Body and Bone (19 page)

But even if she had, why would John call the student newspaper about it?

“Marlon, John's—­”

“She received an email from [email protected]”

“That's not my email address, Marlon. You know that.”

“I know. It's John. But you told him. You broke a confidence.”

“But John's . . .” Nessa trailed off, shaky. “I don't think I did. It must be someone else.”

“It can't be,” he said. “Because you're the only one around here that I told.”

This stunned her. Why had he told her, of all ­people?

“And what about those other things,” Marlon said. “The things I've read in the comments on your blog recently?”

“I need to tell you—­”

“Prostitution. Auto theft.” He paused meaningfully. “Heroin.”

He couldn't hear her. Maybe she really was already a ghost.

So she didn't say anything.

“Are you a heroin addict?”

She hesitated. “I was, yes.”

“It's never
was
, and you know it,” he said. “Once an addict, always an addict. You're only in recovery. You're not cured.”

She knew her lines. She'd go ahead and say them, because nothing mattered anymore. “I'll never use again.”

“It's that kind of overconfidence that will make you slip and fall. That's how it happened for me.”

“I'll never use again,” she repeated.

“Good God. You sound like you're high right now. Since you can't even be honest with yourself, I know you
will
use again. This program only works with complete honesty. You know that.”

A little spark bubbled up, a hint of her former self. Maybe she could still pretend to be alive. “It's semantics. What difference does it make what I call myself?”

“It does make a difference. If you say you're an alcoholic when you're a fucking heroin addict that makes you a liar. I told you everything. And you told me nothing.”

She couldn't speak.

“Step number four: ‘Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. This step requires self-­examination that can be uncomfortable, but honesty is
essential
in this process.' Honesty is essential, Nessa.”

“I know,” she said.

“Step number five: ‘Admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.' ”

It all flooded in. Nessa began to cry silently.

“Have you done that?”

She couldn't answer out loud. No, she hadn't.

But it didn't matter.

“Well, you haven't done it with me. Until you do, Nessa, we have nothing more to say to each other.”

He hung up.

Yes. Perfect. This was right. It was all being taken away.

But not by John, because John was dead.

Something rose in her gut: anger. And it began to outweigh the nothing that had hijacked her psyche.

Whoever was doing this was not going to take one more thing away from her. Not one more person. She had to make this right, because she didn't want to live without Marlon.

Not one more.

She had to fix this. Right now.

She ran out of the house and across the yard to the garage. In the Pacifica, she drove toward town, her heart and head pounding, and played “Use Once and Destroy” by Hole at top volume, screaming along with Courtney Love, fierce and furious, even though it felt like her head would shatter.

It was nearly midnight, and Marlon's street was dark and quiet. Too bad. She strode up to his door and rang the bell. No answer. She rang it again. Nothing.

She went around to the living room window and looked in, her hands cupped around her face. It was too dark to see anything. She went back to the door and rang the doorbell four more times, then knocked on the door.

“Marlon! I know you're in there. I'm going to keep ringing and pounding until you let me in or until the police get here, whichever comes first. Open the door! Marlon!”

When he still didn't open the door, she backed away from his house and scrolled through the music on her phone until she found the song she wanted—­“Animals” by Nickelback—­and blasted it.

“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.

“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?