kneecap into place to keep it from floating. She blacked out a few times as she tightened the cloth, but the insulin dulled the pain, and she finished the job.
Hands pulling, legs bent, then straightening, like a frog trying to swim on dry land, she dragged herself out of the den and down the dark hall. The pain in her knee was bad enough that she wished she had the strength to cut it off.
The floors began to hum. Momma? a child’s voice called. Is that you?
“Stop,” she whispered as she took another lunge.
In the bathroom, she heard the tub faucet glug. “Please, no,” she said as the hall floor, at once carpeted and bare, soaked her (Clara’s) sweatpants with bathwater.
Too tired to keep going, she stayed on the ground for a while. Twenty minutes. Kept her hands down over her head so she didn’t have to see, and pretended it was quiet. When the shaking relented, and her heart muscles loosened enough for breath to come and go without a fight, she tried again. Crawled five more feet. Then took another break. Counted back from fifty. Wasn’t ready. Counted back from one hundred, and started crawling again.
She remembered happier days, even as Clara’s children gurgled. She thought about the itchy wool bedspread that Saraub loved, and the crumb-ridden remote control lodged within their futon’s deep fold. The time she and her mother had robbed the 7-Eleven of Slurpies and hot dogs, then eaten them in the back of the Chevy. On an empty stomach, Ball Park Cheese Dogs make the best meal in the world. Of her work, and her desk, and the view from the top floor of Vesuvius, and all those pretty things she’d planned to build inside New York’s holes.
In her mind, she was already scooting down the emergency-exit stairs on her bottom. Crawling out the lobby, unseen. Calling the cops on these fuckers and incriminating them for Jayne’s murder. The hope was a bubble in her stomach, self-contained, unsinkable. That was all she needed, to make it those last five feet.
There was light through the keyhole. Light! Oh, how she loved light! She wanted to live so badly. To feel wet grass with bare feet, and build cities. To marry Saraub, and fill their house in Yonkers with children, and grandchildren, and tire swings. She wanted to run from here so fast that she flew.
She counted back from three, then ten, then twenty. With a grunt, pushed her feet against the slanted floor, and stood. Her knee screamed. “Ooooowwwwww,” she whispered, as tears rolled, and her nerves came to life—a pinching, throbbing suit of skin. Still, she clasped the gilded wood trim, then the glass knob. Breathing fast but quiet, she twisted the handle. It did not turn. She pulled it. Pushed it. But no. It was locked from the outside.
She looked out the peephole. A black eye with a thin layer of cataract peered back at her. Then the figure stepped away, and she saw that it was Loretta Parker. She waved her index finger back and forth.
“Dirty girl!”
37
The Sound a Trap Makes as It Closes, IV: Katabasis
Days passed. The sun rose, then set, then rose, like a stop-motion camera. When she was thirsty, she slurped water from the sink. When she was hungry, she rationed the leftover Chinese food she’d ordered with Jayne, and when that was gone, just like back in Hinton, she got weaker.
The pile of boxes got smaller. The door got bigger. The humming walls lulled her into a place between sleep and waking life, where around one corner there was a pretty house in Yonkers, and around another there was Schermerhorn, leaning over a tub full of sleeping cherubs while his ghost wife, Clara, screamed.
The thing in her stomach filled the crevices of her body. When she looked in the bathroom mirror, she didn’t see her own reflection. Only a black-eyed silhouette that did not quite stand erect. So she broke the mirror, and even broke the chrome toaster, too.
Hours, days, or maybe weeks later, Martin and Loretta returned. Wearing their dusty wool suit and Claudette Colbert silk, they were a mad couple in frayed finery, like ghosts from the Titanic.
Marty carried a sandwich and glass of red juice on an antique pewter plate. He bent down and placed it at her bare, crusted feet. She didn’t remember how they’d gotten here, whether she’d been sleeping or awake. She didn’t know for how long they’d been standing over her,