Dismember

TWENTY-THREE

Libby had scrubbed her face, ears, and hands three times before stripping, draining an inch or two of water, and lowering herself into the tub. She could have cleaned herself in the bathwater just as easily as in the sink, but she hadn’t wanted to soil it. Washing off the creep’s saliva and then lounging in the water with it floating all around her naked body would have been like taking a bath in a giant, unflushed toilet. Maybe worse.

The water hadn’t yet cooled, which seemed wrong, impossible. In all that time downstairs, her search for the coffee filters, her struggle with Marshall, her frenzied door and window-locking session, the water hadn’t cooled a bit. Not that she minded; the bath-salted water was heaven in a tub.

She lit one of her candles, left the others with the book and the matches on the wide ledge between her head and the bucket of beer, and lolled in the water for a long time with her eyes closed, half asleep and savoring the warmth in her back and legs. Almost half an hour passed before she opened her first beer.

From the bedroom, Paul sang on. The CD had started over at least once and maybe twice since she’d put it on. She hadn’t heard the album enough times to memorize the track listing, didn’t know where in the mix she was, but she knew for sure she’d heard this particular song once already.

For her first beer, she didn’t bother with the lime. She wasn’t going to savor it, though she probably should have. No, this first one was for chugging. If she got one drink in her system fast, she might relax enough to really enjoy the rest.

Images of Marshall pushed their way into her forethoughts, and despite all her mental attempts, she couldn’t shove them all back down into her subconscious. She saw brief glimpses of his shattered glasses and the red mark across his broken nose. She saw the paperbacks fluttering out of his hand like clumsy birds and landing wounded on the countertop and in the sink. She saw the bulge in his pants, which had been surprisingly large, saw the way it throbbed and shifted when he got his hands around her waist, like it was alive down there, trying to chew its way through his trousers.

She took a long swallow of beer, closed her eyes and urged the alcohol to never mind with her liver and kill her brain cells already.

His tongue on her face—she still felt it working its way from her lips to her earlobe and leaving behind a wide, sticky trail.

Oh God. Maybe she should have shoved the potato peeler into his brain while she’d still had the chance. Or maybe she should have shoved it into her own once he’d left. Anything to avoid these god-awful memories.

She finished the beer and tried unsuccessfully to suppress a burp worse than any you’d hear at a Friday night frat party, not that she’d been to any of those in years.

She mentally excused herself before letting loose a second, only slightly less garish belch.

She set the empty bottle down beside the tub. It clinked on the tile. Before she let herself have the second, she lit the rest of her tea lights and distributed them around the tub. She cut into her lime, both the air and the water around her flickering like she was in a pool of molten gold. Lime juice dripped from the fruit as she sectioned it and landed on the unsubmerged slopes of her breasts. She looked down and saw something near her nipple that she hadn’t noticed before. A bruise, long and curved around the contour of her chest, finger shaped. Libby shuddered.

The last thing she needed was a visible reminder of the attack, something she would see every time she changed clothes or took a shower, when she was naked and already feeling her most vulnerable. She grabbed a washcloth from beside the bar of soap on the ledge and draped it over the offensive mark. The damp material clung to her chest, its weight comforting. She hadn’t realized her breasts were sore until the washcloth began to ease some of the pain.

She opened another beer and twisted one of the lime slices through the mouth. Juice sprayed her check and dribbled down the side of the bottle, but most of it stayed inside the bottle’s neck and fell down into the beer along with the misshapen piece of fruit. Libby took a sip and set the bottle on the tub’s ledge.

Eyes closed, she leaned back in the water, let her head dip underneath until nothing remained above the surface but her flaring nostrils. Her hair floated up and tickled at her ears, and though she still heard the music from the bedroom, it was muffled and nonsensical. She breathed slowly and reemerged only after the bathwater tried to eek its way into her ear canals. As she broke the surface, the water sluiced off her face, out of her hair, and down her neck to the concealing washcloth. She opened her eyes and sighed.

She hadn’t yet opened her book, a mystery by an author whose novels she’d recently discovered—actually more of a comedy than a mystery, if it was anything like the previous volumes in the series—but now she thought a little fiction might do her some good, get her mind off what had happened to her today in the real world.

She’d forgotten to bring a towel to dry her hands, but the bathmat beside the tub lay within reach. She flapped an arm over the edge and brushed against the empty beer on the floor before finding the shaggy mat and grabbing hold of it. She pulled the thing close enough to dry both hands, careful not to get it near any of the open flames, and let it fall back to the ground in a heap when she was through.

The book was a little on the slim side, maybe two or three hundred pages, and the cover felt slick against her fingers. She skipped the reviews and the author’s note and the rest of the junk and jumped straight into the action. Thirty pages in, she’d finished her second beer, and the bath had finally begun to cool. She thought about adding a little more hot water and reading another couple of chapters but decided maybe she’d had enough. The bath had been nice, had relaxed her muscles a little and given her a chance to escape, but tempting though it might be, she couldn’t spend the rest of her life here, if only because she didn’t want raisins for fingers and a belly as scaly as an alligator’s.

She didn’t have a bookmark, but she abhorred dog-earing, so she committed the page number to memory instead, closed the book, and set it on the floor beside her two empty beers.

She unplugged the drain with her toes and waited for all but the last few inches of water to disappear before sitting up and blowing out her candles.

Thoughts of Trevor popped into her mind. She thought about his dirty shorts and underwear and the embarrassment in his voice when he’d told them he’d messed himself. Then she remembered the carousel, the classical music, the way they’d all ridden together, smiling and laughing. At least their trip to the mall had ended well.

She wondered what her son was up to now, probably playing a board game with Mike or watching TV, maybe sitting in front of an open comic book and studying the pictures. Trevor always studied the comic books, never simply glanced at them. After closing the back cover of any particular issue, he could tell you everything about any character in any frame, right down to the details of their costume. He almost seemed to have a photographic memory, though he’d never shown such ability in any other aspect of his life.

Libby frowned. She’d been looking forward to a night by herself, but now she found herself missing Trevor and, to a lesser extent, Mike. It would have been nice to spend a little time together as a family, even if they weren’t exactly a family anymore.

She’d left the towel by the sink while washing the Marshall slime off her face. Now, in order to get to it, she had to traipse across the floor, leaving wet footprints behind her, her still-sore breasts bouncing. She dried herself off at the sink and then wiped at the floor, getting most of the moisture and leaving the rest to evaporate or seep into the grout or whatever it was water eventually did.

She thought she’d call Trevor before he went to sleep, tell him goodnight and blow him a kiss through the mouthpiece. Sometimes, when he was home, she snuck into his room to watch him sleep, tucked him in tight and kissed him on the top of his head before crawling into bed herself. She couldn’t do that tonight, but at least she could hear his voice and tell him she loved him.

She wrapped her towel around her body and tied it in a knot near her armpit. She hadn’t looked for the bruise, had purposefully looked everywhere except her chest, and now she wondered how long she could pretend the mark wasn’t there. Tonight at least, she hoped, please God don’t let me dream about that pervert and his wandering hands or about that throbbing mound in his pants. She could have gone the rest of her life without remembering the feel of his stubble on her cheek, but she was afraid both Marshall and his rough face would haunt her dreams for weeks to come. Or months. Hell, she might have nightmares about tonight for the rest of her life.

Bastard. She could only imagine how she’d feel if he’d actually gotten what he came for.

She remembered the daisies, still in their vase in the kitchen. At least she would get some satisfaction when she stomped on the things until they were nothing but green goo running in the indentations of the linoleum.

She took her book with her to the bedroom but left the candles and the remaining beers. She might come back later for another drink, and she might not.

The CD had just restarted itself. Libby walked to the stereo and shut it off before plucking the phone from its base and dialing Mike’s number.

The phone rang five times before someone picked up.

“Pullman residence,” said an unfamiliar voice.

Libby frowned. If the stranger on the other end had answered with only hello, she might have thought she’d dialed the wrong number. But he’d said Pullman.

What’s going on?

“Who is this?” she asked, not able to keep a certain amount of sharpness out of her voice.

The man who responded sounded something like John Wayne, or the way Libby thought John Wayne was supposed to sound—she’d never actually seen one of his movies. “May I ask who’s calling?”

“Where’s my son?” Libby said loudly, ignoring the question. “And my husband? What’s going on there?”

The word husband only barely registered. She hadn’t meant to say it.

“Miss,” the voice said, “please identify yourself.”

“Why don’t you identify yourself?” Libby said, not in the mood for another strange man trying to take control of the situation.

“Ma’am,” the stranger said, “I’m afraid—”

Libby cut him off. “Give me Mike right now.” Her first thought was that both Mike and Trevor had been in a car accident. She’d hated that pickup of Mike’s since the day he bought it. It was untrustworthy, dangerous. If her website business had been any more lucrative, she’d have bought Mike a new vehicle herself and torched that truck until there was nothing left but a foul stench in the air and a mound of ashes on the ground.

Although she hadn’t actually expected it, Mike’s voice came onto the line. “Lib?”

“Mike. What’s going on?”

“I was about to call you. You need to come up here,” he said.

“Why? What’s happening?” A tear splashed against her wrist, and she realized she’d been crying.

“It’s Trevor,” he said, and before he could go on, Libby dropped the phone and began pawing through her closet. She loosened the towel and let it drop to the floor, then stepped into a pair of panties and some jeans. She pulled on the first blouse she found.

Trevor, she thought, wondering how much anguish a parent could possibly endure in any given day. She slipped on a pair of running shoes, skipped the socks. From the bed, she heard a squeaky voice. She hurried over and picked up the receiver.

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” she said, knowing it was a forty-five minute drive. She hung up without waiting for a response and then ran.