Righter pulls his overcoat more tightly around his neck, light from street lamps glinting off his glasses. He nods and says to me, “Take care. Glad you’re okay,” deciding to acknowledge my so-called trouble. “This is real hard on all of us.” A thought catches before it is out in words. Whatever he was going to say next is gone, retracted, struck from the record. “I’ll be talking to you,” he promises Marino. Windows go up. We drive off.
“Give me a cigarette,” I tell Marino. “I’m assuming he didn’t come to my house earlier today,” I then say.
“Yeah, actually he did. About ten o’clock this morning.” He offers me the pack of unaltered Lucky Strikes and flame spits out of a lighter he holds my way.
Anger coils through my entrails, and the back of my neck is hot, the pressure in my head almost unbearable. Fear stirs inside me like a waking beast. I turn mean, punching in the lighter on the dash, ungraciously leaving Marino’s arm extended with the Bic lighter flaming. “Thanks for telling me,” I sharply reply. “You mind my asking who the hell else has been in my house? And how many times? And how long they stayed and what they touched?”
“Hey, don’t take it out on me,” he warns.
I know the tone. He is about to lose his patience with me and my mess. We are like weather systems about to collide, and I don’t want that. The last thing I need right now is a war with Marino. I touch the tip of the cigarette to bright orange coils and inhale deeply, the punch of pure tobacco spinning me. We drive several minutes in flinty silence, and when I finally speak, I sound numb, my feverish brain glazing over like the streets, depression a heavy pain spreading along my ribs. “I know you’re just doing what has to be done. I appreciate it,” I force the words. “Even if I’m not showing it.”
“You don’t got to explain nothing.” He sucks on his cigarette, both of us shooting streams of smoke toward our partially open windows. “I know exactly what you feel,” he adds.
“You couldn’t possibly.” Resentment seeps up my throat like bile. “I don’t even know.”
“I understand a lot more than you give me credit for,” he says. “Someday you’ll see that, Doc. No way you can see shit right now, and I’m telling you it ain’t gonna get no better in days and weeks to come. That’s the way it works. The real damage hasn’t even hit. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it, seen what happens to people when they’re victimized.”
I absolutely do not want to hear a single word of this.
“Damn good thing you’re going where you are,” he says. “Exactly what the doctor ordered, in more ways than one.”
“I’m not staying with Anna because it’s what the doctor ordered,” I reply testily. “I’m staying with her because she’s my friend.”
“Look, you’re a victim and you got to deal with it, and you need help dealing with it. Don’t matter you’re a doctor-lawyerIndian chief.” Marino will not shut up, in part because he is looking for a fight. He wants a focus for his anger. I can see what is coming, and anger crawls up my neck and heats up the roots of my hair. “Being a victim’s the great equalizer,” Marino, the world’s authority, goes on.
I draw out the words slowly. “I am not a victim.” My voice wavers around its edges like fire. “There’s a difference between being victimized and being a victim. I’m not a sideshow for character disorders.” My tone sears. “I haven’t become what he wanted to turn me into”of course, I mean Chandonne”even if he’d had his way, I wouldn’t be what he tried to project onto me. I would just be dead. Not changed. Not something less than I am. Just dead.”
I feel Marino recoil in his dark, loud space on the other side of his huge, manly truck. He doesn’t understand what I mean or feel and probably never will. He reacts as if I slapped him across the face or kneed him in the groin.