For years, she managed. Often, she wouldn’t talk about it for months at a time; she looked well, and it was easy to forget. Then Bonnie would get a glimpse into the secret shadow world her sister occupied—a wince when she thought no one was watching, the way her hands would flutter to her stomach as if to catch the pain at the source—and she knew Nicky suffered more than she said. The day after Nicky called her at the training camp, Bonnie had taken the train into the city to see her without telling Pavel. It was July Fourth, and the gym was quiet anyway. Bonnie had done her usual day of training with Pavel, who of course did not believe in taking the holiday off, then snuck out that evening. The gnawing sensation that her sister needed help had not left her all day and, as she sat on the train, she was happy to think they could spend the evening together watching the fireworks.
—
Bonnie’s mind skipped forward away from that night to her final fight, a memory almost but not quite as painful. In the footage of it online, she is almost unrecognizable. It’s the eighth round and the South African has her in the corner. Bonnie has her gloves up and her head bowed as she gets pummeled from the inside. Her left eyebrow is split open and streaming blood down her mottled cheekbone. One eye is swollen almost shut. Her white gold-trimmed shorts and sports bra are soaked red. Her opponent loads up her right and releases it into Bonnie’s exposed ribs. She bows but she does not break. She also does not fight back. The South African looks to her corner to see if she should continue. The referee is stepping forward to stop the fight when slowly, blood running down her face and chest, Bonnie raises her glove and motions for her to keep going. Come and get me. Bonnie takes two more jabs to the face, her head snapping back with each blow. A woman ringside hides her face in her seatmate’s shoulder. Even hardened boxing viewers cover their eyes. Bonnie has just taken another hook to the head when from her corner comes a fluttering movement. A single white towel sails across the ring, landing in the center. The fight is over.
Throw in the towel. Most people forget that phrase comes from boxing. It’s often said casually enough, but in the sport, it’s the highest humiliation. Many fighters would rather die in the ring than have their corner quit on them. A boxer can recover from a loss, but a surrender marks them for life. As soon as the towel is thrown from Bonnie’s corner, Pavel ducks under the ropes and races toward Bonnie, grasping for her shoulders. Still on her feet, her face twisted with agony, she shoves him away. She eschews the cutman and medic, pushing her way out of the ring alone. In the stands above her, the crowd clamors, waves of human noise crashing over her braided head, some carrying insults, others, cries of undying support. She makes the long walk from the center of the stadium to the dressing room without looking back. What no one in that arena except Pavel knew was that one week before that fight, it was Bonnie who found Nicky dead.
—
At around one a.m., Peachy lit the last in his first pack of Camels for the night and turned to Fuzz.
“Hey, man, can you do me a favor right now? Can you say bacon?”
“Bacon?” said Fuzz, the word in his Jamaican accent rhyming with pecan. “What you want me saying bacon for?”
Peachy doubled over, hooting with laughter. Fuzz rolled his eyes at Bonnie.
“This fool’s always laughing at nuttin’,” he said. “Must be drunk.”
Peachy shot back up, feigning insult.
“I am sober as a judge! Well, almost…Now get this, get this. Listen to me say beer can. Beer can.”
In Peachy’s British accent the words sounded almost identical to Fuzz’s pronunciation of bacon. Peachy laughed so hard the tendrils of his long, copper-streaked Afro bounced like antennae. Fuzz spat at the ground again, unmoved.
“Oh come on, it’s funny!” cried Peachy. “Bonnie, can you explain to this man what funny is?”
But Bonnie was distracted because, for one moment, she could have sworn that she saw Nicky. She was walking toward the bar in a denim dress over a striped shirt, just like the kind her sister had worn when she was still alive. Her hair was tied in a low ponytail and her face was bare but for a streak of dark red lipstick. She was holding the arm of a hefty guy in a blue collared shirt, turning to him and asking him something nervously. She turned to look directly at Bonnie and suddenly the vision was gone; she was just another brown-haired girl in a denim dress.
“Oh boy, here come the last dregs,” muttered Peachy as the couple approached. “Sorry, guys, we’re closing up for the night,” he called as they came closer.
The guy in the blue shirt stopped square in front of Peachy. He had a large round head like a piece of puffed rice and the unnaturally bulging shoulders born of steroids and bad form at the gym. His face registered the surprise and irritation of a person who is not often told no.
“But it’s only one,” he said. “You’re not closing for another hour.”
“That may be,” said Peachy, reaching into his back pocket to produce a new pack of Camel Golds from his seemingly endless supply. Slowly, he unpeeled the plastic casing and crumpled it in his palm. “But, as I said, we’re closing up.”
The door flung open, releasing with it the sound of a raucous Motown track and a wave of chatter and laughter; one of Peachy’s regulars, a leather-clad biker with a handlebar mustache, strolled out.
“I’ll be back,” he called over his shoulder. “Just checking on my ride. You need anything, Peach?”
“All good, brother,” said Peachy, turning back to the couple with his guileless smile. “As I was saying, have a good night, folks.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” said Blue Shirt. “That guy’s coming back but you’re not letting us in? You can’t do that.”
Peachy wrinkled his nose and popped a cigarette between his lips.
“The funny thing is,” he said, lighting it, “I can.”
“Babe, let’s go,” the non-Nicky said, pulling at the guy’s bulky arm. “There’s a sports bar right over there.”
“Nah, babe, nah.” Blue Shirt shook her off. “I’m not leaving until this clown lets us in.”
“Never gonna happen, mate,” said Peachy. “Listen to your girl and trot along ’round the corner to Scores. You’ll like it there.”
Blue Shirt puffed his chest up.
“You think you can talk to me like that?”
Beside her, Bonnie could feel Fuzz bristle to attention. Peachy chuckled and exhaled a cloud of smoke.
“That’s just my accent, mate. I talk to everyone like that.”
Blue Shirt stepped closer so his face was inches from Peachy’s. Fuzz let out a low hum of warning. But Bonnie was watching the face of the brown-haired girl. She saw now why she had thought it was Nicky. It wasn’t her clothes or hair; it was the expression on her face. Or rather, it was the expression beneath her expression, the one she thought she was hiding. This girl was lost. The loneliness around her was palpable. And this man beside her had no idea, was completely oblivious, just as Bonnie had been with Nicky.
By the time Blue Shirt had uttered the second syllable of the word white men have invoked for centuries to degrade Black men, Bonnie was already on him. She hit him first with a crisp, nose-flattening jab. He doubled over, clawing at the center of his face, which was gushing blood, then barreled forward with a roar, attempting to tackle Bonnie around the waist. She caught him with a sharp left uppercut, then socked him in the belly twice with her right. He lunged for her again, his fist whistling past her ear as she slipped him and countered with a blow just below his kidney. His legs crumpled beneath him. By the time he reached the pavement, Bonnie was staggering backward as if just awakened from a dream. The brown-haired girl was screaming in one long high pitch like an air-raid siren.
Bonnie took off down Windward, rounding the corner toward the sea. She could hear Peachy calling her name as she bolted onto the boardwalk, past the novelty T-shirt stores still inexplicably open at this hour, past the skate park where lithe teenage boys sailed between yellow lagoons of light from the streetlamps, past a huddle of ragged figures passing around a small flame, and onto the wide stretch of sand that led to the black sea.
She walked the beach until sunrise, stopping at one point to scrub her hands clean in the surf. When the first pale light appeared on the horizon, she headed home. Back at her apartment, she discovered that the soles of her feet were covered in a thick, sticky black oil. She sat on the edge of the tub and scrubbed each foot with soap and water, but the tar would not budge. She scraped at it with her fingernails but, even once the top layer came off, a black stain remained on her skin. She grabbed a pumice stone hanging on a string from the shower head, a relic of a former resident, and managed to grind and exfoliate the remainder off, leaving her feet raw.
But the tar was like a plague, it had marred everything it touched. She saw it had left track marks across the floor and ruined the bottom of her leather sandals, a gift from Nicky and one of the few nice things Bonnie owned. She grabbed a knife from the kitchen and attempted to scrape the dark muck off the soft leather insoles, but she only succeeded in scratching away the top layer of leather too. When she returned to the bathroom, she found the tub was now stained with a black residue that would not wash off when she turned on the tap. In a panic, she grabbed a bottle of ammonia from under the sink and, without diluting it, sloshed it over the porcelain and began scouring the surface with a wire sponge. She inhaled the chemical fumes until, lightheaded, she staggered from the bathroom and collapsed on the foldout beach chair in her living room.
Only then did she remember what the black tar could be. She’d been warned about it by her neighbors when she first moved to Venice. It usually happened after storms or earthquakes, the result of disrupted oil from the seafloor seeping into the sand on the shore. The easiest way to remove it was to gently wipe your skin and any surfaces it touched with a cloth soaked in olive oil. She would find, her neighbors had promised, that the black tar simply melted away.
In training, she had been taught the difference between reacting and responding. Responding was when you used the tools you’d been taught to clinically counter an attack according to your game plan; reacting was when you acted purely on adrenaline, usually leaving yourself open to further harm. In the early morning light, in her empty living room, Bonnie looked down at her destroyed shoes and feet. For the first time since Nicky died, she let herself cry.
Chapter Three Avery
