The Running Girls(10)

His knee screamed in pain as he approached the shoreline, but the view was worth it. Strange how the mere sight of the rolling waves could so instantly infuse in him such a sense of peace. It was the one thing he’d had in common with Annie from the beginning; probably the thing that had kept them together all those years.

In too much pain to continue, he dropped to the sand once more, his bones rattling as he landed. Beneath the gray skyline, the outlines of the oil refineries in the shadowy distance gave the whole scene an alien aspect. It was truly like nowhere else on Earth and the ache of loss he’d endured in prison—both for Annie and for this place—returned to him. He’d lost his wife, his family, and, for the last sixteen years, his home. There was little else they could take from him.

He closed his eyes, and for a second he escaped his body. He was running along the shoreline once more, his heart pounding as he scythed through the sand, knowing that Annie was waiting at home for him.

When he opened his eyes, he thought about the area where Annie’s body was discovered, on the approach to Camino Real. He could pinpoint the exact spot. Thickets of trees and wild grass decorated a two-hundred-yard stretch of land next to a channel of water. Blood raced through Randall’s veins at the memory. He hated the way nature had continued unabated by his wife’s death; the world should have stopped turning at that very moment. He touched his face, remembering where Annie had struck him that day. The outburst of violence was as much of a shock these sixteen years later as it had been then. Her actions had been so out of character that he’d stood there, dumbstruck, as a rage he’d never seen before glared out at him from her green eyes, the letter she’d found held tightly in her hand. The swelling in his face had never fully gone down; he could still feel the slight curve around his eye. It felt fitting that the injury that had effectively led to his imprisonment had never completely healed.

As his frail body settled deeper into the sand, he thought about how he would give up everything just to revisit that moment with Annie. To hold her after she confronted him with the letter and struck him. To rectify the situation, instead of allowing her to walk away.

“Now why the hell are you sitting in the sand like some kind of lizard? Don’t you know there’s a storm coming?”

A shiver ran down Randall’s spine at the sound of that voice. He summoned only an incomplete memory before turning around to face its source, wondering how he’d forgotten the face of the man staring down at him with his hand outstretched.





Chapter Five


The image of the man’s face was blurred by the glare of the sun from behind him, the glow surrounding his features making him look like an angel.

“What are you doing here, Maurice?” Randall asked.

“If the mountain will not come to Mohammed . . .”

Maurice was Randall’s elder brother by four years. As they shook hands, Randall scanned his memories for the last time he’d seen him. However long it had been, the years had been as unkind to Maurice as they had to him. In Maurice, he saw a slightly bulkier version of himself. His eyes even carried the same haunted look, as if they expected something to happen at any second, the skin surrounding them an array of interwoven, haphazard lines and grooves.

Letting go of his brother’s hand, Randall was struck by an unknown fear. Although they were out in the open, he felt trapped, cornered. The sky felt low, as if the clouds were falling toward him.

He stared up at his brother. “How did you find me?” he asked.

“Where else would you be?” Maurice’s eyes scrunched together in concentration, as if he were trying to read Randall’s thoughts.

Maurice was a preacher, or had been. Randall had no way of knowing if that was still true. He couldn’t, for the life of him, remember the last time his brother had entered his thoughts. Certainly not since his release. Even in those indeterminable days in his cell, he couldn’t recall once thinking about the man who was staring back at him now as if he were trying to unravel a particularly tricky puzzle.

“I need to go home,” said Randall, the sense of entrapment yet to dissipate.

“Here, let me help you,” said Maurice, taking him by the elbow after seeing him falter.

The pain in his knee had flared to life, and he grimaced as Maurice hauled him to his feet.

The sky and land could sometimes play tricks on you, and Randall found himself back outside his house as if no time had passed at all.

“After all that happened,” said Maurice, as Randall unlocked the door, “I can’t understand why you would want to return here.”

“It’s my home.”

Inside, Maurice lifted a family picture from the mantelpiece. Wiping dust from the glass, he said, “Does it help you face up to what you did?”

Randall didn’t much care for the way his brother stared at the picture of Annie and David. “It’s my home, right or wrong. It’s where I belong.”

“You’ve done your penance, Frank. There’s no need for you to be living here with these ghosts of what you once were.”

“What would you have me do?” said Randall, heating coffee for them both at the stove.

“That’s why I’m here. I want you to come live with me.”



Randall wound down the window of Maurice’s truck, as the vehicle shook and jarred its way down the path. The sense of claustrophobia had returned, his chest tight as he sucked in the air from outside. He looked behind him to see his duffel bag in the back seat of the car. A fragment of memory came back to him from earlier. Him falling faint, and Maurice handing him some water as he loomed over him. They’d talked but Randall couldn’t recall much about their conversation, though at some point he must have agreed to this journey.