Free Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates

hear. She heard faucets, a toilet flushing. At least she forced herself to move. Her limbs that were paralyzed, broken. Something warmly sticky as blood between her thighs, on her belly.
    He went away from her, he wanted her gone. While she was in the bathroom running water, the hottest water she could bear staring at her dilated eyes in the steamy mirror, she heard him on a telephone. His easy laugh, the murmur of his voice. A man among men he seemed to her, unknowable.
    She left him. He wanted her gone, she understood and so she left him. Hey: he gripped her chin, kissed her mouth as you might kiss the forehead of a plain child. At the elevator she turned back, the door to 2133 had shut. In the rapidly descending glass cubicle she wiped at her eyes, angry fists in her eyes. She had restored the damage to her mascara, her eye makeup, now it was damaged again, a teary ruin. Her body wept for him, a seepage between her legs. She thought I am soiled, fouled. I am a woman who deserves harm.
    She left the hotel quickly, the revolving door seemed to sweep her out. She imagined faint muffled laughter in her wake but heard only a doorman invisible to her calling after her in a voice of scornful familiarity Good evening, ma’am!
    Â 
    Evening! She wouldn’t be home until nearly seven o’clock.
    On the expressway, wind buffeted the station wagon. Other vehicles veered in their lanes. She was too distracted to be frightened. Fumbling to call Ismelda on her cell phone but the battery had run low. She wasthinking, If the children have been hurt! It was not a rational thought yet she was thinking if The Babysitter had taken them, this was punishment she deserved.
    The Babysitter was an abductor and killer of children in the suburbs north of the city, he’d never been identified, arrested. He had taken nine children in all but he had not taken a child in several years, it was believed that he’d moved away, or was in prison, or had died. He was called The Babysitter for his methodical way of bathing the bodies of his small victims after raping and strangling them, positioning them in secluded places like parks, a golf course, a churchyard, he’d taken time to launder and even iron their clothing which he folded neatly and left beside them. Always their arms were crossed over their narrow pale chests, their eyes were shut, in such peaceful positions they resembled mannequins and not children who had died terrible deaths, it was said you could not see the ligature marks on their throats until you knelt beside them. The Babysitter had not abducted a child from the suburb in which she lived for at least a decade and yet she was thinking almost calmly If he has taken them, I will have to accept it.
    The house was made of fieldstone, mortar, brick that had been painted a thin weathered white. Most of the house had been built in the mid-nineteenth century, on a large tract of land which was now reduced to three acres, the minimum for property owners in the township. She was relieved to see the warmly lit windows through the trees, of course nothing had happened, they were waiting for her to return and that was all. Her husband had a dinner engagement, he wouldn’t be back until the children were in bed. Yet relief flooded her, seeing her husband’s car wasn’t in the garage. She’d had her revenge, then! She would love her husband less desperately now, she knew herself equal to him.
    Rich cooking aromas in the kitchen, the sound of a TV, children’s uplifted voices and Ismelda calling: Ma’am?—but quickly she slipped away upstairs, before the children could rush at her. She showered as she hadn’t in the hotel. She soaped every part of her body, she was giddy with relief. She had a lover! He hadn’t given her his number, vaguelyhe’d promised to call her the following week. No one knew, no one had come to harm, the family was safe. Bruises and red welts had already begun to show on