Hannah can barely lift her head wracked with pain. She has lost the thread of time: Is this the day when she will meet Y.K., or a later day? The thought of returning to the Marriott for the luncheon meeting, having to hear everything a second time, uttering her own banal words a second time, is terrifying to her.

  Enduring his sharp nails inside her body for a second time, the most tender part of her body, is terrifying to her.

  Yet: Is there not comfort in routine? In knowing—I did survive. I will survive.

  Yet: Wondering if, in the night, the door to the guest room had been opened, quietly.

  Surely, the concerned husband stood in the darkness listening to the stricken wife breathe.

  Forbidden by the wife to come closer, to stand over her. Yet concerned for her.

  For which Hannah is grateful, could weep with gratitude: Wes still loves her.

  She doesn’t deserve his love, she knows.

  Prays that, if he discovers how she has betrayed him, he will forgive her.

  But now someone looms above her—“Mrs. Jarrett? Ma’am?”

  Jarring to see the petite brown-skinned woman—Ismelda—standing beside Hannah’s bed, concerned.

  Why is Mrs. Jarrett still in bed, nearing noon? Deathly pale and sweating, bloodshot eyes.

  Daring to touch Hannah’s shoulder to wake her but Hannah is already awake, gives a sharp cry—“Go away! Who are you! Get away! Don’t touch me!”

  Death Sentence

  Between before and after is an infinity.

  Before the small, seismic shift that will precipitate a mountain avalanche, after that shift, the catastrophic consequences.

  As Ismelda lifts the phone receiver to call Wes Jarrett at his office (as Ismelda has not done in the several years she has worked for the Jarretts), the fate of thirty-one-year-old Zekiel Jones, Far Hills Marriott employee, lifetime resident of Detroit, slips into place, as rudely and abruptly fixed as a nail pounded into place by a hammer.

  In the instant before, Zekiel’s life flies before him airy and unbounded to the horizon, and beyond; in the instant after, Zekiel’s life has been truncated to less than ten hours.

  In his office Wes Jarrett takes the call guardedly, uneasily, from Ismelda, knowing that something must be wrong at home, his first panicked thought is of the children for the children are an exquisite burden to him, he has become an anxious father since Katya’s illness, he has become a (subtly) resentful husband … But here is Ismelda’s soft-cadenced lightly accented voice explaining to him that something seems to be wrong with Mrs. Jarrett this morning, she is still in bed, has tried to get up but is too weak, Ismelda has heard her crying, talking to herself as if she has been hurt …

  Hurt, Wes hears. What does that mean—hurt …

  Wes asks if he can speak with Hannah but Ismelda says quickly that Mrs. Jarrett has told her not to come into the room again, she will scream if anyone comes into the room and her skin is “very hot”—“I said, ‘I will take your temperature, ma’am,’ but she would not allow it.”

  “God!”—Wes grips the receiver tighter.

  In a more forceful voice Ismelda tells her employer that if he does not come home right now, she must call 911. There is nothing further she can do alone, she will need to have professional help.

  “All right, Ismelda! Of course.”

  Then, half pleading: “Will you watch over her? Please? Outside the room? I’ll be there in half an hour, I hope.”

  Hurriedly leaving the office, mumbling an excuse to his assistant, on the anxious drive home recalling with a pang of guilt how, the night before, Hannah hadn’t looked good, she’d gone to bed early with one of her headaches, said she wanted to sleep in the guest room so she wouldn’t be wakened by him or by the children and so Wes had left early for work feeling absolved from the husbandly duty of checking in with his wife—though he’d (certainly) intended to call later in the morning to see if she was feeling better …

  As Wes resents having become, of necessity, an anxious father, so Wes resents having become an anxious husband. He has grown to hate the mere sound of the whining word—mi-graine. Not your, my. Hard not to think that “migraine” is a stratagem empowering Hannah and disadvantaging him for “migraine” is that which cannot be questioned, the very essence of the female: a playing card that is always a winning card, irrefutable. Hannah suffers two or three “migraine” headaches a month while headaches afflict Wes so rarely, he has come to think that they might be mythical, like “hot flashes.”

  Fortunately, Hannah is years away from “hot flashes,” Wes assumes.

  At the house Wes leaves the station wagon in the driveway (for he is sure that Ismelda is watching for him at a window) and hurries inside, confers briefly with Ismelda before daring to enter the guest room, a quaintly wallpapered room, not a room in the house that Wes frequently enters, seeing in the bed beneath a ruffled floral comforter that Hannah is lying very still, face turned toward the wall and eyes tight-shut as a child might shut her eyes in a pretense of sleep, stiffening as Wes leans over her—“Hannah? Hannah?”

  Wes is stunned, Hannah is clearly ill. Wishing not to see that a wife is clearly ill is the husband’s prerogative, but there is the concerned presence of Ismelda in the doorway behind him, Wes dares not shrink away nor does he dare touch Hannah, the signal her tense, tight body sends is No! Don’t touch me.

  Hannah’s face is all but unrecognizable to Wes, who rarely sees his wife without her face very carefully made-up, not out of vanity, or not entirely out of vanity, but out of a wish not to disappoint the husband, still less distress or disillusion him. Yet now, Hannah seems indifferent, lethargic, too weak to ask him to leave the room. Her face is mottled and flushed as if with fever. Her mouth is unevenly swollen, disfigured; her eyelids, still with a residue of silvery-blue eye shadow, are puffy and reddened. Her hair, in which Hannah takes such pride, and on which she spends so much money, is matted, as disheveled as the hair of a cheap doll. Repugnant odors lift to Wes’s nostrils from his usually fastidious wife—stale sweat, sour-wine breath, vomit.

  Steeling himself to keep from shrinking away as if he has discovered an unattractive stranger in his house.

  Asking Hannah if she’s all right?—well, clearly she isn’t all right but what is wrong?—as Hannah murmurs what sounds like nothing, then, louder, pleadingly—Please go away, I need to sleep.

  Wes kneels beside the bed. Dares to touch Hannah’s forehead, which is hot to the touch, yet oddly dry, like parchment, even as Hannah whimpers, pushing his hand away as a child might.

  Why is she not looking at him, Wes wonders. Why, her eyes averted, evasive.

  Now Wes sees bruises on the underside of Hannah’s jaw, which he had not noticed before. To his astonishment lurid purple, tinged with yellow, welts ringing her neck like the imprint of fingers …

  “Hannah! What is …”

  Wes lifts the covers from her, before Hannah can stop him. In that instant, Wes sees.

  Inside the loose-fitting nightgown, bruises on Hannah’s shoulders, upper arms, soft, slack breasts. Hannah whimpers No no go away but Wes pulls up the nightgown, tugs it out from beneath her hips, he sees that her stomach and thighs are covered in bruises. Red welts on the insides of her thighs like an animal’s clawing.

  And the smell of the naked body inside the flimsy nightgown: fever, rage, dark coagulated blood, balked, stymied, speechless, squirming beneath the husband’s gaze as a great snake might squirm, not in fear but in defiance of the staring eyes.

  Hannah seizes the cover, pulls it back down.

  Hannah is sobbing, frantic, her secret has been discovered. Wes rocks back on his heels in stunned confusion as if an intruder, a male rival, had rushed at him out of nowhere, struck him in the face.

  Thinking—My wife has been hurt, beaten. Not yet thinking—My wife has been raped.

  What follows then, neither Wes nor Hannah will recall clearly.

  How many times in a voice of raw male grief Wes demands to know what has happened to Hannah, who has done this to her, how many times Hannah insists Nothing, no one.

  She is sobbing, she lies stubborn and stiff beneath the comforter. She will not allow Wes to examine her bruised body further.

  Wes grips her hands, to still them. Both of her hands, in his. He is frightened, angry. “Hannah, for Christ’s sake! I want to help you.”

  He forces her to sit up in bed, against the headboard; he pushes a pillow behind her so that he can sit beside her, of a height with her.

  At last Hannah relents. Telling Wes to ask Ismelda to leave them alone, and shut the door.

  And would he please bring Hannah a washcloth soaked in cold water, for her face, and her migraine pills from the bathroom …

  In a voice so soft Wes has to lean forward to hear Hannah tells Wes that she doesn’t know “entirely” what happened to her, after her Historical Society luncheon at the Marriott: She remembers leaving her friends, going to the parking garage, in the stairwell she might have missed a step, tripped and fell down a flight of concrete steps and injured herself.

  A fall on steps? Concrete?

  She’d struck her head, Hannah says. Her face.

  Wes asks Hannah how she got home after the fall and Hannah says she isn’t sure.

  Hannah explains that the luncheon had been in a private room at the hotel, on the mezzanine, so after lunch she’d exited from that floor directly into the parking garage; she’d intended to get her car but she’d forgotten that she had left the key with the valet parking attendant so she’d had to go down to the ground floor after all; she’d meant to save time but had ended up losing time …

  “Yes, and then? Then what?”—Wes asks impatiently.

  “I—I’m not sure. Someone helped me.”

  “Who?”

  Hannah is perplexed, she has lost her way. She has lost the thread of her narrative.

  She’d had two glasses of wine at lunch, Hannah says guiltily. Maybe three.

  Maybe it was the migraine coming on, maybe she’d been self-medicating without realizing, the meeting had been so excruciatingly dull, she’d stared at the other women’s mouths moving, couldn’t understand a word they were saying, even when she herself spoke, she couldn’t understand a word!—estranged and alienated from the other women, she could sob with frustration, how lonely she was, how lonely in Far Hills, how bored, but why should she be bored, she is (in fact) a very happy woman, one of the happiest women of her acquaintance, far happier than her mother who’d been (also) a migraine sufferer, and something of a (secret) drinker, though Hannah is not a secret drinker but rather a social drinker: a crucial distinction. And unlike her mother, Hannah is happily married. And unlike her mother, Hannah is happy being a mother. Yet in her haste to escape the Marriott she’d decided to exit into the parking garage from the mezzanine floor of the hotel and so had to descend concrete steps from the second floor of the garage to the ground floor, inside the stairwell which was deserted, no one below her on the steps, no one above her, and her footsteps echoing in the hollow space, in her high-heeled pumps she must have tripped, and fallen, a wave of dizziness came over her like a sour smell lifting out of a pit, she’d been anxious to return home before the migraine came on and blinded her, the way a migraine approaches like storm clouds above the Great Lakes—by the time you see the clouds, the sky has already been eclipsed.

  She’d left her migraine medication at home and so was in a hurry to get home before the pain struck, her mistake was hurrying on the steps, must’ve tripped, and fell—headfirst, forward and down—trying to deflect the fall with her hands, still her head struck the wall, or the steps, at the landing she opened her eyes stunned not knowing where she was sprawled on the cold dirty concrete …

  She thinks she might have cried out for help. She thinks she recalls a sort of echo in the stairwell, a muffled scream.

  Ma’am?—the door to the stairwell was pushed open, a figure stood in the doorway.

  Ma’am?—whoever it was, a blurred figure, Hannah’s vision had dimmed, she could barely open her eyes.

  A kind man, a decent man, astonished to see Hannah fallen, whimpering in pain. Stooping to help her to her feet. He’d wanted to call 911 but Hannah insisted she was all right, she hadn’t fallen far, she was sure she could walk well enough.

  He’d walked with her to her car. She hadn’t seen his face.

  No—she had not seen his face.

  Wanting only to return home. Desperate to drive home.

  She would drive directly home, from the Marriott to the house on Cradle Rock Drive less than two miles away. She would drive slowly and carefully. For something was wrong with her eyes. And the ringing in her ears. And the headache like storm clouds blotting out the sky. She would avoid major roads, she would make her way on side streets along Cradle Rock Creek and so to Cradle Rock Road. Once home she would weep in relief. She would take her migraine medication immediately. She would explain to Ismelda that she should not be disturbed, please don’t wake her, keep the children from waking her, and tell Wes not to wake her, she would spend the night in the guest room. For nothing was more precious to her than to sleep.

  She hadn’t noticed any bruises, yet. She’d felt pain, her right ankle, her elbows, the side of her head, but the pain of the migraine was more powerful, eclipsing other pains.

  In disbelief Wes listens to this outburst from Hannah. He has never heard his wife speak in such a way, at such length; slowly and falteringly, then in a rush of words, as if she were recounting a dream whose meaning has eluded her. Almost, Wes would think that Hannah has been drinking this morning.

  He has been aware that Hannah is drinking more than in the past. Where once she’d had a single glass of wine often left unfinished now she will have two glasses, finished. Not intensely aware but (merely) aware as one is aware of the clock’s hand moving as in the corner of an eye so slowly, so without significance, it does not (yet) merit full attention.

  Wes grips Hannah’s hands, which are unnaturally cold. He sees that Hannah is making an effort to look him in the eye as if to convince him that she is speaking sincerely.

  Wes thinks—But something is wrong. Something is not right.

  Not that Hannah is lying. Wes doesn’t think so. But there is something about Hannah’s way of speaking that makes Wes distrustful.

  Since they’d first become lovers years ago there has been a measure of self-consciousness between them, a vestigial adolescent modesty. As, at night, they undress in farther corners of their bedroom, purposefully avoiding seeing each other, and being seen by the other, and usually dress in the morning at different times, avoiding each other altogether, so Wes and Hannah have not frequently appeared naked to each other except in bed, in lovemaking, at close, intimate quarters, and that not frequent in recent years since Katya’s birth. And so it is something of a shock to both husband and wife when Wes throws the covers aside another time to expose her stricken body, pushes away Hannah’s hands, ignores her cries of distress, dares to part her chafed thighs so that he can peer between her legs to see what he has dreaded to see—the vaginal area swollen, reddened, bloodied, bruises and rake-like welts in the white skin of her thighs of the hue of rotted fruit.

  Wes says flatly: “You’ve been raped.”

  Hannah yanks the bedclothes from him, covering herself.

  Trying to speak, to deny. Trying to draw breath.

  No. No no no.

  Furious and frightened Wes looms above her. In his face not love but consternation. Hannah is stunned, struck dumb.

  But that is precisely true, what has been done to you: rape.

  No.

  “Hannah? For Christ’s sake tell me—who did this to you?”

  No future, she has turned her face to the wall. She has hidden her (shamed) face.

  “—in the parking garage? In the stairwell? Who was it?”

  Hannah takes refuge hunched upon herself beneath bedclothes, knees to her chest, arms hugging her knees. Tight as a fist. No one can pry her open.

  Of course it was rape: acknowledge it.

  Y.K. is the rapist. Speak his name.

  The husband is breathing audibly. The husband is pacing the room. Tight-shut eyes. She will refuse to see. She will refuse to hear the husband’s anguish.

  How she hates him, this man who has lifted the covers from her without her consent!—her husband.

  He has dared to lay bare her battered and befouled body, her woundedness, her very nakedness. He has ignored her protests, he has denied her the privacy and sanctuary of her own body.

  “Who was it who came into the stairwell? Was he the—rapist? Or did he find you after—after it happened …”

  No no no. Not ever.

  No way that Hannah can speak the truth to Wes: She has no idea what the truth is.

  “—no one heard you? No one saw you? A man attacked you, beat and raped you, and—no one heard?”

  Except for the quick-shallow breathing that animates her body Hannah lies very still. This, the involuntary infusion of air, greedy in-sucking of oxygen to maintain her battered and befouled and useless life, she cannot deny.

  “Was there a parking attendant? Where was he?”

  Very still. Not hearing.

  Wes considers: multitiered parking garage, remote corners of the garage, a semi-deserted top floor, the stairwell. Almost, he can envision Hannah in the stairwell, heedlessly descending in high-heeled shoes …

  “—was it one of the parking attendants? Who found you? Or—was he the rapist?”

  Wes has begun to sound frantic, deranged. Hannah doesn’t dare confront him, he would see the guilt in her eyes.

  Here is another blunder: Telling Wes she’d fallen in the stairwell at the Marriott. It seemed to her crucial to establish the Marriott in Far Hills, to nullify any possibility of the Renaissance Grand in Detroit. But in inventing concrete steps to account for her bruises, Hannah has had to invent a stairwell. And in inventing a stairwell, she has had to invent being rescued from it. And in inventing a rescuer, she has unwittingly invented a (possible) rapist.