Play dead

FOUR

TWO MONTHS EARLIER

Eve Galvez knew what the therapist was going to say before he said it. She always did.

How did it make you feel?

"How did it make you feel?" he asked.

He was younger than the others. Better dressed, better looking. And he knew it. Dark hair, a little too long, curling over his collar; eyes a soft, compassionate caramel brown. He wore a black blazer, charcoal slacks, just the right amount of aftershave for daytime. Something Italian, she thought. Expensive. Vain men had never impressed Eve Galvez. In her line of work, she couldn't afford the flutters. In her line of work she couldn't afford a misstep of any kind. She pegged him at forty-four. She was good with ages, too.

"It made me feel bad," Eve said.

"Bad is not a feeling." He had an accent that suggested the Main Line, but not by birth. "What I'm talking about is emotion," he added. "What emotion did the incident evoke?"

"Okay, then," Eve said, playing the game. "I felt… angry."

"Better," he replied. "Angry at whom?"

"Angry at myself for getting into a situation like that in the first place. Angry at the world."

She had gone to Old City one night, after work, alone. Looking. Again. At thirty-one she was one of the older women in the club, but with her dark hair and eyes, her Pilates-toned body, she attracted her share of advances. Still, in the end, the crowd was too loud, too raucous. She gave the bar her two-drink minimum, then stepped into the night. Later in the evening she stopped by the Omni Hotel Bar, and made the mistake of letting the wrong man buy her a drink. Again. The conversation had been boring, the night dragged. She had excused herself, telling him that she had to go to the ladies' room.

When she walked out of the hotel a few minutes later, she found him waiting on the street. He followed her up Fourth Street for almost three blocks, closing the distance little by little, moving from shadow to shadow.

As luck would have it-and luck was something that played a very small role in Eve Galvez's life-at the moment the man got close enough to lay a hand on her, a police car was trolling slowly by. Eve flagged the officers down. They sent the man packing, but not without a scuffle.

It had been close, and Eve hated herself for it. She was smarter than this. Or so she wanted to believe.

But now she was in her therapist's office, and he was pushing her.

"What do you think he wanted?" he asked.

Pause. "He wanted to fuck."

The word resonated, finding all four corners of the small room. It always did in polite company.

"How do you know that?"

Eve smiled. Not the smile she used for business, or the one she used with friends and colleagues, or even the one she used on the street. This was the other smile. "Women know these things."

"All women?"

"Yes."

"Young and old?"

"And every one in-between."

"I see," he said.

Eve glanced around the room. The office was a gentrified trinity on Wharton Street, between Twelfth and Thirteenth. The first floor was three small rooms, including a cramped anteroom with bleached maple floors, a working fireplace, brass accoutrements. The smoked-glass end tables were populated with recent issues of Psychology Today, In Style, People. Two French doors led to a converted bedroom that served as the office, an office decorated in a faux-Euro style.

In her time on the couch Eve had met all the Pams-clonazepam, diazepam, lorazepam, flurazepam. None helped. Pain-the kind of pain that begins where your childhood comes to a deadening halt-would not be salved. In the end, when night became morning, you stepped out of the shadows, ready or not.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I apologize for my crude language. It's not very becoming."

He didn't chastise or excuse her. She hadn't expected him to. Instead, he glanced down at his lap, studied her chart, flipped a few pages. It was all there. It was one of the downsides to belonging to a healthcare system that logged every appointment, every prescription, every physical therapy session, every X-ray-ache, pain, complaint, theory, treatment.

If she had learned anything it was that there were two groups of people you couldn't con. Your doctor and your banker. Both knew the real balance.

"Have you been thinking about Graciella?" he asked.

Eve tried to maintain her focus, her emotions. She put her head back for a few moments, fighting tears, then felt the liquid warmth traverse her cheek to her chin, onto her neck, then on to the fabric of the wing chair. She wondered how many tears had rolled onto this chair, how many sorrowful rivers had flowed through its ticking. "No," she lied.

He put down his pen. "Tell me about the dream."

Eve plucked a few tissues from the box, dabbed her eyes. As she did this she covertly glanced at her watch. Wall clocks were scarce in a shrink's office. They were at minute forty-eight of a fifty-minute session. Her doctor wanted to continue. On his dime.

What was this about? Eve wondered. Shrinks never went over the time limit. There was always someone scheduled next, some teenager with an eating disorder, some frigid housewife, some jack-off artist who rode SEPTA looking for little girls in pleated plaid, some OCD who had to circle his house seven times every morning before work just to see if he had left the gas on or had remembered to comb his area-rug fringe a few hundred times.

"Eve?" he repeated. "The dream?"

It wasn't a dream-she knew that, and he knew that. It was a nightmare, a lurid waking horror show that unspooled every night, every noon, every morning, dead center in her mind, her life.

"What do you want to know about it?" she asked, stalling. She felt sick to her stomach.

"I want to hear it all," he said. "Tell me about the dream. Tell me about Mr. Ludo."

Eve Galvez looked at the outfit on her bed. Collectively, the jeans, cotton blazer, T-shirt, and Nikes represented one-fifth of her wardrobe. She traveled light these days, even though she was once addicted to clothes. And shoes. Back in the day her mailbox had been thick with fashion magazines, her closet impenetrable with suits, blazers, sweaters, blouses, skirts, coats, jeans, slacks, vests, jackets, dresses. Now there was room in her closet for all of her skeletons. And they needed plenty of room.

In addition to her handful of outfits, Eve had one piece of jewelry she cared about, a bracelet she wore only at night. It was one of the few material things she cherished.

This was her fifth apartment in two years, a spare, drafty, three- room affair in Northeast Philadelphia. She had one table, one chair, one bed, one dresser, no paintings or posters on the walls. Although she had a job, a duty, a litany of responsibilities to other people, she sometimes felt like a nomad, a woman unfettered by the shackles of urban life.

Exhibit Number One: in the kitchen, four boxes of Kraft Macaroni amp; Cheese that expired two years earlier. Every time she opened the cupboard she was reminded that she was relocating with food she would never eat.

In the shower she thought about her session with the shrink. She had told him about the dream-not all of it, she would never tell anybody all of it-but certainly more than she had intended. She wondered why. He was not any more insightful than the others, did not have a special sense that raised him above all of his colleagues in his field.

And yet she had gone further than she ever had.

Maybe she was making progress. She walks up a dark street. It is three o'clock in the morning. Eve knows precisely what time it is because she had glanced up the avenue-a dream-street that had no name or number-and saw the clock in the tower at City Hall.

After a few blocks, the street grows gloomier, even more featureless and long-shadowed, like a vast, silent de Chirico painting. There are abandoned stores on either side of the street, shuttered diners that somehow have customers still at the counters, ice-covered in time, coffee cups poised halfway to their lips.

She comes to an intersection. A streetlight blinks red on all four sides. She sees a doll sitting in a fiddleback chair. It wears a ragged pink dress, soiled at the hem. It has dirty knees and elbows.

Suddenly, Eve knows who she is, and what she has done. The doll is hers. It is a Crissy doll, her favorite when she was a child. She has run away from home. She has come to the city without any money or any plan.

A shadow dances across the wall to her left. She turns to look, and sees a man approaching, fast. He moves as a gust of blistering wind, carved of smoke and moonlight.

He is now behind her. She knows what he did to the others. She knows what he is going to do to her.

"Venga aqui!" comes the booming voice from behind, inches from her ear.

The fear, the sickness, blossoms inside her. She knows the familiar voice, and it forms a dark tornado in her heart. "Venga, Eve! Ahora!"

She closes her eyes. The man spins her around, begins to violently shake her. He pushes her to the ground, but she does not hit the steaming asphalt. Instead she falls through it, tumbling through space, head over heels, freefall, the lights of the city a mad kaleidoscope in her mind.

She crashes through a ceiling onto a filthy mattress. For a few blessed moments the world is silent. Soon she catches her breath, hears the sound of a young girl singing a familiar song in the next room. It is a Spanish lullaby, "A La Nanita Nana."

Seconds later, the door slams open. A bright orange light washes the room. An earsplitting siren rages through her head.

And the real nightmare begins. Eve stepped out of the shower, toweled off, walked into her bedroom, opened the closet, took out the aluminum case. Inside, secured against the egg-crate foam lining, were four firearms. All the weapons were perfectly maintained, fully loaded. She selected a Glock 17, which she carried in a Chek-Mate security holster on her right hip, along with a Beretta 21, which she wore in an Apache ankle rig.

She slipped into her outfit, buttoned her blazer, checked herself in the full-length mirror. She proclaimed herself ready. Just after 1 AM, she stepped into the hall.

Eve Galvez turned to look at her nearly empty apartment, a rush of icy melancholy overtaking her heart. She had once had so much.

She closed the door, locked the deadbolt, walked down the hallway. A few moments later she crossed the lobby, pushed through the glass doors, and stepped into the warm Philadelphia night.

For the last time.