Daughter's Keeper by Ayelet Waldman Page B

asked, raising her face.
    â€œThis,” he said, and kissed her.
    ***
    Jorge wasn’t home when Olivia got back from her mother’s. She took off her clothes and got into bed. She fell asleep almost immediately and awoke, much later, to the sound of pounding and shouts. She sat up in bed with a start. The noise seemed to be coming from the door of her apartment. Her stomach knotted, and she felt her bowels loosen. She reached for the telephone but had dialed only the 9 and the first 1 of the emergency number when the sharp, splintering crash of the door caused her to drop the phone to the ground. She scrambled for it, holding the sheet around her naked body. Dark forms of men burst through the door of her bedroom. There were more of them than she could count, and she began to scream, terrified beyond anything she had ever imagined she could feel. All she saw were the black of their clothes and the dull flash of their guns. The first to reach her grabbed her by the hair and forced her back onto the bed, her face pressed into the sheets. She felt his knee on her back and knew for certain what she would feel next. For an instant she imagined her body torn open by the force of him and the others as they took turns with her. She knew, as sure as she had ever known anything in her life, that they would kill her when they were done.
    She lay silently, desperately trying to breathe through the sheets pressed tightly against her nose and mouth. The knee on her back was heavy, and the edge of the man’s boot dug into the soft flesh of her buttocks. The quilt around her head prevented her from hearing much of anything other than the noise of the men shouting. Suddenly, the man jerked Olivia’s arms behind her back, and something metal and sharp pinched her wrists.
    It was only when she felt the handcuffs that Olivia realized that the man standing over her naked body, pinning her to her sheets, was a police officer.
    Once her hands were securely bound, he took his knee off her back and jerked her to her feet. He forced her to her knees on the floor next to her bed and shouted at her to lie down.
    Olivia lay there for a long time, slowly becoming aware of her nakedness. At one point she raised her head and saw the men tearing apart the mattress, slicing open the pillows of the couch and throwing the contents of her drawers to the ground. One of the men tossed a bouquet of dried flowers onto the floor and crushed it under his heavy boots. A rough hand shoved her face back down, and she closed her eyes again. She heard the cops jerking open the kitchen cabinets and the fridge, throwing their contents to the floor. She heard the sound of paper tearing and the crash and tinkle of broken glass and then a dry rustle that she recognized as the sound of Cheerios being poured out only after it had been replaced by the crunching noise of the cereal being crushed under feet.
    Finally someone stood over Olivia and shouted to her to stand up. She got to her knees and did her best to shake her hair down over her breasts.
    â€œI need to get dressed,” she said in a cracked whisper.
    The man ignored her.
    She made her voice as firm as she could. “I said, I need to get dressed.”
    She raised her eyes to the man’s face. He was young, not much older than she, with close-cropped hair and a nose that looked as though it had been broken.
    He met her gaze, and then, slowly and deliberately, let his eyes drop down the length of her naked body.
    â€œYou need to shut the fuck up,” he said.
    A voice from across the room shouted, “Agent, tell the prisoner to put some clothes on.” A few of the men who were digging through everything she owned in the world laughed. The agent with the broken nose and the dull, cold eyes smiled and said, “You heard the man. Get dressed.”
    Olivia stood silently for a moment, waiting. Her nipples tightened in the cool air from the open door. Her cheeks grew red and hot. The