To Clayton, we were no different from the older couple come to see the sunrise on a blanket, or the tired-looking mother with the hyperactive toddler, or the pair of teenage girls who had probably been up all night. The two girls walked aimlessly, orbiting each other in a little circle, each deep in conversation with her own smartphone.
Clayton Lilli didn’t know that among this knot of humans, on this wide expanse of green, I was the one who wanted to kill him. It was a startling, distant thing to feel. Here I am on the grass of earth. Here is William, and here is a golden dog. There is Clayton Lilli, drinking water from his sports bottle with all his blood tucked away inside him. Here I am, wanting to let every drop of it come out.
I leaned in closer to William, my body pressing toward him like in the Circle K but this time, thank God, there was no Natty between us. I tried to figure out how to look at Clayton Lilli without running at him across the green and stabbing his eyes out with my keys, and without my heart breaking into tiny shattered bits because now that we were closer, I could see so many, so many expressions that belonged to my beautiful son crossing his perfect shit of a face.
“I want that water bottle,” William said, and then, to my raised eyebrows, said, “Saliva.”
I shook my head, no. “You don’t need it. It’s him.”
“I like to be certain,” William said.
“I’m certain,” I said with such finality he nodded. My eyes burned and itched as they rested on Clayton Lilli. I looked to the dog, to rest them. “He doesn’t deserve a dog that cute.”
“No,” William agreed. “He deserves an awful dog that poops in his clothes.”
I nodded. “A magic flaming dog that rolls on his lap until he catches fire and burns up into a puddle.”
“That dog already got my car.”
William was helping. Being funny, that was good. Being twice as big as Clayton. That was even better.
Clayton Lilli was close to six feet, but he was even skinnier than Walcott, if such a thing was humanly possible. His legs in the floppy shorts looked like lengths of string with knots in them for knees. If he so much as looked my way, William could pick up a rock and smash his head in. I’d seen William smash a head in before, so I could imagine exactly what that would look like. I liked imagining what that would look like.
What I really wanted was to pull that dog aside, because it loved him such an ungodly amount. I wanted to tell it what an asshole it had drawn in dog lotto. I wanted to lay my case out, and have the dog nod sagely, then turn on him and bite him.
It was the way it brought the Frisbee back that broke me. It was laughing up into his face with that silly pouf of tail going like mad. It was the way he knelt and spoke to it, in his sugared voice, saying, “Who is good? Who is a good dog? Who?”
I popped up off the grass, heading right for him. I sensed more than saw William rising, moving with me.
I walked right up to Clayton Lilli, and when he saw me coming, he straightened up and turned, smiling, eyebrows raised politely, like he expected me to ask if he had the time or a spare breath mint.
“Hi!” I said. I sounded so chipper. So bright.
“Hi?” he said.
“Remember me?” I said.
His straight-line, Natty eyebrows came together, and as he searched my face, I saw that he didn’t. He didn’t remember me.
My fist came shooting out forward toward him, hard as it could, and it landed in the middle of his stupid face. Right on the nose. I felt it give in a fleshy, bouncing way, and then pain bloomed in my hand. Clayton Lilli staggered back a step, his hands going up to his face. His little dog started barking its fool head off. Crazy mad barking, right at me.
“What the—” he said, and took a step toward me.
I felt a wild kind of terror rise in me, but then I felt William step in closer, rising up behind me.
“I wouldn’t,” William said, and his voice was deep and cool. Clayton Lilli’s gaze went from me to him. Watching Clayton Lilli become afraid of William made all my fear be gone.
The other people in the park were staring now. The mother picked up her toddler. He watched us, too, with one finger in his mouth. The older couple stood up, shoes dirtying their blanket. The teenage girls were closest. They stared at us, impassive, like they were looking at a TV. One of them started to lift her phone to film us.
William met her eyes and said, “No.”
She lowered it.
William said to me, “I hope you’re certain.” His jaw was tense. He didn’t like this.
“I’m certain,” I said.
He nodded. “Don’t make the fist around your thumb. You could break it.”
I took my thumb out and it was better. A better fist, I could tell already.
I turned back to Clayton Lilli, and I hit him again. Same place. I hit as hard as I could, even though my hand felt like it was already crying. Clayton Lilli was so surprised he sat down in the grass, and the dog ran back and forth in half circles around his back, peeking out from behind one side and then the other, barking. Then it made its legs go stiff, kicking up grass behind it with its feet.
“What the hell?” Clayton Lilli said. A slow trickle of cherry red came from his left nostril and snaked down over his lips.
“Get up, buddy,” William said conversationally. “I’m not sure she’s done yet.”
Clayton Lilli was already getting up, and as he rose, I asked him, “Remember me now? Because I can keep asking.”
His dog jumped side to side, still stiff-legged and growling.
His hands rose to protect his face as he said, “What’s going on?”
“Put your hands down,” William said.
“She’ll hit me if I put my hands down,” Clayton Lilli said, outrage coloring his voice.
“I’ll hit you if you don’t,” William said. He spread his arms apologetically.
Clayton Lilli put his hands down.
I wanted better. I wanted something more John Irving, more Hotel New Hampshire. Why hadn’t I brought a bear? But this was what I had.
I stepped forward to hit him again, and the little dog put itself between us, growling a high-pitched warning. It broke a corner off my heart, to see its tiny, awful, misplaced act of valor.
The man half of the older couple was coming toward us now, saying, “Stop it! Stop it!”
His voice came out very loud and nasal. I could hear he was scared under all the blustery authority. I didn’t even look at him.
“Honey!” his wife called from the blanket, worried to see her husband getting close to William.
“How do you not know me?” I asked Lilli. My hands were both still balled up.
He stopped nursing his nose and really looked at me, looked in my face. It started as a searching look that went to puzzled, and then I saw faint surprise ping. His cheeks flushed a bright berry color, as if all the blood that wasn’t busy coming out his nose had rushed to them.
“Mandy?” he said. “Mandy Pierce?”
William said, “There it is.”
I thought I would hit him again, for getting my name wrong, but seeing the recognition in his face, the shame staining his cheeks, the desire to put my skin on his in any way went out of me. He was pathetic with his stick bug legs and his girly purse dog trying to protect him. I couldn’t stand to put even my fist on him. But finally, I had a name for him. I knew what he was to me.
“This is the guy that raped me,” I said to the blustery older man from the blanket. Then louder, calling it out to his wife behind him, to the mother with the toddler clutched close, to the impassive teenage girls. He hadn’t met the legal standard, but I wasn’t in the mood to split hairs. He’d done his level best, and I knew what he was now. I pointed at him and said, “This guy raped me.”
Everyone in our square of park paused, digesting that. The t
eenage girls believed me. I could see it in their bodies, upper lips curling in tandem as they stepped in closer to each other. The mother looked at him, intense, trying to decide, holding her baby closer, in case. The older couple seemed unconvinced.
“I did what?” Clayton Lilli asked me. “I did not.” Then louder to all of them, “I didn’t.”
I talked over him, firm and clear. “He drugged me at a party, and then he took me out behind his frat house, to a beanbag chair.”
“That’s not true,” he said, speaking to the older man, not to me. I felt my jaw set.
“And raped me,” I said. So loud, so clear. My voice not trembling.
What a long way I had come in that Circle K, the girl who’d never said the word was yelling it across a park, telling the truth to the only jury Clayton Lilli would ever have to face.
Lilli gulped and I felt my hands fisting up again. The little dog sensed violence rebuilding, because it started that silly, endless danger growl again, down in its throat.
“Stop this!” said the blanket man, and I smiled.
William stood behind me, more relaxed now that he had confirmation, letting it play out. He had my back. It was good, but in that moment, I wanted Walcott there. I wanted him here with me so fierce that it felt like a sickness. I knew that if I’d called him, space or no space, then he would have come. That wasn’t even a question in my head. He was the one who had found me, calling, Marco! Marco! He’d spoken for me when I couldn’t speak. He’d decided to love Natty, though it had changed his life, made it different and more serious than what most boys got in college. He so deserved to pop this asshole in the face a few times, too.
“Sir,” said the skeptical blanket man to Clayton Lilli, “do you want me to call the cops?” He’d appointed himself foreman.
“No,” Clayton Lilli said. He was staring at me now with a horrified expression. “Don’t do that.”
That made the last two skeptics on the jury sway my way. I felt their belief click into place, watched their gazes on him change. I’d made him bleed in a public park. I had a huge bodyguard threatening him. An innocent man would want the cops. I saw them all, even the interfering blanket man, realize what Clayton Lilli was. I think he felt it, too. He looked around at them. “I didn’t do that. What she said. We were both drunk.”
“All I had was a Coke and some Rohypnol,” I said, super perky, and I swear to God he blanched.
“That’s not right,” he said, and now he sounded whiny, like a horrid baby.
He looked around. The young mother had gathered her little boy so close to her bosom I was shocked the kid could breathe. He pushed at her, trying to squirm down. The young girls looked at Clayton Lilli like he was a worm.
He turned a pleading gaze to me. “I swear to you—”
He couldn’t find a drop of mercy on my face, because there wasn’t one, and then I saw how I could truly pay him back. Uncertainty. I could hand him the uncertainty I’d lived with for years.
I said, very low and intense, looking him right in his eye. “Do you know the statute of limitations for rape in this state?” I didn’t, either, actually, but I knew it was a long one. Ten or fifteen years. “I can go to the cops anytime.”
I could see fear rising in his eyes, but he said, “At least they’d listen to my side.”
That almost paused me. The cops could only ever be a bluff, because of Natty. I pressed forward. “It won’t be my word against yours, you know. I have a witness. My friend Walcott came and found me, after. He saw how you left me, passed out in the yard. He saw how I was drugged.” Lilli shook his head, and I started free-form lying then, mixing in enough truth to be convicting. “My friend took me to get a rape kit. I have your DNA. I have blood tests, showing I was drugged.” I watched him swallow, his Adam’s apple working. His gaze darted around. The little jury in the park heard everything, and he could see how they were all on my side now.
He reached down and scooped his frantic little dog up. He held it close. When he straightened up, I saw that his eyes were red and wet.
“I didn’t,” he stammered out, his words tumbling all over one another. “We were drunk. But I remember, you said—”
“I don’t remember. That’s how date rape drugs work,” I said, like I was explaining basic math to the world’s stupidest child. “I could have said I loved you, and it wouldn’t have been true, or right, or anything like permission.”
“You did say that.” His bleeding face crumpled, and he was weeping openly there in the park.
I felt an awful shift toward sweetness in the mothery pit of me. I had an unspeakable urge to pat him, and it was unfair and purely biological. It was only because his trembling lip—so like Natty’s—was streaked in blood and snot. It was so wrong that he could pull mercy out of me, simply because his tears went tracking down Natty-angled cheekbones.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Oh God, I am so sorry. But I swear I didn’t rape you, Mandy.”
That killed it. “It’s Shandi, you perfect turd,” I said. “Go home now and look up that statute of limitations. See how many years I have left to decide.”
He looked from person to person, his eyes pleading, but the park jury was solidly behind me. Finally, he turned, carrying his fraught little dog with him, and began walking away. After a few steps, he broke into a run. It was a shambling, sad lope, spine hunched, crossing the park toward home, with us all staring after him, condemning him.
“Miss?” Blanket Man said, solicitous now. “Do you want me to call the police?”
I felt a surge of vindicated exultation at the kindness in his tone.
“Thank you, no,” William said, politely. “I’m taking her home.”
I was panting, and I had a hard time keeping my feet from dancing. In Clayton Lilli’s mind, I could go to the police at any given minute. Let him live with the wondering. Let him eat the worry of knowing I could step in and change his life forever, and he would have no say in it.
William took my hand and pulled me along through the park, in a different direction than the one Clayton Lilli had taken. He walked away from all the eyes, and also away from his car.
I clung to his hand and followed. We went so fast, the breeze felt like a mighty wind on me, like we were flying.
We came out on a road lined with little shops and two restaurants that weren’t open yet. William looked from one to another, exasperated.
“Doesn’t anyplace serve breakfast? You need a shot of bourbon,” he said, like bourbon would be there by the eggs and toast on any decent breakfast menu.
“It’s Midtown, William. They only have brunch here,” I said. “I don’t need bourbon.”
“You do. Your pulse is way too high.” I realized that we weren’t actually holding hands. He’d taken mine to press two fingers on my wrist.
“Stop taking my pulse, Dr. Ashe. I’m fine. I’m just jacked up,” I said. “Did you see what I did back there? I annihilated him.”
He pulled me back into the park, angling for a wooden bench now. I followed, obedient, and I kept his hand. He worked my fingers as he walked, like now that was he was done being medical, he was unaware he held it.
“I didn’t think Clayton Lilli would be so pathetic,” I said. My earth-made monster had been shambling and lumpy, faceless and terrifying, dripping clods of red clay off his huge, filthy hands as he loomed over me. “I’ve been trying to imagine him, ever since the Circle K, and he was never like that.”
William sat me down and took my wrist again. “Since the Circle K? Not before? Take three deep breaths, please.” He was looking at his watch.
I shook my head, trying to get a lot of air down into me. Now that we were sitting still, I could feel my heart pounding all through my whole body, but it wasn’t bad. It felt like victory drums. I’d be a constant sour worry at the very back of Clayton Lilli’s throat, for yea
rs to come. Let him live with the same thing he’d taught me, that all his choices could be taken away in a single snap of time, at my whim.
“Before the Circle K, I pretended he didn’t exist. My virgin birth, remember?”
“That’s interesting,” William said. “It’s interesting that people do that.”
“Do what?” I said. I pulled in one deep breath after another, calming.
He said, “Put people and events away inside their minds, and pretend they never existed. Why should something so random and banal as a bullet change it?”
“All I know is, after the Circle K, I started thinking about him. Not the real him, not like he actually is. He’s so much floppier and weaker than I pictured.”
“That’s interesting, too. Can you say more about that?” He let go of my wrist, and turned to face forward, staring back across the park, listening intently.
I wasn’t sure what he wanted, but I kept talking. “When I got past the idea of a literal monster . . . I don’t know. I thought he’d be some smug, fratty, rich kid, all entitled. That’s who drugs girls in the movies. Or a truly scary sociopath with dead eyes and bad teeth. This real one, I could see all the veins in him because he was so milky. I could see his veins all blue and sad under his skin.” I shrugged, even though William’s gaze on the horizon was so intense, he wasn’t even seeing me. “This real one is . . . He is . . .” I stopped. I didn’t know how to say what he was.
“He’s a person,” William said.
I snorted. I wouldn’t grant him that. “He’s an animal.”
“Yes,” William said, excited. “He’s just an animal, like you and me.”
“Not like us,” I said, instantly. “Call a cab? You’ll have to come and get your car back, later.”
I wanted out. I would never come back to Midtown again. Or Buckhead, where Clayton Lilli worked. Natty and I had to stay east, in Morningside, in Poncey-Highlands and Decatur. In a city of four million, surely our paths would not cross. But Midtown felt like enemy territory now, and my power to hurt him lived in his uncertainty. I never wanted to lay eyes on him again.