The vanishing year, p.25
The Vanishing Year, page 25
My stomach seizes and I feel the sweat on my upper lip. I lick the corners of my mouth, but my tongue is as dry as sandpaper.
“Is that why they’re back now?” My voice is a rasp.
“What people? The people you screwed over back when you were living a disgusting life? Selling drugs on playgrounds?” Henry chuckles softly and shakes his head, tapping the bubbles out of the syringe. “No one is ‘back now.’ I found Jared and killed him. Two years ago, because the police were incompetent and I realized it was you he wanted. He didn’t know Tara existed. Biggest mistake of his life, I’d say.” His mouth twisted once, a sideways kiss. “Mick died of a drug overdose in witness protection. Years ago.”
“Witness protection?” This is why there was no Mick. “Wait, you killed Jared?” I stare at him. This man, this elegant, manicured man, my husband, who likes lamb only on Wednesdays and thinks that cabernet should never be drunk with pasta because they are both too heavy. He is a murderer. It’s inconceivable.
“Don’t be so shocked, Zoe. He’s not the first, he’s not the last. No one will miss him either. Just like they won’t miss you.” He flicks the syringe once more with his finger and walks slowly toward the bed. I inch backward. “It actually wasn’t even hard. He’s not that smart.”
“But . . . but if there is no Jared, and Mick is dead, you were doing these things? The vandalism, the break-in?” My voice hitches to a screech.
Technically, I am the reason my sister is dead. Technically, Jared killed her. But only because he thought she was me. My life, my choices, my mistakes. A simple case of mistaken identity, that’s what set this ball in motion. Jared was coming back for me, a revenge plot for bringing down his house of cards. Henry only continued what Jared started, after, of course, he killed him.
“Do you think I got to where I am by chance, Zoe? That my money, my life, my position is all a happy accident? Truthfully, you’ve tired me out.”
“I don’t know what that means.” I hiss it out between my teeth, kicking my foot in his direction.
“Tara used to just sit in the house and read. You? You’re out of control, running all over Manhattan, following me to the gym.” I must look shocked at this because he half-laughs. “I know every move you make. Your phone, the apartment. With technology, it’s so easy now. GPS. Cameras the size of thumbnails. How do you think I found you at Elisa’s? I know all about your dates with that little reporter, even the little sleepover—that you lied about. Every keystroke on the computer has been recorded. Everything you’ve done since you’ve lived in my home, Zoe.”
“Who’s the girl at the gym?” I spit.
He shrugs. “She’s nobody.” He means it, too. She is nobody to him.
“Caroline? The phone call? That was you, too?” I try to sit up, but my arm flails, shackled above my head and I can’t get purchase on the bed.
He stands over me, with a faint icy smile. “You’re just so out of control all the time, Zoe. You don’t listen to me. You don’t need me, not the way Tara needed me. Tara was sweet, compliant. She needed me. You are defiant. Unlovable. You’re just so fucking unlovable.” His voice is low and the words pierce my heart. He could be right. “You’re indifferent to me, Zoe. I can’t have that. It was different before, with your blissful ignorance. But you had to push, seek her out. Find Caroline. Then your sister. You ruined everything, not me. You’re never content.” His hand grips my knee and I open my eyes. He slides the needle into my thigh and depresses the plunger.
I gasp. “What are you doing, Henry?”
“You didn’t just owe me a wife, Zoe. You owed me Tara. Do you see now?” His face is inches away from mine and I can see all the pores in his skin. His breathing comes in quick rasps. He fades from view and the room wavers and spins.
• • •
When I wake up, the room is dark. The clock on the dresser blinks two a.m. I sit up and my arm shoots through with pain. It is numb and buzzing cold. In the dark, I hear the rustle of sheets next to me. Henry.
“I can’t feel my arm,” I mumble groggily and Henry flicks on the light. I realize I’ve been dressed in a white silk nightgown and robe that isn’t mine. It looks like a bridal negligee. I can’t lift my arms, my legs. I need to get out of here. Henry, clad in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, holds a small key. Deftly, he lifts my arm, pinning it against the wall, while he unlocks the handcuffs and switches them. In the brief second the handcuffs are off, I make a clumsy attempt to flail, softly fobbing him in the cheek. He slaps me. Hard. My face beats a steady hot pain, and my eyes water.
“Do it again, Zoe, and I’ll kill you right now,” he spits at me. Then his expression sags, my sleepiness softening the edges of his face.
I try to focus my eyes on Henry, who is splitting and coming back together, again and again. It reminds me of watching Evelyn’s old television when she worked nights: scrambled soft-core porn channels, a flash of skin here or there, maybe a blinking Technicolor breast. I close my eyes, yellow spots and flashes of color.
When I open my eyes again, Henry is standing in front of me, naked, erect, cupping his penis. His hands move and slide up my thighs. I turn my face away and he pulls me back by my chin. I realize that I’m naked under the negligee and I kick my feet. I struggle to sit up.
“No,” I mumble. The drugs are wearing off, I think. The “No” sounds clearer to me but I can’t tell.
“Settle, my love.” Sometime in the last few minutes, he’s lit candles, turned off the lights. He lies on top of me, kissing my neck, and I push against his chest. “Goddamn it, Zoe. Just for once, be compliant.” He stands up, hastily, embarrassed, slapping at his thigh, at his flaccid failure. “This has never happened before.” He’s both apologetic and accusing; his eyes shine with hatred and he hovers over me until I think he might hit me, his fist clenched, knuckles white. I set my jaw, prepare for the punch, and close my eyes.
He turns away and dons his pajama bottoms. When he turns back, he’s holding a syringe. A quick pinch in my other thigh and my vision swims.
• • •
He brings me trays of food, and I become fixated on the clock each time I’m awake. 6:27 a.m. 4:13 p.m. 5:42 a.m. I try to track the days, but I keep losing count and have to start over. I give up trying to remember and with my free hand, press my thumbnail into the skin along my hip bone until it comes away tinged pink with blood. One half-moon for each day. Or what I think is a day, sometimes it’s hard to remember if it was a.m. or p.m. when I woke last, and therefore has it been a day or twelve hours? I can pass my index finger over the healing lines, feel the scabs, and count. Sometimes, when I bolt awake, panicked and gasping, I feel for these small incisions. Six, I’ve been here six days. Then eight. Then ten.
I think he dresses me in Tara’s clothes, black cocktail dresses and silk pantsuits. Where would an agoraphobic wear pantsuits?
He walks me to the bathroom, two, maybe three times a day, handcuffed with the steel tip of the gun in my back and then plank-walks me back to bed. Then, he props me up, feeds me crackers and juice. Talks to me, tells me about his day. His words float around, echoing as though he’s in an airplane hangar. If I say what too many times, he gets angry. I wonder what he wants with me? Will I just be here forever? His replacement Tara, chained to the bed like an animal?
Will I die here?
Will anyone miss me?
Does anyone care?
A shot to the leg. I barely feel it.
• • •
I’ve started getting sick. Throwing up, hot green bile on the bed, which makes Henry furiously angry.
“What will you do with me?” I ask him, weakly, a long string of spit trailing from my mouth. I’m lying on my side, my face sweating. Whatever he’s injecting me with, it’s too much. My body has started to reject it. It’s making me nauseated and weak. I will die here, in this isolated house in clothes that are not mine.
He’s toweling up my filth and he smiles, a clever, Henry-ish smile. “Yates called me, said she’s been trying to call you. I said you’d left me. You were staying at a hotel in the city and I didn’t know which one. She said she had news on Mick, so I’m guessing she’s discovered his death. A shockingly good detective for a woman. He was living under a different name. WITSEC, you know?” He says all this conversationally, as he works at a stubborn sticky spot on the bare mattress. “After you left town, he turned state’s witness, brought down the whole organization. He did a very small amount of prison time, then went into witness protection. I figured it out easily enough, but then again, I’m fairly well connected. The feds, they don’t talk much to the police.”
My head feels heavy and I let it sink down to my arm, my face wet with tears, sweat. Maybe spit. I am starting to stink.
“But what will you do with me?” I ask again, dumbly, not knowing if he’d even answered the question or not.
“We have three months until hunting season. See, you’ll come back to me then. Realize your mistake, how much you’ve missed me. You’re all alone in the world, Zoe, you have no one. You only have me. You leave your hotel, come back here. To beg for my forgiveness. You try to find me in the woods behind the house, as a surprise.” His voice has lowered to a whisper, his finger caressing my cheek. “I’ll think I’ve hit a deer. It’s tragic, really.”
“Henry, people will look for me. Officer Yates, Lydia, Cash. Someone will wonder. You can’t get away with this.”
“Tara never thought I was stupid, Zoe. But you, you question me at every turn. Honestly, it’s so infuriating.” He says this conversationally. “I asked Yates to pass it along to Cash and Lydia. We had a rather heated conversation about your past. Your secrets. I told her everything, your drug pushing. Evelyn. You are not the person everyone thinks you are.” He purrs in my ear. “You just want to be left alone. You’re afraid. You’ve run away again.” He walks over to the dresser, picks up a wad of cash, waves it in my face. “You’ve even taken some of my money.”
I had shared different pieces of my story with different people, but no one knew the whole thing. Cash knew the most, he wouldn’t be deterred. But, but, he would go to Yates first. After her talk with Henry, she’d assume I’d stolen Henry’s money and skipped town.
Henry lies on the bed, curled into me, his breath hot and wet on my neck and I want to kick him away but I can’t make my legs cooperate. Three months. He’s going to keep me here for three months.
I’ll die first.
• • •
I wake up covered in urine. I smell it before I feel it. Henry is ripping the sheets from underneath me and I tumble against my cuffed wrist, shearing the skin until the blood runs down my arm, which enrages him even more. He is angry, yelling words I can’t understand. The sheets come away piss yellow and red. He rips off my underpants and nightgown, feels along my hip, those crusty ridges. He asks me, What the fuck is this? I answer him, It’s my clock. I don’t think it through; it just comes out and not even coherent. I can’t even be sure of what I say, it sounds garbled. All he hears is clock.
He marches to the dresser. Rips the clock cord out of the wall and slams the door behind him. With my free hand, I feel along my naked hip. Twelve days. I’ve been here twelve days.
• • •
I think he leaves the house during the day. I force myself awake, hear the door slam, the car slide down the driveway. I scream for as long as I can. I imagine Trisha from the market down the road in a little pink warm-up suit, shiny and metallic looking, a bright purple sweatband, new sneakers, trekking past the house, on a power walk trying for the last time to lose the baby weight. I scream for Trisha. I scream until my voice gives out and I am weak, hoarse. I scream all day. Or at least what I think is all day. I scream until Henry comes home.
• • •
Sunup, sundown, faint lights through the curtains, switch arms, a sponge bath. His hands roam my naked body but he can’t keep it up, so he gives up. More foreign clothing: track suits and gym clothes, baggy and falling off, I’m wasting away. I’d rather just starve to death. That will come faster than three months, surely.
“I got you a present.”
A smaller syringe, a faint yellow liquid.
“It won’t make you sick.” He smiles. This is my present. A drug that will kill me slower. I need to do something.
“Henry, wait. Hal.” I recall the name on the back of the picture. Hal and TJ. My voice is thick, molasses coated, stuck like tar on my tongue. I feel the edge of my dress, a summer garden dress, fit for bridal and baby showers, sweet-smelling perfume, and flutes of champagne. Pizzelles. Where did that come from? I remember my sister’s picture, smiling in front of the library on her college graduation day. A flower dress.
“What?” He stands at the foot of the bed, his fingers tapping against my bare foot impatiently. I struggle to sit up. Between doses, I retain a shocking amount of lucidity. Like the drug doesn’t so much seep from my system as much as it dumps out, the fog lifting like a heavy stage curtain.
“Hal,” I repeat.
“Don’t call me that.” His eyes narrow, his wrist, holding the syringe, flicks.
“Why? Isn’t it what you want?” I inch forward, suddenly sure-footed. Steady. I reach out, the handcuff pulling against my skin like a vise and I touch his arm. It’s warm under my fingertips and I close my eyes, remembering when, not that long ago, I would have made this gesture sincerely. Loving. The flat bones in his wrist are unyielding. He meets my gaze and falters. “Let me try.”
I see him consider this. I see him think about me, in her clothes, reading Ruth Rendell and Sherlock Holmes in peep toe bedroom slippers and calling him Hal, picnics in the woods, patiently waiting in our towering apartment for him to arrive home, excited to see him, jumping up, wrapping my legs around his waist. A lifetime of missionary positions and dinners determined by what Henry ate for lunch, or what day of the week it is. Me, being content with this. Obedient. Compliant. He wavers. I see it in the way the syringe wobbles in his hand.
“Hal.” I say it again, but softer, coy, and I avert my gaze. Demure. How I would act if I were truly submissive, try to channel this twin intuition I’ve seen on Oprah. Even think, for a crazy second, if she can see me or hear me, Give me a goddamn sign, Joanie. What would you do? “What if I could do this, we could be happy, couldn’t we? We were once, right? Remember, the day in the woods? The picnic, I wore that purple shirt? We made love against the tree?”
I take a chance here, remembering the force at which he pushed me against that tree, the bark gouging into the soft skin on my back. I think back through our marriage. All the moments of the highest intensity, sweetest romance: Paris, the rooftop. Washington Square Park. Were they all repeat performances? His attempt to revive Tara, relive his past? I’d venture yes, by the way his eyes cloud and narrow and he’s studying me, torn between his logic and his base-level desires. His face softens, loses an edge.
He shakes his head, says nothing. I continue, “Paris? Our honeymoon?” And here, he breaks a bit, I can see it. His eyes widen and his jaw slacks. Henry is a rational man, but he wants this. Most people forgo logic when faced with something impossible that they viscerally want. “Let’s go to Paris. Again. You and me. We’ll relive it. Again. This time for real. Hal and TJ,” I choke out, lower my voice, dip my chin to my chest, and whisper, “You can help me, Hal. Show me. How to act, I mean. All I’ve ever wanted is for you to take care of me.” I realize with a sickening jolt that it’s actually true.
He doesn’t speak, he simply backs out of the room, his hand clutched tight around the syringe, his knuckles and his face an identical shade of white. He doesn’t agree. Yet. But he will.
At the very least, I’m here, still chained, but clearheaded. All I have to do is wait.
• • •
“Hal. Hal.” I shake him, gently. It’s midnight, or later, I can’t tell. “I have to go.” He mumbles something against the pillow.
He hasn’t drugged me in a whole twenty-four hours. He avoids me, and this is either very good or very bad. He’s considering my offer. He hasn’t talked to me, but I chatter at him, rattling off every little thing I can think of that I saw in his boxes, on his corkboard. I talk about our wedding, my plate of scallops, the ornate centerpieces, how it was all just for us, which was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen. I pretend to swoon and I’m girly. Excited, even. We could reenact it. Renew our vows, in Paris! He pretends to ignore me.
It’s brass tacks time, I blather about whatever comes to mind, about all the things I might have said, if I had been myself, but completely and totally under his thumb, meek and in love with him. It’s not even hard, like my brain has blocked out the mental images that should come naturally. Remember that day on the boat? I vaguely remember a boat, I don’t even know if Tara was on it. He has yet to speak. I’m becoming one person in his mind, I can feel it in the way he looks at me when I say certain things and he’s not sure: Tara or Zoe? Or rather, even if he knows that we can’t possibly be the same person, he sees the possibility exist for the first time. That I could pretend this, and stay. That maybe if I did that, became his preferred reality, we could be happy the way he and Tara were happy.
I see him doubt his own sanity. But sometimes, I see the way he draws a breath, quick and sharp, and I know my wildly flung guesses are occasionally hitting bull’s-eyes. I just have to throw out enough of them.
I nudge him with my unchained hand. “Hal. Please. I don’t want to wet the bed again. Remember how mad you were?” I try not to remind him of Zoe, only Tara. I try to morph into her, but biology trumps psychology. I have to go to the bathroom.
He staggers up, grabs a key off the dresser, and without a word, unlocks me. He studies me as I use the toilet, and I even find myself wondering if Tara would do this, this way. I wash my hands. He clears his throat in the doorway, the bathroom low lit with the vanity bulb.
