Hidden Bodies (18 page)

“Fucking closure,” I mutter. If only
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
were a real thing and it’s such an asshole Angeleno thought to have, unoriginal and bratty.
I can’t erase my memories of Amy. But I can stop her from fucking around with my future.

I begin my ascent toward her apartment. This stairwell is concrete and white and every time I step it echoes. Everyone in this building is sleeping; Angelenos need beauty sleep. They need energy
to make storyboards for web series and
hike
and talk about movies they’ll never make and walk their dogs that hate them. My heart pounds and I reach the third floor and I turn the
doorknob and it squeaks and I flinch and I bet nobody was ever murdered here before.

I jimmy the “lock” of 326—nothing is built well anymore—and the front door opens directly into the living room, which is awash in bras, bowls of cereal, empty bottles of
Corona Light, and
US Weekly
s. There is one sofa, covered in frayed blankets, and a small TV. To the left is a galley kitchen with a sad little countertop meant to facilitate
socializing.

The TV is off and the apartment is quiet, but there’s an open box of Cocoa Krispies on the counter, like someone just made a bowl of cereal and wandered away. I pass the counter and walk
past the Pier One barstools into a narrow hallway. The walls are white and there is a bathroom at the end of the hall and the door is open. A closet door to my left is ajar, which means that the
door to my right leads to the bedroom. Amy’s bedroom.

This is it. I put my hand on the doorknob and push. The room is small and dark. Marilyn Monroe hovers above the bed, a breathy beacon in white, immortalized on the wall (
why, hello,
Joe
). Beneath her is a rumpled comforter, covering the faint outline of a body. Hair peeks out from those covers, blond, greasy
.
My breath is short. I count down. I flex. I clench my
jaw. And in one fell swoop I peel away the blanket.

There’s a shriek and a kick and a little ninja, a foot shorter than Amy in a black tank and black panties, springs up as I fall onto my back. The floor is hard. Wood. Her foot is a weapon
and she knows it. She kicks me in the crotch. I scream and roll to my side and that foot gets my kidney. I fold into myself and now she gets my tailbone and I retreat and now that fucking foot jabs
me in my belly.

“Stop!” I beg.

She kicks me again. Harder. And I deserve this because I didn’t find Amy, because I don’t know Love’s number, because my balls have been kicked into my intestines.

She jumps on the bed and stands in karate chop mode. She yelps, “Don’t move.” As if I could turn over. As if my body isn’t a collection of throbbing, busted places. I
breathe. This was supposed to be Amy. That was supposed to be me on the bed, in control. I open my eyes. She perceives my eyes as a threat and she jumps off the bed and kicks me in the head.
Everything goes away now, the pain and the fear and the anger and the lukewarm blood.

Blackout.

“DON’T
move,” the girl says again.

I can’t move. She’s being redundant. While I was out cold she went to work on me. She tied my limbs together with resistance bands. I’m a mermaid flat on her white shag area
rug. I can’t talk. A resistance band is wrapped around my head, cutting through my mouth and jamming my tongue. The girl paces. She grips her cell phone and I wonder when she called the cops,
what’s taking so long, how bad this is going to get. Fuck these fucking resistance bands and I have only one move.

I cry.

In the big way. For everything bad, the starving kids and the way Harvey refreshes his YouTube videos, for Calvin’s body, how confusing it must be, the pot and the coke, the acting and the
writing. I cry for Mr. Mooney and his eggs and for Marilyn Monroe, framed here too; she is everywhere and yet she is dead. My captor picks up a pair of scissors and kneels beside me. Ferberizing a
baby is no easy thing. She pulls the band from my cheek and cuts it.

“Enough!” she screams.

I blubber. I work my lower lip. I drool. “My God, thank you.”

She grabs a hand towel and wipes my face. “Stop it.”

“I—I’m sorry,” I stammer. “I won’t move, I promise. I know the cops are coming.”

Her eyes flash to the left and she did not call the cops. She grunts, throws the hand towel on the floor, and she is still holding her scissors and her phone. “I said stop it.”

I nod. “Sorry.”

She paces and there is a reason she did not call the cops. Anyone would call the cops. That mysterious reason is all I have and I wish I knew what it was because if it goes away I’m
fucked. “Sometimes they’re slow,” I assure her. “But they’ll be here.”

She stops moving. “I said, stop it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop talking.”

“I will,” I say. “There’s just something I want you to know before they get here.”

She groans. She looks at me.

I blurt, “I was looking for my girlfriend.”

“You broke in.”

“No,” I say. “The door was open.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Go look,” I plead. “I swear to you. The door was open, just like Lydia said it would be.”

The girl storms across the rooms, her thighs are hard, shiny. She opens the door. She examines the knob. She slams it. I
do
know how to pick a fucking lock. She returns to me.
“Well, who the hell is Lydia?”

“Do the cops have your code?” I ask. I am
#TeamGirl.
“You should call 911 and make sure they know the access code.”

“They have it,” she lies. She grimaces. She gets a text and she reads and types and it’s probably her best friend, who is like
call the cops
and this girl is like
I got this
and the friend is worried like
you need to call the cops sweetie this is cray.
I can smell the dynamics and I know I have a shot at freedom.

This girl doesn’t want to bring in male authority figures; look how many resistance bands she has in her possession. She was training for something like this. This girl is a vigilante,
like the renegade hotel manager in
Red Eye
. I can’t make sense of the Marilyn Monroe pictures and the West Elm furniture; they don’t match up with her rock-hard thighs, her
resistance. But I do know that she would rather have me tied up in her possession than in a holding cell in a part of town she doesn’t like. She could have rolled my unconscious body out the
door and onto the street. She could have done a lot of things but she knew how to beat me without breaking me. She tosses her phone onto the sofa.

“Is everything okay?” I ask, subtly instructing her that we are equals, with each other’s best interest at heart.

She doesn’t like it and she comes at me and jams the scissors toward my face, stopping a few inches away. “I’ll ask the questions, fucker.”

“Okay, yes,” I say. “You’re in charge.”

She crouches over me. I wish she would put on some fucking pants. “Who are you?”

This matters, what I say to her. I have to be someone she wants to set free. This is the most important question I will ever answer and I swallow. “I’m Paul,” I begin, my mind
whirring.

“Okay, Paul. What else?”

“I swear to you, I am not a sicko. I didn’t come here to hurt you.”

“You didn’t bring a weapon,” she concedes. She pulls the scissors back, the tiniest bit.

I nod. “I’m a mess right now.” Girls want men to be messy.

She takes the scissors away. I sigh. “I’m taking a semester off from law school. I want to be a prosecutor.”

“Uh huh,” she says. “Is your girlfriend in law school too?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” I answer.

She raises her scissors. I was too quick. I fucked up. “You said you were looking for your girlfriend. You specifically said that.
Lydia.
”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m freaking out here.”

She purses her lips. She puts down her scissors and picks up her phone. “I should call the cops.”

I nod, like a Republican promising to lower taxes before a live national audience. “You should,” I agree. I play hard. “I don’t blame you if you do. I would have called
the second you knocked me out. I show up in your
bedroom.
It’s a fucking nightmare. I can’t believe I went to the wrong place. If I were you, I mean, I would have done the same
thing. And I’d call the cops. I mean this is fucked, I know it.”

She doesn’t dial 911. She looks at me. “But it’s not like they’re going to resolve anything. They’ll just throw you in jail and let you out a day later.”

“True,” I say. “But then, when you fuck up like I did, you deserve a night in jail.”

She still does not dial 911. I’m becoming human, becoming Paul. Her allegiance is shifting. “I know I should call,” she says. “As a citizen.”

In a neighboring apartment “Shooting Star” by Bad Company comes on, blasting. A moment later it disappears as suddenly as it started. We both laugh.

“Every morning,” she says. “Alarm clock.”

“That’s one hell of a way to start the day,” I say. “He lives alone, I presume?”

“He’s a she,” she says, and I’ve got her now; she’s opening up. I can see it happening. “Anyway, you’re right,” she says, and it’s an
important sentence.

“I’m gonna call 911,” she promises, but no she isn’t. “This isn’t about you or me,” she rationalizes. “This is just what you have to do in these
situations.”

“Yes,” I declare, unafraid. “It’s the right thing.”

She slides the unlock button on her phone. I watch her fingers, unpainted short nails. She enters her passcode. I listen to the neighbor trudge. She hits the number nine. She hesitates. I go in
for the final swoop. “Don’t feel bad,” I say. “Believe me, I know I got myself into this.”

She stops pushing numbers. “What
is
your deal?” she asks.

And I win. Now I launch into my elaborate story. I tell her that a few months ago, my girlfriend cheated on me. During my first year of law school, which has been very stressful.

“Where do you go to law school?” she asks, and God bless women, curious, mysterious creatures, mutating from one mood to another.

“UCLA,” I answer, and now I get to the good part. I tell her that I was devastated and depressed and I went on Casual Encounters on Craigslist. “That’s where I met
Lydia,” I explain. “And Lydia and I had coffee and she had this fantasy where she wanted me to show up and surprise her in her bed.”

“Ew,” she says. She sits on her sofa. “Does she live in this building?”

“She did,” I say. “Or I got the address wrong. But I would have to look at my phone. She had said that she only locks her door when she’s with someone, that I was welcome
any time. Anyway, I know it all sounds disgusting. But your door was unlocked and I thought this was the place.”

She springs. She can’t believe she forgot to lock her door and she blames herself now. She hits her head with her phone. “I need to get better at living here,” she says. The
air changes now. She’s all about herself, her own failure to lock the door after
this guy
left. She isn’t afraid of me anymore. She’s afraid of what would have happened
if someone truly dangerous had shown up here. She tosses her phone on the sofa again and picks up her scissors.

“Hold still.” She cuts the resistance bands that bind my arms together and now we get to know each other. Rachel is a nanny. She was the head of the rape crisis center in college and
she still teaches self-defense to women. I caress my wrists. “That explains your moves.”

Rachel works for a rich family and this apartment belongs to them, which is the
real
reason she didn’t call the cops. “They’re so paranoid,” she says. “If
I called the cops and the cops called them, I mean, it would be a whole thing.” She puts down her scissors. “They’re kooky LA zillionaires,” she says. “You can tell
how completely sexist and backward they are by all this Marilyn Monroe shit and all the fluffy rugs. It’s what an old man thinks a young woman wants, you know?”

“Well said,” I agree, still her prisoner, her yes man. “Are they famous?”

She says they are but she winces. “I signed a nondisclosure,” she reveals. “I can’t talk to friends or tabloids or anyone. My
mom
doesn’t even know who I
work for.”

“Wow,” I say. “That’s crazy.”

“Eh,” she says. “Hopefully I’ll be outta here soon. Anyway, are you gonna call the Lydia girl?”

I don’t understand women in Los Angeles. The fearlessness. I could be anyone. I could have been lying—I
am
lying. I could be a pervert, one of the rapists she is trained to
combat. Why is she smiling at me and coyly asking about my imaginary Craigslist hookup? How did she recover so completely, to the point of flirting?

“No,” I say. I rub my wrists. “I think this is a sign that I should lay low.”

“Right,” she says. “You’ll get out there when the time is right. I went to this amazing seminar on solitary expansion last month. Life-changing stuff.” She is such
an
alum
; she graduated ten minutes ago and thinks everything can be solved by rallies and communication and banners and hope. She beams. “Coffee?”

I don’t want her to call the cops so I say that I want coffee. She directs me to sit on the sofa while she pours coffee grinds into an old-fashioned coffeemaker. She starts talking about
herself. In addition to being a nanny and a self-defense instructor, she is an SAT tutor and she doesn’t understand rape fantasies.

“I did Women’s Studies at UCLA,” she says. “So many of the women who study that shit are
crazy
into rape fantasies. Explain it to me while I freshen
up.”

She walks past me into her bedroom and she does not close the door all the way. I can see her as she moves around her room, trying on Victoria’s Secret PINK sweatpants and kicking them off
and slipping into jeans and getting out of those too. And here I sit, waxing fake intellectual about rape fantasies and control issues and Craigslist. Nanny Rachel emerges in a tiny black cotton
skirt and big fat UGG boots and a tiny gray half T-shirt. She’s wearing lip gloss. Lots of it. She brushed her hair. She sprayed perfume. She got dressed up for me. I broke into her home and
found her in bed and
she got dressed up for me.