Acts of Love (27 page)

“I don't remember.”

“You're under oath, Julia. You know what that means, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you sometimes lie?”

“She didn't want to see him.”

“Please, answer the question, Julia. Did you sometimes lie?”

“Maybe,” she spit out at him.

“Now, you told us that on your weekend up on Fletcher's Mountain, you and your father had something of a heart-to-heart talk. And you just said that he told you he loved your mother?”

“Yes.”

“And did he tell you he wanted a second chance with her?”

“Yes.”

“Julia, tell me. Was it unusual for your parents to fight?”

“No. They got in fights all the time.”

“And in all those fights, did your father ever hit your mother?”

“I don't think so.”

“I see. Julia, on that Sunday night, weren't you very mad at your father for yelling at your mother?”

“I hated it when they yelled.”

“But it wasn't unusual, was it?”

“No.”

“And it had never led to any form of violence, had it?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“Julia, why did your father bring the gun into the house?”

“He was giving it to me.”

“It was a gift. Now, Julia, when your parents started yelling, didn't you in fact feel betrayed by your father?”

“He promised he wouldn't yell anymore.”

“And when they started, it upset you, didn't it?”

“I don't know. You're confusing me.” She looked wide-eyed at Reardon, who nodded gently.

“Didn't you really yell ‘Stop! Don't!' because you wanted the yelling to stop? It had nothing to do with the gun at all, did it, Julia?”

Julia didn't answer. Carruthers leaned down toward her. “Julia?”

“He aimed the gun at her.”

Fisk continued as if he hadn't heard her. “Didn't you, in fact, get so mad at your father that you leapt at him and fell on his right arm, the very arm that he was holding the gun with?”

“No, no. He shot her. I jumped on him after.” She leaned forward, clutching the railing before her. “After.”

“You don't want to face the fact that it was your fault, do you, Julia? That if you hadn't leapt at your father, under the mistaken notion that you were somehow protecting your mother, she would still be alive today. Wouldn't she, Julia?”

“You're lying,” she said.

“I have no further questions.”

Judge Carruthers turned to Reardon. “Do you have any further witnesses?”

“No, Your Honor. The people rest.”

Judge Carruthers banged her gavel. “This court is in recess until Monday morning.” She quickly disappeared through the side exit to her chambers, where she lit a Camel Filter as soon as the door was shut.

 

T
ED COULD NOT MOVE
; he could only sit, leaden and dull, as he watched Julia descend the stand and walk past him, away from him.

Finally, he rose and strode slowly out of the courtroom, past the meandering crowds and anxious reporters, who, led by an increasingly aggressive Peter Gorrick, were forever asking him questions he had no intention of answering, and down the neatly plowed pathway lined with mounds of hardened snow.

He wondered if Julia remembered how he had taught her to make snow angels, flopping straight back into the drifts, flapping her arms to make wings, spreading her legs to make a robe. How he would lift her straight up, careful not to mar her creation, and they would stand proudly admiring it together. How old had she been? Three? Four? Lost, no doubt, in the ephemera of all early childhood memories. How could he blame her for that?

Fisk came up behind him. “I think we made some marks,” he said, “but if you've got any white rabbits to pull out of your hat, now's the time to do it.”

Ted nodded.

 

T
HE GIRL DANCING ON THE MAKESHIFT
stage had her eyes half shut as she swirled her hips languorously, the gold-spangled string bikini catching the light. Her bare breasts were small but round, firm. She looked bored, or stoned, or both. Ted looked away, hunched over his Scotch. When he finished it, he motioned to the bartender for another and rose, digging into the pocket of his jeans for a quarter. He went back to use the phone by the men's room.

“Sandy? Don't hang up.”

She could hear the bar noise in the background. She slammed down the receiver.

“Fuck.” He dug out another quarter, redialed. “Hold on there. Before you get happy with that receiver again, you and I are going to talk.”

“I have nothing to talk to you about. Now or ever.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“What do you want, Ted?”

“Meet me out at Jasper's Field.”

“You're crazy. I'm not meeting you anyplace.”

He clutched the receiver tightly. “If you're not there in fifteen minutes, I'm using my next quarter to call that dipshit reporter, what's-his-name, Gorrick. On second thought, make it ten minutes.”

This time, he hung up first. He went back to the bar, finished his drink, tipped the bartender, and left.

 

S
ANDY PUT DOWN THE TELEPHONE
. She looked over at John, leafing through the latest issue of
Runner's World
in the living room.

“Listen,” she said quietly, rising. “I think I'm going to go out for a drive. My head feels like a broken-down paper shredder. I need to get out, get some air. Keep an ear out for the kids, okay?”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure. I'll be fine. I just need to drive around a little. Sort things out. It's been a tough day.”

“You want some company?”

“No, that's all right. Someone should stay here with the girls. I won't be gone long.”

She kissed the top of his head and grabbed her coat.

 

J
ASPER'S
F
IELD LAY UNDER A BARREN WHITE
carpet, surrounded by empty bleachers, ghostly horizontal shadows in the vast and silent sky. The letters on the scoreboard were matte green on green, the bulbs that spelled out Home and Away dull and neglected, the dugouts deep tunnels that led only to more darkness. The sole illumination came from Ted's headlights as he leaned against the side of his car, waiting for Sandy. She drove up a moment later, came to a stop a yard from him, and quickly cut off her lights. Her shoes crunched against the frozen earth as she walked toward him.

“I'm glad you came,” he said.

“Cut the Emily Post shit. The only reason I'm here is because of Julia and Ali. Now what do you want?”

“You've got to get Julia to change her story.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I could tell you because she's lying, but you wouldn't care. So let me give you another reason. If you don't get Julia to say it was an accident, I'll make damn sure you regret it. I might not get my girls, but you're not going to get them, either.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Save the holier-than-thou crap for your boyfriend. You and I know better, don't we, Sandy?”

“What would you gain, Ted? Tell me, what would you gain?”

“Freedom, for one. Just get Julia to change her story.”

“What makes you think I could, even if I wanted to? Julia doesn't listen to me.”

“Okay. Ali, then.”

“Ali?”

“She came out of the kitchen, you could get her to say that. She came out of the kitchen and saw that it was an accident. Look. I don't care how you do it, just do it.”

The wind blew icicles from bleachers to the ground, and they both froze, glancing about at the desolate field.

She turned back to him. “Ali already gave her statement to the police. She didn't see what happened.”

“She was scared, in shock. Now she remembers more clearly,” Ted insisted.

“Is that all?”

“I mean business, Sandy.”

“Yes, I'm sure you do.” She held his eyes a moment longer and then walked rapidly back to her car, got in, and slammed the door.

He stood motionless long after she drove away, staring out at the empty playing field and the few lights from the town beyond.

 

J
OHN WAS STILL READING THE MAGAZINE
when Sandy returned. “You feel better?” he asked.

She nodded distractedly. “Yes.” She sat down beside him. “Hold me.”

He took her in his arms, his caress gentle, comforting, meant to soothe—not at all what she wanted.

“Do you love me, John?”

“That's what I've been trying to tell you.”

She said nothing more but began to unbutton his shirt, and hers, slowly at first, then wildly, desperately, clawing his skin in the effort, clawing her way in, looking for a place inside to lose herself.

S
ANDY STARED ACROSS THE ROOM AT THE
top of Ann's head as she lay on her bed, dutifully finishing her homework, though it was a Friday evening. Outside of their shut door, she could hear Jonathon conducting a symphony that swam about only in his own mind, loudly moaning out the flat notes, while Estelle broke into frequent applause. Sandy got up from her desk and paced the room. There were nights when she woke from sleep breathless, gasping for air, sweat dripping down her chest. Days, too, she often found herself able to take only shallow, aborted breaths and, faint, had to consciously force herself to swallow deeply the thick, fetid air of their room, their house. There were times when she thought that she might quite literally suffocate. She went to the end of the room, back, frowning at Ann, still and placid and oblivious. On her fourth trip—up, back—she muttered to herself, “Christ,” and yanked open the door.

She called him from the phone in the hallway. “Is it too late to change my mind?” She slipped past Jonathon and Estelle in the living room. They would never even notice she was gone.

His parents were away for the week. Guadeloupe. He had the kind of parents, the kind of life, where people went away to bake in the sun in mid-February. She walked the six blocks to his house in the steely cold. The houses grew larger with each street, the spaces between them wider, until on his block they were almost all refurbished Victorians separated by broad, snow-covered lawns. There were grilled gates and ornate mailboxes with wooden mallards. He was captain of the basketball team, center of gravity in the cafeteria, one of the boys things came easily to—friends, girls. He knew how to tell a joke. His girlfriend had long, shining chestnut hair, translucent skin, large breasts; a cheerleader, of course. And yet they were friends, he and Sandy. Or if not quite friends, they liked each other, in the sly, shy manner of teenagers. He teased her about her high grades and her standoffishness, never about her family, and she teased him about being a dumb jock. They smiled when they passed each other in the hallway and talked together at parties in the jokey repartee they both found most comfortable. “Do you want to come over? My parents are away.” Easy.

“I'm glad you changed your mind.” He was grinning as he opened the front door for her, waiting while she knocked off the ice that had clustered on the soles of her boots.

She followed him upstairs to his bedroom, which was littered with wrist and ankle weights, two basketballs, Ray Charles records. It smelled of menthol and eucalyptus.

“You want to watch TV?”

“Sure.”

They sat on the floor, leaning up against the edge of the bed, not touching, watching an old Bette Davis movie,
Now, Voyager.
Two cigarettes lit as one.

“Do you want a back rub?” he asked.

She took off her shirt and lay down on the floor. His hands, large and callused, swirled about her back in uncertain circles. She sat up and leaned against him. He kneaded her breasts like bread. Finally he said, “Maybe we should move to the bed.” He shut off the television, shut off the lights, lay down fully clothed.

“Do you plan on undressing?” she asked. It came out, as many things did, sharper than she had intended.

He laughed, embarrassed. “I guess I'm a little nervous.”

They stripped.

He thrust his hand up her, hard, and she clutched his shoulder blades, while his hand went deeper and deeper and her hips raised up in the air. “This is your first time, isn't it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He smiled at her, moved on top, in. She could not seem to synchronize her body to his, could not seem to find his rhythm, any rhythm, and they banged at each other in short, clumsy jerks. It hadn't occurred to her that she might not have an orgasm, it was so easy at home, alone, her hand, the pillow, her muffled groan. Ann a few feet away, innocent Ann.

When he was done, he rolled off and said, “I'm sorry this wasn't an earthshaking experience for you. I've never done it with a virgin before.” He was sixteen; she was fifteen.

“That's okay.”

“Do you want to watch the end of the movie?”

“I guess.”

She dressed during the commercials.

He walked her downstairs and opened the door for her. They did not kiss goodnight.

The frigid air numbed her nose, her hands, her feet as she walked home. She wondered if she looked different. If Ann, if Jonathon and Estelle, would notice. She broke suddenly into a trot, and then a gallop, laughing out loud as exhilaration flooded her veins, her mind, I am free now, free.

When she closed the front door, she made no attempt to be quiet. Perhaps there was a part of her that wanted them to see, to notice,
I am free now.
But the house was still. Jonathon and Estelle were behind their closed door in the back; Ann was lying in bed reading
Seventeen
magazine. If she noticed anything, she didn't give Sandy the satisfaction of commenting.

Sandy lay in bed, relearning how to breathe the stultifying air of home.

 

T
HE NEXT WEEK
, Sandy went to a family-planning clinic, gave them a false name and a false age (it wasn't the kind of place that checked too carefully), and waited in the scruffy narrow hallway on a bench with other women in paper robes and paper slippers, to be fitted for a diaphragm. The woman next to her was having an abortion. She twirled an unlit cigarette in her fingers, round and round.

In the small, bright examining room, Sandy lay with her feet in the cold metal stirrups. She had never been to a gynecologist before, never been splayed open, probed. She shut her eyes and reminded herself of the end result—sovereignty. The Oriental doctor became quite frustrated with her when she tried to insert the diaphragm herself and it flew across the room and hit the wall. “Be serious,” he scolded. She assured him that she was.

Whenever she looked at the pink plastic case—in her purse, her desk drawer—Sandy felt an entirely new sense of power that made her giddy with its potential. She knew that Ann dreamt of candles and flowers and goo, dreamt of one perfect love the way only adolescent girls can truly do, and Estelle. But that was not what Sandy was looking for at all. Her skin burned for touch.

She began.

She felt no guilt. There was nothing tawdry or shameful or illicit. She almost always liked the boys. Sometimes she saw the same one for as long as a month or two.

All that mattered was that one moment deep inside when she was gone, when it was all just gone.

She started a journal then, a jade, embroidered Chinese book, which she filled with a detailed record of her encounters. Sometimes she left it where Ann could find it, prissy Ann.

And then Ann found Ted. And she, too, began to sneak out of the house at night, coming in at one, two in the morning, later than Sandy, no matter how much Sandy tried to delay her own homecoming. Always the same boy, with Ann. Sandy studied her closely, saw the preoccupation in her face, the languor in her body that she somehow managed to sustain beyond the one sensate moment. With the first one, too. Was it narrowmindedness, or luck?

It wasn't what Sandy wanted, was precisely what she was most determined to avoid: one man, Estelledom. And yet. There was that preoccupation in her face, mystifying.

 

S
HE HERSELF WAS NOT THE TYPE
men fell in love with. Before she even knew what it might mean to be loved by a man, she knew that much—at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. She wasn't the type to inspire a man, the way Estelle inspired Jonathon, or Ann now with Ted. She was too acerbic. She didn't know how to coo, to bill. She was not a flatterer. No one would ever romanticize her. But, knowing this, she took this card and played it, played it until the card itself was greasy with fingerprints, tattered and worn. She never thought to question it. At least she was the one dealing, deciding when to close.

She didn't even know some of their last names.

 

N
OW THE AIR SMELLED OF
C
LEARASIL
, burnt coffee on a hot plate, powdery drugstore perfume. Her college roommate sat across from her setting her hair on hot rollers, chewing the diet gum that did not seem to help. She never had a date, but believed in preparation. She went to church every Sunday, and she bolted the door with its flimsy chain lock every night at eleven, so that if Sandy was late, she was forced to sleep on the scratchy couch in the lounge. Though her roommate never used them, Sandy suspected that there were still words like “slut” rummaging about in her brain. She never read a newspaper, didn't seem to know what decade it was. She sniffed the air like a disgruntled schoolmarm to see if Sandy had been smoking pot while she was out. Finally, Sandy went to the university's psychiatrist and was given a medical excuse for getting a single room.

In fact, the only room available midsemester was a vacated double room. It was on the main floor of the coed dorm she already lived in, and the night before she was to make the switch, she lay in bed, listening to her roommate's labored breathing, dreaming greedily of the room two flights down, spacious and vacant, a room, finally, of her own, not befouled by another's odors or mangle of possessions.

The next morning, she carried her one suitcase, typewriter, and textbooks downstairs. There were two beds, two desks, two dressers, two lamps. All day, in her classrooms, in the gym, Sandy thought of that empty room, waiting only for her. She canceled her date for the evening.

She put her typewriter on one desk, her books on the other. She lay on the bed near the window, and then on the one against the wall. She got up, moved the typewriter to the other desk, and returned to the bed by the window, waiting to relax into the details of solitude that had for so long been mapped out in her imagination.

She huddled on the narrow bed, tossing to the left, to the right, on her back. Listening as intently as she could, she could not make out a single sound anywhere. The world was totally silent; everyone was gone. All she heard was herself, the rumbling and humming and hissing of her own body. Fearsome sounds she had never noticed before. She began to think of cells dividing, metastasizing, the clanging of her own deterioration.

The room grew and grew in the dark until it had no walls, no ceiling, no end.

There was only the outline of her own body, heavily delineated, as if bordered in black. She ran her fingertips down her torso, her legs, hugged her arms to her chest, but it did not reassure her, quell her. She sat up in the darkness, stumbled through the empty room to the other bed. It was four in the morning, five. At last she fell into a fitful doze, her dreams a whirlpool of home, Jonathon and Estelle, Ann, seen through a wall of cellophane; they did not hear or see her, but kept playing the oddly shaped instruments that emitted no sound.

She came, after that first night, to dread the act of going to sleep alone.

She put it off as long as she could. She went to the Rathskeller and played pinball and laughed too loudly at boys' pointless jokes; she drank too much; she watched late-night movies in the lounge till three in the morning; but always, always, she had to return to it.

 

S
HE THOUGHT OF
A
NN
, alone now in their room at home. Had she spread out into it? Did she breathe differently, sleep differently; did she miss her?

She called her late at night, when she knew Jonathon and Estelle would be asleep. They talked of their classes and nursing and the merits of the grapefruit diet, and then Ann asked, “So how does it feel, living on your own?”

“Great.”

“I'm proud of you, Sandy. Really.”

Sandy said nothing.

“I suppose you're having too good a time to want to come home for spring break?” Ann asked.

“No, I'll be there.”

 

S
ANDY LAY ON THE FAMILIAR HILLY TERRAIN
of her old mattress, listening to Ann clean up in the kitchen. Above the rattling of dishes, the steady flow of water, she could hear her humming. Jonathon and Estelle, worn out from the unusual strain of having a guest for dinner, had retired early, but she could make out the clucking and fluttering of Estelle when she was distressed, an indecipherable burble of discontent. The water stopped, and she listened as Ann went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth.

“Well,” she asked, coming into their room, “what did you think of him?”

“Ted?”

“No, Santa Claus. Yes, Ted.”

Sandy was quiet for a moment. “He's all right.”

“Thanks.”

“Well, what do you want me to say?”

“You two seemed to get along,” Ann proffered tentatively, instinctively wary of the language Sandy and Ted had seemed to find innately, the jousting and joking that she, earnest, clumsy, was excluded from.

“You're serious about him, aren't you?” Sandy asked.

“Yes.”

Sandy, leaning on her elbow, looked intently at her sister. “Is he serious about you?”