My dad had told Inez not to clean the carpet, that it would need a professional. “Diana will make those decisions,” he said.
She showed up after meeting with the congresswomen and flying from Washington to Islip, and then my dad arrived in the evening. They had a long talk before they came into my room.
“How are you feeling?” my dad asked.
“Great.” My voice sounded like mud mixed with gravel.
“Billy, are you missing anything?”
“Like what, Dad?”
“Let me put it this way. I’m missing a yellow silk scarf, with black polka dots, that your Aunt Harriet gave it to me. I happened to notice that Bedford wore a blue silk scarf around his neck. Made me think. More to the point, your mom is missing her Queensland black opal and diamond bracelet. My birthday present to her.”
I coughed. “You think he took that stuff?”
“He was roaming around up here while those monster dogs were turning our house into a war zone. If we want to file a claim with our insurance company, we first have to report to the police that the bracelet is missing. I’d have to tell them about Bedford.”
“Maybe you left the bracelet somewhere, Mom.”
“Anything is possible.” That was a favorite phrase of my mom’s, which meant “no way.”
“But I didn’t leave my yellow silk scarf anywhere. I haven’t worn it since the spring.” My dad arranged some of my floppy disks in a more ordered pile; he always needed to be busy. “Billy, I got a call today from Max Russo. The CEO of Oxford Enterprises, which is the company that owns the company that’s going to bring out Fruities, saw the video of you and the monkey. He loves it. So Max asks you to reconsider. They’ll pay you a great deal of money to do this commercial. I know how you feel, but —”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
He seemed taken aback. “When did you decide that?”
“Today. I want to pay for the damage to the carpet and the lamp and anything else that got ruined or stolen on Sunday night. Making the commercial is the only way I can do that.”
“No, that’s not acceptable,” my dad said.
“But I want to do it.”
“We won’t take money from you that way.”
“Why not?”
“Billy, bad stuff happens.” My mom, sitting on my bed, patted my head. “You shouldn’t have gone to the hospital without telling us beforehand, that’s true, but once you did, everything else may have been foreordained. Thank God, the house didn’t burn down, no one was injured. Minor property damage is something that can always be fixed. Just please have nothing to do with this man or his daughter anymore. That’s all we ask.”
“I’m going to do the commercial,” I said, “to pay for the carpet.”
If they had known what that would lead to, they would have chained me to the bed.
During the night I had growing pains in my legs. I always measured myself against marks on the wall. I’d made the last mark with a red pen three months after my eleventh birthday. In the morning I stood against the wall, laid a ruler flat on my head, and made a mark with a black ballpoint. I turned around. The black mark was at the same level as the red mark.
Well, maybe the pain came first, the growing later.
I didn’t want to stay home from school a day more than was necessary. I wanted to see Amy. On Wednesday evening I popped the thermometer out of my mouth as soon as my mom and Aunt Grace were out of the room, gave it a hard flip with my wrist and slipped it back in my mouth when I heard them coming back.
“Normal,” my mom said. “That’s funny. Your forehead feels warm.”
“Can I go to school tomorrow?”
Aunt Grace threw up her hands. “Kid’s a workaholic. Wonder where that comes from.”
My mom considered, then said, “No, I want you to take the week off, darling. Get strong.”
“Mo-om!”
She looked at me in an odd way. I think she knew that something didn’t parse, and she shook her head.
Early on Thursday morning she went off to work in Sag Harbor. I didn’t feel sick anymore, just heavy in the heart. The wind beat against the sides of the house and the sky looked like it was full of camel humps. I finished the last of Horatio Hornblower’s fabulous adventures. Around three-thirty in the afternoon I heard footsteps crunch on the gravel of the driveway. Creaking porch sounds rose up, then the doorbell chimed. Soon I heard Inez talking to someone.
Inez clumped upstairs. “You got a visitor, Billy. Needs a little fattening up.”
It took me a few seconds to figure it out. “Amy Bedford?”
“I forgot to ask her name.”
“Inez!”
“Now I recall, that’s just what she said. ‘Amy Beffid.’ Something like that.”
I’d never had a friend visit me before. I’d never had a friend, so how could one visit me? I was flabbergasted, which is a step up from dumbfounded.
“Inez, what should I do?”
“You want me tell her to go ‘way?”
“Don’t you dare tell her to go away.”
“So what’s your problem, cariño?”
“Should I go downstairs? Can I invite her up here to my bedroom?”
“Mi amor, you the little prince, you do what you like. I bring her up. I make her a lemonade. Meanwhile, brush your hair. Get calm.”
Chapter 12
Amy had come straight from school. She must have walked, because I’d never seen her on a bike. Her wounded arm was in a sling. She wore the same faded blue jeans and navy blue windbreaker and black hair ribbon that she always wore. She stopped at the door to survey my room.
“Where’s Iphigenia?”
“By the bookcase.”
Amy scratched Iphigenia’s head through the bars of her cage. Iphigenia was all perky, and you wouldn’t have guessed that she’d nearly died of monkey pneumonia.
I knew what it meant for Amy to be here. I don’t think she visited anyone, much less a boy she hardly knew.
“Amy, this is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me.”
She gave me a two-hundred watt smile. “Well, you came to the hospital. What goes around, comes around.”
“How’d you find out I was sick?”
“I asked Mrs. Ostrow. She said your mom had called in and that you were in bed with a bad cold.”
“How’s your shoulder?”
She wasn’t supposed to use her arm much, not until the stitches came out, so she had to wear the sling. She said, “Carter told me you had a terrific house. He was right.”
I offered her a chair but she said she liked sitting on the bed. I scrunched up against a stack of pillows and she sat near me, folding jointless legs under her, so that if we’d wanted to we could have reached out and touched each other. But we didn’t do that.
“How’s school? What have I missed?”
“We’ve started the Civil War. South’s ahead so far.” Then she told me that everyone had to do a science project, and she had decided to do her project about the life of a lobster.
“Not much of a life,” I said, “to be boiled alive, then eaten with hot melted butter.”
“Have you ever eaten a lobster, Billy?”
“Twice. I wouldn’t do it now because I found out they scream when they hit the pot.”
“They’re supposed to taste real good.”
Inez came up the stairs, bearing a tray with two lemonades and a plate of home-made warm chocolate chip cookies.
“Here, chica. Eat.”
Amy sipped her drink. “Billy, is this the kind of lemonade you sell at the beach?”
Inez had gone, so I said, “Mine is better. My company motto is, ‘You get your money’s worth.’ Still want to work for me next summer?”
“For sure. I need money.”
If she had asked, I would have given her everything I had.
Amy said, “That guy was with you on Red Dirt Road? Duwayne Williams? Carter says he’s a hot item at Bridgehampton High. Scor
es a lot of points and stuff in basketball.”
“Cool.”
I asked if Jimmy was in trouble for what he’d done. Tears trembled like wet pearls in Amy’s eyes. She put her head down on her knees.
I reached out and touched her hair. She pulled her head away to one side. But she didn’t hit me this time, or get up and move away.
She looked up and said, “Can I tell you a secret? You have to swear you won’t tell anyone. Especially not your mother and father.”
“I give you my word of honor.”
She bent her head into the bed, so that when she spoke her words were muffled by the comforter.
“I told you Jimmy stabbed me. They made me tell you that. The truth is, Ginette stabbed me with a knife.”
I heard her but I didn’t believe her. The picture of it came at me like a fist and struck me in the chest, shaking me. Moms don’t stab their children. Or, if they do, it’s a mistake.
“By accident, you mean.”
Her head came up. “No accident.”
She told me that when Carter went away fishing that weekend, her mom had locked her in a closet without food or water. Without even a place to pee: no bucket or pot. Her mom kept her there for two days.
A storage closet, Amy explained. “There was a light. I found the string. So at first it wasn’t dark.”
She didn’t have a watch and she didn’t know what time it was. There was no room on the closet floor to curl up but she could sit with her knees folded against her chest and her back against some cardboard boxes, and that way she could sleep for a time, then wake, then sleep again. She kept the light burning. She wasn’t cold, there was a coat in the closet and she wrapped herself in it. But the closet was damp and smelled of mold.
Late on that first day, or during the night, she had no way of knowing, the bulb flickered, turned pale orange, then died a slow death. So then it was fully black. She didn’t care so much about being hungry and thirsty but she hated it when she had to pee on the floor, in the inky dark, in the place where she sat and slept.
The smell worsened the second day. She wanted to do more than pee but she held it in until she had stomach cramps. She sobbed with the pain. Sometimes she banged on the door and begged her mother to open it.
“I thought I’d die in there. Like, buried alive.”
There was nothing I’d ever seen on television or in movies, or read in books, or heard from another person, that was like this story. This was the most awful true story I’d ever heard.
“Why did your mom do that, Amy?”
“She was mad at me.”
“Why? What did you do?”
She didn’t answer that. Ginette, on the third day, flung open the door and yanked her out. Hauled her across the floor by one arm — almost pulled the arm from the socket. “And she had this knife in her hand.”
Amy tried to dodge past her. To show what Ginette did, Amy clenched her fist and brought her arm downward. Her fist bounced off the bed. I felt the blow as if the bed had been my shoulder.
“A big kitchen knife?”
“No, more like a steak knife.”
“Did it hurt a lot?”
“You bet it hurt.”
Amy stumbled out the front door of her house into the road. It was a cool, cloudless fall day, a perfect day to climb rocks. Duwayne and I came biking by. We didn’t know that the A-1 Self Storage, which we had seen from the road, was where Amy lived.
Ginette showed up at the hospital after they called her. She was sober, and she kept crying. She told Amy they had to blame it on Jimmy, or else Ginette would go to jail.
“When Carter came back from fishing,” Amy said, “he walloped her. Remember his hand? He said he got it caught between the boat and the pier? Bullshit. He broke her cheekbone. Her face is still all swelled up. He threw out the liquor. Smashed all the booze bottles in the yard. Made her go out there afterward and clean up the glass.”
“And he’s still saying Jimmy did it?”
“Two people from social services came round. So Carter gives his version of what happened. He’s like, ‘You can’t give poor Jimmy the third degree about it. He’s all busted up about what he did.’ But these people saw my mom’s cheek. Ginette says, ‘I slipped in the shower. Hit my face on the faucet.’ The woman asked a lot of questions. The man had a tape recorder. I don’t think they believed the Jimmy story or the faucet story.”
“Did they talk to you, too?”
“They want me to come in on my own to their office. Carter says not to go. I think that’s why he wants to hurry up and leave for Sayville. Maybe leave Long Island.”
“For where?”
“Florida.”
“That’s… far away, Amy.”
“And I don’t want to go,” she said.
“So what are you going to do?”
“I have to get out of there.”
I thought that over, and I wasn’t quite sure what she meant.
“Do you mean leave home?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“For good?”
“For the rest of my life.”
Her mother had stabbed her. And I knew that Carter was a wild man, not crazy enough to be put away in a loony bin, but crazy enough to curse at cops and steal from our house. Still, that didn’t account for Amy wanting to leave him for the rest of her life. He was her dad. And when I saw him with Amy, in her hospital room, he was all over her with kindness. He encouraged her to read, called her his brave little girl.
“Does Carter ever hit you?”
“He’s mean,” she said. “I need help. I told you, I have no money. And I don’t know where to go.”
I made up my mind quickly. It was my reckless streak.
“I’ll help you,” I said.
“How?”
“I have to work that out,” I said.
“How will you work it out?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Do you have an idea?”
“I can do it, Amy. There’s a way. Just give me time. I promise I’ll do it. Give me your hand.”
She put it out and I shook it.
“A golden handshake,” I said. “That’s a promise I swear to keep.”
I already had the plan in my mind. It flew in like a swift bird and nested there. I just had to keep it caged there, so it didn’t slip away in the night as so many things do, and study it more before I told Amy about it and then put it to a family vote.
On a windy late October weekend my dad asked me to come into the den. He sat behind his oak desk, in warm lamplight, facing me across the room as if I were a client in his office. Mozart played at low volume in the background.
“Here’s the deal, son. You’re eleven years old, and a minor can’t make a binding written contract. Your mother and I can do it for you, but of course, practically and morally, we need your approval. Is that clear?”
“Clear.”
He had gone to what he called “the Intellectual Property person” in his law firm. That person advised the setting up of an irrevocable trust, with Iphigenia as one of its two assets and the income from all commercial ventures as the other. The income from the trust would be payable when I started college and each year thereafter until I turned twenty one, at which time I’d receive the principal. My dad would be the unpaid trustee, and he could “invade” the trust, as he put it, only in order to benefit my specific interests.
“How much money are we talking about, Dad?”
“The final figure is one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which is not too shabby for a day’s work. I confess I did some hard negotiating. And they’ll pay a small residual fee every time the commercial is aired. If they want you to do any more commercials, they pay extra for each one. Those numbers haven’t been settled yet.”
“Wow.” I hadn’t dreamed it would be that much money. All I’d wanted was to pay for the carpet and the piano repair. I didn’t think those two items could cost anywhere near a hundred and fifty thousand
dollars.
“If you agree,” my dad said, “we intend that the income be used to help finance your college education. And we’d like to suggest that any interest or profit on principal that’s left over be put toward Simon’s college. It’s not that we need that money, we just think it would be a brotherly thing to do. A bonding act. You understand?”
He seemed proud of that last idea. He knew that Simon and I were lacking in the bonding department.
I said okay to everything. “And you agree that I pay for what happened to the carpet.”
“No, I’ve thought about that. It wasn’t your fault the dogs got into the house and peed on it.”
“It wasn’t your fault, either. Why should you get stuck with the bill? The dog should pay for it. But the dog has no money. Neither does the dog’s stupid owner.”
“Billy, don’t argue.”
“Dad, that’s not a fair way to end a discussion, when one person says, ‘Don’t argue,’ or ‘That’s it,’ or ‘That’s final.’ Don’t I have the right to spend some of that money in a way that I like? I’m doing the work. I have to have some rights.”
He sighed. It must be hard, I thought, to live with a kid like me. But it was hard for a kid like me to live with parents.
“All right, yes, if you put it that way, you can pay.”
It was a small victory, but it meant a lot to me. It meant I had rights, even if exercising them cost me thousands of dollars.
The agency shot the commercial in a sound studio on West Nineteenth Street in Manhattan. The law required that a tutor from the school system be present so that I wouldn’t be considered truant, and she did some geography and history with me. There was also someone there from the ASPCA, but he had nothing to object to because the hot lights didn’t bother Iphigenia at all, and I explained to him that she ate these candies all the time, they were rewards to her.
For a while, however, the people in what they called the “creative team” were worried that she wouldn’t like Fruities as much as Wal-Mart’s sourballs and wouldn’t show the same enthusiasm for wrenching them from behind my teeth.
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller Page 8
