The Girl She Used to Be (7 page)

“He probably just misses his wife,” I say. “Marshals need chill time too, you know.”

“Sure, but that guy isn’t married.”

“Yes, he is.”

“No, he’s not.”

“
Yes
, he is.”

“
No
, he’s
not
, Melody. What, you think only the feds can do research or check someone out before getting involved?”

As I stare at Sean sitting on the shoreline, Jonathan manages to slip out—and he must be good because I never heard a step
and I never heard the door close, and if I wasn’t confused before, I sure am now.

After stripping the wet sheets and replacing them with a few abrasive blankets, I curl up in bed and play with the straw that
has become my hair. I cannot fall asleep. I mean, who’s ever heard of a wise guy who wears trendy glasses or makes sure he’s
not blowing smoke in your direction or genuinely tries to refrain from using profanity in your presence? I couldn’t even detect
a New York accent.

And at first I imagined that the term
road trip
meant it would be easier to bury me in a field somewhere rather than at the toll plaza for the Bay Bridge-Tunnel, but now
I think he might actually be planning to take me somewhere. I just don’t know why.

I dissect my situation and though my sensibility suggests that I should knock on the wall and tell Sean about my visitor and
be whisked away yet once more, my heart suggests that I have been running for as long as I can remember and that, in some
way, I have been waiting all my life for this moment.

For it all to end.

And for some reason I feel free, that I have been in touch with both sides, with the light and the dark of my existence, and
that I have somehow managed to find peace. Whether there is validity to this notion is irrelevant; right now, it
feels
valid. I’m not going to destroy it by overanalyzing.

I hop out of bed, undress completely, wash myself clean, and turn up the heat. The old steam radiators burble to life. I pile
on the remaining blankets from the closet and slip into bed naked.

This is not a metaphorical womb, but it sure is warm.

I close my eyes and I can feel sleep coming fast. I let go, and the wave lifts me and carries me far, far away.

S
EAN KNOCKS ON MY DOOR AND THOUGH I TRY TO OPEN MY EYES, they ache—apparently the only part of my body lacking moisture; my
room is a poor man’s sauna and I wake to find myself sprawled nude, lying diagonally across the damp bed, a thin layer of
sweat covering me from head to toe, and in all the years of coloring my hair I have never seen it bleed onto the sheets like
this. I begin to think I really was murdered last night.

“Hold on,” I say, pretty much to myself. I walk to the door and open it textile free; the thought of throwing anything over
my body is revolting. I hide the important parts behind the door.

“You okay?” Sean peeks in and the heat rushes out to meet him. “Holy—what, is your heat broken?”

I rub my eyes, hoping to squeeze out a little fluid. “No, it was intentional. Let me turn it off.” I close the door—or at
least I think I do. I get to the heater and turn the knob and as I look back toward the door, I notice it didn’t latch. Sean
casts a curious eye. It is either that I met my captor last night and he seemed convincingly nonthreatening or that the heat
is making me woozy, but I am slow to cover myself. I smile at Sean and grab my robe on my way back to the door.

“Your wife know you’re a peeping Tom?”

“What?”

“You just saw my naked body. Don’t pretend you didn’t.”

“I don’t have to—because I did
not
see your naked body. I was looking beyond you at the stain on your sheets.” And he’s right. The stain was directly behind
where I was standing and in the time it took to turn off my heater it would have been impossible for him to scan me and analyze
the mess on my sheets.

Miserable seashell-tossing, assassin-ignoring dirtbag.

I quickly throw on the robe and swing open the door, mostly to let the heat out. “That’s not blood on the bed. It’s your government-grade,
over-the-counter hair color.”

I turn around and walk into the room and Sean follows me. I look in the mirror and stare in horror at the reflection. My creamy
caramel looks like someone left it on a dashboard on a sunny summer day. Sean looks over my shoulder and grimaces a little.

“Interesting,” he says.

I bite my tongue.

“Have you ever had your life stripped out from beneath you?” I ask. “Ever been forced to change your clothes, your name, your
address—and your hair color and style—all at the behest of some clod who claims to be your guardian?”

Sean stares at me, or rather my hair, clearly with no intention of answering. His silence vexes me.

I think for a second, then try to provoke him with my insider info. “I guess I can’t expect you to understand that kind of
thing on forty grand a year.”

Sean’s eyes move about in confusion. “I have no idea what relationship income has to comprehension, but I make a little over
fifty-three thousand.”

Never trust your captor.

“So,” he adds, looking around my room in a surveillance-oriented way, “you sleep well last night?”

I turn to him and smile widely. “Like a baby.”

He nods, continues his inspection. “Well, that’s what we’re trained to do: bring security.”

“Sean, I can tell you that you managed to bring a whole new level to my idea of security and safety last night. You’re really
in command of this situation.” His eyes cease wandering and land on my face. “I need to shower.”

Sean nods and inspects the bathroom, comes back out and says, “I’ll wait right here,” and flops down on the sofa next to the
bed.

I walk toward the bathroom and check, from the corner of my eye, to see if he is watching me. My robe is short enough that
its magnetic pull might have the required strength to drag his eyes my way, but I get nothing. I slow my pace. More nothing.
I sigh and drop my head, for just once I would love to be pursued for something other than being murdered or the prevention
thereof.

I close the bathroom door and run the shower. The head sputters a few times, then red-brown droplets begin to fall from the
multi-decade–old shower massage. I’m certain the Chinese could never have contrived a water torture this slow and painful
and overly chlorinated.

I drop my robe and look at my sighing body in the mirror. It seems I am starting to sag all over, which I want to blame on
getting closer to thirty, but it might just as well be from sadness or lack of use. The last time a man had his hands on it
was three name changes ago, when I shed my common sense and consumed a third gin and tonic—one too many, as it turned out.
In a local bar outside Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, I managed to convince this man—a man whose name I never acquired, by the way—that
I was sexy and dangerous and ready to ignite.

He believed my lie.

All I’d wanted was a kiss. I wanted to feel the way my parents did when I was young. I cannot recall a moment, before that
fateful day at Vincent’s, when my parents would see each other that they did not embrace and kiss, whether it was after a
business trip or having just come back from the kitchen. Whenever they slept, they would be entwined in a manner suggesting
they wanted to be part of each other for every moment of their lives, awake and otherwise. With all of the discussions I’ve
had with federal marshals about being secure, I cannot convey to them the veritable security my parents brought to me through
their ardent love. But they were emotionally long gone by that point, their immediate affection slowly destroyed by that unexpected
encounter with Tony Bovaro. They managed to get through the tough times—the initial move and the few others after that—but
eventually I watched their love turn a dull gray. The constant failure—
my
constant failure and inability to be true to our fiction—destroyed my parents. They became distant. They became untwined.
Their bodies were eventually separate on the bed, equidistant even in their movements, like two human wipers on a satin windshield.

Their broken hearts eventually broke mine.

I managed to categorize all their lessons of love and harbor them deep inside, ready to recall them whenever in need. My mother
told me you end up making love long before you think, that the act should be reserved for your one true love, but that so
should the first kiss, because the first time you kiss is the first time you open your body up to someone else, the unprecedented
moment when someone else is inside you. And after watching my parents all those countless times, watching as they would take
each other by the hand and smile while gazing into each other’s eyes, pulling each other closer, and—then the real magic—the
closing of the eyes, and finally, as if by command or celestial force, their lips would slowly, softly meet and they would
push against one another until the act had produced the sufficient and expected ecstasy.

All I’d wanted from Nameless Guy was a kiss.

I’d wanted a chance to feel love, no matter how temporary or imaginary.

The gin was talking. Screaming.

We managed to make it back to his place and we weren’t in the door two minutes before I could read his libidinous mind. I
wanted that slow-motion attack, the gazing, the eye fade, the lips, the pressing.

This guy quick-stepped it over to me and instead of a brief embrace or a longing look, he grabbed my left breast and started
swirling his finger around searching for my nipple, as though my boob was actually his sixth martini. I nudged his hand out
of the way and hugged him, mostly to give him an opportunity to start again.

He backed off and made a little progress by kissing my neck lightly, running his fingers through my hair. Then he whispered
my name—or what my name was at the time. “
Shelly
…”

I let him do it a few times, hoping it might work for me, but having paired my bogus name with his traversing my chest, along
with the dreaded effects of the alcohol, I said this: “Call me…
Melody
.”

Somehow, this made me naughty.

Nameless Guy pulled back, smiled at me, and moaned softly. Then, suddenly returning to his impassioned search for one of my
nipples, he muttered, “Yeah, babe… call me… Steeeeve.”

Now I still consider him nameless because of the
way
he said
Steve
, like it was this highly forbidden thing. And the truth is, what bothered me most wasn’t that he was creepy, asking me to
whisper some different name, but that he somehow found the name
Steve
to be lurid. It was throwing me off. I kept thinking, “Steve?” I mean, who was he fantasizing he was? Steve Carell? Steve
Austin?
Steve
Buscemi? Each possibility was worse than the last.

My interest was quickly retreating and, though sobering, I had just enough alcohol in me to say something totally moronic.
“No, I want you to call me Melody because it’s my real name.”

He smiled and moaned again and said, “Yeah, baby, I’ll call you Melody if you want.”

I pushed him off but his hand remained superglued to my chest. You’d think he was searching for a wire or a wad of twenties.

“My name is Melody.”

He shook his head. “You told me your name was Shelly.” He laughed a little. “C’mon, no one names their kid Melody.”

I took a deep breath and straightened out my clothes. “My parents did.”

His tone changed as the mood of romance decidedly vanished. “Get real.”

Then I walked up to him, grabbed his chest in an effort to twist
his
nipple, but it turns out those things are actually pretty hard to find. I poked him a couple times instead.

“I
am
real,” I said. “My name is Melody, as in Melody Grace McCartney, you jerk.”

I grabbed my purse and bolted for the door and just as I was about to slam it behind me I heard Nameless Guy say, “Oh, man.
…You were the little girl from the Bovaro murder trial.”

I froze. Even in my alcoholic haze I knew what I’d done.

Nameless Guy fumbled around for a minute, then came lunging at the door with a disposable camera. “Can I take one picture,
please? Just for me, to show the guys at work?”

I ran from Nameless Guy’s apartment—and, in fact, ran for two days straight, flanked by two federal marshals and a pile of
paperwork and promises for a better life. And within a month of my drunken flirtation, Farmington, New Mexico, became my new
home.

But I am here now, looking at how my body is fading in the now steamy mirror in my crappy motel room in Cape Charles, Virginia,
wanting so desperately to be loved and touched, to find that man to take my hands, draw me to him, close his eyes, press his
lips to mine, and lose himself—and pull me with him—in that sensual oblivion. I want to be unconditionally loved for who I
am and to feel him find his way inside me because I am open to him, and I want to feel us push and pull and push and pull
and get lost in each other in a way that, through all of my twenty-six years of living, I have yet to experience.