Cold Springs(37)

Then the scene shifted, as cleanly as a holographic picture, and her dad was behind the driver's seat.

Mallory knew, with the logic of dreams, that she was now ten years old as well as six, and her parents had just gotten divorced. Her dad had spotted her walking home from school, pulled her into his car to explain—to apologize for being mean, for yelling, for making her mother run away with Mallory a few months before, the sleeves of Mallory's pajamas trailing from a hastily packed suitcase.

“I didn't mean to scare you,” he said, his hand clamped on her wrist, his eyes like a madman's.

Her mother's words rang in her head, Stay away from him, Mallory. I'm sorry, but we both have to. I'm afraid he'll hurt . . . someone.

Her dad told her the divorce hadn't been his idea. Her mother was keeping them apart. Her mother had bad ideas about how to raise her. He wanted custody of her. He wanted to be with Mallory. Didn't she want that, too?

And Mallory knew full well what her parents had been arguing about, the night her father hit her mother. She remembered their words through her bedroom wall, the sound that ended the yelling—like a sheet of Styrofoam cracked over a knee.

She asked her dad, “Why do you hate Race?”

His eyes closed, his fingers still biting into her wrist. He put his forehead on the steering wheel and started to cry. His weeping scared her more than the look in his eyes, or the grip of his hand, or even the sound of him striking her mother.

The dream shifted again and it was Pérez, her dad's bodyguard, behind the wheel. Mallory was fifteen—her last weekend visit to her dad's, their last huge argument, just a few weeks ago.

Pérez had been driving her to school on Monday morning—Mallory trying to ignore him, trying not to concentrate on the baseball-sized fear that swelled in her gut whenever her dad left her alone with this man.

A lot of her friends' parents had au pairs, or drivers, or personal assistants. But nobody had a Pérez—someone with no soul behind his eyes.

Usually, he would take her straight to school, toss her overnight bags onto the curb without a word and leave, her friends watching from behind the fence, coming up to her afterward and saying, “Shit, Mal. That guy carries, doesn't he? What is your dad—like the mafia? That is so cool.”

And her hands would curl into fists, because these were the same friends who asked if she was “done” with Race yet, if she was tired of slumming, hanging with the homeboy.

But the morning she was dreaming about, Pérez took a detour.

He pulled over in front of the Mill Valley Safeway, and when Mallory demanded what he was doing, he said, “You bring your father nothing but grief. I'm telling you right now, you better stop.”

“Fuck you,” she told him.

But his eyes absorbed the words like they absorbed everything about her. It was as if she were just a shape in a storm cloud, not worth treating as human.

Then she was ten, and it was Pérez holding her wrist. Then she was six, and Pérez was pointing at the Montrose house, saying, “Wasn't for them, you little whore, your dad would be okay. He won't tell you that, but I will.”

“I'll tell my father you talked to me that way,” Mallory said. “He'll fire you.”

“You say anything,” Pérez said, “your boyfriend's going to be scattered off the Farallon Islands for shark chum. You understand me?”

And she knew—the same way she knew Dr. Hunter wasn't kidding, or Leyland, or any of the damn Cold Springs instructors—she knew Pérez was serious.

“Your dad wants to be with you,” Pérez said. “He has it all planned out. But these people—they mess him up, keep a gun to his head; he still tries to solve it peaceful, because he doesn't want to hurt you. And what do you do for him? You disrespect him. You say you don't want to come for weekends anymore. You know what I think?”

Katherine was hurrying down the sidewalk of the Montrose house now, her breath steaming, a brown paper bag in her hand. Six-year-old Mallory was bouncing in her chair, worried that Katherine would run straight into Pérez.

“I think you better change,” Pérez told her. “Cut that boy loose, before we do it for you.”

Ten-year-old Mallory tried to yank away her hand from Pérez, but now the grip was her daddy's—and as much as she feared her father, and hated him sometimes, she didn't want to hear him cry. She didn't want to leave him forever.

A voice was calling from the Montrose house, someone standing on the porch, calling to Katherine. Someone had been in the doorway of the house that night, watching Katherine leave, telling her goodbye—visible only for a second.

Why hadn't Mallory remembered before?

She tried to look, to see who it was, but the shape made her afraid.

“I will make him stay away,” her father was saying. “I have to.”

Something was out of place. Something was wrong with Pérez's words, and her father's. Something about the shape in the doorway.

Then Katherine opened the door of the Toyota, sank into the driver's seat, straight into Pérez's body.

And Mallory's eyes snapped open.

Instructors were yelling, rousting her out of her sleeping bag. Their flashlights cut arcs across the darkness, illuminating the cinder block walls of the barracks.