The Shimmering Road

by Hester Young

  “Enough.” Teresa waves a hand at me as if warding off a pesky bee or fly. “I’ll figure this out. I just . . . first things first. We’ll go for a walk, and we’ll decide. We’ll decide what to do.”

  I know this is not a walk Micky and I will ever return from, know that she intends to get us deeper in the desert, away from the scrutiny of any more passing cars, and do her dirty work. Still, I pretend to believe her. “Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll help you. We’ll figure it out together.”

  “You carry Micky,” she instructs me. “I need to walk. I need to see the stars. Come on.”

  I heave Micky up in my arms, her head against my shoulder. With her chest pressed to mine, I can feel her heartbeat now, pounding like a kettle drum in her rib cage. Her limbs are tense, not floppy. Ready for flight. How did I ever think she was unconscious?

  “You lead the way, Teresa.”

  “No,” she says. “You go. I’m right behind you.”

  That bitch is going to shoot us in the back. But I proceed like it’s no big deal, fall into step ahead of her. We’re still too close to the road. She wants us farther out.

  I walk toward the blackening expanse of desert, taking in the shape of the land, the silhouettes of the saguaros against the vast, sleepy sky. Get a feel for Teresa’s movements a few yards behind me, as she location-scouts for our burial ground. The air is dry and still but alive with the buzzing of insects, the rustling of small creatures in the brush.

  Now.

  I duck into the shadow of a saguaro and loosen my grip on Micky. Plant her firmly on her feet and press my lips to her ear.

  “Run,” I tell her. “Run.”

  Thirty-One

  Adrenaline flows through me, the purest kind of high. As I take off through the desert, there’s no room for fear. Only Micky. Only my baby.

  I hear gunshots, Teresa screaming my name. Several clicks, followed by a string of swears. She must’ve run out of bullets. I don’t know how long it will take her to reload, but we’re not sticking around to find out.

  “Go!” I shout at Micky, blocking her body from behind with my own. “Go, go, go!”

  It’s hard, though, in the dark. There are so many shadows to navigate, rocks that turn beneath my flimsy sandals, low-lying prickly plants that I don’t see until I’ve got a mess of stickers in my calf. The pain doesn’t even register.

  My plan is to follow the unpaved loop back to the main road and flag down a car as soon as we see headlights, but Micky takes off in her own direction and we’ve soon lost sight of the loop altogether. I don’t care. I follow at Micky’s heels. Let her run. Let her put all the distance she can between us and the woman who already claimed two members of her family.

  “Keep running,” Teresa calls to us, and I hear the loud click of a newly loaded cartridge sliding into place. “Go ahead. You think I can’t find you?”

  I can’t tell from her voice how far away she is, but it’s clearly not far enough. When I glance back to get a look, I can see her silhouette, a small black shape against the starry horizon. She begins to move toward us.

  Micky stumbles on a plant nub, and I catch her before she plummets face-first into something large and spiny. We can’t keep running aimlessly, I think. Sooner or later one of us will twist an ankle or impale herself on a cactus.

  I peer over my shoulder again. Although she’s still too far for a clean shot, Teresa’s gaining on us. She can see the movement of our shadows, and she’s faster. Micky may have had the better strategy all along—staying still.

  I grab Micky by the shoulder and yank her down to the ground with me. We scuttle across the dirt, better shielded from view now by the plant life, and park ourselves in a spray of flowering shrubs that seem to lack the standard desert armor. Now the night is our friend, the darkness a screen.

  Not so far off, a light blinks on and begins to scan the ground. Teresa’s footsteps crunch through the dirt. Light sweeps across the desert floor in haphazard circles, passing over us once, then twice, but never pausing long enough to indicate she’s seen us.

  One small motion, one ill-timed cough, could give us away.

  I don’t know how long we wait, crouched on all fours, the sound of our own breathing impossibly loud. We listen to Teresa as she wanders around, calling to us with words alternately reassuring and threatening. Micky, to her credit, does not move a muscle. I’ve never seen a child hold so still. Finally, after my right foot has fallen asleep, Teresa appears to give up, if only temporarily.

  “All right, then!” Her tone is one of forced cheer, like a parent talking up vegetables or family fun time, not some nut job who has just killed a woman. “Enjoy your night, girls! I’ll see you at first light. Unless, of course, the rattlesnakes get you.”

  It’s a ridiculous parting shot, but effective. Because . . . rattlesnakes? At night? Only now do I fully consider the number of creatures that could be roaming around this desert, unseen.

  Teresa trudges off, and in time I hear the sounds of a car engine. In the distance, a pair of headlights blinks on, jerking along the desert floor before coming to a stop. She must’ve made it to the loop, and there she remains, high beams still on, guarding the road. Making sure we don’t try to flag down help. As if there were anyone to flag down.

  The car door slams. I can’t see Teresa, can barely make out her vehicle. Her footsteps are faint, far off, but in the immense night, it’s hard to determine the direction. Then her noises stop all together. She’s somewhere in the dark, waiting for us to reveal ourselves.

  I wonder if Pam’s keys are still in her car or on her person. If we could somehow double back to her SUV, we might have a chance. Or, if I could get myself oriented, we could try to hike back to the main road. But I can’t risk it yet. Not until I know where Teresa’s hiding.

  I cup Micky’s face in my hands, fingertips searching for any dirt or scratches. “Are you okay?” I whisper, finally daring to speak. If I can’t trace Teresa from her sounds, then she hopefully can’t trace us, either.

  “Yeah,” Micky says. “But Vonda. I came into the kitchen and she was bleeding.”

  I remember what Noah said, that he’d found Vonda laid out with a head injury. “She’s going to be fine,” I promise Micky. “Really. Don’t worry about Vonda.”

  “Charlie?” Her voice is racked with guilt. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I got in Teresa’s car. But you’re not supposed to get in the car with strangers.”

  “Oh, Micky.” I give her an awkward hug, not quite sure exactly which part of her I’m grasping in the dark, but hoping it’s comforting nevertheless.

  “I thought she was Grandma’s friend,” Micky murmurs. “And Vonda was bleeding. Teresa said we had to get help, so I got in her car. But she’s the one who hurt Vonda, isn’t she?”

  “It’s not your fault, what Teresa did. She’s a very, very bad woman.”

  “She tried to make me take a pill with juice. She said it was a vitamin to make me strong.”

  I find her wrist, follow it to her fingers. Hook my index finger around hers. “You didn’t take it, though, did you? You knew she was lying.”

  “I pretended.”

  “That was really smart. But how did you know to pretend you were asleep?”

  “We were driving around and she said the pill might make me sleepy,” Micky explains. “She said it was okay to nap. I didn’t want her to know I didn’t swallow it. So I pretended I was sleeping. And then she put a blanket on me.”

  “That must’ve been really scary.”

  “She has a gun,” Micky says quietly. She stirs the dirt with her finger. “Is Pam going to die?”

  I don’t tell her that Pam is probably already dead. That lying around mortally wounded while all the desert animals search for dinner would likely be worse than death. “Right now I’m just worried about
you and me, honey. Let’s just think about you and me.”

  “Okay,” she says, and then, after a moment, asks, “Does this mean you and Noah won’t keep me?”

  “Keep you? What do you mean?”

  She rearranges herself on the dirt. “That’s why you guys come visit me, isn’t it? To see if you want me.”

  “Who told you that? Vonda? Mr. Quijada?”

  “I just know,” she says. “Noah likes me, I think. But you aren’t sure.”

  Have our intentions really been so transparent, my own reservations so obvious? We thought we were getting to know her, making our decision in private. I didn’t realize Micky knew she was being interviewed, knew exactly which member of the hiring committee was behind her and which wasn’t. No wonder she’s never been at ease with me. Noah’s criticism wasn’t so far off base.

  “Oh, Micky,” I breathe. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for it to be like that. It’s not that I don’t want you, I just . . . well, it’s complicated.”

  “I’m not mad.” There’s a long pause, and then Micky’s voice emerges from the night in a soft confession. “My mom didn’t want me either.”

  She waits to see if I’ll disagree, but I’ve already determined that her bullshit detector is too sophisticated for me to bother with polite protestations. “Why do you think that?” I ask.

  “I heard her tell Bree. How things were good until she had me. And how she never gets to do what she wants anymore.”

  Part of me hates Jasmine in this moment. Hates that she was given this sweet little girl she didn’t ask for, didn’t deserve. “Your mom wasn’t ready to be a mother,” I say. “Anybody’s mother. That was her problem, Micky. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “She said I made Ruben leave.”

  “Ruben?”

  She nods. “He’s my dad. I’m not supposed to know. But I do. He left my mom because he didn’t want her to have a baby.”

  A memory flutters back of my own father, drunk and melancholy one night, waxing philosophical about my mother. She was a topic he rarely broached, and I absorbed every detail, greedy for information about the woman who had left us. Donna used to laugh until she cried, he told me. Giggles, that’s what I called her. Everything was always funny to her. Everything except you. He peered at me suddenly with sad, bleary eyes. Getting pregnant, there was nothing funny about that.

  He hadn’t meant to hurt me, but the words lodged in my brain, turned my legs to lead. I ruined my mother, I thought. I made her stop laughing. I made her go away.

  It isn’t until I hear Micky, so ashamed she made her father leave, that I realize I still believe all these things. I ruined Donna’s life. I made her stop laughing. I made her go away. I drove her to addiction.

  Remind you of anyone? Noah asked when I cataloged Micky’s issues, and I realize now how right he was. This girl and I are more alike than I ever wanted to admit, her wounds very like my own.

  All the hesitation, the reluctance to open my heart to her—it hasn’t been about timing or circumstance, hasn’t been about losing Keegan or even being pregnant with another child. It’s about fear, the rawest and most private kind of fear. Because I can’t help Micky face her losses without facing my own.

  I reach for Micky’s hand, not the least bit sure we’ll make it through this night, not the least bit sure I can ever be enough for her if we do.

  “I want you, Micky,” I say softly. “I want you.”

  I turn on my side to get a better look at her, to reassure her of her value in this world, and it is then, in the wake of this profound emotional epiphany, that something bites me on the leg.

  “Motherfucker!”

  I don’t do well with pain. I’ve never broken a bone, never recovered from major surgery, and the contractions of early labor had me begging for an epidural. I’ve always avoided the whole lift-weights, run-on-a-treadmill, or wiggle-around-like-a-backup-dancer-in-a-Rihanna-video thing because let’s be honest: exercise hurts. Given a choice, I will always choose the option that doesn’t hurt.

  This time, I have no choice. This time, it hurts like hell.

  The pain in my leg, like a woman in the throes of grief, goes through several stages. At first, it feels like a cigarette branding my skin with its embers. I leap to my feet, pulling Micky up with me, and peer at the ground. It’s too dark to see anything.

  “Something. Bit. Me.” My jaw is clamped so tight I can barely get the words out.

  “A rattlesnake?” Micky backs away from the area where we were sitting.

  “I don’t think so . . .” We would’ve noticed a rattlesnake, heard its telltale rattle, wouldn’t we? This had to be something small.

  That’s when the pain transforms, begins to spread outward, wriggling beneath the skin like a series of burning worms. I bite down on my hand to keep from screaming. I can’t speak, can produce only a strangled unh.

  Micky’s six-year-old knowledge of venomous desert creatures proves just extensive enough to frighten without helping.

  “Maybe it was a spider,” she says. “Mr. Gittle, the gym teacher at my school, he got bitten by a brown spider a long time ago and now he can’t feel anything in his toes. Or it could be fire ants.” She pauses. “Are you sure it was a bite? Maybe you got stung. By a bee or a wasp, those can kill you. Or a scorpion.”

  I want to ask her how serious each of these scenarios would be, if an encounter with a desert spider or scorpion could prove fatal, but I’m the adult. I can’t let this situation get any scarier for Micky than it already is. And frankly, I’m too busy smothering the involuntary cries of agony that well up in my throat to really hold much of a conversation.

  I limp a few yards with Micky, anxious to put some distance between us and whatever creature got me, but the pain in my leg is too overwhelming to continue. So much for outrunning Teresa. I slump down, leg extended in the dirt before me, as the burning sensations continue to ripple across my thigh. There’s a numb patch now just above the knee, and I imagine the poison doing battle with my tissue, turning my nerve receptors into mush. What will happen if the venom reaches my baby? Did my daughter and I escape Teresa only to fall victim to some tiny, unidentified insect assassin?

  I take deep breaths, try to slow the beating of my heart, the movement of tainted blood through my veins. This has to be worse than a bullet.

  Micky rests on her knees beside me, and I’m glad she can’t see my face. “Charlie? Are you going to die?”

  The edges of my vision begin to blur, then focus, and blur again. “Not tonight,” I say through gritted teeth, and it’s as much a promise to myself as to Micky. “Not tonight.”

  • • •

  THE HOURS ROLL BY, long and sluggish. Before, I thought of the desert as a wasteland, too barren, too harsh to sustain real life, but the night proves me wrong. Dark shapes sail and swoop against the sky—bats, I realize, chasing insects. More than once, we hear the brush around us moving, the crunch of footsteps nearby, and though my heart races every time and I’m sure that Teresa has found us, it’s always some animal. I shudder and try not to think of Pam, lying out there for the lizards and coyotes and whatever else to explore. I hope her death was quick, that she never saw them coming.

  At some point, we hear strange grunting sounds several yards off, chewing, and then a high-pitched squeal. My heart’s in my throat, but Micky leans forward, listening intently.

  “Javelinas,” she tells me.

  “What?” I can scarcely think straight. The pain in my leg hasn’t subsided, has in fact spread, and is accompanied by numbness, tingling, and random bouts of violent twitching that make me wonder if my limb is possessed.

  “Piggies,” Micky says reverently. “Javelinas are desert piggies. I love them. I saw them at the zoo with Grandma.”

  The sweetness—the unbearable sweetness—of this memory nearly undoes me. Here I am, hunte
d by a crazy woman, taken down by a potentially lethal creepy-crawler, and Micky is finding a reason to be happy. Happy on the worst night of our lives.

  Except it’s not the worst night, I remind myself, not for either one of us. Not yet. My worst night was losing Keegan, the night I entered an empty house and knew there would be no first day of kindergarten, no high school graduation, no echo of the boy I loved in the face of a man. Micky’s worst night was losing Donna, losing Jasmine. On those nights, we were alone, more alone than we had ever been. But not tonight. Tonight is not the worst.

  With each breath I take, I repeat this like a mantra. Tonight is not the worst.

  The waiting, I find, is almost as excruciating as the pain. I don’t sleep. Can’t sleep. Not with the fire burning in my leg, the questions burning in my head.

  I think of Noah, how frantic he must be. He must’ve read the text I sent him, must know that I was in pursuit of Teresa. I should’ve told him where we were going. One text, one stinking text, could have been enough. But now? Who—besides Pam with her legally and morally ambiguous spy gear—would ever think to search this particular stretch of desert land for us?

  Maybe I won’t make it home. Maybe Noah will be left to pick up the pieces alone.

  I imagine him back in Sidalie, forced to sort through my belongings, one day finding the engagement ring he gave me in the junk drawer. Why did I put it in the junk drawer? It doesn’t belong there, his offering of love and commitment. It isn’t junk.

  Something tickles my wrist. I recoil sharply, flick a small ant from my arm. Wonder what time it is. Wonder if the venom will eventually render me unconscious.

  It’s so tempting, despite my leg, to head back to Pam’s car. Her keys have to be around somewhere, and my phone should still be under the Wrangler where Pam threw it. It might still have a charge. Even if I couldn’t find the keys or phone, I might be able to arm myself. It didn’t look like Teresa took Pam’s gun.

  But what would I do with Micky? Leave her here alone? Bring her with me into harm’s way?