“You mean like a shrink?”
Tina smiled at the way I said shrink. “I mean like a shrink, yes.”
“No. I don’t know. It’s barely been two days.”
“Okay, well. I have names of people, if you or anyone you know needs them.”
“Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“It’s not, but I do want you to know that.” She let the offer stand as she drew her mohair coat tighter against the creeping cold. It was an expensive-looking piece, the material burnished of lint and pills. Denise would have offered to take it from her so she could peep at the label and see who she was up against.
“You’re the one who saw him, right? That’s what the paper said.”
I swallowed queasily. “I can’t believe the Democrat printed that.” At that point in time, I thought I was only local news.
“Pamela,” Tina said starkly, “it’s in the New York Times.”
I was poleaxed. I imagined the paper—I imagined my picture—on every stoop in our neighborhood, just thirty minutes south of the city. “They can do that? They’re allowed to just do that?”
“It’s unethical but not illegal.” Tina reached for the pack of menthols she kept on her dashboard at all times. One in the car and one in her purse, I’d soon learn.
“You burned that guy,” I said, remembering his yelp, the smell of singed body hair.
“I branded him,” Tina corrected me, jiggling loose a cigarette and offering the pack to me. I shook my head and she shrugged. Suit yourself. “Make anyone who wants to interview you roll up his sleeve first. Do not give that guy a quote, whatever you do. You should have heard the way he was talking about you and your friends before you came outside.” There was the catch of her lighter, and she went cross-eyed as she tried to match the flame to the tip of her cigarette.
“What was he saying?”
“That you shouldn’t have made yourselves so known.”
“Known,” I repeated, confused. “What does that mean?”
“That if you’d been tucked in bed at ten p.m., none of this would have happened to you.”
That touched a live wire in me. “Every last one of us was tucked into bed,” I snarled.
“Can you tell me what he looked like?” Tina faced me with worried, bloodshot eyes. “I promise to explain myself. I just need to hear what he looked like from you.”
I’d been asked to go over it so many times already that I was starting to feel like certain aspects of my story were more hindrance than help, that I ought to simplify it, either leave out the half second when I’d thought it was Roger or make a full-throated accusation. No one tells you that the truest stories are the messy, unwieldy ones, that you will be tempted to trim in the places that make people scratch their heads and pad the parts where they lean in closer. It takes fortitude to remain a true and constant witness, and I did.
“I mistook him for this guy, Roger,” I told Tina. “He dated Denise. Used to. Not just her either. He had a thing with a few of the girls, I’m learning.” I shook my head; I didn’t have the energy to get into all of it. “But I realized pretty quickly it wasn’t Roger. The man I saw was a lot smaller than Roger.”
Tina drew quickly on her cigarette with bulging, I’m-choking eyes. “What else? Do you remember anything else?”
“His nose.” I brought my fingertips to my own, demonstrating. “It was like a beak. Really sharp and straight. And he had thin lips.”
Tina seemed to need a moment with this. She closed her eyes. The corners of her mouth lifted into a not-quite-smile. “I knew it,” she whispered to herself, almost happy.
Tina opened her eyes and leaned across me, cigarette balanced between her teeth. I held my cough in my chest until my eyes watered. I liked being in that car with her, and I didn’t want to give her any indication that I couldn’t handle who she was and what she was telling me.
“This is why I came,” Tina said. “I got on a plane immediately when I heard what happened here. Because I knew it.”
She unfolded a piece of paper, smoothing out the creases with the heel of her hand. I was reminded of the flyers the fraternities would post for their charity parties until she offered it to me. No. Not a flyer for a party.
I read his rather prosaic-sounding name for the first time in that moment, but some years ago I vowed to stop using it. This is no symbolic abstinence on my part—his name has been said enough and ours forgotten, yada yada. I mean, sure, fine, that can be a part of it, but who I want you to remember, every time I say The Defendant, is not him but the twenty-two-year-old court reporter dressed for success in a pussy-bow blouse. She was the one who recorded him in the official transcripts not by his government name, like the licensed attorneys on the case, but by the two most honest letter combinations her sensitive ear and flying fingers could produce: The Defendant.