LATER THAT NIGHT, the guilt really hit hard, the way it tends to do when the distractions of the day all fall away and you’re finally left alone with yourself. Until this point—rational or not—using Titan’s money to pay off my student-loan debt had felt like something that happened to me more than something I’d done. But this was deliberate. I’d chosen to do this for Emily, or with Emily, instead of turning myself in, and that was wrong no matter how you looked at it.
Things are going to hell in a handbasket, Robert would have said. His voice was always in my head. I couldn’t help it. So much of my daily energy went to thinking about Robert, thinking as Robert, anticipating his needs, responding to his requests, manifesting his every wish. It wasn’t possible to just turn his voice off at the end of the day.
A couple sandwiches shy of a picnic, he would have called my thinking now. Crazy as a bull bat.
I stared up at the rain bubble that hung down from the ceiling over my bed—a white plaster water balloon threatening to plunge onto my head at any moment. It was an anomaly of nature that defied all logic considering I lived on the ground floor of my apartment building, but there it was every time it rained, taunting my limited comprehension of both plumbing and architecture.
It was storming outside, and the roaring thunder and flashing lightning only reinforced my notion that God was angry with me. I watched the bubble swell with each passing second, stretching like a waterlogged belly. The Internet had gone out in the storm and I didn’t own a television, so tracking the bubble’s growth was my only active form of entertainment. I could have gone on that way all night, but the buzz of my doorbell shook me back to consciousness.
It was just after midnight. Who could be at my door?
A rumble of thunder crescendoed to a crash. My windows rattled and I realized it must be death at my door, a scythe-wielding reaper, come to massacre me in my blue-and-white-striped pajamas as punishment for my crimes.
Actually, it was a soaking-wet Emily Johnson.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “How did you know where I live?”
Emily looked like she’d just stepped out of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, if the swimsuits were replaced by the designer nightclub-wear Westchester girls partied in to get laid. She was all drenched and disheveled. Her eye makeup ran down her face in crooked inky streams.
“Are you crying?” I asked.
She pointed up at the sky like I was a moron. “It’s raining.”
“Right. But what are you doing here?”
“My date tonight was a bust,” she said, in a way that sounded like she might actually begin to cry. “And I can’t make it back to Bridgeport in this storm. Some asshole smashed the driver-side window of my Range Rover with a goddamn brick. I covered it with a plastic bag, but there’s no way I can sleep in there tonight.”
“You sleep in your car?”
“It’s not a car, it’s a Range Rover.”
“You have a Range Rover but no apartment?”
“Fontana, I have nowhere else to go. Can I come in or not?”
I was still so disoriented, trying to relate this Emily Johnson to the one I knew from work. That version of her was a wire pulled taut. This girl on the brink of tears in my doorway was slack and loose, unguarded. She was vulnerable. Real. And a little insane looking.
“I don’t have much space,” I said. “It’s not like I’ve got a guest room. I barely have a living room. And how did you know where I live? Did I already ask you that?”
“Don’t you have an air mattress?” She stepped past me, through my doorway.
“No, actually.” I followed behind her to the kitchen as she began to disrobe.
“I brought this,” she said. From her oversize Coach hobo bag she pulled a bottle of Jameson. “To say thank you for letting me crash here.”
I was suddenly transported to the most significant moment of my adolescence: seventh grade, when the queen bee, Dana Vandorn, was surprised by her period in the bathroom stall next to mine. She came out sheepish, searching her purse for a dime in order to vend a pillowy maxi pad from the machine. But who carried dimes? I just happened to also be experiencing menses that week and I knew this was my moment. I knew I could have let Dana Vandorn suffer—lord knew she deserved it—but I chose instead to take the high road and offered her a Playtex Sport from my bag. She thanked me with an expression exactly like the one Emily was wearing now. Gratitude pregnant with shame. And you know what? After that day, Dana Vandorn never called me a dyke again.
“Are you a lesbian?” Emily asked.
Had I been thinking out loud?
She was standing in pasties and a black thong. Her dress and accessories lay in a damp puddle at her feet. “It’s cool if you are,” she said. “But I want to be clear that I—”
“I’m not a lesbian.” It was just like a pretty girl to assume everyone wanted her.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Because your clothes.” She pointed to my white Hanes T-shirt and striped men’s pajama bottoms.