“Who? Sean?” He doesn’t wait for her to answer. “That’s who you see on Thursdays, isn’t it?”
He crosses the room, picks up her purse by her feet, and rummages inside.
“What are you doing?” she says.
“Texting Sean.”
“What are you writing?” she shrieks.
He puts her phone back into her purse and sets it down by her foot again.
“He won’t believe it. I’ve never cancelled on him before. He’ll be suspicious. He’s a police officer.”
He resumes his pacing and runs his fingers through his hair several times so violently Sylvia feels the tug on her own roots.
“There’s always a first time,” Richard mumbles.
“Even if you manage to trick him, how do you expect to hide me from Babs? She’ll be here any minute... ” Sylvia’s voice trails off as a thought occurs to her.
Richard stops pacing, slips his hands into his pockets, and looks up at the ceiling.
“Babs doesn’t know I’m here,” she says.
Richard drops his head and looks down at his feet.
“There’s no concert tomorrow.”
He licks his lips and shrugs his shoulders, bending his neck right then left like a boxer going through his pre-fight tics. The gesture, schizophrenically uncharacteristic, disturbs Sylvia like nothing else that night, not even discovering she’d been drugged, not even waking up bound.
“Where is she?”
“You know that when I hate you, it is because I love you to a point of passion that unhinges my soul. Have you heard that one?”
“Where is she?”
“On a plane.”
Then and only then does escape become a vague necessity in Sylvia’s mind. It comes hand in hand with the now first detectable fumes of terror. Where incredulity and exasperation had been her guiding emotion, survival becomes uncertain. She isn’t yet fully afraid, but for the first time that night she can foresee a future, the real possibility, of danger.
“Florida. For her arthritis and the chemo.”
“America?”
“For the warmer climate.”
An image of Babs’s claw-like hands flashes in Sylvia’s mind and she feels remorse. She didn’t know, she says.
“How could you? You’re selfish, Sylvia.”
Sylvia laughs. Loudly and it feels wonderful. The sound makes her feel more powerful because the scorn in it reminds her of her anger.
“Don’t laugh. It’s true. You are selfish. But I love you anyways.”
Sylvia laughs louder, throwing her head back.
Richard takes two long quick steps and strikes her cheek. When Sylvia regains focus, she sees his face very close to hers peering at her with apology. He has dropped to his knees, putting his hand on her leg and he says he’s sorry. The blue of his eye pushed to the very limits of its circumference. His pupils were like two gigantic holes on his face.
“When Babs finds out, and she will find out—”
“The truth? What’s the truth except that I love you?” He sighs and says, “I know about your other men. I’ve been following... making sure you’re all right. Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Always Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays.” His expression is stern, but tender. In a low voice he says, “You’re a slutty, dirty, slutty slut. But I know you’re better than that, Sylvia. I love you. I could love you.”
“You missed Tuesday,” says Sylvia in a cool, lying hiss.
Sylvia watches Richard’s upper lip twitch. He moves his hands to his side, but remains genuflected.
“You don’t have a Tuesday.” His voice is too defiant.
“You know nothing.”
He changes tactics. “You’re out of touch, Sylvia. Out of touch with what you need. Why are you so afraid of love? Do you know what they do when they leave you? One goes home to his wife, another goes to a strip club by Camden, and another always stops by Burger King and gluts himself with crap. These men don’t know the meaning of worship, of loving you, and keeping themselves pure and clean and innocent for you. All they want is to get their knobs in your cunt and pretend that you love them. Of course, you don’t love any of them. You’re afraid to love. Isn’t that it? I guessed the truth? But you’re looking at the wrong men for salvation! I know that’s what you want, to be saved from your fear. To be delivered into love. I’m pure, Sylvia. I am innocent. I would be faithful. I would never betray you.”
He places his hand just above her lap and moves his palms slowly up the length of her thigh without touching her.
“Do you think I don’t know why you go to these concerts? No one adulterates your experience or your personality or your independence. That’s what you want in love, isn’t it? That’s what you want in love. I can do that for you, Sylvia.” His face is now so close she can see the pores on his nose. Leaning so that his lips are by her ear, he says, “I don’t even have to touch you.”
Twice, her mother dated men who returned and even stayed for eggs over the course of several months, and Sylvia watched her mother dye her hair and lose twenty pounds for one of them and leave Sylvia for a week while she went to Biarritz with another when Sylvia was twelve. But they all left her in the end. And for months her mother would weep, lying in bed or slouched in the arm chair in front of the living room window and smoke several packs of cigarettes over the course of the day. Love made women like her mother messy. Sylvia looked at her mother’s broken form and felt only disgust and determination not to be that sort of woman.
And though his proposal is ludicrous, Richard himself probably insane, Sylvia can see beauty and solace in it. He would be devoted to her from a distance, devoted to her as she saw him capable of devotion with Babs. The one man who had ever told her he would never try to get in her pants would be the one man who could take care of her heart.
“Kiss me,” she says.
He looks at her suspiciously. He cannot conceal the quick glance at her lips. It’s the same kind of glance shot at an abandoned cocktail by an alcoholic, tormented by fear and yearning. She tells him to kiss her again and he shakes his head. I want you to, she tells him. I want you to, she tells him again. With his mouth ajar, his shallow breaths lingering nauseatingly around her face, he puts his mouth on hers. He pulls away quickly for a moment as if she burned him. In the next instant, he crushes his face against hers bruising the inside of her mouth with her incisors. He screams and falls backwards when she bites his upper lip.
His fingers are covered in blood when he looks down at them after touching them to his mouth.
“You slut!”
Expecting another blow, Sylvia shuts her eyes. But instead she hears Richard stand. He picks up her wine glass from the coffee table and sends it flying over her head. It shatters against the wall beside the grandfather clock that says five to six. Hoisting the heavy quartz ashtray with her lone cigarette butt inside, he pivots to his right and throws it on the coffee table. It lands with a crack against the wood and rolls toward the living room archway off the front foyer. Sylvia is unsure if the noise is from the ashtray or the table, which Richard overturns—the coasters, magazines, a book, and the wine corks, which he only recently set down ever so carefully on one corner, scatter at high velocity across the room. Now by the window, he yanks once, twice, three times before ripping down all the curtains. Books are pulled from the shelves and fly behind him, landing on top of each other, bending pages and covers; a few volumes, some heavy, land on top of Sylvia. There are so many of them. This goes on and on.
And when Richard is done, finally, he stands facing the hollowed wooden recesses of the shelves, panting, a dark line drawn down the center of his back from sweat. The air smells of old paper and perspiration.
Slowly he turns to look at Sylvia.
“Richard.”
She means to make it sound like a warning, but even to her ears it sounds like a whimper for mercy.
His face is blank. He is not angry, ashamed, or uncertain. It’s the same blank, denu
ding expression she’s seen a thousand times when men have looked at her in lust. The blood around his mouth makes him look like a wild animal. She tries to scream, but finds her throat clamped shut with Richard’s fingers. His other hand is fumbling frantically below the sofa. There’s a loud snap. And the whole tension cord contraption springs back onto itself and Sylvia is free. And breathless and trapped. Her hands tingle from the sudden rush of blood into her extremities and her arms fall stupidly, uselessly to her sides. Richard’s hand moves roughly up her top. Her arms can’t move to fight him off. Losing patience, he’s about to tear open her blouse when he freezes. He clamps his hand over her mouth to stop the guttural protest and terror issuing from it, which Sylvia does not recognize as coming from her until his hand stops it from escaping. And then everything is silent.
She doesn’t recognize the sound immediately. A tinkling far away—an ice cream truck, a child’s bike ringer, a set of keys. Her eyes dart wildly in her head with recognition.
“The flight was cancelled! Can you believe it? Snow! In London!”
It’s Babs. A thud from luggage being dropped on the foyer. She walks past the living room archway and up the stairs. From the second floor Sylvia hears her continue to talk.
“And I forgot my pills! I was in the cab back home and looking in my purse for it. I found all these”—her voice is faint and Sylvia pictures Babs in a bathroom, looking inside the medicine cabinet—“Lactaid pills, but not my prescription. Just as well, I suppose, about the flight”—voice suddenly louder as if she’s calling down the stairs from the top landing, then moving away once again; the pills weren’t in the medicine cabinet—“The one thing I need to make sure my arthritis doesn’t act up from the altitude! I would have had to come back...”—a moment of silence and then a muffled—“Ah ha! Found it!”
Richard flings himself into the kitchen. Sylvia begins to regain some of the feeling in her arms and hands. She hears running water. Sounds of footsteps coming down the stairs.
“I can’t believe this weather!”
She could have called out to Babs. She could have done that a hundred moments ago. But something stopped Sylvia. All she could think about as she tracked Babs’ movement upstairs was how she could still feel Richard’s hand prints on her chest, how at the moment when she knew he was about to rip off her buttons, she’d felt her heart flailing against her ribs almost as if it wanted to escape and have Richard squeeze it. The blood on his lips had made her want to clamp hers over the wound, which she had only moments before inflicted, and suck it to health. Terror of his hunger to take what he wanted without reflecting on his own ego or the consequences of his actions turned out not to incite terror at all, but an uncontrolled excitement, so primitive and uninhibited that it scared Sylvia to paralysis.
She had wanted what was coming.
She’d wanted to be taken by a man who believed he loved her so much that he would risk everything to have her, even risk her hatred.
And Sylvia realizes that she had never been loved till then. No longer was it Richard’s fervid grip on her throat that took her breath away.
The sound of water in the kitchen stops. Babs appears beneath the transom of the living room door and gapes at the destruction wrought in her living room. Still in her coat and muffler with snowflakes in her hair on the brink of melting, Babs manages to slowly turn her head to look at Sylvia.
“Sylvia?”
Sylvia coughs when she tries to say hello, but manages to say, “Babs.”
“What are you—”
Richard enters the living room with a kitchen towel in his hand.
“Richard?”
“Did you find your pills?” he says, wiping his hands and then taking off his glasses to wipe the lenses. He moves slowly, too methodically. Sylvia sees that he’s washed his mouth, but his lip is beginning to swell. Sylvia blushes with satisfaction.
“Yes, yes I did. But—”
Richard cocks his head to one side.
“Richard?” Babs says again, voice high and thin. She takes a step towards him and she hits her foot against the hard quartz protrusions of the ashtray. She lets out a laugh that sounds like a shriek. The vein on her temple moves so vigorously, Sylvia can see it throb from where she sits.
Following Babs’ gaze, Sylvia is momentarily mesmerized by the reflection of the room in the naked bay window: her sitting on the dark purple velvet sofa with Richard off to the left and Babs to the right; the belly of the coffee table partially obscured by the books thrown from their shelves; great mounds of books all over the carpeted space between her and the bookshelves; a bright speck of light close to Babs’ foot distracts her—it’s the overturned ashtray; the grandfather clock, which in the reflection looks as if the arms point to six and one. Five to six.
And then, against her will, she looks at Richard, who is standing before the gutted mahogany shelves. In the reflection Richard seems to be standing amid a great dark space, a black hole. It transfixes her, this abyss. She forces her gaze back to her reflection and sees her mouth open and close and open again.
A thought occurs to her: people could see her from the outside while she cannot see anyone. Her hands begin to shake and her face burns.
“Sylvia,” says Richard before Sylvia can answer, “came by to... she came by to...”
They look at one another, Richard and Sylvia.
And Sylvia makes a choice that she doesn’t understand. All she knows is that this must not proceed any further. It’s not fear of Richard, but of her own response to him only moments before that she must suppress. A loving Sylvia is a possibility she has managed to keep buried. The urgency to remain as she has been overwhelms all other considerations. She must not scream or, worse, cry. She must get out of there; she must, she tells herself, keep her self to herself.
She reaches down into her bag, clenching and unclenching her hand to get it to work, and pulls out the box of chocolates she purchased for the night with Sean. Turning her gaze towards Babs, willing herself to look directly at her with a composed expression, she says, “Chocolates. I found out you were leaving and came to drop it off, but”—she shrugs for levity—“I was late. But here you are.” Sylvia tells herself to get up. Get up! “Here you are,” she says walking, one foot in front of the other, extending the box of candy towards Babs, who takes it from Sylvia and blinks several times quickly, unable to recognize the enlarged photo on the box of the candy to show the detailed image of the pieces within.
“Well, I better run.” Sylvia returns to the sofa and can feel Richard’s gaze on her as she picks up her purse from the floor and grabs her coat. “I’m meeting someone,” she says raising her eyes to meet his gaze with a look of determination that is almost tender. “I’m already very late.”
Before Babs can say another word, Sylvia is out the door.
The world is white and silent and strange. She needs a moment to orient herself. She must get home. Just get yourself home. She puts on her coat; her gloves are not in the pockets, but nothing could tempt her to knock on the door to see if she misplaced them inside.
As she walks past the house, she looks up and sees through the snow and the curtain-less window Richard staring at her, and Babs, working her arthritic hands and frantically gesturing at the room. She cannot move beneath his gaze. Then she realizes that he cannot see her at all and, in fact, is staring at his own reflection, the destruction wrought on his living room, the figure of his sister gesticulating wildly, perhaps even contemplating the black emptiness behind him.
Only once she begins to walk away does Sylvia realize that she has been holding her breath.
* * *
At home, she strips and showers. Reaching for the bar of soap, she sees the twin bands of red across her wrists. She holds up both of them and touches the nascent bruises in turn where less than an hour ago she had been held captive. Bound, loved madly. Madly most of all. Sinking down, sitting beneath the ablution, she brings her arms to her chest and hugs her wrists, kisse
s them tenderly and holds them to her chest once more, rocking back and forth.
Stranger
By David S. Atkinson
I was waiting in my room. I sat on my bed and stared down at my lime green shag carpet. My little blue plastic TV, the one with a handle like a lunchbox, was on my desk. I thought about turning it on, but it only got local channels and there wouldn’t be anything on but news. Besides, I was supposed to wait for my dad to come in.
My bedroom door swung open, hiding the Mr. T poster with all the spit wads on it, and my dad walked in. He slowly shut my door. At first I thought he was going to sit next to me, but then he seemed to think and pulled out the metal folding chair at my desk and sat there instead. I didn’t know why my dad wanted to talk to me right after school. The school year had just started. I couldn’t be in trouble this soon.
“Peter,” he said. Then he stopped. He looked tired. “Peter,” he said again, “what have you heard about Arthur Gowen?”
I blinked and tried to think. I couldn’t remember who that was.
“The boy that lives behind Steven’s,” he went on when I didn’t say anything. “The house that has dark brown stucco falling off. Next door to your little friend Joy.”
“Oh.” That was the one where that ugly old black car that looked like it was part truck parked. “He’s the kid that got expelled.”
My dad ran his fingers through his mustache, cupping his hand over his chin. He’d been shaving his beard for a while, but he still let his hair and mustache go all shaggy. “That’s him.” He paused. “But that’s not what I meant. Have you heard anything recently?” He was talking all weird. All proper, like he’d rehearsed.
I shook my head and my bed creaked. The bed was really old. Not the mattress, but the bed. It was dark and metal, painted with some sort of black metal paint, and the headboard had these faded dark wispy flowers on it. It’d been mine longer than I could remember. I didn’t even know where it came from.
My dad looked down at his leather slippers and hunched his shoulders. “Arthur has been arrested.”
I tried to remember what Arthur looked like. I could only remember seeing him that time playing in Steven’s backyard way back. He kept doing this weird thing where he’d come out looking for his crazy brother. Said he’d escaped from that attic they kept him locked up in. Then he ran inside and changed his clothes and came outside with a cut up t-shirt wrapped around his head, pretending to be the crazy brother. Me and Steven didn’t fall for it and we told him.