Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  As officers of the court led Amanda away in handcuffs, the adrenaline that had sustained me during the months after Amanda was taken into custody at Jason’s front door in her Runnr uniform drained away. She looked over her shoulder at me once, the only time she had actively sought my gaze since the trial started. When I saw her with all the radiance gone out of her, everything she had done—the stalking and spying and harassing and threats—faded, and I remembered only the first time I had seen her friendly face in the crowd at Nomad, how grateful I’d been that night for her unrestrained laughter. By the time her blond hair vanished around the corner, my head was spinning with a sensation far more disorienting and nauseating than any metaphorical prison I had been locked in before. A therapist might call it survivor’s guilt, but it was only freedom—Amanda’s last, poisoned gift to me.

  If I have not included my feelings about Jason in my account of the trial, it’s because I kept him firmly out of mind for its duration. I had spent so much time missing him already, maybe I was all tapped out of that particular emotion. Besides, the Jason I’d pined for since the eighth grade, the Jason I had missed when we were apart and trembled for when we were together, was a figment of my imagination. If I still felt a pang now and then, it was only for the remembered warmth of him leaning up against me in that beanbag chair in front of the TV so long ago. Whenever I did try to think about him, and thus about what I’d done, I encountered only a ragged hole, like a prom picture with someone’s face cut out of it.

  The face that haunted me was Amanda’s. I remembered her stumbling off in handcuffs, her zealot’s certainty cracked and dribbling down the drain along with her vision, however twisted, of justice by and for women. More than the app itself, that vision had given her power and purpose, made her nearly invincible. I’d found the thing she cared about at last, and I’d taken it away forever.

  There was nowhere to go with that realization but home. Letting my apartment in Austin go, too apathetic even to keep my crappy possessions from being thrown into the alley, I slept all day in my mom’s house and stared at the ceiling all night. She cooked for me and made sure I had clean sheets and clothes to wear, but she asked no questions. When journalists inevitably found Amarillo on the map and appeared on our doorstep, she maintained her air of gentle bewilderment, pretending not to understand their questions as she made the short walk between house and car when she went to work every morning and came home at night. Her English comprehension has always been selective.

  Cynthia Omari was the one who pulled me out of the black hole I’d fallen into after the trial. I’d been ignoring Cynthia’s phone calls along with everyone else’s, deleting her messages without listening to them, but, no more easily deterred than the reporters, she’d eventually tracked me down and beaten a path to my mother’s door, where she was waiting when my mom came home from work one day. With her unerring instinct for such things, my mother waved her in, calling out two words before disappearing: “Mija, visitor.” It was benevolent self-interest on Cynthia’s part; she was convinced that the notoriety of having sent the Runnr Revengr to prison would, after it had faded a little, ultimately help my career. She was right. Cynthia is usually right about such things.

  Since she coaxed me back to L.A., Cynthia has been my unofficial mentor. There were countless fifteen-minute lunches in which I learned not to be offended when she left before the food arrived; then slightly longer lunches with e-mail follow-ups afterward; and finally, I began to be invited to her gloriously spacious apartment for parties and then alone, just to have a glass of wine and brainstorm about the series we were cooking up together. I won’t say we’re besties, but perhaps we’re as close as two people like us can be. And, it must be said, under her tutelage, I have not had to audition for a single maid role.

  These days, I have taken to sending Amanda little gifts in prison, anonymously. A box of tampons. A carton of cigarettes. A bottle of fancy face wash. I imagine her bartering these things with the other inmates for what she really wants, and I wonder what that is, now that her dream is gone. Last month I sent her a ream of stationery and a box of pens in case she wanted to write to me, the way Mattie did, from her prison cell. I couldn’t risk a note—not with prison administrators monitoring her mail—but I hoped, against all odds, that she would understand what I meant. I am sorry for silencing you, I willed her to hear when she looked at the paper and pens. I want to hear your voice again. Tell me how to make it right.

  After a few weeks, an envelope appeared in the mailbox, late in the afternoon as always. I recognized the cream-colored stationery, and my heart skipped a beat. I sat at my writing desk with the envelope in front of me for a long time, staring at my name and address in Amanda’s handwriting and the red prison stamp under the return address: SENT FROM A STATE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY. Finally, I tore off a tiny corner, not wanting to damage the letter, wriggled my thumb into the hole, and ripped the envelope open. Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded in thirds. I unfolded it.

  It was blank.

  The stage lights go off with a sound like a puncture wound, and the audience’s applause turns to drunken yelling as soon as the house lights are up for intermission.

  Cynthia waits for me backstage in the greenroom. We call it the greenroom for the duration of shooting, but in the manner of such venues, it’s little more than a repurposed storage room outfitted with a couple of mismatched sofas in varying states of decomposition and a ring of broken-down vanities, one of them holding the replacement Betty wig, perched on a Styrofoam head and ready for her close-up. Craft services is a rolling cart holding H-E-B sandwich and fruit trays under plastic domes and a case of room-temperature Lone Star propped on its side in the corner behind the door. This is definitely not L.A.

  In this environment, Cynthia looks somehow both resplendently out of place and perfectly at home—she elevates her surroundings until their shabbiness seems a kind of quaint homage. She snuggles into a sofa the color of day-old guacamole, typing something on her phone that she dispatches with a single tap when I walk in. A tweet, I assume.

  She puts the phone away and, without getting up, opens her arms luxuriously toward me. “Darling, you are on an absolute killing spree out there. Slaying. Mass murder.”

  Her choice of words always leaves me a little breathless. “Thanks, Cyndi,” I say, leaning over to submit to a seated half hug. As I flop onto the brown plaid sofa opposite, I say, “But they’re half dead at best. Getting better all the time.”

  “Close enough,” she says with a catlike smile. “Here’s a little secret about standup specials. They’re never anyone’s best performance. We give what we can onstage, then fix the rest in post.”

  “Ah. The appearance of funny.”

  “Much more important than the real thing.” She raises an eyebrow. “Of course, the greats have both.”

  It’s just like Cynthia not to say the obvious next thing. I don’t care. I’m used to it by now. And I know her exaggerated poise is an act. I’ve seen her drunk many times, after yet another normie boyfriend went running, intimidated by her public presence and long list of accomplishments before the age of forty. The last one to go, Davis Q. Brown or some such nonsense, broke up with her on network TV, appearing on a talk show the morning after New York magazine published Cynthia’s relationship status as “happily committed” to dish dirt on everything from her clinginess to her support garments. The Cynthia that I encountered when she called me to her apartment in the middle of the night had neither the appearance of poise nor the real thing. And she was funny only in the unintentional way everyone with a broken heart is funny: snot running into her mouth, sobs that turned to squeaks halfway through, wine stains on the sofa that I happen to know cost eleven thousand dollars. I cradled her in my arms and thought, Thanks to Jason, thanks to Amanda, I will never cry this way again.

  Since then, Cynthia hasn’t dated any more normies, only other semifamous people, and if they break her heart, she doesn’t confide in me abou
t it. But she doesn’t look at her phone during our meetings anymore either.

  “Are we still on for Wednesday-morning punch-up?” I ask.

  She nods, and I wonder if she’s thinking about the same night. “I loved the last round of pages you sent me.”

  “You didn’t think the Marvel figurine as murder weapon was too much?”

  “Death by boobs-and-butt? No, I think it’s perfect. Hit him with his own sexual fantasy, right?” She mimes swinging something heavy out in front of her. “Pow! Right in the kisser.”

  “Right in the kisser.” I smile back.

  “I just want to tell you again how thrilled I am to have dropped that dentist sitcom. Irina is very talented, don’t get me wrong. She’s still my bestie, you know? But the idea just didn’t have legs. It’s been done. A successful career woman with a sad-sack dating life, B-plots with the hygienist . . . it has Mindy Kaling’s sloppy seconds written all over it. Workplace comedy is so Obama era, you know?”

  I nod, always the listener.

  “Revenge swap, though. Dark comedy. It’s so right for how everybody is feeling right now. They go low, we get ’em in the groin, right? It’s Killing Eve meets Jane the Virgin.” Cynthia has the courtesy never to refer directly to the source of my ideas; to her, no matter how obviously a script alludes to the creator’s life, it is pure philistinism to suggest a connection. Besides, I suspect that she considers anything that reminds people of the trial good press for the show. “I love that we have the whole will-they-or-won’t-they vibe, but instead of some douchey, Cro-Magnon detective and his stern female partner”—she wiggles her shoulders suggestively—“it’s two gorgeous women of color, locked in a deadly game of cat and mouse.”

  “I’d settle for one gorgeous woman of color and one half-Mexican gnome,” I say, knowing she’ll shrug again rather than contradict me. As a matter of fact, I like the way I look these days, but I know where my bread is buttered. What I’d really like to say is Which of us is the cat and which is the mouse? “But thanks. Have you thought any more about the title?”

  She shrugs. “It’s out of our hands. Last I heard, the network is focus-grouping some ideas that come earlier in the alphabet than G. That bumps the streaming audience by thirty percent.”

  “It was only a working title anyway,” I say, relieved. “What about Comeuppance? It starts with a C.”

  “The e next to the u looks weird,” she says, frowning. “Plus it’s too long. Long words get cut off in streaming menus. You can lose up to fifteen percent on some platforms.”

  “Well, it sounds better than Got Your Back, you have to admit.”

  She gives me the Cynthia Omari special: half-lowered lids with a stripe of green eyeshadow on each. You’re protesting too much, the look says. We both know why that title has to go. Don’t push it.

  I’m saved from my desire to push it by the sound of the door creaking open a few inches.

  “Knock-knock? Dana?” The male voice sounds vaguely familiar, but from my angle I can’t see his face.

  “This is a private greenroom, for performers only,” Cynthia states immediately, with her uncanny knack for knowing at a glance who belongs and who doesn’t.

  “I’m an old friend of Dana’s.” The voice clicks into place in my memory just as he adds, “Or, should I say, of Betty’s?”

  Cynthia opens her mouth to object, but for once, I interrupt her.

  “It’s okay. Let him come in. And Cyndi, I hate to ask, but—” I wrinkle my nose apologetically. “He’s an old friend. I’d love to catch up?”

  Always the graceful one, she rises off the couch. “Of course.” On her way out, she flashes my guest a dazzling smile. Then she’s gone, to wherever semifamous people go when they leave their protégés. Agent lunch? Helicopter pad? With any luck, I’ll find out soon enough.

  Carl Montgomery looks much the same as he did at trial, except the scrofulous beard is taking over even more of his face, creeping down his neck to swallow his Adam’s apple and leaving rusty high-water marks just under his cheekbones. I gesture toward the sofa Cynthia has just vacated. In Carl’s presence, its color turns from day-old guacamole to month-old. I can practically see the fuzz growing on it.

  “Dana. Dana Diaz! Dana, Dana, Dana.” He keeps his mouth open half an inch on the last three words so I can see his tongue wiggling back and forth.

  “Carl, is it?” I say politely. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

  “Is it?” he says waggishly. “We didn’t get a lot of time to chitchat during the trial.” His eyes rest momentarily on the Betty wig but return to me almost immediately.

  Under cover of a rueful sigh, I release my held breath. “That was a stressful time for everyone involved.”

  “Thank goodness justice was served,” he says with an expression I can’t quite see under all that beard.

  “Thank goodness,” I repeat carefully. “How’s life treating you post-trial? Any book deals yet?” I’d turned one down, over Cynthia’s objections, almost the only time I’ve ignored her advice. I don’t want my first book to be about that.

  “Oh, I could never write a book,” Carl says modestly. “Just little sketches here and there. Monologues, like you.” He puts a hand up to stroke his beard in a villainous gesture that strikes me as rather overdone. “That’s right, I’m a standup now,” he says. “Can you believe it?”

  The truth is not diplomatic, so instead I just say, “Wow.”

  “Yes, I know.” He pauses and stares off into the distance, a strange look on his face. “You know, it’s funny, in a way I owe it all to that brutal attack I suffered last spring. Because I lost everything. Not just my job—I hated that anyway—but my online world, which was where my real life was. I didn’t mention this at trial, but my hard drive was stolen during the attack.” As he says the words hard drive he glances sideways at me.

  “Huh,” I manage.

  “Right? That Runnr bitch got her hands on the passwords to all my accounts. My life was a living hell for six months. I had to scrub all my social media accounts, flee Reddit, retire RadioMacktive completely.” He sighs deeply and looks me straight in the eye. “Those were my safe spaces, Dana. Isn’t that what they’re called? And now they were unsafe. I felt quite—what’s the word?—triggered.”

  Good, I think, the disgusting GIFs that were his specialty running on repeat in my mind’s eye.

  As if he can see what I’m thinking, he nods with a faux-pious smile. “As my mother always used to say, the Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  I nod too. I wait for him to go on, but instead, there is a long, uncomfortable pause in which he looks away again, tugging his beard.

  “Except it wasn’t the Lord, was it?” he says, gaze still averted. “It was you.”

  I shift on the plaid couch, forcing myself not to search for my reflection in the mirrored wall to make sure I look calm. That’s the kind of thing a not-calm person would do.

  “No idea what you’re talking about, Carl,” I say, relaxing my diaphragm to keep my voice perfectly level, the way all performers learn to do in drama class. “But if I did, and to make it clear, I don’t”—it always occurs to me, these days, that someone could be recording me—“I would say you probably deserved what you got. Don’t you think?”

  “That’s as may be,” he says, matching my easy tone. “Like I said, we didn’t get much face time during the trial, but since your career blew up afterward, I decided to look you up, just to see what all the fuss was about. Someone was benefiting from my pain, and I wanted to know who it was.” He smiles. “Along the way, digging around in the suggested videos on YouTube, I got pretty interested in comedy. I kept seeing all these losers doing open-mics and I thought, I can do that. There’s not much difference between a troll and a heckler. And what is a comic, anyway? Just a heckler with a microphone.”

  I open my mouth to respond to this gem of an observation, but he keeps talking.

  “But I digress. The point is, I found Betty. And after a
little soul-searching, I’ve ascertained that it was Betty, not Amanda, who paid me a visit that night.”

  “You said it was Amanda under oath,” I point out, thinking fast.

  “Anyone can make a mistake,” he says. “Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. Anyway, I have other evidence, so don’t bother denying it.”

  Evidence. My mind goes instantly, as it often does in the middle of the night, to the recordings from Amanda’s spyware, inadmissible at trial but still out there, backed up on a flash drive somewhere. Perhaps buried in one of the boxes that was auctioned off to pay back rent on Amanda’s storage locker. KITCHEN. HALL CLOSET. BLACKMAIL. Or did she send it to him from prison somehow? I saw her, thumb and forefinger held apart, saying, And only I know where it is. More likely she planted it somewhere safe beforehand and sent Carl the instructions to find it. My face is growing hot, and I try to force my breathing to stay slow and steady.

  “Well, Carl, I’m so glad you’ve found your true calling at last,” I say, preparing to stand up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, my break is almost over.”

  “I won’t excuse you, Betty,” he says, narrowing his eyes and leaning forward so quickly that my feet slip out from under me and I’m thrown back onto the sunken sofa cushion. “I’ll never excuse you for what you did, or forgive you, or put it behind me. Isn’t that what you wanted? For me never to forget?”

  I shrink instinctively away from him, anticipating some violent move, flashing back to Jason’s house, to Aaron Neely’s back seat. I clock the closed door behind him and curse myself for having let him get between me and the exit. If I scream, will anyone hear me over the noise outside? The phone is still in my hand. Will I have time to call someone? Who can I call? Cynthia? Will she abandon her tweeting to pick up or will she let it roll to voicemail?