They lay like corpses as Gale prepared for sleeping. Imogen didn’t mind being squashed in the middle; it wasn’t like it had been with her Kentucky cousins, that lonely summer long ago. Now the warmth of bodies, three spoons tucked tight, meant they were still alive.
He repositioned their hands so they were behind them, and after binding their ankles he used additional rope to attach their feet to Imogen’s walking stick. The idea she’d had to wiggle around in the night and untie each other was foiled. They wouldn’t even be able to roll over and, unless they made a well-choreographed effort to rise simultaneously, they couldn’t easily stand. If they managed it, they’d have to hop together to get anywhere; Gale wasn’t going to sleep through that—and all his precautions spoke to his expectations of an unbothered slumber.
His movements were unhurried, but efficient. He unzipped their sleeping bags and blanketed them. At least they wouldn’t be cold (if he slits our throats in the night). No one spoke. There was too much to think about. Too many horrific images to replay or avoid.
Soon after he’d hunkered down in his own sleeping bag at the mouth of the shelter, the sky a fading mauve in the cloudy dusk, his breathing became rhythmic. On every inhale, something made a soft grinding noise in his throat.
In the silence, Imogen’s ear buzzed even louder. The desire to clap her hand over it to stop the noise was making her antsy. As much as she needed a good rest, she wasn’t sure it would be possible without her tincture. At her back, Tilda sobbed.
“Everybody doing okay?” Beck whispered. “Imogen? Your head?”
“Yeah, I’m feeling better.” And thank God she’d be lying on her right ear all night, not her left.
“What are we going to do?” Tilda begged.
Imogen didn’t want to say what she’d been thinking, that they were beyond reasoning with him, and they’d never overpower him. Her once-reliable imagination was failing her, and her reservoir of ideas had run dry. Sometimes she was so resigned to her fate that she felt wisps of her soul drifting away. She couldn’t tell them how empty she felt, so she lay there in the dark and said nothing.
Beck must’ve been battling her own demons, and for a stretch she, too, didn’t speak. After a while she said, “I’m sorry.”
The apology was so earnest, so final, that Imogen wished she’d never heard it. It sounded as hopeless as Imogen felt.
“It’s not your fault,” Imogen whispered, because it hurt her heart too much to think of her sister dying with the belief that vanquishing Gale had been her responsibility.
“I brought you guys here.”
Imogen considered all the reasons why Beck had organized this trip, full of so many good intentions. She’d wanted to help them—Imogen and Tilda. She’d tried to give them something, in the only way she knew how.
“You didn’t bring that ginger Sasquatch here,” Tilda snarled.
A moment ago Imogen had thought herself incapable of it, but she laughed. After a second, Beck gave a halfhearted chuckle.
“Okay, true.”
“I’m not sorry we came,” said Imogen. “Sorry all this shit happened. But not sorry we…You were trying to do something good, for all of us.”
“Yeah.” Beck sounded distracted. “Ever wonder why I have that article on my wall?”
“The play?” Imogen asked, caught off guard.
“Yeah.”
“I have a copy of it somewhere,” said Tilda. “But not on the wall. I looked like I was about to give the microphone a blow job.”
“Tilda!” Imogen hissed the word, but she wasn’t angry. She appreciated Tilda’s ability to be snarky at inappropriate times now that Gale was asleep.
“Sorry—yes Beck, I had wondered about that,” Tilda said.
“I was trying to remember—to remind myself—that people listen to me. Sometimes take me too seriously. And I have to be more careful about what I say.”
“What is she talking about?” Tilda whispered to Imogen.
“When I was directing the play I learned that if I was unclear about something—stage direction, or a lighting cue—then people would get confused. But if I was very specific, I got the results I wanted. It was kind of a power rush. And it’s like that with patients sometimes too. There’s a part of me that likes it, being in control, but I don’t want to be a dictator. I want to help, I want people to have results that work. But…”
“You can’t control everything,” said Tilda.
“I know. You shouldn’t listen to me all the time.”
Imogen wished she could see her sister’s face. “No, that’s not the problem. I should listen to you, but you should listen to me too—we have to listen to each other, all of us. So yes, I will do what you tell me. But if I have an idea you should listen in return. We keep missing each other’s cues. We’re running out— We have to keep trying.”
“Agreed, yes,” Beck said, sounding a bit revived.
“If only we could get the gun from him,” said Tilda.
“Maybe, somehow, we can get him to stay—here or at Slate—long enough to trigger our rescue,” Imogen said, thinking aloud. She wasn’t quite sure how they’d cope with so many more days in his volatile company, but at least they’d be alive. “Afiya would be the first to know we weren’t back, how long would she wait to call someone?”
“Knowing her, about fifteen minutes past the ETA I gave her. Especially if I didn’t call or text.”
“That could work,” Tilda said.
“You guys…” Beck’s voice faltered, full of emotion. “I hate to put her through all that worry. She’s pregnant and you know how hard it was…” She choked on her words.
“She’s pregnant?” Imogen leaned up a little, and felt Tilda do the same.
“She wasn’t showing,” Tilda said. “She didn’t say anything.”
“She’ll—we’ll—be crushed if we lose another pregnancy.”
“Oh, Beck—”
“And I have to be there for her, for them.”
“You will.” Imogen wanted to embrace her so badly. All she could do was inch her shoulder a little closer, blow a kiss toward the back of her neck.
“She’ll be at thirteen weeks when we get back. We were going to tell you then.”
“I’m sorry, Beck,” Tilda said.
Imogen was sure Tilda knew about one of the miscarriages, but maybe not both. Imogen was in awe of the strength and faith it took for Beck and Afiya to keep trying. It wasn’t fair that their love wasn’t enough to give them the child they both so wanted.
“And I’m sorry I’m saying sorry when I should be saying congratulations.”
“Maybe you should tell him,” Imogen said, suddenly inspired. “He might think you’re lying now, but maybe he’d understand, sympathize. He started all this to try to see his daughter and granddaughter—why didn’t you say something?”
“We told people too soon before. And there’s no way he was going to be the first person I told.”
For all Beck’s ability to boss people around, it struck Imogen that she could be a little clueless about human nature.
“Imogen’s right. He’s a fucking monster but he has a soft spot for babies. This is something you could really connect to him with.”
“I don’t want to connect with—”
“It’s a strategy, Beck,” Imogen snapped. “Remember how I just said we should listen to each other? Tell him every fucking thing—tell him how you’re going to decorate the baby’s room, tell him what names you’re considering. For fuck’s sake, tell him about Afiya’s miscarriages. Make him see you as someone he relates to, that’s what the experts would say!”
In the silence that followed, Gale’s snores were oddly reassuring.
“You really do watch too much TV,” Beck said, ending the standoff.
Sometimes when Beck told her that, Imogen interpreted it as a judgment. But now it helped to squelch her anger. “Yeah. I’ll save your dumb ass with everything I’ve learned from TV.”
Behind her, Tilda snorted, and Imogen had the sense for the first time in eons that Tilda was really listening to her.
Beck conceded. “Okay. When I get a chance, when it feels natural and not like a ploy, I’ll tell him.”
“Good.” Tilda sighed—tired or satisfied or vexed, Imogen couldn’t tell.
“But…we should prepare ourselves. Mentally. To be ruthless. Because that could be what it takes. We can’t shy away. You’ve seen what he can do.”
Maybe, given the evolution of their captivity, their options were only going to become bleaker, more desperate. But hearing Beck verbalize the need to kill him brought home a reality that Imogen wasn’t sure she could face. She was notoriously bad at fighting back—though this time she had advance warning. She needed to wrap her head around it. Change her inner monologue and start thinking of herself as a survivalist, willing to do anything.
“Can you do that? Kill him? What about ‘First, do no harm’?” Tilda asked.
Imogen had been wondering about that too. “Is Gale technically your patient?”
“That isn’t actually part of the Hippocratic oath,” Beck said.
“Seriously?” said Tilda.
“Nope. Nothing even close. And Gale understands self-defense as a means for doing whatever’s necessary. We have to be able to do that too. Train yourself now, mentally. Think about what you don’t want to lose. We may only get one chance.”
“I want to have kids someday too,” Tilda said softly. “Jalal would be a good dad.”
“You finally got a good one,” Beck said.
“I did.”
They were the last words any of them spoke for the night.
Imogen didn’t want to know what Beck was mulling over, what brutality she was replaying in her mind to ready herself to act (like Gale) without hesitation. Or maybe she was only dreaming about a future where she held her infant son or daughter, with her brilliant, gorgeous wife at her side. Tilda was probably creating a family for herself, too, the future she didn’t want to lose.
Who was Imogen supposed to live for?
No one knew, but in recent years she’d started fantasizing about being a mother. Sometimes children appeared in her mind out of nowhere to live out a moment—sharing a meal, talking through a difficult life lesson. Occasionally she would wonder what her day would be like if the girl or boy she passed in the library or grocery store were hers. But her maternal love was for the possibility of a moment, not a duration of forever.
Oh, how emotional she could get, her heart well trained from years of writing to fully bloom for even the less-than-real and most ephemeral of souls. Because I’m a writer. A false narrative had lurked in her subconscious for a year, telling her her contributions to the world—to tikkun olam—were inconsequential. But it wasn’t true. Even a creepy mystery book could look meaningfully at the human condition. And just then, the young heroine from her unwritten fairy tale appeared in her mind—to remind her she didn’t yet exist. To beg Imogen to bring her to life. I have more stories to tell.
That was reason enough, wasn’t it? Something to fight for? She had as much right to be who she was as anyone else. And she was remembering more of the dreams she’d long since buried.
Though she didn’t want to be a mother, she pondered the possibility of being an aunt.
She didn’t have much experience with babies, but she made herself imagine swaddling a niece or nephew, its little face bursting with delight as Imogen cooed and described, in a baby voice, the adult doings of the world. It hadn’t seemed urgent, after the earlier announcements, to put a plan in motion; she thought she had seven months or more to figure it out. Not this time. Now she knew there was only right now.
Should she move to Flagstaff? Was that even realistic?
So many things, even under preposterous conditions, reminded her of the race she was losing—the race she hadn’t bothered to sign up for. The race in which she watched everyone speed past her while she made no effort to keep up. She didn’t mind that Beck was winning the race, but she didn’t want to be left so far in the dust that she couldn’t join the celebration at the finish line. She wanted her sister’s child to know her. One way or another, she was certain she wanted to have a meaningful role in this child’s life.
First things first: they all had to get home. Imogen drifted to sleep with images of herself enraged and ferocious. She might be able to kill for her sister’s chance to be a mom, and her own chance to love someone unconditionally.