He looks at me. There’s a different face now.
“Shut up, you fucking bitch.”
He takes three great strides and knocks me out cold.
*
When I come to I’m in the trunk of his car. He’s driving too fast for the rough terrain and the car fishtails and the brakes squeal. He barrels on regardless, taking the next bend too aggressively, causing the car to slide again. I wonder if his plan is to drive off a cliff and kill us both. All I can think about is how I’m going to be a Saturday night mystery, and how my body will never be found, and how my mother will rock back and forth on the front porch at night and look at the stars and wonder where I am. There will be yellow ribbons tied to mailboxes and tree trunks and then first-year, then two-year, then five-year anniversaries. I will be a cold case in a manila folder in a dusty archive box in the bowels of a county police station. At my high school reunion they will speculate on my disappearance. There will be rumors that I ran off to Spain with a married man. I will be reduced to the phrase “Whatever happened to Amelia Jane Kellaway?”
I wish there was a way I could leave a message, scratch a goodbye note to my family, but I can’t feel my fingers even if there was somewhere to write.
The car stops sharply. He gets out. There’s the squeal of the back door opening, followed by his retreating steps. I wait and wait. Listening for anything, trying to temper my halting breath. Then the trunk swings open and he’s back, pulling me over his shoulder, carrying me a few feet then dropping me to the ground next to a grave-sized hole.
“God no.”
“Get on your knees.”
His face is glistening with sweat and blackened with dirt.
“Wait. You don’t need to do this.”
“I said get on your knees.”
I do as he commands and start to cry. “Please don’t so this,” I sob.
“Say my name,” he says.
“I’m sorry.”
“Say it.”
“I won’t run again. You have my word. I made a mistake.”
“Say it.”
“Rex.”
“Again.”
“Rex.”
He kneels down in front of me and puts his hands around my throat.
“Just remember, Amelia, I gave you a chance.”
“No, no, no, no.”
He squeezes, his eyes laser focused, lips rigid. I claw at his hands. I am fading, slipping in and out, the world graying at the edges, and I can only think of one thing—how the hands on my throat once held a newborn.
Wilderness
16
Before my father left we lived in a big house in a good part of town in Ithaca, New York, called Redmont. The house was a picture-perfect, two-story American Colonial with navy blue shutters. It had a farm-style kitchen, six bedrooms, and a large rose garden. Out of all the rooms he could have chosen for his study, my father selected the smallest room, located in the attic. There were places in that room where he couldn’t stand up straight because of the pitch of the ceiling. I’m not sure why he chose it, whether he had a thing for confined spaces or simply because it was the most silent area in the house. I used to think that maybe it was so he could watch and wave at us kids when we played in our yard.
The house had a name—Redmont Rose. My mother invented it. She even had the name etched into a plaque made of walnut and hung it just above the doorbell so everyone would know what the house was called. Our yard bordered a huge park, with streams and a fort and a freshwater lake with ducks and swans. My brother and sister and I treated it like an extension of our yard and used a secret hatchway in our fence to go back and forth.
Every year the neighborhood held cookouts and summer picnics there. But best of all were the Fourth of July fireworks extravaganzas put on by the Lions Club, who flew in a specialist team of pyrotechnicians from Sweden to run the event. Once my father took me to the top of our garage roof, promising it would provide the best vantage point to watch the fireworks over the lake. I remember looking at his face, luminous in the pink glitter of an exploding horsetail, and thinking how much my six-year-old brother looked like him. When the fireworks ended, I didn’t want to get down but eventually he convinced me that we would come back next year and do it again. Then he returned to his study and his technical drawings and worksheets and I was corralled into another room by my mother so he could get back to work.
Six months after my father left, my mother had to sell our beautiful house. She was very brave. She piled us into the station wagon and told us not to look back, that our new place—an apartment, an hour’s drive across the other side of town—was just as good, if not better. She actually said that. It wasn’t. I had to double up in a tiny room with my sister, while my brother slept in what was meant to be a utility cupboard under the stairs.
What my mother didn’t know was that every Fourth of July I would return to our old house in Redmont and sit on the garage roof to watch the fireworks. One day the man who was living there nearly caught me so I ran off and never went back.
17
At first I think I’m dead. It’s the black. The absence of sound and air. I feel cheated because I want the white light, the outstretched hand of dear Nana May. Then I realize I’m not dead after all. There’s dirt in my mouth and nose, choking me, pinning me down. And it hits me. Oh God, I’m suffocating. Someone help. For the love of God, someone help me. I hear a voice—my own, Nana May’s, God’s—I don’t know whose but it’s telling me to move. Hurry. Think fast. Get out.
A sharp object presses against my right knee, a stone or stick, so I focus on that, moving my knee. Left, right, left, right. It’s taking too long. My lungs scream for oxygen. My head’s about to explode. I try harder. Pivot my leg back and forth. But there’s just no way.
My brain turns to cotton and I begin to fade. Somewhere in this fuzz, I think of him—his face, his hands around my throat, the whites of his eyes. What he did to me. I won’t allow him to win. I push with everything I have, press my ribcage against the load, arch my back. But the dirt might as well be a solid wall.
I try to remember every bad thing I ever saw, the YouTube clip of that white supremacist pouring Jim Beam down a puppy’s throat, that time in eighth grade when Brent Maxwell stole the cowboy hat from the Down Syndrome kid on the way to school in the bus, those people in the Twin Towers who had only two choices—burn alive or jump. It works. Adrenaline jets into my veins. I thump my chest against the earth tomb and a small channel opens up and I can scarcely believe it and I think more angry thoughts and fight harder and dirt loosens and crumbles and finally gives way and I go up and up until I’m breaking through the surface and sucking in the wet night air.
I begin to laugh. I did it. I am free. I am alive.
I brush the soil from my face and blink into the dark and my joy fades. He could be here, watching on in amusement, ready to do it all over again. I listen for his breath, the snap of a twig, the sound of his voice. I lift myself out of the grave and force one jellified leg in front of the other, heading for the trees, moving quickly but carefully to avoid knocking myself out on the low-lying branches. It’s so dark I can’t see my own hand in front of my face.