“Go,” Lara choked out. “GO!”
Felix pulled her upright and reached across her to slam the door as Shelby backed out of their space. The other car was already pulling into traffic. The woman’s gun came up. There were other people in the lot now. A red-faced man, short and fat. A teenage girl in a heavy coat and winter hat. Lara couldn’t talk, couldn’t reach up to brush aside the hairs caught in the sick around her mouth. She could feel the thing that had stolen her life writhing under her. She could see it standing at her parents’ bedside, watching the slow rise and fall of their chests, watching the part of the mattress where Lara had once tucked her small and frightened self between their sleeping bodies as lightning scribbled outside the north-facing windows, flashing again and again over the field. She saw it slip into bed beside her mother, soft and gentle as a whisper, and open up its face to give her a secret even her cold, hard-fingered hands had never found.
The gray-haired woman fired, cracking the Impala’s right rear window and drawing a hot line of pain across the bridge of Lara’s nose. She screamed, jerking back and falling into Felix’s lap. Shelby spun the wheel and peeled out, tires squealing, fishtailing into the sparse traffic—mostly truckers. One stood on his horn, his trailer drifting ominously as he braked. She was drenched in the hot torrent of his desperation. He was driving high on Adderall to make his schedule; the smallest accident and his license would be gone, his living evaporated out from under him.
She felt the driver of the SUV behind him die as a stray bullet caught him in the temple. He was—call Mary in the morning, tell her you’re sorry, tell her you want to do better. God, if anything happened to her—and then he was nothing. A line jumping. A line holding still. A scream of metal. Sirens whooping. Oh God, she thought. Oh God, it has cops. Of course it does. She felt the ripples of shock and terror in surrounding drivers as the dead man slumped against the wheel and veered into the other lane, sideswiping a cab. The cab driver praying please, please as he spun out. The guardrail. Tangled metal. Fire.
Felix was talking to her, saying something soothing as he smoothed her hair back and cleaned her face with a baby wipe that smelled strongly of aloe and disinfectant. He was saying, It’s okay, Lara, only it wasn’t okay. The pain was getting worse. Her eyeballs felt as though they were being forced out of their sockets. Her sinuses burned like white-hot wires pushed through her face, and she could taste Felix’s fear, too, and feel in him an echo of the white fire burning in her mind’s eye, the fire kindled in the summer of 1995 that had never gone out, not really, and she could feel the children sleeping in the Mercury that sped past them on the left, the panic and relief of the parents looking back at the pileup. They pulled up at a red light. Lara didn’t know if she was breathing anymore. There was a weight on her chest. The dark bulk of the overpass loomed ahead of them, the on-ramp poorly lit by a light post with one bulb out.
The light turned green. Shelby followed a semitrailer onto the ramp, and suddenly Felix wasn’t cleaning Lara’s face anymore. “Oh,” he said quietly.
As Shelby accelerated up the on-ramp toward the light and thunder of I-70, Lara turned, her head feeling as though it weighed a thousand pounds, and looked over the rail and across the intersection. The motel was burning. Gouts of red and orange boiled in the wind, which teased the blaze into strange shapes and fanned up a great rampart of smoke behind it. There were people running in the parking lot and flashes that looked like gunfire. Little figures fell and did not get up. She felt it like withdrawal from her meds, brief zaps of thought-annihilating static as want and fear and rage dissolved into nothing, blown away like dandelion seeds.
Felix was on his burner, talking to John and pushing down the center armrest to grope in the backseat as Shelby merged into traffic and cut around the rubberneckers slowing down to gawk over the guardrail at the towering sheets of flame licking up at the sky. Felix drew out a pistol and a pair of what she supposed must be clips and slammed one into its magazine, still talking. The connection must have been bad, because it kept crackling, but as she laid back against the seat and closed her eyes, Lara could still hear Mal screaming in the background.
XXII HALF WINDSOR
“What were you thinking?” Felix shouted at Mal as they climbed out of the passenger side of John’s rental. In the dim light filtering down through the trees that overhung the access road down which they’d pulled the cars, they looked as bad as he felt, deep shadows under their eyes and their hair flattened on one side where they must have slept against the window. From what he could see of their arms—they were wearing one of their shapeless, cowled black cardigans—they’d broken out in some kind of hives, too.
Good.
It felt good to see their pupils shrink in miserable terror as he strode toward them. It felt like doing something about the people he’d seen killed in that parking lot, the little body he’d watched flopping on the pavement as Lara shivered and dry-heaved against his shoulder. It felt like going back in time and wrenching that phone from their hands to smash it on the sidewalk. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“I fucked up,” they whined, their voice hoarse and raw. They shrank back against the side of the car. “Felix, I’m so sorry.”
“Take it easy!” Jo yelled, scrambling out the driver’s side.
“Those people are dead.” His voice cracked, pitching up into a girlish shriek that made him want to crawl into a hole somewhere and staple his mouth shut. “They’re all dead because you’re fucking codependent, because you’re a nightmare and you’ve always been a nightmare you selfish, awful bitch.”
He slapped them. Felix knew as soon as he’d done it that he’d gone too far, that he’d let fifteen years of frustration and rage and unprocessed loneliness tear its way out of him and go straight for the most vulnerable target it could find, but before those thoughts could form belief he had slapped them again.
He never saw John coming, but suddenly he was on the ground and the huge man was straddling his chest and had his wrists pinned. “Felix,” he said, panting a little, and his voice was soft but firm. “I understand, but it’s done.”
Mal was crying softly, not the hysterical screaming he’d heard over the phone but a congested, snotty whimper that made Felix want to hit them again. They were so weak, so wishy-washy. It woke something ugly buried deep under his subdued affect. Manny Vargas, a red-faced ghoul with broken glass and scraps of tulle embedded in his skin, clawing his way out of the son he hadn’t wanted. Felix looked away from John, hot tears of shame burning his eyes. He watched a line of ants march over the rutted ground. They were carrying things. Other insects. Little bits of leaves. The things they needed to live.
“They’re dead,” he sobbed, and he meant not just the people in the parking lot but his mother, who in 2008 had fallen down in the kitchen of his childhood home, her mind wiped clean by an aneurysm, and his tío Lalo, her brother, who had stood up for him once during one of Manny’s rages, putting his body between the two of them until the storm was over. Lalo hadn’t been allowed back in their house for most of a year after that, and a few months after his sister died he was diagnosed with liver cancer and spent eight agonizing weeks sliding helplessly out of the world. Felix had spoken to Leo only a few times in the years since Camp Resolution, never daring to go further than that, always insisting he tell their mother nothing but that he was alive, and he’d missed his chance. He’d missed everything. Now Oji was gone, too, and he hadn’t even flown home for the funeral. Akira had taught him how to knot a tie.
Like this. Over the finger. The half Windsor.
“They’re all dead.”
They slept at the end of the access road that night, Felix tossing and turning in the back seat of his car, the others out on blankets under the thin canopy. They were maybe two hours from St. Louis, a city he’d never seen before. He wondered if he’d ever see it now. It had some kind of arch. A bridge. He couldn’t remember. How many nights had he slept in his car? Thousands. Whole years eaten up staring at the Impala’s roof, breathing the chemical stink of its upholstery and the warm, cheesy musk of his own body odor. How many shots had he missed, too far away from any of his hookups, or too broke, or too exhausted?
John and Mal were talking outside, their voices low. Felix remembered sweating between them in the cool, musty darkness of that nameless bunker in the desert. His first time. Their thoughts running together, their bodies entwined among the others. He’d held John’s nipple in his mouth as someone pushed inside him, as Mal’s slender fingers found his cock and teased it from its hood, as his world took its first desperate breath of free air. He slipped out the other side of the car, easing the door shut behind him, and detoured back toward the main road to squat in the undergrowth. Headlights whisked through the trees as he peed. A deer stood revealed a few yards away, its eyes reflecting the bright glare, light sliding over their dark, liquid depths and passing on, and vanishing. He wiped himself on a leaf and tugged his jeans up, goose bumps crawling up his thighs and ass as the cool night breeze picked up.
Another car passed. The deer was gone. On his way back to the cars he paused to listen to the others, their hushed voices carrying in the stillness. The thought of slithering back into his car, back into that close, cloying smell they hadn’t been able to steam clean out after what had happened in Idaho, felt like contemplating nailing himself into a coffin.
… anyone like you. Baby, oh, baby. I miss you. I miss you. Yes, there, yes, there, God …
… only wanted to watch rom-coms and Disney movies …
… forgot how good you felt …
… can’t tell you, sweetheart, I know, I’m sorry, but I’ll be home soon. I love you …
The wind picked up again, the leaves whispering, and Felix felt a terrible emptiness boil up from somewhere deep inside him. I have no one, he thought, trying to swallow past the lump in his throat. He saw Mal’s eyes widen again, saw them shrink back against the car. Their weakness made him so angry, but it wasn’t their fault. Not really.
If I die, he thought, no one will miss me.
Jo sat with her back against John’s stolen rental, watching the stars through the branches. She and Shelby had tried fucking for a while, but exhaustion, stress, and the lumpy ground under their scratchy wool blanket had won in the end. Shelby cried for a few minutes and then fell asleep while Jo, feeling frustrated and overwhelmed, stroked her hair. It was cold out, even with the sleeping bags Felix had given them. She was pretty sure it was past New Year’s, but she hadn’t seen a calendar in days.
It felt strange to know that her stuff was out on the curb by now, or in a liquidator’s warehouse. Her job was gone. Her clothes. Her music. The yukata Oji had given her for her seventeenth birthday, the summer after camp. The threadbare stuffed rabbit she’d slept with. Little pricks of guilt and loss. The things that had made up her life were falling away, like the last fifteen years had been a parlor trick, cards fanned out and shaken to entice and now snapped flush and made to disappear with a flick of the wrist to reveal that they were right back where they’d started. Scared, broke, alone, and running from something they didn’t really understand.
A shooting star flitted across the sky. Jo thought awhile about how fucked up it was that she felt better on a suicide mission than she did in her own life, about how she hadn’t had a drink in three days without noticing it, about how she hadn’t had a nightmare since the motel in Reno. She loved these fucked-up people. It had killed her when they left, when one by one they fled the nest until it was just her and Oji. On the far side of Felix’s car someone was having sex, mingled voices and the wet, desperate sounds of inelegant kissing. John and Mal. That was good. They brought out the best in each other, when they weren’t ruining each other’s lives.
Felix got out of his car, an indistinct black shape against the dappled moonlight. Shelby stirred at the gentle thump of the door shutting, squirming closer and burrowing deeper into the sleeping bag. “Love you,” she murmured.
Jo tugged up her jacket’s zipper with her free hand, wriggling down into the soft collar. With Shelby against her, the night seemed almost warm. “I love you, too.”
Lara wiggled the SIM card out of her burner, snapped it in half, and slotted in a fresh one. Without Andrea’s voice for company the woods felt suddenly threatening, full of mysterious sounds and moving shadows. She probed gently with two fingers at the bandage over the bridge of her grazed nose and wiped the blood that had seeped through on the sleeve of her coat, too exhausted even to be horrified at using a Michael Kors piece as a tissue, and started back toward the access road, picking her way carefully among the weedy birch saplings and clinging raspberries. Her thoughts kept racing ahead of her. Andrea had been upset with her, probably afraid she was having another breakdown.
You need to tell me where you are, Lo. This isn’t like you. Please, I’m so fucking scared, I’m not even angry anymore.
It was easier with clients. You could just tell them “I’m out of town” and they’d make little sounds of disappointment, maybe try to bribe her into changing plans with spa treatments and Jimmy Choos, but in the end they always let her go. They knew she wasn’t really theirs. Loving someone was what made it hard. Andrea and Adrien and Kevin and all the other hookups and friends and exes who revolved around and through her life in Boston. She missed them so much it was like a lead weight in her stomach, missed them with the terrible pain of knowing that when she went back they were all going to think she’d lost her mind. She thought of the psych ward at Albany Medical, of its bare, water-damaged rooms with their bolted-down beds and of Dr. Weaver’s thick white hair and cool, icy gaze. Those words scratched out in thin, looping handwriting on a legal pad.
Gender confusion … part of systematized delusions?
Something moved out in the dark beneath the trees, dead brush rustling and crunching, and she quickened her pace, her heartbeat hammering, until she caught sight of the moonlight gleaming on the cars. It was like that feeling you got as a child after reading something scary after dark, when even the thought of turning off the lights put your whole body into fight or flight and only bed—feet off the ground, covers over the head—could possibly provide the slightest safety. She would have liked to feel that again, the thrill of being terrified by something that couldn’t hurt her, the ecstatic, shivering relief of escaping its imaginary clutches. The real monsters didn’t care about the rules.
