Maybe it was that girl who made me get out of the van now, or maybe it was just that anger always made me do stupid things.
My heart tumbled in my chest. About fifteen feet away, halfway between the trail’s border and the rushing water, the man stood over the woman, his hand clenched on a switchblade. A knife. He had a knife.
Other than placing that 911 call, I could think of no way to be useful. It had been nearly twenty years since my last fistfight, and even back then, I hadn’t been stupid enough to take on guys twice my size.
As the man’s anger unspooled, his victim chose the defense often used by prey: she went limp, still. Her nose seeped blood.
I swallowed and shouted for him to stop, even as that stupid-making anger rose in me.
If the man was threatened by my sudden appearance, or even aware of it, he didn’t show it. He reached for the woman, his hands tightening on her sweatshirt. He yanked her toward him, so close her chest butted against his, the knife dangerously near her cheek.
Still much closer to my van than the attacker, I risked a few steps forward. “The police are coming.” I tried for threatening, but the tremor undermined me.
The man stared up at me, through me, rain tracing a slick line from scalp to stubbled chin. His muscles spasmed with rage, and there was a fuzzy disconnect in his eyes. At that moment, the man in front of me was hardly human. He was an animal, his body tensed, his breath ragged.
“You should go,” he said.
“I don’t think I should,” I said, even as I flashed to thoughts of Audrey and Leo. While I didn’t move closer, I couldn’t leave her to him. My hand fell to my pants pocket and the outline my phone made there.
The man returned his attention to his victim, but his voice carried to where I stood. “Who do you love?” he asked. Though he looked at the woman, the way he raised his voice made me believe the question was for me. It startled me—not just his words, incongruous in the setting, but the voice itself, which lacked any of the emotion that corrupted his face.
The man dropped his victim to the ground, holding her there with one of his muddy boots. Then he twisted his head to stare up at me. “Your life is already fucked up. You just don’t know it yet.” He punctuated the commentary with a kick to the woman’s torso. Then he dropped into a squat and repositioned his blade so it faced downward, toward his prone victim.
I tried to remember what I knew about how to handle aggressive animals. If nothing else worked, if a dog attacked, you were supposed to hit and kick it in the throat, nose, or back of the head. Look for a weapon. Break bones. I knew if it came to that, I would be the one broken and likely stabbed. I picked up a rock, felt its weight. I threw it, but in my effort to spare the woman further injury, the stone landed several feet from my target, swallowed by a flurry of soggy leaves.
I slid a few feet farther down the trail—still at a safe distance—and picked up another rock.
“Don’t do it,” I said.
He laughed at this, his full attention on the woman.
I threw the second rock, and it caught him on the cheek. With the back of his hand, he rubbed his skin there, once, but remained focused on his prey. His shoulder cocked. The woman struggled with renewed fervor, apparently recognizing, belatedly, that whatever emotional connection had once existed between them wouldn’t save her. His anger wasn’t going to blow over. He planned to use that knife.
Until that moment, each of my actions had been chosen: I had decided to pull over, to call 911, to get out of the van. To throw the rocks. But when the man raised the knife, the inexplicable terror that had seized me in the van returned, my lungs expanding in hot, rapid bursts. At the cusp of the darkness, I saw something that wasn’t there—another woman, another time, imaginary but as real as the rain and the mud and the blood rushing in my ears.
I didn’t intend to interfere more directly—not with the faces of my children so rooted in my thoughts—but I stumbled and found myself sliding down the embankment before my conscious mind recognized the immediacy of the threat. I was as surprised as the man when I stumbled into him, my trajectory a combination of clumsiness and luck, the blade intended for the brunette’s torso instead grazing my arm. Barely a scratch, but I yelped, a sound I had heard many times from animals but that was unfamiliar in my own throat. He lost hold of the knife, and it tumbled into the water.
I fell backward onto the marshy creek bed. Perception became as slippery as the rain upon the rocks, my heart a thunderclap in my chest, the woman beside me still, the man’s face warped with sick purpose.
Then, suddenly, he stopped. He dropped to a crouch beside me, grabbed my face between his hands. His eyebrows knotted together as he studied me. I had no doubt he could snap my neck with a single twitch. “Why the hell are you doing this?” he demanded. “Who are you?”
He was so close, his voice so thunderous, that my ears vibrated. It was then that I noticed a stain on his T-shirt that might have been blood.
I meant to tell him that I hadn’t intended to interfere, that it was all a stupid accident, but the words wouldn’t come. He reached out and grabbed a large handful of my hair, red and long and easily twisted around his fingers. He yanked it, pulling my face even closer.
Then—finally, thankfully—I heard sirens.
For only a second longer, he studied my face, and I his. Broad nose, a bump along its bridge. Left ear shriveled and folded in on itself. A white worm of scar tissue that prevented stubble from growing along one patch of jaw. A man who liked to fight, and not just with women half his size.
He seemed unconcerned that I would be able to identify him. Testify against him.
“Let her die, and I’ll let you live,” he said.
He nudged the woman with his toe. “Probably not much of a choice anyway. She’s close enough to dead.”
Then almost before I understood him, he loped away, up the hill and toward the road where I had so helpfully left my minivan and its key.
He would get to my car first. My registration. My purse. In moments, he would know my name, my address. And the names of my husband and children.
2
My trailside examination of the victim was brief, the moon providing the slightest of light. I had to get close to detect her breathing, barely a whisper on my cheek, and her pulse was weak. No moaning. No complaints of pain. Even when the paramedics moved her, she remained silent.
Half an hour after the ambulance took her away, I still waited for the police to release me. The rain had lightened to a mist that nevertheless glued my hair to my face and left my T-shirt sodden. I probably shouldn’t have used my cardigan as a towel.
“You sure you don’t want a jacket?” the officer asked again. I had to check his name tag to remember his name: Willis. That drew my attention to the body camera that had been recording for the past thirty minutes. That camera made me second-guess my answers and wonder if the pitch of my voice or slope of my shoulders might later be interpreted as guilt.
“I’m not cold,” I said. And I wasn’t. Soaked, sure, but not cold. My nerves numbed, my damp clothes felt as warm as bathwater. That probably wasn’t normal.
A man approached from the street, stopping to talk to the female officer who’d interviewed me first. The new arrival wore gray dress pants that still held a crease despite the hour, a button-up shirt so white it reflected moonlight, and a tie with stripes of deep pink.