on my wrist was steel, a vise. My efforts to pull away were pointless. I know you know what it’s like to be utterly powerless, to be sick with terror. I couldn’t move my mouth, the sounds coming from me were animal, strangled. I choked on the taste of my own blood, retching.
The dog came back without you; Kreskey picked up his pace best he could, that fat fuck. I was glad, I was, and yet I hated you. Lara, I wanted to scream. Lara, help us.
Because I saw you as he dragged me away, a shivering black shadow in the hollow of a tree down by the riverbank. Your white, white face, it was blank, your eyes were unseeing, your body was quaking. I know now—years later, a doctor who has extensively studied trauma and its effect on the brain, the psyche—that it was shock, that you retreated to another place in your mind.
You would sit there like that for the next twelve hours until they found you, while Kreskey got farther and farther.
You ran, Lara.
You ran and hid.
And Eugene Kreskey took us away.
TWELVE
Why was she doing this? She hadn’t seen her father in months.
The rural road twisted and wound in front of her, the canopy of trees so thick above that her headlights automatically turned on. Lily napped in the back seat. Rain glanced at her in the rearview mirror that was trained on the baby instead of the road behind her, something Greg would notice the next time he took the car in for service. It’s not a baby-view mirror, he’d admonished her last time. You’re supposed to be watching the road, not the kid.
The closer she got to the place where she grew up, the more tension she felt settle into her body, the shallower her breathing became. But that’s where she was headed with her story, wasn’t it? The road home was a journey into the past. Maybe that was why she was going to see her father. Or maybe it was just that there was something that drew her back home, to her father, when she had questions she couldn’t answer. Wasn’t there a part of you that always wanted to go back to the time when you thought your parents knew everything?
The crystal heart was in the pocket of her jeans.
She turned onto the long drive to the house where she grew up, taking the rocky, potholed path slowly, hoping not to wake Lily. The house, when it crept into view, was ramshackle and gray, yard a crazy tangle, dominated by a large twisting metal sculpture. Her father had the piece commissioned for some ridiculous sum and it had sat, rusting in the elements, for twenty-odd years.
The statue was an eyesore to begin with, sharp-edged and menacing. Now it just looked like a piece of neglected junk, akin to a rusting old jalopy, or a dilapidated lawn mower.
It was exactly the kind of purchase that drove Rain’s mother crazy and was a part of the eventual undoing of her parents’ marriage. Wasteful, pointless expenditures that frittered away their earnings. The money from his novels came in chunks. There would be months of excess, extravagant trips, lavish gifts, then long dry spells. Her mother worked as a teacher, trying to create stability—financial and otherwise—for Rain. She worked, and managed the house, and Rain’s life—while her father stayed in his attic office, or went on book tours, or spent months at writers’ retreats.
The sight of that sculpture put an uncomfortable squeeze on Rain’s heart, thinking about how her mother worked until the year she died. She got almost nothing in the nasty divorce from Rain’s father, but still managed to save money for Rain’s education with enough left over so that Rain had started her life with a “fuck you” fund—the most important thing a woman could have: the ability to walk away from a shitty man, an exploitative job or any other situation in which she felt helpless and trapped.
Rain stepped out of the car and listened. A chickadee issued a sweet, low whistle and the chimes sang on the porch, wind rustling the leaves. She heard the tap-tap-tap of the woodpecker. Though she’d left this place at sixteen when her mother and father finally divorced, she never stopped thinking of it as home.
Her father, tall and thin, a hurricane of silver-white hair, black shirt and pants, emerged from the house, stepping onto the porch. He lifted a hand, unsurprised, though she’d given him