I GOT a bad feeling early on, with the last client. I could see him grinding his teeth, the way his eyes kept catching at the cross on my chest. But I thought of the bills, the humiliation of my rent check bouncing, the gas I needed, the loans that had ballooned into amounts so large they didn’t seem real. After inflicting pain on the privileged, I had been naïve about the number of men who might be out there looking for women to hurt. Only once, before the last one, did someone lay a hand on me. I told Deidre I had the stomach flu and stayed home until the bruise along my jaw had faded. But that night, as soon as he got me alone, I felt my throat start to close. I was dizzy with whatever he gave me. He watched me touch the cross at my neck. The smell of his car reminded me of the baking soda pastes my mother had used to get stains out of the living room carpet: the smell of rebuke.

You call yourself a good woman? Bullshit. He jerked the chain until it broke, fell between my feet. I didn’t have the strength to reach for it. There weren’t enough words to explain. The cross was a reminder. But not about God. Of course, my mother would have decried as blasphemy that I wore it as a reminder to have faith in myself. To live for me.

When he put his hands around my throat, I tried to scream, but my voice was trapped in my mouth, as though my lips had been sewn shut. And there was so much I had left to do, so much I had to say. I was angry at his anger, his audacity, his desire for my pain. My flesh burned with fury like some self-immolating saint. I kept my eyes on him as long as I could, so that he might see it, feel it. I hoped my rage would brand him, sink into his skin. I wanted it to trail him through the rest of his life, like a ghost.

There was darkness after that. Darkness, water, mud, flies.

I hope when they send me back to my mother, there will be wedges of mud under my nails. My poor mother, who had God and Pastor Roy and clean hands instead of a life. I want her to see that I had at least tried to live.

LILY