Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  “I don’t know. Ruining someone’s reputation?”

  “More like warning someone. So that when it happens to her—which it always will—at least she’ll know she’s not alone, she’s not crazy, it wasn’t her fault.”

  I had been walking faster and faster in Jason’s wake, shouting the words louder and louder, trying to reach him with my voice if I couldn’t with my body. On the last word, a particularly large branch swung back from Jason’s shoulder toward my face, and just as my hands flailed up to swat it away from my eyes, I felt the tip of my shoe wedge in a crack. With sickening speed, the sidewalk lurched up to meet my face, and my hands couldn’t get there in time to stop it. My nose smashed into the concrete, sending jolts of red lightning deep into my skull and filling my mouth with a nauseating smell like dead birthday balloons. The world went black.

  And then Jason was kneeling over me, tears in his eyes.

  “Dana, Dana. Thank God you’re awake. Are you okay?”

  I nodded weakly. “Was I unconscious?”

  “I’m not sure. Your eyes were only closed for a few seconds. But don’t go to sleep, okay?”

  I wheezed out a laugh, but when my head began throbbing in rhythm, it turned into a groan. “Not looking for a nap, under the circumstances.”

  “We need to get you to a clinic. You might have a concussion.”

  I struggled to prop myself up on my elbows, and the change in elevation lit up acidic patches of raw flesh along the right side of my face, where the concrete had bitten deeply into my cheekbone and brow. “There’s no time. I’m fine.” Something felt different, but I couldn’t have said what it was. If pressed, I might have said the day had changed colors. That was all.

  He gave me his large, warm, rough hands—their size and warmth and texture all radiating something like a different color than they had before—and helped me to my feet. We began hobbling back toward the house, his arms around me, partly supporting my weight. I leaned hard, forcing my feet to walk forward even when I lost my vision in black clouds for a moment. No blood in the water was all I had, and I clung to it.

  Once Jason had helped me back into the house and onto the sofa, he disappeared into the kitchen for a few seconds. He came back with a brick of frozen broccoli in one hand and a package of rock-solid-frozen chicken breasts in the other. “Sorry, the icemaker’s broken,” he said. “Hold these to your face to keep the swelling down. I’ll go get you some Advil for the pain. Here, try wrapping them in towels.”

  I had gingerly touched the icy blocks to my nose and cheek and immediately winced away. The kitchen towels Jason brought softened the sting for a moment, but soon the cold gnawed its way through the cloth, stiffening the pile until the loops of thread felt like tiny daggers digging into my skin. I swallowed four Advil gratefully and inhaled the stale balloon smell and waited for the pain to ebb.

  Jason watched me.

  “Can I ask you a question?” He paused for what seemed like a long time, and when I didn’t answer, he went on. “You said we.”

  “We,” I repeated, dumb head aching.

  “What we go through.”

  A connection throbbed back to life in my brain, a different kind of pain. I shook my head. “I can’t fight about this right now.”

  “I don’t want to fight. I just want to know—all those things you said. Have they ever happened to you? I mean, the serious ones?”

  I could have asked him which ones he thought were the serious ones. I could have told him that asking if anything serious has ever happened to a woman—it’s like asking a comic if any of his jokes are funny. By asking the question, you’ve made it clear who’s in charge of the answer.

  But I didn’t. I just nodded and braced myself for his next question.

  “Did—something happen to you in high school?”

  My eyes flooded with tears. It wasn’t what I had expected. All these years, and he’d never once asked. Just like he’d never asked what happened with Neely. I’d grown out of the hope that he eventually would, someday. And now, I didn’t even have to nod to make myself understood. His face registered the impact of my expression as if it were a blow. He broke eye contact, looked down at his hands. All the things men do instead of crying.

  “I always wondered,” he said. “But I was just a stupid teenage boy. I didn’t know how to talk about anything important with anyone, much less ask what was wrong . . . I’m still pretty bad at it, I guess.”

  I whispered: “Not your fault.”

  “No, I knew something was up. I knew you were hurting. But you didn’t say anything, so I didn’t either. I figured whatever was eating you, it couldn’t have been that big a deal.”

  The words echoed curiously in my throbbing skull. They were the same words, almost, Mattie had written. The memory put a sudden fire in me. “It was a big deal. It was rape. I didn’t say anything because of who did it.”

  He caught my tone and looked up sharply. A treble thread of anxiety made its way into his voice as he asked, “Who?”

  I nodded, as if he had spoken the name and I was only agreeing with him. Even as the tears tipped out of my eyes and down my cheeks, blazing hot new paths over my numbed-up wounds, I hardened my voice to say what we both knew I was going to: “It was Mattie.”

  I thought I saw a moment of relief, and then his eyes went bright with fury. “God, that bastard. That fucking bastard.”

  My chin began to shake, completely out of my control, as if the name had broken something on its way out. Fresh spasms of pain rippled through my face and I discovered my hands were shuddering, too, and the frozen blocks shuddering with them. My chest quaked, and I surrendered to the involuntary motion, the force of release buffeting me back and forth between larger and larger parentheses of movement.

  I’m scared, I said, only it came out a silent chattering.

  Jason released his tight jaw, his eyes widening with alarm. He had been sitting on the sofa facing me, our knees almost touching. Now he crushed me in his arms and leaned into my shaking body, which shook all the harder as his grip pressed new pain out of me.

  “Dana, I’m so sorry,” he said, many, many times.

  Then: “Dana, don’t be scared.”

  Then: “No one’s going to hurt you. I’ll kill them if they try.”

  But it wasn’t Amanda or even Mattie I feared the most. It was Jason’s fury, and mine.

  23

  When my shaking subsided, Jason drew back, but it was too late. Every breath hurt.

  “When can I have more Advil?” I said, moving my face as little as possible around the words.

  “I think they’re every four hours. Let’s see, you took a dose around four o’clock . . . What time is it now?”

  But I had already pulled out my phone and gasped so hard, I had to press my hand to my jaw to get the words out: “You’ve got to be kidding.” I showed Jason the phone in anguish. “It’s six, Jason. She could be here in ten hours.” And we had wasted the whole afternoon in arguments and tears. I felt the panic start to rise but fought it, knowing I would only hurt myself more. “We have to make a plan.”

  “I know, I know,” Jason said, pressing his middle finger to the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes. Then he opened them again, looked at me, and stood up decisively. “But first, let me get you something for the pain. You can’t plan anything in this state. You can barely even talk.”

  I nodded mutely. He disappeared into the bathroom and I heard the water running. He came back with a pill and a glass of water.

  “What is it?”

  “Tylenol with codeine, left over from dental work. It’s fine to alternate with Advil.” He smiled. “You may feel a little woozy. “

  “Better than feeling like a cracked bowling ball.” I took the pill and swallowed it down. “Jason, what are we going to do? She’s on her way, and she wants you dead.”

  “She’s none too fond of you right now either, I take it.”

  “In her mind, I broke my promise.” I put
my hand to my head experimentally, looking for a place that didn’t hurt. “What I don’t get is, how does she think she can get me to do it? It doesn’t make any sense. She’s delusional.”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say that’s exactly what she wants you to think.”

  I looked at him, puzzled.

  “The stuff she’s been doing—finding out your motel-room number, sending you flowers, threatening your mom. Calling you from inside your house. It’s all just scare tactics, like something from a movie. She’s trying to scare you.”

  “It’s working.” The medicine was working, too, taking effect much faster than a regular Tylenol, and I enjoyed a lightening sensation as the pressure at the bridge of my nose eased slightly.

  “But think about it—she never actually does anything, does she?” I started to say something, but he cut me off. “When it comes right down to it, we don’t really know she hurt Fash, do we? I mean, officially it was a suicide. You said yourself the guy was messed up. People go off their meds all the time. It’s sad, but it’s not murder. What if that’s really all that happened, and Amanda saw her opening and took the credit for it? The way terrorist groups claim responsibility for crimes they had nothing to do with.”

  It was such a persuasive argument that for one beautiful moment, I almost let myself believe it. Then I remembered the Neely tape and shook my head. “You don’t know what she’s capable of, Jason.”

  “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? To keep you guessing, throw you off. That thing with your mom was the last straw. Anyone who knows you at all knows you care more about protecting your mom than protecting yourself.” I looked at him in surprise—maybe he paid more attention to my feelings than I’d given him credit for. But he went on. “So she gets closer and closer, and you get more and more scared. And meanwhile, she’s also turning us against each other, isolating you, making you paranoid.”

  Maybe there really was something to what he was saying. I had been so shaken after our argument that I had almost begun to think of Jason as the enemy. The thought made me a little dizzy. “Psychological torture.”

  “I’m telling you, she knows how to get under people’s skin. You should have seen me after she was done with me.” He was buzzing with the thrill of putting the pieces together, the same way he’d been after the Runnr call. “Given enough time, she thinks she can break you. And the Fash thing—it just buys her time. It’s something to hold over your head so you can’t go to the police. So you have to sit here for hours and hours and think about all the ways she could hurt you and the people you love.”

  “But the Fash thing doesn’t have to be true to hurt me,” I pointed out, struggling to make sure I located the right words. My head ached less, but Jason’s rapid pacing was making it spin. “Assuming she has me on tape with a motive, it doesn’t matter how much she was actually involved. She can just plant the evidence that makes me look guilty. Maybe she already has. The police want to talk to me.”

  “They would anyway, because of the contest,” Jason argued. “You and Kim.”

  I felt exasperated and lightheaded. The fear that Amanda was going to manipulate me into killing Jason somehow, so absurd a moment ago, had been stealing into my mind over the course of the conversation, like an invisible gas slowly filling the room. I shook my head to clear it. “Okay, fine. Let’s say there’s no real danger from Amanda. She’s still headed here, and she’s still making threats that would worry any sane person. So what do you propose we do? Nothing?”

  “What else can we do? You’re not going to carry out her revenge hit on me, I take it. She’s trying her best to convince you something terrible will happen if you don’t. Fine. I say we call her bluff. Let’s find out what the terrible something is. We have as much dirt on her as she has on you.”

  But somehow, I felt sure the terrible something wasn’t calling the police. “She’ll try to kill you herself,” I said. “Or me. Or both of us.”

  “I’m not letting you out of my sight. So if she’s not bluffing—and I know she is—”

  I looked at him. “But if she’s not?”

  “Whichever one of us she’s after, she’ll have to get through me first,” he said grimly.

  Eight o’clock. We lay on Jason’s bed together, side by side, holding hands, the sky darkening outside the curtains. I felt myself sinking into the bed. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there, though I knew it had something to do with utter exhaustion, and with fear.

  “We could leave,” I said. “Just drive away.”

  “Give up our lives,” Jason said from somewhere far off. “Then she goes to the police. You get arrested.”

  “Maybe she just wants money.”

  “We don’t have any money.”

  There was a pause.

  “She doesn’t want money,” I said. I didn’t tell him how I knew.

  “Don’t go to sleep,” Jason said.

  I jerked awake.

  “I don’t think it’s a concussion,” I tried to say, but it came out thick. “Anyway, that’s a myth, about not letting people go to sleep.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is. You just have to wake them up every couple of hours.”

  “Go to sleep, then. I’ll wake you up every couple of hours.”

  “Just wake me up if I die,” I said, already drifting off.

  Sometime later, Jason and I made love in the darkened room. He curled protectively over my body, and I bobbed and floated in the darkness, straining upward and sinking down into the bed at the same time, trying to forget something. I almost succeeded. At the point where Jason’s glance went hard, that glazed look men get when they vanish in an orgasm—a light was extinguished. Something in me vanished too.

  When I woke up again there was a stranger in the room, watching us sleep.

  I sat straight up in bed, clutching the sheets around my torso and blinking against the light. It took me a few moments to realize it was Jason silhouetted in the doorway. The lump on the bed I’d thought was him was only a pile of pillows.

  “What time is it?” I blinked, groaning as I felt the next wave of soreness hit me. It was all the way through my neck and shoulders now. I felt like I’d been dropped from a tall building.

  “It’s seven o’clock in the morning,” Jason said, setting a mug of coffee on the nightstand. “She didn’t come.”

  “I dreamed she was here,” I said. “Standing at the foot of the bed with a knife, waiting for us to wake up. In one dream she was cutting the bed in two. My half of the bed fell into the ocean.” I shuddered. “And then the whole thing would start over again.”

  “Well, she’s not here. I’ve already checked your phone—nobody called or texted.” He beamed. “I told you she was trying to scare us.”

  “She’s just been delayed.”

  “Maybe the police are looking for her by now. If they are, it would be suicide for her to show up here.”

  “Or maybe—” I didn’t want to say it out loud, but my mouth felt like it was moving on its own. “Maybe she really was here during the night.”

  “Dana.” He sat down on the bed and put his hand on my thigh.

  “Maybe I really did see her standing at the foot of the bed. Maybe she’s watching the house now or waiting for me back at my motel.” My voice was getting higher, hysterical, but I couldn’t stop it. “She wants to kill us, Jason!”

  “Dana, don’t be like this.”

  “She was here,” I said, like a child. “I know she was. I saw her. It was real!”

  In a movie, he would have slapped me out of it. What I wanted was for something shocking to happen, and a slap probably would have worked. But Jason didn’t slap me or shake my shoulders. Instead, he sat quietly beside me on the bed, looking at the ground between his knees and rubbing my back silently as I heaved and wheezed my way through the panic attack. After I’d taken in too much air and made myself dizzy, the tears came and I leaned on his shoulder and allowed myself to go limp and sob it
out.

  When I’d quieted down, I stretched out my hand. “I think I’ll take that coffee now,” I said.

  “Better have some water first,” Jason said. “Hang on.” He got up, and although I wanted the coffee and it was just sitting there a few feet away from me on the nightstand, I felt as if it were too far to reach. The tension of waiting had infected the world around me, and the air seemed thick and alive, a seething, malicious medium that pinned me on all sides. Under the circumstances, moving a few feet, or even inches, felt as impossible as getting out of bed and running a marathon.

  In the kitchen on the other side of the wall, I heard Jason getting me a glass of water from the tap. It reminded me of something in my dream, but I wasn’t sure what.

  When he came back and offered me the water, I took it and looked into it for a long time. Then I said, “Jason.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Why didn’t you want Amanda to meet Aaron Neely?”

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t you introduce them?”

  “Why, should I have?”

  “You introduced me,” I said. “You introduced me to Aaron Neely.”

  There was a strange pause as he looked at me. I could see his image in the glass, reflected upside down, flattened to a sliver.

  “Yeah,” he said shortly. “And look how that worked out.”

  “It seems like it worked out pretty well. For you, anyway.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I stayed silent, and he jerked the glass out of my hand, spilling a little water on the sheets. “What is that supposed to mean?” he said again, louder.

  I reached a finger through the thick, seething air and touched the dark spot where the drops of water had been absorbed into the sheet.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I mean.”

  “Look, I’m not the reason you lost Neely’s respect.” I stared. “You came home with your hair all messed up, dress all crooked, holding your high heels in one hand. Frankly, you lost some of my respect too. You can’t blame me for not wanting it to happen with my girlfriend.”