I come home and the sensation is the same.
And there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. He lives three inches away from me, but crossing those three inches is out of the question. If I do it, he will only say more things that make my heart die in my chest. He’s so good at it—he could probably kill me with a couple of words. Sometimes I picture him lying awake at night, coming up with them.
Sometimes I picture him doing something worse. I have dreams about him swinging from those beams in his attic, or falling from the roof in the middle of a rainstorm. And though I try to tell myself that saving him is not something I can do—or even should do—the urge is a burning fire in my chest.
It follows me around. It stands like a shadow over my shoulder while I file and fill out forms and give out medicine in tiny plastic cups. I know it does, because by the third week some of the residents start to see it. Mrs. Lindeman asks me why I look so sad. Mr. Patterson wants to know what’s wrong.
But all I can tell him is what I tell myself every day:
Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. I’m not the first girl in the world to lose someone she loves because of a psychotic serial killer who fucked with his head. It probably happens all the time in romantic movies that have never been made ever due to how fucking nightmarish and disturbing that is.
He took him hostage.
He took him hostage for days.
And yet no one seems to know the first thing about it. I give in to my worst impulses somewhere around week four and search his name, but all I can come up with is a small article about a Professor Noah Grant who briefly worked at some university in Nowheresville, USA. Apparently, he once organized a student rally about campus assault.
There’s no mention of him in connection to the case. No news reports about a professor who had those terrible things done to him. The only thing I can find is a brief piece about a victim who was released from the hospital six weeks after Humphries was captured, and even that is vague. All of this is vague, to me.
The details I really need are across the street. They are a shadow in the upstairs window, when I look without really meaning to. They are behind the dial tone in the phone I somehow pick up, wanting to call but not quite knowing how to do it. What can I say? How can I ask if he is okay? It will only look like I miss him.
Though maybe that’s because I do. Sometimes, I stand in the darkness of four in the morning, and look across the street at his oddly silent house. And every time I shut my eyes a second before I do, because more than anything I want to open them and see him there waiting for me on the steps. Maybe today he will be, I think.
But he never is. Everything stays shut and still and the same as it was the day before, to the point where I almost look away when it suddenly isn’t. I blink as though there was just something in my eye, and come so close to not glancing back. It was just a trick of the light, my mind tells me. He wouldn’t have his door open this late. He barely has his door open when it’s midday and the sun is like a fucking spotlight in the sky, so this has to be an illusion.
Could be I’m starting to hallucinate. I want his metaphorical door to be open so imagine his real one is, and when I look again it will be as it was before.
Only it isn’t.
The door is definitely open. I can see all the way in to the wind chimes—or would be able to if the lights were on. Instead there is just this velvety darkness, like the insides of a mouth or the shadow of something plush and thick. And though it looks kind of creepy, I absolutely cannot stop myself from taking a step forward.
After all, what are the chances that this is something weird? More likely he just decided to extend an invitation. He saw me looking night after night, and finally gave in to giving me this little sign. Come on in, that door says, and I have no problems obeying it. I go inside and come very close to calling his name, and only stop when I realize.
Noah isn’t there to greet me. No one calls out my name.
Everything is so quiet I could scream, but I’m kind of glad I don’t. Screaming would make it real, and at the moment I absolutely refuse to believe it is. There is just no way it can be. This is just like last time when I thought there was someone in the house, but really thought so only because that is the way my mind works now.
In reality, serial killers never escape from prison. They stay there forever or else they get the death penalty, and even if they do get away none of them try to kill some old nemesis. The very idea of having a nemesis is ludicrous in itself. The whole thing is invented for movies where the hero needs a woman in a refrigerator to spur him on. Or movies where the heroine runs away with a murderer.
Or movies where the girl looks down to check the slippery thing she just stepped in.
And of course the slippery thing is blood. Of course it is—what did I think? That I would glance at it and see something pale and innocent seeming? Noah would never leave a mess all over the floor. He would have to clean it up before going to bed, and so here we are.
Standing in a puddle of blood as black as tar.
Of course I try to stay calm. Staying calm seems like the best thing to do, under the circumstances. People in movies who find themselves in this kind of insane situation always keep a level head, and those who don’t usually die. They freak out and slip in the blood, and crack their heads before the killer even gets to them.
They alert the psycho to their presence with panicked breathing, and make sure he gets them before they can call 911. Or else they run the wrong way—up the stairs instead of out—and then everything goes really badly. They get bludgeoned to death or drowned in a bath or some other horrible thing that I can’t think about right now because the love of my life is probably dead at the hands of a serial killer.
I doubt he would wait. Why would he wait? He probably waited last time, and that’s why he got caught. Noah kept him talking for all those days until the feds turned up, and then came time for some divine fucking retribution. No, no this time he’ll want to stab and stab and stab and, oh God, this cannot be happening.
It must be something else.
I pray to God that I’m fucking insane and none of this is real and I keep doing it until I manage to creep to the kitchen, where the trail of blood ends. Hell, I carry on even after I get there, and can hear the most awful, nightmarish singsong that I could ever possibly imagine.
“Heavenly shades of night are falling,” he sings, and somehow I know I will hear that for the rest of my life. With Ted it was the porch light, and my dancing legs. The smell of varnish and the smooth, clean look of his ladylike fingers. With this, it will be that song, and the square of light that keeps appearing on the wall to my right.
Light, then none, light, then none, light, then none, all of it confusing until it suddenly clicks what it might be. He’s opening the fridge, then closing it again. Singing and opening the fridge, while he probably stands there in the dark with Noah’s dead body at his feet.
Is it any wonder I cover my mouth with both hands? That I do it tight, so tight?
I have to, just to keep all of this agony in. I want to sob, only sobbing probably wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would be enough for this. I could paint my pain in writing across the sky, and it would never get close to how this feels. A million counseling sessions wouldn’t be enough to explain—how could they ever be?
People only understand the everyday. They have no concept of anything beyond it, until something comes along and rips the fabric of reality away. I had no concept, before that one little thing. I thought everything would always somehow be okay.
But I was wrong. I was so wrong.
Suddenly a serial killer can get you by the throat—that is the way the world really is. I go to run, to get to a phone, to do anything at all that might save me or save Noah or save both of us, and somehow there is a hand in my hair. He catches me by the hair and then his other hand is on my neck, even though I swear I didn’t hear him move.
I was sure he was still by the re
frigerator.
And now I’m going to pay for that. I always end up paying for assumptions. When I was just a college kid, I assumed that nothing could ever really hurt me, and look how that turned out. In the first flush of my relationship with Noah I assumed that this was my reward, and now see where I am. I should really stop doing it.
Though it might have to wait until after he kills me.
After all, the chances of me escaping this are almost zero. I fight, but what good is fighting against a stone wall? He must be seven feet tall and when he yanks me back against his body it feels like running into an oncoming train. Stars and birds actually circle my head, and he hasn’t even hit me yet.
I suppose he doesn’t really have to. All of my struggles are so pathetic to him that he seems kind of amused when I make them. I lash out at his face and this horrible grating sound comes out of him, and after a second of dazed contemplation I realize that’s his attempt at laughter. He’s laughing at me.
And he does it again when I kick. Of course he does—my feet are already off the ground. I look like I’m bicycling in the air. Nothing I do has the least little effect on him, and every effect in the world on me. Every time I move, the hair he has hold of burns like acid rain pouring down on my head. I feel as though I might be throttling myself to death, rather than letting him do any of the work.
Plus after a moment he decides I’m being a nuisance.
So he presses a gun to my right temple.
“Now, you best behave,” he says, but I don’t quite obey. I keep going, even in the face of a bullet to my head. I think of something else I can do and come very close to doing it, until he adds the one thing that is guaranteed to make everything less worthwhile:
“Or I might have to kill you, too.”
Just that one word is enough—too. That one tiny word and I am done. Everything is done. He can do whatever he wants and it won’t matter, because Noah really is gone. He truly might be on the floor of the kitchen. Or maybe he didn’t even wake up. This guy is so soft on his feet. He could have crept up while Noah was sleeping and oh. . .
Why do things have to be so?
“You know I said to him that if he ever got himself a little friend I might have to come calling,” he whispers, but I hardly hear him. I’m upstairs laid next to the love of my life, with a bloody hole in my head. Even if by some chance I get away, that’s where I’ll always be now. I can feel it. Every part of me knows it.
“Just do it,” I say, and then I close my eyes and wait to stop feeling this awful pain.
When I open them again he will be waiting for me, in some other better world. He will be there and I will go to him and everything will be so much sweeter than this place. This place where coffee is really dirt and sex is really nothing and reality is so small and mean compared with all the things we can imagine.
Right now, I can imagine him coming for me. I imagine it so hard that when I open my eyes and see him standing at the end of the hallway I think I must be already dead. The gun went off without me knowing it. The bang obliterated all conscious thought and this is just whatever lies beyond.
It must be, because when he lifts his hands there’s a gun in them. And he does it in a way that seems so practiced, so perfectly smooth and calm that it could never be real. Noah is not the kind of person who could hold a weapon like that or have that steely expression on his face—a face that is blood all down one side from a wound that happened God knows how or God knows where—and I’m right about that much, at least.
Noah definitely couldn’t.
But the man who climbs constant mountains in the dark could.
This man, who flung himself across a roof to stop me from falling. This man, who was more concerned about the sting down the back of my leg than the Mace I brought out to possibly blind him. This man, who would send me away just on the merest chance that this might happen even though I know it’s taken its toll.
I know because he is me and I am him, and in his place I would say the same thing as he does to Humphries now. I would use the same voice, like coming thunder:
“If you let her go, I might be able to restrain myself. I could just put a bullet in your kneecap, or stop at half strangling you to death. But you have to know if you don’t, I will not show you any mercy. I was kind, before. However, in the intervening years I seem to have forgotten what kindness is, when it comes to you. Somehow, smashing your face in with a piece of brick no longer seems like enough.”
I think of the scar I glimpsed on Humphries’s face. The one that looked like the corner of something heavy, and hard. And then there’s the way he shouts: “Don’t you fucking say that to me you nothing, you fuck” and the spray of spittle that comes with it. The squeeze of his hand around my throat.
That is definitely what Noah really did.
He didn’t wait for the feds to come. He most likely went to them. He got free and then probably half beat Humphries to death with a brick. He beat that scar right into him, and by God, I want him to do it again. I want it so much I grind my teeth over the taste of it. Viciousness swells in my chest, and it gets stronger when Humphries laughs his fucking laugh and says:
“Maybe I will make you watch again, friend.”
In fact, it gets so strong I think I might black out in the middle of it. Something happens to me for sure, because I think of Noah having to get through that again—I think of me getting through that—and everything goes into a kind of autopilot. I feel the gun leave my temple for just an instant, just the barest instant. And I see Noah’s eyes go wide as he registers what I’m going to do.
But I really don’t know I’m going to do it. My hands reach up on their own, powered by that terror and that rage. That knowledge that one man like this can just ruin people forever and ever and they will never find their way back again. I want Noah to find his way back again. I want it, I want it, I want it so much that I get hold of that meaty fist the second I know the barrel is almost under his chin, and I put my finger over his on the trigger.
And then comes the bang, so loud it drowns me out forever.
THE THING I remember most clearly is the way my hair blew outward when the gun went off. But then, as I said, it’s always the littlest things that stay with people. The light, my dancing legs, the singing and the refrigerator and the drift of my already blood-spattered locks. The look on Noah’s face, like the one he has there now as he sits by my hospital bed. It has a hint of startled awe to it—as though he never considered that I would get myself out of that situation. That I would get him out.
But mostly, it looks like relief to me. It looks like the relief people feel when they’ve finished walking a thousand-mile marathon, and can finally sit down. They can take off that backpack filled with rocks and leave it behind.
Maybe they never have to pick it up again.
Even though I can see he kind of wants to. He comes and stands over me, and puts a hand over the bandages that cover my left ear. And despite the lack of words, I know what he’s saying. This is my fault, his expression says. You will be deaf there until you die because of me.
He just doesn’t understand that there are so many worse ways to be.
“How are you feeling?” he asks, and I answer him honestly.
“Like you still don’t get that none of this is your fault.”
Of course my voice comes out weird and fuzzy when I do. But I don’t care, I don’t care, I know I’m right. I’m more right now than I was before: He sent me away and it happened just the same. It could have happened if I never knew him—if I just saw that open door like a mystery waiting to be solved.
He cannot be to blame.
He just always thinks he is.
“You can say that forever. I’ll probably never internalize it.”
“Do you have to? Do you have to do that?”
“It might help in my quest to have a normal relationship with the woman I love.”
“If you love me, then nothing has to be internalized. You d
on’t have to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re not responsible. You just have to let me be there for you when you think ridiculous things like that, just like you would want to be there if I ever thought that I was to blame for what happened to me. Wouldn’t you want to be?”
“Of course I would. I even know what I would say.”
“Tell me then. Tell me every word.”
“That there should be no punishment for kindness. No toll to pay because you wanted to reach out or wear a nice dress or see if the guy across the street is really sleepwalking and maybe help him out of it.”
“Then don’t make me pay it. And don’t you pay it either.”
“That’s easy enough to say until it all ends with you having to blow someone’s head off,” he says, but for the first time, I can see the cracks in his conviction. I can hear the wavering in his voice and see the desperation in his eyes, as he does his best to make this airtight. The only problem is—it can never be, now.
“And how often do you think that’s going to happen, considering it probably has never happened to any other person in the history of the world?”
“That isn’t the point. None of this is the point. I didn’t want to end things because I was afraid a serial killer might escape from prison and track me down and try to hurt you—the way he actually did. I wanted to end them because you don’t deserve to be afraid or troubled or poisoned by anything, least of all my delightfully undisclosed relationship with a homicidal maniac,” he says, but I see the angle he’s working. I see him going for that third-act faux drama. Everything must always be the truth—that’s what he’s going for. As though lying about trauma actually fits into that category.
“Do you think a nightmarish event you neglected to tell me about is going to make me more sure that we should stay apart? Maybe throw a big hissy fit about how I can never trust you for not telling me about the most awful thing I can ever imagine happening to another person, let alone the person I love?”
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