Sarai Walker - Dietland

With all the drama her voice could muster, Cheryl announced the big news again: As a college student in Los Angeles, Leeta had known Soledad and Luz. She had traveled to L.A. at the time of Luz’s funeral and was there when two of the rapists, Lamar Wilson and Chris Martinez, were kidnapped.

I sat in a chair, deflated. I’d been holding on to hope that Leeta had been mixed up in this by mistake. Now that seemed unlikely.

Sana walked into the kitchen, her hair damp from the shower. “No breakfast?”

“There’s big news. Leeta knew Luz and her mother.” Sana joined me in front of the television. After all the violence and bloodshed linked to Jennifer, we had returned to one of the saddest stories: the little girl who’d been raped.

“I’m wondering if the answer to the Jennifer mystery lies here,” Cheryl said, “but maybe we’re just not seeing it yet.”

Cheryl turned to the Los Angeles correspondent, who explained further that while Leeta was a student at the University of Southern California, she’d volunteered at a local women’s clinic as a rape crisis counselor. Luz’s mother, Soledad, worked there part-time as a trainer.

“And this is just coming to light now? ” said Cheryl.

“Apparently, the clinic didn’t keep records of volunteers from more than two years ago,” said the correspondent. “A witness now recalls that Leeta and Soledad not only worked there at the same time, but might have spent time together outside the clinic.”

Cheryl Crane-Murphy was irritated. I had seen her face so many times in recent weeks that I could read her expressions. “This revelation is certainly important, but what exactly does it mean for the investigation?”

“We simply don’t know,” the correspondent told Cheryl, “but chronologically, the kidnap of Wilson and Martinez was the first Jennifer-related event, although we didn’t know it at the time. They were kidnapped, and the rest of the Dirty Dozen were kidnapped, and they were all held somewhere for a month before being dropped from the plane into the desert. During that time, the other Jennifer attacks began.” On the screen, there was footage of the Harbor Freeway interchange and the brown canvas bags containing Simmons and Green, which at the time had seemed like the first Jennifer attack. I felt queasy as I recalled the slips of paper that’d been stuffed down the men’s throats—Jennifer’s calling card, the way she’d announced herself to the world.

The correspondent explained that Luz’s mother, Soledad, had recently traveled to Mexico City to visit her sick aunt, so the FBI was working with the Mexican police to locate her for further questioning. “I should remind our viewers that Soledad Ayala served as an army medic in Afghanistan with distinction,” the correspondent said. “Nevertheless, according to my sources, she was investigated after Lamar Wilson and Chris Martinez, two of her daughter’s rapists, went missing and were later killed, but she had an alibi and the police have never considered her a suspect.”

“So what are we supposed to think?” Cheryl asked the correspondent. “That Jennifer decided to avenge this woman’s daughter? And that Leeta Albridge helped out because she knew the family?”

“That’s one theory,” said the correspondent.

“Did Soledad help out too?”

“Anything is possible,” said the correspondent.

Sana stood up from her chair and sighed. “In other words, they have no idea what any of this means. You can just tell that Cheryl wants to scream, Who the hell is Jennifer? at the top of her lungs. Look at those bags under her eyes. She probably hasn’t slept for weeks.”

Sana went to the cupboard and took a box of corn flakes from the shelf. “I assume I have to eat this crap since you’re not going to feed me?”

I told her I was sorry, but the news had derailed my morning.

“Are you okay, Sugar Plum?”

I told her I didn’t know how to feel about Leeta being connected to Luz and Soledad, people we had seen in the news, characters in a national drama. I was thinking about Leeta and those days only months earlier when she followed me around the neighborhood. I wished she could go back in time and become that carefree young woman again, but that Leeta was gone, perhaps forever. I thought of the police officers with their guns drawn, searching for her.

Cheryl Crane-Murphy went to a commercial break, so I joined Sana, pouring myself a bowl of corn flakes too. We still didn’t know anything about Leeta’s actions, but I feared she was destined for capture and prison. If she hadn’t done anything wrong, she wouldn’t have run away. The authorities called this consciousness of guilt.

“I’ve never known an outlaw,” I said, packing my mouth with cereal, not even tasting it.

“Me neither,” Sana said.

The other women began trickling into the kitchen and Sana shared the news. I must have looked visibly shaken, because everyone tiptoed around me, grabbing cereal and yogurt, making toast, not engaging me in conversation. When the breakfast rush ended, Sana and I were alone in the kitchen again. She asked if she could make a suggestion.

“Have you been out of Calliope House at all since you left the underground apartment?”

“Just for the bomb threat.”

“I think it’d be a good idea for you to go out. Maybe you could go back to your place in Brooklyn and pack some clothes?”

I was wearing the beige shift and black leggings from the underground apartment. I had nothing else. “No, I don’t want to go back there.” I pictured myself opening the door to my old apartment, a lobster about to be dropped into a boiling pot of water. If I left the door closed, my unhappiness would remain sealed there, trapped inside.

“Then go out and do something else. Fresh air will do you some good,” she said. “You should listen to me, okay? I’m a licensed social worker. I’m also very wise.”

Perhaps Sana was right. Since moving upstairs into Calliope House, I had stayed within its womb, or in its bosom—Verena’s house always brought to mind female metaphors—but there was a whole world out there, lapping at the door. I couldn’t avoid it forever.

I squeezed my feet into my tattered black flats and opened the front door of Calliope House. Outside there was fresh air and sunshine and people who stared at me. Outside hadn’t changed—but I had changed.

On the side of a bus, a pair of breasts whizzed by.

I might have needed fresh air, but I also needed clothes. On Sixth Avenue a taxi approached and I flagged it down. A handful of chain stores in Manhattan sold clothes for women of my size, and I directed the driver to the nearest one. Inside the boxy store, most of the fat women looked resigned, having been exiled to this outpost of the fashion world. I didn’t want to let their negative energy suck me in. I steered myself away from the long black dresses, the enveloping shrouds I’d always worn as a cloak of invisibility. I wouldn’t buy much. I had lost weight in the basement but had been eating nonstop since then; I wasn’t sure where I’d end up. Rubí was handy with a sewing machine, but she couldn’t work miracles.

A saleswoman was walking around the store, a chunky woman with hair in a thin layer that barely covered her scalp. She wore yellow-framed glasses and a short avocado-colored dress that revealed her muscular brown legs, the backs of which were lined with stretch marks, as if fingernails had run down her flesh, leaving a trace. She hadn’t tried to hide the marks with tights. Her sandals were decorated with tiny beads. She was comfortable with herself, I could tell.

“Can you help me?” I asked her. “I don’t know where to start.” Having sworn off long black shrouds, I was lost. Until Marlowe and Rubí, I had never had fat friends, no role models for how to dress. The only fat women I had ever known were at Baptist Weight Loss and Waist Watchers, but they were sad and none of them invested in clothes. They didn’t view their fatness as a permanent state, no matter how long they’d been fat. They were just passing through Fat Town on their way to Slim City. I knew how they thought. I had been one of them.