Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  I followed Carl into the den. He was moving at an excruciating pace. Not in peak physical condition.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” he said, backing up against the sofa and scrabbling his bare feet under him for purchase, trying to get to a standing position. “What do you want, I’ll give you whatever you want.”

  “Already got it!” Betty cried, grabbing the hard drive through my hoodie pocket and wiggling it lewdly back and forth. “But thanks anyway.”

  “I never did anything to you.” He coughed. “I don’t even know you.”

  “That’s okay, I didn’t know my attacker very well either,” I said. “And I certainly hadn’t done anything to him. But I have a feeling you’ve done something to someone sometime. Or maybe you just talk a big game—make funny GIFs to scare women and watch other rapists do what you wish you could. Either way, I’ll find out.” I patted the hard drive like it was my unborn child. “I mean, maybe the police won’t care. Maybe you haven’t done anything illegal. But I bet your mom will care. I bet your employer will care. Your girlfriend—if you have one, you pathetic loser—will care.”

  Betty swung the statue up over her shoulder like a baseball bat, and he cringed.

  “So call the police if you want. But if you do, the first thing you’ll have to tell them is that you got beat up by a girl.” I squatted, careful to stay out of reach of his flailing arms. “And then you’ll have to tell them why I did it. And I did it because of what’s on this.” I patted the drive again. “So if I were you, I’d focus on being very, very good. Because if what I think is on here gets out, I bet it’ll ruin your life.”

  Betty stood up again and swung the statue into his ribs and watched him crumple onto the floor. Everything in the room smelled like pad thai. I leaned over and righted the Runnr bag, which had been knocked over in the struggle.

  “And I do want your life ruined, Carl,” Betty continued. “But I don’t want it ruined that way. I want it ruined—how can I put this?—more like mine has been ruined. Not thrown-in-jail ruined or fired-from-your-job ruined or mocked-on-the-internet ruined. I want you to feel like you’re in jail because someone could do this to you. I want you to quit your job because of PTSD, lose your friends because you’re too afraid to tell them, disconnect your internet because you might accidentally see me on a mutual friend’s Facebook feed and go into shock all over again. I want you to know that I’ll be watching you. Don’t ask me how, but I will. I want you to be scared of being alone with strange women, like I’m scared of being alone with strange men.”

  I leaned forward and he rolled over onto his face with a moan, curling his hands around the back of his head.

  “Except you, Carl. I’m not scared of you anymore.”

  But it wasn’t Carl I was talking to.

  I wedged the statue under my armpit, pulled his phone from my pocket, took his hand—he gasped in pain but didn’t try to jerk it away—and placed his thumb gently on the unlock screen. Then I stepped back, straightened up, and opened the Runnr app on his phone. I found my name—Betty B., for Betty Bare, Betty Badass, Betty Batman—and hovered my index finger over the little circle.

  “Hmm, how would you rate this run, Carl M.? Food got here pretty fast.” I shrugged. “On the other hand, revenge. So maybe just four stars for Betty B.?”

  Face-down, motionless except for the gentle rising and falling of his shoulders, he looked like he was asleep.

  “You know what, Carl? I feel like you’d round up to five.” I pushed the fifth star, then wiped the screen clean and tucked it gently back into his pocket. “That’s just the kind of guy you are.”

  The credits were rolling as I opened the door to step out. At the last second I realized the statue was still under my armpit, and I pulled it out and looked at it. It was not a trophy at all, I could see in this light, but a twenty-inch statuette of Black Widow, the Marvel character, in a clinging costume and back-wrenching pose that showed off her boobs and butt simultaneously. “You go, girl,” I told her and tossed her onto the sofa. Then I left and closed the door behind me.

  I floated down the stairs and through the parking lot in a dream, my mind suspended and quieted in a soft, warm cloud. Behind me, the window that hid Carl’s apartment from the world flickered like a forest fire.

  11

  Keeping a firm grip on the hard drive in my pocket, I pulled the red hoodie off over my head as I walked around the corner to my car. The Runnr cap and Betty wig came off, too, and I rolled all of it up into a thick bundle under my arm. Then I slid the surgical gloves off inside out and balled them up so that the blood-slicked surface was on the inside. The drive home was a blur. The next thing I knew, I was standing in the parking lot outside my apartment, holding the balled gloves up to a streetlight so that they looked like some kind of reptile egg, the blood at the center dulled under layers of translucent plastic.

  I threw them in the dumpster and closed the lid.

  In an apartment complex like mine, there was really no unusual time to do laundry. I let myself into my place and started gathering a bundle of clothes large enough to make the red sweatshirt and cap less conspicuous. It was easy to do. Dirty clothes spilled out of the hamper across my floor. It wasn’t quite to the Doug Branchik level yet, but I hadn’t been taking good care of my apartment. Too much time spent in Amanda’s airy condo, with its clean lines and modern spaces that looked barely lived in, and I was starting to feel as if it were my place. By contrast, my apartment was dark—not the glittering dark of the big night sky outside floor-to-ceiling windows, but the dingy dark of dusty curtains and light fixtures with one burned-out bulb apiece.

  Having gathered an armload of laundry, I stood by the kitchen counter for a long time, staring at the laminate floor. I’d never really noticed before how the laminate was notched to suggest individual boards rather than a single millimeter-thin layer of shaved wood fused to particulate plastic. The surface of the floor was sculpted with a network of tiny plastic trenches and reefs calibrated to offer gentle traction, simulated evidence of irregularity. Compared to Amanda’s hardwood floor, it was obviously fake. How could something so fake have fooled me for so long?

  I pulled the hard drive out of my hoodie pocket and set it on the counter, where it seemed to brood. A large rectangular paperweight that knew things, even though its tiny green eye had gone dead.

  It took a few minutes to find enough quarters for a load of wash, but I found them and headed down the hall to the laundry room to erase the bloodstains.

  What do you want

  I’d intended to head straight over to Amanda’s with the hard drive, but now I had to wait for a load of laundry. I lay down on my bed and stared at the skeleton of a hanging plant I’d purchased a few months ago in a moment of optimism and hadn’t watered since. I propped my feet up on the wall, pointing my toes toward the dried tendrils and thinking, I should really paint my toenails.

  Who are you

  The lightness, which had been so calm and cloudlike, seemed to whiten and swirl around my head, and I felt a surge of something coming up. I squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed them with my hands. Giant red blotches bloomed in the blackness like diseased flowers. When I opened my eyes again they wouldn’t blink away.

  Please don’t hurt me

  I don’t even know you

  I rolled onto my side just as the shuddering began. An icy cold took me as I threw up everything in my stomach all at once. I lay on my side holding myself and shaking all over with the cold.

  When the shaking subsided, I balled the comforter up around the vomit and walked it down the hall to add to my load of laundry.

  What had I done.

  I’d crossed a line I didn’t even know existed. It wasn’t just that I had made someone bleed by hitting him over and over again. It wasn’t just that I’d aimed especially for his face, as if I wanted to obliterate his identity, make him the same as the man who’d hurt me facelessly in the night. It wasn’t just that I had no idea who Carl M. really w
as and what he had really done, if anything, to deserve this.

  I’d enjoyed it, and I wanted to do it again.

  I grabbed the hard drive. I had to get it over to Amanda’s tonight, tell her what I’d done, ask her what to do next. I’d come back and finish the laundry later. On the way to the door, I saw the Betty wig lying on the floor where I’d dropped it, white-blond hair curling luxuriously, its elasticized interior like a glimpse of dirty underwear. I kicked it under the sofa and left.

  As always, Amanda was home and wide-awake, tapping away at her laptop on the kitchen bar. I walked up and thunked the hard drive in front of her on the counter, like a cat dropping a half-dead rat at its owner’s feet.

  “Here,” I said. “Go nuts.”

  Her eyes widened when she saw what it was. “Oh my God,” she said. “That wasn’t in the plan.”

  “Yeah, well. A lot of things weren’t in the plan,” I said. “And actually? I’m starting to think that the plan kind of sucked.” I opened the refrigerator without asking, located a bottle of white wine, unscrewed the metal cap, and took a long swig. The cold, sweet wine hit my empty stomach with a lurch and then spread a welcome warmth up my esophagus.

  But Amanda wasn’t listening. She already had her hands on the hard drive, running her fingers greedily over its smooth, metallic surface. “This is amazing, Dana. I can do so much with this! How did you manage to—” Then she stopped, picked with a fingernail at a smudge of brownish red on the hard drive. She brought it closer to her face and examined it. Then she looked up at me. “Dana,” she said, realization dawning in her eyes.

  “He snuck up behind me. I was looking for the USB port and he caught me and I just—” I swallowed a sob of panic. “I lost it.”

  Slowly her look of shock transformed, her lips turning upward and stretching into a wide, incredulous smile. “You’re incredible, Dana. You’re like a superhero.”

  I thought of the Black Widow figurine and suddenly started laughing, noiselessly, faster and faster, until tears masked my vision.

  Amanda saw me crying and wrapped both arms around me in a hug. It was the first time we had touched since she’d grabbed my hand at Nomad. Her arms felt rail thin but wiry strong wrapped around my shoulders, and I let myself be restrained by her, the only thing stopping me from flying apart.

  Keeping her grip on my shoulders, Amanda drew away from me, a concerned look on her face. “Dana, are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

  “No,” I whispered.

  “Thank God.”

  “I hurt him. A lot.”

  “Good.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand,” I said. “I lost control. I—I don’t know what happened. I—” I saw his bloody face in front of me, his arms clutched to his ribs as he slouched against the sofa, as if for the first time.

  Amanda led me over to the sofa and sat me down. Then she went to the kitchen and filled a glass of water and brought it to me. She watched me drink it, studying me.

  “I know what happened.”

  I stared at my jeans, picking a loose thread.

  “You have one more, don’t you?” she said.

  I didn’t need to ask, but I did anyway. “One more what?”

  “One more name.”

  I looked down into the glass of water I was holding and nodded dumbly.

  “Someone did something to you.” Her voice was steady as she sat down next to me. “A long time ago.”

  I nodded again.

  “It’s worse than Neely. Worse than Fash. And it came back, didn’t it? It came back and you were right there. Like it was happening to you again.”

  I could barely nod. Now that the sobs had stopped, a single tear was working its way out of my eye and down my cheek.

  “I thought so. I knew there was someone else.”

  I waited for her to put her arms around me again, to comfort me, to ask me who it was, what had happened. I wanted to tell someone about the night I fell asleep on Jason’s couch and woke up with Mattie crushing me. For so long I’d been trying to forget the details. Now I ached for them to come spilling out, the way the Neely story had that night in the Bat City parking lot. What would life look like on the other side of that confession?

  There was a long pause. When, finally, I raised my head to look into her eyes, I saw that she was staring at me, her green eyes burning.

  “That’s good,” she said. “Because I have one more name too.”

  I stood up off the sofa so fast the water sloshed out of the glass onto my feet. “Are you fucking kidding me? You want me to do it again? This is—do you understand what happened tonight? What could have happened?” I scrolled back through the events of the evening, trying to put the pieces in order, trying to understand the extent of what I had done. What I could have done by accident, with just a little more rage, a slightly heavier weapon. And then the reality hit me. “Oh my God, the police.”

  “He won’t call the police,” she said. “He’s okay, right? You didn’t do any permanent damage? How about internal injuries? Let me guess—mostly the face?” She seemed to take my sickened stare for agreement and nodded sagely. “He won’t call.”

  “How can you say that?” I sputtered. “What do you—do you have experience with this kind of thing?”

  She was silent.

  “Oh my God,” I said, realization dawning. “You do.”

  Instead of answering, she turned slowly to her laptop, pulled up an encrypted file, entered a series of passwords. Opened up a video.

  I had seen the video before but never all the way through to the end. She advanced it a little further than the three-minute mark, past the absurdly comedic spectacle of Aaron Neely pleasuring himself in fast motion, to the point where the tall woman in the Runnr uniform slid a long red steering-wheel lock out of her massage bag. She raised it over her head. I squeezed my eyes shut, pressed my hands over my ears to block out the sickening sounds.

  “Turn it off, turn it off!” Wine fumes ate at the back of my throat, and I felt ready to throw up again.

  The sound went off, but when I opened my eyes I saw she had merely muted the video. I jerked my head away from Neely’s face, a blotch of red on the grainy video, only to be confronted with its reflection in the tall black window.

  “Grow up, Dana.” I could see Amanda in the reflection, watching me. “This is how the sausage gets made.”

  “Is he okay?” It came out a snivel.

  “He’s fine—as fine as he needs to be, anyway.” Her reflection smirked. “I hear he hasn’t left his house since it happened, and all his projects are on hold indefinitely. Which should keep him out of trouble for a while.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “You just did it to someone yourself, sweetie,” she said. “It doesn’t get more believable than that.”

  “I didn’t want to. I didn’t mean to.”

  “But I bet you liked it,” she said, and my stomach lurched. “Remember what I said about the rolled-up newspaper? You just gave him a little bop on the nose, that’s all. Now he won’t forget the lesson.”

  I had to get out of there. I swallowed hard and said, “I’m leaving town for a while.”

  She didn’t look alarmed, but I could see a glint of something cold in her eye. “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll tell work it’s a family emergency.” I remembered Kim saying those words about Neely and flinched. “Something.”

  “Sure, go,” she said, her voice pitched just high enough for me to hear the effort with which she was keeping herself calm. “But you can’t run away from this forever. You have one more name, Dana. And so do I.”

  “I just need some time to think.” I wondered where the steering-wheel lock was now, how many other tools of the trade she had stashed in this apartment. Then I caught sight of my reflection in the window. Tools of the trade, all right. I was looking at one.

  “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to face the truth, Dana.”

  “Th
at’s what I’m doing,” I said. And walked out.

  12

  The eight-hour drive to Amarillo always affected me like a trip backward through time. Heading northwest into the Panhandle meant leaving behind all the cities nonlocals had heard of, abandoning the rolling hills of central Texas, skirting the majestic emptiness of the mountains and desert to the west, and heading straight into the color brown. Driving up I-27, I began to see brown plains spreading uninterrupted in every direction, brown towns laid out in squares around ancient oil-boom banks, now all but deserted, and brown cattle trampling cattle-cropped grass, giving off a thick brown reek. Even the sky was stained brown at its margins, the horizon obscured by a low-lying cloud of dust and cattle pollution that never cleared.

  I loved it.

  The color brought back childhood memories of writing on manila paper that came in giant rolls with soft-lead pencils whose erasers left marks. Climbing jungle gyms on a brown playground, falling one day from the highest bar onto a pile of wood chips, lying on my back staring at the brown sky. Driving back home on holiday weekends, my trunk full of laundry so I could save a few bucks in quarters, feeling the slender rope that tethered me to Austin stretching thinner and thinner, the world of skinny college boys who drank too much and stayed up all night studying in twenty-four-hour diners becoming less and less plausible until the rope snapped, eaten away by the brown landscape. As before when I’d made the trip, that moment of sever-ance—let’s call it Lubbock—yielded a deep welling of relief as I let go of everything I wanted so urgently and let myself tumble back into the past.

  Which, after all, mostly meant my mother’s house, also brown. When I pulled into the driveway, she was already waiting for me at the back door, having heard or sensed the car approaching. I parked the car, jumped out, and ran over to her. I couldn’t help it.

  “Mama.” I closed my eyes and hugged her.

  She hugged me back. “You hungry for dinner yet? You stop along the way?”