Before We Were Innocent, page 21
We had made our choice, and now we had to live with it.
* * *
—
Later, in the hotel room, Joni stood in the bathroom, washing her underwear in the sink, her cheeks red and mottled as she rubbed hand soap into the crotch of a Calvin Klein thong.
“Is there anything you need to tell me?” Joni asked. “From today’s interview.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like did they ask you about any details I should know about?” Joni asked. “That you forgot to tell me.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, and Joni looked up then, her eyes flashing with fury in the reflection.
“We need to take this seriously, Bess,” Joni said. “I’m the one who’s risking everything here, so the least you can do is be fucking transparent with me, since it’s obvious this isn’t ending here.”
“Joni,” I said then, trying to be braver than I felt. “If you want to back out of this, say it now, and I’ll understand. I swear I’ll always understand.”
“It’s too late for that,” she said. “You really don’t understand anything.”
We stared at each other, and I debated asking whether Joni actually had any idea what we were doing or if she was just better at pretending.
“I said everything we planned,” I said finally. “Broad strokes with few details.”
“Broad strokes,” Joni repeated. “So no more details about your walk, or the last moments before she fell, or what she was wearing, or exactly how she screamed.”
“I told you,” I said testily. “I wasn’t there when she fell.”
After a moment, Joni nodded, but she still looked unhappy.
“I just hope I didn’t get anything wrong,” she said, wringing out her underwear.
* * *
—
After that, we finally had the presence of mind to call our parents and request a lawyer for our follow-up interrogations. We both held the phone away from our ears as our mothers cried and screamed, and we had to be the calm ones, comforting them and pretending everything wasn’t as bad as we now knew it to be. Later, we snuck down to the hotel computer in the dead of night to trawl through the growing list of articles about us—inflammatory headlines printed below angelic photos of Evangeline, or photos of us stolen from our (apparently more public than we thought) Facebook profiles that showed us drinking or flipping off the camera or looking generally depraved. There must have been a leak at the police station, because the connection had already been made between us and Pierre Lauvin, a well-known figure in the hospitality scene in Europe, most notorious for securing girls to grace the decks of wealthy men’s yachts for the summer, and God knows where else. We found out from an article in the Daily Mail (headline: aetos angel’s death linked to paris sex ring) that Pierre had dined in the same Italian restaurant as we had the night before, something the press and prosecution would fixate on for months, even though there was no evidence to prove we were even there at the same time.
“They want us to be guilty,” I said to Joni as I flicked open another tab.
“I know,” she said.
“Are we really as bad as they say?” I asked, squeezing my eyes closed in an attempt to stem another wave of nausea. The new headline described us as cold and unflinching, emotionless as we left the police station hours after Evangeline’s death. Numb, I wanted to scream. Emotionless isn’t the same as numb. Emotionless isn’t the same as willfully disassociating from the real world because it’s too fucked up, too illogical for you to even try to comprehend. Already a portrait of us both was being painted, however tentatively at first, a little shading here and there, a few words like “outgoing” or “wild” thrown into an otherwise neutral article, but it wouldn’t be long until the broad strokes began painting Joni and me as sex-crazed jezebels. The kind of girls who wouldn’t think twice about luring their friend to her death just so that they could carry out their depravity, their feral agenda, with no fear of judgment or fallout.
“No,” Joni said, but she seemed as uncertain as I’d ever known her to be. “They’re just scared of us because they don’t understand us.”
THIRTY-SIX
2018
I PRETEND TO READ MY book in the living room while Joni holds an emergency meeting with her lawyer in her mezzanine office. I hear snippets of their conversation—legal terms that bring back a flood of unwanted memories (a cramped room in a police station, my lawyer’s concerned face as she translated page after page of police reports for me, the strangers who took one look at me and decided I wasn’t built to be free)—until eventually I clamp Joni’s noise-canceling headphones on and listen to the sound of blood rushing in my ears instead, like I’m swimming in my own panic.
At around noon, they come downstairs and Joni introduces me to Kelly, a diminutive woman with RBG glasses and a huge Hermès bag, who looks me up and down with barely concealed disdain, and whose handshake grip is featherlight, as if she can’t let go fast enough. I watch Joni closely as she ties her trench coat over her jumpsuit, but she won’t meet my eye either.
“Where are you going?” I ask, unable to keep a note of desperation out of my voice.
“I have to go to the police station,” Joni tells me calmly, and it feels like she’s just kicked me in the gut.
“It’s all going to be okay,” she says. “I promise.”
“You’re going with her, right?” I say to Kelly. “You have to be in there with her.”
“I’m going in voluntarily,” Joni says, her tone still infuriatingly even. “As a witness.”
“Come on, Joni,” I say, panic rising in my voice. “Seriously?”
“It’s a matter of optics,” Kelly says tersely, clearly the type of intelligent person who doles out sparse information only to get frustrated when others can’t keep up.
“It’s not like last time,” Joni says to me. “I’ll be back in time for dinner.”
“Is everything going to be okay?” I ask the lawyer, but she pretends not to hear me. Joni grabs my hand, her eyes drilling into mine.
“I’ll be back for dinner,” she repeats. And then she smiles at me.
“Why can’t you just pretend to feel something?” I ask then.
Joni drops my hand. “Excuse me?”
“Just for me,” I say. “Just pretend to be normal for me. You’re making it so hard.”
Kelly watches warily as Joni takes a step toward me, but I hold up a hand to stop her.
“You loved Willa, I know you did. So whatever happened, however badly she hurt you, this should all still make you feel something. And if it doesn’t? Just fucking pretend like the rest of us do.”
Joni shakes her head.
“I know it might sound callous, but I’ve already grieved the future I thought Willa and I would have together,” she says. “And I’m not going to put on some histrionic display just for you, Bess, of all people, especially not in my own home.”
Her almost clinical conviction is so familiar to me that, as I listen, something close to relief weaves its way through me because it actually makes sense, in a way that only works with Joni’s logic. I feel something, some fear or resentment, deflate inside me. I’m not entirely sure what I expected coming back here, when Joni has never done what people expected of her. She has always been volatile and odd, honest to the point of brutality. It was part of the reason I was drawn to her in the first place and the reason I most feared her—Joni can’t pretend to feel something she doesn’t, or be someone she isn’t. Joni would never tell you she missed you if she didn’t, or pretend to care about someone she didn’t. Because, up until the past three weeks, I have only known Joni to lie once. And it was to protect me. I think of the aftermath of Evangeline’s death and how life could feel almost normal in the pockets of time between grief, but then how the air would suddenly turn to stone around me and it felt like I might never breathe again, and I choose to understand what Joni is saying, even if nobody else would.
“I have nothing to hide, Bess,” she says, and I let her familiar confidence soothe me.
“Please come back,” I say, and Joni smiles before turning away from me.
“Everything needs to be beyond watertight,” Kelly reminds Joni on their way out, and we all know exactly what she means. I need to keep my shit together if I want to protect her.
* * *
—
Somehow I fall asleep on the couch, waking up around six p.m. to the vast gray marine layer rolling in outside the window. I stare out at the sky, trapped in that slippery in-between place that isn’t quite a dream but isn’t consciousness either, and, once the room has darkened around me, I move into the kitchen. Trying to keep my panic at bay, I carefully chop chilies and cloves of garlic before sautéing them like my dad taught me when I was a teenager. On another gas ring, I heat a pan of water, adding a pinch of salt and half a pack of spaghetti that I found gathering dust at the back of another cupboard, perhaps because Joni believes carbs have “bad energy.” Once I’ve drained it, I mix the pasta in with the garlic, oil, and chilies and I pour it all into a large bowl, decorated with lemons and olive leaves, that reminds me of Evangeline.
I carefully set the table for two, and then I sit in a chair facing the front door with my bowl of pasta untouched, waiting for Joni to come home.
It’s after eleven when the front door finally opens and Joni stands silhouetted in the frame, a stream of bright flashes punctuating the shouts of reporters behind her for just a moment before she slams the door shut.
“Sorry I’m late,” Joni says, grinning as she strides toward the table, flicking on the overhead lights as she does. At the last minute, she detours via the kitchen to pick up a bottle of red wine and two glasses, then I stare at my friend as she sits down opposite me and messily serves herself pasta, nonchalantly twirling the spaghetti around her fork.
“What did I miss?” she says, once she’s swallowed a mouthful.
“Joni,” I say. “What did they want from you?”
“I already told you,” Joni says. “They just wanted to run through the timeline again.”
The timeline, I think, with a thrum of dread.
“Did they ask about me?”
“Only insofar as confirming where I was that night,” Joni says, careful to avoid the word alibi.
I nod wordlessly.
“It’s all going to work out,” Joni says firmly. “You just have to trust me for a little longer. It’s nearly over.”
Joni takes another mouthful of spaghetti, smaller this time, and I stick my finger in the pile of oily noodles in front of me. The food is cold, practically congealed.
“You don’t have to eat this,” I say.
Joni smiles at me. “I want you to know how grateful I am to you for still being here. It means everything to me that I don’t have to be alone right now.”
“Oh,” I say, awkward in the face of her sincerity. “Well, being alone has never really been your thing.”
“I don’t know,” Joni says slowly. “I’ve had to get pretty good at it over the years.”
I feel a pang of anger, because whatever she wants to believe, Joni has no clue what it’s like to be truly alone. And not alone because you’re built that way, but because you don’t think you’re worthy of anyone else. As far as I can tell, Joni rebuilt her life so that she was surrounded by people right up until the night Willa disappeared.
“After we got back from Greece?” Joni says quietly, sensing my skepticism.
“You weren’t exactly lonely,” I say. “You adjusted pretty well, from what I remember.”
Joni looks at me strangely.
“Not lonely, Bess. Alone,” she says. “For a while, I had no one. Ev was dead and you were . . . disappearing. I could feel you slipping away day by day.”
I’m about to correct her when I realize that I’m doing exactly what was done to us back then—I’m judging her interior life on the self she presents to the world. I’m also engaging in a pissing contest with the only person who might, underneath it all, actually understand how I feel right now, how I’ve felt since the day we got back to California. I try to ground myself in the present, letting old resentments soften, begin to break down inside me.
“Didn’t you ever want to disappear too?” I ask, and Joni opens her mouth to say something, probably to indignantly inform me how hard she has worked to rebuild her life from the ruin, no, the mere rubble that was left for her to work with, but then she also catches herself.
“Sometimes,” she says softly. “Recently, I’ve had this . . . I don’t know, this thought that I could just get on my paddleboard and swim out as far as I can without turning back. And maybe I drift on to somewhere else, start some other life far away, or maybe I just stay out there in the middle of the ocean, floating on the waves. Leaving nothing of myself behind. Either way, I’m not frightened, Bess. I’m not leaving because I’m scared or because I’m being driven away or anything. I’m leaving because it’s time. I’m leaving because it’s the only way I’ll finally be free.”
“Joni,” I say. “You’re scaring me a little.”
“Not like that,” she says, smiling. “And it’s not like I’m . . . I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done or how I’ve tried to help people, and I don’t know how I could have done things differently, but it does sometimes strike me how . . . cruel it is that my only way out was to bind myself to my worst moment for the rest of my life. And that’s just a fact. There will never be a single interview or talk I give where I don’t have to reference what happened to Ev, and to us, before I say anything else. Where I don’t have to pretend that we were the lucky ones. And now it will be the same with Willa.”
I reach out and take her hand, smoothing my thumb over her cool skin. Joni always did have cold hands and feet, like an amphibian.
“Maybe I was always destined to climb over the bodies of those I once loved to get where I needed to go,” Joni says, smiling weakly at me. “But some days, I just don’t have the stomach for it.”
* * *
—
Later, I open an email from Steven with a link to a not-so-blind article on a celebrity gossip website. The photo shows me fleeing Whole Foods with my hand obscuring most of my face, alongside a photo of Joni taken from behind as she walked into the police station earlier today. As dread builds inside me, I read the accompanying words:
THE SIRENS’ SONG
Which late-aughts gruesome twosome seem to have reconnected over yet another tragedy? The echoes of the past are as indisputable as this podcast host’s God complex after another young woman meets a tragic end in a luxury oceanfront locale. And in yet another twist? Rumor has it this duo’s alibis are even more entwined than they are . . .
Every single one of the 360 and counting comments guesses the article is about me and Joni.
THIRTY-SEVEN
2008
WE WERE ARRESTED TWO days later, hours after the local newspaper printed the photos of us smiling and eating ice cream on the beach, splashing around in the water like we had not a care in the world less than twelve hours after Evangeline’s death. We had already been caught on camera leaving the police station, heads down, eyes burning, and Joni’s “just fucking peachy” would be replayed over and over, the f-word bleep somehow making it even harsher and less appropriate for the circumstances. It was after the taxi driver claimed on TV that he’d heard us rehearsing our stories in the back of his cab, in the same segment that saw the hotel receptionist describe how horrified poor Theo had been that I’d rifled through his dead sister’s wardrobe like a vulture. The press had already decided that Joni’s smile was cunning, that my wide-set, icy blue eyes were unsettling as we left the police station the second time, after “refusing to cooperate.” The police were open about the fact that they didn’t think we were acting appropriately considering our best friend had just died (smiling, laughing even), and their darkest suspicions about us would soon be confirmed over and over again with each unofficial character statement that came out, embalmed for years to come.
We were still staying in the hotel, so I’m not sure if the adult film we’d watched for all of ten minutes had been discovered yet, or the vibrator that had languished forgotten in the secret compartment of my backpack since I’d landed in Greece, but that would all be found eventually, spurring hundreds of conspiracy theories about Joni’s and my plans to sexually corrupt and dominate our friend. It was after they’d searched the house in Tinos, finding the notes Joni and I had sent each other, but before those notes leaked to the press. Nobody knew about the text message Evangeline had sent Theo on our way to the villa, but it would soon be printed on the front of newspapers across the globe, and by that point there was no way of arguing back, no way of telling the world that obviously it had been a joke, that Evangeline was just falling back into the easy roles we’d carved out for ourselves—Ev as the angel, Joni and me as the bad influences—when actually it was always more complicated than that.
Kevin had already told a local news channel that Evangeline and I had been arguing just before she died, implying that we had been in the middle of some sort of love triangle, but it was before they came up with the nickname “Hollywood Heathens” or the connection to Pierre Lauvin, who they conveniently then forgot when he turned out to be just another red herring in a seemingly endless string of them, just six months later. They had, of course, already trawled through our Facebook accounts and selected the most incriminating photos (Joni and me in matching bikinis at a party in Woodland Hills, posing with empty bottles of Hennessy in a hot tub with another girl from school; me on the back of an already forgotten classmate, my legs wrapped around his waist as I lined up a beer pong shot, my cheeks glowing and eyes demonically red from the flash), making sure to reference our photo albums with dumb titles taken from song lyrics, like “Bona fide hustler making my name” or just “Lick me like a lollipop,” but it was before they hacked into Joni’s account and found the messages we’d sent each other, cruelly and mechanically dragging our sexual conquests, people with dreams and parents and feelings who would then be approached for a statement. That reveal would come later, once we were already in prison and didn’t have access to the internet, along with the video of me blind drunk in Evangeline’s house, rolling around on her cherry-print bedspread and telling her I wanted to fuck Leonardo DiCaprio’s brains out.
