The Assistants(69)

I reached across Ginger’s rack to grab my cell phone from my nightstand. She stirred but didn’t wake. Lily was curled up at our feet like a house cat, and Wendi was sprawled out on Emily’s air mattress. We’d all fallen asleep in our clothes. I found it impressive how Wendi managed to snooze comfortably in pants with chains on them.

“Oh shit,” I said aloud, but no one heard me. It was later than I thought, already almost nine a.m., and there had been no call from Emily.

Robert didn’t take the bait.

“Oh shit,” I said again. Why wasn’t anyone waking the heck up?

Emily was probably being charged right now. What was I doing just sitting here? I had to do something. Anything. Call a lawyer, cry for help, check on Margie’s envelope maybe—the documents I’d hidden in the freezer beneath the ice trays, camouflaged behind a forest of frozen vodka bottles.

I hurdled over Ginger and Lily to stand upright—and then stopped. I’d caught sight of myself in the mirror above my dresser.

Sometimes in an instant you realize everything.

I know that sounds like the tag line to a Taster’s Choice commercial, but I swear that’s how this was. All at once I knew I had to turn myself in. Not only for Emily, but for that crazed woman in the mirror.

She wasn’t who I wanted to be. Cowardly, rationalizing, passing off blame. Where was my integrity? Had I not once been a wide-eyed NYU student underlining her Norton Anthology raw, elated by the words of Emerson and Thoreau?

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

What you are comes to you.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.

That last quote may have been Oprah piggybacking on Emerson, but you get my point. I couldn’t let this go on this way. So I took a breath and went to her, that crazed woman in the mirror, and pulled a hairbrush through her frazzled hair—a hairbrush that had just last night been a microphone. Then I tugged on my shoes and threw on my coat, all the while allowing the decision to settle over me.

They say people who decide to kill themselves experience a profound tranquillity once the deliberation is over, the ending decided. I was feeling something like that, with a bit more gastrointestinal bustle.

I popped two TUMS into my mouth and bade Ginger, Wendi, and Lily a silent good-bye. They stayed sleeping like they’d been roofied, or whatever kids were using to drug one another’s drinks those days. I let them sleep. They’d figure it out when they woke up and found me gone; they’d understand without my having to tell them.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary woman, but she is brave five minutes longer. (That’s me piggybacking on Emerson.)

Slinging my messenger bag across my shoulder—empty except for my phone, keys, wallet, and photo ID, because I wouldn’t need anything else—I reached for the doorknob, just as the door swung open, smacking me in the face.

I cried out, covering my face with my hands, and fell backward, then removed my hands, looked up, and there she was.

“Emily?”

She was disheveled, wearing the same “house clothes” she’d had on when they took her away, and her hair was pulled back in a frizzy ponytail, but it was her, in the flesh, Emily f*cking Johnson.

“They let me go,” she said.

I hobbled up to standing, disregarding my aching and probably broken nose.

I couldn’t believe it. She was home.

“I was just on my way down there,” I said, letting my messenger bag slide from my shoulder onto the floor.

Emily surveyed the kitchen, the empty pizza boxes and candy wrappers. “I see you’ve been eating your pain,” she said. “Because you missed me.”

That blond-haired, blue-eyed bitch from Connecticut. She was home!

“I did miss you,” I said. “I missed you so much.”

The others, finally, had woken up from all the commotion and were out of the bedroom—Wendi with creases on her face, Ginger with her hair wild as a house fire, and Lily struggling to get her glasses on fast enough.

“You’re all here?” Emily said. “For me?” Her voice cracked and she lapsed, unconsciously perhaps, into her natural lower-class accent. “I thought for sure you all were just going to let me . . .” She broke off, her neck and cheeks reddened, her eyes filled with tears. She covered her face with her hands.

“Never,” I said, going to her. “I was just on my way to turn myself in.” I folded my arms around her, squeezing so hard I thought for sure she’d complain, but she didn’t.

Wendi, Ginger, and Lily huddled around us, clinging, howling, crying. My upstairs neighbors might have thought someone had died, because when you get right down to it, there’s such an indistinguishable line between crying out for dear life and crying out for dear death.

I always wondered what the sensation was like, to win. The lottery, the Super Bowl, a gold medal—to win anything, really. To want something so much, and to get it. Now I knew.

Beneath all the tears, I was saying thank you, thankyouthankyouthankyou, to God, the Universe, Buddha, Oprah, anyone and everyone who’d helped out with this in any way. And then I made a silent promise to pay my good fortune forward, because suddenly I had something to pay forward. I was supposed to be an island, and hell might be other people, but what I had there at that moment in my overfull kitchen—well, it was something.