by T. Greenwood
The Google alert about Robby Rousseau came while I was painting. I was at home, in our duplex in Queens, working on a commission job. It was late afternoon, that single gilded hour when the dingy corner of my living room where I worked was imbued with a sort of magical light. The Chet Baker station was playing on Pandora. Liquid amber sunlight was pooled across my paint-splattered hands. The golden hour. That’s what photographers call it.
My four-year-old daughter, Avery, was next door with Gus, my ex, and I was alone and lost inside those painted trees. I stepped away from the easel, tilted my head, studied the canvas. It was one of my Etsy shop paintings, my craft fair paintings: the quirky birches, the frazzled, skittish sky. Over the years, I’d come to realize this was what people wanted: thick white branches, sturdy, steady limbs. The predictable, slightly comical, green of leaves. A painting you could just as easily hang in a child’s room as a dentist’s office. The kind of painting you buy to match your sofa or blinds.
And while I was grateful for the work (and trust me, I was grateful to be making money making art), commission jobs pulled me away from my own projects. Between this and taking care of Avery, there was little time or energy left for much of anything else. But now that Gus and I had split up, I couldn’t rely on him anymore to put food on the table, for his paychecks from the sign shop to cover the minimum payments on my maxed-out credit cards or my staggering student loans. Thankfully, he’d agreed to keep me on his health insurance plan since we weren’t legally divorced yet, or even officially separated for that matter. He paid the tuition at Avery’s preschool, and the “rent” I paid to live in the other half of the duplex was simply a gesture on my part. For the first couple of months, Gus didn’t even cash my checks. “Focus on your work,” he’d insisted, but I wasn’t a fool. I knew my real paintings (the ones stacked in the closet like a pile of dirty secrets) would likely never see the light of day, golden or otherwise. And the birches brought in decent money. It was either accept commission work or go back to bartending, and the mere thought of even one more shift pouring drinks at El Cortada was unbearable. I’d worked at bars off and on for the last decade, but after Avery was born I’d sworn I would never go back. I was thirty-three years old, too old for that backbreaking, heartbreaking sort of work.
As the sun slipped behind the building across the street, breaking the ephemeral, twilit spell, I set my brush down and went to my laptop to check my e-mail. And there, amid the Michaels ads and bill notifications, was the e-mail:
RE: Google Alert—“Robert J. Rousseau”
I hesitated before clicking on the link. It had to be a different Robert J. Rousseau. It had happened before. He shared his name with a French philosopher, after all. And a plumber upstate. But I knew the moment the page began to load that it was him. My Robert J. Rousseau. Because it was the header for my hometown newspaper, The Haven Gazette, that appeared above the article.
I held my breath and scrolled down to the headline.
LOCAL ACTIVIST SOLICITS HELP FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE INNOCENCE PROJECT—FORMER SOCIAL WORKER INSISTS ROBERT J. ROUSSEAU FALSELY ACCUSED IN 1996 CRIME.
I studied the photo of the woman in the article. Jan Bromberg. She wore the same long, thick braid, round glasses, and denim skirt. She’d aged, of course, but I remembered her. She sat through the whole trial. She called my parents practically daily for almost a year until they got a restraining order, changed our number.
But now here she was again. Twenty years later.
The headache began at the base of my skull and bloomed like a flower upward, filling my head. I scanned the article, which provided an interview with Ms. Bromberg, claiming her team at the Innocence Project expected new evidence would ultimately exonerate Robert J. Rousseau.
Ms. Bromberg argued that despite Robby’s “confession” (their quotes, not mine), for the last two decades he had maintained his innocence. Apparently, six months before (unbeknownst to prosecution, unbeknownst to me) the Innocence Project’s legal team had petitioned to get the rape kit, taken that night in 1996, tested for DNA. There had been no need back then. They’d caught Robby red-handed (he’d confessed). But now, with the DNA results expected shortly, Ms. Bromberg was confident this new evidence would provide definitive proof that Robert J. Rousseau was, indeed, not guilty.
Trembling, I clicked out of the e-mail, as though I could make the news go back into the ether from which it came, and went to the kitchen. Every one of my ribs ached with the effort of keeping my heart contained within my chest.
He wasn’t supposed to ever get out. He was going to rot in prison. That’s what my family’s lawyer had promised. What the small New Hampshire community where I grew up demanded. And what I’d foolishly believed. I’d been a kid then, though. I’d trusted adults. Even after my entire world was shattered, I somehow thought promises meant something.
I picked up my phone from the rubble on the counter and trembled as I realized that while I’d been painting, basking in that amber light, everyone I knew had found out about Robby Rousseau. Ten missed calls. My mother. My father. My little brother. My mother again. A few numbers I didn’t recognize. The cycle repeating.
I put the phone on speaker and listened to each message.
Hi honey, it’s Mom. Please don’t worry about all of this. That woman is batshit crazy. He confessed. They convicted him.You have nothing to worry about.
It’s Dad. Listen, just wanted you to know Larry is already on this. It’s a bunch of hoo-ha. Same song and dance as when they tried to appeal before. A DNA test isn’t going to change anything. Do not worry.
Hey Wyn, it’s Mark. Listen. Just wanted you to know I’m thinking about you. This sucks. Sorry. Call me.
Hi honey. It’s Mom again. Maybe you can come home for a little bit? I don’t like the idea of you being alone right now. Daddy and I could drive down and get you and Av if you want.
The next two calls were hang-ups. The media, I assumed. Somehow they always managed to get my number. I deleted all of the calls and then picked up the phone to call my best friend, Pilar.
Pick up, I willed. Pick up.
Voice mail. Unlike me, Pilar never answered her phone when she was painting. I imagined her in that beautiful room, the floor-to-ceiling windows I coveted. Her own paint-splattered hands. And those gorgeous, true paintings she made.
I worried my voice, like my legs, would fail. But when she implored me to “Leave a message . . . or else,” instead I felt chilled with an odd calm.
“About Maine,” I said. “If you still want me to come with you? I think I’m ready.” I hung up before I could change my mind.
Grey Gardens
“It was a steal,” Pilar had said when she first showed me pictures of the cottage.
We were sitting at a coffee shop halfway between our two houses. She’d just cut her bangs, and they were crooked—like the time Avery got ahold of my good scissors and cut her own hair. Pilar had recently bought a pair of 1950s reading glasses, which she wore tethered around her neck by a beaded chain. She was the kind of person who hid her beauty behind homemade haircuts, cat’s eye glasses, and thrift store housedresses. But her homely outfits had the opposite effect of calling attention to her striking face: golden skin, freckled nose, high cheekbones and almond eyes, her beauty the alchemical result of Colombian, Japanese, and Scottish ancestries.
We huddled together at the wobbly bistro table, shielding the phone’s screen from the bright autumn sun, and she thumbed through the photos of the crumbling clapboard cottage that sat atop a rocky cliff on Bluffs Island, a remote islet far off the coast of Maine. She’d bought the house on a whim that summer after she sold a triptych of paintings for a high five figures.
“I had to buy it as is. No inspection. It’s a mess.”
It was hard to tell from the photos on her phone, but it was clearly dilapidated. She wasn’t exaggerating.
“Isn’t it a beautiful disaster? Like a mini Grey Gardens? I mean when Big Edie and Little Edie were living th
ere,” she said.
“It is.” For Halloween one year, she and I dressed as Big Edie and Little Edie (Jackie O’s eccentric relatives). Gus had dressed up like one of the feral cats that lived with them in their wrecked mansion in the Hamptons.
“But it’s right at the edge of the ocean. It’s on two acres. And I figure I can rent it out when I’m not using it.”
I’d nodded, feeling tears welling up in my eyes, though I wasn’t sure if I was upset because this meant Pilar might move away or if it was just envy. I’d been finding myself experiencing a nasty sort of jealousy around Pilar lately that made me feel awful inside.
“And you can come stay with me. It’ll be like when we were at Rizdee.”
Pilar, Gus, and I had all gone to art school together at Rhode Island School of Design fifteen years before. And while I had eventually resigned myself to painting those happy birches, and Gus used his skills to make metal signs, Pilar’s career had moved at a slow but steady pace. Then last year a collector fell in love with her work, and suddenly she was an artist with a capital A. A profile in the New York Times and a show at the Pace Gallery had cemented this, and suddenly, everything was changed.
“I’m going to spend a few months there this winter. Try to get some work done. Make sure the pipes don’t freeze. That raccoons don’t move in.”
“Or squatters,” I said.
We both knew what it meant to live someplace that didn’t belong to us. I’d slept on more couches and shared more bare mattresses than I could count. Gus and I once spent a year living in a teepee in Colorado. I pretended a gypsy life was what I wanted, who I was. But a free spirit was exactly the opposite of the truth. I was afraid. I’d been afraid and running away for twenty years.
Pilar had eventually grown out of this nomadic life and decided to stay in the city about six years ago. And when I got pregnant with Avery, Gus implored me to settle down too, though every inch of me resisted. Gus’s grandmother had owned the duplex in Queens since the 1980s. When she passed away, his father had offered it to us, explaining we could rent out the other half for extra cash. Suddenly we had utility bills in our names. Public records. A landline. The duplex made me a real person.
When we split up, I became the tenant, living on the other side.
The idea had seemed to make sense when we first separated that spring. Especially when it came to Avery. It would be a transition, we thought, with a literal wall between us replicating and solidifying the chasm that had been growing between us for the last few years. But now I knew it had been a foolish thought that we could somehow live our separate lives together. That Avery might not even notice as she passed between the doorway that connected our separate homes.
“You could come with me to Maine,” Pilar had offered. “It would be good for you, Wynnie. To get away.”
* * *
Pilar called back an hour after I left her the message and said, “I’m coming over.”
“No, it’s okay. Everything’s fine.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
As I waited for her to arrive, I took inventory of what I might need to pack in order to leave. Gus and I had lived in the duplex for five years. But I’d only been on this side of the house for five months. I had most of Avery’s toys: the puppet theater that hung suspended in the bedroom doorway, the wicker basket filled with stuffed animals, plastic Little People, and dolls. A bookshelf brimming with board books, and the easel Gus had given her for her birthday.
The apartment was furnished, and I hadn’t bothered to hang up any art. That would have meant I’d somehow accepted this was permanent. But how could living on the other side of the wall from an ex be permanent? It was crazy. I could hear every step he took in the other room, the music he played, the muffled conversations he had. Snoring, sneezing, dreaming. All the intimacies of our marriage were now just beyond my reach. And even as I knew this was the right thing, the best thing, I longed for what we’d lost. Or what I’d somehow squandered away.
Pilar only lived four blocks away, but still her knock-knock-knock startled me.
She rushed past me to put the beer in the fridge, turned the knob on the old gas oven, and unwrapped what appeared to be a pan of enchiladas. Pilar was a better mother by far than I was, and she didn’t even have any children yet.
When the beer was uncapped and the enchiladas were warming in the oven, Pilar motioned for me to sit on the couch next to her, where she was already sitting, tucking her long legs under her like a child.
“Is it Gus?” she asked, because lately, it was always Gus.
I shook my head. Gus, for the first time in ages, seemed to be the very least of my problems.
She cocked her head. She was wearing a Rosie the Riveter–style bandana today, her bleached blond bangs poking out in all their uneven glory from beneath.
“Because, you guys really need to work this shit out. It’s killing me. And this is crazy,” she said, motioning to the hideous couch she was sitting on. The blank walls.
“I know.”
“Where’s Av?” she asked. “Nap?”
“With Gus,” I said. Gus worked ten to twelve hours a day at the sign shop, so Avery only spent the weekends on his side of the wall.
I took a long pull on my beer. It was bitter. Hoppy. One of those expensive craft beers she liked.
“Tell me what’s going on,” she said. “You can’t just say you want to exile yourself to Bumfuck, Maine, and then clam up.”
I stared out the window at the tree whose last leaves had withered and fallen a week ago. The branches looked skeletal, exposed. Raw.
“I just need some time away, to clear my head. To focus on my painting. I can’t keep living like this,” I said. Now I was the one motioning to the ratty couch, the bare walls, the peeling linoleum. The thin wall that divided Gus and me.
“Okay,” she said. “But what about Gus? And Av? He’ll never let you take her.”
I took a deep breath.
“Robby Rousseau might get a retrial,” I said.
Her face drained of color, making her bright red lipsticked lips look like a stain on her face. She shook her head. “That can’t be. You said he was in for life.”
I shivered and the ancient radiator clanged and hissed as it kicked on. It was October, and winter would be here soon.
“The Innocence Project is getting involved,” I said. “They tested the rape kit for DNA.”
She winced perceptibly at the word rape.
“So?” she said.
I shook my head, felt my throat thicken. My voice was damaged that day; afterward, I was left with the crackling rasp of a heavy smoker, the raw hoarseness I’ve had guys (ones who had no idea) tell me is sexy. And this voice, this reluctant, faulty voice, sometimes completely fails when I am under stress, the wound made fresh. Decades of healing suddenly undone.
“I’m just worried,” I managed. “This lady, Jan Bromberg? She’s obsessed. Convinced he didn’t do it. Apparently, she tried to get the DA to test the kit for DNA, but it was denied. So she went to the federal district court and they gave her access. Six months ago. Depending on the results, she plans to petition for a retrial. What if he gets another trial? What if a new jury lets him go?”
“Wait. Didn’t he confess, Wyn?” Pilar asked.
I nodded, squeezed my eyes shut. I could almost hear the crackling recording playing in the courtroom. His high, uncertain voice, describing what he’d done to me.
“Okay,” Pilar said, nodding her head, likely formulating a plan. Pilar had always been a problem solver. The logical one. “When is this all supposed to happen?”
“I don’t know. They’re expecting the results any day now, the newspaper said. And then, if the DNA is messed up . . .”
“What do you mean messed up?”
“God, I don’t know,” I said, my body prickly. “Like if the lab screws up or something . . .”
“Shit, Wynnie,” she said, then more softly, “Are you safe? I mean, if h
e somehow manages to get out . . . would he . . . you’re not going to Maine because you think he might . . .”
My skin buzzed, and my heart started to race. I shook my head. There was no way to explain.
“Okay,” she said, still nodding. “We’ll go. It’ll be okay. We’ll figure out what to do. But what about Avery?”
“She’ll come with me. I mean, she’d have to. We don’t really have a choice with Gus’s job. He can come up on the weekends. It’ll be okay.” Even as I began to formulate my argument, I could anticipate his response to this plan.
“Do you think it’s smart to be so far away while all of this is happening? It’s an island,” Pilar said. “It’s totally remote.”
It sounded perfect. I wanted nothing more in that moment than to be on an island far away from everyone on the other end of that phone line. From Gus. I wanted, needed, to take a flying leap off the grid.
“I mean, what if they need you to, like, testify or something?”
“That wouldn’t happen unless he was granted another trial. Seriously,” I said, feeling frustrated now. “I thought this is what you wanted. You said you wanted me to go with you.”
Pilar sighed and reached out, grabbing my hands. Her fingernails were painted like shiny ladybug shells. “That was before all of this. Don’t you think Gus is going to want to help you too?” she asked. “Be there for you?”
I swallowed hard, pushing the lump that often rendered me mute down again.
“It’s really fine. I’m sure everything’s going to be okay,” I said.
But I knew that nothing was okay. Because no matter what Robby had said to the police back then, when we were both just a couple of terrified thirteen-year-olds—no matter that a jury had convicted him on all counts—the DNA test could change everything.
