Intrusion (6 page)

“I wish I could explain just how lovely you are to me,” he says, and then he. . .he reaches out and just almost lets the back of his hand trail over the side of my face. His knuckles actually catch some strands of hair.

Is it any wonder I gasp? No one has ever said anything like that to me before. I was sure people said that sort of thing only in movies, and certainly never in response to the kind of question I asked. It seems like some sort of distraction from the main issue, or maybe a segue to ease me into the truth.

And then he explains and I don't know anymore, about anything.

“You think it could be something bad, and yet you keep asking. All your thoughts are about reassuring me—which is frightening to me in a way but so beautiful in another. He should have taken your trust and snapped it in two. But I see you holding it out to me all the same, all whole and new. It makes me ache to see it. Your face is lovely enough as it is, but with that hope in your great, dark eyes I could drown forever.”

He pauses then, and seems to realize. He catches himself in the middle of this unbelievable poetry reading, and understands that he might have to dial it back. I feel him do it, even before he asks the question.

“Was that too much?” he asks.

And I answer, without hesitation.

“It will never be too much.”

“Not even if I tell you?”

“Not even then.”

“I could be a pervert.”

“A pervert wouldn't tell me he was one.”

He smiles wanly at that—I see it because I can't help but keep looking in his direction. The thirst for his expressions is strong now, so strong. And I understand why too, of course I do. Each one is a complete gift, as pretty as a picture and twice as telling. I know he's going to say something awful before he's even spoken a word out loud.

I just don't realize how awful.

“Do you remember the story on the news a few years ago—about the college girls who were going missing and turning up battered and bloody and torn to pieces?”

My mind goes to it immediately—the one who took their fingers. He's talking about Floyd Humphries. I can even see the girl they had on the news, with the strange stunted bangs and the lonely, desperate eyes. It's just that once I have, a kind of horror goes through me. An odd sweat breaks out all over my body and all I can think is:

What do you mean?

Why are you bringing this up?

Maybe somewhere inside myself I hope he won't tell me. It would probably be better for me if he didn't. Certainly it would be better for him. He looks like every word is killing him to squeeze out—though his voice is queerly matter-of-fact when he speaks again.

“He had killed four of them when they came to me. I'd written a paper on a certain type of killer, and they seemed to find it interesting. Many people back then found my theories and insights interesting. I was very good at getting to the core of what drove people to sadistic acts, and I guess they thought I could help them catch him.”

He pauses in a way that suggests his throat has gone dry—all clicks and painful-sounding swallows. But though I'm just pulling up outside my house, he doesn't ask if we can go in and get him a drink. He doesn't move. He doesn't even wait for me to ask him what all this is about or why he might be telling it to me. He just says, after a moment:

“And they were right—I was very useful. I was too useful. I described him exactly, before any of us had even seen his face. I knew what kind of car he drove and how his house probably looked inside. I guessed so much that for a brief time I was under investigation myself, though I had no idea it was happening. If I had, maybe I would have stopped. Taken a step back. God knows I wish I had.”

I don't know which is fiercer in me:

The desire to have him stop.

Or the desire to have him continue.

Either way, when he finally speaks again, my heart is racing. Somehow I suspect the end of this story isn't going to be “and then we caught him before he could kill again and I was completely okay with this.” Something is coming, I know. Something that makes my eyes sting before he even gets to the meat of it.

“You see, back then I was very arrogant. Maybe I still am—though I like to think some of that has been washed right out of me. I hope it has, because it had terrible consequences. I convinced them to release most of the things I told them to the papers, and that really didn't work out well for anyone involved. He killed four more girls in retaliation.”

“But you know that's not—” I burst out, but I don't get to the end bit.

He cuts me off before I can tell him what my heart is clamoring for me to say.

Not your fault, not your fault, not your fault
.

“Oh, I know. I know I'm not to blame. I didn't do anything wrong and, yes, my dry facts and uncanny intuition helped catch him in the end. Maybe he would have gone on killing forever if I hadn't been involved. Maybe he'd still be out there, murdering girls who just went out to get groceries or have a good time at some bar. Maybe a lot of things, but you have to know that maybe isn't good enough. You know that, right?”

He turns to look at me, then. I wish he hadn't.

His eyes are like the end of the world.

“And you should also know how I really did it. How I knew what no one else did, without even really thinking about it. People imagine that profiling is an exercise in statistics and elimination. Most serial killers are white males in their thirties, and so on and so forth. But all killers are unique, and the only way to truly catch them is to think the way they do. To imagine what drives them, to feel what they feel. I'm very good at feeling what other people feel, Beth. So good that sometimes I would wake up and think I was strangling some poor girl, in the exact way he did. The things he was responsible for became the things I am responsible for, and no matter what I do or how much therapy I get, that twisted truth is still there inside me. It makes me stop before I even contemplate putting a hand on a woman, because what if I do and my thoughts are all of violence? What if I wake up in the night and instead of only imagining my hands are around someone's throat, I see that they are?”

“The very fact that you're saying that is enough to tell you—”

“That I would never, I know. I would never and yet. . .the terror of it is always with me. His shadow is always over my shoulder. The wound has stopped bleeding and everyone says it looks okay, but the scar is the problem. I have a scar in me three feet deep.”

Only when he's finally quiet do I realize I'm crying. I have no idea when I started—maybe when he said about feeling responsible? I don't know, I don't know, but I do know this: it gets so much worse the second he says about the scar. I have to cover my mouth before I make a sound. It doesn't seem right he should have to hear my pain, after spilling so much of his own.
It isn't about me
, I think,
don't look, don't listen; it's okay, it's okay,
but of course he knows. He just told me he's the best at knowing.

How could he not?

“Why are you upset? We can still be friends.”

“That isn't why I'm crying.”

“Then why?”

“You really don't know? I thought you knew why people are the way they are. I thought you understood what made me like this.”

“I do and yet. . .I think I want to hear you say.”

“I'm crying because that's the saddest thing I've ever heard and it's about you—this is something that happened to you, even though you're so kind and lovely. You just tried to help and paid too high a price. That doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem fair.”

“It isn't so bad really. At least, I'm now at the stage where I can actually feel again for another human being without picturing their nightmarish death.”

“That doesn't sound a whole lot better.”

“Believe me, it is. It feels like progress at least.”

“Well, I'm glad. . .I'm glad they're helping you.”

“Who is helping me?”

“The person—the one you can feel for now.”

He laughs, so sudden it makes my heart stop.

But then he speaks, and it starts again.

“The person is you, Beth. I'm talking about you. Unless you would like it if I wasn't, in which case I'll pretend that isn't what's going on at all. The last thing I want is for you to feel obliged to me or like you might need to do something to make me—”

“I don't feel like that. I don't feel obliged.”

“Do you mind if I ask how you do feel?”

“Don't you know?”

“Yes.”

“Don't you feel it?”

“I do. I felt it when your knee almost brushed mine and your hand definitely did. I felt it when you looked up at me with those eyes like a shadow and put your soft hands on my shoulders and my throat and every little tiny inch where you have touched. I feel it now so strongly that I want to say it will be okay. If you want to do this it will be okay—but the truth is I can't guarantee that. My heart may be beating again, but I know I'll probably never want any kind of sexual contact. Can you live with that?”

“I can. I want to. Yes.”

“Can you live without being with someone in a physical way?”

“It's never mattered to me. It won't matter to me,” I say, and I believe it, too. Why wouldn't I? All sex has ever done is bring me pain. My whole life has been about evading sticky, groping hands greedily grasping at me through the darkness. Memories flash up in my head the second I say it—of the excitement at the idea of losing my virginity in the back of my father's sedan, followed so swiftly by the realization of what sex actually is.

One long disappointment, punctuated by pain.

Like the taste of coffee, I think, after the anticipation built by the amazing smell of it brewing. It should taste rich and sweet and instead is so bitter, so very bitter. That's what sex has been for me—so it takes almost nothing to say yes. How hard can it be?

Oh, Lord, I wish I'd realized just how hard something like this was going to be.

Chapter Four

A
T FIRST
, I don't really think about it. He's so endlessly fascinating, I hardly have the time. I lose entire days to his descriptions of giant mechanical spiders and how to make them, or the bookshelves he has in an otherwise empty room of his rambling house. One Saturday, I come out of a daze and find I've just been trailing my hand over the spines of his battered books, their titles dancing and dancing through my thoughts.

Most of them are made up of words I barely understand—to the point where I have to create new definitions that mean absolutely nothing. I sit in a shaft of weak winter sunlight, and turn
neuro stimulation
into something psychics do to their lovers and
contraindication
into a thing that happens when you fail to indicate your preference of ice cream, marveling at how he can know so much and so little at the same time.

After our third day spent together—sprawled on the floor of his attic, both of us wrapped in old furs from a box marked Grandmother, he seems to still. His eyes fog over with confusion and he turns to me and says:

“This isn't a normal thing to have, is it? This is why people think I'm weird. Because I have old furs that used to belong to an elderly woman in my attic, and persuade girls to try them on with me.”

And of course he's right. He's absolutely right. Serial killers keep their grandmother's old things in their attic. Psychopaths don't understand that this isn't the kind of thing you do with your possible girlfriend. But he's also wrong in all the ways a person can be wrong. He has no clue that five minutes spent with him doing this is better to me than a million years on dates with ordinary men.

I could genuinely sit here forever and look at him pretending to be a bear in a coat three sizes too big for any normal person. Modeling this mothballed thing for him was the most fun I've had in years. I let it hang off one shoulder and gave him a sultry look, and felt almost no fear at all.
Joy
would be the word I'd use to describe my emotional state—and he must know that. He can read it on my face. I know he can.

Yet somehow he isn't sure if this is what we're supposed to be.

“We should probably go out,” he says. “I'm meant to take you to a decent Italian restaurant and pull out your chair for you. Then I order a nice bottle of red even though you hate wine and you inquire about my day despite knowing that I no longer go to any kind of work and just spend my days fixing broken machinery and occasionally selling it. We make awkward conversation that has nothing to do with forensic psychiatry or mothballs or any of the other things we keep accidentally talking about. And then I walk you home and say goodnight. Is that right?”

“It sounds right, and yet I find myself wanting to say no.”

“Not really interested in Italian restaurants?”

“That could be the case. Yeah, that could be it.”

“Maybe you have something against awkward conversation.”

“That's never seemed to stop me before.”

“So what would stop you now?”

“The relief of not having to with you,” I say, and when something like bliss blooms in those somber features—that's when I realize how much trouble I'm in. That's the moment when it starts to matter, because more than anything I want to slide across this dusty floor and lean against one of those sturdy shoulders. I ache to touch him, even though it could well be that he doesn't want to be touched at all.

In fact, I'm
certain
he doesn't want to be touched at all. How else to explain what happens when we go for a walk with Trudy some days later? I finish work at four in the morning, and there he is actually waiting for me on his porch, like some long-lost friend come back to me. Like the sun breaking through the clouds, like a river in the desert. My heart lifts at the sight, even though I know it's weird.