The notebook was gone, fed to the fire. The old woman was back on her feet but flustered and frightened; she’d not expected him to react so quickly, as strongly as he had. As he watched her, it occurred to him how little it would take: they were so fragile at that age, and she was already unsteady on her feet; she’d drunk that glass of sherry very fast. Now she swayed a little in front of him, her eyes full of tears. She stood on the edge of a rug whose corner had ruched up when she’d been scrabbling around on the floor, almost exactly midway between the sharp-cornered stone hearth and his clean-lined coffee table in glass and bronze.
Were he writing this scene, he’d be spoiled for choice.
The One Who Got Away
He can’t see anything except for red.
When he woke that morning he didn’t think he’d be the hero of the story. If he’d thought about it at all, he might have called himself the hunter.
When he woke that morning, he couldn’t imagine how it would be, how she would be, different than what he wanted, not the one he wanted at all. He couldn’t imagine how she’d lie and trick him.
When he woke that morning, he never thought he’d be the prey.
The unfairness of it, bitter in his mouth, trickles down the back of his throat as he succumbs to her, the one who got away, the girl with the ugly face, red-handed, rock-handed, vengeful. She’s all he can see, the last thing he’ll see.
The One Who Got Away
She knows, before she sees, that he has found her. She knows, before she sees, that it will be his face behind the wheel. She freezes. For a second she hesitates, and then she leaves the road, takes off running, into a ditch, over a wooden fence. She scrambles into the adjacent field and runs blind, falling, picking herself up, making no sound. What good would screaming do?
When he catches her, he takes handfuls of her hair, pulls her down. She can smell his breath. She knows what he is going to do to her. She knows what is coming because she has already seen him do it, she saw him do it to her friend, how savagely he pushed her face into the dirt, how he pawed at her.
She saw how hard her friend fought.
She saw how she lost.
So she doesn’t fight, she goes limp. She lies there in the dirt, a dead weight. While weakly he paws at her clothes, she keeps her eyes on his face all the time.
This is not what he wants.
Close your eyes, he tells her. Close your eyes.
She will not close her eyes.
He slaps her across the face. She does not react; she makes no sound. Her pale limbs are heavy, so heavy in the dirt, she is sinking into it. She is taking him with her.
This is not what he wants.
He climbs off her body, beats the earth with his fist. He has blood on his face and in his mouth. He is limp, beaten.
This is not what he wants.
He starts to cry.
While he is crying, she picks herself silently up off the ground.
Go, he says to her. Just go. Just run.
But this girl doesn’t want to run; she has done her running. She picks up a stone, jagged-edged, its tip pointed like an arrowhead. Nothing too big, just large enough to fit snugly into the palm of her hand.
Her hand cups the warm stone and his eyes widen in surprise as she swings her arm toward him. At the sound of the bone at his temple splitting, joy fizzes up in her and she swings a second time, and again, and again, until she is drenched in sweat and in his blood. She thinks she might have heard him begging her to stop, but she cannot be sure; she might just as well have imagined it.
When the police come, the girl will tell them how she fought for her life and they will believe her.
THIRTY-THREE
Miriam sifted through her keepsakes, the objects she’d gathered during the course of brushes with other lives—the lives of others, other lives she might have lived. She noted with some sadness how they were depleted: the key she had taken from the boat was gone, as well as one of Lorraine’s earrings, which pained her terribly.
The things she chose to hold on to represented important moments for her, and when she thought about those times—those few moments alone with Daniel on the boat, her escape from the farmhouse—she liked to have associated objects to hold, to help bring her back to how it really was, to how she really felt. Now, as she held the little silver cross that her father had given her for her confirmation, her first Communion, she closed her eyes tightly and imagined herself at fourteen, before the horrors of the farmhouse, when she was still an innocent.
Miriam was aware that this habit, of collecting trinkets to transport her back to important moments, was a trait she shared with psychopaths and serial killers, which was something that bothered her, but the truth, Miriam believed, was that we all have our monstrous moments, and these objects helped her stay true to who she really was, to the monster she had made of herself.