Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,283

a blockade. The car moves up, flanking me on the left. It is white, square. Not the Porsche. The GTO.

The door opens. Rourke says, “Eveline.”

Eveline—I’ve never heard my name spoken like that, as though there is some indivisibility between it and me. I take one instant, just one, learning the sound by heart, feeling—I don’t know—just feeling.

I climb in, fall in, exhausted, shocked, but grateful to have a friend, in the night, in the cold, in the rain. A friend who is knowledgeable of my heart. It’s not the first time I’ve received his help. Rourke was there when I broke up with Jack, only that night was dry and I was seventeen. And things were different at seventeen. I thought about what Rob said at the wedding about friendship, about needing someone to track you, challenge you. About a friend being a fortress.

He makes a series of deliberate turns until we arrive at a private road—we’ve been here before, the first night we were together. Soaking overgrown branches slap the windshield until we emerge on a grassy plain. Directly before us is Georgica Pond. He puts the car into park and reaches into the backseat for a towel, which he uses to dry me. The towel is stained with blood, blood from his eye, which now I can see. It is slit and stitched on top and hugely swollen, hemorrhaged and violet.

“You okay?” Rourke asks.

I shrug. “I’m okay.”

He draws the towel down my arms.

I ask him how long he was waiting.

“I watched you go in.”

“That was hours ago.”

“About an hour and a half.”

“I didn’t see the car,” I say.

“I wasn’t in the car. I was on foot.”

“By the street?”

“By the balcony. Where you were.”

“Did you hear?”

Rourke looks past the steering wheel toward the pond. His profile and his jaw look like a drawing of a profile and a jaw, the lines are that hard. “I heard enough.”

“He said you left with—”

“Diane? She left with her parents. He knew that.” Rourke turns back to me, turning very serious. “It would have taken me seconds to scale that wall. But you did fine on your own,” he says. “Better than I would have.”

Better than I would have. That’s what Mark had been waiting for. For Rourke to come. So he could trap him, confront him, have him arrested. I can’t even think about it.

My hand reaches for his eye. He does not pull away but breathes into my touch. His normal lid drifts closed, and beneath my fingertips the distended one throbs, as if the eye below is straining to see. In his heart there is a girl; she is me. No contract keeps her; she goes with him, she goes alone, precipice to precipice, on every ledge agreeing again to leap. She is with him, she has been with him, every minute. No one can know what we know. Just us. If you listen, you can hear it. In the wide sound of the rain—us.

54

We go into Manhattan to an anonymous hotel. No one knows where to find us. There are no messages, no calls. One call, one call out. I knew because I woke to the sound of his voice talking on the phone, though I’d heard no ring.

I’d spoken with my mother before we arrived, saying I was safe, that I needed to figure things out, that I’d call again soon. I called for Rourke’s sake more than for hers or my own; I intended to preempt Mark. I wouldn’t give him the opportunity to suggest to everyone that I’d been taken against my will. He would never hurt Rourke again.

Being there with Rourke feels right; it feels like the only possible thing. It’s like being in a command center in a movie, one of those steel-fortified tents where the power congregates while war is raging—strategizing, studying maps, decoding messages, drinking cognac. We have shut ourselves in to accomplish something brainy and strategic. We prepare, but for what?

We sleep in the day if we sleep at all. At night we walk through Manhattan—up Broadway or across Central Park or down Tenth Avenue into Hell’s Kitchen, through scaffold castles, past lapsed construction sites where the plywood ramps rumble when you stomp them and the makeshift walls are covered with graffiti. Rourke walks and people make way. He is fierce and exact and his face is a terrifying mass of bruised flesh. If there is trouble, I don’t doubt the outcome. It’s like walking under an umbrella through a heavy