No One Tells Everything

by Rae Meadows

  “How come we never talked about Callie?” Grace asks. The wine has loosened her tongue just enough.

  “What do you mean talked about her? What was there to talk about?”

  “She died and we were sad and we never talked about it.”

  “What good would it have done? Why does it matter now?”

  “It matters,” Grace says. But she relents. She lets her head fall against the couch and closes her eyes. “It might have.”

  Her mother sighs. “Oh, Grace. Let’s not make this a big thing.”

  “No, we wouldn’t want to do that,” Grace says.

  There are some memories that are tucked away, like the sun, too bright to look at for more than an instant, too powerful and damaging.

  That August day twenty-five years ago, her mother was drinking coffee, watering her plants, dusting, getting the house in order in hopes everything else would fall in line. Grace and Callie were playing Monopoly on the floor of the family room and in the way of their mom’s vacuuming. She told them to go outside and run around. She said she didn’t want to hear from them until lunchtime. Their father was nursing a hangover in his den with a Bloody Mary, trying to soften his regret for how things had gone the night before. Callie tried to get him to come outside and play tag. She pulled his lifeless arm and said, “Please, please, please, Daddy,” and tried to tickle him.

  “Not now. Your dad needs some quiet.”

  “Come on, Callie,” Grace said. “Stop being such a pest.”

  If only, each of her parents must have said to themselves innumerable times in the ensuing years. If only I could have that morning back.

  Grace’s role in the accident was something else altogether. She was there, the only witness. She didn’t move, didn’t reach out, didn’t grab Callie’s shirt, her hand. She had time to do something but she stayed rooted in the crabgrass at the edge of the yard as Callie tripped into the street, as the car didn’t slow, as the body was lifted into the air. Grace shunned the memory of those moments, and for most of her life has refused to look.

  She remembers them now in odd, still frames accompanied by the rapid click, click, click of a camera shutter.

  ###

  Grace wakes up sweating in the late morning sun searing through the window, still in her clothes from the night before. At least she had the wherewithal to take off her shoes. She is already two hours late for work. Her mouth is dry and fuzzy and it hurts to lift her head off the pillow.

  “I’m sick again,” she says to Brian’s voice mail, hoping her scratchy voice sounds authentically marred.

  Today is the day Charles Raggatt will be arraigned, and Grace drives out to Long Island to see him for the first time. By the time she gets to the courthouse in Mineola, the proceedings are an hour behind. She situates herself in one of the wooden flip seats in the back. The old window doesn’t close all the way and a spring breeze finds her neck. In the first row of spectator seats a Hispanic woman crochets until her son is brought before the judge on some kind of drug charge. The young man juts his chin out with defiant bravado. He has a tattoo of a tear on his cheek. The mother bursts forth with something in Spanish and the boy closes his eyes and sets his jaw. She says his name, Carlos, but he will not look at her. Finally, she crosses herself and then leaves the room.

  Other than court personnel, there are only a few people left in the gallery: family members mostly, a reporter taking notes. Three more men are brought in— tough men, hardened men, men with violence and steel in their eyes—one for robbery, another for assault, the third for vehicular homicide. Grace fears the others can hear her rapid breathing. And then there he is. Charles Raggatt. A boy’s face on an oafish body that seems to have swelled in the weeks since his arrest. His face is greasy, his hair matted. He trudges in, cuffed and shackled, wearing the standard-issue orange jumpsuit, led by a guard and followed by his short, bald, well-shod lawyer. Charles doesn’t look Grace’s way. He moves past the gallery and slumps into his seat.

  She fights the urge to catch his eye and say, “Charles, I’m here.”

  CHAPTER 7

  You see his mouth moving but you can’t make out the words. You have lost feeling in your left hand, the handcuff too tight. It’s cold and hard against your wrist and attached to the chain around your belly. “In God We Trust,” it says above the judge’s head, but the letters blur like water spilled on ink. You’ve long since realized that your parents can’t buy your way out of this one. The thought of them, small and disconnected from you, makes you angry. You’re not just angry. You hate them. For what? For not understanding you and for always telling you to try harder and for being so providing and, well, nice. They are on their way to New York and you know the sight of them will make you cry.

  The judge has said something else but you can only hear the jangle of your chains. You pick up one foot and then the other. You think about the smell of blood, metallic as it hung in the room. You look down in a panic but it is only sweat that coats your hands now, bloated and pink and shiny like large baby mice.

  You try to tense your muscles to stop the shaking but it only makes it worse. The chains are getting louder. You are lonelier than you’ve ever been, and you can’t remember ever really not being lonely.

  “Do you understand the charges against you?”

  The judge’s voice cuts a hole in your brain. Your lawyer’s whisper is cool and wordless against your ear. He is urging you to do something but you can’t focus on what he’s telling you to do.

  “Say yes,” he says, “tell him yes.”

  “Yes,” you say. The voice is not yours at all but low and damp. You say yes again just in case it didn’t come out the first time. It sounds like it originates from outside your body.

  Your lawyer’s cologne tickles your nose and you wonder if he can smell your oniony odor. You have not showered in almost a week and your hair is limp and dirty on your forehead. They have you isolated and they monitor you around the clock. If they only knew that you don’t care enough to even get up from the lumpy mattress, let alone figure out how to hurt yourself. You wonder at the events of the last month but you want to say that it was all part of something that started in you long ago, before you ever arrived in New York, before you accepted that you couldn’t shed the soul you were born with.

  “Judge Richard Castiglione” the plaque says. You read it over and over, tracing the curves of each letter and leaping over to the next. You notice him now, for the first time. Although he is sitting, you can tell he is short, his head like a cantaloupe perched on a round body, his skin accordioned around his eyes. Now that you look at him, he seems more paternal than imposing, his voice firm but not mean. More like a father than your father, more interested in your fate, it seems at this moment you stand before him, than anyone else. You want to tell him how it was, how it came to be, how you arrived at this ratty courtroom in Mineola, unable to even scratch your nose, impotent against the churning in your skull. You’re pretty sure he just called you son. Your lawyer puts his hand on your shoulder, warm and heavy through your jumpsuit, so heavy you fear you might tip over. He shakes you a little and you guess you are supposed to say something to the judge who isn’t smiling when you look up at him, but isn’t scowling, either. He doesn’t look disapproving and you like him for it.

  “Say yes,” the lawyer says again.

  All you want to do is sit down, even if it’s back in jail. You are at once unbearably tired and thirsty and you wonder if you could ask Judge Castiglione for a sip of his water. You know that’s ridiculous but you bet he would make the bailiff get you your own if you asked. At last the lawyer leads you to a chair, and then the other man, the one in the wrinkled suit who looks at you with contempt and waves his long fingers around when he talks, gets up. His voice is a yell.

  “He planned to kidnap and murder Sarah Shafer,” he says, but you close your eyes and tuck your brain deep inside to keep from hearing any more. He is the Assistant District Attorney, the one who hates you,
the one who thinks you are a killer. That is not what it was at all.

  Count one: Murder in the first degree.

  You are nineteen years old. The boy you once were was overtaken by someone you despised even more. You can hear your father saying, “I just don’t understand this,” and in your head you answer, Neither do I, Dad. You don’t understand why you were the one that was different, why you were the one that everyone decided was the odd man out.

  Count two: Murder in the first degree.

  Your lawyer tried to explain why there was more than one count for the same charge but you tuned out his words as they tumbled from his shiny lips. You are on suicide watch and the District Attorney could seek the death penalty. You laugh as you think of this now but you don’t explain why you are laughing to your lawyer, who winces and then smiles a little, hoping to make what appears to be your craziness more understandable. If I am crazy now, you want to tell him, then I’ve been crazy for a very long time. But you seem to have lost the connection between your thoughts and your ability to speak. When you open your mouth, all you can hear is the sound of saliva sticking to your tongue and the roof of your mouth. You used to be able to control the messiness better, but somewhere along the line it got harder and harder to keep at bay.

  Count three: second-degree murder.

  You found blood in the most unexpected places. A smear on the dashboard. Soaked into the tip of your shoelace. On the box of Tide.

  Count four: second-degree murder.

  Crusted in your ear.

  Count five: second-degree murder.

  You liked to hear her say your name.

  Count six: second-degree murder.

  Okay, you feel like screaming, okay, okay, okay. You are trembling. The judge’s words sound like they are elliptical and warbling on a tape stuck in an answering machine. You wonder if you will ever go home again, ever leave the state of New York. But then again you don’t really want to go back to Ohio, do you?

  Count seven: first-degree kidnapping

  Now that they are wrong about. She was not a child.

  Count eight: first-degree attempted sexual abuse.

  No. Not that either. Abuse is something you do to inflict pain.

  “It was the most disturbing murder scene I have been to in my twenty-five years,” the Assistant District Attorney says.

  This you hear, the words chiseled as if out of a block of ice. That makes you, according to this man, pacing and jerking his hands around, the murderer. You wonder what he means by the murder scene. Does he mean the room? There was only blood left there.

  Your lawyer touches your shoulder again and you wonder if this is his attempt to be reassuring. You don’t tell him that nothing will help. You don’t say, “I know you are being paid by my father so you have to try to be nice but you really don’t have to.” The chain around your waist is digging into your spine against the back of the chair. You can feel it and you can’t feel it at the same time. Your head itches but you know not to attempt to raise your hands. Even though you are not listening, your body senses that the proceedings are coming to a close. Voices are coming into focus. The judge laces his fingers in a teepee. He is what—perplexed, sad, tired? Maybe he is just bored.

  You hear the rustling now of other people in the room, a cough, a foot tapping, a pen clicking. It is getting too hot to breathe.

  All sharp objects are kept from you so your fingernails are long and dirty. You want nothing more at this moment than to bite them. You ball your shackled hands into fists; your sharp nails slicing into your damp palms. Sounds are at once all around you, magnified, startling. It seems like you have bionic hearing. You identify a car door slam in the courthouse parking lot, the judge breathing through his nose, your lawyer’s watch, its ticking slowing down until it stops altogether. You wonder what else is expected of you in this whole affair. Another yes? Maybe a no this time? The lawyer will tell you, and you’re glad for that. Your eyes settle on the kind-hearted Judge Castiglione, but then again, you’ve never been very good at reading people and he might really be cold and spiteful. You hope not. You hope he cares about you at least a little.

  Your lawyer says it’s clear that you were not in your right mind, which in the eyes of the law means not guilty by reason of insanity. So in the best case, you will be declared insane. You find it a little comforting. It explains a lot of things over the years. It will show your parents that it wasn’t a matter of just trying harder. Even with the humiliation that comes along with it, insanity gives you a slight power over everyone else. Okay, that’s pushing it, you tell yourself. The trouble is, some of the time you don’t feel insane and that is when, in the coming months, you will want to die.

  “You have ninety days,” the judge says to your lawyer, “to enter a circumstance of mental incapacity.”

  Circumstance. You wish it were all just circumstance but you know it goes deep down, to the bone. It is as inseparable from your being as the blood that warms your veins and collects in your chained-together, leaden feet. Your mind has been misfiring for years.

  Judge Castiglione cracks his gavel down. You thought that was just something they did on TV.

  “Okay,” your lawyer says, “they’ll take you back now. We’ll talk soon. I’ll be in touch with your parents.”

  You think that he’ll probably be much more in touch with them than you will.

  You are escorted outside and it’s too sunny and your eyes tear. You are relieved when the door of the police cruiser is shut and you can rest your head against the cool glass of the window. As you pass the donut place you know you might not ever be allowed another donut and your mouth waters and you close your eyes.

  Up until now you haven’t thought much about Sarah’s parents and now you can’t stop thinking of them. A wave of infinite sorrow makes you feel wobbly. The police radio crackles. You imagine she liked her parents a lot more than you like yours. You imagine they will miss her more than yours will miss you. Your parents, you guess, will never talk about it. Your parents will move to another town so that no one associates them with you. They will take your sister on a trip to Bermuda or the Caribbean or even Hawaii to take her mind off of you.

  The car stops and you are back at the jail. The patrolman doesn’t say anything to you as he opens the door. You don’t move at first because you are looking at the sky beyond his head.

  “Out,” he says.

  His hand is warm and tender on your head to keep it from hitting the top of the car. You feel like crying all over again for this kindness. You want to tell him that you are not evil but your jaw is locked like a vise and you are being walked across the pavement and his grip is around your upper arm and you wish he would hold onto you forever. Don’t let me go, you want to say. Don’t make me go in there. But you are already inside the sickly green cement corridor and he hands you off without saying goodbye.

  ———

  The police discovered what they believe was the murder weapon, a small kitchen knife, in a knapsack in Mr. Raggatt’s apartment.

  “‘Charles Raggatt is a faggot’ was just one of those stupid things kids say.”

  “There was this one time when as a joke someone wrote a love letter to him from Hadley Jameson, who was the hottest girl in school. He thought it was really from her and wrote her back. It was hilarious.”

  ———

  CHAPTER 8

  It’s three a.m. and Grace drinks champagne, a bunch of mini bottles, all she could get at the one open store down near the Gowanus Canal, amidst the hookers, addicts, and lurkers. It’s a place she wouldn’t even walk to during the day but she felt fearless, protected by her manic mood. One of the empty bottles rolls under her bed. She is on the verge of discovery and it makes her feel alive.

  She hasn’t felt this way since she was a girl. It makes her think of the summers of her youth before everything started to slide. When her dad could make her mom laugh, when she and Callie ran around and got grass-stained, when they watched the Fourt
h-of-July fireworks from their old army blanket on the golf course at the country club, the four of them, some fried chicken, carrot sticks, and cupcakes speared with little American flags. Grace knows that she was the same then as she is now, too aware of longing to be carefree, too sure of disappointment to forget herself in the moment. But if she closes her eyes she can conjure her mom’s luminous laugh, the rich, deep sound that changed irrevocably when Callie died, that grew shallow, then fizzled. If she closes her eyes she can believe that it wasn’t her fault.

  ###

  It’s Saturday. Grace wakes up on the floor, her head under the bed. As she tries to extricate herself, she bangs her head on the bed frame, the metal bar hitting above her eye. She recoils into the deep, focused pain of it, closing her eyes against the stinging light of day. An overturned champagne bottle has soaked her sheets. This is it for me, she thinks. I am going to stop drinking altogether. The rug has left a red, rash-like patch on half her face and her ripeness disgusts her. Her stomach howls—she hasn’t eaten anything since the bagel she ate yesterday on the way to the courthouse—but it quivers with nausea at the smell of her neighbor’s frying bacon. Deep breaths through her nose. Six steps to a scalding shower. She stands with her face in the streaming water for ten minutes. She focuses on the words on the back of her shampoo bottle and copyedits them in her head.

  Coffee helps a little and she spreads out her Charles notes on the floor. She imagines him in high school, believing against reason that the popular pretty girl liked him. She wonders if there is a way to track the moments in a person’s life to reveal exactly when a course is set in irrevocable motion. She reaches back to the whorl of her hair where her bald spot used to be; the hair that grows there is softer than the rest.