“Together at last.”
There was a moment of paralysis in Teri’s mind when she realized this was not the man she had expected, nor was it a man she knew. His eyes, which had narrowed at first, now seemed to grow larger. She shook herself free of the paralysis and wrapped her hands around the cool ceramic base of the lamp. In one swift motion, as he crossed the distance between them and reached for her, Teri swept the lamp off the night stand and swung it.
The motion startled him slightly. He tried to pull back and the lamp caught him across the face with little force. The shade collapsed and left a mark where the metal frame had scratched him on the cheek. It turned bright ruby red almost instantly, and Teri thought how close the color of blood matched the color of his eyes.
“Jesus! You little bitch!”
The man’s face flared. He swung wide with a closed fist and his knuckles brushed past Teri’s face so close she could feel the air current across her ear. She fell back against the wall with a heavy thud. The back of her head took the brunt of the impact.
A moment passed, maybe two, but no more than that, then Teri drifted dreamily into a wistful, ethereal duskiness. She smiled, drunkenly, and let herself be drawn all the way into the darkness.
[104]
When she awoke, only a scant few seconds later, Teri found herself on the bed, her legs dangling over the edge, the man hovering above her. He grinned through tobacco-yellow teeth and let out a laugh that smelled sour from whiskey. “Welcome back, little missy. Couldn’t bring yourself to miss this part, eh?”
He was tugging at something, and for a moment Teri thought—rather crazily she was soon to realize—that he was trying to make the bed with her on it. He gave another tug. Then Teri rose the final wave up from her blissful reprieve and realized it wasn’t the bed sheets he was tugging at… it was her panties.
She managed to position her knee between herself and the man’s chest, feeling a bit dull all the same and wondering distantly how she had put herself in this position of fending off a complete stranger. For a moment, he seemed to brighten with her resistance, his lips curling back into an odd mutation that was part grin, part sneer. Then Teri flexed her leg and brought her foot up solidly against the man genitals.
A huge sour breath poured out of his mouth, followed closely by a coarse, throaty groan. He fell back against the wall, both hands clutching at his crotch.
Teri rolled off the side of the bed, landed on her feet and was out of the bedroom faster than she had ever imagined possible. She stumbled her way down the hall, hands pushing against the walls, keeping her from losing her balance. In her mind, she quickly made the decision to go for the front door. Surprisingly, though, the man was right behind her, moving with care now, in obvious pain, but moving just the same.
She rounded the corner and followed her instincts into the kitchen.
Behind her, realizing she had trapped herself, the man stopped in the doorway. He was bent over and breathing hard, his face flushed an angry red. “When I get done, bitch, it’s gonna take ’em a month to piece you back together again.”
His left hand was pressed flat against his belly, as if he were trying to keep his intestines from spilling out. A knife materialized, seemingly out of thin air, in his right hand. He raised it to eye level and the light from down the hall glinted off the cold steel blade like the last light of her life.
The man took an unsteady step forward, still clutching his belly.
Teri didn’t wait for him to draw closer. She went first for the knife drawer on her left and when she realized she wouldn’t have enough time to get the drawer open and a knife out, she instinctively grabbed for the freezer door at the top of the refrigerator. The door popped open in a surprisingly fluid motion, swung on its hinges with Teri’s weight behind it, and landed flush against the man’s forehead.
The impact sent him reeling back several steps, and toppled him over. The back of his head slammed heavily into the linoleum floor. He groaned, semi-consciously.
Teri moved forward, stepped on the wrist of the hand that was holding the knife, and tried unsuccessfully to force the knife free. Every breath was deep and heavy, the air barely enough to fill her lungs. Tears began to fill her eyes.
“Come on, you bastard, just let go of it!”
He groaned again, then his eyes—which had been clamped shut in a grimace that she didn’t think she would ever forget—suddenly shot open again. He reached up to grab her leg.
Teri pulled back and landed a kick to the left side of his face. The man’s head slammed into the linoleum floor again, then bounced back up and Teri delivered a second solid kick, this one landing flush against the man’s nose. The tears that had been collecting in her eyes suddenly broke free and poured down her face. She pulled back a third time, preparing to deliver one last kick, then slowly became aware that the man was no longer moving.
The stillness of the night, long and breathy, hot and weary, settled onerously over her.
Teri balanced her weight evenly between the foot that continued to rest firmly against the man’s wrist and the other foot, which was planted solidly on the linoleum floor now. She choked back the next wave of tears without moving, too frightened to disturb the strange, dreamlike stillness that had taken her under its spell.
For a long time, shapeless ghosts became her thoughts and she gave herself to them freely. When she was finally able to go to the neighbor’s for help, she was only distantly aware that she was still in her robe and panties and that the morning sun was only a few short hours away.
[105]
Sleep, as fitful as it was, did not come until late in the morning, long after the police had left and Teri had found herself once again alone in the apartment. She curled up in Walt’s bed, staring through the thin curtains at the orange-red colors pushing their way above the horizon, and tried unsuccessfully to expose the photographs in her mind to enough light so they would fade from her memory.
The man’s name had been Richard Boyle, and she had killed him. The back of Boyle’s head had struck the floor one too many times, harder than Teri had imagined possible, and in the end he had been left with a pool of thick, dark blood circling him like an angry aura.
“Just desserts,” an older officer had muttered somewhere in the tangle of distant conversations that had taken place afterwards. Teri had nodded numbly, suffering a chill that had entered her body and held her in its cold hands since shortly after she had gone to the neighbors. She was lucky to be alive; she knew that. And maybe a Bible-thumping, eye-for-an-eye brand of justice had taken place just the way the good Lord would have wanted it. But then why did she feel so damn horrible inside?
“We’d be happy to give you a ride if you’d like to stay somewhere else tonight,” another officer had said. This was long after the body had been removed, long after all the photographs had been taken and the events of the evening had been recounted time and time again. The chill had not let go of her still, and it was the only tie keeping her from drifting away completely. So easy it would have been to simply close her eyes and sail off on the cloud of melancholy that was surrounding her.
“I’ll be all right,” she had heard herself say from faraway.
I’ve already done my running, Teri thought now. She closed her eyes against the sunrise taking place just outside the bedroom window, and the sleep came and took her far, far away this time. She would not wake again, until early evening.