I shut my eyes when the footsteps came close.
“How you feeling this morning, honey?” Nap asked jovially. “Where did Rooster leave that key? Shit, they messed you up. It’s gonna take you a while to get over this…” I could tell he was angry that I was too damaged to be useful for a while. I opened my eyes and looked at him, straight at him, and what he saw made him stop in the act of picking up my discarded blindfold.
I raised the gun and pointed it as carefully as I could, then fired.
It caught Nap in the eye.
He died far too quickly to suit me.
Of course, I had no idea where the key to the handcuffs was. Nap had said he’d left it with Rooster. I slid off the cot, then hitched myself across the floor, dragging the cot behind me. With incredible difficulty, I searched Nap just to make sure it wasn’t on him. It wasn’t.
It seemed to me there must be a way I could get out of the shack, but trying to get myself and the cot through the door was too hard for me. By that time, I was weak.
So I got to lie on the bed in the shack with the dead man for another day. Bugs came, and my cuts got infected, and the body began to smell.
By the time a farmer working in the adjacent field came to investigate Nap’s van, maybe twenty-four hours later, I was running a high temperature, but not high enough to make me delirious. I longed for unconsciousness the way people in hell want ice water. The farmer saw the body of Nap lying on the floor inside the open door and ran to call for help. The flood of people who arrived after that had no idea a live person was inside the shack. The horror on the faces of the men who came to investigate the body told me that I had gone beyond some boundary.
I had passed; I had become the thing that had happened to me.
No one who saw me chained to that bed would ever be able to imagine that I’d had a dog named Bolo when I was little, that I’d enjoyed playing with dolls, that I’d gotten three raises in the past two years, that I came from a home as clean and orderly as any of theirs.
In the slow weeks of recovery, after repeated questioning by law-enforcement officials on several levels, after enduring a media drench that sensationalized what was already sensational, I realized that returning to my former life was no longer possible. It had been stolen from me. My boyfriend was still posing for the newspapers as my boyfriend, but he wasn’t any longer. My parents simply could not cope with the horror of my ordeal or my execution of the man responsible.
I began to suspect that, in their secret hearts, they thought I had made the wrong choice in my use of the bullet.
My younger sister, Varena, was a rock at first, but gradually my slow physical and mental recovery wore Varena’s lighthearted nature down and then defeated it. Varena was ready for me to rise from my bed and walk. Varena was ready to refer to my crisis in the past tense, to have conversations that did not refer to it even in terms of my recovery. After a few increasingly acrimonious exchanges that included such statements as “Pull up your socks and get on with your life” and “You can’t go on living in the past,” Varena drifted back to her normal routine of nurse’s duties at the little hospital in our family’s town, teaching Sunday school, and dating a local pharmacist.
For a month longer, I stayed with my parents, with my belongings stored in their attic and toolshed. There was a healing quality in the house with the big front porch and the rose garden, the known neighbors. But most of those neighbors found it impossible to be natural around me; the best managed it, but the sheer horror of my victimization defeated the rest.
I tried hard not to be a tragic figure, tried desperately to reclaim my past, but I finally acknowledged defeat. I had to leave Bartley, to forget Memphis, to go somewhere new.
“And why did you pick Shakespeare?” Marshall asked me.
“The name,” I said, almost surprised that someone else was with me. I pulled my T-shirt back over my head. “My name is Bard, as in the Bard of Avon. This is Shakespeare.”
“You picked it off the map like that?”
I nodded, stood. “I’d tried a couple of places earlier that didn’t work out, so random selection seemed as good a method as any.” I stood still for a moment. It was such an effort to move.
“I’ll see you later,” I said. “I don’t want to talk any more now.” I lifted the bag with my gi and obi inside and strode out, not forgetting to turn and bow as I reached the door.
I drove home automatically, trying to keep my mind blank. It had been years since I had told my story, years since I had relived it in full. They had been good years, having people look at me quite normally, as if I was a full woman, not a thing, not a victim.
Now Chief Friedrich had indicated he knew who I was, so he knew I’d killed someone. Maybe he’d think I had had some kind of flashback and killed Pardon Albee, too. The pointed question about a personal relationship might mean that he suspected I’d killed Pardon because he’d paid me unwelcome attention. Knowing Pardon, that was a strange idea.
I sat on the side of my bed when I got home. I tried to picture myself as a vigilante, as some kind of- who was the girl who’d been raped in Titus Andronicus? Lavinia… yes, Lavinia, whose hands and tongue had been cut out by her attackers so that she could not reveal their identity. But Lavinia, I remembered, managed to tell her brothers somehow, and served the attackers to their mother as lunch, since the mother had permitted the rape to happen.
I wasn’t set on gaining some kind of vengeance on all men for what had happened to me. But I certainly wasn’t a trusting person anymore, and I definitely never expected much of people, and I would never be surprised to hear of any perfidy again.
I did not believe in the underlying goodwill of men or the unspoken sisterhood of women.
I did not believe that people everywhere are really the same, or that if you treat people kindly you will get kindness in return.
I did not believe in the sanctity of life.
If all the men were lined up in front of me, the four rapists and the man who cuffed me, and I had a loaded gun… I would kill them all, I thought. But I’m not scouring biker bars across America and I’m not standing in the post offices looking at wanted posters to see if they’ve done anything else. I haven’t hired a private investigator to look for them.
Did that speak to my sanity, or did that say I would commit murder only if it was convenient? I felt a tingling all over, like a hand that had been asleep prickling as it woke up. I’d felt that before after the times when I couldn’t dodge remembering. It was the rest of my personality seeping back into the shell I became when I immersed in the memory.
I turned down my covers, checked that my alarm clock was set, and gratefully crawled into bed. I reached over to switch out the lamp.
I’d kill the woman, too, I thought, feeling a wave of weariness sweep through my body. The woman I’d never seen. The bikers I’d never actually seen, only heard, felt.
But Pardon Albee-could Friedrich really believe I’d kill someone like that, someone I knew in the ordinary course of my life?
Of course he could.
I wondered what weapon had been used to kill the landlord. I hadn’t seen much blood, though I hadn’t examined Pardon very carefully. Since I’d been taking Goju from Marshall for two years or more, I thought maybe I could kill someone with my hands if I needed to-that had originally been my reason for studying a martial art.
That, too, would enter Friedrich’s picture of me: a very fit woman… in conjunction with a middle-aged, nosy, presumably heterosexual man who lived very close to me… Put like that, it seemed pretty obvious to me that I must have killed Pardon in my sleep.