James Hayman - The Cutting

The room didn’t look like any hospital room she’d ever seen before. There was no TV or telephone. No privacy curtain hung from the ceiling. No buttons or buzzers to summon a nurse. Nothing but the bed, a small bedside table, and a single chair that stood against the wall near the door. Lucy tried to lift her hand, wanting to rub away the throbbing pain behind her eyes and in her temples, but her hand wouldn’t move. She pulled harder and realized that what she thought were bandages wrapped around her wrists and ankles were, in fact, restraints tying her to the bed. Both her hands and her feet were secured with canvas straps. No. Not a hospital. A prison. She wasn’t a patient. Someone was holding her prisoner. But who? And why?

Slowly, as grogginess receded, she began to remember. She remembered the fog. She remembered running along the Western Prom, and meeting the man with the hypodermic, the one who called himself Harry Potter. With a kind of despair, she remembered Fritz.

The man must have brought her here. Wherever here was. Okay, that was who. The why, she supposed, must have something to do with sex. It certainly couldn’t be ransom money. Sex slavery? Jesus Christ. That happened to girls from the Ukraine. Not Bates graduates with good jobs in New England ad agencies.

She supposed Harry Potter would rape her. The juxtaposition of the name and the act made it seem ridiculous. To be raped by an adolescent fictional wizard. A British adolescent fictional wizard. ‘Officer, it was ’Arry Potter what done me wrong.’

‘Oh, no, miss, it couldn’t be, he’s such a nice little fellow.’

Ridiculous. Terrifying. She began to laugh. A little hysterically. She was certain he would rape her. When rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it. Isn’t that what all the assholes say? Bullshit. She’d fight the sonofabitch every step of the way. Given half a chance, she’d pull a Lorena Bobbit and bite his cock off. The idea of defiance made her feel a little better. Was it possible he’d already raped her while she was conked out? She didn’t think so. Even unconscious, she was sure she’d have some sense of it if that had happened.

If he raped her, what happened afterward? She knew what he looked like. He wouldn’t let her go with a promise not to tell anyone. Maybe he’d keep her for a repeat performance. Or a bunch of repeat performances. Like anything else, though, rape would get old. Then he’d kill her. A knife? A gun? He had a hypodermic. Her mind played with the words ‘lethal injection.’

Never had she imagined life ending this way. She began to cry. Not in great heaving sobs but softly, quietly. This happened to other people. Not to strong, competent people like her. ‘I won’t let it.’ She mouthed the words, a ritual to build conviction. ‘I will not let this happen.’ She didn’t know what she could do — but something. Was this denial? When facing imminent death, isn’t one’s first reaction always denial? What follows in that famous litany? Fear? Anger? Acceptance? She couldn’t remember. Well, if it was fear, she’d just zipped past denial in a hurry. Because now all she felt was deathly afraid.

How long had she been unconscious? Hours? Days? When she didn’t turn up at the office, Charlie Roberts or John Beckman would have called her apartment, called her cell phone. They knew she wasn’t someone who just didn’t show up for work, especially with an important meeting on tap. Would anyone from Beckman and Hawes have called the police? She didn’t know. Maybe she’d already missed dinner with David. She was ravenously hungry. David would have called, wouldn’t he? David would have reported it, wouldn’t he? David was such an asshole, he might have thought she was standing him up and walked out of Tony’s in a huff. Why did she marry him in the first place? Probably for the sex. He was very good at sex. Don’t be stupid. Nobody gets married for sex these days.

Would people, even now, be watching reports of her abduction on television? She imagined pictures of herself flickering on the screen. ‘A Portland woman, Lucinda Cassidy, was reported missing today. Ms. Cassidy was wearing blue jogging shorts and a white sports bra.’ No, they wouldn’t know any of that, would they? She remembered that girl a couple of years ago who vanished from some club. Some creep had shot her. Buried her down in Scarborough. Of course, just last week that high school soccer player, Katie something, disappeared. They hadn’t found her yet, either dead or alive.

Lucy remembered feeling righteous anger sitting safely in front of her TV listening to reports of missing women. She’d never realized how far she was from understanding the awful reality of the thing. How far from understanding the fear that was gnawing at her and wouldn’t let go. Lucy closed her eyes and tried to suppress a rising panic.

‘Control this.’ Almost pleading with herself. ‘Don’t give in to it. The only way out is to stay calm, to think clearly.’ She breathed deeply and slowly just like Rebecca taught her in yoga class. She tried to picture herself in a different place. She concentrated on slowing the beating of her heart. She listened. There was no sound but the distant hum of what might be an air-conditioning system.

She looked around the room again, studying the details. It was a small room, windowless, maybe twelve feet square. The walls and ceiling were white. Both seemed to be covered with some sort of acoustic tile. Lucy supposed, hopefully, that the purpose of the tile was to soundproof the room. That might mean there was someone outside the room who wasn’t supposed to hear what was going on inside. Who wasn’t supposed to hear her if she screamed. There was a door. It looked solid and heavy. Possibly made of steel or some other metal. It had a silvered knob and a button lock. Above the knob was a dead bolt. She supposed it was bolted, but the opening in the door was too narrow to know for sure.

Then she became aware of another sound. Breathing that wasn’t her own. Slow shallow breathing from behind the bed. She held her own breath to listen. Yes, definitely breathing. She was afraid to say anything, afraid to move. In the end she began crying again. ‘Who are you?’ she sobbed. ‘What do you want from me?’

His face, the face from the Prom, came into view. He was holding a hypodermic. He rubbed her arm with an alcohol swab. ‘I’m sorry, Lucinda, but I’m not quite ready for you yet.’

He plunged her back into darkness.

Saturday. 4:30 A.M.

It was nearly dawn when McCabe, muddy, bruised, and hurting in more places than he cared to think about, turned into the parking area behind the large white Victorian on the Eastern Prom. He pulled the lovingly restored cherry red ’57 T-Bird into parking space number three. McCabe and Sandy had scrimped and saved to buy the car the first year they were married. He sat for a minute, nursing his pain, holding on to the wheel, not knowing why those days came to mind. Days of innocence long since lost. There was nothing he and Sandy loved more than cruising around Westhampton Beach on a summer Saturday with the top down. Guys making twenty times as much as the two of them put together — brokers, bond traders, network producers — would walk slowly around the parked car, gazing in admiration both at McCabe’s vintage T-Bird and at McCabe’s wife from every angle. He smiled bitterly at the memory. Michael McCabe, twenty-four years old. Hot shit extraordinaire. Hot car. Hot woman. Hot times.

Then the hot times came to an end. He always found it funny — painful but funny — that when Sandy finally ran off with one of those guys, it was the car she wanted to keep. Not the daughter they conceived on a blanket in the Westhampton dunes on a moonlit night one of those very same weekends. Knowing Sandy, she might have brought up custody of the car in court if her lawyer had let her. ‘Let’s see. I’ll trade you one forty-year-old classic convertible for one little girl. Even-up trade. No draft choices. No players to be named later. Well, fuck you, Sandy. I’ve got them both, and no, you can’t have them back.’