dependent on anyone, even someone he was in love with.
And that’s when it happened.
She had risen from the table. It was time to clear their plates. He stood up, too, to help her. They were arguing. She said one thing. He countered it. She was moving past him. He reached out and grabbed her arm, harder than he meant to. Startled, she stumbled. The dishes smashed against the floor and she almost lost her balance, lurching against the table as her world turned black.
All he wanted to do was to get her to listen. To slow down and hear his point. But at the sensation of a hard hand clenched around her upper arm, the power in that hand fueled by anger and frustration, Bell panicked. Something sprang up inside her like an animal snapping its leash.
“Get the hell out of my house,” she had cried, her voice high-pitched and hysterical. She twisted her arm, freeing herself from his grip. Then she lunged at him, almost knocking him over because he was not expecting it. She pounded on his chest with her fists. She was sobbing by this point. Her words came in ragged gasps, in the breaks between the sobs. “Don’t you touch me—don’t you ever fucking touch me again—Don’t you—Don’t—”
Clay had tried to catch her flailing hands, hold them still, not to protect himself but to settle her down. To no avail. She pounded and she sobbed. He had triggered something in her, something so immense that it could not be tamped back down again. He knew the general outline of her life—they had divulged a great deal of personal information to each other, the way lovers tend to do in the perfect security of a shared bed and the sweet languor after lovemaking—but he did not know the true power of those memories, the way they waited inside her, secretly furious, smoldering, like a campfire with red embers still hidden under the ash, needing only a slight sifting and the right wind to flash into flame again.
He knew about her father, a nasty piece of work named Donnie Dolan, and about the night when it all reached a terrifying and definitive climax. The night when Shirley rescued ten-year-old Belfa from him forever by slashing his throat.
But Clay did not know about the other times. The ordinary times. He did not know about the daily swats and smacks and pokes and random punches, the routine kicks and sideways wallops. The times when Belfa would be rounding the kitchen table and, for no apparent reason, Donnie Dolan’s arm would dart out like a snake’s tongue and snatch her arm, pinching it, yanking her back toward him. She had bruises constantly on her arms. Purple marks, elbow to shoulder. It was one of the reasons her father withdrew her from third grade: He was tired of answering questions about the marks on her arms. None of your goddamned business anyway, he would mumble into the phone, jerking her back and forth in rhythm with his words, holding her arm, shaking her like a mop. She did not fight back. She couldn’t.
Now she could. She was all grown up, and when those fingers closed once more around her upper arm, she felt the massive force of a sense-memory. The present dissolved. She did not see Clay; she saw the blackness that was Donnie Dolan, and she felt all over again the nightmare of her childhood. She felt threat and menace.
That night, Clay had continued trying to soothe her, center her. He apologized, over and over again. Which only made it worse—because that was what Donnie Dolan had done as well, a muttered, kneejerk, insincere iteration: Sorry. Yeah. Sorry ’bout that. Clay was wrong, he knew he was wrong, and all he could say to her was: I’m sorry. There was no other vocabulary to use in the wake of such a shattering betrayal, and it wasn’t enough.
Tonight, though, he was trying again.
“You have to forgive me, Belfa,” Clay said.
“I do?”
“Yeah. You do.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because I don’t want to lose you. I can’t lose you.”
“What if you already have?”
He pondered the question. “You warned me about this. When I first got back.”
A year and a half ago, Clay had left Acker’s Gap for graduate school at MIT. It was a longtime dream of his. Then he returned. He had helped Nick Fogelsong recover from a bullet wound and he had resumed his relationship with Bell, whereupon a mildly pleasant romance had accelerated