The morning sun rose, bringing with it a thin warmth, though it couldn’t thaw my veins, so frozen with sin. I sat up in my seat, peering through my car’s windshield into the valley laid out before me. Brown, dying grass carpeted the flatlands between the mountains, hemmed in by eternal evergreens.
For a fleeting moment, I let myself hope it had been a nightmare. That my father hadn’t tried to make good on the threats he’d been nursing for years. That I hadn’t committed the irredeemable blasphemy of ending the life of the man who’d sired me. The rear-view mirror told me the truth: black-and-blue fingerprints blooming around my throat, flakes of dried blood tangled in my hair. He was dead. There was no scrubbing that clean.
I looked out across the valley. My hometown had been small, but every house there huddled together in the shadow of the mountains, where spring snow clung like a bad memory until June. Here, I’d drifted into unincorporated nowhere. County land, though I didn’t know which county. Houses dotted the distance, each sitting on its own lonely spread of acres, neighbors in name only. Cows moved through the fields, advertising that these were ranches.
Years ago, after playing some farming video game, I’d told my mother I wanted to be a ranch hand. She pointed out that I didn’t know how to ride a horse, and that ended the dream right there. Hard to be a cowboy if you’d never once sat a saddle.
The buzz of my phone cut through the quiet, dragging me back to the life I’d just run from. Two vibrations, then silence. I checked the screen. Twenty-three missed calls from my mother. Six from my sister. Three from Lilah. And thirty-five text messages from my girlfriend, the latest one still glowing.
They read the way you’d expect from someone who still loved you but was horrified at what you'd done: “Call me, let’s talk,” then “Just talk to me,” sliding into “Fine, I don’t want to hear from you anyway!” and finally, “Please, don’t let this be over. We can make it work.”
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Poor Lilah. Ten years older than me. A single mother with the sweetest little girl, Ophelia, holding her whole heart in both hands. When she’d told her ex-husband she was pregnant, the bastard had ordered her to abort their baby and made their marriage depend on her obedience. When she refused, that poison ate away at their life together from the inside out. It took her years to trust another man, and now she’d given her heart to a killer. Her little Ophelia had started calling me “daddy.” This would be the second time a man she loved by that name lost his soul.
What kind of age is this? I wondered. An age where fathers try to kill us and men walk away from their children. What have I done but add one more corpse to the pile?
I wanted to text Lilah back. To explain. To hear Ophelia’s voice just once more. To try to say why I could never come around again.
But I remembered Bob Cooke, the land surveyor I’d once worked for; one-eyed, always looking at the world through a single, suspicious lens. He believed in every conspiracy from the Illuminati to chemtrails to the government pulling the strings behind 9/11. Crazy as he sounded, one thing he’d said stuck with me: your phone was a leash, and someone on the other end was always holding it. With a warrant, the cops could find you as easy as finding a light in the dark. They’d be looking for me soon.
I stepped out of the car into the cold morning wind and walked into the nearest field. The grass whispered around my legs. With the chill washing over me, I sent one last text to my mother, my sister, and Lilah.
“I love you. I’m sorry.”
Then I pulled the battery from the phone and hurled the device as far as I could. It vanished into the grazing fields, just another lost and broken thing.
Soon enough I’d have to ditch the car, or at least the plates. For now, it still had a few dozen miles left in it; just enough to carry me farther from the place where everything had gone to hell.
