Outside the bathroom, the pig is waiting for me at the end of the hall. My options are to go through him or through the steel emergency exit that likely leads into an alley or courtyard. I take the second option and slide out the door into the cold night air. In a loud stage whisper, I call out Yael’s name, but there’s no reply. All I’ve managed to do is go from a dark crowded place to a dark deserted place.
The courtyard is littered with trash and broken glass and stacks of wooden crates. It’s open to the sky above, and I can hear the sounds of Paris traffic not too far away. I circle the space looking for an exit, but all I find are the locked steel doors I suppose lead into other bars or restaurants and a pair of tall wooden doors secured with a chain. Through them I can hear people laughing and shouting out on the sidewalk.
“Looks like Mommy left you behind.”
I whirl around to see the pig standing before the closed door of the bar. An icy panic seems to lift me from the ground, and for a moment, I feel like I’m floating, in contact with nothing except my fear. I want to shout back at him, tell him to stay away, but as I open my mouth, I know that all I can do is scream.
He moves toward me slowly, no more than a silhouette in the dark courtyard, but a confident silhouette. There’s a little swagger in his walk, a certainty in his own strength. Only when he’s about four feet away do I finally get my shit together enough to take a step backward. I hear the crackle of broken glass beneath my boots.
The shadow of his face widens into a smile as he advances toward me. I step back again, but my back hits a tower of crates stacked against a wall.
His arm lashes forward and cups my mouth as his other reaches around my waist. A scream makes its way out of my throat, but his hand mutes it and it comes out as a weak little bleat. He pulls me forward into him so we’re pressed together.
I squeeze my eyes shut, and all I can hear is a sound like a waterfall, the full-blast roar of my blood in my veins. His hand leaves my waist and scrapes upward along my back while the fingers of his other hand snake into my mouth and try to pry it open. They taste of salt and dirt.
Then the thing inside me opens its eyes once again. It stretches its legs into my legs, stretches its arms into my arms. I am no more than the clothes it wears.
My jaw bites down hard, teeth cutting through the flesh of his fingers until they hit bone. A baritone scream fills the air, and his fingers snap out of my mouth, nearly pulling my front teeth out along with them.
A taste like metal rolls over the surface of my tongue, and I spit the pig’s own blood back at him. Stumbling a step backward, he eyes his fingers to see if they’re all there. I throw my entire weight behind my fist as it rockets forward, aimed at his throat. But he moves, and I collide with his shoulder instead.
The blow doesn’t seem to faze him, and he fires a careening missile of a punch that arcs out to the side before coming in toward my head. It’s sloppy and slow, and I catch his wrist in the air. The elbow of my other arm swings into his cheek and snaps his head to the side.
But before I can follow up, he charges forward, his shoulder landing in my stomach and smashing me backward into the stack of crates. With sheer weight, he pushes me down onto the ground.
My elbow strike had landed hard, and now a dark stream of blood trickles from the corner of his mouth, but he’s smiling, pinning my arms while he straddles me. He reaches around to the back waistband of his jeans and produces a small knife, the blade a slim triangle of steel that gleams even in the dark. He lets it linger in front of my face for a moment, showing it to me, letting me appreciate it. This is what she saw, my mom. A blade catching the light, in the moment before it cut her open.
But my body knows what to do and does it without asking. My leg hooks around his; then my hand slams the knife away just as my hips flick upward and to the side, throwing him off me. I hear the knife skitter across the ground.
I leap to my feet just as he starts to rise. My hand arcs through the air, forming a blunt ax that lands hard on his throat. The blow is so powerful I feel the soft cartilage of his windpipe bend and crackle beneath the edge of my hand. He collapses to his knees, pressing his forehead to the ground as he chokes loudly for air.
But the thing inside me isn’t done just yet. My eye catches the knife lying there amid the broken glass, so I snatch it up and hold it loosely in my hand. The backs of his legs are dangling there, so very open, so very vulnerable. I remember Yael’s words about always finishing what I start.
I move in closer and seize the heel of his work boot. The leather parts neatly as I pull the blade across it, but then I stop just short of the skin over his tendon, unable to go farther.
“Do it.”
The voice comes from the other end of the courtyard. It isn’t a whisper, but a hard and certain command. I look up as Yael steps out from behind a stack of crates and into the dim light beneath a doorway.
I let out a furious gasp. She has obviously been there the whole time. Seen the whole thing happen. Fury wells up inside me.
But the man’s leg jerks in my grip. He’s recovered some of his air and is staring at me, teeth bared, eyes narrowed into slits. What is it I see on his face, aggression or fear?
Yael’s voice calls out once more. “Do it.”
And so I do.
Eleven
There’s a cut on my elbow, a gash about two inches long. Maybe it’s from the broken glass when the pig pushed me to the ground, or maybe from something else. Yael presses a cotton pad drenched with alcohol to it. It feels like cold fire.
“I’ll hate you forever for this,” I say, and mean it.
“That’s unfortunate,” she says.
The kitchen feels too warm and the sweat covers me like shellac. I haven’t been able to stop shaking. “You set me up,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “I needed to be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
“That you could. If you had to.” She peels the cotton pad away. “If you’re going to be in the field with me, I can’t have you crumble when it matters. You need stitches.”
“He was going to rape me, Yael.”
“Oh, to start with, I think.” Yael browses through the first-aid kit spread out on the table—bandages, scissors, tweezers, tape—until she finds a needle and thread. “Anyway, I would have stepped in if you couldn’t handle it.”
The fury is so loud inside my head that I can barely sort through it enough to pick out individual thoughts.
“And the point is, you did handle it,” she says, trying to steady my arm with one hand, the needle poised in the other. “Hold still.”
“I can’t.”
She presses my arm to the table and begins. The first pass of the needle and drag of the thread through the edges of the wound hurt worse than I expect, but not as bad as everything else. My voice is quavering. “The point is, Yael. The point is this was real, okay? That man, he had a fucking knife.”
“Real? Of course it was real,” she says, her face turning red with effort to keep my arm still as she makes another pass with the needle. “I told you, this isn’t a sport. He wasn’t trying to level-up to green belt.”