Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(104)
She unrolls the blueprints on her butterfly-patterned bedspread and weighs them down with her mud-caked sneakers and paperback detective novels bought from grocery stores. She does not like what she finds. Every hallway and stairwell has alarm-triggered lockdown doors. The heating ducts are built with bars staggered through them to prevent the possibility of a crawl space. Every floor has a checkpoint, including the two that run belowground. The cells here are windowless and labeled high security. That is where he will be found.
Her mind plays through so many different scenarios. She imagines walking through the front door with a shotgun pressed to the throat of a hostage. She imagines short-circuiting the transformer to kill the electricity and then lighting a fire in the furnace ducts and sneaking in with the firefighters. She imagines following a guard home and duct-taping him to a chair and interrogating him about the layout and procedures of the center before donning his uniform and hoping she can somehow bluff her way inside.
She exercises every day—getting ready for what exactly, she doesn’t know. She only knows that she owes it to her husband, whom she no longer agrees with but of course still loves, to try to set him free. She has no doubt he is being tortured. She has no doubt he will be put to death. She thinks of him when she runs the hiking trails that thread the woods and when she dons a wet suit to swim in Puget Sound and when she uses the play structure at a local park for pull-ups—wide arm, close grip, underhands—and leg-lift crunches.
She can’t shake the feeling that she is being watched and carries a knife or a gun on her at all times and pauses often in doorways and on street corners. At night the motel window is like a liquid black eye that peers at her, and she draws the curtains over it and sleeps with a shotgun in the bed beside her like a lover whose oily smell and indention linger on the pillow.
One day the meth-head calls her sweetie and she gives him the finger and he calls her a cunt. The next morning she finds the Ramcharger’s front left tire slashed and she walks directly to his room and kicks open the door and finds him tweaking in the bathroom and smashes his face into the mirror and brings down the lid to the toilet tank on his back and tells him if he ever f*cks with her again he will die.
She parks at the All Star Grocery and rolls down the window and studies the FDC, not knowing what she is looking for but not knowing what else to do. She imagines her husband somewhere in the belly of the building. The first thing he ever said to her was that he liked the way she smelled. It wasn’t a line. It was how he felt, his nostrils flaring. He has always been like that, direct and aggressive and hungry and pursuant. That is what made him such a good leader and a bad husband. She has followed him all these years. Even now she follows him, his priorities her own.
One time, when they were still dating, still students at William Archer, they were tangled up on a futon and he said he was going to make love to her and there was nothing she could do about it. She said to him, “Do you always get what you want?” and he said, “Most of the time,” and she said, “Me too,” and grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him toward her.
When he spoke at rallies or gave lectures, she felt as she did when he made love to her—as if some glowing ball of energy was swelling inside her, heating her—and from the rapture in everyone else’s eyes she knew they felt the same. Sometimes, though, she tired of the ideology. Sometimes she pined for a normal life, normal conversation—paint the porch this and mow the grass that—soccer games and park playdates, backyard barbecues with neighbors. When their daughter died, that ball of light inside Miriam, that glow that sustained her over the years, unraveled into many strands that went black like burned-out lightbulb filaments.
Today she goes for a ten-mile run. A light rain mists the air. Wind comes off the sound and carries the smell of algae and dead fish. Crows gather in a tree barren of leaves and make its branches appear heavy with some black, poisonous fruit. They depart when she runs beneath them, their wings stirring the air, their shadows swirling all around her.
When she finally makes her way home to the motel, her lungs hot and her legs heavy, she keys the lock and checks the dusting of talcum powder on the floor. She keeps a tin by the door and every time she leaves she gives it a few shakes to see if anyone has tracked their way inside. Nothing.
She peels off her track pants and sweatshirt and stretches naked for a moment before walking to the bathroom and staring at her red-nosed reflection in the mirror. A hot shower will scald the chill out of her. The curtain is the same dark orange color as the carpeting. She drags it aside to crank on the water—and the tug of her arm reveals the giant crouched figure of Morris Magog waiting for her.
*
She is an old woman, a lycan, though it is hard to tell beneath the gray cover of her long coat and head scarf, her appearance more like a twisted branch or crooked pillar of stones. A few stray white hairs have escaped her trappings and blow around her face. She is slow moving, some of her steps crunching through the snow, some of them carrying her on top of the hardpack. She carries a quiver of arrows and an ash bow crossways over her shoulders. A large dog follows her—thick necked and long legged, with the sharp snout of a wolf—dragging behind it a sled mounded with snowy white rabbits, their bodies soon to be skinned and gutted and cooked, every last ligament and ribbon of meat harvested. They were killed by arrows or by snares and their bloodied furs match the battlefield that makes the woman pause and the dog whine.