11. It Takes Me Two Days to See Tonya

It takes me two days to see Tonya. Fact is I’ve enjoyed meeting up with Tonya a lot. I’m pretty amazed by how she’s turned out, how strong and funny and cool she is. But after last time, it’s way too clear what she’s hoping. Like I said, I’m not going there with her again. And it doesn’t do either of us any good to start picking at the scar.

But getting the investigator’s affidavit from Paulette Cornish was a big deal—it changed the case and maybe the Chief’s life, and Tonya deserves to hear me say so. And besides, I know we may need her help again.

I ask her to meet at Mike’s and get there a little early. There is a woman at the bar, a very tall, blonde patrol officer in the Twenty-Second who I went home with from here one night after the second game of the softball season. (Because of the Chief’s case, I’ve missed several games and practices, although, in a totally un-Pinky-like move, I actually explained in advance to Rory Leong, our captain.) This woman—Maura, I think—starts my way, but I give her a squinty little headshake, and she stops and instead lifts her Manhattan in salute, a classy gesture, and I smile back. Maybe another night.

There was a time in my life when I thought of sex as the most important thing I was going to do each day. I generally had no clue who I was going to find to hook up with that night, but the thought that that person was out there was exciting in itself, something to discover, knowing that the intense reality of the act would, like a glowing star, outshine anything else that would happen to me in the hours in between.

Although I don’t like to admit it, my life is tamer now. The club scene is not so fun anymore. The men are all looking at the twenty-year-olds, and the lesbian places where I’ve gone for years sometimes make me feel like an old maid. This is a better venue, and most nights I arrive here after a game, I’ll leave with someone, man or woman, maybe someone I’ve slept with before, more often someone new. I don’t know if cops have more sex than other professions. Lawyers? Probably yes. NBA players? Probably no. At Mike’s, there’s always a squad of cop-girls, groupies looking their best, or what they think is their best—lots of scent and makeup, big hair, tight clothes—women who, to be plain, get wet at the sight of a badge and gun. And there is also the wartime WTF thing in the atmosphere at Mike’s, turning this into a sexual free-fire zone. Many days on the job are as boring as a file clerk’s, but most file clerks don’t go to work knowing they will pass somebody on the street with a desperate wish to shoot them. And there’s also cop privilege: I know the rules, I know the rules are important, I enforce the rules, so I don’t need to follow the rules. Anyway, people here feel safer to me than some rando. Sex is just sex, doing one another a solid for a couple hours—then go home and don’t look back. Catch and release, as they say.

When Helen died, Pops’s rabbi, who presided at the funeral with a priest Helen liked, said very urgently, as part of her eulogy, ‘We are not our bodies.’ This was some big spiritual point that what was great about Helen was her spirit. And I thought Helen crushed it, she was almost as important to me as Pops, and I was truly shook when she died. But as I was sitting there at the funeral, I thought, Hell if that’s true about me. I will always be awkward with people, and I’ll eternally have a hard time maintaining focus on paperwork or reading. But for the most part, I’ve always been able to count on my body. I was a three-sport athlete in high school, a for-real Olympic hopeful on the board and even now I remain a standout pistol shot. And sex fits in with all of that, because in this realm, I deal with someone else with confidence and get back really positive responses.

Tonya arrives while I’m thinking about all this. She’s carrying a draft beer for each of us. She puts the glasses down on the table and jumps up on the stool but doesn’t remove her coat, sending the message she’s not expecting this to become an evening, which is a relief.

“So I just need to say how totally awesome that was of you,” I tell her.

She shrugs. “Don’t thank me too much. I wasn’t even sure at first if I was going to give the affidavit to you. Paulette—Cornish’s ex—spent all this time going through the boxes in her attic because she wanted me to see what she had against the Chief. She was like, ‘Show your friend that next time she wants to talk to me.’ I warned her that everything is backwards in a trial sometimes, and it might even help you guys by showing Walt’s a liar. But that was okay by her. Best of both worlds: Lucy’s a tramp and Walt couldn’t pick the truth out of a lineup.”

“Well, Mrs. Cornish kind of got her wish. You can be as feminist as you like and say, ‘I own my body and will do whatever I like with it,’ but for a woman, you know how that goes down in public.”

“Word,” Tonya answers. I don’t really need to explain this to somebody who was closeted into her early twenties. “Once I heard how it all played out at the hearing, I was pretty relieved, because I’ve kind of been waiting for the Chief’s security system to bite her in the behind.”

There’s a beat while I try to remember what Tonya’s talking about, which leads to that lost-in-space moment of panic because I’m not understanding something that everybody else does. But finally, I have to ask, “What security system?”

Tonya grabs my arm across the small table.

“Girl, don’t you know there are cameras all around the Chief’s house? The force put them in like four years ago. I was the liaison on that.”

I’ve noticed the cameras whenever I come by the Chief’s place to deliver papers Rik wants her to see, which, given the nature of the P&F proceedings, I can’t usually drop off at the central police station.

“But the Chief said the video output is saved for thirty days,” I answer. “Standard commercial system.”

“No no no,” says Tonya. “That was the original NVR. A few years back, some asshole was harassing her and sticking dog poop in her mailbox every couple months. The fact that we had such a hard time grabbing the guy kind of got the commander, George Leery, thinking dark thoughts and saying we were lucky it was just dog shit and not some crazy street gang that came to kidnap Lucy, because our security setup sucked. So we changed out all the equipment and I put a Thunderhead NVR in her den. Forty-eight terabytes. And it uploads every month to a cloud system with some really cool compression that only saves what you’d want to see, meaning images with full-frame motion. We can go back close to four years. Searching is a bitch, because most of it is people walking by when they take their pooch out, but a year later we nabbed Mr. Dogshit. He started in with, ‘It’s just a prank, I did it once.’ We reviewed seven months and got him five more times. He caught ninety days in jail.”

“Nice.”

“Definitely. But the Chief was recused on the investigation because she was the victim. I guess she never got the details. Or paid attention. She’s not exactly a techie. We all got our flaws.

“But I was worried,” says Tonya, “with these guys saying she brought them home that it would all be on the system and would corroborate them and look pretty, you know, swampy.”

With Cornish, it might have. But the Chief says DeGrassi’s story is all wrong. And if she’s telling the truth, there should be no sign of Blanco.

“Can you show me how to search the storage system?”

She makes a face and kind of draws her full shoulders in around herself.

“I dunno. That really puts me in the middle. And I mean technically, the department is paying for the storage and the equipment.”

“Well, she’s the Chief. Who else can give permission?”

Tonya touches her beer glass and says that she’ll think about it. She’s shaping her eyebrows these days, which she would have never even thought about in her lumbersexual days, and it makes it more noticeable when she shifts into that pensive look. By now I recognize it and realize things are about to go sideways.

“How’s the dude in your building?” she asks.

“Interesting,” I say. “But very mysterious.”

“Is it a thing?” She is hunched over her glass now, almost like she’s ducking.

“It’s a weird thing,” I say. “Rik keeps telling me to give it up.” I’m just making this up on the fly as fast as I can.

“Will you?”

“Not clear.”

She nods several times and sinks back into radio silence for a while. I want to change the subject fast but, typically, find myself stuck for words.

“So, you know,” she says, focusing exclusively on the table and running her finger in the circle of moisture that has gathered beneath her beer, “I was thinking the other day, just kind of wondering, I don’t even know why, but if I had ever been like, ‘Okay, you go be with boys if you have to,’ if I could have ridden with that, you think it might have worked with us?”

It’s all I can do to keep myself from groaning. I have been trying for several weeks now to kind of figure out what’s going on with Tonya. And I am slowly understanding that I am a significant person to her.

Not that I ever had the same experience. My first time was at snowboard camp on Mount Hood in Oregon. I was fourteen, and my mom used a little bit from her trust fund to pay for the summer. It was like, Any price to get Pinky out of the house.

So I was feeling pretty vulnerable anyway, and I said yes to this guy from California named Milos who was seventeen and not a completely bad dude. He wasn’t as smart as me, but he was really good-looking and seemed to have been with a lot of girls. But as soon as he rolled off, this hole opened inside of me, a canyon of regret. Not about the act, which wasn’t much. Generally, I’ve never been very good about the future—it’s just been a place I won’t go—and at that age all I could see for myself was boarding. But even that young, I suddenly knew I’d be dragging this guy Milos around with me for the rest of my life. Not only was I hearing everybody at school discussing their first time, but I’d listened to an entire radio call-in show a few months before on the same subject and was just blown away about how vivid it remained to all these people, eighty-year-olds with great-grandchildren and soldiers phoning from Afghanistan.

I’d said yes to Milos mostly because everyone at camp was saying I liked girls, and I knew I liked guys and wanted to prove it, even though I knew I liked girls, too, which was just wildly confusing. And so I got stuck with Milos, who I realized in the first seconds afterwards was really nobody I’d otherwise have chosen to remember. It wasn’t like he was destined to win the Olympics—or even many local competitions for that matter. He was just a semi-okay person attached to a dick.

For me, really breaking through and getting into sex was a slow burn, a process—a girl, then a guy, back and forth, a little better each time, my pleasure almost like something I fought for. But for Tonya, I guess it was all at once, and I’m the one who flipped the switch. And I understand why that really matters to her. Inside all of us there is this secret self who lives in our yearnings, this me that burns to be in who and how we love, a slender thread of nerve sewing together head and heart and the parts below. That want, that thing, is as persistent as your heartbeat, no matter how much other people cluck or tsk, and it clamors for expression.

Letting it happen is like moving from a flat world into the third dimension. It means your life, finally, is real, not just something imprisoned in your head but an actual thing happening in the world. And if it’s just one person who connected with you and brought you there and saw and valued that in you, he or she is always going to be special to you, which I understand, because that’s who I was hoping Milos would be and who he definitely wasn’t—someone I’d sorta/kinda love forever.

And okay, that’s who I am to Tonya. But it’s definitely annoying that she doesn’t seem to care about the other side, namely what she is—or isn’t—to me. She is stubborn. Even when she was the squinch-faced silent chick I first met, she was a stubborn soul who ran on only one gear—forward. And since I’m who I am, too, meaning the kind of person who basically isn’t diplomatic or patient, I need to tell her how all this is going down with me.

“Girl, all this draking bout you and me? It wears me out, okay? Can’t we hang without heading straight back to what went wrong at the dawn of time? I think you’re truly awesome, but you know, we were never going to work out that way. We want different things. You weren’t going to say okay to me seeing boys—any more than you’d say yes to me seeing another woman. That’s not what’s inside you. Okay, you’re a lesbian, but you’re a pretty traditional person.

“But that has never meant I don’t think you’re very cool. You are. You’re this completely amazing person. And you’ve just like grown so much, it’s like you’re two feet taller and twice as smart and four times more confident. So I’m not like worried about whether you’re going to find your one true love. You will. And I get it. You’ve passed thirty and it hasn’t happened, and you start thinking back and wondering, Well, maybe she was here and I missed the boat. But you will find your woman, you will. But it’s not me. I will never shape myself to just one person. That’s just not what I want, even though everyone else does. It’s weird, but you know, more and more I’m okay being weird.

“Now, you want to know what I do need? Not, frankly, that it seems like you will ever ask. What I need is a friend, a real friend, especially a female friend, someone I think is really cool and can be a pal, which, you know, because of my character defects or whatever, has been harder than all fuck for me to find.”

She sits there staring, the black eyes glossy and her small mouth slightly parted. Her breathing is faster. In this light, maybe because the blood has left her face, I can see more of the rough spots on her complexion that are concealed these days with better makeup. I watch while she struggles to find words, which just aren’t coming because she doesn’t know which is greater, the hurt of what I said or its truth. She takes a big gulp of her beer and gets off her stool, and then another slug before she cinches her belt.

She nods twice, getting ready to speak.

“Call me when the Chief says we can come over to her house one night, and I’ll show you how to search the cloud files. If I can scare up some time, I’ll help you.”

She smiles a little bit and grabs my arm again across the table, more gently this time, before she turns for the door.