the end, there was just nothing I could do against the crazy woman with a terrible past who went on a murderous desert rampage. It will all be very dramatic.”

  He is making a speech. Performing for a crowd. I watch his reflection and envision him practicing these words in the bathroom mirror at home. I half expect him to thank the Academy.

  Dramatics aside, it’s clear to see that he’s found a way to get rid of both the woman he believed would someday identify him as a killer, and the other, who had made him into one.

  I peek back at the main house, its windows glowing like eyes with fractured, leaded knowledge. Two weeks ago, I think, and whisper, “What did you do to Imogene?”

  “It was a very trying visit,” he replies after a moment. “As you know, she can be difficult.”

  Light dances in his eyes, and I realize that I’m the only one he can share this side of himself with. I’ll probably be the only person outside of Imogene who will ever know what he really is, and looking at him, I can see that he was right before. He is not just hot. He is molten.

  “For all its grandeur,” Daniel whispers, “there are very few mirrors in my mother’s house. Have you noticed?”

  He mistakes my silence for interest.

  “It’s because my mother cannot stand looking at things she knows are faulty. She wants her life to be perfect, but it isn’t and she knows it, and so she hides from herself. She even covered up her husband’s death just to maintain the illusion of perfection.”

  “You mean she didn’t tell anyone that you murdered your own father,” I correct.

  “I mean that she helped me clean up.”

  He lets that sink in while he eases around my left side and places the gun on the vanity before me, tantalizingly close. “You’re exactly like her in that way, you know. You hide from your past and from yourself and what you really are. Yet you’re nothing like your own druggie whore mother. I mean, that’s what you were really fleeing when you escaped that shitty little desert town, right? The idea that you might be just like her.”

  He pauses for my response, but I don’t even blink. I’ve had these same thoughts myself, hundreds of times, and he knows it.


  “No, you’re not like her at all.” A sly look overcomes his face, and Daniel practically drawls, “No, instead, you’re just like your father.”

  “You don’t know anything about my father.”

  “I know he bought a horse ranch in northern Nevada when you were born. I know he tried to improve his breeding stock by putting all his money into a papered thoroughbred. I know that horse was diseased.” He waits for me to contradict him. I can’t. “The Internet is such a godsend.”

  I know. My own Google search taught me that the papers had called it the “dry-land strangles,” because it was a disease that spiked in arid weather. Yet it was the infection’s nickname that’d stuck most profoundly in my mind: pigeon fever, because of the abscesses that grew to the size of basketballs in both the animals’ chests and guts.

  “It must have been awful for him,” Daniel says. “Having to put a bullet through the head of every single animal.”

  His wistful smile tells me he’s wishing he’d been there to see it.

  I close my eyes, and the next thing I know, Daniel’s breath is caressing my ear, stirring the short, hacked hair so that it tickles my cheekbones. “And what happened after it was all done, Kristine? Wait . . . don’t tell me. Daddy left the barn and stood in a midnight field with the blood of all those dead horses scenting the air, and pointed that smoking shotgun up at his chin. Even though his only daughter, who’d been drawn from the house by the shots ringing through the night, begged him not to.”

  Even though I lunged as my father pulled the trigger, the hot mist of blood spraying me as I watched his face disappear.

  Even though I was standing right there.

  I try to fight off the memory he’s just conjured, but for a moment I can’t help it. I scent cordite and blood in a midnight field. Daniel reads it all in my face.

  “Did you try to save him, Kristine?” Daniel asks not unkindly. “Or is that when you started?”

  Startled, my eyes find his again.

  “You know . . . standing by, watching, while all the things you love just die.”

  “I don’t,” I manage through clenched teeth, and for a moment I think, I’d slaughter him right now if I could.

  “Your dad.”

  “No.” I jerk at my restraints, the tape squeaking but not giving an inch.

  “Your mom.” When I say nothing, he smiles. “Others.”

  “No,” I say, but it’s a whisper now.

  “A sickness lives inside of you,” Daniel says loudly, leaning on the back of my chair. “It’s why you always fall short of your biggest dreams.”

  Becoming a doctor. Having the perfect family. The ring, the picket fence.

  “You fight and flail . . . but we both know you’ll never be quite good enough. Just like him.”

  “No,” I jerk my head, even though I have had all these thoughts. Yet that was before Abby . . . mostly. I glare at Daniel through the distance of the mirror. “No, I’ve never wanted to kill myself.”

  Unlike either of my parents, the sight of my daughter makes me want to live.

  “Oh, Kristine.”

  And straightening behind me, Daniel reaches again into his pocket.

  “Never say never.”

  Here’s how it’s going to happen.

  Daniel’s hand is in his pocket as he hovers over my chair, and I can feel his body heat spreading around me like a stain. He grows in dimension without moving at all, just swallows my space like a negative force, like I’m nothing. I lean away from him, a knee-jerk reaction to his nearness, but my gentle restraints are rigid. He isn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

  Reaching down, Daniel presses his cold fingertips to my chin, finding the hollow beneath the bone and my head tilts back almost of its own accord. He keeps pressing until all I can see are the whites of his eyes above me, because his gaze remains straight ahead. He watches us through the mirror, his index and middle fingers caressing the hollow of my trachea.

  The cold barrel of a gun alights to kiss my right temple.

  It sends a shock of activity through my mind. Ears buzzing, thoughts scattering like buckshot, I manage to grab onto one thought: it can’t be the gun. That’s on the vanity, and he already said it wasn’t meant for me. Another zipping thought then, and this one hooks my breath with it: maybe there are two guns.

  “Too bad I can’t touch you physically, not for another hour and a half yet,” Daniel says, and finally removes his fingers. I lower my head and swallow hard, despite my mouth being completely dry. Daniel lifts the object in his hand high so I can see it through the mirror. It’s black and rectangular and has too many buttons to be a gun. I blink. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t still reach into your chest and carve out your heart.”

  He points the remote behind us without turning, confident, a magician waving a wand, and we both watch through the mirror as the flat-screen television snaps to life. He is right. He can rip my heart directly from my chest without ever moving at all.

  Her head is tilted forward, her hair still tangled and obscuring her face. Her shoulders are shaking, and every so often they give a wild jerk like a heart monitor recording a cardiac jolt. The room around her is covered in burlap and tarps, but there is a window. The last of the day’s light glows on her from one side, and an artificial glint assails her from above. I can’t identify it, but wherever she is, my daughter has been crying for a long time.

  There is no sound, yet somehow I can still hear Abby’s cries in my mind as clearly as if she’s in the next room. It’s a superpower of mine, of all mothers. Dozens of children can be screaming or laughing on the playground, but there’s one that has you snapping to attention like a hunting dog, stiff and on-point. This is how I sit as I stare at Abby, not breathing, my thighs tense, my biceps curled.

  “That was a crappy stunt you two pulled back in the truck.”

  Daniel shifts so that he’s in front of me, blocking my view of the screen. He props himself on the corner of the vanity, one foot swinging out to knock against my bare shin as he forces me to stare at him full-on. I feel the old anger well up inside of me, a flash flood of roiling heat, and for a moment I don’t stop it. Instead of fighting the situation—the man in front of me and my helplessness and my anger at both—I let myself feel it, fury so primal it burns everything from existence. I can live in this white space without pain. I can hate everything with a completeness that flattens meaning into dust, and I know I’ll be safe. I’ve lived here before.

  Then Daniel points the remote at the television again, there’s a click, and I hear, “Mommy . . .”

  Says the one person worth every ounce of felt pain.

  “Mommy . . .”

  I sway at the crack in her voice. It sounds like her mind is switching directions midstream, from hope to none. Where is she . . . where could she be . . . where does he . . .

  “Momm—”

  He flicks a button, cutting the sound again, and I instinctively reach for her, fingers flaring against the arms of the chair.

  “I know. It’s not very high-tech. Anyone can do it with a camera and a wireless network. But. It can be disassembled quickly, and I think it still does the job, right?”

  I barely hear him. I am entertaining a fantasy of pressing water to my baby’s lips, cupping her head and neck as I do it, of washing her feet, and drying them with what’s left of my hair. Anything. God, anything.

  He clicks again. Her soft whimper sails to me, crisp and clear on the wireless connection. Yup, it does the job all right.

  “Abby.”

  Victory lights Daniel’s eyes, a flipped switch. For a second I don’t understand it, but then Abby’s voice goes crazy behind me, and I realize that she can now hear me too. “Mommymommymommy help. Mommy, help me—”

  Sobbing and wild-eyed, Abby writhes against restraints as soft and inflexible as mine,
head whipping up and side to side as she searches for me. I want to help her, but I can’t—

  Daniel mutes the sound, though I can still see Abby calling to me through the mirror. “Tell her that mommy has been very bad.”

  He presses the remote and the sound returns. Daniel tilts his head at me and I somehow find my voice. Of course I do. Anything to keep that look away from Abby. “Abby. M-mommy has been very bad.”

  “No, Mommy! You’re a good mommy. Please, come get me. I’m—”

  Daniel mutes her once more. “Tell her Mommy is going to have to be punished.”

  Abby is still talking when he turns the sound back on, a rush of words that flow over me, slaking my heat. I begin to shake.

  “Mommy is going to have to be punished,” I say, then rush on, “but I love you, baby. I love you and—”

  “Tell her,” Daniel interrupts in that same even voice, clicking the button, “that when the fireworks begin to shoot out over the lake, she is going to die.”

  He pressed the button again, allowing Abby’s soft crying to fill the room, and I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. I work my jaw, but finally I just whisper, “Please . . .”

  Daniel’s lip twists in disgust, and he shakes his head before muting the two-way speaker and throwing the remote down. It clatters across the vanity as he moves behind me, where he picks up a rucksack that’s been propped against the door. He unzips it.

  The knife he withdraws is serrated, nothing at all like the precision tools he uses in the OR.

  I shake harder.

  “Here’s how it’s going to happen,” he says quietly, moving back behind me and gently tucking the lank strands of my hair behind my ears. It’s too short, and they immediately slide back into my face. “I’m going to ask you a series of questions. I’ll expect you to answer within ten seconds. That’s the only rule, and it’s non-negotiable. None of this stuttering or begging.” He curls his hands into himself as if begging. The tip of the serrated blade pokes me in the skull. “P-p-puh-lease.”