The Rope ap-17 Read online

  “I’m tired,” she said so pitifully it reminded her of the pain-in-the-ass little boy who’d starred in a production of Oliver! she stage-managed in college. “May I go to bed now?” Please sir.

  Jim was either too nice or too inexperienced to say no. “Get some rest,” he said. “This can wait till morning.” He gathered up his medical paraphernalia and let himself out. Jenny crossed to the door and locked it.

  “First time I’ve done that,” she said as she turned back.

  “Thank you,” Anna said.

  Jenny fetched her a Xanax. Dutifully, Anna swallowed it. She longed for sleep. Fear kept her from attempting it. What if she awoke in the jar, having only dreamed she’d escaped?

  Jenny encouraged her to lie down on the sofa, then sat on the coffee table where Jim had put his EMS kit and took her hand. Anna let her. Waking up holding Kay’s dead hand was added to the fear of waking up back in the hole. Anna snatched it back. Jenny’s radio crackled, the hive of the park buzzing with the news of her miraculous return. Sounds of the living comforted Anna even as they rasped on nerves grown accustomed to the deep and abiding silence of sandstone. She would have to find that silence again, go back into the stone. But not until she knew how to come back out.

  Exhaustion and tranquilizers finally dulled the dread. Anna allowed Jenny to put her to bed. She waited until Jenny’s back was turned before slipping out of the borrowed trousers and between the sheets. She didn’t want Jenny to see the cuts on her leg.

  Buddy had been settled in her room, an old sweatshirt of Jenny’s sacrificed to make him a bed in the bottom drawer of the dresser that had been emptied of Anna’s clothes. Anna watched as her housemate put a teacup of water and a small salad of celery, bell pepper, and lettuce in his new home.

  “Tomorrow we should take Buddy hunting for insects,” Jenny said.

  “Bug hunting, tomorrow,” Anna promised her friend. Buddy sniffed at the celery.

  “Want me to leave the light on?”

  Light did not comfort Anna. Dark was safer. She could hide in the dark. “Could you just leave the door open an inch or so?” she asked.

  “Your wish; my command,” Jenny said and smiled. She had a nice smile. The two front teeth were canted, the edges of the incisors crossing delicately like the feet of a dancer.

  Still wearing underpants and the shirt, Anna lay between the worn flannel sheets Jenny had put on her bed and laid her head on the borrowed pillow. It smelled of Jenny, a beachy smell, hinting at coconut oil and salt and clean breezes.

  The smell of good summertime things gave Anna a fragile sense of safety. She curled on her side to soak in the comfort. For tonight her own personal monster—she’d heard him call her name—was trapped in the jar. When she told the “good guys” where it was, they would take him out and she would never be safe again.

  Had Kay’s corpse not called to her to witness her death, Anna would have left the monster to die, as he undoubtedly would have left her to die once she ceased to amuse him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Anna surprised herself by sleeping soundly. Not even the dream of Zach came to break her heart before the sun broke the night. Lying in bed, staring into the dove gray sky that ushered in the new day, she absorbed the strangeness of waking without that familiar pain. Unconsciously, she laid her right hand over her heart. Had the monster burned it out of her the way doctors once burned wounds with a hot iron to clean and seal them?

  Scarcely had the strangeness receded when it was replaced by relief at not waking in the jar to find salvation was only a dream. Today she woke in a bed, free to come and go as she pleased. There was food to eat in the refrigerator and clothing to wear and water to drink. These were so precious, the part of her that stayed afraid feared to lose them. A lesson to be learned: For a woman with nothing, courage came cheap. The brave part of her, the fearlessness she’d found when tarantulas of the mind attacked her, wished she needed no more than a shell at the bottom of the ocean, loved no one, had no baby skunk to die, no sister to get lung cancer.

  As she dressed, Anna concentrated on how pleasurable the slide of soft cotton over her skin was, how sturdy feet felt when encased in rubber and straps, how grand it was to run a brush through her hair, wash her face and hands, how glorious to have ChapStick and Jergens.

  Focusing on these once mundane marvels helped keep dark thoughts at bay.

  Having cleaned the drawer of Buddy’s poop—piled neatly in a corner the way a tidy kitty-litter-less cat might have done—she took him into the relative cool of the predawn behind the apartments and turned over rocks for him. They found a grublike thing the little skunk thought delicious, a moth that was about to expire, and two vinegaroons. To Anna they looked as dangerous as the scorpions they so resembled, but Buddy seemed partial to them.

  By the time she carried him back to the duplex, Jenny was up, sitting on her picnic table, a chipped mug with a bison’s head enameled on it held between her hands. “Coffee’s on the counter,” Jenny said and, “Can I play with the skunk?”

  “Buddy,” Anna reminded her. “Don’t let him fall.”

  When she returned with her coffee, she sat on the table next to Jenny. The Fecal Queen had folded her legs tailor fashion, forming a flesh-and-bone skunk pen. Buddy, full of breakfast bugs, didn’t seem in any hurry to escape.

  “Andrew Madden and Steve will be here in about forty-five minutes,” Jenny said. “You’re going to have to tell them something.”

  She said this without looking up from where she dragged a bit of grass around her lap, trying to get Buddy to play with it as if he were a kitten. Anna noticed Jenny didn’t say she’d have to tell them the truth, or what happened, or where she’d been for all those days. Only that she’d have to tell them something. Anna also noted the “them.” Jenny said it in a tone that suggested there was Them and there was Us and she was part of Anna’s Us.

  “Yeah,” Anna agreed, took a sip of coffee, and moaned softly. All things liquid were revelations of life.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me first?” Jenny slid her eyes to check Anna’s reaction to the question.

  Anna did not react, not externally. She had the odd sensation that her ordeal had split her into two entities. The one with the fear burned from it housed a calculating mind figuring odds, assessing dangers, studying a situation from every angle. The other was like a puppy on a six-lane expressway, a tightrope walker watching the knots fray, a tasty morsel in a bikini treading water in a school of sharks.

  As she considered Jenny’s offer to listen, the fearless part of her schizoid self ruled, the seemingly sane self who conducted interactions with the outside world. The frightened puppy with nowhere to run curled tight around her breastbone, nose to tail, and tried to close out everything but the reassuring sound of her heartbeat.

  Jenny was looking at her with a concerned frown. By normal conversational standards Anna had been quiet too long. Silence was her new normal, Anna realized. In silence, as in solitude, there was a chance of peace.

  Taking it for reticence, Jenny offered Anna the coin shared so readily among women and so rarely among men. She offered up her pain so Anna might not feel alone or fear judgment.

  “When I was in college, I was raped,” Jenny said quietly, her eyes back on Buddy, now sleeping in a perfect circle of black and white. “It was one of those weird Lord of the Flies things. You know, where the whole of the evil is greater than the sum of its parts.”

  Anna said nothing. Part of her wanted to hear Jenny’s story, needed to. The part that knew she would have to pay in kind froze her tongue in her mouth.

  “Some fraternity threw a beer bash at a lake. Usual story: girl drinks too much, the Lord of the Flies possesses boys, also drunk, gang rape on a picnic table becomes a sporting event.”

  The puppy curled around Anna’s breastbone whimpered in its sleep. Anna wanted to speak, to commend Jenny’s courage or offer a word of support in return. Not sympathy. With absolute certainty, she knew
sympathy was wrong. Unable to sort out language for the situation, she sat mute, her coffee cup to her lips to hide their trembling.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me if that’s why I became a lesbian?” Jenny asked with a trace of bitterness.

  “No,” Anna said. “The other girls didn’t try to stop it. They were as culpable as anybody.”

  “They were afraid,” Jenny said. It sounded as if she had said that more than once over the years.

  “Not all of them.” Anna sipped her coffee. It had cooled. Coffee was the only substance she knew of that could quickly cool to significantly below room temperature.

  “No,” Jenny said. “Not all of them.”

  “And they were supposed to be us, not them.”

  Jenny thought Anna had been raped. That’s why she bared her own shame, so Anna’s burden might be lessened by sharing. Anna wanted to insist she wasn’t raped and not because, as far as she knew, she hadn’t been.

  Shared her own shame.

  It was not Jenny’s shame, Anna knew that. Had the monster of the jar raped her, it would not have been her shame. Even so, like Jenny, she would have had to carry it because neither monsters nor society—nor the legal system—would carry it for them. Anna wanted to separate herself from her housemate, from the girl who had been gang-raped, the girl who was not like her, not like lucky Anna, not like the unraped girls.

  Anna pictured how these cowardly emotions would look onstage, how an actor might move her face or eyes, how she would shape her shoulders and spine to embody them for the audience. The image wasn’t pretty.

  Anna owed Jenny Gorman. She steeled herself to give what she could. Beginning her story, she creaked like the Tin Man croaking for oil. “I was knocked out and tossed into a solution hole. I don’t know if I was raped or not,” she said. “My clothes were taken. I woke up naked. The clothes I came back in I found on the corpse of a girl buried in the sand. It was one of those weird Silence of the Lambs things,” she echoed Jenny’s opening statement. The women exchanged wry smiles. Some humor was so black it had to be funny or tragic.

  “I hiked out of here. Up there,” she turned and pointed toward the escarpment, though, from the picnic table, neither of them could see it. “You said there was a trail.” She didn’t try to keep the accusation out of her voice, and, as expected, it won her a smile. The part about running out of water embarrassed her. Anna resisted the temptation to leave it out, to make herself seem more clever. When she told the story to the Bullfrog district ranger and the chief ranger, it would not be included in the recitation.

  Anna told Jenny everything: how afraid she was, how hard it was to choose between drugged water and no water, about the sandwiches and digging a cat hole and finding it full of fine brown hair, about pulling Kay’s clothes off and wearing them, about how important the watch was, how it anchored her in time as she was anchored in place. Then she told Jenny the other thing she would not tell the men coming on the boat, how WHORE had been carved deep in her thigh, how afraid she was that it would scar and every day she would see it there.

  When she finished, they sat quietly for a while; then Jenny carefully scooped the sleeping Buddy out from the nest of her crossed legs. “Make a lap,” she said to Anna. Anna obediently pressed her thighs together. The khaki of the borrowed trousers dragged over the healing wounds.

  Gently, as if she were setting down a soap bubble, Jenny laid Buddy in the new-made lap. “Wait for me,” Jenny said. She disappeared into the duplex and returned a few minutes later with a small glass bottle in hand. “Vitamin E oil,” she said as she handed the bottle to Anna. “It’s supposed to be good for diminishing scars.”

  Without further comment on Anna’s story, she sat again and began rolling a cigarette.

  “Do you want Buddy back?” Anna asked. It was the only way she could think of to say thank you.

  “Secondhand smoke isn’t good for skunk kits.”

  A week before, Anna might have retorted that it wasn’t good for anyone. Now the halcyon days when secondhand smoke seemed a viable threat seemed decades behind her.

  Jenny ran her tongue along the edge of the paper and rolled the cigarette between her fingers.

  “It looks like the snake that swallowed the elephant,” Anna said.

  “I can’t seem to get the knack of it,” Jenny admitted as she lit the bigger end and inhaled.

  “I can teach you if you like.” Anna surprised herself by the offer.

  “You used to smoke?”

  “No,” Anna said as a memory flooded back of a life that had happened long, long ago and far away in a different galaxy. Laughing over red wine, Andrew Lloyd Webber in the tape player, tobacco scattered over an old wooden table the size of a school desk in a kitchen so small the door could only be closed when both chairs were pushed in, and one could clear the dirty dishes from table to sink without getting up, running lines for a production of Our Town set in the Old West, Zach deciding to roll his smokes in keeping with the cowboy motif. Anna’d learned. Zach hadn’t, and, since the show never opened due to financial disasters, it didn’t much matter.

  The growl of one of the ATVs used to carry supplies up the hill from the dock dragged her back into the still of the morning on Lake Powell.

  “The guy is still in the hole?” Jenny asked. The admiration in her voice made Anna feel better than she had since she’d embarked on the telling and, so, the remembering of her days in the jar.

  “I hope so,” she said.

  The ATV carried Chief Ranger Andrew Madden and Steve Gluck, Bullfrog Marina’s district ranger. Steve was also acting district ranger for the Rope until funding came through to pay for another GS-11 permanent position.

  Close behind them, Jim Levitt arrived in a second ATV.

  “Jim is supposed to patrol with me today,” Jenny said, “but there is no way in hell he would miss out on this.”

  Chief Ranger Madden was tall and lean and quiet. He wore the flat hat well and sported a lush mustache just starting to go gray. Had he not been black and spoken with a distinct Boston accent, Anna thought he would have given Tom Selleck a run for his money at the Marlboro Man auditions. There weren’t a lot of black guys high up in the park service. Anna would have to tread carefully around Andrew Madden. He hadn’t gotten as far as he had by being stupid—or nice. Steve Gluck Anna had met on several occasions, but she had never spoken more than a few words to him.

  While the chief ranger leaned against the side of the duplex near the door, Gluck asked Jenny if she wouldn’t mind making a fresh pot of coffee for “a broken-down old ranger.” Gluck was nowhere near as pretty as Andrew Madden. He wasn’t more than an inch or two taller than Jenny, five foot nine at best. Too many long sedentary winters had given him a sizable gut that rode hard and high above his belt. A life out of doors had weathered him. Anna, who was good at guessing people’s ages, bet he was close to sixty.

  Still and all, she doubted that he was a “broken-down old ranger,” though she suspected he used the line with some frequency. Unoffended, Jenny went to fetch coffee. Steve Gluck turned a tired smile on Anna.

  “Jim here says you’ve had quite an adventure.”

  He waited with his sleepy smile while Anna decided what she was going to tell him. All three law enforcement rangers bided in polite silence. A scholar of silences from years backstage, Anna could tell in a heartbeat whether an actor paused or forgot his line, whether an audience was asleep or in awe, whether the silence was active and tense or dead air, momentary confusion or smug prescience.

  The three ranger silences radiating at her were as distinct as the men themselves. Levitt, young and fit and stony-faced, leaked the joyous excitement of a puppy ready to be taken on the best walk ever. Andrew Madden’s silence was hungry and calculating. He needed information so he could start the political spin in his direction should Anna pony up anything in need of spinning. The Bullfrog district ranger—the only one of the three confident enough to allow the vulnerability of facial expression�
��was just a man waiting to get the details on one more hard dirty job he needed to do in a long line of hard dirty jobs he’d plowed through during his career.

  Anna told her story again.

  As she talked, her voice low and even, her sentences with beginnings, middles, and ends, her plotline sensical, her timeline as logical as a person drugged to the gills, in pain, and dehydrated could make it, she could tell she was not showing enough trauma to satisfy her audience. Not that she suspected for an instant any of them wished her ill. They wore varying degrees of the same look her sister the psychiatrist wore when she thought Anna was hiding some metaphorical boil that would heal better if lanced.

  The lack of emotion surprised Anna as well. Trained in an era where a person couldn’t cross Rockefeller Center without stepping on half a dozen psychotherapists, she worried she was bottling up, repressing, in denial, or one of the great many bad labels good old-fashioned stoicism had had heaped upon it.

  When she began relating how she had found long brown hair as she dug a cat hole in the sand, she realized she was doing none of those things. She had not merely survived but won. Winning, and the fact that, unlike for Jenny, there had been no witnesses cheering and swilling beer as they watched her humiliation, allowed her a shred of dignity. Physical violation was the tool men traditionally used to debase women. In wars and feuds men debased women for the sole purpose of humiliating the men to whom they belonged, reducing the women to nothing more than vessels to carry man’s hatred for man.

  Maybe that was why Anna left out the detail that she had been cut with the casual mockery of a boy carving his initials in his desktop.

  She also did not tell them where the solution hole was, insisting she’d have to take them there herself. Had she done otherwise, she knew, as female, victim, and non-law-enforcement personnel, she wouldn’t be allowed to accompany those who went to make the arrest. Anna was determined to see what her monster looked like by the light of day, how he looked beaten, in handcuffs, outnumbered, outsmarted, outgunned. She needed the monster, grown to enormous proportions in her mind, cut down to size.