35

He slapped her. Then he hit her, not as hard as he could, but enough to make her hair fly out from her head. “Stop making all that noise,” he said. She had her fists up, covering her ears. The children were in the bathroom, bawling.

At first I was sure I would be able to climb to my feet at any moment. I lay on my side, my ear on a heating grille in the floor. A strange inner pain awoke in me, a desert spreading, dehydration, hard drought. The children were crying so hard their noise echoed in the heating ducts.

He put his arms around her, neither of them able to speak, rocking, dappled with blood. I could not move. I was certain I did not have a heartbeat. Then it pumped, once. Blood squirted briefly from my neck.

“You don’t know anything about me,” he said, his voice broken. “All you know is—why don’t we call the police.”

“You killed him!”

“I hope so.”

“Tell me—” She had to stop to take a breath. “Tell me why.”

He sounded almost patient when he said, “Please shut up.”

“He wasn’t doing anything, Eric” She wanted to stop talking, but she couldn’t, now that she had her breath. “We get people like this in the woods. Mental hospitals let them go.”

Eric. I had always admired the name—it smacked of Norsemen, exploration of the high seas.

He said, “Go shut the children up.”

She didn’t argue but stood where she was. Her hair was stringy, clotted.

My heart kept squeezing, at about the same rate as a crocodile’s on a winter day. I felt systole, and blood gushed a little more feebly than before. My heart seemed permanently contracted. At last the muscle relaxed, and the valves in my chest fell silent for another age. So it was a sort of pulse, I consoled myself. There was so little fluid in my body that my eyelids dragged over my eyeballs, and stuck.

I managed to open one eye, barely. Eric wiped his hands and forearms on sheets of paper towel. The crumpled, sodden paper littered the floor. His voice was almost kind as he insisted, “Would you go tell the kids to shut up?”

The kids had fallen quiet. It was a shaky quiet, though, and what he meant was: go find out what they’re doing.

When she was back in the room, he continued, “I’m going to cut this carpet out, the whole thing. It’s cheap stuff, tell the landlord Randy puked on it. Go get me all the knives you have.” He was keeping his voice steady, but it was a pitch higher than it should have been.

She hurried from the room. A drawer opened, shut. Soon, I promised myself, I would move one of my hands. She pulled a new-looking Bowie knife from its sheath, the light from the steel reflecting on the ceiling.

“They don’t make this kind of knife to cut up carpet. I told you to go get every kitchen knife in the house, all those fancy knives, every one of them.”

“They don’t make those to cut up carpet, either.”

His voice was very quiet. “Go get the kitchen knives, Helen.”

He stood over me. He began to bend over to take my pulse but couldn’t bring himself to touch me. He looked at me, then looked at the mess on the carpet. There was a dimple in his chin. He massaged one of his arms, kneading the muscle. I could read the look in his eyes: maybe he should get the ax again.

She came back with a handful of blades, dropping one on the floor. I could contract my right hand, make a fist, release it. He selected a long butcher knife with a wooden handle. It was the wrong knife for the job, and his hands kept slipping off the hilt. He made a grunt of effort, stabbing the carpet. He worked on his knees, cutting, sawing. “Move that chair out of the way.”

“Let me do it,” she said.

“I have to use your car. Go out to mine and get the gas can from the trunk. Put it in the backseat of the Chevy.”

She was gone a long time, and twice he rose to his knees and listened. There was the sound of a trunk opening, the slosh of fuel in a can. By now I could wiggle all my fingers. My severed tendons shuddered. Soon, I promise myself, I would try to shift my head.

She entered the room again, flushed, panting. He knelt to his work, slicing the carpet, tearing it. “What are the kids doing?” he asked.

“I told them to dry off and get into their jammies.”

There was silence from the bathroom, the tub empty. It seemed his attack had never happened, except as a forgotten, faded prologue to the sound of carpet tearing. “You better use this knife,” she said.

He accepted it from her. The work went more quickly. There was a thought-out non-logic to everything they did; as long as they had some sort of plan he wouldn’t hit her again. “You told me I could stay here, and you promised you wouldn’t ask a zillion questions. You liked it, didn’t you. A man with secrets.”

Her voice hard, she said, “He’s still alive.”

“He can’t be.”

She said, “Look at his eyes.”

He glanced at me, made himself give me a long look. She was on her hands and knees, gathering fragments of a porcelain dog.

“You can clean that up later. Tell the kids to hurry up and get into bed. I’m going to take a shower, change my clothes. I’m going for a drive. I want you to promise me something.”

She didn’t respond.

He held the knife, pressing the ball of his thumb against the blade. The flesh of his thumb was indented in a fine line where the steel pressed it. “I’m sorry I hit you,” he said. “I need you to promise me something.”

She said, “I think his foot moved.”

“Can you promise me, Helen?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to tell the kids happened out here.” She sounded firm, but not as sure of herself as she wanted to be, an elementary school teacher refusing to panic. “Randy already asked and I told him to mind his own business. I believe in being frank with children.”

He fell into the easy chair. He shook his head, meaning: let me rest a minute. He grunted and, without getting up, drew the handle of the ax toward the chair.

Once during a tour of the Natural History Museum in San Diego, my father and I were shown into a library by a smiling, white-haired woman. The woman made me feel terribly shy. At the time I had no idea why, in that lack of self-knowledge peculiar to children. I realized later when I saw her photograph in a magazine that she was beautiful, refined. She and my father made what I ignored as medical chit-chat. So when a certain drawer was pulled out I was unprepared. I should have been warned, but both adults had ignored me, joking about money and politics, the dead language of adulthood.

A strange map spread before us on the blue felt Ivory-yellow, a fine net stretched outward, a web of highways, a ghostly city in the the shape of a human body. “A nervous system,” said my father. “Belonged to a cleaning woman. She left it to the museum.” The nerves of the dead woman were busy around the empty hole of her mouth.

It was appropriate that my most stark confrontation with the architecture of the body and my first insight into the power of a bequest should occur at the same moment. In the boiler plate and codicils of a will, the dead stand witness among us. In the macrame of the nervous system something of the cleaning woman remained faithful.

“I’m worried,” Helen said, tugging paper towels from the roll. “About the psychological damage to Diane, especially. I have that plastic liner on the mattress from her bedwetting—”

“And milk gives Randy a rash,” said Eric.

She let the roll of paper towels fall. The cylinder of paper touched the swamp of blood and pink began to spread across the green-and-white floral print. I felt her anxiety. It passed through me like pain: He’s going to use the ax. He’s going to hurt her. She said, “I promise.”

He heard it—wet fabric whispering. One hand felt for the ax handle. His fingers made sticky, kissing sounds on the wooden shaft.

She said, “He’s moving.”

After this was over, I promised myself, I would give my body to medical science. The graduate students would file in not ready to believe, every one of them doubting. Even as I stepped to the lectern and opened my notes they would not know what they were looking at. And I could tell them that memory is the cruelest faculty, the first, most lasting form of torture.

I was so careful to deceive myself.