our late night we’ll grab a drink before she heads home to her family. I monitor the outdoor security cameras at my home, keep my eyes on the rearview mirror. If there’s a tail on me, it’s a very good one. And I don’t think anyone’s that good at anything these days.
Still. You can’t be too careful. I leave the parking lot and jog the mile to my gym. Through the park, the town center. It’s a quiet little town, not many people around this time of night. The gym is in an old warehouse. It’s not your usual chain with brightly clad hard-bodies and blaring music, television screens on every machine and in every corner. There’s a big boxing ring in the center, an area for free weights, a couple of rows of treadmills and bikes for cardio. This is a serious bodybuilding gym—lots of cops and firefighters, EMT guys, martial artists.
“Doc,” says the young woman at the desk. She’s as big as any man I know, muscles ripped, neck thick, mousy hair shorn almost to the scalp. I’d say sexual abuse in childhood, if I had to hazard a guess.
“Marin,” I say. “How goes it?”
“No complaints.” But her eyes are sad. It’s always in the eyes if you know how to look. Not just the eyes, but the muscles of the face that jump and dance ever so slightly.
“What’s it today?” she asks.
“Shoulders and back.”
“Let me know if you need me to spot.”
“Will do.”
I have a brutal and punishing workout regimen, in addition to my running. It’s the only way I can keep him in place, exhaustion. I’ll be an hour and a half tonight, working lats and traps and deltoids. Rows, pull-ups, deadlifts. I’ll go as heavy as I can, work to shaking failure. Then I’ll do forty minutes light on the bike, run back to the car. I have a trainer here, too. I see him twice a week—he keeps me limber, working out on all the planes, twisting and balancing so I don’t get tight and stiff like some of the guys here. A couple of guys will get into the ring with me. A couple of them beg off; fighting, the adrenaline, it brings out another side of me and some people can sense it, though I’ve never lost control here.
When I’m done, I realize I’m the last one and it’s ten minutes past closing.
Marin sits patiently at the desk, her bag and coat by the door. She pushes back on the office chair, which looks like it’s about to snap under her weight, reading, I see as I get closer, a copy of one of my books: Surviving Trauma.
“Sorry about that,” I say. “Lost track.”
“Happens to me all the time,” she says. She holds up the book. “This is helping me. Thank you.”
I nod. “I’m glad.”
I reach in the pocket of my coat and hand her a card. “I have a practice,” I say. “If you need to talk.”
She smiles, takes it. “I can’t afford that, Doc.”
“We can work something out,” I say. Her eyes slide away from mine, and I realize how it sounded. “I mean—pay what you can afford kind of a thing.”
She presses her lips together. “Thanks.”
She won’t take me up on it. I can tell; some folks don’t want to talk. Can’t trust. Don’t have the words. Don’t want to hear those words on the air. And that’s okay, don’t you think? Don’t you wish you never had to tell a soul what happened to you? Don’t you wish you could just forget?
“Can I walk you to your car?”
She gives me a look, a kind of smiling up and down. She’s got a couple of inches and maybe even a couple of pounds on me. “No offense, Doc. But can I walk you to your car?”
I have to laugh. “Fair enough.”
I tip an imaginary hat to her and step out into the cool night.
By the time I get back to the garage, I’m sure they’re not following me. I leave the Volvo in the lot and get into the Toyota.
Tess is there as I pull onto the street, sitting beside me. She’s a child tonight, thin and shivering. I am grateful to her, you know. That she’s here with me this way.
In a disaster-stricken Japanese town called Otsuchi, there was an earthquake followed by a tsunami, which precipitated a nuclear plant meltdown, and over ten percent of the population was lost. A young man installed a disconnected rotary telephone