Chapter Three: Killing Mom

I didn't take my eyes off of Dad as he drove. I didn't dare. In the dark, I couldn't tell how much he was bleeding or how badly he had been struck. Minutes crawled by. When Dad cranked up the AC again, the cold air burned on my cheek, and I remembered that I had hurt myself. I dug in the bag for the First Aid kits.

"Were you hurt?" Dad asked. He turned on the radio.

"Not bad." I pulled out a pack of disinfectant wipes, each one a luminous white square in the darkness. "I fell, that's all."

He touched my shoulder. "Thank you."

I briefly touched his arm.

"About the things he said." Dad's hand fell to the wheel again. "Don't take anything personally. He was just angry at me."

I grimaced as the alcohol burned into my cheek. "You should've killed him. You know he's just going to find you again."

"I deeply hurt him," Dad said. "He loves Casey more than any of us, and it's Casey and his family who have suffered the most for my foolishness. If I killed him, I might as well kill myself."

"Your foolishness, huh," I said, looking into the mirror. A squashed, swollen monster looked back at me. "You could've just left your foolishness where you found it."

"Don't talk like that."

"You're the one who said it, not me."

"I wasn't talking about you." Dad's jaw was set again. "I should have known that there would be repercussions for fraternizing with your mother."

"So now I'm a repercussion?"

"Stop!" Dad slapped the dashboard, eyes flashing. I jerked back in my seat.

"Stop," he said again, softer. "I blame you for nothing. You have done nothing wrong. You're… all I have."

I looked away and busily scrubbed at my face. My cheek burned like pain incarnate.

"I consider you one of the victims of my past stupidity," he said. "And truthfully… if Karai had allowed me to have a hand in your life, I wouldn't have done any of this."

"But I would've been part of the Foot."

"As Raphael said, 'Numbers.' I had to think of everyone. But when Karai insisted that our relationship was not only over, but that I was to disappear like I had never been, that you were… essentially a memento…" He frantically tapped his fingers on the wheel. "By that point, I didn't even want your mother to love me anymore. I just wanted to be involved in your life. You were part of me, part of my family. She denied me that. So I made a decision: everyone else was an adult and could take care of themselves. You, on the other hand, were completely helpless. She was talking about taking off your shell, changing your face, sending you away to Japan…" He clenched his hands on the wheel. "She wanted you, but she didn't want me. I started wondering what would happen to you if she couldn't excise me completely."

I shuddered. "I don't want to think about that."

"Nor do I."

I looked down at my hands. The square of disinfectant was stained dark with blood and dirt. "You're telling me the truth, aren't you? The whole truth?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

I opened my mouth and closed it again. There are some feelings you just can't put into words. All I could think of was Dad picking up the phone, her voice calling out to me across twenty states, and his refusal to let me answer it.

I must have fallen asleep. I don't remember when. But I do remember waking up with a snort when the car swerved. I flailed around for something to grab onto and saw a confused image of predawn fields, the silhouettes of scrub and trees, the paling moon. Dad had hit the brakes and the car idled half in the ditch. A pop song was blaring full blast out of the speakers.

"What happened?" I asked. I looked over my shoulder, fully expecting a car in pursuit or the glowing eyes of some jackass mule deer. The road was completely vacant.

Then I looked at Dad. Oh, god, he looked so bad. His skin was pale and his breath was ragged and faint. His face and arm were hideously swollen.

"Are you okay?" I asked. I regretted speaking; my jaw was sore.

"Yes," he said. "I just need a breather."

"Should I drive?" I asked.

He laughed and shook his head. Some of the color returned to his cheeks. "No, thank you." He tapped the gas and took off, going only twenty miles per hour or so. Even at that speed, the vehicle weaved. He took a dirt road going east, toward the faint blush of the oncoming sunrise.

"Dad, please stop. I don't want to die like this."

"I'm looking for a good place to hide," he said. He was slurring. "Don't worry."

Eventually we hit pavement again, and wound between the endless, flat fields spreading in every direction. The monotony was broken only by the intermittent farmhouse or the arced frames of the irrigation units. You could see the sparkle of car windshields from twenty miles away. We must have been in Kansas by then.

We finally pulled up to an abandoned convenience store, a faded, wind-battered edifice that sat a mile out from a ghost town. Dad pulled up behind it. Almost as soon as he had put us in park, he slumped over the wheel and buried his face in his arms.

I grabbed him by the arm. He was cold.

"Hey," I said. "Just tell me what to do."

"First Aid," he said. "And the sports drinks."

As I dug in the back seat, he opened the driver's side door and staggered out, collapsing against the wall of the store. His eyes were closed and he sucked oxygen like a landed fish.

I opened a container of Gatorade and pushed the bottle up into his mouth. "Where did he get you?"

As he took a long swig, he lifted his arm so that I could see the wounds. The leftmost point had only scored a long scrape on the bony plate running along Dad's side, but the middle point had punctured the plate, and the third had ripped deeply through the exposed flesh of his armpit.

I whistled.

"It's nothing," he said. "I'm all right. Just tired. Got the kits?"

He tended himself with bottled water, alcohol, and paper towels. I helped him pluck broken pieces of shell out of the gouge, applied the disinfectant and cotton pads, and taped everything down. He told me to tap the wound, hard, and he turned a sickly, chalky green every time I hit it. Then he slid down on his haunches and leaned out over his knees. I gave him a can of instant soup, and he knocked it back cold.

"You don't look good," I said.

"I lost a lot of blood and some peace of mind, that's all."

I squatted next to him and stared out over the fields. Thick brush and straggling trees hugged the fence-line, but they were hardly enough cover to mask the entire car. I decided right there and then that I was never coming back to this featureless agrarian hell ever again.

"I'm gonna break into the convenience store," I told Dad. "Gonna look for a tarp to cover the car or something."

He didn't answer. He had passed out.

I dug for a crowbar in the trunk, but found nothing. Eventually I grabbed one of Raphael's sai. I thrust the point underneath a corner of plyboard and snapped it off. Fanning the dust away, I pressed my face up against the glass. I saw pale chinks of light stretching across empty shelving and lots of cobwebs. The floor was completely empty. Not a single item left behind, not even a receipt.

Just the thought of breaking in suddenly seemed exhausting.

I crept back to the car and swung the front door open, slumping down on the front seat. Blood had stained the door and the driver's seat was still damp with it, but I was out cold in five minutes. I should've stayed up and kept watch, I guess, but I was tired, too.

The sun woke me by burning the hell out of my face. Late morning… no, noon. I sat up, licking my lips and stretching. The cab was filled with the rank of gore, and eager flies were tickling my legs as they ran up and down the stained upholstery. My cheek was swollen and blazing hot. I fumbled for the First Aid kit, and without thinking about it, my eyes lit on Dad. He hadn't moved and I couldn't tell if he were breathing or not. A fly landed on his arm, ran in a circle, and rubbed its hands together.

I could have gone to check on him, but I didn't. I sat there for a while, just staring, twisting my fingers together, a hundred thoughts racing through my mind. I imagined racing off down the road in the car. Calling the unknown number on the cell phone. Stopping at a police station and turning myself in. The good photo of Mom. And then I thought of the farmhouse in Massachusetts and the faded photo of four brothers laughing over beers.

I looked over at Dad's backpack, sitting in the back seat. The binder with its photos jutted out of the broken zipper. I dove into it headlong.

I threw aside our battered collection of paperbacks and opened the three-ring binder first. There was the picture of Dad and his brothers. Now I could pick out Raphael—the bulky turtle with his hand relaxed on Dad's shoulder. Then I looked at the pictures of Mom. Some had almost faded completely away, especially the ones from newspapers. One picture I didn't remember: a woman in an elegant black dress suit striding long-legged down a sidewalk, a gaggle of suits bunched up in her wake. The date was from last year. I didn't remember Dad cutting it out.

I flipped to the candid shot. She stared out at me with that expression that had frightened me when I was small, but for some reason it only intrigued me now. I felt that if I knew who had taken the picture, I would know what she was thinking.

Setting the binder aside, I thrust my arms into the backpack. I found a little black book, but when I opened it for a read, everything was in ciphers. More digging revealed a bottle of oil and some wrapped rags for cleaning the katana. And then the katana themselves, knocking against my hand as I rooted around. They're illegal weapons and produce some pretty unique deaths, so Dad almost never uses them, and they were usually wrapped up. I only saw them when he took them out for practice and their weekly cleaning.

I reached past the utilitarian pair that Dad used in a pinch and pulled out the two that he kept cocooned in black fabric. I slowly pushed the strips aside. Underneath were the lacquered wooden sheaths, black and shining. There were gold and red accents near the tip and perfect gold buttons on the hilts, and the blades were of high quality steel. Dad had told me very shortly that they were a pair made by one of the best modern sword-makers in Japan, and that Mom had given them to him long ago. They were magic.

I was just about to unbind the katana when the phone went off again.

I stuffed the swords back into the backpack, slid over to the passenger's side, and pushed the papers off of the floor. Unknown number. Carefully, I picked it up, my eyes locked on Dad's still form, and accepted the call.

A husky woman's voice snapped something in Japanese.

"Hello," I said slowly. "This is Saya."

The voice stopped.

Then, slowly: "Where is Leonardo?"

"Sleeping," I said.

"Ah." A dissatisfied sound. "So you are alone."

"Maybe. Is this… my mother?"

Silence.

"Yes."

I swallowed slowly, slid out of the passenger door, and shrank down beside the car, where the shadow would protect me from the sun somewhat. The sand was cool, moist from the morning dew. A storm of unformed ideas rushed through my head, but only one sentence came out.

"Why can't you leave us alone?" I said.

"Leave you alone!" she said, and laughed bitterly. "You are kidnapped, and you ask me to leave you alone?"

I'm an idiot. "I'm tired, all right?" I said, rubbing my temples. "I just want to sleep."

"And you can sleep as much as you like. Just wait where you are and the men in my employ will take you to a hotel. Then you may live in a beautiful city where no comfort will be denied to you."

Just wait where you are.

I shivered and peered over my shoulder onto the road; nothing. I looked back into the fields. Glossy leaves tossed in the wind, a shimmering surge that broke on the fenceline with a whisper. Sparrows tussled in the bushes. A grasshopper stared judgmentally at me from a stalk.

"What exactly happened between you and my father?" I asked.

There was such a long silence that I held the phone away just to see if the call had dropped. It hadn't. I put it back to my ear.

"Are you there?" I asked.

"I am not going to answer that kind of question," she said. "The most important thing is that you are recovered."

"You all have a really funny way of talking about me," I said, "like I'm something you lost on the side of the road."

"Of course you are more important than that." She cleared her throat. I didn't like the sound of her voice, the way it strained to sound pleasant.

I took a deep breath. "Dad said that you were probably going to experiment on me down in the Bunker. Is that true?"

"He said what?" Each word snapped out like a whip-crack.

"You heard what I said," I said as firmly as possible. My voice quavered anyway.

Silence. I heard a door shut, the swish of fabric, the creak of a chair.

"Come on!" I said. "I'm trying to figure out what to do with my life. I don't like being with Dad, but I don't know if being with you is much better. I just want to know what's going on before I make any decisions."

Her voice was brusque. "A long time ago, I had… a daughter. She was murdered."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"Your apologies are not necessary." She cleared her throat. "Your father helped me defeat the forces responsible. Later he helped me clear up other problems around the city. At the time, I enjoyed his company. He was an excellent ninja and had mastered a wide variety of useful skills. He showed me due deference and he stood by a strong moral code that I could respect."

My god! "You touched a mutant because of his moral code?"

"I was cursed with insanity."

I sagged against the car, stomach twisting. The metal was heating up in the sun. "So… why couldn't you share?"

"Excuse me?"

"Why wouldn't you let him be in my life? He says you wanted him to leave completely."

"You were none of his business."

"Am I even related to him?"

"Yes."

"Then doesn't that make me his business?"

"You would have never been born without the resources at my disposal," she said. "Besides, he would have been horrified. The protection of his family was more important to him than any other consideration, even his own life. If he knew about you, he would feel stretched thin. Eventually, he would feel forced to make a decision between you and everyone else."

I turned slowly and looked underneath the car. All I could see was Dad's still hands. I thought of those hands around Raphael's neck.

"Are you telling me that you knew all this and you did it anyway?" I asked.

"If we are wise, we do what solely appeals to logic." Her voice darkened. "But we can't always be wise."

"Yeah." I took a deep breath. "Can I ask what you would have done with me if Dad hadn't…"

"I would have sent you to Japan to live with people I trusted," she said. "You would have received the best in education and training, and I would have paid for reconstructive surgery so that you could have passed for a human being. At the age of ten, I would have brought you here to New York to train beneath me, and you would have been groomed to enter the ranks of the Foot. I never planned on revealing you to your father."

"You would've lied to me."

"For your own good."

"I would've been a prisoner." I rocked back and forth; my proto-shell tapped against the door.

She laughed. "And you are not a prisoner now?" she asked.

"No," I snapped.

"Ah? Then I give you a challenge. Threaten to leave," she said. "See how his hand falls on your shoulder. The words he will say: 'Maybe later, but not now.' When you protest, he will say, 'You are not ready yet.' The truth is, of course, that you will never be ready. Oh, truly, he has not shackled you in a room, but that is no measure of freedom: what he has done is more insidious. He has shackled your mind. Does he not paint me as a bogeyman? Do you not fear me?"

"No!" I said. "I don't!"

"Your voice says otherwise," she said.

I buried my face in my knees.

She laughed softly. "There is no shame in admitting that we are wrong as long as we do the right thing in the end."

"What if I did come to you?" My voice was muffled. "Would you stop chasing us?"

"Yes, of course."

"And you'd leave Dad and my uncles alone?"

"Yes, as long as they kept out of my business."

"And what if I told you that my choice was to live on my own or stay with Dad? Would you leave me alone then?"

"No."

I swallowed back a host of angry words. "If I visited you," I said, "would you stop chasing us?"

"Visited?"

"Temporarily. To see if I wanted to be with the Foot or not."

"My dear, you do not understand. Your father has harmed you. You require care."

"What if I don't want your care?"

Her voice sharpened. "You will stay with us as long as it pleases me."

"Then I've made my decision," I said. "I'm coming to New York."

Her voice brightened. "Oh?"

"As soon as I can," I said. "I swear. I'll get Dad to drive me."

"Impossible. He does not belong in this equation."

"Then maybe you should've kept it simple and fucked a human," I said.

I hung up and turned the phone 'round and 'round in my hands. Then I stood up and pitched it into the field with all of my strength. It turned little cartwheels, hit a furrow, skipped in the dirt. A little cloud of earth followed it.

I was still standing there, squeezing my hands into fists, when I heard a low moan. I whirled around. Dad was stretching very slowly, testing each limb. When he saw me, he waved half-heartedly. I jumped into the car and dug around for food and drink, then hurried to his side.

"Saya," he said with a raspy voice, cracking his neck. "Good. There you are." He set his hand on my knee. He was shaking.

"What, did you think I'd leave?"

"Yes, actually." He stretched, wincing when he raised the arm on his wounded side. "I dreamed you were talking to your mother."

"About that." I helped him up to his feet and stuck a drink in his hand. "I… picked up the phone when she called."

He stiffened. "What?"

"Just drink and eat and I'll tell you later."

"Saya," he said. "Smartphones contain a GPS chip. They can trace the call."

"It doesn't matter."

"Why not?" There was a grim look on his face.

"Because I could use your help," I said. "I want to kill Mother."

He leaned against the wall as he drank the Gatorade. "That's a tall order."

"If we kill her, the attacks will stop," I said. "Nobody else in the Foot is interested in me."

"When I killed the Shredder, the Foot put a price on my head," Dad said. "If we do this and someone discovers it, it'll just start another round of honor killings."

"Then it needs to look like an accident."

He smiled. It was a grim smile.

"There are no accidents in the Foot," he said.

"But you know everything about her."

"I did. A lot can change in ten years." He limped to the car and threw the door open. "Damn. Quarter tank."

"So are you going to help me or not?" I asked.

He clenched the door frame and nodded once, looking out across the wheat fields. My heart sank.

"You don't want to kill her."

"I don't," he said, "but I will." He sank into the car, wincing. "We don't have time to wait. She's probably got someone headed our way as we speak. Come on."

"Maybe I should stay here and wait for them to pick me up," I said. "Then they'll leave you alone, and we can rendezvous in New York City. I can start casing the building."

He started the car. "Don't underestimate Karai." He typed an address into the GPS. "The first thing she would do is send you to a place I can't follow. There would be no way for you to contact me because she would keep you cut off from the rest of the world. She thinks you're brainwashed and would want to correct your behavior at any cost. And if she decided to send you to the Bunker…"

My back itched. Reconstructive surgery on my face I wouldn't mind, but I was fond of my homegrown armor.

"All right, then," I said, sliding into the passenger seat. "How are we going to do this?"

"We are going to drive until the car gives out or they stop us," he said. "My goal is to head to Massachusetts first and visit the farm in Northampton. You remember where that is, don't you?"

"Yeah, kind of," I said. "But why?"

"To see if Donatello will join us," he said. "If fortune smiles on us, we'll grab Mikey, too."

My heart quickened. "So everyone will be together again. Just like the old days."

"Possibly." Dad jerked his chin toward the back seat. "First things first. Let's simplify. Get all the trash and throw it."

His gaze settled on the ransacked backpack; I didn't dare meet his eye as I slid out of the door. He packed everything back into it slowly as I threw garbage into the wind.