by P. J. Vernon
The double sedative burns off adrenaline. Thoughts grow muted, muddy. A bizarre euphoria blossoms. A body high just before the tremendous, inescapable weight of sleepiness. Tilly licks sweat from my shins. She’s not allowed on the bed. I tell her to get off but realize that, again, I only think I’ve done so. As she curls against my chest, my vision tunnels, and I drift, lost to the watery static of the still-running shower.
* * *
• •
I wake in my own bed, beneath my own sheets. They’re airy and light like a fresh morning. Sunlight tumbles from our bedroom’s long bay window, broken in even bands by plantation shutters.
The rays vanish and reappear with passing clouds. A coarse fabric chafes my thighs. Towel-like because I’m in a bathrobe.
My peace fractures into a million shards. Needle sharp and hazardous.
I bolt upright. Tilly jumps to the floor. My eyes bulge in my sockets, and the horrors from last night break through like rushing water. Splintering my mind’s frail dam, taking everything with it. An unstoppable force.
My heart seizes when I hear it: the shower’s running.
Across from our bed, the bathroom door’s ajar. Just enough to catch water spilling over the edge of the tub.
I throw back the sheets and leap to the bathroom. My feet splash into a pool of water. My clothes from last night: I left them in the tub. They blocked the drain.
I shut the faucet off. The spillover drain gurgles—working overtime. I fling a cabinet open and pull towel after towel after towel onto the floor. They instantly become waterlogged. Saturated, and when there’s none left, I dart to the linen closet down the hall, and gather more in my arms.
“Goddammit!” I scream as a thought strikes like a hammer to my face: Nathan’s home tomorrow.
The bath empties, spitting water in a final, draining swirl. My clothes only partly blocked the drain, and less water pours from the showerhead than from the faucet. Still, there’s going to be damage. Significant damage to Nathan’s dream home. Our century-old dream home.
Shit. Shit. Shit. What’s below this bathroom? A stairwell in the kitchen leading to an unfinished cellar. I turn to leave, to check the stairwell ceiling, but something catches my eye. I grind to a dead stop. My reflection in the baroque vanity mirror.
My feet press cold water from scattered towels as I draw closer. My gaze is pulled to itself like a magnet.
I run a finger down my throat in a diagonal trace. Over my stubbled Adam’s apple. Dull purples. Dark blues in places. Greens, muted and sour.
Undeniable proof. Evidence beyond all doubt. Not for the first time in my life, the bruises on my throat gather into the unmistakable shape of human fingers.
5
I rap my knuckles on the kitchen’s marble counter. In the stairwell, water’s gathered in the space between the first and second stories and soaked into the plaster.
A list of priorities materializes. First, the water damage. Yesterday was Saturday, today is Sunday, tomorrow Nathan returns from New York.
This isn’t spilled cabernet on a cushion. This is serious. Our contractor, Darryl—I can tell him it’s an emergency, which of course it very much is. I’ll pay whatever it takes to get him here on a Sunday. But the fact of the matter is, we’ll need new plastering. We’ll need the moisture dried. Hardly a one-day job with zero advance notice.
No, I can’t hide my recklessness from Nathan. But I can invent an explanation that departs wildly from the truth. Which brings me to priority number two: my throat.
A parade of solutions—half-baked and foolish—marches by. Cosmetics are the most obvious. A foundation to match my skin. Then there’s clothing. Turtlenecks. I don’t own a single turtleneck, and it’s mid-June in DC.
A terrifying reality sinks its teeth in. Nathan will see the flooded bathroom. He’ll see my bruises. No rational way to conceal either. This means contingencies, dramatic by their very nature. And dramatic means emotion—that won’t be a problem for me. I already teeter on the edge of sanity.
It also means action. Ramifications. Consequences.
I was mugged. I was mugged and must commit myself to the idea here and now.
Jumped on my night run. It happens all the time in this city, and my taking up running was Nathan’s idea, anyway. If I’m lucky, he’ll conclude we don’t need to file a police report. To do so would be an exercise in futility because I don’t recall details. The assailant was masked. See? The assailant. I can’t even gender my attacker.
Nathan must be convinced medical attention is unnecessary, and if it was, he’s a trauma surgeon at Walter Reed hospital, for fuck’s sake. Simple assault and a stolen wallet pale in comparison to his combat casualties. Mental note: lose my wallet, report my cards as stolen.
After I hang up with our contractor, my chest unscrews a thread or two. My thrumming heartbeat settles.
“Water damage in the master bath? I can stop by midafternoon,” Darryl had said on the other end. “Between two and three. Give it a look-over.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I replied with disproportional gratitude.
Things are moving. I’m beginning the complicated process of tying up loose threads. Maybe, just maybe, Nathan won’t find any to pick.
I’m engaged in a cover-up too. One that consumes all attention and keeps me from reliving, rethinking the events of last night. I’ve compartmentalized. I’ve locked them in a dark corner of my mind. My stomach turns when the thought of confronting them bubbles up like noxious swamp water.
Keep moving. Keep thinking.
A fierce longing strikes. I want Nathan home. Not this second, obviously, but soon. I want to talk to him, and see him, and touch his stubbled jaw. I want to know with certainty that he doesn’t know, and I want to forget. When he’s standing here, the present will crowd out any other realities. When our chests press together, there’ll be no space for last night to exist.
Something chimes. My iPhone, abandoned on the entry table.
It’s Nathan, and I regret my wish.
“Oliver.” He sounds clipped and tired. Hungover maybe, probably.
“Hey.” I ooze cheer as if masking the state of things at home. The state of my life in his absence. “Sorry I didn’t call you back. I fell asleep early. How’s New York?” I brace for Nathan’s answer, pray he’ll skirt the unreturned call.
Unexpectedly, he does. “Got a closed-door working group all day today. Resuscitation fluid strategies. Whole blood versus blood products versus saline. That sort of thing.”
He says that sort of thing as if bells will sound in my brain. I try to pay attention to his work, but I don’t have the wherewithal to keep up. I’m insecure about this, so I never complain or ask for an explanation. “I’m sorry.”
“Had a late drink with Mother, which was not a good idea. Predictably.”
“Really sorry on that front.”
“It is what it is. And also, not your fault.”
“Then you’re home tomorrow?” I want him to say his working group may spill into Monday. I will him to tell me this. Or maybe the airline’s texted. His flight’s delayed. A mechanical issue or lack of an allocated aircraft.
“I am. Mid-morning flight. Ten fifteen.”
Fuck. “Guess you couldn’t get one sooner.” I overcompensate. “I’ll make dinner. Something special. Whatever you want.”
He breathes static into the receiver. “Anything. Not chicken. They’ve fed us chicken all week. Even the breakfast sausage is fucking chicken.”
I laugh and worry it comes off forced. Which, of course, it is.
“I’ll call tonight?” he asks. “FaceTime?”
“Sure.” I answer too soon. My third mistake. The bathtub was my second. The bathhouse, my first. He’s asked two questions, and I’ve provided a blanket yes to both. FaceTime. As in, we’ll converse
via video call. As in, my throat will be in frame.
“Perfect. Talk then. Love you.”
I start to whisper “I love you too,” but he’s already hung up. I’m happy I don’t have to say the words. It’s not that they’re untrue. They very much are, despite our problems. It’s that my own duplicity sours them. Saying those words aloud to Nathan on this morning curdles my stomach like months-old milk.
I need room, a breather. As much as I don’t want to, I need to process things. To determine what they mean to me and for me. Perhaps not last night, but everything since.
The kitchen junk drawer holds a tiny screwdriver, nestled among rubber bands and thumbtacks and Tilly’s heartworm chewables. Tool in hand, I make for the hallway just before the dining room. The powder room door stands to my right, but I turn left. Between the closets on the opposite wall sits a duct vent. The grate is original to the home. Iron painted white. A swirling floral cage that I unscrew and sit gently on the hardwood.
Reaching in, elbow-deep, my fingers find the paper carton.
* * *
• •
Our backyard is narrow. Landscaped and urban, and I sit on one of two stone benches in a back corner of lilac and magnolia. The tall homes of neighbors lean over into the space. They can see me smoking from upstairs windows. Nathan doesn’t like smoking. Nathan hates the idea that I used to smoke. This would make him livid.
I pull a long drag, and my Marlboro glows cherry orange. Smoke sweeps my lungs, and my mind sharpens. Ashing into a coffee mug, I begin to feel sorry for myself.
I’m the one covering up. I’m the one concealing and masking and taking pains to set things right. But I’m the victim. The victim of an attempted murder.
My stomach twists like a wet rag, wringing damp fear from itself.
Murder. A man who entered my life in a chance moment tried to end it just as fast. His motive, inconsequential. Sociopathy, perhaps. But it’s not only that he tried to choke me, to squeeze the life from me. We were intimate. We were intimate when I decided he’d fuck me. We were intimate when our bodies, wet with the salt of our sweat, the adrenaline of our arousal, pressed together.
The intimacy of sex mirrors the intimacy of murder. At least murder that requires one to use one’s hands. To breathe into his ear. The French call orgasm “the little death.”
Is this what they had in mind?
* * *
• •
“We’ll start early this week. Finish up by Friday,” Darryl says as I lead him to the front door. He’s old. Ill-fitting jeans and a purple-and-orange Clemson cap. A fatherly type who instills a spoonful of calm, and I wonder if dads do that for their sons. I wouldn’t know.
He’s worked with us from the beginning. With the house even longer—before Nathan claimed the property, it belonged to the Klein Family Foundation. An asset of Victor and Kathy’s philanthropic trust, whatever the hell that means. “I’ll come by Tuesday.”
“You can’t start now? Maybe get it done by Monday?”
“Home’s historic.” Darryl lifts an eyebrow. “Even the baseboards are works of art. You’re kidding, right?”
No, but I laugh. “Thought I’d ask.”
Tuesday. It’ll take until Friday to finish, which means Nathan’s initial impression of what’s happened will be as I arrange it. I must make this impression digestible. Take as much edge off the shock as possible.
“This is about a thirty-five-hundred-dollar job,” Darryl says, sucking air between yellowed teeth. “That gonna work for you boys?”
“Sure. Absolutely.” The price tag is painful, but what choice do I have? My hand covers my throat. I’m unsure if he notices or finds the gesture odd. “Thanks so much again,” I add as the door closes behind him.
Thirty-five hundred dollars. Shit. It’s not that we don’t have the money. We have it. Nathan’s a surgeon. It’s that I don’t have the money. I’m not a doctor. On the contrary, I don’t have a college degree.
I dropped out way back in Indiana before my path ever crossed Nathan’s. I make excuses for it anytime the opportunity presents itself.
“I wanted to travel,” I lied to Tom, one of Nathan’s friends. Tom Vogt is a senatorial staffer on Capitol Hill. I’m painfully aware I’m not anything like either of them. “I wanted to learn lessons college can’t teach.”
I condescend. As though I were the beneficiary of some elusive enlightenment the conventionally educated can’t relate to. The follow-up question is nearly always the same. “Where have you traveled?”
I’ve left the United States a grand total of one time to backpack through southern Europe. Spain mostly. On the hunt for an overhyped Eurotrashy drug carnival in Mallorca that disappointed. But I stretch this single experience as far as I can. I turn phrases to create the impression of multiple trips. Tasteful trips.
“Madrid, of course. Train to Lisbon. But Barcelona’s always been my favorite. Barceloneta Beach. Catalonian flags on every balcony, all fluttering together.”
“Catalonia,” Tom had parroted. “Romantic. Go with anyone?”
Hector. “No.”
Tom smiled indulgently and tried to catch Nathan’s eye. Nathan whose eager ears had sharpened for my answer. It’s stupid. I’m stupid, but dwelling on this won’t help. I move on to my arrangements.
When it comes to lying, there’s a golden rule: tell as much truth as you can. The truth is, after all, the easiest to remember. It’s the most consistent with inarguable fact. There are two inarguable facts in my situation. My bruised throat and our flooded bathroom. A traumatic event, the catalyst of both.
Only this last part needs to change. I was not at Haus. I was not the victim of attempted homicide. I was mugged on my run. My reaction to this new reality remains the same. I’m distraught, panicked, and afraid.
Jumped from behind, tackled to the ground. I fought back, my hair and body gathering dirt. My attacker choked me. I acquiesced before it went further by giving up my wallet. At home, I showered while reeling fresh from trauma. The truth takes over at this point.
The clothes I wore to Haus aren’t for running. The T-shirt’s fine, but khaki shorts not so much. So I wash them and return them to my drawer. I swipe a pair of jogging shorts across garden gravel before soaking them in the sink.
I ball them up with my tee and underwear and toss them in the hamper. I make sure they’re the only items there before cleaning the driver-side window of Nathan’s tuxedo Range Rover. A black, clotted handprint baked by the heat. Windex turns it bright red again, and the paper towel looks soaked with something fresh.
Next, my stolen wallet. A narrow alley cuts behind our place. The city collects garbage and recycling each Monday morning—the day Nathan returns. Wallet in hand, I walk the length of the alley to the end of our block. A pair of garbage and recycling containers sit to one side. They serve a mid-rise apartment building and brim with eclectic refuse.
I hesitate. My cards are all replaceable, and new ones are already on the way from the bank. Ditto my driver’s license. A significant hassle, but replaceable nonetheless. None of these things give me pause.
It’s the photo that stops me. The smiling woman with a Peter Pan haircut minus the youthful sheen. My mom, Deborah Park.
She’s dead, and it’s the only photo I have. When she passed, I’d scoured the blue Cracker Jack box of a house we lived in for more. Even a picture with Dad in it could be cropped with scissors. But after searching the Facebook albums of far-flung kin, I concluded this was it. This is all there is.
Commit, I tell myself. You were mugged. Commit.
But I can’t. I slip the picture in my pocket and hurl the wallet into the dumpster.
The tips of my ears burn. I’m the victim here, yet I’m making tough calls. Excruciating choices. Guess there’s no such thing as a one-hit trauma, and I scream.
“You a
ll right, son?” A reply from nowhere, and I jolt. Behind the containers, a binner raises his worn head—a hard-up man collecting bottles for cash. Sun has leathered his face. His silver hair, knotted. His clothes more ill fitting than Darryl’s.
“I’m okay.” I give a shaky nod, and he returns my gesture just as nervously.
Has he already gone through these, or is he only getting started? Has he seen what I’ve tossed? If anything, his abrupt presence is a sharp reminder that there are so many ways for me to fuck this up. So little is in my control.
I ball my hand into a tight fist—knuckles white—and punch brick on my way in through our back door.
The pain is instant and hot. Skin peels from my knuckles, and blood fills the space torn tissue leaves. This is okay. A good thing for my story.
Maybe I fought back.
6
I breathe deep. Commit.
The word has played on a loop in my mind all afternoon and into the evening. Sinking deep into the sofa, I’ve skipped the frantic search for ways to hide my throat while FaceTiming Nathan. Instead, I adjust the lighting in the drawing room to capture it.
I hold a trembling phone in front of my face. My palms are soaked to the bone, and instinct screams to mask my anxiety. But on this call, emotion is okay. Emotion helps.
I scroll to Nat.
A high-pitched ringing squeals. My face resolves in the feedback window up top. As small as it is, my bruising is plain. No way to miss it on his end. I brace for the plunge and the weightlessness to follow.
“Hey.”
Nathan’s face materializes from blackness like it did inside Haus. He appears fatigued. His sandy-brown hair is tousled; the loosened knot of a baby-blue tie sits at the frame’s bottom. Worry and suspicion mark his eyes, and his brow knots. “What’s on your neck?”