Safe Harbor

by Luanne Rice

  When the glass stopped falling, the first sound was Brainer barking, running from the broken picture window to the front door and back. A big wave crashed on the rocks outside, down by the beach; the sound, unmuffled by window glass, was startlingly loud. Maggie began to sob—whimpering at first, then with growing hysteria. Teddy crawled out from under the table, kicked glass away, and scuttled across the room.

  “It was a brick, Dad,” he called.

  “Don’t touch it,” John said, still holding Maggie.

  “I know. Fingerprints,” Teddy said.

  John nodded, realizing there wouldn’t be any. People, even noncriminals, had gotten sophisticated about evidence. Even the local hotheads—whose prior worst crime might have been overzealous letters to the editor or loud protests outside court—had absorbed plenty of information about fingerprints and hair and fiber from the cop shows they watched and the legal thrillers they read.

  Drops of blood splashed on the floor. Focused, John examined his daughter to make sure she hadn’t gotten cut. When she looked up into his face, her eyes widened with horror and she shrieked in his ear.

  “Dad, you’re cut!” she cried. Touching the side of his head, he felt a spot of warm liquid; grabbing a green-and-blue napkin, he held it against the gash. Teddy ran over, pushed Maggie aside, looked at his father’s head. John rose and, holding his kids’ hands, walked into the bathroom.

  “It’s not too bad,” he said, peering at his reflection in the mirror. “Just superficial—looks a lot worse than it is.”

  “Oh, Mommy,” Maggie cried spontaneously.

  John hugged his daughter. His heart ached horribly for her. She missed her mother all the time, but something as traumatic as this was bound to bring thoughts of the accident back. He had brought this on himself. Wanting to salve his own wounds, he had taken on the busiest case in his career—not even two years after his children lost their mother. He was a selfish jerk, and his kids were hurting for it.

  As if Teddy felt the same way, he edged John aside and took his sister’s hand. Two spots of blood had stained her soccer jersey, and Teddy grabbed a washcloth and began to clean them off.

  “I know you’re a tomboy, Mags,” he said, “but people will think you got roughed up on the field if we let you go to school like that.”

  “I don’t get roughed up,” she sniffled.

  “That’s right,” Teddy said, scrubbing the shirt. “Any roughing that gets done, you’re the one doing it, right?”

  “Right,” she said, tears streaming from her clear blue eyes.

  God help me, John thought, backing away. He touched the cut on the side of his head. Maybe it was deeper than he had first thought. It was bleeding more heavily now; he swore inwardly, not wanting to go to the emergency room for stitches. He had meetings scheduled at the office, as well as cases to read and the brief to finish.

  The doorbell rang.

  Had one of the kids dialed 911? Starting for the door, he stopped in the hallway. What if it was the person who had thrown the brick, one of the shoreline residents angry with him for pursuing Greg Merrill’s emotionally charged case to the state supreme court?

  Over the years, John O’Rourke had received many threats. His work made people angry. He represented citizens accused of the worst acts a human being could do. Their victims had families and friends, sweet lives and beautiful dreams. People saw John as a champion of monsters. He understood and respected the public’s rage.

  He knew someone could decide to come after him someday, wanting more than a conversation, but he didn’t own a gun. On principle, but also out of healthy respect: As a criminal defense lawyer, he saw every day the damage that guns could do. Right now, remembering Maggie’s terror, he hoped he wasn’t wrong. Shaking from the attack in his kitchen only moments ago, he put his hand on the front doorknob, paused to gulp air, then yanked it open.

  A woman stood on the top step. Dressed in a charcoal gray coat, appropriate for the chilly fall day, she had shoulder-length brown hair and eyes the color of river stones. Freckles dotted her nose. Her smile was fluid, but set—as if, waiting for him to open the door, she had determined to look friendly and pleasant. But upon seeing his face—his expression wild, he imagined, with blood streaming down the side of his head—her jaw dropped.

  “Oh,” she said, lurching back, then stepping forward. She reached up, as if she wanted to touch his cheek. “Are you okay?”

  “Did you see anyone drive away?” he asked, looking up and down the quiet seaside street. Her car was parked in the road—a dark blue sedan.

  “No,” she said, those deep obsidian eyes peering up at him with marked concern. “I didn’t. Shouldn’t you sit down?”

  John didn’t reply. He leaned against the doorjamb. Strangers rarely rang his bell. More often, they called at night, while his family slept. Sometimes they wrote long, impassioned, well-reasoned but hateful letters. They hardly ever showed up, smiling, acting as if they cared.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Can I help you?”

  She laughed, a liquid trill that sounded so gentle and tender, it made him weak in the knees. He hardened his gaze. After Theresa, the sensation repulsed him, and he refused to let it get him.

  “I think it is I who should be helping you …” she said, smiling, touching his elbow. Her voice was gentle, vaguely southern, reminiscent of Virginia or the Carolinas.

  “Oh,” he said, as she attempted to push him down to sit on the step. She was a professional caregiver—it was written across her face, in her tone of voice, in her plain coat and sensible black leather shoes. She was a nanny, sent by the agency, to take over after the latest Baby-sitter X’s defection. “Are you here for the position?”

  “Let me help,” she said softly as his knees buckled again and stars flashed before his eyes and the siren wailed up the street—brilliant, wonderful children; one of them had called the police—and John O’Rourke sat heavily on his stone steps and took her response as a “yes.”

  THADDEUS GEORGE O’ROURKE had called the police, but he ignored their arrival. Maggie was a mess. He had to finish getting her ready for school, then get his own stuff together and make the bus—otherwise his father would have to drive him, and the middle school was out of his way.

  “Maggie, you’d better take the shirt off and start over,” he said, realizing the blood wouldn’t come out.

  “No way,” she said. “You said I could wear it.”

  “I know, but those blood splotches make you look like State Exhibit Twenty-four. We’ll wash it, and you can wear it tomorrow.”

  “That means next week—no one ever washes clothes around here,” Maggie said. Then, catching Teddy’s scowl, she tugged his sleeve. “Sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s not your fault. Or Dad’s. I could learn how …”

  “You’re eleven,” Teddy said, frustrated, resuming his efforts to clean the spots. “You’re supposed to be playing, not doing laundry.”

  “Everyone has to pitch in,” she said, casting a worried look toward the front hall, where deep voices were beginning to interrogate their father. “Do you think they’ll do anything this time?”

  “Sure,” Teddy said.

  “But they won’t catch who did it, will they?”

  “They might.”

  Brainer had run out to greet the police officers, and now he came bounding back to see Teddy and his sister. A huge golden retriever, he’d been part of the family since Teddy was nine. He was the best, smartest, coolest dog on the planet, and Teddy had named him himself. His fur used to be as smooth as silk, but that was before; now his coat was tangled, matted with burrs, twigs, and bits of dry seaweed. He nose-bumped Maggie, then leaned against Teddy for some reassuring pets.

  “It’s okay, boy,” Teddy said, crouching down. “Good dog, Brainer.”

  The dog licked Teddy’s face. Closing his eyes, Teddy rubbed the dog’s soft fur. Brainer had always been insecure. He was superfriendly to strangers, but he always ran back to the family to
get affirmation that he was good and brave enough. Kind of like Teddy himself, he thought. That’s how he used to be when his mother was still alive. He’d go act all rough and tough on the soccer field, worrying the whole time that he was blowing the game. But then he’d climb into the car where she’d make him believe he was the best player on the field.

  “Brainer could have gotten hurt,” Maggie said sadly, scratching the retriever behind the ears. “Don’t the brick-throwing people think of that?”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “But why? I don’t get it. They hate Greg Merrill for hurting those girls, but they throw bricks through our window and don’t care about hurting Brainer.”

  Or us, Teddy thought. He shivered, and he was glad he had his hands buried in the dog’s thick fur so Maggie couldn’t see them still shaking. Two policemen passed the door, on their way to see the broken window, and he heard them say, “What does he expect?” Teddy’s stomach tightened the way it did when he was out with his father and someone stared them down.

  Or called his father “Counselor” in a sarcastic way. Or, the worst, the time he and his father had been waiting in line at Paradise Ice Cream and the sweet-looking little old lady had walked over, smiling, to ask, “Do you think Anne-Marie Hicks would like to have a nice ice cream right now?” Anne-Marie Hicks was one of Greg Merrill’s victims.

  The police officers paused, glancing in at Teddy and Maggie. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of looking up.

  “Teddy?” Maggie asked, her voice dropping so the officers wouldn’t hear her.

  “Yeah.”

  “How come Dad represents him? Really?” she asked, frowning. The age-old question. Teddy had asked it when he was her age, only back then the defendant had been someone else.

  “Like you said yourself before, it’s his job.”

  “Why doesn’t he represent innocent people instead?”

  Teddy laughed, throwing the wadded-up washcloth into the sink. He was giving up on the bloodstains; let Maggie wear the dirty shirt if she wanted. Their father’s voice rose, talking to the cops in the front hall. The crisis was over—no one was hurt, and the police were on the case.

  “Why are you laughing?” she asked.

  “I was just thinking,” he said. “Of telling you to ask Dad that question.”

  “Why? Because you think he should, right? Only represent good people who didn’t do it?”

  Teddy’s spine tingled again, thinking of that old lady at Paradise Ice Cream. After she’d said that, he had gone online and looked up the murdered girls. Anne-Marie Hicks had been seventeen. Her high-school yearbook picture had been posted, showing blond hair that slanted across her eyes, seven earrings in her left ear, four in her right, and a huge smile revealing braces and a little gap between her front teeth.

  “Right, Teddy? That’s why you think I should ask Dad?”

  Teddy felt another pull deep inside, remembering how their mother had sat with their father for hours, rubbing his shoulders while he wrote briefs and studied legal documents, getting ready for the murderers’ trials, supporting him no matter what she felt about the cases.

  “Tell me, Teddy!”

  Smiling into his sister’s anxious blue eyes, so innocent and worried, he felt like crying, but laughed again. “Mags, I think you should ask Dad why he represents guilty clients because I’d love to hear the lecture he’d give you.”

  “Lecture?”

  “Yeah. All about ‘the miracle at Philadelphia that resulted in the Constitution, the Sixth Amendment, and a defendant’s right to counsel… .’ Yay, team. And then he’ll tell you about Oliver Wendell Holmes and how law is ‘a magic mirror’ … where we get to see our own lives reflected. Just ask. You’ll get Dad going, and he won’t stop till dinner.”

  “I wish he would,” she whispered, burying her face in Brainer’s matted fur. “Not stop till dinner. Never leave …”

  Teddy stopped laughing. He figured it was the same for Maggie as it was for him: Ever since their mother’s death, he hadn’t wanted to let their father out of his sight. He listened to the voices in the hall. His father was trying to be friendly to the officers—people he grilled mercilessly when he got them on the witness stand—and the police were treating him coolly back. Maggie had heard, too. When she lifted her head, her eyes swam with tears.

  “It’s okay, Maggie,” Teddy said, pulling her into a hug. Her thin body trembled in his arms. Her hair looked terrible, as if their father had taken nail scissors to it. It was dirty—just a few hours away from being greasy—and she smelled funny. She smelled like an under-the-bed mixture of dust and sneakers. She smelled like Brainer, tangled and stuck with dried leaves and seaweed without their mother to lovingly brush him every day.

  Teddy wanted Maggie to smell like lemons and lavender, just like their mother had. He wanted her to have clean hair and straight bangs. She cried, missing their mother as much as Teddy did, and he held her closer as the policemen passed by again, whispering into her ear, “Don’t cry, okay? You’re my girl, Mags. My best girl in the world.”

  MAGGIE DIDN’T LIKE the noise. The siren, first of all, but then the police radios squawking like trapped mice. Poor little animals caught inside a speaker box, wanting to get out and run home to their mamas.

  She didn’t mind the actual police officers. Most of them were nice—to her. They smiled, crouched down to say hi, asked her how was school or was she hoping to be the next Mia Hamm. The soccer jersey, of course. She just acted polite, not bothering to explain that the jersey was her brother Teddy’s, that she wore it because it was like taking a little bit of him to school with her.

  The reason she was so polite, and the reason all the police officers made her heart hurt, was that they didn’t like her father. She thought that maybe if she was very kind, quiet, and well-mannered, the officers would see that her father was a very good man. Didn’t they know what it was like for him, raising his children all alone? But the policemen didn’t care about that. They were like most of the people around: All they knew about her father was that he was the lawyer for Greg Merrill.

  Maggie understood all this. Teddy thought he was shielding her from knowing, but she knew anyway. She’d grown up fast since their mother died. She was eleven, but she felt old. She figured she probably felt twenty. Old and tired inside, wound up like a kid outside. She had come flying out to the porch, just to give Teddy a chance to get ready for school: to let him off the hook from having to take care of her.

  Her father sat in a chair, being examined by an EMT. Maggie sidled closer. She wanted to make sure the cut wasn’t deep and deadly. Their mother had died in a car accident, and at first the EMT’s had thought she would be okay. Her car had hit a deer, then crashed into a tree. She had been on the Shore Road, just past the police station, and help had arrived immediately. The EMT said she had stood up, walked over to the animal to see if it was still alive, and then sat down because she was feeling dizzy.

  Maggie could see all this in her mind, even though she hadn’t been there. She could see her mother in her blue dress and white sandals. The moon had been full that night. It was July, and her mother had had a sunburny tan that glowed in any light—even moonlight. Her sun-streaked hair would have been windblown, from the car window being open. Her lipstick had been fresh and pink—she had heard her dad say that to Gramps.

  Maggie sometimes forgot what she knew and what she had been told. So much about her parents she just knew—held deep inside, the way she knew how to breathe, the way she remembered every day how to walk and ride a bike. But some of this story had come from her father, from so long trying to make sense of the fact her mother was no longer here.

  Was no longer anywhere.

  The part about the EMT’s thinking she was fine. They had examined her. She wasn’t cut anywhere, but they had taken her blood pressure and listened to her heart, thought she was okay, but told her to stay still anyway. An ambulance was coming. It would take her to the hospital, where do
ctors would check her out thoroughly.

  Her mother had laughed. (Was that the story or something Maggie just knew? It was so there, in Maggie’s mind, the image of her mother’s blue eyes wide and amused, her throat rippling with soft laughter.) “I’m fine,” she had said, concern replacing the amusement. “But what about the deer? Should we call a vet—to put it out of its misery?” And she had gotten up to go see if the deer—a female whitetail—was in any pain.

  And she had sat down. Just like that: a sigh, and she had sunk onto the ground, leaning against a tree as if suddenly exhausted. As if the whole thing—being out so late at night, too late to put Maggie to bed and kiss her goodnight, driving home in the moonlight, hitting the whitetail deer, hearing the waves on the rocks like the thump of blood in her ears—as if it all had simply been too much.

  Thinking of her mother, Maggie saw her father tilt his head so the EMT could better examine his cut head. The whole time, police officers were talking. “An eye for an eye,” one of them was saying. “Seven girls in the ground, a brick through the window, you do the math.”

  “I have two children,” her father shot back. “Watch what you say.”

  “Seven girls,” the policeman said, holding the brick in what looked like a huge Baggie but which Maggie understood to be an evidence bag.

  “He’s been cut,” a woman said. “Take care of him and lose the attitude.” Her voice was sharp, with a different accent, and made Maggie look. For some reason, Maggie hadn’t noticed her before. She’d been standing at the door, dressed in a dark gray coat with straight brown hair touching her shoulders, but now she moved toward Maggie’s father, as if she wanted to protect him. Was she a detective? Or another lawyer? She was pretty and plain at the same time.

  “Who are you?” the head officer asked.

  “She’s from the employment agency,” Maggie’s father said, prodding the side of his head—no longer bleeding—with two fingers. “She arrived just after the incident, but she didn’t see anyone.”