“Don’t, Mr. Harvey,” I managed, and I kept saying that one word a lot. Don’t. And I said please a lot too. Franny told me that almost everyone begged “please” before dying.
“I want you, Susie,” he said.
“Please,” I said. “Don’t,” I said. Sometimes I combined them. “Please don’t” or “Don’t please.” It was like insisting that a key works when it doesn’t or yelling “I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it” as a softball goes sailing over you into the stands.
“Please don’t.”
But he grew tired of hearing me plead. He reached into the pocket of my parka and balled up the hat my mother had made me, smashing it into my mouth. The only sound I made after that was the weak tinkling of bells.
As he kissed his wet lips down my face and neck and then began to shove his hands up under my shirt, I wept. I began to leave my body; I began to inhabit the air and the silence. I wept and struggled so I would not feel. He ripped open my pants, not having found the invisible zipper my mother had artfully sewn into their side.
“Big white panties,” he said.
I felt huge and bloated. I felt like a sea in which he stood and pissed and shat. I felt the corners of my body were turning in on themselves and out, like in cat’s cradle, which I played with Lindsey just to make her happy. He started working himself over me.
“Susie! Susie!” I heard my mother calling. “Dinner is ready.”
He was inside me. He was grunting.
“We’re having string beans and lamb.”
I was the mortar, he was the pestle.
“Your brother has a new finger painting, and I made apple crumb cake.”
Mr. Harvey made me lie still underneath him and listen to the beating of his heart and the beating of mine. How mine skipped like a rabbit, and how his thudded, a hammer against cloth. We lay there with our bodies touching, and, as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth surrounding us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where worms and animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.
I knew he was going to kill me. I did not realize then that I was an animal already dying.
“Why don’t you get up?” Mr. Harvey said as he rolled to the side and then crouched over me.
His voice was gentle, encouraging, a lover’s voice on a late morning. A suggestion, not a command.
I could not move. I could not get up.
When I would not – was it only that, only that I would not follow his suggestion? – he leaned to the side and felt, over his head, across the ledge where his razor and shaving cream sat. He brought back a knife. Unsheathed, it smiled at me, curving up in a grin.
