Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,281

fistful of my hair and jerks me forward. I fall to my knees, swinging the hand with the broken glass just in time, keeping the palm raised. Mark holds my skull, and pulls my face into his thighs. I reach blindly to the rail, and twisting my left hand through the bars, I let go of the glass. It cracks against the brick below.

“Bleeding on the streets,” he says to the top of my head. “Destitute.” He spits when he talks. Specks of saliva prick the back of my neck. For a second I think it’s the rain, finally arrived. “Without that abortion you would have ended up dead. Like your junkie friend.”

The smell of his penis through his pants—it smells like soap or detergent. I turn my face away.

“It wasn’t an—”

“Spare me the revision. If your body hadn’t had the sense to dispose of the offending organism, you would’ve killed it anyway. You wouldn’t have gone to him. And though I was happy to pay for an abortion, I never would have raised his offspring. You might have taken it to your mother, she relishes subsocial behaviors, but you’d just gotten out. You had no intention of going back. And, by the way, you could have called anyone from the hospital that day—Dennis, your aunt, Sara, even asshole Rob. But you were quick. You were devious. You called me. You knew it would crush him. You knew I would tell. And you knew how I would characterize the loss. I was impressed by the efficiency of your cruelty. I was shocked, actually, by how hard he took it.” Mark bends. “He was crying.”

He waits for a response. I say nothing. It’s hard to say nothing. It takes everything. I think of Jack, his moments alone with the gun. Deliberating, agonizing. Sitting there, back against a tree, coping with a lifetime of fear and failure, waiting and waiting, for nothing and for no one. Pulling the trigger in a final concession to solitude. Proof.

“Didn’t I tell you? He came to the apartment. To give me money. He’s so honorable. The night of that pathetic Mexican dinner. The night I took you back to my parents’ place. I told him, ‘I don’t need your money.’ Harrison said, ‘Then give it to her.’ I said, ‘Trust me. She’s not going to need it either.’ That was the first night we slept together, Eveline. You actually rewarded me.”

I say, “You should have just left me in the hospital.”

“No, no. You were too good to pass up. Besides, I liked the way you played—an eye for an eye. Biblical.” Mark kneels now too. He takes me down to the ground. Pulling me around, following with his chest, ready to bear down. “What did I say, earlier tonight, how long has it been—a week?”

Oh, that’s the part about his not drinking. He kisses me hard, and his tongue in my throat makes me gag. If I could scream, I would scream, but a scream—

There’s a noise. Something hits the cottage. The wall or the door, I don’t know, a rock or a brick. Our heads look toward the rail. In my mind is a picture of us that way, Mark and me, grafted like skin from one part of a body to another. Like living onto dead. “If you’re thinking it’s Harrison,” he says in a sort of under-growl, “you’re mistaken. He left with Diane. He’s probably screwing her right now.”

I have very little time. I look at his eyes. They look like discs of clay, like there is no soul on the other side. I look steadily, careful not to show lenience or restraint, not to enrage him further with highness or compassion. If he is a monster, I cannot help but wonder whether it was I who helped make him one. Didn’t I stay too far outside? Didn’t I stay untouchable? Didn’t I console him by turning slavish? Didn’t I give him access to places in me that were persuadable—poverty and heartbreak—in order to stay persuaded? I answered to something preexisting in him and he in me, and so what I threaten by leaving is far deeper than the motive to hurt Rourke.

He peels back my shirt, and I wait patiently, like getting dressed in bandages after an injury. My jeans—he starts on the buttons. Though there are five, and he knows there are five, he races through to three, and starts to pull.

I say, “Mark.”

He did not expect this, my speaking. He