Vacations from Hell

“My mother would cook the onions for hours,” he said. “In two bottles of wine. She would add them slowly, drip by drip.”



Smack, smack, smack. He whacked each clove of garlic, shattering the papery skin and breaking it off with his fingers. Marylou looked at me sideways and tried again. The heat and humid stench of onions in the room took my breath away.



“A phone,” she said. “We need to call the police. He attacked Charlie.”



“He attacked you?” Henri asked, not sounding overly concerned. “This surprises me.”



“He did,” Marylou assured him, thus spreading my lie. “Well, he cannot hurt you here. Sit down. It will be fine here. You are safe here. My wife…but she is not here right now.”



There was a strange omission in the sentence.



“Do you know this movie?” he asked, pointing the onion-sticky knife at the screen. “It is very American, but I enjoy it. Watch.”



“The police,” Marylou said again.



Henri went right on chopping. I had to do something—look around for a phone, a computer, something. Marylou had stashed the pipe under her slicker. If anything went wrong, hopefully she would use it.



“The bathroom,” I said, falling back on my old excuse. “Could I…”



He waved the knife as permission.



In the dark, knowing what I knew now…nothing was more horrible than those dark steps, the dozen photos of Henri’s wife. I have never felt so frightened. So alone. So doomed.



So when I got to the top of the steps and Gerard clapped his hand over my mouth and pulled me into the bathroom, I was actually quite relieved. His other arm wrapped around my body, holding me still. He leaned in very close to me, so close that I could feel his warmth and smell the light smell of sweat and the outdoors and feel his breath on my ear.



“I followed you here,” he said very quietly. “I climbed up a tree and came in through the window. I weel let you go. Do not scream. I trust you not to scream.”



He released my mouth and then me.



“Why did you say I attacked you?” he asked.



“I had to say something,” I whispered to him. “Something to get Marylou to leave.”



Gerard looked a bit hurt but nodded.



“You should never have come here….”



“It was Marylou,” I said.



“Henri has a car. I don’t know where the keys are. When you go downstairs, you find the keys, and you take them. And then you put your sister in the car and drive out of here. You are all right as long as Henri is alive. Get to safety. Get to the police—”



“You want me to steal his car?”



“Eet is better than the alternative. Do what I say this time. Please.”



I don’t know why I was listening to Gerard. Of the two people involved in this, he was considerably weirder. All Henri had done was tell us history and make soup. Gerard won the crazy race by a mile, on the face of things, but still…I believed him. I believed that Henri had done something very, very terrible and that we were in a lot of danger.



“Marylou is not going to come along if I steal a car,” I said, steadying myself against the wall.



“No,” he said with a nod. “She will have to be taken unwillingly. Knock her out. I can help you with that. I will wait outside, and when you come out with the keys, I will punch her. Eet will be very quick. She will feel eet later, but eet is better than the alternative.”



Here he was with “the alternative” again, all the while casually talking about creeping out of the darkness and punching my sister in the face.



“What?” I said.



“I know how to do eet.”



“How?”



“I was a lifeguard,” he said plainly. “You learn to do this when people struggle in the water. You need to hit the jaw. Getting punched is—”



“I know,” I said. Clearly the phrase “better than the alternative” was one Gerard had mastered in his English lessons. Not that I knew what he meant. “Isn’t there another way? And are you saying that this alternative—”



“You do not have time to wait. Go back down there and look for the keys and—”



Before he could say any more, the door swung open, and Henri stood there, with a small hunting rifle in his hands.



“Bonsoir, Gerard,” he said.



Henri moved us both down to the kitchen. His gun was on Gerard the entire time, but I felt pretty certain that he wouldn’t have particularly objected to using it on me. When we got down there, he made Gerard sit in a chair, and politely asked Marylou to tie him to it with a spool of rope he had by the door: ankles and wrists.