'How can you?' she cried. She shook her head. 'I can't take you back to someone who hurt you so much.' But she didn't stop driving.
'I have to go back,' I said.
'You don't. You can choose something else. There are shelters for battered women. The government should offer you some protection. The police . . . .'
'You don't understand,' I said.
'I do,' she said. Her voice got quieter. 'I know what it's like to live with someone who doesn't respect you. I know how hard it is to get away. But you
'No,' I said, 'I can't.'
'You can. I'll help you. You can live in Kanaskat with me and he'll never find you. Or if you just want a bus ticket someplace—back home, wherever that is—I can do that for you, too.'
'You don't understand,' I said.
She was quiet for a long stretch of road. Then she said, 'Help me understand.'
I shook my braids back and opened the collar of the jacket, pulled down the lapels to bare my neck. I stared at her until she looked back.
She screamed and drove across the center lane. Fortunately there was no other traffic. Still screaming, she fought with the steering wheel until she straightened out the car. Then she pulled over to the shoulder and jumped out of the car and ran away.
I shut off the car's engine, then climbed out. 'Marti,' I yelled. 'Okay, I'm walking away now. The car's all yours. I'm leaving. It's safe. Thanks for the jacket. Bye.' I buttoned up the jacket, put the collar up, buried my hands in the pockets, and started walking along the road toward Richie.
I had gone about a quarter mile when she caught up with me again. The sun had set and twilight was deepening into night. Six cars had passed going my way, but I didn't hold out my thumb, and though some kid had yelled out a window at me, and somebody else had honked and swerved, nobody stopped.
It had been so easy to hitch before I met Richie. Somehow now I just couldn't do it.
I heard the Rabbit's sputter behind me and kept walking, not turning to look at her. But she slowed and kept pace with me. 'Sheila?' she said in a hoarse voice. 'Sheila?'
I stopped and looked toward her. I knew she was scared of me. I felt strong and strange, hearing her call me by a name I had given myself, as if I might once have had a chance to make up who I was instead of being shaped by what had happened to me. I couldn't see it being possible now, though, when I was only alive to do what the fire in me wanted.
Marti blinked, turned away, then turned back. 'Get in,' she said.
'You don't have to take me,' I said. 'I'll get there sooner or later. Doesn't matter when.'
'Get in.'
I got back into her car.
For half an hour we drove in silence. She crossed Interstate 5, paused when we hit 99, the Strip. 'Which way?'
I pointed right. The fire was so hot in me now I felt like my fingertips might start smoking any second.
She turned the car and we cruised north toward the Sea-Tac Airport, my old stomping grounds. We passed expensive hotels and cheap motels, convenience stores and fancy restaurants. Lighted buildings alternated with dark gaps. The roar of planes taking off and landing, lights rising and descending in the sky ahead of us, turned rapidly into background. We drove past the Goldilocks Motel, where Blake and I had a room we rented by the week, and I didn't feel anything. But as we passed the intersection where the Red Lion sprawls on the corner of 188th Street and the Pacific Highway, fire flared under my skin. 'Slowly,' I said to Marti. She stared at me and slowed the car. A mile further, past the airport, one of the little roads led down off the ridge to the left. I pointed.
Marti got in the left-turn lane and made the turn, then pulled into a gas station on the corner and parked by the rest rooms. 'Now wait,' she said. 'What are we doing, here?'
'Richie,' I whispered. I could feel his presence in the near distance; all my wounds were resonating with his nearness now, all the places he had pressed himself into me with his rope and his cigarette and his sock and his flaked stone knife and his penis, imprinting me as his possession. Surely as a knife slicing into a tree's bark, he had branded me with his heart.
'Yes,' said Marti. 'Richie. You have any plans for what you're going to do once you find him?'
I held my hands out, open, palms up. The heat was so strong I felt like anything I touched would burst into flame.
'What are you going to do, strangle him? Have you got something to do it with?' She sounded sarcastic.
I was having a hard time listening to her. All my attention was focused down the road. I knew Richie's car was there, and Richie in it. It was the place he had taken me to tie me up. He might be driving this way any second, and I didn't want to wait any longer for our reunion, though I knew there was no place he could hide where I couldn't find him. My love for him was what animated me now.
'Strangle,' I said, and shook my head. I climbed out of the car.
'Sheila!' said Marti.
I let the sound of my self-given name fill me with what power it could, and stood still for a moment, fighting the fire inside. Then I walked into the street, stood in the center so a car coming up out of the dark would have to stop. I strode down into darkness, away from the lights and noise of the Strip. My feet felt like match-heads, as if a scrape could strike fire from them.
Presently the asphalt gave way to potholes and gravel; I could tell by the sound of pebbles sliding under my feet. I walked past the first three dark houses to the right and left, looming shapes in a darkness pierced by the flight lights of airplanes, but without stars. I turned left at the fourth house, dark like the others, but with a glow behind it I couldn't see with my eyes but could feel in my bones. Heat pulsed and danced inside me.
I pushed past an overgrown lilac bush at the side of the house and stepped into the broad drive in back. The car was there, as I had known it would be. Dark and quiet. Its doors were closed.
I heard a brief cry, and then the dome light went on in the car. Richie was sitting up in back, facing away from me.
Richie.
I walked across the crunching gravel, looking at his dark head. He wore a white shirt. He was staring down, focused, his arms moving. As I neared the car, I could see he was sitting on a woman. She still had her clothes on. (Richie hadn't taken my clothes off until he got me in his apartment.) Tape was across her mouth, and her head thrashed from side to side, her upper arms jerking as Richie bound his thin nylon rope around her wrists, her legs kicking. I stood a moment looking in the window. She saw me and her eyes widened. She made a gurgling swallowed sound behind the sock, the tape.
I thought: he doesn't need her. He has me.
I remembered the way my mind had struggled while my body struggled, screaming silently: no, oh no, Blake, where are you? No one will help me, the way no one has ever helped me, and I can't help myself. That hurts, that hurts. Maybe he'll play with me and let me go if I'm very, very good. Oh, God! What do you want? Just tell me, I can do it. You don't have to hurt me! Okay, rip me off, it's not like you're the first, but you don't have to hurt me.
Hurt me.
I love you. I love you so much.
I stared at him through the glass. The woman beneath him had stilled, and she was staring at me. Richie finally noticed, and whirled.
For a moment we stared at each other. Then I smiled, showing him the stumps of my teeth, and his blue eyes widened.
I reached for the door handle, opened it before he could lock it.
'Richie,' I said.
'Don't!' he said. He shook his head, hard, as though he were a dog with wet fur. Slowly, he lifted one hand and rubbed his eye. He had a big bread knife in the other hand, had used it to cut the rope, then flicked it across the woman's cheek, leaving a streak of darkness. He looked at me again. His jaw worked.
'Richie.'
'Don't! Don't. . . interrupt.'
I held out my arms, my fingertips scorched black as if dyed or tattooed, made special, the wrists dark beyond
