I pointed right. The fire was so hot in me now I felt like my fingertips might start smoking any second.
She turned the car and we cruised north toward the Sea-Tac Airport, my old stomping grounds. We passed expensive hotels and cheap motels, convenience stores and fancy restaurants. Lighted buildings alternated with dark gaps. The roar of planes taking off and landing, lights rising and descending in the sky ahead of us, turned rapidly into background. We drove past the Goldilocks Motel, where Blake and I had a room we rented by the week, and I didn’t feel anything. But as we passed the intersection where the Red Lion sprawls on the corner of 188th Street and the Pacific Highway, fire flared under my skin. “Slowly,” I said to Marti. She stared at me and slowed the car. A mile further, past the airport, one of the little roads led down off the ridge to the left. I pointed.
Marti got in the left-turn lane and made the turn, then pulled into a gas station on the corner and parked by the rest rooms. “Now wait,” she said. “What are we doing, here?”
“Richie,” I whispered. I could feel his presence in the near distance; all my wounds were resonating with his nearness now, all the places he had pressed himself into me with his rope and his cigarette and his sock and his flaked stone knife and his penis, imprinting me as his possession. Surely as a knife slicing into a tree’s bark, he had branded me with his heart.
“Yes,” said Marti. “Richie. You have any plans for what you’re going to do once you find him?”
I held my hands out, open, palms up. The heat was so strong I felt like anything I touched would burst into flame.
“What are you going to do, strangle him? Have you got something to do it with?” She sounded sarcastic.
I was having a hard time listening to her. All my attention was focused down the road. I knew Richie’s car was there, and Richie in it. It was the place he had taken me to tie me up. He might be driving this way any second, and I didn’t want to wait any longer for our reunion, though I knew there was no place he could hide where I couldn’t find him. My love for him was what animated me now.
“Strangle,” I said, and shook my head. I climbed out of the car.
“Sheila!” said Marti.
I let the sound of my self-given name fill me with what power it could, and stood still for a moment, fighting the fire inside. Then I walked into the street, stood in the center so a car coming up out of the dark would have to stop. I strode down into darkness, away from the lights and noise of the Strip. My feet felt like match-heads, as if a scrape could strike fire from them.
Presently the asphalt gave way to potholes and gravel; I could tell by the sound of pebbles sliding under my feet. I walked past the first three dark houses to the right and left, looming shapes in a darkness pierced by the flight lights of airplanes, but without stars. I turned left at the fourth house, dark like the others, but with a glow behind it I couldn’t see with my eyes but could feel in my bones. Heat pulsed and danced inside me.
I pushed past an overgrown lilac bush at the side of the house and stepped into the broad drive in back. The car was there, as I had known it would be. Dark and quiet. Its doors were closed.
I heard a brief cry, and then the dome light went on in the car. Richie was sitting up in back, facing away from me.
Richie.
I walked across the crunching gravel, looking at his dark head. He wore a white shirt. He was staring down, focused, his arms moving. As I neared the car, I could see he was sitting on a woman. She still had her clothes on. (Richie hadn’t taken my clothes off until he got me in his apartment.) Tape was across her mouth, and her head thrashed from side to side, her upper arms jerking as Richie bound his thin nylon rope around her wrists, her legs kicking. I stood a moment looking in the window. She saw me and her eyes widened. She made a gurgling swallowed sound behind the sock, the tape.
I thought: he doesn’t need her. He has me.
I remembered the way my mind had struggled while my body struggled, screaming silently: no, oh no, Blake, where are you? No one will help me, the way no one has ever helped me, and I can’t help myself. That hurts, that hurts. Maybe he’ll play with me and let me go if I’m very, very good. Oh, God! What do you want? Just tell me, I can do it. You don’t have to hurt me! Okay, rip me off, it’s not like you’re the first, but you don’t have to hurt me.
Hurt me.
I love you. I love you so much.
I stared at him through the glass. The woman beneath him had stilled, and she was staring at me. Richie finally noticed, and whirled.
For a moment we stared at each other. Then I smiled, showing him the stumps of my teeth, and his blue eyes widened.
I reached for the door handle, opened it before he could lock it.
“Richie,” I said.
“Don’t!” he said. He shook his head, hard, as though he were a dog with wet fur. Slowly, he lifted one hand and rubbed his eye. He had a big bread knife in the other hand, had used it to cut the rope, then flicked it across the woman’s cheek, leaving a streak of darkness. He looked at me again. His jaw worked.
“Richie.”
“Don’t! Don’t… interrupt.”
I held out my arms, my fingertips scorched black as if dyed or tattooed, made special, the wrists dark beyond the ends of my sleeves. “Richie,” I said tenderly, the fire in me rising up like a firework, a burst of stars. “I’m yours.”
“No,” he said.
“You made me yours.” I looked at him. He had made Tawanda his, and then he had erased her. He had made Mary his, and then erased her. Even though he had erased Tawanda and Mary, these feelings inside me were Tawanda’s: whoever hurts me controls me; and Mary’s: I spoke up once and I got a curse on me I can’t get rid of. If I’m quiet maybe I’ll be okay.
But Sheila? Richie hadn’t erased Sheila; he had never even met her.
It was Tawanda who was talking. “You killed me and you made me yours,” she said. My fingers went to the jacket, unbuttoned it, dropped it behind me. “What I am I owe to you.”
“I—” he said, and coughed. “No,” he said.
I heard the purr of car engines in the near distance, not the constant traffic of the Strip, but something closer.
I reached into the car and gripped Richie’s arm. I pulled him out, even though he grabbed at the door handle with his free hand. I could feel the bone in his upper arm as my fingers pressed his muscles. “Richie,” I whispered, and put my arms around him and laid my head on his shoulder.
For a while he was stiff, tense in my embrace. Then a shudder went through him and he loosened up. His arms came around me. “You’re mine?” he said.
“Yours,” said Tawanda.
“Does that mean you’ll do what I say?” His voice sounded like a little boy’s.
“Whatever you say,” she said.
“Put your arms down,” he said.
I lowered my arms.
“Stand real still.” He backed away from me, then stood and studied me. He walked around, looking at me from all sides. “Wait a sec, I gotta get my flashlight.” He went around to the trunk and opened it, pulled out a flashlight as long as his forearm, turned it on. He trained the beam on my breasts, my neck. “I did you,” he said, nodding. “I did you. You were good. Almost as good as the first one. Show me your hands again.”
I held them out and he stared at my blackened fingers. Slowly he smiled, then looked up and met my eyes.
“I was going to visit you,” he said. “When I finished with this one. I was coming back to see you.
“I couldn’t wait,” said Tawanda.
“Don’t talk,” Richie said gently.
Don’t talk! Tawanda and Mary accepted that without a problem, but I, Sheila, was tired of people telling me not to talk. What did I have to lose?