the kidnapper parked the car, as the kidnapper removed the matching key chain from the ignition, as the kidnapper walked around the car and opened her door and drew her out.
The keys the key.
The kidnapper led her up a paved walkway. She heard him fingering the key chain that had so recently been in the ignition. He unlocked a door. She tried to remember all the doors that could be unlocked with the keys on her key chain. Their front door. Their back door. Their car. David’s basement studio. The Phillips 66. Her locker at work.
The kidnapper pressed her through the door and relocked it behind them. She recognized the smell of the room but couldn’t place it.
She had the urge to yank off the blindfold yet also felt somehow safer in this artificial dark, letting her other senses be the courageous ones for a change. The smell of cinnamon, old fabric, Clorox, dried-out dirt.
Dried-out dirt. Of course. Aunt Norma’s kitchen. The deer knew all her secrets. Her botched plant-watering duties.
The kidnapper guided her to the table. She could see it in her mind’s eye as she sat: the red-and-white-checkered seat cushions. The stove with the tarnished copper kettle. The window bars, remarkable in their ornateness (not long ago she had sat right here drinking tea with Norma, had thought how funny it was that something made to protect you from violence was also made so pretty). She had always loved Norma’s kitchen, old-fashioned with its hutch and teacups, clichéd and cozy. It was no place for a kidnapping, no place for a murder.
The kidnapper took Norma’s seat at the round table for two. He reached across the table and pulled the sweatshirt blindfold off her eyes.
She found herself face to face with herself.
6
She witnessed herself: the same uneven eyebrows and recently emerged wrinkles on the forehead. The same hexagon stud earrings she had been wearing every day for the past month. The dark cropped hair on the brink of needing another haircut. The angle of the nose; the placement of the mole on the neck. The color of the eyes, the capillaries showing in the whites of the eyes, the slight bags under the eyes.
She stared at her self and her self stared at her.
She was struck by their sole difference: the other woman bore a long, thin scab stretching from her right temple down to the chin. Instinctively Molly touched her own cheek, as you would if you noticed an inexplicable wound on your face in the mirror, but her skin was undisrupted.
The overhead light was too much to bear.
Molly looked down, trying to take refuge in the sight and solidity of her thighs, her knees, but they no longer quite felt like hers.
The woman stood and turned on the strawberry lamp on the hutch and turned off the overhead light and stepped to the stove and flicked on the burner beneath the kettle.
Molly realized then that the woman was wearing her old black jeans, the comfortable ones with twin holes at the crotch. She had searched for them last weekend, to no avail, pawing through every drawer in her dresser.
“My jeans,” Molly said. The words sounded ridiculous, pitiful, in the silent room.
The woman studied her coolly from her spot beside the stove.
Molly focused on the fridge, the small magnetized whiteboard Aunt Norma used to write reminders to herself. It bore one word now, in blue ink, all capitals: BLOOD.
“I’ll go by Moll,” the woman said, her tone magnanimous.
Molly had always resisted that particular nickname.
“Moll,” the woman repeated. “Moll. Maul. Mal.”
Or maybe Molly just imagined the migration to the Spanish word for evil. But the woman’s voice did grow more venomous with each repetition. Molly thought to fear the heating water, the boiling threat that could arc across the kitchen to burn her face.
“It’s just because Norma has to have her blood drawn when she gets back from Arizona,” Moll explained, her composure returned. “Earl Grey?”
Molly never drank caffeinated tea at this hour.
“Decaf,” Moll clarified. Molly listened to the sound of her own voice emerging from the skull of another. “Not that you’ll be going to sleep anytime soon.”
Molly looked at the door. Moll watched Molly looking at the door.
“It sounds so civilized,” Moll said, sitting back down in the chair across from her, “but what a savage drink. Pour hot water over dry leaves, add to it the milk intended for the young of another mammal.”
She delivered this with a knowing smile; a visceral shiver shook Molly.
As