Swerve

by Vicki Pettersson

  “She won’t. Not if you stay away from her.”

  “And in return?”

  There was only one thing Waylon would want in return.

  “I stay. One night.” I said. “That’s all.”

  “That’s all?” Waylon hooted. The earth dampened the sound, eating his laughter whole. “That’s more than enough.”

  My heart thumped at that, but I was resolute. I wanted my mother back. “You have to promise never to come near her again.”

  “You got yourself a deal,” Waylon said, too fast. His teeth flashed, and in that moment they were the brightest spot in the entire mine. “But Krist-i-ine . . . are you ready? Cause I’m going to show you how long a night can really be.”

  Gilbert took my mother away. Even guided, she stumbled across the carpets, a yelp tipping into crazy laughter as she righted herself and disappeared into the drift.

  “Lie down.”

  I didn’t move. I just thought, oh my God. She didn’t turn around. I didn’t know if my mother knew what I was doing, what I was giving up for her, but unlike me, I think with a start, she never once looked back.

  The realization came too late. She was gone, and now I was here with Waylon.

  “Willingly,” he reminded me, “or else it’s not a fair trade.”

  Waylon smiled as I swayed forward to sit where he was pointing. The silk threaded blankets were still warm from my mother’s body. I realized it was the closest I’d been to her in months.

  She didn’t even look back.

  Waylon reached for the restraints, but I stopped him with the softest touch on his forearms. My fingertips were ice, but his skin blazed, and I knew then that I was right. It wasn’t the chunk of black, petrified stone around his neck. It wasn’t even the fact that he still worked the drifts. Waylon Rhodes was the Coal Man simply because he burned from the inside.

  “Willingly,” I said. “And then you disappear from our lives forever.”

  Waylon dropped the chain and climbed over me. His balls sagged and so did his gut. The coal around his neck swung like a metronome. I fastened my eyes on that. “Okay, but I’m going to work you. You don’t know who you are, Krissy-Girl. Not until you been pushed to the edge.”

  And that’s when time finally stopped.

  The surface was up there somewhere. I had to keep reminding myself of that over the long hours of sweating and grunting. Somewhere up there, light was shining off of Josie Scott’s head. Somewhere else my mother was sleeping off her bender. Yet as Waylon continued to pound and hammer and chisel precious things away at my core, the pull of the surface lessened for me. Like the dynamite crates and abandoned carts, I was now a part of this underground museum. I, too, was suddenly old and dusty and blasted inside.

  Hours passed like days, and at some point in that artificial week, Waylon made me do a hit before trying to take me one last time. The coal on his necklace felt like a block of ice as it struck my heated cheek, and suddenly he just collapsed. His snores were rumbling over my body before I realized he was asleep. I also realized suddenly that I needed water.

  I, too, now burned.

  Sliding from beneath him, I fell to the floor, crashing awkwardly on my hip, though that was the least of my bruises. I’d seen Gilbert drinking from a jug in the corner and I zigzagged in that direction, my head stuffy, my stomach sensitive to my fingertips. I was reaching for the dirtied jug when I spotted my new pair of shorts. My eyesight swooped as I blinked and wove my way over to them, and I almost knocked back into Waylon, but steadied myself by planting my legs. I tottered, but didn’t fall.

  The pristine white denim was ruined. Holding it eye level, I wondered at the red and blue stains before I remembered Josie’s Popsicle stick. I flipped them over, but didn’t have to wonder about the other stain, Waylon’s, at all. I remembered feeling pretty putting those shorts on that day. I’d felt hopeful about the start of summer. I pulled them on again, trying to recapture that, but all I felt this time was sore.

  And so very hot.

  Pivoting, I found myself studying Waylon as he slumbered. He’d face-planted, arms hanging over each side of the modified mine cart, the hair on his flat buttocks matted with sweat. My gaze swung around again, and finally fastened on the prettiest object in the den, a jewel-toned lantern more delicate and decorative than the others. Time swooped sideways in the drift, tricking me again, and suddenly I was next to it.

  I opened the front cage of the lantern, then lifted it to let the light play on the onyx bead of a dry silk tassel. When the fabric touched the wick, spreading the warmth, I felt a smile rise with it. I felt a kinship with the flame.

  Half of the room was engulfed in flames before Waylon felt my heat and clamored to life. The drugs he’d fed me had caused my mind to unhinge every few seconds, so I was just standing at what felt like a safe distance, watching him get wrapped up in the soiled silk sheets as he staggered from the cart. I felt someone laugh when he fell over backward, further into the den. The laugh rumbled deeper inside of me before swerving into a feral roar. Then I felt flames licking the hair on my arms, and I turned and ran.

  Smoke chased me, along with Waylon’s furied, frantic bellows, as I pinwheeled past boxes marked EXPLOSIVES and crevices large enough to hide in. Hard quartz corners cut at my arms and coiling pockets of methane gas followed my progress with round silence, but I kept running until I finally reached the ramp.

  I was less careful climbing up the shaft than I’d been going down. Wobbling, my foot broke through a rung of rotted wood, and when the one below it splintered beneath my weight, I heard a pained grunt. Fingertips scrabbling at my ankles. I climbed faster.

  I was clearing the shaft collar when I felt the ghostly swirl of the upcast. They would say later that air was blowing into the Lumbago from another connecting mine, but I knew it was really the ghosts of trapped miners. The spirits shuddered through the tunnels, awakened by the fire. Their windy, upward howls ferried with the warning scent of burning wood. Time was moving, sprinting, once again.

  Open sky streamed above me, and tendrils of my long, thick hair rose, hot air ribboning it high above me.

  “Wait!” Waylon called. “Take my hand!”

  I paused . . . and I looked back.

  Waylon had broken two more rungs above him and fallen farther into the shaft. He was too heavy and too far off to lunge for the rung beneath my bare feet. I turned away.

  “Kristine, please!”

  It was the first time he’d ever said my given name without turning it into a taunt. I frowned at that, looked up at the vast, hot sky above, and blinked. When I turned back to Waylon, he looked nothing like he had while he violated me in the bowels of the mine. I wondered for a moment if I looked different too, haloed by the light above me, hair snaking around my head on the breath of ghosts.

  Bending, making sure each of my limbs was carefully balanced on a rung, I let go with my right hand, reached down to Waylon, and touched his heated skin. Before he realized what I was really after—before he could snag my wrist and ­reverse-grip—I wrapped my hand around his necklace and gave the icy coal around his neck a hard yank. His eyes widened on a strangled yelp, but I just turned and climbed the rest of the way to the surface. Waylon’s shouts battered my back, but I felt nothing. His power was in my fist.

  I took it slow, stumbling down Mount Rushton on bare feet, though I never fell. I had just touched flat ground when the explosion roared behind me. Pebbles shook beneath my feet but I kept walking. Coal in my fist, I did not look back.

  Hold on, baby.

  Do no harm.

  I didn’t adopt the oath because I wanted to be a doctor, a healer. I swore myself to it because of what I already was—a killer. My mother claimed no memory of leaving the mine with Gilbert that day, and in a belated fit of self-preservation, he actually agreed with me when I told the police I’d exited along with the
m. Relief almost swept the deputy’s face blank, and even if I did still have the grit of the mines between my toes, I knew that as far as the authorities were concerned, Waylon had died alone in that mine, a victim of his own searing vice.

  Yet every so often I’d catch my mother looking at me, and not with annoyance or disgust. Not like before. Instead, she regarded me with the same wariness once reserved solely for Waylon, and every time I caught her at it, it felt like she was looking right through that missing space. I took no satisfaction in it, because I knew that blasted out part of me had gotten stuck down there with him. With all those floating, furious ghosts.

  I’d like to say I felt remorse for what I did. I’d lie to myself about it sometimes, telling myself in the darkest nights that I had no choice, that there’s no way I could have saved us both. Then I’d feel something chortle deep inside of me, and I’d bury myself beneath the sheets and cover my ears with coal-stained fists.

  I didn’t bother looking for Josie Scott. She was nothing to me now, less than a fly to be swatted at, and after the explosion she didn’t dare seek me out either. Yet I did catch her stutter-step as she paused in front of the window of the Seven Leagues a week later. She was fixed on a calcified chunk of rock swaying lightly from a nail head on a worn leather cord. It hung right between the porcelain figurines and a collection of bottles bleached amethyst by the sun.

  I felt a happy fury rise to my throat watching Josie trying to gaze upon it without appearing to look, and when she finally lowered her eyes and walked away? I swear I tasted smoke in the back of my throat.

  That’s when I knew the truth. If given the chance? The only thing I’d change about that night would be to blow up that mineshaft sooner.

  And then my belly began to grow, tight and round, pulsing with life. With every movement, anger bloomed. I didn’t care. The rage, at least, drove out the pain. It kept the other kids from meeting my eyes in school. It kept the whispers I knew were flying behind cupped palms from ever reaching my ears. By fall, I was brittle and chipping apart. By winter, I was dead to it all.

  And then it was spring and it was time and I was ready to hate her.

  I walked to the town’s sole hospital by myself that day, braced against the world and almost welcoming the rolling pain. Bright and familiar, it was the only thing I’d felt in months. Dead silent, dead-eyed, dead to the life inside and around me, I pushed and pushed and waited for coal to emerge from my womb.

  The lusty, cutting wail almost stopped my heart.

  Borne in the depths of the mines, carved into me before being carved out of me, this girl-child raged. Stunned, I watched her rail against the unfairness of being born with sounds and emotions that I no longer had in me. Astonished, I just stared when the nurse placed a squalling, red-faced being in my arms, and then stared some more when the thing actually paused to pin me in place with murky, knowing eyes. Then she blinked.

  “What?” I said almost defiantly.

  The center of her hairless eyebrows pulled together in a frown. She blinked again. Still warm from my body, she just lay there all pink and solid, looking at me like I was the one newly born. It was a spotlight stare, and something never before seen bloomed inside of me to fill up that empty, blasted space. I stared back, unblinking, as it took root, and after a moment, I shifted her closer. The little brows relaxed, and something inside of me recalibrated.

  We went on like that, in a call-and-response pattern, one unknown need meeting another. She pushed out her pink tongue, or flailed, or slept—and I responded—nursed, swaddled . . . kept watch. At some point, the nurses left the room, but I was too busy blossoming inside to notice. For the first time in nine months, I felt full and round, entranced with the sight of this tiny fury.

  My mother came the next morning, but only because they’d told her I’d changed my mind.

  “So, that’s it?” For the first time since Waylon’s death, her smirk was back. “One night, and you think you’re fit for this?”

  “Oh, Momma,” I sighed, though I was calmer than I’d ever felt in my life. I had someone else to be furious for me now. “You know.”

  She stared hard in challenge, thinking I meant how it felt to be a mother. “Know what?”

  “You know,” I said, and I pinned her back with that see-right-through-you stare. “Just how long one night can be.”

  Back in the present, I’m crying again. My sobs jerk the breath from my lungs, convulsions causing my stomach to spasm as I choke on my own snot.

  “Damn it.” I squeeze my eyes shut until light burns behind my eyelids.

  And what’s a smug little prude like you gonna do about it?

  An unexpected growl erupts from my cramping belly. I can no more stop it than I can the tears—it escapes me like a living thing, swift and wild and hovering on the periphery of my blurred vision, waiting to see what I’m going to do. I avert my eyes, staring back out the window, but instead of the lawn, the estate, or Daniel, this time I catch my own reflection. Despite the hacked hair and shorn ear and red-rimmed eyes, despite the tears, I recognize the woman I see there. I saw her once before, in Waylon’s upturned face.

  Krist-i-ine . . .

  I jerk at the tape binding my wrists.

  You don’t know who you are . . . not until you been pushed to the edge.

  I growl again and realize the sound matches the reflected image, matches the heat that has kept flaring up inside of me as I’ve been forced on this sick road trip. It’s as combustive as the fire that roared as I rose to the surface of the Lumbago, icy coal curled in my fist.

  What’s a smug little—

  “Same as last time,” the reflected woman interrupts, snarling, bleeding. “I’m gonna bury that motherfucker.”

  And I look around for a weapon.

  Daniel has thoughtlessly left no sharp objects lying nearby. The bedside tables echo the chinoiserie motif and are thickly lacquered, without hard edges or drawers. The desk before the lake-facing window is a surprisingly simple Parsons design, no more than three sides of a rectangle topped with a cluster of faux roses and two shining gold pens. Even if I could get over there, I can’t see myself severing duct tape with a Mont Blanc.

  Bed aside, the only other furniture in the room is the console holding the television, but I can’t reach it while bound to the chair, and Daniel was overly occupied with that area anyway. I doubt he’d have forgotten to clear it of anything that might help me.

  I need to fashion a weapon for myself, but as I glance around at all the ninety-degree angles in the room, all these walls and doors and blocks of furniture, there’s not one sharp corner to be found.

  “Mommy . . .”

  The cry is tiny and desolate, the mewling of lost prey, and my throat tightens as I glance back at the television, though Daniel has not yet appeared. “Hold on, baby,” I say, because he can’t hear me, because he’s not with her. Yet.

  I lean forward to test the chair. The intricate scrollwork on the seat and arms is delicate, but it might as well be a concrete slab at my back. I try again for my feet, but the chair’s weight forces my head down, and I see nothing but blood dripping from my ear to the carpet below me. I push to the balls of my feet and manage to scoot forward a few inches, but I’ll never be able to right myself if I topple forward, so I settle all four chair legs back on the floor, and blow the sticky, jagged lengths of hair from my face.

  I can’t break the chair, so maybe a window? If I can create a shard of glass, rub it against the tape . . .

  But there’s nothing to swing at it, save my head, and I’ve taken enough blows there already. I could rub up against a bedpost or a desk corner until it gives . . . no, that’ll take hours, and the sun is already slipping away. Fireworks will soon light the sky.

  I have no leverage, no range of motion, no mobility.

  I look back at Abby and feel my face crumple, but push ba
ck the tears this time and try to focus on the room I’m in. I need to cast it in the light of that ornate lantern in the mining den. I need to start thinking like Daniel, like Waylon, and forget for a bit all about do no harm.

  That’s when, through the mirror, I note something I passed right over before. I have to blink a few times to wrap my brain around it because it’s not a proper weapon like a knife or a gun. Smaller than my palm, it’s propped against a virgin cream candle on the nearest side table. It’s made mostly of paper, but like me, it only needs a little spark to find its strength.

  All I have to do now is scoot over, grab hold of the book of matches . . . and set myself on fire.

  I stare at the gold matchbook—a detail that’s as prettily staged as the rest of the room—and my mind flashes on all the burn patients I’ve seen come through the OR. It’s one of the worst types of injuries. Skin insulates and protects everything inside of us, it regulates temperature and sensation. It’s a living organ in itself. Burn victims are stripped of all those things.

  Plus, most victims of home fires are overcome in minutes. I’ve heard it dozens of times, and I’ve even asked the EMTs, Why didn’t they just leave the house?

  Modern homes burn faster, came the answer. The building, the furniture—it’s all more combustible. Used to be you had thirty minutes to escape. Now it’s three, and if they’re sleeping . . .

  But this isn’t a modern home. Everything in here is antique. And Daniel has succeeded in one thing, at least: I am now wide-fucking-awake.

  I begin rocking, edging my way toward the table. I totter in my haste and topple forward, gut tipping first, but the chair arms smack the side table and send a rumble up my forearms. Still, it stops my tumble. Unfortunately, I’m now unable to close the distance between me and the matches. I shift my weight back to my toes, but momentum flings me forward and I turn my head just before I face-plant on the table. The lamp crashes atop me—God, I’m so sick of being hit in the head—and when I open my eyes and my vision finally settles, I see the book of matches has fallen flat. “Shit.”