by Riley Sager
I’ve lost track of Sam, who’s still somewhere behind me, creeping through the darkness. I am alone, which doesn’t unnerve me as much as it should. I’ve been alone in the woods before. In situations more dangerous than this.
It takes me fifteen minutes to make a loop back to my starting point. I stand right where I began, my skin slimy with perspiration and two damp patches under my arms. Now is a rational time to find Sam and head back to the apartment, to bed, to Jeff.
But I’m not feeling rational. Not after the day I’ve had. A hollow ache has formed like hunger in my gut. My single pass through the park isn’t enough to make it go away. So I set off on a second one, again walking beside the lake. This time, fewer lights reflect off the water’s surface. The city around me is winking to sleep one window at a time. When I reach Bow Bridge at the lake’s southern end, everything is darker. The night has swept me into its arms, wrapping me in shadows.
With that dark embrace comes something else. A man. Drifting through the park on a separate path fifty yards to my right. Immediately, I can tell he’s not one of the prowling men looking for sex. His walk is different, less confident. Head down and hands thrust into the pockets of his black jacket, his progress is more amble than walk. He’s trying hard to look inconspicuous and nonthreatening.
Yet he’s watching me. I notice how his Yankees cap keeps turning my way.
I slow down, taking half-steps, making sure he’ll be in front of me when our paths connect roughly twenty yards ahead. I long to check behind me and see if Sam has caught up, but I can’t. That might tip him off. A risk I need to avoid.
The man whistles as he walks. The nondescript trill cuts through the silence of the park, high-pitched and airy. I get the feeling he’s trying to put me at ease. An attempt, innocent or not, to get me to let down my guard.
Up ahead is the spot where our paths meet. I stop and mime rooting through the purse, making sure he notices. He has to. The purse is too big to miss. Yet he pretends not to see it, continuing his exaggerated stroll until he’s on the same path, just ahead of me. He keeps up the whistling, trying not to scare me, trying to get me moving again. The Pied Piper.
I start walking. One, two, three steps.
The whistling stops.
He does too.
Suddenly he’s whirling around to face me. His pupils ping-pong around his sockets, crazed and dark. The eyes of an addict in need of a fix. On the surface, though, he’s hardly threatening. Gaunt cheeks. Body as thin as a broom handle. He’s practically the same height as me, maybe even shorter. The jacket gives him some girth, but it’s all show. He’s a featherweight.
The hardness of his face is amplified by the sweat slicking his high forehead and razor-blade cheeks. His skin is as taut as a drum. He practically vibrates with hunger and desperation.
When he speaks, his voice is a sluggish mumble. “I don’t wanna bother you, okay? But I need some money. For food, you know?”
I say nothing. Stalling. Giving Sam enough time to get closer. If she’s even there.
“You hear what I’m sayin’, mama?”
The silence continues on my end. I leave everything up to him. He can leave. He can stay. If he does and causes trouble, Sam will certainly strike.
Maybe.
“I’m real hungry,” the man says, gaze flicking to my purse. “You got food in there? Some cash you can give?”
I look behind me at last, seeking out Sam’s approaching shadow.
She’s not there.
No one is.
It’s just me and the man and a purse that’ll make him really pissed if he looks inside and sees it’s stuffed with nothing but paperbacks. I should be scared. I should have been scared this entire time. But I’m not. Instead, I feel the opposite of fear.
I feel radiant.
“No,” I say. “I don’t.”
I stare at him, monitoring his movements, waiting to see the flex of an arm or the curl of a fist. Anything to suggest he’s thinking of doing harm.
“You sure you got nothin’ at all in there?” he says.
“Are you threatening me?”
The man raises his hands, takes a step back. “Whoa, mama. I ain’t doin’ nothin’.”
“You’re bothering me,” I say. “That’s something.”
I turn, start to walk away, the purse dangling limply from my hands. The man lets me go. He’s too strung out to put up a fight. All he can muster is a parting insult.
“You’re one cold bitch.”
“What did you just say?”
I spin around and stride toward him, pushing close enough to smell his breath. It stinks of cheap wine, stale smoke, and rotting gums.
“You think you’re tough shit, don’t you?” I say. “Bet you thought I’d quake at the sight of you and hand over whatever you wanted.”
I give him a shove that sends him rocking back on his heels. His arms pinwheel as he tries to maintain balance. One of his hands knocks against my face, so light I hardly feel it.
“You just fucking hit me.”
The man’s face goes slack with shock. “I didn’t mean—”
I interrupt him with another shove. Then another. When the man crosses his arms, blocking a fourth push, I drop the purse and start to swat at his arms and shoulders.
“Hey, stop it!”
He ducks away from my blows, dropping to his knees. Something tumbles from his jacket and plops onto the path. It’s a pocketknife, folded shut. My heart seizes at the sight of it.
The man reaches for the knife. I slam into him, hip against his shoulder, nudging him away from it. When he stands, I start slapping at him again, swinging wildly, hitting his chest, his shoulders, his chin.
The man lunges forward, pushing back now. I fight him off, still swatting, kicking at his shins.
“Stop!” he yelps. “I didn’t do nothin’!”
He grabs a fistful of my hair and yanks. The pain tugs me into stillness. My eyes close against their will, lids dropping. Something flickers in the sudden darkness. Not a pain, exactly. A memory of it. Similar yet foreign to the one I feel now as the man pulls me backward.
The memory pain explodes like fireworks across the backs of my eyelids. Bright and burning hot. I’m outside. Near the trees. Pine Cottage vague in my muffled vision. Someone else has grabbed my hair and is pulling me back while people are screaming.
My fingers wrap around the man’s jacket collar, dragging him to the ground with me. We hit the ground hard, me on my back, him on my chest, both of us puffing out shocked breaths. When he goes for my hair again, I’m ready. I roll my head along the ground, evading his tug. Then I tilt forward, slamming my head against his own. My forehead connects with his nose, the cartilage bending.
The man cries out and rolls off me, a hand to his blood-gushing nose. He rises to his knees. His fingers are stained red.
Real pain and the memory pain spark through me like live wires on a car battery, jump-starting my muscles. It cracks the brittle shell around my memory. Tiny flecks of it fall away, beneath which are shimmering glimpses of the past.
Him.
In a similar crouch on the floor of Pine Cottage.
A bloody knife within His grasp.
Although I’m vaguely aware this is a different place in a different time, I see only Him. So I dive on top of Him, curled fists smashing against His face. I punch Him a second time. A third.
Rage takes over. Like a black ooze that’s filling me up, spilling out of my pores, covering my eyes. I can no longer see. Or hear. Or smell. The only remaining sense is touch, and all I feel is pain in my fists as they smash into His face. When it becomes too much to bear, I rise to my feet, directing a kick at His skull.
Then another.
And another.
Each blow comes with a name, bubbling forth against my will. I spit th
em out as if they’re poison, spewing them onto Him, covering Him.
“Janelle. Craig. Amy. Rodney. Betz.”
“Quincy!”
That’s not my voice. It’s Sam’s. Suddenly, she’s right behind me, crushing me under her arms, dragging me away.
“Stop,” she says. “For God’s sake, stop.”
I spend a few seconds fighting Sam’s grip, thrashing and snarling. A feral dog trapped by a leash. I only ease up once I see the blood. It’s a smear on Sam’s hand, slick and dark. Seeing it makes me think I’ve hurt her. The very thought saps the rage out of me.
“Sam,” I gasp. “You’re bleeding.”
I’m wrong. I realize that when I glimpse my own hands, seeing them soaked with blood. The same blood that got on Sam. The same blood that trickles down my arms, stains my clothes, splatters my face and neck in hot dollops.
Some of it is mine.
Most of it is not.
“Sam? What happened? Where were you?”
Instead of answering, she releases me, knowing I’m not going anywhere. In a flash, she’s beside the man in the grass. He lies on his side, an arm flung out behind him and the other curled inward.
I can’t look at his face but can’t help but look at his face. What’s left of it. His eyes are swollen shut. His broken nose seeps blood darker than the rest of his blood. He doesn’t move. Sam pushes two fingers into the slick of blood at his neck, seeking a pulse. Worry creases her face.
“Sam?” I say as dizziness and fear and shock somersault through me. “He’s still alive, right?”
My vision blurs, Sam and the maybe-dead man veering in and out of focus.
“Right?”
Sam says nothing. Not when she runs her jacket sleeve across the spot she touched on the man’s neck, erasing the indentation left by her fingers. Not when she snaps up the knife lying in the grass and drops it into her pocket. Not even when she drags me from the scene, unable to look at me as I wail, “What did I do, Sam? What did I do?”
19.
We move quickly, a pair of fugitives hurtling through the darkness. Sam’s thrown her jacket over my shoulders, her hand pressing the small of my back, pushing me forward. I keep going because I have to. Because Sam won’t let me stop, even though all I want to do is collapse onto the ground and stay there.
Breathing has become a chore. Each inhalation is hampered by an anxious shudder. Each exhalation is accompanied by a sob. My chest expands from the lack of oxygen, my desperate lungs pushing themselves against my ribs.
“Stop,” I gasp. “Please. Let me stop.”
Sam increases the pressure at my back, forcing me onward. Past trees. Past statues. Past bums stretched across benches. When we come upon others—a man on a bike, three friends drunkenly walking arm in arm—she turns inward, shielding my blood-soaked body from view.
We stop only when we reach the Conservatory Water, that elaborate pool where in the daytime kids watch their toy sailboats traverse the shallow water. I’m guided to the pool’s edge, lowered to my knees, hands plunged into the water. Sam cleans me off as much as possible, splashing water onto my arms, my neck, my face. On the other side of the pool, a homeless man is doing the same thing to himself. When he stares at us, Sam yells, her voice skipping over the water.
“What the fuck are you looking at?”
The man backs away, grabbing his fistfuls of trash bags and disappearing in the darkness.
Sam dips a hand in the water, scooping liquid onto my forehead.
“Listen,” she says. “I think he’s still alive.”
I want to believe her, but I can’t let myself.
“No,” I murmur. “I killed him.”
“I felt a pulse.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “I’m sure.”
Relief pours over me, more cleansing than the water she continues to splash onto my bloodstained skin. I can breathe easier. My throat opens up, releasing another sob, this one grateful.
“We need to call for help,” I say.
Sam lowers my hands into the water again, rubbing them beneath her own, erasing the evidence of my sin. “We can’t do that, Quinn.”
“But he needs to get to a hospital.”
I try to pull my hands from the water but Sam holds them under.
“Calling 911 will get the police involved.”
“So?” I say. “I’ll tell them I was acting in self-defense.”
“And were you?”
“He had a knife.”
“Was he going to use it?”
I can’t answer that. Maybe he would have, eventually. Or maybe he would have walked away. I’ll never know.
“He still had it,” I say, unsure of who I’m trying to convince, Sam or myself. “The police wouldn’t charge me if they knew that.”
Sam finally lifts my hands from the water, turning them over to see if any blood remains. It’s all gone. My palms are pale and glistening.
“They would if they knew our reason for being out here,” she says. “If they knew we were trying to lure someone. Especially if they found out you could have gotten away.”
The only way she could know this is if she had been there. Hiding. Watching me the whole time. Watching even as the man’s knife dropped from his pocket. For a moment, that particular truth eclipses everything else.
“You saw me?”
“Yeah.”
“You were there?”
I start to hyperventilate again, my body wracked by a series of lung-scraping gasps. The sudden lack of air makes me woozy. Or maybe that’s just from shock. Either way, I have to steady myself against the pool’s edge to keep from tilting over. When I speak, it’s in sharp, ragged bursts. “Why—didn’t you—help?”
“You didn’t need help.”
“He had a knife,” I say, a warm slick of anger rising in my throat. It feels like a swallow of Wild Turkey moving in reverse, inching its way higher. “You just sat back and fucking watched?”
“I wanted to see what you would do.”
“And I almost killed a man. Happy? Was that the reaction you were looking for? Why didn’t you try to stop me?”
“The question you should be asking is why you didn’t try to stop yourself.”
I manage to stand, shaking water from my hands before striding off. Away from the pool. Away from Sam.
“Quinn,” she yells to my back. “Don’t go.”
“I’m going!”
“Where?”
“To the police.”
“They’re going to arrest you.”
It’s the way she says it that stops me. Her voice is flat, the words alarmingly matter-of-fact. She’s right, and I know it. Panic boils in the depths of my stomach. I’m the moth that got careless with the flame. Now I’m engulfed.
“Knife or not, the cops aren’t going to understand,” Sam says. “They’ll only see you as a vindictive bitch who came here looking for trouble. You’ll be arrested for aggravated assault. Maybe worse. The kind of charges your boy, Jeff, won’t be able to talk the cops into dropping.”
I think of Jeff, mere blocks away, oblivious in his slumber. This could ruin him. He has nothing to do with it, but no one would care. My guilt is enough to destroy us both.
The dizziness returns, bringing with it a harsh tremble that paralyzes my legs. I sway, unsure how much longer I can remain upright. Sam keeps talking, only making it worse.
“You’ll be in the papers again, Quinn. Not just one, but all of them.”
Oh, I’m sure of that. I picture the headlines: FINAL GIRL SNAPS, GOES INTO VIOLENT RAGE. Jonah Thompson will have an orgasm over it.
“There’s no recovering from that,” Sam says. “If you go to the cops, life as you know it will be over.”
The words are ugly in her mouth, even thou
gh she’s only telling the truth. Yet I hate her all the same. Hate her for showing up, barging into my life, bringing me into this park. Mixed with that hate is another, more unwieldy emotion.
Despair.
It bubbles inside me, making me sweat and cry and feel so helpless that I long to plunge into the pool’s water and never resurface.
“What are we going to do?” I say, hopelessness splitting my voice.
“Nothing,” Sam says.
“So we just leave the park and pretend it never happened?”
“Pretty much.”
She picks up her jacket, which I had shrugged off at the water’s edge. She puts it around my shoulders again, nudging me forward. Our pace is slower this time, both of us keeping watch for signs of police. We take a different route out of the park.
Few people see us on our way from Central Park West to my building. Those who do probably write us off as two drunk girls stumbling home. My dizzy swaying helps sell the charade.
Once home, I fill the tub in the guest bathroom and peel off my clothes. The amount of blood on them is gut-churning. It’s not as bad as the white-dress-turned-red at Pine Cottage, but close. Bad enough that I start sobbing again as I lower myself into the tub. Tendrils of pink form in the water, swirling slightly before vanishing into nothingness. I close my eyes and tell myself everything about tonight will disappear in the same manner. A flash of color quickly gone. The man in the park will live. Because he was carrying a knife, he won’t mention what I did to him. Everything will be forgotten in a few days, weeks, months.
I examine my knuckles and see that they’ve turned a ghastly bright pink. Pain pulses through them. A similar ache throbs in the foot I had used to kick the man into unconsciousness.
More sensations from earlier in the night come back to me. The pulling of my hair. Seeing Him crouched on the floor, bloody knife within his grasp.
Memories.
Not of tonight but of ten years ago.
