Life Sentences

by Laura Lippman

  “Yeah, but we didn’t mix much. We had been apart for three years by then. Friendly, sure. But not friends.”

  “Yet your brother ended up working on her case.”

  “My brother also ended up marrying my best friend. Baltimore’s small that way. Especially our Baltimore.”

  “Candy—Reggie—married Donna?” It bothered Cassandra that this information bothered her.

  “He prefers to be called Reg these days. Donna prefers it, which means Reg prefers it. He’s been in love with her since he was seven.” Tisha laughed. “But he had to wait his turn, watch her marry her shit of a college sweetheart, make a botch of that. They celebrated their fifteenth anniversary last summer.”

  It felt as if Tisha was taunting her, but that had to be in Cassandra’s imagination. She had barely admitted to herself that little flame of attraction she felt for Reggie—Reg—Barr. There was no way his sister could have picked up on it. Maybe he had said something that indicated he found Cassandra attractive? She shouted the idea down as impossible, insane, even as her heart skipped in careless loops around her rib cage.

  The waitress came to take their order, and Cassandra tried to set the tone, ordering an appetizer and entrée salad, asking for a three-ounce pour of the recommended wine pairing. Tisha got a chicken-salad sandwich and a glass of iced tea, looking pointedly at her watch.

  “You said you were self-employed,” Cassandra said, “but you didn’t tell me what you do.”

  “I’m a graphic artist.” She paused, seeming to expect some reaction. “I wanted to be a painter, but, well, I knew that wasn’t in the cards. I had to make a living. I took time out when the kids were born, started over when they got to school.”

  “I remember your drawings,” Cassandra said. “The future renderings of your family. Remember fifth grade, when we all drew pictures of girls getting ready for dates?”

  “You said Donna was the artist,” Tisha said.

  “What?”

  “In your book. You said we all imitated her. But I was the one who started it.”

  That was it? This was why Tisha was coiled with fury? The lack of credit for her childhood artistry? Cassandra had told eight hundred thousand readers that her second husband was impotent unless he paid for sex, and this was what Tisha felt needed to be set straight? It was hard not to laugh.

  “I did? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything by that. Donna’s drawings stood out in my memory, for some reason. Remember, her girls were always slightly dog-faced in profile, more snout than nose?”

  Tisha was not ready to be appeased. “You were always giving my stuff to Donna,” she said, stirring sugar—and she used real sugar, not one of the pink-, blue-, or yellow-packeted substitutes—into the tea that had arrived. “That whole story about the record party. That was mine, too. You got it confused with the graduation party, which was at Donna’s.”

  “Are you sure?” Cassandra had used her childhood diaries to help her reconstruct some sections of her life. She couldn’t imagine being wrong about something as seminal as their first boy-girl party.

  “You had Reg there, dancing. Why would Reggie be crashing a party at Donna’s house? That party was at my house, and you didn’t know half of what was going on.”

  “Such as…”

  “Such as Fatima going upstairs with Karl, the one who had a mustache in the sixth grade—probably because he had been left back three times—and going into one of the bedrooms, and he asked her for oral sex and she didn’t know what it was, but she didn’t want to seem ignorant, so she said sure—and used her teeth!”

  Cassandra laughed. “I wish I had known about that.”

  “So you could put it in your book?”

  “No—well, maybe. I wish I had known because it’s the essence of Fatima, game for anything.”

  “Was, maybe. She’s churchified now.” Tisha looked worried. “Don’t go putting that in a book. She would die.”

  “I won’t,” Cassandra promised, although she couldn’t help feeling wistful. Not about the missed opportunity for using that anecdote, but for the reminder that there had always been a few things to which she was not privy, information limited to the inner circle of Tisha, Donna, and Fatima. My best friend, Tisha had said of Donna. Callie didn’t go to junior high with us—Tisha, Donna, Fatima. Had Tisha always thought that way? Had she not seen the quartet as even, balanced? They had sat together for four years, their desks pushed together. Didn’t that make them a foursome, at least when they were young?

  “Do you keep in touch with Fatima? I assume Donna is part of your life if she’s married to your brother.”

  “Fatima doesn’t keep in touch with us. She’s not comfortable with anyone who knew her before she went to Spelman. My, she did put on airs about that.”

  Tisha seemed amused by this, and Cassandra felt she was missing some subtle distinction. Spelman was a good college. Why shouldn’t Fatima, who had grown up in a chaotic household, be proud of that?

  “I mean, I went to Northwestern,” Tisha continued, “and you don’t hear me going on and on about that.”

  “That is a good school.”

  “Tell me about it. My oldest wants to go there and he doesn’t begin to have the grades. Where did you go?”

  Cassandra would have given anything to avoid answering this question, but it had been put to her too bluntly to evade. “Princeton.” Sorry, Tisha, but you were the one who wanted to play this game.

  “Undergrad?”

  “Yes, with an English major yet. No wonder I didn’t have a real job—well, ever. I temped and freelanced through most of my twenties, worked briefly as an editorial assistant at a big publishing house, then began picking up adjunct teaching gigs and doing corporate writing, freelance. But until I started writing, in my late thirties, I was pretty lost.” She hoped that admission would balance things.

  “I have an MBA. One of those kinds that you get on the weekends, but it’s been good for my business, small as it is.”

  “And you’re married, with kids.”

  “A boy and a girl.”

  “I remember when you wanted three kids.”

  “Oh, lord, two are enough.” There was a flash of something genuine, a feeling that the real Tisha had finally shown up, and Cassandra relaxed.

  “Three kids, and your husband was going to be an architect.”

  “Orthodontist,” Tisha said. “Regular hours, not a lot of emergencies, and there’s always a new crop of snaggle-toothed children coming up.”

  “You like living out here?”

  “Love it. It’s a lot of driving—when the school day ends, I’m a full-time chauffeur—but it’s been great for the kids. Besides, the oldest is a senior in high school, the youngest two years behind him. We might downscale, sizewise, but I think we’ll stay out here. It’s where Michael’s work is. Where do you live these days?”

  “Brooklyn.” She added quickly, “I bought in more than ten years ago, when it was still a relative bargain, and I borrowed against the equity to help my dad buy his place.”

  “You’re pretty rich, aren’t you?”

  Even by Tisha’s standards, the question was direct.

  “I don’t have to worry too much about money, about small emergencies. I’m not sure I would describe myself as rich.”

  “Your books are bestsellers.”

  “You’d be surprised what that means on a balance sheet. And I’m all I’ve got, all I can count on. I may not worry about money in the present tense, but I do have to prepare for an illness that could wipe me out and think about retirement. I don’t have near enough put away.”

  Tisha nodded absently, using a fork to pick the pistachios out of her chicken salad. She wasn’t so much eating her food as deconstructing it.

  “Why did you write about my birthday party, anyway? I mean, even if you had gotten it right, what was the point?”

  Whoosh, back to that. Why couldn’t Tisha let it go? “Well, it was our first boy-girl party.
Remember? And I felt inadequate. When it came to that stuff, I was behind the curve. You and Donna and Fatima, you were ready for boys. I was still playing with toys. I gave you a toy, in fact, for that birthday, a stuffed cat. I could tell you thought you were beyond such things.”

  “But—” Tisha seemed to be struggling, either with emotion or the attempt to find the right words. “It was my party. What was it doing in your book?”

  Cassandra knew Tisha had not asked the question she wanted to ask, the underlying complaint: Why did you get to write it?

  “I’m a writer, it’s what I do.”

  “But it was my life.”

  “Lives overlap, intersect. If I wrote only about my life, I wouldn’t write about anything.”

  “Maybe that would be better,” Tisha muttered.

  “Tisha, are you angry that I want to write about Calliope? As you said, she wasn’t really our friend.”

  “I just don’t want to be in there, too. But I will be, won’t I? We all will—Donna, Fatima, me. I thought you were done with us, at least.”

  Tisha always had been quick.

  “I don’t know what I’m writing, but there’s clearly a story there. She was one of us, once. Not part of our gang, but a classmate. I want to figure out how the path deviates, how we end up in middle age, safe and snug, and she flounders so horribly. Okay, you had a tight family and Donna’s folks were practically Baltimore royalty. But Calliope wasn’t that different from Fatima, and you say Fatima made something of herself. Callie’s story will tell us something larger. About the accidents of fate, the choices and temptations we faced.”

  “But I don’t want to be a part of it. I just don’t. Can’t you leave us out of it?”

  “You won’t be the focus, Tisha, far from it. The real story is what happened to Calliope. Of course, I’ll have to talk to your brother—”

  “He can’t help you, either.”

  “He was her lawyer.”

  “Gag order,” Tisha said.

  “During the case, yes, I read that. But I don’t think a gag order can be upheld in perpetuity.”

  “He figured where this was going, told me that he can’t talk to you. Nor can Calliope, even if you can find her, and Reg himself isn’t sure where she is.”

  “Can’t talk to me,” Cassandra asked, “or won’t?”

  Tisha sighed, checking her watch. “Does it really matter, Cassandra? Maybe we’re all just done being supporting players in the Cassandra Fallows show, starring Cassandra Fallows as Cassandra Fallows.”

  “That’s not fair, Tisha, not fair at all.”

  “I’ve got to go.” She put down a twenty, far more than she owed, even with a generous tip. “I have a teleconference at two.”

  “It was nice to see you, Tisha.” Hurt as she was by that crack about the Cassandra show, she wasn’t going to be sucked into picking a fight, closing any doors.

  “It was good to see you, too, Cassandra. I’d love to talk to you, really talk—when you’re not writing a book. I don’t care what anyone says—I thought the novel was your best work to date. You should write more fiction. Not that you haven’t written plenty already.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  ROUTE 108 STREAMED PAST the windows of Tisha Barr-Holloway’s “mama car,” an eight-year-old Dodge minivan that was fiendishly reliable, denying her any rational reason to trade it in. Even with her youngest approaching driving age, she still had to ferry a lot of kids around because of all the rules these days. Curfews, no more than two kids in a car at any time when there was a young driver behind the wheel. Lord, how the rules had changed since her sixteenth birthday, when she had gone down to Glen Burnie with her father and come back with a license three hours later, and the only real restriction was the fact that their family had only one car.

  Tisha actually preferred the new way of doing things, even if it meant she was chained to the steering wheel for a few more years. Howard County had too many twisty country roads left over from its farming past. Route 108 was one, in fact, and Tisha was driving much too fast, given the light rain that had begun to fall. I would kill Michael Jr. if I caught him driving like this, she thought, continuing to drive ten, fifteen miles over the speed limit. She did not, in fact, have to be at home at any particular time, did not have a teleconference at two, but she had needed to get away from Cassandra. Ravenous, she mapped the area in her head, tried to remember where the nearest fast-food place was. A Jack in the Box, she thought, over by Wilde Lake. She’d backtrack and hit the drive-through.

  That thing about the novel—why had she said that? She hadn’t even read the novel, while she had read the two memoirs more attentively than she cared to admit. Tisha didn’t have much use for lying, yet that one had just popped out, bold and unrepentant. She had read about the novel, after Reg told her to call Cassandra Fallows, but she hadn’t even considered reading it. Yet if she had taken the time, she was certain she would have preferred it to the memoirs.

  Tisha hadn’t paid attention when My Father’s Daughter was first published. She had two young children at home; she wasn’t reading much of anything in those days. But the book, still in hardcover, had eventually crossed her path and she had noticed the name on its cover. Cassandra Fallows. Had to be the same girl she had known all those years ago, the one who had disappeared abruptly between freshman and sophomore year. Tisha picked it up, thinking only that it would fill in the gaps, tell her why Cassandra hadn’t come back to Western High School after ninth grade.

  Boy, did it ever. In Cassandra’s version, her withdrawal from Western was because of an end-of-school beat-down administered by three East Baltimore crackers with whom Cassandra had been feuding all year. Only Cassandra had to make it some kind of karmic retribution, punishment for a slight she had administered to Tisha more than three years earlier, an incident that Tisha had all but forgotten.

  “What bullshit,” Tisha had exploded the next time she saw Donna. “Do you remember any of this?”

  “I remember the beat-down. I mean, I remember hearing about it, after the fact. But I don’t remember that we were anywhere nearby. And if we were, so what? Can you imagine me wading into some fight? I don’t think so.”

  It was funny about Donna, how nothing shook her self-regard. She had made a disastrous first marriage, which was simply never discussed, then married Tisha’s baby brother, yet it hadn’t made her any less superior. She still considered herself above everything and everybody, Andre Howard’s precious baby, the niece of state senator Julius Howard. Marriage to Reg had saved her, yet Donna managed to convey that her companionship was an enormous favor she had bestowed on him.

  The Howards and the Barrs had grown up only five blocks apart, but they were big blocks. The Howards were serious shit, a family almost as storied as the Mitchells, for whom the downtown courthouse was named. The Howards were never quite the first at anything, but they had always been in the hunt. There had been a time when everyone thought Donna’s uncle Julius would be Maryland’s first black U.S. senator or governor, whatever he wanted. But those scenarios had assumed he would easily move from city council to city council president to mayor, and things hadn’t progressed quite that smoothly. After a failed run for city council president, Julius Howard stalled out in the statehouse. A man of consequence, but not the one-of-a-kind, first-of-a-kind he thought was his due.

  Still, the Howards mattered in a way that had always irked Tisha. She had befriended Donna when they were in kindergarten, instinctively adopting the old adage about keeping enemies close. Not that two five-year-olds could be enemies. But they would have been rivals, eventually, if they hadn’t become friends. And she did adore Donna, just not as blindly as everyone else did, including Reg. Look at Cassandra, thinking Donna was the artist in the group when Tisha was the one that everyone was imitating. Tisha had started drawing those elaborate pictures of girls preparing for dates when they were in fifth grade, not fourth as Cassandra’s book would have it. A small thing, but if Cass
andra couldn’t get the small things right, why should she be trusted on the big things?

  She did have some of the details down: Donna’s drawings had looked like dogs, Sweet Polly Purebreds, with those snoutlike noses and eyes on the sides of their head. Donna never did master dimension or perspective. Of course, Cassandra being Cassandra, she had to make a thing out of this whole drawing phase, place it against the backdrop of women’s liberation. Why were they so fascinated with dating, images of girls caught in midtransformation? Wasn’t it funny that it was the preparation for the dates that interested them, as opposed to the dates themselves? They loved the idea of dressing, of doing their hair, of applying lipstick. The dates would be anticlimaxes. “Like the girls in Apartment 3-G,” Cassandra had written, missing the point that the only variation in that comic strip was hair color. It never occurred to her that Tisha had been compelled to fill in the blanks, make up her own Apartment 3-G, where it wasn’t about being a blonde, brunette, or redhead but about the texture of hair and how to combat it.

  “That’s the thing about white people,” Tisha had complained to Donna when she couldn’t get her worked up about the way Cassandra had created bookends of two unrelated events. “They never think anything is about race unless it affects them. Then it’s all about race. Try to tell someone like Cassandra what it was like, looking for someone with a face like yours on the comics page of the Sunpapers or on television, and she’d think you were being so overwrought. But when she gets beat up—by three white girls, no less—that’s all because she’s, I don’t know, Harriet Tubman, leading the little Negro girls to freedom.”

  Donna had laughed. “More Harriet Beecher Stowe. Although I’ll grant that Cassandra’s prose is a little smoother.”

  God, why couldn’t Tisha be like Donna, one of those people who skimmed the surface of life, never getting bogged down in anger or righteousness? “I wouldn’t show my face,” some people whispered when Donna came back to Baltimore after her first marriage collapsed. She had met her husband, who hailed from the Knoxville, Tennessee, version of the Howards, in college, persuaded him to work on her uncle Julius’s campaign. The wedding ceremony was a year after Princess Diana’s and almost as grand. The bridesmaid’s gown had been among the most hideous Tisha had ever worn, and that was saying something.