I couldn’t get a fix on how to feel about Malloy. I wanted to slug him and fuck him and get away from him and be rescued by him all at the same time. I felt surrounded by him, here in his place where everything smelled like he did. I wondered why he was going out of his way like this to help me—he didn’t know me that well and certainly didn’t owe me anything. I wondered if he was sleeping on the other side of the bedroom door, or lying awake like me. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to creep into his bedroom or sneak out the door, so I just stayed on the couch and pulled my knees up to my chin.
I didn’t know if I wanted Malloy or not, but I did know the one thing I really wanted. Sure, I wanted revenge and I wanted to clear my name, but more than anything else, I just wanted to go home.
If I had lost everything in a flood or an earthquake, I would be sad, but I could eventually let it all go and find a way to start over. But my things weren’t destroyed. They were sitting there in my house, just the way I left them. The coffee cup I hadn’t washed. Fruit from the farmer’s market that would just go bad. The book I was reading. My dirty laundry. My vibrator—God, did I leave it on the bed or put it back in the drawer? Would the cops staking out the place bother to water my plants?
Worse, what was going to happen to my little house on Morrison Street now that I was a fugitive, wanted for murder? I’d never had a relationship that lasted even a tenth as long as my relationship with my house, my own private sanctuary where everything was just the way I liked it. When I bought that house, it was a cheap 70s fixer-upper with ugly shag carpet and a leaky chimney. I gutted the place and redid everything from the ground up, made it my own. My mortgage was less than three years from being fully paid off. And didn’t the cops seize your property if you were involved in a criminal investigation? I wasn’t sure, but it killed me to think that after all the money and hard work I’d put into that place, those bastards could take it away just like that. Somehow, that hurt much more than what Jesse had done to me.
When the sun finally came up, Malloy came out of the bedroom. He was wearing gray sweatpants and a clean white t-shirt and he didn’t look tired or rumpled or like he had just woken up. He looked the same as ever. I must have looked awful with my hair all snarled and sticky black eyes squinting against the sun. I felt like deep-fried shit.
“Coffee?” he asked, unfazed as he ambled into the kitchen. “Sorry, I don’t have any Sweet’N Low.”
“Black is fine,” I said. “Do you mind if I jump in the shower?”
“Go right ahead,” Malloy said, his wide back to me as he filled the carafe of the coffeemaker with bottled water. “You’ll find clean towels in the cabinet to the left of the sink.”
Malloy’s bathroom was pristine and nearly empty. I carefully avoided looking into the mirror and concentrated on snooping around instead. You can tell a lot about a bachelor by his bathroom. Apparently Malloy was completely immune to the latest craze for marketing XXXTREME ultra-studly chick-magnet grooming products to insecure men. The last bachelor bathroom that I had been in had been cluttered with body spray and shower gel and crotch deodorant with names like JACKHAMMER, MAGMA FORCE, or BLAST OFF. Not here. Beside the faucet on the tiny sink was a bottle of store-brand antibacterial hand soap. Nothing else. Malloy’s medicine cabinet contained no surprises. There was nothing odd, unique or amusing anywhere to be found. No Viagra or Rogaine or Preparation H. No Vicodin or Prozac or AZT. He could have been anybody.
Inside the shower stall, the white tile looked as sterile as an operating theater. The stainless steel gleamed. On a narrow, built-in shelf sat a bottle of dandruff shampoo and a plain white soap dish containing a large green-and-white bar of Irish fucking Spring. I didn’t realize they still made that shit.
I stripped down and turned on the hot water in the shower. While I waited for it to warm up, I lost the battle to avoid looking in the mirror.
I guess you could say it was getting better, but it was still horrible. The swelling had gone down and my right eye, which had been swollen almost completely shut, was now open. The color palette of my bruises had shifted from lurid purple to more muted tones of ochre and bile. I wasn’t going to be winning any beauty contests any time soon.
The water was hot by then so I slipped in and goddamn, that was good. It was the first real shower I’d had since Jesse and it did wonders to improve my mood. By the time I was done, I almost felt like I could beat the bastards who did this to me. I felt like I could win. Must have been the Irish Spring.
When I got out I found a black mug of black coffee waiting for me on the coffee table. Malloy was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper.
“Hey,” I said softly, pulling the white towel tighter around my body and picking up the mug. “What should I wear? The dress or the jeans?”
I don’t know why I asked. I was a big girl and I’d been dressing myself without Malloy’s advice for more than 35 years. In spite of everything, it was still way too easy to cast Malloy in the hero/Daddy role. I really needed to watch that.
He looked up at me and the fact that I was only wearing a towel registered in his eyes. He looked back down at the paper. I scanned his face for any reaction at all, any tiny hint of a response to my near nakedness. He hid it well, but there was an undeniable tension in his jaw and shoulders. It could have been any number of things, but I desperately wanted it to be desire. It was as if I needed some kind of proof that I was still just a little bit sexy in spite of everything. Realizing that I had been fishing for a reaction, I felt suddenly pathetic, like a junkie combing the carpet for a dropped crumb of dope.
“For now just put the jeans and tank top from yesterday morning back on,” he said, sipping his coffee without looking up, giving away nothing. “I have an idea.”
That’s how I wound up dressed like a boy.
14.
Malloy pulled the SUV into the lot of a shabby North Hollywood mini-mall that contained a purified water retailer, a 98-cent store, a restaurant that offered “especialidades Oaxaqueños,” and a tiny barbershop. Malloy took a spot in front of the barber.
There was a Spanish sign above the door. The window featured a sinister, weirdly proportioned painting depicting a pair of floating scissors hovering behind the small, disembodied head of what looked like a child with a mustache.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked, running my fingers nervously through my hair. Malloy had made me cut off my long nails at his apartment and my newly blunt fingers felt foreign against my scalp. “You know, I’m about as far from a boy as you can get without being pregnant.”
“Sure I’m sure,” Malloy said, taking my arm. “Come on.”
“It’s closed,” I said, pointing to a hand-lettered sign that read CERRADO. “It’s a Sunday, isn’t everyone supposed to be at church?”
“I called ahead,” Malloy said. “He’s expecting us.”
Inside, the shop smelled like the air had been sealed in a jar since 1947. Cigarettes and pomade and Clubman shaving talc and that blue stuff the combs sit in to kill germs. The barber himself was an ancient brown gnome with a face like a dried apple and a shiny bald head. He wore an immaculate white short-sleeved guayabera and white shorts that showed off bandy little rooster legs with large knobby knees. I wondered briefly about the wisdom of trusting a bald barber, but Malloy seemed to think the guy was all right.
“Jarocho’s been cutting my hair for twenty years,” Malloy said, patting the barber’s stooped shoulder. “He’s solid.”