by Hester Young
Teresa might be there, waiting.
At some point, Micky drops off to sleep on me, her head wedged in the portion of my lap not eclipsed by baby belly. I put a hand on her cheek. She’s cool, so cool next to the heat of my toxic skin.
God, I’m thirsty. I haven’t peed in several hours, must be severely dehydrated. And I haven’t felt my baby move in a long, long time. I won’t think about what that means.
I listen for sounds of Teresa, try to focus my distorted gaze. At some point, the distant headlights of her car blink out. Perhaps she’s switched them off herself. Perhaps her battery has died.
I’ll see you at first light, she said, and she’s right. Once the sun comes up, Micky and I have no way to hide.
• • •
THE RISING LIGHT is nearly imperceptible at first, a deep blue that edges onto the horizon, slowly flushing out the black. No one is coming to help us, that much is obvious. Not Noah, not the police, not some random passing car. Whatever I’m going to do, I’d better do it now while I still have the shadows on my side. Another thirty, forty minutes, and Teresa will have a clear view for miles.
My leg is agonizing, a blazing inferno with dead spots, and my vision comes in drippy waves. The right side of my face feels like a pincushion, needles piercing the skin—the venom has spread that far upward. I can’t make it all the way back to the main road, which leaves me with just one option.
I rouse Micky gently from her sleep. “We have to go,” I whisper. “You’re going to follow me back to Pam’s car, okay? When we get close, I’ll go ahead and you wait until I tell you it’s safe, understand?”
Micky understands all too well. “What if you don’t come back?” she asks, fingers hovering around her mouth.
“If something happens to me and it looks like you’re in trouble, you run,” I tell her. “You run for the road and you follow it until you see a car.”
“Okay,” she says, but her tone is dubious. I don’t blame her. If Teresa shows up, we’re pretty much sitting ducks, end of story.
Still, she rises to her feet. We begin our limping journey through the dwindling dark.
It’s unnaturally quiet as we walk, just the occasional songbird and the soft padding of our shoes. At this hour, beneath an endless indigo sky, the desert looks like an ocean floor, murky outlines of rocks and silt and weedy plant life. The saguaros ripple and flex in my distorted vision, anemones in the current. Like my dream, I realize. My very first dream of Micky.
This was the world waiting for me when I stepped outside Jasmine’s apartment and saw my niece crying for her mother beneath the desert moon. Mama? she asked, and I thought that Micky was calling for the mother she’d lost. But what if I was wrong? What if she was calling for the mother she needed? Calling for me.
Suddenly I’m sure of something: this familiar patch of desert land, this place I dreamed of—it’s no accident. Every choice I’ve made since I came to Arizona has been leading me here.
When Pam’s car comes into view, I believe we just might make it. The early morning feels so calm, so extraordinarily peaceful, it’s hard to believe that something bad happened here last night. I leave Micky crouching by a thorny bush. We don’t exchange a word, but I kiss her on the forehead. Give her hair a quick ruffle.
Then I’m jogging, or as near as I can come to it on my gimpy leg, bracing myself for the sight of Pam’s body. I want her keys. I want her gun. I know she went down near Teresa’s Range Rover, but Teresa moved her vehicle last night, so there’s nothing to mark the location.
I see no trace of Pam at all, not even the blood-soaked earth she surely left in her wake.
Teresa must have been cleaning up after herself. She could’ve loaded Pam into the Range Rover last night, I realize. But how would she have been strong enough to lift the woman? Pam’s got at least fifty pounds on her.
It occurs to me that Teresa might not be alone. She might’ve called for reinforcements—her husband, maybe, or Quico.
I have no idea how many people are out here.
Increasingly dizzy, I give up on finding Pam’s body and stumble instead toward her Wrangler. The creeping daylight only highlights how bad my vision has gotten, imbuing the landscape with that psychedelic, watery sheen. And my leg is starting to feel like it’s been shot full of Novocain.
I try the driver’s-side door first, peering over my shoulder the entire time so no one can startle me from behind. Give the rear door a halfhearted tug. Both locked. My phone is my last hope. If it’s not under there where Pam tossed it, I’m out of luck.
I peer under the carriage, but it’s too dark to see anything. I lie down on the dusty ground. Grope around with one arm, praying that my hand finds an iPhone and not another angry desert creature.
Rocks. Something with teeny prickers that embed themselves in my fingers. No phone. I wedge my head and shoulder beneath the car, still fishing.
Suddenly I feel the weight of the entire vehicle shift above me, down and then up. Someone moving inside. The click of doors unlocking.
I roll out as fast as I can, but I’m too late. Teresa’s standing over me, gun pointed directly at my face. She must’ve spent the night in the Wrangler. And here I am, flat on my back, served up nice and easy so she won’t even break a nail.
“Looking for this?” With one hand, she tosses my cell phone onto the dirt beside my head. “I knew you’d be back. A woman always wants her phone.”
She’s still wearing her work clothes from yesterday, still in heels as she leans forward to deliver a parting shot to my head. It’s the heels that get me: three-inch spikes with a cute little bow. No way. No freaking way.
With every ounce of force I have left, I kick her in the ankles.
I have the vague urge to yell, “Timber!” as she crashes sideways into the car. The gun goes off in her hand. I scramble across the ground, trying to crawl out of her path, to protect my belly. In the side of the car, a tiny bullet hole announces her miss.
Teresa regains her footing. Kicks off her broken heel, furious.
I don’t see what happens next. Somewhere behind my eyelids, light explodes in pale starbursts, lifting me out of pain and fear. Is it the poison? Has Teresa shot me? Perhaps I am dead. Perhaps this is how life ends, not in darkness, but in a sudden, dazzling light.
I blink. Realize that someone is peering down at me. A woman.
She has shoulder-length auburn hair and blue eyes that crinkle at the corners, but it’s something else in her I recognize. Beyond this older woman’s face, I feel the girl she once was.
She bends down, presses her fingertips to my cheek, and I feel the memories washing over me like water. Her cheap perfume. Her fingers snapping open a can of Tab. Her blowing raspberries on my tummy, trying to make me laugh. The way she applied mascara, eyes open wide, as if surprised by what she saw in the mirror. Impossible memories—I was much too young—and yet they’re there.
Hi, bunny, she says, and that, too, is familiar, an old nickname I haven’t heard in decades.
“Mama?”
But she’s already retreating. She can’t stay. I know she can’t stay. She brings her hand to her lips, then lets her fingers fall back toward me. A kiss. She’s blowing me a kiss good-bye. I should’ve had a lifetime with you, she murmurs, and her words are an apology, a regret, and a wish all rolled into one. I feel my vision blurring, though whether from light or tears or animal venom, I can’t say. I wipe my eyes. Find myself huddled in the dirt again, kneeling in the shadow of the Wrangler. I’m alive, categorically alive, though maybe not for long. Teresa limps toward me, seething, one foot bare, her gun trained on my head.
She flounces toward me like a woman about to slap her lover, her fury almost comical. The remaining high-heeled shoe throws her whole gait off, but the .22 in her hand assures me that she means business.
I should be afraid, but I’m not. No
t when I catch sight of the woman behind her.
Standing against the jagged mountains, Pam is the most solid thing I’ve ever seen, no insubstantial dream but a force of nature. Her shirt is torn and soaked in red, the finger of her right hand tied tightly in stained cloth. With the first strands of a not-yet-risen sun lighting her from behind, she looks like a wounded angel.
She’s battered, bloody, limping. Unsteady on her feet, but not unsteady in her aim. That is dead-on accurate.
Three bangs reverberate throughout the valley. Silence, and then Teresa pitches forward onto me, crushingly heavy.
“Well,” says Pam as I roll Teresa’s body off me a little too aggressively, “my work’s done.”
Before I can thank her, for my life and for my daughter’s, she collapses.
Thirty-Two
When I open my eyes, the first thing I see is Noah. Noah and the sterile white surfaces of a hospital room. The hospital setting is neither unexpected nor unwelcome, but Noah’s eyes, red from crying, alarm me.
“Where’s Micky?” I ask, and he startles at the sound of my voice.
“You’re awake.” The corners of his mouth lift into something resembling a smile. “Nice to see you.”
“Where’s Micky?” I repeat.
“Downstairs in the cafeteria with Vonda.”
“She’s okay?”
He nods. “She’s a trouper, that one. Gave a statement to the police, cool as you please. She’s been askin’ for you.”
“What about the baby?” I reach down and touch my belly through the flimsy hospital gown.
“Her blood pressure was pretty high for a while. They thought they might need to do a C-section at first, but looks like she’s calmed down. They wanna keep an eye on you both a bit longer, make sure. How you feelin’?”
I lift my leg experimentally, try bending it at the knee. “Numb. But most of the burning’s gone. What was that, anyway?”
“They think you got stung by a bark scorpion,” Noah tells me. “You had a pretty bad reaction. They gave you antihistamines and a lot of Tylenol, remember?”
Now that he says it, I do have a vague recollection of some nurse handing me pills, although I don’t think I knew what they were. I’m a little disappointed all that suffering required nothing more than some over-the-counter medicine, but it’s comforting to know my organs haven’t been irreparably damaged by one pissy scorpion.
I take a deep breath and prepare for the news I don’t want to hear.
“And Pam? What happened to Pam?”
Noah takes my hand, folds my fingers against his palm. I wait for him to tell me, to pronounce the words “she’s dead.” Instead, his voice is laced with disbelief. “Do you believe in miracles?”
Miracles, I think, are beside the point. “Are you saying she’s alive?”
“Took three bullets, but she’s alive. I’m tellin’ you, that cat’s got nine lives.”
I laugh, a crazy, brittle laugh filled with a relief I can’t adequately express. “Her shirt—it was all bloody. I thought she’d bleed out for sure.”
“The bullet barely penetrated her skin,” Noah says, pointing to his own side to illustrate. “Just missed her rib. That one was the least of her worries. She lost a finger, and she’ll need some rehab on her ankle.”
“Guess you were right about twenty-twos. All they do is make a person mad.”
“Pam’s in the ICU,” Noah informs me, lest I think she walked away unscathed. “But she’s conscious. I just spoke to her myself.”
“Was she upset with me?”
“At you? Why would she be upset?”
“I should’ve trusted her. She knew Teresa was full of shit, but I . . . I wasn’t sure.”
Noah wilts at the mention of Teresa. “You weren’t the only one who got Teresa’s number wrong,” he says, and I can tell he’s been beating himself up about it. “Anyway, Pam wasn’t upset. She was . . . peaceful.”
“Peaceful” is the last word I’d ever use to describe Pam. “Don’t tell me she had some near-death experience.”
“Something like that.”
“White light, bright tunnel? Heavenly voices speaking to her from above?” I say it like it’s a joke, but in truth, the memories of my mother still burn bright in my mind.
“I don’t think it was like that.” Noah glances at me, considering how to tell it. “Pam said she saw Donna. That Donna came to her in the night, told her to watch out for you and Micky.”
“Huh.”
“You don’t believe her.”
I shrug. “The human brain does some interesting things in a trauma situation. I saw some weird stuff myself.” I don’t tell him that I, too, saw Donna, that she blew me a kiss. My mother is a topic I will need to spend some time alone with. “Can you bring Micky in?” I change the subject before he can question me. “I’d really like to see her.”
“Sure. I’ll head over to the cafeteria. She can come up when she’s done with dinner.”
He starts to stand, but I grab at his sleeve. There’s one more thing we need to settle. “Noah?”
“What, sugar?”
“Before I see Micky, I need to know. I need to know if we’re going to take her. If we’re going to move out here and make a go of it, or . . .”
He sighs. “Five minutes awake, and you wanna do this?”
“I’m sorry. But she asked me last night if she was going to come and live with us. Things changed out there, Noah. I think I understand her now.”
I don’t tell him that I’ve already made up my mind. That Micky is my child, that for her sake, my life needs to be here, in Arizona. If Noah is going to leave Sidalie, he needs to make the choice freely. I won’t bully him into it.
He leans back in his chair and stares at the ceiling. I can see this won’t be a simple yes-or-no answer.
“When you and Micky went missin’, I got to thinkin’,” he says. “About our life and what I wanted it to be. All the stuff we’ve been fightin’ over.”
“And?”
“And I realized you were right about a lotta stuff. The whole marriage thing—you were right.” His head dips in defeat.
“You mean, you don’t want to get married?” The air has mysteriously vanished from my lungs. Being right, in this instance, carries no satisfaction.
“I guess I had this idea it was gonna fix things,” he admits. “I’ve been so busy worryin’ about what’s right for the baby and what other folks’ll think. But it’s not about them, it’s about us.”
I sit up in my bed, body suddenly rigid. “You don’t think we should be together?”
“No,” he says. “I’m not sayin’ that. Just that we don’t need to go runnin’ into anything. What you’ve been tellin’ me all along.” He leans forward, urging me to understand. “Bein’ around Carmen kinda cleared my head, you see? I couldn’t help but remember. How I felt back then, marryin’ this girl I thought I had forever with.” He shakes his head. “We were so over-the-moon happy, Charlie. And that wasn’t enough.”
I turn my head away from him on the pillow. Curl up. I don’t need to hear how happy he and his ex-wife once were.
“You were right,” he tells me. “People can’t get married ’cause of all the things goin’ on around ’em. It’s gotta be ’cause of what’s goin’ on inside ’em. You and me, we’ve got time to grow that. We don’t have to be all in a hurry.”
“We haven’t had a lot of time to focus on just us.”
He smiles. Strokes my cheek, coaxing me out of my protective ball. “Things happened so fast, I’ve pretty much never known you as anyone but pregnant, hormonal Charlie. I dunno who you’ll be. Got no idea what to expect after the baby arrives. But I’m in. I’m in this.”
“Where?” I ask. “Where, exactly, are you in this?”
“I did a lot of thinkin’ on that, too
.”
“What did you come up with?”
“Well,” he says. “I started thinkin’ about Boone, this dog we had when I was a kid. Boone got cancer, right? And Nanny and Daddy Jack, they said it was time to put him down.”
I grab my head as if in physical pain. “Oh my God, Noah. Are you seriously answering a question about our future with a dead-dog parable?”
He waves me off and continues with his story in earnest. “I loved that dog, okay? I was goin’ nuts. ‘No, no, you can’t put down the dog!’ I was all worked up.”
I bite my tongue and wait for the punch line.
“Anyway, Daddy Jack said somethin’ that stuck with me. He said, ‘Let the dog remember a life that was good. Don’t make him stick around until it’s bad.’”
I grip the rail of my bed. “Are you the dog here, Noah? You don’t want to stick around until it gets bad?”
“No, no.” He looks vexed, as if his meaning should’ve been perfectly clear. “I’m talkin’ about Sidalie. Saying that I had a good life there. But maybe, just maybe, I’ve stuck around too long. That it’s time to let that dog die.”
I could laugh or cry; instead, I choose some awkward hybrid of the two. Tears coupled with a fit of giggles that rapidly disintegrates into a string of unladylike snorts. “Oh, hon . . .” My eyes are welling up even as I gasp for air. “Oh, hon, I love you so much.” When I finally compose myself, I realize there’s one last question. “What about your company?”
“I’ve got an idea about that.” He takes a deep breath. “I split ownership with Pete Gantos. That means it’s still half mine. He’ll handle the day-to-day, and I’ll advise, maybe start up a little branch out here. I’m gonna have to go back to Sidalie now and again,” he warns, “but I’ll be livin’ in Tucson. With you and the kids. Fair?”
“Fair.”
“So. You still want that house on Mawith Drive?”
“Yeah.” I grin. “I want it.”
“All right, then. Here we are, and here we stay. I’m not gonna lie, this whole thing scares me shitless. But I’m gonna try. Gonna do my damnedest.”
