Life Sentences

by Laura Lippman

  “Invoke. But don’t worry about the words. You can simply say you do not wish to speak. I’ll be there with you, to explain the legal part. There will be a hearing. You may be put in jail at the end of that hearing, but I will be there with you.”

  “You’ll stand with me?” Hopeful, amazed.

  “Yes.”

  “For however long this takes?”

  “For however long it takes.” She had never been more sincere. Or, as it turned out, more wrong. Calliope Jenkins was locked up for seven years, and Gloria served as her lawyer for only five of those seven years, leaving the firm of Howard & Howard to start her own practice, leaving Calliope to Reggie Barr, at one point Gloria’s best friend in the firm, her confidant—and her rival for partnership. She betrayed Calliope, and the worst part was that Calliope wasn’t angry or even surprised. Betrayal was the natural order of things in Calliope’s world.

  The only consolation was that Calliope turned out to be one of the few women on the planet who was cold to Reg’s charm. “I don’t like his cologne,” she said to Gloria, who pressed to know why she was unhappy about her new attorney. “Too sweet.”

  Too sweet. Those were among the last words Gloria ever heard from Calliope Jenkins. Too sweet. In the years since then, Gloria had been reamed out by clients, accused of horrible things, asked to do horrible things, even been slapped on one memorable occasion. But nothing had hurt as much as Calliope Jenkins’s emotionless resignation, her indifference to Gloria’s broken promise. In the end, Calliope was being considerate of Gloria’s feelings, trying to assure her that her new lawyer was fine. Except for his cologne.

  A plane cut through the pale morning sky, southbound for the airport, a sight that always lifted her heart. Gloria, who traveled only for pleasure—and always in first or business class—could not imagine being unhappy on a plane. All trips were joyous, in her mind, and everyone on a jet was bound for a fabulous place or person. Yet Gloria, who had lived in Highfield House since the mid-nineties, had never noticed that the eastern sky was part of the local flight plan until the planes disappeared, for more than a week, in the wake of 9/11. Suddenly, the sky was empty and it took a while to register what was gone, what had changed. It was chilling, realizing that something could achieve presence only through absence.

  In the year that Donntay Jenkins disappeared, the Department of Social Services in Maryland opened hundreds of investigations into complaints of possible abuse or neglect. But Donntay Jenkins, the child that no one ever saw—a child for whom there was not a single photographic likeness other than the hospital snapshot of him at birth, squinty, hairy, Martian-like—became the one child everyone cared about. Until the next child came along. A girl who had been starved to death, a toddler who had been fed methadone. Then another, and another. It happened every two years or so, and each new case replaced the old one in the public’s mind, forcing the previous children down a notch. Until the New Orleans case had invoked his name, no one had thought about Donntay Jenkins for years. It turned out that even Donntay’s alleged condition at birth, his status as a so-called crack baby, was a crock, a media invention. There were moments when Gloria almost doubted that Donntay had ever existed, wondered if all her efforts had been on behalf of some phantom child whose only life had been in the confused, cluttered mind of Calliope Jenkins.

  Then she would hear that mournful wail again: “My son…my son.” Whatever Calliope might be—junkie, crazy lady, cold-blooded killer—she had definitely been a mother. But everything else about her remained a mystery, thanks to the legal advice provided by one of the city’s best law firms.

  CHAPTER

  10

  ALTHOUGH SHE WAS NOT FORBIDDEN to return to Baltimore—although, in fact, nothing about her arrangement had ever been spelled out—she knew it was expected that she would stay away, that she would never venture farther west than, say, the outlet shops on Route 50. They would probably prefer that she not enter Maryland at all but understood that she had to visit her mother, now in a nursing home in Denton. Certainly, she was not to cross the Bay Bridge under any circumstances. Why should she? Her mother was all the family she had. All the family she had. And whose fault was that? Hers, of course.

  No, only a fool would risk venturing back into Baltimore. But then the others were fools if they didn’t understand that she was exactly that, a fool, and she couldn’t stop being one just because that would make it nicer for everyone else.

  If only—but, no, she must not let her thoughts go all the way there, even as her car was hurtling toward a destination she should avoid. She understood now how fragile her mind was. In the absence of anyone else’s love or care, she had learned to be solicitous of herself. She simply could not think about certain things or she might break down again, the way she had after her first son was born. She didn’t want to go back to a hospital, even for a day. Yes, she knew that ideas had changed, that if she experienced another episode similar to those spells she had in her twenties, they would be more likely to try pills instead of talking so much and giving her those intelligence tests. Maybe, she thought fleetingly from time to time, pills could actually fix her. But to what purpose, what gain? And to what loss?

  Growing up as she had, Callie knew there was always a catch. From the time she was three or four, her mother had walked her through their neighborhood, pointing out the junkies and the winos who were bringing the area down. “They think they’re happy,” she hissed at her daughter, yanking her arm, “but they smell.” Odor was terrible, then, odor was the giveaway. Odor was the only thing that separated Callie and her mother from poor people. Don’t ever smell, of anything. “Is Myra Tippet going to have to show you how to clean?” her mother would say if Callie carried the smallest whiff of anything. Proper as Myra was, it had never occurred to her to claim the surname of Callie’s father, to pretend that they had been married. Callie didn’t mind that they had different names. It helped sometimes to think of her mother as “Myra Tippet,” as someone other than her mother. It was Myra Tippet, not her mother, who had scrubbed Callie raw every night, sniffed at her armpits when she turned twelve, later claimed that she could smell Callie’s menstrual blood, and maybe she could. It was Myra Tippet who believed that appearances were all.

  We do not need anything or anyone, Myra told Callie, beginning with your father. What about his family? Callie would have liked at least one grandparent, maybe an aunt, and Myra had no family. Ditto, Myra said. Ditto made Callie think of ditto sheets, the old mimeographs coming off purple in her hand, the overwhelming smell. Confronted with that fragrance, she had been terrified to do her work, back at old school 88, lest she came home smelling and her mother took after her. Yet she would be just as angry if Callie got bad grades. Callie could never anticipate what might set her mother off. “Does Myra Tippet have to teach a girl a lesson?” she would begin. As if Callie were forcing her, as if Myra had no desire in the world to hurt her daughter, but her daughter had forced her hand. Any grade less than a B? Stand in the corner for an hour. Left the milk out? Then you will drink it, spoiled though it may be. Too close to the stove? Then get closer, let me hold your hand to it, find out just how hot that hot can be, until the flesh made actual contact with the flame. Does Myra Tippet have to teach a girl a lesson?

  It was strange to see her now, shriveled and needy, dependent on Callie in more ways than she would ever know or admit. Complaints were her only power. Just two days ago, listening to her mother’s usual grievances, Callie had felt the tug of the west, the call of the bridge, and thought about continuing to Baltimore when she left the nursing home. After all, she had crossed the line into Maryland, if only by a bit. Why not keep going? She had managed to shout the voice down that afternoon. Now here she was at 4 A.M. on a Sunday, doing eighty above the Chesapeake Bay.

  What had prompted this trip? Trouble sleeping, for one. Perhaps the way her name had surfaced in the news for a moment there last month, only to subside again. It was hard to see how quickly her image came
and went, to be reminded that she was a person of no consequence, as she had been repeatedly informed at the time, forever a footnote, capable of dragging others down but inadequate to the task of raising herself up. Bad girl, sly girl, stupid girl. The last, at least, was undeniably true.

  But the trip also could have been motivated by nothing more than the hint of winter’s end. Whenever the seasons changed, she felt a surge of restlessness. It was amazing to her how a journey of only eighty miles could carry her twenty, thirty years into the past. Once there, she never called anyone. There was no one to call. She was careful not to be seen, although she usually managed to see him from afar. His pull over her should have lessened with each passing year, but it didn’t work that way. Every time she saw him, she wanted him anew.

  But she had made a bargain, vague though some of the terms may have been. She had her little house, her little car, her little life. Her mother was cared for. All that could end if she angered the wrong people. Still, every now and then, she had to get in the little car and leave the little house. The little life? That went with her wherever she was.

  It was comforting, in a way, to see that he had aged, too, although it did not dim his appeal. Still, it made her feel better about how unkind age had been to her. That was the cost of those seven years in jail. She had been sapped, tapped, trying to stay strong. The mind had fed off the body. When she came out of that jail, she was prematurely old at the age of thirty-six. Body thin, yet soft. Face hard, yet slack. Over on the Shore, in the pronounced salt air, one saw raggedy hoopties, lacy with rust, engines running strong. That was her.

  But, boy, she had been good looking once, the kind of good looking that comes out of nowhere at eighteen or nineteen, after the ugliest of teens—Brillo-pad hair, skinny and flat chested, growing up but not out, gangly as a preying mantis. Her sudden transformation made her bold. Too bold, some might say. She flew too high, she forgot where she came from, she believed all those pretty words. Opportunity, future. Dreams. When she fell, she crashed hard.

  She still remembered the day the first social worker had come to her door, when Rennay was a baby. To the extent that she could think at the time, she had assumed they were trying to bust her for having a man on the premises. Welfare workers back then, they were always looking for evidence of a man—a pair of shoes, a shaving kit. She knew the drill from her mother, who had been investigated from time to time, ratted out by neighbors who believed she must have had extra income to live as she did. But Myra’s extra money came from off-the-books cleaning jobs, not men.

  “There’s no man here,” Calliope told the social worker with a ragged laugh. “That’s the problem. No man’s been here, no man’s ever going to be here. I’m alone, this baby won’t stop crying, and I’m going crazy.” She meant crazy in the everyday way, but they held that against her later.

  Was she crazy? She honestly didn’t realize that there were so many dirty dishes in the sink, couldn’t smell the stink of the diaper, couldn’t smell her own sour body odor. Still, she was caring for Rennay, best she could. To this day, she didn’t believe that a roach walked out of her son’s ear. That was a lie. Perhaps it had been in the crib and come from behind his head, which wasn’t good, she knew that much, but that was the landlord’s fault, the bugs in the building. And, okay, she had not taken the trash out for days, and there was food sitting out. But there were not roaches in her baby’s ear. That would probably kill a child. Yes, it had been days since she had eaten and, true, she probably appeared to be high as a kite, although she wasn’t using then, just sick with grief. But Rennay was okay; she would never hurt him, even in her anguish and confusion.

  And there were no roaches in her baby boy’s ear.

  Then and now, she could not help returning to that one fact, over and over. The public defender kept trying to tell her it didn’t matter. “Please focus, Callie. They want to terminate your parental rights. This is the least of your problems.” The lawyer wasn’t much older than Callie and was, to use a favorite saying of Myra Tippet’s, dumb as a box of rocks. Later, the second time, it was this memory that made Callie accept the private counsel, thinking she would be better served. She wondered about that choice. She wondered about all her choices. There were those who would say that she had done pretty well for herself. Her mother, for example, thought Callie had struck a brilliant bargain. Not that she would ever say as much, but the truth was there under all her criticisms. Complaining was a privilege of sorts. For years, Myra Tippet had no one but her daughter to complain to; now she had an entire staff to listen to her grievances. It was heaven to her, complaining about the detergent used to wash her sheets, the dryness of the cake at lunch, the lack of premium television stations on her little set. She was in paradise with so much blame to spread around.

  Callie arrived in the city in darkness, with only an edge of light at the eastern sky. She felt as if she were racing the sun as she headed toward his neighborhood, racing time itself, years falling away with every block. She liked that he had never moved, and not just because that made him easier to find. She bet his wife nagged him to death over that decision.

  It was tricky, spying on him without being seen. And it was a Sunday, too, a less-than-predictable day when it came to people’s habits. But he was up early, as usual, and within an hour of her arrival, he came out for the paper. Oh so proper, in his robe and slippers, a real-life Dr. Huxtable. Even scrunched down in her driver’s seat, she could catalogue everything that was wrong or mockable in him. Years ago, she would list all his faults as she fell asleep, as if to cast a magic spell that would keep her from falling in love with him, but it hadn’t worked then and it didn’t work now. She noticed that the house itself looked a little worse for wear in the winter light. He was ridiculous, he was horrible, he had betrayed her, he was a monster.

  She loved him.

  She turned the key in the ignition a moment too soon and he seemed to start at the sound of the car engine on the quiet street. But he did not turn around, nor did he look back. He did not see her. Sometimes, she wondered if he had ever seen her, even as he described her to herself. Her eyes, her mouth, her skin, her body. He had sung her praises in great detail, as if she were blind, as if she had never glanced in a mirror. Back then, when cell phones seemed like something in a futuristic movie, such secret conversations were trickier, more fraught with discovery. He would call her from pay phones around town, or—more thrilling—from his office or an extension in his own home, rushing to squeeze in all the words, all the tributes, arguing his case for her. Back then, the mere sight of a phone could make her heart jump. Eventually, when people told her to move on, to find someone else, it was the memory of the before time, all those words, that made it impossible. There were two versions of him, and only she got to decide which one was true, authentic. She believed the man who said he loved her, not the one who betrayed her.

  She sighed, wishing she had someplace else to visit, some other memory to poke and prod. Her hometown was a blank to her, a sketched-in background, as plain as a child’s drawing. A stripe of green for grass, some scrawled blue strokes for sky, a yellow circle of a sun. Back in grade school, when all the girls had a passion for drawing, it was the people in those pictures on which she had lavished her attention, those fantasy families of four, so different from her sad little unit of two. A mommy, a daddy, a boy, and a girl. She spent the most time on the females, drawing their dresses and jewelry and hair in great detail, giving them purses and shoes, doting on every item. The men? Their faces were blank, empty circles above crude blue suits and red ties. It was like trying to draw God.

  THIN ICE

  MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME HOW to skate. Nervous in so many things, she was the only mother in our neighborhood who didn’t fret about the safety of skating on the pond above the dam. She also insisted that I learn on proper blades, not the twin, babyish ones that other children were permitted. Occasionally, she would break away from me, execute a dazzling spin, even a jump, but she spent
most of her time instructing me. I realize now how selfless she was, putting aside her own fun, taking my mittened hands in her gloved ones and matching her movements to mine, hobbling herself. My father, hatless and gloveless like a teenage boy, watched from a broken ledge of concrete, calling out encouragement.

  He was all of thirty-seven, younger than I am now as I write this. Of course, parents always seem ancient, finished, to their children, but my parents loomed larger still in my mind. I thought of them as Zeus and Hera and learned only years later that this was too apt. Like Zeus, my father tortured his wife with his infidelity. If only my mother could have summoned Hera’s wrath, fought him tit for tat. Then again, it was always Zeus’s conquests who were punished by Hera; he got away scot-free.

  Yet for all my father’s extravagant claims for his second marriage, it could not have occurred if he had not already fallen out of love with my mother several years earlier. How did that happen? With one failed marriage behind me, I need to understand this, or I’ll end up having two failed marriages behind me. When I consider Lenore Fallows as a woman, not my mother, I see how…fetching she was. No, not beautiful. Her face was round, her brows heavy. Her figure was always a little lumpy, even before I had my way with it, coming into the world via an old-fashioned Caesarean that left a scar and a permanent pooch. Still, she was smart, the quality that my father claimed to value above all others. My father would forgive anything if a person was smart—but then he also expected to be forgiven everything, because he was smart.

  Lenore Baker Fallows was more than intelligent, although her most amazing capacities would not be revealed until after the divorce. Why would anyone stop loving her? He said he didn’t, exactly, that he always loved her, but a day came when he wasn’t in love with her, a simplistic bit of rhetoric that he would have red-lined in a student paper, damning it for the cliché that it is.