There Will Be Lies (38 page)

She is smiling too, remembering – smiling and crying, at the same time.

Once
, she says,
I took you to the park. You were scared of the slide – it was bigger than the ones you’d been on before – so I said I would take you with me. I slid down, with you on my lap. You wanted to do it over and over. You were so happy. And then, walking home, your little hand in mine … the way you reached up to take it when we had to cross the street … I don’t know. It was like it brought something to life, in here
. She touches her chest.
It was almost painful, how much I loved you. Do you know what I mean?

Yes, I want to say, but I am crying now too, looking away, as if I can erase what she has just said, erase her love. I go into the bathroom and shut the door, and for the longest time I just sit on the side of the bath, my head in my hands. I count the stains on the wall – maybe blood, maybe something worse. There are fifty-four.

When I have done that I come out again. Shaylene is curled up on the bed, but sits up when I open the door.

You saw those books we passed?
I ask.
You know, left by other guests?

I see the pain on her face – the disappointment that I’m not saying, I don’t know, that I forgive her, or I love her, or something. But she pushes it down, quick, like someone pressing a drowning person back down into the water. Her face smoothes out, water ripples going still, no sign of the struggle below. She smiles, half convincingly.

Guests?
she says.
I think they call them victims here
.

I mime a bellyache from laughing so much. I don’t think my face is looking so happy because she stops smiling.

Yes
, she says.
I saw them
.

I might go and get one
, I say. It’s been ages since I have read anything, and there’s no way I’m just sitting in this scuzzy motel and TALKING to Shaylene all fricking night. What’s she going to do, tell me again how she couldn’t have a child of her own, and that makes everything all right?
And some candy
, I add.
You have cash?

Sure
, she says. She reaches in her pocket, takes out some money, and hands it to me.
Don’t be long, though
, she says. I can tell she’d like to come with me, to not let me out of her sight, but at the same time she knows she can’t. She knows she can’t demand anything of me, after what she’s done.
And
…
be careful
.

It’s the corridor outside
, I say.
What could possibly happen?

She shakes her head.
Sorry
.

You want candy?
I ask. We haven’t stopped to eat, for reasons that are 100 per cent obvious, and she must be hungry too.

OK
, she says.

What do you want?

I don’t mind. Whatever
.

My mind flashes back to ice cream for dinner. It seems like a different world now.

Shelby
, she says.

Yes?

I was scared. You were going to be eighteen. I didn’t want you to leave me, to go to college. I knew the truth would come out. That’s why I
…

She pauses. And I understand something – why Coyote came along when he did. Because of my birthday. Because things were building up to an explosion anyway.

So he brought along some TNT.

But you won’t ever leave me, will you?
says Shaylene. There are tear tracks on her cheeks.

No
, I lie.

She smiles.
Good
.

She opens the door for me and I limp on out of there, and I don’t know then that it’s the last time I’ll ever stand in a room with her, like everything is normal.

I scan the books on the shelves and end up picking some little airport thriller, with a picture of a stack of cash on the cover, dripping blood. There’s a review on it, says it’s ‘Pure escapist thrills’. That sounds like what I need right now.

After I choose the book, I hobble along to the vending machine. I’m shivering a little in the cold air. I can see moths flitting around the broken, flickering fluorescent lights set on the walls. Everything else, apart from the highway, has disappeared – whisked away like a magician’s trick – WHOOSH – by the Arizona night.

I get a Payday for Shaylene and a Mars and a Snickers for me. I feed dollar bills in, and corkscrews of metal spiral outwards, making the candy bars drop into a trough at the bottom. Like unavoidable fate, turning, pushing you forward, till you fall.

I turn for the room. That’s when I see movement – dark, quick – in the parking lot below.

I stop. I watch.

Armed police, holding assault rifles, are heading towards the motel stairs. In a circle.

A circle that’s tightening, getting smaller and smaller.

I don’t like to use my voice. I prefer to speak with my hands, if I have to speak.

But my hands can’t talk through walls so I can’t warn Shaylene.

I see one of the police spot me – he points up and for a moment time stops, as they point their guns at me. A couple of them, closest to the stairs, start to run.

The phone, I think. They had my phone. I may not have USED it, but I don’t know how these things work. Plus, I realise now, I DIDN’T TURN IT OFF. How hard would it be to set up a trace anyway? Use cell towers to triangulate, or whatever it’s called. Yes, that has to be it. They must have watched us, driving down south, a shining dot on a map.

Easy. Like playing hide-and-seek with a little kid. I picture those circular screens in submarine movies, the cone sweeping around, making the moving dot pulse, blip, blip, blip.

Worse, I think: suddenly I am sure the cop car we saw in Flagstaff, on the way here, was watching us, marking our passage. Biding their time till we stopped. Till we were in a place where there weren’t many people, unlike, say, THE GRAND CANYON.

Waiting till we were at a deadbeat motel, our guards down.

I take a very deep breath, and I focus all my strength on my diaphragm and my chest – I have to make this LOUD, like nothing I’ve ever said before, because usually I am all about speaking as quietly as possible, so people don’t hear what I sound like.

Then I push the air out, over my vocal cords. You don’t have to think about how to do this, but I do. What I do have to think about is what to say, what word to use. In the end I go with the simplest one.

I shout:

Mom!

What happens next happens very quickly, and all at the same time:

The first men hit the top of the stairs – they go down on one knee, their guns aimed at me, or at the door to our room, I don’t know. They’re shouting something, but there’s too much going on –
get down
, I think?

Then more guys rappel down from the fricking ROOF, and land on the walkway on the other side of me. There are also guns pointing up from below, in the parking lot. I’m, like, in the centre of a spider’s web of sightlines, bullets ready to come crashing into the middle of the circle.

The door of Room 22 opens, I was going to say, with a bang, but I don’t hear that – but it opens very suddenly, OK?

Shaylene steps out, and she’s got a shotgun in her hands.

A
shotgun
?

A fricking
shotgun
?

Then I think: Oh yeah, the tennis bag. I have no idea where she got the gun from, but she had it all along. She’s been planning for this moment.

She swings the shotgun towards the nearest cop, and since she
isn’t already dead, shot a hundred times by those assault rifles, I know in that instant that the only thing making it tough for the cops is me – I’m standing right here, maybe three feet from Shaylene, collateral damage. Because I know, for a fact, they wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a woman with a shotgun. A criminal.

I decide to make it harder for them.

I lean closer to her, then hold my hands up, telling them not to shoot, please don’t shoot. There’s a pause of one millionth of a second where I think bullets are going to fly, anyway, but they don’t.

All of this has happened this quickly:

Cops door shotgun move
.

Shaylene snakes her left arm around my neck from behind, pulls me back. The shotgun comes up, under my chin. Holy crap she’s using me as a hostage. A shield. I only have time to think that and then she’s pulling me back inside the room, kicking the door shut once we’re in.

Shaylene lets me go and backs away into the room. She stands by the bed, looks at me for the longest time, or maybe just a fraction of a second, and then says,
I’m sorry, Shelby. I’m sorry for everything I did to you
.

Then she lifts the shotgun and puts it under her own chin, ready to blow her face off.

Through the dirty curtains, reddish highway glow comes weakly shining.

The Gideon Bible sits there, doing nothing. I wonder how many screwed-up things like this it has seen. I wonder how objects cope, when something terrible happens in front of them. How they get past it. How they can ever be the same again.

If she pulls the trigger, I think, this bed and this Bible and this nightstand are going to have to witness it.

Maybe that’s what haunting really is: the way violence affects the things around it, the world in which it happens, the objects that can’t look away.

Objects like me.

I can’t look away.

Shaylene’s finger is white on the trigger. She’s looking right at me and there are tears on her cheeks.

Then I realise something: I’m back in the Crone’s cottage, and this is the same moment, come again, only this time I didn’t kick the door down to get here; this time I was dragged. But the heart is there on the plate again for me to eat.

As soon as I see this, anger surges in me; it feels like the colour of lightning. She is not the moon, I realise, yanking at the tides, yanking at me. She is a broken window on the plane, pulling me towards the cold outside. I take a step forward. There are probably people shouting things from the other side of the door, cops, but of course I can’t hear so I don’t know for sure.

No
, I say.
You don’t get out of it that easily
.

What?
she says. She has to speak with her mouth; her hands are full of gun.

You told me you would die before you let anyone hurt me. When we were at the campsite
.

She looks confused.
Yes
, she says.
That’s why. I hurt you. I have to pay
.

This is going to hurt me more
, I say.

She shakes her head, whole body shivering, a metal bar struck against stone, humming with fear and adrenalin.

You did something terrible
, I say.
To the Watsons. To me
.

I know
, she says.
That’s why
–

I ignore her. As long as I keep talking, I keep her from splattering her nose and eyes and brain all over the ceiling.
You stole me
, I say.
It’s like you killed me. The real me – Angelica Watson. You killed me and you put someone else in my place. Shelby Cooper. Like in those stories where the fairies take a baby away and put a different one in the crib
.

Changelings
, she says. She is looking at me with something like fear, and something like wonder.

I know what they’re called
, I say.
That’s what you did to me. And I will never ever forget that
.

The tears are really flowing from her eyes now. She’s one trillionth of a second away from pulling that trigger.

But you don’t get to just leave
, I say.
You don’t get to make it all go away
.

I take another step. One foot away from her now.

Don’t come any closer
, she says.

No. You’re not pulling that trigger
, I say. I am thinking of my body, closing around that dead heart like a tomb, making me a coffin.
You kill yourself and I have to carry you around forever. No way
.

Back off
, she mouths.
I’m going to shoot
.

No
, I say.
Drop the gun
.

I can’t go to jail
, she says.
I can’t lose you
.

Suddenly she reverses the gun, and points it at me. I stare down the barrel. I can SEE what she’s thinking, on her face, like reading a book. She’s thinking: Two cartridges. Take us both out. And then all of this goes away, and she doesn’t have to pay for her crime, and she doesn’t have to be alone.

No
, I say, shaking my head.
You won’t lose me. That’s too easy
.

She blinks.
What
?

I’ll visit
, I say.
In prison. I’ll come see you
.

She is like a cartoon of shock.
Why?

Because that’s the only way to move on
, I say.
If I don’t, then you’ll always be there, with me, in my mind, wherever I go. What you did will always be there. Unchanging. But if we visit … then what you DID will only be one thing, and the other thing will be what you DO
.

I don’t get it
, she says, as much with her shoulders and her eyebrows as with her mouth.

You made a mistake
, I say.
But you have to LIVE with that mistake. No one forgives a dead person. I’d never forgive you if you died
.

Then both of us
–

No. You don’t really want to kill me. Do you?

I can tell because of the way she’s shaking. I can tell because of the way she’s crying. But I am worried that the gun might go off, accidentally, so I don’t get any closer.

For a moment, there’s stillness, which is like silence, but my version. Light is blazing through the gauze over the window, a spotlight, maybe? But then I notice that it’s shifting and moving, raking the walls, filling the room, making it a vessel of light. A helicopter, then.

Her eyes twitch to the door.

What is it?
I say.
What did they say?