Chapter 18 #2
Her whole body locks.
Her hand freezes halfway to her glass. Her shoulders come up to almost her ears. She lets the fear of an intruder fully penetrate her and she doesn’t turn around, not for a long moment. She just sits perfectly still and waits to be told she imagined it.
“Mabel,” I accentuate, so she knows none of this is an accident.
The chair wheels around and she finally sees me, perched in the very nice wingback in the dark, gloved, ankle crossed over my knee, and I watch her pupils blow.
She’s trembling. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’ve read every article.” I don’t move. “Every outlet. Every report I could get my hands on, and there’s one thing I still can’t work out.”
“How did you get in my house—”
“Why?” I tilt my head. “Why bully a high school girl into oblivion? What does that get you?” I look her over, taking my time about it. “It wasn’t jealousy, was it, Mabel? Tell me it wasn’t that petty, that you were envious of a teenager and the life she had ahead of her.”
Her hand is creeping toward the desk. There’s a phone on it, face down, next to a coffee cup, surely with something furred growing in the bottom.
“I don’t know who you are but I am calling the police. You better get out now.”
“Mm. The police. They’ve been here before, right?”
“I was found innocent.” Her voice climbs to shrill. “Do you understand that? A jury. A judge. So you can fuck off out of my house. I can say whatever I want, however I want, to whoever I want, and there is not one single thing you can do about it.”
“You’d think that. Wouldn’t you?”
I stand up.
I slide the spikes out of my back pocket as I do it, one in each hand, and I let them catch what light there is.
They’re not knives. They’re six inches of ground steel with no edge at all, tapering to a point you could split an atom with. I picked them up from the hardware store and filed the tips myself.
She’s halfway out of the chair. “I’m serious. I’m calling—”
“Sit. The fuck. Down.” I don’t shout it. That’s why it works so good.
She sits down obediently.
I can smell it on her now, over the wine. Fear has a scent of sweat, something sharp and wild, and it fills the small space between her desk and my chair like a gas leak.
And then, once the fear heightens, because she is exactly what I thought she was, she starts barking like she’s brave, like a Chihuahua to a Rottweiler.
“You have no idea who you’re dealing with. None. I have an army of lawyers. I have people who…”
I tune out as she prattles on and on. Her insults degrade, and inside of thirty seconds it isn’t threats anymore, it’s just filth.
Words about my body, about what I must be, what I must have done, what a woman who breaks into a house at midnight must let men do to her.
It’s inventive. I’ll give her that. A born bully, artful in her craft.
I stand there and let her tire herself out like a petulant toddler. It’s like watching a dog bark at a wall.
When she finally stops, she’s breathing hard, and there’s wine on her cardigan. She is looking at me with pure hatred and buried fear, probably as she’s done a million times before. But tonight’s different. Tonight she learns there are consequences to her actions. Consequences to being cruel.
“Promise me you’ll stop,” I say.
She blinks.
I nod at the screen behind her. At the four tabs. At the spreadsheet.
“They’re children.”
Her face melts into something sinister.
“They are sniveling, mean, pathetic little girls with no future in front of them. Whores, the lot of them. They have always been that way and they always will be.” She leans forward.
She wants to say this. She has been waiting years to say it to somebody’s face.
“I’m not bullying anyone. I’m the only person in their lives telling them the truth. ”
The room gets very quiet.
Then, I slice through it: “Ah, so that’s what this is.”
Her face crumples up into a mess of features, her head shaking. “You don’t know anything about—”
“The bullied become the bullies.” I take a step. “Was it that bad? Your childhood?”
“Get out of my house.”
“Because I had a bad childhood, Mabel.” I take another step. She leans back in the chair as far as the chair will let her.
“My mother was murdered when I was a little girl.” Another step.
“Then I lost my father and my sister in a single night, and I took a bullet that grazed my heart.” One more step.
“I watched my house burn to the ground with everything I ever owned inside it.” I’m close enough now to see the broken vessels in her cheeks.
“I was almost Brinley’s age. They are formative years.
Important ones. Years that should be protected by people who know better. ”
She opens her mouth but not a single sound exits.
“My wretched past has turned into something that most people wouldn’t call good, but not one single time in all my years, did it occur to me to go after a child. That’s a different kind of low.”
“Fuck you.”
It’s the f-bomb straw that breaks the camel’s back. I don’t remember consciously deciding it’s time to shut her up. My reflexes simply deploy.
I push her forward into the desk, and the first spike goes through the back of her right hand.
I put my full weight behind it, and the spike goes clear through her flesh and right into the particleboard like it’s going through cake.
The whole desk jumps. The wineglass tips over the edge and shatters in the dark.
She hasn’t started screaming yet. There’s a lapse. A second or two of shock, where adrenaline protects her from the pain. I drive a second spike in, this time through her left hand, pinning her to the desk again.
That’s when she screams.
It’s an enormous sound, out of proportion to the woman making it.
It fills the house. It rattles the newspaper towers.
She’s howling, sobbing, thrashing, and both hands are tacked palm down to her own desk and she cannot move them.
Every jerk of her arms agitates the wound and inflames her agony.
Blood comes up around the spikes in two dark rings, and spreads.
I step back and I wait. I wait for the worst of it to pass, because there’s no point talking to someone who can’t hear you.
When she’s down to gulping and whimpering, I crouch beside her chair.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?”
She can’t answer. Her whole face is wet.
“Still. It’s nothing.” I look at her hands. “Nothing at all compared to what Brinley must have felt, to do what she did. Imagine it, Mabel. Seventeen years old. The entire world still in front of you, and being in so much pain that dying looks like the easy option.”
I shake my head slowly.
She continues to sniffle, totally subdued.
“I couldn’t let it go.” I sigh, theatrically. “I’ve been trying to. I’ve been walking around a very nice city with a man who thinks I’m good, trying to let it go.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “And I couldn’t. I wanted you to feel exactly what she felt. I wanted it so badly I couldn’t sleep.”