She’d learned this lesson more than once: If a man seems like he’s going to attack you, he’s going to attack you. Don’t just hope for an alternative explanation to present itself; don’t just wait until he actually attacks before taking defensive action. Most of the time, that’s simply flight. Sometimes, though, running is impossible, or inadvisable, or counterproductive. Like now.
Ariel pulls a water bottle out of her bag, opens the cap, balances it on the mouth. She’s getting close, just a few seconds. The bottle is in her left hand; the man is on her left side.
Just another few steps, another few seconds … Now—
*
Ariel’s town is small, especially in winter, with no summer people around. You see everyone. At the gas station, the supermarket, the coffee shop, the movie theater and drugstore and town hall. You see people you know walking on Main Street, across the shopping plaza’s lot, into the Chinese takeout, out of the pizzeria. You see their cars and trucks passing you on the road, you know what everyone drives, you recognize your friends’ cars from a quarter-mile away. Your enemies’ too.
She saw Jeb Payne’s wife all the time, a miserable-looking woman herding three kids in and out of a beige Sienna at soccer practice and school drop-off. Ariel also saw Payne’s cousin Brooks, the cop. The two had grown up together, thick as thieves their whole lives. This was the reason that Ariel didn’t go to the police. One of the reasons.
A couple of months after the attack, Ariel found herself standing behind Beverly Payne at the supermarket checkout with two of her children; the older one was outside, slouching, staring at a screen.
Ariel felt the impulse to say something to this woman. But what? To accomplish what? Ariel definitely wanted to hurt Payne, of course she did. But did she want to hurt Beverly?
Do you know how your husband got his face busted up? This is what Ariel could ask. Beverly would stare back, insulted, defensive. No matter what bill of goods Payne had tried to sell, this woman probably suspected the truth. It may have happened before, maybe even to Beverly herself. At least one in ten married women has been raped by their husbands. Beverly would not be unfamiliar with her husband’s violence.
I don’t know what you’re talking about is how Beverly would answer, quick and angry, then she’d turn away, hoping the interaction would just end there.
I’m the one who did that to his face, Ariel would say to the back of Beverly’s head. Do you know why?
Beverly’s kids would be staring up at Ariel, mouths wide, implicitly understanding that this supermarket interaction was something important. Something life-defining. And the lives being defined would be the kids’.
Because he was trying to rape me.
One of the boys dropped his sippy cup, which rolled Ariel’s way. Beverly heard the sound, and turned while Ariel knelt to retrieve the cup. She stayed in a crouch to extend it back to the boy.
“What do you say, Cole?”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Ariel turned her eyes to Beverly, who also said, “Thank you.”
No, this woman was not Ariel’s enemy. She was a fellow combatant.
*
The general idea of Main Street was one of the things that had appealed to Ariel about moving to a little town, the promise of something pure, something innocent that she wanted to believe in, the quirky characters behind the plate-glass windows of the idiosyncratic businesses, friendly small talk and the small superficial niceties of small-town living. She’d hoped that this would be the antidote to everything wrong about her life in the city, and she held on to that hope for a long time, too long, the way you hang on to your last hope: desperately.
It made Ariel feel less safe that she was the one who’d beaten the crap out of Payne; it made her worry about revenge. He knew where she lived, where she worked, where she shopped and ate and filled up her gas tank, where her child went to school and baseball and swimming. He knew when she was alone, he knew how she was vulnerable. And his best friend was a cop.
She considered keeping his semiautomatic for self-defense, but she knew the statistics. Possessing a gun would only increase the likelihood that she herself would get shot. So instead she cleaned off her fingerprints with mineral oil, then used twine to lash the weapon to a cinder block she’d found on the beach, which she dropped off a bridge into a deeply dredged channel. But Ariel had no doubt that Payne owned others; the average gun-owning household has eight of them.
She continued to take self-defense classes, to practice confronting different types of physical peril, using different tactics. She grew stronger, quicker, more confident. She learned a lot of ways to defend herself.
“Okay,” she said to her martial-arts instructor, just a few months ago. “Now I want to learn how to attack.”
*
Ariel couldn’t stop wondering if she should have shot Payne. Was death a fair punishment for sexual assault? That was debatable. But as long as that asshole was alive, walking around freely, she would never feel safe. And what punishment was commensurate for that?
She had no faith in the police to investigate. No faith in the judicial system to provide a remedy. Ariel didn’t want to kill anyone, but she did want to sleep easy. She did want justice. Who could provide that?
No one.
*
She’s just a few steps away from this man who has been following her. Three steps, two, now—
Ariel pitches forward, as if she has lost her balance and is on her way to falling, losing a grip on the water bottle, which tumbles at the man’s feet, and the bottle’s loosened cap flies off, and a glug of water splashes onto the orthopedic-looking shoe, and he instinctively leans over to retrieve the bottle, or brush off the water, and so his arm is down, his torso bent, his face much closer to waist-height than he’d want if he had any idea what was coming—
Ariel brings her knee up into the man’s face, and she hears the sound of teeth cracking upon one another, a groan as he tumbles, and while he’s down she swiftly kicks his abdomen without much in the way of aim because it’ll hurt him no matter where the blow lands, and she takes a hop backward away from his possible reach, and rebalances herself—
“Please stop,” he says in unexpected English, but she doesn’t dwell on that surprise as she prepares another kick, this one more careful and powerful, this’ll be the knockout—
“I’m trying to help,” he says, then something unintelligible.
She puts her kicking foot down on the pavement. “What?”
“I’m American.” He spits some blood onto the sidewalk. “I’m trying to help.” He runs his tongue around in his mouth, assessing what level of dental damage has occurred in there.
“Who are you?”
“I’m trying to help,” he says again, pushing himself to a sitting position.
“Help with what?”
“With your husband. I’m from the embassy.”
*
From a half-block away, Pete Wagstaff watches in amazement as Ariel now has what appears to be a civil conversation with the CIA man she just beat the shit out of. Then an SUV with diplomat plates screeches up, and Pryce climbs into the backseat with the guy she was just pummeling. And all this just minutes after that motorcycle raced up out of nowhere, whatever the hell that was.
Until an hour ago, Wagstaff thought that Ariel Pryce was probably a waste of his time. Not anymore.