From inside her bag she pulls out an object, too small for me to see, and tosses it over the yellow tape, onto a pile of roof shingles in the center of the lawn. She stares at the object and takes another sip from the flask before turning away, rushing down the street in the opposite direction, away from Ronan’s house and whatever might remain. The pink diamond kite lurches toward the ocean.
Once she’s gone, I cycle toward the house, lean the bike against a stop sign, and walk toward the site. The investigators, having finished their coffee, are now closer to the front, so I tread carefully, slow and unobtrusive, until I spot the object, face-up atop a stack of black roof tiles.
Immediately I recognize it. Amy and I used to joke that it looked like her; it was a Christmas gift from her grandmother the year Amy turned six, a brunette Barbie™ Hair Play Doll, with a short, purple print dress and wraparound heels, the classic Barbie breasts and hips, the classic Barbie smile. Eventually Amy lost interest in toys, and Hair Play Barbie™ wound up in an old suitcase along with My Pretty Pony and a family of Smurfs. But now there it was, tossed among the wreckage, stripped of its purple dress and plastic high heels, a naked brunette Barbie™ abandoned in the scorched remains. It felt wrong, a betrayal, but there was no way I could claim it, not with the investigators walking toward me, shooting me the evil eye and ordering me to “move on, kid—get the fuck outta here. This is a crime scene.”
And so I did; I walked back to my bike, and left the naked Barbie™ to its fate among the ash-heaps, knowing that, with its brown eyes and bright, pink-lipped smile, it really did resemble Amy; knowing that it would soon be crushed under a bulldozer’s blade; knowing that, the one time it had needed me, I’d done nothing to save it.
In the first drawing the girl is naked, down on all fours, her mouth twisted in a pained grimace, her blank eyes cast bleakly toward an unseen viewer. Dark hair hangs wildly around her face as her bent arms carry her weight, her neck straining as a man prepares to enter her from behind, his erection drawn as an angry snake. I flip the page and see the same drawing again, the same image, on successive pages. Page after page is the same, only not the same—each drawing shows incremental change, a slight shifting in the naked girl’s position, the snake-cock inching closer to her raised backside, the man’s large shaded hands moving toward her hips. Page after page—the naked girl, the naked man, each image another cell in this animated rape scene. Turn the pages fast enough and you see the motion, the snake-cock approaching until finally it penetrates, the girl’s eyes inching shut as her face, page by page, slowly disappears. There are ninety-seven sketches in all, and each one depicts the same brutal image—the naked girl, the naked man, a rape rendered in stop-motion, the girl’s face slowly disappearing over ninety-seven pages, the pencil lines deep and precise.
The girl’s face I have seen in drawings many times before, because it’s Amy’s face. And the man, too, I recognize, his face a less frequent subject of her drawings yet one I’ve seen spotted in her sketch pad. Unmistakably, the face belongs to Mr. Ronan.
And finally, one more face, on the last of the pages—the same scene, the man raping the girl from behind, only in this image, the final one, a third face appears, a sleeping face, the body lying motionless in the corner while the man rapes the girl—the sleeping face, of course, none other than my own.
. . . . .
Upstairs Clyde and his partner have left, the four women gathered at the table as the last of the thunder fades. The lasagna has already been cut and served; Jill and Maddie sit together on one side, Kelly and an empty chair across from them. Amy stands, topping off her glass of Riesling. From her eyes it’s clear that she knows what I’ve just seen, that through her ex-husband she has orchestrated the reveal.
I’m still in a daze, and maybe my hands are trembling.
“Donnie, are you okay?” Kelly asks.
“It’s a very ugly basement,” Amy says, walking toward me. Jill and Maddie are still in Tennessee Williams’ land, smashing dialogue back and forth like old pros.
“Just the narcolepsy,” I say, although maybe I’ve never been more awake. Amy touches my shoulder and guides me toward the table.
“So now you know,” she whispers. “Captain Sick was real.”
My lips move, words form, but I can’t hear them over the screaming beat of my heart. Amy whispers something more, but I am lost, dazed, my knees shaking.
“Donnie, sit down and have something to eat,” Kelly says. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I stumbled toward the table as Jill stands up, Amanda Wingfield in my ex-girlfriend’s prom dress, ready to belt out her showstopper line.
“Then go to the moon, you selfish dreamer!” she says as she and Maddie start giggling. I collapse into the chair beside Kelly and start eating my uncle’s lasagna, as if the world hadn’t just shattered like a glass figurine—like glass always does in a memory play.
-13-
The next day: The Lion King on Broadway, a fucking musical, just what I didn’t need, yet Kelly had bought the tickets and I couldn’t blow it off without giving a reason, the only one good enough being the truth trapped deep in my gut, twisting my intestines into harsh, nautical knots. Seeing those drawings of Amy and Ronan had left me raw, as if every inch of me had been covered in Band-Aids, and now, without warning, they’d been ripped off—each tiny hair yanked free, dark dust mites of adhesive clinging to my skin.
Since coming out of Amy’s basement,
