There Will Be Lies (14 page)

Mom says she heard sirens behind us, but we figure they won’t know what car we’re in – no one even stepped out of the diner when we ran. So they’re not going to be able to follow us. That’s Mom’s thinking, anyway. I don’t know if she’s right.

Yes
, says Mom.

Wow
, I say. Anya Maxwell is kind of a legendary figure – she smashed her husband’s head in like fifteen years ago with a kitchen TV. He bled out and got electrocuted too – the Double Death, they called it. Later it turned out, because all her friends came forward, that he’d been beating her and raping her for years, and she’d just snapped. So she became a sort of heroine to some feminists, and then got even more famous when she skipped bail and disappeared, totally.

It’s a bit like that whole Elvis-being-alive thing – people say, if someone’s a bit mysterious,
maybe she’s Anya Maxwell
. That kind of thing. Now, the idea that this woman is my mother is just disorienting. All my life, she’s been Shaylene Cooper, and now she’s Anya Maxwell, and it’s like someone just took a big tug on the earth beneath me and pulled it a thousand miles along, like a rug, so I’m living on some totally other part of the world.

You cut off the TV in the motel room, didn’t you?
I say.

Yes. I couldn’t afford for the news to come on
.

Wow
, I say again.

We pass a sign that says APACHE/YAVAPAI NATION 3 MILES: it is pointing down a side road. I think of the Dreaming, the elks and the Crone and the Child, and whether if we went down that road I could find some wise elder or something, ask them some questions.

But we continue past it, and the forest keeps flickering past.

Eventually Mom pulls over at a rest stop. There’s a short section of desert south of Flagstaff, similar to the scrubland where we saw the petroglyphs, then you get up on to the forest plateau again, where the pines start to crowd in. There’s a sign that says PRESCOTT NATIONAL FOREST 5 MILES. It doesn’t occur to me to ask why we’re heading back in the direction of Phoenix.

I just
… she says.
I couldn’t go to prison. Not with you. You were so young – losing you like that, it would have broken my heart. So I took you, and I ran. I changed my name. I changed my job
.

So
…
Alaska
…

A lie. I’m sorry. I had to keep you safe
. Her hands when she gesticulates don’t look human any more; they look like starfish flapping. And it’s a cliché, but my head is spinning. I mean really spinning, like vertigo. I feel like I’m going to throw up.

Then Mom saying ‘lie’, like that, makes me think of something – of the coyote, before my accident, saying there will be two lies and then there will be the truth. My dad wanting to kill us, that was the first lie, right? So what if this is the second?

I feel as if my body is dropping through thin air, my stomach rising.

Anya Maxwell didn’t have a daughter
, I say slowly.

They kept you secret
, says Mom.
To protect you
.

Right
, I say.

She frowns at me.
From my reputation, you know. And from knowing that I killed your dad, I guess. Then when I took you they never changed the story, I don’t know why. Maybe it would have looked weird
.

Uh-huh
, I say.
Mom, are you lying to me right now?

She looks so shocked I instantly feel bad.
What? Why would I lie to you about this? You’re my only girl. My little princess
.

And you’re Anya Maxwell
.

Yes. Anya Maxwell, who had a daughter the authorities kept quiet about, and who knew that people would be looking for her. For her and her teenage girl
.

Oh
, I say, realising something.
So when we were with Luke, you didn’t break our engine just to change cars, you did it because
…

… Because I knew they’d be looking for a woman and a girl. Not a family. Or what seemed like a family
.

Suddenly, everything is clear. That line on the closed caption:

Police think these images may just show An
–

Police think this may be Anya fricking Maxwell.

Though I guess the person typing out the closed captions probably wouldn’t have included the fricking. This, though – this is why Mom stabbed Luke through the hand, nailing him to the table. So that he wouldn’t pick up on the news story.

But
… I say.
Can’t you turn yourself in? I mean, I’m older now. I could come visit you, we could
–

No way
, says Mom.
The DA was pushing for the electric chair. It was California, remember?

California?
I say.
I thought we lived in Alaska
.

Well
… says Mom.
I had to protect you
.

God
, I say.
But your husband … my dad … he was hurting you
.

There’s no material evidence. Only witness testimony
.

She starts to cry, suddenly, and something clicks inside me, some cog, and I lean over and put my hands around her. Then my stomach flips and I pull away.

Luke!
I say.

Yeah
, says Mom, still crying.
That was unfortunate
.

His hand
… In my head, it runs again, like a rewound video – the blade, sticking out of his flesh, the blood spurting. The memory of it is jagged in my head, uncomfortable, sharp-edged. It hurts me; I can’t imagine how much it hurt him.

It’ll be fine
, says Mom.
No arteries
.

It’ll be FINE?

She closes her eyes, for a moment.
Sorry
, she says.
Sorry. It was the only thing I could think of. You know I wouldn’t normally do that, right? You know it was wrong?

Uh, yes, Mom, I know it was wrong. You impaled his hand. And what do you mean you wouldn’t normally do that? You were all ready to smash his head in with a rock
.

She blinks.
But I didn’t
.

Because I tripped you!

Sorry
, she says.
Sorry. I did stab him. I did, and I’m sorry for it. I wish I hadn’t had to. But he would have seen, or heard. You understand that, don’t you? He would have realised. Who I was. Who you were
.

Yes
, I say.

And then
…
I would have lost you. I can’t lose you
.

She’s crying hard now, and I touch the tears on her cheek.
It’s OK, Mom
, I say,
I get it
.

Thank you
, she says.

We sit there for a while in silence.

Then Mom takes a long deep breath, scrubs her face with her hands. She turns to me. A glint in her eye.
Anyway
, she says slowly,
now he’ll have a story to tell about himself, for once
.

I can’t help it – I laugh. It’s awful, it’s terrible, but I laugh. And then Mom is laughing too, and we sort of have to hold on to each other, because we get all hysterical. It’s funny! And also tragic and disgusting and appalling. But funny too!

When we come back to our senses, Mom starts the car and pulls out, indicating carefully. We follow I-17 another few miles. Forest flickers past the window of the car, the trees different and the same. It’s like someone is shuffling a deck of cards, with pictures of trees on them. Then Mom sees a sign for the Prescott National Forest again, and she turns off. We pass a gas station, fluorescent lit, and Mom pulls up.

Wait here
, she says.

She goes into the store and I wait. The engine is still running. I watch a wasp crawl across the windshield. I start to feel nervous – we’re the only car parked here – but then Mom reappears, shielding her eyes from the low late-afternoon sun. She walks back to the car at what I think she imagines is an inconspicuous pace, only it looks suspicious to me.

But, you know, I saw what she did with the steak knife, so it’s not like I’m an unbiased observer.

I watch her pull something from her pocket, something dark like a Taser. Her face is all cold and hard determination.

Two lies, and then the truth.

I pull back into the seat, as if I could push myself through it, as if I was made of ectoplasm, thinking about how this was a person who would make a knife stand out of someone’s hand just to stop them from watching TV, and that this is a person, too, who knows that when I’m with her I slow her down.

A person who killed my dad.

A person who was willing to smash Luke’s brains in with a rock, and leave him to die in the middle of nowhere.

A person, I suddenly realise, who just might hit me with ten thousand volts and leave me behind, leave me to wake up on a kerb as policemen ask me questions and I just blink at them, like, what the hell?

I keep my eyes on her hand, raising the black object, and I brace myself.

What’s wrong with you?

Mom gets in and hands the black something to me – it’s a basic cell phone – keys big enough for a giant to operate. Then she gives me another one, identical.

I am shaking.
Nothing
, I say.
Nothing
.

One for you, one for me
, she says.
Your job is: programme my number into yours, and vice versa
.

What? Why?

They’re prepaid. No contract. The cops don’t know we have them
.

The COPS? What is this, TV?

OK, the police, whatever. Just keep yours on you
.

We’re together
, I say.

We may get separated
, she says.

I roll my eyes.
I can’t believe you got us burners, like on
The Wire, I say.

Mom shrugs.
What can I say. I love that show. Charge the cell tonight and keep it safe
.

So we’re on the run. And we have burner cells. It would be bitching if it wasn’t so totally weird and awful. In my mind’s eye, a flash,
like firework-afterburn: Luke’s hand again, the knife sticking out of it like a flag.

Mom checks a big fold-out map she also got in the 7-Eleven, then opens her purse, takes out her old cell phone, and tosses it out of the window. Then she pushes the lever from
P
to
D
and we pull out, pine needles crunching under the tyres. At a fork, Mom takes another turn on to a smaller highway.

It’s not the same road we were on before, and we follow it for maybe an hour – I don’t know; I programme the numbers into the cells, but then I think I fall asleep for a while.

Next I know, we’re turning on to another road, and then another. We’re in deep forest now, and I gasp.

There’s a canyon
, I say.

What?

A canyon
. I point – it’s not as big as the Grand Canyon, but it’s impressive, running alongside the road, a big gouge in the land, red rock descending to a ribbon of blue water. Pine trees hug the sides, and encompass us all around. We’re on little more than a dirt track, I realise.

A rabbit runs on to the track in front of us, startles, and dashes back into the bushes.

A little later, I see a deer flit through the trees beside us, on the forest side. It gives me a strange feeling to see them there. It’s getting harder and harder to remember what happened with Mark and the elks. And there were wolves, I think? But the dream has stuck with me, unsettling me, and now it’s as if it’s bleeding into reality, like newspaper print left behind on damp clothes.

Where are we going?
I ask.

Judge Ricardo’s cabin
, says Mom.
He’s not there at all this
week – his mom had a stroke. He had to fly back east. He got the call at the end of the day on Friday
.

You know where Judge Ricardo’s cabin is?

I know everything. I’m the stenographer
.

And sure enough, there’s another couple of turns, and then I see a log cabin in front of us, a little semicircle of gravel drive in front of it, all neat and tidy. It’s set into the side of a hill that rises up beside the canyon, and it looks down over it, over the river below and the trees and the rock.

And this river: it’s not like the creek we saw before, with Luke, slowly flowing, brown and green. This is swift, and foamy, and racing past – it is a true river.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a river before. I am entranced by it – by the way that it is always shifting, always moving, the ripple and the currents and the eddies, but at the same time it is one indivisible still thing. The effect is of something crumpled, but shining; tinfoil.

It’s beautiful. It feels like … like my dream, I realise, woozily. That same sense of no civilisation, of just primal nature, like there would have been a million years ago, when people hadn’t messed everything up. Though of course here, there’s obviously rain, because it isn’t all dry and broken.

It’s lush, and green, and there is luxuriant undergrowth everywhere and many colours of leaves.

We’ll be safe here
, says Mom as she gets out of the car.

She is wrong, but I don’t know that yet.

The cabin is incredible, when we finally get into it. We don’t have a key, of course, but we find one under a stone frog near the door. I guess if we hadn’t, Mom was going to bust out some previously unsuspected lock-picking skills, since she is all about surprising me these days.

The interior is all wooden floors with patterned rugs on them, and open fires, with big stone fireplaces. It’s bigger than it looked from outside, like a cottage in a fairy tale, and there are two big rooms for me and Mom, with king-size beds.

We both know, of course, that we can’t exactly stay here forever, but we deliberately don’t talk about what we’re going to do next.

There are cans in the kitchen – we make beans for dinner, and sausages. Then we share a can of peaches. In a cupboard we find enough bottled water to survive a nuclear holocaust.