Page 50 of A Slow Fire Burning

So she doesn’t fight, she goes limp. She lies there in the dirt, a dead weight. While weakly he paws at her clothes, she keeps her eyes on his face all the time.

This is not what he wants.

Close your eyes, he tells her. Close your eyes.

She will not close her eyes.

He slaps her across the face. She does not react; she makes no sound. Her pale limbs are heavy, so heavy in the dirt, she is sinking into it. She is taking him with her.

This is not what he wants.

He climbs off her body, beats the earth with his fist. He has blood on his face and in his mouth. He is limp, beaten.

This is not what he wants.

He starts to cry.

While he is crying, she picks herself silently up off the ground.

Go, he says to her. Just go. Just run.

But this girl doesn’t want to run; she has done her running. She picks up a stone, jagged-edged, its tip pointed like an arrowhead. Nothing too big, just large enough to fit snugly into the palm of her hand.

Her hand cups the warm stone and his eyes widen in surprise as she swings her arm toward him. At the sound of the bone at his temple splitting, joy fizzes up in her and she swings a second time, and again, and again, until she is drenched in sweat and in his blood. She thinks she might have heard him begging her to stop, but she cannot be sure; she might just as well have imagined it.

When the police come, the girl will tell them how she fought for her life and they will believe her.

THIRTY-THREE

Miriam sifted through her keepsakes, the objects she’d gathered during the course of brushes with other lives—the lives of others, other lives she might have lived. She noted with some sadness how they were depleted: the key she had taken from the boat was gone, as well as one of Lorraine’s earrings, which pained her terribly.

The things she chose to hold on to represented important moments for her, and when she thought about those times—those few moments alone with Daniel on the boat, her escape from the farmhouse—she liked to have associated objects to hold, to help bring her back to how it really was, to how she really felt. Now, as she held the little silver cross that her father had given her for her confirmation, her first Communion, she closed her eyes tightly and imagined herself at fourteen, before the horrors of the farmhouse, when she was still an innocent.

Miriam was aware that this habit, of collecting trinkets to transport her back to important moments, was a trait she shared with psychopaths and serial killers, which was something that botheredher, but the truth, Miriam believed, was that we all have our monstrous moments, and these objects helped her stay true to who she really was, to the monster she had made of herself.

Sometimes, when she found herself in a very dark place, she felt overwhelmed by the urge to confess. If she had a confessor, where would she start? Would it be with the most recent transgression or the very first one? It had to be the latter, she supposed. The first was the defining one, the one that set her on this path.

Start with the night she escaped from the farmhouse, when she stood in front of the broken window and prayed, and prayed. When she clambered out the window, when she ran along the dirt road. When she heard the thunder that wasn’t thunder, the sound of the car, coming from behind her, coming from the farm. When she realized he was coming for her and started to run again, scrambling over a fence, flinging herself into a ditch, wriggling forward on her stomach until she was concealed, at least in part, by an overhanging tree. There she lay, listening to the car’s gears grinding as it slowed, its lights illuminating the branch above her head. The car passed.

For a while after that, she lay in the ditch. How long, she couldn’t say. She could never say. Miriam remembered so much detail about that day and the night that followed—the smell of the house, the pale, blasted blue of the evening sky, the song in the car, and that sound Lorraine made, that awful sound, after he punched her. But she could not for the life of her remember how long she had lain in that ditch, frozen and unable to move, only her mind whirring, thinking,It’s not my fault he chose you.

She could not remember, either, how long she stood in the locked room in the farmhouse, paralyzed with terror in front of the brokenwindow, could not remember how long it had taken her to make the decision that her best chance was not to stay and fight but to run, to raise the alarm. She could not remember how long she stood there and prayed, prayed that he wouldn’t come down the stairs, prayed that he wouldn’t come for her. Prayed that he would take his time with Lorraine.

Her mind moved on, and it wasn’t until she sat in Lorraine’s bedroom at her dressing table, pocketing her gold earrings, considering what a bad person she was, that they returned to her, those despicable things she had thought, all the time she had wasted while she was thinking them.

Miriam was tested and found wanting; she discovered at that time that she lacked some essential goodness, some critical strand of moral fiber.

She was not good then, and has not been good since.

At the bottom of the wooden box, beneath the letter from the lawyer, lay the dog ID tag.

Miriam didn’t like to think about that moment, the moment with the dog. It wasn’t something she was proud of; it was a loss of control, in a moment of pain. She kept the tag as a reminder to herself, that the transfer of hatred from one person to another didn’t work. Didn’t make sense. She thought about Jeremy, how she longed to push a knife into his throat. Sometimes she thought about Myerson too, about smacking him over the back of the head with a claw hammer, pushing him into the canal, watching him sink beneath the surface of that filthy water.

She thought about it, but she didn’t have the courage to act. Andthen it happened, one day, that there was a rude customer in the shop, and a near-collision on the towpath with a cyclist who called her a stupid fat bitch, and, arriving home with her chest tight and her vision blurred, in the early stages of a full-blown panic attack, she found the dog on her back deck, tearing into the food recycling bag she’d put out that morning and forgotten to take to the bins, and almost without thinking, she snatched the dog up. She took it down to her cabin, placed it in the sink, and quickly, with a sharp knife, cut its throat.

The animal didn’t suffer; it was a clean kill. Not literally, of course—literally it made a terrible mess, blood all over her hands and her clothes and the floor, so much more than you would have thought; it took an age to clear it all up. Sometimes, she thought she could still smell it.

Later that night, she put the dog in a bag and carried it along the path, tipped it out of the bag into the water at the back of Theo’s house. She thought the little body might be found, but it must have drifted into the tunnel, perhaps snagged on the propeller of someone’s boat, so in the end, Theo never got to wonder about who had done such a terrible thing, he just got to wonder where the dog was, and in some ways Miriam found that more satisfying, the sight of him wandering up and down the path and in the roads nearby, calling the animal’s name, putting up pitiful little posters.

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