Her Dad’s voice from all those years ago brought her up short, “Baby Girl, don’t chase the ball, let it come to you. Hit that ball in the sweet spot right at the front of your swing, with all your power behind it. This is how the big boys do it. Wait.” Savanah sprang back into the room, her back hitting the wall, where she pressed herself flat just inside the doorway. The house was dark. She had turned off the light after searching the suitcase. Everything she needed to take with her was waiting on the bed next to her backpack. She considered her grip on the bat, and pulled it back by her ear, she felt her body tensing and ready to swing. Doors were crashing open, footsteps moving with purpose through her family’s beach house. They were calling out to each other. She couldn’t understand what they were saying, but she knew their meaning nonetheless.
Heavy footsteps were pounding up the stairs and down the hall towards her. Angles of light running ahead darting here and there searched. For a moment she felt her throat close off, and as the loose floor board just beyond the bedroom door creaked, Savanah’s muscles flexed as she pulled oxygen into her lungs and with force swung as if to hit a home run.
The metal bat met bone and more metal. Savanah could feel the crunching of the breaking bones reverberating through the bat to her hands and through to her shoulders, she could hear the splintering bone deep in her ears, but the force of her swing was undeterred. She heard something heavy and solid hitting the floor and the flashlight fell somewhere in what again became deep darkness, but not before she caught a glimpse of the gun. His curses filled the air. Before she could think, she swung again and this time directly at the cursing. There was a sickening thud and silence. A wave of nausea rose inside her and despite it, she didn’t pause, she reached into the darkness for the gun. There was flesh, there was something wet and sticky, there was metal. She grasped the gun and tossed it on the bed.
Pounding foot steps, angry voices were coming towards the stairs. Muttering to herself, “I can’t battle them all” and with everything she had she pushed the prostrate figure back out the bedroom door. She swung the door shut and fastened the latch with fingers that were strangely calm. Yanking on the large dresser on the opposite wall she pulled it in front of the door to buy her a few moments.
Trying to process it all, she again spoke aloud to herself, “Well it’s a small grace, but I think they still need me alive.”
Yanking up the window shade moonlight streamed in the window. Savanah opened the window and popped off the screen. She reached across to her suitcase and pulled out a plastic bag and put the gun securely in it and shoved it haphazardly along with everything else on the bed into the backpack laying there. She knew the gun could come in handy later, but it would have to stay dry. Slinging the backpack onto her shoulders, she then reached outside and around the window frame.
Her hands grasped onto a rope that hung there, where it had hung since her teenage years. Savanah closed her eyes and leaped, caution having been thrown to the wind several days ago, but hoping the rope was still strong enough somehow after all these years.
Without pause, she shimmed down the rope and then leaped the final few feet to the ground. From inside the house she could hear the intruders struggle and knew they would be only moments behind her. Savanah ran with certainty through the dunes to the dense ice-plant covered hill that rose to the side of the house. The backpack slammed up and down against her back. Savanah felt her lungs would explode as she reached the edge of the cliff. Turning around briefly she saw the beams of light going everywhere all through and around the house, but somehow no one seemed to have determined her direction yet, but that was only a matter of moments. They would see her prints, but they would lose her tracks in the ice-plant, and would not be able to guess her escape route.
She’d had played this scene a hundred times as a child, but now the need to escape was real. She leaped off the cliff and once again felt that momentary sense of flight before slipping under the waves of the frigid ocean water far below.
written by Kathy Garcia
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