Bunny devoted herself to taking care of me in a way I might not have expected. The next morning, she showed up in my room. They had installed me in the Madame Butterfly Suicide Sex Suite, a place teeming with memories of Anthony, so that any surface my mind attempted to land on became a knife that cut me. She was carrying a tray: peanut butter toast, a bruised banana, and a shot glass holding a bug-eaten rose from their front yard. I had been worried after the way I drunkenly insulted Ray that I would not be allowed to stay with them, but Bunny had told me he was extremely sorry and embarrassed about it, and indeed Ray himself had made a speech to that effect immediately upon my entering their home, and at the end had even gotten down on one knee and grasped my hands. “I am determined,” he said, “to become a better man.” I looked at him, understanding that he was already very drunk. The bruising on his cheeks was gone now, I had been in the hospital for so long, but there was a hot pink seam at his hairline that I couldn’t stop looking at. Really, all things considered, he did look much better, and it was amazing how completely the bags under his eyes were gone. He looked ten years younger. With his eyes open, you could no longer see where the stitches had been because they were right in the fold, but every time he blinked, you could see the hot red line where they were still healing. I did not believe he would become a better man, but I was very grateful he was letting me stay in his house. When I thought of the things I had said to him, especially about Allison, I felt like a dog that had pooped indoors.
“Oh my god,” I said, gesturing at the tray. “You’re so Judy!”
“Well, you deserve it. I’m not going into work today,” Bunny told me as I ate my peanut butter toast. She had thrown herself across the foot of the bed, having settled me with my tray, and was now examining her toes.
“I know I’m not allowed to mourn,” Bunny said. “But I—”
“For Ann Marie?”
“Yeah. I just, you know, and I never, I just can’t—” Her words were like a car that wouldn’t start, an engine that refused to turn over into a full sentence.
“I know,” I said. “Bunny, I know.” What had happened was so big, and we were so used to considering our lives as trivial. We almost didn’t know how to approach it. The largeness of what had happened, of what we had done.
“It was an accident,” Bunny said, her chin crumpling. “I never meant. I never, ever, ever meant to—”
“Of course you didn’t,” I said. “I know that.”
“I loved her. I mean, I hated her, but I also loved her.”
Those two girls growing up in that red sandbox. Those two ponytailed heads turning at the sound of the ice-cream truck. Ann Marie’s round ugly-cute face in goggles as they stared at each other underwater. They had braided each other’s hair. They had slept in the same sleeping bag. Ann Marie had known Allison, could remember meals Allison used to cook. She knew how their living room used to look before Ray redid it.
“And then sometimes,” Bunny said, “sometimes I’m just mad at her. Please don’t ever tell anyone this because it’s so bad that I even think these things, but like, of course Ann Marie would find the ultimate way to ruin my life with her crazy-fragile brain tissue. Like, how dare you die and pin all of this on me, and I even picture her, like, laughing in heaven or whatever. She was always so on about heaven. Who was getting in and who wasn’t. Who God loved and who he didn’t. And then I thought I saw her. At the Rite Aid.”
“What?”
“I just fully hallucinated that this other girl was her! She was in the skin-care aisle, and I was so convinced it was Ann Marie that I was, like, creepily walking up behind her, about to tap her on the shoulder. And I just thought, oh thank god, it’s all been a big mistake.” She stared at me. “Am I going insane? How could I think that? How could my mind—and I just keep remembering stuff. Stuff we did as kids. Like we loved the game Concentrate. Do you remember that game?”
“No,” I said.
“It was a really weird game, I don’t even know how we learned it, but it was like a rhyming game? Where you were supposed to be hypnotizing the person and kind of simulating these experiences for them? You would hammer on their back with your fists and say, ‘Concentrate, Concentrate, People are dying, Babies are crying, Concentrate.’ ”
“I have never heard of this game in my life.”
“I swear, it’s a thing,” Bunny said. “Lots of girls played it. Anyway, you pretended to crack an egg on the person’s head, and then you would pretend to stab them in the back and push them off a building, and they were supposed to imagine themselves dying and tell you what color they saw.”
“This is insane.”
“I know. Little girls are insane.”
We sat there and Bunny didn’t say more.
“What’s going on with Eric?” I asked, later when we were out by the pool. I had taken a shower in her dad’s ultra-luxury steam shower, and we had made cinnamon rolls from the can, and I was feeling woozy but good from the sugar.
“Well, we’re definitely having sex.”
“Shut the front door!” I said. I had not been prepared for this. I had stupidly been in the hospital and out of touch, unable to protect her or at least try to sway her from driving just straight into the rocks.
“Well?” I said. “How is it?”
“I mean, good?”
“How did it happen? You have to give me the entire scene. Go.”
“Well. One day, I guess like ten days ago, after our practice, he asked what I was doing, and I said, avoiding going home for as long as possible, and he asked if I wanted to come see his new apartment, because he just moved to Hermosa Beach. So I was like, sure. So he drove us there, and he asked a bunch of questions about my dad, and was he super strict, and I was like, no, he doesn’t know half of what I do, I don’t even have a curfew, I’ve stayed out all night before and he’s never even noticed. And he’s like, cool, cool. So then we go to his apartment.”
“What was his apartment like?”
“Oh, it was like boy stuff, like bro-y, he had a cheap leather couch from IKEA, but then no rug or coffee table or other stuff to make it look less sad. He did have a cat, though, which somehow made me feel safe. It’s an orange tabby named Mayonnaise.”
“That’s cute,” I said. I was already feeling yucky about this story and she hadn’t even gotten to the juicy parts, but I was trying to be supportive and nonjudgmental. Stay focused on the cat.
“So he made us drinks, Cactus Coolers and tequila, which is yummy, turns out. And we were just being silly. I don’t know, I remember laughing a lot, but I guess I got pretty hammered, which is kind of embarrassing, and then I don’t have any memories at all.”
“Wait—what?”
“But in a way, I’m kind of glad because I got it over with and I didn’t have to be all awkward.”
“So wait, you had sex?”
“I guess so, I woke up in the morning totally naked with him on top of me, like inside me, and I leapt out of bed and I was scrambling around, out of my mind, like crying and screaming and trying to hide in the bathroom.” She was laughing as she told me this, making fun of herself. “Because I had no idea what was going on. But then he explained it to me, how I was the one who kissed him, how I gave him this whole speech about how I wanted him to be the one to take my virginity and then I burped in his face, which is embarrassing, but I was also like, that sounds about right.”
“So were you upset?” I began rubbing at my knees where the sunscreen was refusing to soak in.
“I mean, no. I mean, like, yes, obviously, because also I was hungover so I felt like I was dying and I spent the rest of the day throwing up and then that was the day you got attacked, and it honestly felt like the world was ending. But we’ve done it since then. So, like, I have memories. That was important to me. Because I feel like it’s not really your virginity if you can’t remember it.”
“Right,” I said. In a way, I wasn’t sure how to proceed, but honesty seemed like a good base layer. “So that was date rape.”
“But does it really count as date rape if I wanted it to happen?”
“Admitted gray area,” I said. “But it sounds like in the morning you did not want to have sex, and, like, he was having sex with your sleeping, passed-out body, which is gross and wrong.”
“Please don’t ruin this for me,” she said.
“I’m not trying to ruin it! If you’re into it, then I’m fully supportive, I just want to advocate for your boundaries.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Noted.”
“Well, do you enjoy it? I mean, is the sex good?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“Do you cum?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“If you’re not sure, then you’re not cumming.”
“It’s just so much going on, I mean, I certainly feel a building to something and then a kind of frenzy?”
“But is it like when you masturbate? Are you like, nrrrr?” I rolled my eyes up in my head and faked a small seizure.
“No. Definitely not. But it’s still pretty painful so I’m not sure if that maybe has something to do with it.”
One of the simplicities of being male was always definitely knowing whether or not I had orgasmed, so I found her answers maddening. I had chosen much more bizarre and, on paper, bad sexual partners, but I had always had my own erection as a kind of guide, a Virgil, if you will, to lead me through the inferno. And I had been occasionally freaked out by where it led me, but there was no faking it.
Women, however, had drunk so very deeply of the cultural Kool-Aid that they couldn’t even figure out if they were cumming. Were they moaning right? Did their tits look good? How were they supposed to let go, get carried away? They were in deepest drag and they didn’t even seem to know it. I felt bad for Bunny but also ill-suited to help, and a little bit grossed out. It just seemed unnatural to me. Not a man and a woman having sex, although that wasn’t my favorite thing to picture, but someone not understanding or being able to detect their own sexual pleasure. It was like someone confessing they liked eating soap and dirt, that they couldn’t tell what was food and what was not food.
“But isn’t the pain,” I said, trying to figure it out, “like, at first it hurts, and then it gets hot and it stops hurting?”
“No,” she said, “definitely not, it hurts the whole way through.”
“Like, pardon me if this is too intimate, but are you really dry or something?”
“I have nothing to compare it to,” she said.
“Has he said anything?”
“He said I’m really tight, which is a compliment, right?”
“Yeah, but if it’s causing you active pain, then not so much.”
She took off her sunglasses and sat up on her lounger then, and she looked more sad than I had ever seen her, even after Ryan Brassard told everyone she had bitten his ear. “But it’s supposed to hurt! That’s like the first thing anyone tells a girl about sex is that it’s gonna hurt and she’s gonna bleed, but no one ever tells you when it will stop being like that. I don’t even care,” she said, “I would keep doing it except—”
She broke off and there was a wet sound in her voice like tears were coming, but then none came. She put her sunglasses back on and sat perfectly still, like she was killing someone far away with her mind.
“What is it?”
“He has a girlfriend,” she said with a tremendous exhale. Sometimes I marveled at the sheer size of her lungs. They must be the size of grocery bags in her chest. “Which I knew! And I thought I didn’t care, but obviously I do.”
“Well,” I said, searching for a bright side. After all, my boyfriend had a fucking wife.
“And I told myself I was fine with it, but he teases me about it. He’ll be on the phone with her and start fingering me and keep talking to her, and when I pull away or get mad, he’s like, ‘Don’t get all butt hurt.’ Or he will make fun of me for being jealous. He says I’m irrational, he calls me his irrational little bull.”
I hesitated, because calling Bunny an irrational little bull was both apt and kind of cute, but these were all still giant red flags, just waving in the lusty breeze. “I don’t like this, Bunny. It’s one thing to have a girlfriend but to call her in front of you and then try to finger you—that’s power-tripping.”
“I think he thinks he’s just being funny,” she said. “He says if he didn’t know better he’d fall in love with me.”
“What is that supposed to even mean?”
“I have no idea,” Bunny said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a compliment.”
“That’s the shadiest compliment I’ve ever heard.”
“I don’t know,” she said, and shrugged. It struck me as perverse, a grown man treating such a majestic creature as Bunny Lampert this way. With her large hands and soft little titties, she was a Wagnerian fantasy of a milkmaid, a baby Valkyrie. Was Eric insane? Did he stomp on flowers and piss on kittens?
“Fuck that boy,” I said.
She smiled. “Indeed, I already have.”
“Walk on him in your heels, grind his face into the mud, honey. That boy is trash.”
“You are sweet to me,” she said, and picked up my hand, kissed my wrist. “But I don’t think I’m the kind of girl who is going to get Prince Charming.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” I said.
“Well, Michael, I’m a fucking murderer.”
“No, you’re not,” I said, before I could think about it.
“But I am,” she said, with such sureness I was terrified.
Because I was living with Ray and Bunny, I had front-row seats for everything that came next. We did not attend Ann Marie’s funeral; Ray thought it would be offensive, and his lawyer advised against it. I was there when his lawyer, a man named Swanson, whose lips were too red and who wore truly unattractive glasses, little beady grandma wire-frame dealies that made him look ten years older than he was, swept into the house at ten o’clock at night, also drunk, demanding that Ray pour him a scotch and then getting angry at the quality of the scotch (“Swanson, I don’t drink scotch! Forgive me, this was a gift from a client, blame him, not me!”), and told us that Ms. Harriet had called the DA and was demanding murder charges.
“There’s no way,” Ray said. “It’s involuntary manslaughter at the most, which you yourself said was a wobbler. Misdemeanor manslaughter. That’s the most they’ll do.”
“Ray, I’m telling you that the DA was making noise about going for second degree murder.” I was beginning to understand the dynamic between Ray and Swanson. They were like frat boys, even though neither of them had probably ever been in a fraternity. Maybe Swanson had, but there was deep acne scarring on his cheeks and he was a pedant through and through, so I doubted it. The man had no style, no swagger, he’d been pretending to be forty his whole life and now he had finally grown into it. But together they were making up for the youths they’d never had, or something along those lines.
“How? How would that ever fucking fly?”
“He’s saying she has a violent past. Some incident where she bit a kid.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Ray turned to us, the silent peanut gallery curled up under a fake-fur throw on the couch. “You never bit anybody, did you?”
“Uhh…” Bunny said. “Well, it was like—”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Ray said.
“I’m not a criminal defense attorney,” Swanson said. “Ray! I can’t take this to trial, you know I’m not a trial lawyer. We’ve gotta get you somebody else.”
“It has to be you,” Ray said. “I want you. You’re the only one I trust.”
“I know a great guy,” Swanson said, sucking down the rest of his poor-quality scotch. “His name is Remi, and he’s the best, he can sit in, and—”
“I don’t want Remi, I want fucking Swanson! Because you’re an animal, Swan! You’re a fucking dirty, cheating, little animal and I want you in my court.” The two men embraced. Ray was almost crying. Bunny was frantically chewing her nails.
“We’ll see what happens,” Swanson said. “Who knows. Some of those witness accounts, I mean, we could go in there and argue mutual combat.”
“But she didn’t hit me back,” Bunny said. Both men looked annoyed with her for interrupting.
“I thought you couldn’t remember anything,” Ray said in a singsong parody of her voice.
“Maybe she did hit you back, you hit her, you didn’t know your own strength, it was a hell of a punch and then she fell just the right way. These things happen. They happen all the time.”
“But that’s not what happened,” Bunny said.
“It’s not about what happened,” Swanson said, waving his glass of scotch around. “There was no video footage. We have nothing but your word, a dead girl, and a bunch of eyewitness accounts that vary wildly.”
“They vary?” I asked. This was the first I had heard of this. Bunny crossed her arms over her chest, pushed air through her nose.
“They vary substantially,” Swanson said, turning to me, warmed by a new audience. “We have some people claiming the punching went on and on, Bunny was like a wild dog, no one could get her off the girl. We have some people claiming it happened in a flash, was like a scuffle, they became aware of it and it was over before they could look. No one agrees how many punches, no one agrees who started it, everyone agrees Ann Marie was running her mouth about that gay kid.”
“He’s the gay kid,” Ray said, gesturing at me.
“Oh, sorry,” Swanson said. “But you know what I mean.”
“Do you think it would make any difference that I was later attacked?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Swanson said.
“Well, the girl who Bunny hit, her boyfriend and his friends jumped me. I was in the hospital for a little over a week.”
“No, no,” Swanson said, “I think that might look bad, make Bunny look even more guilty. Everyone is going to forgive the grieving boyfriend for getting wild after his girlfriend kicks the bucket, I mean, come on. You got any food around here, Ray?”
I felt like I’d been hit in the head, dizzy and blind. Everyone is going to forgive the grieving boyfriend for getting wild after his girlfriend kicks the bucket.
It was like getting my heart broken, somehow. That what happened to me could be framed that way, casually, to my face, in a house with Oriental carpets and marble.
Later, in her room, Bunny and I did face masks.
“It feels like fire ants are crawling all over my skin,” I said.
“It feels like my skin is literally burning completely off.”
“Oh, I love it,” I said.
“The pain is how you know it’s working.”
We were quiet. Skin care was a bond between us because both of us longed to be beautiful, even as we feared we were not and could never be, even as we were suspicious of the urge to be beautiful in the first place. What was that power? You were supposed not to want it, not to crave it, not to pursue it. Beauty was just supposed to land on you like a butterfly, showing the world that you were special, worthy of love, attended by magical birds who folded your laundry. But here we were, trying to burn our skin off for that.
I could tell she was upset. How could she not be? The possibility of a trial, homicide charges. “Why…” I began, not certain what I was going to ask until I said it, “do you think that Ann Marie’s boyfriend jumped me? I always assumed it was because I was gay, but maybe it was because I was your friend, and it was more because of Ann Marie.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe because he was afraid of being seen as beating up a girl? So he couldn’t beat me up directly?”
“Or he was afraid you’d overpower him.”
“Or it was Jason who made it all happen and it was because you’re gay.”
“Or it’s all of those things.”
“Do you ever get freaked out because you do things without planning them?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said.
“I mean, like, sometimes I’ll reach to get an apple off the counter, and then I’ll get freaked out because I didn’t plan to reach out and grab the apple. I just did it. And maybe as I’m doing it, I have a thought like, mmm, apple. But I didn’t plan it. And yet other stuff we do plan and then do on purpose, but it’s like a small, small percentage. At least for me. And I get freaked out about that, and I get afraid that basically I’m sleeping even while I’m awake.”
“I know exactly what you are talking about,” I said. “And I feel exactly the same way.”
And then we washed our faces and went to bed.
I texted Anthony: So did you really break up with me at the hospital while I was totally out of it?
He didn’t text me back for three days.
Then he texted: No, I don’t remember breaking up with you per se, but I feel very guilty because I do think we should stop seeing each other.
I didn’t write back. I didn’t want to seem weak by showing him my anger or my hurt. Yet I mentally composed texts that I refused to send every hour of every day. I just feel ashamed, I imagined writing. Why? Don’t feel ashamed, he would say. For having such a coward and Cyprian man, such a stretched-out, gaping old asshole, as my first love. My rage was incoherent. I didn’t even know what I wanted from him exactly. Probably for him to be someone else, and for me to be someone else, and for the situation to be an entirely different situation than it was. Probably something along those lines.
Meanwhile, I was afraid to leave the house. I didn’t want to run into Jason or Aunt Deedee. Tyler and his friends had not been arrested or charged as far as I knew. I had gotten an unclear phone call from Principal Cardenas telling me to take as long as I needed before coming back to school, with no mention of any formal procedure for resuming my attendance, but I knew I was never going back. It wasn’t exactly that I was afraid they would jump me a second time. In a rational sense, I didn’t expect we would be playing Tom and Jerry, banging each other with hammers all over the town or something. But I did feel like if I caught sight of one of their faces without being braced for it, that I might lose my voice and never be able to speak again. Or perhaps go blind, or turn into a pillar of salt. If I saw them, even for an instant, I would lose the coherency of self, such as I still possessed it.
Aunt Deedee, in particular, was extremely miffed at me for moving out. I could not explain myself. I could not tell her that it was Jason, because I did not know for sure that it had been Jason. What if I were wrong? Or worse, what if I told her and she didn’t believe me? I could not afford these realities. And so I told her that Ray Lampert had insisted, that they had a spare bedroom with an actual closet, that it “just made sense.” And she let it happen because it made her life easier too, but she was still insulted. There she had gone, treating me like her own child, taking care of me like one of her own, and what did I do? Move in with a friend who had a pool, like I wasn’t part of her family at all, like she wasn’t the closest thing I had ever had to a mother. She had actually said that part. “I’ve been like a mother to you, Michael, and I suppose I would have expected a little bit of gratitude.”
Did she think I had forgotten my own mother? My real mother? And even if she had been trying to be a mother to me, shouldn’t she have done a better job? Was teaching me how to apply eyeliner and telling me “no boys” really enough? I had paid for my own food and clothing since I was old enough to get a job. I was living in, literally, a closet. But I said, “I don’t mean to express a lack of gratitude. I am very grateful, Aunt Deedee, I really am. You know I love you.”
“I love you too,” she had gasped, and hugged me so tightly that I finally caught it, what was going on for her, what was at stake. She was upset because she knew she had failed me, and she could not, could not look at it. And I didn’t want to make her look at it either. She really had done her best. She really was trying very hard. It was not fun to be Aunt Deedee. In fact, it was terrible and bleak to be Aunt Deedee.
For whatever reason, in these bizarre, timeless weeks, Bunny decided she needed to teach me to drive. We were always together. She had stopped working for her father out of moral disgust more latently, and need to “take care of me” more patently, and there were only so many shows to binge-watch and only so many blueberry muffin mixes to bake (she loved blueberry muffin mix, she loved to eat the batter raw; I had to positively claw the bowl away from her to make sure any of them got baked). And so we went to the DMV and I got my permit, and then she would take me out driving. We drove only in parking lots, especially at first because her Jeep was a stick shift, and I was a slow learner. I would scream every time I stalled the car. This made Bunny laugh hysterically each time we lurched, and I would say, “Shut up, shut up, I can’t concentrate with you laughing like that!” and she would say, “How can you be so bad at something? I’ve never seen you be this bad at anything!”
The thing is, I was falling in love with Bunny again. She was so clumsy with artifice that she had no choice but to be absolutely and authentically herself, which gave me permission to be the same. And that had been part of it all along. That we were our truest selves when we were together.
That Christmas was a weirdly happy one. We didn’t get a tree or do any of that, but we did order in Chinese and have a movie marathon. I hadn’t gotten presents for Ray or Bunny, and I didn’t think there would be any gift exchange, but then on Christmas Eve, Ray suddenly pulled two wrapped boxes out of the closet.
“Wut,” Bunny said.
“You didn’t tell me we were doing presents!” I said.
“We’re not,” Ray said. “Weirdest thing. Found these up on the roof. Wrapped up just like this. I think they’re from Santa. He must have dropped them off early.”
He set a box in front of each of us, and we tore into the paper like little kids. I couldn’t imagine what was in a box this size, and then when I saw the packaging, that white packaging, I almost started crying. I was like one of those audience members sobbing after Oprah gave them a car.
MacBook Airs for both of us, silver and sleek and so expensive I didn’t want to touch it and get finger grease on it.
“To take to college,” Ray said proudly.
I had never known that a material possession could make me so happy, but my giddiness lasted through New Year’s.
Of course, I could not help but think about, almost constantly, what Bunny had done to Ann Marie, and how it was different or the same as what those boys had done to me. I found myself observing her hands, thinking about the heaviness of her bones, the densely packed muscles in her back, in her buttocks, in her thighs. “Like celery…just crunching,” Naomi had said. A mosaic of bone. Pulp. I could vaguely remember someone saying that in the deeper dream chambers of my hospital memories. His spleen is pretty pulpy.
But the difference was, at least to me, that Bunny had seen red. She had left herself, lost herself, in a kind of divine madness, almost like Heracles, who was driven mad by jealous Hera and tricked into killing his own wife and children. Madness personified gets onstage and brags: “Nor shall the ocean with its moaning waves, nor the earthquake, nor the thunderbolt with blast of agony be half so furious as the headlong rush I will make into the breast of Heracles.”
In such a model, madness and violence both are seen as a loss of control, and the essence of good behavior is defined as a maintenance of control. There are a thousand versions of the same philosophy, from studies showing hypotrophy of the frontal cortex in murderers to treatment protocols for domestic abuse that advise against the consumption of alcohol, lest the batterer “lose control.” (I wish I could have told them, drunk as my father was, he always seemed to know to hit my mother or the kids and never accidentally hit a cop.)
In some ways it made Bunny’s violence more terrifying, more otherworldly. I remembered Naomi, how stricken she seemed afterward: “That was some of the craziest shit I’ve ever seen.”
But the boys who had beaten me, pulped my spleen, cracked my ribs, had been laughing. They had been chewing gum. They were not in an ecstatic frenzy. They did not “know not what they did.” They were talking to each other like they always did. I remember one of them made fun of another one for being out of breath from kicking me. They were perfectly in control.
And for me, that made their behavior much worse somehow, though I was hard-pressed to articulate exactly how.
At root, I seemed to be upset about the existence of physical power at all. That violence is nothing but another kind of touching.
I was also confounded by the existence of Ray Lampert as a ready moral corollary. He, an overtly bad man, a man who cheated his neighbors, who committed frauds both large and small, who abused his wife, who was venal and petty and drunk, was universally revered, a valued member of the community, a city council member. And Bunny, by virtue of her actions on a single afternoon, but who was otherwise honest, kind, generous, and hardworking, had been cast out of our community, stigmatized, and mythologized as a specific kind of female evil. She was Lizzy Borden, she was Medea, she was some sort of Kali with the cunt of a cow. Was it any wonder I wanted to excuse her? To explain away what she had done?
But no matter how hard I tried, or how I contorted my mental world, I could not make what Bunny had done right. No one could argue it was right to do that to Ann Marie. Yet I could not stop loving Bunny. I could not stop being on her side. I would continue to love her, even as she horrified me. I would continue to love her because she was mine.
One night in mid-January, when I was fully asleep, Bunny came into my room.
“Sorry,” she said when she saw she had woken me. She already had my window halfway open. The window in the guest bedroom led out to a portion of angled roof, whereas her window opened onto empty air. “Go back to sleep.”
“Where are you going? To see Eric?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Sorry.”
I went back to sleep. But she was not gone for very long. It was only an hour or two later when I heard the window grating open again.
“You smell like fucking gas,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Why do you smell like that?”
“I splashed gas on my shoe when I was gassing up the Jeep,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”
And I did.
The cops came while we were eating breakfast. Cheap bagels, the kind that are too sweet and never toast correctly, slathered in cream cheese. There was a knock on the door, and when I answered they swarmed inside, sliding past me and filling the space, at least six or seven police officers and a gaggle of crime scene techs.
“We have a search warrant and a warrant for your arrest,” one of the officers told Bunny. “You’re charged with the second degree murder of Ann Marie Robertson. You’re also wanted for questioning regarding an act of arson at the construction project on 605 Grand Street. Please stand up and put your hands behind your back.”
“I’ll call your dad,” I said. “I’ll call Swanson.”
Bunny nodded. But she didn’t look scared. She looked somehow enlivened, bold, the way she did when she was on the volleyball court, about to slam a ball out of the sky on her new legs. As though she were proud of herself for the first time in a long time.