Did she think I had forgotten my own mother? My real mother? And even if she had been trying to be a mother to me, shouldn’t she have done a better job? Was teaching me how to apply eyeliner and telling me “no boys” really enough? I had paid for my own food and clothing since I was old enough to get a job. I was living in, literally, a closet. But I said, “I don’t mean to express a lack of gratitude. I am very grateful, Aunt Deedee, I really am. You know I love you.”

“I love you too,” she had gasped, and hugged me so tightly that I finally caught it, what was going on for her, what was at stake. She was upset because she knew she had failed me, and she could not, could not look at it. And I didn’t want to make her look at it either. She really had done her best. She really was trying very hard. It was not fun to be Aunt Deedee. In fact, it was terrible and bleak to be Aunt Deedee.

For whatever reason, in these bizarre, timeless weeks, Bunny decided she needed to teach me to drive. We were always together. She had stopped working for her father out of moral disgust more latently, and need to “take care of me” more patently, and there were only so many shows to binge-watch and only so many blueberry muffin mixes to bake (she loved blueberry muffin mix, she loved to eat the batter raw; I had to positively claw the bowl away from her to make sure any of them got baked). And so we went to the DMV and I got my permit, and then she would take me out driving. We drove only in parking lots, especially at first because her Jeep was a stick shift, and I was a slow learner. I would scream every time I stalled the car. This made Bunny laugh hysterically each time we lurched, and I would say, “Shut up, shut up, I can’t concentrate with you laughing like that!” and she would say, “How can you be so bad at something? I’ve never seen you be this bad at anything!”

The thing is, I was falling in love with Bunny again. She was so clumsy with artifice that she had no choice but to be absolutely and authentically herself, which gave me permission to be the same. And that had been part of it all along. That we were our truest selves when we were together.

That Christmas was a weirdly happy one. We didn’t get a tree or do any of that, but we did order in Chinese and have a movie marathon. I hadn’t gotten presents for Ray or Bunny, and I didn’t think there would be any gift exchange, but then on Christmas Eve, Ray suddenly pulled two wrapped boxes out of the closet.

“Wut,” Bunny said.

“You didn’t tell me we were doing presents!” I said.

“We’re not,” Ray said. “Weirdest thing. Found these up on the roof. Wrapped up just like this. I think they’re from Santa. He must have dropped them off early.”

He set a box in front of each of us, and we tore into the paper like little kids. I couldn’t imagine what was in a box this size, and then when I saw the packaging, that white packaging, I almost started crying. I was like one of those audience members sobbing after Oprah gave them a car.

MacBook Airs for both of us, silver and sleek and so expensive I didn’t want to touch it and get finger grease on it.

“To take to college,” Ray said proudly.

I had never known that a material possession could make me so happy, but my giddiness lasted through New Year’s.

Of course, I could not help but think about, almost constantly, what Bunny had done to Ann Marie, and how it was different or the same as what those boys had done to me. I found myself observing her hands, thinking about the heaviness of her bones, the densely packed muscles in her back, in her buttocks, in her thighs. “Like celery…just crunching,” Naomi had said. A mosaic of bone. Pulp. I could vaguely remember someone saying that in the deeper dream chambers of my hospital memories. His spleen is pretty pulpy.

But the difference was, at least to me, that Bunny had seen red. She had left herself, lost herself, in a kind of divine madness, almost like Heracles, who was driven mad by jealous Hera and tricked into killing his own wife and children. Madness personified gets onstage and brags: “Nor shall the ocean with its moaning waves, nor the earthquake, nor the thunderbolt with blast of agony be half so furious as the headlong rush I will make into the breast of Heracles.”

In such a model, madness and violence both are seen as a loss of control, and the essence of good behavior is defined as a maintenance of control. There are a thousand versions of the same philosophy, from studies showing hypotrophy of the frontal cortex in murderers to treatment protocols for domestic abuse that advise against the consumption of alcohol, lest the batterer “lose control.” (I wish I could have told them, drunk as my father was, he always seemed to know to hit my mother or the kids and never accidentally hit a cop.)

In some ways it made Bunny’s violence more terrifying, more otherworldly. I remembered Naomi, how stricken she seemed afterward: “That was some of the craziest shit I’ve ever seen.”

But the boys who had beaten me, pulped my spleen, cracked my ribs, had been laughing. They had been chewing gum. They were not in an ecstatic frenzy. They did not “know not what they did.” They were talking to each other like they always did. I remember one of them made fun of another one for being out of breath from kicking me. They were perfectly in control.

And for me, that made their behavior much worse somehow, though I was hard-pressed to articulate exactly how.

At root, I seemed to be upset about the existence of physical power at all. That violence is nothing but another kind of touching.

I was also confounded by the existence of Ray Lampert as a ready moral corollary. He, an overtly bad man, a man who cheated his neighbors, who committed frauds both large and small, who abused his wife, who was venal and petty and drunk, was universally revered, a valued member of the community, a city council member. And Bunny, by virtue of her actions on a single afternoon, but who was otherwise honest, kind, generous, and hardworking, had been cast out of our community, stigmatized, and mythologized as a specific kind of female evil. She was Lizzy Borden, she was Medea, she was some sort of Kali with the cunt of a cow. Was it any wonder I wanted to excuse her? To explain away what she had done?

But no matter how hard I tried, or how I contorted my mental world, I could not make what Bunny had done right. No one could argue it was right to do that to Ann Marie. Yet I could not stop loving Bunny. I could not stop being on her side. I would continue to love her, even as she horrified me. I would continue to love her because she was mine.

* * *

—

One night in mid-January, when I was fully asleep, Bunny came into my room.

“Sorry,” she said when she saw she had woken me. She already had my window halfway open. The window in the guest bedroom led out to a portion of angled roof, whereas her window opened onto empty air. “Go back to sleep.”

“Where are you going? To see Eric?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Sorry.”