Page 49 of Antihero

“They won’t do anything you don’t allow.”

“That is not,” she said, “the question I asked.”

“They will want to examine you,” Evan said. “And treat you.”

Her nod came like a quiver. “Will they make me … describe what happened?”

“Yes. They will ask. And if you decide to do a kit—”

“I can’t put it into words. It was impossible, what happened to me.” She turned away again. Passing lights strobed across her reflection. “But of course, everything is possible.”

The driver was in a world of his own, softly mouthing lyrics from the next track, something about putting Molly all in her champagne.

Evan said, “Maybe you can describe it from outside yourself.”

Her head snapped over. “Outside myself?”

“Like a scene. Like something that happened to someone else.”

“Do you think you have any right, in any way,” and here she clenched her teeth with Eastern European ire, “any right to tell me anything right now?”

“No,” Evan said.

“What then? More instructions that you’re going to explain to me about what I need to do next?”

“No,” Evan said.

“Good. Okay, then. I don’t want to hear your advice.” She turned back to her window, her fist shoved to her mouth.

The Uber accelerated and then braked hard, a horn blaring at them for five full seconds. Their driver cut hard around a corner, and then they skimmed beneath streetlights, bars of shadow flurrying across them.

Anca squeezed her legs together again, curled into herself.

To give her some privacy, Evan focused on the back of the driver’s seat, the bopping PLAYAH cap. Took her home, ’n’ I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it.

Anca’s gaze remained fixed out the window. When she spoke, her cracked voice surprised him: “She sat on the subway. And clutched the laminated seizure plan to her belly.”

Evan waited. Gave her room.

She swallowed dryly. Reset herself.

“A mother with children. That’s who she looked for first. The second choice was a couple with kids. Third: a woman, alone.” At last she turned her bruised face to him. “She needed to pay attention for when it started to happen.”

Anca sat on the crinkly paper of the ER exam-room table. A face peered back from the mirror across, blanched and haggard in the harsh fluorescent lighting. They’d taken photos of her bruises already and the word written across her face. The gap in her hospital gown revealed the dick drawn in Magic Marker across her shoulder blade, a match for the image tagging the subway car she’d been kidnapped out of. She’d required a hand mirror to see it. The sexual-assault nurse examiner had helped her try to wash it off, along with the WHORE on her cheek; though faded, stains still stood out against the reddened skin.

She could scrub all she wanted but it would always be there on that spot, an echo of her violation, a reminder that her own skin could be claimed by someone else.

They were talking now, the nurse, police officer, social worker, a resident, and the attending. It was crowded, little space, no privacy. The examination and treatment had been excruciating, though as compassionate as possible. Out in the hall, the statue of Saint Bernadette Soubirous kneeling with a rosary laced across her praying hands had given Anca some comfort. Thank goodness for Catholic hospitals.

They’d started her on antibiotics to protect against … diseases. She’d be HIV-tested in seventy-two hours. She had needed stitches. Significant signs of tearing and—and—

Her thoughts left her.

Aches and burns. Aside from that, only numbness. Flesh deadened from local anesthetics, mind deadened from Ativan, her body an empty warehouse. She wondered if she would ever feel again, feel any sensation not inflicted by them, something, anything to let her know she was alive—the burn of an oven-hot pan against her palm, a glob of peanut butter trudging down her throat, the ache in her hip flexors from standing during the Paschal Vigil.

I will never be the same again, she told herself.

It was something she needed to hear. She gave herself permission to be here in this anguish in this moment, to let it have as much of her as it demanded.