She looked at her wrinkled fingers. She must have been sitting in the water for a long time. Once, she read an article about some scientists who had finally managed to answer the question of why fingertips get wrinkled in water. It turned out the wrinkling was a trait humans had evolved so it would be easier to collect food in rivers. A useful ability a thousand years ago. For men who definitely didn’t take two-hour baths. That question had kept the British scientists at the University of Newcastle so very busy. And she felt like those scientists, and also like she’d fumbled through her whole life that way, with a holdover skill that was useless for her time.

She brought both knees to her chest and reached her wrinkled fingers out to the magnet holding the plastic curtain in place. She stuck the magnet to the steel of the tub and unstuck it and she felt relief. Here was an invention that came from useful study.

One of the things that had been hardest for her, on moving from the childhood baths in the sink to the phone-booth showers of adulthood, was dealing with the shower curtain. She was afraid of the inner plastic lining. Billowing in the heat, it would brush against her body in a way that she found perverted. She’d put the shampoo and conditioner bottles at the ends to weigh it down, but they always escaped and the lining would corral her against the white ceramic wall.

After finding out about Don Osvaldo, she stopped believing in Santa Claus and started believing in rapists. No other figure had such a presence in her childhood. Not thieves, not the Virgin Mary, or angels, or the boogeyman, vampires, or elves. The rapist in her imagination was a hunched-over man with long hands and fingers, a long face, bilious yellow skin, shining teeth, and wolflike features. And he would always be lurking around the corner, waiting for her to leave the house to buy bread. But also, like God or the devil, rapists could take on any form; they could be the footsteps she heard at night, lying in bed. Or they could be the shower curtain.

Children had been raped at her school, and back then no one employed the concept of pedophilia, and the result was that she’d gotten things confused in her mind and thought that rapists only went after children under fourteen. Or maybe it was her childish need for hope, for a happy ending, that made her think she’d be safe once she was no longer a child. The thing she was most anxious for when she was little was to stop being little. To make it past thirteen as soon as possible, so she would finally be out of harm’s way.