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“And then,” Maleah said, “One night, I invited him over for dinner, and he put something in my drink.”
Shaw shook his head and looked down. Blood whooshed in his ears, and he was distantly aware of the springs in the sofa creaking as Maleah shifted position, of the rasp of fabric as she smoothed her skirt with both hands. Then, because she was a person and deserved that much, he looked up again and forced himself to meet her eyes.
“I woke up the next day, and he was gone. I wasn’t sure what had happened. I thought maybe I’d had too much to drink, but…but part of me knew that was wrong. Knew something was wrong. I had bruises. I…” Her hand hovered above her midsection. “I hurt. I had some bleeding. And I couldn’t even think about it, couldn’t even ask the question, even though part of me was already asking it, I suppose. There was this gap in the night, and that was fine. I wanted to fall into that gap, forget about all of it, pretend it hadn’t happened. Then—” Her voice broke. Her chest hitched, and the hand that had been hovering turned into a fist, and she pressed it between her breasts. “He texted me that afternoon. A picture.”
North nodded. Shaw nodded too, but he was only distantly aware of the movement. Inside, he could feel the labyrinth opening. The forking paths. His mind took him through his imagination’s most vivid reconstruction of what that awful day must have been like. Unregulated empathy, Dr. Farr called it. He could feel what it must have been like for her, waking up, head aching, a part of you hurting in a way that you knew wasn’t right. No, go back. The blurry minutes of drugged semiconsciousness, hands on you, hands, your legs being forced apart. No, go back. A stumbling, assisted walk to the bedroom, your fumbling attempt at resistance, pain as your hair was pulled and whatever was fogging your brain made it easier to surrender than keep fighting. No, go back—
North’s hand bit into Shaw’s thigh. Shaw drew in a sharp breath; the pain was a lifeline, and Shaw followed it, swimming up from that place inside his head.
“—wanted money again,” Maleah said. “I said no. I was going to the police. Then he said fine, he’d put those pictures everywhere. Online. At my school.” She glanced at a bag leaning against the coffee table, worksheets covered in children’s handwriting that were poking out of the top.
North squeezed Shaw’s leg again—digging his fingers into sensitive flesh, the grip brutal and unyielding. It made Shaw open his mouth as he fought a cry of pain. Then North relented, and Shaw forced himself to form words: “What—what grade do you teach?”
“Third.” She smiled reflexively. “Fourth; I’ve got to stop saying third. We had a teacher quit, and—” Another on-off smile like someone was running it from a switchboard. “You don’t care about that.”
“My fourth-grade teacher was Mrs. Willows,” Shaw said. “She smelled like lavender, and she taught us all the state capitals, and she loved to say, ‘Ten-four’. That was the first time I ever heard someone say that.”
Maleah began to cry in earnest, hands covering her face. Shaw moved to sit next to her. He didn’t touch her; he wasn’t sure she wanted that, not after whatever she’d been through.
“It was one dumb decision,” she finally managed to say through the tears. “Why should I have to pay for it the rest of my life?”
“It wasn’t a dumb decision,” North said. “He took advantage of your trust; you didn’t do anything wrong. What happened to you was terrible and evil, and I’m sorry.”
Maleah excused herself and came back with a wad of tissues. She sat next to Shaw again, wiping her face, staring into a place where she was alone. “I don’t know if you understand what it’s like. Being a teacher. Being a teacher in a small town. Being a teacher who’s young and Black and a woman in a small town where ninety-five percent of the population is white. If I had gone to the police, they might have found him. They might have arrested him. I kept telling myself I had to do it so that this didn’t happen to some other girl. But I didn’t do it, because I knew once he posted those pictures, it wouldn’t matter that I was the victim. I’d lose my job. And I’d never work again, not as a teacher.” She was still staring off into that alone place, her face dead, as she said, “They’re not just nudes. He tied me up. There were…toys.”
North met Shaw’s eyes. His jaw tightened; his cheeks looked hectic, and his eyes were hooded with rage as he shook his head and looked away again.
“Do you still have the picture?” Shaw asked.
Maleah shredded a tissue on her lap. “I want him to leave me alone.”
Shaw took a deep breath. “How long did it go on? After that night, I mean.”
“A few months. Then he got arrested. I guess he wasn’t dumb enough to try anything from there; they record your calls, don’t they? Or something like that? I knew he wasn’t going to be gone forever, but it felt like—it felt like magic. Like someone had swooped in and touched everything with a magic wand and given me my life back. It was a few weeks after he got picked up that I had my first real night’s sleep.”
“And then?” North asked.
She stared down at the strips of tissue. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. Shaw had spent enough time at this point watching anime together with North—you could technically call ittogetherif you were hiding behind the couch and he was sitting on the couch and everything was fine because North didn’t need to know you were watching anime together, but then the puppy bit your ankle—that some of the visual language had become a reference point for him. And what he was seeing on Maleah right then was what he thought of as dead eyes, blank circles where the eyes should have been. When a character shut down. When a character couldn’t take it anymore—anditmeant everything, anything, the experience of being alive in a bad world.
“Why did you call Philip?” Shaw asked.
A tear escaped, and Maleah blotted it with the tissue. She held her hand there. She was trembling, and the confetti-strip ends of the torn tissue trembled with her. “I heard him.”
“Philip—” North began.
She shook her head, and North stopped. Her breathing came faster and faster. “I was at Walmart. And I heard him, in the next aisle over. His laugh. I recognized his laugh, and all of a sudden, it was like flashbulbs going off: these pictures, these moments. Oh my God.”
It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two that she cried again, and this time, when she leaned against Shaw, he put his arm around her. He concentrated on the feeling of bone and muscle jarred by sobs, of the solidity of her body, like a kind of thunder against him. He anchored himself there, and when he looked up, when he saw the worry in North’s eyes, he nodded. The worry stayed, though, and North’s lips parted like he might say what he couldn’t help himself from saying, over and over again:maybe you should step outsideorI can handle this. But he couldn’t, of course. Not without Shaw.
Before North could speak, though, Maleah dried her eyes and sat up. She smiled a watery thank-you to Shaw, mopped her face with the tissues, and blew her nose. “I’m sorry. It’s—it’s still a lot, and I try not to think about it.”
“You remembered something from the night Philip drugged you.”
She nodded. “It was so strange; I’ve never had anything like that happen to me before. But I heard that laugh, and I knew I’d heard it before, and then it was like all these other fragments of memories surfaced. Things they did.” She stopped and shook her head.
“That’s a common trauma response,” Shaw said. “Even drugged, your body was locking those memories in place. It’s not unusual for a stimulus to trigger you to recall the episode—that’s pretty much textbook, actually.”
Maleah had those dead eyes again, and Shaw wasn’t sure she’d heard him. “I thought I was going to pee myself. I was standing there in Walmart, holding a jar of bread-and-butter pickles, and I honestly thought I was going to mess myself. As soon as I saw him, I knew who he was.”
