by Luanne Rice
“My boyfriend called her,” I said.
“What’s her name?”
“Mary McLaughlin,” I said.
“I know her,” Officer Fincher said. “I know most of the defense attorneys.” I waited for her to make a comment about Mary McLaughlin being smart, or good, one of the best, but by then our eye-to-eye, woman-to-woman moment had passed.
Finally Officer Fincher left, and I was alone.
I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. I couldn’t stand looking at those scrubbed mint green walls terrorizing me with the idea I might be here forever. I kept hearing the panic and disbelief in Paul’s voice when I called him at our apartment. I wondered if I’d ever get to return to Chelsea, to Paul, our cats, our friends, and my work at the institute for Avian Studies.
I thought of Anne. She must have gone to the hospital with Frederik. I wondered how badly I had injured him—not because I care about him, but because I’m worried about my sister and what he’ll do to her and the children if he recovers. He doesn’t deserve her lying for him.
On my way into jail, I passed through two sets of locked metal doors. The sound of them clanging shut has lodged deep in my brain. Guards were stationed at desks behind bulletproof glass, with just a slit at the bottom, through which one sheriff’s deputy handed my papers. A radio was playing, and between the first set of doors I heard the sung phrase “We stole some clothes, but I wanted love; I know that my sister did too …” And by the time the sheriff’s deputies, one on each side of me and my heart skittering up my throat, rushed me through the second set of steel doors, my mind called up the next part of the song: “… Lilly Pulitzer gave up her ghosts; we wore pink, but inside we were blue …” I can’t be sure whether I actually heard that second phrase or only imagined it. But it didn’t matter because suddenly I was not only hearing “Crime Spree”—a song from long ago—but singing along with Anne, years before she’d met Frederik, one summer day in Central Park, lying on our blanket in the Sheep Meadow, tanning in bikinis and listening to WABC. We were fifteen and sixteen. Blue sky, sun, the park, being together.
The Sheep Meadow was packed with sunbathers, but we found a clear spot without too many little kids around, within easy sight of three Collegiate School boys we knew from the Gold and Silvers, the Christmas dance at the Plaza, who were playing Frisbee.
We sprayed Sun-in on strategic face-framing strands of our black-brown hair—blond was one dream that would never come true. My hair was long and straight, Anne’s short and wavy; I wanted hers, and she wanted mine.
Scorching heat filled the city like milk in a bowl—it rose up from the sidewalks, the pavement, and the park’s walkways, benches, dry grass, and lumpy boulders of New York gneiss and Manhattan schist.
“Crime Spree” came on, and we liked the song’s cockiness, the attitude: two sisters against the hard world, behaving badly in ways we would only sing about. They’d lost each other somehow, an idea unthinkable to us.
She kissed the lawyers on Folly Beach
I scammed on Azalea Square
Northern good girls on a southern crime spree
On the road with nothing to wear.
Sometimes the world is a crazy place,
It gives and it takes right away,
If I could trade everything just for a space
In her life, well I’d do that today.
We had to leave home but we didn’t know why
We each had a stone in our shoe
We spoke the same language no one else could hear
Big sister, you know I miss you.
Kids came around with black garbage bags full of ice and Heinekens, and Anne bought six beers for us.
We were underage, but she was my older sister, and no one cared anyway. We both liked to get numb. We lay on our stomachs, bikini tops untied to drive a group of Frisbee-playing Trinity School boys crazy, and she told me the tallest was named Park, and she kind of liked him.
Sitting in jail, I wished for “Crime Spree” to be a sign. I felt the spirits of our young selves fly down from the heaven where wisps of brave, radiant teenage girls go once their dull, inducted middle-aged replacements take over.
I had to believe that the ghosts of the young, wild Burke sisters had taken over the guards’ favorite radio station just long enough to blast twelve seconds of that song to give me strength and remind me of my sister: not the Anne now, but the Anne then. To remind me of why I’d done this for her.
I want the song and memory to drive away the knowledge that I’d completed Frederik’s job for him, convinced Anne to cut me from her and the children’s lives for good. The spider silk of today’s reconnection would break. We would become reestranged, only in a much worse way. The song is in my head, but so is a map of the future.
I tried to kill her husband. My lawyer will say I was defending my sister, but Frederik will convince Anne at least to pretend to see it his way. He will get her to deny my story and show the court my letters and e-mails, proof of my feelings about him. I will serve time in jail, no matter how good Mary McLaughlin—a friend of Sarah’s—might be. Anne will never visit or write to me. Her kids will grow up and I’ll never know them.
A man who fears and despises me will write my future.
