I must have looked so brainless, glancing around the kitchen for his mother. Left, then right, like I was getting ready to cross the street. He had been talking to her. Perhaps she was in the pantry getting the flour? Pot roast called for a roux. I would soon be tossing around words like that with people like me, people who wouldn’t look at me like I had two heads. Roux. Au poivre.
“Get undressed,” he said. I’d heard people describe rapists and murderers before. How their eyes went black and they saw pure evil. But the man I saw before me was the man I’d seen at the lake, in the car. I’d seen this man all along. I’d seen him and I’d gone with him anyway, because he’d asked for my help, and I’d already denied it to my mother that day. I’d have been a real bitch to tell someone no for the second time in twenty-four hours.
“You’re not going to use that,” I told him, an especially insane thing to say and exactly why I said it. I thought I could get him to comprehend the gap between what he was doing and who he was, because it was an insane gulf, a death swim. He was a law student in tennis whites who had broken his arm playing racquetball with his…
I hadn’t noticed it at first, but when I did, icy terror packed my chest. The sling hung around his neck, sweat-wrinkled and abhorrent as a used condom. Whatever was broken in this man was not a bone in his arm.
* * *
There were times, with CJ, that I’d been disgusted too, that I hadn’t wanted our skin to touch, that I had to grit my teeth and will him to be finished with me. At least I didn’t have to pretend to enjoy this, I thought. At least.
* * *
After, he gagged me with a mildewed dish towel and bound me to a chair between the front windows, using the same twisted dark rope we would have used to tie close the trunk of his car once we’d loaded in the boat. The rotted rag plugged the laugh in my throat. Oh, Ruth, I said kindly to myself, there is no boat.
I was facing the lake water I could still smell in my hair, thousands of feet below. It was as if he wanted me to enjoy the view. The door closed behind him and the car engine caught; the sound of gravel giving it to rubber. He was leaving. I sobbed because it was over and it hadn’t been that bad, right?
I twisted my wrists in the ropes, soundlessly at first. The scream that had collected in me had reach; I had to make sure he was far away before I used it. I tried rotating, shimmying, sawing, bouncing in the seat of the chair, but the ropes were so tight I could not even blister my skin. I screamed and screamed until my chin was slobbered with saliva and my vision spotted, black holes burning through the edges.
I came to with another burst of relief, the kind that must come after a long-dreaded surgery. It’s over. Behind me. I can get on with life now. The lake’s horizon severed the sun in half like a woman in a magician’s box, gutting it orange. The kitchen was dark and the air clammy. I looked down and saw goose bumps flecking my bronzed knees. It had been so long since I’d had a tan.
I thought again that what had happened wasn’t so bad, in the grand scheme of things. This sort of thing happened to women all the time and they still fell in love, had careers, babies, if they wanted those. I hadn’t been disfigured or lost some seminal ability, like my sense of smell or taste. I hadn’t lost the person I loved. I thought of Tina, and relief turned to a gratitude so pure and intense that I wondered if I’d been drugged with something.
I heard the woman’s voice then. The sweetness in it lifted me higher. It’s way nicer than you said! Even after I processed her words, even after I heard his response, with that peculiar, malignant affect, a sort of euphoria stayed with me to the end.
My back was against the wall, the driveway behind me, the front door to my right. I had no way of seeing either of them through the window. I thought about Tina, the way she sat on the kitchen counter swinging her feet and pinching off pieces of cheese while I was cooking, so that I always had to shred more as I went, and I thought about the culinary school where I would learn to properly chiffonade leafy herbs, and I marveled at the pointlessness of it all, at the timing, which did feel pointed in its own way. Why not a year ago, when there was nothing to take from me? It was like he had scoured the beach for the woman most flush with life.
The girl outside said “Hey!” in this funny, outraged way, and then the two of them came squeezing through the door on my right like some sort of black-and-white comedy duo my father used to laugh at on TV. She was younger than I was by a few years, young enough to look invincible and hassled and unafraid, even with a gun muzzle imprinting her cheek. I wanted to shelter in her adolescent hubris for as long as I had left, but it was obliterated the moment she saw the mangled grief on my face.