Swerve

by Inglath Cooper

  But decency wins out. Knox can see the moment the decision to reveal what he knows crosses Jason’s face. Knox keeps silent, waiting for him to leap the chasm of reluctance on his own.

  “There is one thing,” he says in a soft voice, as if the Colombian might be hiding in the dressing room behind them. Knox and Emory both wait, even as he knows her patience is as thin as his own.

  “Madison said he talked in his sleep. Some crazy stuff, mumbling about beatings, maybe when he was a kid. Or maybe not. I don’t know. But there was a place he talked about.”

  “What was it?”

  “Some place he called the hotel.”

  “What kind of hotel?” Knox asks.

  “No idea.” He hesitates and then pulls a phone from his back pocket. “She sent me a video one night of him talking in his sleep. She thought it was funny. We were fairly open with each other about our love lives, its quirks and whatnot.”

  Knox feels his heart kick up a beat. “Could we see it, please?”

  His hesitation is only a flicker of a second, as if he realizes he’s come too far to turn back now. He taps the screen, opens the text app, scrolls down, and clicks once, handing the phone to Knox.

  Knox taps the play button and holds the phone closer to Emory. She’s so still, he wonders if she’s holding her breath. The video starts, the headboard of a bed is the first shot on the screen. There’s no sound. The camera moves to a man, sleeping, flat on his back, one arm thrown up above his head. Even in the dimness, Knox can tell it’s the same guy on the festival footage, the same guy who ran out of Madison’s apartment last night.

  A few seconds of silence pass, and then he mumbles something that isn’t a recognizable word. His head moves side to side. The camera remains still on him. Hotel California. Back to Hotel California.

  A low giggle follows. Madison’s giggle. “You want to go to Hotel California? That’s kind of a long way.” And then the camera turns off.

  Knox looks up at Jason. “Will you send this to me?”

  “Keep my name out of it?” Jason asks.

  “Will do.”

  Knox gives him his number and waits for him to send the video, before saying, “Thank you. I understand not wanting to be involved, but you’re a stand-up guy.”

  Jason smiles, and it’s clear that the compliment means something to him. “Thanks, man. I hope you find him. Madison was a good friend to me. She shouldn’t have died like that. No one should die like that.”

  “No,” Emory says. “No one should. Thank you, Jason.”

  They leave the store then, and it isn’t until they’re back in the Jeep that Knox plays the video again. They watch it five times, back to back before Knox looks at Emory and says, “Next on our list. Figure out where the heck Hotel California is.”

  Mia

  “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

  ―Mahatma Gandhi

  THEY’D LIED, of course.

  She and Grace were not together.

  Following her sanitization, Mia had been taken to a different room from the one she’d been held in before. This room was like a place where she would be living. Alone. There was a bed. A sofa. A bathroom. A closet with clothes in it that looked nothing like anything she would ever wear. There was a small kitchen with a refrigerator and food in it.

  There was a door, locked from the outside. And there were no windows.

  There was a TV with a remote. Flicking through, she noticed there were no news channels. Only channels featuring old shows, most of which she’d never heard of.

  Mia sat on the edge of the bed, fighting an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia, panic clawing at her throat.

  She felt paralyzed with a choking combination of fear and fury. How could this have happened to her? To them? Where was Grace? Was she hurt? Was she even alive? Was that why they weren’t letting her see her? Had they already killed her?

  Sobs rise in her throat, tears flooding from her eyes in a sudden rush. She’s trapped. The absoluteness of this hits her as it has not until this very moment. She has no way out. No way to fight back. No way to free herself.

  She can only sit here, waiting for her fate to come, and she knows it isn’t going to be a good one, given everything that awful woman did to her over the past couple of hours.

  Panic grips her like a vice around her throat. She knows without doubt that she wants to die. She will not sit and wait for whatever they have planned for her to come.

  She leaps from the bed, running to the small kitchen with its row of drawers. She yanks each one open, praying there is a knife inside, anything sharp enough to slice her wrists, allow the blood to flow out of her body, releasing the life they are going to take anyway.

  But the drawers are empty, and she collapses onto the floor, sobbing so hard she cannot breathe.

  The door clicks, and there is the sound of keys turning multiple locks before it swings open, and the hulk of a man who had brought her to this room steps inside, a syringe in his hand. “Proprietor says you are to have this. You have an appointment this evening, and you cannot greet your first customer with a face ruined by crying. You will sleep until you are needed.”

  “No,” Mia screams, jumping to her feet and running to the far side of the bed.

  He doesn’t bother to chase her, merely pulls a gun from his coat pocket and points it at her. “I am allowed to use this as a last resort. Do you want last resort or syringe?”

  Mia stares at the gun, wanting so badly to tell him to shoot her. But she won’t. That would be leaving on their terms. She’ll leave on her own.

  She sits down on the side of the bed, her shoulders slumping, and waits for the needle to do its work.

  Emory

  “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

  ―Friedrich Nietzsche

  WE AGREE TO start online. This time at Knox’s apartment.

  We’d been closer to his place than my house when we’d left the store after our talk with Jason. Knox had asked if I would mind if he changed clothes and said we could use his laptop.

  And so I find myself standing in the center of his living room, trying not to listen to the sounds coming from his bedroom that indicate he might be in a state of undress.

  I focus on my surroundings, noting the fact that the walls are bare, the furniture is minimal, and it really does look like the kind of place a person would do nothing more than eat, sleep, and shower in. A place where a person has not chosen to create a life but rather an existence.

  I circle behind the sofa to the lone table backed up against it. A single photo sits in the center in a silver frame. I pick it up, recognize Knox—a younger, obviously happier Knox. He’s wearing a tuxedo, and the woman on his arm, a wedding dress.

  They’re both smiling, looking into each other’s eyes. She’s utterly beautiful. She’s holding a bouquet of roses, and they look as if they can’t wait to start the life ahead of them.

  And yet, there was no ring on Knox’s finger now. Yes, I’d noticed. No white telltale imprint to indicate he’d recently removed it to hide the fact that he was married. This definitely wasn’t an apartment made to look like a home by a loving wife.

  The bedroom door opens. I attempt to place the frame back on the table, but set it down too quickly and it turns over, glass down.

  I glance up to find Knox staring at me. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have—”

  “It’s okay,” he says, walking over to right the frame.

  The silence that follows is awkward, and yet I find myself saying, “She’s beautiful.”

  “Yes,” he agrees. “She is.”

  I want to ask, but I don’t. It’s none of my business, but I’m surprised when he says, “She deserved far better than what I ended up being able to give her.”

  “You look so happy in the photo.”

  “We were.”

  “What happened?” The question is out before I realize I am asking it.

  He runs a fi
nger along the top of the frame, his voice regretful when he says, “I guess I wasn’t able to be two people. The man you see in this picture. And the one who came back from Afghanistan. That wasn’t the same man she married.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and I really am. It seems so unfair that two people could begin a life together, certain of what they had, only to find it all torn apart by something as horrible as war.

  “So am I. But she’s happy again. Remarried. And that’s good.”

  “Do you mean that?” I ask, my psychiatrist’s curiosity surprised that he could want something for her that he clearly no longer had.

  “I actually do. She never wanted me to be in the military. That was my dream. It blew up in my face and ended up damaging us both.”

  There should be something for me to say. I’ve spent years of my life studying how to help people with trauma, people whose lives have been upended by things they never saw coming. And yet, I can find nothing that seems appropriate. Maybe it’s my own trauma, my own current inability to believe what has happened to Mia that has left me empty of anything resembling professional empathy.

  Knox turns then, waves me toward the sofa and says, “Let me grab the laptop, and we’ll get started.”

  I sit at one end while he disappears into the bedroom, returning a few moments later with a rather beaten-up computer. He sits down next to me, and I realize then we’ll have to sit close for me to be able to see. A table with chairs might have solved that, but there isn’t one, so I try not to think about the fact that our arms are touching. Is it my imagination that I can feel the heat of his body emanating like a force field colliding with my own?

  “It looks bad,” he says, “but still works.” He opens the lid, waits for the screen to pop up, then moves the cursor to the top to engage the wireless network.

  Once it has, he opens a new screen, cursors up to the search engine bar and types in hotel california.

  I look over his shoulder at the first offering, a video for the song by the Eagles. Next, Wikipedia lists the song, declaring it the title track from the 1977 Eagles’ album.

  The next listing is the Hotel California in Todos Santos, Mexico.

  “Could that be it?” I ask, pointing at the listing.

  “It could be, but why Mexico? Let’s see what else we can find.” He traces his finger down the screen, past more references to the Eagles’ song and then clicks over to the next page. It’s halfway down the second page that his finger stops on Hotel California, Loudoun County, Virginia.

  He clicks. The webpage features a beautiful old brick mansion, southern in architecture with enormous white columns on the front. A small discreet sign at the entrance gate reads, Hotel California. The heading at the top of the page says: “Known as a getaway destination for senators and Washington, DC, influentials.”

  “That’s a lot closer,” I say. “Maybe he had a rendezvous out there?”

  Knox cocks his head, throws me a look. “Did you just say rendezvous?”

  My face seeps crimson. “Hookup then. Is that modern enough?”

  “I guess it’s all the same,” he says, trying not to smile. “Maybe someone out there would remember him. We’ll show his picture around, see if anyone recognizes him.”

  We both read the description, noting the fact that it’s on the National Register of Historic Places.

  “It’s about an hour away,” I say.

  “Probably a goose chase,” he says, “but it’s worth a shot.”

  “Agreed,” I say, wishing I felt more hopeful about it.

  He closes the lid on the laptop, starts to get up from the sofa just as I do. Our legs bump, and it’s as if we’ve both been zapped with a jolt of stunning electricity. He looks at me. I look at him. And the air around us is charged with things I’ve never felt before. I want to touch him so bad that I actually can’t even think beyond that single thought. My hand moves of its own accord, as if it doesn’t need my permission to do what it wants. I touch his face, feel the stubble that is evidence of the shave he’d skipped this morning.

  Again, feeling jolts through me, hot and searing.

  “Emory,” he says on a low, husky note of sanity, the awareness there telling me he knows this is a path we shouldn’t take. And I know it too.

  But still, my hand turns so that my knuckles smooth across his jawline. I hear his sharp intake of breath and know a wave of power I’ve never felt with anyone. When it comes to physical relationships, I am all but a novice. I’ve yet to have a single experience that convinced me the hype about sex was anywhere near accurate.

  But here, in this moment, touching this man, I realize he’s the one who could show me why I’ve been wrong. What I’ve been missing out on.

  “Why you?” I ask softly, as if he knows what I’ve been thinking.

  Judging from the look in his eyes, I think he does. How, I don’t know. Maybe he feels it, but I can see that he wants me as much as I want him.

  I lean in, so close that our lips are almost touching. We hang there between the urge to give in and the realization that it is a line that once crossed might permanently change our ability to go forward with the reason we are together in the first place.

  Mia.

  Her name flashes through my brain, and I sit back, suddenly ashamed of even this momentary lapse into my own needs.

  “Mia,” I say out loud, my voice breaking across her name. “What kind of sister am I?”

  This time, it is Knox who runs his hand across my hair, one finger tipping my chin up so that I have to look at him. “A human one,” he says quietly. “It’s normal to want comfort from someone who understands. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  My psychiatrist mind knows he is right. But there’s more that I want from him. That’s the part that makes me wonder how that could possibly be when the vast majority of me is in the worst kind of mourning for what has happened and the unbearable question of how it will end.

  “Here’s something I know,” he says, no longer touching me, as if he doesn’t trust himself. “Human beings aren’t one dimensional. Life isn’t one dimensional. Even when we’re experiencing something we don’t even know how to process, we need to feel alive, be reminded all is not completely insane.”

  “Was it like that for you in Afghanistan?”

  “Yes. We somehow had to compartmentalize. Head out on a mission where we might end up losing civilians who weren’t supposed to be in the line of fire. And then play cards that night before bed and try not to be shocked by our own laughter. Life is never all good or all bad. On a daily basis, it’s a never-ending switching back and forth between the two. Somehow the blend is bearable most of the time.”

  “But the two of us right now . . .”

  He gives me a long, layering look. “You know what I really want to do right now?”

  I hesitate, not sure I need to hear what he’s going to say. But I can’t help it. I want to hear it. “What?” I ask, the word barely audible.

  “Pick you up. Carry you into my room and make you forget about everything going on in your life right now except the fact that I am inside you. Make you certain with every move of my body that I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

  A sharp intake of breath tells us both I have just visualized him doing exactly that.

  And then he says, “But I’m afraid that’s a recipe for regret on your part. And I’ve caused enough regret in my life.”

  I get up from the sofa then, walk to the door on shaky legs, turn the knob. Without looking back at him, I say, “I’ll wait for you outside.”

  It isn’t until I reach the Jeep that I allow myself a deep breath and the reluctant admission that I am in way over my head.

  Emory

  “To perceive is to suffer.”

  ―Aristotle

  I FEEL LIKE this is going to take us nowhere.

  What is the likelihood that something the Colombian guy mumbled in his sleep is even real? Maybe it’s a place where he grew up, or who
knows what?

  We’re about to take the exit off I-66 for Route 29 when I spot a truck ahead, loaded with chickens in wire crates. Feathers are flying out of the truck and floating onto our windshield.

  I let out a long sigh, and Knox looks at me, eyebrows raised.

  “I hate those trucks,” I say.

  Knox lets off the gas, but the truck has slowed down too, and we’re close enough that I can see the poor things flattened inside the crates, unable to stand. Tears spring to my eyes and start down my cheeks. I wipe them away, looking out my window to avoid seeing the picture ahead of us. But it’s emblazoned on my eyes already, and I can’t hold back the sudden urge to sob. Nor can I stop the scream that rips from my throat. “I . . . hate . . . this . . . world,” I say, crying so hard now that I can barely get the words out. “Everywhere you look . . . there’s cruelty.”

  “Hey,” he says, putting a hand on my shoulder and squeezing softly. “They’ll be out of sight in a minute.”

  “Does that change what’s going to happen to them? Does my not seeing it mean they won’t be slaughtered?”

  “Do you want me to pull over?”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head. “We need to get to the next place. What if Mia is in a cage somewhere? What if someone is planning to do something awful to her?” I am outright sobbing now, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. It’s as if a hole inside me has been ripped open, and all the pain I feel over Mia’s disappearance, all the empathy I’ve ever felt for people and animals not in control of their own fate, comes pouring out of me, a tidal wave of emotion that flattens me.

  “Oh, shit!”

  I look up just in time to see one of the crates flying off the back of the truck. It bounces in the center of the lane in front of us. Knox slams on the brakes, and I just know we’re going to hit it. Somehow, though, it’s air-bound again, landing in the pull-over lane and skidding across the asphalt into the grass at the edge of the pavement.