Seven Suspects Page 5

  “Sometimes,” I say to her, “you have to stand up to bullies and mean people, even if it means they won’t be your friends anymore.”

  Her face is clouded with uncertainty. She’s anticipating abuse from her friends.

  “Sometimes kids are going to tell you your parents are stupid, your aunt is a freak, your clothes are ugly, and everything you’ve ever known is wrong. You have to be strong enough to know those things aren’t true and the people saying them aren’t worthy of your trust. Hold out for friends you can trust.”

  She shrugs. I shrug back. The train rolls in. We ride and walk silently back to Aunt Bobbi’s place, which just a few days ago was the coolest place in Roberta’s life.

  Betsy’s nightly call from Paris is perfectly timed. I’ve just finished eating dinner and Roberta has just finished looking at hers. I remain calm about that, though. I know she’ll wake up with a ravenous appetite and consume the calories she needs for breakfast. I’m less calm about the chat with Betsy.

  “How are you and the Princess doing?” she asks. Her voice is light and cheerful.

  “We’re doing okay,” I reply. “She’s Roberta now and she’s getting some grief at school for having a transsexual aunt. She isn’t pleased with me for challenging the primary bigots to a conversation, but I think this, too, will pass.”

  I answer Betsy’s questions, then turn her over to Roberta. I tend to the dishes and kitchen cleanup, but I hear snatches of Roberta’s side of the conversation, which is mostly one-word answers punctuated with preadolescent attitude. Poor Betsy is going to be plagued by guilt for being so far away in a beautiful city, hopefully getting laid by a worthy lover, while her child toils in misery back in the ghetto.

  Roberta brings the phone to me. “Mom wants to talk to you,” she says. When I take the phone, she leaves without another word and goes into her room.

  “Is she going to be alright?” Betsy asks. Her voice drips with worry.

  “Yes,” I say. “Have a good time and don’t worry about us. We’re just having an adolescent snit fit a couple of years ahead of schedule.”

  Betsy doesn’t understand.

  “Roberta and her friends seem to have jumped to the next step in human development,” I tell her. “She reminds me a lot of what it was like to be a teenager.” I don’t put into words the rest of that thought—that I had to go through puberty as a male, which spared me the sharp-tongued barbs of other girls, but only at the expense of learning to be tough, not to cry, and to act as though femininity was a disease.

  Betsy asks what she can do—should she talk to Roberta again?

  “The best thing you can do is have a great time,” I counsel. “You want to be well rested for the job ahead of you when you get home.” I laugh when I say it, but it’s the truth.

  “You’ll call me if things get bad?” she asks.

  “I will. But don’t worry. Have fun. We’ll work through this just fine.”

  “I’m sorry, Bobbi,” she says. “I thought it would be fun for both of you. I feel so guilty for putting this on you.”

  “Stop it, Betsy,” I command. “This was always going to be part of it. I can’t be part of her life if I’m not part of this part of her life.”

  “We’ll be home in three days,” she promises.

  “Fill them with fun and kisses,” I say. We exchange vows of sisterly love and sign off.

  I knock on Roberta’s door. When I knock a second time, she murmurs something unintelligible. I open the door and peek in. She’s lying on her bed clutching her pink teddy bear to her bosom, a picture of angst and misery. I sit next to her and put a hand on her arm.

  “We’re family, you and me.” I give her arm a gentle squeeze as I say it. “Your mom and I look after each other, and we both look after you. We always have.”

  She’s mute, but she’s listening. She wants to be placated. I can sense it. She needs words from me that she can use with her friends to justify loving me. But knowing that and finding the words are two different things. I sit next to her in silence, rubbing her arm, squeezing her hand, brushing her hair back from her head. She accepts these gestures of love. She needs them, and I need to share them.

  Finally, I lean over to kiss her forehead and stand up. “Time to get ready for bed. Just know that I love you more than anyone and I’ll be there for you and your mom for as long as I live.” I kiss her once more before I leave. She smiles ever so slightly this time. Maybe we’ve crossed a bridge.

  6

  “WOULD YOU KEEP an extra close eye on her today?” I ask the sign-in teacher at Roberta’s school.

  “Absolutely.” She says it with a nice smile. She’s a friendly, middle-aged lady with whom I’ve bonded in a casual way over the past year or so. After a beat, her eyes squint a little in concern. “Is everything okay?” she asks.

  “Yes, yes,” I say. “I just had a dream last night. Please, humor me.”

  “Of course,” she answers. “And don’t underestimate your feminine intuition!”

  As I make my way to the El station, I keep thinking I wish it were just a dream. A dream I would ignore. But it wasn’t a dream. It’s that feeling again. It hit me as soon as we left the flat this morning. I swear, someone is following me. I can feel their eyes on my body.

  I don’t believe in intuition or supernatural powers or even an interactive God, but this feeling of being stalked is as real to me as a headache. The rational part of my mind says it stems from the trauma of having been assaulted years ago. The rational part of my mind knows I’m imagining things. It even knows I’m conjuring fears from the past because I’m stressing over something in the present. But I can’t think of what that might be, other than wanting to box the ears of Roberta’s playmates if they keep harassing her.

  Meanwhile, the irrational part of my mind is screaming obscenities and making my hand retrieve the Mace from my purse and keep it in a pocket so I can whip it out and blind some villain before he can do bodily harm to Roberta or me.

  I looked behind us several times on the way to school this morning, but I didn’t see anyone or anything that accounted for the shiver of fear I felt. I didn’t want to make a big production out of it with Roberta in tow—I just wanted to get her to school, then deal with it. Of course, now, the feeling’s gone.

  Still, when I get back to the city, I go through my spy-novel routines to check for suspicious characters. I’ve scouted my usual routes to and from home and to and from Roberta’s school, looking for stores and alleys that let me check for followers. I’ll save the best ones for when my skin is crawling with certainty that someone’s stalking me. For now, I use a corner tavern that has doors on both streets. I go in one and out the other and look for boogeymen. Nothing. A few blocks from the salon, I turn down a side street that provides access for vehicles delivering goods and services to the stores on the main street. The street is deserted except for a delivery truck. I’m the only pedestrian. No one follows.

  When I get to the salon, I call Cecelia.

  “It’s happening again,” I say. I don’t bother with a greeting. Our telephone conversations are like one long dialogue interrupted daily by life.

  “The invisible monster thing?” Cecelia has a way with words.

  “Yes.” I tell her about being followed this morning. “I’m worried they might go after Roberta instead of me,” I tell her.

  “Are you sure you’re being followed?” There’s doubt in Cecelia’s voice.

  “Do you think I’m crazy?” Her doubts rile me. I’m not an alarmist.

  “Of course, I think you’re crazy.” One of the foundations of our friendship is the certain knowledge that voluntarily becoming a woman is an irrational act.

  “Seriously, Cecelia.”

  “Seriously, Bobbi. It could all be in your head.”

  “The last time I felt like this, people really were following me and they hurt me.” My mind is consumed by the vision of that dim alley, the sights and sounds of the violence, how I felt aft
erward, forever afterward. “I have to take this seriously,” I tell Cecelia.

  “I understand.” She says it gently, not her normal tone. I realize I’m crying. I hate when I do that.

  “What should I do?” I ask.

  “Start by figuring out who you’ve pissed off lately,” says Cecelia.

  I start to deny having pissed off anyone, but Cecelia cuts me short with a whooping laugh. “What?” I ask.

  “Come back to earth, Bobbi,” she says. “You piss off someone every day or two. Let’s start with that guy you took home last weekend.”

  “Why would he be angry?” I ask. “I’m sure he’s been turned down before.”

  Cecelia asks me if I’m kidding. I’m not.

  “You threaten to beat him into tomorrow and you think that doesn’t hurt his deep-seated male ego?”

  “Okay, I see what you mean,” I say. Mostly, I remember how bad his breath smelled, but through the vapors, I recall he was upset when I made it clear I would kick his fat ass if he didn’t go away. “Okay,” I say. “That’s one.”

  “You’ll have to do your own count, honey,” says Cecelia. “But face it, you’ve been arrogant and nasty since you and Phil broke up. You’ve sent a couple studs home with their egos dented. And you’ve had some runins at the salon. And remember that guy in the bar a few weeks ago?”

  “Can you narrow it down a little?” I know what she’s talking about, but this is a game we play, where she’s the Mother Superior and I’m the village slut.

  “The one where you said if he didn’t get his hand off your body you were going to tear his eyeballs out of their sockets.”

  “So?”

  “Bobbi, you can’t talk to people like that.”

  “I should just let him fondle me in public?”

  “Of course not. But women resist advances without threatening bodily harm, and they reject men with a lot more consideration about the guy’s feelings.”

  “I have to be politically correct to someone who treats me like trash?”

  “Don’t be so testosterone driven,” says Cecelia. “You’ll start sprouting body hair and your boobs will shrivel up.”

  I start to argue, but Cecelia signs off, laughing. I get her humor, but as I approach my first client, I’m also working on the list of people I’ve offended.

  Lunch comes late, but I have a ninety-minute gap in my schedule, something that never happens. It’s like going to Maui in the middle of winter. I try to think of what to do with such an abundance of time. The only thing I can think of is to go back to the deli where I met the nice man yesterday. I know he won’t be there, but it would be nice if he was. Roberta goes home next Sunday, and I can’t help thinking how lovely it would be to have a civilized man come calling.

  My fantasies are dashed when I enter the deli. Two men are having coffee at a back table, neither of them Mr. Nice Guy. The rest of the tables are empty. It’s two o’clock, so an empty eatery isn’t exactly a shock.

  I order and get to work on my social media posts. I’m just wrapping up when the waiter appears at my table.

  “You have a call,” he says. He gestures to the counter where the cash register sits.

  “What?” I’m stunned. Since cell phones came along, calls like this don’t happen. I assume something’s gone wrong at the salon and I just didn’t notice the incoming call on my cell. I walk half the length of the deli to pick up the phone.

  “Hello?” I can hear the worry in my voice. All I need is another personnel crisis.

  The line is dead. I repeat the greeting several times, a reflex, like a chicken running after its head has been cut off. I hang up the phone and establish eye contact with the waiter.

  “They hung up.” I say it in a puzzled voice. “Did they say who was calling?”

  The waiter shakes his head, no.

  “Man or woman?” I ask.

  The waiter shakes his head again, explains the manager took the call. The manager is indisposed, which means he’s in the bathroom. If I were still a male, I could walk in and have a chat with him, but in my present condition, it would cause a stir. At least, I hope it would.

  I move quickly back to my table. If something’s amiss at the salon, I need to get moving. I collect my purse and sweater, then reach for the bill. That’s when I see it. A postcard, sort of, except it’s not a postcard. There’s original art on the front. It’s done in pencil, an impressionistic maze of black and white and gray, a frantic collection of tiny triangular, square, and rectangular shapes in varying shades that evokes an emotion of something like wonderment in me. There is a suggestion of form in the cacophony. It seems impossible at first, but the longer I look at it, the more I sense a picture of something within the art.

  Despite my rush to get back to the salon, I sit for a moment to study the image. It takes a few beats, but I find it. It is the picture of a phallus penetrating a diaphanous vagina, seen through broken glass with each fraction bending light in a different way. My first thought is that it’s a work of artistic genius. My second thought, and it overwhelms everything else, is that someone dropped this on my table to let me know they want to fuck me.

  The dam breaks on my pent-up fears and memories. The feeling of being followed. The bogus phone call to get me away from the table. The two goons laughing while they assaulted me in an alley. The smell of it comes back to me, and the feelings. Worthlessness. Weakness. Self-disgust.

  My breath comes in short gulps. My heart is pounding. I feel perspiration on my face.

  “Are you okay?” the waiter asks.

  “Yes.” I manage to get out the one word. I hand him the bill and money to cover my meal and a tip. One thing about working for tips, you never forget to take care of others in the same boat.

  I look around, trying to figure out where the man with the card came from. I’m the only customer in front. The two guys in back are gone. They must have left by the back door because I didn’t see them come by to use the front door. The creep who left the card must have come in by the back door. I piece it together. He followed me here, placed the call from the alley in back, or maybe the bathroom by the back door, then dropped the card on the table while I was talking into a dead telephone. He knew my patterns. He knew the deli and its phone number. He knew it had a back door.

  He owns me. He can attack any time he feels like it and I won’t see him coming.

  I check the back side of the card. More lewd artwork, far more graphic. The word “LOVE” with the “L” presented as a man with an erection, the “O” a vagina dangling on the erection, the “V” a woman’s legs spread for sex, the lower-case “e”, a child still in the womb. My stomach wants to wretch. I calm myself. I put the card in my purse—I’m not sure why, maybe it can be evidence later. I wobble toward the door on shaky legs. I’m palming my can of Mace in one hand so no one can see it—the benefit of having oversized hands. When I open the door, the blinding sunshine of a perfect autumn afternoon floods my senses, but somewhere deep inside, I know it’s an illusion. For me, I’m walking into a dark new reality far beyond sunrises and sunsets, far beyond the reality of the people I pass on the street.

  When I get back to the salon, I ask the receptionist if anyone called me at the deli.

  “Can’t you just check your call register?” she asks.

  “The call came into the deli phone,” I say.

  “Really?” She punctuates her response with the quizzical look of a young adult, born long after the world communicated by hardwired telephones and hard-copy letters. I try not to think of her as a naïve and simple bitch, or myself as an angry, aging lady.

  She tells me there’s a new client who asked for me and I have plenty of time before my next appointment. I glance at the waiting area, half hoping to see Mr. Nice paging through a magazine, hoping to have a cut and conversation with me, maybe something that begins a hot romance with a stay-the-night guy. Yes, even when I’m depressed and afraid for my safety, I have romantic fantasies.

  N
o payoff this time. The gentleman waiting for me is in his thirties, a good-looking guy wearing a very expensive suit. It turns out, he works with one of my other male clients. He doesn’t say so, but I’m pretty sure they are a couple, not quite ready to share their secret with their colleagues in a very large and very conservative financial institution.

  The afternoon flies by, and I’m late picking up Roberta. I’ve kept my Mace handy all the way to the school. Just before I enter, I put it back in my purse and confront my newest fear—that Roberta will be the last kid there, sitting by herself in the corner, crying. Not a rational thought, but a constant fear of mine whenever I’ve been charged with picking her up.

  She’s fine, of course. She’s playing with several girls, one of whom I recognize from my previous run-in with her friends. Meredith and Paul, the queen and king of childhood bigotry, are in a different area, with different kids. They note my arrival and turn away, buzzing with their chums. Roberta walks to me, smiling, with the grace of a homecoming queen.

  “Hi, Princess,” I say.

  She returns the greeting and hugs me. Like old times. I could cry. It’s insane that an adult woman would let the acceptance of a dependent child bring such sunshine to her world, but that’s where I’m at.

  We talk academic stuff on the El, when it’s quiet enough to talk at all, but when we start walking to my apartment, I ask her about Meredith and Paul.

  “They started with that stuff about you again, Aunt Bobbi.” Roberta is saying this matter-of-factly, the way President Obama would speak publicly about the taunts of a Republican rival. I wait for her to finish the story. She doesn’t.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “I told them you are my aunt and I love you and I would love you if you were my aunt or my uncle or my father.” Again, I wait for her to finish the story. Again, she doesn’t.

  “And?” I ask.