Death Gets a Time-Out

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Why?”

  “Why did we leave?”

  I nodded.

  “Trudy-Ann’s death put a damper on the fun, I suppose.”

  I blinked at the sarcasm in his tone. The violent death of a wife and mother hardly seemed something someone should joke about, especially if that someone was supposed to be a man of God. “How did Polaris react to the death of his wife?” I asked.

  Hyades rocked forward in his chair and leaned his arms on his desk. “He was devastated, of course, and he was also very worried about the little girl. I remember him holding Lilly in his arms at the funeral. She looked so odd. Pale and silent. Stunned. He just held her close to him. I think that’s when I realized that there was something special about him. That he was spiritually different from other men. There, in the midst of his own grief, he focused on this needy child.”

  I wondered what kind of man this Hyades was if he thought it so unusual that Polaris would have comforted his wife’s child during her funeral. Isn’t that what a parent is supposed to do? It’s certainly what any woman would do. “What happened to her, to Lilly?” I asked.

  “Like I said, she seemed to slip into a catatonic state. She stopped speaking, stopped eating. Polaris sat by her bed for days, feeding her by hand, changing her clothes when she soiled them. He was absolutely devoted to that child. We had a few house meetings to decide what to do, how to help her. Some of us tried to convince Polaris to pretend to her that it hadn’t happened. To tell her a different story about how Trudy-Ann died. After all, it seemed pretty clear that the girl remembered nothing. At one point I think he even considered it. One of the girls had a father who was a psychologist back in the States. Polaris called him, to ask what to do with Lilly, how to help her. The doctor said that lying to her wouldn’t do her any good. Even if we could all convince her that she hadn’t killed her mother, that Trudy-Ann had died in some other kind of accident, somewhere in Lilly’s mind she would always know the truth. That truth would torment her. The trauma would express itself in some other way.”

  “So what did Polaris do?”

  “It became clear that Lilly wasn’t going to get any better in San Miguel. She needed intensive therapy, and there wasn’t any to be had there. At the time it was nothing more than a primitive little city in the Northern Highlands of Mexico. Polaris sent Lilly back to the States to live with her father. You must understand, this was a very traumatic decision for him. He was much more than the girl’s stepfather. When Polaris and Trudy-Ann got together, he stepped into a void in Lilly’s life. Raymond hadn’t paid any attention to her since she was a baby. Polaris became her father in every way. Sending her away was absolutely devastating for him. He made Raymond promise that he’d get therapy for the girl. I think Polaris even paid for it himself. Not that he had two dimes to rub together back then. But whatever he did have, he sent to Raymond, to pay for Lilly’s treatment. It was clearly the right decision. She ended up coming out of her catatonic state. And the rest, of course, is history. Oscar-winning history.”

  “If he was so attached to her, why didn’t he have more of a relationship with her after he returned to the States?”

  “He tried. He always kept up with her, through Raymond. When he came home, he visited her. He brought Jupiter to see her—the two children were very close. But it soon became clear that his presence served only to remind her of the trauma she’d experienced. Raymond and Beverly were married by then, and they asked Polaris to stay away, for Lilly’s sake. He did, by and large. I think he and Jupiter would come to see her every once in a while, but not often. Losing his place in the child’s life was a tremendous sacrifice for Polaris. But he did it for her; to keep her mind from breaking again.”

  I tried to imagine that pompous oddity enthroned on his wicker chair with his robes and ringed toes and his history of smacking people around as the devoted father Hyades described. It was hard, but not impossible. Even the most peculiar, the most self-absorbed, the most abusive people can love their children, especially when those children are small. When they are young, vulnerable, and utterly dependent on you for their very existence, it is so easy to be devoted to them. As they grow older and begin the work of separating from you, that’s when loving them becomes much more of a challenge.

  “Of course, by then, Polaris had much more important work to do,” Hyades said. “He had an entire flock to care for, not just a single little girl.”

  “How did that happen?” I asked. “How did the CCU start?”

  Hyades smiled. “You mean, how did we go from a commune in San Miguel to all this?” He waved around the room, symbolically taking in all the CCU campus and its various holdings.

  “Exactly.”

  “It began soon after Trudy-Ann and Lilly were gone. Polaris was deeply moved by the Mexican funeral rites, by the celebrations of the day of the dead. The Mexicans understand death to be a part of life. It is simply another passage, a transition, that each of us must experience. He began to study the Aztec and Mayan civilizations, and found inspiration in their shamans’ teachings about the spirit world. Birth is the emergence from the world of the spirit. Death is simply the return back home to the spirit realm. Then, as Polaris immersed himself in these teachings, he had a transformative moment of epiphany.”

  I could tell that Hyades had told the story of the CCU’s origins many times—that it was something of a ritual. His voice had become sonorous almost in imitation of his boss, although without the Brooklyn accent. He stared up at the ceiling, his palms open on the tabletop.

  “One night, Polaris climbed to the top of a hill outside San Miguel. He lay on his back and stared at the night sky. Suddenly, a silvery beam of light shone from the stars, directly into his eyes. It was the gaze of our fathers in the spirit realms of the planetary heavens.” I stared at him, wondering how a man who seemed perfectly intelligent, and not a little cynical, could believe what sounded to me like such utter nonsense. He face betrayed no skepticism, and yet I wasn’t convinced. Was there something a tiny bit ironic about his tone?

  Hyades continued. “The fathers looked down to this world and saw below them on that hillside a pure and true guide. They found, after millennia of searching, the man who could bring the truth to this world. The beam of light transferred teachings directly from the heavens into Polaris’s very mind. In an instant, the wisdom of the ages was given to him. And the Church of Cosmological Unity was born.”

  Either Hyades genuinely believed in the spiritual nonsense that had made them all so tremendously wealthy, or he was a remarkably adept faker. I decided to bring the conversation back to the terrestrial plane.

  “Do you know if Chloe knew about Trudy-Ann’s death? About Lilly’s involvement in it? Would Polaris have told her about it?”

  Hyades shook his head firmly. “No. I know for certain that he would never have told Chloe anything. We all swore a blood oath to keep what happened an absolute secret. Polaris cut his own palm and pressed it to the open wound of everyone who lived in that house at the time. He would never have violated his vow, even within the bonds of marriage.”

  I blinked at the minister. “I’m not sure I understand. If you took a vow, why did you tell me everything just now?”

  He shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “You knew the bare bones of the story already. It was important for you to understand that truth.”

  I nodded. There was only one other question I had. “Reverend Hyades, is it true that Polaris has a history of violent behavior? I’ve been told that he was aggressive with Jupiter, and that he hit his wife at least once.”

  Hyades shook his head. “That is the most ridiculous allegation I’ve ever heard. Nonviolence is one of the major tenets of the CCU. If there’s nothing else . . .” He rang a bell on his desk, and his devoted acolyte came to escort me back to my car.

  Sixteen

  THE next morning I got a welcome phone call from Wasserman. The judge had agreed to an inpatient placement for Jupiter. He could get out of ja
il, as long as he checked into a rehab facility approved by the court.

  “It was really your insistence that inspired me to press for his release,” Wasserman said to me. “Why don’t you tell him the good news.”

  I rushed down to the jail as soon as I dumped the kids at school. Despite all my pleading, and my threats to get sick right on the desk to prove to them how much I needed it, I could not get the marshals to allow me to take my Ziploc baggy with half a lemon in it into the visiting room. I was about to give up and deposit the lemon in the locker that already held my cell phone, purse, and shopping bag full of nausea-abatement snacks when a female guard approached the front desk.

  “What’s up?” she asked. She looked familiar; then I recalled that she’d been working at the jail back when I was at the federal defender. In those days, even though I’d spent most of my time at the federal lock-up, I’d still gone to county often enough to know most of the guards. I knew which ones would keep me waiting in between the security doors for no reason other than that they just didn’t like defense lawyers. I knew which ones would cinch my client’s handcuffs just tight enough to hurt. And I knew which ones would wish me a pleasant day, or take an extra moment to allow an inmate a lingering goodbye with a wife or child. She was, I remembered, one of the good ones.

  “This lady’s trying to bring food into the visiting room,” said the guard who’d been giving me a hard time, holding up my lemon in its plastic bag.

  The female guard was small, not much taller than I, and round. Her uniform strained over the shelf of her breasts, and her hair was ironed into a precise bob. Her skin was nut brown, and she had a pleasant smile that she shone my way. “Morning sickness?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “I read about that lemon trick in one of my pregnancy books,” she said. “Never did much for me.”

  “I thought the lemon might help with the smell in there,” I said. “It’s just awful when you’re pregnant.”

  “Don’t I know it. I’ve got five kids, and I was sick as a dog with every single one of them. You think the smell in the visiting room is bad, you should try it up in the SHU, when the inmates plug up their toilets and they overflow into the halls. It’s enough to make you want to die.”

  I groaned. “You know what? I think I’ll give that a miss.”

  “You can keep that lemon,” she said. “It’s not going to do you a bit of good, but go ahead and bring it on in with you.”

  She was right, of course. The lemon didn’t do a bit of good. I kept myself from throwing up only by stuffing my mouth full of Spicee Hot, the ginger-flavored chewing gum Peter had found for me in a Chinese grocery store.

  Jupiter mustered a smile when he saw me waiting for him, and I saw a flash of the charming boy that lurked under the miserable inmate he’d become. I smiled back, and said, “I’ve got really good news.”

  His eyes widened and his lip began to tremble. “Bail?” he whispered.

  “Yup,” I said. His eyes filled with tears and he laughed. “Wait,” I continued. “Before you get too excited, you’re going to have to go into an inpatient drug treatment facility.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “I mean, it’s better. I want to be in rehab. Can I go back to Ojai? Would that be okay?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I mean, the court might decide it’s too far away. You need to be back in Pasadena for your court appearances.”

  “That wouldn’t be a problem. At least I don’t think it will.”

  He grabbed my hand and squeezed it. I jumped a little. This was the first time he’d touched me other than to shake my hand. I patted him on the wrist and said, “I’ll talk to Wasserman about it. Maybe. We’ll see, okay? Now it will take some time to engineer the release; to get the rehab center approved, and all that.”

  His face fell and he dropped my hand. “How long?”

  “Maybe a week,” I said.

  He sighed. “Okay. I can handle that. A week.”

  “But now we’ve got work to do,” I said. Jupiter and I made a list of every teacher he’d ever had who thought he was a decent student, every person he’d been close to who thought he was a decent human being. We carefully listed every job he’d ever worked, from his stint as an usher in a movie theater in high school to the Mexican surf shack he worked in during his escapes to Baja, to the computer game companies that had expressed interest in his designs. Finally, when I was confident that I had the names of absolutely everyone who would have a remotely kind word to say about him, I stacked up my papers and buckled them up in my briefcase. Jupiter began to rise from his seat, but I put out a restraining hand.

  “There’s something else we need to talk about,” I said.

  He sat back down and looked at me, his eyebrows slightly raised.

  “Lilly told me about what Chloe was doing to her. About the blackmail. And she told me that she asked you for help.” Jupiter grew very still, except for his fingers, which were spread out on the tabletop. They trembled, tapping the Formica. Suddenly, he clenched his fists and shoved his hands into his lap.

  “You don’t need to tell me anything,” I said. “I’m a part of your defense team, and what you say to me is confidential, but at the same time, I have certain obligations. I’m sure Wasserman told you this, but I’ll say it again. A defense attorney is an officer of the court. As such, we aren’t allowed to put testimony that we know is perjured on the stand. Let me explain what that means. If you tell me something, like, for instance, if you tell me that you killed Chloe . . .” He opened his mouth to object, but I raised my hand. “This is purely hypothetical. If you admit something like that to me, then your options will become limited. If you choose to take the stand, Wasserman will not be allowed to have you testify that you were innocent of the crime. A lawyer can present testimony that he doesn’t personally believe, but he’s forbidden to present testimony that he knows for certain is a lie. So if you tell him, or me, that you did it, you won’t be able to testify that you didn’t. Do you understand?”

  He nodded.

  “Understanding what I just explained to you, is there anything you want to tell me about what happened between you and Chloe?”

  He chewed his lip. “I didn’t kill her. I’m going to tell that to the jury. I didn’t kill her.” He looked up at me. “I’m not just saying that because of what you told me. It’s true. I didn’t kill her.” He stared into my eyes unflinchingly.

  “Was she blackmailing Lilly?”

  “Yes. I mean, that’s what Lilly told me, and I’m sure it’s true. She wouldn’t lie.”

  “Why did you tell me that you didn’t know how Trudy-Ann died?”

  He blushed. “Because . . . you know. For Lilly.”

  “But you do know, of course.”

  He nodded.

  “Did you see it? Did you see Lilly shoot her mother?”

  “No. I was looking for Lilly, I think. I was in the hallway when everything started happening. I remember seeing some stuff, mostly just the blood, I guess. And the sound of everybody screaming.” His voice faded away.

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  “No, not really. I was really little. I don’t remember very much from Mexico at all. I remember Lilly, though. I loved her so much.”

  “Do you still?”

  He nodded. “She’s my sister, you know? Even if our parents were only married when we were little kids. She’s my sister. She’ll always be my sister.”

  “Did you confront Chloe about what she was doing to your sister?”

  “I tried to. When we were lying out at the pool together. I told her she had to stop blackmailing Lilly, but she just told me that I was in over my head, and then she laughed at me.”

  “And then what happened?”

  He paused, and a dull red flush crept up his neck. “Then she . . . she got up and went into my bedroom.”

  “And you followed her?”

  He nodded.

  “To have sex?”

 
; He nodded again.

  “Did you talk any more about Lilly when you were . . . done?”

  He shook his head. “No. It felt, I don’t know, wrong or something, to keep talking about it. You know, while we were in bed. I knew I had to talk to her. I mean, I promised Lilly I would get her to stop. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it there, in bed. I guess I figured I’d talk to her about it later.”

  “And did you talk to her about it later?”

  He shook his head. “There wasn’t any later. She was killed before I had a chance to see her again.”

  I believed him.

  I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe that Jupiter had killed Chloe in a fit of rage after she’d refused to stop blackmailing Lilly. I wanted the murder to have taken place like that, because then Wasserman could argue that it was an unpremeditated homicide, carried out under the influence of emotion or provocation. Premeditation is a necessary part of first-degree murder. Without it, the murder is at worst second degree, and not subject to the death penalty. Presenting the argument would also allow the defense to introduce evidence of Chloe’s scheming behavior, her flouting of the law, her lack of anything resembling a sense of moral decency. I wanted Jupiter not to be innocent, but to be guilty of that lesser crime, because the other possibility was intolerable to me. The idea that my friend Lilly was guilty of murder was unacceptable. But I believed him. God help me, I believed that Jupiter Jones was innocent.

  Seventeen

  WHEN I got home that afternoon, I found Lilly sitting at my kitchen table and my husband lying on the floor at her feet.

  “Am I interrupting something?” I asked, trying to pretend a nonchalance I didn’t feel.

  “I found him like this,” Lilly said, and laughed.

  I looked at her closely. Was she a murderer? I shook myself. Of course she wasn’t. She was my friend. I would know if she were capable of murder. Wouldn’t I?