Mislaid

by Nell Zink

  Byrdie saw Temple several times—Temple was always conspicuous—and thought, When this all blows over, I will try to get that jacket back.

  Temple saw Karen every day and Byrdie not at all. He had other worries. While pretending to study in the library, he had struck up an acquaintanceship with a zaftig junior girl who clearly thought he was very sweet. She was majoring in international relations and learning Chinese, a language she claimed had no verb tenses. She seemed sincerely perturbed that he would waste his time on Russian. “Russia is doomed to irrelevance. The Soviet Union is breaking up. God, Temple, why are you doing this to yourself?” He went to see his adviser and came back unhappy. Jefferson scholars were not supposed to struggle this way. Indecision, okay, but existential crises? Where was the accomplished kid they’d recruited? Did he need a semester off?

  Karen remarked that he had started learning Russian because of a girl, and now he wanted to switch to Chinese because of a girl. “You’re like in Plato’s symposium,” she said. “You fall in love with any fat, ugly person who knows more than you do.”

  “Plato was justifying pederasty,” Temple said. “You should read Xenophon’s symposium. That’ll open your eyes.”

  “Give me a break, Mister Know-It-All,” Karen said.

  “I’m the opposite of Plato,” Temple insisted. “If Plato was right, I’d be craving sex with my Russian professor. Maybe it’s not the worst idea. I need an A.”

  Karen lay back on the bed, wriggling and caressing her body, and moaned, “Comrade Moody, nyet! Nyet! Pravda! Take A! I must give you A!”

  He lay down on top of her. “My blond feeble goosefat whore,” he sighed.

  “Don’t you James Joyce me!” she said. But it was too late.

  The trial was set to start on the eighth of March. The weather was pretty and sunny, with soft carpets of crocus blooming everywhere.

  Jury selection was brisk and efficient. Finding jurors sympathetic to handsome white students is not rocket science. Almost no one but middle-class retirees came to jury duty anyway. The defense felt safe on that score.

  For the CA it was six of one, half a dozen of the other. White jurors might favor Byrdie, but they were also more likely to disapprove of drugs. His case hinged on how Karen presented herself. The jurors would regard drug use by an upper-class boy as sowing wild oats. Seeing that the wild oats had been sown on a black girl who looked white and too young would shake their faith in Byrdie’s probity. He felt they would believe Karen’s testimony no matter what. All the physical evidence was on her side: the notes, the drugs. So the more pathetic she came across, the better for the prosecution. Her unfitness would rub off on Byrdie. The jurors would send him to jail to teach him to pick on someone his own size.

  The defense was pursuing the same strategy, while expecting a different outcome. If Karen was not credible, the prosecution had no case. So the strategy of the defense team, including the judge, was to make her nervous.

  The venue was a tiny courtroom where the judge and jury took up nearly half the space. It was usually used for things like traffic infractions and divorce decrees. It was not the judge’s usual circuit court, but he had insisted on a small room to reduce threats to security. The courthouse had no guards at the outside doors. Reporters and hostile frat boys were wandering around at random. Byrdie’s brothers were out in force to support him, and other frats had joined the cause in solidarity. Hip flasks were making the rounds. The bailiff told Karen gently that the judge would rather violate protocol than have her get “lynched,” so he brought her in after the courtroom filled and sat her down by the door. She hunched there looking miserable.

  Opposite the judge sat the lawyers, the court reporter, Byrdie, Lee, Trip, a few of Byrdie’s frat brothers to pack the house, the bailiff, and Karen. The room was wider than it was deep. Everyone in it was wearing a suit, except Karen in a gray rayon dress with a white lace collar. It was brand new and too large. It made her look like a thirteen-year-old Mennonite.

  Outside in the hallway, the press, fraternity brothers, and assorted curious spectators were lurking with Meg, Dee, and Temple, who had arrived much too late to get inside.

  “Why’s the docket say Virginia v. Fleming?” Meg asked.

  “I guess the frat boy’s last name is Fleming,” Temple said.

  “Tell me what he looks like,” she said, rather unsteadily.

  “Like imagine Paul Newman in a Cheech and Chong movie. He’s almost as tall as I am”—a fact Temple could readily verify, since he was wearing Byrdie’s clothes. Meg pulled her watch cap low over her brow. Raising her sunglasses, she stepped up to the double doors and applied her eye to the very narrow gap between them. She could see the back of Karen’s head. She maneuvered and contorted until a security guard asked her to step back. She felt a little ill. But she couldn’t run away from Karen. She clutched Temple’s sleeve.

  Inside, the frat brothers glared at Karen evilly. Mike whispered “Bitch.”

  Irritated by the noise, Lee turned to get a look at the star witness. And that was that. He stood up and said, “Your Honor, I request a recess.”

  The judge said, “Mr. Fleming, let me remind you that you can fake being an attorney in a letter to the IRS, but here in a court of law you need to have passed the bar. So sit down, before I cite you in contempt.”

  Lee sat down and whispered urgently, “Byrdie.”

  Byrdie leaned toward him, and Lee pulled out his wallet. Hidden deep inside it under the tattered business cards of plumbers through the ages was a family portrait snapshot from 1975. He pointed at the little girl.

  “Holy shit,” Byrdie said. He stood up and said, “Your Honor, we have a holy shit situation.”

  “Sit down! You’re on trial!”

  Byrdie sat down. The formalities began. The charges were read. They were very serious. Byrdie didn’t seem to be listening. He swayed and seemed on the verge of leaping up, like he was having an out-of-body experience and fixing to levitate.

  Lee sat next to him, looking at the picture, still as a statue. And then, because the room was so small he could almost reach out and touch her anyway, he turned around and handed it to Karen.

  Karen looked at it for a second, drew it close to her face, and said “Oh.” She let it fall to her lap and her mouth remained a little round O. She pressed her hands against her cheeks. Then she turned around and yelled “Mom!”

  The CA paused in his opening statement and the door to the hallway began to rattle.

  “This is a little much,” the judge said. “Don’t make me use my gavel.”

  Karen leaped to her feet and grabbed the door handle. She was about to run out, but the bailiff held both her arms.

  “Don’t you restrain her,” Byrdie’s lawyer said. “She’s not on trial here.” The bailiff let her go and she opened the door.

  “She’s my witness!” the CA said. The bailiff grabbed her arm and shoved the door shut.

  “Miss Brown, please, could you tell us what you want?” the judge asked.

  Karen was blotchy, with tears on the tip of her nose. She pointed at Lee and screamed “Mom!”

  “Is Mom here?” Byrdie said excitedly, leaning toward her.

  “Are you feeling ill, Miss Brown?” the judge asked.

  “I need to leave, right now!” Karen said.

  The door rattled.

  “You need your mother to come in here?”

  A flash of intellection hit Karen. She realized that whatever was going on, it might be the sort of thing policemen and courthouses only complicate. She said, “No, thanks.”

  At this point Meg had done the math. Virginia v. Fleming, her self-sufficient child screaming for her. She slipped away from the door and down the hall. She needed time to think.

  “Have her mother come in,” the judge said. The door opened and Dee squeezed into the room. The bailiff struggled to force the door shut behind her. “You’re her mother?” he asked.

  “I’m her aunt,” Dee said. “It’s hot i
n here! Karen, baby, you all right?”

  “I’m just fine,” Karen said, sitting down. “Come sit with me.” She patted her own chair.

  “If I could have a minute alone with you,” Lee said to the judge, “that would be really helpful.”

  “That would be entirely out of order,” the judge said, glancing at the CA.

  “Then fuck it. This girl is my daughter and I’ve been looking for her for thirteen years. Her mother ran off with her, and there’s a warrant for her arrest, and she’s out there in your hallway.”

  The judge was silent, then said, “How do you know that’s your daughter? She was six.”

  “She was three. But, Mickey, sweetheart, you know that’s your mom in the picture.”

  Karen nodded and cried.

  Byrdie stepped over the back of his chair and squeezed in between her and Dee, which was not easy. He hugged her and patted her head. Karen looked up at him, sobbing, and Byrdie began to cry tears of joy. Lee wept silently. Trip’s eyes were moist. The jury was rapt. They had expected nothing like this.

  Even the judge was moved and said, “Well, is this any way to reunite a family?” He shooed the jurors toward their door and glared at the frat boys and the prosecution. “Can we get these people some privacy?”

  “Hey,” Byrdie called out, looking up. “Before we get rid of them, can we go back to my trial for a second? Because now I know why I carried her all the way to Dabney and left her that note. I didn’t even go through her pockets! If I had, I would have found the drugs that dweeb put in there and none of this would have happened!” He paused to digest his own statement, forced to admit its incompatibility with the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution. “So now I’m glad—so glad—” Byrdie was succumbing to the sentimentality that permeated the room like a fog. “You know, I didn’t tell you guys, but I saved her from being, you know . . .” He looked at his frat brothers meaningfully. “I can prove it. I still have her T-shirt where you dickwads wrote ‘Sex Receptacle.’”

  He didn’t mention the swastika, not thinking it germane to the case, or that the T-shirt fit him, being an old undershirt of Temple’s, and that he’d worn it several times since to masturbate.

  Through her tears, Karen said to Lee, “Could you please forgive my mom? If you don’t, she’ll run away to Chihuahua.”

  He said, “I hereby drop the charges.”

  Karen punched Dee’s arm and said, “Go make Temple catch Mom before she gets in the car!”

  Dee tried to do as Karen suggested, but when the bailiff cracked the door, the population of the hallway surged in, with Temple in the lead. He saw Karen cuddling with the Thetan hegemon, and Lee and Trip hovering over them. He pulled his mother out into the hallway to hear what he felt must be an interesting explanation.

  Trip was pointing out that abducting Karen had been a crime, the kind where the state presses charges, so it wouldn’t be much help for Lee to lose interest, unless he was planning to bring back Old Testament law.

  “Sober up,” Lee said, addressing himself to the judge. “L’état, c’est nous.”

  “Ahem,” the judge said. The jurors hadn’t budged. “That’s it, we’re calling it a day. Case dismissed. Trip, Lee, Byrdie, Miss Fleming, I’ll see you in my chambers. Leave those things you call attorneys here to talk to the press.”

  Temple was a lot faster on his feet than Meg. He caught up to her next to the Dumpster behind a drugstore, not far away, counting her money. “Lee Fleming’s not mad,” he insisted. “He was really happy to see Karen, once he got over the shock. Come on back with us! We’ll all go out to dinner!”

  “My kids are grown up,” she said, staring at the money in her hand. “I’m free. I can start over. I can get on the next bus to New York.”

  It wasn’t even self-pity. It was blank denial via panic. Meg looked back at her own life and thought, Did any of that have anything to do with me? She felt strongly that her life had begun the day she met Luke. Luke didn’t know she had a son. Meg didn’t want to disappoint Luke by opening this particular can of worms. She really was a very romantic person.

  “No, you’re not. Come on, this is great! The Thetan hegemon is your son! I knew that guy was all right. My trouble times are done. I’m going to marry the King of Elfland’s daughter!” He sang several lines of “God Has Smiled on Me” and did a little heel-and-toe dance.

  At that, Meg’s heart softened slightly. She asked, laughing, whether Karen was aware of his plans.

  “I don’t know, something about that name ‘Fleming’ has a certain ‘ring’ to it. Get it?”

  “You’re counting chickens big time,” Meg said. “You know she’s only sixteen. You think I would let her get engaged to a bratty kid who puns?”

  “She’s crazy about me.”

  “Everybody’s crazy about you. I’m crazy about you! Half the time Karen makes me feel like I’m raising an iguana. She looks at me all walleyed and I have no earthly idea what’s going through her head. None. You make me feel like a mom, because you’re transparent and you have no common sense. You seriously believe when she figures out she’s rich, her first step is going to be to marry you? And what makes you think it’s so smart, marrying a kissing cousin of Harry Byrd? They call it a white machine, but it’s people! Individuals. My family, her family, all the other charming people who if they had their way, you’d be picking cotton. That’s who we are. There are nicer people you could get involved with, trust me!”

  “Well, I love Karen very much.”

  “I know it. There’s never a reason to take a word you say on faith, because you couldn’t tell a lie to save your life.”

  “Also, she loves me,” Temple said.

  “Maybe so. I don’t know what goes through her pea brain. Except that right now she’s figuring out I screwed her to the wall, and she’s wanting to trust Lee Fleming. And now you think I should trust him, too! But I’m not going back there. You don’t know him. He’s about five hundred times smarter than you are. He can dominate people and make them do things they never thought they would do.”

  “But he can’t fuck with you now, because Karen would never speak to him again.”

  “You wish. My problem is whether anybody will ever speak to me again.”

  “Are you kidding? You’re Mom. And you should have seen his face when he looked at her. It was love.” Temple lowered his voice like a soul crooner on the word “love.” “Not I-love-you love. This was unconditional love, Christian agape, like his top priority in life is how he can fatten her up. If we don’t hurry up, he’s going to buy her a pony.” Almost whispering, he added in an undertone, “I am rushing so hard on pure euphoria, it makes me frightened.”

  He leaned down and Meg stood on tiptoe so they could hug. A deep male voice boomed through the alley. “Get your hands off her, boy!”

  Temple raised his arms and stepped away from Meg. It was a uniformed cop, sidling down the alley with his hand on his revolver. “Ma’am, are you all right?” he called out.

  “I’m fine,” Meg said, stepping between Temple and the cop. “We’re friends.”

  “We had a report you were under pursuit,” the cop explained.

  “We were having a footrace,” Meg said. “I won, and now he has to buy me lunch. But thank you for your concern.”

  “Why don’t you take two steps toward me and turn out your pockets?” the cop suggested to Temple. He obeyed, starting with his jacket. A battered paperback of The Confessions of St. Augustine flopped to the asphalt, and a prerecorded Herbie Hancock cassette landed next to it with a sharp click. “Open it,” the cop said, pushing the cassette case into a puddle with a leather-clad steel toe.

  Temple crouched to retrieve the cassette from under the policeman’s boot. “Oh, no! The tape’s all wet!” he said, shaking it. “My sister is going to kill me!”

  Out on the sidewalk, a pedestrian paused to watch. Suddenly bored and somehow also disappointed, even disgusted, the cop wished Meg a nice day and returned to the street.<
br />
  Temple stood poised in front of the Dumpster, mourning the ruined cassette and weighing whether to put the damp, dirty book back in his jacket pocket or in the trash. “I’ve read it an awful lot. I could leave it for someone else,” he concluded, propping it against the wall.

  “I’m going to walk you back to the courthouse now,” Meg said.

  Eleven

  Meg and Temple arrived at the judge’s office. Karen was clinging to Dee, and Byrdie and Lee were gone, to Meg’s profound relief. But they had left a forwarding address. Trip handed Meg a note torn from Lee’s black book—an invitation to dinner at a restaurant. She stared at it in silence.

  Karen took the note and folded it and said they would be there.

  It was hard work dissuading Temple from coming along uninvited, but Dee finally extricated him and drove him home. She felt Meg and Karen needed time to talk. Which was true, though they spent most of the afternoon playing pool in Karen’s dorm. At suppertime they were late.

  The restaurant was hidden down a back alley, up a narrow staircase, with nothing to mark its presence but an old Pepsi sign. Inside, the high-ceilinged loft space was painted white, there were huge crimson roses in white vases, and the prix fixe was a hundred bucks. Lee and Byrdie were waiting in a private back room with oyster shooters and two bottles of champagne on ice. The atmosphere conveyed was that of a 1960s-themed surprise party.

  When Meg was led into their presence and made to sit down, everyone could sense the hurt. Lee felt more hurt than he expected—he was used to feeling angry—and Meg felt so guilty she could have gutted herself with a teaspoon. “I’m so sorry,” she said to Byrdie over and over as Lee opened the champagne.

  “It’s okay,” Byrdie said. “You did the best you could. I just wish you would have written to me, or called me or something.”

  Meg writhed and covered her face.

  “Why are you picking on Mom?” Karen finally asked Byrdie. “We should be celebrating! I feel so happy and lucky. I always had the best mom and the best boyfriend in the whole world, and now I have the best brother and the best father, and maybe even the best grandparents!”