Body and Bone

by LS Hawker

  “Your favorite, Marlon,” she shouted.

  Several dogs began barking, and a light came on in the house next door, followed by Marlon’s porch globe light. His front door flew open, and there he stood, looking possessed in his rancor.

  “Get in here,” he hissed.

  She ran inside and he slammed the door behind her.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” he shouted.

  Nessa was out of breath and frantic. “I’m here,” she said, “to do step number five. I’m here to admit to God, to myself, and to another human being—­that’s you—­the exact nature of my wrongs.”

  “It’s too late for that,” he said.

  “Why?” she said, her fists clenched at her sides. “Why is it too late?”

  “Because I’m sick of the chaos that follows you wherever you go. I’m sick of your lying. I’m sick of being held at arm’s length.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said? I’m here to—­”

  “I heard you. I just don’t believe—­”

  “John’s dead.”

  Time stopped as they stared at each other, and Marlon’s exasperation deflated into bewilderment.

  Nessa collapsed on the couch and began sobbing.

  In her desolation, she only dimly felt Marlon curl himself around her, his arms shielding her, his face in her hair, murmuring to her as if she were a tiny child.

  After a while, her sobs devolved into whimpers, and the story leaked out of her in fits and starts.

  When she finished, she felt light as fog, and a merciful quiet enveloped her aching soul.

  “Are they sure it’s him?” Marlon asked.

  “I’m sure it’s him,” she said.

  He nodded. “I know what you mean. I knew the minute Lori was gone. Felt it in my guts.”

  He brushed the hair back from her face and wiped her tears away with his fingers. “Can I get you a glass of water?”

  “Thank you,” she said, suddenly shy at finding herself in his arms.

  He padded into the kitchen and she heard him putting ice in glasses and running the tap. She looked around the room, at the sparse furnishings and decor, except for a large framed portrait of Marlon’s late wife.

  He returned with two glasses, one of which he handed to her, then sat next to her on the sofa.

  She took a long drink of her water and cleared her throat. “Okay,” she said. “Step number five.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “You don’t have to do this now. Not after—­”

  “I’m doing it now,” she said.

  He didn’t argue.

  “When I was sixteen, I was raped by a football player at my high school.”

  Marlon’s face crumpled, but she didn’t allow him to say anything.

  “In high school, my best friend was Candy, and we could have been twins. This is important. Same eye color, same hair color, hairstyle, same build. They called us the Glimmer Twins after—­”

  “Mick Jagger and Keith Richards,” Marlon said, nodding. “Please continue.”

  “So Candy and I were at a party, and I got so fucked up that Candy had to practically carry me upstairs to one of the bedrooms where I could lie down until she sobered up enough to drive us home. I found out later she went to the basement to watch a movie with some other girls. So I was practically paralyzed, you know—­vodka, E, pot, and who knows what the hell else.

  “I don’t know how much later Nathan the football player came into the room, locked the door, and got up on the bed.” Nessa cringed, remembering how her one fucked-­up thought at that point had been that she didn’t look very good—­Nathan was the hottest guy in school, and she’d had a crush on him, like everyone else.

  “I tried to talk but my mouth didn’t work. None of me worked at that point, but that didn’t seem to matter to him. Because he stripped completely naked and got on top of me.”

  Nessa’s breath hitched and she had to stop talking, squeezing her eyes shut and crossing her arms over herself, as if it were all happening now.

  The only other person she’d talked to about this in her current life was John. She sneaked a peek at Marlon now, and he was looking at her in the same heartbroken way that John had.

  Nessa cleared her throat and let go of herself. “So, yeah, so I was no virgin. What was weird was that I would have loved to have sex with him. But this was something else. If he’d ever spoken to me before that, or even made eye contact with me, that would have been one thing. But I might as well have been a knothole in a tree, you know?”

  Marlon remained silent, but his posture and expression made him look ready to launch out of his chair and track Nathan down.

  “I threw up on his letter jacket,” Nessa said, “so he punched me in the face and broke my nose.” She pointed at the bump on the bridge of it.

  Marlon flinched.

  “So Candy and some other guy finally got the door open. Long story short, Nathan was eighteen, so he was charged with felony rape. He got thirteen years in Chino, and there went his college scholarship. So up until about nine days ago, I thought Nathan was the troll. He was paroled last year. I thought he’d tracked me down and was going to make me pay for ruining his life.”

  Marlon sat digesting this story, and Nessa let him process it while she shivered in the air-­conditioning and relived past terrors.

  What she hadn’t told Marlon was that even after she was sober and married to a man she loved, sex was always hard thanks to that night. Not all the time, but she’d never again know what it was like to have sex without the rape hanging over her bed like an anvil from a fraying rope.

  Marlon stood. “More water?”

  She nodded and he left the room. Marlon returned with the refilled glasses and handed one to her, then gripped her shoulder. She reached up with her opposite hand and squeezed his, then let him go.

  “What made you think . . . he was the troll?” Marlon asked as he sat down.

  ­“Couple of things,” Nessa said, taking a long drink and setting the glass on the coffee table. “I found some things around my house with BIG on them.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The song that was playing while he was raping me was ‘Dead Wrong’ by Notorious B.I.G. He had it on repeat. I guess it was his jam, like all the wannabe homie white boys. I used to love rap, but that was pretty much ruined for me. To this day I can’t listen to Tupac or Biggie because of this guy.”

  “You said there were a ­couple of things.”

  “Right. The other one was that the troll posted a trivia question to my blog. The answer to it was ‘Rosie.’ ”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “That’s my real name. Well, my nickname. My birth name was Gypsy Rose Lee Gereben. So that’s another thing I haven’t told you, but I’m going to tell you why it’s not my name anymore, which is where I confess the exact nature of my wrongs. But first I’m going to cry for a minute.”

  And she did. This was something about Nessa that had always driven John crazy. She never just cried—­she announced her intention beforehand. Marlon rose again and left the room while Nessa sobbed hard. He returned with a box of tissues. He held it out and she pulled several Kleenex out before he sat down again.

  Nessa let herself finish while Marlon sat quietly stroking her hair. She blew her nose and took a drink of water.

  “Okay,” she said. “Candy also went by a nickname. Only hers was cooler. She chose it, she said, because Candy was the ultimate rock name: ‘Candy Shop’ by 50 Cent. ‘Sex and Candy’ by Marcy Playground.”

  “ ‘Candy-­O’ by the Cars,” Marlon offered. “ ‘In Candy’s Room’ by Bruce Springsteen . . .”

  Nessa let a smile break through her tears. “Right. Anyway, I’ve never known anyone who picked their own nickname and had it stick. But Candy was that kind of person.<
br />
  “She lived with her grandma because her own mom had abandoned her when she was an infant. When we weren’t out at the Smell, we were at her grandma’s house. She’d seen all the legendary acts in the sixties at the great old clubs like the Troubadour, Whisky A Go Go, and Pandora’s Box. She saw the Doors, the Byrds, Led Zeppelin, and Janis Joplin live. We’d sit and listen to her stories for hours.”

  Marlon obviously couldn’t help smiling at this bit. “She sounds great,” he said.

  Thinking of Candy’s grandma brought Nessa to tears again. Being around her, Nessa had gotten to see what real maternal love should look like. Thanks to Grandma, and thanks to Candy’s own drive and ambition to be successful and get out of LA, Candy had had top grades and planned to go to college, unlike Nessa, who’d been completely out of control.

  “Candy and her grandma kept me grounded,” Nessa said. “Until she had a stroke and died. It was shortly after that I got Candy hooked on heroin too.”

  Through her tears, Nessa watched Marlon struggle to refrain from throwing out more AA sayings.

  “It wasn’t long before we were shooting every day. Since it was summertime, Candy said she’d just do it until school started again, because she was going into her senior year and wanted to keep her grade point average so she could apply for scholarships. Because we were eating into Candy’s college savings, we started telling each other, We’ll just do it on the weekends. Which then became only after dark and finally, just until I start college, and then we’ll never do it again.”

  Marlon was nodding his head vigorously with obvious recognition of the addiction pattern.

  “Then it became the first thing I thought of every morning. Just a little taste. It circled my brain like a catchy but horrible song that looped and looped with no way to stop it.”

  More crying, more nose blowing, more water gulping. When did the feeling better part start?

  “My eighteenth birthday came up, and Candy and I discussed for hours that we were going to quit right after that. Just one more time. So that night, we were going to go downtown and score, then go shoot up. But that morning, my brother, Brandon, gave me a little gift-­wrapped package, which he said was from Hoover, this guy who gave me my first hit. After that, he became my mom’s boyfriend, but that’s another story. Anyway, I opened it because I wanted to see what kind of shit he was bribing me with this time. He had a thing for me, see, and I used it to get drugs and booze and whatever else, while my mom looked the other way.

  “I locked myself in the bathroom and opened it. Inside was a brand-­new works kit—­syringe, cotton, spoon, lighter. And a bag of beautiful black tar heroin. I couldn’t wait to show Candy.

  “So we had the H and at sunset we trespassed and got into the atrium under the Seventh Street Bridge, which is just disgusting—­trash, graffiti, and all kinds of crap. But when you’re a junkie, it’s a wonderland. We were getting ready to shoot heroin for the very last time. We’d promised each other that this was it. We were done with drugs.”

  As with describing the rape, Nessa began to tingle as if it was all happening again. She could picture the maze of pipes, the brilliantly colored graffiti, the smell of rot, and garbage, and death.

  “We settled in and I said, ‘Happy birthday to me.’ And Candy said . . .” Nessa’s throat closed up again. She cleared it and went on. “She said, ‘You first. It’s your birthday.’ ” Nessa cried silently for a while, folded in on herself, the psychic pain nearly unbearable. “But I always went first. I sat there thinking, I’m eighteen today. I need to not be so selfish. I need to act more mature, so my first act as an official adult would be to let my best friend go first.”

  She could see Candy sitting against the concrete wall, her shining eyes, the love she had for Nessa, the kind of love she’d never experienced before that.

  “I tied off Candy’s arm and we hunted for a vein. I saw the one I wanted, a fat, blue, virgin. I filled the syringe and flicked the bubbles out of it, then slid the needle into my best friend’s arm.”

  Nessa stood, desperate to be moving, to shake the memories loose and spit them out and examine them. She walked to the window and looked out so she wouldn’t have to face Marlon.

  “Candy’s eyes rolled back and her face turned to the ceiling. I watched and released the tube from Candy’s arm. As I slid out the syringe and tied my own arm off, from the corner of my eye I saw Candy go stiff. I thought maybe she’d seen the cops, but I looked around and saw no one. But when I looked back at Candy, there was foam on her lips and coming out of her nose, and she’d bitten into her bottom lip.”

  Nessa was shouting now, wailing the words. Her saliva flecked the window before her. “The syringe fell out of my hand. She began to convulse and fell over, her back arching, her head banging over and over on the ground. I grabbed for her and looked around for something to jam in her mouth, but I couldn’t find anything. Candy kept on biting her lips and her tongue, and there was blood everywhere. Everywhere.”

  All Nessa could do was watch until Candy stopped convulsing just as quickly as she’d started. Her skin was gray and her lips were blue. Her eyes were open, but she couldn’t see anything anymore.

  “I slapped her face. Her breathing was shallow, and I tried to sit her up. Candy needed to walk around to metabolize the junk. I tried to stand her up. I really tried. Her breathing got slower and slower, foam and blood dripping from her mouth and her nose.”

  Nessa had screamed at Candy to quit being such a selfish bitch and wake up. She kept dragging Candy back and forth, the toes of her worn tennis shoes scraping along the trashy cement.

  Still standing at the window, Nessa wiped her own nose and looked at Marlon.

  “I didn’t know what to do. I needed to call 911, but I didn’t have a phone. I’d sold it to buy junk. Besides, I had a police record—­DUI, grand larceny, possession . . . prostitution. Now that I was legally an adult, if I called the cops I would go to jail and never get out again.

  “I didn’t know CPR, but I had to try. I pushed on Candy’s chest and put my ear to her lips. No sound. Not a pulse. Nothing. Candy was gone.”

  Nessa stared out at nothing, feeling emptied out, bereft, alone.

  She turned away from the window, sat back down, and wiped her eyes and nose.

  “I panicked. I couldn’t think straight. I just knew I was about to be in the biggest trouble of my life. I’d killed someone. Even though it was an accident, even if it would be considered manslaughter, I didn’t think I could handle prison. I had to get out of there. Candy was dead. It was over for her, but I couldn’t go to prison.”

  Then Nessa realized there had been another reason to flee: she’d known that Joyce would somehow capitalize on Candy’s death, turn it into an opportunity to be on television again. Suddenly, Nessa could get away from Joyce and her schemes, her boyfriends who wanted to molest her, the bizarre home she’d never thought she would escape. This was her ticket.

  “So I switched purses with Candy,” Nessa said. “I put mine next to her body, hoping that the cops would think she was me. She was actually wearing one of my outfits—­we were always sharing clothes—­and I switched jewelry with her. We had matching tattoos.” Nessa rolled up her left sleeve and showed Marlon the Glimmer Twins tattoo.

  “So I took her purse with her driver’s license and I ran from the Seventh Street Bridge. I didn’t even go back to the apartment to get my stuff. I went to the train yard and jumped into a graffitied box car that was headed east like a fucking hobo, dopesick and in shock, so grief-­stricken I wanted to die. But I didn’t. I ended up in Denver, in a homeless shelter that had a rehab program. Cleaned up my act, because now I was living for two of us.

  “Thanks to Candy’s good grades and spotless police record, I was able to get my GED, then I got a bachelor’s in communications from Metro State. If I hadn’t stolen Candy’s identity, I’d have kept on using, because
my record would have followed me around forever. If it weren’t for Candy, I’d be dead now.”

  They sat in silence a moment.

  “So you started using after the rape, is that right?” Marlon said.

  Nessa nodded. “Actually, after the trial. During the reality show. But I’ll tell you about that another time.”

  “That,” Marlon said, “is an extraordinary story.”

  “I know. Thank you for listening.”

  She looked down and saw that their hands were entwined. Marlon noticed this too, but he didn’t let go. He smiled at her.

  “So what was Candy’s real name?”

  “Vanessa Angela Frye,” she said. “Which was my name until I got married. But I’ve always gone by Nessa.”

  “It suits you,” Marlon said.

  “Now you know everything,” Nessa said. “I am sincerely, deeply sorry that I talked about you to John. Please forgive me. I need you to be my sponsor. But I also need you to be my friend.”

  Marlon squeezed her hand. “As it turns out,” he said, “I need you too. After our phone conversation, I was completely wrecked, even though you are a monumental pain in the ass.”

  Nessa lunged toward him and threw her arms around him, burrowing her face into his neck. He held her tight.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  They looked at each other, and Nessa was nearly overwhelmed with the urge to kiss him, with the urge to sleep with him. Looking into his eyes, she could see he had the same urge. But it would ruin everything. Even though she hadn’t felt this close to another person since . . . John, in the beginning, when they’d had their whole lives ahead of them.

  Instead, she laid her hand on Marlon’s cheek, stood, and walked out the door.

  Chapter Twenty-­Two

  Wednesday, June 29

  SHE’D READ ABOUT this, this autopilot feeling that comes after a loved one dies and there are things to do.

  Nessa got up the next morning, showered, dressed and called Lock It Up. The receptionist said that Brady was off that day, so Nessa looked up his address online and drove to a town house on Todd Road. She wanted to talk to him about when exactly John had bought the keys, make sure it was John.