Chapter 8
I have remembered this room often, and now I see all the places I have remembered wrong.
Where are my cathedral arches? The oppressive dark wood?
The bed faces three adjoining windows, and between my feet Lake Wanika is as blue as the ocean, shimmering with resentment that memory had cast its waters gray-brown.
This is why you cannot convict someone on eyewitness testimony alone, I think with outrageous clarity before my brain goes back to feeling like it’s in one of those jars in a laboratory, submerged in blue liquid.
Or is that the stuff hairdressers use to disinfect their combs? Certainly not my hairdresser.
I reach for my phone on the nightstand out of habit, finding instead a Nature Valley granola bar and a Dasani water.
He hates both items with a fiery passion.
I did not know granola bars could make you fat or that water had a taste before I met him.
I feel infirm, trying to twist the cap off the water bottle.
When my Pilates instructor guides me through a sequence to improve my grip strength, I stop trying.
I want to reserve my energy for my core and glutes.
But if I get out of here alive, I will hire a fucking personal trainer for my thumbs.
I finally get the cap off and gulp until the plastic craters, wipe my mouth, then wolf down the granola bar in four bites. I collapse back on the bed, lie there covered in crumbs. Wait for the shaking to stop.
Eventually, I drag myself into an upright position and set my feet on the ground. Wait again for the spots to clear from my eyes. The rug I got right, at least. Red, rough plaid that used to burn my knees.
I walk hunched and hurting to the door and find it locked from the outside.
On Henry’s lot there are two structures—the main house with the kitchen and rustic, gnarled log furniture arranged around the fireplace where we used to gather with wine and dark chocolate after dinner, and then this studio apartment–like cabin.
It’s where Henry’s mother used to put him before he learned to swim and, worried he might wander into the lake in the middle of the night, she had the door outfitted with a lock from the outside, like Henry was a valuable in a safe.
There’s nothing in here but a bed and a minuscule airplane bathroom and a closet containing a pair of slippers the size of boats, I find when I peer inside.
Someone must have finally recycled the endemic collection of wire hangers from the dry cleaners.
I go to the windows, and though I see they are double paned and possibly soundproof—there is an insulated silence to the room that feels manufactured—I give them a shove so I can say I covered all my bases.
I look around the room. The dresser is without drawers and there are two circular stains on a console table at the foot of the bed, telling on the pair of table lamps that used to frame the space.
Anything I could use to break the windows, to cast the walls with the demented splatter of Henry’s brain, has been removed from the room.
It is just me and the granola crumbs and my roofie juice.
I stumble haphazardly toward the bed, land like a chalk outline of a dead body.
It is night when I wake again, and Henry is sitting on the edge of the bed with his face turned away from me.
I lie still awhile, wits thawing, eyes adjusting to the dark.
I count to three, sit up with a gasp. Henry’s head whips in my direction, and I catch it, the flash of relief on his face, in the way of someone sitting bedside to a loved one in a coma.
Nurse. Nurse. She’s not a vegetable after all.
“Henry,” I whisper cautiously. “What… what is this?”
He says nothing for a long time. Then, “It’s just for a few days.”
I stare at his potent silhouette in the dark, my heart inching up my throat. “A few days for what?”
He ignores me, reaching for something on the nightstand. Water, in a Yeti. He offers it to me and I do not take it.
“I’m not drinking that.”
“There’s nothing in it this time.”
This time. His medal is in the mail. “Can I… Could I just go home?”
“I’m trying to make that happen for you.”
Something about the way he says this, like it’s out of his control, infuriates me. “You’re trying? What the fuck? Unlock the door, then. Give me my phone. My phone. Where is my—”
My head slams into the pillow. Henry is on top of me, his hand around my throat. “If you try to tell me what to do again, you will regret it.”
Henry has had his hand around my throat before, he’s even squeezed as hard as he’s squeezing now, but it is how he is looking at me that is new and incomprehensible. He is afraid. Afraid. Why would Henry be the one who is afraid?
Like he is telling me a secret, Henry leans in closer.
“Say you understand, Faye.” Gracefully and with deep benevolence, he lifts the index finger at the base of my windpipe, permitting me to suck in a wheezy breath.
He smells the same. Like he’s been fixing something outside. Fresh air and good, clean sweat.
“I understand.” My voice is sandpaper. My hands, I realize, are pressed against Henry’s chest. I’m holding on to him like he’s saving me from a burning building.
Henry considers me a moment. In the dark I can only make out the whites of his eyes, switching places in their sockets while he searches my face for any indication that I may be disingenuous. “You don’t yet,” he decides. “Not really. But I’ll explain in the morning.”
He loosens his grip, but his hand remains at rest on my throat a moment longer than necessary. I am still holding on to him. I know this must please him, and perhaps that’s why I do not let go. This is Stockholm syndrome, I tell myself. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
At last, Henry stands. He starts for the door, watching me over his shoulder to make sure I don’t move a muscle.
I listen to him lock me inside and lie there taking shallow, shaky breaths, wishing I were drugged again so I did not have to think.
Around and around in my mind, I play out what just transpired between us until I arrive at my dire conclusion.
Once, I was in a hotel room in Miami, doing press for the first show my husband and I produced together, and we were waiting for a call from the network publicist. I was sitting cross-legged in the bed with my phone in my lap, facing the bathroom, where I could see myself in the reflection of the full-length mirror above the Jacuzzi bathtub.
It was exactly forty-eight hours before our show would premiere, the time when the studios lift their embargos and the media is permitted to publish reviews.
The publicist was supposed to be calling with an aggregate snapshot from the critics, but she was five minutes late, and then ten, and I knew it would be bad.
If it’s all raves, the call comes on the minute.
Are you sure you’re on the Wi-Fi? my husband had asked.
He was pacing the room, and when I looked up to answer him, I caught the reflection of myself in the bathroom mirror.
My face looked longer than usual, and my eyes seemed to turn down at the corners, like a frowning mouth.
This is what true terror looked like, I saw.
I was imagining all kinds of catastrophic headlines—Emmy Winner Faye Heron Struck Out on Her Own and Struck Out Big-Time or some punny such—which would snowball into green splats and tipped-over popcorn buckets on Rotten Tomatoes and, the true kiss of death, next to nothing on social media.
In the end the reviews were mostly positive, and a small but dedicated fanbase came through on socials, and the publicist had just gotten stuck in another meeting that ran over, but in that moment I saw on my face what I had seen on Henry’s as he pulsed my throat in his hand. Something catastrophic is coming.