Swerve

by Vicki Pettersson

  He pulls me back, resettling me in place, his touch firm but gentle. “Let’s practice once before I allow Abby to hear you again. We’ll start with something easy.”

  “I don’t—”

  He lifts the knife. “Right earlobe or left?”

  He’s going to cut me up?

  He’s going to make my daughter listen?

  Daniel sighs. “Right earlobe or left, Kristine. If you don’t answer in five seconds, I’m going to assume the answer is both.”

  No time to make a proper decision . . . not that there is one.

  “Left,” I blurt, as he’s reaching for my right ear. He detours smoothly, without hesitation, and pulling the lobe down low, begins sawing. It only takes seconds, just long enough for my surprised squeal to swerve into a throaty scream, but the fire that shoots through me burns long after he throws the flap of skin down into my lap. It’s not the full ear. I can see through the tears that he’s left most of the cartilage intact, but none of his surgical skills were on display as he sawed at the soft flesh, and so each breath escapes me in a guttural moan.

  Daniel waits. Eventually, I straighten from my forward slump. I am breathing like an animal, chest heaving, something large hibernating inside my throat.

  “Okay. Not bad for a first try.” He saunters around until he’s in front of me again. The throbbing burn of my lost earlobe is turning cold, but the blood hitting my shoulder is steady and hot. “The phalanges are next. I’ll let you choose between distal and medial. We’ll build slowly to appendages and joints, though I’ll be certain to pay careful attention to key muscles.”

  Demonstrating, he leans forward and angles the blade into my mouth. I pull back my lips but he’s not cutting or thrusting or hacking. He’s just pointing at my tongue. The tip of the blade scrapes it and I taste blood. Withdrawing it, he then taps my nose. “And cartilage. And sockets.”

  He moves the blade to the corner of my eye, and digs a bit until the skin pops. He leans back then, and heaves a great sigh, satisfied to watch me shake. “I wouldn’t move too much if I were you.”

  But I can’t help it. For someone tied up and completely immobile, I am awfully busy, quaking and bleeding and gasping for air as I try to reassemble the thoughts in my scattered mind. Daniel drinks in the sight as if sipping a fine wine.

  “I really shouldn’t have gotten so angry at you for running, for fighting.” He tilts his head like we’re engaged in an actual conversation, like my teeth aren’t clattering in my skull. “I have to say that I learned so many things along this journey that I never would have if you’d simply gone along with the plan. You forced me to improvise and exercise patience and restraint. All of those things put me in an even better place than originally intended.

  “I’m still going to kill you, of course, because extinction of the faulty and the weak is a vital and necessary part of the natural evolutionary process. . . .”

  And I was defective. Because I hadn’t seen him. Because I could not be made better or fixed. Because the last thing the world needs is two Mrs. Hawthornes.

  “But I guess what I’m saying is . . . you’ve helped to accelerate my own evolution. If I believed in such things, I’d say that this moment, you and me here, was fated from the start. I feel . . .” he searches out the word. “Appreciative. So, thank you.”

  He drops a kiss atop my sweaty forehead, careful to avoid my dripping ear, and then gets up and puts the knife back in the knapsack. He catches my frown through the mirror just as he opens the door, and snaps his fingers, the sound almost cheery. “Oh, wait—that’s right.”

  Returning one final time to the dresser, Daniel points the remote at the television, and allows Abby’s pleas, now kitten soft, to fill the room. “Almost forgot—you’re going to need to be able to hear the questions.”

  He’s going to make it hurt.

  There is a long moment of pure stupidity, where my mind simply blocks out Daniel’s words. I’m so dumbstruck that my ear doesn’t even hurt. Then, when his meaning finally crashes over me—when I realize that it’s not Abby who has to listen to someone she loves being tortured, but me; that it’s not my body parts I have to decide are to be removed, but hers—I do something that surprises us both. I roar like a match has been set to my insides, and the sound is so oily and raw and feral that Daniel actually backs up three whole steps. It’s a sound I thought I’d left buried deep inside a mineshaft eleven long years ago.

  I pour my guts out into the cry, spots blooming behind my eyes, my earlobe and head throbbing with the sound, but my goddamn stubborn broken heart keeps on beating, despite how much I hate the world right now, how much I think I’ve always hated it. I suck in a breath so deep and jagged that it hacks right through my middle.

  A sob bursts up and out of me so fast that it lifts me from the seat. Daniel draws back even more, tilting his head, not quite trusting his own ears. Then he blurs into an indistinct outline as tears fill my eyes and I wail for the first time since my father blew himself away in front of me.

  The ability to cry hasn’t been cauterized from me after all.

  Daniel takes a tentative step back my way, like he doesn’t want to spook me. Abby is crying out to me too, but my sorrow smothers even that, because I know what’s coming for her. I drown her out with gulping howls that quake the entire world. My tears, inaccessible before, are unstoppable now.

  I don’t remember Daniel moving in front of me, but his eyes suddenly search my face. He studies me up close, as if he’s never seen me before. My shoulders shake and my throat is seared, but the sound keeps rolling out, etched from my vocal cords to emerge raw and scabbed.

  And oh, how he loves my pain. Loves it. I can see it when he straddles my chair and bends close to capture my release for all time, and it’s with total horror that I realize he has never, ever looked at me with such love before.

  Gently, almost primly, Daniel settles himself onto my lap. He inches nearer, ignoring the hot, low sounds still escaping my throat. I think he’s going to kiss me again, but instead, he places one hand on each side of my chair and gently, ravenously, licks the tears from my right cheek. His hot tongue slides from my jaw to my inner eyelid, where a new tear threatens to spring.

  I tilt my head up so that it’s almost touching his, same as we used to do in bed. My breathing steadies slightly. We are so close that our eyes threaten to cross, and for a moment, it almost seems like there’s that old magic between us. We share a look, both intimate and uninhibited. A drop of blood falls from my ear. Finally, I give a small, capitulating nod: I see you. I see who you really are.

  And then I bite down on his fucking nose until my teeth meet on the other side.

  Daniel howls, jerking back, but I hold tight and he has to strike my face with the flat of his palm to jar me loose. Wheeling away, he cups a hand to his injured nose, and even through my newly rent tears, I can see he comes away with blood. Good. I snarl when he looks at me and spit his own blood back in his face.

  He is back on me in an instant, and this time the gun is in his hand. The barrel doesn’t quite fit into my left nostril, but not for lack of trying. His nose is still attached, but also not for lack of trying.

  My voice emerges as if caught in a bubble. “Do it, you pansy little mama’s boy.”

  That almost gets him. His index finger twitches. “I should. I’d love to see your brains splattered against hand-painted chinoiserie.”

  “Let me guess? Mommy picked it out herself ?”

  His chest heaves against mine as he fights to control his breathing, and he finally uses my face to push up and away, though he yanks his palm back quickly when I angle in for another bite. He smacks me upside the head again, causing new pain to bloom in my shorn earlobe and my battered temples. Then he jostles my chair as he goes to check the damage to his face in the powder room behind me. I think the fucker is actually pouting.

 
Yet even as my eyes are returning to Abby, Daniel changes his mind. Instead, he stops short of the bathroom and wheels back toward the front door, the duffel, and the house on the hilltop. I realize he’s fleeing. He doesn’t trust himself in the same room with me. He is heaving from the effort not to flatten me.

  Daniel opens the door, turning only to cast me one last bloody, murderous look.

  “I think,” he says, through clenched teeth, “That I’ll go visit your daughter now.”

  And even though he leaves, he flattens me all the same.

  The sun is sinking from view as Daniel strolls back to the main house, leaving only shadows to yawn over the yard and the lake and the killer. I moan as he disappears from view, then catch myself as I glance at the television, and at Abby curled into the corner of that unidentifiable room. I don’t want to scare her with any more cries, but my whole body hurts. Head, ear, leg, feet—I am a constellation of slim bones linked together by bright spots of pain. I am an asterism of agony.

  Yet Daniel is going to appear on that screen soon. I know and dread it, but can do nothing to stop it.

  When the fireworks begin to shoot out over the lake, she is going to die.

  Bile rises to my throat and I have to choke it down. There’s no way I can remain stoic or strong through this. He is going to take that blade to my child, my baby, and knowing I’m watching, that I understand how it feels, he’s going to make it hurt.

  Stand by, watching, while all the things you love just die . . .

  “Oh God . . . oh God . . .” I whisper it through yet more tears. They’ve been building up for years, and it seems they ­aren’t going to stop now that they’ve been given rein to fall. They well fat and round in my eyes while saliva pools in my bloodied mouth. My armpits sweat. My earlobe bleeds. My whole body weeps.

  “God, please . . .” I haven’t prayed since my father died ­either.

  You mean since he killed himself.

  The thought is just suddenly there, uncharacteristically bitter and accusing, and it stills me for a moment. I wouldn’t be here now if my father had chosen to live. Everything would be different if instead of fleeing his problems on that star-slammed night he’d have just bent down and taken my hand. Maybe he and my mother could have fought for our family and home together. Then she wouldn’t have needed to prostitute herself in the deep, dry opium dens of a busted mining town.

  And maybe I wouldn’t have felt it was my responsibility to single-handedly save every damn thing I saw: my father, my mother, my patients . . . even Daniel, when I thought he was being dragged through the desert by a madman.

  And Abby wouldn’t be tied up in a home that spawned a psycho. She wouldn’t be terrified, with an ineffectual mother who could do nothing to stop her pain. A broken mother, I think, and another tear silently falls.

  Because that’s what Daniel has gotten wrong. In this way, I am exactly like my mother. The screaming horses and my father’s moonlit death isn’t what I hide in the darkest corners of my mind. I’d been angry at him for that, but I’d still pined for him for years.

  Yet my mother wore down my love in increments. She was a pumice stone applied to an open wound—she kept rubbing at me with every relentlessly bad decision, every unwarranted criticism, and each moment of neglect until I was finally so numb that I felt nothing for her at all. Sure, I eventually ran away, escaping to Vegas, but it was only because my mother had abandoned me first.

  I lower my head, exhausted from the pain clustered in my body, by everything I’ve seen in the last twenty-four hours, by my newfound tears, and by knowing that, even after being alone for so long—after swearing I wouldn’t repeat my mother’s mistakes when it came to men—I didn’t just choose wrong. I picked the worst possible man to bring into my daughter’s life.

  The knowledge is a blade in my body, it is the greatest injury. It wedges next to one final memory that I have wadded into a tight ball, and just like the tears, it comes roaring up from the dark. I turn to it as it rushes me and finally face it head on.

  The surface was up there somewhere.

  I’d been in the mines before, but I’d never gone deep and never alone. They were wormholes to a different world, underground museums untouched by anything more probing than rattlers for most of a century. The weak-sloped hillsides surrounding Tonopah were studded with these plank-topped holes, all chipped by Chinese laborers back when the West was still wild.

  At least I knew to watch for rotting timber and duck the low backs. After leaving Josie Scott braying on the bright surface above me, I continued down into the Lumbago, sniffing for pockets of methane gas and watching for the dark rims of hanging slabs. Waylon and his customers had cut such a clear path in the drift that I didn’t have to worry about where I was going. He even had old carbide lamps burning throughout the tunnels, splashing enough light on the walls to catch my own shadow snapping in and out of shape. Another ghost, I thought, the pebble-stone pop of blasting caps snapping beneath my feet as decades-old graffiti guided me deeper.

  I hurried past a cache of old dynamite crates stored in an alcove blasted a half-century before, surprised that the wood hadn’t been stripped for reuse before I realized how difficult it would be to drag it back up to the surface . . . and starting an open fire down here would be suicide.

  Seventy feet down—I was counting—and I finally began to move horizontally. The pressure from the earth all around me was like a vise slipped around my skull. I kept my mind ­forward-focused, eyes searching out the next hanging slab, if only to keep it from swerving to the thought of ghosts. At some point, I stopped wondering how much deeper I had to go and wondered only what exact depth was required for time to stop.

  The sound of my feet scrabbling over cut sericite was what alerted Waylon to my presence.

  He was naked, lying on a platform bed with industrial wheels, an old mine cart refitted and repurposed and centered in the middle of the room. The packed floors were covered in Orientals, the wall niches painstakingly fitted with candles and colored glass. The air was filled with a sickly sweet scent, I knew it was some kind of drug, and it made my lungs constrict in defense. Grocery bags were stacked in the far corner, half-hidden by a silk curtain with a garish and frayed pom-pom fringe.

  Waylon was facing the entrance, reclined on his side like a king, and when he saw me hovering in the doorway of cut rock, he pushed up to one elbow and bent a knee invitingly. “Well, lookie who finally deigned to join us.”

  I didn’t answer. Instead I stared at the form lying next to him, trying to reconcile the tumble of flesh with my mother. This woman’s limbs were splayed wide on the matted furs of other once-living things, greasy hair spilled atop a pillow of yellowed lace. She, too, was naked, but her body was a constellation of bruises and marks. Waylon had been beating her, but I don’t think she felt it. Even now, she only writhed beneath him, toward him, her arms bound above her in chains.

  A spittoon sat next to a second bed in the corner, where Gilbert Anderson—a man I knew from the recycling center—was struggling into a sitting position. At least he had the decency to try and cover himself. Incense burned on a ledge above him, but did nothing to mask the smells of body odor and drugs and sex.

  I took in all of the decayed decadence and thought of emperors and Rome. I thought of the way it all burned.

  And, suddenly, I knew why I’d really come.

  I stepped into the room, gaze firmly on Waylon’s face. “I want my mother back, Waylon.”

  I didn’t recognize my voice in the heavy stillness of the mine. The quartz ledges cut it in two, making it half of what it should have been.

  Waylon glanced down at my mother with a surprised look, as if to say, why? But I did want her. I knew that now. I wanted it to be like it used to be between us, before we wheeled into this tumble­weed town six years earlier. The way it was when I was a kid and she still wanted to feed me, to no
urish me. To keep me alive.

  I remembered the way she used to look at my father too, with a smile that made even Josie Scott’s brightness pale in comparison. That woman was somewhere inside that sunken chest, buried beneath those fevered eyes.

  I wanted her back.

  “I’m taking her out of the mine and this life. Now.”

  I could see it too. Us, rising from the Lumbago together, walking down the clean south face of Mount Rushton hand-in-hand and getting in that old Chevy and leaving Tonopah and the greater Mojave far behind to become a real family again. I suddenly wanted this more than anything.

  Waylon ran a lazy hand over his hairy chest, then let it fall to toy with the tip of one of my mother’s breasts. “But your momma wants to stay with me and ol’ Gilbert here. Ain’t that right, Janie Mae?”

  He gave her nipple a hard twist, and my mother jerked beneath him, chains rattling.

  “Say yes, baby, and I’ll give you another hit.” Waylon reached down and emerged again with a glass pipe. He dangled it above my mother’s face, just out of reach.

  She looked at it like it was both Jesus and the Second Coming.

  “Momma. Don’t.”

  Her head bobbed, then swung my way as if on a hinge. I could have sworn a creaking sound accompanied the movement. Eyes going in and out of focus, she eventually gave up and just dropped her head back onto the stained pillow.

  “And what’s a smug little prude like you gonna do about it?” she finally croaked.

  I told myself it was only the drugs talking. I wasn’t smug; I was brave. I wasn’t a prude; I was the girl who was going to save the only person left to me in this world. I’d get us both out of this mine. Because I damn well wasn’t going to stand by and watch one of my parents die again.

  “A trade,” I told Waylon. “If you accept, my mother leaves this mine now. And she never comes down here again.”

  Waylon eyed me lazily and licked his fat bottom lip. “Even if she wants to?”