Expose

by Danielle Girard

  After dinner, the older children cleared the table while the younger ones went outside to gather firewood. Moments later, the youngest came squealing into the dining room. “It’s snowing!”

  All at once, everyone abandoned their tasks and made their way outside. Faith grabbed a coat off a rack by the door and wrapped it over her shoulders while the kids barreled out into the yard in T-shirts and jeans.

  Schwartzman watched through the window. Hal approached, holding out her coat. “You want to take a walk?”

  She glanced at the thin white layer on the walkway. “I don’t have great shoes for walking in the snow.”

  “You can hang on to me.” He nodded toward the door. “Come on. How often do you get to see snow?”

  The answer was almost never. She’d once spent a weekend in the snow. Twice when she was in Seattle, they’d had sleet.

  Hal held out her jacket, and she stepped into it.

  They remained a few minutes in the driveway, watching the kids use their bare hands to pack snowballs and throw them at one another.

  The children were mesmerizing. Schwartzman could have watched them all night, but Hal gave her arm a gentle tug and led her toward the street.

  They walked slowly, the occasional snowflake cool on her cheek. The streets were quiet, the snow a soft whisper.

  “The air feels so fresh.”

  “It’s nice to get out of the city,” Hal agreed. “I don’t know if I could live up here, but I like to visit.”

  Her shoe slid an inch before gaining traction. Though she wasn’t going to fall, in an instant Hal had hold of her wrist. He put his arm out. “Here, hold on.”

  She looped her arm in his, noticing how much she had to reach up to him. At five foot nine, she rarely felt short. She remembered when she’d first set eyes on him—this big black man. They were in a tiny apartment, huddled in a miniature bedroom with a corpse. She recalled how he had squatted down in the corner while they’d talked about the dead girl.

  Only later did she realize he’d done that for her benefit, somehow sensing she was intimidated by his size.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m better than that.” She tugged his arm to her side in a little squeeze. “Your family is amazing, Hal.”

  He chuckled softly. “They’re a bunch of characters, all right.”

  “They’re all so animated. It makes me . . .” Jealous was the first word that sprang to her mind. But it wasn’t jealousy. What would her life have been like, growing up with siblings? Would she have been more extraverted? Dragged away from her books by the presence of other children? Or would they have been quiet and intellectual like her?

  She could easily imagine her father with other children. His calm, soothing way of teaching, his stern but gentle style of discipline. And her mother, wouldn’t she have loved to have a boy? Or another girl? One with her small features, her petite nose, and her beautiful curves? Surely, the genetic dice would have rolled in her favor a second time around.

  What she experienced watching Hal and his family was more like wonder. Like witnessing a beautiful ritual in a foreign culture. Even Hal seemed different. Less guarded, more free.

  They had stopped walking. Hal watched her, one brow cocked high, a little smile tugging at his lips.

  She studied his face, the flawless dark skin of his face, the green in his hazel eyes, the amber flecks in his irises. Only recently had she observed a few gray hairs along his temples, the highlights of gray whiskers on the days he didn’t shave.

  Even with her eyes closed, she could picture him clearly. The broad cut of his jaw. The way he worked the muscle there when frustrated or impatient, or how he rubbed the top of his head when puzzling something out. The amused smile that played at his lips, curving the right side up more than the left—all the parts of him that etched themselves in her mind when she thought of him or spoke to him on the phone.

  “You were saying something,” Hal prompted.

  “Huh?”

  “It makes you . . .”

  She tore her gaze from his, afraid to look any longer. “I don’t know what I was going to say.” It made her want a big family, but how could she say that? Thirty-seven and without a partner, finally divorced from a psychopath husband—about as far from creating a big family as possible.

  Hal pulled them forward again, and she listened to the silence, so rare in the city.

  Back at the house, the party had returned inside.

  In front of the garage, Schwartzman eyed the small window of the apartment where she would sleep. She felt awkward about occupying an entire guest room that could have fit a family of four. But they’d assured her that they would be fine in the house. All eleven of them.

  The cold had mixed with the alcohol, and she was loose, numb. She tilted her chin up and closed her eyes, the cool flakes landing on her skin.

  When she opened her eyes, Hal was watching her.

  She started to laugh at her own silliness, but his expression was serious, concentrated.

  She had the briefest sense that something was wrong. His expression seemed so intense. But then she realized what it was. What she hoped it was.

  A tiny breath escaped like a pop from her lips as Hal leaned down and kissed her.

  41

  In a half dream, Bitty remembered herself back at Berkeley, in those first days of her freshman year. Because of the flight connections on her trip from Oklahoma, Bitty had arrived at her dormitory a day before the others and spent the first night in her dorm alone. The next morning, she’d been half-asleep, wearing her flannel Lanz nightgown, when her roommate had arrived. As the door swung open, Bitty felt self-conscious in her nightgown, but the girl who stepped inside wore a black cloth that covered her head to toe, the only opening a small slit for her eyes. Two women followed in her trail, both dressed the same way.

  Bitty had panicked at the idea that this woman was her roommate. How could they live together? What would they talk about? She needed a friend, someone like her, and this woman was nothing like her.

  And then her roommate’s mother and sister left, and Aleena Safar went through a complete transformation. She removed the long black cloak. Underneath, she wore capris and a silk blouse with a wide boatneck and long, flowing sleeves. It was like a strange joke with a punch line Bitty didn’t understand.

  Bitty would later learn that Aleena had been planning her start to college since she was thirteen, when she’d first begun to wear the cloak—a niqab, it was called. For five years, Aleena had waited for the opportunity to explore other aspects of herself. “I can be a faithful member of Islam and show my ankles,” she had joked.

  Bitty had not understood. She didn’t know Islam or understand why the cloak—she had forgotten what Aleena called it—had to be worn. And it didn’t matter because Aleena didn’t wear it again in front of Bitty for almost eight months.

  That first day in the dorm, Aleena unpacked a suitcase of beautiful clothes—blouses and slacks, gorgeous scarves, which she often used to cover her head. As she worked, she held things up to Bitty. “This would look great on you,” she’d say. But Bitty was afraid to ask.

  Could she really wear something so beautiful? Her?

  It took Bitty no time at all to realize that she hated her wardrobe, hated everything that identified her as someone who came from Perry, Oklahoma.

  She detested the frilly, floral tops and the skirts that reached past her knees. Hated her hair in a ponytail. Hated the little ribbons her mother had tied onto hairbands. Hated the way she made her hair curl with the pink foam curlers, the smell of the hairspray she had used for years to hold the thin ringlets in place.

  Thankfully, Aleena insisted Bitty share her wardrobe, and soon Bitty ignored her own completely. Over that first semester, Bitty became a new person, as sure a transformation as the one Aleena had made that first day.

  The more Bitty broke out of her shell, the more full she felt. The more she spoke up and out. By the spring, she was
no Bitty. Her name became ironic, a joke, like how you might call a huge man by the nickname “Tiny.”

  She walked with her head up, her shoulders back. She took long strides and wore a confident smile. Empowered, she’d become someone the people at home would not recognize. She knew how to use her appearance—wear her hair short and spiky, play up her fair skin with deep colors or black. Less fabric was more. She painted her lips bigger, lined her eyes bigger. She met people’s eyes without feeling awkward, held their stares. The men usually smiled back; the women looked away. It was as though she had ingested one of Alice’s mushrooms and entered a whole new reality.

  That night, she’d been especially brazen. The rain had stopped after two weeks of showers, and the evening was warm. She had chosen an off-the-shoulders blouse and shorts. Walking toward the party, she was showing more skin than she did on the hottest Oklahoma days, more skin than the man she would later marry had ever seen all at once, at least not in the light.

  Then, in a matter of a few hours, everything had changed.

  After that night in April, she longed to be invisible Bitty again. And quickly—so quickly—she had retreated back into that shell. She wore only the clothes that she’d stuffed at the back of her wardrobe. She retreated into her former self, cloaked in the comfortable bulk of her Oklahoma clothes. She didn’t show bare arms—the characters written there had taken days to scrub off completely, despite her efforts. Bloody scratch marks covered her legs, so she kept them out of sight as well. She moved slowly, stiffly. Everything hurt.

  She’d completed her classes but couldn’t recall how. When she arrived back in Oklahoma in May, she refused to talk about what had happened. She would not admit something had happened.

  She never gave her parents any explanation. Refused to answer her father’s questions about why she wasn’t going back while he thrust upon her his perspective, the way he always did, in dollars and cents, citing the $4,300 he’d spent for the year of college, books, meals, and the two trips home—one at Christmas, the other in May. She didn’t let herself remember how long she’d saved on her own to get herself to Berkeley.

  It was over. And she wasn’t ever going back.

  For weeks, she’d barely left her room. Then came the email from one of the boys who had been at the house party that night. Attached was an image of the group of freshmen. She stood at one end, grinning those red lips like a clown. The others—three boys and two other girls—had come that night for the same reason as she, attracted by the host’s mystique. They’d romanticized him because of the way he spoke, the sound of his voice like poetry. The strange group he’d amassed at the readings drew them in further, gathering at the bars where they slipped in the back door without fake IDs and drank in dark corners well after last call.

  Who had sent Bitty and Aleena to that first reading? Who had insisted they had to hear Bengal? She couldn’t remember.

  She would have discarded the email and the photo if her computer hadn’t frozen, that damn image stuck on the screen. She stared at their young, happy, stupid faces and noticed the two men captured in the back corner of the image.

  And there he was. His profile caught in the camera—the corner of his eye, the line of his jaw.

  Aleena had contacted her shortly after that, when the Fourth of July had burned out. Bitty felt hung over, her nerves raw after a week of fireworks—the smells, the popping sounds, the fire-like light. Though Bitty had started to feel stronger, Aleena sounded whispery and weak on the phone. She didn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. She needed Bitty’s help. She needed Bitty to come back. And so she had.

  Lying, she told her parents she was going to Oklahoma City to meet up with a friend from high school for a few days. After flying back to Berkeley, she stayed only two nights so that the two girls could go to the Berkeley Police Department. They had barely spoken while they were together—no catharsis, no bonding. Just the cold terror of their shared torture. She slept on the floor of Aleena’s tiny apartment, took the bus to the airport. Came home with less than twenty dollars of her summer savings.

  And her parents were never the wiser.

  Eventually, the questions died down. The subject reared its head less and less often, like some venereal disease that waited dormant in her bloodstream until something triggered it into an outbreak. Her parents—mostly by her father’s declaration and her mother’s nodding agreement—settled into the notion that whatever had driven Bitty home for good was the fault of the school. Too liberal. Too many freaks. Whole idea of sending their Bitty out there was one giant mistake.

  Like they’d said from the start. Being right made it easier for them to let it go.

  But the picture of him had lit a silent fire in her. She had begun stalking the internet for him. She babysat all day and then helped her mother in the evenings. Only when everyone was asleep did she boot up the inexpensive laptop she’d bought for school and connect to the Ethernet jack in the living room—the one place in the house with internet access, usually used for getting certain television stations. Bitty searched for events on and around the Berkeley campus. Pored over Facebook. Clicked and clicked and clicked until the muscles of her hand ached and her eyes wouldn’t stay open.

  Each night, when she became too tired to search anymore, she hid her laptop against a support joist behind the bureau. Then she would remove the small plastic bag taped to the back of her desk. From it, she would pull out the worn image and stare at his face, imagining what things she would say when she found him.

  Over the years, her search lost steam. She met Tucker, and he filled her nights with movies down in Stillwater and walks in the moonlight. Weekends, they rode horses at his parents’ farm and swam in the lakes in summer. It was less romantic than it sounded, but it distracted her. And while Bitty had resisted the urge to forget about what had happened in Berkeley, eventually, it was easier to bury it.

  She’d held out on being intimate with him for as long as possible. His warm breath on her face had made her sick. The first time they’d made love was excruciating—the burns would prevent her from ever enjoying sex. But Tucker’s appetites weren’t demanding, and they slowly fell into a pattern—more roommates than lovers.

  After she and Tucker married, they bought the one-story house out past his folks. Weekends, they put down laminate wood flooring to replace old linoleum and shag carpet and tiled the bathroom. Bought a new mirror.

  A couple of years later, there was Noah. Three years later, Dirk.

  And then, almost fourteen years after that night, there he was. Her son needed to find a news story on a technological advance for his science class, so with a casserole baking in the oven, she stood over Noah’s bony eight-year-old shoulder while they skimmed articles about technology. Software as a service—who knew what that was?

  But she knew him instantly.

  A shudder ran through her, as though she’d been submerged in frigid water. Reading his bio, the reality sank in. The man had called himself Bengal.

  She had moved Noah aside and scoured the website for more. Events took her to a full-screen headshot. He was a featured speaker at an upcoming conference.

  In San Francisco.

  The flawless tan of his skin, the black of his hair, the odd olive green of his eyes—almost yellow. The wave of his hair. She had seen it fall, the ends draping across his face. The pain returned.

  Her torturer.

  “What’s wrong?” Noah had asked.

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “You made a noise like you’re choking.”

  “I’m fine.”

  But she wasn’t. From that instant, the tremor built from her core. A vague vertigo built into the rocking sensation of an earthquake.

  She had to face him. Make him feel her pain. But it wasn’t enough. Now she realized the truth.

  She had to kill him.

  And she’d thought she would. Naively, stupidly.

  And she had failed.

  Bitty’s head thunder
ed. Lightning flashed beneath her eyelids, and her teeth chattered. Her pulse knocked insistently in her temples. Her body warred with itself, pounding and clawing in some cruel punishment that originated from within.

  As she rose toward consciousness, the smells gripped the strings of her memory, drawing out the old terror. Eucalyptus and mothballs, the scents mixing in her nose until she vomited. She had made Tucker throw away the mothballs, refused to have them in the house. Let the damn moths have her sweaters—she couldn’t stand that smell. And eucalyptus? There was no eucalyptus in Oklahoma.

  She was not in Oklahoma.

  The basement. The party. All those years ago. She tensed, waiting for the shrill terror of Aleena’s cry.

  Aleena was gone. It was just her.

  “Tabitha,” he purred. “It’s been such a long time.”

  That voice. She cried out, jerked her arms up to cover her face. Something sharp bit into her wrists, holding them down. She struggled to shift, to roll over, but couldn’t.

  The sounds moved farther away.

  She shifted her head toward the noise, but everything was so dark. She tried to open her eyes wider, and her eyelashes brushed against something rough. She shifted her head, the liquid cool against her cheek. The smell of it assaulted her.

  Her own vomit.

  The same as all those years ago.

  She fought against the restraints, but they only tightened as she did. And then she was so tired, so winded. Her body went slack. Exhaustion swallowed the fear until it pulled her under.

  She jumped at the sensation of cold on her face. A towel, wiping across the skin. Soothing. She tried to ask why. Her voice came out muffled. Something bitter sparked on her tongue.

  “Not quite yet,” he said. A sting in her leg. A sharp bite.

  A needle.

  Drugs.

  She tried to talk, to tell him she’d made a mistake. She shouldn’t have come back. She thought of Tucker, Noah, and Dirk, not yet five. They needed her. And Aleena, whose children were even younger than her own.