Am I ever going to see Zelda again?
Her desperate whimpers for help from that cold, sterile cage are still ringing in my ears. My nine hours in the holding cell of the Sixth Precinct are up, but I wish they’d have let her go free instead. She didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t ask for this.
Right now I feel almost as innocent as Zelda. Then again, she’s a twenty-two-pound French bulldog and I’m the girl who tore off her shirt in the middle of a spontaneous “Blurred Lines” karaoke session at Tortilla Flats. Did I mention there was a video camera?
I feel like such a failure, and I’m still not even sure how all of this happened. I wish everything could go back to the way it was just a week ago. I had a ring on my finger from a man I’ve loved for a decade, a dog, and an apartment we all shared in the West Village. But the damage is irreversible, and all of that is now gone, stripped from me by a twenty-two-year-old who I thought was my friend. Nothing makes sense anymore.
I’m ashamed, and I don’t even recognize myself. I thought I was doing everything right. I thought I had it all figured out. I met the man of my dreams in college, then we moved to New York and got great jobs. I adopted Zelda for us for his twenty-fifth birthday, and with her, we became a family. Then he asked me to marry him, and we started planning our dream life together. And then I find out he was sleeping with his assistant.
Wouldn’t you fight for the dog too?
It felt like she was the only thing I had left. And now that she’s gone, and my fiancé is gone too, the only people waiting for me out here are my viewers.
I have to be on air in exactly fifty-seven minutes.
People always ask me, “How on earth do you wake up at 3:30 every morning to do the traffic?” I laugh, because to me, it’s simple: I roll out of bed. I throw on Spanx. I dry my hair. I apply my makeup. Then, I deliver the news to all of New York.
The question people should ask me would be much more revealing: “When you wake up at 3:30 in the morning to do the traffic, what on earth is your fiancé doing?”
Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang.
The pounding at my door triggers the pounding in my heart. I was sound asleep and so was Zelda, who was snuggled up in my armpit, snoring away. Now I’m awake, and Zelda’s barking. She darts to the door, always the first to sense when something’s amiss. I look to my left to nudge JR awake—lord knows he wouldn’t hear an Aerosmith concert if Steven Tyler was belting out a tune in bed with us—but he’s not there anyway. He must have fallen asleep on the couch again, so I try to rev up my voice to carry into the other room. “J-J-J-R?” My raspy attempt is a waste; he isn’t home.
I wonder: Is that him on the other side of the door? Did he forget his keys again? It feels like he’s spending every night at the bar these days. I roll my eyes as I spring off the end of our California king–size bed and squint at the red lights on the cable box across the room. It’s 2:37 in the morning. I’m gonna kill him; I have to be up for work in less than an hour.
Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang.
“Police! Ma’am. Open up.” Okay, definitely not JR. “It’s the NYPD. We have something that belongs to you.”
Me? What’s going on here? The diamond on my ring finger catches the light from my phone as I unplug it from the charger, and I think, They must have the wrong house. There’s no reason for the police to be at our door in the middle of the night. I throw on JR’s old UCLA hoodie that’s sitting on the end of the bed and head for the door.
Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang.
I’m coming. I’m coming! I look at Zelda but all she’s doing is looking back at me, waiting for me to open the door—no help. Between her barking, their knocking, and the noise of garbage trucks and late-night bar-hoppers, it sounds like a fourth-grade band practice where all the kids just got their instruments yesterday.
I rub the bottom of his sweatshirt across the dry corners of my mouth, then the crust in my eyes, and finally the sweaty hair matted to my forehead. There, I look a little more alive now. But my just-awoken arms are still weak as I try to hold Zelda’s collar and unlock the deadbolt at the same time. Maybe it is JR, I think, shaking my head, playing a trick on me or something. But I have to be up for work soon. He better hope there are no pileups on the George Washington Bridge today.
“Okay, okay, I’m here! I … oh.”
I open the door and it’s exactly who he said: the NYPD. He’s tall, but looks a lot like my gym teacher from elementary school—a washed-up athlete who traded in PowerBars for donuts and is now stuffed into his uniform. I grip Zelda a little tighter, ordering her inside. What she knew from that first bang on the door I now know too: Something is amiss.
“What seems to be the prob—?” I stop as I see someone shuffle in the background. My sleepy eyes begin adjusting to the artificial light beaming in from the hall, and I realize that in his New York City cop hand is the shoulder of my fiancé.
“JR! Wh … wh … what’s going on?” I finally squeak out. Neither of them address me or even look me in the eye—they just walk right in.
“Leave everything but your ID,” the cop says to JR as I hold the door to the apartment open for them. JR looks at me blankly and follows the officer’s instructions.
“Baby, I … what’s going on?” I’m tripping over my words and—ouch—the stools next to the kitchen counter too.
JR seems annoyed, like either the police officer or I had done something to inconvenience him, and he knows he has to pacify us both. He walks over to the counter and sort of hops in place to get his shackled hands into his back pocket. He manages to pull out his cell phone and wallet and toss them on the counter.
“G, can you get my ID for me—it’s in my wallet.” Robotically, I walk back toward the counter, this time more aware of that stool, and open his wallet, extracting the ID from its plastic shield.
Eyes: Blue. Hair: Brown. Height: 6’3”. Bullshit, I think as I hand it to the cop. He wishes he were six-three.
“Okay, let’s get going, Mr. Wright.”
The cop turns to me. “Sorry to wake you up like this, Miss Layne. I know you have to be at work early.” He smiled. “My wife loves you. She calls me every morning at 6:05, right after your traffic report, and she’s like, ‘Yo’ll never believe what Guiliana said to Eric this morning, busting his chops again. And she was in the cutest purple shirt.’” He shakes his head, smiling.
I manage a weak smile, trying to mirror his. Typical, I think. No one ever watches for the traffic.
“Aw, that’s so sweet of …” My voice trails off. I’m trying to get JR to look at me, but he won’t. Our eyes had met for a very brief second in the kitchen, and I’d noticed that his were red. I didn’t ask him or the cop what had happened. I didn’t need to. It was exactly like that time in college, the night before graduation, when he went to drop his pledge brother off at the frat house and said he’d be right back. Hours later he called me from the police station. He’d been arrested for smoking pot on the porch—could I come and get him?
My mind flashed back to the present just in time to see JR and the cop file silently out the door and into the early morning darkness. Was I supposed to come get him this time? He hadn’t said and neither had the cop. Mind reeling, I crash down onto our old, olive-green velvet couch and slip into my own darkness. I