Celeste
My mother used to tell me that I can’t run away from myself. At thirty-three, I still have no idea what the hell she meant. I only know that it wasn’t intended as a gentle warning. It was a slap in the face.
No matter how hard or how fast you run, dear daughter, you cannot escape yourself.
The last time I heard those words, they’d dripped with smug satisfaction. Twenty-one years old, and I’d literally just escaped from a nightmare. Found a damned pay phone—the only one in the county—and, fingers shaking, dropped in the coins and dialed a number that made tears stream down my face, buttons blurring until I had to blink them back to continue.
I-I got away, Mom. I finally got away from him. Can I come home? Please?
Those words ignited the last shreds of my dignity, burning them to ash at my feet. I remembered the girl I’d been five years before, furious at a world—and a family—who blamed me for a tragedy that had nothing to do with me. I’d made mistakes, endless mistakes, but I hadn’t done that.
He’d believed me. The boy I met online. He believed me. Sympathized with me when I needed it, and raged with me when I needed that.
Come stay with me. Start over. They don’t deserve you. They don’t understand you. I do.
At twenty-one, I cringed at the girl who’d fallen for such obvious bullshit. At thirty-three, my anger is aimed where it belongs: at the asshole who’d targeted a desperate teenage girl. And at the mother who picked up the phone five years later.
You can’t run away from yourself.
She said that and then hung up. I never contacted her again.
Today I am running. Not from myself. I’ve never been the problem. It’s the rest of the damned world that just keeps boxing me in. This particular box was supposed to be my den, my safe hideaway. Now, once again, the comforting barriers between me and the world threaten to harden into cage bars. The urge to flee is overwhelming, but this time, I recognize that the problem isn’t a place. As always, it’s a person. I’ve finally started to realize that the answer is not escape.
Don’t abandon my safe den. Deal with the person holding the damn keys.
Twelve years ago, I fled Aaron, and what did that get me? Twelve years of running.
Don’t run from the threat. End it.
First, though, I need to keep from getting killed myself, and today the threat comes in a package as ridiculous as rust-speckled pickup trucks. Two have already spit gravel at me, their drivers honking and yelling.
They see me. They’re just making a point: roads are for driving. Even when I jog on the shoulder, I swear they swerve toward me. At the last second, they veer and hit the gas to send black smoke billowing.
The worst, though, are the dogs. Around here, I’m jogging a gauntlet of snarling canines who’ve only ever seen a runner when someone’s making off with the family Xbox.
I pass my neighbor’s house. Kids race around the yard with toy tomahawks and six-guns. Even thirty years ago, born to parents who weren’t exactly models of liberal thinking, I knew better than to play this particular game. When the pop-pop-pop of gunfire sounds, I instinctively skid and drop to one knee, and the towheaded children erupt with laughter, pointing at the silly city slicker who doesn’t know the difference between a handgun and a cap gun.
When I can breathe again, I squint over at the kids. There are at least four of them, all in hand-me-downs, with scraggly hair. The oldest can’t be more than seven and totes an air rifle.
Dear Lord, I can hear the banjo music already.
The oldest kid—a girl, it seems—points that rifle straight at me. She fires, and the plastic pellet skids through the gravel beside me. I wheel, ready to march over and have a word with her parents. Then I see the girl’s father, beer in hand, lounging on the front porch, watching everything. He lifts a hand in mock greeting.
As if on cue, the roar of a pickup sounds behind me, and I am tempted—damn tempted—to stride into the middle of the road.
I won’t let you intimidate me. I’ll stand my ground, and I’ll make you pay . . . forced to clean my blood and bits from your front grille.
As much as I’d like to think my untimely demise would haunt my killer, there are people around here who’d only sue my estate for the vehicular damage. Not that it would do them much good. After a cheap burial, my estate would consist of a ramshackle house in rural central Florida. If someone does hit me, I almost hope they sue . . . and end up stuck with a money pit of a house, perched on land not even worth the cost of demolition.
That house might not be much, but it’s more than I have ever had. A respectable job. A place to live. A piece of land. A life that is actually worth fighting for.
I resume my jog. When gravel crunches, I turn, expecting to see an asshole driving on my shoulder. Instead, this one stays on his side as he slows to pass me. I brace for what will come next—some witticism about how he can help me get my exercise . . . in the back of his pickup. That’s when I recognize the vehicle and know no innuendo is forthcoming.
The truck is an antique Dodge, driven by the owner of the only business in Fort Exile—a combination gas station, automotive garage and convenience store.
As the pickup passes, I struggle to keep my gaze forward.
Don’t look. The view may be very nice, but don’t . . .
I look, of course. Tom Lowe is the hottest guy in Fort Exile. Granted, it’s a town of under a hundred people, half of them over fifty. Anywhere else, Tom would be a seven edging in on an eight. Dark hair, worn country-music-star long, dark-brown eyes, a crooked nose and a grin that shows off excellent dentition to full advantage. Add a scarred cheek and broad tattooed biceps and Tom’s body tells the story of a guy who grew up destined to work under the chassis of a pickup, sweaty and grease stained.
The fact that one of those tats clearly comes from a prison stint should erase the appeal of the rest but . . . I call myself a reformed bad-boy-magnet. The problem is that Tom Lowe is the walking model of a reformed bad boy. Exactly the kind of man I used to fall for, with the bonus that, like me, he’s past that stage of life. He seems like a genuinely sweet guy, one who pulls over for joggers, runs a legitimate business, and is a respected member of a community that grants respect as grudgingly as praise.
I know I shouldn’t slow when he passes. Shouldn’t look temptation in the face. Fortunately, I don’t have to, because that window only goes down long enough for a friendly thumbs-up. Then, as the truck rolls past, Tom points at the sky. I squint to see dark clouds.
“Thank you!” I shout.
Tom flashes another thumbs-up and keeps going. I tell myself that’s for the best. Like an alcoholic with a ninety-day pin walking past an open bar, I feel a twinge of regret but mostly a wave of relief. Tom Lowe would be my bender, sending me tumbling back to rock bottom.
I peer up at the sky again. Those clouds are rolling in fast, and storms here strike hard, especially in late August as hurricane season hits the coast. The first time I’d been caught in the rain, I’d nearly done a jig of glee, imagining the cool water sluicing the sweat from my body. Instead, the rain lashed in bruising torrents, the humidity doubled, and the sweltering temperature didn’t drop one damn degree.
I turn around to head back. I’m passing the neighbor’s house when he shouts at me from the porch.
“Done already? You weren’t hardly out for a minute, girl.”
His laughter fades behind me as I reach the blessed quarter-mile gap between our houses. Cows graze under a moss-draped live oak. The pasture ends in a snarl of kudzu that has swallowed the fence between our properties. On the other side, my land devolves into brush and swamp. I’m passing the edge when I catch a flash of motion in my backyard.
I freeze, half hidden behind a gnarled cypress. The moment I stop moving, mosquitoes descend, and I swat two before steeling myself against the bites and peeking around the tree trunk.
The first thing I see is the house—a two-story clapboard box with peeling white paint and a crooked front porch. Whatever movement I saw, though, it wasn’t at the house. It was in the backyard, which is huge. An acre, according to the local kid who cuts the grass and smirks as he overcharges me. Probably a half-acre in reality. Still huge, and it’s close enough to that swampy brushland that I spotted an alligator in my yard last month, which is why I’m frozen here, peering into it.
The yard is still and empty.
What had I seen? I struggle to remember as I swat at another mosquito. It’d been well above ground level, whatever it was. Definitely not an alligator. A person? Yes, I’d had the impression of a person moving behind the shed.
I squint at the shed. It’s a dilapidated wooden building that looks as if it has served time as a small barn, garden shed, chicken coop and now, in its dotage, a structural eyesore, begging me to put it out of its misery. The only saving grace is that it doesn’t sit in the middle of my lawn, howling for release from its rotted bonds.
Whoever cut the lawn before had granted the shed a dignified dotage by not mowing within ten feet of it, that extra space now consumed by long grass. I can barely make out the building. Yet I know it’s there, and no matter how often I tell myself it’s a charming addition to the property—the sort of rickety rural structure that photographers clamor to capture—all I see is an eyesore.
Right now, though, I see more than an eyesore. I see a place where someone could get within a hundred feet of my back door unseen. That’s a chilling prospect for any woman living in the country alone. For me, it could be a death sentence. The only thing that would make my current situation worse is if my past nightmare returned.
If Aaron has finally caught up with me.
At twenty-one, even thinking I saw someone in my yard would have sent me running. I wouldn’t even have stopped in the house to pack a bag.
By twenty-six, I’d have told myself I was seeing things. I’d have walked into the house, locked the doors, closed the blinds and pretended everything was fine, just fine . . . and then spent the next week sitting awake all night with a gun in my lap.
Thirty-three-year-old me has tasted freedom and knows it’s an illusion, one that can be shattered in an instant. By a phone call. By an email. By an envelope in my mailbox holding the receipt for a headstone engraved with my name, purchased by my own credit card.
I hide behind the tree just long enough to calm my pounding heart. When I resume my jog. I try not to burst into a full-blown sprint for the door. Get into the house. Lock the door. Head upstairs. Get the gun. Two minutes later, I’m walking out the back door, gun hidden at my side as I stride toward the shed.
It’s a masterful piece of theater, right up until I’m three steps from the overgrown part of the lawn. Then I’m moving a helluva lot slower as I scan for the telltale shift of the grass that says “alligator.” At least the gun will help with that, too.
I pick my way through the overgrown strip until I reach the shed. I circle it once as I listen for any sign of life. None. At the door, I pause and listen again. Still silent.
The door lost its handle years ago, and now a nailed-on piece of rotted wood is all that keeps it from banging in the wind. Or the wood was rotted. It isn’t now. Yet it’s the same rusty nail and the same makeshift design.
Someone replaced the crappy wooden stopper with a slightly less crappy wooden stopper?
I snort at the idea. Clearly, I’d formed a general “rotted wood” impression of the entire shed, which extended to this scrap. It isn’t as if I’ve been out here in the past two months. Who uses a shed surrounded by knee-high Florida swamp grass?
I swing open the makeshift stopper and yank the door. With the rusted hinges, I could barely open it the first time. When the door flies open freely, I stagger back, nearly landing on my ass.
So someone not only replaced the door stopper but oiled the hinges? Nicest hired killer ever.
I snort another laugh. That’s ridiculous, of course. Aaron would never send a hired killer. That would take all the fun out of watching me plead and beg for my life. Also take all the fun out of killing me himself.
The door hinges clearly loosened up after I wrenched it open last time. Still, I bend to the ground, looking for footprints. The problem is that the ground is hard, and despite the promise of rain, it’s been dry for a week. Even my own sneakers leave no marks on the dirt.
I push open the door and use my cell phone light to look inside. I don’t expect to see anything. No one would be using the shed in the condition it’s in, the interior filled with broken pieces of tools I couldn’t even identify the last time. Rusted metal and rotting wood and—
I blink and lean in for a better look. The metal is still there, and the wood, and it’s still scattered around, but it looks . . .
As if someone tidied the shed while leaving junk lying about?
I give my head a shake. No one Aaron sends is going to replace the door stopper and oil the hinges and tidy up while leaving junk artfully strewn about to make it seem untouched. That’s the sort of hired killer Hollywood envisions. Anyone Aaron sent would just hole up in the shed until nightfall, bust in the back door and drag me back to his boss.
No one is here, and no one has been here in a very long time.
I back out, shut the door and peer up at the sky. Black clouds creep inexorably toward me, a stealth storm hidden under cover of bright sunshine.
I peer at the shed again. Then I shake it off. No one is here. No one has been here. The only thing I need to worry about is battening the hatches before the storm strikes.
I take one last look around before heading inside.