by Rae Meadows
When the fireworks start, the three of them look up, lost in thought and light. Grace pulls the little flag out of her cupcake and licks the frosting as the lights twirl and dance in the sky. In the dappled reflection of the explosions, she steals a glance at her parents’ upturned faces.
The finale is never enough, never quenching—no matter how many colors, how expansive the cascading lights, how intricate the designs, how loud the booms and whistles, how quick the successions, it always leaves Grace wanting, not quite satisfied. But as the family walks away, she holding onto her father’s arm and her mother taking his other hand, stepping carefully in the sultry dark toward the lights of the clubhouse, Grace feels the possibility of a tenuous repose.
———
September 15, 2003. Charles Raggatt, 19, of Hunter, OH, fidgeted and twitched his head during a brief court proceeding before Nassau County Court Judge Richard Castiglione. Raggatt told the judge he understood the ramifications of entering a felony guilty plea.
———
CHAPTER 31
Just before jury selection was scheduled to begin, Charles made a deal with the prosecutors to plead guilty to one count of second-degree murder for a lesser sentence. In the note about it in the Post, his defense attorney said the Raggatts had not attended the proceeding because of a previous commitment. Sarah’s parents sat stoically in the front row of the courtroom.
Grace drives out to Long Island to attend the sentencing hearing, to see Charles in person. The day is warm but not stifling, incongruously beautiful for the proceedings. Inside the drab courtroom the windows are open wide and a fan blasts above the judge’s bench. The lawyers from both sides are here, and in the gallery there are a couple of reporters. Sarah’s parents, seated in the front row, stare straight ahead with swollen, glassy eyes. The Raggatts are absent once again. One of the bailiffs fans herself with an empty legal folder.
There is a small hush when Charles, in prison orange and white sneakers without laces, is brought in. His body looks deflated from when she first saw him months ago. Above all, Grace is struck by his youth in a way that she had lost sight of. He is just a teenager, not even fully formed. She aches at the sight of him, unable, in the end, to do anything for him.
He does not look up from the floor as he is led to the defense table. She thought he might look for her, but as far as he knows, she could be anyone. Once seated, he hangs his head and closes his eyes.
The judge sentences him to twenty-five years to life, which gives Charles the possibility of parole when he is forty-five years old.
Charles, never lifting his eyes, apologizes to Sarah’s parents in a stilted, incoherent speech. He is nervous and rambling, unable to make the words mean all the sorrow he wants to communicate. He tries to wipe his tears with his shoulder. Her parents refuse to look at him, her mother facing the window as he talks, her father watching the clock. When Charles stops making sense altogether, the judge orders him to wrap it up.
“In the end I have destroyed a lot of lives,” Charles mutters, his eyes cast downward, “and what more is there to say?”
He looks up briefly with faraway, mournful eyes, as if seeking out the horizon. There is silence, a cough, a jangle of keys. Soft cries from Sarah’s mother. Grace tries to catch Charles’s gaze but comes up empty.
###
The following day Grace goes back to the Mineola jail, this time during visiting hours. Now that there is no trial to prepare for, the restrictions on Charles have been lifted. He will be transferred within the week to a prison upstate. The officers on duty do not recognize her and she passes through metal detectors and pea green hallways to a windowless room lined with vending machines. It is sparsely occupied by men in orange who murmur in low tones to their women, most of whom have dressed up in low-cut tops and thigh-high skirts. One of them eyes Grace’s sundress with derision. In a room off to the side, a heavily tattooed man with a pointy mustache leans his chair back across from his harried, court-appointed lawyer.
It’s ten minutes before Charles is brought in, his wrists manacled together in front. He trudges along behind the corrections officer, led like a mule.
“Hi,” she says.
He looks up slowly, moving like he is underwater.
“Oh,” he says. “Hi.”
She rises and holds out her hand.
“I’m Grace,” she says.
His face goes soft and then he reaches out to her with his clumsy, cuffed hands. She looks at those hands and inwardly retracts, fearing what they have done. But then she takes them in hers, and the feeling fades.
They sit across from each other at a plastic table.
“You’re Grace,” he says, with a spreading smile. “I’m Charles Raggatt.”
“I know,” she says.
“It’s nice to meet you,” he says. “I mean in person. I’m sorry I haven’t called.”
He looks away, as if she might scold him.
“That’s okay,” she says. “You’ve had a lot going on.”
He stares off, then jerks his head to dislodge the thoughts.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
“It’s unforgivable, what I did,” he says, his face contorting, crumbling.
She reaches out her hand and touches his arm to bring him back.
“Thank you,” she says. “For all that you told me.”
For the briefest moment, his doughy face falls away and before her is a sweet little boy, a slight blush to his cheeks, a brightness for having pleased. But it swiftly dims.
“Do you want something from the vending machines?” she asks.
“Okay,” he says. “I like the ice cream sandwiches.”
When she returns, he seems to have regained some clarity of thought. He looks more self-possessed, more present. He unwraps his ice cream and takes a bite, then another, chewing quietly.
“Did you go on field trips to Severance Hall as a kid?” he asks.
“I did,” she says, “and I usually fell asleep.”
“I was the only one who ever seemed to like it. I would close my eyes and then the music started and I wouldn’t think of anything else. That was heaven for me.”
She smiles.
“Yesterday I was thinking that maybe there’s accumulation that can happen with good things. That they can add up to counteract the bad.”
“That’s a nice way to think about it,” she says.
“I tend to forget the good stuff.”
“I do, too.”
“Grace, it’s really you.”
She laughs a little.
“It’s really me.”
“It’s weird we’re just meeting now.”
He traces an ink stain on the table with his finger.
“Hey, I realized the other day that you never told me what happened to your sister. How she died.”
His handcuffed hands rest in a quiet heap on the table.
“She was hit by a car,” Grace says.
“Oh,” he says. “That’s too bad.”
Something flickers in his eyes. Maybe he knows better than anyone that there is no end to what goes unsaid.
“So,” she says, fidgeting with her visitor’s pass. “When are you moving?”
“Not long now,” he says. His eyes glaze over. “They got me into a good place I think. Where I can get some counseling or something. I can thank my lawyer for that. It’s up in the northern part of New York. Not that far from Canada.”
Grace thinks that in some sense Charles is relieved to be no longer in control, to do only as he is told, shorn of responsibility for what he is and what he is capable of.
“That’s good, Charles,” she says, palming her keys in her pocket, suddenly feeling the need to go, to extricate herself from the terrible inelegance of meeting for the first and last time.
“What are you going to do now?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Go back to my regular life, I guess.”
He nods and nods, slightly rocki
ng in his chair.
“Are you disappointed?” he asks, his face a desert of limitless need.
She doesn’t know whether he means in him, in his guilty plea, in the whole affair.
“No,” she says emphatically. “Not in the slightest.”
He smiles, first shyly, then with irrepressible pleasure.
###
Grace drives out to the town of Nutley, New Jersey, looking for the grave of Sarah Shafer. She has given the girl unpardonably little thought during all of this, and for that she is sorry. It takes her all afternoon, but in the third cemetery she finds it, under a downy shroud of new grass, with a freshly incised, rose-colored granite headstone.
Beloved daughter and sister.
Grace leaves a bouquet of peonies.
###
Grace’s seat at Chances is just as she left it. Jimmy has lost a little weight and he beams when she compliments him on it.
The wine goes down too smoothly.
“You’re moving?” Jimmy asks, wide-eyed, as he pours her another.
“Don’t worry,” she says, “I’d never leave you. I’m only going three blocks away.”
“Thank God,” he says. “For a minute there I thought I’d been dumped.”
The best part about the new apartment is the view. Grace will be able to see all the way out to the Statue of Liberty from her kitchen. She drinks her wine down fast and slides her glass down the bar to Jimmy.
“One more,” she says.
“Gracie,” he says. “Welcome back.”
###
Dear Grace,
Thank you for coming to see me. I wish it had been under better circumstances. I’m afraid the stress of everything has taken its toll. But it was great to finally meet you face to face.
I forgot to tell you one of my new favorite quotes I found in my book. “It’s better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.” Maybe there’s something to it. I think it will be good for me to keep in mind.
I’m going away, as you know, for very many years. I admit that I’ve had thoughts of killing myself, particularly in the last few days. But then I remember you, and how for the first time I know what it’s like to have a real friend.
Maybe when I get out, we can sit down in a café over coffee and talk as old friends who haven’t seen each other in a long time. I would like that.
Yours truly,
Charles T. Raggatt
###
Grace is six and Callie is four, and they are with their parents, posing for a family portrait in the woods behind their house. The photographer wants the shot framed by branches, so they are all sitting in the brambles, trying to look comfortable as they slap at mosquitoes.
“Okay, why don’t we try a standing one,” he says.
They move out of the trees and around to the front of the house. He arranges them in a line across, with Grace and Callie in matching sailor dresses in the middle, and directs them to walk together, hand in hand, up the driveway.
Callie refuses to hold Grace’s hand.
“I said I was sorry,” Grace says.
Callie scowls.
Their father gets down on his haunches next to her.
“Forgiveness is in your hands,” he says, glancing quickly up to his wife. “It’s a powerful position to be in, you know. Grace said she was sorry, now it’s up to you.”
Never one to resist his charms, Callie’s pout recedes and she takes her sister’s hand. Her smile blooms.
“Doesn’t that feel better?” he asks, tickling her protruding stomach.
They assemble and they walk. Their parents catch eyes above their heads, and then Grace turns because Callie has called her name.
Snap.
“I think that was the one, folks,” the photographer says.
But none of them hear. Grace and Callie are laughing and running, tugging their parents along. The four of them are, for the briefest, sun-bleached moment, an impenetrable unit, an unbroken force moving through the world. They collapse on the lawn. The wind is light. The photographer goes to his car for a new lens.
“Can we do an airplane?” Callie asks, poking her dad as he stretches out on his back.
She recognizes a prime opportunity, knows when he’s an easy target for attention giving.
Grace lies on the grass and rests her head in her mother’s lap.
“Jack, your shoes,” her mother says, brushing her soft palm across her Grace’s forehead again and again. “You’ll get her dress all dirty.”
He holds his feet in the air, one at a time, and Callie wriggles off his topsiders, tossing each one out into the yard.
Callie places her belly on her father’s feet. She grabs his hands. They lock eyes, she with anticipatory glee, he with dramatic flourish, and slowly, slowly, he lifts her. She holds her body straight out with childish grace, her strong little legs tensed, her toes pointed like her mother has taught her, and with shrieks of joy, up and up she goes.
But after a moment Callie quiets. She raises her eyes, and with great determination she lets go of her dad’s hands, breaking away from all of them, flying on faith.
From her angle, Grace sees only girl and sky.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their unwavering support, my gratitude goes to: Alex Darrow, Jennifer Sey, the Meadows family, and the Darrow family. A special thank you to Christopher Sey for asking me the question that set this novel in motion.
I am indebted to my dear agent and advocate Elisabeth Weed, and to my insightful and encouraging editor Kate Nitze. Thanks also to Julie Burton, Dorothy Carico Smith, Melanie Mitchell, David Poindexter, and Scott Allen at MacAdam/Cage.
