Debbie looks at him in horror, her posture hardening.
Flummoxed, he tries again to comfort her. “It’s for the best,” he says. “The sooner she kills me, the better. Believe me.”
Debbie’s eyes fill with tears and her mouth gets small. “I think you’d better go now,” she says.
“Look at me .” It’s Gretchen. He is back in the basement again. Reality folds and skitters on the periphery of his vision. He doesn’t want to give in to her, but he has learned his lesson, so he turns his head and gives her his attention.
There is nothing in her face. No anger. No pleasure. No pity. Nothing. “Are you scared?” Gretchen asks. She dabs his forehead with the cloth, his cheek, the back of his neck, his collarbone. He thinks he sees a flash of emotion in her eyes. Sympathy?
Then it’s gone. “Whatever you think this is going to be like,” she whispers. “It’s going to be worse.”
CHAPTER
18
T he first thing Susan did when she arrived home from Sauvie Island was to unzip her tall, black leather boots, kick them off, and fling them on top of a pile of other shoes that had been abandoned at the door. Stained and reeking of bleach, the boots were ruined.
Susan lived in what she liked to call a loft but what was actually a large studio apartment in the Pearl District, just north of downtown on Portland’s west side. The building, once a turn-of-the-century brewery, had been redeveloped several years before. The facade still stood, hulking and brick, along with the old smokestack, but the rest of the structure had been replaced to provide residents with the most modern amenities. Susan’s loft was on the third floor. Technically, it belonged to an ex-professor of hers who was on a yearlong sabbatical in Europe with his wife, writing another book. He lived in Eugene, where he was the lauded head of the M.F.A. writing program at U of O, but he kept the place in Portland ostensibly as a writing getaway, though it was rarely used for literary pursuits. Susan had wanted it to be hers from that first weekend she’d spent there. The open kitchen had the latest appliances, a stainless-steel fridge and an impressive, gleaming range. It was everything the house she had grown up in wasn’t. Sure, the countertops were Corian, not granite, and the range was a Frigidaire knockoff of a Viking, but from a distance, the place still looked chic and urban. She loved the Great Writer’s blue desk. She loved the built-in bookcase that took up an entire wall and was stacked with the Great Writer’s books, two layers deep. She loved the framed photographs of the Great Writer with other great writers. The bed was walled off with a Japanese screen, leaving the rest of the space a living area, which consisted of a blue velvet sofa, a red leather club chair, a coffee table, and a small TV set. Everything that was actually hers in that apartment could fit in two suitcases.
She pulled her shirt over her head, pulled off her black pants, her socks, her underpants, her bra. She could still smell it, the bleach. It was on everything, soaked into everything. God she had loved those boots. She stood for a moment naked, shivering, her clothes a pile at her feet, and then she wrapped herself in the kimono that hung on a brass hook on the bathroom door, gathered up her clothes, the expensive beautiful boots, walked barefoot out into the hallway, down to the small rectangular door marked GARBAGE by the elevator, opened it, and threw the whole bundle down the chute. She didn’t wait like she usually did to listen to the bundle fall; she went straight back to her apartment, into the bathroom, turned on the tub, let the kimono fall in the corner next to the door. Only an inch of steaming water had accumulated, but Susan climbed into the tub anyway, squatting in the hot water and watching her feet redden. She sat down slowly, wincing a little as she did, and then inched backward, stretching her skinny legs out in front of her. Her naked body only made her think of them. Does he bleach them in a tub like this? The waterline was just at her hips now and she leaned back against the cold porcelain, forcing herself to press against it until it warmed to her body temperature. Her arms were covered with goose bumps, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t seem to stop the damn shivering. She turned the faucet off with her toes, closed her eyes, and tried not to think about the pale, bruised thing that had once been Kristy Mathers.