Again, she laughed. “Oh hell no. He’s too much of a coward. That’s his deep, dark secret. That’s why he beats women: because he’s terrified of them. And now, he’s terrified of me.”
Faith gripped together her hands. Callie was clearly drunk. How could Faith tell this woman that her moment of triumph, her final revenge, was a lie?
“Rod and I had this moment in my lawyer’s office.” Callie turned toward Faith. “It was just the two of us. I told the lawyers to leave. I took my hair down. I shook it out like Cindy fucking Crawford. I said to Rod, ‘Your life is in my hands, asshole. I can destroy you with the snap of my fingers.’”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, the usual. He called me a crazy bitch, kept insisting I was making the whole thing up, but it was the look in his eyes.” Callie pointed to her own eyes. “He was scared of me. His hands were shaking. He started groveling, begging me not to go to the police, whining about how he would never do anything like that. That he loved me. That he would never hurt me.”
Her bitter laughter carried across the room.
“You know what I said to him?”
She clearly wanted a response.
Faith had to swallow before she could ask, “What?”
“I got in his face, looked him straight in his beady little pig eyes, and I said, ‘I won.’” She banged her fist on the bar. “Fuck. You. Rod. I. Fucking. Won.”
23
Gina couldn’t open her eyes.
Or maybe she could open them, but she really did not want to. She had forgotten what it felt like to sleep. Like, for real sleep. The way you slept when you were a kid and you reached that sweet spot between puberty and college and you could close your eyes and wake up at noon the next day in a state of full bliss.
Where was she?
Not where was she in the metaphoric sense. In the physical sense. Like, where the fuck was her body located on planet earth right now?
Her eyelids slitted open.
Dusk, leaves, dirt, birds singing, trees swaying, insects insecting.
Good God, Target’s camping display was brilliantly realistic! She could practically smell s’mores cooking on an open flame. Or baked beans, like that scene in Blazing Saddles where they all started farting.
Gina laughed.
Then she coughed.
Then she started to cry.
She was lying on her back in the woods. She was bleeding where the hammer had cracked against her head. She was going to be raped. She needed to get the hell out of here.
Why couldn’t she move?
Gina had no understanding of anatomy, but there had to be a power line of some sort that plugged into her brain and went to her legs and made them move up and down or sideways so that she could roll over and stand up.
Gina kept her eyes closed. She tried to clear her mind. She imagined the line. Tried to send a current into the line. Wake up, line. Let’s get some movement, line. Hello, line.
I am a lineman for the county …
Oh, how her mother had laughed at Gina praising R.E.M. for Wichita Lineman when Glen Close was the singer who’d made it famous.
Glen Close?
Glen Campbell.
Had anyone seen Michael Stipe lately? He looked like Julian Assange had fucked the Unabomber.
Gina’s eyes flooded with tears. She was going to be raped. She was going to be raped. She was going to be raped.
Why couldn’t she move her legs?
Her toes. Feet. Ankles. Knees. Fingers. Elbows. Even her eyelids.
Nothing would move.
Was she paralyzed?
She could hear breathing. She didn’t think the breaths were coming from her own lungs. Someone was behind her. Sitting behind her.
The man from the car.
The one with the hammer.
He was sobbing.
Gina had seen an adult man cry exactly once in her life; her father on 9-11. Gina had been at the library when the news broke about the first airplane. She had jumped into her car and driven to the safest place she knew, her parents’ home. They had all huddled around the television. Gina, her mother and father. Her sister Nancy was in lockdown at work. Diane Sawyer was in her red sweater. They watched in horror as thousands of people were murdered in front of their eyes. Her father had held onto Gina, grabbed onto her, like he was afraid to let her go. His tears had mixed with Gina’s. Everyone had been crying. The entire country had wept.
Her father was dead from lung cancer less than a year later.
And now Gina was in the woods.
The crying man was not her father.
He was going to rape her.
He had hit her with a hammer.
He had taken her into the woods.
He had drugged her.
He was going to rape her.
Gina had seen his face in the car. The memory tickled at the back of her brain. She could not summon his features, but a sense of familiarity was there. She had seen him before. In the gym? At the store? Inside the office when she went in for monthly meetings?
The face belonged to the man who had been watching her. He was the source of her paranoia. He was the person who had stolen her pink scrunchie from the bowl on the sink. He was the reason Gina had shut her blinds, checked her locks, hermitted inside of her house.
Nancy had no idea that Gina was missing. They had talked on the phone before Gina had left for the Target. Her sister called once a month, maybe. Her mother called once a week, but the last call was yesterday so the next call would not be for another six days.
Six days.
Her twelve-year-old boss already had her Beijing report. He would email her, but Gina had trained him not to expect quick responses to his tedious emails because elderly people did not understand computers. Her nosey neighbor was not actually that nosey. The only person who would notice her absence was the InstaCart delivery boy, and she knew that he
