by Mark Dunn
“I’ll be back on Monday, Thom.”
“You’re ready to come back?”
“I’m ready to come back. And even if I’m not, I need to come back. I need to get back into my routine.”
“Excellent,” said Thom. “I’ll see you on Monday.”
Monday came. Abby rose early. She had an eight-thirty. She showered and dressed, nuked a frozen scone in the microwave, and then steeled herself to spend the day doing what she was very good at: cleaning teeth, making other people feel comfortable and relaxed during a sometimes intimidating trip to the dentist’s office. Abby was a popular hygienist. Some of her patients had switched dentists just to have Abby clean their teeth. It was a good job, a job she really loved. She hoped that she would be able to concentrate, that her hand wouldn’t shake, that memories of the attack wouldn’t intrude on her thoughts at inopportune moments.
Her eight-thirty went well. Mrs. Johnstone. One of Abby’s oldest patients (among a goodly number of senior-citizen transplants), Mrs. Johnstone was solemnly mindful of what Abby had been through and asked no questions. Her nine-thirty, Ginger Lopez, a bartender in her mid-thirties, was too used to drunken customers spilling their guts. Abby had to make it clear that she didn’t feel like doing any spilling that morning.
Her ten-thirty, Mr. Spinella, cancelled at the last minute. He was a real estate attorney and the time of a closing got moved up and he was very sorry—his secretary said—and, of course, he would pay, in full, for the missed appointment.
Abby’s eleven-thirty was a new patient—just moved to Port St. Lucie, he told Ms. Purdy on the phone. Abby didn’t want any new patients that first week back. She only wanted to clean the teeth of people she knew. She had neglected to tell Ms. Purdy this. It was her own fault.
The man came on time. Abby poked her head out into the waiting room and called his name: Davin Romey. He was a fairly young man, perhaps in his late twenties, with a short and stocky wrestler’s build. The first thing that Abby noticed about him was the wide breadth of his chest. He was wearing a fitted ecru-colored t-shirt under a loose blue summer jacket. He got up and took off the jacket. Abby noticed now that he had muscular arms, both biceps and forearms. Abby always thought of Popeye when she met men with overly developed forearms. Normal protocol, especially for a first-time patient, was to greet the patient and shake his hand. But Abby didn’t want to shake this man’s hand. He obviously wouldn’t know her story and might even think her rude, but she didn’t care; she didn’t want to shake the man’s hand. Entering the man’s open mouth with all of her dental instruments was intimate enough for her.
As Abby was leading Mr. Romey down the corridor to her room, she asked him how he had come to pick Dr. Jensen’s practice. “Did someone recommend us to you?”
The man shrugged. “Phone book. Yellow pages. A dentist is a dentist, right?”
Wrong. But Abby didn’t want to engage him. There was something about his voice that didn’t sit well with her.
Abby pulled the long arm of the dental unit out of the way so that the man could slide easily into the chair. She took a look at the questionnaire for new patients he’d filled out in the waiting room. “You’ve had some gum problems?”
The man nodded. “I chewed tobacco for a few years. I think it did a number on my teeth and gums.”
I know that voice.
“When was the last time you visited a dentist?”
“Two, maybe three years ago.”
Once Romey had settled in, Abby said, “I’m going to take some X-rays.” Romey nodded. Abby covered his chest with the lead shield and placed the thyroid collar around his neck. “Open, please,” she said, after she had put the unexposed film on the X-ray mount. She inserted the bitewing into the man’s mouth. “Bite down, please.”
There was a smell about him. Cologne.
When she had finished with the X-rays, she said, “I’ll be right back.” She took the film down to the room where the X-rays were developed. Suddenly, she felt queasy. Was it the two cups of coffee she’d had with her thawed-out scone? Sometimes coffee gave her a sour stomach.
He’s wearing the man’s cologne. The man who assaulted me. He’s wearing the same brand of cologne as the man who grabbed me and pulled me behind the Dumpster. He pulled me with forceful arms. Strong, muscular arms.
And there were two other smells, along with the cologne. What were those other smells?
Abby had to sit down. Jensen’s assistant Loretta—a young woman whom Abby really liked (she didn’t ask stupid questions)—appeared in the doorway.
“Are you okay?” This was a legitimate question.
Abby felt weak. Loretta noticed that she was slightly pale.
“I’m okay,” said Abby.
“Do you want to go home?”
“I’m in the middle of an appointment.”
“Screw that. Go home if you need to.”
Abby shook her head. Then she shook her head again, along with her shoulders and arms, in the same way that actors shake themselves to limber up before a performance.
Get a grip. You’re being idiotic. You’re grasping at coincidences. This is a man named Mr. Romey. He has come in to get his teeth cleaned. The form said that he’s employed as a locksmith. This is what he does, Abby. He makes keys. He doesn’t terrorize women in late night parking lots. Stop it. Pull yourself together.
Abby pulled herself together. She returned to her patient. She liked it that he wasn’t overly friendly, that he only spoke when she asked him a question. Abby liked people as a rule. She liked talking to her patients and having them talk back, but she also liked that other aspect to her job—the option, when she didn’t feel like listening to people, to put things into their mouths to keep them quiet.
Abby sat down on her wheeled saddle-stool. She depressed the foot pedal to recline the patient chair. She rolled over to the tray of instruments and plucked up her explorer and mirror. She pulled down the lamp and concentrated its beam on Romey’s open mouth. She used the explorer and the mirror to look for cavities. Nothing obvious there, but the mouth still showed evidence of some abuse. The chewing tobacco, she imagined. She traded the explorer for the probe so she could look for pockets. There had been a pronounced receding of the gums.
Chewing tobacco. That was one of the other smells. The man smelled of chewing tobacco and cologne. Too much cologne, just like the generous amount that Mr. Romey is wearing now. And there was some smell on his hands. He put his hand up to my mouth to keep me quiet. What was that smell on his palm? Try to remember, Abby.
Abby’s hands began to tremble. She withdrew the probe and mirror from Romey’s mouth.
His mouth now empty, he was freed up to speak. “Are you okay?”
“I’ve been ill,” was all that Abby could think to say. After all, she had been ill. Everything had shut down after the attack. She had lain in bed, not eating, shivering in a warm room. She couldn’t sleep, and when she did, her dreams were disjointed, unsettling. They were displaced dreams—not about the attack itself but filled with everything else dark and menacing that her subconscious mind could conjure up.
Such things do not happen. A woman does not get knocked around behind a Dumpster, does not have her handbag ripped from her shoulder with such force that she is left with an ugly strap-width contusion. A woman does not have a strange man’s hands on her ass, looking for a way to get inside, and only by the grace of God—(What was it? Did he see someone approaching? Did he lose his nerve? What made him stop?)—a woman does not go through all of this and then find the man who did it to her seated in her dental chair two weeks later. Such things simply do not happen.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said the man. The voice had a slight Brooklyn cadence. Abby knew Brooklyn accents. She had lived in Brooklyn when she went to school there to study dental hygiene. The man who’d attacked her had the same accent.
“It’s okay. I’m better now,” said Abby. Her hands had stopped shaking. She placed a gloved hand back
into the man’s mouth to check for bumps and lumps on the floor of his mouth and inside his cheeks. “Stick out your tongue, please.” Abby took out a cotton 2 x 2 to look under the tongue. She gave the tongue a careful inspection. The man had said that he used to be a tobacco chewer.
Used to be. Abby’s assailant hadn’t given it up. In fact, it smelled as if he had been chewing a plug right before the attack. A thousand thoughts had raced through her head as she lay crumpled upon the pavement that night behind the Dumpster. One was this: that she hoped the man would get oral cancer. What a strange thing to think at such a moment. Yet only a minute or two after the attack, Abby was already thinking of how her assailant should be punished for what he did to her. He hadn’t raped her—not literally, but she had been raped in every other sense of that word. Men like that should have to pay for what they did.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” This was how he had responded. He had asked me, as he held me, as he had pushed himself against my back, as he had breathed his fetid tobacco-breath upon my neck, he had asked me if I had a husband or a boyfriend. I didn’t know how to answer. Should I have lied and said yes? How would he have reacted? Would he have shown my made-up husband or boyfriend that he didn’t own sole title to me? That I belonged to my assailant as well? Is this the sort of thing that psychotic men do to women in the dark? Assault both the women and the men they love?
So I told the truth. That I didn’t have a husband. Nor a boyfriend at the moment. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he had said, almost sympathetically—just as Romey had said it. Exactly as Romey had said it. “You’re much too pretty not to have a boyfriend.”
Abby closed her eyes.
Brass.
Abby opened her eyes.
The third smell—the smell on his dirty hands: brass. What is made of brass? Keys are made of brass. Locksmiths smell of brass.
It was clear to Abby now: the man in the chair was the same man who had assaulted her in the corner of the sandy parking lot. He had never asked what she did for a living. He would not have known that she was a dental hygienist. He had said that she was pretty, yet he had never gotten a good look at her face. He had come upon her from behind. He had done his dirty business in the dark. If he had fully seen her, something of this recognition would have registered on his face in the waiting room, wouldn’t it? Or there would have been a slow process of recollection there in the chair. Yet there was not.
In this respect, Abby had him at a disadvantage.
Abby rolled over to her ultra-sonic and took the water-blaster into her right hand. With her left hand she took up the suction—her “Mr. Thirsty.” She hooked it to one corner of Romey’s open mouth. With the foot pedal she turned on the ultra-sonic and began to clean her new patient’s teeth as her thoughts ran wild. Every moment of the assault came back to her. Every smell, every sound, the painful grip of her assailant’s muscular paws. It all came blasting back into her brain as the ultra-sonic—the sound of its shrill whirring—assailed the silence of the room.
Abby would have to find a way to detain him so that someone could call the police. It shouldn’t be that hard to do. He’d have to wait as she went back to retrieve the X-rays. Yes, this was when she would grab Loretta and have her make the call. The police would come quickly. Then it would all be over. He would be put behind bars for what he had done to her.
But I want him dead.
It could not happen that way. He had not killed her. He would be put away. Justice would be served.
But I want him dead.
Abby tried to shake the thought from her head. Her head shook with more violence than she expected. This drew Romey’s attention. He pushed her arm away—the arm with the hand that was blasting away at his fetid mouth.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked.
She removed her foot from the pedal. The room grew quiet again.
“I’m not feeling well,” she said, the words shaped by fear.
“Maybe I should go.”
Don’t go. You can’t go.
“No, it’s okay,” she said, almost pleading. “Just give me a moment.”
Now he was looking at her. Now he was staring at her, studying her. He had not seen her face on the night of the attack. Or had he seen her face? In the club. Where Abby had gone for drinks with her friends. Had he been watching her from across the room? Did he follow her out to the parking lot? Is this why he was there, why he was almost on top of her before she had even reached her car? The club had been dark and smoky. Perhaps this is why it took him some time to remember her.
But now he is remembering me. Now he knows it’s me.
“You’re going to keep your mouth shut. I’m going to walk out of this place and you’re going to keep your mouth shut.”
“Okay.” This is what she had said that night. When he had said that he wasn’t going to hurt her, even as he had fumbled with the belt to her jeans. Now she was saying it again. The same way.
This is how he knows.
He sat up quickly. He hit his head against the lamp.
“I haven’t finished the cleaning,” said Abby with forced placidity. “I haven’t polished. We have to look at your X-rays.”
“Shut up,” he said, rubbing his head. He grabbed her by the wrist to command her complete attention. The tight vise on her wrist was painfully familiar. “Get this bib off of me,” he said.
He released her wrist. She put her hand upon the bib. She moved her hand to the bib chain. She turned the bib around so that the chain was touching the front of his neck.
I’m going to strangle him with this chain. That is what I am going to do. I am going to choke him until he dies.
And yet her hands, her own grip would not be strong enough. Abby had “hygienist hands”—often aching, nearly arthritic from the meticulous work they did—the professional downside to being a dental hygienist.
I can’t do it.
Yet there was something that she could do. Behind her was the drawer with the syringes. Not the innocuous air/water syringes of her trade. The kind that gave injections. Injections of Lidocaine. She threw open the drawer and grabbed the syringe. As Romey was tearing at the bib and flailing at the lamp that was still blocking his escape, she plunged the hypodermic into his chest and injected the air that was inside the syringe. Right where she knew his heart to be. He seized up and fell back into the chair. She grabbed a second syringe, just to be sure, and stabbed him again.
You can’t have too many embolisms.
The man was dead within seconds. Abby knew that poor dental hygiene can sometimes lead to heart disease and coronary-related death. But who knew that dental hygienists were capable of achieving that same end all on their own?
Loretta came. And Dr. Jensen. Ms. Purdy phoned the police. Abby was on the floor now. She sat on the floor looking up at the dentist and his assistant. At the man she had just killed, his body slumped in the chair, his limbs flopped out like those of a rag doll. Abby felt weak. But she no longer felt powerless.
To Dr. Jensen she said, in a soft, almost cheerful voice, “The patient is a good candidate for some reparative periodontal work. But at this point, I’d say he probably shouldn’t bother.”
The dentist gave no reply.
1999
CONSTRUCTIVE IN BOTSWANA
The locals called them the “White Campers,” though they didn’t do any actual camping until week three of their visit. They were in Botswana under the auspices of Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village initiative. The “R and R” component of the trip came only after two weeks of building cement-block houses for residents of the village of Serowe. The fourteen crew members, largely from the Northeastern U.S., finished four houses under the supervision of crew leader Jack Darrigan, a New York City building contractor, and started work on three others.
Each day they hauled blocks (called “bricks” by local builders), mixed mortar, raised wood and tin roofs, sang, prayed (Habitat for Humanity being a Christian organization), and then
piled into their chartered mini-bus (called a “combi” by the natives), and headed back to the lodge, where they feasted on samp and beans, mabele, goat seswaa, and braised oxtail, and where they drank too much beer (Habitat for Humanity being a fairly liberal Christian organization).
The first two weeks of the trip had been physically grueling but invigorating. The White Campers had definitely earned their R and R: a visit to Moremi Game Reserve in the Okavango Delta in northwest Botswana. There they would take part in a four-day/three-night budget photo-safari with campfire grub and army-issue tents. Offsetting the bare-bones amenities were twice-daily trips through the savanna and wetlands; within the two-thousand-mile reserve, the Habitat crew members had the opportunity to view some of the most diverse and abundant natural habitat wildlife to be found anywhere on the continent. Zebras and greater kudus, cape buffalo, crocodiles, elephants, vervet monkeys, wildebeest, ostriches, giraffes…Ericka Prager tried to keep a list, but she eventually had to stop. The profusion of animal residents of the Okavango defied itemization.
Ericka was from Greenwich, Connecticut. She was a high school biology teacher. Her friend Soumeya Powell, a fellow teacher at the school, had asked her to come. It didn’t take much coaxing; Ericka was already familiar with Habitat from having worked on a couple of houses in Stamford. She was young. And she was adventurous.
Ericka was also single.
David Venetti lived in White Plains, New York. He was a computer programmer. David had never given much thought to taking a trip to Africa, but once he had started thinking about it—especially the chance to use his weekend carpentry skills for some purpose other than helping his father build a backyard deck—the idea began to appeal to him.
David was also single.
Through the two weeks of home-building, Ericka and David had worked happily side by side. A growing friendship soon moved cautiously into the realm of romance. At twilight on their last day in the village of Serowe, as the two stood on the porch of the cabin David shared with two other single young men on the crew, as David and Ericka stood listening to the herdsmen calling their cows in for the night, as they watched the obedient cattle, their cowbells jangling, lumber through the dusktide shadows to their night pens, David reached over and kissed Ericka.
