He tells me his name is Chris. I tell him I’m Linnea. He leads me along a hard-packed dirt trail—narrowed by encroaching prickly pear cactus and rosinweed—to a cabin on the other side of the hill. Our steps scare a cottontail out from a mesquite bush. It darts behind the cabin fast. Every cell in my body is telling me the last thing I should do is duck into another building with this man, but my brain keeps saying Max.
It’s dark in here. He goes to the corner, stoops to light a rusty lantern, and holds it up so it throws off its watery light.
I gasp. Max is stretched out on a low, narrow cot, an itchy-looking army-green blanket bunched up at her feet. Her eyes are closed. Her chest rises and falls gently, and once I see that, I can breathe too. She’s alive. That’s all that matters. That’s everything.
I kneel beside the cot. Her face is sweaty; damp hair clings to her forehead. She is pale, so pale. Even her lips are pale.
“Max,” I whisper, patting her cheeks gently.
“Let her sleep,” he says. “She needs to rest.”
I find her hand—a tight fist. I unclench it enough to squeeze her fingers, to offer proof I’m here. I whisper her name once more. She turns her head as if she’s seeking my voice. She whimpers softly.
He’s drugged her.
“Harper?” she says, her voice a scratch in the sand. I want to say, “I’m here, I’m here!,” but instead I grip her hand more tightly and murmur that she’s going to be okay. She shifts her weight on the bed and something rattles. I see it then, a rusty chain locking her other arm to the bedrail.
“Oh my God,” I say. “What is this?”
“She needs to stay safe.” He rests his hand on the hilt of his knife. “You heard her, she’s hallucinating.”
“What are you talking about?” I forget who has the power. His energy shifts. A bull lured by the red cape. “I mean,” I backpedal, “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Harper,” Max says, her eyes still closed, her voice still weak. “Where were you?”
“She keeps asking for her sister,” he says with dismay. “Her dead sister.”
“She needs a doctor,” I say.
He makes a noise in his throat. “I thought you were the doctor.”
“She may be severely dehydrated. I can’t give her IV fluids.”
“She’ll be fine. This place is good for girls. Especially ones with fucked-up families. The clean air, the quiet. It brings them back.” He skims his knuckles over her cheekbone. I don’t want him touching her. I glance at the knife at his hip. I imagine grabbing it, sinking the blade into his neck.
“Ezra?” she mumbles.
“Ah, see?” He snatches his hand away from Max and kicks the nearest wall. Sawdust and dried insects crumble down from the rafters. “How are we gonna make a new life together, Max,” he screams, “if you won’t leave the old one behind? How can our love survive that?” And then he turns to me. “You see that? That’s what she’s sick with! Not something an IV’ll fix. That.”
“What?” I ask.
“She asks for him.” Now he’s pacing the short length of the cabin as if he’s caged. I’m worried he’ll mistake one of us for his jailer.
“That’s only because you’ve frightened her. Unchain her. Let me help her and she’ll forget all about him.” I swallow hard and add, “Whoever Ezra is.”
There’s a chillingly long moment in which he seems to think. Then he mutters something about this day needing to end already.
“You smell like puke.” He hurls a shirt at my face. “Put this on.”
I hesitate.
He laughs. “You waiting for me to turn around? Fine. There ya go.” I swap shirts fast. He grabs mine, tosses it outside. The peasant blouse he gives me—elastic neckline broken off one shoulder—smells stale. Like this place. If it was Max’s, I don’t recognize it.
Next he hurls a musty sleeping bag at me that I don’t bother unrolling. I’m wrecked with fatigue, but I sit up, spine against the crude tongue-and-groove wall, and watch Maxine breathe. On a cot at the other end of the cabin, Chris sleeps in snatches. Every time I move, he wakes. Exhaustion or no, it’s not like I’d be able to let my guard down enough to sleep with the dragon curled under the same roof.
As I hold vigil over my sister, I assess my own body: the arm he twisted doesn’t seem broken, just bruised and sore. I can’t feel hunger anymore, so that’s a plus. I’m thirsty, but he made me take a few sips of water before he turned in, so I suppose dehydration isn’t imminent. I’m weak, of course, but how much of that is thanks to this impossible day, this impossible situation, or … Linnea’s friends had warned me that I needed to take “my” (her?) meds or I’d get sick.
“It’s been a whole year,” I’d pointed out.
“Forever,” Julie had said. “That’s how long a heart transplant patient has to stay on the anti-rejection meds. Every day of forever.”
The morning when Shelby called me, panicked about Max (my God, was that only yesterday?), before I drove to the house, I had grabbed a carton of OJ from the fridge—didn’t bother looking for a glass—and swallowed one pill from each plastic prescription container, just like Alma showed me (“Make sure you take all three,” she stressed). More out of scratching a better-safe-than-sorry itch than anything else. I hadn’t taken the pills with me. I’d thought I’d be back.
Every day of forever.
I want my forever back. I’m sick of this tour through someone else’s.
All night while I watch my sister breathe I spin vivid fantasies of getting Chris’s knife and plunging it into his chest, even though when I try to imagine what that might feel like, to send a blade through someone’s heart, what kind of force it would require—physical and mental—I doubt I’ll be able to follow through. One blip of hesitation, and I’d be the dead one.
Even if I could be quick enough and ruthless enough to murder him in cold blood, I wouldn’t have gotten the chance anyway. Before he settled in, he pulled the knife off his belt and slid it under the mattress.
Somehow, the sun rises in the morning, feeble early rays setting light to the window quilted in cobwebs.
Somehow, we have all survived the night.