He raised a fist and smashed it into the side of her head. There was an explosion, and a noise like a drill in her skull. Those must be dancing angels, she thought, on the ceiling. There was that muffled crying again, coming from somewhere.
Something cold rested against the side of her face. She knew it was important to work out what it was and to keep very still until she did, to keep absolutely frozen. And then she realized it was the knife. It was in the split second before she felt the blade tilt and slice through her cheek that she realized.
She felt her body shift into limpness, vaguely saw that his face was changing, that his hands were tearing at whatever he’d put over her mouth. Then she was gasping for air, trying to swallow huge gulps of it as he cut the loop around her neck to free it, lifted her head and shoulders. He was holding a glass of water to her mouth, ordering her to take a sip, but it was running down her chin as she panted, dripping onto her breasts, mixing with something red. Why was there so much red? He was blotting her face with the gashed nightdress.
For an instant, he looked at her as if shocked to see what he was doing; his face crumpled in uncertainty and exhaustion, as if he was puzzled by how it was turning out. His head trembled, and he blinked several times, as if he’d been temporarily blinded but was now seeing clearly again.
Then he was kneading her breasts, pinching and sucking, biting so hard she cried out and he smacked a hand over her mouth and told her to shut up. He was tugging his already unbuttoned trousers off, and his boxer shorts. He climbed on top of her, grabbing her hair and pulling her face close to his. His expression made her think of a painting of Apollo flaying Marsyas, looking tenderly at his victim as if he were nursing instead of killing him. His voice sounded almost loving when he whispered, “You’ve made me wait too long for this,” and forced himself into her.
She was weeping softly, thinking that she wanted to get his DNA beneath her fingernails but couldn’t because her wrists wouldn’t move. When he came, his DNA would be inside of her; there would be evidence there, at least, when they found her body.
“Look at me. Say my name.”
A drum pulsed in her temple. Her neck was too heavy, and her eyes wouldn’t open fully. She thought the wetness in her eyes must be blood, squeezing out through the pressure she felt inside her head.
“Say it.”
Keeping his name from her head, from her voice, was her last talisman.
“Say it,” he said. “You do what I tell you.”
But she realized she couldn’t remember what his name actually was.
He told her again to say it, supplying the word himself at the end of the phrase he wanted from her, and she repeated it, though the words were fuzzy.
“Kiss me,” he said.
She tried to move her head away, but even a millimeter made her brain shake too much, made it ache too much, and he fastened his lips to hers, pushing his tongue into her mouth. She considered biting him but was too scared to try.
“Tell me you love me.”
“I love you.”
“Say, ‘I love you, Rafe.’ ”
“I love you, Rafe.”
“Tell me what I’m doing to you.”
She didn’t know what he wanted her to say. She said the only thing she could think of. The only true thing. “You’re hurting me,” she said.
“Good.” He grabbed her hair again. “Now tell me that you’re going to come, that no other lover can do for you what I can, that you belong to me, that this is how you like it.”
She parroted all of this, listened as his breath grew faster, braced herself as his movements became more violent.
When it was over, his body slumped over hers, tamping her into the mattress. She thought he was breaking her ribs, bruising her lungs, boring a hole into her stomach in the place where he’d punched her. It was several minutes before he pulled out.
“You loved it. I could tell you did,” he said. “I could feel you coming. I know better than anyone what excites you, Clarissa.”
She could feel wetness between her legs like acid, and her chest too constricted and scalding to breathe, and her shoulders as if they had been ripped from their sockets, and her ankles chafed and raw from how hard she’d tried to pull them free. Her hands and fingers were numb because the blood had drained from them.
He had the gag in his hands. She could see it was leather, like the one the woman wore on the cover of the magazine. She was weeping again, her breath labored. “I promise I’ll be quiet.” Her voice was a croak, squeezing out of her raw throat.
“I don’t trust you. I told you I’d never trust you again after the trick you pulled in that park. You’re going to learn that I mean what I say. That’s going to be the last thing you learn.” She tried to turn her head away, was tugging again at her wrists to escape, but she was barely able to move at all as he fastened it.
“You need to be gagged for the other things I’m going to do to you. We don’t want you disturbing your neighbors with your screams.” He threw himself onto the bed beside her, shoved an arm over her breasts and a bent leg over her hips, and fell deeply asleep.
The whooshes of air in and out of her nose were so loud. Her chest was heaving, up and down, lifting and dropping, pumping and deflating. She was certain she would wake him, but she couldn’t slow down her breathing, however hard she tried.
Please do not let him wake, she thought. Please, please do not. Please, God. Please help me. It kept going through her head, an unspoken incantation, over and over again. A charm to keep her alive and bring help. But it was soon overpowered by another chant that she couldn’t stop. There was no God. There just wasn’t. There couldn’t be. There was no hope. Laura must have prayed, and God hadn’t saved her. God had let Laura suffer unimaginably.
Her breathing was getting worse. She thought the room was filling with smoke and she was choking on it. She tried to tell herself she was imagining it. She tried to tell herself there couldn’t be a fire because if there was the smoke alarm would go off and she wasn’t hearing its siren. But she knew there wasn’t enough oxygen. There wasn’t. There just wasn’t. She would bite her own tongue as she died, like the wicked queen who couldn’t speak or cry out as she danced to death in the red-hot iron slippers they’d forced onto her feet with tongs.
She couldn’t understand why the room was spinning. She squeezed her eyes shut as tightly as she could, then opened them, but she was still in the center of a whirlwind. Everything was in a haze. She couldn’t pick out a single object to anchor herself.
When she next opened her eyes, she wasn’t sure where she was or why it was so hard to move or what had happened to make her hurt so much everywhere. But she was sure that there really was a fire and she was dying from inhaling smoke and almost blind because the air was so thick with it. Robert said that if she ever got caught in a fire, she should get low on the floor. He said that staying low was the only way to find air. It was smoke that killed, he said. She was trying to move because she knew that that was what Robert would want her to do. She was trying to get herself onto the floor, trying to get her arms and legs free, but something had frozen her and something else had fallen on her. Maybe it was the roof. A roof had once fallen on Robert in a fire. Maybe the roof had fallen earlier, when the room had been spinning. She wondered if she was dead and in her coffin, with the lid bearing down on her.
There was a bell coming from somewhere far away. She thought it must be the church bell tolling her funeral. Something was heavy on her breasts. She opened her eyes and saw it was an arm. And then she remembered where she was and what had happened and who the arm belonged to, and realized there hadn’t really been a fire. But she knew she had been in deep terror, and that he had done something very bad to her head that made her unable to think properly or stay awake, and she was certain she had had some kind of absolute and uncontrolled panic attack and lost consciousness, and she knew she had to try as hard as she could not to let that happen again because somebody had once tol
d her that if you fell asleep with a head injury you would die.
There was a rattle, then a crash of metal. He was stirring, looking around sharply and listening, muttering and swearing under his breath. He slammed a fist into the top of her head. There was a blast of tiny dots, then only dark.
SHE THOUGHT THAT she must be dreaming. She was peering through a shimmering fog, and Robert was bending over her, pulling at something on her face. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. He was at the bottom of the bed by her ankles and moving her legs, laying them alongside each other instead of so far apart. He was reaching above her, and then she could see her hands, held in his, and he was rubbing them. His face, his beautiful face, was white. Why was it so white? And his cheeks were wet. Was it raining? The drops were like tears, but that couldn’t be right. Didn’t Robert once say that he never cried? Or was it the man called Azarola who’d said that? Robert seemed to be whispering. Why did he sound as if he were choking? His voice was so odd. And he was wrapping her in the quilt, arranging her on her left side. He was holding a phone and punching numbers into it and giving her address.
There was something very important that she must remember. She was trying so hard, but couldn’t make herself. And then it came to her. “You must watch,” she tried to say.
He only shushed her gently. He was holding her fingers again, rubbing them. Her fingers were very white, whiter even than his face.
But then she could see a shadow in the doorway. She knew the shadow belonged to the man. Robert followed her gaze and jumped to his feet, putting as much space as he could between himself and the bed, as if to lead the man away from her.
The man was waving the knife in his right hand. With the blade pointed up and out, he advanced toward Robert. Robert took a step back and also leaned back, but the man stepped forward to maintain his face-to-face proximity to Robert and held the knife out farther.
Robert feinted a punch to the right. When the man thrust his knife out to meet it, Robert pivoted, used his left hand to hit the top of the man’s right arm, used his right hand to grab the wrist with the knife in it, and jabbed his left forearm into the man’s nose. All at once, there was an earsplitting crack of bone, a burst of bright blood, and the clanging of the knife onto the floorboards. As the man swayed on his feet, blinking and dazed, Robert brought his right fist to the man’s left temple and his left fist to the man’s jaw so his head snapped back and his body recoiled. Like the loser in a boxing ring, the man wavered for an instant, then crashed down, thumping so hard onto his side that the whole room seemed to shake.
Robert kicked the knife away as he stepped forward to inspect the man, who was entirely still but for the ragged rise and fall of his chest. He checked and double-checked for signs of consciousness, as if the man were a rabid dog he didn’t want to turn his back on. He leaned over to lift the man’s limp hand and then drop it, watching it fall with a resounding thud. It was his fingers Robert seemed especially concerned with, as if wanting to assure himself that there wasn’t the slightest twitch.
There was a fresh rush of blood from her cheek and a sharp cramp in her stomach. She didn’t realize she’d groaned until Robert turned his back on the man, calling out her name as he took a step toward her. It was only a few seconds of inattention, but it was too many, and it was all her fault.
The man stretched his right arm over his head and reached beneath her bedside table. When his hand emerged, it was holding a second knife. More of its mass was in the black rubber-grip handle than the blade, which was short and wide. The man sat up and drove the knife into the back of Robert’s upper thigh.
Robert screamed, an animal noise that went right through her. He fell to his knees, straight down.
The man spat crimson from his mouth and blew it from his nose. He reached up, the knife shining silver above his head, held high to finish Robert off. As the knife swept down, Robert twisted around, grabbed the man’s right wrist with both hands, jerked him onto his back, and half sat on him, pinning him down with a knee on his abdomen.
Robert seemed not to notice his other leg, which was splayed on the floor, the light-brown corduroy of his trousers darkening with blood. His navy jersey was damp with sweat under the arms, on his chest, over his back.
The man punched Robert in the face with his left fist, splitting Robert’s lip, but nothing would make Robert let go of the man’s right wrist. Nothing would make him stop trying to get the man to drop the knife. Nothing would make him give up his effort to keep the knife away from his own body.
There was so much blood. Robert’s dripped down his chin. It pooled from his leg onto the floorboards. The man’s left a track from his nose, which had spattered his bare chest and chin as well as the sleeve of Robert’s jersey.
The man slapped his left hand over Robert’s two hands, fighting to control the knife. It juddered between them as each tried to drive it toward the other, as each tried to turn the blade toward the other. The man was on his back so that he had to push the knife upward against gravity. It was Robert’s only advantage but the advantage wasn’t enough. It was a kind of awful arm-wrestling match, and Robert was slowly losing, weakening as he lost more and more blood. His face was gray. His forehead was beaded with sweat. He grunted.
Neither of them noticed her slipping off the bed. She lifted the first knife by its tortoiseshell handle from the floor where Robert had kicked it. She stepped shakily toward them, looking like a newly made vampire rising from her grave for the first time. Blood snaked along the inside of her thighs. Blood streaked from her face and down her neck and over her breasts and belly. Blood matted her blond hair, staining it dark red.
The kind and helpful policemen had lied to her, feeding her all of that false, deadly hope, telling her she was safe when she wasn’t, when really she was as far from safe as anybody could be. The things they did didn’t work. Only she herself could truly make the man disappear. Only she could make him vanish so completely he’d never, ever be able to come back. It was the only way. Nothing else would make him leave her alone. Nothing else would help Robert. The next time the man’s knife went into Robert, it would kill him. She knew it would. She knew exactly what she had to do, and she knew she’d only have one chance.
She really was extremely good at human biology, as she’d once told Robert. Her obsession with reproduction spilled over into a fascination with the whole body, but it was an interest she’d had even as a schoolgirl. All of those details had imprinted themselves on her. She remembered the pictures of the heart, the photographs and illustrations and anatomical diagrams that she’d always thought so beautiful. She’d studied them all over again when her father had his bypass.
The man was wearing only boxer shorts. She could see those pictures as if they were drawn on top of his chest in layers: the heart and its labeled chambers beneath the thoracic cage, the thoracic cage beneath the skin. Even with her pounding head and blurry eyes she could see them. She didn’t even have to try. She knew that there was a gap between his ribs, just above the right ventricle. She knew that that was the deadliest place. She made herself focus on the target, in line with his nipples and slightly off center, trying not to let herself be distracted by the pain etched on Robert’s face.
She didn’t let herself take her eyes off that spot as she aimed the knife into the man’s chest with all the force of her own downward rush. It was easy for her to fall to her knees on the floor just above his head; falling was what her body wanted to do. There was a split second of resistance, like the instant just before she penetrated the rind of a melon with a very sharp point; then the metal sank deeply, as if his flesh were the inside of the fruit. The knife went all the way in. It didn’t stop until the hilt reached his skin.
He wheezed and sucked, but only briefly. His lips were no longer pale. They were blue. Bubbles of red were leaking from between them. The blood didn’t spurt from the knife wound, as she’d thought it would; it seeped up steadily, to shape itself into a dessert plate aroun
d the handle. Her hands weren’t working like they usually did, and the knife was getting so wet and warm and slippery it was difficult to grasp. But she knew that she mustn’t let go. No matter what happened. She knew that. She kept trying to hold it for fear of it not working. In case she’d miscalculated or missed the spot she’d aimed for. As if he would recover if she let go. As if he’d grab up the other knife again and plunge it into Robert. As if the hole she’d made would seal over and he’d pop up and come after her if she didn’t make absolutely sure the knife had done its work.
His eyes rolled, then froze. They were still open, but she knew that he wasn’t seeing her. At last he wasn’t looking at her. He really wasn’t. She knew he could never look at her anymore.
Robert’s arms were around her, and she let go of the knife. He was sitting on the floor, pulling her across his lap, scooting them as far away from the man as he could get them, smearing a trail of red over the floor as he dragged his stabbed leg. He was holding her and rocking, somehow tearing off his jersey at the same time and wrapping her in it, both of them soaked with blood. He was saying her name. Again and again he was saying it, as if he were trying to call her back from somewhere else. But she felt herself falling away, and his voice seemed to come from a great distance even though his lips were still shaping the word.
The room was full of strange people dressed like policemen and paramedics and Miss Norton was there, too, weeping. She could feel them tearing her from Robert, hear them telling him that he needed urgent treatment himself. She tried to cry out his name so they wouldn’t take him from her but she couldn’t make any sounds come out. All at once, the pain in her head exploded and the world snapped into black.
EIGHTEEN WEEKS LATER
The Maiden Without Hands
Monday, July 20
The Book of You: A Novel Page 26
