Henry considers me a moment. In the dark I can only make out the whites of his eyes, switching places in their sockets while he searches my face for any indication that I may be disingenuous. “You don’t yet,” he decides. “Not really. But I’ll explain in the morning.”
He loosens his grip, but his hand remains at rest on my throat a moment longer than necessary. I am still holding on to him. I know this must please him, and perhaps that’s why I do not let go.This is Stockholm syndrome, I tell myself. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
At last, Henry stands. He starts for the door, watching me over his shoulder to make sure I don’t move a muscle. I listen to him lock me inside and lie there taking shallow, shaky breaths, wishing I were drugged again so I did not have to think. Around and around in my mind, I play out what just transpired between us until I arrive at my dire conclusion.
Once, I was in a hotel room in Miami, doing press for the first show my husband and I produced together, and we were waiting for a call from the network publicist. I was sitting cross-legged in the bed with my phone in my lap, facing the bathroom, where I could see myself in the reflection of the full-length mirror above the Jacuzzi bathtub. It was exactly forty-eight hours before our show would premiere, the time when the studios lift their embargos and the media is permitted to publish reviews. The publicist was supposed to be calling with an aggregate snapshot from the critics, but she was five minutes late, and then ten, and I knew it would be bad. If it’s all raves, the call comes on the minute.
Are you sure you’re on the Wi-Fi?my husband had asked. He was pacing the room, and when I looked up to answer him, I caught the reflection of myself in the bathroom mirror. My face looked longer than usual, and my eyes seemed to turn down at the corners, like a frowning mouth. This is what true terror looked like, I saw. I was imagining allkinds of catastrophic headlines—Emmy Winner Faye Heron Struck Out on Her Own and Struck Out Big-Timeor some punny such—which would snowball into green splats and tipped-over popcorn buckets on Rotten Tomatoes and, the true kiss of death, next to nothing on social media. In the end the reviews were mostly positive, and a small but dedicated fanbase came through on socials, and the publicist had just gotten stuck in another meeting that ran over, but in that moment I saw on my face what I had seen on Henry’s as he pulsed my throat in his hand. Something catastrophic is coming.
Chapter 9
In the tiny bathroom, there are women’s sweatpants and a man’s fleece, thick wool socks. Drugstore shampoo and conditioner. A bar of soap. Abar. One of those very rudimentary toothbrushes they don’t sell in drugstores anymore, but for some reason is always a part of the amenity kits on overseas flights. The bristles are so soft that for a paralyzing moment I worry I have his kid’s toothbrush in my mouth, before remembering Henry wouldn’t do that to me. He will kill me, but he would not give me a used toothbrush.
The first time we came here, Henry said that if I didn’t want to bathe in the lake, which I didn’t, that I only got three pulls on the shower cord, and everyone would know by the level of the water tank if I took more, and I would be shunned. We laughed but he was serious. This morning, I give myself five pulls, hissing each time the ice-cold water splits my scalp. I get out, shivering, shuddering, really. My chest hitches with painful breaths, and I look in the mirror and I am stunned to see I am sobbing. I usually only cry when I’m angry, when I’m shouting at my husband and begging him to do something to save our marriage. I dry myself with a tattered towel that catches in the clasp of the spiky bracelet I wear always. I blink off my tears and stare at the underside of my wrist a long moment. With the edgeof my fingernail, I flick the double-pronged clasp with my thumb, and I wonder, could I use this?
He has left me a weak hairbrush with plastic bristles that snag and break my hair, which he knows I am very precious about. I work through it in small sections. My arm is heavy by the time I’m done, but it is a task that required enough concentration that my panic has momentarily subsided.
When I come out of the bathroom, he is there, standing by the window, his hands in his pockets like he’s waiting to take me on a date. He’s made the bed with pathological precision, the fold in the quilt at the exact place where the pattern breaks.
“You need to eat,” he says. He takes me by the elbow and ushers me outside and toward the main house. I’m barefoot, and he goes carefully, pausing so I can skip from stone to stone on the rough path. “We’ll get you shoes,” he says, bafflingly apologetic.
My phone sits on the kitchen table in a blast of sunlight, the once-finger-smudged screen pristine, like Henry spent the morning wiping it down with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration. I just know he has a big plastic tub of electronic screen wipes from Staples, a stocking stuffer he bought for himself and had his wife wrap last Christmas. Tragic, that image.
Henry toes the leg of an empty chair, angling it toward me with a jut of his chin.Sit. I comply, my heart beating in my back. The appearance of my phone, a tether to the outside world, is a thrilling development.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Faye,” Henry says in a soft, sinister voice, “I will do whatever I want.”
My blood betrays me, moving in all the wrong directions. It should be draining, running cold, not surging in the places it is surging, warm as the sun on my skin. It is too much to look at Henry, and soI concentrate on the imperfections in the wooden floorboards that people pay a lot of money for back in LA—it’s called hand-scratched, and I’m the dummy who paid for someone to brutalize shiny new floorboards by hand—wishing for this moment to end but knowing that when it does, I will return to it forever.
“Don’t look like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re scared.”
I raise my eyes to his. “I am scared.”
Henry’s astounding face shows all his years of unforgiveness. “Maybe now you are.”
I blink slowly, thinking I might understand. “So you know, I was never afraid of you that day in the car. I was afraid of missing my flight and not making my interview. The episode was about ambition, but people interpreted it the way they wanted to interpret it.”
“And you let them.”
“I’ll take responsibility for that, yes.”
“How very noble of you,” Henry says, each word clipped and clean.
Anger churns in my chest. Anger feels so much better than fear. Fear is something I like to experience when I know I am safe, and I don’t know what the hell I am at this moment. “I was angry and I had a right to be. You wanted me to miss my flight. You did not want me going to LA. You did not want to lose your hold over me. And you know what, Henry? PT was the one who told me to write about it.”
Henry studies me, his pupils that unusually dark blue and the whites of his eyes veined red, like he’s been crying, or trying not to. “I disabled your facial ID and changed your passcode.”
It takes me a moment to register that we’ve moved on. Henry must know I’m right, that there is nothing he can say to defend himself. I stare at the dead face of my phone, dejected.
“You should really have some more discretion when it comes to saving your famous friends’ names. I mean, the full name, Faye. What, do you just go around hoping people see your phone light up with messages from Oscar-winning pedophiles so everyone is aware of how important you are?”
“Spoken like a card-carrying member of whatever backwoods society you were born into.”