by Mike Wehner
I was staring daggers right at her eyes when she raised them from her binder, the outer rims glistening with fear and sadness. I opened my ears, considering her speech a self-delivered last rites. Parting words that were sure to send me over the edge.
She started at the beginning. The day she met John.
With and Without You
PAGE 1
There was a time when I thought of myself as a feminist. A time when I knew that men and women were equal in everything. I thought that with enough practice and hard work I could do anything that a man could, I built my life around this notion. I studied chemistry and got good grades. I was a college athlete. Later, I found some success as a chef which is a profession dominated by men. My entire life was confirmation we’re all the same. I hate to break it to you but we aren’t. It was the hardest lesson I ever learned.
The truth is so simple that I’m shocked I’ve never heard it said out loud. Women and men both think about it, it influences our psychology, but nobody ever comes out and says it. It’s on the face of every girl who’s ever been hit on by a stranger, or in a man’s grin after his girlfriend slaps him on the arm when he’s acting like a jerk. It’s a foundational notion of our society, maybe we’re too ashamed to admit that on the most basic level there is a massive difference between the sexes.
The truth is that men and women aren’t the same, not physically. We aren’t a little different either, we’re barely the same thing. Almost every man on earth could strangle me, could rape me, could beat me into the ground and there would be no way I could stop him. It’s not like I’m some prissy, basic bitch. I was kicker on my high school football team, I’m that girl. I was good too.
I don’t mean a guy with a weapon, I mean a regular guy with regular hands. Don’t believe me? Girls, go ask a guy to arm wrestle. Not some big meathead but a malnourished vegan who plays a lot of video games. Let me know how that works out.
We know it’s true, but we never say it. That’s the contract between men and women. You can kill me but I can ruin your life with one accusation. It’s a completely fucked up balance of power and it influences all of us all the time.
When I am laughing and playing along with some guy who is hitting on me at the grocery store he never seems to notice the nervousness in my voice. How uncomfortable I am, how there’s a voice in the back of my head wondering if this guy is going to follow me to the car and toss me in his trunk along with the cantaloupe. Every girl feels uncomfortable and vulnerable and afraid out in the world because everything is so much bigger and so much stronger. Your body is something men deeply want and need. I’m fortunate, I don’t get it as bad as a lot of girls because I’m kind of a jerk. Guys tend to like nicer girls, probably because they are easier targets. There’s also the fact that many girls are prettier than me, more composed, feminine.
I want you to keep this in mind as you read my story. Remember it when I am swept up in his loving arms and remember it when he is crushing my throat shut on the floor. John and I were magic together, I felt it the first time we met. People are drawn to magic, but magic can be dark and dangerous.
He looked right through me with those overcast eyes when I caught him staring from across the bar. I knew we were a matched set the first time I set eyes on him, hunter meet huntress. It wasn’t love at first sight, love requires data. Only an idiot would equate a fabulous first impression with the density of love, but you can see someone and know that they are going to impact you. Silly me, I thought it would be for the better.
If you’re reading this, then you know the basics. I shot my boyfriend. While that statement is true, it isn’t the whole truth. I squeezed again and again and kept squeezing even after the gun was empty. Then I was dragged to the ground in an instant as if the whole universe began rapidly expanding and gravity with it, holding me down, paralyzed. Head stuck to the floor by an invisible force, I watched the man I loved writhe and gasp. Unable to blink, I watched him die in a waking pause.
It took me twenty-seven minutes to shrink the earth, stand up and call the police. Those minutes were a singularity where the function of my life was infinite. How long would it take you to reassemble yourself after being pulled apart in the center of a black hole? It took me twenty-seven minutes.
Had I been able to recover quicker and sprint to the phone I don’t think the police would have charged me with murder. That doesn’t mean if I weren’t arrested things would have been fine, but they certainly would have been better, at least a little bit.
This isn’t a tell-all, it’s a tell everything. Note for dissonant note, a perfect transcription of how I came to kill a man and why it doesn’t make me the devil. My life is every bit as torn apart as the man’s I shot. The same goes for all our family and friends. This book isn’t about forgiveness, it’s about atonement. If I can convince one guy or girl to abandon their terrible romance the way I couldn’t then it was worth my time to write.
I hope that I provide a modicum of closure to everyone involved and leave no questions unanswered—especially to the people who loved John. I know my name is tarnished forever, no matter what I say. The stench of this will linger the rest of my life, if not in your heads then in mine even though I know that I did what I had to. It’s never the right thing to kill someone, but sometimes it’s the only choice.
A lot of people haven’t bothered to gather the facts before labeling me a murderer. I was defending myself, I did not murder Johnathan Bray. The jury didn’t acquit me because of the playfulness of my hair or any of the other made-up media garbage that will float out there forever, poisoning my waters. The jurors found me not guilty because I am not a murderer. You may not believe me now, but by the end of this book, so help me god, you will.
Nineteen
You don’t get anything in life unless you ask for it.
After Erin’s meeting I went straight home and dug the book out from underneath the bed. I buzzed through it in a few hours and on the second and third passes I started writing notes in the margins. By sunrise the kitchen table had a polychromatic spreadsheet of sticky notes stretched four feet wide and I was manically looking for inconsistencies and half-truths. I used yellow for the prosecution’s perspective, neon green for the defense. Blue for questions to myself. Orange for food pontifications, set way off to the side.
At nine o’clock I decided to walk the dog before I got ready for work. Zeke and I walked up the hill to the end of the street like every other morning. The road didn’t end in a cul-de-sac, instead there was a long metal guardrail half the width of the road with a diamond sign bolted to the middle. DEAD END it read. I agreed.
The long night of study created more questions than answers. I freed my anxious dog into the grasslands. The snap of the leash sent Zeke sprinting up the nearest slope to mark all four of the sparse pine trees that leaned eastward at the top. Over the hill and into the bottom of the valley I plopped. Clouds drifted over the tops of the trees whose bottoms I couldn’t see, the earth appeared to be picking up speed as I cursed myself for not sleeping.
Zeke had his beak shoved into the ground when a picture from Charlie hit my phone, the dog’s puffy tail swatting back and forth like windshield wipers in a northern downpour. On the screen a mountain lion was sprinting with a medium-sized dog in its maw. The caption read: these are so much easier than deer. Then he sent me a link to California Wildlife’s instructions on what to do if you come across a mountain lion in the wild. Wave your hands, throw rocks, try and look big. If it attacks you, don’t run. Food runs. “Playing dead is for bears,” he said, “unless you see cubs.”
I began screaming for the dog and after his preprogrammed delay he came, nose covered with dirt. I had no idea there were dog-eating lions in California, the monsters were everywhere but my bedroom. I scanned the hillside.
I peeked between every house for lurking cats on the way home, hoping I didn’t catch the belly dance of a curious tail against the bright sky wall. The newest information is what you fear
most, we assume time is an indicator of likeliness. The anxiety built with every step, stacking its way up to my dizzy head and before I collapsed with panic and tiredness my eyes became temporary space telescopes. They zoomed a million times magnification and found more monsters everywhere I turned my head. Zoom-zoom to the dirt and chemicals and bacteria around my feet, zoom-zoom to the atoms racing through everything with mushroom cloud force. I raised my head and zoom-zoom to the sky and the trapped gases and pollutants and carcinogens, zoom and the infinite cataclysmic comets and the center of life, the sun, zoom, and saw it for what it really was. An impossibly large ball of a hundred zillion endless nuclear explosions, so I turned away in fear and looked out at an empty part of the sky and zoom-zoom-zoom poof! A hundred billion million trillion more galaxies and stars and planets all screaming through infinity, whose surfaces would explode or melt or freeze or crack me back into a string of lonely atoms. Death was everywhere. A lion between the houses, a spot of empty sky, what’s underfoot, over-heel, ubiquitous. You will be eaten. A lion. A virus. A fire. Or the monster with the biggest teeth of all, time. It devours to survive and it has a taste for infinity.
This cynical epiphany brought me to my knees in the front yard of my home, I held my chest and gasped for air while the dog barked and jumped.
“Alex, one of those goddamn bees get you?” Annie said. Zeke ran over to greet the lady of the manor, knowing my condition wasn’t serious. I held up a finger to let her know I needed a second to compose myself. Annie was on her rocking chair when I walked up to the stoop, she had a glass of pale lemonade that was half gin. Annie didn’t sit there every morning or have any routine other than making sure her eyelids were caked with purple eyeshadow. In the house she’d shown me pictures of her black and white wedding where she rode in a lime green convertible for the first time, her eyeshadow was the same even in muted grays.
“Morning,” she said, “I hope the cell phones really are killing those bastards. Morning Zeeker! He’s a good boy, is he getting bigger?” The rocker was sideways so her feet could be in the sun which kissed the corner of the porch.
The dog had been a huge issue when I moved in, but now she loved him. Annie swore up and down that my extra-large dog looked like he was bred to kill. Zeke was a mastiff, which makes him half as smart as other dogs and twice as lazy. So lazy that when he hears a noise outside he usually opens and shuts his mouth rather than waste energy barking.
“He’s getting fat Annie, getting old.” Zeke laid down on a cool pile of mulch where the hedges blocked the sun. I sat on a porch step to keep her company. She was the only person I talked to with any frequency, we didn’t like each other much but we both needed the companionship. “Thank you for letting him out last night.”
“You were right, he did his business and ran right back downstairs,” she was holding her glass in her lap with two hands and the condensation pooled in the wrinkles on top of her fingers. “How’s that new job going?”
“I like it more than I thought I would.”
“Your generation needs to learn how rewarding hard work can be. New kid came to mow the lawn, little jerk ran that damn mower over the marigolds.”
“I told you I’ll still mow, I enjoy it.”
“You come up with any new recipes I can try?”
“Not really, I just do what I’m told. I’ve helped with those freebie spoonfuls that people get to start the meal.”
“The amuse bouche?” she said. If she had sunglasses on she’d have tipped them down her nose.
“Yeah, sorry I didn’t want to bore you with jargon.”
“Young people, every time you discover something you think you were the first to do it. James and I had a French place we frequented when he was still here, god rest.
“He wasn’t much for trying new things, but we went on my birthday so he had to go anywhere I damn well pleased. It was down the road a piece, closed, eight or twelve years ago I think.” Annie kept her hands encircled on the glass while she took long, slow gulps.
I wondered if the reverie she had for her dead husband was genuine or a reward for surviving an awful marriage, a small revision in her mind to improve what time she had left.
“My doctor says I should walk more, but I don’t have no reason to,” she said, “that beast of yours, he pull?”
“If the sun is out then I’m the one doing the pulling, he isn’t much for this weather,” I said. Zeke was on his side, licking at the air with a bunch of mulch in his teeth.
“You think I could walk him, maybe in the afternoons now that you’re gone?”
“Any time you want you go right ahead and let yourself in, he could use the exercise.”
“So could I, when do you work next?”
“I work tonight and I think have a date soon.” Annie held up a finger and went inside to fill her glass, she checked her makeup in the reflection of the storm door before walking in.
“That’s a relief, I never see you with anyone and thought you might be one of them new people they’re talking about creating a third bathroom for,” she said. It would have been a lot more offensive had she been less old or less drunk.
“It’s a girl before you ask,” I said.
“She pretty?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. The question was like wearing a pair of pants that used to fit but now you struggled to get them buttoned and once you did it reminded you of how good you used to be, better and slim. All I could do was shrug my shoulders.
“Of course she is, she’s lovely I’m sure, but that don’t matter, what matters is how you feel when you get home.”
“Are you being dirty?”
“Oh Alex, you’ll know when I’m being dirty. When you get home ask yourself what’s next. If you can’t wait to see her or call her then you know you’re on to something.”
Once her glass sat empty on the ground next to her chair I picked myself up and descended into the bottom half of the house to get ready for work.
You don’t get anything in life unless you ask for it. Before I’d left with the dog that morning I called Erin and asked her out for ramen. She said yes.
◆◆◆
I hadn’t spent much time in San Francisco proper, I toiled my life away in the basement watching people eat on TV. I cooked a lot more than I could eat so if I made something I thought Annie might like I’d take it to her. The rest of it went to the dog as long as it was safe for him to eat. Everyone knows dogs can’t have chocolate, but they can’t have onions or garlic either.
“Let’s go into the city,” Erin said on the phone the morning of our date. Then she pressed me about which hills I’d eaten on or under. My list was too short for her to stand. “We have to go right now, get on the train and meet me at the MacArthur station and we can head in together, go, go!”
I got in my car and headed towards the BART station. The sky was a washed out blue, lined with slim rows of gray clouds that looked like lines of Sanskrit prose. I wound into town over wavy grass hills with pine Mohawks. In every direction was a wonder of the west. Valleys of grapes for rotting to the north, the can’t-see-it-all-in-a-lifetime majesty of Yosemite to the east, a star city of plastic people to the south, and my destination to the west, over the water but not quite to the sea, San Francisco. Curving southbound on a barren country road I was in the hollow center of everything.
When I was growing up in the Midwest almost everyone thought that they’d be better off if they relocated to one of the wrinkled edges of America. That a twenty minute drive to the nearest movie theater meant they lived in the middle of nowhere and that America being the best place only applied to the outer rim. Most people thought the boring flats they came from were a purgatory until you made your way somewhere more interesting. That if they could just make it to the water then life would be better and sweeter and more complete than any world they could craft out there between the mile-wide squares of corn and wheat.
At the station I waited seven minutes behind the yello
w line before the train came grinding towards me. The front car looked like it had an eye patch with one offset window coming my way. I beat myself up all day with the ifs and hows but when I crossed over the yellow paint the cool cabin air washed away some of the fear. The car was empty except for two teenage boys who sat with their backs to the window and feet up on the seats, at that age where the worst thing they could do was something not cool.
I flung myself into the first row and braced the window ledge as the train vibrated a few times then departed. You don’t get anything in life unless you ask for it, I kept telling myself.
With and Without You
PAGE 38
Everyone caught the fever the summer of 1994. It was sudden, one day the kids were fine and the next they were mad for soccer. It was the year World Cup soccer came to America. I was nine but I told everyone I was almost ten. A freckled tomboy with a meaty, single braid that bopped around when I ran.
I remember watching the opening ceremony on TV. My dad shot his eyes at me when the wavy-haired singer missed the empty net, like he did when Grandma said something racist at dinner. We always had that connection, I knew when his eyes were trying to find mine so he could tell me what he was thinking.
Soccer games don’t have commercials, instead they have a sponsor’s plaque in the upper left corner. Computers can put them all over the screen now and we don’t notice, but in those days it was voodoo magic to my young mind. I was mesmerized as it switched from candy bars to credit cards and each time I didn’t recognize what was being sold to me I forced my dad to explain what it was so I could ask for it at the store. “Erin, watch the game,” he said, “this only happens once every four years and even then our team doesn’t always get to play.”
Once the games started and the US team did well that was it for me, I was going to be a soccer player. I didn’t think girls were allowed to play soccer, I’d never seen one. I knew it was called football in Europe and girls couldn’t play American football, so logic dictated: it must be forbidden. I was going to be a pioneer, the first girl to play. I told this to my mom and she added it to the list on the refrigerator of futures I’d dreamed up for myself. It was written right underneath “attack dog untrainer.” This was a profession invented after being jerked away from a police dog at the mall that I tried to pet. I wandered a lot as a kid, up to strange animals to pet them and to strange people so they’d pet me. My mom dragged me away and told me they were trained to attack and couldn’t be pet like a regular dog.
