Time and Trouble

by Gillian Roberts

  The defense lawyer, an old friend of Emma’s, wanted the skinny on the accuser, one Tina Bright, twenty-six, divorced and childless. Wanted whatever damaging information would weaken Ms. Bright’s stance as the irate madonna. Unfortunately, Mr. D was known to be a letch, but he insisted on his innocence this time.

  This job sounded infinitely more enjoyable than tracking a sulky, mixed-up teen. Now Billie could work with maladjusted adults.

  What should she wear? Would Emma think a question about what people who worked in a tchotchke factory wore would demonstrate ignorance or a lack of imagination? Billie felt a flare of anger—at herself for the dithers and at Emma for creating a climate that gave her the dithers.

  She decided to hang it up for the week. Might as well be with Jesse during a portion of daylight hours. Make a real dinner and give Ivan bonus free time.

  She pulled her bag off the back of the chair and half stood up, but reconsidered. The weekend that so beckoned her must look excruciatingly long to Penny Redmond. Maybe a call before she left. Nobody, meaning Emma, would know and Billie, upon hearing that all was as well as could be expected, could selfishly enjoy her own weekend.

  Penny sounded tired.

  “Thought I’d check in and see if everything’s all right,” Billie said.

  “Guess so.”

  “Last night went all right?”

  She could almost hear the teenager shrug. “Wesley freaked. About Mom and the shooting and all. And the cops were here, looking for evidence, and that didn’t help. But it’s all right. I stayed in his top bunk and that calmed him down, and when he went to school today, he seemed mostly okay.”

  “Did you go to school?”

  Long silence. “It’s just that…it’s going to be a hassle, my missing so much. Tuesday, after the long weekend, I’ll go. I kind of… Today, it’s Friday, anyway, and with all the other things, you know?”

  Billie murmured assent. It had been an incredible blow to the head—her boyfriend killed, her father a corrupt criminal who attempted to kill her and her mother—all in twenty-four hours. She must be reeling.

  “The thing is…?” Penny left it an open question.

  “Yes?”

  “Wesley should be home by now, but he isn’t. I went looking for him, but I couldn’t find him.” The idea didn’t sound complete, but Penny left more heavy air in her wake.

  “And you’re worried,” Billie said.

  A deep breath. “Like I should have been at the bus stop maybe, even though he’d hate it if I treated him like a baby.”

  “Does he have friends he visits after school?”

  “He’s not allowed to just go off and…” She seemed to remember that those who allowed or disallowed were not around. “He knows I’d worry.”

  Billie thought of the knobby-jointed boy’s profound attachment to his sister. Disappearing did not sound like the little she knew of Wesley, and Penny obviously agreed.

  “I mean he’s not that late,” Penny said, “but all the same.…”

  Billie glanced at the doorway, making sure the prison matron wasn’t around to observe what she was about to do. The door was clear, with only Zack outside at his desk. “I’m just leaving the office,” Billie said. “Would you want me to stop off at your house? Help you figure this out?”

  “I’d like that,” Penny said. “I don’t know why I’m so jumpy, but I’d feel a lot better if he’d come home.” She sounded younger and less sure of herself by the second.

  “Give me time to clean up here and take care of a few things,” Billie said. “And try not to worry.” When she hung up, she considered what she might have meant by saying she’d help Penny figure out where Wesley was, given that she hadn’t exactly proven herself a bloodhound in finding Penny herself.

  Emma was right. She should back off and leave this to whatever community Penny already had, the people who knew her, knew Wesley, like the next-door neighbor. Sunny. The pretty woman with the gorgeous life. The one who’d stirred up negative sensations, a sense of having been insulted by her. Snubbed. Treated shabbily.

  And then an image, like a flashcard behind her eyes. Outside a nursery school, near Billie’s home, maybe four months earlier. She saw the blonde woman holding the hand of her four-year-old as they entered the building. Billie had been on her way to work at the mall, frantically assembling herself as she walked to the bus stop—her car was in the shop. She was going to be late, was going to be further in debt because of the car; her morning coffee burned at her stomach walls, her son had been having a tantrum she had to will over to Ivan, she’d felt raggedy and badly put together, and the day had barely begun. And there was this woman in a tennis outfit, the tiny skirt barely covering perfect legs, and on the wrist of the hand holding the child’s, a bracelet set with diamonds that caught the morning light. And then the woman laughed, a silver-gold sound that was echoed by her child as they entered the excellent preschool that Billie was never going to be able to afford for her son.

  The sight had burned itself into her retinas, stopped her dead on the pavement as if it was a physical blow.

  That privileged woman with the world’s options laid out like a buffet had been Sunny Marshall Billie now realized. Or perhaps not. But the image, the envy, the aversion and sorrow had been directed at someone close enough to who and what Sunny was, and Billie still felt its long-lasting half-life, even when the actual woman had been nothing but warm and pleasant. It was interesting and troubling to think about what this meant about her powers of judgment. Maybe of anybody’s.

  “Am I interrupting?”

  Billie stifled her automatic apologies—for thinking, for breathing—and waved Emma in.

  Emma entered, then stood in front of Billie’s desk, declining an offer to sit down. “I’ll be just a minute. Wanted to tell you… Well, the I.J. came, and—you didn’t have your radio on, did you?”

  What kind of question was that? She seldom did. The one day she had, Emma had been upset by the program, even though Billie was oblivious to it. She hated being forced to look up at the woman. She was tempted to stand up herself, be taller than Emma again, have the other woman crane her neck. But she didn’t want to be thought of as jumping to attention, so she passed.

  “Well, then,” Emma said. “This should interest you.”

  She wasn’t carrying the paper she’d mentioned.

  “Maybe provide you with that conclusion you crave. ‘Closure,’ they call it, don’t they? And everybody aches for it to happen to everything.”

  So she’d come into Billie’s office to make sure she ended the week with a put-down.

  “Me, too,” Emma said. “This one’s different.”

  Say what? Billie had to clamp her jaw shut in order not to let it drop. Emma was confessing to caring about something?

  “And I did meet her.”

  “Her?”

  “Yvonne.”

  “They got her.” Good. As good as such a sorry story could be. “It’s over, then.”

  “But not the way you’d expect.” Emma looked around, then decided to sit down in the straight-backed chair and be eye-to-eye.

  Almost as if she’d been nervous about doing it until she tested the waters. But that was impossible. Emma was as sensitive as a bulldozer.

  “She’s dead.”

  “Oh God.” Billie’s blood thickened and grew heavy in her veins. “What’s going on?” she whispered. Death after death. “Who— What happened to her?”

  Emma shook her head. “She killed herself. Early this morning, or late last night. She committed suicide—and here’s the worst of it—she shot herself on the Tassios’ front doorstep. She was there when Mr. T went to get the morning paper.”

  Billie said nothing, just let herself be possessed of the image of Yvonne’s rage and ultimate revenge against the people she believed had ruined her life. The image of Stephen Senior already burdened by news of his son’s death, already dreading the morning paper with Stephen’s face on the front page, op
ening his oversized door and finding the dead girl in a pool of blood. Of Mrs. Tassio, the impeccable, the immovable. It had been a horrible but inspired ending to Yvonne’s life. Death as a weapon.

  “No note, no nothing, although she had a photograph of Stephen under her. The police aren’t making any statements or accusations yet, but it seems fairly obvious. She’d spun all the way out of control, destroyed him and then herself. And managed a pretty dramatic number on his parents, too.”

  Billie sat in stunned silence, her mind filled with the image of that self-important doorway and its desecration. Then she abruptly thought of her own front door and the same madwoman standing there the day of Stephen’s murder, and a valve inside her system clamped down so violently she nearly blacked out. When she breathed, the sound was jagged.

  “It’s over now,” Emma said softly, and Billie had the odd sensation that she understood, had made the mental leap along with Billie. “For real. Our estimate of her wasn’t far off the mark. Too bad. Too bad about the boy. Too bad about both of them.” She smacked her palms on her thighs. A very final, finished-with-it sound, and then she stood up. “It’s Friday, Billie. We’ve got our ending now, that closure, so go home and do whatever it is that makes you forget about people like that.”

  Billie couldn’t remember why she’d had such a hate on for Emma a few minutes back. She stood up, too, and nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “I guess…I guess that was good news.”

  “Not really,” Emma said. “But then, you didn’t ask for good news. You only asked for a conclusion.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll settle for.”

  “Always take what you can get,” Emma said. “Then at least you have something. Like long weekends. Go now. Enjoy yours.”

  “I will,” Billie said. “I may actually get home before it rains.…” She glanced at the darkening windows. “Almost. And then I’m going to bed just as early as Jesse does and going no farther than my own backyard until Tuesday. I’ll be at the factory at eight A.M.”

  “Speaking of which—when you’re there, stay in touch with the office. Say you wear the beeper for your kid, you know. And don’t forget to check it this time, okay? Don’t get so absorbed making gewgaws you forget why you’re there.”

  Well, God forbid they should part on a completely equitable note. But Emma had said to take what she could get. “I’ll remember, boss,” Billie said. “I’ll try real hard.”

  Thirty-One

  Billie approached the Redmonds’ deep porch. The flowers in the clay pots were in need of water, and behind them, the house looked closed and silent. Perhaps Wesley had surfaced and the two of them were watching TV in a back room.

  She rang the bell. Someday, she wanted a housey house like this. One that was part of the collective unconscious. Spacious rooms of benign orderliness. A cared-for garden. Wise papa on one side of the fire, benevolent mama on the other. Cheery family pets.

  That the current occupants didn’t fit the wholesome bill wasn’t the house’s fault. While she waited, the phantom Billie floated through its rooms, phantom-lived the life she’d once envisioned. Two artists in a rambling house. A passle of children—all adorable, artistic and precocious. Cam’s sense of color providing surprises on the walls, rooms full of crafts from the world over gathered on backpacking treks with the entire clan and adapted to their use in ingenious ways. Music as a constant.

  That’s what she’d imagined. Cam, too, for a while. That was a nice time, while they had the same delusions.

  She rang again.

  Artistic, they’d said when they found their house, ready for their creative input. It had been the only one in Marin they could afford, and that, barely. For which she owed Cam a debt of gratitude. He was the one who wanted to buy, not rent, and nowadays, with her neighborhood gentrifying at warp speed, she couldn’t have touched her tiny quarters, her only material asset. Rooms that were odd-shaped and cramped, awkwardly arranged. No central heat. It had been built as an unheated bungalow for San Franciscans escaping to sunny Marin from the city’s summer fogs. Billie and Cam had felt sorry for its homely self and adopted it, thinking it would be temporary. Turned out they were talking about their marriage, not their house.

  She rang one more time, half turning away as she heard the bell sound again through its rooms. Where was Penny? Wouldn’t even a ditsy teenager leave a note? Billie hadn’t been delayed that long by news of Yvonne’s suicide, but maybe Penny had decided she wasn’t coming.

  Billie retreated down the steps. She made one tour around the house, just in case. Around the side, the narrow hedge ran between the house and its neighbor. To the back, a long, sloping expanse of green ending in a rectangular plot as wide as the grounds, filled with spiny, bare bushes.

  A rose garden. Had he promised her one?

  But no Redmonds. A garden shack, a small stoop, and back stairs, then around to the side facing the Marshalls with a garage—one car, it looked, the way we lived then. Attached to the house. Sophia the earnest homemaker had even put crisscross curtains at its rear window, but through them, Billie saw the dark blue Lexus she’d helped Penny retrieve at the dock, its JUS KIDN vanity plate a sick joke.

  Wherever Penny had gone was within walking distance.

  And that was it.

  She was only two steps closer to the curb before she knew that wasn’t going to be it at all. Something was out of kilter and she was supposed to have learned from Yvonne to pay attention to signals.

  This one wasn’t even subtle. There should be a note or there should be Penny Redmond.

  Maybe she’d gone next door. Sunny’s kitchen was inviting. It was worth one last check. If she wasn’t there, that would definitely be it.

  She crossed the driveway, admiring an emerald Jaguar in the driveway. It looked newly washed and waxed. And even if it was Sunny’s second car, for when she was child-free, Billie wasn’t going to allow that frisson of revulsion. Of envy, really. It was all a crap-shoot, and Billie couldn’t go around resenting others’ good fortune.

  A man in a navy-and-white warm-up suit answered her ring. He had to be the Talkman, the lord of this manor, but Billie was surprised. She’d imagined him coarse-featured and burly—the sort of barely civilized brute called “a guy’s guy.” Potbellied or overmuscled. But he had a runner’s lean look, and his features were bland, perhaps, but finely shaped. It annoyed her that he didn’t fit her stereotype, although she had no idea from what pieces she’d put together her prefabricated image.

  “Sorry to bother you,” she said. “I’m looking for Penny Redmond.”

  “Oh, well, then. You’ve got the wrong address. She’s one over.” He pointed toward the Redmonds’ house.

  “I know. But she doesn’t seem to be there, and I thought maybe she was visiting at your house. I’ve met your wife, and she seemed close with the girl. I know she offered to help now that Penny’s parents are…”

  “Sunny’s at some god-awful kiddie birthday party. Nobody else is home. No.” He shook his head to make his message clear. He was obviously used to saying everything several times so his dimwitted audience could get it.

  “Did she come over at all?”

  “Penny? Uh-uh.” He also shook his head, in case “uh-uh” was too difficult a concept.

  “Do you know if her brother got home?”

  “Wesley? Didn’t know he wasn’t there.”

  He seemed ordinary enough, except for the voice that sounded plumped with sweet liquid, like a cordial-stuffed chocolate. But the rest of him was nothing special one way or the other. Certainly he wasn’t the foaming-at-the-mouth idiot she had pictured. Dull, even, this not-at-all-a-lad from Nevada. Was his boisterous, hundred-percent-on-air persona a lucrative act, nothing more? They said comics were often silent depressives offstage. Maybe that was also true of overly opinionated radio hosts.

  Yet Sunny had fallen in love at first sight, she’d said. Billie couldn’t decide with the sight of what. Maybe women like Sunny needed low-key mates, to
keep the jollity balance on keel. And a whole lot of people associated a dull seriousness with significance and wisdom.

  He looked mildly anxious. “I was just going for a run,” he said. “Before the sky falls.”

  “Okay, then,” Billie said. “Thanks. Tell Sunny hello from Billie.” She waved and headed across and down yet again. Seldom did one find such a richness of porches in a day. Or a year. “And if you see Penny, tell her to give me a call.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said with no enthusiasm. He stood in the open doorway, watching her retreat. Maybe he was on something. Downers. His wife left and he sneaked ’ludes.

  And why was she wasting a minute speculating about him? She so quickly became involved in other people’s love stories, analyzing where they’d gone right and she hadn’t, searching for the big secret.

  Well, the big secret was there was no accounting for taste. Sunny had been a genuine golden-girl catch. Complete with the gold. She’d settled for too little, could have and should have done better.

  Which was rich—the divorced, penniless woman deciding the contented, stable one had made a mistake. Still, they’d been married only five years. After five years of her own marriage, Billie had still been pretending that all was bliss. Time would tell.

  What was it about time, the idea of it, that bothered her?

  She shook her head. It didn’t rattle the errant thought back into place. She headed for her car.

  Time, her mind said. Time.

  Marches on. Waits for no man. Is money.

  Time to go home and forget about this just as Penny Redmond has forgotten about you. Be grateful. End of story. She had to think about what she needed to stop for on the way home, not time.

  And tide. After time. Flies. To wash our clothes, wash our clothes, wash our…

  Time out.

  It’d be Jesse and Billie alone tonight. Great. She’d rent some merry animated romp with no darkness to it, and make popcorn and they’d get in their jammies and watch. That was what it was all about. And that was enough.

  *

  It took forever to find a parking space near VideoDroid. Everybody and his sister and whining child was in the store looking to have their minds taken off the week they’d just completed.