“Wait,” she said at one point, “is my fight today?”

“No,” Ray said, “it’s tomorrow.”

“I thought it was today.”

“No, Bunny, it’s tomorrow, I promise.”

She loved boxing and she talked about it rapturously. “I just wish my mom were alive to see me box,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I just think she’d be so proud of me.”

“I bet she would,” I said, even though I thought Allison probably would have preferred it if Bunny went to college or got married. But maybe that would have been wrong of Allison. Maybe it was wrong of me to have preferred that too.

“Did you ever think of going to the Olympics for boxing?” I asked. “They have that, right?”

She shrugged. “They do background checks, so I don’t think that would work.” I had meant to imply that she had achieved or still could achieve all her girlhood dreams, but instead I had stepped in it.

“Wait, is my fight today?” Bunny asked.

I looked at Ray, alarmed, but he answered calmly, “No, sweetie, it’s tomorrow.”

“Okay.” She nodded, like she was deciding to trust him. “Okay.”

What the fuck was going on here? Ray wouldn’t look at me.

“Did it get rescheduled or something?” I asked. “All this confusion over the schedule?”

Ray didn’t answer, took a huge bite of his club sandwich.

“Wait, what were you just saying?” Bunny asked. “Your train got rescheduled?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, clearly confused.

When Bunny got up to pee, Ray leaned over to me. “Sorry about that,” he said. “She’s taken one too many in the head, if you know what I mean.”

“What?” I asked, though I had heard him perfectly well.

“She’s had a series of concussions,” he said, “so she gets confused a lot. Her memory’s bad.” She hadn’t been uninterested when I’d been telling her about my life, I realized, she’d been literally having a hard time following what I was saying.

“And she’s still fighting?”

“We’re doing this new therapy, that’s part of why we’re in New York, the doctor is the best, the best. They inject stem cells right into her brain, it’s incredible!”

“Why is she still fighting?” I asked again.

“Ach,” he said. “She’s not that bad. Really, with the brain stuff. It’s a very common problem, very common. She’s at the height of her career, she can’t stop now!”

Her brain was dying, and her father was fighting her anyway, like she was a racehorse who could win the cup and then be turned into dog food. Or maybe she would have stem cells injected straight into her brain (Was that even a thing? How could you inject something straight into the brain? It didn’t make sense! Ray Lampert was insane!).

“What does her doctor say?” I asked. “Does he know she’s fighting?”

“He knows, he knows,” Ray said. “He advised against it, but they have to say that for liability reasons. What doctor is going to tell someone with brain trauma to go get in the ring?”

“Well, exactly,” I said.

“You think Mike Tyson never fought with a concussion?”

“I think when Mike Tyson was fighting we didn’t understand how bad a series of concussions was, and the whole joke of Mike Tyson is that fighting messed up his brain so it’s just a really poor comparison.”

“Touché,” Ray said, and drained his mug of coffee.

When Bunny came back from the bathroom, I stood up and I hugged her and I said it was wonderful to see her. “Are you coming to my fight?” she asked. I told her of course I was, that I would see her later at the hotel but I had to run some errands. Ray wouldn’t look at me and when I said goodbye, he was silent.

“I love you,” I told Bunny, my arms still around her. I only came up to her neck. She looked down at me, smiled with so much sleepy love and joy that it physically hurt me.

“I love you too,” she said. “Always have, always will.”

“Okay,” I said. “Take care. Be careful.”

“I will,” she said.

I walked out of the diner, and then I walked north for a few blocks, my heart pounding. I hailed a cab, and I had it take me to Port Authority, where I intended to take the next bus to Ithaca.

I didn’t believe I could stop Ray Lampert. I could not avert the tragedy, but that didn’t mean I had to watch.

* * *

—

But I didn’t get on the bus. I didn’t even buy a ticket. Instead I bought a pack of cigarettes, even though I had quit smoking my freshman year at Pomona. I stood outside Port Authority watching the frenzy of taxicabs and sweating in my stupid denim jacket in the September humidity, the hot smoke in my lungs like the city itself entering me.

I kept thinking of this joke Bunny and I used to have, where she would pretend to be what we called the “Love Monster.” And she would talk in this strange Muppety voice, and she would say, “Love meeeee, love meeeee!” as she wrestled me and pinned me down so she could lie on top of me like a gigantic cat. “I do love you!” I would cry. “I do love you!” No matter what I said back to her, that’s all she said. “Looove meeeeeee!” And once she had gotten herself arranged comfortably on top of me, she would begin to purr and pretend to fall asleep.

“You’re crushing me,” I would whisper.

“Love me,” she would say.

* * *

—

I spent a few hours wandering the city before finally returning to the hotel. I didn’t want to see them. But when I went to my room and passed by their door, I was somehow disappointed that it didn’t open. I paused for a moment outside it, listening, and heard the low murmur of the TV. Then I kept walking down the long hallway to my own room, slid the key card, collapsed on the bed in a sweaty heap, and listened to the air conditioner singing some terrible robot madrigal until I fell asleep in my clothes, my shoes still tied to my feet.

* * *

—

Bunny’s fight the next day was on the undercard of a fight between heavyweights Tony Barsotti and Mikhail Volkov in Madison Square Garden. When I looked at the ticket Ray had given me and it said Barsotti vs. Volkov, I thought he gave me the wrong ticket. I hadn’t understood that women’s boxing was just the opening act for the real boxing, the men’s boxing. I had watched all of Bunny’s fights, so I thought I knew what to expect, but I had been unprepared for the size of the spectacle itself.