Cold Springs(30)

She hated her mother for sending her here. She hated Chadwick for catching her.

Most of all, she hated the memory his presence had sharpened—Katherine's face, her cold fingers on Mallory's knee, her smile when she said, Hold it for me. I want you to, Mal. I love you.

Mallory's definition of love had been formed that night. Someone makes you admire them, need them, want their approval, and then they abandon you, leave you holding . . . something. A necklace. Pain. Their blackest thoughts. Their path.

It had taken Mallory years to get angry about that. She had grown up deathly afraid she would end up like Katherine, but when she tried talking about it to her parents, her counselor, her teachers, she saw no reassurance in their eyes, just the exact same terror. They handled her as if she'd been infected, as if the silver necklace around her neck was a vial of nitroglycerin. They gave her doe eyes. They used gentle voices. If she threw a fit, they retreated. Just like Katherine—always turning to smoke.

And so Mallory had gotten angry. Fuck, yes, she would keep the necklace. She would be Race's friend. Fuck, yes, she would try heroin. She would validate their fear. She would leave them holding her childhood pictures, wondering what the hell had gone wrong. That was love.

“You will rest when it's time to rest,” Dr. Hunter yelled. “You will work when it's time to work. You will do what you are told, and you will save your own life before you get out of here. That, ladies and gentleman, is a promise. You will find I keep my promises.”

She tried to push away the anger, the desire to scream cuss words until they taped her mouth. She thought about home—about Race, and the world of trouble she'd left him in.

She couldn't be gone now.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Talia Montrose—the ragged cuts, the way her fingers had curled into claws, the fat black fly walking along her eyelid. The sound that had come from Race's throat—the raw, hollow moan that was beyond pain—the sound of some animal that had never learned language. The look he had given her—not saying anything, not accusing, but knowing damn well it was all her fault. Her father had threatened to do something like this. And still she and Race had stayed together. They had run. They had slept in places too horrible to remember, on mattresses that stank of urine and grease. They had made awkward love—the first time, despite what their parents had thought—driven together by pain and fear and the need to believe there was something that could burn the image of death out of their brains. She had tried to comfort him. They had tried to make a plan. Race had pressed the money into her hand, said, “I can get more. I will. Keep this for now, until we're ready to leave.”

She wanted to believe Race's beautiful vision—that they could run away together. Race had wonderful dreams, better than anything Mallory ever had.

But at the same time, she had delayed. She had dragged her feet, kept them from leaving Oakland. Part of her craved trouble the way she craved heroin—the way she wanted to lie down and feel the rumble of the BART tracks until the sky turned black and the world ended. Part of her wanted to follow Katherine into that darkened bedroom and close the door.

No, Mallory told herself. Just survive. Just get out.

And so she marched, the man with the body bag screaming in her peripheral vision, as if he'd always been there, waiting for her to step in the wrong direction.

7

Another week of pickups—New York, Utah, St. Louis, Belize. Chadwick chased a boy across a rooftop, collared him at the TV aerials, and dragged him down five flights of stairs by the scruff of his neck. He pulled a girl out of an underage prostitution ring after breaking a two-by-four over her pimp's head with a little too much relish.

Olsen did her job with quiet efficiency. She related well to the kids, treated them with the right mix of respect and firmness. She had no more nervous moments, betrayed no further scent of fear. She performed better than most of the young women he'd trained that year—always women, since Hunter's rules stipulated a male and female escort must work together on every assignment—but the whole week, she said maybe a dozen sentences off-duty. He could feel her slipping away, withdrawing from the job, just like so many others.

The dropout rate for new escorts was eighty percent. The work was just too intense. It didn't take long for the rookie to hit a job that really unnerved her—a situation that resonated in her nightmares like a diminished chord. For Olsen, for whatever reason, it had been the Mallory Zedman pickup.

They got back to Texas late Friday night.

Saturday morning, after four hours' sleep, Chadwick was sitting on the deck of the Big Lodge, proctoring a White Level study hall. He had his cell phone in his hand, tapping his thumb lightly on the numbers.

At the picnic tables behind him, a dozen white levels were bent to their work—writing essays, studying for AP exams or SATs.

The morning was crisp and cool as the underside of a pillow, the sky scratched with high winter clouds, sunlight gilding the hills and the wings of redtail hawks. The white levels didn't seem to notice. They labored so quietly that a family of deer had gathered to graze the hillside not a hundred yards away.

The last year of his marriage, living in San Francisco, Chadwick had often fantasized about the Texas Hill Country. He had imagined starting every day here, teaching kids in this setting, reinventing young lives. Now here he was, thinking only about San Francisco.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on 1994, the year he'd started escorting.