Chapter 2 - The Tracks Behind Me
The silence of the desert was deafening. There were no birds, no distant highway hums, only the crunch of gravel under my white walking sneakers and the rhythmic wheeze of my own lungs. By hour two, the midday sun felt like a physical weight pressing against the crown of my head. The temperature hovered near one hundred and five degrees, and the air was so parched that sweat evaporated from my skin before it could form beads, leaving behind a crust of fine salt that stung my eyes.
Every half mile, my mind played tricks on me. A twisted acacia bush in the distance looked like the front fender of a highway patrol car; a shimmering band of heat looked like a wide ribbon of fresh water. Each time, I blinked hard and forced myself to look down at the two dark lines pressed into the dirt. Those tire tracks were my lifeline. If the wind rose and wiped them away, I would be walking in circles across an ocean of stone.
My thoughts kept drifting back to Madison’s childhood. I remembered sitting beside her bed when she had scarlet fever at age seven, wiping her forehead with cold washcloths through the night, praying that God would take years off my life and give them to her. When had that sweet, freckled child turned into a predator? It hadn’t happened overnight. It had started with little cruelties: the forgotten birthdays, the way she rolled her eyes when Robert spoke about his modest childhood, the cold calculation in her eyes whenever she surveyed our home and casually asked which antique sideboard would look best in her apartment. Tyler had merely poured gasoline on an ember of greed that had been smoldering inside her for years.
Around four in the afternoon, my knees buckled. I fell hard onto the rocky shoulder, scraping my palms against jagged flint. The pain was sharp, but the exhaustion was heavier. The bottle was down to two swallows. My head pounded with a dull, throbbing ache that signaled heat exhaustion. A voice inside me whispered that it would be so easy to lie down beneath the shadow of a limestone outcrop and let the sleep take me.
May you like
Then I remembered Tyler’s oily smile as he had asked for the toolbox. I remembered him leaning against my dining room table in Minneapolis, eating my cooking while plotting where to leave my bones. Rage—pure, ice-cold fury—surged through my veins like adrenaline. If I died here, Madison and Tyler would stand in front of Robert’s friends at a memorial service, wearing designer black clothes bought with his pension, wiping away fake tears while celebrating their victory.
"Get up, Sarah," I ordered myself aloud. My voice sounded like gravel grinding in a mortar. I staggered to my feet, leaned against the wind, and kept walking.
