You can’t believe you are hungry. Aren’t you supposed to feel nauseous instead? Locked in a car with a throat-slasher? Bleeding? It must be nerves emptying acid into your stomach and making you think you are hungry. Where does it say in those books and movies that the victim felt hungry while they were in grave danger? You’d like to complain. Letters should be sent to writers of thrillers everywhere. You never mention hunger, the letters should say. You are wrong. You haven’t done your research. You yourselves haven’t let yourself be victims so that you know exactly what’s going on inside the head of one. Go out and be victims, the letter would say. Real ones, you’d add. The killer shakes his head. “What’s the matter?” you say.
“You’re too old,” he says, and he stops the car. You’ve been feeling this way anyway, lately. Your daughter keeps laughing, telling you that you are on the doorstep of fifty. You wonder what that doorstep looks like. Is it a large sheet of granite like the doorstep to your home that continually has green splats of goose poop on it from the goose who likes to stand on the granite and peck at your glass door, wanting in? The flesh around your face has been feeling looser. You were hoping while kissing Paul the last time that he didn’t notice. You think you even tried to think of kissing “firmly” last time, so that he would not notice. You used to tell yourself that your hair, with its gray, sometimes made you look blond in certain light or from a distance, but now it really looks as gray as a sad cloudy day, as bleak as crows calling in a fallow field on a sad cloudy day, as miserable as cold rain beginning to fall on that sad cloudy day in that fallow field with the crows wheeling overhead, calling their faraway call that reaches into your heart and splays it open.
Too old for what? you think to ask, but don’t. There’s no point in hearing an answer you wouldn’t understand. He answers you anyway, even though you never voiced the question. “For killing you. When I kill people too old, they are more ready for it and the energy doesn’t come out from their eyes.” You don’t say anything. You hold your breath. If he isn’t going to kill you, then what is he going to do with you? Is he telling you to get out of the car on your own? That now is your chance? You begin to reach for the door handle, and think maybe when you try to open it he will press the button that unlocks it.
You are so amazed when he does unlock it that for a second you don’t pull the handle to open the door. You look at him out of the corner of your eye. He is scratching both his arms again. He is shaking his head. You get out of the car. You step out on the side of the road onto fallen pine needles. You start heading down the road. The road, of course, must lead to somewhere. You will come to a house. You will come to a bigger road. Your leg with the wound wants to stay behind. Your leg with the wound wants to stay seated in the car without weight on it and without the cold wind touching it. Your leg with the wound doesn’t care about the killer seated in the car with you. Your leg could stand that killer a little longer. You grab your leg from behind, lifting up on it to help it take the steps it needs to take in order for you to get away. Up ahead, it is so dark that you imagine you could walk off the road and into the forest and not even know it.
Then the sound you are dreading to hear you hear. It is the killer opening the car door. It is the killer’s footsteps coming up behind you. You imagine he is going to grab you from behind and kill you here, instead of in the car, where it would be too hard to extract your body once you were dead. You start to run, of course, but your leg, the one that would rather be sitting back in the car, doesn’t let you run. You hobble forward. You scream for help. You can hear your voice getting carried off by the wind, traveling behind you. He catches up to you and grabs you by the arm. “This way,” he says, and he pushes you into the forest holding a flashlight in front of him, lighting up the fallen red and gold leaves. He puts you up against a tree. “Sit down,” he says.
Great, it’s about time, your wounded leg says. Your other leg, your good leg, could kick your wounded leg for being so stupid.
“You must be about fifty,” he says, pointing the flashlight in your face. “Do you have daughters? Is one a teenager?” The face of your oldest girl flashes before your eyes. You see her long hair and her perfect eyebrows and her pointy elbows that seem to jut out all the time. “Is she?” he says. He kicks your wounded leg now with the heel of his shoe. You scream, and roll forward, then you nod. It is your bad leg making you nod, not wanting the pain to happen again. “If you tell anyone what happened, or what I look like, I will find your daughter. I will cut her throat,” he says. You think about your brother. His death was enough. Enough, enough, you want to say. This many members of my family can’t kill themselves or be killed. There has to be a limit, you want to say. Isn’t there some kind of limit? Isn’t one tragic death per lifetime enough? Oh, no, you think. you can’t kill her. She doesn’t want to die. And realizing this you are relieved. You know now that Sofia, despite her sagging shoulders, despite her hair hanging in front of her face, is not like your brother at all. She wants to live. You see it in how she fights to regain her speed in that last twenty-five of her one-hundred free, how her shoulders power through the water, how she slowly, steadily gains on the field as if she imagines her former slow self is there in another lane and she will beat it. You make a deal, with God of course, because the killer is an animal and won’t listen anyway. You tell God you’ll remember to compliment Sofia from now on. You won’t make the same mistake your father did with your brother. You’ll stop yourself from saying, “Fix your hair,” or “Keep your back straight,” and instead you’ll say things like, “Your first twenty-five was so fast!” “That swimsuit looks good on you!” “You got an A in English? That’s terrific.” Just let her live, you think. Deal?
“I read your identification in your wallet,” the killer says. He recites your name, your address. He recites your driver’s license number, which you haven’t even memorized yourself, but it sounds right, as if he has memorized it. He throws your purse at you, and it hits you in the chest. You did not think your purse was so heavy. You did not think there was that much in there that could cause so much pain. Does your hairbrush with your hair and your daughters’ hair in it really weigh so much? Does your ChapStick you never use weigh that much? Do your coins? And suddenly you remember how to say coins in Spanish, monedas, and you wonder why you couldn’t remember that before when you were helping Alex with her homework and she asked you what the word meant. How is it that you remember this word when a killer is standing over you holding a long-bladed knife, and his arms, up and down, are covered in scratch marks, and your leg is throbbing and your mouth is so dry? Is this another thing to write and tell these writers of thrillers about, that even when you are faced with possibly losing life, with the lives of your family being lost, you remember stupid things you could not remember before? Monedas sounds heavier than coins, and now you are not surprised that for a moment you cannot breathe when your purse is thrown at your chest. All the monedas in Spain seems to have been thrown at your ribcage at once. The killer turns and leaves. He is not going to kill you. You will live. He is off to kill someone else. Someone young. You are too old to be killed. What good fortune, you think. But it is not something you want to tell others. I was spared because of wrinkles like rakes beside my eyes, and loose skin at my neck. You hear Chris’s car drive off, and when it’s gone you look up. A thin sliver of a moon in the shape of a curved sewing needle hangs up there, providing a bit of light, though not really enough to see much more than the leaves, which no longer appear warm red and gold, as they did under the beam of the flashlight, but look frosted, as if suddenly the temperature’s dropped and everything’s become white and crisp to the touch. You feel inside your purse, but your phone is not there. You do not have a way of letting anyone else know where you are. You think about what Thomas told you, that there is a zoo in Miami that uses iPads so that orangutans can order food by pointing at their choices on a screen. They have all the intelligence they need to speak, but their vocal cords aren’t developed like ours. And here you are, you think, a human in the woods without your old-model flip phone to call for help. You use your vocal cords, but your voice just gets thrown around like a loser in a wrestling match landing hard on a gym mat. You can hear the wind take your scream and slam it back down when another crosscurrent of wind intersects it, and your cries for help end up by your feet.
You start walking toward where you think the road is. At least there you won’t get as lost as you would deeper in between the pines and maples and bushes with thorns that embed themselves in your pants and continue to prick you long after you’ve left the place where they’ve grown up in tangles and thickets. You think how you will probably never remember where this spot off the road in the woods is, and how if you were in the woods by your house, or anywhere else, it would seem like the same woods. You would never be able to bring anyone back here to show them the blood that dripped from your leg and onto the leaf-covered ground. You would never be able to show them where the killer stood over you and threatened to kill your teenage daughter if you turned him in. Only the woods can talk for you now. The tree you leaned up against remembers the feel of the warmth of your back on its deeply lined bark. The sapling you grabbed onto so you wouldn’t fall as the killer pushed you forward on your wounded leg remembers your weak grasp. Only those things know, and like the orangutan without the right vocal cords, they really can’t speak.
The moon lights up the flat expanse of the road more brightly than the woods. You feel something shore up against your leg in the wind and reach down to find a page of Paul’s story. The killer must have thrown it out the window before he left, unimpressed by the metaphors, the inexact images, the turn the writing took at the end. You can hear more pages fluttering around you, but you only keep this one page, because it happens to be the first page, and so much possibility lies in the first page when the final pages aren’t there to end it. Bobby Chantal, for example, could still be alive. And you could end up not being here on this dark road, walking for what seems like forever, wishing you had never met Paul or Chris, wishing your bad leg would just remove itself from your hip and try walking on its own, because it’s slowing you down. You don’t look forward to not telling the story of the killer you cannot identify because he knows about your teenage daughter.
This is the tree in the woods cooling off after you lean up against it. This is the wind taking the warmth and sending it over the deer sleeping in a small valley on tall grass bent by their bodies now bedded down. These are the other pages of Paul’s story mixing with leaves, acting like leaves, blowing up in currents, sailing down and wafting side to side. This is rain coming days later, dropping on the printed words, magnifying briefly the B for blood Paul wrote when describing the first moments he found Bobby Chantal with her throat slit.
This is more rain, sopping the page, and this is even harder rain, able to tear the paper because of its force. This is the paper, not even as hardy as the thin fallen leaves it’s mixed with, crumbling, losing its whiteness, and becoming unrecognizable after the season’s first snow.