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If someone’s determined enough, if someone doesn’t mind doing some damage, taking the time, you can’t keep them out. Not really.
“You know it almost never happens, a stranger targeting someone. You’ve got all your dark little statistics stored in there. Violence nearly always comes from inside the house.”
He’s here. This is real.
“Violence nearly always comes from someone you know.”
She rubbed her cheek, feeling the ghost of her father-in-law’s long, thin hand.
“Here you are, forcing them into this horrible place, impatient with them, hand over a mouth, irritable, incapable, telling yourself it’s because you love them.You’rethe violence in the house.”
You let your father-in-law into your life. And now you’ve let this Corner in. Something you did. Something you didn’t do. And don’t you remember him? There’s something about him. Something familiar. Isn’t there?
She knocked the back of her head against the chimney to unhinge her husband’s counterfeit voice from her brain, to disrupt the dizzying swirl of blame and confusion.
Stop, stop it. It’s not your fault. You want him to be someone you recognize, because then there might be some horrible thing you did, some reason for all this. And you’ll come out and—what—say, “Yoo-hoo! I remembered who you are and what I did and I’m so very sorry, it’s all my fault.” And he’ll say, “Wow, thanks, no need to murder you now, because I so appreciate the apology.” It’s ridiculous. You didn’t do anything. It’s his fault. This Corner.
“And now you’re thinking of him like the kids do? As the Corner? If you weren’t delusional at first, maybe you are now. At least you have to consider that.”
You’re not delusional. He was trying to scare you. And he did a good job, because you’re scared.
“You should’ve grabbed a weapon,” said her husband.
What weapon? There’s nothing, nothing.
“The fire poker.”
She felt a full-body wince of acute regret.
Why didn’t you think of that? You’re stupid, so stupid!
She pictured herself lying in the hidden place, holding the looped handle of the poker in one hand, its L-shaped end pointing at thehidden panel door. When it swung open, she’d have her foot against the L of the poker, her hands on the loop. She’d be strong, using arms and legs together. Boom, puncture the skull, dead.
She groaned aloud with the beauty of it. The impossibility of it. The poker was only just on the other side of the wall in the living room. But getting it would mean leaving the hidden place, going through the office and into the living room, which was visible from the stairs, the entry, the playroom, the kitchen.
So here you are. Swallowed up and fantasizing about the best ways to put a fire poker you don’t even have through someone’s skull. You can’t get it, not without risking showing yourself. Wouldn’t it be better to sit against the door? To use body weight and legs pressed against the rise of the chimney to keep him out? Keep him from being able to tell, even if he pushed the just right spot, that the door was a door at all?
“It figures,” muttered her husband. “Your solution is to do nothing at all. To hide.”
Sometimes the hardest thing to do is nothing at all.
She flinched, reeling back in time.
But other times the worst thing to do is nothing at all.
Unlocking the door to her dorm room at her mid-Atlantic university after a late-night cramming at the library. Her then boyfriend had spotted her from the hall, hurried behind her, and wrapped his arms around her just as she swung the door open and took the first step into the room. He’d intended it as an affectionate hug of a greeting, but she hadn’t seen or heard him approach. She only saw and felt the man-arms pin her hands to her sides as they tightened. She’d registered that strength, the emptiness of the hall, of her room, the late hour, and was drowned in a wave of utter helplessness, the surety that this was it, the primal bad.
She hadn’t screamed. Hadn’t fought. To her deep shame andhorror, she’d gone loose, folded into a tiny fetal ball of trembling whimper, staring blankly at the linoleum floor of the dorm room.
You can’t freeze like that again. If it comes to it. If it comes to a confrontation.
Even now, her disappointment at her reaction was bottomless. She’d crumpled to protect her belly as though her attacker had been a bear instead of a man. As if a human man would be as merciful as an animal, bat her around the head and neck and try to bite her tender middle, try to kill her quickly. Certain it was a man come to push her into the room and hurt her, all she’d been capable of was melting into terrified weakness. How was that any different from compliance? After all, she couldn’t even make herself say, “No.” Scream for help. Couldn’t speak at all. Couldn’t elbow him or fight or move.
Ringing in her head were the same things she’d heard said so often, this time said about her:Out so late, all alone, no precautions, what was she wearing?
She rolled her head against the brick of the chimney. A wave of deep exhaustion pulled at her, and she let her eyes close.
At first, she remembered, her boyfriend felt terrible. It hadn’t even occurred to him the level of fright his surprise hug might give her, the level of threat she felt in the dorm so late, when she thought she was alone.
