Baiba opened her door. Brandon took one look at her and froze. Broken capillaries charted a road map across the whites of her eyes. Red marks ringed her neck. Her hands trembled. Her face was pale and damp.
Baiba turned without a word and went back to her pullout couch. She crawled between the sheets and hugged a pillow against her baggy T-shirt as if it were a stuffed animal. He followed her to the foot of the mattress. “What happened? Are you okay?” He sat on the edge of the bed.
Her chin quivered. She covered her face and began to cry softly. Soon her sobs intensified. She gasped for air, coughed, and rocked back and forth with the pillow clasped tightly against her breasts. He didn’t know what to do except wait. When her sobs finally turned into muffled moans, he went to the sink, poured her a glass of water, and brought it back to the bed. Then he found a box of tissues in her bathroom and set it down beside her.
Questions multiplied in his mind. He sat next to her again, placed his hand on her back, and felt her ragged inhalations. He watched her alarm clock for three unbearably long minutes. Give her time, he told himself. Give her time. And finally she said, “I went out last night and someone drugged me and—”
“Oh my God, Baiba. That’s terrible.” He put his arm around her shoulder and she moved a little closer to him. “What can I do?”
“I shouldn’t have bothered you,” she said, “but—I just woke up so foggy. I couldn’t remember anything and—”
“Of course you should have called. You can always call me.”
She put her hand on his knee. “You’re a good friend, Brandon.”
“You need to report this, you know. Where were you when it happened? In a bar?”
“Something like that.”
Brandon sensed her evasion. “Who did it? Did you know him?”
Baiba covered her face. “Oh, God, Brandon.”
“What? What is it, Baiba?”
“If I tell you something, do you promise you won’t say anything?”
“Of course.”
And then she blurted out, “It was Merchant. Thomas Merchant.”
Brandon felt the name like a punch in the solar plexus. “What?”
“I’ve been seeing him, okay?”
“Seeing him? You mean having an—” He stopped and considered his words. “A relationship with him?”
“Yes. But no one knows, okay? I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t. You can understand why, can’t you?”
Brandon was too stunned to answer. He managed to nod his head.
“He asked me to dinner last month. I shouldn’t have agreed to go. I know that. But I wanted to.”
Brandon’s body was humming. He imagined his pores constricting so that his skin became a protective membrane shielding him from the words.
“He took me to the Four Seasons. God, that place is amazing. It was so romantic.”
“I bet.” Brandon’s mouth felt dry.
“And then he took me home,” she continued.
And fucked you, Brandon thought. He didn’t breathe. He had to fight the urge to pull his hand away from her, as if she were suddenly infectious. In the space of an instant, his whole conception of who she was began to crumble. He shook his head as if this movement could reset his thoughts and emotions. How could you do this to me? he wanted to say, and then a hot lump of shame formed in his throat.
Two years ago, Baiba had introduced herself to him across a desk in the small first-floor office where prospective caregivers were interviewed at Park Manor. They had talked for half an hour, and at the end of the interview, he had felt certain that she would hire him. Later he learned that she had had to advocate on his behalf because Constance Hodges had not wanted him on her staff. And since then, she had never asked him to be anything other than what he was. No one—not even Maybelle—had tried to understand him the way Baiba had. Whether out of discomfort, repulsion, or politeness, the others had astutely avoided the issue of who and what he was. But not Baiba. One evening while they were in Arthur Lane’s bedroom sorting through the clothes, jewelry, and photos he regularly pilfered from other residents’ suites, she had asked him, “When did you first realize you were, you know, a man in a woman’s body?”
Brandon was surprised by her directness, but he was also grateful for the invitation to reveal more of himself. “I always knew,” he admitted.
“What was it like for you growing up?”
And as they painstakingly traced the provenance of each article Arthur Lane had stolen, Brandon told her about the Church of Salvation in Jackson, Michigan. Once a month, the congregants gathered in the church basement to stuff envelopes with brochures pleading for money to stop the Queer Agenda. The covers of these brochures featured tattooed men in leather and butch-looking women in men’s clothing, and the headlines asked Do you want perverts living on your street? Do you want males sharing the restroom with your teenage daughter? Every June, he told Baiba, Pastor Sutter rented two buses and the congregation rode from Jackson, Michigan, to New York City to hold up protest signs at the LGBT pride march. “I helped make those signs,” he told her. “I painted banners that said Burn in hell for your sins. And the whole time I knew I was condemning people just like me.”
When he told Baiba about his surgery plans, she didn’t say, “Oh my God, how could you do that to yourself?” She said, “You’re going to look very handsome on the beach.” And a week later—just last Wednesday—she gave him three thousand dollars to help him pay for the procedure.
Now Brandon hugged her tightly and kissed the top of her head. “Go on, Baiba. Tell me what happened. You need to tell someone.”
“It was really good that first time,” she said. “Different, but good.”
He nodded.
“And the next day he came over to my apartment with flowers and a little Tiffany bag. There was a jewelry box inside. He gave me a gold chain with a beautiful diamond pendant.”
Brandon stared out the window as her head rested against his shoulder. His jaw ached. He didn’t want to hear any of this. He wanted to be anywhere else.
“And a few days after that he called me again and, well, I couldn’t really say no. I didn’t want to say no, and this time it got a little—” She shook her head.
“A little more different?” he supplied.
“I promised myself that was the last time,” she said, “but he brought more flowers. He gave me another little Tiffany bag. He told me he had to see me or he would go crazy. And I went back.”
“And you went back again last night?”
She nodded. “He sent his car for me.”
“What happened?”
And then she told him everything she remembered, from the moment Felipe had opened the Escalade door for her in the snow until the moment when she had sipped the drink Merchant gave her and all her memories dissolved.
“He drugged you. He took advantage of you.”
Baiba stared down.
“And he choked you, too. I see the marks. Was that one of his differences? Did he like to tie you up?”
Her silence was the answer.
“I think I should take you to the hospital,” he said. “I should take you to the police.”
Baiba shook her head and gripped his arm so hard that it ached. “No! You promised. You can’t tell anyone,” she nearly shouted. “What happened was my own fault. I’m to blame for this.”
“That’s what women always say, Baiba. But you’re not.”
“Yes, I am!” She punched her legs with her fists. She gripped her skull as if it might crack open if she didn’t hold it together. “Oh, God, Brandon. Don’t you see? I went right along with it. I let him do those things to me—until last night I liked it. I enjoyed it.”
He held his breath. How much more would he have to hear?
“I know what that must sound like to you, but—”
“It’s okay,” he said weakly. “It doesn’t change how I feel about you.” But it did. Her fucking Merchant like that changed everything. He would never, he realized, be able to give her what she wanted. Rough sex. Expensive jewelry from Tiffany’s. Dinners at the Four Seasons. She would never want him.
Baiba grabbed his arm. “You won’t tell anyone, will you? I just want it to all go away. Promise me.”
“I promise. Of course.” But you couldn’t just pretend things hadn’t happened, he wanted to say. The worst events in your life had a way of carving the deepest grooves in your memory. Even dementia victims seemed to hold onto their traumas. How many times had he sat up with them at night while they tried in vain to fit fragments of haunting memories into cohesive narratives? He thought of Lucy and the things she had said. No, Daddy. No! I don’t want it. Please, Daddy. Take it away. Even Lucy had bad childhood memories. She was always talking to her daddy.
Brandon glanced down at his worn Converses. He could already predict the memories that would plague him decades from now. His father landing a hook on his jaw when he refused to wear a dress. Reverend John Sutter unzipping the fly below his tumor-like gut. Shivering on the front steps of the LGBT Community Center his first night in Manhattan when he had nowhere to go. Despite three years on Judith Greenwald’s couch, those memories were still vivid. They still got in his way sometimes. He stared into Baiba’s tropical blue eyes and softly caressed the rash on her chin where Merchant’s stubble had burned her. He understood perfectly why Merchant had wanted her. But he could never do what Merchant had done. He knew a little too well what it felt like to be the woman in that equation, to be the object of someone’s self-serving desires. For as long as he could remember, he had experienced and interpreted every human interaction through two simultaneous points of view—male and female. That was the one dubious superpower, he supposed, that came with living in the fluid nexus of genders.
“Why don’t you sleep,” he said gently, to cover his ambivalence. He didn’t want to talk to Baiba anymore. He needed to think, to sort out his feelings. “Go to sleep. I’ll stay with you for a while.”
“And then you’ll go to Park Manor, right? You promised you would go. I told Hodges you would be there tonight. I told her you would tell anyone who asks that you only gave Lucy water to drink. I don’t want to lose my job, Brandon. Please.”
He nodded reluctantly. Merchant had used her, he thought, and now she was using him.