Jenna seductively moan and coo in ecstasy. Her cries of pleasure turned louder as the passion progressed.
As soon as I heard her, I worried Uretsky would find it odd that Ruby took so much pleasure from the act. I couldn’t very well have instructed Jenna to behave as an unwilling partner. Such direction would have seemed contradictory to the fantasy Jenna believed she was creating for our benefit. If pressed, I would tell Uretsky that Ruby didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her suffer. That could not have been further from the truth. Each time Jenna cried out in pleasure, Ruby cringed in pain. We sat in silence while Drunk Drew had sex with a woman he thought was my wife, but was too intoxicated to notice the switch.
When I tried to hold Ruby’s hand, she pulled away.
“I don’t want to be touched,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry for everything.”
Ruby looked at me and fought back tears. “I want you to know that I’m never going to stop loving you, John.” She spoke in a whispered voice, as though Jenna and Drunk Drew might overhear us talking.
I didn’t say anything. A good husband knows when it’s time to just listen. Meanwhile, Jenna’s moans of ecstasy, faked or not, grew louder and more intense.
“I didn’t appreciate the motto ‘Live for today’ before I had cancer,” Ruby continued. “Every day I’ve lived with this disease, I’ve felt tainted by its presence. It’s as though somebody took a gigantic eraser to the best parts of my life and wiped them away with a quick sweep of the hand. It didn’t matter how great my yesterdays were, because I’d have to live through this today, knowing that my body was working hard to kill me.”
“I understand,” I said.
“No, I don’t think you do,” Ruby said. “Because the situation we’re in right now feels a thousand times worse.”
I kept my eyes fixed on Ruby, but words failed me. I looked away, only to have Ruby grab my chin and force me to reconnect.
“You begged me to go along with your identity theft plan. I didn’t want to do this, but you made me. You begged me. That’s what I want you to really understand.”
Jenna cried out again, and I could tell it was the finale. Ruby and I didn’t speak until ten minutes later, when Jenna entered room 325 through the unlocked interior door, counting her money from Drunk Drew. Including what I owed her, Jenna’s jubilant expression implied that she had had one of the best workdays in her life.
She looked Ruby and me over and smiled. “You guys are my freakin’ favorite couple ever,” she said. The word came out sounding like “ev-ah.”
“Is Andrew gone?” I asked Jenna.
“Yeah, he’s out of there. I’d hang around and chat, but I’m dying for a smoke.”
I paid Jenna while Ruby snuck back into room 324. If Uretsky was watching us, we wanted him to see Ruby leave that hotel room, not her body double.
“Thanks for everything,” I said.
“No. Thank you,” Jenna said.
I thought that would be the last time I’d ever hear Jenna’s voice.
I was wrong.
We got back to the Harvard Avenue apartment shortly after one o’clock in the morning. I tried to get in touch with Uretsky to tell him we’d completed his task and he should let Winnie go, but I didn’t have a phone number for him. I sent an e-mail through the One World game instead. No response. I text messaged him by replying to one of his earlier texts. He’d used a bunch of different numbers to contact me, so I sent a bunch of different texts.
Again, no response.
Ruby sank to the floor, her head buried in her hands. Ginger sauntered over and rubbed her furry little body against Ruby.
“I can’t take this anymore,” Ruby said. “It’s too much. . . . It’s too much for me.”
I knelt beside her.
What could I say to make it better? What could I do?
Nothing.
“It’s going to be all right,” I said, stroking her hair. “I promise. Everything is going to be all right.”
That would be the second thing that night about which I was wrong.
The apartment phone rang and woke us at seven o’clock the next morning. We had passed out—not fallen asleep—on the hardwood floor. Ruby, who lay huddled in a fetal position, rolled over onto her back and jumped to her feet before the second chime sounded. She rose too quickly, so I gripped her shoulders