The room I’m sitting in is pale green, almost white. A door with a thick glass window. Like in the movies, there’s a camera in the corner of the room. I think, absurdly, about waving at it.
There’s a metal table. (Probably issued from a cop movie as well.)
“What’s so funny?” asks the younger, taller cop with no moustache.
I shake my head, cough.
He asks me, again, if I know Emily Rose Reese.
“I do,” I say, although that’s not Emily Rose Reese, the girl they’re asking about. Emily Rose Reese is the weird girl I barely remember talking to last year. A blur of annoying quips and thick brown hair, lots and lots of thick brown hair, and glasses. Em.
The moustache says again, “So you do know Emily Rose Reese?”
I don’t know Emily Rose Reese. Em. I think of the yellow scarf, capillaries of red breaking through egg yolk. The red of her eyes as the sun pierced through the irises.
“How did you meet Ms. Reese?”
“There’s a kennel number on the fridge,” I say.
“Pardon me?” says the moustache.
“It’s not for my lawyer. It’s for my dog. Someone should get him,” I say, and it occurs to me for the first time that we are not in the movies. This is really happening.
I imagine her crying and shaking, showing off the bruises and scratches on her neck, wincing theatrically when people come closer to have a look. I imagine someone asking if it’s okay to take a picture, a no-nonsense but friendly female cop squatting beside her, telling her that she’s being very, very brave for doing this. And she’s looking up at the female cop as she says in the tiniest voice, You think so?
I know so, the female cop says, and her face is complicated; it shows admiration (for Emily Rose Reese) and disgust (for me) – kindness and toughness all at the same time, all needed to express the proper kind of support for the victim.
Later on, Emily Rose Reese will open her legs, allowing people in white coats to insert swabs into her and take samples to keep in red bags with black biohazard signs against red squares. I want them to be gentle with her, those people, to scrape and pinch and whatever else they need to do but only as much as necessary. I suppose I should wish her harm, someone ripping open her cervix in some horrible accident (an earthquake could cause a slip of the hand), but I don’t.
I realize now that I was Emily’s, Em’s – Em; she’s my Em – mysterious summer project. It’s comforting to know that I was indeed that important to her if only for a little while. But then not just for a little while, really. This, what’s happening right now, this is bonding. This is for life, her accusation and my supposed crime. I will always be the perpetrator, from now on, and she will always be the victim. We will be forever linked in the eyes of the law and the rest of the world. Suddenly the name Bride doesn’t seem so out of place anymore because this union of ours is a marriage; it was for better and now it’s for worse, and nothing can do us part except, of course, death.
I think of Em’s beatific smile from this morning, the way her eyes softened as if we were sharing a secret, the secret that would allow us to connect beyond what was happening. A secret between secretly married people.
I’ve only spent a few days with her and only got a glimpse of the possibility of being with someone like me or, rather, someone who could understand me. Sitting here in this room, this is the only thing I truly miss, her companionship. Not having her here is the biggest source of my distress.
I doze off briefly in a zigzag of non-dreams, colours and electric sand running through my body. I’m aware of where I am and where I’m not.
32
MY FIRST COURT DATE HAPPENS ONE MONTH AFTER MY arrest and bail. My conditions are: no communication with the victim, no weapons, no leaving the city. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was expecting more – having to wear an electronic bracelet on my ankle like a drunk celebrity, getting a camera installed in my bedroom, Net Nanny preventing me from perverting my mind with porn.
Jason comes over every two to three days to torture me with stories about his pathetic dating life. A lot of it happens online. On his desktop, he has folders of links to girls he’s approached or is planning to approach: Yes Girls, Maybe Girls and No! (girls who rejected him, but whom he tells himself he didn’t want to get with in the first place).
“The crème de la crème,” he says, clicking the mouse to close the folders.
“Who fucking says that? Crème de la crème?”
He blinks at me. I’ve offended him. Good.
There’s construction being done on my building. New windows being installed. I fantasize about Jason leaving my house and a glass panel falling down from a great height, cutting his head off.
I wave for him to go on. “Don’t sulk.”
“Okay. Okay. ACAs. I just clean up there. They’ve got these eyes,” Jason’s manicured eyebrows form into a worry arch. “Whether they’re about to cry or not, they always look like this. You should go. They’re really eager to please, it’s astonishing. The older ones especially.”
“Who?”
“ACAs. Adult Children of Alcoholics. The meetings I go to.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Is it?” he says. He looks at me, the eyebrows rearranged on his face, one raised.
“Right,” I say. I’m the one who’s at home awaiting trial for assaulting a young, vulnerable woman.
“Fuck. I miss that bitch so much sometimes,” he sighs.
I pat him on the back. The bitch, Candi of the messy tattoos, has gotten back together with her filmmaker boyfriend. They’re now making a documentary about the difficult lives of public relations professionals. Jason said they interviewed Gloria.
(On the day of the interview, Gloria was running on three hours of sleep and had a meltdown in front of the camera. The night before, one of her visiting clients, a broken-nosed actor known for playing bad-boy love interests in rom-coms, called her before midnight, high on coke. He wanted to jam and had forgotten his guitar, so Gloria had to locate the owner of a music store that carried his favourite brand of a semi-acoustic. She managed to get the guitar! I can’t say I didn’t feel impressed and proud when Jason told me about it.)
“Maybe it’s a mommy thing for you? With these children of alcoholics?” I say. But I’ve lost him. He’s back to talking about Candi. How she betrayed him, how she had terrible taste in TV shows, how her new boyfriend will have to put up with her poor hygiene – I didn’t want to pry but I wanted to ask about that; I didn’t ask – and how, how, how –
He can’t possibly think that this is interesting. He’s torturing me because he can. There must be a sense of retribution in being in charge of the person who has always made him feel insecure, to be my surety, to have that power over me.
I never confront him about his reasons for agreeing to bail me out, but I suppose I’m grateful. It really doesn’t matter.
In the past few weeks since my arrest, I’ve resigned myself to various humiliations, big and small. The big ones are losing my job, not being able to leave Canada – where I rarely feel at home anyway; not that I feel at home anywhere, really – having to put the beach house up for sale to pay for my legal fees, putting Dog in the kennel and getting an email from Gloria suggesting that I get in touch with Celia Stone from Personality magazine to do an interview “to help your cause!!!”