Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(100)

He nodded, understanding.

“Use your shirt, tie it off.” I nodded at Boots. “If you call an ambulance you’ll have some explaining after they arrive. If I were you, I’d have your buddy bring you in. Luis isn’t going to feel like driving.”

He looked around the garage toward his friends. “Why not?”

I didn’t answer. I was already pulling my boots back on. “And for God’s sake don’t pull a gun next time you’re in a fight. That’s not who you are.” Luis was stirring. I watched his fingers slowly clench and unclench as he groaned. His right ankle was the size of a Valencia onion. I watched his fingers move. His hands flattened and braced, crablike, against the concrete, and he started pushing himself up. He was muttering something that I couldn’t make out. He looked pretty out of it.

I picked up one of the circular forty-five-pound weights that had fallen off the bench press. I had to strain to carry it. I walked over to Luis and lifted the weight with both hands, still needing to squat a little so I could push up with my legs. Not for the first time, I thought with mild astonishment about gender difference when it came to physical strength. How men like Luis could lift six or eight of these weights with no problem. And yet be knocked out cold same as anyone. Somehow that felt fair.

With an effort I raised the weight to shoulder height.

The metal disc was poised directly over the spread fingers of his right hand.

I released my grip.

The weight fell.

There was an awful crunching sound and he let out the worst cry yet. Not a nice way to wake up. His left hand clutched its damaged partner to his body and I saw tears of pain in his eyes. I bent down over him. “Luis,” I said. “Pay attention.” His face was drenched in sweat and patched with blood. Quite possibly concussed and an ankle he wouldn’t walk on for a long time. And the hand. His fingers. I caught a glimpse of them as he cradled them protectively. They didn’t really look like fingers anymore. The hand was a flattened, crooked mess.

I had his attention. “We need to talk about Zoe,” I told him.

He looked at me, face drawn tight with pain. “What about her?”

I spoke slowly and clearly so he’d be sure to understand. “She’ll come by for her things. You’ll receive advance notice. It’s very important that you not be home when that happens. In fact, I’d spend the day in a different city entirely. Take a trip somewhere. You understand?”

He nodded. He understood.

“Then it’s over. For good. You leave her alone.”

He nodded again. Sick with pain. But he seemed to understand.

The epinephrine that had flooded my body began to recede and I was filled with the strange chemical depression that always hit after violence. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I didn’t want to be in the garage anymore. I didn’t want to be around people. I wanted to go find a quiet room and lie down and go to sleep. I walked outside without lingering. Gunshots might mean police whether Luis wanted them or not.

Five minutes later I was back on the freeway. Riding in the rightmost lane, letting the faster traffic flow by on my left. Part of me wondering why people like Luis did the things they did. The way I always wondered. The other part, with what I knew of people, didn’t bother wondering at all. I’d been learning that for most of my life.

After college, it was something I kept learning.



* * *



After graduating, I moved around the Bay a few times, restless, feeling unfulfilled. I ended up back in Berkeley without any idea about what I wanted to do. One afternoon I stopped while walking past a women’s shelter in Oakland, remembering two long years spent with my first foster family. A week later I was in a certification course, and within the month I started working as a first responder. Like the name suggested, meeting women immediately after an incident, wherever they were. Offering comfort, support, creating a safety plan with them. The training emphasized how to help them heal, gain the self-confidence needed to start afresh, but my job meant different things. Maybe helping them find employment, or sign a lease for the first time.

Maybe helping them stay alive.

There was a problem. Many of the women who walked out of the shelter healed tended to return. When they returned, they were not healed anymore. And there was a formulaic truth: the more often they came in, the worse shape they were in. I began to feel that as fast as we could help them find their feet, there were unseen forces out there knocking them back down. Unseen people, actually. Only these people weren’t unseen. They were right there in the open.

It was Clara that did it. A fun-loving Haitian woman with a happy smile and scared eyes. The first time I saw her she had a bruise under her eye. The second time, a chipped tooth. The third time, a broken wrist. It turned out that her husband was ex-military. When he got drunk he seemed to think he was still in combat. And that the hostile forces were principally his wife. After the third time, I convinced her to leave him. Using all of the persuasive arguments and rhetorical techniques I’d learned in training. Making every salient argument about reclaiming her life and finding her inner strength.

She agreed. I was happy. She was happy.

She left him. It took courage. I was proud.

I hadn’t considered something significant. Just because one person made up her mind to leave, the other person could still go and find her. I’d imagined that leaving was the final step. Actually, it was only the first. And the most dangerous. I began to see that the women who dared to leave often fared the worst. As though exercising free will was the greatest possible insult. Maybe it was humiliation, maybe rage. Maybe, with some of the men, just an impersonal tendency to apply violence to any part of their life that didn’t seem to be working. Some would kick a dog, woman, kid, TV set, all with the same matter-of-fact brutality. Others just seemed unfathomably depressed. They could be the most dangerous. I wasn’t a psychologist. I didn’t know why. Maybe a murder didn’t seem so bad if there was a suicide planned five seconds behind it. Maybe just a general nihilism or indifference to life.