It was a system that suited both of us, these weekly visits, until one evening when two drinks at the bar turned into four. I suggested, half joking, that we were both turning into our mother the older we got; that made her angry. She was nothing like Agnes Wakefield, and I had better be grateful for that. I didn’t see why I should be. Our sniping took us onto the curb in the valley between streetlights, and I told her she could pretend to be something else, but she had always been a rotten bitch to me, ever since we were children.

“If I’m such a bitch,” she said, fishing her keys out of her purse, “then you can find your own ride home.”

I watched the taillights of her car shrink away in the darkness. Trees closed in the country road, and she was gone.

As I pulled out my cell phone to call for a ride, it slipped from my unfeeling fingers and skittered across the pavement. Such a brief moment. How many times have I dropped my phone and reached over to retrieve it—something you hardly even think about, it’s such a natural act.

But I was drunk, and I did not notice the person coming up behind me.

When I bent down for the phone, there was a sharp crack on the back of my head. I fell forward, landing badly on my wrist—felt a knee in my back, tried to push away the stranger, but he was too heavy. I could not turn to look at him, so he remained a mystery, a dark weight on my back, reminding me of my own shadow as a child, the ghost who used to follow me around, the tall shape of seething darkness, although perhaps darkness is not quite the right word—not necessarily darkness but nothingness, a shape of nothingness sometimes glimpsed standing at the top of a staircase or the end of a hallway. The Nothing Man, who even my mother never believed existed. And that, I thought in that wild moment, was who knelt on my back, the Nothing Man, and if I did ever manage to turn my head, I would see the terrible emptiness of him.

As if he sensed my thoughts, his hot breath in my ear said, “Don’t try to get up.” Of course I tried, but a hand pushed my head down, pressed my cheek into the gritty asphalt, and I felt the chilling circle, a mouth of metal, press into my neck.

Time sagged. Wind stirred litter and dead leaves across the empty street. Dirt migrated from my lips, mashed against the ground, into my mouth. A beetle crawled across the asphalt near my right eye, its wiry legs twitching. The knee in my back was a sharp weight crushing my gut. I smelled my own alcoholic sweat and a man’s sour musk blanketing me.

My purse was yanked from my shoulder, and with my hair spilling over my eyes, I heard only the sounds of careless rummaging. He took what he wanted, tossed the empty bag to the ground, where it flopped like a dead fish, an empty and forsaken thing.