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  “Boyd! Boyd! Catch her, she’s falling!” I heard one man shout.

  Must be the cops.

  Exposing a quick vulnerability, I unwittingly allowed Brad to make up the distance between us. He grabbed me by the side, causing me to spill my handheld assets, and dragged me in a standing top slant. My sneakered heels parted the film of dirt on the driveway into two paper-thin trenches.

  What is it with these brothers dragging me backwards?

  Brad held his breath in his unrelenting effort to haul me to his two-door VW Bug, an older model in pearl white. In he pushed me, the gun to my temple. And without removing the aim of the barrel on me, he crab-walked backwards and sideways to the Bug’s engine. The rain had smeared the windshield with foggy dots, filtering Brad into a watercolor impression of himself as he rounded the car.

  I considered opening the door and rolling down an embankment once our speed reached 25 mph, and I would have taken my shot at the physics of velocity and downward motion to safely jettison my body, but I had an eight-month-old baby in my carriage and I had vowed that not one fine fiber of his budding hair would be ruffled. In fact, my running lunge toward Brad only minutes before was really just a ploy to distract him from Dorothy’s escape—I had planned to cut left and run down the dirt part of the long driveway, in the hopes the cops would soon intercept. But Brad, panther-quick Brad, called my bluff by pulling his gun, which I suspect is the weapon he recovered from his brother upstairs.

  I should have taken his gun.

  Off we drove down a dirt road in the woods, in the same direction as the quarry, and adjacent to the curvy, narrow path my captor had forced me down only days before.

  The apathetic sky half-heartedly offered rain, but the canopy shielded the car of most of the drops. I stared straight ahead, counting the passing oaks, the passing pines, the lovely birch, and a couple of saplings of unknown vegetation. The forest, although dark from the black clouds, bloomed in uncurling new leaves, leaves of lime and emerald. Had the sun been in control that day, I’m sure brushstrokes of light would have accented the bright hues of green and made shadows dance in a kaleidoscope forest, transforming it to a magical place—for those with the vision to see such things.

  Here I am going on about the beauty of a cold forest when I’m really telling of a drive of horror. But the truth is, I did consider how I might capture the scene in a painting and how I might reduce the play of shadows in shades of gray and deep green and offset those with highlights of lime and sunshine yellows. So if part of this retelling is trying to convey how one without emotion might think in this situation, I’m just recounting the mental and physical facts, as they were.

  The tumble of tires over a dry stream caused me to look in his direction. Brad’s nostrils were flared, his eyes glistened from sobbing, and the blood from his face hole dripped to his velvet jacket. When he sensed my eyes on him, he snarled.

  “Bitch. I’m taking that baby today,” he said.

  I looked forward, concentrating on the black rings of a white birch and how they complemented her budding yellow-green leaves. The tree reminded me of one in the grove behind my home, the one in which I’d hidden Jackson Brown. Such a memory in that moment gave me the resolve to harden further, to generate even more strength. I pushed levers in my brain so roughly, I killed any lingering shred of fear. Yes, practice in my jail cell prepared me for this—the unfortunate inevitable reality. I may have miscalculated Brad’s travel patterns, but I had not failed to prepare for the worst.

  The birch allowed me to calibrate a steady self-command, a warrior mode. I sat straighter in the car, as though leaning against the tree’s solid trunk.

  Brad, apparently expecting me to beg his mercy, slammed on the brakes, and I folded forward at the waist, bracing against a head slam with quick hands on the dashboard. I was drawn in, however, for I had buckled myself. The forest surrounded us, but for the dirt road behind. Ahead, the road went on about another fifty feet and abruptly stopped at a pile of deadwood that dammed the end-point. There was no other direction to drive except backwards. End of the line.

  “Ronny told me you were a cold bitch. He called you a crazy bitch. A crazy fucking bitch. Oh, I’m taking your baby. And you will pay for what you did. No one knows where you are now. And no one is going to find my exit, little bitch panther bitch.”

  How eloquent. What poem are you quoting, Walt Whitman?

  What exit? There is no exit. You’re full of shit. You got yourself trapped. You don’t know what to do next. I can see the dancing in your nervous eyes. Idiot. You’re so dumb, dumb as your brother. Couldn’t even plan an escape contingency. How foolish. How juvenile.

  “I know what you’re thinking, panther bitch. You think I need the doctor to slice that baby out of you. Ha ha ha,” he chortled, and on his special, patented low voice, he added, “Who do you think used to cut those girls up before he came? Huh? Me, bitch! Me! And my brother. I got all the tools I need in the trunk. I’ll take your baby, throw you in the quarry, and hike on out of here unseen.”

  Okay, he might be telling the truth now. Perhaps this is the plan.

  I pursed my lips and flattened my face, involuntarily signaling I was slightly impressed with his strategy. I almost said, “Touché.” Instead, I chose to raise his bet, launching our game of Crazy Poker into full swing.

  “You know, Brad. That’s a nice plan and all. But I don’t think you have the stomach for any more blood today,” I said, winking slowly to match my sly smile. “I mean, the hole in your face is getting real ugly, going to scar your pretty little face pretty bad, precious.” And then I blew him an air kiss.

  I have to admit something here. Really, I do. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I don’t want you to think me brave, to say such a thing. Actually, I find it rather fun to be wicked. I do, okay. I admit this much here. Frankly, I do have a bit of evil in me, a notion I can’t quite shut off all the way, a feeling of pleasure when someone else squirms in my presence. Please don’t tell the doctors who have so far agreed to not label me a sociopath.

  I must have shocked him—which is exactly what I intended to do—for as though I’d tagged him in freeze tag, he stared at me, unblinking. The water from his eyes stopped bubbling anew, but the older tears fell down his cheek and mixed with the blood, creating a pinkish sludge that pooled in the stubble on his chin.

  Dear Brad, you look so terrible. Tee-hee-hee.

  He stared on and on. The sporadic raindrops pinged the hood of the car, here and there, their light tapping nearly silenced by the engine’s purr. All else was quiet, even frozen Brad zipped his lips. Ping. Purrr. Silence. Purrr. Silence. Ping.

  Do you see him? A creepy, blood-faced man, shaken, uncoiled, bug-eyed on me. He wakes me from sound sleep, seventeen years later. I bolt up in bed, the world darkened still by him. I noted the time on the car’s analog clock when we stopped: 1:14. At 1:34, Brad was still staring.

  So I stared back.

  I tried to scare him with my glare, but I’m sure had anyone stumbled upon us in the forest, and had Brad not been face-gored by a sharpened bedpost, they might have thought we were in the throes of falling in love, pupils dilated and us virtually holding roses in our teeth by the appearance of our eyes-locked gaze.

  They say staring at a wild animal is a sign of aggression and a sure way to invite an attack. But doing the same to a cobra is a way to tame, which is something I’d witnessed only a week before they kidnapped me. On the night Mother discovered my pregnancy and thus the night before she had the doctor evaluate my pregnancy, I hid in her study, watching her watch a video from her law firm. She had no idea I was in the room at the time, nor that I was pregnant. This would be the night of my stark reveal.

  Mother, my father, and I had just finished a celebratory dinner of fried pork chops and applesauce to commemorate Mother being home from her four-month trial in New York—which she won, of course. At our four-person kitchen table, it was hard to tell who sat at the head. Neverthe
less, I chose the most unlit corner and bulked myself within my dad’s faded navy sweatshirt, which four months prior, before I started showing, used to be huge on me. Since I no longer had a chance of hiding in just the baggy clothes alone, I draped a pink-and-green quilt around my body, sniffing and fake coughing and claiming my muscles ached.

  After dinner, I went to my room, finished some advanced calculus, and inspected my round form in a bedroom mirror. After removing my father’s navy sweatshirt, I tiptoed down the stairs and slid, silently, into Mother’s darkened office, where she was working. The glow of her television cast electric blue on her sitting in one of her Dracula throne chairs. She sat in her bubble of TV light, and I stood beyond that bubble, well hidden in the shadows created by the mahogany bookshelves and matching paneled walls of her study.

  In the past, I had wedged myself in the same shadowed corner to study Mother’s inner thoughts and also to gather data on how to react—truly react—to certain social situations, for this was where she sometimes watched movies my father considered “chick flicks.” Whenever Patrick Swayze collapsed into Demi Moore’s all-encompassing kiss in Ghost, Mother would clutch her neck, stroke her own skin, and breathe in deep. I figured I should do this whenever Lenny kissed me, so I did. He seemed to appreciate the gesture, so I allowed moments of joy when my physical senses flared upon Lenny’s tighter embrace.

  On this particular occasion in which I spied on Mother, she was not watching a movie, but rather the raw footage of a wildlife television show—Mother’s client being a mega-entertainment conglomeration, which owned the rights. The show, the station, the producer, hell, everyone, were being sued by the estate of a somewhat famous wilderness “expert.” This man, the wrongful death complaint alleged, had been “pressured, goaded, and threatened” into approaching a cobra during an ill-fated trip to the deep backwaters of India.

  Mother sat in her study watching the footage of the incident. So sets out our wilderness man, perfect wilderness boots and pressed khakis and proper chest patch and all, all of which was filmed and in a raw, unedited state. Mother leaned forward in her chair, stalling her note taking, when the “expert” lay on his belly in the India high grass to level his eyes with an arched and mesmerized cobra. Their faces were five feet apart. Mother checked her antique cuckoo clock, wrote down the time, and returned to study her client’s on-screen star in the moments before his death. She raised her hand to her mouth, tapping a finger on her teeth as though anxious, and I know, I just know, the edges of her lips were curled in a slight grin, a simple excitement of anticipation. I thought in that moment Mother was resigned to the ultimate power of death. So I too, accepted death as base fact. But I didn’t allow myself the pleasure she seemed to hold in witnessing the finality of life. I smoothed a palm gently over my belly, calming the child within.

  The man in the video stared at the snake for a good long hour, which is a calculation I had to guesstimate given the fact that Mother grew bored with waiting and began to fast-forward. Play. Fast-forward. Skid. Rewind. Fast. Stop. Play. A quick twitch of the cobra caused the wilderness star to also twitch, but he did not avert the snake’s gaze. The cobra backed down slow at first, lowering his head, but recoiled quickly, and oddly, in a strange and swift backwards hiss, disappearing beneath his rock. Just then, a tiger leapt from beyond the scope of the camera and into the frame, landing on our man’s back and eating his neck.

  Mother rocketed from her chair, her notes and pen tumbling to the floor. “Holy shit!”

  Watching her watch the mauling, I blinked a few times, as is usual to keep one’s eyes moist when watching a television show. I checked the time, thinking I had another twenty minutes before I’d have to select my clothes for school and crawl into bed.

  The tiger, taking his jowel-licking time, disemboweled our man—such gory nature all being caught on video because the cameraman dropped the camera, still rolling, and had obviously fled the scene.

  “What a damn beautiful beast,” Mother said, plunking into her leather seat.

  I stepped out of the shadow.

  “What, Mother?” I said.

  She pushed into the chair, locking her elbows when she pressed her hands on the armrests to pin herself into a deeper safety.

  “Lisa! Holy hell. What the hell?! You scared the shit out of me. Have you been standing there the whole time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Son of a bitch, Lisa. You can’t be hiding on me. Son of a damn bitch. You gave me a heart attack.”

  “Oh, um, well, I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just wondering what you said.”

  “I don’t know…what?”

  Flustered, she scanned the floor and bent to gather her papers and pen, stopping after picking up each object to shake her head confused-bewildered-angry at me.

  “Did you say ‘beautiful beast’?”

  “Oh, Lisa, I guess so,” she said in an exasperated but stunned voice. She huffed back down to the edge of her seat, taking me in head to toe.

  “What does it matter?” She asked, looking more closely at my body.

  “Well, I wondered what or who is the beautiful beast in the video, is all. The man, the cobra, or the tiger?”

  “The tig, the tig…er,” her voice wavered on drawn-out words. She squinted, zeroing in on my waist, which bulged in a tight white t-shirt. I stiffened my posture like a flat-foot ballerina awaiting the Premier Maitre de ballet’s inspection. While pinching my shoulders for a more perfect stance, I lifted my chin as though pride would trump judgment.

  “But the tiger killed the man. He is beautiful to you?”

  “He did kill the man, but the man trespassed on his territory.”

  Mother fixed on the rise of my torso and the descent to my pelvis. I moved closer and into the bubble of blue. A beam shot sideways as a spotlight, and realization ruled the room. Denial could live no more.

  Hesitant and with an unsure voice, yet still continuing her precision answer—because Mother was loath to abandon her stream of thought, she continued, “He is beautiful for his cunning strategy and ability to strike fear in the cobra.”

  I straightened as she palmed my swelled belly.

  I felt like a tiger as she fell to her knees.

  Was she the cobra and the safe distance between us the mauled man?

  Perhaps the analogy is too strained. Or too true. Nevertheless, I didn’t mean to tame her, and I didn’t mean to hurt her. I didn’t mean any harm at all to my mother. I suppose the nature of me is just that though: her weakness, her blindspot, and thus, my own.

  Not until I was trapped in the VW with staring Brad, did I realize how hurtful I’d been to Mother. Sure, she was distant—she too suffered a cold demeanor. We were similar, I believe. Although, as far as I know, Mother had never been evaluated as a psychological oddity like me, and she does cry and curl her fist in fits of anger. So I do not believe she is emotionally challenged/gifted in a medical sense, like me. All I know of her past is, she has some past, and we are never to talk about her parents. I have one Nana is all: Nana, my literary rainbow ghost.

  Despite Mother’s tall walls and her thick boundaries, she did try with respect to me.

  I didn’t.

  In staring at Brad, I resolved to try harder with Mother. She was not the cause of our distance. I was. I should have told her sooner. I should have shared the pregnancy, not to reveal a vulnerability, but to connect.

  As Mother allowed the feel of her hand on my pulsing bump to soak in the reality of her impending grandmotherhood, she likely concluded yelling would lead to nothing. She’d tried a couple of times when I was a toddler; each time I hadn’t understood what a raised voice meant, so I had simply started laughing because that’s what people did when things got loud on the television shows my father enjoyed. So the night of her discovery, Mother pointed to the door as an indication I should leave her be. When I woke the next morning, rested and hair mussed, I found her in her study with her clothes from the previous evening still on, one
leg slung up over an armrest of her chair, and a stiletto dangling from her big toe. Two bottles of my parents’ best vintage were scattered on her Persian rug. My father sat cross-legged on the floor opposite her, his head cradled in his muscular hands.

  Staring at a cobra can tame him, if done right, so I kept staring at creepy Brad in the front seat of that damn VW, in the middle of the Indiana woods, stalled on our way to Brad’s demented plan to butcher me and steal my child. On and on we stared, on and on clicked the clock, on and on the one-tap, two-tap, rain pinged the windshield, the roof.

  And then Brad got even creepier.

  “Panthertown.”

  This again.

  “Oh deary-o, you are a clawed and wild panther. You got me,” Brad chuckled, as he pressed a white handkerchief he’d extracted from his frumpled shirt pocket to the blood dripping off his chin. With his free hand, he picked lint from his jacket.

  “Panzy, woops, I mean Panthy, look at my outfit. Such a mess,” he said in a debutante, sing-song voice, which lowered one hundred octaves when he swiftly leaned across to growl, “You fucking cunt. My jacket is a fucking mess.” He leaned back on a tittering, “Ahem.”

  You will never enjoy another second of your life for calling me the C word.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SPECIAL AGENT ROGER LIU

  Lola hastened instructions to the paramedics about the chief and his deputy, flashed her badge, and pantomimed for me to do the same. My ears were still whooshing, whirring out everyone’s voices. The woman in the housecoat and with the shopping cart who had fetched my phone, toddled to the other end of the strip mall and bent into a trashcan, oblivious to the sirens and the screaming and the fire and the smoke around her. How wonderful to not exist in this dimension, I thought.

  Lola guided my missteps, like I was a drunk done with his last shot of the night, to the Viking woman’s F-150. As she jammed the shift to first, second, third, and fourth, I watched how she poked her nose out the driver’s window as if smelling her way. However odd, this vision of Lola prompted a vast nothingness, a near-complete absence of sound, which replaced the wind in my ears. I didn’t panic. I allowed the relief, and in so doing, realized the sharpening of my vision once again—even sharper than before.