Last Breath

22

It was odd. She was far away and yet very close. She was floating, weightless, yet she felt the limp heaviness of her body and the cold rigidity of the floor. She was not herself, but who else could she be?

There was no way of making sense of this. She concentrated on little things, single moments that were at least roughly comprehensible.

The hands moving over her. Gloved hands, she thought. Hands of leather.

They turned her on her stomach, pulled her arms behind her. She felt the brief, distant protest of the muscles in her shoulders-pops of pain that flared and vanished, unimportant.

Her wrists were pressed together in the small of her back, and something was wound around them. Rope, she thought, until she sensed its stickiness pulling at the soft down of her arms. Then she knew it was adhesive tape, thick and strong. Duct tape, probably.

For a moment she was a child again, laughing as her dad mended a sofa cushion with tape. She thought he called it “duck” tape, and the idea of duck tape was funny to her. She was five years old.

It was long before the boogeyman had come into her life, long before she had learned to be afraid.

The boogeyman-why think of him now? There seemed to be some relevance to the thought, some connection she could not grasp between the leather hands binding her wrists and the skinny, shadowy figure that had groped for her in the crawl space.

Her wrists were immobilized now. They twisted helplessly behind her back.

“No use, C.J.,” his voice breathed.

Whose voice? She ought to know it. She had recognized it before.

Next the leather hands moved to her ankles, applying tape to the bare skin above her sneakers.

He’s got me trussed like a turkey, she thought.

First ducks, now turkeys. Her mind was filled with birds. She liked birds, except for the mockingbirds that lived in the trees outside her bedroom window and kept her awake at night with their variety of songs.

Birds… She wondered if she could fly out of her body and be a bird in the sky, or a birdlike spirit, a thing no tape could bind, no leather hands could hold.

“This is the way I always wanted you,” he whispered. “Did you know that? Did you ever suspect?”

She didn’t understand, couldn’t think straight. He was talking as if he knew her, as if they had a history.

Well, of course they did. He was the boogeyman, wasn’t he? The terror of her childhood, come back to haunt her again…

His hands were on her mouth now, opening her lips, her jaws. She was in a dentist’s chair and he was saying, “Wider, wider.” No, she wasn’t. She was on the floor in the hallway of her house, and the man with leather gloves was putting something into her mouth. It tasted like rubber. It was spongy yet hard, like a tennis ball-firm but hollow, squeezable. It filled her mouth and cut off her breath.

He’s suffocating me, she thought, but then she drew air through her nostrils, and felt her lungs expand. She could breathe. Only her mouth was blocked.

“I got so sick of your yackety-yak,” he said. “Should’ve done this years ago.”

Now there was pressure on her cheeks and against the back of her head. The pressure increased as a strap was drawn taut and secured with a buckle or a Velcro fastener.

She knew what this was. She had seen it used on mentally ill arrestees who tried to bite the cops who restrained them. It was called a throttle. In plainer language, a gag.

He’s got me bound and gagged, she realized, and those words- bound and gagged -registered with her in a way that her previous thoughts had not.

She was helpless. Couldn’t fight, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. He could do whatever he liked with her. Could kill her in her own house, and she couldn’t scream for help.

Fear flashed through her, and she flopped on the floor, arching her back, fighting against the tape and the gag, and trying to see what she was up against, but she couldn’t see, there was only darkness.

Open your eyes! she yelled inwardly, and then with a worse shock of fear she understood that they were open and had been open all along.

Blind? Was she blind? Or He slapped her. She felt the hard sting of his hand on her cheek.

“Why are you fighting me, you stupid bitch? This is only what you agreed to. You took a vow, remember? I guess it didn’t mean anything to you, but it meant something to me. Remember, C.J.?”

She didn’t remember. She didn’t know who he was or what he was talking about.

“Till death do us part,” he whispered. “That’s what you swore. Remember? ”

He was laughing, and the laughter, even more than his words, brought the memories back. The judge, the ceremony, the small handful of guests, the party afterward at a restaurant in Westwood. No honeymoon-they’d both been too busy for that.

Adam.

It was Adam.

His voice, his hands, his body next to hers.

Adam, not the boogeyman. Adam, not a random stranger.

A scream of anguished confusion welled in her throat and tried to force its way past the throttle in her mouth, but only a muffled squeal came out, overridden by his laughter, then silenced by his gloved hand on her face.

“Want another whiff, you bitch?”

The damp cloth, pushed into her face. She refused to inhale.

“Go on, breathe it in, C.J. We’ve got places to go.”

Past his voice, past the hammering of her heart, a new sound.

Her phone was ringing.

For some insane reason she caught herself thinking that calls always came at the most inconvenient times.