The Rules of Survival by Nancy Werlin

Author:Nancy Werlin [Werlin, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2008-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

28

GET RID OF HER

Nikki eventually came home that night with a heavily bruised face and a fractured right forearm that had been splinted. She was smiling and pleased with herself, chatty, hungry, attacking two slices of cold pizza right away. But her good mood didn’t last past the next morning, when—after consulting with my new, unexpected ally, Aunt Bobbie—I went to the police station. I had gotten the name of the right policeman, an Officer Brooks, from simply listening to Nikki. Aunt Bobbie, clearly scared but also somehow righteous, went with me.

I was scared, too, but I was also full of hope. Emmy, you see, I thought I had the means to get rid of our mother right there. It wasn’t anything like I had expected, but I thought I could get her put in jail for a while. I wasn’t sure for what—bearing false witness or lying or trying to frame someone; something like that. Claiming somebody had done something criminal that he hadn’t actually done must be some kind of crime, I thought.

But I was wrong. The Massachusetts system of police and courts wasn’t going to bother seriously with someone like Nikki. She just wasn’t bad enough . . . except to me. Except to us.

It had all come to a head inside me. I knew, for the first time, fully and consciously, what I really wanted. The words beat in me like a drum.

Get rid of her. Get rid of her. Get rid of her.

This was different from what I had always thought before, and what I had told Murdoch I wanted: Get us away from her.

I don’t really want to remember much about the next couple of weeks, so I will just state the facts. The police—particularly Officer Brooks—were offhandedly kind to me. Officer Brooks had this casual just-doing-a-job quality that you never see in the cops on TV. He was not intense and committed. Nikki wasn’t a big deal to him. She was just a minor wacko; some woman who got her new boyfriend to beat her up so she could blame her old boyfriend for abuse. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before, and he sorted her, and me, out quickly, efficiently, and with indifference.

Nikki’s story was that Murdoch had assaulted her mid-morning. My story was that I’d been with him then, and so that was impossible. Murdoch’s story was the same as mine; except it turned out that when he was initially questioned, he didn’t say that I was with him. Trying to protect me from Nikki’s anger if she found out, I figured. “He said he thought her story would fall down some other way,” Officer Brooks told me.

Without too much difficulty, after questioning Nikki, the police found Rob—whose full name was Robert T. Borodetsky. The whole business from before, of Nikki asking Rob to assault Murdoch, and Murdoch fighting back, came out.

“She told me I owed it to her after that,” Rob said, according to Aunt Bobbie, who went to Boston Municipal Court to hear the trial that took place before the district judge.

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