Bright Young Women(20)
“What if it is Roger?” Bernadette whispered.
For a moment, I felt like I was swallowing glass. Then I remembered. “It can’t be,” I said, rolling over to face her. On the wall adjacent, there was a painting of Mother Mary, wearing blue and praying with her eyes upcast. “I saw him, remember?”
Bernadette picked at the scratchy, expensive fabric of the comforter. She opened her mouth, and half a vowel came out. She pressed her lips together, tight.
“Bernadette?” I asked, apprehension pooling in my bowels.
She shook her head. No. She wouldn’t say it. No.
I sat up, scooting closer to the foot of the bed and placing my hands on top of her knees. She turned her face away from me.
“You know whatever you tell me is in confidence until you give me permission to talk about it, right?” I had started to say this once I took office, like I was some kind of priest. But I found it worked. It was something about the part “until you give me permission.” It was a sharing of power.
“There was this time.” Bernadette closed her eyes. “With Roger.”
It happened in his car, parked right outside The House, on their way home from a movie. His hand on the back of her neck as they kissed, gently at first, then not. He pushed her face down into his lap. Held it there. He thrust until she sobbed. Her nose stuffed up and she could not breathe. She was sure he was going to accidentally kill her.
“It was last year,” Bernadette said, her face still turned away from me but smeared with tears now. “He and Denise had that huge fight in the middle of Winter Gala, remember? And they didn’t talk for a whole month?”
Oh, I remembered.
“Anyway,” Bernadette said, swiping at her face with the back of her hand, “he asked me out a little bit after that. I didn’t want to advertise it. They were broken up, sure, but you could tell she wanted to be back together with him. And I didn’t want to deal with that, you know?”
That. Denise’s bruised ego; her wrath. I did know.
“We don’t have to tell the police, do we?” Bernadette faced me finally, desperation in her bloated eyes. “I would lose my title if this got out.”
I caught myself about to say I didn’t think we needed to. I didn’t want to give Sheriff Cruso one more reason to suspect Roger. But keeping something like this from the authorities felt unethical, like we were vaguely conspiring to protect a person who didn’t totally deserve it. “Would you be okay if I spoke to my father about it? He’s an attorney. A good one.”
Bernadette replied without taking the time to consider it. “Can I let you know in the morning?”
We stared at each other with honest, exhausted faces. If the answer wasn’t yes now, it certainly wouldn’t be yes with clearer heads.
“Of course,” I told her. The thing about what I said to them—about speaking to me in confidence, about needing their permission to share—it worked because I always kept my word.
Jacksonville, Florida, 2021
Day 15,826
The Jacksonville airport is much newer and nicer than Newark’s. They don’t just have better food options and bathrooms where all the toilet sensors actually work; the floors are gleaming white terrazzo as far as the eye can see, not so much as a swatch of carpet to slow me down as I speed-roll my suitcase alongside me, trying to beat the other business-class passengers to the front of the Hertz line.
It is after midnight by the time I am buckled into my sanitized-smelling midsize SUV. The parking attendant scans my reservation barcode and tells me to enjoy my trip with a genuine smile. She is drinking from a coffee tumbler that says Life with Christ is a wonderful adventure, written in the same loopy cursive as the letter that brought me here. The boom barrier lifts.
From Jacksonville, it is a long, mind-numbing drive on a wide highway that slants imperceptibly north to Tallahassee. I listen to Blue ?yster Cult and drum the steering wheel to the beat, feeling painfully wired. There are hardly any other cars on the road at this hour, and the pine trees fur together thickly outside my window. I realize with a jolt of panic that I need to pee. There are signs every twenty miles or so for interstate rest areas, but no way am I trapping myself in a public bathroom in the middle of the night, out in the middle of nowhere, where gators and bears would find my body sooner than a park ranger. No fucking way.
I pull over onto the shoulder of the road and hurriedly unbutton my wool suiting pants. It is early spring, damp and mild, but the backs of my knees are sweating as I drop trou and squat in the grass. I’ve left the driver-side door open for cover, not that I need it. The night is solid black, the highway quiet save for the harsh pulse of the insects in the trees.
I don’t hear the car or even see the headlights, and at first I think he’s come out of the woods.
“Excuse me?”
I shoot to my feet, snatching up my pants and looking right and left and up and down, trying to find the man attached to the voice. I spot him over the hood of my car, standing at the passenger-side door, a faceless silhouette. He could be nineteen or ninety; I have no sense of his age or his stature, where he materialized from, and if the passenger-side door is locked. I think about just diving behind the wheel, but what would stop him from diving in right alongside me, weapon of choice against my cheek. Drive, bitch. Do exactly as I tell you.
“You startled me,” I say stupidly into the dark. There is urine dribbling down my thigh.