One Cold Night

wasn’t Becky’s kidnapper, he was the opposite of everything Lisa had wished for in a father. Special — it was a word he should not have been allowed to use.
    Her foot caught on something sharp.
    “Ouch!”
    She stopped abruptly and bent down to assess her bleeding left foot. He was slicing her open bit by bit: first the accidental cut to her inner arm when he was knifing off the ropes on the bed, and now this. She sat all the way down and as her body met the ground she felt as if something heavy within her kept falling. Falling and falling through her body, past her body, beyond caring. Not that she didn’t care; she cared. It was just that... she didn’t know how to think of it... but obviously the day had not gone quite as planned, as he had planned. She was beginning to get the feeling that he wasn’t really sure what he wanted from her, exactly. She decided to take a chance.
    “Why don’t you get it over with?” Sitting cross-legged on the stony ground, she looked up at him and waited.
    He stared down at her, the gun tight in his hand. He looked stricken with confusion, as if he wasn’t sure what she meant.
    “I don’t think you really want to kill me,” she said, knowing it was a risk; also knowing that risk was all she really had to work with. “You just want to get to know me, like you said before, and that’s a pretty normal thing to want.” She stressed normal to throw a lifeline into the chaos of his mind, thinking maybe, maybe it made sense to give him the benefit of the doubt even though he didn’t deserve it.
    His forehead tensed and his blue eyes began to cloud in such a strong reaction of bafflement it frightened her.
    “You don’t believe me, do you?” His voice was small and soft, creepy. “That I’m your father.”
    “I... I don’t know what to believe.”
    “Susan told me she had an abortion, but now I know the truth. When I look at you, I see my flesh. ”
    The way he said flesh, savoring it, made her want to vomit.
    “What I don’t understand...” She faltered, then regained herself; she had to face him now if she was going to have any chance at all. “What I don’t understand is why you kidnapped me.”
    He hesitated, as if kidnapped didn’t fully agree with his own perceptions.
    “It’s my turn,” he finally said. “And she was wrong to lie.”
    “Is that what you told yourself when you came up with this plan?”
    “It’s what he told me.”
    “Who?”
    “Him.”
    Oh, Jesus — Jesus. Was that it? “But that’s an idea, ” she said, “and I’m a person. Can’t you see that?”
    Shaking his head, he seemed to struggle with something. “He planned it all out for me. He said he was my brother. He told me it would be best for everyone, and I deserved my turn.”
    Right at that moment, the sun tipped out of the sky, the trees darkened, the air chilled.
    “Turn for what?”
    He stared at her, and in the pause Lisa remembered something Susan had once told her about her highschool boyfriend: that he was handsome and supercool — her word had been magnetic — and that his only brother had drowned a year before they’d started dating. Now it was obvious Susan had been talking about Lisa’s very own father, that this was the guy, but magnetic was not the word she’d use for him.
    “And isn’t your brother dead? ” Lisa asked a second question before he’d answered her first.
    A storm gathered in his face as he leaned aggressively toward her. But before he could say or do anything, a car door slammed in the near distance.
    “Get up!” His hand tightened around the gun, his knuckles turning white. “Right now! Get moving!”
    Her body automatically obeyed; she sprang up, stepping forward onto her injured foot. They continued deeper into the woods, swallowed by trees that seemed to multiply, growing denser and more ablaze with color. She smelled bark and damp earth and without making sense it became the smell of this man’s rage and confusion.
    As they walked, her eyes slid to his profile. He had an unassuming face, plain, really — not handsome, at least not anymore — and Lisa wondered what Susan had seen in him. She figured he was about thirty-one or -two, just a little older than Susan, yet he looked middle-aged in a way she was not. He was a loner and a stone skipper, and she recalled now that the first time she’d seen him, standing at the edge of the water in the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, he had seemed as bland and innocuous as