Then Ricky stepped out the door in his red and white uniform shirt and waved to me. He got in the car and slouched down low in the passenger seat beside me, groaning and rubbing his face with both hands, the way men do after a long and frustrating day at work. I needed to pick up Liz from the Del Monte cannery, so I began driving toward Auzerais Avenue, while Ricky unbuttoned his work shirt beside me. He tossed it in the back seat—he had on a white crewneck undershirt beneath it—and then he grabbed my right hand and tried to rub it against his crotch. I pulled away and told him to stop.
“I need it,” he whined. At the beginning of our relationship Ricky had been very gentlemanly and deferential when it came to physical affection, but we had been together for several years at this point and he had relaxed quite a bit, to put it gently. I had gotten past most of my fear and inhibition, and except for a few remaining trigger points, functioned as a normal person in that way. Ordinarily what he had done would have been all right, but the insistence and abruptness that went along with it were very unwelcome in my current state. I started to cry a little, and he said, “Oh, hell, Clara. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not that,” I said, and then I began to argue with him. I didn’t say a word about the trip to Spectrum or the gun or what I had been pretending all day I wasn’t hearing on the news. I didn’t even tell him about my conversation with Susie. Instead I pulled into a vacant lot beside an abandoned dive bar, turned off the car, and began yelling at him—really yelling—about how he hadn’t taken me to the Chihuly exhibit at the Crocker Art Museum before it closed in September. It was a display of beautiful blown glass artwork; many times we had discussed making the drive to Sacramento to see it, but it hadn’t happened and now the exhibit was gone. I had been genuinely disappointed to miss it, but needless to say, Ricky was caught quite off-guard by my rage on the subject. After all, he had shot someone the day before. He was, at that moment, a fugitive from justice. Most likely he had spent the entire day breaking into a sweat every time a cop walked in to buy a cup of coffee, and unbeknownst to me he had only gone in to work that day because he had bigger plans for later. And now I was attacking him with my disappointment about glass art.
I got out of the car and slammed the door. I yelled at him again through the open window, and then he got out too. The lot was sandy, with a couple of scraggly palm trees beyond the concrete and chain link, and a back seat from a van lay on its side not far from my car. On the wall of the adjacent building the word SOURCE was written in great graffitied bubble letters, rounded as balloons. Ricky walked halfway around the front of the car, asking me what my problem was. He tried to put his hands on my shoulders to calm me down, and I pushed him away, hard against his chest. We never fought like this. I think I wanted someone to see us and send the police. I wanted an easy way to force this situation to a head, to have him taken into custody without my being responsible or disloyal. But nobody came, and it was just the two of us standing there yelling at each other.
The sun was beginning to set, and we were late now picking up Liz. A sudden silence fell between us. Ricky looked around and, seeing nobody, spoke to me in a calm voice. “Why don’t you come out and say what you’re really mad about?” I only stood there, breathing heavily through my nose, not answering. “Come on,” he said. And then he said something really nasty, something intended to provoke me. He smirked in a mean way. “Make it hurt,” he said.
I’d never hit anyone in my life except for Clinton, but I slapped him across the face—backhanded him—hard enough that it made the tips of my fingers sting. That was the phrase I had often used in bed with him, in the beginning, when the wiring in my brain was still all wrong. He had never thrown those words back in my face this way. After I hit him I felt shocked at myself but also angry at him. “How’s that,” I said, like a statement. “You still haven’t answered,” he replied.
“Tell me why I stay with you,” I said in a disgusted voice.
“Because you have a soft heart for strays,” he said. I gave him a fed-up sigh that nearly spit in his face. He rubbed the side of his mouth where I’d hit him. “Thanks for letting me keep my balls.”
Then we got back in the car, and I drove to the cannery, and we got Liz.
My right hand has knotted into one great cramped claw. I massage it with my left, trying to ease the muscles out of their frozen state, but the ache goes deep down to the bone. The story of that night races through my head, and I want to spill it all onto the paper right now, every word, before shame and regret and the fear of legal repercussions stifle the telling. But I don’t have the means. It will have to wait. Still, my memories keep flowing.
We drove to a little diner after we picked up Liz from the cannery. Felicia’s, it was called. They had a meal the men liked called the Five Spot, which was four cheeseburgers and an order of skinny, greasy fries for five dollars, which was enough for two people to share. Chris and Forrest were already there when we arrived. I could see them through a window on the diner’s chromed side, sitting at a booth under the warm light that filled the place at every hour. When I was a little girl my mother bought me a French picture book called La Boite à Soleil, “a box of sun”. On its cover a smiling blonde girl knelt holding up a narrow, open box. The story was about a girl who catches a firefly, but as my mother read me the incomprehensible French words in her lovely voice, I liked to imagine a more magical storyline in which the girl captures real sunlight in a wooden box and can peek in to see it at any time. Felicia’s Diner always made me think of that story, because of the cheery yellow light held in that narrow building, and normally it was one of my favorite places to have dinner with our friends. That night, though, I felt numb. I felt raped. Everything I had set up so nicely was decaying around me like rotting vegetation—my friendship with Susie, my romance with Ricky, and now even my happy memories of dinner at Felicia’s. I didn’t think about large-scale things like you’re going to send your stepbrother to jail or last night your boyfriend killed a man. Instead my mind latched onto upsetting but manageable portions of the crisis and gnawed on them like bones. I thought, Susie may never let me see my nephew again. She may never let my mother see her grandson. I thought, How could Ricky use those words to spite me, and felt bitter gall at how I could ever be tender and intimate with him again, knowing he had it in his heart to mock me with that phrase. The fact that our real concerns were much larger was beyond my ability to grasp.
I sat at the end of a booth beside Ricky, with Liz across from me glancing over a menu with a pondering, pursed-mouth expression, but my mind was far away from this gathering, fluttering like a moth in too many directions. Make it hurt, I kept hearing in my mind—in my own voice, drenched in the shame and vulnerability of the way I had said it to him long ago. At the time I hadn’t realized how naked I was before him, revealing not only my skin but also the fact that some dark aroused corner of my mind was in bed with Clinton, some gargoyle-filled corridor that had learned to draw pleasure from it. It humiliated me then, but never more so than now, when this murderer would stand before me and remind me that he found my sexual tastes weird and repugnant. That there were some things that made even Ricky Rowan shiver and say no.