Page 114 of The Quiet Tenant

He runs after his daughter.

CHAPTER 78

The woman, almost there

“We have to go.”

Your neck hurts. Pain pulses at the back of your head. Shit. It must have happened during the drop, when you went careening into the ditch.

You do not have time to hurt. You do not have time to check that your body still works as expected.

“We have to go now,” you tell her.

The pistol. You still have the pistol. You reach for it under your sweater. Your face hardens.

In a few seconds, he’ll catch up with you.

“Get out,” you say.

She listens. You have the gun, so she listens.

You step out. It’s frigid outside. Here you are—outside, without him. Gun in hand. A brief inventory: ice on the road, icicles dripping from the trees that line it.

Your bare feet burn against the frozen ground. You can’t slip. Can’t fall. A fall would bring this whole enterprise to a tragic end.

Hurry up.

You link your fingers around the girl’s wrist. The two of you, one.

“Come on.”

There is no time, no time at all. You climb out of the ditch, pull her after you, onto the asphalt.

One stride, then two.

You find your pace. You urge her forward and she follows, smooth and malleable, not because she trusts you but because you have a gun and she is a girl in a body, tender and exposed.

Soon you’re running. Your body propels the both of you. With every step, the town gets closer.

Search. You saw it in the guidebooks. On the map. A small icon like an officer’s badge. In the basement, you followed the road withyour finger, from the Butcher Bros. to the Wishing Well to the town center. You have to trust you got it right.

Somewhere in the distance, the Honda screeches. Doors slam. A scream. His voice. He found you, just like he promised he would.

You run for you and you run for her and it has to be enough. Maybe she looks back. Maybe she tries to reverse course, every fiber of her pulling her back to the truck, back to him. Back to the hands that held her when she was born and fed her when she was hungry, to the eyes that watched her on the playground and the ears that listened for her cries in the night.

We gravitate toward the bodies that keep us alive.

He calls for her. You recognize the syllables, her name in his mouth, and this is bad news. If you can make out what he’s saying, then he is too close.

Something gives in. There is a lightness to your left, the same place where you felt his daughter pulling just moments ago.

You have lost her. He must have caught up with you, snatched her back from you.

So close.

You clutch the gun, think of the bullets you left back in the house, the magazines in the cardboard box. You regret not loading the pistol. You regret everything.

No.

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