With her head still tipped back, face turned to the coffered vault of the theater lobby, Petra Quist closed her eyes, and behind the lids they moved as if following events in a disturbing dream.
“He doesn’t mean to. He just, like, you know, he gets too excited. He’s like a boy sometimes, the way he gets so excited.”
“How does he hurt you?” Jane persisted.
“I’m a little drunk. I’m dead tired. I want to sleep.”
“How does he hurt you?”
“It’s not like he really hurts me.”
“You said he did. Sometimes.”
“Yeah, but I mean…not bad, not so it marks me.”
“How? Come on, girl. You want to tell me.”
After a silence, shaped by tension yet as still as kiln-fired porcelain, Petra spoke softly, though she didn’t whisper. Her voice grew quieter than before and somehow distant, as if the essence of her retreated from the outer regions of her body, from the world of ceaseless sensations assaulting her five senses. “He slaps me.”
“Your face?”
“It stings but never marks. He never marks me. He never would.”
“What else?”
“Sometimes…one hand around my throat. Holding me down.”
“Choking you?”
“No. A little. But I can breathe. It’s scary, is all. But I can breathe a little. He never marks me. Never would. He’s good to me.”
Thunders of silence suggested an inner storm, and the blank upturned face served as a mask behind which anguish hid. She was drunk, and she might be tired, but in spite of what she said, she didn’t want to sleep. Her silence was not a final statement, but instead a pause for gathering.
“Sometimes he calls me names and, like, says things he doesn’t mean, and he’s so…rough. But only, you know, because he gets so excited, is all. He never marks me.”
Jane said, “All this, holding you down by the throat, slapping you, being rough…you mean it’s during sex.”
“Yeah. Not every time. But sometimes. He doesn’t mean it. He’s always sorry afterward. He buys me Tiffany to apologize. He can be so sweet, like a little boy.”
This troubled child in a woman’s body had made revelations that Jane could use to push some of Simon’s buttons in an interrogation, although nothing yet with which she could effectively whipsaw him.
Bound by more than zip-ties, by ligatures of times past, trapped between the idea of a thrilling libertine life and the grim reality as she lived it, head tipped back and slender throat exposed to Jane, Petra now disclosed a fact that might be used to break her cruel lover, though she didn’t understand the importance of it.
From the internal distance into which she had retreated, her voice came colored by melancholy. “Funny how things are. You figure nobody can really hurt you anymore, you’ve been hit with it all. And then some stupid thing that shouldn’t matter does. Like, it’s not when he’s rough that hurts me, you know, not hurts me so it matters. What hurts me is the weird thing, when sometimes he forgets my name and calls me by hers, and she’s just a damn machine.”
37
Into darkness Tanuja carried light, the glass tumbler warm in her hand, luminous candle-cast shapes without form pulsing on the hallway walls, ahead of her absolute blackness beyond the reach of the humble lamp.
This building drew into it the hush of the church to which it stood connected, the quiet of those empty pews and that shadowed altar. The only sounds were the faint squeak of her sneakers on the waxed-vinyl floor and the occasional sputter as the candle flame found impurities in the wick.
The restroom doors did not feature automatic closures. The one at the women’s lavatory stood half-open. She pushed it wider and did not close it after she crossed the threshold.
In this smaller space, with reflective glossy-white laminate walls and mirrors, more light seemed to swell from the candle, and the shadows largely retreated. There were two sinks in a cove on the left side of the room, two on the right, and four enclosed stalls against the back wall.
She went to the cove on the right and set the candle on the counter between those two sinks. In addition to the back wall, the side walls of the cove were also lined with mirrors, each reflecting the reflection in the other, flickering candles ordered to infinity.
Tanuja went into the nearest stall. Just enough candlelight bounced off the low ceiling to provide guidance. She tended to business and flushed the toilet.
She returned to one of the sinks and cranked on the water and pumped liquid soap from the bottle. The water was hot, and from her lathered hands rose the rich orange fragrance of the soap.
When she turned off the water and pulled a couple paper towels from the dispenser, she looked at her face in the back mirror, half expecting the stresses of the night to have visibly aged her. Food and drink had done their job, however, so that she didn’t even appear tired.
The candle before her and its legions of reflections rendered her eyes less dark adapted than they had been in the hallway. When movement in the back mirror suggested a presence behind her, she thought at first it must be illusory, nothing more than shadow and light dancing to the soundless rhythm of the throbbing candle flame.
But her confusion lasted only a moment. Whether he had entered through the open door to the hall while the water rushing into the sink masked his arrival or whether he had been in one of the other stalls, he was there and he was real. A youngish man. Blond hair that looked almost white in the spectral light. He loomed less than an arm’s length away, and though she wanted to believe that he was an innocent parishioner who, for whatever reason, had remained behind after the play, she knew that he was no one that benign.
She started to turn but felt the poles of a handheld Taser pressed hard into the small of her back. Although the cold steel pins failed to pierce her T-shirt, the garment didn’t provide enough insulation to protect her, and she received a shock that disrupted nerve-path messaging throughout her body.
The sound that escaped her was like the faint lament of some small night creature seized in the talons of an owl. She seemed not to collapse so much as shiver to the floor, as if unraveling from her bones, there to shudder uncontrollably and gasp for breath that her lungs would not expand to receive.
The attacker pressed the Taser to her abdomen and shocked her again, and pressed it to her neck for a third blast, which was when she passed out.
38
Turning her face to Jane and opening her eyes, Petra Quist said, “Anabel. Sometimes in the sack, he calls me Anabel, just like the house computer. Weird, huh?”
“Have you asked him why?”
“He doesn’t know why. He says it doesn’t matter, it’s nothing. But it’s something to me.”
Leaning forward, touching the girl’s hand again, Jane said, “Sometimes they hurt us most when they don’t know they’re hurting us at all. In fact, that’s why it hurts—because they don’t even know us well enough to understand.”
“That’s some true shit. How can he be in my arms—in me—and call me, you know, a machine name?”
“Do you know, with the program he has,” Jane explained, “each homeowner can customize the service name of the house computer?”
The party girl’s blue eyes were clear, her stare direct, but she was still peering at the world from the bottom of a martini glass. A frown of puzzlement. “What’s that mean or matter?”
“He could name it anything from Abby to Zoe. So he named it after some woman he knows.”
Whatever might happen here in the next few hours, Petra must realize that she had no future with Simon, and yet she reacted in a proprietary manner. “What damn woman? Why didn’t he tell me about the bitch?”
“If I were you, I’d ask him. Hell, I’d make him tell me. But, listen, sweetie, maybe this is important. Exactly when does he call you Anabel?”
“I told you, like only sometimes in the sack.”
“When he climaxes?”