The Girl She Used to Be (30 page)

The counter has ten stools and four are taken, with a stool between each person. I sit at the end, in much the same way I
sat at the bar in West Virginia a few days ago—except that I have a bag full of cash sitting on my lap.

The heavyset, post-retirement-age waitress behind the counter comes to me and passes a halfhearted smile and says, “What can
I get you, honey?”

I speak for the first time today. “Coffee,” I say in a rasp. I point behind her and add, “Slice of cherry pie.”

I get the other half of her smile and she walks away.

I put my elbows up on the counter and rest my face in my hands and sigh.

My ears become more aware with my eyes closed. I hear the waitress and short-order cook chatting in front of me, the clinks
of utensils and coffee cups on saucers, the whispery conversations, the distant newscaster on the television in the corner
of the restaurant.

I can feel my body drifting and I shift forward as I nearly fall asleep. The din of the restaurant is soothing—the clinks,
the whispers, all like parents trying not to wake the baby.

Everyone, everything, is as faint and gentle as a kiss on the cheek, a secure and welcoming urban nest.

Chatter.

Clink.

Whisper.

Then, just as I’m about to fall asleep, someone murmurs my name:
Melody Grace McCartney
.

Out of the depth of my fading awareness, I pull my hands from my face and open my eyes. I look around the diner.

Then I hear it again.
Melody Grace McCartney
.

A smile comes to my face as my eyes dart around the room randomly and I say, “Jonathan!”

“You got
that
right,” the waitress says as she pours my coffee. “What an asshole
that
guy is. He deserves everything that’s coming to him.” She slides the pie my way and walks a few steps closer to the television.
“What a waste.”

I rub my eyes and look at the television and I see myself; along with the newscaster and the ticker at the bottom of the screen,
CNN has a picture of me in the corner—from when I was six years old.

I stumble off my seat and run to the end of the counter so I can hear every word, but now the chatter and the clinks and the
whispers are impeding my understanding of what is happening.

My eyes open wide as my picture disappears, replaced by an image of Jonathan, unshaven and disheveled, in handcuffs.

Just as I am about to tell everyone to shut up, the screen changes and I’m staring at a commercial for a Toyota Camry.

I am motionless. I am not breathing.

I walk back to the end of the counter and grab my bag of cash off the stool and clutch it to my chest. The waitress catches
my eye.

“Something wrong, honey?”

I clear my throat. “I’ve just… I’ve just been on the road for a few days and I’m not sure, um…”

“What is it?”

“What, um… do you know what that was all about?”

She points over her shoulder. “What, you mean the Johnny Bravo business?”

“It’s
Bovaro
, Rita,” the cook says.

I swallow and nod.

“Boy,” Rita says, “you must’ve been traveling on a mule because it’s the only thing the news people want to cover,” she says.
“I’m tired of hearing about it.”

My hands start to tremble; I rest them under my thighs. “Can you… tell me what happened?”

She leans on the counter. “Johnny Bovaro apparently found out where the government was hiding a witness, that McCartney girl,
and murdered her. She was in Witness Protection for almost her whole life, like twenty years or something, and this asshole,
Bovaro, kills her because her
parents
testified against his dad. The Mafia is nothing but a bunch of assholes.”

“
Rita!
” the cook screams.

She rolls her eyes and waves him off.

Now my legs are shaking too.

“Anyway,” she continues, “he kills her, slices her into pieces, and dumps her into the East River or the Hudson or both.”

I swallow and almost choke on my saliva. I try to act casual. “How’d they find this out?”

“He turned himself in. Even brought her bloodied sundress with him.”

I wipe the tears before they run down my face. “Allergies,” I say.

“She was his first murder—
supposedly
—and he couldn’t handle the guilt, or some crap like that. But if he hasn’t lost his mind already, he will soon.”

“Huh?”

“I mean
literally
.”

“I don’t follow.”

“He’s hooked up with the Justice Department and he’s giving them every shred of knowledge he has on his family’s operation.
He’s taking them all down.”

An older gentleman seated three stools away from me keeps his eyes locked on his newspaper and adds, “He doesn’t stand a chance.
He’ll be dead in a week.”

“Good,” Rita says, “an eye for an eye, Carl.”

“The guy’s a hero, if you ask me,” Carl says. “He flipped on the bad guys. One less group of thugs in New York.”

“He’s a loser.”

“He’s a hero.”

“He’s a
loser
.”

I look up and let the tears roll down my face and whisper, “He’s a hero.”

Carl and Rita stop their arguing.

Rita leans forward again, hands me a napkin. “What’s wrong, honey? Why are you crying?”

I smile a little and say, “It’s a very sad story.”

She cocks her head and studies me, but says nothing.

“They ever find her body?” I ask.

Carl says, “They gave it a shot but the tides have been rough. Her body parts are probably in Lower New York Bay by now. They’re
never gonna find her.”

I want to call Sean. I want to hold his face tightly. I want him to hear me when I say, “You see, Sean? Jonathan Bovaro was
indeed my hero after all. You know
nothing
.”

Jonathan gave me something the Justice Department and the U.S. Marshals and the Bovaro family could never deliver: He gave
me my life back.

I reach in my bag and pull out a twenty and drop it on the counter and prepare to leave.

Rita smiles. “You, uh, new to the area? Just wondering if we’ll see you again.”

I shrug. “Yeah, I’m new to the area. I might be back.”

She takes the twenty from the counter and asks, “What’s your name?”

I walk to the door and stare at the empty street. Just before I leave, I turn and smile and say, “I haven’t decided yet.”

I
EVENTUALLY BECAME FELICIA EMERSON, NOT BECAUSE I HAD some longing for Scottish roots, but because the San Diego State University
student I blackmailed outside his favorite college hangout had the name available on his template of fake IDs. At first I
convinced him I was a federal agent and that he’d been nabbed helping a few freshmen gain entrance to the bar. Later, I gently
extorted a host of documents out of him: driver’s license, birth certificate, even a Social Security card that he reissued
to me by way of a dead teenager in Alabama, all through the miracles of computers—and their vulnerability of being hacked—and
high-quality printers. The kid was amazing. He even had the California seals to make the documents official.

He would have served some serious jail time.

But his real concern was how he would—or would not—be able to get into law school with a felony on his record.

He created my documents gratis and I disappeared from his life.

I moved to Los Angeles a month later, in July, where I tested into UCLA’s adult education program and managed to shave off
two years of school—and almost every undergraduate math course they offer.

I am now a twenty-seven-year-old college junior.

Felicia Emerson has a host of student loans, a small one-bedroom apartment near the campus, a stack of textbooks, a laptop
computer, and a deep-seated, though not entirely understood, hatred for USC.

I feel at home here: the carefree nature of the students, the slow pace of academia, the gorgeous and consistent weather.
I plan on staying in college until I finish my Ph.D. and, God willing, become a professor. Every day, as my unshackled existence
unfolds, I get a greater understanding of the woman I am becoming—and oddly, of the girl I used to be. Without facing some
certain future, my past could have no bearing.

It has been nearly five months since Jonathan returned my life to me, and every night I fall asleep thinking of him—though,
rest assured, I
fall asleep
—and sleep well. I watched him in the news every day for months and saved every image I could find of him on the Internet.
He was and is brave, still standing against his family and, most miraculously, still living.

You see, he entered WITSEC.

I think of him fondly each day, imagining him cooking someone’s eggs at a greasy spoon in the Midwest or delivering mail in
northern Wisconsin or managing a warehouse in Tennessee.

And though I will never see him again, these truths tell part of his story: The marshals protect him but they hate him; Jonathan
rarely sleeps because he never knows when someone will find him; he will accidentally expose his true identity or someone
will recognize him and he will be moved on to another place, another city, another state; he will be miserable every single
day.

He can’t say he wasn’t warned.

And I hope he’ll think of me the way I think of him. Men, and even some of these frat boys, have tried to meet me, to understand
me, to (at a minimum) lust after me. I let them down easy, hand them some excuse that builds their sense of self because the
truth would be difficult to grasp: that I am in love and no other body or mind or soul could disconnect the fetter linking
me to Jonathan. Any other pair of lips would become his, any hand on my skin would become his, any word would be converted
to his style and intonation. And, in the darkest, most sensual moment of the night, I would raise my mouth to the stranger’s
ears and whisper softly, “Jonathan, I love you. Only you can make me feel this way.”

Perhaps I did fall in love with Jonathan because he set me free. But I believe we all fall in love for some esoteric and simple
reason: the first time a man comes to your rescue, the way he holds you when you kiss, his smile that haunts you and has you
endlessly daydreaming. I’m not sure the reason you fall is as important as the fact that you have indeed fallen. At least
that’s what I tell myself when I fantasize about a life I will never have with a man I will never fully know.

Oddly, it is Sean who is on my mind at this moment, as I scan the hundred wedding bands in the glass case below me.

“That one,” I say to the jeweler.

He adjusts the felt ring case, removes a thin gold wedding band encased with tiny diamonds and swirls etched into the edges.

“That was handcrafted by one of our artists here.”

I smile. “How much is it?”

“Two thousand, fifty.”

I slide it over my knuckle and it’s snug. I hold out my hand and analyze the ring in the light. It is brilliant and full of
life. It’s perfect.

“I’ll take it.”

The jeweler stares at me for a moment. “You understand it’s a woman’s wedding band?”

I do not look at him. “Of course.”

“It’s just very unusual for a lady to buy one for herself.”

I open my checkbook. “I’m not buying it. At least not with my money.” I can’t think of a better way to spend what remains
of that nine grand.

He takes my check, studies it. “May I ask why you want a wedding band if you’re not married?”

I look at the jeweler and think of Sean and smile a little. “Well, no matter what, there will only ever be one Mr. Emerson.
My heart is his, will always be his, and I’m going to wear this ring to remember him and… partly to send the message
to other men that I’m not available.” I hated Sean when he uttered those words, but now I fully understand them. “That sounds
sort of arrogant, doesn’t it?”

The jeweler grins and shakes his head. “It sounds real. I don’t get that much anymore.”

I leave the store and walk out into the cool afternoon and start the long journey back to campus, where I have a class in
American Justice; I am the teacher’s pet.

As I walk along the city streets, I watch the blasts of light shimmering from my ring and I twist it around my finger and
I think of Jonathan. The clear and distinct memories are fading a bit, the exact words we said, the specific images. He is
becoming larger in my mind but shifting more out of focus.

Every day I want to find him, to hunt him down the way he hunted me year after year as I grew older. But we could not and
will not ever find each other. He will never know my name and I will never know his. I can’t even send him a cryptic message
the way the marshals used to contact distant relatives for witnesses. Our lives are separated, broken at the center and drifting
aimlessly, a certain impossibility of reconnection.

Every day I want Jonathan to know that he is inside me, that he is my first, that he will be my only.

My hope, my prayer, is that he will know this truth:

He gave me my freedom; I give him my faith and fidelity.

Forever.