long enough to take careful aim.
The fifth of September. Her father was mowing grass down by the canal where their small wooden fishing boat was moored against the seawall. As she lowered the pistol and held it loosely at her side, Alex watched her father work in the Miami sun, shirtless and sweating heavily. He was an inch over six feet tall, with muscular shoulders and a tight waist. His hair was black and wavy and he wore it longer than most men. When he grew out his mustache, people said he looked like Clark Gable. Alexandra could tell that other women found him attractive from the way they smiled with their eyes and followed his movements even when Alexandra’s mother was watching.
At that moment, her mother, Grace Collins, was at the grocery store and wouldn’t be home for at least another hour. Alexandra was alone in the house. She could hear a drone that sounded like a bumblebee trapped in a glass bottle. It was louder than the lawn mower.
Turning from the rear window, she lifted the pistol again and this time aimed across her father’s bureau out the side window of her parents’ bedroom. The gauzy curtains were open a few inches and she could see the side of the Flints’ house and, off in the far corner of their yard, a plywood playhouse painted white with red trim. It had a single window and a flower box with some plastic roses poking out. Mr Flint had built the house and positioned it beneath a jacaranda tree. It was the neighborhood hang-out, where the Flint girls, Molly and Millie, and their kid brother, J.D., and Alexandra played with Barbies until last week, when Alexandra decided she was too old for dolls. That was right after Darnel Flint raped her.
On television she’d seen men holding pistols with both hands. She tried to remember how it was done. She found a comfortable grip on the .38, then tried to locate the best place for her left hand. After some experimenting, she discovered that by cradling her right wrist, she could hold the pistol steady for maybe half a minute. Long enough to scare him.
The buzzing sound was changing, growing more impatient. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere deep inside her flesh.
Through her parents’ window she watched the Flints’ station wagon back out their driveway, the kids and parents going off to do their weekly grocery shopping. Only Darnel allowed to stay home.
Darnel Flint was seventeen, a senior in high school. He had long fingers and broken nails and he lisped certain words. He didn’t play sports and he didn’t have a car or a part-time job, and his clothes were always wrinkled. His skin was pale and his mustache was so blond, it was nearly invisible. Darnel’s father was a burly, flat-faced man who drove a Coca-Cola truck for a living. He was extremely religious and he filled his house with wood plaques and metalwork and mirrors with Old Testament quotations that he had hand-painted on them. While he was at work, Mrs Flint drank whiskey from iced-tea glasses and sat in her Florida room in her pink housecoat, talking on the telephone.
The month before the rape had been the happiest time in Alexandra’s life. She and her parents had vacationed in North Florida at a beachfront village named Seagrove, where there were dunes and sea oats and miles of white sand. For the whole month of August, her father rented a wood house with a tin roof and a wraparound porch just across from the beach. The house was painted pale yellow and had white trim. The days were long and hot and she and her dad spent several hours each day building a sand castle beside the still waters of the Gulf.
While her mother looked on, the two of them constructed it on a part of the beach where hardly anyone walked, far enough from the gentle slap of the surf so that her father claimed the castle would survive at least a thousand years. They worked on it all month – minarets and moats and towers, and a complex system of escape tunnels beneath the castle walls. She collected twisted pieces of driftwood to use as barricades and placed them strategically just beyond the moats. Her father christened Alexandra ‘Princess of the Sugary Sands’ and declared the sand castle her official palace.
In the cool of the late afternoons, her parents took long walks down the beach, holding hands, leaving her to add new features to the sand castle. The morning they were to depart Seagrove, her father assured her that her creation would always be there, forever in the same place, exactly as they’d left it. And someday they would return and resume their building project.
Then just a week ago, on the first Saturday after the start of the new school year, Darnel came into the playhouse holding a bowl of ice cream and he told his sisters and kid brother to scram. J.D., a cute kid of five with dark hair, demanded to stay, but Darnel punched him in the chest and he ran off, wailing. As Molly and Millie marched away, they gave Alexandra superior smiles, as if they both knew exactly what was in store for her and didn’t much care.
‘The dog goes, too,’ Darnel said as he dumped Pugsy, Alexandra’s boxer, outside the door.
While Pugsy scratched at the plywood door, Darnel held out the dish of Neapolitan ice cream to Alexandra. The dish was green. Reluctantly, she took it and ate a few bites; then Darnel unzipped himself.
‘This is for you. I’ve been saving it.’
Alexandra stared at his erect penis, then dropped the dish and sprang for the door, but Darnel was quick and got a hand over her mouth. While he clamped her mouth shut with one hand, he dragged down the elastic band of her white shorts and shoved his rough hand between her legs.
As he wedged himself inside her, Alexandra opened her mouth against Darnel’s hand and bit deep into one of his fingers, wrenching her head to the side, trying to strip flesh from the bone. She tasted the tang of his blood, and Darnel cried out, but he did not stop.
The rest of it was fast and clumsy and it hurt at first; then she was numb. The ice cream dish was broken on the plywood floor and a puddle of ice cream melted next to her head the whole time. As Darnel rose up on straightened arms and began to groan, she turned her head to the side and her gaze fell on the playhouse mirror, where she and the Flint sisters had made their first experiments with makeup. Mr Flint had inscribed a passage from the Twenty-third Psalm across the top of the mirror. With her eyes blurred. Alexandra stared at the mirror, and for a second she thought she saw the outline of someone’s face. But when she blinked her eyes, the apparition had vanished.
As Darnel worked to his climax, she turned her head away and let the Scripture run through her mind, a quieting refrain. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’
Finally, Darnel rolled away and lay panting for several moments. Then he told her that from this moment onward he and Alexandra were engaged, which meant he had the right to kill her if she violated their sacred oath of silence.
She said nothing to her parents. Her father was a police officer and she was afraid he would explode and kill someone. Her mother taught high school and had a very stern manner. Several times, she had told Alexandra that girls who misbehaved with boys had only themselves to blame. Girls were in charge. They simply had to be strong and prudent and exercise good judgment about what gestures of affection they gave to their male friends. Flirting could lead to trouble, she said. Be vigilant.
For the next few nights after the rape, Darnel tapped on her bedroom window and stood with a bowl of ice cream in his hand. Ashamed she’d provoked him to such an emotional pitch, Alexandra trembled and fought back tears. She peeked around the edge of the curtains but wouldn’t show herself.
Even after he gave up and stalked away, she couldn’t sleep. Each time her eyes began to drift closed, she felt again Darnel Flint’s suffocating weight against her chest, and she jerked awake.
Then last night, Darnel Flint had been at the window again and his hair was slicked back and he wore a new shirt and was holding a rose. Through the glass she told him to leave her alone. She never wanted to see him again. He was disgusting and mean and
