by Rob Roberge
You think your first boss—he ran the local florist and fruit market and hired you when you were fourteen to dig potatoes while paying you something like fifty cents an hour—found her body. This may be true. It may not be.
You are almost positive that Nicole’s mother moved away not long after the murder. But you may only think this is logical, which, of course, doesn’t make it true. You don’t remember ever seeing her after the murder. But you don’t remember seeing her before the murder, either. You’d only ever seen Nicole at school and after school with the other kids.
Here’s what you find out from the articles:
There are rumors that the police had a strong suspect and that there was a torn piece of a T-shirt not far from the crime scene. Why no one has ever done a DNA test is beyond you. And of course they would have, if there were evidence to test. Some DA would love to close a thirty-four-year-old murder of a little girl. This calls into question whether or not there even is a T-shirt. From what you find in your research, however, there is no reason to doubt that there was a strong suspect, but not enough evidence to ever make a case. You consider who this suspect might be.
You think of one enormously creepy guy who was in his twenties and always hitting on ten- to twelve-year-old girls. He had some kind of head injury and everyone seemed to feel bad for him. As you remember it, he exposed himself to a ten-year-old girl at your town park and his father, who was connected with the local mob guys, got him off.
You ask your father where this guy lived, wondering if his house was close to Nicole’s. Your dad has no idea. You find him on Facebook. He has nothing but pictures of himself—usually shirtless, bodybuilding shots—and famous Disney stars when they were younger, like Miley Cyrus around age twelve. Britney Spears on The All New Mickey Mouse Club. Christina Aguilera.
You think, It’s not out of the question. You think you could maybe crack the case, solve a thirty-four-year-old murder. Of course, this is absurd. How could you?
You find every newspaper article you can. The earliest are dated June 23, 1977, the day after she went missing between 6:00 and 6:20 p.m. Her body was found only hours later. Some articles are from years afterward. You find one that has an interview with the officer in charge of the case, long after it happened. Monroe is not a big town. They don’t have a cold case unit, only this one officer who stays familiar with the case for decades. In an interview with a local paper on the twentieth anniversary of her murder, he says that Nicole’s mother would call every year on her birthday and ask if there had been any leads or progress on her case. Every year he had to tell her the same thing—they knew no more than they did in 1977. She calls on Nicole’s birthday for seven years, always getting the same answer.
Then she stops calling.
You wonder why you are so obsessed with this. It’s Nicole’s mother’s story. Not yours. You’re pretty sure you never met the woman. Maybe if she found out some stranger was digging into the case it would hurt her. But for some reason, you are haunted by Nicole in your early forties. You dream about her head being bludgeoned. You obsess over the case. You read about it as much as you can. Your fear of men returns, though it’s not as strong as it was in the years following her murder. Nicole is a story in your life.
But she is not only your story, and she is not nearly as much yours as she is her mother’s. Her brother’s. If they’re still alive, are you capable of hurting them?
—
2011: You find yourself, when looking around the room at one of your regular AA meetings while you still live in the desert you hate, on the verge of an anxiety attack. You think you may need to take a Xanax before the attack peaks. You are having trouble breathing, and you are thinking about how much you fear some of the men at the meeting. It’s not a thought you like. These people are supposed to be your peers, after all. You’re there to help one another. Not judge one another. But you’ve been finding yourself full of fear in rooms with men who talk—and sometimes even seem like they’re bragging—about their violent pasts. And there are a ton of violent men at your meeting. You find yourself going to meetings where there are more women. Daytime meetings tend to have fewer men. You start going to them. Increasingly, even though you know it’s not wise, you just skip the meetings altogether.
—
1985–1993: Over the course of about a decade, you have two serious long-term relationships. Both of these women are very understanding about the fact that you’re often medicated. They know you’re bipolar. They are very forgiving—even if you yourself are not—of how these pills fuck with your libido and your dick. Men in their fifties, you think, have to deal with their cocks not working. Why you? Why in your twenties? You hate your fucking brain.
When you are single, you go off your meds. It’s one thing to suffer through a limp dick with a woman who loves you—it’s another to do it with a stranger. That would be violating part of the contract of casual sex.
You later find out that these weekends of sleeping with three different women are not, in fact, just you having a good time. You learn that you are dead center in manic episodes when you fuck around. You read that for a manic episode to be diagnosed, several factors occur at once:
• Expanded self-esteem.
• “Pressured speech”—characterized by rapid bursts, often jumping from topic to topic.
• Severely reduced need for sleep—two or three hours a night is common. Days without any need to sleep can occur, though you pay a horrible price when the episode is over.
• Overindulgence and risky behavior in enjoyable things like sex, drugs, alcohol, and shopping.
You have no idea that promiscuity is a symptom of anything. You just think you get laid a lot and you really don’t see a problem. Because you’re getting laid a lot.
You stay up, sleeping an hour or two a night, for a week or two at a time with your energy flying, your self-esteem off the charts.
Then you crash terribly. You can’t get out of bed. It’s like gravity has quadrupled its force. You can’t bother to shave or shower. You barely leave the house, drinking alone at home. Eventually it starts all over, and suddenly you want to be back out and around people. You’re up for days. You’re always looking for something or someone new. You are addicted to alcohol and opiates and sex and new adventures.
You have friends dropping from AIDS, but you still never use a condom. One night a friend, a woman you have slept with on two occasions, comes to see you at work, holding a Time magazine with a picture of the HIV virus on the cover. She’s in medical school. She knows shit.
She says, “We’re all going to die.”
You don’t really know what to say to this.
“There’s no stopping this virus,” she says. “It adapts to each host.”
“Don’t all viruses do that?”
“They don’t all kill you,” she says.
You’ve already lost three friends. You expect you’ll lose a lot more—quickly. You are twenty. You think about dying more than most people you know. But somehow you don’t think this is what’s going to get you in the end.
You look at the photo of the virus. It is, like so many things out of context, beautiful.
It’s like the MRIs you will later see of your brain. The bipolar brain lights up and fires differently than a normal brain. At your particular baseline—which is a state known as hypomania—your brain looks like a lovely planet covered with an electrical storm. A green-and-red planet with glowing white-hot veins firing, connecting everything. It looks incredible, impossibly beautiful. It’s where all your trouble lies.
—
1991: You work in the kitchen at a catering company. You have to be there at ten every morning. Often, you puke blood when you wake up. Every day, you need two or three drinks to stop your shaking hands, so you can be ready for work. You are drinking on your breaks, just to keep from getting sick during the day. You are exhausted all the time. You need to quit, you tell yourself. But you can’t seem to do it, and you ke
ep on the way you’ve been going.
—
2013: You tell the story about your grandfather and the family friend who worked on the Mackay-Bennett, the ship that goes to fish out the bodies in the twenty-eight-degree water.
Some facts:
• Your grandfather is from Halifax.
• The day after the Titanic sinks, the White Star Line sends what is known as “the undertaker ship,” the Mackay-Bennett, from Halifax to the last known coordinates of the Titanic, where it will claim the bodies left floating in the twenty-eight-degree water, load them onto the ship, and bring them to Halifax for burial.
• The ship does not have enough pine caskets to hold the bodies left on the surface.
• There are two debris fields littered with tables and deck chairs and wooden luggage crates and, of course, the bodies of the dead. These two distinct fields give some credence to eyewitness claims that the ship split in two prior to sinking.
• Crew members of the ship are to judge by the quality of the victims’ clothing what class they were. First-class victims are given priority and taken immediately to caskets. Second-class victims are taken on a case-by-case basis due to the dwindling number of coffins. Steerage passengers are loaded down with weights and sunk. This decision is based on the logic that there would be no one in Halifax to claim the poorer bodies because they were coming to America to start a new life. This is a much-debated fact—whether or not the bodies were fished out of the water by class.
The lies:
• The family friend who tells the story.
• The frozen dog.
You make up the family friend to justify why you would tell the story beyond your own weird obsession. The frozen dog makes it human. Less factual, yes, but for you more true and memorable. Without the frozen dog, it’s not a story. It’s just history.
2004: You are on your hands and knees, your wrists are bound, and you are being caned. The first ten or twenty strikes sting badly—they are just pain. A pain you have to get through for the pain to get you where you need to be. You are blindfolded and you hear the authoritative click of your wife’s heels on the wood floor as she walks around you. With each strike, your whole body lurches forward and your ass stings and you wince. Slowly, around twenty strikes in, your body begins to relax and you ride with the pain and stop fighting it. Soon, you are not moving at all when the cane hits your ass and you are emitting a low moan that you can’t control. She starts hitting you harder. Each blow radiates a calm throughout your body. You feel your skin grow tight and you know that there are welts rising on your ass.
“Just breathe,” your wife says.
You take deep breaths. The tension melts from your body.
She hits you again and you don’t move at all.
Your eyes are closed, even though you’re blindfolded, and you are breathing calmly and every time you are hit you let out a low, animalistic groan of pleasure that spills from your mouth. Your body feels like it’s floating. It’s as good as heroin. With each strike, you feel everything that worries you or scares you or haunts you leaving your body and all that’s left is you, peaceful, no matter how hard you’re being hit.
—
2005: You and Gayle are having dinner with another couple, very good friends of yours. You think you are close. Dinner talk turns to sex. In the course of conversation, you and your wife mention you’re into S/M and that you are the one into pain. Either you or your wife mentions that you have a brand with Gayle’s initials. This doesn’t seem to cause any trouble at dinner, but the next day you get an e-mail from one of your friends saying she is worried about you—that she thinks you’re in an abusive relationship. At first you think this is a joke, that she’s kidding, but it soon becomes clear that she is serious. She tells you that she and her husband are concerned. You think she’s being ridiculous and put it out of your mind. Until you realize that they no longer accept your invitations to dinner, nor do they invite you and Gayle to dinner.
You had seen each other regularly, spoken often. You realize the friend still e-mails you but not your wife. She has taken some judgmental stance on Gayle, freezing her out, and this angers and hurts you.
At one point, the two of you are out for coffee and you tell her that you have a terrible headache.
She says, “I thought you liked pain.”
You look at her. “You are joking, right?”
She isn’t joking. She thinks you just like any pain that happens to cross your path. It hits you that she’s really clueless about all this and it begins to anger you even more that she’s making judgments based on such a level of ignorance.
“I don’t get turned on when I have a headache,” you say. “Nobody on the planet gets a hard-on when they have a headache.” You shake your head.
She says, “It doesn’t seem healthy. What you’re doing.”
You can’t believe you’re having this conversation. These are liberals. They would never dream of judging a gay friend who had come out to them, hiding under the guise of concern.
Your friendship with this woman is over. You have no patience for people who judge you. You have even less patience for people who judge your wife.
Before the check has come for the coffee, you have decided you have spoken with her for the last time. This isn’t a friend.
Years later, you will make up with this woman, realizing you misread the dinner conversation. You were thinking they would want to hear something they didn’t want to hear. You will feel guilty for having brought the whole thing up. You didn’t realize it at the time, but you will come to realize that you had as much to do with hurting this friendship as they did. You wonder how much of this—the bipolar, the addiction, the S/M—people in your life simply do not want to hear. How many relationships you may be blowing apart with this, and it frightens you.
—
1993: You move to Buffalo to be near Gayle after you have been long-distance lovers for more than six months. You take an apartment down the street from hers, but you end up spending every night in her apartment. You only spend time in your place twice—once to write an unpublishable story and once to watch the Knicks lose in triple overtime to the Magic. You later call it the most expensive writing office you have ever had.
After a month, you still haven’t found a job and you realize there’s no way you can afford to keep your apartment. You think you will have to move back into your grandmother’s hoarder house, still filled with her shit no matter how many trips to the dump you’ve taken. Another winter there alone feels unimaginable. You’ve only been sober for five months. You have no idea if you can stay sober alone. And you don’t want to leave Gayle. You’re afraid of going back to being long-distance. Afraid you’ll lose her.
You tell her that you’ll have to leave Buffalo. That you can’t afford it and you’ll have to go back to the farmhouse in Connecticut filled with your grandmother’s lifetime of garbage and ugly memories.
You have fantasies that you could just stay here and live with Gayle, in her orderly apartment, and the two of you could build some kind of life together, a kind you’ve never quite had, although you’ve lived with women before. You think about all the people you’ve lived with, many of whom you didn’t even particularly like. Moving in with Gayle would be a no-brainer for you. You like her tremendously. You think you might be falling in love. But you know what Gayle’s independence means to her. She has never had a roommate, male or female, never come anywhere close to moving in with a lover. You are not sure whether she ever wants to move in with a man, or whether a life as a self-sufficient woman on her own is the one she pictures for herself, so different from her mother, who has been financially dependent on her father her entire adult life, and who at times suffers from agoraphobia, making her dependent on her husband and kids in other ways too.
Gayle loves her mother and is close to her, but you know she has spent most of her life since her teens focused on becoming a different kind of woman, standing on her own two
feet and proving herself. So moving in with a guy she’s just started dating, a guy who doesn’t even have a job, does not strike you as something this sort of woman would even consider.
That night you make love. You hold each other all night. Both of you are crying.
Sometime around dawn, Gayle sits up and says, “You could stay here.”
It doesn’t seem possible that she is really saying this. It is one of those rare moments in life when it feels like the world has somehow read your mind and you have made something—with the sheer force of your desire—manifest into reality.
“Really?” you say, afraid that she cannot mean it—that she must be just being polite, and you are supposed to decline. But you don’t want to decline.
She smiles around her tears. “Really,” she says. Her eyes make her look as happy as you are.
And you move in together. Friends of yours tell you you’re being impulsive and that you’re on the rebound from Mary and you’re less than six months sober and that it’s dangerous to move in with someone you’ve only been seeing long-distance for a few months. But you and Gayle have been friends for years. You’ve never been with someone you feel quite this way about. And you have nowhere else left to go. You move in together.
—
2000: You are spending your first night in the first house that you and your wife have just bought. It’s a beaten-down 1912 California bungalow in a somewhat seedy section of Long Beach that you bought for $115,000—a price tag that both stuns your friends and makes them afraid to visit you. “It must be in a fucking combat zone,” one says.
The first night, you are awake, unable to stop your mind from spinning while Gayle sleeps beside you.