At night she lay listening to the groan of the freezers. Her cell phone told her there were places where people wore sheer gowns and tuxedos without socks, where girls dyed their hair pink and wore crop top T-shirts that said #MeToo. If you wore a shirt like that where Bathsheba lived, the boys would take it as an invitation—like please sir, can I have some rape too, sir, like the kind you gave Melissa Barnes in the backseat of Billy Sanger’s car last winter, or what you did to the youngest Haskell girl when her parents were out of town for their anniversary? These weren’t thoughts as much as physical instincts, her survival brain on high alert at all hours of the day and night. If she stayed in Florida, she would be eaten alive. This was her anxiety. They would pick her bones clean and leave her with nothing but babies. At first her body would give her power. She would be the puppet master, Salome on a dais, and they would follow her with their eyes the way dogs will follow the food in your hand. But this power wouldn’t last. Five years, ten, and then she would be somebody’s mother, drinking too much gin on a Tuesday night. The animals that circled her then would be scavengers, jackals come to pick the leftover meat from her carcass.
If she stayed here she would be smoking by thirteen, drinking by fourteen, pregnant by fifteen. The practical skills she learned would be breastfeeding and changing diapers. One minute she would be the girl with her hands in the wind, driving through the Everglades at night with the radio up too loud and a bottle of tequila between her knees, and the next she would be the woman in the Walmart with the black eye buying frozen peas and carrots in bulk.
So she ran, packing a small bag and hiding it in the woods. She took all her babysitting money and a fifty-dollar bill from Avon’s wallet. By this point Samson was already gone. He’d hitchhiked his way north, telling Avon he was going with his buddy Elvin to Tampa for a boys’ weekend. Bathsheba couldn’t forgive him for that, for leaving her behind, not just for the sense of abandonment, but for the rise in DEFCON alert that happened in her house in the months and years after.
“Don’t you run on me,” Avon used to tell her after dark, a pint of whiskey in his belly. He set trip wires on the stairway and hung bells on all the doors and windows. Radar Hunt sold Avon a pit bull bitch that hated other females, especially the human kind, and she would bark every time she saw Bathsheba, her lip curled and murder in her eye. Avon staked her under his daughter’s window at night. This is the sad truth of the life of Katie, born Bathsheba. She has been held captive before. In many ways it is the defining factor of her life. And you can say she should have known better, that she should have seen Mobley coming a mile away, but to say that is to betray your own ignorance. Look at your life, the relationships you keep getting into. Can’t you see the pattern? The wife who turned out to be just like your mother. The boyfriend who hit you just like your dad. You act like the world is filled with rational choices, that our brains are simple binary systems where if you push the red button and get a shock, you stop pushing the red button. But what if the red button pushes you? What if your father is a red button and he trains you to push him, rewards you for pushing him? What if he teaches you that pushing the red button is called love, a sharp electric shock that leaves behind a dull ache? Doesn’t it make sense that when you finally escape into the wild and you see a red button, you would push it, because who doesn’t want love?
And here she is, a mile above the earth, eating lobster, drinking champagne, and talking about philosophy, about Mondrian and Kandinsky. As far as she knows, her dream has come true. And this makes her happy, happy, happy.
“Wait till you see the stars,” Mobley tells her. “Down near Big Bend there’s no light pollution. It’s just you in the dark with the universe.”
Alone in the dark.
Katie smiles. She can’t wait. She takes a forkful of lobster, puts it in her mouth. The taste, sweet and sour, is unlike anything she’s ever experienced. She closes her eyes. Across from her Mobley looks at Astrid, who raises her glass once more and smiles.
You see, Katie, born Bathsheba, believes she is going to Texas to become an artist. But the truth is, she is going to be locked away in a tower like a princess, taking Mobley’s seed inside her until she becomes pregnant with his miracle child, and then she will be held there under those starry skies until she brings forth his child from her sacred womb. It came to him in a dream one night last year, this vision of fatherhood. An immaculate conception, sired through a surrogate. A vessel. One woman would bear him a son. Then she would vanish, and other women would raise the boy, none outshining his father, the biggest, reddest button of them all. The child would be cared for, pampered, but only Mobley would show him love. In this way would the child’s devotion be complete. In this way would he earn the right to be that most sacred of things—E. L. Mobley’s heir.