Gretchen mewled animal-like, honked into the tissue, heaved a few distraught, shuddering breaths, then felt she could speak again.
“After we had lunch,” she shuddered as she remembered it, “I, I helped him throw away all the containers, we had Thai food, and then...then I asked him to go behind an ambulance with me. Oh, Father...I could tell from the look in his eye he didn't want to. But he did. And then...then...we, we...oh, I know we're not even married, I know it's a sin. But we...we had intercourse there on the gravel behind the ambulance! With the nurses and patients and paramedics mere feet away! We could hear them chatting away as they passed, while we...we...” She pressed her lips to the mesh and whispered the details into the general vicinity of where she suspected his ear was located.
“Please! That's quite enough, thank you.”
“I didn't even know him, Father! I had just met him! And he seemed so nice! What is he going to think of me now?”
“Do you love him at least?”
“You might think it's impossible, but, yes, Father. I think I do.”
“That's not so bad then. It would have been worse if you had no feelings for him at all. So don't beat yourself up about that.”
“You mean...it's not a sin?”
“Certainly it's a sin, but there is a relativity to sins as well, you know.”
There was silence. A long uncomfortable silence. Finally, the priest's voice came through the mesh again: “Is that it? Is that the extent of your, your transgressions, shall we call them?”
Gretchen wailed anew.
“You mean crimes against God, don't you?”
“Not at all. Transgressions.” He spoke now with more confidence.
“A-as bad as all those things are, they're not even the worst of it. Perhaps this is the worst. It's certainly the most humiliating.”
He emitted a strange noise, as if his imagination was unable conjure up something more humiliating than the many horrid acts Gretchen had already committed. He seemed to shift uncomfortably on the other side of the divide; she didn't know if priests sat on a seat or what position they might be in. But she cleared her throat and forced herself to speak.
“No, this is the worst, Father.” She was barely able to get the words out, but she supposed that was better than reeling the words off without a care in the world. “I've always prided myself on having a moral compass, Father. I've been trying to find North, struggling to find North, desperate to find North, but it's, it's like the compass has been waterlogged or something. Not functional. I keep veering off track.”
“Just go ahead, my child.” He said it as if the suspense were killing him.
Gretchen sighed. “Okay, here goes. My roommate woke up one morning and found that someone had...relieved themselves on our kitchen floor. How can I explain—”
“Please don't,” he said quickly. “I believe I get the picture.”
“You see, my roommate knew a man she had met in our local bar had done it. She picked him up, and they slept together. I heard them at it, Father, all night long. Our bedrooms are on opposite sides of the apartment, but it doesn't matter. The sound carried. I was a bit tipsy myself, but that still couldn't drown it out. She was very angry at him, and she's been tormenting this poor person, humiliating him in public, putting posters of him up all over the city, and now she's got a special page on Facebook, and campaigns on Twitter and Instagram. These are social media sites, Father, which allow people to—”
“Yes, I'm well aware of them.” His tone let her know he was bit annoyed she thought of him as maybe living in a monastery cut off from the modern world, but also that he considered social media unseemly and slightly seedy. At least that's the impression Gretchen got, though she might have been mistaken.
“But you'll never believe this, Father. The guy called and said he didn't do it, but my roommate didn't believe him. I thought it was just cruel for her to expose him like that anyway, humiliate him in public, and now all over the world. But then, Father, yesterday there was this horrible smell coming from the closet of my bedroom. I opened the door and rummaged around to see what it was. And there I found my, my, my nightgown. The one I'd been wearing that night. The one with the little green and yellow cats. It seemed to have disappeared. I didn't know where it had gotten to. But when I found it, I picked it up. And I saw, saw...”
“Yes? What did you see?”
“Father!” Gretchen's tears rolled anew. “There were brown stains all over the hem! All over the bottom of the nightie! I did it, Father! Me! I was the one who, who...squatted down on our kitchen and—and...and this poor innocent man! He's being tortured! For something I did myself!”
“D-do you recall doing this?”
“No! I had had a few drinks, as I told you. But I can only imagine how my mind was working. There I was, tossing and turning in bed, the pillow over my head, trying to block out the squeals and shrieks of delight, the spanking noises, the squelching, and, and...something in me must have snapped! I don't remember, but I did it to teach her a lesson! I wanted to think her trick had done it! She's always dragging them into the apartment, strange man after strange man. And she never sees any of them again. I wanted to punish her, Father. Put her on the straight and narrow.” She could hardly say, 'like me,' after what she had revealed about David and the parking lot. “Ohhh, Father! I feel filthy, disgusting, repulsive. And I kept saying to her, what disgusting creature would do something so horrible? What deranged lunatic? And all the time, Father, it was me! ME!” She moaned her despair yet again. “What a heinous act to commit! But I think I understand a little why. I used to have a boyfriend, and he really did a number on me. Really made me deranged. I—”
“I'm terribly sorry, I don't mean to sound uncaring or dismissive, or even rude, but I have to remind you this is a confessional. And it's not even the scheduled time for confession. I've made an exception in your case. I don't know how to put it politely, but when I agreed to hear your confession, I had no idea it would be so lengthy. We do have counseling services available here at the church if you'd like to take advantage of them.”
Gretchen blew her nose into the tissue.
“I'm so sorry, Father. Of course. I understand. You have other things to do. I'll end now. Those are all my sins. I'm waiting for the penance I deserve. But, er, this seems like a very nice church. I...I do plan on joining the choir here. If that makes any difference to what penance you're planning to give me...?”
“I'm afraid not, my child.”
“I understand.”
“Are you sorry for all your sins?”
“Yes, Father! Yes!”
“In that case, your penance is...”
The sun had long set before Gretchen exited the church, penance finally done. Clean again. But as she was walking down the steps to the subway, her purse hit her on the thigh, and she realized it had slipped her mind, with all her other sins, to bring up the matter of being an accomplice to some as yet unknown criminal activity to boot. She would have to visit another confessional soon.
CHAPTER 12 FIVE MONTHS AGO
“ORDER IN THE COURT! All rise, please!”
Hauling her beleaguered poundage onto the bench, Judge Edna Lee scowled out at the audience over the tops of her red spectacles as the cameras trundled around her. Her yellow perm looked worse than usual. Some days, some episodes, the afternoon TV small claims judge could be congenial, chatty even, and then her shows weren't particularly engaging. But when she woke up in a bad mood...magic! Today was surely one of those days. At the sight of the scowl on the judge's jowls, Gretchen's heart fell. It was going to be an upward struggle. Why hadn't Mike contacted Judge Judy instead? At least then she might know what to expect. With Judge Edna Lee you never knew. Maybe that's why her show was such a surprise hit, giving Judy a run for her money in the ratings department.
“Your honor,” Ed, the bailiff, said to the judge, handing over a manila file, “this is case 8736 on the calendar. Brown versus Barnett.”
&n
bsp; Judge Edna Lee snatched it from him.
“Everyone's been sworn in,” Ed continued. If he was annoyed by her rudeness, he didn't let it show. “Ladies and gentlemen, you may sit. All witnesses, you may also sit.” Behind one of the cameras, a PA with a clipboard motioned for the paid audience to sit, as if they were deaf or stupid and couldn't understand what the bailiff had just told them to do.
The audience members exchanged excited looks, shifted forward in their seats under the scalding studio lights. They were in for a treat, and heaven help the poor defendant and plaintiff!
When Edna Lee got up on the wrong side of the bed, everyone in her courtroom, including the audience, was a criminal, every victim an imbecile. But when she was in a good mood, she loved everyone, gave everyone the benefit of the doubt, and came across as a kindly, concerned elderly aunt who wanted to right all the wrongs in the world. Her view of life seemed to vacillate wildly, from Rush Limbaugh-like to pinko. If she wasn't bi-polar, she was definitely bi-political.
On one show, she had praised those American states which had passed laws allowing same-sex marriages, calling them progressive, a peek into the future. The next day, she had suggested to the homosexual ex-couple who were fighting over an antique Tiffany lamp that both of them get electroshock treatment to cure their 'repulsive illness.' The cameras had zoomed in on, all America had clearly seen, the movement of her throat as she fought to keep down the sick when they had revealed they'd been 'married.' And 'married,' with finger quotes in the air, was how she referred to them the length of the show. “Some asinine, bizarre laws a few deranged, liberal-mad states have chosen to pass will not be tolerated in my courtroom,” she had pronounced, then thrown their case out of her court.
“I could smell the stench of this case before I even entered my chambers,” Judge Edna Lee now snapped. “Putrid! Rancid! Rank! Another grubby, petty, vulgar case!”
She flipped open the manila folder, and made a show of inspecting it. She made it seem like she was eyeing an aborted fetus. She snorted, thrust the folder to the side and glared all around her.
“Another case about a damn money-grabbing ex-boyfriend!” she snarled. This gave Gretchen hope.“I think you all know by now, I'd rather douse my eyeballs with bleach than try any of these ridiculous cases.” The judge appealed to the heavens, which were actually the lights and boom mics above her. “I see it all the time, a bright, attractive woman in one corner of my court, a jerk in the other. What the heck is wrong with the young women of America? The supposedly independent young women of America? What the heck is wrong with you?” Her eyes shot daggers at Gretchen standing behind the defendant's desk, and the judge tapped the side of her head, where brains were located (or, she seemed to be implying in Gretchen's case, where a brain should have been located). “Idiot!”
On the plaintiff's side, dressed in the shiny gray suit Gretchen had met him in and never seen since, Mike sniggered. His smarm suit. He was, Gretchen couldn't help but notice, clean shaven. She tried to cringe behind her notes, dreading what the comments about her on Youtube would be like when the video was uploaded there. Appearing on the Judge Edna Lee show was mortifying, yes, but free. If she lost, the show would pay Mike Brown back the money he claimed she owed him. Judge Edna Lee might be humiliating her before millions of viewers, but, and this gave Gretchen further hope, the judge seemed to be on her side. Everyone knew it was usually the boyfriend that 'borrowed' money from the girlfriend and never paid it back. She relaxed as much as she could with cameras hovering around her and a mic circling the top of her head like a vulture.
The judge's sympathy would certainly help, as Mike had come prepared. They had had to pull in extra chairs to accommodate his caravan of witnesses. Gretchen peered sadly down the extended row on his side and saw Louise and Carly Rae seated there, along with the man from the bodega who always called her Peliroja and now wouldn't look her in the eyes, the French girl from the apartment above, and another scantily-clad bitch she didn't recognize but suspected was his new girlfriend, brought along for the free trip to Los Angeles only as an irritant. Didn't the girl realize what she was getting herself into, hitching her star to insidious Mike Brown? But by the dull gleam on the girl's beautiful face, Gretchen suspected she didn't have the intelligence to understand. Even she, Gretchen, had been duped. So why would a blonde bimbo be any more cognizant?
Roz was Gretchen's only witness, and she wasn't even witness to anything. Gretchen passed her a glance, and she was sitting in the witness chair bedecked in as much of her jewelry as her number of appendages, limbs and earlobes, and the strength of the material of her clothing, would allow. Free advertising for Gems of Buddha. She had had a t-shirt printed up specially, with the website and bricks-and-mortar address clearly legible.
Gretchen adjusted her hair and smiled up at the judge. Grateful.
“At least,” Judge Edna Lee continued, “that's what I thought! Then I had a closer look at the details of the case.”
But—what...?
“I realized as I delved deeper into the complaint, and then as I compared it to the cross-complaint, that maybe I was being confronted by something more singular. A vile, sneaky attempt by a spurned lover, a spurned girlfriend, to get her revenge on an honest man whose only mistake was meeting her, loving her, doing his best for her, doing his best to survive under a constant barrage of shrewishness, and if that's not a word, I don't want any emails, until her shrewishness, her craziness, her emotional abuse drove him to the sad inevitability of a breakup, a breakup which his morals fought against, but which she forced him into. And that this vindictive, desperate harlot orchestrated a devious plan to snatch from him the win on a lottery scratch card that he had bought with the last of his hard-earned money. There's only one thing I hate, despise, abhor more than a greedy ex-boyfriend. And that's a greedy ex-girlfriend.”
“I—I—” Gretchen couldn't force any more sounds from her constricted throat. Her head spun. What had Mike written in his complaint? His first poem? A love poem to Judge Edna Lee? He had his head slightly lowered now, and was looking up at the elderly female judge with honest puppy-dog eyes, subservient, grateful, beseeching. Charming. Was he going to charm the money out of the judge? Just as he had charmed his way into Gretchen's life? She felt something stick in her throat, but whether it was disbelief, shock, or vomit, she couldn't tell. She tried to swallow. She couldn't. “I—”
“Did I allow you to speak?!” Judge Edna Lee bellowed.
The audience shrank and squirmed excitedly in their seats.
“I'm sorr—”
“I didn't allow you to speak!” She banged her gavel time and again on her desk. She pushed her glasses, which had slid to the witch-like point of her nose, back up. She threw the file open again, looked down to locate Gretchen's name, which she had apparently forgotten. “Ms. Barnett, I will let you speak. Certainly I want you to speak. I take extreme joy in tripping up hateful, dishonest thieves, catching them out in their pitiful lies. It will give me great pleasure to interrogate you. But first I must hear from the plaintiff. The whole sad, sorry, sordid story.”
She turned to Mike and beamed down as if he were a favored grandchild on his birthday.
“Now, dear, poor Mr. Brown,” she didn't even have to look down at his file for his name; she seemed to have selected a special place in her heart for Mike Brown out of all the many, many people who had appeared before her, “why don't you tell the court the entire sad story? From beginning to end? Well, no, it's only a thirty minute show, and with commercial breaks, that only gives us twenty minutes and we don't do To Be Continueds. So why don't we start here...” she looked down at his complaint, flipping over page after page, searching for the point in time in their relationship where he might begin his testimony, “Ah, here! You'd been supporting this repellent leech for months, this woman who hated the job she did, but you'd been putting up with her constant nagging and bitching and moaning and complaining, you were a prisoner in the apartment, catering to her
every need, cooking, cleaning, scrubbing the toilet she used daily and often without compunction, and then you decided to buy a $5 lottery ticket with the last of your money. Tell us about that night. What night was it?”
Mike gave her a look as if he were a toddler lost in a supermarket aisle, and not a fun one with the cookies and cereals, but a scary one with toilet bowl brushes and generic tampons.
“I'm sorry, your honor. I'm a bit nervous. What did you ask?”
She gave him a kind look.
“The date, honey.”
“I think,” he gulped, and it was so amateur dramatics Gretchen bit her tongue from screaming. How could the judge not see she was being played? But then...how had Gretchen not? “I believe it was the fifteenth of July.”
“Try to keep your voice up, dear.”
“Sorry, ma'am.” Mike cleared his throat, then leaned his head towards the mic that stuck out from the edge of the desk, but everyone knew those mics were only for show. His real mic was clipped to his tie. His ironed tie. “It was the fifteenth of July.”
“I realize it's traumatic for you, but why don't you try to tell us what happened?”
“Gretchen had come home from a trip. She had beaten up a passenger. A defenseless passenger. He wanted to, to utilize the facilities. I think he was diabetic. But she wouldn't let him. She attacked him instead.”
Gretchen could hold it in no longer. “Lies!” she blurt out.
“Not a word from you!” the judge roared. “Beast! You will speak when you are allowed to! When I tell you to! You've traumatized this poor man enough, without roaring your abuse out at him here in court as well. My court, I remind you!” She flipped her head around to Mike, her voice at once caressing. “Please continue.”
Emergency Exit (The Irish Lottery Series Book 6) Page 20