It’s half-past four in the morning, and a woman wearing red plaid pajamas and a Mad Max: Fury Road shirt has been bound to the foot of her bed.
She sits, legs folded, arms secured with increasing tightness to her sides. Looking down, she can see that the bottom half of Furiosa’s face is now entirely obscured by sticky, dark grey ribbon, which she knows will cover her own mouth soon enough.
Raising her head and shaking the hair out of her face, she watches the man wrap the duct tape around her body over and over again, at least six times now, and she remembers her father—his big, broken-skinned thumbs in the glow of the evening news— stitching up holes in her shirts before school the next morning. Nothing fancy, just around and around until the job was done. The man kneeling before her has the same silent, squinty-eyed focus behind his balaclava that her father did, ensuring that the thick roll of tape is threaded repeatedly through one of the ornate, carved gaps in the frame of the California King.
Her husband bought that bed because it looked “artistic,” but she later found out that it was just a pain to dust, as most art tends to be.
Every time the kneeling man has to move the tape around the bedpost, past the corner of the mattress and through the leaf-shaped hole in the frame, he has to lean close to her, his chin grazing her shoulders. He smells like whiskey and White Shoulders perfume. She can’t feel the gun on his hip but knows it’s still there, patient.
There’s a sudden ripping sound when he’s decided he’s done enough, and he presses the end piece down firm on the side of her arm. He shifts her back and forth for a few seconds to test it, to make sure she has no wiggle room. She has none.
She stares him full in the face as he stands, tearing one last piece of tape, a small one, and holding it up in one leather-gloved hand. The other hand goes, almost thoughtless, to the piece at his hip. He meets her gaze and sighs.
~
At eleven o’clock the previous evening, the woman, having recently donned said pajamas, is inside the bed—not yet tied to it—and is trying to learn how to sleep alone. It’s been almost ten years since she’s had to cultivate this skill for any length of time, and neither meditation, melatonin, milk, nor mental sheep have been successful aids. As for the stronger ones—booze or Benadryl—she doesn’t want to form a habit of either, so tonight she lies on her back and, in her head, spells the parts of the room she can see.
C-E-I-L-I-N-G.
During these long nocturnal vigils, every sound—every distant crash of the ice maker, every pop of the floorboards, every shift in the pipes—becomes a sadistic rapist, a meth zombie, a masked maniac who for whatever reason is hell-bent on driving to the end of the cul-de-sac, breaking into her house, and completing her annihilation.
C-L-O-S-E-T.
She jolts out of bed sometimes, holding her iPhone as a lantern in one hand and grabbing the Louisville Slugger in the other, then sliding her feet into blue-sequined slippers—the clear footwear choice for violence—and confronting the outer regions of the home.
M-I-R-R-O-R.
But it’s never anything. She can see the deer from the kitchen window every time, judging her, taking a break from chomping the shit out of the unsold lot across from her house. She pads back into the bedroom, still not ready for sleep.
C-H-E-S-T-O-F-D-R-A-W-E-R-S.
One of her few remaining companions amidst the inevitable post-breakup friendship custody battle—Ashley, the therapist, had sided with her—recently said that every time she gets up to make sure there is in fact no one there, or every time she returns to a room to make sure she did in fact blow out a candle, or every time she drives back to make sure she did in fact lock the door, she is making these anxieties worse, stretching them, letting their molecules expand to fill any container she gives them.
F-A-N.
But she welcomes the fear now, in a way; its presence at least indicates a will to persist.
B-L-I-N-D-S.
She has run baths so hot she has to get into it one body part at a time, then stared with longing at the little square green box of left-behind razor blades on the marble counter. What was the joke he used to make? (“Sideways for attention, long ways for results.”) She has wondered about the technical aspects of the long ways. She has even sat down, half-delirious, at the computer after spending the Fourth alone—there’s little worse than listening to other people’s fireworks through the dogged trickling sounds of your own snot—to see if there is a YouTube tutorial. There isn’t, although there was a pretty horrific clip from Thirteen Reasons Why which seemed to end that line of inquiry. She can see the bathtub from where she’s lying now, the glowing night light reflected in the porcelain.
B-A-T-H-R-O-O-M.
Lately she is not motivated to kill herself, but she isn’t motivated to do much of anything else either. Even trips to the Kroger or the post office feel like multivolume quests of tedium. The one mercy in the timing of Jared’s bombshell, and possibly why he dropped it when he did (if she could believe he had any consideration left in him), was that at least school had ended in May and she doesn’t have to go to work. Maybe by next month she’ll be able to sleep by herself again. Maybe she’ll get an exercise routine, master the yard work, start intermittent fasting, write a book, brew kombucha, sell Rodan & Fields, and do the other crap her successful, fulfilled single female friends Instagram about all the time. Right now, she just wants books and Hulu.
P-I-L-L-O-W.
Suddenly, she thinks, Wait—is this even for sleep? Or is this the one for panic attacks?
P-I-C-T-U-R-E.
If it’s for panic, looking at the photo above the drawers will not help. Their wedding day, just the two of them, summer in the Caribbean. She needs to take it down, but it requires a step stool to reach and of course he has moved that item already, for repairs on his new place.
C-O-M-F-O-R-T-E-R.
He—Jared—has showed up on a few afternoons over the last several weeks to pick up a small load of his detritus, breezing by after work. In these instances, when she hears his car amble up the driveway, she has installed herself on the back porch, smoking a cigar or reading a novel or both, not moving again until she hears the front door slam and the engine’s whirr disappear.
They never discussed this arrangement, just assumed it, but he’s only removed clothes so far, and toiletries, as if he’s just on a long vacation, and there’s still so much of his baggage bogging down the house, adding weight to what’s left of her sagging life. She needs to get motivated, take all of his game systems and garage rubble and stick it into one handy pile so she can reclaim the rest of the space, but she’s mired in stasis. This agonizing slow dribble of relocation is making it all worse. She wishes he would just hire some movers and get it all over with.
M-A-N.
And there he is. No preamble—in the doorway of the bedroom, a dark silhouette.
She sits up, pulling the blanket to her chest and engaging all veins of idiocy.
Is mascara still all over my face? How much weight have I put on this past week? How do I smell? Did he get fed up with her? Is this when he crawls back with his tail between his legs? When did he get in here?
“Jare?”
She didn’t even hear his car. She has so many questions but knows not to overwhelm him with them—to let him come out with it all on his own.
“With boys,” they had told her, in her early days of teaching, “don’t look them in the eye and ask for what you want to know. That gets interpreted as a challenge, a threat display. Just work with them on something, side-by-side, together, something they enjoy, and that’s when they’ll talk to you, on their own terms.”
That’s fine. He doesn’t have to apologize all at once. She’s just thrilled he’s back, and hates her own guts for it, but not enough. She leans over to the bedside table and switches on the lamp, only to hear a sharp, alien sound break through her imbecilic joy.
“Don’t move.”
She freezes, blinking twice. New light through the lampshade is already speeding outward, and her eyes follow it to the doorframe to see that her husband is not there. Instead, there is a stranger outfitted in black: black pants, black gloves, black gun, black turtleneck—in the thick of July no less—and, just as in her paranoid fantasies, full black face mask. There are three holes cut out, two for his eyes and one for his mouth.
After all the weeks of worrying about this very moment, it takes her a few seconds to realize that this is extant, and dire—not a hallucination borne of her late-night spirals.
“Put your hands up,” he barks, his voice deep and twangy.
She can feel heat prickling across her skin, starting from her chest and bleeding up to her scalp, stinging every follicle. She knows she should focus on a happy memory, to ride out of earth on a wave of nostalgia—weekends on the old pontoon boat, muggy wind in her hair, turtles perched on dead trees—but her mind, staunch and irrevocable in its patterns, turns even in this final moment to blame and interrogation.
She should have moved, gone to a gated apartment complex and bought a labradoodle, but no, “It’s still my house damnit,” she’d said—and here she is raising both hands in numb surrender. Losing the trail of fuzzy recollections, she wonders if she has even a nut hair of a chance to survive this. What is she supposed to say in these situations? Where is the trouble whistle her father gave her years ago? (He couldn’t bear to say “rape whistle.”) Will anyone be able to hear her? How methed-out is this guy on a scale of one to ten, how does she alter her approach based on that score, and how is it even possible to determine it? Are break-ins like bears? Should she play dead, or make herself big? Can she reach the slugger? But he’ll shoot her long before she gets to it, she knows. She realizes that no amount of overthinking in the world can procure her any other options when the man, who hasn’t altered his pose over the last thirty seconds, cracks her reverie.
“I didn’t think you was in here.”
There’s been a tonal shift from the initial brusqueness; there is something almost ameliorating about the statement. It is not the precise, sheepish apology she had been anticipating a mere minute ago. Caught off guard, her hands waver in the air, but she sees the gun still facing her and holds her tongue.
“I’d heard…” he continues. “They told me y’all was moving out.”
The burglar seems more hesitant now, even awkward in his rigidity. He’s her husband’s height and build, hence her earlier mistake, but—though it’s hard to tell through the mask—he seems younger than Jared. She wonders how many of these heists he has pulled off already. Is she his first? His fiftieth?
Her musing about his age is overwhelmed by confusion and then anger. Who has her ex been mouthing off to in order to lure a watchful criminal here? Talking in a public place about moving out, or, worse yet, posting on social media? She has blocked him on everything, less out of rage and more because she couldn’t bear to see him with the new model. A former student. Christ. She knows early childhood and college are different worlds, but she thought they fired people for that nowadays. Who knows—this might have been going on for a year or two, with him waiting to get tenure until he told anyone about it. It’s making her nauseous to think about. Or maybe it’s just the gun.
When the young man says nothing more, she ventures, “It’s…my husband…my ex, I mean. He’s the one who’s moving. I’m still here.”
He nods. She realizes the last part did not need clarification.
“But the garage?”
She remembers, and almost smiles.
You’ve been casing the joint a while, she thinks.
“It’s been in the shop down at the dealership for the last two days. They dropped me off here. They’re going to pick me up tomorrow. Transmission went out…”
She’s rambling. She imagines most people do that when they’re nervous, but she tapers off because she doesn’t want to annoy this guy who, at least up to this point, seems to be cogent and not—at least, she hopes—high as balls. She makes a quick decision to treat this night as if it were a business transaction. She remembers the woman shrieking in Fargo and where that got her, so she won’t allow herself histrionics.
“Look,” she says, keeping her hands in the air, despite the growing ache in her muscles.
She’s been meaning to lift weights again, but that’s gone into the big cabinet labeled “Tomorrow” along with the kombucha. “I know you probably want to get in and out of here quickly, so I’m happy to help you.” (She doesn’t say, “I don’t want to die,” because she doesn’t even want to further put that idea into his mind.)
“Right there,” she nods, and points one hand to the nightstand, “there’s a debit card and probably about fifty bucks in my wallet. I know you probably came for more, but I’m not one of those people who keeps wads of cash stuffed inside mattresses, unfortunately.” She realizes that probably sounds like a lie, then backtracks. “Of course, you’re welcome to look anywhere you like. I’m just trying to save you time.”
The intruder is unreadable. He’s not moved an inch, except for his breaths, which she can see coming in and out of him in ragged, slow drags, his chest rising and falling in the amber glow of the lamp. Her presence, she knows now, was not part of his plan, so is it possible that he is almost as unsettled as she is, like the bee they always said was more scared of her than she was of it? She always thought that was bullshit, but as she watches him inhale and exhale she starts to grow a tiny, tender shoot of hope.
“I do, however, have jewelry.”
~
In the walk-in closet, she is standing in front of the cherry wood jewelry armoire, opening the little sliding drawers one by one. Her robber has allowed her to drop her hands and put on her slippers, mostly without verbal cues except for yelping “Slow!” once as she tiptoed towards the closet door.
Don’t worry, she wanted to say, it’s not like I know Krav Maga. She’s not making any grand plans to dash for the door or bash his head in with the baseball bat.
Her father had said to her, when she’d moved to the city for college, “Honey, if someone ever tries to mug you, just give them the damned purse. The reason these little old ladies on the news get shot is they’re too chintzy to hand theirs over. Money’s just paper.” She wasn’t chintzy, and she knows that, but the other aspect of herself she’s reaffirming in this moment is that she does, believe it or not, want to live.
“I think plenty of this is pawnable,” she says, dropping pieces into a plastic bag that he’s holding, having removed it from a pocket in his cargo pants. She wonders what else he brought with him as she picks up a couple of ancient brooches, the glass and rhinestones glinting in the fluorescents. “These may not seem like much, but they are antiques and there’s some worth in that. Of course, the pearls might net you the most.”
She reaches her hand over on a shelf and opens a new box, fashioned to look like a treasure chest. When she opens it, dozens of pearl strands, some with gemstones attached, some freshwater but mostly saltwater, dangle out in a tantalizing white flood.
“Holy shit,” he says. He’s still pointing the gun at her but not as intently now; his eyes are wide as he looks between the pearls and his victim. “He a doctor?”
“He’s a professor, but he came from money,” she says, picking up the first necklace, a long set with a lobster clasp, and palming it briefly. They’d been foils in that way, both teachers of a sort, with disparate backgrounds. “They’re my birthstone, so he’d usually give them as gifts. This one was for our anniversary about a year ago.”
As she picks up each new item—a ring here, a choker here, a bracelet here—and plunks it into the black hole of plastic, she rattles off each occasion attached to it.
“First birthday we spent together…fifth anniversary…Christmas two years ago…”
She’s losing herself in thought, wistful, forgetting why she is in this closet. Her voice is less shaky now than it was a few minutes ago, sharpened by these revenants.
“Valentine’s day the winter we got the house…oh, this is a nice one, a triple strand, another Christmas…and this one from when I lost the first baby…”
She’d given up afterwards, unwilling to go through the hellish tribulations of foreign adoption or IVF, especially after what she’d seen colleagues deal with. She has children, anyway, just not by blood—that’s how she feels. Jared had said their lives would be every bit as full without a baby; it was just a different path, was all.
But maybe he lied. Maybe that was part of why he’d left, part of why he’d gone for a young one. Newbie would give him that, probably. She’d need to brace for it.
“…and, last but not least, this ring was actually inside a bath bomb he bought me once.”
The stranger, without her noticing, has holstered the gun and is now grasping the sagging bag with both hands. She inhales, deep, and shuts the treasure chest lid, then replaces the drawers; she’s left a few charms and trinkets from her family in there, but he doesn’t seem to care or find any of it to be thief-worthy. She claps her hands together as if shaking off dust and in that instant feels, despite the occasion, a bit lighter.
She meets his gaze, and grins.
“What else would you like?”
~
She glides into the bathroom like she’s giving a grand tour, opening the medicine drawers.
“Feel free to peruse these and see if they have any street value, I guess. I don’t have any pain pills, and his meds are already gone, but I have no idea if any of this is still useful.”
He bends to peruse the bottles which, she now remembers, is mostly comprised of supplements—turmeric, fish oil, other oozy capsules to shore up against the onslaught of age and ache—and she grazes her hand over the counter as he rifles around.
“Perfumes? Can you use those?”
She picks up a bottle of White Shoulders, the same scent her grandmother used to wear. Heeding an intrusive thought along the lines of “If I die, I’d like to smell good,” she pushes down the spritzer only to realize too late that she’s had it facing the wrong direction. The floral puff of droplets wafts out toward the burglar, covering him from neck to pockets. He stands up in a ferocious jolt.
“Shit!” he yells.
She takes a step back, dropping the bottle on a bath rug. She’s done it now. She’s gotten too casual about this event, and because of it her brain matter is about to be splattered all across the watercolor print of sandpipers on a beach that hangs behind her.
But in her horror it takes a few seconds to register another sound over the blood rushing in her head—that of laughter. The man is chuckling, trying to wipe off the fragrance but only absorbing it deeper into his black clothes.
“Ain’t I just a goddamned pretty princess,” he says.
For the first time, through the largest hole in the balaclava, she can see that he’s smiling.
~
“I think you’re going to like this, and hopefully it will make up for the spritzing,” she says, opening the door to Jared’s man cave. “Behold: Console City.”
If she thought the man was smiling before, he is elated now. This must be pay dirt, the kinds of things he was hoping to find here but even, due to her husband’s former passions, in larger amounts. His eyes scan the flatscreen TV, the Xbox One, the PS4, the Oculus, and the tricked-out PC with the three monitors. She has no idea about the specs on that system other than the fact that the fan inside it has neon lights on the blade and the keyboard glows in a rainbow gradient pattern.
She remembers being in here with him, cuddled up in the bean bag while he played Warcraft or Diablo or even the old-school Zelda or Final Fantasy games. He didn’t mind if she couldn’t always play with him, like she did with Halo or Borderlands; he just needed an audience. What does it say about his new life that he hasn’t bothered to pick these up yet?
“Is these for the kids?”
She shakes her head, with a sideways smirk. Why does he care?
“No kids. Feel free to take every bit of it. I don’t have anyone to co-op with now.” She glances to the darkness outside of the window. “I’d help you carry it, but I don’t presume you’ll want me to see your car.”
Indeed, she thinks as she tries to avoid observing any specific patterns in the tattoos peeking out from his turtleneck, the less she knows of him, the more he might be inclined to let her live—although he’s not touched his gun in the last few minutes. The occasion is taking on more of the tone of an open house than that of a burglary.
“Thank you,” he almost whispers, looking at her. He then drops the bag of pearls and pharmaceuticals to work on dismantling the labyrinthine black cords.
~
From the garage, he takes the guitar, the power tools (barely used as Jared ended up being far less handy with them than he’d imagined himself to be), and the electronic drum set, dusting off the spiderwebs. She averts her eyes as he drags the kit out of the side door, the rubber footing squeaking across the concrete.
Her study he leaves curiously alone, despite the presence of her laptop. He looks up at the walls of the room, then grumbles and moves onward. She wonders if he’s not a Mac person but doesn’t push it as she’s not sure when she last backed up her lesson plans.
In the guest bathroom there hangs a painting by a bygone local celebrity, an abstract of periwinkle blue and sandy taupe. He insists he has no use for it, but she tries to convince him that it’s worth some money since the artist is no longer alive.
“I’m just trying to help you,” she says, holding up both hands.
“Do I tell you how to teach?”
Alarmed, she asks, “How did you know that?”
Has he been stalking them for longer than she had thought?
Or, even worse, is this a disgruntled former student?
(Remember that C you gave me for arithmetic, bitch? Watch me subtract from your house!)
“All them pictures in the next room,” he says, sighing and stretching upward to remove the painting from the wall, silently acceding to her opinion. “Them kids you’re with. And the crafts. The notes they wrote you, with the crayons and shit, all on the wall.”
“Oh,” she breathes, not sure how to respond.
(Is this why he chose to spare her computer, knowing what her salary is now? Can he intuit that, depending on how the settlement goes, she will lose this house she loves within the next year, anyway?)
Following him into the kitchen, as he props the painting up next to the ever-growing pile of spoils—He took the Who-pudding! He took the roast beast! she thinks, wholly out of season—she glances at the marble countertops and notices that the window above the sink is open. She can’t see the deer—no witnesses tonight—but she can smell the incoming rain and hear the cicadas. She walks to the lifted pane and pulls it back down. He’s been watching her, still crouching next to the haul. If he thinks that she’d attempt to make an escape through that tiny opening he’s got another thing coming. We’re not all as limber as you are, she thinks, but instead of saying that she shrugs and says, “Bugs.” He nods, stands up, and continues wrapping the fine china that she’d pointed out earlier—the wedding set—in layers of grocery bags.
Had she left it unlatched? Had she really been that stupid, after obsessing over all five doors on a regular basis, to leave the window unlocked? Or was he a workman who’d come in at some point—a pest inspector, an air conditioner repairman, a plumber—and had simply switched the latches when she had her back turned?
She watches the back of him now, the muscles of his shoulders, not negligible, shifting under the black sweater as he stacks the plastic-wrapped plates and cups. Did this man have any teachers who gave a damn, when he was one of “them kids?” Any parents? Why is he robbing people instead of fixing a dog’s broken tail or building a bridge or singing on a reality TV show? How did he get here—not into the house, as that was obvious now, but to this pathetic juncture both of their lives?
She can’t know for certain that she is a better person than he is simply because he is the thief and she the bereft. She knows where she came from. “You certainly dug yourself out of a hole,” a professor had once declared, during those awful first day ice-breakers when students spoke their names and their home towns. Hers was utterly unpronounceable and known for chop shops. If she hadn’t had someone who always pushed her, reminded her, held her to a higher standard, how quickly might she have ended up wearing the same black gloves that her burglar is?
She stopped suspecting he would kill her half an hour ago, but now the last traces of her panic are washed away by waves of something ridiculous—pity. As he places the bags of dinnerware with the rest of the haul, humming a tune she vaguely recognizes, she takes another glance around the kitchen. He’s already turned down the Kitchen-Aid on account of its weight and what she guessed was a lack of application to his present life (“But, trust me, one day you’ll be really glad you have this,” she’d protested), so she squints at the cabinet above the fridge.
“Hey!” she chirps, moving forward.
He turns around, alarmed.
“I forgot the liquor!”
She says it as if they are readying a picnic. He tenses as she stretches up on her tiptoes and opens the top cupboard, placing his hand on the gun, but she derides him.
“Do you really think I’d put a glock in a place I can barely reach? Here, hold on to all this.”
She grabs bottle after bottle, again surprised that Jared hasn’t removed them, and hands them down to her guest, who then transfers them to the counter. She closes the cedar wood door and steps down again; even under his mask, she thinks he looks befuddled.
“Some of this is quality stuff, trust me. There’s a four hundred bottle of scotch here.”
“The fuck you say?”
“I mean, that’s how much he told me it was,” she answers, with a shrug. “I wasn’t there when he bought it, so he could have exaggerated.”
She laughs and reaches for the Highland Park Odin. Unopened, it glimmers in a special wooden case that has been crafted to look like the prow of a Viking ship. They had been saving that bottle for her birthday, but she was living alone by the time it arrived. She lifts it up to the robber like she would hold an infant at a christening. He takes it, but frowns, still bemused. Her eyebrows furrow.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, it’s just that…” He looks straight at her, falters, takes a few seconds. “I’ve just ain’t never had real scotch is all. I don’t even think I’ve seen it except for in movies.”
“Oh!” she exclaims, and with this she looks more terrified than she has all night. Without thinking, in the same gesture she’d use for one of her first graders who spilled a cup of juice, she taps the top of his hand. His leather fingers are cold. “Let’s fix that.”
“No,” he growls, recoiling his hand and crossing his arms, almost petulant. “If this is your big idea to get all of your shit back, you’re not gonna get me drunk.”
“This stuff is far too good to get drunk on,” she says, blithe as a berry, already un-stoppering an Ardbeg An Oa. “You sip this.”
She opens the freezer and removes two of the tiny frozen stone cups she used to utilize, pouring them each half a dram; vapor dances and twirls around the smoothed edges as she nudges his portion across the counter.
“To a civilized transaction,” she says, raising the cup. To her surprise, he raises his as well and knocks it against hers with a wet little clicking sound.
It’s good. It’s so damned good. Something about the rush, the remnants of hysteria, the perverse thrill of the scene—could he still kill me? will I ever taste anything after tonight? —enhances every taste bud, and the burn in her throat with the smoke and clove and salt on her tongue gives her the most unencumbered joy she has felt in a month.
He is smiling at her, mulling it around in his mouth, scraping up an opinion. He nods and holds up the cup again in some sort of swashbuckler’s salute.
“That leaves Wild Turkey in the dust.”
She nods back, replying, “I’m glad you like it.”
She sees him looking at the other bottles now—some, like Chambord or Blue Curacao, for fancy cocktails she made once and decided she didn’t like—and his gaze rests on an almost-empty container of Gentleman Jack.
“Not much left in this’n.”
He’s actually eyeing her with something like an accusatory sneer as he grabs it by the squat neck, sloshing it back and forth.
“What?” she spits. Now she’s the one crossing her arms. “It’s not like I’ve been sitting here every night drinking alone and listening to ‘A Long December’ on repeat.”
That is precisely what she’s been doing.
“Counting Crows?” he queries, taking another sip of the Ardbeg.
“Yes!” She jumps a bit, then feels embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she exclaims. “I just thought I was the only one around here who remembered them at this point.”
“Pop-Up Video. That’s how I ‘member ‘em. Back when we had a TV still, I’d get home from school and watch it.”
He finishes the dram, his Adam’s apple jutting outward as he throws back his head, exposing the stubble beneath his chin.
“Ahhhhh,” he exhales. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she says, realizing she has no idea what kind of night this is anymore. “I liked it, too. Wasn’t that where the Rick Roll came from? They used the video from Pop-Up Video when they tricked people into opening it, right?”
“Not sure what you’re talking about. Ain’t had internet in a while,” he grumbles, stretching his hand out for the Ardbeg but pausing until she nods him permission to get more. “The nineties shit, though, that shit was my jam. Semisonic, Joan Osborne, Jewel, Alanis, Sugar Ray, Fastball, Lisa Loeb even, she was a 10…“
“…Third Eye Blind, Goo Goo Dolls, Matchbox 20, Marcy Playground…”
“Oh GOD yeah Marcy Playground.”
“You were humming ‘Sex and Candy’ earlier, I think.”
He looks a little severe now, like he’s been caught stealing, which is of course exactly what is happening.
“I love that song,” she says, holding up her palms in an assuaging signal. “They were big at the same time as Harvey Danger.”
He relaxes a little and offers her the bottle of Gentleman Jack he admonished her with earlier. She accepts the libation, then tips up the bottle and takes a taste of her old friend.
“You surprise me with the music, though.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She looks him up and down, perhaps made too brave by the oncoming buzz. “I figured a tough guy like you would be into death metal or gangster rap.”
“Who’s to say I ain’t?” he bristles. “Them were just good years for me, is all. Middle nineties. A lot of shit hadn’t gone sour yet,” he mumbles, staring somewhere to the left of her. She’s not sure if she’s talking about generalities, like 9/11, or his own life. She wonders how much younger than her he truly is, or if she’s not that much older and he’s just much more in shape. He snaps back to stare at her and points at her shirt.
“That some indie band?”
She looks down, failing to remember what she’d put on a few hours ago before bed.
“This? No, this isn’t a band! This is the girl from Mad Max: Fury Road.”
“Mad Max? Mel Gibson?”
“Uhh, the same universe, but this is the most recent movie in the franchise, and by some accounts the best of them. I mean, if you put a gun to my head—”
Foot already in mouth, there’s an awkward pause wherein she looks to his hip, then gulps. He tilts his head to the side and brings the scotch once more to his lips.
“—I’d say it’s the best action movie of the last ten years. It’s my favorite, at least.”
“Wow. Better’n Braveheart?”
“Is that your barometer?”
“I have no idea what that means but you’re goddamned right it is.”
“Well, I think so. And it’s certainly shorter than Braveheart.”
She spies the clock on the wall, downing the rest of the Gentleman Jack in one swig.
“I mean…how much time do you have?”
~
She glances at both sets of their feet propped up on opposite ends of the coffee table and wonders how many months it has been since someone laughed in this room.
He digs the movie, of course. She’s seen it half a dozen times now, so she can peek at him sideways from time to time without missing much plot. His face is itching him under the balaclava—probably not something he intended to wear for several uninterrupted hours—and in between cheers, questions, exclamations, and guffaws, he moves his fingers under the fabric to scratch what she imagines is his beard.
He laughs during moments she herself would have thought inappropriate (such as when the Splendid Angarak gets crushed underneath the wheels of Immortan Joe’s rig), but otherwise the atmosphere has become nonchalant. If not for his wardrobe and weapon, this could be any old hangout, or a first date with someone she met on OKCupid.
In a quieter moment, when the wives are learning about seeds from one of the Many Mothers in the desert, she turns to him and asks, “Will you need this TV, too?”
Despite her earlier admonitions, she is, in all probability, drunk now.
He takes another swig from the second bottle of scotch they’ve opened, this one a ten-year-old Laphroiag, then scrunches up his lips and makes a grunting noise.
“Nah,” he says, throwing his wrist around, grandiose and magnanimous. “Damned thing’s already mounted to the wall. Too much of a pain to get down.”
She turns back to the screen with an infinitesimal smile.
Even more than Max or Furiosa, her visitor is excited by the War Boys, the powdery white henchmen of Immortan Joe with their apocalyptic religion and souped-up vehicles. “Shiny and Chrome!!!” he starts to shout along with the film.
Most of all, though, he roots for Nux—the tumor-ridden stowaway, the bad guy turned noble sacrifice. “Witness me,” Nux whispers, holding up one pointing, querulous finger before he steers a hard left, crashing the rusted truck, pulverizing Rictus, and stopping the cavalcade of doom behind him. In the only shot she hates, the Doof Warrior’s electric guitar stretches from the carnage out towards the viewer in slow motion. She shakes her head before noticing that her new pal is sitting on the edge of his seat, his elbows on his knees and his chin perched on his clenched fists.
~
“I don’t wanna do this to you.”
“I’m telling you, you don’t have a choice.”
“This shit’s fucking retarded.”
She grimaces. If this were a student, she would instantly correct that, but she doesn’t want to push her luck more than she already has and pretends she didn’t hear him.
“Look. I want to give you a head start. If I don’t immediately call the police after you leave, there are going to be questions I don’t know how to answer. The only explanation I’ll have for not immediately alerting anyone is if I’m tied up.”
She jabs the roll of duct tape into his face, but he’s still not buying it.
“Y’uns don’t got rope or nothin’? Bungee cords? That’s gonna hurt to pull off.”
“You can try to put it on my clothes wherever possible, as opposed to skin. Anyway, the maids are coming in the morning—they usually get here about eight o’clock, and they’ll discover me then. But by that time you could hypothetically be in another state.”
She is having to get rid of them, due to the cost—she has already cut the cable package which, crucially, had included the security system—but she has asked them to come one more time. She will miss those ladies, their affable precision, but things will be easier to clean with just her being here, anyway.
He crosses his arms again, shaking his head, refusing to meet her eye, but she’s relentless.
“Even if I’d wanted to rat on you, I won’t be able to give a description, because I saw nothing of you. I won’t even snitch to them about your crush on Lisa Loeb.”
This cracks the veneer a bit. He chuckles, rueful.
“Just let me use the bathroom beforehand because I’ll be holding it a while.”
She grabs his sinewy wrist with one hand and places the roll into it with the other, then turns and gallivants to the master bathroom, leaving no time for argument.
When she flushes, washes her hands, and reemerges into the bedroom where this odyssey began, he’s cursing under his breath and ripping off a strip of tape.
~
“You breathin’ okay?”
“Yes.”
“Sure?”
“I promise.”
He glowers down at his handiwork, still holding the small piece for her mouth.
“I’m…sorry.”
She blinks a couple of times.
“For which part?”
“All of it. I done this job a few times but…when you get to know the lady…I don’t know, fuck it. I guess this part most of all.” He scratches the top of his scalp with his free hand. “I never…had anyone at home, when I did it.”
She sniffs, looking up at the ceiling, speculative.
“Oh, I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I’ve had a great time,” she admits, her tone amiable. “I can’t believe I’ve waited this long to get robbed.”
He sniggers and kneels again.
“People rob each other in a lot of ways.”
Careful and close, he lays the last piece over her lips, pressing it in at the corners. She can see his eyes now—green, with dots of gold. As he makes sure he didn’t catch any loose hairs, his gloves moving the tendrils behind her ears, she catches a chill.
“I don’t exactly know what happened to you,” he rasps. “But I know it was stupid.”
Still buzzed, she feels a tremor in her throat, the sneak of salt in her eyes.
She wants to ask him one more time if he needs the Kitchen Aid, to make a joke about Marcy Playground, to wish him a safe journey in whatever direction he is taking. But she can’t—she can’t even grin, with the tape pulling on her skin—so she just nods.
He stands again. He has loaded everything in his vehicle except the first garbage bag they packed, which he swings over his shoulder now like a traveler in a fairy tale. He stands in the doorframe, where first she saw him hours ago, staring down at her. She knows now, for certain, that it’s over—that, for whatever reason, he will leave her alive.
Before he steps away, he points one timid finger at her, mouthing a voiceless command.
~
She is sound asleep, head lolled to one side, when Pam finds her in the morning. She is having lackadaisical dreams she won’t remember, something about a boat, when the maid drops the Lemon Pledge and ShamWow on the carpet with a banshee wail. She opens her eyes and howls a half-muffled bellow of protest as the tape on her mouth is torn off in one unsympathetic rip, like a ruthless older brother with a band-aid.
In the midst of the maid’s frenzy, she says the words she will say again and again in the hours and the days that come, resolute in the face of other concerns—to the policeman who scribbles her narrative on a yellow legal pad, to the insurance claims officer who tallies up her losses, to the lawyer who slides the papers across a heavy wooden desk. To the salesman who asks if she needs her new exercise bike delivered, to the friend —Ashley—who breaks the news she saw on Facebook about the baby. To her father, on the phone. To herself. A common mantra, once empty, now quite true.
“I’m okay, actually. I’m okay.”
