Marsha leans to put her heels back on and then rolls her body up like we’re in a yoga class. She doesn’t speak, probably still too out of breath, but continues down the hall. These halls look exactly like the OPD ones, except they’ve got carpeted floors. I have the urge to remove my own shoes and slip my feet into the carpet, feel something soft on my skin.
Marsha unlocks her door and invites me to sit down on an orange chair, the only bright color in the whole room. Marsha’s office looks like I imagine a therapist’s office might: framed posters with quotes on the walls, all a mild blue-white tone, like she copied and pasted it straight from Pinterest. She has paintings of flowers on the walls and her desk is glossy. Behind her desk, she has sliding-glass doors that open up onto a patio overlooking the bay.
Marsha looks around like it’s her first time in here too, sighs, says, “Wanted it to be peaceful, you know? Everything in the world’s too heavy.”
Marsha done looked up “how to be your best self” and found some Cosmo article about actualization. Bet it’s working for her, too.
The orange chair actually feels like a cloud, like I’m sitting inside dandelion fluff.
Marsha hasn’t sat down yet. “Would you like some tea? Coffee?”
“How ’bout a burger?”
She laughs harder than she should. “It’s barely ten in the morning.”
“For real, I’m hungry as shit.” And I really am, haven’t eaten since Trevor and I had the pancake, and he ate most of it anyway.
“Oh.” Marsha scrambles, glances around like she can pull a burger out her desk. “I could order you some food.”
“You gonna pay for that?”
“Of course.” She smiles, happy to see me agree to something. “I don’t know what’s open right now, maybe this Italian place down the street.”
“Italian?”
Marsha says she doesn’t know many other delivery places, so I tell her to just order a pizza and she asks what I want on my pizza and I tell her whatever got the most meat. She laughs like she’s uncomfortable and trying to figure me out. I say she should get a large so we can share and she says she’s cutting back on carbs and I call bullshit on that because Lord knows Marsha could use some good food.
Twenty minutes later and Hank knocks on the door holding the pizza.
Marsha finally sits down in the chair beside me. I put a couple pieces on my paper plate and a couple on hers. Marsha tries to refuse it, but I tell her I ain’t talking if she ain’t eating and she rests the plate on her lap and begins picking off all the cheese, careful not to eat the crust.
I watch her, how meticulously she removes it.
While we waited for the pizza, Marsha had me sign the contract she told me about. It was pages and pages of fine print, but Marsha made me read it all, said you should never sign anything you don’t read first. Then, she brought out the pictures. Don’t know how she got them so quick, but she has each of the cops’ faces printed out clear as day, uniforms and badges with their numbers. All she’s missing is their voices, would have had me knowing each of them in half a second. Still, I remember them all, remember their skin, the way their fingers curled, every dimple, every bald spot.
It makes sense. That’s all I could think when I saw him: makes sense. 612’s splotches were redder in this picture, like a blush was mixed in with his usual discoloring, and he was smiling with his teeth. It looked forced. Everything with him was forced. Jeremy Carlisle stared at me through the photo the way he didn’t stare at me that morning I woke up in his bed.
612 is the one who wrote my name in his suicide note. He is the one who has set my world spinning.
I haven’t told Marsha any of this because she told me not to start talking until she said to.
After she prepares each slice to be eaten, she returns her attention to me. “I’m going to record this conversation, so I can type it up as part of your file. Completely between us, so feel free to say whatever you would like.” She places a recorder on the table and presses the red button. “Alright. First off, I need you to explain to me your relationship with any and all members of the Oakland Police Department, particularly Officers Carlisle, Parker, and Reed.”
It’s funny hearing their names, names I can’t place to a person because they were never that to me. They were never branches in a family tree or men who gave those surnames to their brides. They were numbers and badges and jaws. I tell Marsha I don’t know exactly who Parker and Reed are, that all I know is how the first cops found me that night off Thirty-Fourth, got me in their car. All the times they refused to pay me, said protection was my payment. I tell her about the day the detectives showed up by the pool, that room that closed in on me, the eyes, the tingle. I tell her about 612—Carlisle—and how he touched me, how his house was fit for five and seemed to house only him and his gun. I tell her how they came for Marcus and Cole.