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To Daniel Johnson—
gentleman, scholar, treasured nephew
Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Are You Looking at Me or Not?
The detective was waiting for me when I arrived home from work. He sat in his own Civic, rather than an official police car, on the side of the driveway where Joe used to park. He might have been doing a crossword; I saw him lay down a folded section of the newspaper when I pulled in beside him.
I swore, not at the sight of Thornburgh, but because reporters from TV news vans were also waiting for me, on the street in front of the house. They ran up the driveway with cameras as I parked in the garage and stepped out of my car, but when I held my hand over my face and said that I was sorry but I couldn’t talk to them, the detective moved forward and told them in his reasonable but no-nonsense voice that they needed to get off my property.
Then he turned to me and nodded, a variation on an old-fashioned bow. I’d always been grateful for that quality in him, his politeness, the way he treated me with respect back then and didn’t—like so many of them—seem to believe that I must have brought what happened to me upon myself. Although Dawn had never been indicted, I knew that a lot of people who hadn’t even met me thought I was a terrible mother.
He wore civilian clothes: neatly pressed pants and a turtleneck under a windbreaker. The crease in his pants reminded me of the care my husband had always taken with his own appearance, and I felt a quick jolt, grief and pleasure together, thinking about Joe and the things I loved about him.
What I knew about Kenneth Thornburgh, besides the fact of his kindness, was that he had moved to the Albany area three years earlier—just before Joe died—from a small town across the border in Massachusetts where he had been unable to solve the murder of a fifteen-year-old girl. He saw this as his own personal failure, if you could believe the conclusions drawn by Cecilia Baugh in the feature story she wrote for the local weekly, The Everton Eagle, shortly after Thornburgh joined the force. He lived alone in the new condo development across town. After our trial, he suffered a mild heart attack, and since then he did not go out on active calls anymore. Instead, he ran investigations from behind his desk.
“Mrs. Schutt,” he told me as we walked toward my back door together, “I’m sorry to bother you.” He was the only one of his staff who didn’t call me by my first name from the very beginning, from that morning they’d come in to find Joe dead on the stairs and me, with barely a pulse, beaten and bloody across our bed. In the way that matters most, they saved my life, but in another way they destroyed it with the questions they asked before the ambulance rushed me away.
Thornburgh was one of the few people who could look at my face without wincing. The surgeons had done their best, but the scars were obvious, and my features looked as if they’d been pulled apart and rearranged, like a Picasso painting. Maybe in a museum a distorted face is a symbol, but it’s become all too clear to me that nobody appreciates encountering one on the street. No symbolism there—it means your face has been bashed in.
My hair had grown back since they shaved it for my brain surgery. When I was young I hid behind my bangs out of a shyness that felt paralyzing sometimes, but as an adult with facial injuries I had a better reason to let my hair fall over my bad eye—the one with the sagging lid they hadn’t been able to fix—and the cheek on the same side, the right, which remained slightly uneven, the skin buckled despite reconstruction of the bone. On good days I could almost forget what I looked like, but every time I went out in public, the stares and whispers reminded me.
There was one blessing in it, if you could call it that. For the first time, I understood what Dawn must have felt like as a child, when other kids either leaned in to get a closer look at her lazy eye or turned away because—as Iris would have said back then—it freaked them out. How many times had Dawn come home crying because some classmate had called her a name or, probably not even meaning to be cruel, asked her in frustration, “Are you looking at me or not?”
In the garage I told Thornburgh it was fine, this was not a bad time, and asked if he wanted to come in. In fact, I was glad for the company, however brief it would be. All I had to look forward to was another Friday evening ahead of me with no plans, except to eat a microwave dinner in front of the TV with the dog stretched out beside me on the couch. Besides, I knew from experience how stressful it was to face reporters alone.
I gestured at the door with my chin because I was carrying a potted ficus, which somebody at the office had given up on and put out with the trash. When my friend Francine, the receptionist, saw me pick up the plant on my way out to my car and I told her I was going to take it home, she warned me that it was too far gone. But this only made me more determined to nurse it back to life.
The detective said no thanks to coming in, it wouldn’t take a minute, and then he looked down at his shoes before he continued, covering his mouth with his fist as he cleared his throat, a habit I’d become familiar with during the trial. “I wanted to make sure you heard,” he said. “About the appeal?”
“Appeal?” My arms went slack, and he stepped forward to take the plant from me.
“You’re not going to tell me you didn’t know this was up before the court today, are you?” He pointed his thumb at the news trucks. “What do you think they’re doing here?”
I shrugged, feeling my shoulders shake. “I tried not to pay attention.” I didn’t say that I’d purposely left the radio off in my car on the way home—afraid of what it might tell me—precisely because I did know what was going on.
Thornburgh said, “Well, you’d have to find out sooner or later. The court granted Petty’s appeal for a new trial.”
I had not heard the name Petty spoken aloud in months. The sound of it made a ripple rise up the back of my neck.
I put a hand on the car hood to steady myself. “Did they grant it based on the dying declaration?” It always seemed wrong to me that it could be called that, when I hadn’t actually died afterward. But it had been explained to me that this was the law.
Thornburgh said, “It was more of the Sixth Amendment thing. The fact that the defense couldn’t cross-examine you during the trial, because you didn’t remember.”
I rubbed my forehead as jolts of pain darted behind my eyes. “He’s not going to get out on bail, is he?”
“Oh, no. Absolutely not. No way would they give bail for a crime like this.” He squinted in his rush to reassure me, and with a thud of dread in my gut I could tell what was coming next. “But Mrs. Schutt—Hanna—we want to put him away again as much as you do. Well, I shouldn’t say that. Of course you want it more.” He coughed gently.
“Who is ‘we’?” I said, though I already knew.
“The police, and Gail Nazarian. She’s worried he might walk this time, unless they can get a direct eyewitness to what happened.”
At the prosecutor’s name, my temples folded in on themselves in a full-blown throb. This had been happening more and more lately, and I knew I’d have to mention it to my neurologist during my next checkup. Quietly, to subdue the noise in my head, I told Thornburgh what I’d told him
every other time before. “I don’t know anything more than what I’ve said already. I can’t remember that night.”
It seemed again that he didn’t believe me, and for a moment I thought he might say so. Then I remembered that this was more Gail Nazarian’s style, not the detective’s. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he did look sorry. It was an expression I’d seen often during the trial, especially when he had to testify about what he’d seen in our bedroom that morning three years earlier, when my friend Claire called the police after looking through our front window and seeing Joe lying on the stairwell in his own blood.
At the sound of children shouting, Thornburgh looked down the block to a yard near the corner where the Osborne girls, Portia and Rosamund—who were young enough that they didn’t even seem to notice the media chaos on their street—chanted an old camp song as they took turns jumping into a huge leaf pile I’d watched their father rake for them the day before. The detective smiled slightly as he handed me the ficus and turned to leave.
“Is there anything you can do to get them out of here?” I asked, meaning the reporters.
“They’re allowed to be in the street,” he told me, which I already knew. “The only way to get rid of them is if you go down and give them something they can use.” When I hesitated, he added, “Want me to come with?” The childlike phrase made me smile, and I said yes before fear let me change my mind. I set the plant on my car and began to follow him toward the curb.
Before we could reach the reporters, my next-door neighbor Pam Furth approached from where she’d been watching everything on the strip of grass between our driveways.
“Anything I can do, Hanna?” she asked, feigning all care and concern. I knew this was for Kenneth Thornburgh’s benefit, because everyone knew he was a bachelor and Pam, whose husband had divorced her, made no secret of the fact that she was always on the lookout for a new husband.
I didn’t bother to answer her.
As Thornburgh and I approached the street, the reporters began to close in. At the front of the pack I saw Cecilia Baugh, whose face was twisted into an expression calculated to remind me of our past connection, and that she was the one closest to home on my story, since the house she grew up in was just around the block. I looked away from her. Questions were yelled from every direction, all on the order of “How does it feel to hear that Rud Petty will get a new trial?”
“I don’t have any comment, except to say I’m confident he’ll be convicted again.” I spoke slowly, forming each word in my head before I said it.
“Would you mind repeating that, only louder?” someone shouted from the back.
Meeting my eyes and seeing that I was finished, Thornburgh told them, “Give Mrs. Schutt some breathing room, please,” and motioned for me to walk back up toward the house. “I’ll be in touch,” I heard him say under his breath, so only I could hear. “Take care of yourself, okay?”
His words were more than a formality, I knew. I could sense how much lay behind his wish for me—Take care of yourself—and I would have liked to show him that I felt it, but it didn’t seem like something I could afford. All I managed was “Thank you,” and I watched him get back in his car and pull out of the driveway, giving me a gesture that was either a peace sign or half of a wave. I remembered how he’d reached for my hand in the hospital, the first time he came to talk to me there. He’d touched my fingers with the merest hint of a squeeze, which I took to be reassurance and comfort, until he cleared his throat and started asking me to repeat the statements I’d made when he discovered me in our ravaged bed, next to the croquet mallet that had killed my husband and just about killed me.
Before I brought my plant inside, I paused for a moment to listen to the song the Osborne sisters were singing as they climbed to the top of their picnic table, jumped off into the leaves, and scrambled up again. It was a song my older daughter, Iris, had learned years ago at the YMCA day camp we used to send her to, instead of the fancy sleepaway ones—horses, soccer, dramatic arts—her friends attended. We offered to send Dawn to the camp, too, but she said she’d rather stay home. Which I let her do, even though Joe believed it was our duty to push her sometimes. “She needs to get out in the sun,” he said. “She’s too pale.” He was right. Once, a new student in her eighth-grade class asked Dawn if she was an albino.
Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie—those bones gonna rise again! Who’s not ready? Holler aye! Those bones gonna rise again. When I was a child I learned the lyrics as “dem bones,” but of course that wasn’t acceptable anymore, at least in a town like Everton. I wanted to wave at the girls, even though I knew they wouldn’t see it from such a distance. Besides, I knew my house was off-limits to the children who’d moved to the neighborhood in the past few years. Though I tried to ignore it, I knew some people called it the Lizzie Borden House.
And even when I was out walking the dog, the kids avoided me, probably in large part because of the way I looked. Maybe their parents had told them to stay away. It still stung, but I was used to it by now. This Halloween, the same as the last two years, I knew I’d end up with as much candy left in the bowl as I started out with.
In the old days, entering the house through the garage, I would have used my key to get inside, then pushed the buttons on the alarm system to disable it when I entered. I would have taken my shoes off by the back door before stepping into the kitchen. When Abby greeted me with her usual tilted-up, black-snouted sniff-kiss and the expression that meant What are we having for dinner? I would have measured out her food with a cup from the storage tin in its place under the sink. Then I would have picked up the mail and stacked it in order of importance, bills on top. Living with an accountant had taught me to be organized, to think in terms of “systems” for everything in the house. Though it wasn’t my nature, I learned from the beginning of my marriage to sort, check, anticipate, and plan, and it became clear to me quickly why Joe liked to live that way; it made me believe I had control over my life.
But now I didn’t bother with systems anymore. I just poured Abby’s food into her bowl, letting some spill over, and went upstairs to change my clothes, tossing my blouse in the direction of the hamper. After putting on my jeans and an old sweatshirt that had belonged to some boyfriend of Iris’s, I clipped on Abby’s leash and patted her flank the way she liked it. It was better for both of us if I walked her before night fell completely, because we were both afraid of the dark. At the window, I pushed a corner of the curtain aside and saw that Thornburgh had been right. After filming my flimsy quote for their newscasts, the reporters had all gone to file their stories.
Our town was the kind Joe never thought he’d move to. His family had been what he called “blue-collar Buffalo” for three generations before him, and even though he was proud to have left the bad parts of his heritage behind—his father’s drinking and sarcasm, the dependence on food stamps when his father got fired, hand-me-downs that had already been through two cousins before him—he was also committed to not straying too far from his roots. For a year after we were married we lived in an apartment in Albany, but then Joe surprised me by saying he thought we should start looking for a house, and he named a few of the suburbs. When I asked why, he said it was because of the schools. “They’re better out here,” he said, as we drove around Everton checking out For Sale and Open House signs. I wasn’t even thinking of being a mother yet, but as it turned out, with Iris being born the following year, he was right to settle us into the four-bedroom Colonial at 17 Wildwood Lane.
The houses on our street lay in a staggered pattern across from each other, and Wildwood ended in a cul-de-sac bordering the conservation land known as Two Rivers. This was where my friend Claire and I had always met for our walks on Saturday mornings before that Thanksgiving weekend three years earlier, and where I still took Abby for her exercise twice a day. As the dog and I stepped out the back door and through the garage after Thornburgh and the reporters left, she headed automatically in that direction.
There was no denying it anymore—it was starting to get cold. We hadn’t turned the clocks back yet, and technically the sun was still out, but the air held that distinct winter’s-on-its-way feel. I was halfway down the block, pulling the hood of the sweatshirt over my ears, when I heard somebody’s front door open behind me. I shut my eyes for a moment because I knew what was coming, and I hadn’t decided yet how I wanted to feel about it.
Sure enough, Warren Goldman called my name in a low voice, then ran to catch up with me. He hadn’t had time to put on sneakers, but came out instead in his moccasin slippers, the soles slapping softly on the sidewalk.
“Hanna,” he breathed, trying not to give away that the short sprint had winded him. He needed a haircut; little wings lifted away from his neck in the nippy breeze. He hadn’t bothered to grab a jacket, and I could see goose bumps rising on his arms, which were bare beneath their tee-shirt sleeves. The shirt, faded and stretched over his stomach, said THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE. Reading it I smiled to myself, remembering the party he and his wife Maxine had thrown in celebration of Hillary Clinton’s election to the Senate. Joe hadn’t wanted to go, saying he wasn’t a big fan of the Clintons, but I knew his resistance had more to do with the fact that parties made him uncomfortable, and he hated small talk. I let him think I believed his reason for declining, but I liked Hillary and didn’t mind small talk, so I said I was just going over to show my face at the party to be polite, and then I didn’t get home until midnight.
I reminded Warren of that party now, and he smiled. “That was a good one,” he said. His face sobered. “Remember Maxine got out her guitar?”
I felt guilty, even though I hadn’t intended to cause him a painful memory. Warren reached down to scratch Abby behind the ears. Then he straightened quickly, giving out a mild exclamation at the sudden movement and putting a hand on his back, imitating an old man. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you have plans for Thanksgiving? I was going to invite you over, if you didn’t. Our son and his wife are coming.” Ever since Maxine died, two years before Joe, Warren had referred to his wife as if she were still alive. Joe considered it creepy, and I knew other people did, too, but I thought it was sweet. I thought it was touching that he honored her memory this way, even though he must have realized it sounded odd.
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