“Tell me your name,” he says. “I’m guessing you know mine.”
I won’t look him in the eye. My breath has grown shallow and quick, small gusts over my lips.
“Well?”
I don’t know how to answer. None of this is going according to plan. I feel like an actor onstage who’s rehearsed the wrong play. I need to get out the door, get away, think it through before things go too far—
Before I can react, he reaches behind me, slides his hand around my ass and into my pocket and comes up with my wallet. I make a grab but he yanks it away, opens it and takes out my driver’s license.
“Alice Elizabeth Croft,” he reads. “Five-four, one hundred fifteen pounds. Black hair, green eyes.”
He returns my wallet, smiling, looking me over. “Sounds about right.”
“Can I go now?”
He steps back, hands up. “Who’s stopping you?”
I open the door and stumble onto the front porch, pausing at the top step to pull up my hood.
“Hey, do you want a ride?” The amusement in his voice is clear, even through the storm. “It’s 336 Signal Road, right?”
I run down the wooden steps and leave him laughing behind me.
* * *
I unlock my front door, drenched and out of breath from my mile-long sprint through the forest. My sneakers are muddy and bristled with pine needles. I toe them off, strip out of my gloves, T-shirt and jeans and leave them in a dark, sodden heap next to the door.
In my bra and underwear, I head for the bathroom and take out my kit: straight razor, ointment, gauze and a large, flat bandage. My hands are trembling and too slippery to hold the razor. I wipe them on a towel and sit at the edge of the tub, my ankle crossed over my knee, and run my thumb over the tapestry of pink and white scars on the sole of my foot—the hard, half-healed ridges and faded round cigarette burns, the deeper, purplish groove from last year’s infection. I slide the blade across the arch of my foot. Once, twice, three times. There is a short, shocked pause before the invisible cuts fill into fine red threads, then fat strands of yarn, swelling crimson beads, each one adorned with a square, striped catchlight from my bathroom window. One by one the droplets shiver and burst and drip to the tile, swirling into the rain that trickles from the ends of my hair.
I close my eyes as the fire sets in. The razor blade clatters to the floor.
CHAPTER TWO
On Vashon Island, there is a strange tree. Decades ago when the tree was young, a boy parked his Red Ranger bicycle there, straddling the fork and locked in place with a sturdy chain. The bike was never reclaimed so the tree grew around it, engulfed it, until only the wheels and twisted handlebars remained visible, suspended six feet off the ground like some giant prehistoric insect trapped in amber.
I lived near the tree when I was growing up. My grandmother had a small trailer in a lot across the road, and I would sneak away sometimes, silent on the loamy footpath, to my spot on a mossy stump where I would stare up at the bike and wonder how to extricate it. Something about the preternatural fusion of tree and bicycle distressed me. That horrifying, remorseless consumption—the strangled metal, trapped inside the bowels of the tree.
Recently I read that the bicycle was vandalized and the front wheel removed. I imagine the bike’s decapitation, the final indignity. I don’t want to see it.
* * *
“Mocha decaf,” says Midge.
“You’re good,” I say, easing the café door shut. A rich aroma greets me: coffee and cream, and something seductive from the huge ancient oven behind the counter.
“What else?” she says.
“Whatever that is in the oven.”
Midge smiles, wiping her hands on her canvas apron. She has always reminded me of a Sesame Street monster. Small, square, adorably ugly. A huge fierce grin full of crooked teeth, a tuft of wiry black hair. “You can’t have that. It’s a wedding cake.”
“So cruel. Thank God there are muffins.”
I take my breakfast outside and lay out my notes and pages. It’s early morning, drizzly and cool. Across the gravel road, two gray horses appear through the mist, grazing in a ragged field against a backdrop of dark pines. One of them lifts her head and lets go with a high-pitched whinny that rips through the stillness and trails away.
Aside from the Red Ranger tree, Vashon-Maury is like any other island in the Puget Sound, with one utilitarian commercial district featuring a handful of disorganized grocery stores, interspersed with touristy shops bearing hand-painted names like Heron’s Nest and Treasure Island, where you can buy mugs depicting the Seattle skyline or salt and pepper shakers shaped like the island’s famous strawberries (which nobody grows anymore, though the festival lives on). On Thursdays, we have a farmers’ market with lumpy rows of pumpkin and zucchini, and jars of organic jam covered by squares of red-and-white gingham, tied around the lid with hemp twine. At the north end of town, our single-screen theater shows last season’s films in a postapocalyptic setting; the stoner at the ticket counter will ask if you want popcorn, and if you do he’ll follow you to the snack bar to ring you up, then trudge upstairs with a hot dog for himself and start the film ten minutes late.
It’s a humble town, peeling and briny. So it makes no sense for me not to sleep at night, but the fact is I can’t. I haven’t slept in the dark since I was thirteen years old. Instead, I spend the nights working on my manuscript—Zebra Down, fifth in the series of young adult novels that’s been paying my bills since I left high school—and in the mornings I take a walk or ride my bike to the Beanery for a cup of coffee.
I brush the crumbs off my fingers, open a book of writing prompts and choose one at random. This is my daily routine, my exercise, prescribed by an online writing teacher who believes in the importance of keeping the creative muscles loose. Ten minutes, scribble like hell, see what comes out.
Faceless men.
I set the timer on my phone and begin.
At night I dream of faceless men. They move through the architecture of my imagination like spirits, shadowy incubi who wait for sleep to deliver me. They press me into the walls, the floors, and I am trapped here in the structure, with all my ghosts inside me and all my rooms on display. I let them seduce me, reveal me and all the secret places where I simmer and burn, let them lift me up and drag me down and nail me with their need, until I feel the push of everything male against all that is female in me.
My phone beeps at the end of ten minutes. I read my page of scrawled handwriting as I sip my coffee and crumble a bite of muffin over my plate.
Nail me, I think disgustedly. Paging Dr. Freud. I cross it out and write it back exactly the same way. Twice.
I obliterate all three versions with lines that dent the paper, rip the page from my notebook, crumple it and toss it toward the trash can. The paper bounces off the rim and lands on the sidewalk. Before I can get out of my chair, a man on his way out of the coffee shop stoops to pick it up.
Jack Calabrese. He grins and starts to open the page.
I leap up and snatch it away.
“Whoa,” he says, laughing. “Check out the reflexes on the little cat burglar.”
I back away, the ball of paper in my fist, and begin to pack up my notebooks. My heartbeat accelerates—I feel the pressure rise in my neck.
“Don’t go,” he says.
“I need to get home.”
“Why? Is someone waiting for you?”
My mouth tightens. No one is waiting for me, but his tone implies that he knows this already. As though such a thing