“Want to play again?” Lily asked as Jonathan totaled up their Scrabble scores.
“I don’t know.” He squinted at the score sheet. “You won by a hundred points when we played in Tsalagi. Two hundred when we played in French. You’re making me feel pretty stupid.”
She put their dessert, a plate of chocolate chip cookies, on the table between them. The snowstorm had made the day so dark that they’d turned their cabin lights on early and had eaten their supper in the late afternoon.“Then let’s play with no borders.”
“No borders?”
“We can make words in French, English or Tsalagi.”
“Why not Mic Mac and Russian, too?”
“Ha, ha.” She gave an exasperated sigh at his small Dad joke.
Jonathan leaned back in his chair and regarded his daughter. After the morning’s pancake debacle, he figured she’d spend the day in a pout, on her beloved ridge. Instead, when he got back from the boathouse, he’d found her baking cookies and making a pot of chili big enough to last several days.
“You want to play for some stakes?” he asked, chalking her sudden good humor up to hormones and chocolate chips.
“Nah.” She looked at him with an oddly wistful smile. “Let’s just play like we used to. When I was a kid.”
That would have been when we lived with Mary, he thought as he started flipping over the tiles. They had been happy with her; Lily had been a sweet child with a good life. But then her grandfather Fred Moon sued him for custody of Lily and it all went to shit. Did he dare tell her that he wished she would be like that kid again? Back before bras and cramps and Tik Tok? No, a stern inner voice warned him. Say that and this new, happy Lily will vanish like smoke.
He turned his attention to the snowy world beyond the walls of the cabin. In the middle of their French game, as Lily was sinking his ship with the word quinze, he’d heard a noise. A soft, brief creak on the porch. After he’d come back with voila, he’d gotten up to look out the front window. Snow was pummeling down like a ripped pillow, obscuring any chance of seeing tracks. Finally he decided it was probably just Opie, their resident opossum, trying to get warm under the porch. Still, he’d slipped his knife Ribtickler in the back of his belt. No point in being careless, even in a snowstorm.
“Game on,” Lily announced, turning over the last tile. “Any language you want. Losers go first.”
He chose a tile, flipped up an E. She turned over an M.
“Ha!” she cried. “My streak goes on.” She spelled out a-m-i-e. “French for friend.”
He reverted to English, spelling d-a-n-c-e on her a. Back and forth they went, his words prosaic and practical, hers frilly and romantic, all having to do with love or friendship. Amour, baiser, desir. When she spelled the word beau, he could keep silent no longer.
“You trying to tell me something here?”
“What do you mean?”
“All your words are mushy French stuff.”
A rare blush crossed her cheeks. “I called Alenna when we were in town yesterday. She has a new boyfriend.”
“I didn’t know she had an old boyfriend.” Jonathan tried to picture Krisjean Prosper’s reaction. She had vain hopes of her smart, but hot-to-trot daughter going to college.
“She’s got three old boyfriends.” Lily gave a big sigh. “Now she’s got a new one.”
“And you’re feeling left out?” He tried to pose the question as neutrally as possible. Beyond that scumbag Marc Freneau in Maine, boys had been a distant threat to Lily, like the coyotes that remained invisible during the day, but howled wildly at night.
For a long moment she stared at the tiles on the board, as if they might conjure her answer. “No,” she finally said. “But I do miss my friends.”
He’d realized that might become an issue as soon as they moved here. In Maine she had friends. Here the only kids she saw were ones they passed by in town. He felt another hard knot of guilt in his throat, as if he were keeping an animal in a cage, just to prove some stupid point. “Would you like to go back to Maine? I could probably find another job up there this summer.”
This time she hesitated so long he feared she might suggest going home to Hartsville, or worse, back to the Moons in Oklahoma.
“Maine is okay.” She looked at him pleadingly. “But couldn’t we go someplace not in the mountains?”
He stifled a groan, figuring the next word she said really would be Oklahoma. “Like where?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Kentucky, maybe. I hear it’s pretty there.”
“Kentucky?” He sat back, surprised. It seemed as if she’d chosen Kentucky as randomly as she might pick up a tile in this game. “Kentucky’s pretty enough. But so’s Utah, or Wyoming.”
“It’s just a suggestion,” she said, a tinge of acid returning to her voice. “We’ll go where you want to go, anyway. We always do.”
“We go where I can get work, Lily,” he said, trying to keep her good mood from curdling. “When you’re eighteen, you can go anywhere you please. I’ll buy you a plane ticket and help you pack your bags.”
“But that’s three years from now!” she cried. “Alenna will probably be married and I won’t have even had a date!”
She folded her arms, in a huff. As she did, Jonathan heard a sudden thump on the porch. He looked up just as the front door exploded in a deafening roar, pieces of the lock and door knob flying across the room. In a blast of snow and frigid air, two men wearing winter camouflage stormed in. They looked like monstrous, hooded snow men. One aimed a handgun while the other pointed a weapon the size of a small assault rifle.
“Atli!” Jonathan yelled the code word he’d drilled into Lily’s head from day one. “Atli now!”
He leapt to his feet, kicking over the table, the Scrabble tiles scattering like broken teeth.
Lily jumped up and ran towards the kitchen. As the man with the handgun started after her, Jonathan drew his knife and heaved it at his gut. With a thrussshhhh like scissors cutting cloth, it sheared through the man’s jacket and into right side of his abdomen. Blood spurting, he fell screaming to the floor.
“Atli! Atli!” Jonathan kept yelling. He lunged toward the gunman, trying to pull Ribtickler from the man’s side and plunge it into his heart. His fingers had just grasped the handle of the knife, when another thunderous blast made his ears ring. A fiery pain sizzled through his right shoulder as he flew over the wounded man and landed on the floor beside him. As blood and bits of his own flesh spewed into his face, the rifleman ran over and pointed his weapon at Jonathan’s heart.
“Get the girl back here or you’re a dead man.”
His lips looked clownish–a fleshy red circle moving behind a ski mask of mottled white. Jonathan tried to speak, tried to tell them that the girl would not be coming back here ever, but the fire in his shoulder made his tongue useless, the words float in his brain. His one sentence came out garbled, as if he were drunk.
Rifleman turned to his partner, who lay writhing on the floor. “How bad are you?”
“I don’t know.” Handgun gasped, his voice high and breathy. “This hurts like shit.”
“Give me your zip ties,” said Rifleman. “I’ll take care of him and go after the girl.” He grabbed Jonathan’s right arms. The right arm felt normal, but the left flopped like a disjointed chicken wing. Jonathan heard bones crunch and felt another hot spurt of blood on his face as the man fastened his wrists together,in front of him. I am going to bleed out, he thought airily. Right here in the living room. Where did Lily go?
He watched, bleary-eyed, as Rifleman slipped through the blood on the floor and headed toward the kitchen, in Lily’s direction.
“You goddamn bastard,” Handgun cursed beside him as the coppery smell of blood enveloped them like a cloud. “You’re gonna pay for this.”
Jonathan lay there, his shoulder on fire, the room swirling around him. Atli, atli, atli the word echoed in his brain. Cherokee for go. Had Lily remembered that?
His head cleared for a moment, and he wondered if he dared make another grab for his knife, but he heard more footsteps, coming from the kitchen.
“She ran away,”announced Rifleman.
Jonathan breathed deep, grateful. Lily had remembered atli. She knew what to do.
“Where the fuck did she go?” Handgun’s voice cracked.“There’s a foot of snow out there.”
“Her tracks lead into the woods,” said Rifleman. “We should have covered both doors.”
Rifleman knelt down beside his partner, wrapping a kitchen towel around the man’s wound as they conferred in whispers. Jonathan caught the words cutie and freezing. Handgun mumbled something he couldn’t understand, but Rifleman said, “I’m going after her. She can’t have gone far.”
Yes, she can, Jonathan thought as he felt himself start to float somewhere near the ceiling. Lily had remembered atli. She can go as far as she needs to. She’ll take off for Maine, or maybe even Kentucky. She’s heard it’s pretty there.