by Joy Fielding
“Promise you won’t get angry,” Jo Lynn began, as every muscle in my body began twisting into spasms.
“Please don’t tell me she was with you all day.”
“It was very educational for her. She’s never been inside a courtroom before. Which is shameful, when you think about it. I mean, she’s going to be eighteen on her next birthday.”
Assuming she lives that long, I almost said, but didn’t. It was Jo Lynn, after all, whom I wanted to kill. “You took her to court with you,” I said, as Larry gazed up at the ceiling, his eyes frozen in disbelief, as if he’d been shot.
“Well, you wouldn’t go with me.”
So it was my fault, I thought, almost afraid to say another word. “Tell me you didn’t take her with you to the jail.”
“Of course I took her with me. What did you expect me to do—leave her alone in the middle of North Dixie Highway? That’s not the greatest area, you know.”
“You took her to meet Colin Friendly?”
“No, of course not. She waited in the waiting room. Wait till you hear about this visit, Kate. It was incredible.”
“You took my daughter to the county jail,” I repeated numbly.
“That is some amazing place,” Jo Lynn babbled, oblivious to my hands reaching through the phone wires for her throat. “I was really nervous, but Sara was great. She was my navigator, directing me to the visitors’ parking, and telling me to relax, that I looked beautiful, all that stuff that girlfriends are supposed to say.”
“Sara isn’t your girlfriend,” I reminded her. “She’s your niece, and she’s half your age.”
“What’s age got to do with it?” Jo Lynn demanded testily. “Really, Kate, you don’t give your daughter enough credit. She says you treat her like a child, and she’s right.”
“I treat her like a child because she acts like one.”
“You sound just like our mother.”
“Someone has to sound like an adult.”
“Anyway,” Jo Lynn continued, “we had to walk across a bridge to get to the inmate visitation area. It was like a moat, you know, like around a castle. Actually, it’s quite a pretty building,” she said, one word running into the next, as if she were afraid I might hang up were she to take a breath.
I’d been considering doing just that, and I’m not sure why I didn’t. I tried telling myself that I was waiting to speak to Sara, which necessitated wading through the rest of Jo Lynn’s story, but I’m not sure that’s the truth. Listening to Jo Lynn was akin to driving by the site of a bad accident. No matter how hard you tried not to look, you couldn’t turn away.
“You go in the front entrance, and there are all these signs. Stop! Read! The following personal items will not be allowed into the facility past the metal detector! And then it lists fourteen things, fourteen! And you wouldn’t believe what some of them are—cell phones, diaper bags, hats. Hats!” she shrieked with obvious disbelief. “And then you get to security, and there are these other signs, the usual ones about no smoking, stuff like that, but then this really funny one that says, No Firearms, Ammunition, or Weapons of any kind beyond this point. We had a good laugh about that one. I mean, who would be stupid enough to bring a weapon to a jailhouse?”
Probably someone stupid enough to bring their seventeen-year-old niece, I thought but didn’t say.
“I told them my name and who I was there to see, and they looked at me like, I don’t know, like with new respect or something, because I wasn’t there to see some nobody who’s robbed the local 7-Eleven. And I had to sign in and everything, and we sat down in this waiting area, which wasn’t the greatest place in the world. Just a bunch of uncomfortable blue chairs, and the rest of the room was this icky shade of gray. But there were vending machines, so I bought us some Cokes, but I only got to have a couple of sips before they called my name, and I had to leave my Coke behind because they won’t allow any food or beverages into the visitors’ rooms. Not even gum. Can you believe that?”
“So you left Sara in the waiting room by herself.”
“There were other people there. It’s not like I abandoned her. She was fine. She was enjoying herself.”
“Can I speak to her?”
“She’s still asleep.”
“Then wake her up. And bring her home. Now.”
“Why? So you can yell at her? She didn’t do anything wrong.”
“She skipped school,” I reminded my sister. “She didn’t come home last night.”
“She was with me. And I tried to reach you. Several times. Trust me, she learned more yesterday out in the real world than she would have at school. She’ll write an essay about it, get an A.”
“You had no right …”
“Lighten up,” Jo Lynn said. “It’s over, and the kid had a great time. Don’t ruin it for her.”
“Just wake her up and bring her home,” I instructed.
“Soon,” Jo Lynn said stubbornly.
“Not soon. Now.”
Jo Lynn’s response was to hang up the phone. I turned toward Larry. He shook his head and walked from the room.
It was almost four o’clock when I heard Jo Lynn’s car pull into the driveway. Larry had left the house at two for the driving range, afraid that if he waited one more minute for my sister to show up with our daughter, he would explode. I encouraged him to go. I was way past anger by this time.
Michelle was off with her girlfriends, and I was alone in the house. I moved from room to room, compartmentalizing my anger, tucking it away, like knickknacks into a drawer, rationalizing it out of reach. Sara was safe, I told myself, and I knew where she was. No harm had befallen her. Missing one day of school wasn’t the end of the world. She’d easily make it up. She’d spent the night with my sister, and my sister had called twice. It was my fault that I hadn’t returned her calls. I couldn’t be angry with my daughter for my sister’s lack of judgment. And what was the point in being angry with Jo Lynn? Had it ever done me any good?
By four o’clock, I’d settled into an eerie calm. I would greet them at the door, thank my sister for bringing Sara home, get rid of her as quickly and as painlessly as possible, then wait till Larry got home to talk to Sara. We’d already agreed the best way to deal with her was without the fireworks she’d be expecting, and possibly even counting on. We would give her nothing to rage at. The less said, the better. Sara wasn’t stupid; she knew what she’d done wrong. There would be consequences for her actions; it remained only for Larry and me to decide what those consequences might be.
Jo Lynn pushed past me as soon as I opened the front door.
“Where’s Sara?” I asked, staring toward the old red Toyota leaking oil on my driveway.
“She’s in the car.”
I strained to see her through the glass of the car’s dirty front window. “Where? I don’t see anybody.”
“She’s hiding.”
“Hiding? That’s ridiculous. What does she think I’m going to do?” I was about to step outside.
“Don’t go out there,” she warned, her voice stopping me. “I promised her I’d talk to you first.”
“I think we’ve talked enough,” I said, calm giving way to anxiety.
Jo Lynn reached over and closed the front door. “I promised her,” she repeated. “You don’t want to make a liar out of me, do you?”
I’d like to make mincemeat out of you, I wanted to say, taking note of her white T-shirt and short shorts, her newly trimmed hair. I restrained myself, forced a smile onto my lips.
“You’re angry,” she said. Obviously my smile lacked a certain degree of sincerity, and besides, Jo Lynn had always been very good at stating the obvious.
“You got your hair cut,” I said.
She fluffed at the sides of her blond curls. “This afternoon. You like it? It’s only a few inches.”
“It looks very nice.”
“Look, I know I shouldn’t have asked Sara to go with me without first clearing it with you,” she said, catching me
by surprise. Jo Lynn was not one who apologized easily. “But I was really nervous, and I didn’t want to go alone, and I really needed someone to go with me, and I knew you wouldn’t come.”
“You’re saying it’s my fault?”
“No, of course it’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault. There is no fault. I’m just saying that if you’d been a little more understanding, a little more sympathetic …”
“I would have gone with you, and you wouldn’t have had to drag my daughter down with you,” I said, completing her sentence. This was more the sort of apology from Jo Lynn that I was used to.
“Well, yes,” she said. “I really needed you. And you weren’t there for me.”
I nodded, took a deep breath. I was no longer anxious. I was on fire. Beads of sweat broke out across my forehead and upper lip. Jo Lynn didn’t notice.
“It was so incredible, Kate,” she was saying. “It was the most amazing thing being there in that jail with Colin.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then instantly thought better of it. The more I protested, the longer this scene would drag out. So I said nothing, wiped the perspiration from my lip, and waited for her to finish.
“I was wearing this new white dress I bought that I thought he would like, and I was right, he loved it. It’s very classy, not too short, not too low-cut. Subtle, you know.”
I nodded. My definition of subtle and Jo Lynn’s definition of subtle were not to be found in the same dictionary.
“Anyway, I was a nervous wreck all afternoon. But Colin was really great, he kept looking over at me in the courtroom, giving me his little smile, like he was telling me not to worry, that it was all going to work out fine. And, of course, Sara was so sweet. She was holding my hand, and telling me how cute he was, and how romantic the whole thing was, kind of like Robin Hood and Maid Marian, and making me feel better. And I was telling her not to believe all the awful things people were saying about him on the witness stand.”
“So you went to the jail,” I said, trying to hurry her along.
“We went to the jail, and I told you about the moat and the signs and everything.”
“You told me.”
“Well, the room where you visit with the prisoners is on the second floor. Longest walk of my life, I tell you.” She giggled. “I was so nervous. It was this long room with a glass partition, and you sit on one side of the partition and the prisoner sits on the other and you talk into these phones. It’s really silly. I mean, they’ve already made us leave everything behind, our cell phones, our diaper bags, our hats, for God’s sake, so why do we have to be behind glass? They don’t even let you touch. I mean, I think that’s cruel and unusual punishment, don’t you?”
I said nothing. This is cruel and unusual punishment, I thought.
“So, I’m waiting there behind the glass. There are a few other people in there too, talking to their husbands or whatever, but everybody stops and looks up when they bring Colin into the room. I mean, he’s really a celebrity. He has this aura, you know.” She paused. I assumed this was for effect, and I tried to look suitably impressed. “So, the guard directs him over to his chair, and all the while he’s looking at me and smiling that sad little smile of his, and I’m thinking that he is so gorgeous, I’m about to wet my pants, and then he sits down and he picks up his receiver and I pick up mine, and we just start talking, like we’ve known each other all our lives. He has a little bit of a stutter that’s just so endearing. He tells me how grateful he is for my support, how he loves coming to court every day because he knows he’s going to see me, and how much he appreciates my faith in his innocence. He’s so polite, Kate. He’s a real gentleman. And he has a great sense of humor. I think you’d like him.”
I cleared my throat to keep from screaming. I stared hard at the floor.
“He wanted to know all about me, the kinds of things I like, what I like to do. Oh, and he asked about you.”
My head snapped up sharply, as if I were a puppet whose strings had been yanked. “What?”
“He remembers you from court,” she said, her voice growing instantly defensive.
“And what did you tell him?”
“That you were my sister, that you were a therapist. He laughed about that, said he’d have to meet you one of these days.”
I shuddered, felt my body grow cold.
“And he thought Sara was absolutely beautiful.”
“Good God.”
“He said that …”
“I’m not interested in anything else that monster had to say.” I moved briskly to the front door and yelled toward the shadowy figure in the car. “Sara, get in here this minute.”
“Don’t get angry when you see what she’s done,” Jo Lynn began. “I think it looks spectacular.”
“What looks spectacular? What are you talking about now?”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
If I hadn’t already known that it was Sara in the front seat of the car, I probably wouldn’t have recognized her. The creature who emerged from the red Toyota was familiar to me only by height and the size of her bosom. Her long brown tresses had been trimmed to shoulder length and bleached ash blond. The flowered-print Indian blouse and blue jeans had been replaced by a tight white T-shirt and red-and-white-checkered miniskirt.
“The clothes are mine,” Jo Lynn offered unnecessarily. “That hippie stuff didn’t exactly go with the new hair.”
She looks like a hooker, I thought, too stunned to say anything out loud. Actually, I realized as Sara walked past me and straight into her bedroom, she looked just like Jo Lynn.
Chapter 12
We tried not to make too big a deal about Sara’s hair, reasoning that anything negative we might say would only encourage her further, and anything positive would only be misinterpreted. I went so far as a meek “So, how does it feel to be blond?” Larry mumbled something about everybody needing a change now and then. It was left to Michelle, as usual, to state what was obvious: “My God, what did you do to your hair?” she screamed as soon as she saw her sister. “It looks awful!”
Actually, it didn’t look awful. It just took some getting used to, and over the course of the next few weeks, we all sincerely tried. But Sara never makes things easy, and she was, by turns, remote, nasty, defensive, and hostile. Everything but contrite. Anything but sorry. We never got an apology for our night of anguish; we received no assurances she wouldn’t put us through it again. For a while I tried pretending that she was a character in a play, dropped temporarily into our world to provide some much-needed comic relief. But in the long run, it was hard to find her funny. Interestingly, she did write an essay for her English class about her day in court, as Jo Lynn had suggested. Naturally, she received an A. So much for consequences.
It was around this time that Larry started his gradual retreat from the rest of the family. At first, it was just Sara he avoided, reasoning that the less contact he had with her, the less chance of conflict, the less chance of heartache. So whenever possible, when Sara was at home, Larry wasn’t. His workdays got longer, his golf games more frequent. The result of this, of course, was that Michelle and I saw that much less of him too, but in those weeks before Thanksgiving, this subtle shifting away from us went largely unnoticed. I was pretty busy myself. The holiday season, contrary to popular myth, is not a time of unrestrained joy and merriment. It does not bring out the best in people. In fact, just the opposite is true. My office calendar was booked solid through Christmas and into the new year.
And then there was the little matter of my mother and sister, both of whom I decided were, in their own unique ways, completely looney tunes. My sister continued her public vigil at the courthouse and her private visits to the jail. My mother expanded her list of complaints: if strange men weren’t following her, they were banging on her door at all hours of the night, and whispering obscene messages over the phone; certain women on her floor were plotting to have her thrown out of the building; she was receiving smaller po
rtions at mealtimes than any of the other residents; Mrs. Winchell was trying to starve her out.
She began calling me, both at the office and at home, at least fifteen times a day. Hers was the first call I received in the morning and the last one I took at night. One minute, she’d be hollering; two minutes later, she’d be as pleasant as could be. Often, she’d be crying.
I didn’t blame my husband for not wanting any part of either my mother or my sister at this point. They weren’t his family, after all. His family was quiet and sweet and had never given us any trouble. His mother, widowed a decade earlier, lived in South Carolina, two blocks from Larry’s older brother, and next door to a lovely widower she’d been seeing for the last five years. We made occasional forays into each other’s territory, and such visits were always unfailingly pleasant. No, it was only my family that was ever, and increasingly, problematic. Had I been able to escape them, I would have. Hadn’t I already tried?
So, I honestly didn’t mind that in those weeks surrounding Thanksgiving, Larry was rarely at home. In a perverse way, I was probably even grateful. It was one less person to worry about.
Thanksgiving itself was strangely calm. The proverbial lull before the storm. We celebrated at our house, and everyone was on their best behavior. Larry was a genial host, expertly carving the turkey and making small talk with my mother, who was pleasant and talkative and minus her recent paranoia. Jo Lynn came conservatively dressed in a white silk shirt and black crepe pants, and refrained from mentioning either Colin Friendly or his trial, which was on a week’s hiatus. Sara, whose dark brown roots were beginning to intrude rudely on her otherwise ashen mane, was helpful with the dishes and attentive to her grandmother. “Who is that sweet thing?” my mother whispered at one point during the evening, and I laughed, thinking she was making a joke, realizing only later that she really didn’t know. At its conclusion, Michelle pronounced the evening a resounding success. “Almost like a normal family,” she said, proffering her cheek for me to kiss good night.
