Lily ducked for cover, probably fearing for the giraffes on her cardigan, as Wendi retaliated with a handful of Swedish Fish.
“Stop throwing the candy!” I yelled. “It’s more teasing than the rats in the walls can handle.”
Wendi agreed to a truce and returned to her lying-down position, further scuffing my walls with her boots. “If I knew you’d be this good at bluffing, Tina, I would have entered you into the World Series of Poker.”
I laughed like I thought I should.
Let everyone think it was a bluff. I didn’t trust Wendi to not go ahead and leak the documents if she found out about them—and then what? There would be no undoing that once it happened. I’d probably get subpoenaed, sworn to an oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, and what the hell was the truth anyway? None of that mattered. I only needed one person to believe I had those documents, and that was Robert.
30
I WOKE FIRST, dry-mouthed and momentarily confused as to why there were other people’s limbs draped across my chest. Then I remembered how the night had turned into a sleepover, all candy and pizza and late-night stomachache. There had even been an impromptu hairbrush sing-along to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” when our page views reached one million—which in retrospect made little if any literal sense, but it felt right at the moment. I know, girls singing into hairbrushes, right? But would you believe I’d never done that before? I mean, not when I wasn’t by myself, alone, doing my own backup vocals. It was different in a group—louder, for sure. My upstairs neighbor had to bang on the floor with a broom handle to quiet us down. But now all was silent.
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 fucking Johnson.