You’re Anya Maxwell? I say as we drive out of Flagstaff and onto I-17 again.
Mom says she heard sirens behind us, but we figure they won’t know what car we’re in—no one even stepped out of the diner when we ran. So they’re not going to be able to follow us. That’s Mom’s thinking, anyway. I don’t know if she’s right.
Yes, says Mom.
Wow, I say. Anya Maxwell is kind of a legendary figure—she smashed her husband’s head in like fifteen years ago with a kitchen TV. He bled out and got electrocuted too—the Double Death, they called it. Later it turned out, because all her friends came forward, that he’d been beating her and raping her for years, and she’d just snapped. So she became a sort of heroine to some feminists, and then got even more famous when she skipped bail and disappeared, totally.
It’s a bit like that whole Elvis-being-alive thing—people say, if someone’s a bit mysterious, maybe she’s Anya Maxwell. That kind of thing. Now, the idea that this woman is my mother is just disorienting. All my life, she’s been Shaylene Cooper, and now she’s Anya Maxwell, and it’s like someone just took a big tug on the earth beneath me and pulled it a thousand miles along, like a rug, so I’m living on some totally other part of the world.
You cut off the TV in the motel room, didn’t you? I say.
Yes. I couldn’t afford for the news to come on.
Wow, I say again.
We pass a sign that says APACHE/YAVAPAI NATION 3 MILES: it is pointing down a side road. I think of the Dreaming, the elks and the Crone and the Child, and whether if we went down that road I could find some wise elder or something, ask them some questions.
But we continue past it, and the forest keeps flickering past.
Eventually Mom pulls over at a rest stop. There’s a short section of desert south of Flagstaff, similar to the scrubland where we saw the petroglyphs, then you get up onto the forest plateau again, where the pines start to crowd in. There’s a sign that says PRESCOTT NATIONAL FOREST 5 MILES. It doesn’t occur to me to ask why we’re heading back in the direction of Phoenix.
I just …, she says. I couldn’t go to prison. Not with you. You were so young—losing you like that, it would have broken my heart. So I took you, and I ran. I changed my name. I changed my job.
So … Alaska …
A lie. I’m sorry. I had to keep you safe. Her hands when she gesticulates don’t look human anymore; they look like starfish flapping. And it’s a cliché, but my head is spinning. I mean really spinning, like vertigo. I feel like I’m going to throw up.
Then Mom saying “lie,” like that, makes me think of something—of the coyote, before my accident, saying there will be two lies and then there will be the truth. My dad wanting to kill us, that was the first lie, right? So what if this is the second?
I feel as if my body is dropping through thin air, my stomach rising.
Anya Maxwell didn’t have a daughter, I say slowly.
They kept you secret, says Mom. To protect you.
She frowns at me. From my reputation, you know. And from knowing that I killed your dad, I guess. Then when I took you they never changed the story, I don’t know why. Maybe it would have looked weird.
Uh-huh, I say. Mom, are you lying to me right now?
She looks so shocked I instantly feel bad. What? Why would I lie to you about this? You’re my only girl. My little princess.
And you’re Anya Maxwell.
Yes. Anya Maxwell, who had a daughter the authorities kept quiet, and who knew that people would be looking for her. For her and her teenage girl.
Oh, I say, realizing something. So when we were with Luke, you didn’t break our engine just to change cars, you did it because …
… Because I knew they’d be looking for a woman and a girl. Not a family. Or what seemed like a family.
Suddenly, everything is clear. That line on the closed caption:
Police think these images may just show An—
Police think this may be Anya fricking Maxwell.
Though I guess the person typing out the closed captions probably wouldn’t have included the fricking. This, though—this is why Mom stabbed Luke through the hand, nailing him to the table. So that he wouldn’t pick up on the news story.
But…, I say. Can’t you turn yourself in? I mean, I’m older now. I could come visit you, we could—
No way, says Mom. The DA was pushing for the electric chair. It was California, remember?
California? I say. I thought we lived in Alaska.
Well…, says Mom. I had to protect you.
God, I say. But your husband … my dad … he was hurting you.
There’s no material evidence. Only witness testimony.
She starts to cry, suddenly, and something clicks inside me, some cog, and I lean over and put my hands around her. Then my stomach flips and I pull away.
Luke! I say.
Yeah, says Mom, still crying. That was unfortunate.
His hand … In my head, it runs again, like a rewound video—the blade, sticking out of his flesh, the blood spurting. The memory of it is jagged in my head, uncomfortable, sharp-edged. It hurts me; I can’t imagine how much it hurt him.
It’ll be fine, says Mom. No arteries.
It’ll be FINE?
She closes her eyes, for a moment. Sorry, she says. Sorry. It was the only thing I could think of. You know I wouldn’t normally do that, right? You know it was wrong?
Uh, yes, Mom, I know it was wrong. You impaled his hand. And what do you mean you wouldn’t normally do that? You were all ready to smash his head in with a rock.
She blinks. But I didn’t.
Because I tripped you!
Sorry, she says. Sorry. I did stab him. I did, and I’m sorry for it. I wish I hadn’t had to. But he would have seen, or heard. You understand that, don’t you? He would have realized. Who I was. Who you were.
Yes, I say.
And then … I would have lost you. I can’t lose you.
She’s crying hard now, and I touch the tears on her cheek. It’s Okay, Mom, I say, I get it.
Thank you, she says.
We sit there for a while in silence.
Then Mom takes a long deep breath, scrubs her face with her hands. She turns to me. A glint in her eye. Anyway, she says slowly, now he’ll have a story to tell about himself, for once.
I can’t help it—I laugh. It’s awful, it’s terrible, but I laugh. And then Mom is laughing too, and we sort of have to hold on to each other, because we get all hysterical. It’s funny! And also tragic and disgusting and appalling. But funny too!
When we come back to our senses, Mom starts the car and pulls out, indicating carefully. We follow I-17 another few miles. Forest flickers past the window of the car, the trees different and the same. It’s like someone is shuffling a deck of cards, with pictures of trees on them. Then Mom sees a sign for the Prescott National Forest again, and she turns off. We pass a gas station, fluorescent lit, and Mom pulls up.
Wait here, she says.
She goes into the store and I wait. The engine is still running. I watch a wasp crawl across the windshield. I start to feel nervous—we’re the only car parked here—but then Mom reappears, shielding her eyes from the low late-afternoon sun. She walks back to the car at what I think she imagines is an inconspicuous pace, only it looks suspicious to me.
But, you know, I saw what she did with the steak knife, so it’s not like I’m an unbiased observer.
I watch her pull something from her pocket, something dark like a Taser. Her face is all cold and hard determination.
I pull back into the seat, as if I could push myself through it, as if I was made of ectoplasm, thinking about how this was a person who would make a knife stand out of someone’s hand just to stop them from watching TV, and that this is a person, too, who knows that when I’m with her I slow her down.
A person who killed my dad.
A person who was willing to smash Luke’s brains in with a rock, and leave him to die in the middle of nowhere.
A person, I suddenly realize, who just might hit me with ten thousand volts and leave me behind, leave me to wake up on a curb as policemen ask me questions and I just blink at them, like, what the hell?
I keep my eyes on her hand, raising the black object, and I brace myself.