Caroline Eriksson - The Watcher

I pull on my vest and then hold my hand out to her urgently.

“Please? I’ll explain later. Trust me for now.”

Yet another person I’m asking to place their trust in me even though I don’t deserve it. I try not to think about all the things I owe people and my shortfalls, try to focus on the fact that I’m doing the right thing. For once. Finally.

The look on my sister’s face changes. Without further ado, she reaches for her purse, takes out her car key, and presses the key and my phone into my hand. I stuff the phone into my vest pocket and wrap my fingers around the key and squeeze.

“Thank you.”

Our eyes meet. So much left to do. It feels hot behind my eyes.

“Will you wait here?” I ask. “Until I get back?”

My sister gives me one of her wry smiles and says she has no intention of leaving until I’ve brought her car back. Then she grows serious again and quickly strokes my cheek.

“Be careful,” she mumbles. “I only have one sister.”

I start to head toward my sister’s car, but Leo moves to stand in my way.

“I’m coming with you,” he says.

I look into his worried eyes and think about the violent conclusion to the story I just wrote. I picture Veronica rushing into the summer cabin, crazed with her desire for revenge, and how the world becomes streaked red with blood. Scenes that no child should have to witness.

“It’s better that you stay here,” I say as calmly as I can.

“But I—”

“In case she comes back. You never know.”

Leo stares at me. I hold my breath and try to look like I believe what I just said might actually be plausible.

“OK,” he finally agrees.

“I’ll be in touch,” I say. “As soon as I can.”

Leo responds with silence, his eyes two bottomless wells in his pale face. I feel a sting inside. I realize I may not have another chance. Anything that needs to be said should be said now.

“Hey, I’m sorry about what happened the other day. When you came over and I shut the door in your face. You didn’t do anything wrong. It didn’t have anything to do with you. I’m the one who—”

“It’s OK.”

I shake my head.

“No, it wasn’t OK of me to do that. I want you to know that, that it wasn’t OK at all. I’m glad you were brave enough to try again.”

Then I walk away with long but controlled steps. I don’t turn around a single time, don’t know if they’re still standing there watching me. For safety’s sake, I wait until I’m around the corner and out of sight before I break into a run. I see my sister’s car and pick up the pace a bit. Only now do I allow myself to relax, to feel the terror.

Oh, Veronica, what are you planning to do?

I throw myself into the driver’s seat and turn the key. Then I floor it, following in Veronica’s footsteps. Toward doom.

Fast, bordering on reckless, that’s how I drive. But it’s late Friday afternoon, and it takes time to get out of town. In some spots, traffic is so heavy and slow that I start yelling. At one point, I have to stop myself from jumping out of the car and continuing by foot. Adrenaline bolts through my body. How much of a head start does Veronica have? Fifteen minutes? More? She’s probably stuck in traffic, too, right? I cling to that thought, needing to believe it’s true, because then I can hopefully catch up to her as soon as we’re out of the city.

But as the height of the buildings along the side of the road gets shorter and the traffic lights fewer and farther between and traffic thins out, what can’t happen does. I take a wrong turn. Realizing that I turned left too soon, I swear out loud and hit the steering wheel. I slow down and do a U-turn, turning right across the solid line, and I don’t care about my fellow motorists’ angry honks. All I can think about is that I’m losing valuable minutes. My head is throbbing. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Then I’m back on the right road and I floor it. I pass one car, then another. The sun sinks toward the horizon. No sign of a gray SUV yet.

I picture Philip, unlocking and opening the door to the cabin, the cabin he, Veronica, and Leo have been to so many times, where they spend their weekends and celebrated holidays, laughing and resting and spending time together, just the three of them. Now he brings a stranger over the threshold. He lets her tromp right into their most sacred space—and trample it. He crosses the limit of decency so uncaringly, so unsuspectingly. And he underestimates his wife, underestimates the strength of her anger, the unbridled power of her desire for revenge. What will Veronica do when she gets there? What is she planning? Lines of text flicker past—sentences I wrote during the last week.

The intensity in the air between them one second and then, a moment later, stillness and silence, deadly silence.

My fingers tighten around the steering wheel.

The life and bustle of the city feels increasingly distant. The highway stretches out ahead of the windshield without much variation. The exits are few and far between. The longer I travel, the more bucolic it becomes. After a while, a gas station appears on the right-hand side, and as I approach, another car pulls out of it—a gray SUV. The driver zooms past, and I catch a blurry profile, but there’s no doubt: It’s Veronica! She must have stopped to fill up, maybe buy something.

I slow down and settle in at a comfortable distance behind the car with Veronica’s nervous facial expressions and jerky movements fresh in my mind, remembering how the gravel sprayed from under her tires when she pulled away. But there’s no sign of her agitated mental state here on the highway. The SUV doesn’t weave in the lane. It just proceeds calmly and soberly ahead. No reckless passing, no furious speed. Quite the contrary, Veronica sticks to the speed limit and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. But maybe she’s taking her time for a reason. Maybe she’s waiting for it to get dark out.

We continue for another fifteen or twenty minutes before she signals and takes an exit that leads to a traffic circle and then onto a narrower country road. There’s one car between us. A small bridge leads over a stream, and we pass a farm with brown-speckled cows in a pasture. Then the woods take over altogether. We drive for a long time without anything other than conifers visible on either side of the roadway. The sun peeks between the trunks every now and then, its light richer and now flame colored.

After a while, the driver ahead of me turns off onto a side street, and there’s no longer anything between me and the SUV’s taillights. There are no other cars in sight, neither farther ahead nor behind me. The woods grow ever denser. Finally the SUV signals again and turns onto a road leading into the thick of the woods, a road so narrow that I probably would have missed it otherwise.

The road is rough and uneven. The car bumps, and I drive even slower. The sun has set, and it’s dark in among the tree trunks. Way up ahead I see the glow from the SUV’s lights. There are a few cabins along the road, but we pass them, penetrating deeper into the woods. My heart is pounding harder and harder in my chest. We must be almost there. What will happen then?

The SUV is no more than maybe fifty yards ahead of me now and veers left at a fork in the road. A few seconds later, I do the same. We pass several cabins of various sizes, and then the woods thin out a tiny bit. There’s something reflective a little farther ahead, and I realize it must be the lake where they used to go swimming and fishing when Leo was little. Just then the gray vehicle slows down and parks, and oddly enough only then do I notice it: the Storm family’s cabin. It’s right at the edge of the forest and looks exactly like I’d imagined after hearing Leo’s description. A wooden gable facing the narrow road, a patio, and a balcony. The front door isn’t visible from here. It must be on the other side, facing the water.