Part 11 (2/2)
Andrea shut her eyes for a moment. She seethed. She boiled. She felt something shoot up her spine like mercury blowing from the top of a thermometer. When she reopened her eyes and saw Bart stepping up to roughly seize Melanie by the upper arm, she couldn't hold it back.
She balled one hand into a fist, extending the middle knuckle like a dull spike, then let it fly, punching Bart just below the ear and behind the jaw, dead-center into the delicate bundle of nerve ganglia. His head snapped, his eyes widened, his jaw dropped.
Bart stepped back for a few seconds to compose himself, then looked up at Andrea with a humorless grin that made her wish she'd given calm reason one more chance. Public place or not, he was ready to do murder. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up another empty bottle and c.o.c.ked it back like a small club.
And promptly dropped it to shatter on the floor. Tequila Mike had leaned over the bar and clamped one large hand around Bart's wrist. Once the bottle was dropped, Mike maintained the pressure and applied a twist, and all at once Bart had new priorities.
”Got a happy hour special,” Tequila Mike said. ”You let my customers stay happy, and I don't snap your scrawny arm.”
Bart grunted wetly as Mike, still behind the bar, began to drag him toward the door, three people forced to s.n.a.t.c.h their drinks and flee their stools as the two of them struggled by. At the end of the bar, Mike climbed over, then twisted Bart's arm behind his back and sent him none-too-gently on his way out the door. Mike lingered for a moment, waiting for further trouble, an attempted reentry, but there was none.
Andrea's relief faded when she saw Melanie's face. Her painfully obvious gaze at the door.
”I should talk to him. I don't want to leave it like this.”
Andrea could only shake her head. ”Mel. Dont. Please, for me.” Not knowing which she was more afraid of: losing her to coercement, or to her own free will.
Melanie touched a finger to Andrea's lips. ”Five minutes. That's all. Ten at most, and then I'll be right back. What can he do right outside?”
Andrea bit her lip and turned to the bar. Listened to the footsteps fading toward the door. Ordered a refill on her gimlet. And then another.
While ten minutes stretched on until last call, and closing.
THE NEXT WEEK was as fully miserable as she had expected. But she could endure. She took perverse comfort in cynical twists on old plat.i.tudes.If you love something, set it free. If it returns, it's yours forever. If it doesn't, hunt it down and kill it .
After ten days, she knew she would survive once more.
And then, at day's end after work, she returned to find Melanie slumped on the sofa, cradling Tripod in the dusk as though he were her last and only friend. As Andrea stood in the doorway, instantly recognizing Melanie's shadowy silhouette, numb existence turned to joy. At least until she turned on the light.
”Oh Melanie,” she whispered. Her skyrockets fizzled into clouds of soot. ”What did he do to you?”
The answer was obvious, Bart's legacy written in swollen lips and puffy eyes, and the now-yellowing bruises that circled them like satellites. Even her posture hinted at how stiff and sore she was.
”At least I'm free now. He said he never wanted to see my face again.” Her eyes gleamed with defiance, tempered by heartbreak. ”Can you blame him?”
That Melanie had left her sitting there in Tappers was forgotten. No grudge could survive in the face of that much pain. Andrea dropped her briefcase and shed her coat to the floor on her way to the sofa. She slid in beside Melanie, held her as carefully as she would a Ming vase, eggsh.e.l.l-thin.
”I'm sorry, Andrea,” Melanie whispered into her shoulder. ”I treated you bad that night.”
”Forget about that, it's ancient history.”
”It just seemed like he really wanted me back. Like it'd be better than ever. He cried. And he was so good to me those first three days.” Melanie winced when Andrea's hand caressed her belly. ”But I think this is what he had in mind all along. Hurting me. That's all.”
Andrea withdrew her hand, leaning in to brush her lips over the constellations of bruises and abrasions.Tears stung her eyes. She would nurse those wounds, heal that heart back into working order. And then they would try their d.a.m.nedest at happily ever after.
Melanie took a deep breath. ”He beat me. And then he raped me.” She spoke with the flat, husky voice of someone who has cried every tear that could possibly be shed, then emerged into numb compliance. ”And then he drugged me so I'd stay unconscious for hours, and hours.”
Andrea felt her soul cracking in two. ”He could've killed you.”
”Sometimes ... I wish he had.”
Before Andrea could respond, Melanie pulled up her sweater and tugged down the top of the loose drawstring sweatpants she was wearing. Enough to expose her belly, and the most hateful violation Andrea had ever seen.
From just under her ribcage to just over her pubic bone, Melanie's stomach was canvas to a huge depiction of a graphically rendered p.e.n.i.s and s.c.r.o.t.u.m. Lewdly erect, swelled beyond all dimensions of reality. Colored the dark pink of sausage and traced with bulging blue veins. The skin was only half-healed, still scabbed.
”He had his tattoo artist friend do that to me while I was knocked out. And said ... said that ... that...” Her voice faltered, and it appeared she had some tears in reserve after all.
Andrea held her closer, shaking her head, about to be miserably ill. ”You don't have to repeat it. Please don't.”
”He said no one would ever want me like this, manor woman. But just in case they did, they'd still have to think of ... ofhim .”
ANDREA TOOK OFF work the next several days on the pretense of sick leave, she and Melanie becoming hermits, rarely venturing beyond the apartment door. She made anonymous calls to crisis centers, speaking in general terms and learning what sort of counseling Melanie should undergo. For she would never completely heal without professional help. As well, she tried in vain to convince Melanie to file felony charges.
”No. No police,” was all the reply she could elicit.
”But why not? You could get him locked away for this.”
”No police,” Melanie would repeat, hugging herself and looking away. Never toward a mirror. ”I'd have to ... to show them ... myself.”
The days pa.s.sed. The cuts healed. The bruises faded.
The scars, inner and outer, remained.
After she returned to work, Andrea felt the guilt of a career mom leaving behind a latchkey kid. She was no good in her office, distracted and jumpy and irritable. That she returned the first day to find Melanie in tears and darkness did not help. Nor did, the third day, finding Melanie's stomach newly raw and b.l.o.o.d.y, sandpaper in her hand.
”I want it gone,” she said. ”I just want to be rid of this.”
”Soon,” Andrea told her. ”Doctors have techniques now, lasers, they can remove tattoos, erase them right off...” Hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. Such procedures were much easier said than successfully done. Especially with red-based inks. She'd checked. Melanie seemed to sense this too.
The next day Andrea brought home a bag of takeout Chinese, hoping it might perk Mel up. She flipped on the light, and kung pao shrimp splattered to the floor when she noticed the blood on Tripod's whiskers.
After a frantic room-to-room search, Andrea found her in the bathtub. Naked, curled onto her side like a sleeping child. Pale, so pale. For she must've bled herself almost clean.The handle of a kitchen knife protruded from her belly, from its gaping wound.
And for Andrea everything snapped at once. This went beyond tears, beyond screams, beyond grief. She knew what it must feel like to die inside, without your body getting wise to the idea.
Calmly, so calmly, she sat on the floor and reached over the edge of the tub to hold the cold, limp hand. To contemplate the loss. And the damage.
The knife in Melanie's stomach had been driven on a very deliberate course, from one side to another, severing the tattooed c.o.c.k from the tattooed s.c.r.o.t.u.m.
Just look at her: the castrated woman.
Andrea stared mutely at the knife, the input weak and fuzzy, dreamlike. More distinct was the gentle ache in her own belly, the nudge preceding her own blood loss, the cramps before her period.
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