Your Heart Belongs to Me

joined with a desire to help. But Samantha could not help him; she made it clear that she could not. What he had seen in her eyes seemed more like commiseration, which might be as tender as pity, but was a compassion for the hopeless, for those who could not be reached or relieved.
    The sun oppressed him, the glare of windshields, the heat rising from parked cars, the scent of tar wafting up from the hot blacktop, and he wanted to be home in the cool of the solarium.
    “Hello,” said a voice behind him. “Hello, hello.”
    He turned to discover the Asian woman with the bouquet of pale-pink lilies. She was in her twenties, petite, strikingly pretty, with long glossy black hair, not fully Asian but Eurasian, with celadon eyes.
    “You know her, you know the author,” she said, her English without accent.
    If he was too short with her, his rudeness would reflect on Sam, so he said, “Yes. I know her. Used to know her.”
    “She is a very good writer, so talented.”
    “Yes, she certainly is. I wish I had her talent.”
    “So compassionate,” the woman said, stepping closer and with her glance indicating the book he carried.
    “I’m sorry,” Ryan said, “but I’m afraid I have to be somewhere, I’m late.”
    “A remarkable book, full of such insights.”
    “Yes, it is, but I’m late.”
    Holding the lilies with both hands, she thrust them toward him. “Here. I can see the sorrow between you and her, you need these more than I do.”
    Startled, he said, “Oh, no, I can’t take them.”
    “Please do, you must,” she said, pushing them against his chest with such insistence that one heavy bloom broke off its stem and fell to the blacktop.
    With pungent pollen from the stamens abrasive in his nostrils, nonplussed, Ryan said, “No, see, I’m not going anywhere that I’ll be able to put them in water.”
    “Here, here, you must,” she said, and if he had not taken the crackling cellophane cone in his free hand, she would have let the flowers fall to the ground.
    Although he had accepted the lilies, he tried to pass them back to her.
    He felt suddenly that he had been scorched, a line of fire searing along his left side. An instant later a sharper pain followed the hot shock of laceration—and only then he saw the switchblade knife.
    As the lilies and the book dropped from Ryan’s hands, the woman said, “I can kill you any time I want.”
    Stunned, clutching at his wound, Ryan collapsed back against a Ford Explorer.
    She turned and walked away at a brisk pace toward the parallel row of cars, but she did not run.
    The blade had been so sharp, it slit his shirt without pulling the threads, as cleanly as a straight razor slashing through one sheet of newspaper.
    Reaching cross-body, right hand slick with blood, he frantically traced the wound. It was not ragged enough to be a laceration, more like an incision, about four inches long, too shallow to require stitches, not mortal, just a warning cut, but deep enough to have discernible lips.
    He looked up and saw that, as petite as she was, she would swiftly disappear through the crowded rows of cars, perhaps in one of which she would escape.
    Shock had silenced him. Now that he thought to shout for help, he could summon only a wheeze.
    Looking for someone to call to his aid, Ryan surveyed the surrounding lot. In the distance, two cars moved away along the trunk road from which the rows of parking spaces branched. He saw three people on foot, but none nearby.
    The woman with the knife vanished among the vehicles, as if she liquefied into the glass glare, into the heat rising off blacktop.
    Ryan possessed his full voice now, but only cursed quietly, having had time for second thoughts about making a public spectacle of himself. Anyway, she was gone, beyond finding.
    He crushed a few lilies underfoot, without intention, as he made his way to the dropped book, which he plucked off the pavement with his clean hand.
    At his ’32 Ford coupe, perspiration dripped off his brow onto the trunk lid as he fumbled in a pants pocket for his keys. He had broken out in a sweat that had nothing to do with the warm day.
    In the trunk he kept a tool kit for road repairs. With it were a moving blanket, a few clean chamois cloths, a roll of paper towels, and bottled water, among other items.
    He stuffed a chamois through the tear in his shirt and pressed it to the wound, clutching his arm to his side to hold the cloth in place.
    After he washed his bloody hand with