He scoots across the console toward me. “What’s your real name, huh?” he asks in a husky voice. “I bet it’s even prettier.”
“Just let me out here,” I repeat. “I can walk.”
But he’s on me before I can get all the words out, his hands everywhere—squeezing my breast, unbuttoning my jeans, pulling at my shirt and face. “You smell good,” he whispers hungrily. “Like gardenia bushes in the summer. They used to grow by the house where I grew up. That was my favorite house. It’s gone now.”
I know he’s drunk because I smell like ammonia and river mud and because it’s an oddly specific description. I claw at his face and arms, but he hardly notices. Another woman streaks across my mind, a fat hand flattened over her mouth. Don pins one of my arms to my side, his weight bearing down on my broken rib, causing me to cry out. His other hand is inching down my panties.
“Come on, girly. I brought you all this way. I bought you those peanuts and that sandwich, all that bottled water. What’s in it for me? This is what you wanted, right? This is what you really wanted.”
I turn away and scream and he jerks my face back, mouth gaping over mine, bourbon-tainted saliva slathering my lips and chin. His tongue is as strong and as determined as the rest of him. In his ardor, he loosens his grip and I free my other hand, managing a weak punch to his throat. He draws back, surprised, but his grin only widens.
“Hard to get? Hardly seems right for a girl in your position, but I’ll play along.”
It’s the way his eyebrows fall, slumping over his eyes, that I notice first. Then his hand goes to his throat. “How hard did you hit me?”
He starts wheezing after that. His eyes bulge and his face purples and his other hand clutches his stomach that gurgles loudly. I flatten myself against the passenger door, unsure what I’m seeing.
“What did you do to me?” he wrenches out before the first spasm hits, every muscle in his neck and shoulders coiling over itself. His mouth clenches at a weird angle and his eyes roll as the seizure takes over. I see my moment and scrabble at the handle, but still the door won’t unlock.
Don grimaces and tears at his door, swinging it wide and vomiting all over the gravel. It’s a pained, guttural sound.
Frightened and desperate, I grab the key fob where he’s wedged it in the ashtray as he doubles over outside the car. I press at the buttons frantically until I hear the familiar click and jerk the handle. The passenger door flies open, and I tumble out backward, scrabbling away on hands and feet. The cabin light flares on and the car dings menacingly as Don contorts in another peculiar spasm. This time when he vomits, I smell the blood. And he collapses.
Getting to my feet, I take shaky steps around the trunk and find him lying face-first on the ground.
“Don?” I whisper, my voice hoarse. I nudge him with a toe. He doesn’t respond. “Don!” I pound his back and struggle to roll him over. When I finally succeed, his eyes are open and lifeless, his posture limp, his mouth still. No breath emanates from his nostrils.
Shit,I think.Shit. Shit. Shit.His vomit is the color oxblood at my feet.
Suddenly, I am five years old again. The breeze toys with the thin wisps of my hair as I squat down, poking a finger into the man’s shoulder. My toothmarks dot his forearm, the glisten of spit and blood in them. I don’t know to feel bad yet. There is a buoyancy inside me, something rising like heat, lifting me up. I smile and slip another berry between my lips, but I’m not hungry anymore. In the distance, my mother’s voice is calling, the pitch tilted and wrong, blemishing the afternoon.
Don, I realize in that moment, is very, very dead. And still, I feel scared of him. I taste the bourbon in my mouth and wipe my face again and again. If I leaned down now and pumped his chest, put my mouth over his and blew, would he hold me there? Would he come to and finish what he started? Would I be saving a rapist?
The shame within me stirs, a mix of regret and confusion. This is a bad, bad thing.Again.And I don’t know how it happened. I can hear my mother’s voice echoing from the past:What have you done?
I wish I knew.
The car dings, and I recognize that even if we are on an unpopular road, we are making quite a scene. If I stand here too long,someone will happen upon us. There will be police and an ambulance. I can’t risk it.
I step over Don’s body and reach into the driver’s seat to grab his discarded tie. I use it to tug his wallet from his front pants pocket. Nine dollars won’t get me far, and I can’t use his credit card without leaving a trail. Don doesn’t look like he’s hurting for much with his swollen belly, twill dress shirt, and eel-skin shoes, but he’s only got a twenty. Looks like plastic is the way he likes to play. I pocket the cash and Shell card and throw his wallet into whatever stalky crop they’re growing in the field next to us. Climbing into the driver’s seat, I drop his thermos on the ground before pulling the passenger door closed.
I should feel something, I think. Something more than panic at what this might cost me. Something more than displaced shame. A man just died. And I did nothing to save him. But I don’t feel sad for Don. I only feel relieved to be rid of him and grateful for his car. When I saw that policeman choke at the restaurant in Radcliffeborough, I wrapped my arms around his chest without hesitation, jabbing my fists into his solar plexus until he coughed up the chicken lodged in his windpipe. I remember the intense fear that something terrible was happening, how he might be lost. His life, however unknown to me, had a palpable weight, like gold bullion. He had a value I could taste in the room. Even after saving him, knowing he was okay, I was so shaken I couldn’t eat. That was before I learned he was an officer, before I saw the fury in my husband’s face, before the reporter showed up.
Watching Don die was nothing like that.
Maybe Henry has finally broken something in me. Maybe I’m no good for men anymore. Maybe I never was.
4Myrtle
Meeting her was a shock.
I didn’t grow up with family. My father died before I was born. I had no siblings. If there were grandparents, they never came for birthdays or holidays, so I just assumed they’d all died. Eventually Gerald came along, but he wasn’t family. My mother clung to him out of some desperate longing for normalcy, trying to create the appearance of a true American household. But we were always just loose parts stowed together. We didn’t fit. Even when it was only my mom and me. Sometimes I would catch her looking at me, as if I were a thing to be wary of.
I was nine years old and deep into the shame of my nightly forays in the woods and the resulting diagnosis when a woman showed up. I remember lounging on a plastic chaise in the backyard when she came strolling over, a thick flood of dark hair pouring over her shoulders, flashing with copper glints, like mine. She was exquisite in a pair of stiff, wide-leg pants, the scuffed leather toe of her boots peeking out, little purple flowers embroidered on her shirt, and a knit scarf wrapped too many times to count around her neck.
She stood over me as I froze, staring up into those twinkling eyes, the color of shamrocks. “Do you know me, child?”
I shook my head slowly.
