“I gotta go now,” she said, taking two steps backward.
Manny’s eyes blacked over. He breathed low and slow and forced a taut smile. “Hang on, can I get a ride to the church? I’ll be late if I walk.”
Kit saw he was hurt and felt a need to appease him, unclear whether she was protecting his feelings or protecting herself. She nodded and threw the gloves in back.
They bounced along in silence for a while, a hot wind riffling their shirts and hair. Kit went slow to keep from stressing the bungees that held up her muffler.
“Who’s that fat kid hanging out with Charlie?” Manny asked.
“That’d be Jim Dirkin.” Kit wondered how and when he had known they had been spending time together.
“Looks to me like he’s moving in on our daughter,” he said.
The phrase our daughter bothered Kit. Just yesterday she had longed for family, had resolved to make things right with Charlie after keeping her in the dark for so long. She thought she could figure out a way to let the girl know her father. But he hadn’t earned the right to claim her as his own. Kit was the one who had carried Charlie, birthed her, kept her safe and fed and schooled when she hadn’t even known how to do these things for herself. If he wanted to know Charlie, it would be on Kit’s terms. She wanted to back him off but knew to keep quiet, not to draw out the venom behind his eyes.
“Dirk’s not so bad,” she said. “Not my first choice, I’ll admit, but if I put a stop to it, she’ll just run toward him.”
Manny shook his head. “I never thought you’d be so na?ve.”
Kit scooped up a pair of pecans from her cupholder and cracked them in her fist. She picked out the brain-like meats, dropping the sharp shells to the wind.
“Listen, Charlie’s tough. She can look out for herself. Let it be, okay?” She had never been good at telling Manny off. She ate one half of a pecan, green and bitter, and spat it out the window.
“No good?” Manny asked.
“Too young.”
Manny took the other half for himself and ate it. “I don’t know,” he said. “Tastes just right to me.”
Kit looked at Manny, his skin creased and seasoned with time, the whole of him still stunning. She knew she should be cautious, but the fetters that bound her to him were stronger than her common sense.
She reached across and pushed her fingers through his hair, felt the damp on his scalp, the cool silk of his hair. He tensed beneath her hand and the back of his neck went red under the copper tan. The space between them sizzled, needs welled up inside her, pressing out at her breasts, hips. Like always, a sick elixir of hunger and hate. To strike was to seduce, to want was to fear, to love was to hoard. She took her foot off the gas and let the car drift to the shoulder, where it idled and stalled. He tipped back in the seat, unbelieving. Out of breath and insane with anger and wanting him, she clutched the back of his neck and straddled him, pressed her forehead to his, and closed her hands around his throat. She could bite him, rip out his lip with her teeth and chew. She wanted every inch of him pressing into her. His face calm, grateful, too, and so beautiful. When the vessels began to burst in the whites of his eyes and his blues went purple, she let go. He coughed and rubbed his neck, turned his weight over on her, and pinned her to the seat.
“I came back for you, Kitty Cat,” he rasped and leaned in and whispered a call into her ear. “I came back. Even though you left me, I came to find you. You don’t belong stuck in this place. These people don’t understand you. Tell me this: When did you feel more perfect than you did with me? Fucked up and free?” Tears eked from the corners of his eyes and slipped down those deep creases. “You’ve been hollow without me,” he said. “Look at you. No one to care for you, no one to touch you. I can see it,” he said against her neck. “How hungry you are. I know you want me back. Leave with me. Let’s go. Let’s go.”
Kit wanted to slip away, no note, no goodbyes. Like water down a drain, she would just disappear. Under the spell of this invitation, she even forgot about Charlie. She was a nameless runaway, stalking her next meal, waiting for someone to tell her who she was. She was starving, and with him she would never be hungry again. She closed her eyes and felt something pull her toward him, a beautiful undertow.
She lost herself in an eddy of movement and touch. Their bodies slipped into one another, a fusion of similar substances. Lemon drops and the smell of swamp filled the truck and she was sixteen again, then thirteen, then just born, grasping at the breast, rooting for milk to fill her belly. She could curl up and be fed by him. She would never be alone.
Then something, a spring or bare shaft of metal, dug into her spine. She tasted salt and rust and her skin chilled. “Easy,” Manny said and heaved his body against her again, the metal thing gouging her deeper. A probe, unwelcome. An injury.
“I don’t want this,” she said, but he pressed on more feverishly, as if he sensed a window closing. “Get off!” she said.
“Okay, all right, I understand,” he said, pacifying, but his hands were in her hair, his body glued to hers. She was flung back on the bed of that cowboy’s truck, cold metal at her spine, and then years before, to a hard motel mattress, more scared of loneliness than of physical harm. His breath hot and damp at her ear. This is not love. She pushed him off, noticing how much stronger she was, how he had lost his advantage over her. Then her feet were on his chest and she hurled him against the half-open window. She kicked the door latch and he tumbled into the dust, and before he could get to his feet, she peeled out like the ground was collapsing away.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Manny stood there choking on the dust kicked up by Kit’s tires and was catapulted back to the day when he first lost her. He had watched her cut a path in that black Mustang, and even after she disappeared, after the cuffs were clamped to his wrists, he pinned his eyes to the horizon, certain she’d circle back. Then, the years in prison waiting for her to appear, a bashful apology on her lips, perhaps a small, hard tool stowed somewhere indecent where the guards wouldn’t look.
His careful calm gave way to a bulldozing rage. He squeezed shut his eyes and saw himself torching the town, house by house, field by field, stopping only to watch the blazing figures dance in their yards and listen to their smoke-muffled screams. The specific violence of this fantasy startled even him, as if these thoughts and inclinations had been crocked and fermented in the dark somewhere, waiting for the lid to be lifted. This drive to destroy was so ambitious and true that he wondered if the source was divine, and so he watched and waited for a sign. Since his time in prison, Manny recognized the force of God in him as so powerful, sometimes it overtook him. He needed to siphon its strength to keep it contained, to stay focused.