Ariel didn’t know how the house worked. Nor for that matter did she know how her brand-new baby worked; neither came with an operating manual. But her electric toothbrush? That came with a thirty-two-page instruction booklet.
Those first years in the farmhouse were an exercise in nearly nonstop frustration, one thing after another breaking, leaking, failing, and every problem was compounded by Ariel’s humiliation at never being able to answer practical questions about her own house—was the heating hot water or steam, where was the septic tank located and when had it last been emptied, what level of electrical power, where does the water come from. She didn’t know a damn thing.
She began to worry that the tap water tasted funny. Did it? Sometimes the things you experience every day are hard to judge. Ariel asked anyone who came over; she received differing opinions. She called a testing service that sent a guy to take a sample and send it to a lab, then emailed her an analysis that she couldn’t even begin to understand; it was like a completely different language.
The water was alkaline, the man explained on the phone. A filter would fix it, easy.
A few weeks later Jeb Payne arrived, climbed down through the Bilco doors to her partially excavated cellar—dirt floor, rough-hewn masonry walls, a creepy room filled with cobwebs and mechanical things she didn’t understand, lit by a bare bulb hanging from the low ceiling, and surrounded on all sides by crawl spaces populated by mice and rats and raccoons and possums, fighting and fucking and nesting and dying, the stench of dead rodent a wintertime constant.
“Huh,” Payne said, approaching the large bullet-shaped thing that looked like a futuristic barbecue grill. “Seems you already have a filtration system.” He put his beefy hand on the thing, fingers like sausages, and turned back to her. “Right here.”
Ariel absolutely loathed the condescension on his face, like he was exercising admirable restraint by not laughing at her.
“Seems it’s disconnected.” He leaned over, examined a hose, a pipe. “You don’t happen to know why?” He glanced back up at her, over his shoulder, with an obnoxious bit of side-eye. “No, I don’t suppose you would.”
Ariel could feel the shame surge into her cheeks, and she knew he could see it too.
In that moment Ariel hated herself for being this type of person, with this timeworn type of incompetence, a woman at the mercy of a man like this, his arrogance the natural consequence of her own choices, of her mother’s choices, of society’s choices about what men know how to do, and what women know how to do, and don’t.
He was the final straw.
Ariel called the plumber and the electrician. “Nope,” she admitted, “not an emergency. Nothing wrong in fact.” She paid each tradesman for an hour of his time to walk through and explain things while she took notes and asked questions—what’s this for, how does this work, why is this here. It was embarrassing, but a worthwhile investment in avoiding future humiliations, putting her ignorance on display to conquer it.
And it was more than the tradesmen. It was everything: Ariel decided to bring her whole life under her own dominion, to figure out how to do the things she’d been paying other people to do for her. Most things aren’t so complicated. You just need to be willing to try.
*
Ariel had never wanted to be a woman who looked at everything through the lens of fear, of worst-case scenarios, of escape contingencies, of self-defense, of distrust and antagonism, of risk avoidance. She wanted to be a person who went out into the world without fear, even when she didn’t go out at all; she wanted to be undaunted just lying in bed.
Life presents so many choices. Superficial ones of how you look and dress and wear your hair, but everything else too—how you raise your child, how you earn your money and spend it, what sorts of friends you have, what you do with free time, cats or dogs, wine or beer, vegetarian or omnivore, sedans or pickups. Innumerable choices. We don’t even realize we’re making many of them; don’t recognize we’re free to.
But we are. Ariel forced herself to look long and hard at her options. To choose deliberately.
What she chose to be was a person who knows how her house’s plumbing works in a general way. A person who understands the fundamental mechanics of the truck she drives, the farm she owns. She chose to be a person who will research how to do almost anything, then do it—draft a sublease agreement, change a flat tire, repair a leaky faucet, balance books and file taxes, build a tree house and a campfire, reignite a pilot light, tape and spackle and sand and paint a patch of drywall.
Also a woman who knows how to defend herself. Even how to kill someone, using nothing but her bare hands.
CHAPTER 14
DAY 1. 7:21 P.M.
Ariel arrives at the next intersection, and realizes that she’s not certain where she is, where her hotel is. She turns left, walks a few steps, then catches a glimpse of the river down the hill—
“Crap.” She has been heading in the wrong direction, a long block out of the way, which means another five minutes that she’ll need to remain out in the world, walking around, exposed, vulnerable. She spins, backtracks a few steps to the corner, turns—
Ariel feels her breath catch, but forces herself not to react visibly.
He’s on the other side of the street, walking in her direction slowly, as if he’s just out for a stroll.
She has almost no time to make the next decision. Once again, she can spin and flee. Or she can pretend she doesn’t notice him, doesn’t recognize him, walk right past. Or she can confront him.
He has changed the top of his outfit, he’s now wearing a gray crewneck instead of the blue polo. But the khakis are the same, with creases down the front, albeit less sharp. And it’s the orthopedic-looking shoes that are the real giveaway.
Or she can attack. For much of Ariel’s life, attack would never have crossed her mind; it would have seemed outlandish, impossible. Not anymore.
She steps off the curb, starts to cross the street. She could do this. She has done it before.
*
It was two years ago. George was playing at a friend’s house, and the farming crew had knocked off at four-thirty, as always. So Ariel was all alone when she heard a truck pull into her driveway.
Her first assumption was that it was the irrigation company, which she’d called a few days earlier, and they’d been noncommittal about when a team would be available for a service call.