by Rae Meadows
Next to his coffee mug, Jimmy had a pocket paperback of T. S. Eliot poems.
“I didn’t know you liked poetry,” she said, picking up the book.
“My patron saint,” Jimmy said. “The bard of missed opportunities and lives not fully lived.”
He hiccupped a mournful laugh. Grace knew she should have reached out for his hand then, but instead she slapped the book on the table and slid it back to him.
They didn’t know yet the scope of the disaster, the deaths, the fear, the sadness that would shroud the city in darkness, the footage of the planes that would be shown again and again and again, as if this time they might see something different. The endless caravan of debris-carrying trucks that would rumble their way to Staten Island and the Fresh Kills Landfill. The smell of smoldering metal, fuel, and bodies that would last for weeks. But they did know that there would forever be a before and an after.
Brian drains his glass and the ice cubes hit his teeth. He winces and rubs his mouth.
“Ow. Okay, so I know that you’re a great copyeditor. You catch everything. And you like white wine,” he says pointing to her glass. “And you live in Brooklyn. What else?”
Grace wonders if this is a date or if Brian is just lonely, too. She doesn’t understand his interest in her. Maybe he wants to know why she’d rather sit alone on the sidelines than play along with everyone else. It’s by default, Brian, she says to herself. It’s not evidence of an independent character.
“There’s not much to tell,” she says. “I grew up in Cleveland.”
He circles his hand to elicit more.
“I was born on the day the Cuyahoga River caught fire.”
Brian looks sidelong at her, curious.
“It’s the river that runs crookedly south from Lake Erie. At the time it was so polluted it was more like brown ooze than water.”
He smiles, wrinkling his nose.
“They used to say anyone who fell in didn’t drown, they decayed.”
He laughs and wipes his finger through a water ring on the bar.
“What else about you?” he asks.
“Um. I don’t know. I’m kind of boring. In college I majored in art history, but I can’t tell you a thing about art.”
“You really don’t like to talk about yourself, do you?” Brian asks.
She shrugs.
“Pets?”
She shakes her head.
“Pet peeves?”
This makes her laugh a little.
“When people say ‘impactful’ or ‘literally,’” she says. “Loud laughers. Being rude to waiters. Taking up more than one seat on the subway.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he says.
This isn’t so bad, she thinks.
“Let’s see. How about favorite color?” Brian’s cheeks are flushed pink.
“Don’t have one.”
“Any siblings?”
“No,” she says quickly.
She remembers Callie’s funeral like she’s looking through a tunnel. There is an echo to the sounds—the sniffles, the organ, the words that she can’t understand. Her dad sat alone and she sat behind him with her mom. He smelled of alcohol. Grace wore a white-collared black dress she didn’t like that her grandmother had sent from Saks for Christmas. She was there too, her mother’s mother, Grace’s only grandparent, with her hawkish nose and Ferragamo shoes, tissues up her cashmere sleeves, her arm a rigid fence around her daughter’s small shoulders.
The air conditioning didn’t work well in the church so there were two giant fans blowing from the back. There was sweat on Grace’s father’s neck. Her mother didn’t cry. Instead she turned off the light inside and checked out, leaving her empty body sitting in the pew. Grace was afraid to touch her hand for fear it would be cold. She had wanted to be the only child, the one her parents would gaze upon with pride and love. But when she looked up at the little coffin in the front of the church, she knew she would be lonely for the rest of her life.
Brian has asked her something.
“What?” she asks.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Grace wishes she were someone who could do this.
“Why don’t you tell me something about you,” she says.
He smiles and settles in his seat, happy to talk, ready to reveal himself. She finishes her wine and orders another.
###
She leaves Brian at the bar and jumps into a cab home. Her mother has left her a message, but when Grace calls back, her father answers. She cringes.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Well hello there. What’s new in New York?”
“Not much.”
“How’s your weather?”
“Springish. Getting warmer.”
“Good, good. Job’s okay?”
“Yeah. It’s fine.”
“Your mother’s not here or I’d hand her the phone. She went to one of her Junior League meetings.”
Ice clinks in his cocktail glass.
“You can just tell her I called,” she says.
It’s the same conversation they’ve always had, each of them trying to get off the phone as quickly as possible.
“I was just remembering that time that you chased the monarch butterfly all the way to the Cooks’ yard.”
Her stomach seizes.
“That was Callie,” she says.
“Oh,” he says, taking a sip. “Why sure. I remember now.”
“Dad.”
“Hmm?”
He’s in his den, she knows, in his beige Eames chair, with his octagonal wooden coaster under his glass, looking out into the dark, toward the cluster of maples between their house and the Millers’ driveway where she and Callie used to play a version of kickball, using the trunks as bases.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I’m just fine,” he says.
“Okay,” she says.
“She was such a great kid,” he says. “So much energy all the time.”
Grace closes her eyes. She was the last to see Callie alive. They had been playing Marco Polo in the front yard.
“Dad,” she says, with quiet impatience, frightened by his wistfulness.
“Oh, I know, I know,” he says. “That was a long time ago.”
Grace finds the remains of a bottle of Chianti in the refrigerator, left by the professor. From the smell she knows it has turned but she takes it to the couch anyway.
After a long swill from the bottle, she flips on the TV for the late local news, for any developments.
“Late today, police arrested 19-year-old Emeryville College freshman Charles Raggatt, Jr. for the murder of Sarah Shafer. Shafer, also a freshman at Emeryville, was found stabbed to death and buried in a shallow grave behind a Long Beach condo complex. No word yet on what led investigators to Raggatt.”
A sweatshirt covers the boy’s face as police lead him from the apartment, only jeans and Nikes visible. And large handcuffed hands. He is big, almost lumbering, and he stumbles before reaching the car.
The vinegared wine comes up in Grace’s throat. She lunges for the bathroom in time to throw up pure liquid, blackberry-dark against the white porcelain of the toilet. It drips from her lip as she falls back against the tub; she spits acidic juice into a wad of toilet paper.
She wonders if Sarah Shafer thought she might die when she first felt the knife. She wonders when she knew.
CHAPTER 4
The next day at work, Grace avoids Brian as much as possible, slinking off to the bathroom whenever she senses his approach. She can’t face the inevitable “that was fun last night” or “we should do that again sometime,” the strained friendliness and sincerity. She spends most of the day hunched down in her cube trying to find out anything more about Charles Raggatt.
He lived at the complex where the body was found, a spoiled rich kid who was allowed to move off campus to the beach during his first year because money made the school bend the rules. He was the social chair of h
is fraternity. He drove a new red Land Rover.
“I didn’t know him,” a kid interviewed on campus said, “but I knew Sarah and she was awesome. I heard he crashed his BMW when he was drunk and his parents bought him an SUV as a replacement. She would never have been friends with that guy.”
He supposedly had a $3000-a-month allowance, a 60-inch television, disco lights and a smoke machine for parties, and a penchant for boasting about high school antics. He was a finance major who was barely passing. There is no real variance in the tone of what is reported: he was an asshole who got whatever he wanted.
No one has spoken up in Charles Raggatt’s defense, or expressed disbelief that he was capable of such a thing. In fact, no one admits to knowing him at all.
Grace wonders who would speak up for her.
###
Grace goes to Chances straight after work, telling herself she needs to go to clear her mind of the murder.
Jimmy bows a little when she arrives and pours her a glass.
“Have the job offers started streaming in?” he asks.
“Everyone passed on me,” she says, waving it off.
“Oh no, really? I’m sorry, Gracie. I’d never pass on you.”
He smiles but quickly looks away, corking the bottle and setting it behind him, even now, not wanting to imply a possibility of more than this. Years ago, before the parts they played for each other became intractable, in the middle of their banter he had asked, stuttering on the first word, “Would you like to go out sometime?” She had thought he was kidding so she laughed and then he blushed and then so did she and she said, “Oh, Jimmy” and panicked and said, “Sure!” too loudly, too late, too full of wine. He nodded his head but they both knew that the moment had passed, that the space of intimacy had closed over, filled in.
“Thanks, Jimmy,” she says.
“Maybe you need a hobby,” he says. “I hear knitting is making a comeback.”
“As long as I can do it here.”
Jimmy is pulled away by orders down the bar.
Grace lifts her glass with ceremonial seriousness, trying to forestall the pleasure of the first taste. She doesn’t last long. She sips, and then she drinks it down.
Another of her father’s old rules was that when he arrived home from work, there was no talking to him before his first cocktail. As a young girl Grace had such a crush on her dad. Tall and lean, his golden hair a little floppy, so handsome in his dark gray suit. His hands strong but refined; his nails, short and buffed. His monogrammed pigskin briefcase had been a gift from her mother, and its contents were an adult mystery. Indecipherable papers. A few pens in their designated loops. Grace and Callie used to watch him when he came in the door, whispering between themselves as he set down his briefcase, got a glass from his carved mahogany bar, filled it with ice, pulled out one of the bottles from down below, opened it—Grace likes to believe she can recognize the thwunk sound of the cork stopper of a Maker’s Mark bottle—and poured the smoky amber liquid into his glass. He would sip it down a little and then top it off again.
“Where are my favorite girls?” he would say then, before even turning around, and they would come running.
“Let your father relax for a minute,” their mother would call from the kitchen. But Callie would already be squealing as he tickled her. Grace would hang back a bit, smiling, waiting for him to pull her in for a hug.
The older man next to her at the bar orders a Jim Beam, neat, and she almost wants him to talk to her. It wouldn’t matter what he said.
Jimmy pours her a new glass. She drinks and watches the soundless television above the bar. Attractive doctors getting it on in a supply closet.
The bar is filling up. In the mirror are animated faces, laughing, talking, elasticized. Jimmy is pouring pitchers, shaking martinis. A woman with brassy hair and deep scowl lines has joined the Jim Beam drinker. She nods as he talks. There is a formality between them—perhaps a blind date. Her armpit sweat is showing through her silk blouse and she keeps her elbows locked to her sides to hide it.
Grace glances at the TV but the doctor show is over.
“Gracie, you want a refill while I’m here?” Jimmy asks.
“I’m okay for now,” she says.
She’s making a new effort to stop at two and she steels herself against her desire for another. Two is fine, she thinks. Two is acceptable.
When she looks back up at the TV, it’s him. Charles Raggatt. A photograph of the arrest, his head uncovered, exposed. His face is pink and puffy, babylike, and despite a beefy, six-foot body, his shoulders have a slender quality, hunched over as if for protection, his chin scrunched against his chest. Mouse-brown hair sticks up in random patches. Not at all the person she’d spent the day reading about. He glances up and out with eyes that are exhausted, confused, almost myopic, without a trace of defiance. He looks like a child who has been awakened from sleepwalking, frightened and lost.
###
At her desk, Grace swallows four Tylenols with her coffee before she takes off her coat.
“Grace, hey!”
The spicy smell of Brian’s deodorant hurts her head.
“Hey.”
“I left a ton of stuff for you. Beverly is out today.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to have lunch today? I mean with me?”
His face is mottled by the shivering light bulb above him.
“I don’t know. It looks like it’ll be pretty busy around here.”
“That’s cool,” he says. “Some other time.”
“Yeah,” she says. “That would be good.”
“Definitely,” he says, his confidence restored.
Brian taps his fists on the top of her cubicle wall and retreats.
She flips through the new stack of page layouts on her desk for the Charles Raggatt story. The article is now just half a page, accompanied by his mug shot. They have a suspect and an explanation: a cocky rich kid, a pretty girl, a sexual advance gone bad. The sides have been determined and no one wants to be aligned with the villain. It will probably be the last time the story is covered in the magazine. The mystery is over.
Grace searches the small grainy photograph for more, but finds only the confounded eyes of a boy with a lot of secrets.
The article talks about Charles Raggatt’s car, his failing grades, his notorious partying, and then something new: he is from Cleveland, one town over from where Grace grew up. His father is the CEO of a venture capital firm. His mother, a onetime Miss Ohio. His parents could not be reached for comment. Grace imagines them, prominent in the community, known for their annual holiday party. The mom is petite and tan, with expensive jewelry. She’s had her kitchen and her eyes done. The dad has salt-and-pepper hair, goes hunting once a year with his friends, and spends as little time as possible at home. They can’t bring themselves to speak in their son’s defense. Bad for business. Embarrassing. Uncouth. They stay quiet and hire expensive lawyers.
###
“Did you see they arrested someone for killing that girl?” Jimmy asks.
“Yeah,” she says.
“What a bastard,” he says.
Grace has an urge to defend Charles Raggatt. He may have murdered someone, but there is something about him that she recognizes.
“We don’t know everything yet, though,” she says.
“Oh no?” he asks.
She takes a long drink.
“He’s from Cleveland, like me. From another preppy, repressed suburb.”
“No shit,” he says. “I hope there wasn’t anything in the water.”
Grace gives him a small laugh.
“He doesn’t look like the same person they describe,” she says.
“Looks can be deceiving.” Jimmy pours her another.
She shifts position in her seat, unable to get comfortable.
“I don’t know. He seems totally alone,” she says.
“Who isn’t?”
Jimmy smiles a little and she smiles
back. She drains her glass and counts out some bills, intent on making it home in time for the news.
The image of Charles Raggatt lingers inside her, feathery, shifting, like smoke from smoldering incense.
###
One of the last times she saw the professor, they ate dinner at a dark, brick-walled Italian place on Tenth Avenue, far from anywhere his wife might see them. Grace had sensed him distancing himself from her so she made the extra effort. She wore a skirt with tall boots—his favorite on her—and spritzed her wrists with perfume.
He had taught a class that night, so he was riled up, still in pedantic mode. He told her about a student who had turned in one of the best papers he’d ever received—insightful, well written, succinct—when everything else she’d ever done for him was barely mediocre.
“She clearly plagiarized. Or got help,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know for sure. But it makes the most sense.”
“So? It’s not necessarily right,” Grace said. “Maybe she was really inspired this time. Or maybe she got a babysitter and finally had enough time to work on it.”
“The simplest explanation is usually the best. Occam’s Razor.”
He jabbed the air with a marinara-covered fork. Two red droplets landed on the tablecloth in front of her.
“That’s reductive. It doesn’t hold true for everything,” she said.
“I’m just saying the odds are in my favor.”
She bit down on the inside of her cheek. Under the table she gouged her knuckles against her thigh.
“Simplistic is not the same as simple,” she muttered, stabbing her penne.
“Grace, it’s common sense. You know what they say in medical school? When you hear hooves, think horses not zebras.”
He sucked up a tendril of spaghetti and smiled at her. She said nothing more about it.
But it makes her angry now to think about it and she wants to tell him. She dials, but his wife answers. Grace hangs up.
