by M. O'Keefe
I shook my head, unable to speak, panic in my throat like rats in a pipe. Fear was a tidal wave heaving me up and I started to run for the car.
Faith, that weak rebellion, slipping from my fingers.
ANNIE
Once Annie got back inside she made a beeline for the bathroom.
“Annie?” Hoyt asked but she ran past him, shut the door, and barely made it to the toilet before throwing up. Whether it was because of a concussion or fear or being so awful to Ben or the belly full of Champagne she’d had not too long ago in Dylan’s kitchen, she didn’t know.
Hoyt knocked on the door.
“Give…give me a second,” she cried. She took her time standing up, brushing her teeth, looking at the jagged cut over her eye. And slowly, she came up with a plan. Not a great one, but the only one she had.
“Annie?”
Fury curled her lip, but showing him that would only get her beaten. Possibly raped.
Be smart, she told herself.
She opened the door to the bathroom only to find Hoyt standing there with a sandwich. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich he’d made for her.
“Come on, now,” he said, leading her over to the settee. “You’ve gotten too skinny, that’s the problem.”
Right. Too skinny.
“Eat up and then we’ll get going.” He sat down with his own sandwich. “Annie?”
“Thank you,” she breathed, toying with the sesame seed on the edge of her crust. He liked manners, and Annie was all out of petty mutinies. Her molar was loose from her last uprising.
“You gonna eat?”
“I have an idea.” Her voice was barely a breath. It was all she had. Her breath. Her pounding heart. Her shaking hands.
“You are not really known for those.” He said it like a joke. Like one of those teasing things married people do.
My wife, the little dear, she keeps forgetting to close the garage door. What an airhead!
Oh, his stupid, careless little barbs, how they used to wound. But there was nothing left in her to wound.
“I will give you all the land,” she said. “I will sign over everything to you—you can sell it to the energy people, you can rent it out for grazing. You can build an amusement park on it. I will give you every inch.”
“That’s not what I want—”
“You can have the land. But I won’t come with you. We can have the deal drawn up, as well as a divorce, and I’ll sign it all. It’s yours.”
“No.”
“Hoyt, let’s be honest. You don’t care about me. All you care about is the land. It’s all you’ve ever wanted.”
“I promised your mother I’d take care of you.”
The mention of her mother blew her back a second. “What?”
“Before she died. She came to me, asked me to make sure that you’d be all right. I think it’s why she hired me.”
“That’s…that’s ridiculous.”
He shrugged. “Your mom was kind of ridiculous.”
Of course he would think that. Everyone in town thought Mom was ridiculous.
And truthfully, it made sense that Mom had been trying to match-make. She’d been dying and terrified of leaving her alone. Alone meant unloved. In her mother’s paranoid world, it was better for Annie to be with Hoyt, no matter what, than to be alone.
“She’d want you on that land, Annie.”
“She’d want me alive,” she snapped back.
For five years during her marriage she’d allowed herself a kind of powerful delusion. Not hope. But…pretend. A thick layer of lies she told herself. And that was all gone now; she could not hide from reality anymore.
Sooner or later Hoyt was going to kill her.
“It’s gonna be different when we get home,” he said, watching her from beneath his nearly translucent lashes.
Yes. So much terrifying, awful sex to look forward to.
Anger was losing ground inside of her, surrendering in great swaths to the old terror.
That was what he did. That was his power. Magical and awful. He was a black hole of hope. Sucking it in, neutralizing it. Turning it into fear and self-loathing. And she didn’t understand how that happened to a person. How someone became that way.
“What was your mom like?” she asked.
He blinked those icy blue eyes like he didn’t understand the question, and she wasn’t totally sure why she was asking about his mother now. Maybe she was stalling. Maybe she was trying to figure out why he was the way he was.
“You…you don’t talk about her much.”
“There ain’t a lot worth talking about. She died when I was young. I don’t remember much.”
“What do you remember?”
“Annie? What the hell is this?”
“I’m just talking. You know about my mom; I just thought I should know something about yours.”
“She was pretty. And she smoked. That’s what I remember.”
“But didn’t your grandparents talk about her? I would think they’d tell you stories—”
“They were my dad’s parents, not my mom’s.”
“What were they like?”
“They were old. And they worked. And they made me work. No school. No friends. No birthdays. No church. Just work.” He shook his head. The few times he’d talked about his childhood it sounded lonely. Cold. But was that enough to make Hoyt this way? Maybe the horror of Hoyt was that he just happened. There was a glitch in his chemistry. His cruelty was in the way he was wired. He was simply born this way. “And you know something, in the end it didn’t even matter. They died broke. I had to sell the land just to pay the back taxes. That’s it. That’s the story.”
“Were they kind, at least?”
“Kind? What the hell, Annie?” he yelled, his face getting red. “They’re dead. All of them. Mom. Dad. My grandparents. All gone. All I have is you, Annie. We’re alike that way, ain’t we? No parents. No one else to look after us. To care about us.”
“Smith.” She dared to say a name she hadn’t said aloud since Hoyt demanded Annie fire him years ago. “Smith would have taken care of me.”
“That old fucker?” Hoyt laughed.
“He was my friend.” They never talked about this. About what she did to Smith, about the things Smith said about Hoyt. She pretended it never happened just so she could sleep at night. Sleep at night next to her husband.
“He was a criminal, Annie. He went to jail for seriously fucking up some couple in a bar. Took out his eyeball or some shit. Punched out a woman. He was a drunk and he was dangerous. The whole town knew it. Everyone. Except your crazy mom. Or maybe she knew and she just didn’t care.”
“Don’t…don’t call her that,” she said.
“Crazy? That’s what she was.”
“Don’t call her that!” she yelled.
His hand snaked forward and grabbed hers, pressing the bones of her fingers together until the nerves screamed and then went numb. She hung her head, breathing through the pain.
“Your mom was a crazy old woman living alone. Putting her only child at risk because she had a crush on a violent dirtbag.”
Annie thought of Dylan and those things Ben had said about him. That he was a criminal. That he killed someone in jail.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
She’d known Dylan had secrets, painful ones. That he had a violence…an anger that simmered just under the surface. Annie had thought it was about the car racing accident, about having his life changed so irrevocably. But no…his secrets were much worse. Much more painful.
But she wasn’t scared of that. Of who he was. Of what he’d done.
She was proud of him; she admired that he was a survivor. She liked it.
She was attracted to it.
So, what did that make her?
People threw the word crazy around like it didn’t mean anything. But her mother had not been well, and worse, she had not been strong enough or did not care enough about Annie to take car
e of herself. To stay on her meds. To make better choices.
And she’d definitely had feelings for Smith.
Was Annie like her mother? Was there something dark in her drawn to that kind of violence?
Annie’s head pounded and she could not hold on to her thoughts. They kept slipping through her fingers.
Dylan.
The farm.
Mom.
Getting free.
Giving up.
“If you ain’t gonna eat,” he said, “let’s get going.”
“It’s getting dark,” she said without much urgency or conviction. Annie used to be a much better liar. An excellent placater. In the months she’d been hiding, she must have lost the knack. Fallen out of practice.
Hoyt stood, looming over her. His shadow stretched across the entirety of her home.
“You don’t have to drive,” he said. As if she could.
Somewhere he must have learned at least some small measure of socialization. How to act as if he were human. And Annie’s job as his wife had been to wait…to try to help him keep that mask on and then to brace herself when he could no longer pretend.
I can’t go back to that. I just can’t.
“I’m not going,” she breathed.
“What did you say?”
He was going to hit her. There was no pretending otherwise.
“I said I’m not going.”
“Stand up,” Hoyt said, radiating terrifying stillness. An electric horror.
“No.”
When he grabbed her arm, all that fear shattered. It fell to pieces around her, revealing only a bone-deep rage. A fury so hot she thought her skin might smoke.
Annie resisted. Not looking at him, she put everything she had, all her weight and grief and hate, into it. She kicked and punched and pushed and smacked. But he was big and it was over almost before it started. He cuffed her once, the heel of his hand catching her lip, and it split, blood pouring into her mouth.
“You done?” he asked. Like she was a child throwing a tantrum.
Annie spat a mouthful of blood at him.
His pale eyebrows and eyelashes stood out against the bright red flush of his skin. She’d never seen him this angry. Not even the night he put his hands around her neck.
“You should kill me now,” Annie said. “We both know that’s how this is going to end.”
“It’s going to end with you coming home where you belong. And us being a family again. Like we’re supposed to.”
“We’re never going to be family.” He didn’t know the meaning of the word and frankly, she didn’t, either. Mom had not given her that kind of vocabulary.
“Get up.” He pulled Annie up by her upper arms, his fingers digging into the tender skin near her armpits, pushing those nerves against the bones so that sparks radiated into her fingers. “Is there anything you want to take with you?” he asked. “Them dirty books?”
Annie shook her head. She wasn’t going to take anything with her, not even the romance novels she’d loved so much. Because she was only going to run again. She would run and run until he was forced to kill her.
“We’re going to be okay, Annie,” he said. One of his hands touched her hair and she flinched away. “I like this. Your new hair. Did I tell you that? Looks real nice.”
She spat blood onto the floor near his boots.
He huffed a long breath and she braced herself for another smack. More pain. More blood.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing his denim coat with the shearling collar from where he’d thrown it over the driver’s chair of the old RV she’d been calling home. “We’re leaving.”
The outside world was a shock. Cool and dark. The trailer park was quiet and still, as if everyone was gone. Or maybe just cowering, like they knew that something evil was here and they didn’t want to attract its attention.
That instinct was honed to a bright edge in the Flowered Manor.
Annie had kept her head down her entire marriage. She’d never asked for help, and the people who would have helped her, who looked at her like they knew what was happening in her home—she pushed them away. Hard and fast.
That was over—as of right now.
“Help!” she screamed. “Help me!”
ANNIE
Not even a twitch. Not even a dog bark.
“The hell you doing, Annie?” Hoyt demanded, shaking her. Annie’s brain sloshed against her skull and there were little explosions of light behind her eyes.
She spat more blood out onto the grass, leaving a trail past her trailer. Like anyone is going to follow me, she thought with dark despair. The lights were on in Ben’s trailer and it glowed like an aluminum jack-o’-lantern.
But she couldn’t see him anywhere. There were no shadows behind his blinds.
“Ben!” she cried and Hoyt began to run, pulling her toward the front of the park where he’d parked his truck in the shadows behind the main office. She hadn’t even noticed it before. She barely noticed it now.
She’d pushed Ben away too well, apparently.
This is it, she thought. The beginning of my end.
Those thoughts she’d refused to have before about Dylan—she opened herself up and let them flood her. Every memory. Every moment. How everything he asked her to do was somehow exactly what she wanted, but could never ask for. The strip club and the skinny-dipping. The gifts. Touching herself until she figured out what she liked and how she liked it.
It was as if he’d seen inside the dark corners in her head and found every secret desire and then had put a voice to them, made them real.
More real than most things in her life had ever been.
No one ever touched her the way he did. And it wasn’t just his hands on her body. In her body. It was how sure he was when he touched her, like what he gave her, she deserved. And like the thing she wanted so much it was a fire in her blood, running under her skin, he deserved. He touched her like everything between them was exactly the way it should be. No shame. No regrets.
Just a hunger.
And care.
Annie’s breath sobbed in her throat. Really. He’d been so kind.
And all her reasons for leaving him, which had seemed so real, and so valid and so important—they were stupid now. And she wished she’d never walked away. Never left that mountaintop. And the promise of him.
I’m sorry, Dylan, she thought. I’m so sorry.
Hoyt opened the passenger-side door and she resisted again, digging her heels into thick mud and puddles, sitting back until her ass almost touched the ground.
“Get in the goddamn car, Annie.”
“No.”
God, where was Joan when she needed her? Joan would stop this. With her badge and her gun and her fuck-you fearlessness.
“There a problem here?”
It was Kevin coming out of the office, and Annie sagged with relief. “Annie. You all right?”
“No.”
“We’re fine,” Hoyt said. “You need to mind your own damn business.”
“Call the cops, Kevin. Call—”
“I’m having a conversation with my wife,” Hoyt said.
Annie jerked her arm away and turned, trying to run, but Hoyt caught her around the waist.
“Hey!” Kevin jogged toward them. She’d never seen him move so fast. But just as he got close, a black car screeched into the entrance of the trailer park, spitting gravel everywhere, its headlights cutting across the whole of them, making everyone freeze as if they’d all been caught stealing something.
The car was barely stopped before the driver’s-side door was open and a man was hurtling toward them. All Annie saw was a black fleece and a pair of jeans but she knew, under her skin where she was attuned to this man, it was Dylan.
Relief crashed over her.
“Get the fuck away from her,” he bellowed before exploding like a cannonball against Hoyt. The two of them hurtled against the side of the truck and Hoyt held on to Annie’s arm just enough that she
got pulled with them, smashing into the car as well. Her head bounced off the side of the truck. Hoyt dropped her arm and she collapsed onto the ground. Behind her, she heard the terrifying animal sounds of a fight and she knew just enough to crawl away, as fast and as far as she could.
Her hand hit something hard and cold in the dirt. The gun. Her gun. It must have fallen out of the back of Hoyt’s pants where he’d shoved it.
She grabbed it and kept crawling.
Arms caught her. Rough hands that were gentle against her skin.
I won’t hurt you, they promised as they lifted her from the ground and Annie sobbed for breath, blood still spilling from her mouth.
“Hey, hey, girly.”
“Ben,” Annie sighed.
“Yeah, come on, now, let’s get you out of the way.”
He led her to the darkest shadows near the office. Kevin was there, too. She didn’t realize he had a bat in one hand, a cellphone in the other.
“You all right?” he asked, sparing Annie only the quickest glance before looking back at the men locked together against the side of the truck.
Annie sank back down onto the ground, onto her knees. Her head spinning.
“How did Dylan get here?” she asked, watching the fight. He was smaller than Hoyt and the two of them fell to the ground. Rolling over each other. Dylan smashed fists into the side of Hoyt’s head and Hoyt shot back against Dylan’s ribs.
“I called him,” Ben said. Annie would try to make more sense of that later. That Ben had talked to his son, that his son had come down off that mountain like a berserker.
For her.
I am saved, she thought, not even for a moment imagining the cost. Unable to foresee what everyone would pay for her rescue.
“You need to stop this,” she whispered, trying to get to her feet, but very suddenly and all at once, she couldn’t do it. She landed hard back on her knees. “Kevin, please call the cops. Please—”
“No,” Ben said. “No cops.”
“I can’t let them kill each other on my front lawn,” Kevin muttered.
“It’s Dylan’s front lawn,” Ben said. “I figure it’s up to him. And he would not want cops here.”
The fight had changed. Hoyt was bigger but Dylan was on top of him, his fist wrapped in the neck of his shirt, his other fist smashing across his face. Blood splattered across his shirt, into the dirt. Over and over again. His face in the shadows was awful. Terrifying. Something different had slipped into his skin. A creature, violent and vicious, that she only recognized as trouble. As dangerous.
