Elina

I’m not sure whether this is a good development or a bad one.

Joe shook me awake in the dead of night, tossed me back in the trunk without even retying my hands, and now we’re... I don’t even know where. Somehow, he got it into his head Nick could see us, Nick was sending helicopters for us—and his solution was to drag us to a place so run-down, so pathetic it’s probably not even on any map.

The good: even he’s got to know this is no place for a four-year-old. As long as we’re here, Joey should be safe.

The bad: everything else—oh my God! This place is like something out of a slasher flick. There’s a one-room cabin with no apparent source of heat, which is where we’re holed up. Then, there’s twin outhouses marked LADIES and GENTS, and a rusted-out trailer on the other side of the clearing. In the summer—some long-ago summer—this place was probably a campground. There’s a corkboard, long since fallen to the floor, with colorful tags spilling off it. You probably drove up in your RV, came to this cabin, and got one of those tags to prove you’d rented a space. Somewhere nearby, there’ll be a lake or a river for swimming. Probably a barbecue pit.

I worked at a place like this in high school, policing up chip bags and beer cans, shoveling lime down the long-drop johns. It was fun. They had a waterfall everyone used for showering, and a nightly hot-dog roast.

This, on the other hand, bites the big one. I pull the duvet closer around me. It smells like mold, vomit, and wet paint, just like everything else from that godawful house. And it’s doing jack shit to keep me warm. My teeth are chattering.

“We need... We need to build a fire.”

“We can’t.” Joe goes to the window. Three out of four panes are cracked or broken.

“Seriously, my toes are turning blue. And we’ve been up here for hours. No one’s coming.”

“You don’t know that.” He cranes his neck to look at the sky.

“We’d hear it if they were. Come on—untie my feet. I’ll get some water. If we just do a small fire, we can douse it right away if—“

“They have drones now. Totally silent. We need to stay out of sight. Stay away from the windows.” He steps back.

I think about telling him a cabin in the woods is easily the worst place to hide if someone’s seriously looking. It’s isolated. It’s obvious. And police helicopters have infrared. Staying out of sight won’t save you if they come looking.

Maybe he’ll take me back to the city if I tell him that. We can lose ourselves in the crowd, and then I can lose him.

Then again, maybe he’ll cut my throat: one less heat source for the cops to pick up on.

I let myself entertain the fantasy that Nick really does know where we are, that he’s on his way, even now. It’s not totally impossible. He could have some...some secret Boy Scout training I don’t know about. He could be following our tracks even now, wending deeper and deeper into the woods. Or he could be here already, skulking outside, waiting for Joe to let down his guard.

Joe pushes his way under the duvet, ruining the fantasy. I force myself not to shrink away as he cuddles close for warmth.

“Remember this, Ellie?”

“Hm?”

“Last time we came to a place like this.”

My head spins. I have literally no idea what he’s talking about. “You mean, when....”

He nods like I’ve actually said something meaningful. “Yeah. When we drove up to Niagara Falls. We stopped at that place with the amazing fries, and that grackle flew off with half of yours.”

“And you ate the other half.”

“Well, you didn’t want them.”

“They were all birdy!” I feel gross reminiscing with him, like this is even a good memory. I want to remind him why we went to the Falls, how it was meant to be his last big adventure, before he started fake chemo. How it cost me most of what I had left, after his fake biopsies and fake radiation already drained my real college fund.

“The Falls were something else, though. Majestic. One of those things that’s gotta be experienced.”

I nod. Can’t seem to dredge up anything to say about that.

“There were like...five rainbows at once, and you couldn’t even look directly at the water with the sun shining through the mist. Like the whole air was sparkling. Remember what you said?”

I wish I didn’t.

“You said, let’s come back here every year. When Junior’s old enough to remember. You got him that Maid of the Mist bear. I still have that. Bet he misses it.”

He never played with that stupid thing.

“Let’s go back, once this craziness dies down, once we’re all back together.”

Over my dead body.

“We can finally have that wedding. Junior can carry the rings. We’ll do it on the Canadian side, and stay there after. Where no one’s looking for us.”

I should encourage that. If the shit really does hit the fan, and we all end up on the run, the border cops’ll catch us. They’ll see how scared I am, pull us over, and the nightmare will end. “Canada, eh?” I put on my doofiest Canuck accent. “That’s aboot the best idea I’ve heard all day. Hoser. Loonies. Milk in bags.”

Joe laughs. He seems to be relaxing. Maybe he’ll fall asleep. If I can wriggle out from under the duvet without him noticing, maybe he’ll freeze to death. Maybe I’ll freeze to death, too, staggering through the woods with no shoes or coat. He confiscated those after my first escape attempt.

Then again, if he dies, I can take his shoes and coat.

Maybe I can kill him.

Probably not.

He’s still droning on about the wedding, how I’ll wear a flower tiara, and Joey’ll have a tiny tux. How we’ll write our own vows, and exchange them under a white rose bower. It’ll just be the two of us, but that’ll be fine, because we don’t need anyone else to be happy.

On the grand scale of injustices, this is minor, this is nothing, but... We planned a wedding together. He has to remember that—it wasn’t that long ago. I wanted family, tradition, everyone I loved in attendance. Candles, not roses. Wedding crowns, not flower tiaras. Dancing and singing for days. The way he’s ignoring all that only serves to bring it home: I’m not real to him. Not even his son is real to him. We’re all just...side-characters in the story of his life. He’s dreaming his dream, by himself. I’m not sure exactly when he stopped pretending to care what I think, but it feels like a long time ago.

Outside, something rustles. Joe stiffens against my side. “What was that?”

“Probably a squirrel. Want to shoot it?” Please be Nick. Please be Nick—please be someone! I prick up my ears, but there’s nothing more to hear.

“Should’ve brought a gun....” I get the sense he doesn’t mean for squirrels...and I’m incredibly glad he didn’t.

“Just ignore it. It’s freezing. I’m freezing.” And maybe it is Nick, scuffling around out there. It did kind of sound like a shoe in the dirt... Or maybe that’s wishful thinking. Either way, keeping Joe distracted isn’t a bad idea. “What about—what about after the wedding? The honeymoon? Would that be in Canada too?”

He shoots me a suspicious look, but the bait’s too good. “Niagara-on-the-Lake. It’s like...Canadian wine country. We can get our own little place on the edge of town. Start a peach orchard.”

Acres of peach trees in Canadian wine country. Yeah. That sounds affordable. “Sounds like heaven,” I murmur. I can’t keep the disgust off my face as I rest my head on his shoulder. Doesn’t matter. He can’t see from this angle.

“It’ll be great,” he says. I can’t see his face, either, but I know the expression that goes with this tone of voice: dreamy, distant, enraptured. Back when I was eighteen, it made me weak in the knees. Thought he was some kind of sensitive soul. Especially when he got going on one of his speeches—Joe could make anything sound good. But now I’m tuning him out, straining my ears for the slightest indication we’re not alone.

The woods are never silent. I used to be pretty good at distinguishing ambient sounds from human sounds, but it’s been a while. And I’m a city girl at heart. That scrape—that might’ve been Nick peering in the back window, or a low-hanging branch grazing the roof. And that tiny patter—a boot scattering pebbles? Or a mouse tripping across the stoop?

I need to get the rope off my ankles. If there is someone out there, I want to be ready to make a break for it.

“Quit wiggling.”

Shit. Can’t move my arms with him battened onto me like a moth on a tree trunk. Got to get rid of him, at least for a minute.

I cough. “Could you—could you at least get us some water?”

“Didn’t bring any.”

Seriously? “Then you need to find some before dark. There’s got to be a stream or something—I think I can even hear it.” There is kind of a rushing sound, off to the east.

“Can you even drink stream water? Without getting sick?”

“You can if you boil it.”

“We’re not building a—“

“We have to. At least when it gets dark. Or we’ll freeze to death. Nobody’s going to come out here at night, anyway.”

“I said no fire!” He surges to his feet. For a second, I’m convinced he’s going to kick me. I scuttle backward till my ass hits the wall. “What the hell’s the matter with you? I’m just going to check the car. I think there’s some Gatorade in the back.”

“Sorry....”

He storms off. That wasn’t elegant, but at least I got what I wanted. He left the car half a mile away, under the canopy of what was once a picnic area. Hidden from any inquisitive drones, I guess. That’s got to buy me at least fifteen, twenty minutes.

The second the door slams, I’m picking at the knots: slow and steady, no panicked scrabbling this time. By the time he comes back, I want to be sitting here with the rope wrapped around my ankles, in case he checks—but tied to nothing but itself.