False Memory

to.”

Klick-klick. Martie’s heart was racing already, and she sensed that the sight of the gleaming blades would plunge her into a full-fledged panic attack far worse than anything that she had experienced previously. Klick-klick-klick.

“But, Sooz, good God, you mean he makes love to you—”

“There’s no love involved.”

“—he does you—”

“Rapes me. He’s still my husband, we’re just separated, I know, but it’s rape.”

“—but you don’t wake up during it?”

“You’ve got to believe me.”

“All right, of course, honey, I believe you. But—”

“Maybe I’m drugged somehow.”

“When would Eric be able to slip the drugs to you?”

“I don’t know. All right, yeah, it’s crazy. Totally whacked, paranoid. But it’s happening.”

Klick-klick.

Without opening her eyes, Martie pushed the drawer shut.

“When you wake up,” she said shakily, “you’ve got your underwear on again.”

“Yes.”

Opening her eyes, staring at her right hand, which was knotted around the drawer pull, Martie said, “So he comes in, undresses you, rapes you. And then before he goes, he puts your T-shirt and panties on you again. Why?”

“So maybe I won’t realize he’s been here.”

“But there’s his stuff.”

“Nothing else has that same smell.”

“Sooz—”

“I know, I know, but I’m agoraphobic, not totally psychotic. Remember? That’s what you told me earlier. And listen, there’s more.”

From inside the closed drawer came a muffled klick-klick.

“Sometimes,” Susan continued, “I’m sore.”

“Sore?”

“Down there,” Susan said softly, discreetly. The depth of her anxiety and humiliation was more clearly revealed by this modesty than it had been by anything she’d previously said. “He’s not…gentle.”

Inside the drawer, blade pivoting against blade: klick-klick, klick-klick.

Susan was whispering now, and she sounded farther away, too, as though a great tide had lifted her beachfront house and carried it out to sea, as if she were steadily drifting toward a far and dark horizon. “Sometimes my breasts are sore, too, and once there were bruises on them…bruises the size of fingertips, where he’d squeezed too hard.”

“And Eric denies all this?”

“He denies being here. I haven’t…I haven’t discussed the explicit details with him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t accused him.”

Martie’s right hand remained on the drawer, pushing against it as though something inside might force its way out. She applied herself with such intensity that the muscles in her forearm began to ache.

Klick-klick.

“Sooz, for God’s sake, you think maybe he’s drugging you and screwing you in your sleep, but you haven’t confronted him about it?”

“I can’t. I shouldn’t. It’s forbidden.”

“Forbidden?”

“Well, you know, not right, not something I can do.”

“No, I don’t know. What an odd word—forbidden. By whom?”

“I didn’t mean forbidden. I don’t know why I said that. I just meant…well, I’m not sure what I meant. I’m so confused.”

Although she was distracted by her own anxiety, Martie sensed something profound in Susan’s word choice, and she wouldn’t drop the issue. “Forbidden by whom?”

“I’ve had the locks changed three times,” Susan said, instead of answering the question. Her voice rose from a whisper, sharpened by a brittle note of nascent hysteria that she was struggling mightily to repress. “Always a different company. Eric can’t know someone at every locksmith, can he? And I didn’t tell you this before, because maybe it makes me sound loopy, but I’ve dusted the windowsills with talcum powder, so if he did come through a locked window somehow, there’d be evidence of it, there’d be handprints in the powder, some mark of disturbance, but the talcum is always perfect in the morning. And I’ve wedged a kitchen chair under the doorknob, too, so even if the bastard has a key, he can’t open the door, and the next morning the chair is always there, where I put it, yet I’ve got his stuff in me, in my panties, and I’m sore, and I know I’ve been used, brutally, I know it, and I shower and shower, hotter and hotter water, so hot it hurts sometimes, but I can’t get clean. I never feel really clean anymore. Oh, God, sometimes I think what I need are exorcists — you know? — some priests to come here and pray over me, priests who really believe in the devil if there are any like that today, holy water and crucifixes, incense, because this is something that defies all logic, this is utterly supernatural, that’s what it is, supernatural. And now you’re thinking I’m a fully rounded nutball, but I’m really not, Martie, I’m not. I’m messed up, no question about that, okay, but this is apart from the agoraphobia, this is really happening, and I can’t go on like this, waking up and finding…It’s creepy, disgusting. It’s destroying me, but I don’t know what the hell to do. I feel helpless, Martie, I feel so vulnerable.”

Klick-klick.

Martie’s right arm ached from the wrist to the shoulder now, as she pressed on the drawer with all her weight, all her strength. Her jaw was clenched. Her teeth ground together.

Bright needles drew hot threads of pain up through her neck, and the pain sewed a little reason into her confusion-torn thoughts. In truth, she wasn’t concerned that something would escape from the drawer. The scissors weren’t magically animated like the brooms that plagued the beleaguered sorcerer’s apprentice in Disney’s Fantasia. The crisp dry sound—klick-klick—was in her mind. She was not actually afraid of the scissors or of the rolling pin, not afraid of the knives, the forks, the corkscrew, the corncob skewers, the meat thermometer. For hours now, she had known the true object of her terror, and she had fleetingly considered it several times during this strange day, but until now she had not faced it directly and without equivocation. The sole menace before which she cowered was Martine Eugenia Rhodes: She feared herself, not knives, not the hammers, not the scissors, but herself. She was forcing the drawer shut with unwavering determination because she was convinced that otherwise she would yank it open, would seize the shears — and, in the absence of any other victim, would rip brutally at herself with the pointed blades.

“Are you there, Martie?”

Klick-klick.

“Martie, what am I going to do?”

Martie’s voice trembled with compassion, with anguish for her friend, but also with fear for herself and fear of herself. “Sooz, this is spooky shit, this is weirder than hoodoo.” A cold brine of sweat drenched her as thoroughly as if she had just stepped out of the sea. Klick-klick. Her arm, shoulder, and neck ached so intensely that tears flooded her eyes. “Listen, I’ve got to wrap my brain around this a little while before I can advise you what to do, before I can figure out how I can help.”

“It’s all true.”

“I know it’s true, Sooz.”

She was frantic to be off the telephone. She must get away from the drawer, get away from the scissors that waited in it, because she couldn’t escape from the violent potential within herself.

“It’s happening,” Susan insisted.