The Assistants (17 page)

O
F COURSE
on my way back home from Kevin's, I got caught in a heavy, melodramatic rain that left me drenched by the time I dropped like a felled tree onto my bed. I closed my eyes and listened to the storm pounding at my windows, thinking about how my life was over. Which was something I'd thought a number of times before, to an embarrassing degree, but this time it had to be true. Because what else did I have to lose?

What else could possibly go wrong?

It was a masochist's favorite question, and intuitively one knows the asking is a dare. It's:
Go on, nothing can bring me any lower; I have nothing left to care about.

And so the impossible and inevitable happened while I was just lying there feeling sorry for myself. I never even saw it coming.

It was a break, a cascade. Not the clean trickle of baptism, more the membrane-addled gush of the womb. Plaster. Paint
chips. Crumbly gray cement. When the ceiling rain bubble finally burst, it erupted ninety years' worth of spackle matter all over my head.

My sheets were muddled to charcoal black and brown, soaked through to the mattress. My hair, stuck wet to my face, smelled inexplicably of ashes.

I looked up and was surprised to find an opening no bigger than the circumference of a quarter—surrounded by a flailing popped balloon.

Amazing
, I thought.
Drop by drop, how much it grew, how much matter it collected over time.

I plugged the anticlimactic hole with a plastic
I-heart-NY
bag and some masking tape. I tossed my sheets into the trash. I didn't have any clean sheets to replace them with, but I hadn't thought that part through.

I took a shower.

Only then did I begin to cry, because, in truth, there is nothing more self-satisfying than sobbing in a steaming shower.

That's how Emily found me, sodden and pruned, curled up on the shower floor. We didn't have a bathtub, mind you, so it was a stand-up shower I was lying down in, no easy feat for a full-grown adult. Luckily I only ever got to be half-grown. Still, my thigh or elbow must have been blocking the drain because I'd managed to flood the room.

Emily was standing ankle-deep in water. “What happened?” she asked.

“The rain bubble popped,” I said.

“And it made this big of a mess?”

I shook my head. “Kevin broke up with me.”

Emily's perfectly symmetrical Anglo-Saxon features did a thing I'd never seen them do before. They warped hideously with grief. She knelt down and lifted me up from my puddle. “Why?”

“Because I'm me,” I said. “He finally figured it out.”

To Emily's credit she didn't kick me while I was down, literally or metaphorically. She also didn't try to say anything to make me feel better. She barely spoke at all. But she got me dried off, and dressed, and into bed.

As previously stated, I didn't own a second set of sheets, so Emily made up the bed with a checkered tablecloth and a few bath towels. She fed me Girl Scout cookies from the freezer and glass after glass of Jameson. When she opened up my laptop, the Assistance site appeared.

“Let's not worry about this now.” She clicked off the page and opened up Netflix instead. “How about something with Channing Tatum . . . ,” she said. “Or Ryan Gosling.”

“No.” I curled into the fetal position beside her. “I only want to watch ugly people tonight.”

“All right, well, that shouldn't be too hard.” She scrolled through the new releases. “In what category would you place Jeff Goldblum? He's sort of got an ugly-sexy thing going, don't you think?”

“Emily?” I slurred into my pillow. “There's something else.”

I wasn't looking at her, but I could tell she'd stopped scrolling. “What?” she asked.

I took a deep breath to calm myself—a profound, bottomless inhale of fresh air, followed by a stanky, whiskeyed exhale.

“Before Kevin kicked me to the curb,” I said. “He told me something . . .”

I could feel Emily bracing for the worst, tightening her jaw and sphincter muscles as if that would help to make what I was about to say less awful.

“What did he tell you?” She tried and failed to sound composed.

I couldn't utter the words out loud, because then it would all be too real, how bad this was, how serious it was, the trouble we were in.

“Fontana!” Emily was yelling now. “What did Kevin tell you?”

“He told me that he got called into a meeting at work,” I said. “And they were talking about our website.”

Emily was quiet for a moment. The plastic
I-heart-NY
bag that I'd masking-taped to the ceiling crackled from the wind outside.

“The Titan legal department,” I clarified, because I wasn't sure if the words drooling from the side of my mouth were puddling onto my dishcloth-covered pillow in coherent sentences. “Glen Wiles and the rest, they're looking into our funding.”

“I knew it. I knew when you got fired.” Emily shut her eyes and let out her breath in this defeated way that got me sobbing again.

“Oh no, don't do that.” Her eyes shot back open. “Don't start crying again, we just dried you off.”

She reached for my glass of Jameson and waved it beneath my nose, but I batted it away. She tried a Girl Scout cookie next with the same result.

“What are we going to do?” I bawled.

“Listen to me.” Emily wrapped her arms around my shuddering torso. “We're in this together, okay? Till the end. And I'm not going to jail, so neither are you. Do you understand?”

She squeezed me with a brute strength I never knew she had.
It was impressive, her ability to rise up and be strong this way now that I had totally fallen to pieces. “Whatever we have to do,” she said, “we'll do it. I promise you, okay?”

It was a question, I realized, that I was supposed to answer. “Okay,” I said.

“Do you believe me?”

“I believe you,” I said.

“Do you trust me?”

In this case I did. Because if anyone could figure out a way out of this it was Emily, even if it meant our having to run away and forge new identities. Reinvention was Emily's specialty.

“I trust you,” I said.

“Good.” She let me out of her hold and stared straight ahead for a moment, calculating something invisible. “Our site really ticked them off. They're probably just looking for a way to discredit us.”

“But the site's funding is legitimate,” I said. “We haven't faked an expense report in weeks. Do you think—?”

Emily began shaking her head. “Now that they're on a hunt? No. And if Glen Wiles is already involved, forget it, it's only a matter of time. We were safe before because no one had a reason to take a second look at anything, but now they do.”

“Yeah, that's what I think, too.” I sat up to retrieve my drink. “Does this mean we should pack a go-bag? I don't own any actual luggage, but I do have one of those giant blue IKEA sacks.”

Emily glanced at the window. It had finally stopped raining. “How drunk are you right now?” she asked. “Too drunk to—”

“I don't think I'm sober enough to drive anywhere,” I said. “But I could definitely fly a plane.”

Emily blinked her eyelashes at me a few times. “Okay. For now let's just get you through the night.”

She returned to my laptop's keyboard. “You said you wanted ugly. How about something with Michael Cera? Or Steve Buscemi?”

“Emily, I fucking love you.” My eyes welled, but I fought off another sob. “I'm sorry I've never told you that before.”

“I love you, too, Fontana,” she said. “I really fucking do. And that's why I think we should leave first thing in the morning.”

I
T WAS FIRST THING
early the next morning when they came. One man cop, one woman cop, wearing regular-people clothes. Business wear. Neither wielded a gun but they each probably had one.

“Tina Fontana?” the woman said when I opened the door.

“Yes.”

She was polite and she did all the talking. A black woman with auburn corkscrew curls. Past the doorway were a few squad cars, uniformed cops.

Emily was at my side. We were both in sweatpants, what Emily called
house clothes
, which for her meant pajamas that actually covered her body and provided warmth.

“Are you Emily Johnson?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

The man cop pulled out handcuffs then, shoved me aside, not
roughly, but assertively. He began reciting the rights, just like out of a TV show where the antihero finally gets what's coming to him.

The man cop had his olive-skinned palm on the back of Emily's T-shirt. He'd gone around behind her and secured her wrists.

I held my wrists out to the woman, waiting.

“Please step aside, Ms. Fontana,” she said.

Emily's blue doll-eyes pooled, but she remained silent. Not because she had the right to, but because her shrieking was coming out without sound in a silent scream.

“You have the right to an attorney,” and all that, the man cop was explaining to her.

“What's going on?” I asked. “Why are you only taking her?”

They guided Emily to the door and she finally eked out a sound. “Tina?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't understand, but listen to me, I'm going to figure out what's happening.”

Yet even as I said it, I knew. Robert had spared me. Emily was going down for the both of us.

“I'll take care of it,” I said. “I'm going to get you out, I promise.”

Makeup-free tears streamed down Emily's face. She hadn't even had a chance to put eyeliner on—that was the thought that ultimately broke me up. I knew how much Emily would be pained by sitting in a cell wearing her house clothes and no foundation. It would feel to her like they'd stripped her naked.

I followed after them, out to the street, where the cool autumn morning air stung my cheeks.

“Step aside, Ms. Fontana,” the woman cop ordered me.

“Can I come with you?”

“Ms. Fontana, please step aside.”

They stuffed Emily into the back of their black sedan. She locked her eyes on mine through the window.

“I'm going to get help,” I screamed at the glass. “Don't be scared.”

Then they drove her away. The uniformed cops got in their squad cars and peeled off in sporadic directions until everyone was gone but me.

I stupidly never asked where they were taking her. When I turned around to go back into my apartment, throw on some sneakers, and call a cab, I realized I had no idea where to have the cab take me.

I took my computer into the kitchen and tried a few searches, but Google was failing me. I needed Kevin, but I couldn't ask him for help now. Wendi, Lily, and Ginger would all be at work by now, and there was no sense terrorizing them with this unexpected turn of events any sooner than necessary. It would only transform the next few hours into a cacophony of opinions and scolding, finger pointing and self-reproach—and I needed to think!

What would Emily do, I wondered, if I'd been the one taken? There was an acronym that would never find its way onto a rubber bracelet. What Would Emily Do? But she would do everything in her power to help me, wouldn't she? She wouldn't run, right? Just last night she'd professed that we were in this together, that she wasn't going to jail, so neither was I. And I promised her the same just now when she had her hands up against the glass of that cop-car window like a new breed of Pound Puppy. So I couldn't just pack my blue IKEA sack and go—I had to do the right thing. I had
to preserve what was left of the goodness in my soul. But for the record, this was exactly why I never wanted to have friends.

So much for being an island.

Thanks to the Legal Aid website, I eventually figured out that Emily had most likely been taken to the local precinct, and the best I could do for now was wait for a phone call. I couldn't even bring her some clothes. Some moisturizer. Her hand lotion, so she could at least smell like herself while she was there.

I moved back into the bedroom, sat down in the middle of my bed, upon the checkered tablecloth and bath towels Emily had laid out the night before. I pulled my knees into my chest, observing a circumference of spilled-whiskey stains and cookie crumbs, and I shuddered at the thought—it was all up to me now.

—

B
Y THE TIME
evening drew near, I'd stared my entire day away and not come up with any ideas of what to do next. Emily hadn't called. And I needed to leave the apartment. I needed to speak to another human being, so I texted Ginger, Wendi, and Lily.

It was shocking news to deliver over a table of drinks at Bar Nine—that early this morning one of us had been put into a cage. But their initial reactions, across the board, weren't what I had expected. I thought Ginger would immediately insist that she actually had nothing to do with any of this. I thought Wendi might smash a glass against the wall or break someone's neck. And I thought Lily would just pass out. Instead, they all went still.

I'd never seen such stillness over our table at Bar Nine. The only positive element I could glean from their sincere surprise and
terror was that business at Titan today had obviously gone ahead as usual. Only Emily had been taken out, and it had been kept black-ops quiet.

“How many hours has it been since they carted her away?” Ginger asked after a solid sixty seconds of no one saying anything.

“I got the runaround all day,” I said. “They wouldn't let me talk to her and she's not allowed visitors.”

We all stared at my taciturn cell phone on the tabletop.

“How can they not even allow her a phone call?” Lily said, her voice cracking.

“Probably because Robert has everyone in his pocket,” I said. “Everyone answers to Robert. Anything he wants.” I could hear my own paranoia regarding Robert's superpowers, which made them no less real. Even that big book of mental disorders used by psychiatrists worldwide to call crazy as they see it stated that you could be paranoid and also be right. I'd read that in an issue of
The New Yorker
at my dentist's office, mistaking it for an article on the season finale of
Homeland
—but it still applied here.

“I hate to be the one to ask this”—Ginger's usually sharp eyes had dulled to cloudy sea glass—“but should the rest of us be preparing for the police to yank us out of our apartments next?”

“Is that all you can think about right now?” I fired back at Ginger. “Yourself?”

“I hate to be the one to agree with Ginger about anything ever,” Wendi said, nervously flipping her Zippo lighter on and off. “But she's right.”

If I knew Robert—and I did know Robert—he'd taken out Emily to make a statement so loud and clear that he wouldn't have
to be bothered going after everyone else. “I don't think you should be worried,” I said. “Emily's the one he chose to sacrifice. That's how Robert operates.”

Ginger took a sip of her vodka gimlet, a sure sign she was beginning to feel better. “I guess it makes sense that Robert would want this to end quietly. It would only make him look bad if what we accomplished got out to the public.”

Wendi nodded her sad horns, which had faded to near invisibility. “This way he still wins. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky. But I don't feel lucky; I feel like I want him to lose.” She flipped her Zippo on and off, then threw it onto the table with a force that nearly scared Lily off her chair.

“We have to get Emily out of there,” I said. “That's what we should be focusing on.”

“We will.” Lily gripped the edge of her chair with both hands. “As soon as they actually charge her with something and set her bail.”

“If,” I said, because, again, I was afraid of what Robert was capable of. “If they set her bail.”

“Son of a bitch,” Wendi said.

“Emily's screwed,” Ginger said.

“Oh aah well,” Lily said.

I was just about to give up on trying to find comfort in human contact and head home when my cell phone rang. I bumbled it to my ear. “Hello? Hello?”

All I could hear was measured sociopathic breathing on the other end.

“Emily?”

“We need to meet,” a brusque voice answered. “In an hour.”

“Who is this?” I took a few steps away from our table.

“Central Park, near the statue of the giant sled dog.”

I continued farther away from our table, holding my non-phone ear closed with my pointer finger. “Margie? Margie Fischer? Is that you?”

“Be there.” She hung up.

I slipped my phone into my jeans pocket and looked around. Ginger, Wendi, and Lily were waiting for me to return to the table, perched halfway out of their seats.

“Was that Emily?” Ginger asked when I reached them.

“No.” I grabbed my jacket and messenger bag from the back of my chair without sitting back down. “Wrong number.”

“Then where are you going?” Wendi squinted at me like she wasn't buying it.

“I just can't sit here anymore.” I threw my bag over my body like a sash. “I need some fresh air. I need to be alone.”

They believed me, because it was a very Tina Fontana reaction to have to the scalding disappointment of a wrong number when waiting for an important call. Still, I made sure none of them tried to follow me out of the bar.