Speak

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER

November 5th

I've been drunk for the last five days. I'm sure that's a personal record.

I intended to stay that way for far longer, but Don came home from work this afternoon and told me to sober up and get out or stay drunk and marry him. I decided I had overstayed my welcome.

I have a roaring headache that won't quit. "It's the price you pay for not getting drunk more often," Don said. As he’s the expert on this, I'll take his word for it. Meanwhile, I'm drinking water, nibbling crackers, and contemplating becoming a teetotaler. Is there something on Pinterest about using dozens of liquor bottles? Asking for a friend.

A cup of strong tea is steaming up my computer monitor as I type this. I should probably move it, but the droplets of moisture on the screen remind me of rain on a window, and the sane normality of this comforts me and I will keep this image in front of me as I attempt to write about what's happened.

I guess it started when I answered Don's call.

"So, what are you doing?" he said it like he always does, his voice swinging up to emphasize the "you." There's no other greeting quite like it.

"Watching my dog eat leftover filet mignon and nursing my wounds after sitting through another warm family evening. And you?"

"Watching football with my best buddy, Zip." Zip is Don's Doberman Pincher. I like to tell Don that Zip is one of his better features. He's a happy-go-lucky dog who loves everybody, the complete opposite of his owner.

"And how is Zip, anyway?" I asked.

"Oh, he's fine. He ate his steak, and he's flaked out on the couch drinking a beer." Zip is probably lying in his bed, chewing a bone. Don adopted Zip after he was drummed out of the canine police academy. Zip had decided he liked the guy he was supposed to attack during a training session and refused to bite him again.

Don served in Iraq before he went to college. On the long list of things he won't talk about from that period in his life was his time on the army bomb detection squad where he used dogs to do the dirty work. In Don's world, dogs are never allowed on the furniture, nor are they fed anything but their own food. This comment was aimed at me. He lectures me regularly on the evils of spoiling them.

I don't give a s**t what he thinks, and he likes me for it.

Because my life sucks and I have no idea how to fix it, I asked him about his and was rewarded with the expected response; a tirade about university politics and the same worn experiments that yield the same results over and over. He's bored with it, and one of these days he's going to quit, he says.

I've known Don Leibowitz for four years; he makes this threat at least once a week. He said it to me for the first time during our second conversation. However, regardless of how he feels about the job, he is an excellent teacher. I should know. I was one of his students.

Come to think of it, Trish, I know we've talked about Don a few times, but I don't think I ever told you how we became friends in the first place.

Don is the reason I passed Biology 101.

Back then, he was a grad student who had the misfortune of teaching a class full of students who were trying to acquire just enough science credits to graduate from college. Most of us didn't care, and I cared less than most.

He looked and acted older than the grad students who usually taught classes for tenured professors, and he was not inclined to suffer fools gladly. A lot of students didn't like him, especially those of us who were flunking.

We'd just taken our midterms, and I'd got another big, fat F. As Don was passing out the exams, he spoke to three or four of us and asked us to stay after.

I waited in the back, reading Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," while he called us up, one by one, spending a few minutes speaking to each student. Heads nodded as I'm sure each heard about their low grades and ways to rectify the situation. He called on me last, probably assuming from my body language I didn't care. For everyone else, he sat up straight in his seat, terse—not friendly, but not unkind.

But by that point, it was just the two of us. I picked up my backpack and trudged to the front of the room. It was the first time I'd been close enough to really see him. I usually entered the room late and sat in the back, with my head down, doodling. Without the margins of a notebook to distract me, I observed his rumpled and unshaven self from up close: the frayed cuffs of his faded jeans and the army surplus boots, bright green eyes, and his brown, fast-fading-to gray hair that he wore in a ponytail. My other instructors all wore business casual. Mr. Leibowitz just wore casual.

He was also younger than he looked from the rear of the classroom. As I learned later, Don was only twenty-eight. He's still thin as a rail, but in those days, he teetered on emaciated, his face thin, unshaven, and rarely graced by a smile. He took most of his college pre-requisites on a laptop between night patrols and firefights. I guess that would be enough to age anyone.

Don unbuttoned his lab coat to reveal a faded army-green t-shirt, tipped his chair back against the whiteboard, and studied me. "Miss Ghertz, do you have any idea how low your grade in this class is?"

"Yeah. I know." I shrugged.

"Do you have a plan as to how you're going to deal with it?"

"Not yet, but I'll figure it out. Is that all you needed?" I slid my backpack onto my shoulder and prepared to go.

He held up a hand to stop me. "I take it this doesn't bother you?"

"No. It does. But I just don't get science." I cared a lot. And I didn't know what I was going to do. But it wasn't his problem. Again, I prepared to leave.

And again, he stopped me. "Have you tried the tutorial center?"

"Yeah. Last semester."

"So, this is your second attempt?" Frowning, he tilted his head.

I nodded.

"What year are you?"

"I'm a senior."

He raised a surprised eyebrow. "How old are you?"

I got this look a lot. I didn't look my age. I'm sure I didn't act it either. But I was also younger than many of my classmates. "Twenty-one. I graduated from high school a year early."

He nodded. "What's your GPA look like?"

"It WAS a 4.8 until biology came along," I replied. "Now it's a 4.1."

Both eyebrows rose, disappearing beneath his disheveled hair. His tone was somewhat impressed. "You must have taken a lot of weighted classes while you were in high school."

Of course I did. I'm a Ghertz. We excel. We don’t do anything halfway.

"I take it you're planning to go to grad school?"

"I'm not sure." I'd maxed out my student loans. My GPA and the hope that some grad school would be impressed enough with my transcripts to offer me a full residency were my only hope. But I wasn't about to tell a stranger, much less an instructor, about that.

He squinted at me. "Well, if you don't get your s**t together, there will be little chance of it."

I nodded and moved across the classroom toward the exit, muttering under my breath without really thinking about it.

"What?" he said to the back of my head.

"Nothing. Sorry," I replied, opening the door.

"Miss Ghertz! You're an adult, and I'm not your father," he said. "I'm not going to wash your mouth out with soap for saying the wrong thing."

Maybe I was empowered by the phrase "you're an adult" or his reference to my father. But before I could stop myself, I was facing him, staring him right in the eye, enunciating my words. "I said: I have my s**t together; I just don't know what to do with it."

He crossed his arms and looked at me as though he was seeing me for the first time. His mouth twitched. "Why didn't you just ask me for help then?"

Because Ghertz's don't ask for directions. Nor do we ask professors to save us from ourselves.

I threw up my hands. "f**k it. Fine. I need help." The admission laid my helplessness bare, and the minute I said it, I wished I'd contained it. Another F was preferable to feeling foolish and weak.

He leaned forward, the legs to chair hitting the floor with a solid thunk. Unfolding his arms, he placed his hands on the desk. "Now was that so hard? Tell you what, buy me a beer, and I'll do what I can to help you with your s**t. Fair enough?"

I shrugged and told him if he didn't mind wasting his time, I didn't mind buying him a beer. This arrangement was probably against university policy, but—as I've mentioned—Don doesn't stand on convention.

At some point, during those hours we spent together, in between his repeating every lecture he'd given all semester, answering my questions, and telling me what was important and what wasn't, we became friends. After I passed his class (with a B minus—he didn't make it easy, just accessible), we continued to meet for beer. And now, after four years, with a Master's in Journalism and a Ph.D. in Molecular biology between us, we're like an inside joke that only makes sense to the people who tell it. Friends because we get each other when nobody else does. To quote Don, "In a weird way, we're both damaged goods. The military broke me, and your parents broke you." This is also why we are friends and only friends. Another fact Don made clear early on in our relationship. Which is fine with me. I've had a lot of bad dates. I haven't had very many good friends.

I shifted the phone from one ear to the other and rearranged myself on the couch as Don groused about his often-oblivious colleagues. His interests in DNA research lie outside the mainstream, and his biggest detractor is the senior scientist, Dr. Angus Anderson. I hear a lot about Anderson, usually followed by a string of expletives.

Though Peter's lecture was still ringing in my ears, I griped too. Ferreting out typos and grammatical mistakes for other reporters is no fun, and typing obituaries was worse, I assured him. "They're a daily reminder of how far off course I am. Someday, someone's going to be typing mine, and it will read, 'wanted to do great things with her life, but wrote obituaries instead."

"When you write mine, you can say I made lots of great discoveries, but they were all buried with me." Don stopped to take a noisy sip of his beer. "And now that we're both depressed, why don't you come over?"

It was eleven at night. I was sure to drink too much and be too sloppy to drive. I'd show up at work with circles under my eyes and hung over, still wearing the same clothes I'd worn to my parents' party.

Sounded like exactly what I needed.

Emmett was already at the door barking when I ended the call.

Though he can afford to live in a nicer place, Don is a tightwad and chooses to live in the older, run-down part of town because it's cheaper and because he doesn't like the idea of anyone recording his comings and goings. No security gates or cameras for him. This isn't a problem for a former soldier, but when I visit, he always has me call him from the car, so he can meet me out front. Don usually reminds me to make sure I have my pepper spray and my cell phone because he knows I'll forget both, but that night neither of us thought about it. He also refuses to carry a cell phone — he doesn't like the bill or people being able to reach him too easily. But he's always nagging me to keep up with mine.

I pulled up outside his building and, to my irritation, discovered there were no parking spaces available. A large, raucous party had spilled out into the grass in front of one of the downstairs apartments. An overweight superman ran drunkenly in front of my car, followed by a woman in a cat costume.

Oh yeah. Halloween.

I drove around the block three times, trying to find a parking spot either near his apartment or under a streetlight. After a few minutes of driving in circles, I gave up and parallel parked on the street. When I slipped my keys into my pocket, I realized I'd left my cell phone at home on the counter beside my pepper spray.

Emmett stared at the strangely dressed people, his nose working. The hackles on his back stood at straight angles and the most amazing growls emanated from his small chest.

I shushed him and picked him up. "Let's go see Don."

We crossed the street, and I set him down on the sidewalk. He trotted a few feet ahead, stopped, and paused to look back at me with worried eyes. I urged him on.

Don's apartment was around the corner and upstairs, well away from the noisy gathering. The security light on that side of the building had been out for months.

Probably because of the contrast between the crowd and the lights pouring from the windows on the front, it seemed even darker than usual as we rounded the corner.

Emmett trotted a few more steps, froze, staring hard into the blackness, and growled.

"Hush. We're almost there." I made my way to the base of the stairs and my palm brushed the metal of the wrought-iron railing as I placed a foot on the bottom step.

The darkness formed a hand, snatching at my shoulder, twisting in the fabric of my shirt, jerking me backward. Everything; the brick, the iron railing, the pavement beneath my feet, twisted with me, blurring. The hand became a chokehold.

The chokehold became a knife against my throat. The back of my head struck the brick of the apartment building with such force, I heard my own blood pumping in my own brain. Bone against brick.

Another hand clamped my mouth shut with a smack, muffling the scream that finally escaped my frozen vocal cords. The darkness had a face. A swarthy man, a little taller than I was and twice as wide, leaned in, and I caught a whiff of his body odor—he smelled like he hadn't bathed in months. I gagged. Tried to scream again.

"Shut up!" he hissed. "I don't give a damn whether I do you dead or alive, understand?"

The blade slammed flat cold against my throat as he dragged me backward, further away from discovery, into a darker space, under the stairs. As if to send the message home, the blade slipped, the edge catching at my skin—I could feel the blood trickle down my neck from the shallow cut.

I was caught in a netherworld merry-go-round of terror, able to hear the distant music of the party and the dull chatter of drunken partygoers, unable to struggle, and completely stupid with indecision. One of his hands slid up my skirt and clawed at my underwear as the other tore at my blouse, buttons skittering away like mice in the darkness.

He pinned me, using his body weight as a weapon; his nails scraped my inner thighs. At one point during his ragged excitement, he dropped the knife, the blade struck and bounced twice before settling somewhere beyond my head. He cursed and scrambled to find it while still trying to hold me down though I wasn't struggling.

Emmett emerged from the darkness snarling.

The voice was low. "Tell your f*****g dog to shut up before I kill you both!" He swung at the Emmett with the knife; Emmett dodged it, barking.

"Please," I whispered "Please don't hurt him! Emmett. Hush. Please."

Emmett never does what he's told, never stops barking until he wants to. This time he did.

With my underwear halfway down and my blouse ripped open, I laid there beneath those stairs with a song I will forever hate beating out its rhythm in the apartment above us. He fumbled with his pants, reaching for his fly. I rolled my head around, trying to see Emmett. If I were still, if I cooperated and didn't fight, maybe it would be over sooner, and the man and his knife would get what he wanted and leave.

I just needed to keep looking at Emmett and I could just make out his outline if I focused on him. His small body, the shadow of his head against the moonlight. Then his eyes. I could see his eyes. They reflected a light from somewhere beyond us. Good. I could just keep looking into his eyes until it was all over.

He moved closer to me, to the man leaning over me.

"Shshshsh . . ." I whispered, but Emmett wasn’t growling.

He took another step forward, his head c****d, eyes fastened on the man.

His NO reverberated through me, vibrating in the air, like someone had hit a baseball bat against a metal post.

The man half-rose; his hands paused. He shook his head and muttered to himself. The zipper hissed, he shoved my legs wider, lowering himself.

Emmett's hackles rose, and he seemed to double in size. Go away!

The man stopped. Looked at the dog.

"He won't bother you. Please don't hurt him," I said, not realizing, in my confusion, that he could hear the little dog—or, for that matter, that I should be able to hear him at all.

Emmett took a final step, standing half-over me now; his message more strident, inches from the attacker's face. GO. AWAY.

The man fell backward, off me now. He forgot to be quiet. "What in the mother-f*****g hell ...?"

My sense of self-preservation took hold, lifting me off the ground, pushing me to crawl out of his reach, further up under the stairs, dragging my loose clothes behind.

One hand still holding onto his pants, the other the knife, he crouch-shuffled backward, trying to stand up. Emmett advanced again, and the man hit the back of his head on the railing with a dull, metal-to-flesh clunk.

A split second. They were both frozen, staring at one another.

The dog's ears flattened. He growled, his teeth, white in the moonlight, flashed. Run!

Turning, the man choked back a cry and turned, still clutching his clothes. My last image of him was a glimpse of a brown t-shirt and stained gray pants as he ran into the depths of the buildings behind the apartments and vanished.

Emmett followed him a few steps, barking and then returned to me, tail a small gray flag of triumph. Gone, he announced. Gone. Gone. Gone.

I crept from under the stairs, crying, clutching at my torn shirt, calling Emmett. This was where Don's neighbors found me a few minutes later, holding my small dog and sobbing.

The cops asked a lot of questions. What did the guy look like? How tall was he? Had he said anything? Did he seem like he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol? Would I recognize him in a line-up?

And finally, why did I think he'd stopped? When I told them my dog might have scared him off, they glanced at Emmett and shrugged. He was afraid people would hear the little dog barking, they said. Or something he heard spooked him.

That was it. Something he heard.