lines disappear beneath the hood. I thought of my brother as he had been, as I remembered him, as I wanted to remember him. I thought of Albuquerque and Los Angeles, and of the miles of lost interstate in between.
A pistol lay on the seat between us, and when he wasn’t shifting gears, Shawn picked it up and caressed it, sometimes spinning it over his index like a gunslinger before laying it back on the seat, where light from passing cars glinted off the steel barrel.
* * *
—
I AWOKE WITH NEEDLES in my brain. Thousands of them, biting, blocking out everything. Then they disappeared for one dizzying moment and I got my bearings.
It was morning, early; amber sunlight poured in through my bedroom window. I was standing but not on my own strength. Two hands were gripping my throat, and they’d been shaking me. The needles, that was my brain crashing into my skull. I had only a few seconds to wonder why before the needles returned, shredding my thoughts. My eyes were open but I saw only white flashes. A few sounds made it through to me.
“SLUT!”
“WHORE!”
Then another sound. Mother. She was crying. “Stop! You’re killing her! Stop!”
She must have grabbed him because I felt his body twist. I fell to the floor. When I opened my eyes, Mother and Shawn were facing each other, Mother wearing only a tattered bathrobe.
I was yanked to my feet. Shawn grasped a fistful of my hair—using the same method as before, catching the clump near my scalp so he could maneuver me—and dragged me into the hallway. My head was pressed into his chest. All I could see were bits of carpet flying past my tripping feet. My head pounded, I had trouble breathing, but I was starting to understand what was happening. Then there were tears in my eyes.
From the pain, I thought.
“Now the bitch cries,” Shawn said. “Why? Because someone sees you for the slut you are?”
I tried to look at him, to search his face for my brother, but he shoved my head toward the ground and I fell. I scrambled away, then pulled myself upright. The kitchen was spinning; strange flecks of pink and yellow drifted before my eyes.
Mother was sobbing, clawing at her hair.
“I see you for what you are,” Shawn said. His eyes were wild. “You pretend to be saintly and churchish. But I see you. I see how you prance around with Charles like a prostitute.” He turned to Mother to observe the effect of his words on her. She had collapsed at the kitchen table.
“She does not,” Mother whispered.
Shawn was still turned toward her. He said she had no idea of the lies I told, how I’d fooled her, how I played the good girl at home but in town I was a lying whore. I inched toward the back door.
Mother told me to take her car and go. Shawn turned to me. “You’ll be needing these,” he said, holding up Mother’s keys.
“She’s not going anywhere until she admits she’s a whore,” Shawn said.
He grabbed my wrist and my body slipped into the familiar posture, head thrust forward, arm coiled around my lower back, wrist folded absurdly onto itself. Like a dance step, my muscles remembered and raced to get ahead of the music. The air poured from my lungs as I tried to bend deeper, to give my wristbone every possible inch of relief.
“Say it,” he said.
But I was somewhere else. I was in the future. In a few hours, Shawn would be kneeling by my bed, and he’d be so very sorry. I knew it even as I hunched there.
“What’s going on?” A man’s voice floated up from the stairwell in the hall.
I turned my head and saw a face hovering between two wooden railings. It was Tyler.
I was hallucinating. Tyler never came home. As I thought that, I laughed out loud, a high-pitched cackle. What kind of lunatic would come back here once he’d escaped? There were now so many pink and yellow specks in my vision, it was as if I were inside a snow globe. That was good. It meant I was close to passing out. I was looking forward to it.
Shawn dropped my wrist and again I fell. I looked up and saw that his gaze was fixed on the stairwell. Only then did it occur to me that Tyler was real.
Shawn took a step back. He had waited until Dad and Luke were out of the house,