The Last Chance

by Rona Jaffe

  A taxi stopped at her building and disgorged four people. As soon as they went inside, another cab pulled up and a couple went in. They were dressed for a party and carried small packages. He moved forward, light on his feet, poised to spring. The next to arrive was a taxi with four again, and while one of the men was paying the driver he crossed the street just in time to melt into her building along with the group.

  The doorman was calling upstairs on the house phone and had his back to him. He went up in the elevator with the four people, two men and two women, all looking carefully into the air in the manner of people in elevators, not sure if he was going to the same party, not going to speak to him until they saw him there. They got off two floors above Rachel’s apartment. He got off with them. They went to the right, so he went to the right. There was a long metal coatrack in the hall outside an apartment that had a Christmas wreath on the door. People were hanging up their own coats, and his group joined them, politely waiting their turn, still not speaking to anyone until they would be introduced later inside. He noticed the fire exit and just disappeared through it. Nobody saw him go, nobody cared.

  He ran down the two flights of stairs to her floor. Out the fire exit, down the hall to her apartment. He paused for a moment to turn down his coat collar, smooth his hair, look as normal as possible. Then he rang her bell.

  He heard the peephole scrape open and then the sound of a chain being removed and a lock opened. She stood there in a pink robe, her scrubbed face as clean as a child’s, his Rachel, his victim, his love. She looked neither pleased nor angry, just perplexed.

  “What are you doing here, Hank?” she said.

  “May I come in?” Hank said. He was by her before she could answer, and he closed and locked the door. She was still looking at him, her soft lips parted, her eyes searching his face for an answer to this kind of behavior.

  “What is it?” Rachel asked.

  He put his enormous hands around her thin throat and led her backward to her bedroom. He had his fingers on her arteries where they led to her brain; if she tried to struggle or scream he could make her black out in an instant. She seemed to know this, or suspect worse, and she let him push her, while her eyes grew huge with fear.

  Holding her neck, having her in his power at last, inflamed him almost beyond bearing. He kept one hand around her throat and with the other he unzipped his pants and let his erection spring free. He saw her glance at it, just a flicker of her eyes, and then she looked at his face again. He could feel her pulse beating wildly underneath his fingers. She was terrified. It would be so easy to crush her. He would make her do everything he had ever dreamed of, he would ravish her in every way. He was glad she knew he was the master, but for some reason her fear angered him. Was he so repulsive that she had to be terrified? Even while accepting him, waiting for his next command, she was rejecting him.

  “Take off your clothes,” he said, his hand still around her throat.

  She let the robe drop to the floor. She was wearing a nightgown under it. He ripped that off with one hand as if it were made of paper. She was more beautiful than he had ever dreamed. When she had been his unapproachable goddess she had seemed larger, but now she seemed very small and delicate.

  “You know I could kill you if I wanted to,” Hank said to her. “You know that, don’t you?”

  She scarcely seemed to breathe.

  “Slut,” he said. “You deserve to be punished.”

  Nikki was finishing her Christmas shopping. Most of the stores were open until nine thirty tonight because it was the week before Christmas. She left her office early so she could get to Gucci, which wasn’t open late, to buy wallets for both her daughters. She wanted to get them something they would never spend the money on themselves. The rest of the list, of things they wanted, she would get at Bloomie’s. Gucci was so crowded, and she had to wait so long on line, that she decided to buy herself a present too, just to make up for the annoyance. There was a dark-brown pigskin attache case she had been longing for, just the sort of thing an executive like herself should carry, but she had put off getting it because it cost a fortune. Now, as she looked at it, trying to decide, the thought flashed through her mind that she should have let John Griffin buy it for her when he offered to get her a present, and she smiled because she knew that meant she was completely over him.

  Season of trust and cheer, she thought, amused, watching the cop with the huge, ominous gun on his hip, patrolling the store for thieves, pickpockets, holdup men. She charged the two wallets and the attaché case and had them gift-wrapped separately.

  Out in the street with her shopping bag and her handbag firmly clutched to her body against the surging crowds, Nikki walked briskly to Bloomingdale’s. She glanced into the store windows on the way, cheered by the decorations and the lights. She really enjoyed shopping for her daughters. She was going to make Christmas dinner for them in her apartment, and for Lynn’s boyfriend too, if he still existed. She wondered if she ought to buy him a present. No, that might make him think she was pushing him into becoming a member of the family. Goodness knows, she didn’t want her daughters to get married as young as she had. She hoped they would profit from her example.

  Her first stop in Bloomingdale’s was at the St. Laurent department. She wasn’t very well organized, she went as the spirit moved her instead of going floor by floor. But the decorations enchanted her. All the merchandise looked so desirable she had to restrain herself from buying things she didn’t want or need. She bought small printed challis scarves from St. Laurent for Rachel, Margot, and Ellen, and then she had to go to the wrap desk and stand on a long line to have them gift-wrapped. It occurred to her that she could have bought gift paper and wrapped them at home herself. Well, she’d do that for Dorothy and Lynn.

  She was getting hungry, but she had a lot more things to do. Down one floor on the escalator to underwear and robes. There was an electric eye on the bank that separated each escalator from the next, and some sort of matron, who couldn’t fool anyone into thinking she was a customer instead of a guard (and probably didn’t want to), was sitting opposite the electric eye waiting for it to signal her that a shoplifter had taken away a garment with its white plastic tag still attached to it. Once Nikki had been stopped because although the salesgirl had taken off the tag from a sweater she had bought, there was a stray one that had been dropped into the pocket. It had been very annoying.

  Dorothy and Lynn wanted warm, cuddly nightgowns for college. It amused Nikki that while they were sleeping with boys and being very sophisticated, they still favored the sort of virginal, frumpy sleepwear she had worn in her college dorm in her day. In fact, they even wanted her to try to find mukluks! She bought them each two nightgowns, because she couldn’t decide which she liked best, and then she wandered to the sexy at-home robes. She didn’t own anything really nice to wear around the apartment, and it was time. Who knew whom she might entertain some long winter night?

  She bought herself a beautiful robe for a present, too expensive—but, then, it was Christmas. Then downstairs to the gourmet shop on the lower level, where she bought imported jam and mustard and tea and fruitcake, and a big jar of brandied peaches to serve with her Christmas turkey. Charge accounts were rather reckless things to have, but in any case you wouldn’t carry a lot of cash at Christmas when there were all those pickpockets lurking around crowded department stores and streets.

  Now she was laden with shopping bags filled with packages. A last stop to buy gift wrap and ribbon, another interminable wait, and at last Nikki was out on the street. The smell of roasting chestnuts rose in the air and reminded her of many Christmases past. It always made her feel happy. She would have bought some, but she didn’t have a free hand. Naturally there were no cabs. It was a nice night and not such a long way, so she decided to walk home.

  Two Salvation Army soldiers, a man and a woman, were playing Christmas carols on the sidewalk. A man dressed as Santa Claus was clanging his bell next to a soup p
ot for the collection of money to feed poor people Christmas dinners. Poor drunks, Nikki thought. Everyone always felt so nice at Christmas, doing things for others, and then the rest of the year you were furious if someone tried to bum some change off you.

  The crowd thinned out as she came closer to the residential streets, and the air was noticeably fresher. She looked up at the apartment windows, noticing strings of lights, Christmas cards hung on thread, pictures drawn on the glass in artificial snow. She remembered when she had decorated the whole house for Dorothy and Lynn, but she didn’t feel sad for the vanished past. It had been fun, but now was fun too, and there were new things she had never done.

  She turned into her block. It was so dark and empty. The people around here must all go to bed at eight o’clock, or else they went away for the holidays. It was funny how in New York you could go right from one sort of neighborhood into a completely different sort in just a moment. What seemed elegant in daylight looked ominous tonight. Damn, her keys were at the bottom of her purse, and she would have to wrestle with all these packages when she got to the steps of her building. Usually she had the keys out, it was a habit lately.

  Coming down her block, between her and her house, Nikki saw a gang of kids. They were boys, black, no more than fourteen years old. In a minute she realized they were not just kids horsing around at night, they were mean kids looking for trouble. They looked at her, nudged each other, and formed a solid line. She felt perspiration trickling down her sides. She tried to cross the street, but they surrounded her, linking hands, like kids playing ring-around-a-rosy, but their eyes were absolutely empty and their faces were masks of hate. They were not amused, and they were not playing.

  She realized suddenly that she was just a thing to them. She was not a person with feelings but an object that it might be fun to destroy. Something or someone had so brutalized them a long time ago that they were incapable of feeling the slightest empathy. They were moving closer to her now, still in their tight ring around her. They were deciding what to do with her. She knew only one thing: they would not let her go.

  She screamed then, as loudly as she could, and they laughed at her. No one even opened a window. She kept screaming into the void of the empty, dead street until she realized that she did not exist. She who was loved and needed by so many people did not exist at all. And then the boys leaped at her like so many snarling wild cougars.

  In a city of many millions, crowded one atop another, you would think that people would notice each other, but they don’t. The more noise you hear the less you hear. Privacy becomes anonymity, and both are prized. In a high-rise apartment house you can hear when the neighbor next door or upstairs flushes the toilet, lets the water run out of the bathtub, has an argument. You can sometimes hear the scrape of the chain when a light bulb is turned on in a closet. You can hear the incinerator door clang, a key turned in a lock, a phone ring, a voice answer. And soon you block it out and hear none of it. Some people are lonely and read old letters they find in the trash left by others, but most pretend their neighbors don’t exist. Suicides, domestic murders, attacks by strangers, all go on in secrecy. Each family exists in its own little cell. It is the same in the street. Violence has no reality, it is a play performed for the onlookers, who know it’s only pretend unless they run onto the stage, and this they will not do. There are shots in the night, sirens, screams. They might be the cries of birds in a country hamlet. Night sounds. Awakened, the living cling to each other and procreate, celebrating the dead.

  In this huge city, life is as much an accident as death.

  Jill didn’t want to go near her mother’s body on the kitchen floor, or even look at it. She didn’t know what to do. Her mind seemed to have stopped functioning. She finished eating the chicken leg, dropped the bone into the garbage, and wiped her hands on the dish towel. Then she went to get Stacey. It seemed at this moment that her little sister was the older one and that she was the child.

  “Stacey … I killed Mom.”

  Stacey looked up from her homework. “What?”

  “I killed Mom. In the kitchen.”

  Stacey jumped off her bed and ran to the kitchen. Jill followed her, slowly, afraid to hear her sister scream. But there was no scream, and when she got to the kitchen her sister was talking on the kitchen phone. “I need an ambulance,” she was saying, “immediately. No, I tried 911, and they’re busy. It’s an emergency.” She gave the operator their address and hung up. “Dummy,” she said to Jill, “she’s just out cold. What did you do to her?”

  “She’s not dead?”

  “Dead people don’t breathe.”

  Jill felt something inside of her open, and she began to cry, great gulping sobs of relief and grief, of joy and frustration, at being back in the mainstream of life again and out of her nightmare. She had never cried like this before. “I didn’t mean to kill her,” she said. “I just wanted her to shut up.”

  “Part of us often wants to kill our parents,” Stacey said calmly. “But only lunatics do it. I knew you didn’t hit her on purpose. You threw the iron, right?”

  Jill nodded, still sobbing.

  “Well, she’s probably got a concussion. But she’ll know you didn’t mean it. We’ll get her to the hospital and they’ll take X-rays. That’s a nasty burn she’s got. She’ll be mad as hell when she sees that. But the main thing is she’s going to be okay.”

  On the floor Ellen moved and groaned. Now Jill could see quite clearly that she was breathing. Stacey knelt beside her and took her pulse. “Go get a blanket,” she said to Jill.

  Jill ran into the bedroom and took the blanket off the bed. She brought it back to the kitchen and Stacey put it neatly over her mother as if she were tucking her into bed. “Don’t move, Mom,” Stacey said. “You’ll be okay. The doctor’s coming.”

  “Why does she need a blanket?” Jill asked.

  “It can’t hurt.”

  The crying had stopped now and she felt cleansed and calm. She wondered why she never cried when it felt so good afterward. She felt hungry again and she poured herself a glass of milk. Stacey was looking at her in disbelief but didn’t say anything. Jill drank the milk and rinsed the glass and put it neatly upside down on the drainboard. Then the doorman rang on the housephone to say that an ambulance was downstairs and had they called for it.

  “Half an hour,” Stacey said, looking at her watch. “Incredible. The fastest record in New York.”

  They both rode with their mother to the hospital. Everyone was nice to them because they were so young-looking and Jill was so obviously grief-stricken, the marks of tears still on her face and her eyes red. Where was their father? They didn’t know. Out for dinner. Jill knew there would be other questions later, but right now the nurse rushed Ellen into X-ray, and then put her to bed in a room with three other women in it. Stacey had even thought to bring along her mother’s wallet with her Blue Cross card in it. It occurred to Jill that she was very lucky to have a sister like Stacey, and that if Stacey said she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up, then she meant to be one, and whatever she meant to do she would do. It was funny how the two of them were so different, coming from the same parents, the same home. But maybe they weren’t so different; maybe they just coped with things differently.

  After a while a doctor came to see their mother, examined her, and smiled kindly at the two girls, who were sitting beside her bed. Ellen was awake but seemed a little confused. He told her she was in the hospital and would have to stay a few days for observation until she was better. She nodded.

  “What happened?” he asked gently.

  “I have a headache.”

  “That’s natural. I’ll give you some medication. Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  “An accident,” Ellen said. She closed her eyes. “I want to sleep now.”

  The doctor looked at the two girls: the small, sturdy one and the taller, emaciated one, sitting side by side holding hands. His eyes told them that he had seen worse cri
mes in this hospital, much worse, that whatever had happened to bring their mother here was already well known to him and could not surprise him. He looked at them, and his kind, lined face told them they were not criminals, that life held all sorts of tragic and inexplicable things. Jill felt a surge of warmth toward him. He was only a little older than her father, but he looked so tired.

  “What are your names?” he asked them.

  “Stacey.”

  “Jill. What’s yours?”

  “Dr. Wilson. Why don’t you girls go home and get some sleep? You can come to visit your mother tomorrow.”

  “Are you going to be her doctor?” Jill asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is she going to have a scar?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Where had she heard that conversation before? When she was in the hospital and her mother was assuring her she would have no scar. She was saying the same thing her mother had said! Jill fought down the panic. She wasn’t going to be like her mother, she wasn’t! Her question had been only natural. After all, if there was a scar, it would be her fault.

  “Come on,” he said gently. “There’s nothing for you to do now.” He led them out of their mother’s room and put them into the elevator and set them free.

  In the street, in the dark, the gang of boys swooped down on Nikki and pulled her handbag and her packages from her numb hands, tore off her earrings, her watch, her rings. She felt them plucking at her as if they were taking bites from her skin, more shock than pain. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might have a heart attack and die right here before they had a chance to do whatever they were going to do to her. She felt the sidewalk hit her shoulder and leg as they threw her down, and suddenly they were gone. Gone, just like that, running off into the darkness carrying her things, tossing her gift-wrapped packages into the air and from one to another, turning the corner, gone.