Doro was a black man this time. That was a relief, because, the last couple of visits, he’d been white. He just walked into my bedroom early in the morning and sat down on my bed. That woke me up. All I saw was this big stranger sitting on the side of my bed.
“Say something,” I said quickly.
“It’s me,” he said.
I let go of the steak knife I slept with and sat up. “Can I kiss you, or are you going to jump me, too?”
He pulled back my blankets and ran his hand down the side of the bed next to the wall. Of course he found the steak knife. I kept it sheathed in the tight little handle you’re
supposed to use to pick up the mattress. He threw it out the door. “Leave the knives and
frying pans in the kitchen, where they belong,” he said.
“That guy was going to rape me, Doro.”
“You’re going to kill somebody.”
“Not unless I have to. If people leave me alone, I’ll leave them alone.”
He picked up a pair of jeans from the floor, where I had left them, and threw them in my face. “Get dressed,” he said. “I want to show you something. I want to make a point in a way that even you might understand.”
He got up and went out of the room.
I threw the jeans back on the floor and went to the closet for some clean ones. My head was aching already.
He drove me to the city jail. He parked outside the wall and just sat there.
“What now?” I asked.
“You tell me.”
“Doro, why did you bring me here?”
“As I said, to make a point.”
“What point? That if I’m not a good little girl, this is where I’ll wind up? God! Let’s get away from here.” Something was wrong with me. Or something was about to be wrong. Really wrong. I was picking up shadows of crazy emotions.
“Why should we go?” he asked.
“My head … !” I could feel myself losing control. “Doro, please …” I screamed. I tried to hang on. Tried to just shut down, the way I had the day before. Freeze. But I was caught in a nightmare. The kind of nightmare where the walls are coming together on you and you can’t get out. The kind where you’re locked in some dark, narrow place and you can’t get out. The kind where you’re at a zoo locked up like the animals, and you can’t get out!
I had never been afraid of the dark. Not even when I was little. And I’d never been afraid of small, closed places. And the only place I had ever seen a room where the walls formed a vise was in a bad movie. But I screamed my head off outside that jail. I started flailing around, and Doro grabbed me to keep me from jumping out of the car. I almost made him have an accident, as he was trying to drive away.
Finally, when we were a good, long way from the jail, I calmed down. I sat bent over in the seat, holding my head.
“How long do you suppose you could stay even as sane as you are in the midst of a concentration of emotions like that?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything.
“Most of the prisoners there aren’t half as bothered by their thoughts and fears as you were,” he said. “They don’t like where they are, but they can live with it. You can’t. Wouldn’t you rather even be raped than wind up in a place like this even for a short time?”
“You got any aspirin?” I asked. My head was throbbing so that I could hardly hear him. And for some stupid reason, I had left my new bottle of aspirin at home on my night table.
“In the glove compartment,” he said. “No water, though.”
I fumbled open the glove compartment, found the aspirin, and swallowed four. He was stopped for a red light, watching me.
“You’re going to get sick, doing that.”
“Thanks to you, I’m already sick.”
“You don’t listen, girl. I talk to you and you don’t listen. For your own good, I have to show you.”
“From now on, I’ll listen. Just tell me.” I sat back and waited for the aspirin to work. Then I realized that he wasn’t taking me home.
“Where are we going? You don’t have another treat for me, do you?”
“Yes. But not the way you mean.”
“What is it? Where are we going?”
“Here.”
We were on South Ocean Avenue, in the good part of Forsyth’s downtown shopping district. He was driving into the parking lot of Orman’s, one of the best stores in town.
He parked, turned off the motor, and sat back. “I want you to step out of character for a while,” he said. “Stop working so hard at your role as Rina’s bitchy daughter.”
I looked at him sidelong. “I usually do when you’re around.”
“Not enough, maybe. You think we can go into that store and buynot steal something other than blue jeans?”
“Like what?”
“Come on.” He got out of the car. “Let’s go see what you look good in.”
I knew what I looked good in. Or at least acceptable in. But why bother when the only guy I was interested in was Doro and nothing I did seemed to reach him? He either had time for me or he didn’t.
And if he didn’t, I could have walked around naked and he wouldn’t have noticed.
But because he wanted it, I chose some dresses, some really nice pants, a few other things. I didn’t steal anything. My headache sort of faded back to normal and my witchy reflection in the dressing-room mirror relaxed back to just strange-looking. Doro had said once that, except for my eyes and coloring, I look a lot like Emmalike the young version of Emma, I mean. My eyestraffic-light green, Rina called themand my skin, a kind of light coffee, were gifts from the white man’s body that Doro was wearing when he got Rina pregnant. Some poor guy from a religious colony Doro controlled in Pennsylvania. Doro had people all over.
When he decided that I had bought enough, he paid for it with a check for more money than I had ever seen in my life. He had some kind of by-mail arrangement with the banks. A lot of banks. He ordered everything delivered to the hotel where he was staying. I waited until we were out of the store to ask him why he’d done that.
“I want you to stay with me for a few days,” he told me.
I was surprised, but I just looked at him. “Okay.”
“You have something to get used to. And for your own sake, I want you to take your time. Do all your yelling and screaming now, while it can’t hurt you.”
“Oh, Lord. What are you going to give me to yell and scream about?”
“You’re getting married.”
I looked at him. He’d said those words or others like them to Rina once. To Emma heaven knew how many times. Evidently, my time had come. “You mean to you, don’t you?”
“No.”
I wasn’t afraid until he said that. “Who, then!”
“One of my sons. Not related to you at all, by the way.”
“A stranger? Some total stranger and you want me to marry him?”
“You will marry him.” He didn’t use that tone much with meor with anyone, I think. It was reserved for when he was telling you to do something he would kill you for not doing. A quiet, chilly tone of voice.
“Doro, why couldn’t you be him? Take him and let me marry you.”
“Kill him, you mean.”
“You kill people all the time.”
He shook his head. “I wonder if you’re going to grow out of that.”
“Out of what?”
“Your total disregard for human lifeexcept for your own, of course.”
“Oh, come on! Shit, the devil himself is going to preach me a sermon!”
“Maybe transition will change your thinking.”
“If it does, I don’t see how I’ll be able to stand you.”
He smiled. “You don’t realize it, but that might really be a problem. You’re an experimental model. Your predecessors have had trouble with me.”
“Don’t talk about me like I was a new car or something.” I frowned and looked at him. “What kind of trouble?”