Swerve

by Inglath Cooper

  “I’ll take a walk farther into the park. Why don’t you wait in the car?”

  “I’m fine here,” I say, wishing for something to do, anything other than stand and wait helplessly.

  In ten minutes, two more police cars pull in behind the first. Three officers in total get out and walk over to Officer Duncan. They speak in low tones, and I’m assuming he’s briefing them on what I’ve already told him.

  One of the policemen walks over and introduces himself. “I’m Officer Adams,” he says.

  He’s young, but his eyes are serious and concerned. I realize it is only them taking me seriously that will allow for the possibility of Mia being found quickly.

  “Her car is parked in the field over there?” he asks, pointing in the direction of the festival tents.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you mind letting me take a look in the vehicle?”

  “I don’t have the keys to open it.”

  “I can open it. Not a problem. You can ride with me and show me where she parked.”

  “Okay,” I say, walking around the front of the car to slide in the passenger side.

  I am instantly sobered by the wire divider between the front and back seats, and the official-looking computer attached to the dashboard.

  He starts the car and pulls onto the road. I tell him where to turn and then point to the Land Cruiser at the end of the grassy field, my own car still sitting next to it with the lights on.

  “Wait here,” he says, getting out and walking toward the four-wheel drive. He shines the flashlight under the vehicle and then inside each passenger window, until he reaches the back. He walks to the trunk of his car, opens it and pulls out a tool which he uses to slide between the window and door lock.

  The door opens easily, and he again uses the flashlight to search the inside of the car.

  My phone rings, and I glance at the screen. Grace’s mom. I answer with an uneven hello.

  “Any word from the girls?” she asks, her voice no longer sleep-roughened, but laced with panic. “I’ve been calling everyone I can think of. We’ve driven anywhere I can imagine she might have gone, but there’s no sign of them.”

  “I’m at the festival grounds,” I say. “I found Mia’s phone on the side of the road and called the police.”

  There’s a moment of stunned silence. “We’ll come there,” she says and hangs up.

  Unable to stand the confines of the car any longer, I get out and walk over to Officer Adams. “Anything?” I ask.

  “Just a purse on the passenger seat.”

  He hands it to me. “Is this Mia’s?”

  “Yes,” I say. I open it, glancing inside to see the pink canister of mace I had pleaded with her to carry when she was out at night.

  As if he’s read my thoughts, Officer Adams says, “I know it’s hard not to panic, but usually these things end up with a simple explanation.”

  I know he could be right. Could she have left the festival with other friends? Maybe on a first ever night of inevitable rebellion?

  But I can’t believe that even for a second because I know my sister, and it’s not something she would do. I know this because of everything we’ve been through together. When you’ve shared the kind of loss we’ve shared, put the shattered pieces of your family life back together again so that it at least resembles something of what it once was, you know each other in ways you never would have otherwise. And while I want more than anything in the world to believe him, I don’t.

  I don’t.

  Emory

  “The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

  —John Milton

  GRACE’S PARENTS ARRIVE, parking behind Mia’s Land Cruiser.

  Mrs. Marshall gets out of the car and runs to me, wrapping me in the kind of hug mothers give when comfort is desperately needed. I would like to shrug it off, assure her that I don’t need it, but I would be completely unconvincing, so I accept it with the awareness that it has been a very long time since anyone comforted me.

  When Mrs. Marshall steps back, she smooths my hair from my face, and, with notable reluctance, acknowledges Officer Adams now standing next to us. I introduce him to the Marshalls and explain that their daughter was with Mia at the festival.

  “And she hasn’t come home either?” he asks.

  “No,” Mrs. Marshall says with a crack in her voice, looking at me. “Mia’s phone. Where did you find it?”

  I point to the area where the other two police cruisers are parked, lights flashing. “Off the road there. In the weeds.”

  The look on Mrs. Marshall’s face tells me she knows, as I do, that this is not good news. “I’ve tried Grace’s phone a hundred times, but her voice mail just picks up. What do we do? Tears run down her face, and Mr. Marshall puts his arm around her, pulling her close.

  “Officer Adams,” he says. “Please. What can we do?”

  ~

  THE ANSWER ISN’T a satisfying one.

  Officer Adams leads us to the station. The Marshalls and I follow him in our own cars into downtown DC, the traffic nearly nonexistent at this hour of the night.

  Once we arrive at the station, Officer Adams leaves us with two representatives of the Family Services Division. Both young women look barely older than I am. One says she’ll be working with the Marshalls, and the other one leads me into a small room so newly painted that the chemicals burn my nose as she closes the door behind us.

  “I’m Ashley Middleton,” she says, offering me a chair. “I’m really sorry to be meeting you this way, but hopefully, this will all be some kind of misunderstanding.”

  I know she’s trying to make me feel better, but by now, I’m growing weary of the pacifying. It’s four o’clock in the morning. There can be no good explanation for why Mia hasn’t come home.

  Ms. Middleton takes the chair across the table from me, pulls a sheaf of papers from a brown leather notebook and pops the top from a BIC pen. “Can you give me your sister’s full name and her birthday and social security number?”

  “Mia Angle Benson. June 15, 2000.” I recite the social, noting her surprise that I know it by heart. “I’m her guardian,” I say, explaining. “Our parents were killed when Mia was eight.”

  “Ah,” she says, sympathy lighting her blue eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Can you tell me exactly what your sister was wearing when you last saw her?”

  I describe the jeans with the holes in the knees, the sleeveless top with its hippy flair that Mia had been so taken with during a shopping expedition we’d made to downtown D.C. at the end of last summer. I mention too the hoop earrings Grace had given her for Christmas.

  “Do you have a current picture of her?”

  “Yes,” I say, opening my phone and clicking on Photos. I scroll up a few to the ones I’d taken last weekend when we’d both run in a 5K to raise money for victims of domestic abuse. I’d actually been surprised when she asked me to run with her. She and Grace normally ran together after school, and I realized then that maybe I had been a little jealous of Grace somewhat replacing me as Mia’s confidante and companion.

  I tap on the best shot of Mia. She’s smiling, a water bottle held high in her left hand, her tank top wet with sweat. Her smile is the most beautiful thing about her. It always has been. She’s one of those people who can change someone’s day by simply smiling at them.

  “What a pretty girl,” Ms. Middleton says. “It’s clear that you’re sisters.”

  “Thanks,” I say, refusing the urge to tell her that Mia is far prettier.

  She asks me a series of more detailed questions then, about Mia’s daily habits, whether she has a boyfriend, could she be pregnant, would she tell me if she were, has she ever disappeared before, even as a young child?

  This question brings me up short, even as I start to say that she never had.

  But there was that one time.

  Mia had just tur
ned nine. Mom and Dad had been gone less than a year, and Mia still cried for them every night. At nineteen, I had struggled with how to explain our loss to Mia. I’d been truthful with her, told her about the drunk driver, and when she’d asked where they had gone after leaving earth, I’d told her they went on to Heaven.

  She’d told me many times that she wanted to go there too. That she didn’t want to stay on earth without them anymore. Most of these declarations had ended with me holding her until she cried herself to sleep. And then, one day, she just quit asking.

  One afternoon after my classes, I returned to the house to meet Mia when she got off the school bus, as I always did. But she wasn’t on the bus. I actually chased it to the next stop a few houses down and insisted that the driver let me look for her in the rows of seats filled with children staring up at me with curious eyes, certain I would find her there asleep.

  But she wasn’t there.

  I ran back to the house to call her school, but as soon as I walked through the door, the phone rang.

  It was Pastor Dennis from the church we’d gone to with Mom and Dad, the church I still tried to attend on a semi-regular basis, more for Mia than for myself. The voice on the other end was sympathetic and familiar, and I felt instantly guilty for not being more faithful in my attendance.

  “Emory,” Pastor Dennis said with sympathy in his voice. “Mia is here with me. I know you must be frantic.”

  Without answering, I started to cry, dropping to the floor on my knees, the phone in my hand. I’d barely figured out that Mia wasn’t where she was supposed to be, and my body was shaking with fear. Because it was then that I realized how alone I would be in the world without her. “Oh, Pastor Dennis, thank you. What happened?”

  “She knocked at the front door of the church. She had come to see me.”

  “But why?” I asked and then hoped the question didn’t sound disrespectful.

  He was silent for a moment. “She wanted to know if I could tell her how to get to Heaven. She said she wanted to go there to be with your parents.”

  The sob broke free from my throat so instantly and with such force that I couldn’t hold back the torrent of tears that followed. It was a full minute before I could bring myself to speak. “Oh, no.”

  “It’s not your fault, Emory. You’ve been an exemplary sister, taken care of her as only someone who truly loves her could. She’s just missing them.”

  “I know,” I said, my voice breaking again. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t replace them.”

  “Of course not. And you wouldn’t want to.”

  “What do I do?” I asked, feeling as helpless as I had ever felt in my life.

  “You just keep loving her. And maybe let her know how much you miss them too.”

  “I’ve been afraid to tell her that.”

  “Because you don’t want her to think you’re not strong enough to take care of her?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s okay to let her see your grief, Emory. It will make hers seem a little less enormous if it is something she shares with you.”

  I realized instantly that he was right. I’d kept my sorrow from her because I didn’t want to add to hers, but I could see that wasn’t the right thing to do. “I wish she’d asked me,” I said.

  “How to get to Heaven?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She says that she doesn’t think you believe Heaven is a real place. She asked me how it could not be real if that’s where her mom and dad are.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe,” I said. “I’m just—”

  “Angry,” he said softly. “How could you not be?”

  “Have you ever been angry at God?”

  “Of course,” he said. “We’ve all been angry at our parents at some point in our lives. He is my eternal father, but that doesn’t mean I always agree with or understand the things that happen in this world.”

  His answer surprised me. “You don’t think I’m horrible then?”

  “That is the very last thing anyone would think about you, Emory.”

  But I found that very hard to believe.

  He didn’t know that I’d let my parents leave this world thinking I didn’t love them.

  How much more horrible could horrible be?

  The Proprietor

  “Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin.”

  —Aesop

  SHE HAS THE sleep habits of a vampire.

  Sleep is for the weak. She’s always thought as much, even as a teenager when most of the girls she’d gone to school with at The Spence School in Manhattan had coveted an extra hour of sleeping in as if it were the key to the success they assumed was their rightful inheritance.

  While they slept, she plotted her future. She supposed that was the difference between someone who was born with her future already mapped out and a girl who’d been granted a scholarship to Spence. A girl with a genius IQ that elevated the school’s quotable stats in a way that made her a public relations bargain.

  She certainly hadn’t cared that they’d used her to enhance the school’s reputation. Mutual use was an undeniable tenet of life on planet Earth. Success was determined by an individual’s ability to spot the need in another human being and then to fill that need in a way that satisfied both parties. It was a roadmap she not only understood but had become an expert at implementing in every professional relationship that mattered.

  She had her father to thank for that education. He had taken her hunting with him when she’d been a little girl. He liked to trap and then shoot, explaining to her that it was too much trouble to try to hit a moving target. He wasn’t particular about what kind of animal he trapped, although his preference was deer. They could eat deer.

  One morning, when she’d been seven or eight years old, he’d gotten her up early and asked her to walk with him through the woods behind their small house to check the traps. She had been happy to be asked and dressed quickly in snow bibs and boots. The New York winter bit at her cheeks as they walked through the trees, following the path her dad knew so well.

  The first trap was empty. He added bait, and they walked on anther thousand yards or so before they saw the second one.

  A young deer, probably born the summer before judging from her size, leapt up from the snow as they approached. The ragged iron jaw of the trap held her right front leg hostage. She bucked and reared against it, but the leg only began to bleed more, a bright red puddle forming on the snow beside her.

  She’d had no idea deer could scream. But this young doe made a sound of terror that played through her head like glass against glass. The sound made her more curious than empathetic. How long had the deer been here like this, trapped by a fate she’d never thought to expect?

  She noticed then the adult doe watching them from a short distance away. Even in the early morning light, she could see the fear and worry in the doe’s eyes. She wanted to charge at them, make them leave her baby alone, but it was clear that she knew she could not. Somehow, that mama deer knew she had no power over them.

  Her father held his gun out and said, “It’s time for you to learn about follow through.”

  She looked at him, unable to hide her surprise. “You want me to shoot her?”

  “There’s no other choice now. Even when you’re the captor, there comes a time to show mercy.”

  “What if I miss?”

  “You won’t,” he said. “Aim the way I taught you, and it’ll be over quick.”

  She lifted the rifle, the butt resting on her shoulder as she pointed it at the young deer. The deer was calm by now, staring back at her as if there was no longer any point in questioning her fate. Even so, she took her time, realizing the importance of not missing. Using another life for your own gain was one thing, suffering another.

  For a moment, her fixed look slipped to the mother, meeting the deer’s head on. Was there pleading there, or was it simply her imagination? For a single, emblazoned second
, that pleading registered deep inside her, ignited recognition of something she would later value in life. That moment when both parties involved in a negotiation realize that one holds the winning card.

  Pity swayed her for a brief, flickering second, but she understood somewhere deep inside her that losing wasn’t an option. She moved her focus back to the young deer, bolting backwards now against the jaw of the trap, as if aware that death was imminent, that fighting back was her only option.

  She found a spot on the deer’s chest, let her finger find the resistance in the trigger and then pulled. The blast rocked the silence of the woods around them. The deer went down, and its stillness now seemed to her, merciful.

  She lowered the gun, looked at her father. He smiled at her, pride in his voice when he said, “That’s my girl.”

  The words echo in her mind as she picks up the piece of paper from Sergio on her desk.

  Two deer in trap. 17 or 18.

  She pictures their new captives as they must look now, terrified, trying to decide when is the right time to fight to free themselves. Little do they know, there will be no right time. That moment disappeared when Sergio gave them the option of getting in the cargo area of his Range Rover or being shot.

  Freedom from the current trap will only occur when they agree to put themselves in the final and ultimate trap.

  And make no mistake, it will only happen with their agreement. Of course, when their options are laid out for proper consideration, entertaining some of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world will seem like a privilege, one they will welcome.

  She figured out long ago that human beings relish choice. They like knowing they have options. Even teenage girls.

  She pulls open the center drawer of her desk, removes a lighter, and ignites the end of the note, holding it over her metal trash can and then dropping it just as the flame engulfs the paper and turns it to ash.

  Her insistence on leaving behind no evidence whatsoever is her greatest strength. She’s been called anal, obsessive, controlling. But then she’s never been caught.