four now, but I hope someday he will be like you.” He reached up his gentle hand to pat my bed.
“Scottie, thank you—for being a friend!”
And then we both burst into song: “Traveled down a road and back again! Your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidante! Thank you for being a friend!”
I could remember being eight years old, during the worst of it between my mother and father. I always thought of those years as the “Yellow Apartment Years” because we had moved into this extremely depressing complex that was painted a violent shade of marigold. And The Golden Girls would come on, two back-to-back episodes, on the Lifetime network, right when I got off school. Gabby and I would eat tortillas I microwaved with ketchup and Kraft Singles inside, and watch The Golden Girls, arguing about who was our favorite. She loved Blanche, but I loved Sophia. For her meanness. She didn’t seem to need any of the others. She was complete in herself.
“Do you think you could tell us any more about that night?” Detective Carmine asked.
“Right,” I said, snapping back into the present. And then I told them. It would have taken too much strange effort to refuse to tell them. And I did not wish to owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills in case I couldn’t get into Medi-Cal. That wasn’t justice, not justice for me. I did not, however, mention that I thought I had heard Jason’s voice. I had decided that his voice had been a hallucination, something I made up, possibly even after the fact.
“But,” I said, “I don’t want to press charges.”
“That’s something that happens on TV,” Detective Brown said. “You don’t press charges, the DA does, and it all depends on whether there is sufficient evidence to prosecute.”
“Oh,” I said. It seemed wrong that I could be in a hospital for a crime there wasn’t enough evidence for, as though I were Schrödinger’s cat. I might be, but possibly was not, the victim of assault. Maybe four guys had gotten together and beaten the piss out of me, or maybe they hadn’t? Hell, who could say in this wacky world! It didn’t matter that I was bruised, peeing blood, that it hurt like fuck to laugh or sneeze because my ribs were broken. Just moments ago, when I had thought the choice was mine, I had wanted to make sure those boys would not be brought up on charges, but now that I knew I was powerless, I was furious that they might not be, and anxious about what it might mean in terms of my medical expenses.
“A social worker should be stopping by today or tomorrow to see you,” Detective Carmine said. I was released the next day, and Bunny drove me to her house in her red Jeep Cherokee, and I dimly saw through the darkened glass Jason watching from our kitchen as she led me, limping, up the path into her mansion.
Bunny devoted herself to taking care of me in a way I might not have expected. The next morning, she showed up in my room. They had installed me in the Madame Butterfly Suicide Sex Suite, a place teeming with memories of Anthony, so that any surface my mind attempted to land on became a knife that cut me. She was carrying a tray: peanut butter toast, a bruised banana, and a shot glass holding a bug-eaten rose from their front yard. I had been worried after the way I drunkenly insulted Ray that I would not be allowed to stay with them, but Bunny had told me he was extremely sorry and embarrassed about it, and indeed Ray himself had made a speech to that effect immediately upon my entering their home, and at the end had even gotten down on one knee and grasped my hands. “I am determined,” he said, “to become a better man.” I looked at him, understanding that he was already very drunk. The bruising on his cheeks was gone now, I had been in the hospital for so long, but there was a hot pink seam at his hairline that I couldn’t stop looking at. Really, all things considered, he did look much better, and it was amazing how completely the bags under his eyes were gone. He looked ten years younger. With his eyes open, you could no longer see where the stitches had been because they were right in the fold,