by Rufi Thorpe
* * *
—
I did not attend the arraignment the next morning, but Ray and Swanson swung by to pick me up on their way to Lynwood Jail to get Bunny back. We were giddy and it was a short drive with no traffic on the 105, but once we were there the process ground to a halt. Getting someone out of jail was as lengthy and boring a process as buying a car. Swanson and I wound up going to Carl’s Jr. while Ray waited because Swanson complained he was getting low blood sugar. They needed to “locate the inmate,” and for some reason this was taking hours. Didn’t they know where she was? It made me anxious, but Swanson assured me it was always like this.
He ordered a Western Bacon Cheeseburger. I ordered a salad.
“So you met Ray in an AA meeting?” I asked.
He laughed. “Pretty ironic, huh?”
“It’s like a meet-cute in a romantic comedy. Two alcoholic men, running from their financial and spiritual obligations…”
Swanson giggled and covered his mouth with his hands so his chewed-up burger wouldn’t show. “Exactly, exactly,” he said.
I punctured a little cherry tomato with my plastic fork. “But he said you helped with the lawsuit after Allison’s death.”
“I did, I did,” Swanson said. “That’s what bonded us, I think. He was trying to get sober after she died, and we met. Honestly, we met a few times before I put the pieces together. I’d heard him share multiple times, but he’d never gone into detail about the accident before, and as soon as he said ‘tire,’ I thought: I’ve gotta talk to this guy.”
“Right,” I said. “He told me. Because you were already working on a case against Ford.”
“But we sure worked some magic on this one,” Swanson said. “Boy.” He took a big bite of his burger.
“So you think Bunny got a good deal?” I asked.
“Mmm—yes! Absolutely. The arson alone could have been up to three years. That was really very stupid. She should not have done that.”
“Well, you know why she did it, right?”
“Angst?” he asked.
For a moment I could not speak, and the entire world seemed to me as sinister and sad as a fast-food restaurant, and even the beautiful photons of sunlight cascading through the air outside were nothing but extensions of the absurd and heartless Rube Goldberg machine that was the universe. I tried to speak with as little emotion as possible. “The panels weren’t up to code. The inspector had been bribed. She was worried families would move in and one of the panels would malfunction and a real fire would start that actually killed people.”
He laughed, a little uneasy. “Still illegal, however!”
“Moral, however,” I shot back.
“The law of man has never been about morality,” Swanson said, wiping his lips with his napkin. “Thank god!”
“What’s it about, then?”
“Capital!” he cried, his face joyful, even resplendent. He sucked on his Diet Coke, and I saw the brown liquid come up through the straw and for a flashing moment I saw him as an ape. “Money is a more tangible thing than the Good, the Beautiful, or the True, right? I mean, I mean, money is about value, right? Whatever you value. Used to be, when you killed someone you just paid their family a lump sum, Beowulf and all that, right? A wergild. Man price. I don’t know, don’t worry too hard, Michael, everything’s made up!” He giggled again. “It’s all just made up!”
His phone buzzed. “All right,” he said, “she’s out.”
* * *
—
On the car ride home from the jail, I felt so elated to see Bunny again, to have her in the car, that it was like being in love. We sat in the back of her father’s car together, and held hands, and I remembered that first ride to Manhattan Beach together because Bamboo Forest’s egg drop soup was too watery, and the way Ray had gotten drunk and rammed the light pole, and the way we had walked home through the salt air, bathed by the whooshing noise of cars and the ancient churning of the Pacific. How light our bodies were as we walked, how easy it was to begin to love her, how nimbly my tongue managed to tell her the truth. It seemed to me that it had been much easier then to know what the truth even was.
“Are you okay? Was it terrible?”
“Not terrible,” she said. “I mean, I cried at night, which was embarrassing. But it wasn’t like the movies, no one tried to beat me up or anything.”
She knew, I presumed Ray had told her, that she was only temporarily free, that she would be remanded at her sentencing hearing. But it seemed indecent to speak of this, and we were all pretending that all of the bad part was over now, that she would never be parted from us again, that the two nights she had spent away were an aberration and that Ray and Swanson had saved the day.
I looked at her pink cheek as she watched the passing buildings through the window, and I wanted to gobble her up. I wanted to consume her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her and hold her tight. I wanted to smell her skin and close my eyes and beg God to let me keep her.
“Can we eat something?” she said. “The food in there was terrible.”
* * *
—
That night I startled awake, certain that someone was trying to break into my room through the window. I fell off the bed, and for just a moment my kidneys and liver flared, every nerve lit up in agony, and I was certain I had exploded them within my body. It had been weeks since I had felt anything more than mild soreness, and the pain evacuated the air from my lungs.
“Are you okay?” Bunny asked, and she was kneeling over me. She was wearing red lipstick and she stank of perfume as sweet and synthetic as new plastic.
“Why are you in here?” I asked. I had never seen Bunny in red lipstick before, and somehow in the dim moonlight it made her unrecognizable to me. Like this was a dream and her face was trying to turn into someone else’s face.
“I was going out the window,” she said.
“Why?” I asked. I already halfway knew, but I wanted to make her say it. Somehow, fury had opened inside me like a parachute, when I had been previously unaware of harboring any rage at all.
“Eric’s waiting,” she said, pointing at the window.
“Don’t go,” I said. “Don’t go fuck that shitbag.”
She shook her head, like she didn’t know what to say, tugged on her ponytail and turned away from me toward the window. I scrambled to my feet and put myself in front of her.
“Seriously. Don’t. Bunny, don’t go.”
“I’m just gonna go for an hour,” she said. “I’m coming back.”
“It’s not that I think you’re running away—it’s that you are not his two a.m. booty call. He can’t just text and then come get you and get a blow job and then let you go to fucking prison!”
“I. Want,” she said, saying the words slowly, with dramatic space in between each one, “To. See. Him.”
“It’s a bad idea,” I spit back at her. But I wondered if I was just pearl clutching. Who was I to deny her the quick thrill of giving a blow job in a car, of gliding through a sleeping town, of feeling that one’s life is one’s own.
“It’s my bad idea,” she said, and she shoved me with her shoulder as she tried to get past me. I stumbled, but caught myself, and walked backward to keep myself between her and the window. “Bunny, Bunny, Bunny,” I was saying.
“Get out of my fucking way,” she said, and I could see the muscles in her neck widen and swell as she stood up taller, trying to intimidate me.
“Please don’t. Don’t go,” I said, begging in a way that reminded me of my mother.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. We were backed up to the window, I could feel the cool glass against my shoulder blades through my T-shirt. There was no farther to go.
“Get out of my way.”
I didn’t move.
“Get out of my way,”
she said.
“Bunny, Eric is a bad guy, he’s not nice. He’s not—”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said again.
“Just—there are going to be so many other guys. There are going to be so many other—”
“No, there’s not!” she shouted in my face, and then she bent forward and I didn’t understand what she was going to do until she heaved her shoulder into my abdomen and hoisted me like a sack of dog food and threw me hard across the room. I think she may have meant to throw me on the bed, but my velocity was such that I skidded across the satin coverlet and hit the floor beyond it. My organs screamed and I lost my eyesight. Then I started breathing again and I blinked and blinked until I could see the patch of carpet in front of me. I could hear the window scrape open. I could hear Eric impatiently honk like an idiot. I could hear her feet crunching along the roof. I could hear the thump as she jumped down into the yard. I could hear the car door open, a rush of music, then close. I could hear the engine and the tires on the pavement as he drove away, taking the stop sign at a roll and then making the right. I could hear the wind entering the window. I could hear the fibers in the carpet shifting underneath my face. I could hear my heart beating, a disgusting wet sound like the bag of innards in a chicken, but hot, pulsing. I could hear time unskeining like ribbon off a spool, and the fact that it would never stop seemed merciless.
But wouldn’t I have gone if it were Anthony in that car waiting for me?
And I knew then why I didn’t want her to go. It was because I wanted her to stay with me. I wanted our friendship to be enough. I wanted these last days together to somehow be about our closeness. I wanted her tragedy to belong to me.
The day Bunny was remanded at her sentencing hearing was a Tuesday. In the days between our late-night altercation and her court date we were quiet and formal with each other. She didn’t apologize, and I didn’t bring it up. I texted Anthony that I missed him, then immediately texted again saying I shouldn’t have sent that and asking him not to reply. The morning of her court appearance, she knocked at my door. She was already dressed for court in a pink angora sweater and gray skirt that Swanson had picked out and dropped off at the house without anyone having asked. I didn’t see what difference it made at this point, but we all supposed he knew what he was doing. As the doom of her court date came nearer, Swanson became ever more manically cheerful. Anytime anyone said the phrase “three years,” Swanson would chime, “But she’ll get half-time credits! Eighteen months, folks, eighteen months.” He sounded like a game show host.
“Hey,” she said, “I have something for you.” She came in and sat on the edge of my bed. She was holding a thick manila envelope. “So I withdrew enough of the money from that account my dad has in my name and I paid off my Jeep. I’m signing it over to you. Here are the keys and the manual, and here’s the pink slip. So all you have to do is take this form to the DMV to transfer the title, I’ve already signed it.”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked. “Bunny, this is too much.”
“How else are you going to get a car?” she asked.
“Does your Dad know? Is he going to be pissed it’s not his?”
“I’ll tell him,” she said.
I felt badly about how happy and excited I was. This was my last day with her and I had prepared myself for the numb tragedy of it. Of driving to the courthouse in Ray’s car. Of waiting for her appearance. Of handing her over. I didn’t know what would pass over her face when the bailiff first put his hands on her and her body became not her own. It was the kind of terrible thing that was difficult to put into words, but I had watched it happen to my mother, and I knew what it was. I had prepared for bureaucracy and tragedy and tears, but I had not prepared for someone to give me a car. I kept trying not to smile, but pushing it down made it hurt.
“I’m sorry I was so mean about Eric,” I said. “You can do whatever you want. It’s your life. I don’t know why…I—”
“No, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I went. It was boring and stupid, but I just—I wanted so badly to feel like someone loved me. I always had this fantasy that—I have this tiny freckle, here,” she said. “And here.” She tilted her head so that I could see her neck. “See I have three tiny freckles in a row. And I have always had this fantasy of lying in bed with a man, and him noticing them and loving these three tiny little freckles. That only I have. That are me. And I thought—maybe he would see them.”
“I’ve always loved those freckles,” I said. They looked like the beginning of a dotted line. Like someone had marked where to start the knife when they cut off her head. I don’t know why they always portended such violence to me, but they did.
“I don’t know why I wanted him to see them.”
“Did he?”
“Of course not. I mean, and obviously we were in a dark car, I didn’t literally expect him to see them, it wasn’t the freckles, it was the whole thing.”
“You wanted to be seen.”
“Yes.”
Why did we want so desperately to be seen? I saw her. My eyes were full of her. But it wasn’t enough, and I was no longer hurt by it. The way she loved me wasn’t enough for me either. Maybe love would never be enough. Maybe it would never do what we wanted it to do.
* * *
—
The court was a buzzing, bustling place, and though our sentencing hearing was scheduled for eleven, Ray and Swanson and Bunny and I had gotten to the courtroom an hour early just in case. Our hearing was in Department 31 on the third floor, and even the hallway outside was crowded with people making deals or preparing or reviewing notes, lawyers and clients, street cops and detectives. There was a group of EMTs eating sunflower seeds and laughing. Swanson steered us to a cold granite bench, and we sat. “So once we go in, we can’t talk. You guys want to chill out here, and I’ll go see what case number they’re on?”
We nodded dumbly. Even though there was no reason for me to be personally nervous—I would not even have to speak in the courtroom—I found I was so physically freaked out that my eyes didn’t seem to be working correctly, as though my pupils were letting in too much light or not enough. I was incredibly distracted by this security guard who, while talking casually with an EMT who seemed to be his friend, had his hand on his gun and was gently fiddling with it. There were green tiles in a pattern with beige tiles, and I thought: Who designed this? What architect is tasked with determining the stagecraft of justice?
Swanson had returned to us. “They’re ahead of schedule, so let’s just go in. You need to go to the bathroom?” he asked Bunny. She shook her head. “Last chance,” he said, which even in my stunted state I found to be a frightening thing to say.
But I was glad Swanson had us go inside, because the courtroom was like a bath and it was better to have time to adapt to its strange temperature. It was a large room with a curved ceiling like an airplane hangar, and at the front of the room the judge sat at the bench, the American flag and the California flag hanging limp behind him, flanking the seal of the State of California. These were the totems. These were the details that made this a real courtroom and not a dream. The judge seemed to be some kind of ancient mouse king, swallowed in his black robes, with a pointy face and bifocals. He still had all his hair and it was an unremarkable brown color, gray at the temples. His voice was a nasal, pointy instrument he used to poke holes in things. We watched a gun charge get dismissed, and the young man bounced out of there like he could barely keep his feet on the ground. His friend was wearing a crucifix so covered in diamonds it must have cost as much as a car. The bailiff was constantly hunting people secretly looking at their cell phones, the use of which was prohibited as many notices in the courtroom advertised, and whenever he would catch someone silently scrolling or texting, there would be titters as he confronted the person and confiscated their phone. The first time it happened, I didn’t know what was going on
, and he moved from the bailiff’s box with such speed and emergency that I thought someone had drawn a gun.
Bunny and I held hands. Ray sat on her other side, and next to him Swanson sat, although Swan kept getting up, going outside, coming back in, and generally being in constant, agitated motion. We were watching a setting hearing where they were arguing over the date of a preliminary hearing, and the public defender explained she would be occupied for at least a month on a murder trial, and then would be taking a two-week vacation.
“Would you like to cancel your vacation?” the judge asked her.
“Excuse me?” the public defender asked.
“Would you like to cancel your vacation?” he asked again.
“No, thank you,” the public defender said, very smoothly, but I could hear, we all could hear, the quaver in her voice.
“Very well,” the judge said, and set the date of the preliminary hearing.
Watching all of this was absorbing and boring at the same time, much like a piece of theater. The case right before Bunny’s, we were all on edge with the knowledge that we were next. The defendant was in custody, and when the bailiff brought him out, there was an anguished twist to his face, and it was plain he was on the verge of tears. He slumped as far down into the chair as he could.
A man got up and said that the defendant’s lawyer had had a family emergency and he would be stepping in for her for the day.
“Sit up,” the judge yelled at the defendant. “Sit up like a man at your own hearing.”
The boy sat up more in the chair, but I could see his shoulders were shaking. I understood then what the man representing him was saying. The boy’s lawyer had not shown up. She had a family emergency. And now this young man was at his murder prelim alone, and he was angry and terrified and crying very much against his will in front of the judge. I guess it was then that I understood how unsafe we really were. The judge did not have any tenderness or even any inclination toward civility for this young man. The fact that we would all be crying if our lawyer bailed on us during a hearing when we were accused of murder was not of consequence.