Mitigating Circumstances

by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg

  “Will he come back, Mom?”

  “No, Shana, he’ll never come back. I’ll move out of this house tomorrow. We’ll never come here again. Soon we’ll both forget this night ever happened.” She knew this was a lie.

  CHAPTER 10

  Once they had gone, Lily hurriedly started throwing things in a small duffel bag. The house was dead quiet again, that ominous stillness like before, and she was shaking. The memory of the attacker’s face in the last few minutes before he had left kept flashing in her mind, and each time she dropped what she was doing and stood there, frozen in thought, trying to put her finger on what it was that she associated with his face. Suddenly the face appeared, but not as she remembered it. It appeared in a mug shot photo.

  She ran to the living room, tripping and falling on the edge of her robe, soggy and reeking from Shana’s vomit. From her position on the floor, she saw her briefcase and crawled the rest of the way on her hands and knees. Her fingers trembled as she dialed the combination lock. On the third try it clicked open. She threw all the files on the floor and frantically searched for the one she knew contained the photo. Papers went flying across the carpet.

  Suddenly it was in her hands and she was looking at his face. He was the same man who had attempted to rape the prostitute. Clinton’s case that he had dismissed today. The man was even wearing the same red sweatshirt. He had been arrested and photographed in it. Photographed with that smug smile. They must have released him about the time she left the building, giving him back his original clothes with the rest of his property. Someone either picked him up or dropped off his car. He must have followed her from the complex.

  There was no doubt in her mind as she studied the hated image in her hands. No doubt at all. It was him.

  Her breath was coming fast now, catching and rattling in her throat. Whatever effects the Valium had were gone. Adrenaline was pumping through her veins. She rapidly sorted through the pages of the file to the police report. There it was: his address. His home was listed as 254 So. 3rd St., Oxnard. His name was Bobby Hernandez and although Hispanic, he had listed his place of birth as Fresno, California. Lily tore the sheet with his address from the file and placed it in the pocket of her robe. She went into the bedroom and threw on a pair of Levi’s and a sweater, transferring the address to the jeans. She dug into the back of the closet until she found her fur-lined winter hiking boots. John had insisted that she remove every single item that belonged to her from the house when she moved, as though he wanted to erase her from his life, everything except the furniture. That he wanted to keep. In the same box was a blue knit ski cap. She placed it on her head and stuffed her hair inside it.

  She headed for the garage. Back in the corner, behind three or four boxes was her father’s shotgun, a twelve-gauge Browning semi-automatic, the one he had used to hunt deer, one of the curious items her mother had given her after his death. She had given Lily his cast-iron barbecue, one Cross pen, and his shotgun. Nothing more.

  In the stillness of the garage, as her hands touched the barrel of the gun, Lily felt his presence beside her and heard his voice. “Good shot, Lily girl. Good as any boy could make,” he would say with his booming, gruff voice on the Saturday afternoon he had taken her to shoot tin cans lined up on a tree stump. He had wanted a son. She no longer dreamed of frilly dresses and bows for her hair. By the time her grandfather had died, when she was thirteen, Lily had wanted exactly the same thing as her father.

  Spotting the small box containing the green slugs, she again heard his voice, right there next to her, clear and distinct. “These are called rifled slugs, Lily girl.” She loaded them into the chamber and crammed several more into the tight pocket of her jeans. “These will make a hole big enough to throw a cat through. You can bet on that. You shoot something with this baby and it’s gonna stop.” She did not falter for a moment, his voice guiding her, pushing her on. “Once you get your sights on them and decide to shoot, shoot. You can’t wait or you’ll miss.” He had taken her on a deer-hunting trip, proud of his daughter, wanting his hunting buddies with sons to see what a good marksman she had become. “It’s meat, honey,” he said, speaking to her in the car on the drive down. “Venison.” Later, in the woods, she had the shot, the gentle, beautiful animal in her sights, but she had hesitated, teeth clenched, hands sweating, unable to pull the trigger. He was disappointed. She had let him down. She vowed she would never miss again.

  As she left the garage, shotgun muzzle down in her arms, her footsteps echoed even when she had left the concrete flooring and was walking on carpet. She felt heavy, rooted to the ground with resolve, walking in another dimension, no longer alone in her body. The phone rang like a shrill bell, invasive, unwelcome, but a signal, a signal to begin. It was John.

  “Shana’s asleep. I’m worried about you. Are you coming over?”

  “I’ll be there in a few hours. Don’t worry. I can’t sleep now anyway. I want to calm down and take a bath. He’s not coming back here tonight. Just worry about Shana.” Do what you do best, she thought without contempt, accepting her role, and I’ll do what has to be done.

  She started to lock the front door and leave and then thought of something, returning to the kitchen. Rummaging through the drawers, her fingers seized a black Magic Marker, the one she had used to label the moving crates. She shoved it into her other pocket and left.

  The moon was out, the night clear. A streetlight reflected half moons of light on the manicured green yards. She had only briefly seen the neighbors on either side the day she moved into the house. They were both elderly couples and she had heard their televisions blasting early on in the evening. The sounds that had earlier pierced the night had fallen on deaf ears. The block looked quiet and peaceful, as if nothing had ever happened, yet the stillness was audible now, a sound of its own.

  She crouched at the rear of her car and began marking the license plate. The plate read FP0322. With the marker she altered it to read EB0822. It was a small change, but it was the best she could do. She threw the shotgun in the backseat, thought of covering it, and then decided that it didn’t matter. The rage was an unseen inferno, burning all around her, blinding her, engulfing her, pushing her on. She kept seeing him over Shana, the knife at her navel, his body heaving on top of her precious child.

  She drove toward Oxnard. The streets were quiet. She rolled the window down and let the night air blow in her face. As she passed the farming area of Oxnard, the smell of fertilizer reminded her of his rancid odor. She tasted his vile penis in her mouth—she spat out the window. The edges of her mouth stung from the razor-sharp nicks of the knife. The thought of where that knife had been and the dried matter she’d tasted made her force the thought from her mind to keep from vomiting.

  Slowly she drove down the dark streets, passing from one streetlight to another, one stop sign, another traffic signal changing from red to green to yellow and back again. In her mind they were like runway lights, illuminating her descent into Hell. Cars sped past her now and then. Couples coming home from parties, dates, bars; lovers crawling out of beds and returning to other beds. At one red light she looked into the car next to her and for a brief minute visually connected with the driver, a middle-aged woman with tired, defeated eyes in a lined face. Lily thought she might be a late-shift waitress from an establishment like Denny’s, going home to a little apartment somewhere. Maybe she feared someone would be waiting to jump out and attack her. “Be careful,” Lily told her as their cars moved into the intersection. “You could be next.”

  She was trying to formulate a plan. It didn’t take her long to find the house. The street was a major thoroughfare in Oxnard and she simply followed the numbers. The area was called Colonia. She knew it well, for it was infested with drug dealing and crime.

  His house was one in a row of tiny stucco houses. Across the street was a vacant lot. The yard was overgrown with weeds, dry and cracking from lack of water. On the front porch was an old refrigerator with a big heavy-link
chain and padlock. They had probably been cited by the police, she thought with contempt, before purchasing the lock. In the driveway was a dusty black older-model Plymouth and a partially primered brown Ford pickup. In the attempted rape and kidnap, he had driven a van and there was no van. The screen on the front door hung haphazardly on its hinges. One window was boarded up with no glass. The other was open yet covered by curtains. The house was dark.

  Like a burglar she cased the area, noting that the nearest streetlight was a block away on the corner. She had driven here with intent, her loaded shotgun in the backseat, but with no definite plan. She knew she couldn’t enter his house and shoot him. That would be suicide. And she had no way of knowing for certain that he was actually inside. There was only one way: wait for him to come out. It could be broad daylight and dozens of people might be milling about on the street. Some of these houses had five or six families living together. She looked at the cars parked up and down the streets she prowled. Evidently, Hondas were not a common mode of transportation in Colonia.

  Turning back toward the field she had passed earlier, she steered the car onto a dirt road, pressing down on the accelerator and flooring it. The car had been washed only a few days before. It was now absorbing the dust she was churning up with her tires. She parked by the road, with crops planted as far as she could see on either side. Taking the shotgun from the backseat, she pointed into the fields and fired it. The blast shattered the stillness of the night, and the butt of the gun smashed into her shoulder. Her father had been dead for ten years. She wanted to be certain her weapon of death would perform. Quickly throwing it in the backseat, she spun out and headed back onto the main road, making her way under the freeway and traveling into the safer, well-lit streets of Ventura.

  She passed the government center complex and pulled into the parking lot. Lights were still burning inside the belly of the jail, but the windows were dark. Her eyes darted to those windows and she was instantly filled with visions of him watching her, watching as she fumbled with her keys as she always did, never having them ready in her hand, always reckless of her own safety, thinking she was impervious, invincible, spending so much time among criminals and crime that she had felt like someone watching it all from above, protected and safe. She thought of how her little red car had stood alone so many nights in the parking lot. A force more powerful than rage seeped into her mind: guilt. By her actions she had caused this to happen to her daughter. It had started with the night she had slept with Richard, a married woman out fucking around while her child and husband were home.

  But no, John had not been home. He had been lurking in the shadows, spying on her, waiting to catch her at something he had repeatedly and wrongfully accused her of dozens of times through the years. There had been terrible rows. She had hated him for his distrust and even threatened to go out and cheat on him purposely because he didn’t believe her no matter what she did or said. From the onset of their marriage, in whispered words from the soul, he had shown her again and again his fear that he would someday lose her. He had also said that she did not love him, had never loved him, had only sought refuge in their marriage. She had heard the words so many times over the years that she finally believed him.

  Maybe he was right. She had shunned the social scene in college, the aggressive, egotistical young men who had asked her out. She had selected only the shy, bookish types to date and ended the relationships before they had a chance to develop. Their meeting had been chance, in a drugstore with a small lunch counter. He lied, overinflating his job and income at a personnel agency, courting her with flowers and cards. But it was his reverence for women and his nurturing nature that made her feel safe, protected. “Men will just use you as a receptacle,” he had told her. “They think women are just for sex.” He said he wanted to make love to her when she was his wife, the future mother of his unborn children, the “way it’s supposed to be.” In time, Lily initiated the sex between them, found her body seeking it. The more she wanted, the less he wanted her. It began after Shana was born and gradually got more pronounced, particularly the last year or so. Finally she had stopped wanting.

  She circled the parking lot and then left, her hands firmly planted on the steering wheel, her back rigid. The darkness was slowly changing into the overcast gray of a southern California morning. She could hear birds in the trees as she passed the parkway leading to Oxnard. Here and there, the world was awakening.

  She had to go to the bathroom but refused to stop. She willed the urge to disappear and it did. As she pulled up to a stoplight and glanced in the rearview mirror, she caught sight of her image. Her face was ashen. Her eyes bloodshot. She looked old and tired in the blue knit cap, pulled low on her forehead. As she realized that the stench of him still clung to her body and had now grotesquely blended with her own developing body odor, a wave of nausea assaulted her. She bit down on the inside of her mouth, tasting her own blood.

  Slowly guiding the Honda onto his street, she saw a dark green van parked at the curb, its rear doors open. Her eyes turned at once to the shotgun in the backseat while her pulse raced and her stomach churned. Eyes back to the street, she saw no movement. A muted radio played from an open window, the words probably Spanish. She strained to pinpoint the sound. Pulling to the curb five or six houses away, hands locked and sweating on the cool steering wheel, she let go long enough to wipe them back and forth on her denim-clad thighs before she reached for the shotgun and transferred it to the front seat, the muzzle pointed at the floorboard.

  When a dog barked somewhere, she jumped and took her foot off the brake. The car was still in drive, engine running; it jerked forward.

  After staring so hard at the front of his house that her vision had blurred, she saw a distinct flash of red. She floored the Honda and covered the distance between the houses in seconds. Slamming both feet on the brake, she threw the gear shift into park without thinking and grabbed the shotgun. The sound of the barrel as it struck the top of her car was earsplitting in the morning silence. He was exiting the house, halfway down the curb, headed toward the van. He saw her and stopped abruptly, planting both his feet firmly on the ground. On his face was a look of shock and confusion.

  Inside that second, reason flickered behind the eyes she lowered to the sight, coursed inside the finger on the trigger, a pinpoint of light before blindness. Her body moved back inches, but the light was gone, the sight a framed portrait of red fabric pulsating with the beat of his heart. Her nostrils burned with Old Spice after-shave. Sandpaper fingers dug into her vagina. The man in front of her was no longer the man who had raped her daughter, he was the old puppeteer, her grandfather.

  She fired.

  The impact knocked him off his feet. His hands and legs flew in the air. The green slug ejected onto the street. The explosion reverberated inside her head. A gaping hole appeared in the center of the red sweatshirt, spewing forth blood. She was drowning in a frothy sea of red blood: Shana’s blood, virginal blood, sacrificial blood. Her throat constricted, mucus dripped from her nose, and once again the alien, detached finger squeezed the trigger. The slug hit near his shoulder, severing his arm.

  Her knees buckled beneath her. The shotgun fell butt first to the ground. The muzzle came to rest under the soft flesh of her chin, stopping her. Moving her head, she vomited chunks of chicken onto the black asphalt, seeing pieces of flesh boiling. She pulled herself into the open door to the car, her arms locked around the shotgun. Everything was moving, shaking, bleeding, screaming. She saw objects flying through the air, trapping her inside the core of horror.

  Move, she ordered her body, still frozen. Move. She grabbed the steering wheel, releasing the shotgun. Don’t look. Drive. Her foot responded and the car surged forward. The intersection was there in a second. Turn. Breathe. Turn. Drive. She had not killed a human being. Turn. Drive. Turn. The sun was shining, but she saw only a dark tunnel in front of her. She knew she was in Hell and there was no way out. “Please, God,” she prayed. “
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” She screamed, “Show me the way out.”

  Her body was like ice, but she was dripping with sweat. The sign read Alameda Street. The sun was blazing, the streets teeming with activity. Seeing the stop sign, she braked, waiting while three school children crossed. She had been driving aimlessly for at least an hour. The shotgun, now on the floorboard, had rolled to a resting place against her feet. She kicked it back and continued.

  It was as if she could see herself from a position outside her body. Somehow she no longer felt connected. The houses were larger and the yards well tended. She was no longer in Colonia.

  In her mind she could visualize the crime scene: the police cars with their lights flashing, the ambulance and paramedics, the crowd of onlookers being shoved back by the police. If he had survived, he would have been transported to the nearest hospital, and the emergency-room staff would be trying to stop the bleeding, assess the damage. It had been so long he might even be in surgery, a dedicated physician trying to save his life. What she willed herself to see was his disgusting, inhuman body beneath a coarse dark blanket, lifeless.

  Finding a major cross street, she made her way to the freeway and headed home. To Shana, she thought, she had to get to Shana. “He’ll never hurt you again, baby. He’ll never hurt anyone again,” she whispered. As the words left her mouth, the voice she heard was not her own. It was her mother’s voice, saying the words she’d yearned to hear as a child, telling her that her grandfather’s perverted abuse of her body was over. Those words had never been spoken. Only his death had freed her.

  She plucked the knit ski cap from her head and tossed it out the open window as she entered the on-ramp to Camarillo. She felt remarkably calm and controlled, both full and empty, horrified but at peace. The rage had been released, allowed to take its own shape and propelled toward its target, locked inside the green slug. The evil had returned to the person who had unleashed it.