Innocence

At first she said nothing, but then a strategy occurred to her. She didn’t think her father would have told him more about her than that she suffered from social phobia; and perhaps a member or two of the household staff had given him another few details. She had not yet spoken, and perhaps he knew so little about her that he could be led to assume that an inability to speak was part of her condition. The more neurotic and emotionally disabled he believed her to be, the more convinced he would become of his absolute power over her, and the more likely it would be that he might grow careless.

As Telford continued his salacious monologue, he watched Gwyneth with the sharp stare and hunger of a wolf circling a lamb. Now she responded not merely by cringing and drawing into a huddled posture on the window seat, but also with wordless sounds of misery and tortured apprehension. When he demanded answers to his lewd questions, she strung together half-words and short clusters of syllables that meant nothing, grunts and sputters and thin mewls of distress that might have inspired pity in another man, though Telford had no pity. After a few such exchanges, he arrived at the conclusion that, although she could read, she was incapable of speech, that she was either limited by some physical impediment or by a developmental disability.

Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies. Telford stood a foot taller than Gwyneth, weighed twice her hundred pounds; he was bold where she was timid, cruel where she was gentle. When he realized she couldn’t speak to plead or to accuse, or to shame him, he was further inflamed by her helplessness. Into his eyes and across his flushed face came an expression so brutish and so carnal, Gwyneth feared that in addition to all the ways that he promised to abuse her, he would at the end of the ordeal tear into her with his teeth.

He no longer called her Gwyneth. He didn’t call her “girl” anymore, and he didn’t even deign to address her as “you.” He had several names for her, all of them coarse, many of them obscene.

At last he ordered her off the window seat and to the bathroom adjoining her bedroom. He said, “I want the nose ring for a souvenir and that red bead on the lip. We’ll scrub away all the stupid Goth stuff, so I can see the little girl beneath, the fragile bird that so desperately wants to be a hawk.”

With coltish unsteadiness, making thin sounds of distress, Gwyneth preceded him into the bathroom. Step by step, she frantically considered ways to distract him or to tumble him off his feet so that she might have a chance to run, but he was strong and made stronger by his lust, by his profound desire to commit those cruelties and ultimate transgressions about which he had previously fantasized.

In the spacious bathroom, he ordered her to undress. She feared that if she hesitated he would slap her, that the slap would open in him a door to an even darker place than the one his mind currently inhabited, that it would lead to a sudden acceleration of the planned rape and murder. Tears still slid down her face, smearing her Goth makeup, tears for her father, not for herself, and her tremors were uncontrolled. As she began to unbutton her blouse, she turned away from him, facing the vanity, eyes downcast, as if desperately modest.

She heard him pull the drain-control lever that engaged the stopper. She raised her head to look into the mirror above the vanity, not at herself but at what lay behind her, and she saw him in reflection as he leaned over the tub to crank the hot-water faucet. In that posture, he was at last vulnerable. She spun around and shoved him hard. He toppled into the bathtub, crying out in pain as the gushing water scalded him.

The elevator would be far too slow, and if she stumbled and fell as she raced down the stairs, Telford would catch her. He might snare her easily anyway. Darting through the open bathroom door, she heard him floundering out of the tub, and instead of sprinting through the apartment to the front door, she went directly to the nightstand on the right side of her bed, yanked open a drawer, and snatched up the small aerosol can of Mace.

She knew that he was almost upon her. She turned, saw him three steps away, and thumbed a stream of the chemical into his eyes, as her father had instructed. Telford cried out. As if he had collided with a wall, his forward motion became a backward stagger. She seized the advantage, squirting him in the nose and mouth.

Mace causes no permanent injury but is highly effective. Tears burst forth, vision blurs completely, and a kind of blindness-with-light ensues for a few minutes. Inhaled even slightly, it forces the target to struggle for breath, and although he is in no peril, he feels as if he might suffocate.