As Abby was leading Mr. Romey down the corridor to her room, she asked him how he had come to pick Dr. Jensen’s practice. “Did someone recommend us to you?”
The man shrugged. “Phone book. Yellow pages. A dentist is a dentist, right?”
Wrong. But Abby didn’t want to engage him. There was something about his voice that didn’t sit well with her.
Abby pulled the long arm of the dental unit out of the way so that the man could slide easily into the chair. She took a look at the questionnaire for new patients he’d filled out in the waiting room. “You’ve had some gum problems?”
The man nodded. “I chewed tobacco for a few years. I think it did a number on my teeth and gums.”
I know that voice.
“When was the last time you visited a dentist?”
“Two, maybe three years ago.”
Once Romey had settled in, Abby said, “I’m going to take some X-rays.” Romey nodded. Abby covered his chest with the lead shield and placed the thyroid collar around his neck. “Open, please,” she said, after she had put the unexposed film on the X-ray mount. She inserted the bitewing into the man’s mouth. “Bite down, please.”
There was a smell about him. Cologne.
When she had finished with the X-rays, she said, “I’ll be right back.” She took the film down to the room where the X-rays were developed. Suddenly, she felt queasy. Was it the two cups of coffee she’d had with her thawed-out scone? Sometimes coffee gave her a sour stomach.
He’s wearing the man’s cologne. The man who assaulted me. He’s wearing the same brand of cologne as the man who grabbed me and pulled me behind the Dumpster. He pulled me with forceful arms. Strong, muscular arms.
And there were two other smells, along with the cologne. What were those other smells?
Abby had to sit down. Jensen’s assistant Loretta — a young woman whom Abby really liked (she didn’t ask stupid questions) — appeared in the doorway.
“Are you okay?” This was a legitimate question.
Abby felt weak. Loretta noticed that she was slightly pale.
“I’m okay,” said Abby.
“Do you want to go home?”
“I’m in the middle of an appointment.”
“Screw that. Go home if you need to.”
Abby shook her head. Then she shook her head again, along with her shoulders and arms, in the same way that actors shake themselves to limber up before a performance.
Get a grip. You’re being idiotic. You’re grasping at coincidences. This is a man named Mr. Romey. He has come in to get his teeth cleaned. The form said that he’s employed as a locksmith. This is what he does, Abby. He makes keys. He doesn’t terrorize women in late night parking lots. Stop it. Pull yourself together.
Abby pulled herself together. She returned to her patient. She liked it that he wasn’t overly friendly, that he only spoke when she asked him a question. Abby liked people as a rule. She liked talking to her patients and having them talk back, but she also liked that other aspect to her job — the option, when she didn’t feel like listening to people, to put things into their mouths to keep them quiet.
Abby sat down on her wheeled saddle-stool. She depressed the foot pedal to recline the patient chair. She rolled over to the tray of instruments and plucked up her explorer and mirror. She pulled down the lamp and concentrated its beam on Romey’s open mouth. She used the explorer and the mirror to look for cavities. Nothing obvious there, but the mouth still showed evidence of some abuse. The chewing tobacco, she imagined. She traded the explorer for the probe so she could look for pockets. There had been a pronounced receding of the gums.
Chewing tobacco. That was one of the other smells. The man smelled of chewing tobacco and cologne. Too much cologne, just like the generous amount that Mr. Romey is wearing now. And there was some smell on his hands. He put his hand up to my mouth to keep me quiet. What was that smell on his palm? Try to remember, Abby.
Abby’s hands began to tremble. She withdrew the probe and mirror from Romey’s mouth.
His mouth now empty, he was freed up to speak. “Are you okay?”
“I’ve been ill,” was all that Abby could think to say. After all, she had been ill. Everything had shut down after the attack. She had lain in bed, not eating, shivering in a warm room. She couldn’t sleep, and when she did, her dreams were disjointed, unsettling. They were displaced dreams — not about the attack itself but filled with everything else dark and menacing that her subconscious mind could conjure up.
Such things do not happen. A woman does not get knocked around behind a Dumpster, does not have her handbag ripped from her shoulder with such force that she is left with an ugly strap-width contusion. A woman does not have a strange man’s hands on her ass, looking for a way to get inside, and only by the grace of God — (What was it? Did he see someone approaching? Did he lose his nerve? What made him stop?) — a woman does not go through all of this and then find the man who did it to her seated in her dental chair two weeks later. Such things simply do not happen.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said the man. The voice had a slight Brooklyn cadence. Abby knew Brooklyn accents. She had lived in Brooklyn when she went to school there to study dental hygiene. The man who’d attacked her had the same accent.
“It’s okay. I’m better now,” said Abby. Her hands had stopped shaking. She placed a gloved hand back into the man’s mouth to check for bumps and lumps on the floor of his mouth and inside his cheeks. “Stick out your tongue, please.” Abby took out a cotton 2 x 2 to look under the tongue. She gave the tongue a careful inspection. The man had said that he used to be a tobacco chewer.
Used to be. Abby’s assailant hadn’t given it up. In fact, it smelled as if he had been chewing a plug right before the attack. A thousand thoughts had raced through her head as she lay crumpled upon the pavement that night behind the Dumpster. One was this: that she hoped the man would get oral cancer. What a strange thing to think at such a moment. Yet only a minute or two after the attack, Abby was already thinking of how her assailant should be punished for what he did to her. He hadn’t raped her — not literally, but she had been raped in every other sense of that word. Men like that should have to pay for what they did.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” This was how he had responded. He had asked me, as he held me, as he had pushed himself against my back, as he had breathed his fetid tobacco-breath upon my neck, he had asked me if I had a husband or a boyfriend. I didn’t know how to answer. Should I have lied and said yes? How would he have reacted? Would he have shown my made-up husband or boyfriend that he didn’t own sole title to me? That I belonged to my assailant as well? Is this the sort of thing that psychotic men do to women in the dark? Assault both the women and the men they love?
So I told the truth. That I didn’t have a husband. Nor a boyfriend at the moment. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he had said, almost sympathetically — just as Romey had said it. Exactly as Romey had said it. “You’re much too pretty not to have a boyfriend.”