Chapter 8
"Want a ride home?" Talisha asked after their shifts were over.
"No, that's okay, but thank you. I really like riding home late at night. It's peaceful and breezy," Vanessa said with a smile. In actuality, she just wanted to be alone, if only for a few minutes. She wanted to inhale the freedom, the seclusion, the feeling that she was still a young woman whose life wasn’t crunched into a catastrophe she no longer recognized. She wanted the wind to whip along her back, propelling her forward as nothing else in her life seemed to be.
Vanessa wanted to escape Emma—even if just for the duration of a ride home—and she resented herself for it. Caring for a six-year-old was a full-time job in and of itself. Her constant need for attention and stimulation was overwhelming. Her little personality was so formidable that Vanessa needed to always walk the line between sensitivity and discipline, being on high alert at all times that anything she said or did could be picked up by her little sister. Vanessa always had to be ON. There was never a time to slack off, to rest, to relax.
Then of course, there was Emma’s epilepsy, piled high on top of all the other ways that immediately having to care full-time for a kindergartener was weighing down on her. The missed doctor’s appointments, the cost of medications, the heart-palpitating fear that one day Emma might have a seizure in her sleep and choke to death: these were all ghosts that haunted Vanessa, day in and day out, hissing at her during still moments when the dust settled in her mind.
She mounted her bike—her main form of transportation after the bus stopped running for the night—and rode off into the royal blue night. The commute home was pleasant, as she’d expected. There was something about using her own strength to propel her from point A to point B in the wake of her lifelong reliance on a motor vehicle back when her parents were alive and before she’d had to sell their cars to make ends meet. She felt somehow superior, biking along in her endorphin-fueled high of smugness past rows of cars whose drivers have a pulse that's slowly just creeping along, and a disposition to match. Riding a bike felt like some well-kept secret that, even in the throes of poverty, Vanessa was able to cash in on. The wind blew and the sky was clear. Despite the looming threat of 1 a.m., the sky was still blue, and not completely black. She wore her headphones for the duration of the ride in spite of the muddled law around impaired hearing while cycling. As Vanessa sped through the navy nighttime nonchalance, "Rock Me Now" by Metric just felt right leaking into her ears.
She turned onto the street where she grew up, ignoring road signs and speeding through a neighborhood intersection that, in daylight hours, is usually occupied by minivans and sport utility vehicles but now, here, in this light (or lack thereof) looked like an abandoned strip of suburbia whose glory was lost with the setting of the sun. The lights of the gated entrance to Vanessa’s neighborhood were glittering measurably through the bars that separated it from the scathing outside world. Against the golden teasing of home beyond the gate, a shape was cast in shadow. Wheels were outlined and a body was sketched across the peripherals of the night, lurking in the lack of light in a way that pricked at something inside of her, some little plastic bag of bravery out of which dread and terror and trepidation spilled out, drop by horrified drop.
Vanessa got closer, her hopes resting in both the actions of the person on the bike to speed away kindly and the benefit of the doubt on her own part: there was nothing to fear here. It didn't matter that she was wearing a helmet and he was not. It didn't matter that she was in athletic wear and he was in jeans and an oversized, ill-fitting t-shirt. It didn't matter that she was on a $500 mountain bike (a relic of a past time, before all this tragedy) and he was rolling around on a kid's bicycle, flocked in neon colors and mock-cool graffiti letters. They were simply two human beings doing the same thing at the same time.
And yet, all girls are made to fear anyone more masculine than them. They're simply engineered to feel this way. From the moment they are born, they are instructed to fear the man. There are various shapes and sizes of men, and women are programmed to fear them all. They all want to hurt each and every woman, or so women are told. They all want to take a piece of the dainty femininity, to rob women of something, to engage in a sort of New Age scalping. They want to do women harm and should never, under any circumstances, be trusted.
Vanessa was mulling it over in her mind, in the span of the six or so seconds it took for her to roll down the street toward the gate to her neighborhood, toward the man on the other bike, toward a force field of danger and uncertainty that she wasn't entirely aware was there. She knew, sure, but she wanted to deny it, to write it off as fiction for her own sanity’s sake. Vanessa was so steadfast in her denial, so stubborn in her manual reboot of character analysis, that she didn't notice at first when he spoke to her. And then, in a slick spreading of the lips that she knew instantly would haunt her every time she rode home in the dark, he smiled at her with a set of teeth the color of the sky on an overcast day. The smile wasn't just a smile. It was an offer. A business deal. A proposition. It was every fast-talking, pinky-ring-wearing, New England car salesman rolled into a sinister gesture of the mouth. This smile wasn't the smile of a polite stranger. It was the smile of a man who liked what he saw, a man who stumbled upon a good fortune, a man who—regardless of any rapidly perishable clamoring of decency—wanted to cause Vanessa harm.
"Hey, girl," she heard the man shout at her through her headphones as their bikes passed each other in a perfect parallel. Vanessa ignored him, putting him in a category of irritating people that a person’s brain tricks them into believing will go away if they don't make the effort to respond. To Vanessa, in that moment, this man was just another bill collector or charity fundraising cold-caller. And yet, he didn't go away. Her failure to respond to his shouting only spurred more shouting, more anger, more intent to harm. With an innocent swerve of her leg in what she believed to be an ordinary stride, Vanessa had kicked a bee's hive simply by walking along, minding her own business.
"Hey, girl, you live here?" he shouted at Vanessa as they both circled the cul-de-sac where she lived, the literal and metaphorical end of the road, the place where she needed to make a decision on where to go and what to do. She could input the access code to the gate, but it takes about a full minute to open and another to close, scraping away at its viability as an actual deterrent against intruders when a person is being pursued. He still had that smile draped across his face, that grin that hinted to Vanessa what absolute carnage was being broadcast through his mind. The smile of force. The smile of degradation. The smile of evil.
"Hey, girl, you don't have to be afraid," he continued, almost laughing. The words were caked in cruel intentions, saturated with sinister rawness. Vanessa could hear that evil smile drizzling itself over the words as they emitted from his mouth. It was as if he said this to only heighten her fear, to only reinforce the unspoken fact that yes, she did have to be afraid. Vanessa wondered—as they both circled around her safety like vultures on their bikes—if that was the modus operandi of all men: to say exactly the opposite of what they mean, to lie and cheat, even when it's blindingly obvious, just to snag a piece of some girl. Vanessa didn't want to believe it, wanting so much to preserve her asinine belief that people are inherently good, but the evidence was mounting over the years in the opposite direction.
The whole time, she was pinned under the weight of her own social appearance. If she was afraid of this guy, this man in a t-shirt riding a child's bike and harassing her outside of her residence after she’d had a long night at work, it seemed rude to her. But why, Vanessa realized, is it rude to be afraid of a stranger blocking the entrance to your home and shouting at you? If he were a woman, she would be just as afraid, she rationalized to herself in her head. I'm not a racist, she replied to her own internal moral compass, which is forever ticking and clicking to make her justified in everything she does. I am an equal-opportunity employer of fear. In Vanessa’s mind, she’s terrified of everyone.
Screw seeming rude, she realized, and pedaled off at full speed in the opposite direction. Who cares if some grown man on a child's bicycle screaming things at me in the middle of the night gets his feelings hurt that I'm riding away from him? This was the difference, she thought to herself as the wind streaked itself through her hair and the straps of her backpack rattled along behind her in the crisp whisperings of night, in women who get hurt and women who don't. All women have the potential to be victims. Vanessa’s anger at the plight of the modern female was fueling her getaway, and she didn't dare look behind her for fear of the man there, following her, elevating this from a simple elbow-rub with danger to a full black-tie-gala of peril and vulnerability.
Vanessa reached the far edge of the street—her headphones still hooked into her ears—romancing the world around her in jovial juxtaposition of the danger that just materialized in a puff of proverbial smoke. There was a streetlight shining on the corner ahead and the darkness of the residential area behind her was quenched, somewhat, by the flashing headlights of passing cars on the high-traffic intersecting street in front of her, a major vein in the little body of suburbia that she was raised to call home. She made sure she was alone in a swatch of cars whipping by, solo in a sea of people, and called Jessica.
Three rings. Three rings of Vanessa wondering whether or not she would answer, whether or not she was busy wrangling Emma back into consciousness on the floor of her home, whether or not danger was still lurking in the darkness behind her. In those three rings, Vanessa’s panting normalized. Her heartbeat diluted from the monstrous roar of a fearful woman to the passionless pulse of a disappointed cynic. She calmed down, the furious tsunami of her soul simmering down to naught but angry waves in the wind, not because she was any less scared and not because she was any more safe… but because she simply had no choice. Time was seeping through the cracks that had been set before her, and it was through this time—the seemingly mediocre three rings—that Vanessa was forced to garner all her strength.
She heard rustling behind her and turned to see those two glimmering rows of sinister squares, caked with his saliva and gleaming at her like headlights. "Hey, girl," he sneered with a smile on his face and evil in his voice. Like a mosquito drawn relentlessly to the ocean of blood just below the surface of the skin, he wouldn't just go away. He wanted something more, and apparently, in his mind, he was entitled to it.
Vanessa poured herself onto her bike gracelessly, sloppily, and in sheer terror. She sped off into the obscurity of night—charcoal now from the intermittent illumination of the street lamps—feeling her pocket quake a few times with the angry vibrato of Jessica calling her back, and her fear mounting with every moment of restraint that she practiced in not looking over her shoulder. Not checking to see if he was there. Not giving him the satisfaction of knowing that he'd rattled her. Not letting him see how he'd affected her, how he'd changed the course of her evening, how he'd inserted himself into her routine. If he couldn't manage to physically insert himself into Vanessa, at least he could do this to her: the emotional rape of fear.
As she pedaled at full force into the distance, unsure of where she was going or what her next move would be, Vanessa heard a screech ring out through the darkness. Unable to contain her curiosity, she peeked behind her at the scene unfolding just over her shoulder. A figure—dark and chiseled—bounded through the neighborhood on foot, a monstrous being that was just surreal enough to her to believe that now she was actually hallucinating. Had someone drugged her at work? Had they slipped something into her drink? It was wild enough that she was put on this detour because some man couldn’t move out of her way or let her go home without making a comment. Now this—now seeing this beast running behind her—was too fantastical, too hyperbolic to be unwrapping itself in real life.
The beast hissed and screeched, tackling the man on the child’s bike with torrential force. The two tangled with each other on the pavement, ripping hairs and strangling each other, gurgling and panting. Punches were thrown, arms were bound. The onslaught of brutality clashed in waves, with the muscular figure roaring and pinning the man on the sidewalk, rendering him useless. Vanessa, too unnerved by the presence of just the first man (let alone the second, more threatening figure), sped off into the night, away from the danger that had nearly overtaken her.