I fell asleep in Thomas’s armchair. This despair I knew so well had gotten the better of me.
Would the boy’s face fade away someday like Cassandra’s? Hazy outlines, just a silhouette, and your mind playing tricks on you: Look, you don’t remember her anymore, you can’t even honor her memory now. The boy’s still there in my head: thin shoulders, bony legs, narrow joints making him look nothing like a lumberjack’s grandson ready to be like his father and grandfather and greatgrandfather, strong, unshakable men all of them. The boy’s a total mystery. Where’d that body come from? Where’d he get all those brains that won’t do him any good in a place like this? He’s some exotic pet bird left in the wild: no defenses, no survival skills. He tells me secrets, whispers all sorts of things in my ear without his father knowing, when we’re both hidden under his big bed with the sheets hanging down to the ground like tent flaps. Secrets about what he thinks about this hero living in the same house as us, that bearded giant who came straight out of a myth, who could split a log as thick as a beam with a single axe blow, who could carry half an elk carcass on his shoulder or kill a bear with only one gunshot to protect his own. That descendant of Titans, who’s so quiet because a witch on a rocky island in the Mediterranean cast a spell so he couldn’t open his heart or he’d turn everyone he loved to stone. I liked the way the boy reinvented the story, making something out of a father-son meeting that hadn’t gone perfectly, and the way he kept believing that someday Benedict would tell him how he’d met the boy’s mother, tell him about their love and especially why he’d left him and his mother to live by themselves. Like there was an explanation for everything.
I woke up with a start. A dry, calloused hand was flat on my mouth. Clifford’s red face was just a few inches from mine.
“Hello, Bess. You’re not getting bored all by your lonesome, are you?”
His whole body was pressed up against mine, his left hand was holding down my wrists while his right hand had come down to unzip his pants.
“I’ll give you what Benedict couldn’t be bothered to, sweets.”
I tried to bite him, to knee him, to push that heavy, unnatural body off, but he didn’t let up: he kept going, nibbled, dug his fingers into my clothes, through the zippers, trying to get at my skin. I fought as hard as I could even with his forearm pressed against my belly to keep me on the chair, but I was no match. And then he had to let go of my wrists for a second to pull down my pants.
What happened in that second? What part of my brain was taking orders? What part of my body finally decided he wasn’t going to have his way? I groped around, feeling with my fingertips for what I’d seen by the hearth while Clifford was already grinning at what he was sure he was about to get, smirking like the vilest sort of man.
I finally felt the steel under my palm, cold and oddly soothing, then made contact with the wooden handle, and when I had a good hold on it, I struck.
At the first blow to his temple, he stared at me, befuddled, as if he were a child surprised to have his toy taken away. Blood was dripping into his ear, darker and thicker than I’d have expected. With the second blow, it went deep into his throat, almost like a knife through butter. I pushed it in down to the handle, my hand flat on its butt end, with all the fury I had, until I felt his body go limp and slump back.
Clifford was staring straight at me. He wasn’t blinking, there weren’t any questions in his eyes, there wasn’t a single clue as to what he’d seen when he got to the light at the end of the tunnel, if that had made his death any more peaceful.