Читать книгу Tell Everything - Sally Cooper - Страница 9

In February, I was making blueberry pancakes when cops visited our house again. Alex shovelled the driveway while I stood on the stoop in my slippers. An officer confirmed my name and wrote down my occupation as unemployed. He handed me a subpoena then drove off.

I dropped the sheet on the kitchen table. New butter sizzled straight to brown, the element too high. I tossed the frying pan into the sink and slammed another onto a cold burner. Stanton had lied. And the other one, Young — crafty blonde. Weekends were supposed to be sacred. They couldn’t make me testify. What happened had nothing to do with our lives now, I’d tell Alex, and trust him not to hold a grudge. Snow clods rattled the window. Untroubled, he’d stayed outside. I didn’t like to let him down.

He came in fifteen minutes later, his hair chaotic from his toque.

“Allo, luv,” he said. He was in a British mood.

“Sweetness.”

We ate on the living room couch.

“When that bobby pulled up, I buckled and surrendered you.”

“Snitch.”

“Fugitive.”

Since I’d quit my job at InfoText, I’d taken to letting the phone ring. Whenever the detectives or the Crown called, I deleted their messages. Come and get me. I liked the image of myself as a runaway — its reckless mystery, and its privacy — though I doubted I’d have the nerve. Ramona’s trial started next month.

“It’s a trial they’re asking me to testify at. No big deal.” Good. Minimize it.

“You say that like it’s a birthday party. How could this happen? You don’t know anybody. Is it your dad?”

“Nobody you know.”

“Then it is your dad. Seriously, why haven’t you told me?”

“You don’t like it when I talk murder.”

His eyes churned bark-grey. “You know a murderer?”

“Murderess. Accused. And not know. Knew.”

We read the subpoena together. The Queen commanded me to report to District Court on Wednesday, April 22.

My voice tinny, I told him that Ramona had befriended me in high school, when my dad and I moved south from Haliburton to Cloud Lake, a Brampton subdivision, that we hit it off in the summer but drifted apart once school started. “Ramona had a career and a house and a fiancé. I lived with my dad and went to high school,” I said. I left out my panic, how my tongue roped at saying “Ramona.”

“They must need you as a character witness,” he said. Trustful, assessing, he took me at my word. How could I forget? My part in the trial he would see as a part-time job, a duty that occupied but didn’t own me. He wouldn’t make the leaps, connect this to that, invent causes or blame.

“It’s for the Crown, not the defence. I talked to the cops last summer. I thought they wouldn’t need me for the trial, but they called last week.”

I settled my hands against his. We pushed our palms until our fingers bent and our knuckles cracked.

“Did you end on bad terms?”

“We ended. She got married and I left for university. Then I met you.”

Alex had said “I love you” first and quickly. We were in his dad’s BMW with the sunroof open. Drunk on whisky, I was making noises and rocking into him. He was the first man I’d had inside me. We were parked by the sea a thousand miles east on what we’d convinced his parents was a painting excursion. I was nineteen.

He didn’t repeat the words. Afterward, I lay under a blanket and shot back more whisky.

“What did you say?”

“When?”

“Then. There.”

“You heard me.”

“I heard something but I’m not sure.”

“You heard.”

“What I heard was something a person would want to say again.”

“Re-ally.”

“Maybe it’s not what I thought.”

“Maybe it is and I don’t want to say.”

“It’s okay to say.”

“I know.”

The air was pearling up as we stuck our feet into desert boots then stepped onto wet sand littered with shell fragments and spread with sticky seaweed.

“We should move higher. The tide.”

We drove to grass and pitched a pup tent between the car and the ocean. I crawled into the sleeping bag as the nylon filtered pinkish orange light. Alex tied the flaps, zipped the screen. He got in beside me, and I pulled off my jeans now that I had his warm legs. I wouldn’t let him see me upright without clothes. Later, I wouldn’t sleep in the same bed at other people’s houses. We tangled together, legs and arms, heart against heart, and he said it again, once, before I slipped into drunken slumber, and I heard it and remembered, and from then on he felt okay saying it and we could talk about it.

I didn’t remember beginning to love him. He built love around me, and I sat inside. I had known him the same as I’d known anyone else. Then something shifted. He named it, and I lingered long enough so all that mattered was staying there. In bed, beside him, I’d catalogue our body parts. His slimmer hips and ankles, our same-sized hands. The few inches he had on me, though neither of us was tall. At the thought of him leaving, my longing throbbed.

Back in Guelph, Alex moved into my room. Soon we had our own apartment overlooking the Speed River. We sealed our love in a ceremony with candles and body painting and acid. We spoke vows and played Hendrix’s “… And the Gods Made Love” as everything reduced to vibrating particles.

We found the rings at the farmers’ market, two entwined snakes, heads meeting. The rings made us husband and wife. I’d used Shore as my last name ever since.

“It’s not about marriage,” he said as we walked along Macdonell Street to the Albion Hotel for fries and a pitcher of draught.

“You don’t believe in it?”

“It’s a convention. What we have is no less valid because we didn’t say the prescribed words and get the paperwork. It’s what we make it. Nobody can take our bond away.”

I’d believed Alex’s words and thought he did, too.

Talking about our crazy first time beside the ocean diverted us from my subpoena, and we moved into the bedroom. Afterward, Alex headed back out to salt the walk. Valentine’s Day, Alex brought a rose. “Bet Ramona never gave you one of these,” he said.

“If she had, it wouldn’t have come in this plastic test tube.”

A few mornings later, Alex pinched his moussed hair into points. He rinsed his hands in my bubble bath and said, “You were lovers, right?”

“You could be talking about anybody.”

He soaped me.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know I was your first. But don’t you wish you’d been one of her sex slaves? You could have learned her techniques and tried them out on me.”

“That’s right. You know how much I like that stuff.”

“Maybe you’d like it more.”

“I doubt that.”

He sat on the side of the tub. “Why didn’t you tell me, Pauline? It hurts me that you didn’t.”

“It’s a sob story. And there’s not much to tell.”

I didn’t want to talk about Ramona again before the trial, especially not to him. My testimony would have the odd cast of a public truth he could react to along with everyone else. If I told him now, the story would enter our relationship. It would live in this house with us. It already lived in my office. I could breathe in there, alone with it, but I couldn’t take it out of the room, let alone share it. I liked how Alex saw me and feared any change that might take him away. Holding onto him was worth any flak he gave me.

“We should tell each other everything. Like lovers do.”

“Why, so we can hurt each other?”

“So we can know each other and stay open.”

“What we call the truth comes back on us.”

“Where is that coming from? What does it even mean? We don’t do that.” He dipped a face cloth in the water then wrung it over me. I took it and spread it out on my chest.

“We would, eventually. Like these sex slave comments. You suspect that since Ramona and James allegedly had sex slaves, that I might have been one of them.”

“I was making a joke. About sex. About something I’d like to try that I thought you might, too.”

“That’s sensitive of you.”

“How is that insensitive? You were friends, you said. What else aren’t you telling me?”

“We were friends. Since I’m part of a trial about this issue, since I did know the woman accused of these things, you might not try to get me to do them.”

“I’m not trying to get you to do the things she’s accused of doing but to have some fun with me. Remember that?”

I sucked in a long, audible breath then heaved it out. He stood. “I don’t know what you’re about. You don’t want me to feel sorry for you. But you’re making it hard for me to feel anything.” He walked out, leaving the door open and the air cool. I drained the water and stayed in the tub. He came back in, coat on, and held out a towel. My skin squeaked against the porcelain as I stood up and let him wrap me.

“Kiss me, so I can go to work,” he said. I gripped his sleeves and kissed hard, relieved. He never went out without saying goodbye.

Fighting with Alex left me revved up, contrite, driven. After breakfast, I put on Nirvana, closed my eyes, and flung my body around. By the end of the song, I screamed along: “A de-nial. A de-nial.”

Panting, I took my library book into my office. I’d given up reading slave narratives from the southern U.S. and returned to true crimes. I’d found one about a girl in California whose captor kept her for seven years, two of which she spent in a box under his waterbed. Through a vent hole she could see a patch of driveway beneath his mobile home. Each day she was let out for a couple of hours to empty her bedpan, eat leftovers, read the Bible. Her hair fell out, her muscles atrophied, and her vision dimmed. She signed a contract and wore a gold collar she believed would identify her to other men who would seize her if she escaped. She had a slave name, K.

I identified with K, though it didn’t make sense. My dad lived half an hour away and Jenna wrote letters. Until recently, I’d had a job, and besides, Alex and I didn’t have that kind of relationship. He joked about tying me up — for fun, he’d said. He didn’t torture me or keep me in a box, and he wouldn’t. I hated that I wanted to read about K. I hated what Alex must see in me when I brought up serial killers and he changed the subject. That I liked to read about other people’s pain, that it didn’t hurt me. It did, though. What K suffered shocked me, and I cried sometimes, though more often she showed up in my dreams. When I read about her watching dawn rise through her vent hole, I got the idea for a pinhole camera.

A hole in the box’s door could project an inverted and reversed image on the opposite wall. I could record what I saw on a piece of photographic paper. It wouldn’t make sense in the novel, but I wanted to try it anyway. Besides, I hadn’t worked on that novel since the interview with the cops.

Canvas covered the chicken wire on the box. The cone measured six feet long and three feet high at its wide end. Like K, I couldn’t stand up.

Today, I sat inside. The walls needed lining so the chicken wire wouldn’t print hexagons on my skin. I hung a quilt over the opening then climbed in again. I’d seal the box with opaque tape and spray-paint the lining flat black. A pinhole camera had to be light-tight.

“Polly” came on, a song about a man torturing a girl. I’d read that the real girl, the one the song was based on, had escaped her captor. The line “she’s just as bored as me” made the rage sound sympathetic and hollow. I could relate.

I nudged the honeycombed foam with my palms, soles, knees, and back. I rolled my face against the wire, pursed my lips and tongued the chromic thread, the spongy give. In here, the panic wound down a notch. I’d touched this calm in a sex shop once when I’d let Jenna belt me into a straitjacket as a gag. When I had the door and lining in place, I could crawl in here and sink into the familiar numbness.

The weekend before the trial started, we went to a wedding at a hippie church in the Ottawa Valley. I was marvelling at the bride’s grey hempen braids when the pastor said, “Through submitting to Adam, Eve is submitting to God.”

The bearded pastor clasped his hands in front of his rainbow-banded robe. Jeans and earth shoes peeked out from beneath the hem.

“While Eve submits to Adam,” he said, “and by submit we mean that she hands him her will and asks him to bend it to God’s ways, she must cultivate her own will that it may be tested through Adam, and that where it is true, she have it shown right back to her and know it to be so. Now I won’t say they submit to each other — Adam, as the man, is next to God — but only that Eve must not give up her self, or her soul. As Adam’s wife, she is part of a holy union made robust because she ministers her own will for the purpose of its submission to Adam, and through Adam, to God.”

I studied the women. The unadorned faces with warty cheeks and unplucked chins. The grey-pink skin and shapeless hair. And the strong, sinless eyes. As if they held no secrets. Or if they did, they defied anyone to wrong them for doing so.

My hand crept over to Alex’s, and he pressed it. For courage or sustenance, I couldn’t tell. Maybe forgiveness. I hoped so.

Earlier in the week, Alex had brought a print of a Japanese silk painting home from a History of Surgery exhibit at the College of Medicine. He’d unrolled it on our living room floor and secured it with art books.

In the foreground, a woman lies serenely in a flowing turquoise and white kimono, head on a red and white bolster, hair tied off her face with a maroon scarf and spilling over her pillow, eyes shut. A man kneels beside her on a bolster, hands on thighs. To his left sits a black lacquer box with an open drawer and a red lacquer teapot with platter and spoon. To his right, a greyhaired geisha in glasses fans the prone woman.

“It dates from the end of the eighteenth century,” Alex said. “That’s Seishu Hanoka using a preparation of datura.”

“Datura. Didn’t Carlos Castaneda?”

“No, not him. That voodoo zombie guy.”

“The Serpent and the Rainbow,” we said in unison. I touched my ring.

Alex continued: “Hanoka used his datura preparation as an anaesthetic agent given by mouth. This print shows Hanoka experimenting on his wife. See that spoon? The teapot? That’s how he administered the preparation.”

The wife is talcum white while the husband and his helper are a healthy olive. The wife lies stark-faced, at rest, arms straight at her sides. Hanoka looks placid, yet keen.

I leaned over the print. A ceremonial knife sits above the tied waist of Hanoka’s pants, its handle obscured by the pattern of the silk.

A slip of paper in the bag said Seishu Hanoka founded the Hanoka School of Surgery in Japan. Even if he’d orchestrated his wife’s surrender, I suspected her sacrifice held pleasure, and intent. After the anaesthesia discovery, such a wife, her will well-tended, would insist her body be subject to further experiment. For her husband’s career, of course, but for her own reasons besides.

The couple stood to take their vows. With Alex, I had submitted by agreeing not to make the relationship official and by showing only a loveable version of myself. I’d handed over nothing in bed, though. I stayed shy there, left his kinky offerings unsampled. Since our fight in the bathroom, I’d thought about my testimony at Ramona’s trial and whether Alex would react more to the fact of my secret or to what it revealed.

I returned his hand-squeeze. A woman strummed guitar and a man played the organ as we all stood and sang “Here Comes the Sun.” Alex and I spent the rest of the ceremony Morse code–pressing each other’s palms, eyes on a life-sized felt hanging of God banishing Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

When the Ramona Hawkes trial started on March 30, 1992, I added the morning news to my routine. Anchor Tad Stiles read highlights of the opening remarks while the screen showed text superimposed on shots of Ramona’s arrest.

The Crown Attorney for Peel County, Ron Laurie, planned to make full use of James Hawkes’s vices. Certain statements rattled me. “Nobody forced Ramona Hawkes to drug and sexually assault anybody.” “Ramona Hawkes was no paralyzed victim.” “She got caught up in a spiralling escalation of paraphilia that ended with her murdering her husband.” I shrank at the term “sexually assault.” Its invasiveness and its stigma. I didn’t see how I’d ever get used to it.

Laurie’s instructions to the jury struck hardest: “Look past the gender of the accused and examine the evidence. Ask yourself, who was in control? Who had the power? Ramona Hawkes wanted to commit crimes with her husband. When she found out he had fallen for someone else, she grew jealous and killed him. This woman before you did not murder out of a subjugated wife’s fear for her life. Rather she acted from a calculating killer’s need to eliminate a threat.”

I scoured the papers but couldn’t find the name of the woman who’d come between Ramona and James. It occurred to me that James, not the other woman, had provoked Ramona’s jealousy, that Ramona did have feelings for her friends. We’d mattered.

Well, one of us had.

By day ten I was tuning in to the morning news as soon as Alex’s tires squelched out of the driveway.

Tad Stiles came on: “Record lows in Alberta. Two home invasions at separate ends of Toronto overnight — and new details about Molly Sumner, today’s sensational witness at the Ramona Hawkes trial. Next on Good Morning Today!”

After the commercials, a shot of Ramona, slate-eyed with a white-blond fringe. I forgot to blink. GMT! liked this photo of her posing in a merry widow for her husband, the victim.

Then Tad Stiles: “The trial of Ramona Hawkes continues today with the first of her teenage friends appearing before Justice Walter Larraby. The Crown lobbied unsuccessfully for her to use a pseudonym. Though she was under eighteen when she knew the Hawkeses, nobody sexually assaulted Molly Sumner.”

Flash on the merry widow, then on GMT!’s favourite. Ramona stands by an unlit campfire, one foot on a log, one fist balled into her hip. The other hand, raised, grips the feet of a jackrabbit carcass. Its ears flop like hair.

“Strange to imagine someone so beautiful as evil,” Tad Stiles blurted.

Beautifulevil. Once again, they hadn’t shown the scar photo. Last week, after the defence introduced it into evidence during his cross-examination of Identification Officer Leif Peterson, the Toronto Telstar ran it and American Murderer showed it as part of a ten-minute spot, but I hadn’t seen it since. Probably because the photograph of Ramona’s scars was not alluring, nor even sad. It was cold, and it was grim. It promoted extremes. In it, Ramona lifts a hospital gown to expose a jagged welt across each thigh. She’s tucked her hair under a cap and wears no makeup. Her dark eyes stare past the camera. She has no other visible marks. At the trial, it had come out that doctors found nothing else, no bites, scratches, or welts.

The defence must have thought people would feel sorry for Ramona. People did. Nobody wanted to imagine a man hurting a woman like that. Though some, like Cynthia Fist, a columnist in the Telstar, agreed with the Crown. Cynthia Fist allowed that James Hawkes had likely caused the wounds. Yet there were intersecting marks, she noted, the sort of tentative test cuts a person might make before harming herself. She brought up Munchausen Syndrome, where a person self-inflicts injuries or presents symptoms in a quest for attention. She referred to Diane Downs, who shot herself in the arm after shooting her children. When the Crown suggested Ramona could have inflicted the wounds herself, Cynthia Fist agreed.

Ramona could have used a riding crop, Fist proposed, or a rope to scar her thighs. I figured knife, if she’d done it, the same knife she’d used on James. Why not? She probably got the idea right after she killed him. If she killed him. Cynthia Fist said the wounds looked fresher than Ramona claimed. Nobody had an answer. She could have done it, but that didn’t mean she had.

I skipped breakfast and headed for the Lucky Dollar. It was too soon for reports of Molly Sumner’s testimony, but the papers would tease out more details.

I saved Cynthia Fist’s column for last. Whenever the trial bored her, she shifted focus to the periphery. A seasoned trial watcher, she believed the friends and relatives of the accused could erupt at any time in court.

“Darling little sociopath” has parents, too By Cynthia Fist Toronto Telstar

Toronto – The parents of accused murderess and sex offender Ramona Hawkes are a constant presence at her trial.

During a murder trial, the media will often assign blame to the parents for psychologically damaging their darling little sociopath. Good, honest people like Ivan and Petra Ksolva get lambasted for the slightest difference in their child-rearing practices.

Balderdash! What happened to personal responsibility? Ivan and Petra are as much victims of the crimes of their spawn as the parents of James Hawkes and the parents of any of the young women being exhibited at the trial. In fact, we should commend Ivan and Petra. They have fully (if misguidedly, in this reporter’s opinion) supported their daughter throughout her arrest and pre-trial incarceration. And now here they are at the trial.

What parents! Above and beyond most.

Not everyone liked Cynthia Fist, but they read her. I did, too, because she said what she thought. I took courage from her.

I placed the folded paper on the fridge. The past few Christmases Alex and I had spent at his family cottage on Georgian Bay. I hadn’t called my dad since convocation. He didn’t match up well to Ramona’s steadfast parents.

Reporters had revealed one new fact about Molly Sumner. She was fourteen when she first met Ramona Hawkes, who was fifteen. She was twenty-eight now, four years older than I was. Ramona wouldn’t consider either of us for friendship today.

On Heidi Roth-Lopez, a panel discussed murderers. Dr. Sheldon Highman, a British specialist in North American crime, claimed murderers didn’t “get caught.” Rather they “self-revealed.”

“Murderers decide on a subconscious level when they are ready to be found,” said Dr. Highman.

Two men who’d served on juries at high-profile murder trials and a woman engaged to a serial killer on death row in Florida had said their pieces. Highman had the floor.

“Their crimes saturate them to the point where their secret leaks out,” he said, “noticeable at first only to those who are looking. Some leave clues, a signature, so to speak, maybe an item abandoned at the scene of the crime, or a totem stolen. Often they engage in a relationship with the society out of which they have cast themselves, taunting it. They want their evil discovered so they can assume their rightful position as pariah, outcast, whipping post.”

Heidi offered a moue to the audience then asked, “How does this theory apply to any of our current murderers?”

The audience pumped their arms in the air. Heidi squinted at Dr. Highman, his words a parade of barbed, distracting flowers. The other guests sat mute, hands in their laps.

“There is Ramona Hawkes,” he said. The reason I was watching. “Ramona is a prime example,” said Highman. “An outcast who could no longer contain her secret and thus signalled her desire to come into society, if only to assume her role as fallen woman. Killing her husband was the signal, not in and of itself, although the spouse in such a case is always the first suspect.”

“You’re saying she wanted to get caught? So she killed her husband?” Heidi’s voice lilted up an octave at the end of each sentence.

“The defence would have us believe she was an abused wife,” said Highman. “Though you’ll notice no mention of this history was made until after she was charged with murder. A more distinct possibility is that the salacious rumours are true. Ramona and James did lure girls into sexual slavery, or some semblance thereof. As the Crown has suggested, one likely got too close to her husband for comfort and our Ramona took matters into her own hands.”

Dr. Highman’s lips and forehead glistened.

“For Ramona to kill James signalled that she’d had enough of this,” he said.

“And how would you describe this?”

Highman scanned the audience as if he faced a horizon. “Ramona Hawkes is a classic case,” he said. “She would have murdered eventually. Her obsessive behaviour had veered out of control, and she had to be stopped. Since no one else had any inkling of what the dear girl was up to, she stopped herself.”

“By killing her husband?”

“Yes. Now you’ve got it.”

Each day now, I got inside the box. Sometimes I lay with my head near the brass door and watched the phantom window the pinhole projected on the box’s far wall. Sometimes I woke up hot from dreams of riding in a car with Ramona and K, nobody at the wheel. I ransacked the images, from James’s bloodsprawl on his marital bed to Ramona cuffed, head bowed, stepping from the court wagon into the underground garage on the first day of her trial. It was important to see Ramona as no different from Myra Banks or Evelyn Dick. Violent. A murderess. Ramona in seamed stockings and a British accent. Ramona with a valise. If Ramona could kill James, could she have killed me? Sometimes I wished she had.

Ron Laurie had twenty-nine women ready to testify at the Ramona Hawkes trial. When Ramona’s lawyer, Bill Witherson, challenged this use of similar fact evidence, Laurie countered that the patterns of her friendships constituted a “unique modus operandi” upon which her motive hinged. Justice Larraby ruled that six of the women could testify. Laurie moved successfully to have the names of the most recent two protected. Both were under eighteen, and one was alleging sexual assault, though the charge was part of a second indictment the Crown would try later. I was one of the six chosen as witnesses, but I was not under eighteen. They wouldn’t protect my name.

Cynthia Fist wrote the same things about each witness.

Predator’s “pattern” started young By Cynthia Fist Toronto Telstar

Toronto – A lovely young woman who narrowly escaped devastating consequences by virtue of age and the “luck” of meeting Ramona Hawkes in her formative years, Molly Sumner is as much a victim as any other, tainted by her association with this creature who fed off her innocence and used her to grow into the fearsome preying monster we witness each day in Courtroom 7-2 …

I wondered what she’d say about me.

Justice Larraby gave the Hawkes jury time off until the Tuesday after Easter. The talk shows reverted to transvestite love triangles and female gang warfare. I didn’t buy the paper.

Alex emptied his gym bag into the basement washer. He took off his T-shirt and tossed it on top. Aside from an oblong beige stain on his left shoulder, he had unmarked skin that flushed often, his muscles etched like dunes. He folded me into a bear hug and I inhaled his cinnamon bite, fingers nestling in the valley of his spine. Growling, he guided me into a kiss, my hair in his fist.

I ferreted his scrubs out from the clothes pile. “Shouldn’t the hospital wash these for you?”

“Usually they do. I forgot to take them off before I went to the gym. Don’t worry. I didn’t do much today. They’re clean-ish.”

I researched bloodstains in a book called Handy’s Household Hints. Wearing rubber gloves, I soaked then rinsed the scrubs in a paste of cold water and meat tenderizing crystals from the Lucky Dollar. Then I met Alex in bed.

He sidled onto me and pinned my arms to my sides. “Nobody lets me do anything,” he said.

“Who?”

“The hospital. I could perform surgery as well as anyone, including Dr. Augustin. How else am I supposed to learn if I can’t practise my skill?” He’d complained this way before. When we’d met in Foundations of Art at university, he’d griped about an oil painting the prof assigned. He worked best with watercolours, he’d said, and refused to use oils. He got a 0 and switched to pre-med.

“Show me your skill.” I wriggled away and spread my arms. I met his eyes then closed mine and held my breath.

He lay on his side and leered. “That’s what you say. But you never let me do anything either.” He twirled the hem of my nightie with a finger. I moved closer and kissed him.

“Surgery. Dr. Hanoka practised on his wife.” I kept my tone jokey, light. I wanted to go to a new place with him, but I didn’t know how to get it started.

“The poster boy? He administered anaesthetic. He didn’t cut her.”

“So you say. Show me, then, on my body. How would you take out my appendix?” I lifted my nightie, what I usually waited for him to do.

“You’d have to take off that chastity belt for starters,” he whispered near my ear. The edge had left his voice.

I turned off the lamp and slid out of my panties.

“Lights are helpful, too.”

“If you’re so good, you should be able to perform surgery in the dark.” My belly shuddered then rose to meet his cold hand.

“First you’re prepped,” he said. “Shaved, washed. An orderly rolls you into the operating theatre on a gurney then transfers you to the table, supine. Then you’re intubated and given general anaesthesia. Your abdomen is draped. There are blazing lights above and nurses to assist. I’d have my tools on a tray beside me. With my Metzenbaum scissors — I know you love the terminology —”

“Baby.”

“I’d cut here, called McBurney’s Point, and hold the incision open with a retractor. Then I’d reach in, snip the appendix free, clamp, suture.”

He marked the line with his fingernail. My thighs stirred. “I wouldn’t feel a thing.”

“Not until you woke up.”

“You’d have your fingers inside me.”

“This is different. This is beneath the skin.”

We were watching The Ten Commandments and eating Easter eggs when I announced I was going out of town for a while, up north, back to Haliburton maybe, to work on my novel. “I’ll have to miss the trial,” I said.

“Unless they un-subpoenaed you, I wouldn’t advise it. You could get charged. They call it contempt of court.”

“That cop, Detective Stanton, he phoned again. He took me to meet Ron Laurie, the Crown attorney. I had to go over my story, practise being cross-examined.” My voice shrilled. The cops had given me a copy of the police statement with my answers to their questions about Ramona, but I wanted Alex to hear what I said on the stand, rather than read it at home. I grabbed his shoulder. “They won’t protect my name, Alex, because I was eighteen. Oh, and I’m not supposed to go in the courtroom before I testify so I don’t get influenced. They could charge me if I do. Most of it’s in the news, though. All the girls are saying the same thing — that they acted out fairy tales and movies. Nothing sexual. What’s the point of having me up too?”

“Maybe they think you’ll say something different.”

“I don’t want to say anything.”

“The question is, do you have anything to say?” “The question is, why should a person have to talk if she doesn’t want to?”

“A person shouldn’t have to say anything at all,” he said. Then he kissed me, what he did when he didn’t want to fight. I snapped my face away. I wanted opposition, the okay to fling out all subjects, hurl fury at him.

“You’re jittery. Anybody would be, no matter what kind of testimony they were giving. This is a murder trial. It may be inconsequential to you, but what you say could affect this woman’s life and many others. That’s enough to rattle anybody.”

I let myself agree with him and reminded myself that the Crown would ask about what my statement contained, nothing more. It calmed me that Alex wasn’t prying, yet I half-wondered if he didn’t care. What little control I had I felt slipping away as the date of my testimony grew closer.

“Come to bed,” Alex said. He stood and took my arm. His voice, his mouth, stayed even. I teetered and a near-sob choked out. I rolled it into a laugh and let him pull me along.

“But the Red Sea,” I said. “It hasn’t been parted yet.”

“Don’t make me make that joke.”

Later, half-kidding, I said, “I feel a cold coming on.”

“Maybe you need a doctor.”

“I need surgery. A long recovery. Something to make it hard to talk or think.”

“Brain surgery. Or throat.”

“What about the face? You could disguise me.”

I rubbed his hips with my thighs while he hovered above and made fingernail dents on my temples and neck where he would cut.

“Not your face,” he said. I closed my eyes as he moved the crotch of my panties aside. “I need to know it’s still you.”

“Why is Friday the holiday and not Monday?” Alex bit into his morning plum. “Anybody can die. Rebirth is the niftier trick.”

“Don’t complain. Maybe you’ll see some stigmata today.”

“One can only hope.”

Inside the box, with the door closed, I pictured myself on the witness stand. Ramona might look right through me or give a sign — a wink, maybe, or a lip-curl. I didn’t know which I’d prefer. I’d never told Alex and I’d never told my dad and I shouldn’t have to tell anybody now. I didn’t care if my testimony helped put Ramona in jail for murdering James. I didn’t care about the future sex slaves I might keep from harm. I’d even stopped caring about K. If I could only forget everything so not telling was not lying. Who would know? Only Ramona, and she had no reason to spill. Though she might think I wanted to protect her. Ramona wouldn’t understand shame.

St. Mary’s Hospital was up the street from the courthouse. Alex had convinced me to drive in with him on Wednesday. But what would I do until then?

The answer came to me. Too bad if Ron wanted me out of the courtroom. I would see Ramona Hawkes.

Thirty-nine people stood in line outside the courthouse across from the obelisk and the sculpture of three soldiers on University Avenue. The sky was lightening over squared roofs, and headlights dimmed. At the end a greyhaired couple had set up woven Maple Leafs lawn chairs. Beside them, a girl sat crosslegged on the interlocking brick tying washers and bolts onto a black leather cord and singing, “An-ger is an energy.” The Manson family came to mind, cross-legged outside Charlie’s trial with Xs carved in their foreheads. Charlie had Xed himself first. With what? Maybe his fingernails. His long, dirty fingernails. The Manson girls heated bobby pins to red hot to burn their Xs then ripped the Xs open with needles.

After Alex left for work, I’d pinned up my hair and put on three sweatshirts, scrub pants, and Doc Martens and tucked my old fake ID into my pocket. At the last minute, I punched on a fedora, Alex’s, from his artist days. I walked up to the highway and caught the bus into Toronto. I disliked driving in the city.

The crowd shuffled and a lawn chair bumped my knee. My heel landed on the girl’s corduroy bell-bottom.

“Sorry,” I said and stepped away. She licked her lips. Under a fatigue jacket and a down vest, her black T-shirt read “Too Drunk to Fuck.” She looked familiar but like no one in particular. She stretched the collar and scratched at a tattoo on her breast.

“You get used to it.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Every day. Lots of us do. It’s a drug.”

How many days had I spent combing the newspapers when I could have disguised myself and come here, to the source?

“I’m waiting to see if they’ll put her on the stand,” the girl said. “Not likely. I’m Joy. This is my first.” She tied the ends of the cord in a double knot then snipped them. She put the necklace over her head and dropped the washers under her shirt.

“Pauline. Mine, too.”

“Why don’t you sit? I’ll make you one. The metal feels good on your skin. Like a piercing, without the pain.”

More than ten people stood behind us now. “That’s okay.” I pictured the cold washers between Joy’s breasts. I moved back and looked up. Buildings bar-graphed the sky.

“Everyone’s buying her story,” Joy said, standing. She had half a head on me. “Like Wanda Kake in the Beaconsfield Slaughter. They even had blood evidence, but Wanda looked good and spoke sweet and the jury let her off.”

I remembered the blood on Alex’s scrubs, the flutter I’d had later that night when we’d played surgery. I hadn’t met someone who liked talking about murder in a while.

“That’s because nobody wants to convict a woman,” I said.

“They’ll be making a big mistake if they let her go.”

“Why do you think?”

“I don’t know.” Joy started another necklace. She told me she’d run away last year. She was catching up on what she’d missed at an alternative high school called FreeTeach. “My Canadian History project’s on women who murder,” she said. “This is my research.”

I liked Joy. I hadn’t connected with anyone this fast in years. Joy knew as much about this case as I did. I told her that I read murder stories and that I wrote them, but I didn’t tell her I’d waited here once, outside Osgoode Hall, the summer after Grade 13. I didn’t tell her about Ramona.

Security guards moved in, arms outstretched, and blocked the cordoned-off line. Television crews hauled equipment and barked into walkie-talkies. As the old couple folded up their lawn chairs, the lineup wobbled. Sunlight wrapped the buildings and drivers extinguished their lights. Joy fingered the necklace under her shirt, her hair swinging near her hips. She kept her eyes on mine until the court van splashed past and everything shifted. Then she smiled and I looked away.

Inside the courthouse, Joy headed for the stairwell.

“It’s faster this way,” she said. “We’ll get better seats.”

“You go ahead,” I said. “I don’t care where I sit, and I need the ladies’.”

I passed the Crown Attorney’s office. Maybe Ron was in there. He’d told me to wait in the hall outside the courtroom until my name was called when I came to testify. I moved into the crowd by the elevator.

Detective Stanton stood at the door as people filed into the courtroom. I hadn’t expected him. I hesitated. He could charge me if he caught me at the trial before my testimony.

Someone pushed me, and I caught up to the old couple, who stood behind Joy now. When Stanton stopped her, she showed off her T-shirt, hands on hips. He didn’t see me edge past. I found myself a seat by the far wall. Moments later, Joy plunked down beside me.

“That cop’s a perv,” she whispered.

A man in black biking tights sat down, and Joy slid closer.

“Sorry,” she said, her leg resting against mine. She smelled like gasoline, maybe motor oil. I wanted to sniff her palms, her cuffs, chase down her scent.

As an escort officer led Ramona to her seat, I shivered, nauseous. To keep myself from jumping up and screaming, I sat on my hands and inspected on Ramona’s clothes. The navy dress was boat-necked, the matching jacket too broad for her shoulders. The ends of a limp navy bow grazed each ear. The Telstar’s shot of Ramona descending from the court van had shown spice-toned hose and patent-leather pumps.

The overall effect was matronly, save for her face, which she’d caked with foundation, crimson lipstick, and brown shadow blended up to the brow.

“Bitch,” said Joy.

“You think so?”