But it hurt.
She got to her feet more slowly, rubbed her elbow. She had paid more attention this time, had the impression that the woman had lightly touched her shoulders as she passed, did something to her that caused her weight to overbalance to the front, sending her face first into the floor.
She breathed. Jacob scowled. She watched him painstakingly convert his fear to anger. Anger was fine. She was fucking pissed.
“Third time’s the charm.”
This time he grabbed her, but she’d been a walkaway, carrying heavy loads for the sheer pleasure of doing things with her hands, walking miles at a time, having long, unhurried, sensuous yoga sessions on the B&B’s lawn that made her strong and supple. He was a gym rat, attended by skilled trainers and a pharmacopoeia that gave him cut transverse abdominals like an underwear model and arms with lean triceps and strong wrists, and he could do an hour on the elliptical, but it was all for show, never used.
She shook him off easily. She thrilled to realize she could have flattened him as easily as the merc was knocking her out, run up one side of him and down the other. It had been years since her father had been physical with her, but she recollected his iron grip, how he could carry her out of the room when she was misbehaving, ignoring her squirming. Let him try now.
She tried for a low sprint pumping her arms for speed, though she knew she’d need to be fired out of a longbow before her speed was high enough to make a difference to the woman. She almost faltered as she drew near, some cowardly part of her not wanting to get the coming beat-down, and she killed that part of her with a blast of will, put on more speed.
Her head bounced off the wall on the way down, filling her vision with stars. She took longer to get up. She was dizzy. It had been a solid hit. Had the woman hurt her on purpose, to punish her for refusing to back down? Had her run-up just been better?
Her father went into the bedroom, she supposed to phone for backup, so she walked this time, turned around, stared at the woman, the two of them alone now save for the watching eyes.
She ran. Something was wrong with her balance, and she couldn’t get her wind. This time the woman caught her and turned her around, neatly canceling all her momentum as she did so. Natalie and she were face to face. The woman’s nothing-special face and small teeth were right there, her breath smelled of toothpaste. She had a booger up one nostril. Her eyebrows weren’t plucked, which Natalie hadn’t noticed, and had a bushiness that reminded her of Gretyl. She wanted to cry.
She tried to walk past, walked into the woman, was pushed gently away. She tried again. She was really dizzy. It had been a bad hit.
This woman wasn’t her enemy, she just had a job. Natalie didn’t care. She swung a wild roundhouse the woman easily sidestepped. Had she smiled a little? It was weird to be here, silent except for breathing, her father’s muttering from the bedroom. Wordless intimacy. She swung again. Again. If she’d had a gun, she’d have shot the woman, her father, herself. What does a walkaway do when she can’t walk away?
She gave up, arms dropping to her sides. Stalked into the bedroom. Her father was in the chair, looking disgusted, like she was pathetic. She supposed she was. What’s more pathetic than a walkaway who stops walking?
She swallowed and tried to work up the courage to fall on him, to stick her thumbs in his eye sockets, rake her nails down his throat, knee him in the balls. The thought of the violence was so seductive that she was actually stayed from moving, surprised at her id’s ardor.
But then she embraced it, with a predator’s grin. She heard herself panting. Now she would do it. Her father understood, she saw it in his eyes. He was scared. The predator rose. She would enjoy this.
One step. Two steps.
A hand on her arm. Strong. A man’s hand, squeezing so hard she gasped, then the needle in her elbow. She turned and saw the man, not big, shorter than her, but with a face like a stone and a bull’s neck. Then she didn’t see anything else.
[III]
SHE WAS CERTAIN she was still in the house. You couldn’t fake the smell. But it looked like a hospital room. The door had no handle or inset panel, just some kind of invisible sensor that chose who passed. This hospital bed was bigger, cruder, and she was – she squirmed her hips – she was plumbed into it. There was an IV in her wrist, and a sense of fuzzy-wellbeing she knew couldn’t be endogenous. She wondered what was in the IV bag. She’d have loved some Meta right now.
She was in four-point restraint, with an extra band around her forearm to keep the IV firmly seated.
She supposed it was a suicide attempt. The idea wasn’t very disturbing. Her sorrow was a distant moon orbiting her psyche far away, visible but ultimately exerting only the mildest of tides.
“Now what?” Her voice was thick, her mouth pasty. If there was saline in the bag, it wasn’t keeping her hydrated. It was like someone had dumped a tablespoon of hydrophilic shipping gel-pellets in her mouth, drying it to the texture of old roadkill.
She willed the door to open, thinking of the days she’d spent in isolation in the other room, wondering if they’d leave her, a tube going in and tubes going out, a brain inextricably tethered to inconvenient meat, easily coerced, thanks to its ridiculous frailties.
Had they had this room ready all along, as plan B? Or had she been kept unconscious while they refitted a room to make it secure?
A nurse came through the door, wearing hospital whites and wheeling a cart. He stood beside the bed.
“Hello,” she said.
He stared at her consideringly, then pulled out the cart’s trays, pointed a thermometer in her ear, fit a pressure cuff to her arm. He flipped back the blanket and impersonally hiked up her gown, accessing a small box taped over her hip that she hadn’t known was there.
“Why doesn’t all that stuff come with remote telemetry? If you’re going to pretend I don’t exist, why not get transmissions in another room, spare yourself the social awkwardness?”
He was good at ignoring her. He checked her catheter, so mechanically that she felt anger instead of humiliation, which was, in its way, a mercy. What an asshole.
“I know there are cameras recording, but at least tip me a wink. Don’t nurses have to take a vow? An oath? Are you a nurse? Maybe you’re a ‘med-tech.’ Did you flunk out of nursing school and get the version that doesn’t come with the Florence Nightingale training?”
Taunting him wasn’t satisfying, and her mouth was so, so dry.
“How about a drink? Water? Juice?”
He had a hose with a sponge tip. He pulled off the sheets and threw them into a basket in the cart’s base, revealing a rubbery under-sheet. Working with that same impersonal efficiency, he gave her a quick sponge bath, hose in one hand and a small hydrophilic towel in the other, stopping after each limb to wring the cloth into his cart. From her distant mental vantage point, Natalie admired the cart and wondered who its primary market was – people with loony old relatives locked up in attics?
He did her face and ears with wipes in sterile packaging, like the guys at the detailing place working squeegees over the windscreen of her dad’s cars. The fact that it was done by humans was a selling point. All the places her dad used had “bespoke” or “hand-wash” or “artisanal” in their names, sometimes all three. She smelled the nurse, soap with a bit of sweat, saw some stubble under his left ear. There was one point where she could have kissed him. Or bit him.