Pulled farther into the room, a sensation of something breaking massively about her like a landslide, an explosion of glaring-white heat—the realization that she has crossed over and cannot retreat.

  Too taken by surprise to recall what name this man has given himself, or what initials. His face is coarser and blunter than the face she’d expected to see. His skin has the texture of parchment, his heavy jaws are unshaven. He isn’t wearing anything like elegant evening clothes but rather beltless trousers, a damp undershirt against which wiry chest hairs press. Blunt bare feet, toenails discolored and clawlike; hair in damp dark tendrils on his forehead, which is lower than Hannah recalls. Heavy-lidded eyes, narrow, alert and shiny like the eyes of a predator bird.

  She draws breath to protest. Or, simply to speak. With the palm of his hand he covers her mouth—No.

  You Like This

  … my happiness is my children, my husband. My marriage. My happiness is not myself but these others for whom I live …

  Midafternoon, the tall windows are open to the sky. A spangle of sunshine like gold coins against the ceiling.

  Something has been done to Hannah: her wristwatch, bracelet, rings have been removed and set upon the bedside table, as before surgery.

  He returns from the bathroom, bare-padding feet, in his wake a crude sound of plumbing. The bed sinks beneath him as he kneels above her, straddles her without a word. The bluish eyelid, a hawk’s eye. His skin slaps against hers like derisive applause. Her dilated eyes arouse him, he laughs into her face. His teeth are bared. She begins to plead No, I don’t think … His fingers grip her throat, he hears nothing of her stammered speech. No words that Hannah has uttered has the man heard. None of her rehearsed pleas, her apologies, the boastfulness of her regret, none of this, he is indifferent to her except as the woman whose clothes he has removed from her without seeing, scarcely seeing her. His thumbs caress the arteries beneath her jaw. Beneath her makeup, her skin is wearing through. She begins to move in protest, she has become a beautiful scaly snake in his hands. As firm-fleshed as a snake, lithe and pained. The sensation between her legs is so sharp, it’s indistinguishable from pain. She is having difficulty breathing, there is a shadow in her left lung. His weight increases on her prone and helpless body, a terrible annihilating weight, as blind and indifferent as the sun. Her eyes are open and stark and unseeing showing a mad rim of white above the iris. She is lost, unmoored. No idea where he has taken her. Her cries are torn from her, like blows. He is not squeezing her throat to cut off her breathing but there is the possibility that he will, he is only just teasing. He is caressing her forcibly, rhythmically. He is deep inside her even as his large hands hold her throat to secure her, he moves deeper, her body has no defense against him. He is unhurried, as methodical as a surgeon. A coroner. In an earlier lifetime he’d been a fighter pilot. At a distance he’d killed. It was not murder or slaughter but simply killing. It had been a task, such tasks stand between the pilot and the hours after sunset when he would eat ravenously, and then sleep the heavy blameless sleep without dreams. The bombings occur in daylight, the light of day is precious. Then, the oblivion of sleep. Such sleep is yet more precious. Truly you would kill for such sleep. A very young man, he’d been trusted by his elders to drop bombs onto the earth, onto cities. Trusted with death. Of course it had not been death, it had been a task. He had not performed these tasks alone, others had performed with him, a sky darkened by fighter planes like hornets tormented out of their hive, he’d been but one of an elite squadron though (of course) he’d been alone in the cockpit of the plane as he is alone now inside his skin. High in the air there is only now, there is never a time when there is not-now. Thrusting himself deep inside the female body like one intent upon evisceration, he is in the now. He inhabits no soul, he is a being generated by the random firings of neurons, yet there is bliss in such a being, animal grunts, guttural cries of pleasure. And as pleasure mounts and breaks, yet there is a reserve, more pleasure, confounding and annihilating. His thumbs release their pressure on the arteries in Hannah’s neck, the relief in the woman is immediate, enormous. Breath rushes into the woman’s lungs, she could have wept with gratitude. The wish to live floods into her lungs, her name has been forgotten as of no more consequence than the futile beating of a moth’s wings against a window in a farther room for all that remains, all that breaks upon her like an explosion of the sun is her adoration for this man who has returned her life to her as negligently as a god that gives, takes, and gives again.

  In the flat bemused reptile-voice staccato-grunting You like this. You like this. You like this.

  • • •

  It has been a long time, Hannah cannot move. Her eyelids flutter weakly, she cannot see. Her face is bare of makeup, her eyes smudged with mascara. Her mouth is bare, raw, swollen. Sensation has obliterated her, in the aftermath of sensation there is nothing. Her heartbeat, that had madly accelerated, is slowed now, almost imperceptible. A match had flared into flame, the flame had touched her, ignited her, exploded inside her, now the flame is extinguished, her body is numb, she can barely lift her head. The tender soles of her feet burn as if she has been walking on hot sand.

  Her lips move, she must speak. She has been sobbing, now she must speak, helpless not to speak, for even the dignity of silence has been torn from her, hearing with a kind of pitying astonishment the futile words in a voice barely audible: I love you. These words uttered impulsively, unbidden.

  As if a plea, an argument, a hypothesis—yet there is no one to respond, he seems not to hear as if sparing her.

  She lies beneath the surface of shallow warm water. Sun plays upon the water, which is warm, unthreatening. She cannot drown in this water, it is too shallow. She is drifting into a stuporous sleep.

  Jesus is condemned to death.

  Jesus is made to carry His cross.

  Jesus falls for the first time beneath His cross.

  Jesus falls for the second time beneath His cross.

  Jesus falls for the third time beneath His cross.

  Jesus is stripped of His garments.

  Jesus is nailed to the cross.

  Jesus cries in a terrible voice, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?

  She is kneeling, she has hidden her face so Jesus cannot see her shame, that He is suffering for her, she isn’t sure why, could not have said why, though it has been explained that Jesus will die on the cross for her, whose name is Hannah.

  For—her!

  A game of adults. A game among adults. Joker Daddy pretends to believe. And so, the children must believe. The wife must believe. All must believe. And this belief includes also the understanding that though Joker Daddy does not (really) believe, yet it must not be acknowledged that Joker Daddy does not (really) believe, for it is Joker Daddy’s power to make you believe what you know to be not-true.

  Mommy? Mom-my? The child is Hannah, cowering before Joker Daddy, but no, the child is Hannah’s daughter who has been searching for her, frightened, though Mommy is bending over her, leaning to her, the little girl stares through her wide-eyed; and there is the boy, his name, too, has been misplaced, a name chosen by the father of the boy, he, too, is searching for Hannah, he is anxious, fretful—Mommy where are you!—Hannah has become a wraith, they cannot see her.

  Someone jostles Hannah awake, rising from the bed oblivious of her. He is barefoot, he is naked, he moves with negligent ease, no more self-conscious than an animal would be, or any naked man indifferent to being observed. Hannah calls to this person, his back is to her, he doesn’t hear. Faucets are turned on, a toilet flushing. Hannah forces herself to move her limbs, lift her head from the warm slow-moving water as if she were lying in a stream in a trance of lethargy. At the final station of the cross Jesus has died, His body is being removed from the cross.

  Her limbs are paralyzed, broken. Something as warmly sticky as blood between her thighs, on her belly and breasts, yet pale, milky-translucent.

  It’s clear, he wants Hannah gone. He has left the bedroom, he is in another part of the suite, still naked, making a phone call.

  The body, left behind. He has murdered her with his bare hands, it is accomplished.

  Like a sleepwalker Hannah makes her unsteady way to the bathroom, taking with her the sleek leather Prada bag. Even in such a state Hannah is canny enough to locate the bag on the floor near the bed, carry it with her.

  Large, luxurious, white-tile-glaring bathroom, a place of refuge. Running water, as hot as she can bear, seeing the sallow swollen face and dilated eyes wraithlike in the steamy mirror.

  How flimsy beauty is, a matter of pixels. Too close, magnified and as grotesque as enlarged pores. Too-small, collapsed, pinched features run together as in a bottle with a narrow neck.

  Still, Hannah’s eyes through the steam-scrim are beautiful eyes, appealing—Love me, please help me!

  At a distance, a deep-guttural male voice. Easy laughter of a man laughing with another man. A man among men, he seems to her, unfathomable.

  Despair of women, that men are unknown to them, essentially. The male with his brothers, exalting, in jubilation excluding the female.

  Hannah manages to restore some of the damage done to her makeup, hair. A rash-like flush on her throat lifting to her jaw. That air of breathlessness. On the bathroom counter is a large black comb with thick teeth, a crude sort of comb, not entirely clean, which Hannah uses to tamp down her hair. She feels a stir of repugnance.

  A man’s deodorant, harsh astringent smell, applied to her damp underarms. Above all, she must restore the glistening-red lips. Survival!

  Crucial to play out the scene. Not as a humiliated and ill-used woman nearing the age of forty but a naïve virginal breathless girl untouched by childbirth and the maulings of rough hands.

  On the bedside table, Hannah’s wristwatch, rings, bracelet—had she removed these herself? Had he removed them? But why? She feels relief that these possessions have not vanished.

  Hurriedly dressing. Shaky fingers. Trying not to be repelled, her beautiful clothes have been sullied.

  He has reappeared, phone between chin and shoulder. He is naked, indifferent, kingly. His eyes glide over her, the woman, as if in mild surprise that she is still here, or that she is here at all when his use for her has vanished. Murmuring into the phone Sorry. Get back to you in five minutes.

  Hannah is on her way out. Hannah isn’t going to linger. Hannah waves to the man, bravely smiling, mimicking a silent goodbye since Y.K. is still holding the phone.

  With a sudden alacrity that suggests belated concern, even regret, or the pretense of such concern and regret, Y.K. hurries after her. He makes it a point to unlatch the chain lock.

  “Hey: bye.”

  Gripping Hannah’s chin to kiss her mouth lightly, playfully, as you might kiss the mouth of a child, a touchingly needy child, a boring child, a sweet-vulnerable child, to hurry her on her way.

  The Adored One

  Dusk! Hannah is stunned, it has become so late.

  She’d told Ismelda she would be home by five-thirty, thinking that in fact she would be home much earlier (for certainly she didn’t intend to stay in the hotel room with Y.K., whom she scarcely knew: they’d have a drink downstairs, discuss their circumstances, their feelings for each other, that would be it), but it is after seven by the time her car turns into the driveway at 96 Cradle Rock Road.

  On the interstate, gusts of wind buffet the Buick. This raw wet Good Friday, lingering winter. Gigantic snakes rush invisibly at the vehicle but Hannah is too distracted now to be frightened. Her body aches, breasts, belly, between her legs burning. Headache, heartache.

  As if she has been drinking but lacking the elation of drunkenness. Yet—I have a lover. A lover!

  Forced now to recall Babysitter. As she returns home to Far Hills.

  Fitting punishment: if Babysitter has taken her children, in her absence.

  In the late winter/early spring of 1977 Babysitter is an (as yet unidentified) abductor and murderer of children in the suburbs north of Detroit who, in little more than a year, has taken five—six?—children between the ages of eleven and fourteen. The child victims are kept for days, allegedly fed and “cared for”; their bodies are then found in public places, naked, hands crossed over their chests in a position of repose, their clothes laundered and neatly piled beside them.

  Cause of death: strangulation—ligature.

  Rarely does Hannah feel the need to think of Babysitter for his victims have been older than her children. Abducted from public places where they’d been alone. Her children are never alone, not for one minute out of the sight of a responsible adult.

  Yet thinking, as she approaches the Far Hills exit—If Babysitter has taken my children, it is what I deserve.

  Approaching the house at 96 Cradle Rock Road.

  Still the air is wet, raw, windy. At dusk the sun has vanished. Shadows rise vaporous from the earth like wraiths. Far Hills is notoriously dark at night: there are few streetlights. Outsiders are not welcome here, you must know where you are going before dark.

  Cradle Rock Road, two miles from downtown Far Hills, is a particularly dark, twisting suburban road, a tunnel into the night.

  Very easy to become lost on Cradle Rock Road if you don’t know exactly where you are expected.

  Is this Hannah’s house?—suddenly.

  But no: not Hannah’s house, for there is a FOR SALE sign on the front lawn.

  She drives on, another quarter of a mile. And here, of course: Hannah’s house.

  Seen from the outside, at night, her house is difficult to distinguish from other houses on the road. Warmly lit from within, set back into a partially wooded lot, a little distance from the road.

  “Thank God.” Hannah could weep with relief.

  Turning into the driveway, approaching the (three-car) garage. A mild jolt seeing Wes’s station wagon in the garage—(is Wes home?)—before Hannah remembers that of course Wes is away, on business.

  As she has been away, undetectable on Wes’s radar.

  In the corridor leading to the kitchen, a fresh, fruity smell—Ismelda has prepared smoothies for the children: strawberry, banana, vanilla yogurt. From another room, comforting sound of TV cartoons. Children’s uplifted voices, sharp-eared Ismelda calling Mrs. Jarrett?—quickly Hannah replies Yes, hello, be right there!—slipping away upstairs before the children can rush at Mommy.

  Not ready to face the children. Not just yet.

  Absurd fear that the children might smell him on her.

  And Ismelda, certainly. A risk.

  That oystery smell of semen. Wetting the crotch of her underwear, as she’d driven home on the freeway …

  In her bedroom quickly stripping off the soiled clothes. Silk shirt, woolen trousers from Neiman Marcus, feeling anxious suddenly, dirty, befouled. She will throw out these clothes, she will never wear them again.

  Needing badly to shower, she hadn’t had time in the hotel, hadn’t wanted to be seen by her lover with wet hair, flat-headed, unattractive to the man for whom female beautiful is essential.

  Soaping every part of her body, near-scalding needles of water. Giddy with elation, guilt. A lover! I have a lover.

  She feels a stab of guilty elation, she will love Wes less desperately now that she has become his equal.

  Out of the shower, shivering with cold. A glimpse in the steamy mirror that is less harsh than the bedroom mirror—reassuring, Hannah looks younger, less harried than she feels.

  Discovering that her breasts hurt, not unpleasurably. He’d squeezed her, pummeled her. Scarcely conscious of her.

  Feeling that sinking sensation, the man’s desire. Excluding her.

  Examining her throat in the mirror. Have shadowy bruises begun to form? No one will suspect a man’s fingers … Hannah is chagrined, excited. Wes has never touched her like this.

  If bruises are more visible in the morning she will wear a turtleneck, long sleeves.

  Wes would never notice, she thinks. (But Ismelda might.)

  Downstairs, the children rush at Mommy, hugging her legs. She laughs at their ardor, their eagerness. She kneels with them, tears brim in her eyes. Like one who has returned from a dangerous journey hugging the little girl Katya, the little boy Conor.

  Faint with relief—no one knows where Mommy has been.

  Oh, what do they have to show Mommy? Easter eggs? Such colors!

  Yes, the Easter eggs are very beautiful but didn’t Ismelda understand that Hannah wanted her to wait until she returned home, she’d intended to dye the eggs with the children? Speaking sharply to Ismelda who is preoccupied at the sink rinsing dishes, seeming not to hear Hannah, and when finally hearing murmuring an apology, Hannah is doubly annoyed that Ismelda has disappointed her and is now apologizing in her soft-impassive way, forcing Hannah to raise her voice, making of Hannah an overbearing (white) woman employer, exactly the person Hannah knows she is not.

  No idea how to interpret Ismelda. In a way, in awe of Ismelda: child-sized brown-skinned woman with the small fixed smile meant to communicate—what, exactly? Fear of her (white) employer?

  Now that Ismelda has apologized, whether sincerely or not, Hannah is obliged to assure her that it’s all right, of course it’s all right, except that she is disappointed, just a little …

  All this while the children are clamoring for Mommy, nearly knocking her off-balance. She laughs, flush-faced. My life!

  Recalling the hotel room, tall narrow windows boldly open to the sky, raw wet April light, suddenly Hannah is there, with him, he might have suggested a drink out of the miniature bar while lying together naked in tangled smelly sheets but she’d caused him think she had to leave, why’d she suggest that she had to leave, a blunder, like blurting out I love you to embarrass him, how silent he’d been, how ashamed she is, wishing the children in bed for the night and Ismelda out of her sight upstairs in the snug attic room beneath the eaves listening to her Christian rock music so that Hannah can be alone, pouring herself a full glass of Chardonnay, giving herself over to an erotic reverie recalling her lover whose full name she does not (yet) know.