The door unlatches with a snick, almost inaudible even in the quiet of the storeroom, so easy to miss. A beat of silence. Then it’s thrown open, slamming against the wall with a crash that sets the frame shaking and the air ringing with the promise of violence.
It’s startling; I nearly cry out, but I catch it in time. Instead, what comes out is a sort of strangled whimper, beating itself against the closed wall of my lips and leaking out in bits and pieces. Too loud in my own ears. Too loud in this closet.
A pair of feet walk into the storeroom. I say walk, but really they march. And with them come the sound of leather creaking, the edge of a machete scraping across the wooden floor, the slow but heavy breathing of a very big man.
I try to quiet my own breath but it’s so hard. Terror has robbed me of control. The sour taste of my own fear builds in the back of my throat. My heart beats like it’s trying to make up for all the beating it may never get to do again. If I could see, I would have closed my eyes.
The man with the machete is so tall he brushes against the light fixture as he crosses the storeroom, sets the bulb swinging. Creak, creak, back and forth. I’ve stood under that fixture and stretched my hands high and only just touched it with my fingertips, but I’m nobody’s idea of tall. I’ve measured the distance between everything in this storeroom and in the house at large. I know where almost everything is in relation to everything else. Knowledge like that is vital. It helps me not walk into things. It helped me when I ran down here and hid in this storage closet. The one we always keep empty.
The man with the machete – I know it’s a machete because Michelle said so, before all the screaming began – starts scattering the things at the far end of the storeroom. Boxes are swept to the floor, glass shatters, shelves splinter and break. Things we spent a lot of time arranging and sorting and storing. I knew them all by touch. I paid for them all. I wait for the crashing to stop.
When it does, the silence is worse. Not total silence, mind, but then total silence is a very rare thing. Listen closely enough and something somewhere is always speaking. The man out there begins to pace back and forth. Aside from his heavy footfalls the only sounds are the groaning of the floor and the complaints of the light fixture as it swings back and forth overhead.
Then the man stops walking. Stops directly in front of the closet I am in. There are four of them in this small room beneath the house. Four of them. He doesn’t even go near the other three. Heavy breathing. Almost a grunting. A scrape of a boot on a floor: a foot getting into better position for whatever he decides to do next.
I could decide to send my mind on a mission to discover what it was that gave my location away, but what’s the point? I could wait for him to throw open the door and then I’d be at his mercy. It would be over quickly. Nothing lasts forever, not even the act of dying.
But something inside me can’t accept any of that. I may be terrified but I’m not a quitter. Not after everything I’ve lived through. Show me a blind person living anything even resembling a normal life and I’ll show you a fighter.
And I’ve always been stubborn. Scared, but stubborn.
I remember my parents taking me to see the doctor when my sight began to fail. A long time ago, maybe twenty years now. I remember the doctor’s lab coat catching the light. Bright and clean. Bright enough to cut through the darkness that was creeping at the edges of my vision, the darkness that was dimming everything. I remember that lab coat because it was one of the last things I ever saw that clearly.
I don’t remember the doctor’s face. It was blurry.
I remember his voice, though: dry and raspy, like he smoked too much and had dried out his throat. Apologetic in his message. Poetic in his choice of words. After examining me he drew my mother aside to a corner of the room where he probably thought I couldn’t hear them, and there to express his confusion at what was making me lose my sight at the age of 9 all he could say was “I don’t know. It’s just like there’s no light in his eyes.”
I remember that. Remember the pity with which he said it. And I hated to be pitied, even at 9. I still do. That day I vowed to live a life above what everyone thought possible for me. I learned braille, topped every class I ever attended. Went to law school. Graduated cum laude.
An equally stellar career, characterized by an absolute lack of mercy in the courtroom. Just last month, when I found myself against the estate of a deceased woman whose insurance company didn’t want to pay anything, right before I found all the loopholes, no fewer than three people told me to let it go, that the family needed the money, that she was all they’d had. I told them I was sorry, but it was unfortunate that the family had come up against me.
I told them that winners win and that was all there was to it, but I was lying. The real reason was that I couldn’t accept failing at anything.
Interestingly, as I pushed my life to higher heights my sister Michelle’s seemed to fall apart with corresponding speed. Booze, drugs, bad company, every cliché you could think of. Took her years to hit rock bottom. And when she did I took her in. I’d bought a house and moved into it – to prove a point – and needed someone to live with me. It was a big place, grounds I never walked and a garden I couldn’t see. She needed a place to land safely, start over. The arrangement worked out.
Still, I never allowed myself to grow wholly dependent on her. I only rely on Michelle for things I absolutely cannot do myself. Like driving me when I need to go somewhere. Like making sure the house is clean and in order at all times.
Like warning me when a hooded man with a machete breaks into our house in the middle of a party and hacks the heads off our neighbors. Screaming to draw his attention and leading him deeper into the house. Away from me.
Michelle gave me a chance, and God help me I’m not going to piss it away now.
So I wait, and I listen.
Not many people know this, but a person’s breathing will always give them away. Someone who’s aroused will always take shallow, pregnant breaths. An angry person will also take shallow breaths, but the exhale will last longer. And if someone is about to make a physical move, an act of raw power, their entire breathing will slow. But that’s not what you’re waiting for. Listen for the inhale that lasts a lot longer than all the rest. Then move.
I throw myself against the door of the closet. It flies open, straight into the man standing behind it. And he truly is a unit: even with the force of my whole body behind it he only staggers a step or two backwards. He doesn’t even grunt.
But I am already out of the closet and moving, so these thoughts are in my mind and gone again in fleeting slices of time. As I move I am bent over and low, drawing on my memory of the room’s layout in this my moment of absolute need.
Two long strides, pivot. Face the right. Door only three strides from here, maybe four …
A grunt, at last, from my right. Exasperated, annoyed. When I’m hit it feels like a mountain has hit me. I feel the impact all over my right side and my feet are no longer on the floor, I am flying. The wall I hit feels more accommodating than the thing which hit me.
I slide to the floor in a heap, dazed. I smell dirt and oil, taste dirt and blood. I feel broken.
The footsteps start toward me, and I try to stir. To stand. To crawl, even.
But the man speaks, and I freeze instead.
“I told you I’d find you.”
And I am back in the courtroom, and the insurance case has just ended, and my assistant is whispering to me that the dead woman’s husband is coming my way. His approach made the floor shake ever so slightly. I’d assumed he was just fat.
But even now I realize that’s not entirely accurate: when he spoke, I remember tilting my head up instinctively. When he spoke. One sentence, and he was gone, and I forgot him almost as soon as it was done.
“I’ll find you.”
The same voice, even if there’s now a lot less life in it. But how was I supposed to know? How many bitter people had threatened me just like that every time a case was over? How many of them ever actually did something about it? But I should have known better. He’d said it differently. He’d meant it.
He takes one more step toward me, and I begin to beg.
I don’t want to. I could even say I don’t mean to. I am a proud man. I hate begging for anything. But I beg anyway. I beg as the footsteps approach, measured and heavy, accompanied by the creak of leather.
I offer him money. More money than the insurance company. I swear I won’t tell anyone what happened here. I’ll do anything, I tell him, if he only lets me live. It matters little to me that Belinda and Hamilton, our neighbors from next door, begged much the same way until they stopped begging for anything.
I hope and I beg, because what else can I do?
He comes to a stop directly above me. His breathing slows till it’s virtually not there anymore. Grunting, he bends down – I smell sweat and sour breath washing over me – and lifts me by my neck. I never thought that was possible before. I always thought that was something people only put in books.
He lifts me high, and as my legs dangle in empty space I can’t breathe. I struggle, kick at him. Nothing happens. I am going to die here. All of it, ending here. All of it for nothing.
I hear the tip of the machete scrape the floor as he lifts it. And then I hear something else. I hear it above the whistling of my own breath in my throat. I hear it above the blood pounding and the pressure building at my temples.
I struggle harder though it uses up the breath I have in my lungs a lot faster. I kick at him, hammer ineffectually at the arm holding me above his head, even force a tiny scream through my throat.
The man with the machete laughs.
At just the perfect time.
Because when you’re laughing, you can’t hear what’s behind you.
And I’ll give Michelle credit: she moved quietly. Even my ears nearly missed her. But I’d know that step anywhere.
Pat pat pat pat… and then a jump.
The man grunts and drops the machete as Michelle thumps into him. He drops me too. It feels like a long way down, and the floor isn’t gentle.
From the absence of either her or him falling I guess she’s clinging onto his back. Holding on for dear life – hers and mine. From the wet sounds that keep repeating and the exclamations of rage and pain that accompanies each one, I guess she’s stabbing him with a small knife.
My head swims and I feel myself fading away. But I fight it. Now or never.
I find the machete by patting blindly around where the sound of it falling originated. I find it by slicing my hand nearly open on its blade. I ignore the pain.
Now or never.
I lift the machete. The noises that Michelle and the man are making are more than enough to triangulate their position. I yell and lunge with the weapon, throwing my full weight behind it. The blade meets a wall of flesh, is resisted momentarily, then slides clean through. I hear another grunt, but this one more terminal.
“Michelle! Get away!” I shout.
I hear her jump off the man’s back, but this unfortunately means his full attention is free to focus on me. A hand grabs me. I feel him lean down toward me. I know his mind: he will take me with him.
So I brace my leg against his injured body and push myself back, breaking free. In the same motion I pull the machete out of him. He yells with the pain.
I step forward and swing the blade – right where my ears tell me his head should be.
It thumps into his neck but doesn’t slice clean through. It gets stuck. I am sprayed with warm, salty blood. But the man falls. Crashes to the floor like a felled tree, gurgling. But doesn’t move again.
My knees give way and I collapse – right into the spreading pool of blood. I am too shaken to care. I am literally shaking with the knowledge of what I have just done. The man sounds in his death throes like a faucet running out of water pressure.
Someone touches me and I scream. Raise my hands to defend myself.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Michelle says, grabbing my hands to restrain me. “It’s okay. You did it. It’s over.”
My throat is so incredibly sore when I speak, but I have to know: “How… how are you alive?”
Even now, she manages to smile. I can hear it in her voice. “I hide better than you do.”
What else there to say to that? I sit there and let Michelle hold me. Draw strength from her. I am still shaking.
“Is…he…” Now my teeth are chattering so hard. “Is he… dead?”
“I think so.”
“Check. Please… check.”
Without a word Michelle leaves my side. I hear her grunt as she tries to turn the man over. There is a pause of several seconds filled with nothing but the continued creak of the overhead fixture. But in the silence I find peace again. Because if the man with the machete had still been alive Michelle would have been screaming by now. The silence is good news.
And she knows it, because even when she comes back to sit beside me, the blood still soaking our bottoms, Michelle doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to: I already know what she saw. There was no light in the man’s eyes.
“Police?” I eventually whisper.
“Later,” she says. “Let’s just enjoy the fact that we survived.”
So we do that, sitting in the storeroom with only each other to hold on to as the light fixture creaks gently back and forth, back and forth.