by Amy Gentry
“You’re lying.” I felt Jason’s bedroom door yawning at my back.
“I’ve never lied to you, Dana. Never.” She cracked a sick grin. “You lie to yourself.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It started with him checking the messages on my phone,” she said with a lilt in her voice. “Has he ever done that to you, Dana? Have you found him with your phone in his hand?”
I shook my head, a vision of Jason holding my cell phone when I got out of the bathroom flashing through my mind. “No.”
“Now you’re the one who’s lying,” she said with her short laugh like a fox’s bark. “Ask Kim, she’ll tell you. It starts with a little harmless snooping, and it ends with you locked in a soundproof room, throat too bruised to scream even if anyone could hear you.” She reached her left hand up to her neck with a shudder, closing her eyes momentarily.
I saw my opportunity and lunged for the gun, but she opened her eyes and yanked it back. “Ah, ah, ah, not unless you’re going to use it on him,” she said. “And if you aren’t, which I’m starting to think you aren’t, then you’re going to have to let me use it.” She reversed the grip so that it was pointing toward me.
I went rigid in Jason’s doorway, pinned between the gun in her hand and the gaping hole that was the door to his bedroom.
“The problem is, that wouldn’t be right. I can’t do this one for you.” She sounded almost childlike, explaining the rules of her game. She was starting to unravel. “You have to do it for me. Or, better yet, for yourself.”
There was something in Jason’s bedroom, in the open space behind me, I didn’t want to think about. Something about last night. “Why should I believe you over him?”
“You don’t have to,” she said. “That’s the beauty of it. You have your own reasons. Mattie told me everything.”
At the mention of Mattie, I threw the stun gun at her eyes, hard, and when her hands flew up to shield her face, I skirted to her left, trying to get around her. But I made it only halfway, and then she had the gun up again. I ducked into the studio that had once been my room. Swathed in black corrugated soundproofing, with thick black curtains over the windows, it was a black hole, and as I stumbled backward into it, my eyes took a moment to adjust. I crouched behind the door and waited.
“Dana? Dana, I don’t want to hurt you.” As she stepped into the room, her right hand feeling around for the light switch, I heard her kick something, and the stun gun that I had thrown at her a moment ago skittered forward.
I lunged for the stun gun, grabbed it, pulled the trigger, and held it to her hand. She let out an unearthly yowl, and the door jerked forward and hit my nose. The pain was blinding, but I heard her gun clatter to the floor. I dropped to my knees and searched for it with my left hand. Amanda’s foot smashed into my cheekbone and new fire shot through my skull, igniting yesterday’s fireworks all over again. I dropped the stun gun and heard one of us kick it away.
But just then, my fingers closed on the handgun.
I scrambled backward, still on the floor, with the gun in my hand. Standing over me, Amanda paused for only a moment. Then she kept moving forward, her eyes a curious blank, glittering out of the darkness like a cat’s.
“How could you let him touch you again after what he did?”
“You really did watch us.”
She frowned. “Did I? Are you sure?”
“The picture.”
“Maybe I have cameras in Jason’s house. I was there long enough to do just about anything in there.”
“But Betty—you left the wig.” The panic had risen sharply in my chest at the thought of the house being bugged, and I worked hard to fight it back down.
“Okay, maybe I really was there,” she agreed.
“I thought you never lied.”
“It was a joke,” she said. “You of all people should know the difference.”
Just then, there was a thud, and Amanda crumpled to the ground. Behind her, Jason stood with a baseball bat in his hands.
I lowered the gun slowly.
“The locks are still the same,” he said. I started crying as I scrambled to my feet. Then a head rush turned on all the lights at once, lights I didn’t know were even in the darkened room, exploding in front of and behind my eyelids. I lost a few moments leaning against the soundproofed walls and then fell through them, to the other side of darkness.
When I opened my eyes, I was sitting on the floor. A few feet away, Jason crouched over Amanda, the butt of the gun jutting out of his back pocket.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” he said. “I was about to come check on you but I had to finish this first. Don’t worry, she’s not going anywhere.”
Amanda lay on the floor, still in her jacket, wrists bound with bungee cords. Electrical tape covered her mouth, the same thick black vinyl Jason had used all over the room. He wore the rest of the roll on his wrist like a bracelet. Amanda rocked a little, moaned, and went limp again. I looked back at Jason. He was standing in the center of the room, right under the ceiling fan, shifting his bulk from side to side. The top of his head almost brushed the light fixture. I’d never noticed just how tall he was before, and how big in the shoulders.
“I don’t know how we’re going to do this,” he said.
“Do what?”
He looked down at Amanda’s limp body grimly.
“Jason. You don’t really mean—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. My head was splitting anew, my body stiff and sore.
“There’s no other way, Dana. We called her bluff, and she came here with a gun.” He pulled it out of his back pocket as if to show me, weighing its heft in his hand. Then he lowered the gun to a forty-five-degree angle and straightened his arm, almost tentatively.
“Jason!”
“Relax, we’re not going to do it in the house,” he said. He frowned, rubbing the bridge of his nose the way he had in the storage facility. “Or maybe . . .” A flicker of excitement passed over his face.
I started to panic. My head felt too heavy to let me stand up, but I got to my hands and knees. “Jason, let’s think this through.”
“I am thinking. We can cut the panels up afterward, that part is easy. The problem is coming up with a place to dump them. But the beauty is, they’re black, so as long as no one brings a black light in, we have some time.” He walked to the closet and started rummaging around. “I know I put the leftover plastic sheeting in here. We’d have to cover the floor too.”
“You keep saying we—” Still on hands and knees, I interrupted myself with a cough that made the place behind my eyes throb. “Why do you keep saying we?”
A huge, shiny piece of black plastic emerged from the closet. Jason’s limbs came into view a moment afterward, and he dumped the tarp on the ground.
“We’re in this together, Dana. She’s after us both, not just me. And she’s just going to keep coming until she’s . . . taken care of.” I was trying to rise, but at this I went lightheaded again and retched. He looked concerned but didn’t stop smoothing the plastic over the floor next to Amanda’s slightly stirring body. “Besides, you’re the reason we can’t go to the police.”
“We can,” I said, gasping. “We can go. I’ll go.”
“No, we’re past that now.” Almost level with Amanda on his hands and knees as he worked, he looked down at her face with disgust. “She destroyed my life with her lies, and now she’s destroyed yours too. She has to be stopped, and I can’t do it alone.” He rolled Amanda onto the plastic as she protested feebly, half awake.
I can’t do it alone. Just like Mattie’s truck. That gave me an idea. “But you’ll have to. I won’t help you, Jason.” Chicken out, I thought silently in his direction. You can’t cross this line without me.
A look of desperation crossed his face for a moment, but then he went back to the business of spreading the sheeting out as far as it would go. “Then I’ll do it alone. I’ll figure it out.” He perked up. “This room
is actually the perfect place to do it. Like a giant silencer.” He looked around at the soundproofing panels, and I got another flash of the day Amanda and I met. He didn’t hit me. He did other things.
“This was it, wasn’t it?”
For the first time, he looked up sharply from what he was doing. “What do you mean?”
“The soundproof room. So no one could hear her scream.”
He stared at me. “You don’t believe that stuff about me locking her in?” He got to his feet indignantly. “That’s another of her ridiculous lies.” I stayed silent, and he took a step toward me, desperation on his face. “Dana? Come on, you have to believe me. She’s lying. I mean, sure, we had fights. But that’s just her being a drama queen.” He watched my face, and suddenly the desperation was gone, replaced by irritation. “You don’t believe me? Check the whole house, there’s not a single door that even locks.”
“There wasn’t when I lived here,” I said. “But I did notice some scarring on the door when I was searching the house. What was there, Jason? A sliding bolt? Why would you need a bolt on the outside of the door?”
He was silent.
“Anyway, how do you know what she told me about you?” I said slowly. Then I pulled my disposable phone out of my pocket. The one he’d bought at Best Buy and brought home for me. The one he’d activated and set up when I wasn’t in the same room. I looked at it in horror for a moment before hurling it across the room as hard as I could. It bounced off the soundproofing. “It’s bugged.”
“Dana,” he said. “We have to trust each other.”
“But we don’t, Jason. And I think I know why.”
“Listen. Listen, Dana!” He took a deep breath, composing himself, then looked down at the gun in his hands, then at Amanda. “I’m not the world’s greatest person. I’m trying, but we both know I fall pretty short. And honestly—” He seemed to be avoiding the sight of Amanda, but his gaze was drawn back to her again and again. “I have some intimacy problems, okay? Because of Mattie, because of my dad. Because my mom ran out on all of us and left us there to rot.”
“Yeah, I know.” It was something Jason and I had in common but never talked about. The sense of abandonment—his mother, my father. The hole in each of us, the embarrassing hole we had both learned to cope with by joking about it. We gravitated toward each other because we knew we would never ask each other what was beneath the jokes. Never take the joke seriously, even when it spoke the truth out loud. Even when we were hiding in plain sight. Despite myself, my eyes began to well up.
Jason was near tears too. “Face it, Dana. I’m a mess. We both are, but you’ve always been stronger than me. I’m an easy target. That’s why I attract messed-up, manipulative women like her again and again. Women who know how to push my buttons, make me do things I don’t want to do.”
“Make you?”
“I know I shouldn’t let it get out of hand. That’s why all my relationships end so fast. Because I recognize what’s happening, and I try to do the responsible thing and end it. Why do you think I left Austin for L.A. in the first place? It was Kim. Things were getting bad between us, and she started spreading rumors. I had to leave before she poisoned the whole scene against me. I know you don’t want to hear this, but she’s one of them.”
I’d never spent much time on the Austin comedy forums. I’d actively avoided them, in fact. What had I been afraid of finding out, and why?
“I didn’t want you to be one of them. I always knew you were better than those women I dated. That’s why I didn’t date you, because you were better. I didn’t want to—to sully what we had.”
“I don’t think a relationship sullies things, Jason,” I said, finally making it to my feet. “Not a normal one.”
“This time is different, though.” His eyes lit up. “I’ve finally recognized my pattern, and I’m trying to change.” He seemed to have forgotten the gun in his hand, and he was waving it around alarmingly. “When I agreed to give us one more chance—”
“What do you mean, one more chance?” I said. “Why do you always talk like we’ve tried this before?”
And then Jason got a huge, stupid smile on his face, and the gun dropped to the floor.
I started to repeat my question louder, a horrible thought dawning on me. I remembered his anxious face, waiting for me to tell him who had done that to me, and his relief when I’d said “Mattie.” What had he been worried I would say? “What do you mean, one more—”
But Jason was grinning maniacally, his face stretched in a ghoulish laugh. Then his head jerked backward and his body went rigid. He slumped to the floor with a heavy thud. Next to him, I saw Amanda crouched on the plastic sheeting, holding the forgotten stun gun, the bungee cord she must have been working to loosen this whole time still wreathed around one wrist. Now she was reaching for the real gun, the one that had fallen out of Jason’s hand.
Time slowed as Amanda touched the gun lightly, spinning it on its axis, then hooked a finger around the trigger loop and began tugging the gun closer, sliding it along the floor. In a moment she would have it in her palm. Her face looked eerily calm, determined but relaxed, as if she knew who she wanted to hurt, and why. The bruise-colored rings around her eyes were like a special kind of darkness radiating from within, tinted with sickly yellowish green and purplish blue from the blood vessels beneath her thin skin. Hypnotized by that darkness in which everything was mysteriously visible, I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t move.
It was dark in the TV room except for the screen. I was asleep. I woke up with someone on top of me. I couldn’t see him. I only felt him, smelled him, tasted the blood when my teeth cut my lip. I’d known with every fiber of my being who it was, but I couldn’t see him. So I’d let myself think—know, even—otherwise. And that certainty had colored everything ever since. My relationship with Jason. My response to Amanda. Even how I’d interpreted Mattie’s letter; I’d been infuriated that he’d described what happened to me that night as being someone else’s fault.
“You,” I said.
Jason was already moving again, rolling over to one side to get up, but Amanda was now holding the gun in both hands, aiming the muzzle at his head. Both still lying on the floor, each rolled onto one shoulder, they looked, for a moment, like a flattened-out parody of a shooting at point-blank range. Or like lovers lying in bed together, one of them reaching out to stroke the other’s hair. Jason screamed for help.
Unstuck in time, I thrust out my hand and felt it bump into something cold and heavy, a metal rod that yielded to my touch. Before the mic stand could tip all the way over, my fingers closed around the shaft, and I hefted the heavy base up over my shoulder.
Amanda never saw it coming.
Finding the strength somewhere, I swung the mic stand again and again and again, until everything was still.
Puddled on the black tarp, the blood looked like standing water after a storm. When I looked down into Jason’s black eyes, the tears in them making them blacker still, I couldn’t help it. My eyes started tearing up too.
“We tried it?” I said to him. “You wanted to believe that’s what happened. But deep down, you knew what it really was. After I told you what Mattie did—what I thought he did—you finally felt in the clear. But you were the one who had something to prove that night, weren’t you?” He said nothing. “You didn’t ask. You didn’t even wake me up. You just started. And once you started, you wouldn’t stop.”
He stared up at me, uncomprehending.
“It was you, not Mattie. You raped me.”
A trickle of blood overspilled his eyebrows and ran down his eye socket, hugging the side of his nose. The black eyes turned slowly red, then began to weep. A single, bloody tear.
I was over Jason at last.
Amanda was screaming.
She looked up, saw me standing over Jason’s body holding the mic stand, and scrambled backward in terror, slipping in the blood. I waited patiently for her to find her footing
on dry ground.
“Here,” I said. “Hold this for a minute.”
Dazed, Amanda took the mic stand from my hands and clutched it to her chest, watching me in terror, her eyes darting once in a while to Jason, as if he might get up and try something. I kicked the handgun to the opposite side of the room, then located the stun gun, which was half covered by the tarp, and kicked that across the room too. Then I walked over to the disposable phone lying by the wall and pocketed it.
“You saved my life,” Amanda said, still hugging the mic stand, letting it support her weight like a crutch. “He was going to kill me, Dana. He had me tied up and—” She shuddered. “He was going to kill me this time.”
I stared down at his body and wondered if he would really have done it. I thought of the truck he was too scared to steal by himself; the way he’d offered me to Neely to win his favor; the rape he’d been so happy to believe his brother was guilty of so he could go on believing what we’d had was just bad sex. The things he’d done to Amanda because he thought she deserved them. Ultimately, the only crimes Jason ever committed were the ones he couldn’t admit to himself were real. And even those, he’d relied on me to corroborate.
But all that was over.
“I’m going to call the police.” I dialed 911 on the burner, leaving bloody prints on the buttons, and held it to my ear.
“He had me tied up,” she repeated, rubbing her wrists as she stared down at his crumpled body. “But this time I got away. I got away.”
“You can try claiming self-defense.” The phone started ringing. “Although it’s going to be your word against mine.”
“What?” She was still groggy, moving slowly, like a person underwater.
“You didn’t kill Fash, did you?”