Louise felt her anger rise up in her throat. Normally she thought carefully about everything she said to John Paul before she said it, but tonight she dropped her guard.
“Didn’t want to get in your way,” she said.
“What did you say?”
“Thought you’d have more fun without me.”
John Paul closed the door behind him, throwing the room back into darkness. Suddenly she couldn’t see him. Something in Louise woke up enough to be scared.
“John Paul,” she said, and then his hands were on her, feeling for her roughly, pulling her up out of the bed by her clothing.
“Who’d you fuck,” he said. His voice was too loud. She cringed. The voices downstairs stopped—they were listening.
“Shhhh,” she said—remembering too late that being shushed was one of John Paul’s triggers, that telling him to lower his voice was worse than slapping him in the face. He had told her this in these words.
“Don’t shush me,” he said. He shouted. “I asked you a question. Who. Did. You. Fuck.”
A tiny giggle from downstairs.
“No one, no one,” whispered Louise, urgently. John Paul’s grip on her collar was tightening.
“You sure?” he said. “Because I know you’ve got that in you. I’ve seen it.”
Once, thought Louise. One time. The first week they were together. Her second month at Union. So drunk that she barely remembered. So drunk that it wasn’t right.
“John Paul,” Louise said. “I went to bed. I was tired.”
He held her there a few more seconds, breathing into her face. Then, slowly, he loosened his grip. He let his arms drop and took one stumbling step backward.
Louise’s eyes were adjusting. John Paul’s glasses glinted in the streetlight coming in from outside. He put his hands on his waist, hung his head briefly. Then he pushed past her and collapsed into his bed, diagonally, taking up too much space. There was no room for her.
Louise looked at him. She didn’t want to wake him. Didn’t want to raise his ire a second time. She could sleep on the floor. Or she could go back out into the cold, get into her staff car, hope it started, hope a gas station was open at that time of night. She could make the drive back to the Garnet Hill Lodge. She could leave him behind forever.
A small flame of rage was burning in her belly.
“I hope you die,” she said to John Paul, before she could stop herself.
• • •
He was on her. His left hand grabbed her shirt. His right hand punched her, twice, while she flailed with her arms, trying to protect her face. She kicked at him. She fell to the ground. Curled into a ball there, protecting her head, trying to protect her stomach. He kicked her once, hard, in the back.
Don’t cry out, she told herself. Don’t cry.
It was a sick instinct, one designed to sacrifice her body in the service of her pride. She could not bear the thought of those girls downstairs, in their going-out clothes, hearing her beaten.
John Paul, above her, was panting.
“Say it again,” he said.
She was silent.
She waited just long enough. In her mind, she went through a checklist: her car keys were on the table just inside the front door. Her purse was on the floor next to the bed, but she’d leave it. It was too hard to find in the dark.
“Say I hope you die, John Paul,” said John Paul. “Say it.”
She let a few more moments of silence go by and then tackled him around the knees with all her strength. She was smaller than he was but she had the dual advantages of sobriety and gravity. She tackled him and he hit the ground, hard, and she jumped up—the pain in her face and her back unabating—and ran down the stairs. As she grabbed the keys on the table she heard him thundering after her, down the stairs.
She sensed faces watching her from the living room. She did not turn. She flung open the front door and almost died slipping on the icy stairs, but she righted herself. She got into the staff car and tried to start it, once, twice, three times. It was very bad at starting in the cold.
John Paul came out of the house and launched himself down the stairs and it was the ice that saved her. Unlike Louise, he went down, hard, and stayed there. That’s when the car started; that’s when she backed out fast into the dark and empty street and then threw the car into first, second, third, fourth.
• • •
Her heart was still pounding. The gas gauge was at a quarter tank, maybe a little less. It would not be enough to get her back to the Garnet Hill Lodge; this much she knew. And her purse was back beside John Paul’s bed.
Both eyes were swelling, but the left one was worse. She rolled down her window and broke free from the top of the side mirror a small piece of the ice that had formed there. She held it against one eye, then the other.
She had an eighth of a tank as she approached the exit for Shattuck. The Garnet Hill Lodge was another half hour up the thruway from there, and forty-five minutes of local roads after that. She could go home, could sneak into her house and sneak out again in the early morning and hope that Jesse and her mother would not see her and her mangled face. But if they did, she thought: if Jesse did.
She took the exit. She had no choice.
And then, waiting at the light at the bottom of the off-ramp, she had an idea.
• • •
She’d never been to the Van Laar Preserve in winter. She had no idea how plowed it would be. In the Adirondacks, snow accumulated fast and rarely melted, so that by March you could find yourself hip-deep in places that weren’t plowed by private service. But the family spent Christmas there, she had heard, and there had been no big snowfall since then.
Sure enough, when she arrived at two in the morning, the entrance was clear. At the end of the driveway, the huge dark house sat dormant. She cut her headlights, waited until her eyes adjusted. No sign of anyone on the grounds. The moon was bright that night and the snow reflected it broadly. It was easy to see, even at that hour. She got out of the car.
