A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

on my cheek, put me in a cab, and disappeared into the dark.

THIRTY-THREE

Margot had given the cab driver my address, and for a minute as he headed toward the West Side Highway, I sat in the backseat, drenched in perspiration and frozen still. I’d been turned inside out and then right side in again, but some of my veins had been left on the outside of my body in the process, and now they throbbed. The driver asked me if I was all right, and I just sort of whimpered and shook in the backseat. Then I leaned forward and gave him a different address and sat in a daze as he took me to the only place I could possibly go.

“What the hell, Jilly, it’s after three a.m.,” Raf said, rubbing his eyes, when he finally opened his door after a minute or two of my pounding on it. “You almost gave me a heart attack.” Then he took me in—my wild eyes and hair, the sweat-drenched clothing, the bloodstains on my sleeve—and he immediately threw off any remaining sleepiness. “Are you okay? Are you hurt? Who did this to you?”

“No, not hurt. But maybe not okay. I don’t know. Can I come in?”

“Of course,” he said, and swung the door open wide for me.

“What happened?” he asked as I paced around his living room. Just being in his presence—my familiar, solid beanpole, someone who was going to stick a knife in my hand only so I could help him chop onions—allowed me to anchor myself back to the Earth, although my blood still pinged around inside of me, bouncing off my skin, making everything buzz and tingle. Imagine the feeling you get when the hair on the back of your neck stands up. Now imagine it doing that for an hour straight.

“So it turns out that they actually think they’re witches. That they do real magic. Not, like, card tricks, and not just sending some positive energy out in the world, but that they can truly influence events.”

“They . . . what?”

“Yeah. They’re out of their minds. And now I guess I’m one of them.”

“What did they do to you?” he asked.

A strangled noise erupted from my throat at the thought of having to tell him any more details, having to relive the chanting and the knife and the cow tongue, so I just shook my head. Raf came over and put his arms around me as I tried not to cry. “I’m not sad! I’m just kind of overwhelmed,” I said, my face against the threadbare T-shirt he’d worn to bed.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“Yeah, it’s fine, it’s just that I got freaked out by it all and I didn’t want to be alone in my apartment because they showed up there and kidnapped me earlier and”—here I caught a whiff of myself, reeking of the herbs they’d burned and the oils they’d pressed onto me—“Oh God, I smell like a feral child who’s been raised by wolves, so here I am stinking up your apartment and I’m sorry but I didn’t know what else to do.”

He stepped back and looked at me, a little overwhelmed himself. He nodded a couple of times, quickly, and then asked, “Would a shower help?”

My whole body drooped with relief. “A shower would be amazing.”

I followed him to the bathroom, watching as he knelt down and turned on the water for me. He knew that his tricky faucet confused me to no end. I stood there shivering while he adjusted the temperature.

“Okay, that should be good,” he said, turning to go, and I so desperately didn’t want to be alone that I just said it without thinking it through:

“Will you stay in here with me?”

He hesitated. Then he nodded, put the toilet lid down, and sat on it. I pulled the shower curtain—a solid, shiny blue—and he turned away as I took off my clothes and stepped in.

Raf’s shower was not the cleanest place in the entire world. Of course he had a three-in-one body wash/shampoo/conditioner. I was grateful for all of it, for the bits of mold blooming on his tile, for the stupid boy bath products that I used to dab the cut on my palm, which had already begun to scab up. Through a crack between the wall and the edge of the shower curtain, I could see him sitting, jiggling his leg, his head turned away from the shower for propriety even though he wasn’t going to see anything anyway. He swallowed, then adjusted his athletic shorts.

“I have to keep going back,” I said as I soaped up my hair, as my heart continued to pound against the walls of my chest. “It’s good for the story, right? That the tastemakers of New York are in this weird cult?”

“It’s definitely not what I would have expected,” Raf said. He adjusted his shorts again.

My skin still prickled, sensitive, as I tried to scrub the night off it. Faint streaks of red marked my hip bones where Margot had moved her fingers. “But the wildest thing is that when you’re in there with them, it feels . . . almost real. They sweep you up in their delusion, even though I know that actually, they’re all having this mass psychotic break.”

“Well . . .”

I paused in my scrubbing. “What?”

“I don’t know if they’re having a breakdown. A lot of people believe in things that we can’t prove.”

“Yeah, but you don’t know . . .” I started. “Some of what they were doing was just . . . Oh, I can’t think about it anymore tonight.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not saying what they . . . I just mean, my grandma practiced Santeria when she was growing up, so she was always making potions and stuff when my mom was a little girl. And you know my mom. She’s a realistic person. But even now, she swears that she saw ghosts in her childhood bedroom. I don’t think that makes her crazy.”

“No, I didn’t mean