Don't Look Back
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For Delinah Raya,
“Little Hercules”
Who proves year after year to be the
best choice I ever made
Contents
Use
all
your voices. When I bellow, bellow back.
—James Goldman,
The Lion in Winter
Life is so fucked-up now, and so complicated, that I wouldn’t mind if it came down, right quick, to the bare survival of who was ready to survive.
—James Dickey,
Deliverance
… he must not turn his eyes behind him, until he emerged from the vale of Avernus, or the gift would be null and void.
—Ovid,
Metamorphoses
Prologue
Terror came as a vibration, a plucked-wire note more felt than heard, primary to the deadening heat, to the flick of unseen insects against her face, to the oppressive night humidity that pressed into her pores. There was excitement, too, the familiar stomach-flipping rush of the “get” and the piano-trill naughtiness of being where she knew she shouldn’t be. But terror was paramount.
As Theresa stole along the trail leading upslope from the river into the jungle, mud caked the soles of her sneakers, making her legs wobbly with a sensation like floating. It wasn’t surreal so much as
un
real. Dewy orchids wet-kissed her legs, calves, and arms as she brushed through, her silver digital camera in hand, set to night-vision mode.
Appropriate, since she was on a night hunt of sorts.
She broke into the clearing. At the far edge, a fallen tree trunk lay like a parapet. Beyond, the earth dipped sharply into a canyon.
Breathing hard, she dropped to her stomach and army-crawled across the clearing, coarse stalks ticking her chin, insects stirring, dampness pressing through the knees of her hiking pants. But she couldn’t take any chances.
She reached the log and rested for a moment, hiding behind it. She thought of Grady as she most often did—laughing the belly laugh he’d had even as a baby, the one that could spread through a room, contagious. She knew that her being here had something to do with him—not just here in Mexico but here in this clearing well past dark, away from the safety of the lodge.
Readying her camera, she rose inch by inch and peered over the top of the log.
Down below at the base of the canyon, a squat concrete house sat backed into the far rise, earth spilling across its slab roof. Through the night-vision filter of her little camera, the world appeared green-tinted, an alien landscape.
One window was shoved open, a winking eye. Leaves bobbed around the frame’s edge. Blackness beyond.
He was inside.
Theresa’s head buzzed. For a moment all she heard was the thrumming of her heartbeat and the whine of flying bugs. She took a picture of the black square of the window. Zoomed in. Took another. And then several more.
One clear image. That’s all she hoped for.
It came as quick as the strike of a snake, a face morphing abruptly from the darkness, shadowed eyes oriented upslope, locked on her precise location.
Staring back up at her.
For an instant his dead gaze nailed her to the spot. And then she unclenched, a gasp escaping her lips, the camera slipping down from her panic-sweaty face. Lurching away from the log, she fumbled the silver case, feeling it fall through her slick fingers. As she scrambled to find her feet in the moist vegetation, she knew she couldn’t afford to search for the camera. The time for hunting was over.
Now she was prey.
Chapter 1
“How many…?” Her mouth was dry. “How many times?”
Rick looked up at her from his perch on the faux-leather chair, elbow resting on the desk they’d crammed into the master bedroom. The computer monitor at his shoulder gave his face a jaundiced pall. “Five, six. Maybe seven.”
Eve wet her lips, fought her breathing into some semblance of a rhythm. “Where?”
“Her place, usually.”
“Usually?”
“A car. Once.”
“A car,” Eve said. “Jesus. A car.” Her hand had made a fist in the bedspread, pulling the fabric into a swirl.
That strangled Inner Voice piped up:
Don’t ask. Don’t
—
“What’s she look like?” Eve asked.
She could feel the sweat beading above the neckline of the worn nursing scrub top she slept in—Los Angeles hadn’t gotten the memo that it was supposed to be winter.
Rick rested the points of his fingers on his kneecap, as if to extract the bone. He cleared his throat. “She’s … elegant. Does Pilates. Blond. An accountant. From Amsterdam.”
Elegant. Blond
.
Pilates
. Each specific, an arrow punching through flesh.
Eve looked down at her stretched-out scrub top. She had the kind of plain good looks that aunts called pretty, but never had she been described as “elegant.”
That’s enough now. Trust me, you
don’t
want to know anything else.
“How … how old is she?”
He waved a hand. “I don’t know what that has to do with it.” It was a halfhearted attempt, she could tell, and he relented under her skeptical glare. “Twenty-six.”
Her mouth made a few attempts before she got the words out. “So she was eight when we were eighteen.”
“Why is that…?”
“We could legally
vote,
Rick. And she was having a My Pretty Pony–themed birthday party.”
An image swept in unannounced, her and Rick’s third date, them in the car, driving up PCH to Malibu for a lazy beach day. He’d guessed her favorite Beatles song on the first try—“Let It Be.” Two hundred and thirteen songs, and he’d known.
How far from there to here. And no bread-crumb trail leading back.
“Remember Malibu?” she asked. Their shorthand.
He gave a woeful nod.
“I wish you still looked at me like that. Like I was … special.” Her vision was blurry—she’d held out until now, but then she’d heard the words, even from her own mouth, and that had done it. She hated herself for being such a goddamned open book.
He spread his hands, laced them again. “What am I supposed to say?”
You’re supposed to say, You’re
still
special.
She wiped her cheeks. “I don’t know.”
A burst of animation rocked him forward in the chair. “I feel like our lives have turned into this soulless, scheduled bullshit. E-mails and PowerPoint presentations and e-mails
about
PowerPoint presentations, and none of it matters. None of it. Matters.” He was talking fast, which he did when he was upset, words and sentences tumbling out. “It’s like we never stopped and looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t want to live like this.’”
Her gaze found the airplane tickets in their optimistic yellow sleeves on the bookshelf. Their ten-year anniversary was nine months off, and just last week she’d cashed in miles for a vacation package—a full week in the jungles of Oaxaca. Rick thought the trip ambitious, but she’d studied biology with a minor in Spanish, so why not? Plus, the state was the safest in Mexico, none of the narco violence that had people going missing and decapitated corpses washing up even in Acapulco. Just a chance to escape all the petty distractions, the tentacles of modern communication, the tiny violations that chipped away at them minute after minute. A chance to clear their heads, breathe fresh air, get out of range. A chance to remember who they were.
Seven times. Seven. Times.
Rick’s cell phone chirped a text alert, and she couldn’t help wondering. Past his sallow face, the computer glowed, his Gmail open, four unread e-mails. The screen refreshed, another bold message ticking into the in-box. The life of a public defender, always on call for crises most likely to occur at night, on weekends, in the middle of marital catastrophes.
“—job I hate, can barely keep us in the house,” he was saying. “I’m grinding out hours, get home, no energy, you’re there with HGTV on—”
“I watch TV at night,” she said, “because I’m lonely.”
“I’m not a mind reader, Eve.”
A metallic scrape of latch against strike plate announced the door’s opening. Nicolas stood in the narrow gap, door and jamb pressing either shoulder, his seven-year-old face taut with concern.
In his droopy pajamas, he brought to mind John Darling from
Peter Pan,
with his tall, dignified forehead, the glasses framing oversize Disney eyes. His tufts of blond hair were tinged faintly green from chlorine. Despite the avalanche of emotions currently threatening to submerge her, she had to be up in six hours to get him to swim practice.
“Why are you yelling?” Nicolas asked.
She forced a smile out of the black inner swamp, fought it onto her face. “I’m sorry we woke you, Little,” she said. “We’re having a … disagreement.”
“No,” Nicolas said. “
Daddy
was yelling.”
“I wasn’t yelling,” Rick said.
“I think we could both stand to keep our voices down,” she said.
Rick dipped his head remorsefully, and Nicolas withdrew. The air conditioner labored ineffectively.
“I didn’t know you felt alone when you watched TV,” Rick said. “I thought you didn’t want to talk to me.”
His expression of vulnerability choked off her reply. Fourteen years in, and still the sight of his suffering gave her an ache beneath the ribs, no matter—evidently—the circumstances.
“I thought you were sick of me,” he said. “Last month.…” His lips trembled, and he pressed his knuckles to his mouth. “Last month you purse-dialed me. You and Nicolas were singing in the car—‘Hey, soul sister, I don’t wanna miss a single thing ya do.…’ It was magical.” He took a jerky breath. “I wished I was with you.”