Page 69

Jessica

I think he’s going to kill me. Honestly.

I thought he would take me back, to his office, to my room, to her—but instead, he is pushing me down the hall and toward the small bathroom off the kitchen.

I try to dig my heels in to push back, try to twist out of his grip—but he presses the blade of the knife into my neck and I stop.

The blood is already running down my throat, the sharp edge of it nicking me several times in the process. I’ve stopped begging because that doesn’t seem to be working, but I have no idea what else to try.

My mom would know just what to do. Once, when she was in college, she was hijacked and rode in the car for twelve miles with a guy who was high on LSD and had a shotgun pressed into her rib cage.

He wanted Dairy Queen, but the DQ in town had closed like six years earlier, and there weren’t any others in that town.

Somehow, Mom convinced him that a salad would taste just as good and that she made great salads, and got him to agree to stop at a produce stand beside a gas station.

When they stopped, she bought two heads of lettuce and some carrots and told the clerk to call the cops, then got back in the car with him.

When I asked her why she got back in, why she didn’t just run, she said that then he would have gotten out and probably shot the clerk and anyone else he saw.

She got back in, knowing she might die, and drove him to her apartment, where she fixed him a salad, and was sitting at the table with him, eating, when the cops busted in.

I didn’t believe her when she told me that.

I didn’t believe her for a decade, not until I was doing a history project in eleventh grade and we went to the library and used the microfilm, and I came across an article in the paper with a picture of her holding a head of lettuce, her arm around the store clerk.

I could never have done that. And this, I’m not going to be able to talk my way out of.

I’m not her. I don’t think quick like that.

Maybe I’m not her daughter, after all, and it occurs to me, in the moment before he pushes me into the bathroom and toward the open shower door, that if I’m going to die, I should at least know the truth.

I fall on the white subway tile, my hands catching me, and I look back at Dr. Joe, who is kneeling beside me, his knife in one hand.

“Is she really my mom? That nurse?”

He pauses and wipes his mouth with the back of his knife hand. “Your mom never said anything to you? Anything that might make you think you were adopted?”

Had she? I hold up my hands, showing him my palms. “Let me think a moment. Just, please. Give me a sec.”

I try to process twenty years in a few seconds, and come up short. “I mean, my dad is dead. That’s what she always said.” I think of the photos of him and wonder who that man was, why she had to lie. “And she is kind of old. Older than my friends’ moms. But no, she never said anything.”

“Lay down on the tile, head toward the drain.”

Yeah, that doesn’t sound like anything I want to do. I tense and he smiles.

“Don’t bother, little lamb. Make one move I don’t like, and I’ll just start stabbing. This can be quick or it can be painful, so lay down if you want it fast.”

The movement is so quick that I don’t understand what is happening.

A blur above his head. A cracking sound.

He tilts forward, and I shriek, diving to one side and hugging the tiled wall as he falls, his knife still stuck out, into the place where I’d been.

The nurse—both hands tight around a bronze frog—stands above him, her breath hard, eyes wild.

“The keys are in the Excursion,” she gasps. “Head north and use the key fob at the gate.”