Ritchie crouches into an antagonistic pose. God, is he really going to launch himself at Dante? Does he really think he can take on a shape-shifter in a fight? Of course, he doesn’t know Dante is a shape-shifter, but surely he must see—everyone must see—how powerful Dante is, how wild. It must be obvious from his face and his eyes that he is used to making the most ruthless of life-and-death decisions.
“This is none of your mix,” Ritchie snarls.
“I belong in this house and you don’t,” Dante says. His eyes never waver from Ritchie’s face. “Get out.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
Dante takes a step closer. “I will take your fucking head off.”
I have backed away, trying to get out of the path of violence, should it come. “Should I call the police?” I ask Dante in a low tone. I really don’t know the answer. If cops come, there will be a lot of questions, and I’m not certain Dante’s life bears investigation. So if he says no, no matter how bad it gets in here, I won’t pick up the phone.
“Not yet,” he says. “But if things get too rough, you better.” If Ritchie pulls a gun, if he tries to split Kathleen’s head open, if it looks like I’m losing the fight…
Kathleen is still sending wondering glances Dante’s way, but she’s more focused on her husband. She’s stopped crying, which I consider a good thing. Tentatively, she approaches Ritchie and touches his arm. “Don’t let’s cause any more trouble,” she whispers. “Let’s just go.”
It’s then I realize that she has suddenly changed course. She’s no longer afraid for herself; she’s afraid for Ritchie. She doesn’t want Dante to hurt him, and she’s pretty sure he could.
But it’s a mistake for her to let Ritchie know she thinks he’s weaker than another man. All of us realize it at the same time—Kathleen, Ritchie, me. With something like a howl, he snatches his arm away from her, strikes her in the shoulder, and launches himself at Dante.
Kathleen screams; maybe I do, too. The fighting is sudden and brutal. The momentum of Ritchie’s body slams Dante into the wall, and causes a framed picture to crash to the floor with a shattering of glass. Dante grunts, wraps his arms around Ritchie, lifts him, and then heaves him against the hardwood floor into the middle of the living room. I hear the crack of Ritchie’s head, but before he can react, Dante has raced over and dropped on top of him. He begins pummeling Ritchie in the face. Now Kathleen is shrieking.
Ritchie isn’t done yet. He bucks hard, punches Dante in the gut, and bucks again, dislodging him. They roll backward and forward, knocking into the coffee table, each trying to land a telling blow. I see blood streaking down Ritchie’s face and welts forming along Dante’s arms.
“Stop them! Stop them!” Kathleen is crying. Instead, I dash into the kitchen and scoop up my cell phone, checking to make sure it’s still operational. But I’m not ready to call yet. As far as I can tell, Dante isn’t in any real danger, and that’s all I care about.
Kathleen has run over to me; her face is pleading. “Stop them,” she begs.
I shake my head. “I don’t know how.”
They have rolled again, and once more, Dante is on top. He’s got his hands wrapped around Ritchie’s throat and now he starts banging Ritchie’s head against the floor. The sodden thumping sound is terrifying. After about the fifth concussive knock, Ritchie makes a strangled noise and lies still.
“Ritchie!” Kathleen wails, and skids across the floor to kneel beside him, her hands fluttering around his face and neck. “Oh my God, Ritchie!”
Dante comes wearily to his feet and stares down at Ritchie for a moment. I step close enough to touch his arm. His skin is slick with sweat and a few streaks of blood. Some of it is his, but I think most of it isn’t.
“Are you all right?” I ask in a quiet voice. When he nods, I say, even more quietly, “Is he?”
Dante nods again. He’s panting a little. “I don’t think he’s even unconscious.”
As if to prove Dante correct, Ritchie moans and curls onto his side, holding a hand to his head. Kathleen looks up at me, her expression cold.
“I need ice. And some water to wipe away the blood.”
Wordlessly I nod and head to the kitchen to ruin two dishcloths. One I line with ice cubes from the freezer before folding and knotting the edges together; the other I hold under warm water then wring out so it doesn’t drip. Dante has followed me.
“What do we do now?” I ask in a low voice. “I’d like to keep the police out of it if I could.”
He nods. “Me, too. I think we just send them home.”
“They came in two cars. And I don’t think Ritchie’s in any shape to drive.”
He curses under his breath. “All right. She drives him home, you follow in her car, I follow in yours. Then you and I get the hell out of Dodge before he recovers.”
I glance at Kathleen, who is smoothing the hair from Ritchie’s face, bending down to press a kiss against his battered cheek. “I’m afraid for her,” I whisper. “As soon as he’s feeling good enough, he’s going to beat the hell out of her again.”
His gaze has followed mine. “That’s Kathleen, I take it,” he says wryly. “We weren’t formally introduced.”
“That’s her.”
“Well,” he says with a certain satisfaction, “he won’t be hitting anyone for a while. Pretty sure I broke his arm.”
Part of me is fiercely glad to hear this. It will be good for Ritchie to know how awful it feels to be beaten up by someone you are too small or too helpless to defend against. Part of me is worried. I cannot help but think this humiliation will make him even more dangerous. More dangerous to Kathleen.
“Maybe we should take him to a hospital,” I say.
“We’ll let Kathleen make that decision.”
I give him a look of protest. “She’s too afraid of him to make those kinds of decisions.”
He returns his attention to me. “She’s chosen him,” he says gently. “She’s still with him. She’s making some decisions every day.”
I want to say, The only reason she doesn’t leave is that she fears for her life. But I know that isn’t true. It might be one of the reasons she doesn’t leave. But she loves him. She wants him to love her back. That’s the real reason she stays.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” I say instead. “It looked like he got in some nasty blows.”
He nods and puts a hand to his jaw, then his groin. “Yeah. Hurts like hell. But nothing broken.”
I sigh. I’m still holding the ice-filled towel in my hands, and now my fingers are as cold as my toes. “And to think I’m always worried about you when you’re gone. I worry about what terrible things might happen to you when you’re—you know. Different.” I glance at Kathleen and Ritchie. They are too far away to hear me, but I want to be circumspect anyway. “And now it turns out that you only really get hurt when you’re just hanging around my house, not looking for any trouble.”
He smiles, but I think his expression is sad. “That’s because there is no safety, Maria. Just living is dangerous. Wherever you are and whatever shape you take.”
I push to my tiptoes to kiss him on the mouth. “I’m glad you were here,” I whisper. “Now get some clothes on so we can drive them home.”
He glances down at his body, as if, until this moment, he didn’t realize he was still naked. “Right. I’ll be out in five minutes, and we’ll go.”
It is only as I bend down to hand the dripping towels to Kathleen that I realize I, too, need to dress before we leave the house. I have been so focused on everyone else that I have, for a moment, completely forgotten about myself.
Kathleen does not speak to me or Dante as Dante carries Ritchie to the rusty red truck and none too gently settles him inside. Ritchie is fully conscious now, but in bad shape. His head lolls back against the headrest and he moans as Dante jostles his broken right arm. Kathleen climbs into the driver’s seat and then reaches out the window to hand me the keys to her Aveo.
“You might
want to take him to an urgent care center,” I suggest. “I think he should have that arm looked at.”
“Let’s get the cars home first,” she says in a clipped voice.
We form a strange procession, me following the truck, Dante in my Saturn following the Aveo. I have only been to Kathleen’s house once before, when I dropped off some insurance papers, so I would have had trouble locating it on my own. This makes me wonder how she found my place. Then I remember that Ritchie gave her a GPS system for Christmas last year, since she was getting lost so often. I think, There’s another reason to hate technology.
She does not want our help getting Ritchie inside the house. She does not want my repeated solicitations, and I cannot bring myself to apologize. Dante did nothing wrong, after all; he defended himself against an attack by a home intruder. It occurs to me she might be just as embarrassed as she is angry, but, in any case, she refuses to let down her guard. I sigh, give her the keys, and climb into the Saturn next to Dante.
He hadn’t bothered to cut the motor, so we are out of the driveway, out of the neighborhood, in seconds flat. “Well! I’ve worked up an appetite,” he says brightly. “Let’s go for breakfast.”
The rest of the weekend passes in an oddly companionable manner. There is none of the restlessness and bickering that I usually associate with the later parts of Dante’s visits, as if we are trying to build up walls of irritation between us to cushion the blow of the upcoming separation. Instead, we are affectionate, clingy, just a little spooked, as if we witnessed a tornado or barely survived a plane crash. As if we looked straight at the bony face of Death and saw him watching us with a hard, considering stare. We never have much time together, and we always know it could be cut short, but we seldom have such tangible reminders of how frail our existence is. We are kind to each other, these last few days. We remember we’re in love.
Naturally, I have tried to call Ellen to tell her the story and to get her take on what to do next, but she doesn’t answer her phone. I remember that she had plans to be out of town over the weekend, visiting her sister, I think, and she won’t be back until late Sunday night.
“Come in early Monday,” I say in the last voice-mail message I leave her. “I’ll tell you the whole story then.”
So Monday morning I leave Dante half asleep in my bed, kissing him hard on the mouth before I step out the door at seven. I meet Ellen at the office. As soon as I say, “It’s about Kathleen,” she suggests we find a different venue for our conversation, and we head to the local McDonald’s for coffee.
As you’d expect, she’s disturbed by the tale, but not even remotely surprised. We debate whether or not I should have called the police to have them check on Kathleen’s house as the weekend progressed and Ritchie recovered, but we both decide it would be hard to predict when he might gather his strength for retribution. “I’ll talk to her, but I don’t have much hope that she’ll listen to me,” Ellen says in a brooding voice. “But she has to know that there are options. She has to know that if he turns violent, she has somewhere to go.”
I blow on my coffee to cool it. “I’m afraid she’ll never speak to me again,” I say. “It’s not my fault and I know that, but she—She’ll blame me somehow.”
“Well, she’s in an impossible situation,” Ellen says. “And she has to blame someone.”
Ellen has finished her first cup of coffee and gone for her second one before she brings up the topic that I knew would be unavoidable. “So let’s get to the only part of this story that includes an element of novelty,” she says. “You, and the man who was sleeping in your bedroom when Ritchie arrived.”
“You’re like a tabloid reporter,” I say. “Always looking for smut.”
“Honey, I don’t have to look for smut. It’s always there.”
I make an irritable gesture. “Anyway, why is it you never talk about your personal life? Why are you always asking questions but never giving out details?”
Ellen laughs. She has two ex-husbands, both of whom she gets along with so well that they come to her house for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and for the past decade or so she’s been dating an auto plant supervisor named Henry. They each maintain their own houses and, as far as I can tell, only get together a few times a month. I’ve met him a dozen times. He’s a big guy, heavyset, with a thick walrus mustache and merry blue eyes. He gives the impression of being friendly, capable, and easily amused by the world, but I’ve always thought he could deck someone with a single blow if he felt the situation called for discipline. “My life is so boring that insomniacs could hire me to come talk about it and they’d fall straight to sleep,” she says. “But ask me anything you want. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“I am not interested in all the intimate details of my friends’ lives, thank you very much.”
She curls her fingers impatiently in a motion that means give. “C’mon, tell me. It’s been obvious for a while that there’s a guy in your life—”
I almost choke on my coffee. “Obvious? Obvious? Are you kidding? I never talk about my—my romantic encounters.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah. Every few weeks you glow like a lava lamp, and anyone who’s ever had sex knows you’re sleeping with someone you’re pretty hot for. And then you mope around for a few days, so it’s clear you’ve broken up. And then you’re happy again, so you’re back together. I figured you’d talk about it when you wanted to talk about it—but I’ve decided now’s the time.”
Oddly, even though I was expecting the interrogation, I haven’t put much energy into preparing a cover story. Even now I’m torn between my usual evasions and a strange longing to tell the truth. Share the story. Make the burden easier to bear.
“Well,” I say. “His name is Dante.”
She makes a face. “I can already tell this isn’t going to end well.”
I give her an indignant look. “It’s a great name!”
“For a cat, maybe. Go on.”
“His name is Dante, I’ve known him since college, we’ve been involved off and on for years. But he’s—mysterious.”
She knows how old I am, so she does the math. “You’ve known him for about fifteen years and he’s still mysterious? Honey, any man I’ve known longer than six months is so predictable I can tell you when he’s going to fart and when he’s going to shit.”
“Well, Dante’s different.”
She rests her chin in her hand. “How so?”
I give her essentially the story I gave Matt all those years ago. “He travels a lot. When he’s gone, I can’t really get in touch with him. He’s not particularly forthcoming about his job or his circumstances. I only know about him what he wants me to know.”
Ellen’s eyes are huge. “Well, now, you could hardly have opened up a cookbook and come up with a better recipe for disaster!” she exclaims. “Next you’re going to tell me you’ve allowed him to invest all your money for you and put his name on the title to your house.”
I can’t help a chuckle. “Nope. In fact, I have access to his bank accounts when he’s gone, and he trusts me to handle bills and various transactions for him.”
This crinkles her forehead. “Have you ever met his parents?”
“They’re dead, but I know his brother and sister. I babysat for his niece the other day, in fact.”
Her frown deepens. Clearly this description doesn’t fit her notion of a con man or felon. “Do they seem normal?”
I have to laugh again. “Define ‘normal.’”
“Do they have jobs and houses and stuff?”
“Christina does. William—I don’t know.”
“Do you think they’re gunrunners? Drug dealers? Slavers?”
“God, no. I think they’re—eccentric.” I can’t say, I think they’re harmless, because I remember Dante beating the shit out of Ritchie, and I know the word doesn’t apply. “I’m pretty sure I don’t have anything to fear from them,” I say lamely.
She tilts her head to one side. “There’s mo
re to this story than you’re telling,” she says with conviction.
“A little.”
“But you’re not afraid. You don’t think you’re in danger.”
“Right. I’m really not.”
“And the sex is good?”
Again, she’s caught me taking a sip of coffee, and again I nearly choke. “Ellen!”
“Well, it would almost have to be to put up with this—mystery crap.”
“The sex is good.” I shrug and set the coffee down. “I love him. I’ve loved him for a long time. I’ve adjusted to his lifestyle.”
She’s regarding me shrewdly still. “You realize that anytime someone has secrets, there’s usually a cold day of reckoning when those secrets are revealed. You could find yourself in love with a terrible man.”
I nod. “I could. I don’t think so, but I could.”
“Well.” She drums her fingers on the table. “It’s no worse than I thought.”
I laugh at her. “Don’t worry about me,” I say. “You’ve got enough on your plate trying to fix Kathleen and Grant.”
She sighs. “Neither of whom, I would guess, can be fixed.” She glances at her watch and pushes to her feet. “Shit, we’re going to be late. Come on. Let’s go see how Kathleen’s doing.”
I am convinced Kathleen doesn’t want to lay eyes on me, so I send Ellen to reconnoiter while I go straight to my office. Ellen appears in my doorway about ten minutes later.
“She looks okay,” she reports. “Tense, you know, but not like she’s been hit in the face recently. I asked her how her weekend was and she just said fine.”
“Should I go talk to her?”
“Sure, why not?”
But I don’t have the courage to try until late in the day. At noon, I avoid both the lunchroom and the group outing so I don’t accidentally run into Kathleen. Whenever I have to use the bathroom, I skulk around in the hallway first, trying to determine if she’s already in the ladies’ room. It’s no surprise the day drags on as if it is sixteen instead of eight hours long.
Finally, about ten minutes before closing time, I slink to her corner of the building. I’ve already seen our boss leave early, and I know there are no other desks within hearing range. Unless Ellen is lurking somewhere nearby—a real possibility—we should be able to talk in privacy.