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didn’t understand the saying, she didn’t understand how a person watched themselves in the first place. The game they played just proved her point.
    So she had stopped watching herself, or maybe she’d never quite begun, and here she was, trapped in a coma, trapped in a nightmare, trapped in a suburban house in a pile of cracker crumbs, boneless hands as useless as her naked feet. The man hadn’t come, but he would, and just the thought of that samequestion—do you love me yet?—that bland smile, those stony eyes scraping up and down her body made her shiver. She turned up the volume on the TV. On the screen, a man was pacing in a bedroom, running his hands through his hair and muttering to himself, reminding her of, well, her. Suddenly, he flipped the mattress off the bed, uncovering the bars that held the mattress in place. He wrenched one of the bars free and turned toward the camera, brandishing the bar like a sword.
    Bars. Bars under the mattress.
    She flew from the couch, ran up the stairs. Her own bed was king-size, and a platform, so that wouldn’t do her any good, but in the spare bedroom, there was a smaller bed. For a child, he had told her, when the time was right. It was disgusting, that a man at least twice her age would want . . .
    â€œThe time will never be right,” she said out loud, then heaved the mattress and box spring off the bed. Wooden bars extended from one edge of the frame to the other. They were not screwed down. She hefted one. It was about as long as a baseball bat, and nearly as heavy. She almost cried.
    She ran back down the steps, new tool in hand. She shoved the love seat away from the picture window, took a deep breath, reached back, and swung the bar as hard as she could. Instead of a satisfying crash, the bar thumped against the glass. Frowning, she ran her fingers over the surface, found that she had barely scratched it. She brought the end of the bar to the glass again and again, the bar thumping instead of crashing. She tried theback windows with the same results. Thump, thump, thump. Some kind of special glass, then. To keep people out, to keep people in.
    You have no point.
    But she would not give up, not yet. The glass down here was too thick, but what about the glass upstairs? Maybe he thought she wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to jump out of an upstairs window. And she wasn’t. But there was a tree outside her bedroom. A tree—drzewo, neither male nor female. The tree was big and strong, the nearest branch a few feet from the house. If she could break the window, she might be able to reach far enough to grab it. Maybe.
    She ran upstairs again and paused in front of the window. She said her silent prayer, and then swung the bar with everything she had. The first blow cracked the glass, sent the birds outside scattering. The second sent a web of smaller cracks throughout the pane. The third shattered it completely. She smashed the remaining bits of glass from the edges of the window. Then she ran to the closet and pulled all those fine dresses from the hangers. She lined the bottom of the window with the clothes so that she wouldn’t get cut.
    She leaned out the window and immediately felt dizzy. But she had no other choice. She wouldn’t wait here for him to return. For all she knew, he was out buying her a wedding gown. The thought almost made her laugh out loud. If she hadn’t been so scared, she might have.
    She patted the clothes that she had piled on the window ledge. Nothing poked through. Good. She leaned her body overthe ledge and stretched for the tree branch, but she couldn’t reach it. Before she had time to think better of it, she’d stepped up onto the ledge, holding both sides of the sash. There she hadn’t been as careful to knock out the glass, and a sliver sliced one palm. She gasped and almost pulled her hand away but forced herself to hold on so that she didn’t go tumbling out the