Whittaker 01 The Enemy We Know

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—

that our lives had become unmanageable.

I heard him coming. The hall funneled the sound of his rage, racing just ahead of the man. Our clinic’s manager screamed, “Letty! Watch out!” but he already filled the doorway. Despite training, I leapt to my feet. Waves of booze and the clamor of civilized people fumbling in the throes of chaos seeped around his mass. In the distance, the thud of running feet, objects careening into each other, and panicked versions of “what’s going on?” littered the air.

After the first instinctive reaction, my training reasserted itself, and I recognized the intruder as a client I’d just begun seeing. Now he stood swaying on the threshold, jean jacket straining at the shoulders, barely covering a ratty t-shirt which offered sexual favors to my sister. His bleary, pig-mean eyes stared straight through me. So different from the shy, hurting man I’d met with a week ago.

We’d met together twice for counseling. Despite an initial complaint of marital conflict, Randy had kept the focus squarely on a seemingly trivial dispute with his boss. At the time, I’d thought he was avoiding the real issue, but we were still getting to know each other. Any attempt on my part to bring the subject back to his troubled marriage was charmingly, but firmly, deflected. Maybe he was ready to talk.

He slammed the office door so hard I flinched and bit my tongue. Maybe not.

“
Where is she?” The dead monotone scared me more than if he’d yelled.

“
Who?”

“
You
bitch
.” His teeth chewed at the word, turning his face into a lupine grimace. “You think this is a joke?” He pulled a hunting knife out from under his jacket, moving deeper into the room, still blocking the door.

“
No, Randy,” I said, eyes locked on the weapon. My voice sounded high and thin, squeaking past my closed throat, a far cry from the professional calm I wished for. “I don’t think this is a joke. I can see how upset you are, but I don’t know what you want.”

“
I want Carrie to stop this bullshit. Get that? Real simple. And I want
you
out of our lives.
Where is she?
”

It was hard to think. All the oxygen pumping from my thudding heart seemed directed to my extremities. My legs tingled in helplessness; flight was impossible.

My mind scrambled to mesh together the bits of information from our sessions with what he was saying now. “I thought your wife’s name is Debbie?”

“
What?”

“
Debbie?”

“
Don’t play stupid with me. You knew the whole time, didn’t you? You knew why I was here, and you played me for a fool. You think I don’t know? The whole time you’re yapping about trust, and you and that bitch are setting me up behind my back.”

“
Randy—”

“
My name ain’t Randy!” he exploded. “Quit pretending.”

It finally sunk in that “Randy” had given me a fake name. So much for trust. I jettisoned any information gleaned from our previous sessions and pretended he was just an irrational stranger—which he was—leaving very little to go on. Just a name, really. The name of the woman I was supposedly conspiring with: Carrie.

It clicked.

Carrie, the client usually scheduled in this time slot, had canceled at the last minute. She and I had been working for the last four months on self-esteem issues, gathering her courage to deal with her relationship with her abusive boyfriend. She’d recently decided to get out and had begun making practical plans for her escape.

Guess who showed up?

His eyes darted around the room, hyper-alert, as if he thought I had her stashed in the file cabinet. My office held an old metal desk, an ergonomically challenged chair, a tattered love seat, and a waist-high, two-drawer file cabinet sans escaping girlfriend.

Ethically, I couldn’t even acknowledge that Carrie was a client. Stacked up against the stark reality of the buck knife, however, confidentiality seemed like a vague, misty concept. Problem was, I liked Carrie, and I refused to draw a map for her asshole boyfriend. And there was the added issue of not having a freakin’ clue where she might be.

“
Where is she?” he repeated.

Drunk, dangerous, and impatient. The unholy trinity.

What the hell was his name, anyway?
She must have said his name a half-million times, at least. She’d even divulged having it tattooed in the shape of a crescent moon on her left breast. Why should her boob tattoo flash into memory and not his name?

“
Look, I know you’re upset. I want to help.” I worked to keep my voice calm, dropping it low and soft in direct contrast to his anger.

“
Don’t you try that psych crap on me, you bitch! You’ve been trying to break me and Carrie up ever since she started seeing you.”

Well, not exactly, but I doubted what’s-his-name could distinguish the fine line between encouraging Carrie to make her own decisions and telling her to leave the jerk who kept throwing her against the wall whenever she disagreed with him.

“
It’s not crap to tell you that the police are coming. You know that, right? You can make this so much better for yourself if you just give me the knife.” My eyes were glued to the weapon—it looked like something that could gut a deer with one flick of the wrist. My stomach rolled, stomach acids sloshing loosely from side to side.

“
Give
you
the knife? Why? So you can stab me in the back with it? You bitches are all alike. First chance you get, you kick a guy in the teeth.” The blade whispered evilly as he sliced it through the air. I hated that knife.

“
I wouldn’t hurt you,” I said. Sweat rolled down my face, tickling.

“
Bullshit! You’re taking Carrie away!” His face flooded with incredulity, and the next few seconds blurred as he charged forward. Flipping the desk chair aside like it was made of Styrofoam, he pinned me against the back wall, the knife a silver glint below my chin. Its tip nicked my skin, not cold as I anticipated, but burning a slender line across the thin layer of flesh guarding my throat.

“
You just don’t get it, do you? I love her. And you got no right coming between a man and his woman. That’s a sacred thing and you can’t just—”

“
I’m not taking Carrie away. She’s—”

“
Liar!” Rage twisted his face into a grotesque mask, barely human. “You think I don’t know? You think I’m stupid because I don’t have a stinkin’ diploma stuck up on my wall?”

He smashed the knife into the glass frame above my head, shards splintering like frozen rain on my hair and the floor below. He’d just killed a cheap Monet print, but now didn’t seem like the time to point out the error.

“
You think you’re so special, don’t you? Got your college education, and your tight, little ass that you like to shake in front of all the men. Bet you make them crazy, huh? Make them come back for more, just ‘cause they got the hots for you. Do you wear that long, black hair up just so’s we wonder what you look like at night, when it’s down?

“
And then you act all concerned about me, like you care. Just like
her.
I’m not stupid,” his voice dropped again to that frightening, raspy whisper. “I know what she’s planning. She’s been checking into those shelters like she thinks that’s gonna keep her safe. I bet you been workin’ on her, trying to get her to go to one of them places.”

The knife skimmed my throat again; I couldn’t even shake my head to answer without slicing it off. Tears of frustration pooled in my eyes, ready to fall. Carrie and I had talked about the possibilities of domestic abuse shelters, but that was weeks ago. At the time, she wouldn’t even take the brochure that I’d tried giving her for fear that her boyfriend would find it.
Was her cancellation today part of an escape plan that she hadn’t trusted me with?

“
Did you try her at work?” The question popped out of its own volition.

“
Huh?”

“
Well… she canceled her appointment. Maybe she just got called in to work.”

Stopped him cold. Suddenly, as we stood there in a grotesque parody of an embrace, the wail of police sirens filtered through the strip-mall thin walls of the office. No soundproofing, another cheap aspect of our working arrangement, but I loved it now. His eyes locked on mine, briefly, and a disturbing emotion rippled between us. He stood there only a few moments more, but it felt like hours; his breath fanned my cheeks while his body held mine hostage. Rearing his head back, he spit full in my face, then bolted for the door. Turning right, away from the front lobby, he ran toward the back fire exit. I heard shouts, and a thunk as something heavy tipped over. Seconds later, several police officers flew past the office door in pursuit.

Now that the time for panic was officially over, it took possession of my body, unhinging my knees, crashing me down to the floor. I cowered there, heart pounding, adrenaline turning my mouth tinny, shaking so hard my joints ached.

The sound of more running feet jolted me to my knees, but it was just my supervisor Marshall sprinting down the hall. The back door slammed, and then Marshall was at my side.

He guided me into the chair. I watched disinterestedly as his mouth made noises over me. My brain tuned him out until a shout of astonishment from him pulled me back to focus. Marshall knelt beside my chair, holding my right hand. For a brief spasm of time, I imagined he was going to propose. That is until I saw the bright red blood pooled in the cup of my upturned palm, seeping over the side and into his beneath like a water fountain in a particularly grisly park. My first instinct was that I’d been stabbed, but then I spied the glass shard sticking straight up, cleaving the pad of skin between my thumb and forefinger. I couldn’t stand the sight of the alien object stuck inside me. So I pulled it out. More blood.

Marshall’s noises grew more agitated, but this time a wave of dizziness blocked him out. A uniformed policeman pushed into my tiny office, crowding us, using up more air. My ears started ringing, and the cop pushed my head between my knees. I closed my eyes, concentrating on not throwing up while someone squeezed the cut on my hand real hard.

“
Wayne,” I said to my knees.

Someone’s head orbited into my vision. “What?” the someone said.

“
His name is Wayne.”

I may have been powerless over the precipitating events, but the drama that came after was my own fault. Between the dizzy spell and the gash in my palm, the consensus was to haul me off to the hospital. I hate hospitals.

I argued, but Marshall dug in, overriding my objections. He was my boss, after all, and in today’s litigious society, I guessed I understood his point. Concerned about lawsuits, he’d want the record to show that I’d been provided services immediately after. Besides, Marshall Tannor was fairly new to the clinic, and he was a sweetheart. And cute.

I caved on the hospital but refused an ambulance, which meant someone needed to drive me. A clinic full of helping professionals in the middle of a crisis turned the simple favor into a battle of the co-dependents. Our intern Mary Kate won, and I found myself praying she wouldn’t wrap my car around a telephone pole as we caromed across town to Sacred Heart.

After all the hoopla, I ended up waiting more than two hours behind a guy with chest pains, a cow-kicked farmer, and a lady who held an ice pack to her head and moaned every forty-seven seconds as if wired to an alarm. While I sat there dripping blood, an officer showed up to take my statement.

Two minutes into the interview, a nurse signaled us back. In order to stay out of the way of the medical staff, the officer took up a position slightly behind the cot I was sitting on. The interview took on a surreal quality as the physician stabbed and tugged at my palm while the officer droned on just out of sight, over my shoulder.

Descriptions of the knife became the main focus, and I couldn’t figure out why. I kept tilting my head back, frustrated at not being able to see the cop’s face, his expressions. I answered every question, but we circled back again and again to the buck knife—how big was it? what brand? did I see a sheath? where was he standing when he pulled it out? Over and over again. Even the doctor looked up from stitching to eye the cop questioningly.

Marshall came in at the tail end of the interview, Mary Kate slipping in behind. After the officer left, my boss informed me that in addition to the back lot and the roof, the police had spent quite a bit of time searching my office for the missing weapon.

“
No, he had it when he took off,” I said. By now, I’d repeated the facts so many times the words felt blurry, insubstantial. “He ran off with it. He must’ve ditched it somewhere.” “He only made it a couple hundred feet from the clinic before the cops nailed him. The options are pretty limited.”