It was a childish habit—checking under all the doors in a public washroom to make sure someone wasn’t lurking—because what would Maggie do if she actually found someone? Scream? Fight back? Wilt? Yet she could never resist the urge.
In this particular bathroom, Maggie discovered only one pair of feet. They were at the far end of the glinty silver latrine, behind the final stall door, which was closed and, presumably, locked. And they were turned, these feet were, in the wrong direction—as if the person attached to them might be barfing or about to flush the toilet. Maggie hurried back to the opposite end of the room, taking the toilet closest to the exit. She locked the door, covered the seat with paper, squatted so her skin wasn’t even touching, then started peeing as quickly as possible.
She was acutely aware of the sound coming from the only other compartment in use. Or, rather, she was aware of a lack of sound. Though she loathed in general the prospect of listening to another person pee (or worse), she was further loath to find herself in an enclosed space with someone who wasn’t using it for its intended purpose. She knew about public restrooms. Everybody knew about public restrooms. At the girls’ school she’d attended when she was little, a teacher had been raped in one of the stalls after hours. It was her first encounter with the word. She’d taken it home to her mother, without yet comprehending its meaning. From the way her teacher had said it, she’d understood that the word had negative connotations. But when her mother explained it, jabbing her index finger into the invisible air between them, Maggie thought she might faint from embarrassment. “Never mind,” she’d said, backing up slowly. “Never mind,” she’d said again, as though she could undo her sudden new knowledge; undo the existence of the word’s meaning altogether.
Still squatting, Maggie bent over even farther and angled herself so that she could peek—her shorts around her knees—under the partition in the direction of the far toilet. Though there were several stalls between them, she could clearly make out the feet, which were now firmly facing in Maggie’s direction. She sat up clumsily; the tiniest splash of urine landed on her underwear.
She closed her eyes and flushed; her heart practiced hand-speed drills against her breastplate. An image—one that didn’t belong to her, one that belonged, if at all, to the coed—skimmed along the backs of her eyelids, a pebble across a pond. The detectives had worked up to the more gruesome photographs. They’d started with a shot of the coed’s building. Then a shot of the coed herself—professionally taken, nondescript gray background, cocked head, sweet but canned smile. The third photo was of the back of her head. An oval bruise was below the hairline, just above the nape of her neck. Her chin—what Maggie could see of her chin from the angle of the camera—was pushed up against the base of a toilet. Maggie had looked up at the detectives. “It’s just like my bruise,” she’d said, massaging her neck. They’d nodded. They’d felt so certain—the three of them—that it must have been the same man. But by the time they’d run the gamut of mug shots—there’d been a witness to the murder—they discovered it wasn’t. Mark, when he got home, after he saw the cops standing over her and then had seen what they’d been showing her, was furious. “What I’m trying to figure out,” he kept saying, pacing toward the kitchen table, then away from it, “is why you felt the need to show her these?” He’d grabbed at the photos of the coed, but they’d swiped them from his reach. “Explain the logic,” he kept saying. “Just help me understand.” It was Maggie who showed the detectives to the door. And in the morning, it was Maggie—though she knew it wasn’t the same man; they all did—who began surfing the web for pocket pistols. Online, she discovered a whole world dedicated entirely to personal defense. She’d found it utterly entrancing.
She used an elbow now to push her way hastily out of the stall, nearly racing to the bathroom’s exit.
Outside the sun was blinding, the air thick. She took a deep breath, then exhaled steadily.
It was hard to believe they were headed in the direction of a multi-state storm, but she’d gotten out her phone while she was walking Gerome and a brief search had turned up some legitimately brutal photos as evidence—loose power lines, homes with trees resting on their roofs. An old man was dead, though that might have been an unrelated story. Still.
Gerome hadn’t peed when she walked him, but at least he’d gotten to stretch his legs.
She made a beeline across the parking lot in the direction of the car. She’d left the windows cracked, but Maggie knew it sometimes took fewer than fifteen minutes for a dog to die from heat stroke. She’d seen it too many times before.
A man dressed as a cowboy tipped his hat in her direction as they crossed paths on the asphalt.
“Nice tits,” he said.
She stopped, then turned. Instinctively, she raised a hand to her chest, a protective gesture. A man was accosting her in broad daylight. She couldn’t believe it.
“Excuse me?” she said.
The man, who had also stopped and turned, also said, “Excuse me?”
“What did you say to me?” Her therapist had once told her that, for victims, confrontation could be a powerful tool. To ignore new moments of vulnerability might be to encourage preexisting fear.
“Ma’am?”
“Just now,” said Maggie, “what did you say?”
“Did I say something?”
“You did.”
Except now Maggie wasn’t sure. Now she was confused. She’d heard the word so precisely: tits. But now the voice she perceived in her head didn’t match up with the one this cowboy was using. Evidence indicated that babies, after birth, could distinguish sounds once heard in utero. Maggie wondered now if she’d plucked this word—this tits—from a memory, from a memory of a memory, or, worse, from an article she’d read earlier that morning. Space, as a concept, kept a certain type of person awake at night—its vastness; its ceaselessness; the notion, for instance, that the Milky Way itself was a blip on something numinously more massive. What sometimes kept Maggie awake was the idea of auditory dimensions and the infinitesimally imperceptible regions of her own head. It was possible she’d been hallucinating, but possible also that her energetic id had an internal voice that had chosen this moment to introduce itself.
“Did I wish you a nice day?” the man said. “My wife says I’m always wishing people nice days. She says I’m on autopilot half the time. Half the time, she says, I have no idea what I’m saying.”
A woman in the distance whistled.
The cowboy turned, gave a thumbs-up, then looked back at Maggie. “There she is now. Bet you anything I’m in hot water just for talking to you.” He tipped his hat again. “Nice day,” he said. Then he was gone.
Maggie didn’t know what to say, only what not to say. She would not be telling Mark about this. He wouldn’t have believed her.
Immediately beneath Maggie’s moccasins was a freshly paved twelve-inch surface covering made of sand and rock glued together with man-made hydrocarbons, beneath which was a six-inch layer of recycled asphalt product, beneath which was an underlayment of gravel, beneath which—deep, deep, deep beneath—was the continental crust itself, igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary. Some twenty miles beneath the crust was the lithosphere, beneath which was the asthenosphere, beneath which was the upper mantel, beneath which was the liquid outer core, beneath which was the solid inner core, where—on this particular day—the temperature was just shy of 10,800°F, as hot as the surface of the sun.
Some thirty-nine thousand miles above, Maggie shivered.