“You couldn’t bear to look at those bruises,” Ida says.
“It’s not that,” I tell her.
She sits quietly for a second and then asks, “What is it?”
“They’re different things,” I tell her. “I didn’t want the pictures released to the public because I didn’t like the thought of everyone seeing what he’d done to me. I didn’t want to look at the pictures myself, because…”
“It’s all right,” she says, at the first sign of hesitation.
“I hate the fact that I’m smiling,” I tell her. “In every one of those pictures, I’m smiling. That’s when I really started to feel like he had me in a way that I couldn’t possibly escape. He could take pictures of my battered, naked body and still get me to smile for the camera. I didn’t like that then and I don’t like that now.”
“I was going to ask about that—a lot of people, even after you gave your press conference, thought that those pictures might have been doctored in one way or another,” she says. “Whether it was the bruises that might be fake or that you weren’t actually naked in the original and someone put in another person’s—you know how that sort of thing works,” she says. “The one thing that always chilled me to the bone, though, was that smile on your face.”
I wonder if we should be discussing why she was looking at the pictures in the first place. That just seems like a lot of schadenfreude for an ostensibly bubbly and caring member of the talk show community.
“I’ve got to be honest,” she says, “when I saw that first photograph, I thought those pictures might have been doctored, too. It was that smile. I couldn’t imagine someone going through all of that and still being able to put a smile on her face—”
“I didn’t do it out of courage,” I interrupt her. “I did it out of fear. There’s nothing inspiring about that smile; it’s a smile that I wore because I didn’t want to make him angry.”
“You did what you had to do,” Ida says. “I think that’s the best way to think about it, because who knows what could have happened if you refused? He could have beaten you or he could have drowned you in the lake—there’s no telling what—”
“I don’t like to think about that,” I interrupt her. “Even now, it still feels, sometimes, like I’m playing with someone else’s poker chips and at any moment, he’s going to come back to claim me and put me in that place again.”
“Powerful words,” Ida says, though I have no idea what she’s referencing. “We’ll be back after this break for our last segment with Emma Roxy. Stay with us,” she says.
“And we’re out!”
Ida leans toward me for a moment and says, “I noticed I touched a couple of nerves in that last segment. Don’t worry, the next one is all about the bright future you’ve got ahead of you and the wonderful ways in which you are blessed and blah, blah, blah,” she says. “There shouldn’t be anything too drastic.”
At least it’s nice to know the mask comes off.
“Yeah,” I say. “Could someone get me some water?”
Ida snaps her fingers, gets someone’s attention I can’t see, and mouthes the word “water” while pointing at me.
I see the man run off the set and I look over the crowd. Some of the audience members are looking at me or otherwise toward the stage, but the rest of them have their heads turned, talking to each other. Almost everyone in the room is smiling.
I glance back and see the man coming toward the stage, but one of the directors or someone in similar position of authority stops him.
The man’s looking back and forth between me and the man that’s holding him up, talking to him. He nods a couple of times and then just stands there as the man who stopped him calls out, “And we’re back in five, four, three…”
“We’re back with Emma Roxy,” Ida Falcone says, and it’s not until that moment the man with my bottle of water is allowed to come up to the stage and hand it to me. They wanted to make sure they got it on tape and they couldn’t do that if we weren’t “back.”
I unscrew the lid and take a sip of the water, just to ease my throat, and Ida turns back to me.
“Now, we’ve heard some of the terrible things that you’ve gone through,” she says, “but you’ve also got a lot to look forward to, don’t you?”
The way she phrases it, I don’t know how to answer.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I suppose.”
“Well, you are dating Damian Jones, aren’t you? I’d say that’s something to look forward to,” she says, and the audience cheers.
Maybe it’s the shortened “commercial break,” but I’m having trouble seeing how they’re going to make this drastic transition work on broadcast.
“We’ve gotten to know each other a bit over these past few months,” I answer.
The rest of the conversation is just more of the boring drivel that I thought I’d end up missing after Ben sent off the pictures. I still don’t miss it.