Blood Sugar(63)

The feeling of relaxation I adopted and retained from my week in the telomere study had evaporated. I was filled with unease in a purgatory of having no control over my future. No syllabus. And knowing that I was being doggedly investigated by the justice system and could be arrested at any moment distracted me from entirely feeling the weight of Jason’s death. So I was handed a sort of moratorium from the full despair of grief, which was replaced by nauseating uncertainty and panic. I knew, however, the sadness and grief were still in there, deeper than I could access, waiting to come out when given a chance. Waiting to take over once my fate was settled. I just hoped that chance would not come when I was serving a life sentence in prison.





CHAPTER 42


    STRAW



Jesula stopped coming to clean my house. She missed one day. I texted her. And called. No response. Then she missed her second day that week, with no explanation. This was very unlike her. I called again and again. It kept going to voicemail. I drove to her apartment to check in on her. I had only been there a few times, but I remembered the brightly painted blue building in Little Haiti. The neighborhood’s rent was rising with the water levels on Miami Beach. Rich people moving inward, pushing the lower class out. I knocked. It seemed she wasn’t at home. I knew where her son went to junior high school. I thought about trying to reach him. I worried something terrible had happened to her. That afternoon I called Roman. He was back in DC dealing with other cases, but we made sure to talk once a day so he was fully informed. I mentioned Jesula’s disappearance and through the phone I could feel his eyes narrow as he paused, like he now knew something.

“Do not try and contact her son. Or her.”

“But—”

“Ruby. Give me a day.”

In that one day Roman fought to find out if Jesula had been called as a witness to the grand jury, and when it was confirmed she had been, he managed to attain a copy of her testimony through his backdoor channels. He flew to Miami, leaned against a wall of his war room, and slid down so he was sitting on the floor. He liked to stretch out after a flight. He handed me a stack of papers. I sat on the floor across from him. And as I read, I learned sorrow has no bottom.

Far more damning than the Evelyn W. video, or my knowledge of insulin, was Jesula’s testimony. What she told them hurt me emotionally, and legally, and the worst part was I hadn’t seen it coming. I had known her since I was fifteen years old, and I considered her both my friend as well as a sort of maternal figure.

I’d thought she cared about me. I’d thought she liked me, at the very least. She would often remind me to bring a sweater when I went out, since I got chilled inside movie theaters and malls and especially grocery stores. When she saw I was stressed about work and too busy to eat a proper lunch, she would hand me a banana and a handful of almonds and make sure I finished the small snack before rushing out into the world. She knew about so much of my life, from my party days as a teen, to my sober days, to my breakup with Seth, to my move in with Jason. She knew exactly how I liked my grandmother’s tiny antique clocks to be arranged, and when she dusted them, she placed them back just right. And it didn’t go only one way. I knew about her extended family still in Haiti. And I helped get her shy, sweet twelve-year-old son into a thriving charter school, which was much better than the barely accredited school he had been attending. Which was also how I would have known how to contact him, should Roman’s advice not have stopped me.

But underneath that closeness there was still a divide. There was still my privilege. And when I read her testimony, it hit me. The truth was Jesula cleaned the bathrooms where I shit. Maybe it was never a real friendship. Maybe this was her chance to have power over someone she felt had all the power all along. Perhaps she had resented me this entire time, since the moment I walked into that Kremlin club bathroom and bought lollipops. This realization mortified me. Could I have been so bad at reading people that I invited someone into my home twice a week who secretly hated me?

The tone in her testimony came through clearly. She seemed not reluctant but excited to report to the grand jury, detailing every single fight she had ever overheard between me and Jason. She was in our house for countless days. She saw us getting ready for work in the morning. Saw us grieving over Kangaroo. She heard us talking to each other on the phone while one of us was working late and the other one was pacing in the kitchen. She listened in when we discussed having children someday, and she let me know she would be our nanny if we needed extra help.

She was there for little moments that happen in every marriage, voices raised, frustrations coming to a head. In her testimony, she remembered and recounted every harsh word we had said to each other like she had been taking notes all along, waiting for this moment to help bring me down. She testified to my anger problem, citing that she once saw me give Jason the middle finger. That I stomped into the bedroom all sulky and did it through the bedroom wall. Jesula took only the worst bits and pieces and edited my happy marriage to Jason to create a mosaic of hostility and abuse. Her testimony made it seem like it was probable that I did want to kill my husband. And as type A as I was, that want probably led me to actually do it. In fact, she was happy to report, I was so type A I was accepted into an actual scientific study about goal-oriented people.

All of this was a horrible disfiguring of the facts, like a Picasso painting, but none of it was actually a lie. And then I read on. She had a lot to say about my grieving process. She told the grand jury that when my dog died I hung on to and cherished her every toy. I wouldn’t even let Jesula clean the floor because I didn’t want all her fur to be swept away forever. The dog’s water bowl sat out for months, without being emptied. Eventually the water evaporated. But the dog beds and dog treats and leashes stayed put. None of this was that weird, Jesula explained. Except then, when my husband died, I threw out all his belongings within a day. Closets were emptied. Surfboards given away. His favorite diet soda glasses boxed up and donated. Jesula was horrified by how differently I acted after my dog died versus after my husband died. It was unnatural, she said.