The Girl She Used to Be

by David Cristofano

  I stare at myself in the mirror and I look like a middle-aged woman. My skin is pale and worn, and my hair is frizzy from the chemicals of color. I wash my hands and take handfuls of water and run it through my hair, an exercise in futility.

  “Nothing for me, thanks.”

  I exit the bathroom and go to Sean’s side, not because I need or want his protection but because he won’t let me go anywhere without him anyway. He puts his hand on the small of my back, in the same spot Jonathan had—but not in the same way. I stand next to him as we wait in line as if I were his daughter. I stare at the floor the entire time.

  When we return to the Explorer, I get in the back and slump down. To my surprise, Sean gets in the back with me. I wonder if he really is considering taking advantage of me or if he just enjoys our little backseat visits. He smiles at me and chucks a pack of Hostess Orange CupCakes into my lap. It’s sort of chivalrous, I suppose, his remembering my affinity for this particular junk food, but his offering, having come just a few minutes after I said I didn’t want anything, has him shifting slightly from arrogant to bumptious. As for his intentions? I do some simple math. Add the cupcakes to my hideous reflection in the rest room and the answer, obviously, is that Sean simply likes our backseat visits.

  He offers me a bottle of Aquafina. I’ve known Sean for less than two days and he’s already become predictable and dull. There are only so many times you can win a girl with trans fatty acids and distilled water.

  I daydream, for a moment, of cannolis.

  Sean opens up a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos, grabs a massive handful, and shoves them in his mouth. He crunches so loudly it actually hurts my ears.

  I say, “You know those things are loaded full of MSG?” He shrugs. “Or do you eat them to fend off the ladies? Because believe me, after a bag of those, your breath will be a far greater defense than your wedding ba—”

  “Tell me the truth,” he interrupts, “have you been duping WITSEC into relocating you because you’re bored or scared?” He pauses, then adds, “Or because you want to live off the subsistence checks?”

  I play with the wrapper of my cupcakes. “You can’t be serious.” My response is so lackluster I don’t even convince myself.

  “Because I’ve got to tell you, Michelle, you—”

  “Oh, geez, we’re sticking with the Michelle thing?”

  He waves a chip at me like a switchblade. “I’m not using your real name outside of a federal facility. It’s against regulations.” Another handful of Doritos goes in.

  “Then call me by some other name. Give me a nickname.”

  He looks at my hair, slows his chewing, and says, “Okay… Spike.” He licks his molars. “C’mon, it’s the subsistence checks, isn’t it?”

  “Look, over the years I’ve talked to enough people involved in the program to know it’s possible to rip off the government left and right, but I’m not about that.”

  He studies me for a moment, then nods, apparently believing me. I’m pretty sure I was telling the truth.

  Sean takes a big drink. “I had this one guy who’d actually been relocated more than you. Guy was a real piece of work, a lazy slob, wouldn’t pick his nose if the government didn’t do it for him. Well, he got, just as you have, three months of subsistence checks while securing a new job in his new location. And every time he got near the eleventh week, he’d receive some mysterious call or letter—nothing we could ever verify—that sent him into a panic and we’d end up moving the guy again.”

  I swallow. “Huh. What a loser.”

  “One time he got a bunch of credit cards under his new ID, most of which were furnished by banks working with WITSEC, and he maxed all of them out at strip clubs and dive bars.”

  “Let me guess. He ran out of credit and suddenly asked to be relocated.”

  “You got it. The government made him disappear along with all of his debt. He started over from scratch.”

  I smirk. “I’m on the flip side of that coin. The government took from my parents and me.”

  “How?” he asks, looking deeper into his bag of chips.

  “Well, for starters, the house my folks had in New Jersey was worth quite a bit. Not to mention the savings and investments my parents had. All gone.”

  “It’s true that you can’t keep profit from the sale of a home if you’re in the program.” He says this like it was an idea he came up with on his own.

  There are so many things you assume you should accept, or are told to accept, in the program—and surrendering your assets is one of them. I never understood it, merely allowed it to be a de facto experience in my wayfaring from alias to alias. I learned the value in not accumulating emotional investments, so the monetary type acquired the same fate. As a robot built by the government, I was not programmed to ask the obvious question:

  “Why?”

  Sean mulls it over. “It’s complicated. But to begin with, the person in WITSEC is no longer the person who owned the house. I mean, names don’t match, Social Security numbers don’t match. It’s a real legal mess. And even if it can be worked out—as it has in a very few rare cases—it might no—”

  “Very few and rare mean the same thing.”

  He speaks louder. “Even if it can be worked out, there is now a tie between your former life and current life. People can trace checks and legal documents. Even if you have the money turned over to a friend or family member, all you’re really doing is potentially putting those people in danger.”

  Sean has officially become a government dweeb in my mind. He seems to have no grasp on what is at stake—or no longer at stake—when one enters the program. He has been drained of empathy and filled with indifference. Where is the man who supposedly cared so heartily for abused and mistreated kids?

  I toss my cupcakes aside, open my water, and take a drink. I turn and watch a young man buckle his little girl into her car seat and give her a kiss. She smiles back and kicks her legs. I am tired of living a vicarious family life through the brief shopping events of mini-mart patrons.

  I so long for the simplicity of those moments everyone takes for granted; how I would cherish a smile from a child of my own. What do I get? Sean giving me textbook examples of criminals past, dishing out another way-it-is rendition of Welcome to WITSEC, points delivered as static and sterile as a course in criminal procedure. All this takes a toll on what remains of the threshold of my composure. I try to refrain, to shelter my frustration—and to shelter Sean, really. But the cab of this car is awfully freaking small.

  So everything harbored begins to leak and slowly pour out, the first droplets of magma down the volcano’s side.

  “The money isn’t even the real issue, Sean; it’s the predetermined hopelessness. I mean, what’s the point in ever wanting to establish roots, to buy a home and build a family, when it could all be eradicated one afternoon on the walk back from the Dairy Queen? Who wants that?”

  He looks at me for a second and shrugs.

  His vague apathy begs me to give him some more, but now my tenor has progressed and my voice is a little stronger—the inevitable eruption, you see. “It’s ridiculous. These people, especially the innocent people, risk their lives for the feds. They give up their careers, their families, their dreams—all so the feds can try and make a case. Meanwhile, if Justice comes up short on evidence or something gets thrown out of court on a technicality, the criminals are free, if they’re not out on parole anyway, while the people in Witness Protection are running for the rest of their lives. Seriously, who’s really being sentenced here?”

  Sean stops looking at me and his chewing is accelerating and he starts tapping his foot.

  I nudge his knee to get his attention. “What kind of deal is this?”

  “It’s better than death.”

  Boom.

  I smack the bag out of his hands and chips fly all the way to the dashboard. “You callous dick! The Department of Justice did not give my folks all the information. My parents would never h
ave done this if they knew how things really worked. You played us and threw us into the wind!”

  “Don’t yell at me. I had nothing to do with your parents!”

  “Who did, Sean? Who is responsible? No one wants to take responsibility!”

  Sean turns his body to me, faces me square, and unleashes. “You want to know, huh? You want to know who is responsible?”

  “Damn straight!”

  “You are! You caused all the misery you’ve had these past years! You think we don’t know what happened back when you were in high school? It’s all in your file, every bit of it. You had a bitter argument with your parents about a boy you wanted to date. Your folks thought it was a bad idea and they kept you from seeing him, didn’t they?”

  I sit back. Tears fill my eyes and all I can do is watch as the pendulum slowly swings back in my direction.

  “And what did you do, huh?” he asks.

  I wipe my eyes. “Don’t do this.”

  “You figured you’d get even, didn’t you.”

  “Stop.”

  “You were going to fix your parents’ wagon once and for all. You were so smart. Who were they to tell you what you could do with your life?”

  I look up at him and a few tears drop from my eyes to my lap. “Please, stop.”

  “You figured you’d teach them a lesson they’d never forget, yeah?”

  “Sean…” I start to sob.

  “Well, you succeeded. Storming out of your house and calling the local paper and telling them how there was a family of Bovaro witnesses living in a neighboring community? Sheer brilliance.”

  Reliving this moment—an action I rarely allow myself to conduct—along with Sean’s jarring critique of my decisions, sends an upward heat through my head and chest. Like driving through a bad neighborhood, I want to speed through it, hit all the green lights, arrive safely in a reposeful future. But the outcome is inevitable: I’m destined to break down on the bleakest, most dangerous block.

  “I bet your folks were willing to let you date whomever you wanted after that, right?” He pauses and scratches his chin. “Hmmm, wait. I guess you never got the chance to find out. Refresh my memory. How long after the paper ran that story were your parents murdered?”

  My face is covered in saliva and mucus and tears. I look up at Sean, but he is a blur—a cruel, indomitable blur. “I have no doubt… that you are a tough marshal, Sean. If that’s what you’re trying to pro—”

  “How long?”

  I shrivel. Everything about who I am, whoever I am, is fading to black, and Sean is delivering the darkness. I answer, “Twenty-nine hours.”

  Sean finally gets around to brushing the crumbs from his clothes and he seems to be taking his time. I am staring at the floor but I can see in my peripheral vision that he keeps grabbing short glances of me. He hands me a handkerchief, which I accept, and I can’t help wondering how many weepy women and children have dried their faces with this cloth. It must be part of the U.S. Deputy Marshal’s official uniform.

  I wipe my face, my eyes, my nose—and the thing is saturated. I do not hand it back.

  After catching my breath I say, “You… are a bastard.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says immediately. “I was out of line.”

  “Well,” I say after a moment, “it was all true. I might as well have pulled the trigger myself.” I play with the stitching on the handkerchief. “My folks were at the A&P buying a few things for our imminent trip to yet another town.” I sigh. “We almost made it.” I gaze out the window and focus on nothing. “Worst of all, my parents are buried in a town far from their family, with some names no one would ever recognize on their gravestones. They weren’t buried on the plot reserved for them by generations of McCartneys dating back to the Civil War. I would have to fly hours to put flowers on my parents’ grave—and we both know I won’t be flying anywhere anyway.”

  “It’s a bad story. Sorry I brought it up.”

  And so it ends. If divorce could possess a specific sound, its fading resonance would be lingering in the cab of our vehicle. This unrecoverable moment is like the first bullet added to a magazine, waiting for that future argument when no other thing can be said to trump or wound a loved one, and the gun is drawn and the bullet is fired and resentment and anger and distrust emerge as the only available emotions, and they stick in the air like sulfur, with everyone gasping.

  We stare ahead, entranced by the backs of the headrests, listening to each other swallow. And as the minutes pass, the margin of whatever acceptable silence remained has vanished.

  I finally look at him and he tries to smile a little, but the effort is obvious. “You know,” I say, “you really need to work on your bedside manner. Don’t they have classes for that?”

  He sighs with relief. “It’s, uh… harder than you think. The Marshals Service is a rare group of individuals. I mean, the motto is Justice, Integrity, Service. They didn’t even think to put protect in there. You’ve got to understand that most of us are folks sent out to bring in criminals who have escaped from prison or jumped bail, so we already despise the people we’re pursuing. Then, if you become a WITSEC inspector, well… then the odds are you’re protecting some dirtbag terrorist or mafioso, which doesn’t exactly instill compassion among folks in the Service, you know what I mean?”

  I nod, though this is hardly my problem.

  “These criminals,” he adds, “they’re just horrible. And such a bunch of whiners, always complaining. But we have to keep them happy, and that rubs the marshals the wrong way.”

  “No one ever kept me happy.”

  “According to your file, we tried. Kept moving you to places we thought you’d like, got you jobs we thought you’d thrive in.”

  I sniffle a little. “What were the mob guys getting?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  He looks at me and can tell I’m serious. What he probably doesn’t know is that I’m going to use all of this for future negotiations.

  “Uh,” he says, looking around the vehicle.

  “What, you think I’m with Internal Affairs? For the love of Pete.”

  He lowers his voice anyway. “For starters, they get a lot of money. I mean, we draw the line, but we’ll give them lump sums for setting up businesses or… even just spending cash.”

  I open my eyes a bit. “How big?”

  “Like, five or six figures big.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “We’ve done worse. We actually put one guy’s wife and his girlfriend into the program—and his wife had no idea what was going on.” My response is a slack jaw. “You can see why the marshals have no room for compassion.”

  I shake off my shock and pick up where I left off. “That’s my point, really. I am not a terrorist or mafioso. I’m just an innocent girl.”

  Sean shrugs.

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  He reaches for the door handle. “It’s not up to me, Spike.” He gets out, walks around the car, opens the driver’s door, and brushes the Doritos off the seat. “My job is to get you from point A to point B in one piece.” He sits down but turns around to face me. “The Justice Department really isn’t supposed to support you your whole life, you know. WITSEC is here to get you started, get you situated in a new town with a new job. After that, you’re supposed to be on your own—unless there’s trouble.”

  I’ve heard this before. He’s definitely taken the class on tripe.

  “Yes,” I say, rubbing my sore eyes, “but there’s nobody in those new places to bring security and reassurance all those times I hear a noise in the middle of the night, or to help me explain my past to questioning neighbors, or to help calm my fears when I’m reluctant to turn the ignition of my car.”

  “It’s an imperfect system, but it’s all there is.”

  I look out the window as a car pulls in next to us and a young couple gets out, holds hands, and walks into the convenience store.

  The worst part,
the piece the feds can never correct, is the unbelievable loneliness. I consider asking Sean if he was ever ignored when he attended elementary school, but I can tell by his swagger that the bastard probably had a hundred friends his entire life, king of his freaking fraternity and whatnot.

  My elementary school days were lousy even before WITSEC. I remember sitting at lunch in first grade and no one would sit with me, like everyone already had friends and there wasn’t any room for one more. Not that anyone really picked on me; they just acted as though I wasn’t there. My mom would put little notes in my lunch, like, “I’m thinking of you, kiddo” or “I have a surprise for you when you get home” and stuff like that. Those notes were the only thing that kept me from crying every day while I ate my bologna sandwich off in a corner of the cafeteria. And the impossible thing to convey to the people assigning me a new life is that that’s what it’s like for me every day. It never changes. I just move on to the next place where I will once again not know anybody and not feel accepted. I am still six years old, having never really learned how to make and keep friends or how to negotiate in a relationship or even how to open up—because I’m not allowed to open up.

  Two months ago, while I was showering, I slipped my hand under my breast and I was certain I felt a lump. I panicked. I got out of the shower still covered in soap and reached for the phone. I needed a mother, a sister, a friend. Who was I supposed to call, Farquar? There was no one. No one. I just stared at the phone and wept.

  Sean can tell he’s lost me, takes in a breath like he’s going to ask another question or provide some great insight, but, alas, it becomes a great exhale of nothingness.

  “You know,” I say, watching as the young couple hops back into their car and speeds away, “I don’t even care anymore. Just take me somewhere and dump me. No matter what place you take me to, I’ve been there before.”

  Sean tries to get me to look at him, like all of a sudden he’s testing out a little compassion. I got news for him: He should attend the class first.

  I drift down in the seat, close my eyes, and feel the early pangs of a headache. “Point B, Sean. Just take me to point B.”