Chapter 21
I STARE AT THE PLACE WHERE MY MOM ISN’T. I STARE and stare. If someone touched a lighter to my arm, I wouldn’t remember to flinch until the skin was black. I’m no longer something permanent.
Then I scream.
It tears out of my throat like an invasive vine. I gag on it, keep screaming, unable to stop long enough to breathe. I cry like I’m coughing up my lungs, harsh, racking sobs that tear at my windpipe.
My legs give out under me, and it’s a relief.
The sharp crack of my knees on the carpet, and the pain that radiates from them.
What’s the point in running if there’s no one left to demand a future from me?
Now that I’ve been robbed of my final act of love and absolution?
But there’s still the threat of blue-and-red lights, of heavy boots and heavier words, and more than that, there’s the fact that I want to live. I still want to. I’ll always want to.
So I have to run. I have to try.
The pink threads dangling from the hem of the comforter ripple like they’re laughing.
Silly girl. You tried so hard, and it meant nothing.
You measured living only by what you could stand, by how thin you could stretch yourself, and none of that stopped you from being robbed of the only person who could finally say enough.
My vision’s blurry again. She can’t be gone. Not like this. Not this fast.
I don’t bother with a suitcase for myself.
I take the same duffel bag I brought on my road trip with Veer, with a few additions.
A rain jacket. Uncle Bill’s papers. Laptop.
More disposable syringes and antiseptic wipes.
Full-size shampoo. A Polaroid of my mom, younger, smiling, holding three-year-old me as we twirl under a wide blue-gray sky.
My back is to the camera, and her eyes have the blurry look of television static, but we look happy. She looks happy.
She isn’t dead. I won’t believe it. A pack, the flayed man said. Maybe he’s going to kill her soon, but he hasn’t yet. He wants someone to hunt with first.
He’ll at least keep her alive until sunrise.
Once the sun’s up, he needs to hide, not hunt, and he might not care to keep her around after that.
Which means I have the rest of the night to find her, so I can be there with her for the end, to do my duty with a knife and gut myself on the last thing I owe her, the only way my family knows to show their devotion. I need her to forgive me.
I don’t know where that thought comes from, but it’s true: I need her to forgive me. For forsaking her, for resenting her, for never being enough.
The bathroom smells like lavender. Her towel is still damp. The leftover humidity runs a tongue down my cheek. I close my eyes while I pee, but all that means is I can’t look at anything as a distraction.
I know so little about the flayed man. This flayed man. He’s Brian’s version, a desert dweller, not the story I grew up with.
I wash my hands, desperate to keep moving. Brian can tell me more about what he might do. Where he might go. He must know more, all that talk of eating hearts, of evolution. He took my email but didn’t give me his. But I have the phone.
When I punch his contact into the Nokia, the only answer is a flat triple chirp of a disconnected line. I want to scream, but all that comes out is a sound like creaking hinges on a haunted house.
Don’t think about it. Keep enduring. I have our bags and a few weeks’ worth of blood. I’ll get my fucked-up car, and I’ll scour the state of Nevada mile by mile until I find her. Until I get my forgiveness.
In the kitchen, I smell rot.
Red on stainless steel. A trail no wider than my finger and only a little longer, trickling slowly from the bottom edge of the freezer door. I rip the freezer open, my heart in my throat.
Every single vial is smashed. The plastic grooves of the freezer bottom are soaked with blood.
Slushy and slow moving, crawling its way toward me.
Twisting in the glittering wreckage, the forsaken shards drawing red lines across their fat, segmented bodies, are fistfuls of the flayed man’s white worms.
Hysteria claws at me. My mom fed recently, but I haven’t since yesterday. I drag a finger through the pooling remnants, trying to avoid the broken glass. The smell of it makes me gag. I try not to breathe as I stick it in my mouth. Even tainted blood can sustain us, can’t it?
Then I’m doubled over the sink, spitting, then heaving up foamy pink liquid, bright spots bursting across my vision and my curse howling as if to say, poison, poison, poison.
The flayed man’s sick blood will do nothing for my hunger.
I sob, once, and then I can’t stop. I don’t care if the neighbors call the cops.
They’re already coming. I know life isn’t fair—if it was, I wouldn’t have been born an abyss with teeth, but just for once, why can’t it be simple?
Why can’t it be easy? We never had a chance.
Fuck, we’ve never had a chance. All my life, I’ve been running, and I was ready to do it again, and now what?
My mouth is too dry and my throat is too raw and my eyes are swelling shut from crying.
I can still smell the flayed man, faintly, the way the gritty, unwashed stink of body odor seeps around strong cologne.
He caught my scent, but I caught his too.
My curse’s senses are sharper than mine. If I let it run, will it find him?
All I can do is reach past my lungs to where my curse snaps at its iron confines, and throw the lock.
This time, it runs with its head low and its jaws bared, arrow-sleek and single-minded.
The flayed man’s carrion stench fills my nose and turns my stomach.
The chain goes taut, pulling me toward the highway, toward the desert, rippling agony through my bones.
Pain shatters my wrists, and I wonder if this is the same pain my mom felt when the flayed man turned on her.
I bite my spit-slick tongue with razor canines and imagine my skin erupting with the same flower-petal cuts that dotted her arms. Will my bruises take the same shape as hers?
Pain overwhelms me, and there’s no more thoughts but this: it only stops if I can stop it. And right now, I don’t want to.
But years of obedience win out and I find myself curled before the wreckage of the freezer, the linoleum like ice on my overheated cheek, calm enough to think. My curse only gave me a direction, but it’s a start.
Two needs scrabble urgently inside me, nipping at each other, vying for dominance: I need to find my mom. And I need to find more blood before hunger takes me apart.
I choose my mom. I always have.
I need a car.
The mechanic looks at me like I’m crazy, but he returns my keys and lets me drive away with a still-busted windshield. Maybe he smells Joanne’s suffering still somewhere on my skin.
The Filipino market closes at 9:00, and I make it through the doors at 8:50.
It’s huge and concrete and fluorescent lit, and this time of night it’s as empty as a cemetery, just me and the miserable cashiers and a solitary auntie pushing a hand truck stacked with pale slabs of frozen chicken.
When she passes me in the aisle, I smell aspirin and strawberry candy and a heart drowning in fluid meant for the rest of her body.
I’m no longer a raging storm. I’m hollow.
I had to press warm washcloths over my eyes to get them open enough to see properly.
The Top 40 knockoff piped through the grocery store speaker warbles about late-night phone calls, and the disembodied beep of Brian’s disconnected phone echoes somewhere at the back of my skull.
I find the pig’s blood in the meat section at the back, packaged neatly next to shrink-wrapped lobsters and pasty sacks of uncooked fish balls.
I take two containers and grab a bag of Takis and a couple of pork skewers from the hot bar to make it look more like a normal grocery run.
The skewers smell good, like brown sugar and barbecue sauce. They’d smell better if they were raw.
The cashier is young, with brown lip liner and impossible lash extensions. I smell the filed-down edges of her acrylic nails, the musk she’s drowned in vanilla-floral perfume. I smell bitterness and late-night diaper changes and a stomach that wishes it still knew how to fill with butterflies.
“Find everything you need?” she deadpans.
“Yeah.”
“Great. $14.38.” She grabs a plastic bag, and her long black ponytail catches in the silver tinsel of a miniature Christmas tree on the checkout stand. Christmas was months ago. The speakers croon something about last summer and wanting her back.
I dig in my wallet and find I have exact change. That would feel lucky, if it weren’t for everything else.
Hunched in my back seat in the darkest corner of the parking lot, I suddenly miss the inane music in the grocery store.
The quiet is suffocating. I pop the lid off the pig’s blood, pull it into a syringe.
It smells like floor cleaner and manure and an itchy not-quite-rightness, like the embarrassed prickle of calling out to someone you think is a friend but turns around to reveal a stranger.
That doesn’t stop it from making my mouth water and my sinuses sing.
Make a fist. Metal meets skin. Out of habit, I tense for the rush of euphoria, for the dissolving of my limbs and the soar of my heart, but it doesn’t come. Just a vague weakening of the relentless beat of hunger.
It won’t be enough for long.