CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
Ana would never remember exactly what happened that night after she left Bonnie, drove home and got the bottle from the shoebox in the back of Aunt Easter's closet. There were some memories, still-shots of clarity illuminated in an otherwise perfect shadowscape of oblivion, but they were unreliable at best, contradictory and incomplete. She could remember replacing the empty bottle in the shoebox as clearly as she could remember smashing it against the tree in the front yard where she and David used as Safe when they were playing Hide and Seek, the same tree where Erik Metzger had tied up the Puppet when he burned his father's screaming dolls. She could remember watching the grandfather clock tell her the real story of Hansel and Gretel, the one where the boy died and his sister ate him, still chained to the oven where the witch burned alive, and she could remember going through it as it chimed all around her and tumbling down the dark stairs to the playroom where David was waiting for her. David, grown tall enough to wear his father's purple uniform. Or maybe it was Erik Metzger all along, although his voice was childlike as he huddled with her in the ship-shaped bed and told her he was lonely, that she promised they would be a family now and begged him not to leave him again, and she cried and told him she was sorry and she loved him. It didn't matter anymore whether he was David or Erik; she was back where she'd always belonged and she loved him.
She remembered it all, but none of that had really happened. They were dreams—colorful little bubbles popping on the surface of a tarry blackout—and they didn't mean anything. When she first woke, she wasn't in the basement playroom or Aunt Easter's closet or frozen in the front yard or any of the places she'd visited in her drunken daydreams. She didn't know where she was at first, only that it was somewhere in her Aunt's haunted house, in the mostly-restored wreckage of some room or another, sprawled out on a floor that smelled of stain and sealant and whisky vomit. Pale winter sunlight stabbed through the trees, the windows, into her skull, pinning her in place like a bug on a board. She tried to roll over, away from the light, away from the crusty puddle gluing her face to the floor, and couldn't. Nothing worked, nothing but her nerves, which transmitted and amplified every ache, every sound and smell, every punishing sensation. Pain was proof her body had not fully shut down, but oh it wanted to, and it resisted her feeble efforts to get the gears turning, so that she lay God only knew how long in the mess of her own making with nothing to do except soak it all in.
Somewhere in the middle of her suffering, some inner fuse tripped and she blacked out again. Not slept. Sleep was for living things.
The next time she woke up, the light was a little more bearable. Still a pin, but rusty and dull. She squirmed to loosen it, then dragged a hand up next to her head and pushed until she moved the filthy floor away from her face. So that was better. She was tempted to let herself slide back into the black and wait out this hangover where she didn't have to feel it, but it was so cold. Not cold enough to burst the pipes or kill stupid drunks passed out in the…whatever room this was, but too cold to let her sleep. She had to get up, do the adult thing and get a shower, drink something and go back to bed. Whose bed? David's boy-sized bed frozen in 1993 upstairs? Or the pirate ship bed in the playroom downstairs? Both promised nightmares. What choice did she have? Her sleeping bag in the now open-air parlor was probably iced over and she was as capable of driving to Freddy's as she was building a rocket and flying to the fucking moon today.
As if in agreement, her stomach sent up a sour mouthful of acid. She spit it out weakly and wriggled back some more. Her head bumped something hard, prompting the sound of glass bottle, not quite empty, rolling on a wooden floor. Her head turned without consulting her. When the seasickness subsided and her eyes focused, she could see the bottle. She could not begin to make sense of the name of the label, but it had a picture of a pirate steering a ship's wheel, so she guessed it was all right. After a few failed attempts, she got a hold of it and dragged it over. No cap and most of what had been in it was either in her or on the floor, but there was enough for two sips and a swallow. She felt better, enough to sit up and remember that she had a blanket in the truck. A nice warm quilt, made to be used and not hung up on the wall and looked at. She doubted she had strength enough to go all the way outside and back again in one trip, but it wouldn't be the first time she'd slept in her truck. It wasn't that cold, surely. And she'd have a quilt to wrap up in. The kitchen was on the way to the front door (she still wasn't completely sure where in the house she was, but the kitchen was just off the great hall, where both wings connected, and therefore, on the way to literally anywhere else), so she could stop for a glass of water, maybe start some coffee brewing, rest up for the next leg of the journey. Maybe there was even a bathroom on the way (she was much less certain of this) where she could puke out more of this molten lead and maybe wash up a little.
She guessed this was a plan, so now she was more or less obligated to follow it. Ana tipped the bottle one more time, knowing it was empty but drawing a little strength from the lingering taste (and where had she found it anyway? This wasn't the bottle from Aunt Easter's closet and it sure wasn't her usual brand), then used it as a crutch to help her climb first to her knees, then to her feet. Her headache increased with altitude, but she concentrated on balance and breathing and it eventually eased enough to let her walk.
Short, attainable goals, that was the trick. First, make it to the wall. Good. Now the door. Doing great. You're in the hall already. Do you know where you are? No? Take a moment, look for clues. Okay, there's a window at the end of the hall in that direction, go the other way and you'll come out by the kitchen. Yeah, it's a long way, but don't think about walking down the whole hall. Just focus on reaching that doorway, then the next one. One step at a time. You got this.
At last, at last, she reached the double doors at the end of the hall. Hard to open. Old hinges, swollen frame. Had to fix that. When she finally managed to brute force her way through, she was rewarded with darkness. No windows in the great hall. She was in the heart of the house, where all passages meet, and there were lights on in other rooms, but none of it reached all the way in here. The heart is always dark.
Ana shut the doors to the wing behind her, and then again, and one more time with an almighty skull-splitting slam so they'd fucking stay shut. The bang echoed through the house like a gunshot, but oddly, it was the soft scrape of a footstep that she heard. A bootstep, to be precise. And Ana was barefoot.
Her cold, bare feet took her forward to the meeting-point of this house's many ways. She looked down the hall toward the front of the house, past the grandfather clock, to the grand staircase, and watched, frozen, all her body locking painfully rigid as a dark figure rose up from where it had been sitting on the bottom step, just waiting for her. Not a dream. Not her imagination. This was real. There was a man in her house, heavy boots thumping as he came toward her, fractured moonlight that reached long fingers in from the unfinished kitchen outlining his powerful frame in silver and striking white sparks off suggestions of metal here and there—an earring, a steel stud on a pocket of his cargo jeans, a gold watch on a heavy band.
Her brain, reduced to reptilian survival instinct, first tried to see Erik Metzger, to the extent that all her vision briefly washed out purple. But Metzger was dead and ghosts did not carry car keys clipped to their belts on a chain, so then her brain, evolving to primitive mammalian intelligence, tried to see the far more reasonable threat of Mason Kellar. She imagined she could see shadows in the shape of his tattoos and she tried to dash them away—and him with them—by slapping at the light switch.
The man was no hallucination. Neither was he Mason Kellar. What she had mistaken for blown out prison tats in an instant became some damned expensive ink crawling up his arms, up his neck, and along the shaved side of his head. The watch he wore was a Girard Perregaux, the twin of the one on her own wrist. The serial numbers were only a few digits apart, bought on the same day, from the same shop.
Her throat finally unlocked with a hoarse cough of outrage: "Rider?"
He punched her. Not hard. Not enough to bruise, just enough to destabilize her, and while she stumbled back, he shoved her up against the door, his rough hand over her mouth, shoving her head back so that all she could see were his cold Viking eyes, and then she felt the needle in the big muscle of her thigh.
"What the fuck was that?" she demanded, but seeing as she was demanding it on the wrong side of Rider's hand, all her ears could hear was a muffled caw of outrage and Rider did not deem it fit to answer. Instead, he pulled out his phone and thumbed at it one-handed until it began to talk.
"I fucked up," Ana heard herself say in a drunken, tearful mumble. "I have fucked up my whole fucking life n' I can't do it anymore. Where are you? Pick up. It's me. Please pick up. I dunno where I am. Who I am. I fucked up, Rider. I ruined it. Everything. My do-over. My last chance and 's all fucked up. I can't fix this," she said and now she was sobbing those big slobbery drunken tears. "This is my fucking house, Rider. I can't leave and I can't fix it. All I can do is die here. I fucked everything up when I didn't die here! It's all…purple! All of it! I'm bleeding purple all over this fucking town! Me! And I can't do this to him anymore," she sobbed. "The stupid son of a bitch thinks he loves me. I gotta make it right. I gotta make it right. He told me I should burn it down and…and maybe he was right. I really think I got to. I was born here. I was supposed to die here. Everything will be all right if I can just…fucking…die here. Rider? Are you there?" Breathing, wet and ragged, and then, a whisper, "Don't come," and the dead space of an ended call.
Rider had stared her down the entire time the call was playing, watching her eyes as her leg filled slowly up with hot lead. Now he put his phone away and said, "You got something to tell me, pony, you better say it now."
She tried, but the words were confused enough in her heard and none of them made it all the way out of her mouth except a slurred, "Call Freddy," or maybe, "Don't tell Freddy." Even she didn't know which one she meant or what she meant by it.
Rider nodded like this was just what he expected to hear. Then he picked her up and put her on his shoulder and walked out.
Ana hung, swaying with his stride, as he went to the garage and flipped the door up and open, revealing his car. Not a rental this time, his actual car. The Ferrari FF, blood red, a real cop magnet, especially with those California plates. He didn't drive it often, just when he was getting work done, because it impressed the hell out of those who were easily impressed by fuck-you money, and because it had a surprising amount of cargo space.
Rider opened up the trunk.
She tried to say something, tried to shout it, tried to fight.
She might have moaned a little. And then she tumbled down into the dark and he slammed the lid on her.
Time was. It did not pass. It existed in a space around her, without a before or an after. Fragments of things swam in or out of her awareness, non-linear, disconnected from herself and each other. None of it had any permanence, not even her.
She was fifteen again in the trunk of her mother's car, only this time, she didn't get out and she drowned, sinking with the car to the bottom of the lake. She was eight and riding in her mother's car away from the parking lot at Circle Drive where she had almost gone to Freddy's, barely conscious after the beating, knowing it was just the first of many because even if she couldn't feel it, she knew she was bleeding, ruining the upholstery of this car seat where she slumped. She was thirty (and counting) and she'd fallen asleep on the loading dock again and now Freddy was carrying her to bed, taking off her shoes and pulling a blanket up over her shoulders, resting his huge, heavy hand briefly on her head before he went on about his endless rounds. She was ten and tied up with a phone cord on the brick-hard bed of some cheap motel while her mother sat her up and poured orange juice like acid into her mouth and everything went dark again. She was seventeen and out in the desert with Rider on that day, the day he'd finally stabled her, only was she even her or was she the guy in the hole she'd dug for him? She couldn't see, couldn't feel the shovel in her shaking hands or feel the hot ground under her feet, but she could hear Rider talking, and while her ears could make no sense of his words, she knew he was telling her that the man was dying and she owed it him to hear what he had to say about it.
There was more, seeping in around the edges of these main events. Impressions of light and darkness, heat and cold, voices she couldn't recognize and even music, throbbing like a hangover in her head. Everything swam around her while she sat motionless and watched it all without seeing any of it. Anytime it started to make too much sense, something…would happen…a voice…a pinch of pain…and it would all come unraveled again.
She dreamed, but she wasn't sleeping and so she didn't wake up. She just gradually realized she was already awake, although she thought she was still dreaming because she was there again, in the impossible past, shut up in the trunk of a moving car. She was half-wrapped in something, too heavy to be a tarp, too small to be a blanket. She couldn't see anything—the dream was perfectly black, as black as the real trunk had been—but something about this covering struck a memory-chord deep inside her and resonated as 'familiar' and 'safe', although she couldn't identify it and couldn't pull her thoughts together enough to be curious. She couldn't even really be afraid. The dream had dulled the sharp edges of the terror she'd felt on that long-ago night and all she could feel now was the disorientation of being lost in the dark. She pushed whatever was on her off and the cold came rushing in, dashing clarity into her mind but not waking her up. The only way to wake up was to reach the end of the dream, to relive her escape or to die.
She groped around her, feeling for the tail-light and finding it in some strange new place. She clawed at it, trying to push it out so she could flag down some other driver behind her on what she already knew would be some dark road on the way to the lake where her dead mother meant to drown her. But this time, the tail-light didn't budge. It didn't matter. No one was out there to see her pale hand weakly waving from the hole where the light was supposed to be. She managed to roll over, now feeling for the edge of the rough pad separating the trunk from the back seat, but again, couldn't find it where it should be. And now the fear began the slow crumble into panic. So much was different in this dream. It wasn't supposed to be this cold. The carpet was scratchy and the smell of old spilled gasoline was sharp in her nose. Her cheek felt bruised. Her arm hurt. There were a thousand points of information insisting upon themselves in ways no dream could.
This was happening.
She beat her fists on the lid of the trunk with all the force her limited space allowed, but only once. Who the hell was going to hear that? Except maybe whoever was driving and whoever that was, they did not have her best interests at heart. She felt at the tail-light again, pulling at wires and scratching at the back of the plastic cover, then abandoned it and felt along the back until she found the backside of the lock. No latch, of course, why would there be? But it was the only weak point she had, so she did what she could with it, wiggling around until she could kick. Her bare feet thumped clumsily around, catching her toes painfully on hard metal edges. Useless. She'd break her foot before she broke the lock, but what choice did she have?
The car slowed, turned. She heard/felt the wheels leave the smooth, flat road and drop onto something rougher, unpaved. 'Secondary location,' she thought wildly. 'Body dump site.' The car was still rolling, not fast and probably not far. Just trying to get some cover between them and the road. For the killing.
Ana shoved herself up against the wheel well until she was afraid the next hard bump would break her neck and kicked as hard and fast as she could, ignoring the pain.
The car braked, then pulled over and stopped. And when it was stopped, the driver's door opened and someone got out.
Ana braced her arms and drew up her legs, readying herself for one good kick when that lid opened up. If she'd really been kidnapped, she still had a chance to survive this. If not…If not, what was this? A part of her still expected to see her mother's face leering in at her, or what was left of it after twenty years in a grave. Would her mother's skeletal hand feel as real when it reached in to pluck her out and finally and forever choke the breath out of her? Maybe then she'd wake up, but what if she didn't? What if she wasn't asleep at all? She couldn't remember much of last night (was that only last night? Time felt thick, unstable), but she remembered the bottle from Aunt Easter's closet. And…another one, a different one, in the room where she woke up. How many more bottles had there been between them? How much had she put away before passing out, maybe lying on her back where she couldn't do anything if she puked in her sleep but drown in it? Maybe she wasn't awake or dreaming, but dead and damned, and if she woke up again at all, it would only be into something worse.
But when the trunk did open, it was not her mother, neither dead nor alive, looking down at her. It was a man, faceless and featureless against the pale sky behind him. She thought it must be Erik Metzger, come to carry her out of this nightmare into next level of her own personal Hell, but the brightness of the world made her turn her face away, and when she did that, she saw the thing that she'd been wrapped up in on waking into this dream and recognized it immediately as Rider's leather jacket. When she looked up again, it was him. Odd fragments of memory came back to her, like words on loose pages from a burnt book—not enough to read the story, but enough to get an idea of its substance.
He took the jacket off her, letting the cold grip her in its frozen fist, and put it on as she curled up tighter, shivering and blinking at him. He studied her for a while, then offered a hand.
She reached out tentatively and took it.
She knew she was awake then, for real. Just why Rider's hand was so much realer than the trunk, she could not explain, but here it was, slapping the last of the sleep away so completely, it left her feeling a little hungover.
He helped her unfold herself from the car and onto a winter road with a few inches of compacted grey snow under her toes. There was more snow off the shoulder, proof that a plow did come by, if not often. And there were chains on Rider's tires. Shiny. Brand-new. Well, they'd have to be, wouldn't they? When was the last time it had snowed in Bakersfield?
While Ana pondered these questions, Rider led her around to the right side of the car. He opened up the back door, leaned in and came out with a rolled-up pair of jeans, and that was how Ana belatedly processed she was standing on the side of the road in nothing but a stained tee and a pair of natty panties.
"Get dressed," he ordered, pushing the jeans into her arms and nearly pushing her over onto her ass in the process.
Ana fell against the car instead and held onto it until she found her balance. Dressing took all her concentration. The road behind Rider's roadster was empty, as far as she could see, not a billboard or gas station or anything at all but trees. Lots of trees. She could see towering pines, larches, hemlocks…no joshuas, no prickly white firs. Not Mammon, in other words. Nowhere near Mammon.
She looked the other way and saw with some concern that the road they were on came to an end just a hundred meters or so ahead of them. It didn't fork and it didn't actually end either. It came to a heavy-duty gate set in a high stone wall topped with wrong iron fencing, a little too pointy to be strictly decoration. There was a little guard's shack like a toll booth right in front of the gate and there was someone inside, someone who had seen her come half-dressed out of the trunk of a car and who was just…watching. Beyond the gate, the road continued, winding up and around a gently sloping lawn and well-kept winter gardens to an expansive building the same salmon-pink color of the enclosing wall.
"Where are we?" Ana asked.
"Get in the car."
"What is that place?"
"Get in the car and find out."
"Tell me now and maybe I'll get in the car."
Rider wordlessly strolled back around to the driver's door and slid in behind the wheel. He turned the key, adjusted the heat settings and then just stared her down through the window while she shivered in the wind (nothing like Mammon's wind, crisp and clean and dry, but still bitter cold).
Her feet were freezing, so Ana got in the car, but kept her hand on the latch, ready to jump out again in an instant. "Where are we?" she asked again as he put the car in gear and rolled on up to the end of the road.
He parked, but left the engine idling, and made no move to engage the man in the guard's shack, who was speaking into a radio clipped to his collar as he watched them—alert, but not alarmed—and not on the phone talking to the cops. "Glove box," said Rider.
Ana looked at him.
He did not look at her.
She opened the glove box. Nothing in it but the leather folder with the car's papers in it and a brochure for a place called Chrysalis: A Women's Wellness Center. The building featured on the front was not quite the same as the one she saw up ahead, but according to the brochure, there were six locations: Colorado, Georgia, Montana, Maine, Ohio, Oregon and Virginia.
Ana looked around helplessly. Too cold to be Georgia. Beyond that, she could be anywhere. As for 'Women's Wellness Center,' that sounded like a spa, but what she could see of the building reminded her more of a hospital, albeit an upscale one, and this wall (and that guard) would have fit in around a prison. On the Venn diagram of spas, hospitals and prisons, there was one obvious overlap.
"I'm not going to rehab," said Ana, tossing the brochure back in the glove box and shutting it with a slap.
"Up to you," Rider said, unruffled.
"I can't help but notice you're not driving away."
"That part's up to me," he replied.
She opened the door.
"Girl, you set one fucking foot on that road and you gonna piss me off so much I will push your stubborn ass out of my car and leave you here. You want to walk twenty miles back to town in your bare feet or do you want to grow the fuck up and listen to me talk for five minutes?"
"And then?" she challenged.
He shrugged. "After I say what I got to say, you got a decision. I ain't going to tell you what to do."
"Right. You'll just make me walk home if I don't do what you want me to do, but it's entirely my decision."
"Pretty sure that guy will call you an Uber. Not sure how you're planning to pay for it," he said, pulling her wallet out of his hip pocket. And her phone, but it was the wallet he opened, making a show of fanning his thumb along the dollar bills folded inside.
She put her hand out, but he didn't pass it over and she knew better than to try and wrestle it away from him. There was nothing she could do but say, "You're going to steal my shit too, huh?"
"Steal? If I hadn't picked it up, it'd still be laying on your floor where you apparently stripped down to go skinny-dipping through your money vault or wherever the fuck your drunk ass was hiding when I got there. Way I look at it, I'm the one made sure to bring it along, so it's mine to dispose of, as I see fit."
"Oh, did I forget to pack when you kidnapped me out of my fucking house? And drugged me," she recalled, squinting to see that memory more clearly. "Did you fucking drug me?"
"You can make that your story if you want," he said indifferently. "They've probably heard wilder ones. 'Course, they'll probably call the cops and then you got a whole other set of problems, because if you succeed in siccing them on me, they're only going to end up looking at you even harder."
"I'm not calling the fucking cops on you!" she snapped. "What the fuck, Rider?"
"Just putting all your options out there." He reached over and opened the glove box, retrieving the brochure and handing it back to her. "All of them. Option number one, you go through that gate, and I give you your shit so you have it when you get out after serving your time. Option number two, you go through that gate just to get me to give you your shit and do not serve your time, in which case, this—" He held up her wallet and phone, one in each hand, staring her down between them. "—is all the shit you got left in the world, I'll see to that personally. Or option number three, you tell me to fuck off, and I do, keeping your shit and leaving you here on this side of the gate with nothing but your goddamn stubborn pride. That's it as I see it, but if I'm leaving something out, you let me know."
She huffed, looking out the window, but there was nothing to see, nothing but the unfamiliar landscape under a grey winter sky. She looked at the brochure again, scowling at photos of sober living success stories enjoying their sobriety at one of the many Chrysalis centers (which one was she at? What state was she even in?) that floated between paragraphs of buzzword-riddled bullshit that talked about 'understanding addiction as a means to amplify the light within' and 'empowering women to realize meaning fulfillment' on their 'recovery journey' through a 'tailored blend of therapeutic experiences.'
"It's not a prison," said Rider, watching her flip that single sheet of folded paper over and over like the story was ever going to change. "You don't want to go in, they ain't gonna drag you, and any time you want to walk out the door, ain't no one gonna stop you. The only thing they gonna do," he continued calmly as Ana yanked on the door handle and kicked the door open, "is call me."
Ana stopped, one foot on the frozen ground, one in the car.
"And if I get that phone call, I will stop whatever I am doing and—look at me, pony."
She did.
His face was cold, killing-hard. "I will stop whatever I am doing. If I'm doing business, meeting's adjourned. If I'm giving the toast at my brother's wedding, I put the champagne down and walk out. If I'm getting my dick sucked, I slap the bitch off and zip up. I will stop," he said, carving out each word as if with a knife, "whatever I am doing, and I will go directly to your aunt's house in that shit-hole poison town and I will burn the fucking thing to the ground. And then I will find wherever it is you are storing those goddamn stupid animals—and I will start looking at that big haunted-looking bastard I had to drive past to get to your place, the one that had their faces on the sign above the door—and I burn it to the ground. And let me tell you right now, I do not believe in ghosts, but if something tries to rise up from the fucking ashes and come at me, they will find me waiting with that goddamn welding torch you left in my garage. Whatever don't burn, I will bury in a dozen different goddamn oil drums across these great United States and a couple more in the goddamn ocean besides. You got something to say to me?"
She stared at him, silent, and at last shook her head.
"It's a ninety-day program," he said tersely, gripping the steering wheel in both hands and staring straight ahead. "You make it through and maybe we'll talk again. You want to call me an asshole then, you go right ahead. Hell, I'll even give you one free punch, anywhere you want to plant it. Until then, you make the right choice, darlin'. Or I will take all your other choices away. You hear me?"
She nodded once.
"You ready?"
"Did you pack me a bag?" she asked with admirable calm, all things considered.
"No. They wouldn't let you keep one anyway," he said with a shrug. "This ain't the friendly-feely kind of rehab. They got the lowest rate of relapse in the country, but they get it playing hard-fucking-ball. No personal effects allowed. None. Whatever you go in with, they take away. You'll get it back when you leave. Clothes and basic necessities are provided. You want more than the bare minimum, you got to earn it and order it through their commissary."
"But it's not prison."
"It's not. It's just a lot like prison, at least in the beginning. But it'll only stay like prison if you make life hard for them, and I know you ain't that dumb, so shut up and listen. I put money on your old work-card so you can get whatever they got that you may want, plus you're allowed five hundred in cash for when they start letting you on furloughs and having personal shit again, so I tucked that in there too, but they gonna keep it in a lockbox with your other shit until you're trustworthy. You try to sneak money on the floor, or anything else for that matter, and you lose your privileges."
"My privileges? Jesus Christ!"
"They'll go over all that with you. All you got to know for now is, I got you covered, so don't give them shit. They're gonna search you when you get inside and it's gonna get invasive, they tell me, but you are going to spread them cheeks and let them look where they want to look. You don't got anything for them to find anyway."
"You going to walk me in? Make sure I don't slip them the old 'help, I've been kidnapped' note?"
"No. Men aren't allowed any closer than drop-off. You walk in on your own, darlin'. Now, is there anything you need to say to me before I fuck on out of here?"
She shook her head, grit her teeth, and said, "Give me my phone," in a hoarse, angry voice.
"What for?"
"I need to make a call. I can't just disappear like this, damn it!"
"Fuck your job."
"My job? What job? I don't have a job and I wouldn't give a flying fuck about it even if I did! I have friends! You know what friends are? You remember that thing we used to be? You want to maybe put yourself into the head of the man you were a year ago and imagine what you'd think if I said see you tomorrow one night and then fucked off for ninety fucking days? Give me my goddamn phone!" she yelled and then sagged back, as out of breath as if she'd been running hard all the way down Coldslip from her house to the pizzeria. "Please," she whispered. "He's my friend and I'm his family and if he loses me like this, he's…he's not going to be okay."
She had seen Rider's eyes like this before—cold, assessing—but never when he was looking at her. He looked at her now the way she'd seen him stare down countless junkies with their sob-stories, lying about sick kids and dead grandmas and anything they could think of that might convince him to give them one more shot, one more pill, one more chance to stay safe in the life they knew, no matter how miserable it was. He never had. He'd shot more than a few just for trying.
"I'ma give you this," Rider said at last. "But I am warning you only once not to abuse my trust and do some dumb shit like quick-dial 911 and start screaming about a kidnapping."
Ana gave him the scornful look that deserved and put her hand out.
Rider gave her the phone, but didn't release it right away. "If you're thinking you're going to tell your friends where you are—"
"Stop lecturing me and give me the fucking phone!"
"Woman, you better shut your mouth and hear me, because I ain't playing." He waited for her to take a cooling breath and adopt a convincingly penitent expression. "You may be thinking of calling in some help to bust you out of this place, but you need to know this ain't no celeb babysitting spa. Just because they'll let you walk out sure don't mean they let anyone else walk in. This place deals with a certain kind of clientele, and that clientele are known to have the sort of people in their former lives who may only want to rescue her just long enough to put her in the ground before she can run her mouth to the right person about the wrong thing. Relax your tits on that account, darlin'. These people see the worst of humanity every day and they are ready to throw down when they have to."
Ana would have laughed if she wasn't quite so pissed. Oh, she had no doubt the people running this place had stood fast against some bad customers, just like she had no doubt they'd fall over themselves to open the door for Fredrich Faust and his bottomless bank account. As for Freddy? Yes, he had homing protocols, but he could override them, and yes, she was a long way away, but if he thought to check behind the visor of the cargo truck, he'd find the keys. If not, he'd either steal a car or come for her on foot, but he'd come all right. And no matter how many hardcore thugs this place had dealt with, they were not ready for Freddy to tear the gate off its hinges, smash through those pretty glass doors and come at them with his eyes full of black and his mouth full of metal teeth.
Rider must have seen some of her thoughts in her face because he didn't push it any harder than that. He released his grip on the phone and leaned back, saying, "You got sixty seconds. Don't get cute."
Ana turned her phone on, very aware of Rider's stare, and thumbed down to the F section of her extremely limited contacts. She started with Faust, just to put off the scene with Freddy. She didn't know what she was going to say and didn't have time to think about it. He picked up on the first ring.
"Miss Stark, how good of you to call. To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"Hi," she said inanely, groping for words.
"Fifty seconds," said Rider.
"Are you alone?" asked Faust after a scarcely discernable pause. His voice was just as calm as ever, suggesting nothing more than a mild, distracted curiosity, but Ana wasn't fooled.
"No," she admitted. "I'm with a friend. He's helping me…um… Look, I don't know how to say this, so I'm just going to say it. Please don't ask questions."
"All right."
"I'm about to check myself into rehab."
"I see," he said with no more than polite interest. "If you will forgive the question, do you need help with expenses?"
"No. I just wanted to let you know, so you don't worry when I don't show on Tuesday. I'm sorry. You know I was looking forward to that, but this…comes first."
"May I visit you?" he asked, so easily, this man who had not left Mammon since the opening of Disneyland. "Or perhaps call or write?"
"I don't think I'm allowed," she said hoarsely, blinking away her blurred vision. "I don't really know what's going to happen. But listen, it's a ninety-day program, okay? And then I'm coming back. So please…don't do anything until I come back."
"I don't believe anything can be resolved in ninety days, even if I were inclined to be aggressive, but I hear you, Miss Stark. I shall do nothing until I hear from you again. May I ask where you are staying?"
"It's a place called Chrys—"
"That's enough," said Rider. "I said one minute, it's been three. Wrap it up."
There was no point in arguing, unless she wanted him to take the phone away and maybe shoot it. "I can't tell you," she said. "I'll call you later if I can. Otherwise, I'll be back in ninety days. Okay?"
"All right," he said after a considering pause. "I appreciate you taking the time to contact me. I very much look forward to your return. Please do let me know if I can do anything for you, anything at all."
"Thanks. Goodbye, Mr. Faust."
"Goodbye, Ana."
Rider's hand was right there as soon as she touched the end-call icon.
"I need to make another call. Yes!" she snapped when he shook his head. "I have more than one friend, damn it! I need one more call!"
"You are testing me," he warned, but leaned back again.
She put the second call through under his watchful gaze, and just like before, she didn't have long to wait before Freddy's voice, so much like Faust's, was growling cheerfully in her ear.
"Hello, Ana. I hope you're calling to tell me you're on your way over, because you're grounded. You know I don't like it when you leave without saying goodbye."
"Sorry," she said and somehow managed a laugh. "Because now I'm really going to wreck your day."
"Oh?" he said with understandable caution.
"I have to go away for a while."
"What? What happened?"
God, she'd just said all this. Why wasn't it any easier the second time around?
"I'm going into rehab," she said, ripping the metaphorical bandage off all at once.
"I don't know what that means. Ana, where are you?"
"I'm not sure, but I think I'm in—"
"No," said Rider firmly.
"Who is that?" Freddy demanded, his words underscored by a rising scratch of static. "I know that voice. Is that Rider? What's going on? Answer me and that's an order!"
"Yeah, it is. He took me to rehab."
"You keep saying that! What is that? Where are you?"
"It's where you go to…to get sober." Ana rubbed at her tightening throat and rolled her eyes for comfort, then said, "I'm an alcoholic, Freddy." It was easier than she thought it would be. "I need help and…this is where you go to get help. I'm sorry I left without saying anything. I wouldn't have done that if I'd known I was going to be gone so long."
Silence on the other end of the phone. Then, "How long?"
"Ninety days. And then I'll be back, I promise. Can you…Can you tell everyone for me?"
"I want to talk to him."
"What?"
"Rider," said Freddy. "Put him on. Now."
Ana glanced at Rider, who shook his head. "He doesn't want to talk to you."
"That's fine. I don't want him to talk. I want him to listen. Put me on speaker."
Before Ana could, Rider reached out and took the phone. "I'm here. The fuck do you want?"
"At the moment? I want to crush your head between my hands, so I suppose it's a good thing you're not actually here."
"You seriously trying to scare me?" Rider asked with a faint twitch of a smile.
"No. I'm warning you. Ana is my family. Mine. And whatever you think you were doing with this stunt, you did it by breaking my family. Ana would never have left like this on her own. You stole her."
"Look, man—"
"Shut up. You stole her. Tell me you did it for the right reasons. Tell me she wouldn't have gone on her own. I don't give a damn. You broke my family, you son of a bitch. I should have put my fist through you the first time I saw you. The next time I see you, I will."
This was not the first time Rider had ever had his life threatened, but it was the first time Ana had ever seen him show even a modicum of unease on receiving it.
"If she's not home safe in ninety days, I am coming for you," Freddy growled. "If she is…you'd still better stay the hell away, because I will never forgive you for this. Never. I want to talk to Ana now."
Rider wordlessly passed the phone over.
"Don't be mad," she said.
"I am. I am furious. But not with you. Be strong, Ana, and get well. Will you call me sometimes, to let me know you're all right?"
"If I can," she said helplessly. "I don't know if they'll let me."
"Do your best, then. We'll see you soon."
"Love you, big bear," she croaked.
"I love you, too. We all love you and we want you home. I'm sorry, but I have to hang up now. I've got to go to the freezer."
"Okay. Goodbye," said Ana, but he was already gone.
"You got a real badass there, don't you?" Rider drawled.
"Shut up. He's losing his goddamn mind right now." Ana shoved a fist across her burning eyes, then exploded, "Christ, are you doing this? Are you really fucking doing this?"
He didn't answer. He didn't need to.
"Then kiss me goodbye," said Ana, lifting her chin, tight-lipped. "Because this is it, Rider. You do this to me and this is fucking it. I will never see or speak to you again."
"I know," he said. He looked at her, eyes bright and angry, then reached for her so suddenly that she thought she was about to get slapped.
She didn't flinch away from it. On some level, she welcomed it, wanted to walk in through those stupid doors with a big man's handprint stamped in red right across her face, but he didn't deliver. His rough fingers snagged at her braid as he cupped the back of her head and pulled her toward him, forced her stiff neck to bend. His beard scratched at her face. His lips were as rough as his hands when he pressed them to her forehead.
It was only the second time in all their years together he'd ever kissed her. The first time had been the first. And this was the last. She knew it, he knew it, and neither of them said it. What she said instead, hoarsely, still angry, was, "I'm sorry, man. I'm sorry I'm such a fuck-up."
"You ain't a fuck-up, Ana. You a survivor. And you gonna get through this shit, too, and come out even stronger. This?" He pointed out the window with the hand not pinning her to him. "This is your real do-over, not that godforsaken open sewer of a town where you're squatting. This, right here. You're gonna do it over and you're gonna do just fine and go on to a hell of a lot more better things than me."
His hand tightened in a silent, painful goodbye. Then it opened and he pushed her away. "Go on then. Fuck off. Here."
He bent awkwardly around the steering wheel and pulled off his boots, then passed them over. She put them on. They were warm from his body, sweaty and heavy and way too big, but she put them on and tied the laces as tight as she could. She got out and took a few clumping steps away from the car, shivering in the cold.
"You need a jacket?" he asked.
"No," she said, keeping her eyes on the road on the other side of the now-open gate, winding up the hill and around the gardens to that salmon-pink prison waiting to take her in. "I don't need to go far."
"Get going, then."
"Thanks for the ride."
She started walking and he drove away and neither one of them looked back.