by Rae Meadows
“Because I don’t believe the story about him,” Grace says.
“The murderer?”
“Yes. The kid being charged.”
“Oh, Grace,” her mother says, looking past her out the window. “Why waste your time on someone like that? What are you doing?”
“I don’t think it’s a waste of time,” Grace says. “To help someone.”
“To help someone?”
“To try. To pursue the truth.”
Grace stares at her mother, defiant, even as she fears she is chasing dizzily after something she may never know.
“I don’t understand this, Grace.”
“I talked to him today. The kid who’s accused. So don’t be alarmed if you see collect calls from a New York jail on your phone bill.”
It’s the end of the uneasy peace. Her father spills his water reaching for his bourbon, then can’t make his hand work well enough to right the glass.
“Jack, let me help you,” her mother says.
“Susan, please,” he says. “I’ve got it.”
He sets the glass upright but there is a puddle of water on his plate. He looks at it and then at them.
“Goddamnit all,” he says and pushes away from the table.
He muddles off to the bar, then withdraws to the haven of his den.
Her mother stares at the center of the table.
“More wine, Mom?” Grace asks, picking up the bottle.
“No, thank you,” she says.
So Grace fills her own glass to the rim and drinks it down before she can change her mind. It tastes so good, the familiar promise of solace. She fills her glass again.
“I’m worried about you,” her mother says.
“Don’t be.”
Her mother scrapes the remnants of the plates onto hers but doesn’t get up. She rolls the wine around her glass and takes a sip.
“Mom.”
“Hmm?”
“Why did you put up with him?”
Grace looks steadily at her mother, who twists her necklace around her forefinger.
“I don’t think this is an appropriate conversation,” she says.
“I want to know,” Grace says. “Tell me.”
“Keep your voice down,” her mother says.
But Grace can see the smallest hint of an opening in her tired eyes.
Her mother stacks the plates and stands.
“Mom. Leave it. I’ll do it.”
“No, it’s fine. I’ll do it,” she says.
“I’ll do it!” Grace says, yanking the plates from her. “You don’t always have to do everything. I’ll clean up.”
And for the first time ever, her mother lets her. She sits back down and works the cork back into the bottle.
“Marriage involves a lot of putting up with,” her mother says. “That’s the commitment.”
When dissatisfaction turns to antipathy and then to apathy, Grace thinks.
“Sounds like fun.”
“It’s not like he hasn’t put up with things, too. Who among us is perfect?”
“Not you?” Grace says.
Her mother smiles a little but doesn’t divulge further. She folds her napkin. Grace rises from her chair.
“I thought he might leave me once,” her mother says quietly.
“What?” Grace sets the plates on the table and waits.
“When I was pregnant with Callie. I suspected he was having an affair with one of the secretaries in his office. Janice.”
“I remember her. The flaming red hair.”
Her mother nods.
“But when Callie was born, something changed. I don’t know what it was. She was a good omen. And he came back to us with renewed purpose.” She looks down at her lap and then back up. “And I was always thankful that he did.”
“And that was enough for you?”
“Where there’s an ebb, there will always be a flow, Grace.” Her mother stands and walks towards the living room. “There’s always a reason to be optimistic.”
Grace runs the water in the sink to get it hot. Her mother is a neat cook, cleaning up as she goes, so there is little to do but wash a pan and load the dishwasher. But Grace wants to make a mess. She takes one of the plates and drops it on the floor, the shards splitting like a sunburst.
“Grace?”
“It’s all okay,” she calls back with mocking cheer.
She sweeps up the dirty pieces. Of course it was Callie who brought him back, she thinks.
Grace takes the wine bottle outside, kicking off her shoes on the front steps. The grass is cold and soft, lit by the slice of moon overhead. She walks across the front lawn, down its subtle grade, and turns around, looking back at the house. A light is on in her dad’s den on the far right, and in the upper left, in her parents’ bedroom. She leans against the trunk of one of the low-branched sugar maples she and Callie used to climb, and rubs her hand against the bark. She places the bottle in a crook of the tree, then hoists herself up, her foot in the V-shaped crutch where the trunk splits in two, just as she remembers it, the perfect step. She shimmies up to a new level, reaching down for the bottle. The bark and knots gouge her feet, but she is surprised by her nimble handling. The lone streetlamp is close enough to light her way. Up and up. She can no longer see the ground in the dark but she doesn’t care. She will not think about what comes next or how to get back down. She settles on a limb and uncorks.
The Taylors’ husky has gotten out and trots down the street, looking around, catching Grace’s scent perhaps, but not considering that she might be in the tree above. Somewhere in the distance the faint roar of a motorcycle engine rises and then fades out.
When Grace finishes the last swallow, she hurls the empty bottle as far as her spindly arm can throw, sending glass splintering and skidding across Woodland Road, crashing through the suburban quiet. And then there are only the night sounds of crickets and leaves, once again.
CHAPTER 15
When Grace awakes at dawn, shivering, it is to the pat-pat-pat of the jogging feet of tiny, white-haired Mrs. Taylor, anorexic for thirty years, known to push the food around her plate at every dinner party and run for an hour every morning, her shoulder bones sharp through her windbreaker. Grace shifts her sore neck to watch. The bottle glass crunches under Mrs. Taylor’s small feet. She looks down and around but doesn’t stop.
In the growing light of the morning, Grace begins to realize that she is stuck in this aerie of new green leaves. The branches sway and squeak against each other when the wind blows. She can’t feel her feet and her hands are scraped and red from the cold. She manages to slide down a level but she’s still up high and afraid she might fall and break her neck. She’s stranded like a cat, ashamed by her predicament.
Below, her father appears, an apparition out of the mist, shuffling from the garage in his navy monogrammed pajamas and leather slippers, still having trouble getting his legs to work how he wants them to. He has a golf club in his hand. A driver. Of course, Saturday morning tee time. Grace’s shoulders hunch in sadness. He has always been impeccably groomed, no matter how much the liquor was flowing, but now his beard shows a few days of white bristly growth, his hands too tremorous to shave.
He looks back at the house for a minute, then outward over the yard, from neighbor to neighbor, and down to the street. She’s hidden in the leaves above his sightline.
His face is perplexed and far away, but then that’s quickly replaced by a look of purpose. He angles his body over his club, adjusts his stance, looks toward the Millers’ hedge, and swings, swooshing over the damp grass, watching the phantom ball rise high into the air.
“You’re pulling your swing at the end,” Grace says.
He freezes.
“Dad.”
He looks around, spooked.
“Callie?” he asks quietly.
“It’s Grace,” she says, impatiently rolling her eyes. “Up here. In the tree.”
“What the hell?” he says. “What’re you
doing?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she offers as explanation.
He glances quickly to where his ball might have landed, then back to his daughter.
“It’s in the spinach,” she says.
He chuckles, leaning on his club, winded.
“Are you coming down?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Hmm?”
“I can’t.”
He laughs a little and starts to cough, wagging his head. With an awkward gait, he makes it to the base of the maple and mumbles something unintelligible.
“What?”
“The grass,” he says. “Needs to be cut.”
“Looks okay from up here,” she says.
He smiles a little with one side of his mouth. She tries to warm her toes in her hands, her back wedged against a branch.
“Wait there,” he says, and then laughs again.
“Ha ha,” she says.
He heads slowly back to the garage, his bed-tousled hair going every which way.
He emerges a few minutes later dragging a ladder behind him, plodding across the grass. There is a sheen on his brow and his breath rattles. He puts his hand on the trunk and hangs his head in exhaustion.
“Dad, why don’t you go rest. Mom can help me down.”
He extends the ladder on the ground, and then hoists it up against the trunk.
He wheezes.
“Dad.”
“I have it,” he growls, securing the feet of the ladder.
Somehow she turns herself around, grazing her cheek against the bark, and finds a rung with her foot. Her legs are stiff and her arms shake as she inches her way down. He steps away as she approaches. Her shirt is torn and her face bleeds.
“What a mess,” he says.
She combs the detritus from her hair with her fingers.
“Go on home,” he says between exhales.
Home meaning inside, meaning New York, meaning away from him? She doesn’t ask. She takes the ladder and collapses it, but when she tries to carry it, he pulls it gruffly from her hands.
###
“It made it easier for me when Caroline was born,” Charles says. “She’s four years younger than me. I could tell my parents were relieved. My mom used to dress her up in little outfits. But I was always glad to have her. I miss her a lot.”
Grace sits in her dad’s den, coiled up in his armchair.
“I once had a sister, too,” she says. “Callie. She died when she was eight. I was ten.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” he says, his voice slow and distant.
“But I think it was the same for my parents. She was a second chance or something. She made it all better.”
“What was she like?”
“Outgoing. Cute. Spunky.”
“Sounds like Caroline. It’s like she and I weren’t related. Sarah was like them,” he says.
Grace waits, but he doesn’t go any further.
“I was thinking about Ohio,” he says. “I wish I could have appreciated it more. The good parts about it.”
“That’s always the way it is though, isn’t it?”
“For a place I couldn’t wait to leave, I would give a lot to be there now,” he says.
His longing settles heavily between them. She hears a guard yell.
“I should’ve asked for help,” he says.
She sits up.
“What do you mean? When?”
“When I knew something was going wrong. But it was gradual and I was used to it. I didn’t think anyone else could understand. I thought it would get easier at college. I thought I could start over and no one would be able to tell. But I guess that didn’t turn out so well.”
Their call is interrupted by the loud tones of numbers being dialed.
“Mom, I’m on the phone,” Grace yells. The phone goes quiet.
“Charles, what happened at Emeryville?” she asks.
“I can’t talk about that.”
“Okay. Maybe you can tell me something about when you were a kid.”
“It wasn’t all bad,” he says. “We went to Sea World once.”
Grace smiles. The four of them went there once, too. She and Callie had played on the pirate ship jungle gym, climbing rope ladders and sliding down the masts, as her mom watched and her dad slipped off to the beer garden. At the killer whale show, she got jealous when Callie was chosen to touch Shamu’s nose.
“It was really hot and sunny,” Charles says. “We drank lemonade and ate fried shrimp from little cardboard boats. Caroline got a stuffed penguin and I got a bottle with a ship in it. At the diving tank, my dad bought my mom an oyster with a pearl inside. Nothing that exciting, I guess. But I remember being happy. I was bummed when I heard they’d closed it down.”
“It’s probably better that way,” she says. “If you went back to see it now I’m sure it would seem a little grim.”
“Seeing how things are going, I probably wouldn’t have been able to see it again anyway,” he says.
###
“Grace,” her mother says, finding her sprawled on the couch with her hand over her eyes. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you depressed?”
“No,” Grace says. “It’s just my winning personality.”
“You forget who you’re talking to. You weren’t always this dour. You were an effervescent child.”
Her mother sits on the edge of the couch and shines her glasses on the tail of her shirt.
“You’re thinking of the wrong daughter,” Grace says, squinting against the sunlight.
“I’m serious, Grace.”
“Come on, Mom.” Her head hurts.
“There’s wine gone, your father said.”
Grace sits up to a terrible head rush.
“Are you trying to ask me something, or are you just making idle commentary?”
“It’s certainly not me drinking it,” her mother says.
Grace laughs.
“Thanks for clearing that up.”
“Grace.”
“Mother. Like father, like daughter, I guess.”
Her mother sets her jaw.
“I’m so sorry to have depleted the stash,” Grace says. “You know, just because he isn’t on skid row drinking Thunderbird from a bag doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem.”
“Don’t be patronizing and don’t change the subject. It’s your well-being that concerns me,” her mother says in measured tones.
Grace shakes her head but keeps quiet.
“You don’t know everything, you know,” her mother says.
Neither do you, Grace thinks.
She looks at her mother’s birdlike hands, her wedding ring loose on her finger.
“I have to go,” Grace says.
“I could use some olive oil,” her mother says. “If you don’t mind stopping while you’re out.”
Grace drives over to Hunter, again to the Raggatts’, and parks the car a little before their driveway. There seems to be no one home, but then a Jeep rushes by and pulls in, blaring music and spewing the little pebbles of the driveway onto the lawn. A fit blond girl in track pants and a sweaty sports bra, her hair pulled messily back in a ponytail, jumps down from the passenger side. She is unselfconscious, with a shadow of coltish clumsiness.
“Hey, is it both pages in precalc?” Caroline yells above the thumping bass. “The homework?”
The driver, a girl with wild, curly brown hair, turns down the music and says something Grace can’t make out. There is a peace symbol hanging from her rearview mirror.
“No way. He’s way too hot for her. Call me, okay? Later,” Caroline says, and waves.
The driver flashes a V with her fingers.
As Caroline swings her bag over her shoulder, she angles just enough to slightly register Grace’s presence in the car, the swiftest dark glimmer.
Grace wonders if here in Hunter everyone knows—Charles Sr.’s colleagues, Caroline’s classmates, Kathy’s book club member
s—or if they have managed to keep the news quiet. Maybe the Raggatts receive hushed we know it’s not true support from their friends, palatable alliances until the Raggatts become marked as a murderer’s family, courting stares, accusations, double takes.
After Callie died, they became a family with a story, the recipients of forced solemnity and nervous apologies. There’s the family that lost a child. Grace thinks about Sarah Shafer’s family and wonders if they will ever not be viewed with sympathy and horror.
The Jeep, its driver resting her foot up on the open window, barrels by again and Caroline lopes toward the house.
“Excuse me,” Grace yells.
Caroline stops and turns back.
Grace scrambles out of the car and up the driveway, without a plan. Caroline’s face is young and without lines or blemishes. Her cheeks glow ruddy.
“Hi,” Grace says.
“Can I help you?”
Now that Grace is here she wants to stall, at a loss for what to ask.
“Um, yes, I think so.”
The girl smiles and leans her head in encouragement.
“I’m sorry to spring on you like this,” Grace says. “But I wanted to talk to you. I want to talk about Charles.”
“What?” Caroline says. Her face goes pale.
“I’m not a reporter.”
“You have to go,” she says, her lip trembling.
“I know that he isn’t capable of what they say. I’m sure you don’t believe it either.”
“He didn’t know what he was doing,” Caroline says. “He’s sick.” It is what she has been told, what she has to believe. “I can’t talk to you.”
“I’m on your side,” Grace says. “I’m on his side. I just want to talk. He needs you.”
“How dare you?” Caroline’s voice is high and thin. “Who are you, even? What do you know about my brother?”
“I just—”
“Get out of here, or I’ll call the police.”
Caroline hardens her face and walks backwards. She runs into the house and slams the door.
The Raggatts’ house is a manicured and still fortress, the windows reflecting the last of the sun.
CHAPTER 16
It’s piercing, a buzzing whine, almost electronic, incessant. The cicadas are back this summer. You can’t see them but you hear them everywhere. They’re almost loud enough to drown out the laughter of the neighborhood kids playing a game of water-gun tag at the Harrisons’ down the street. You covet those sounds, ache for them, haunted by what it must feel like to be a part of them. You are nine years old. You laze on the sprinkler-wet grass under the hot sun. Despite the heat, you are in sweatpants because you don’t want to be reminded that you are chubby, that your thighs rub together. The air is heavy and damp. You are the only one home.
