Guilty (11 page)

Kate ignored the signs, pulling her blue Toyota Camry next to the yellow-painted curb right in front of the overhang. She'd had the heat blasting on high in hopes of drying her wet hair and clothes during the twenty-minute drive between the DA's office at 3 South Penn Square and Ben's school in the Northeast Philadelphia suburb where they lived, but she still felt cold and clammy. A quick glance in the mirror confirmed that except for a few wavy tendrils in front that had been hit by the full blast of the heat, her hair remained a damp mess. Twisting it up in back and stabbing the resultant wet knot through with a pair of bobby pins she fished out of the cup holders between the seats, she grabbed her umbrella from the backseat and got out. The cool air made her shiver; the drumming cascade hitting her umbrella echoed the still-accelerated thudding of her heart. Rain poured onto the umbrella but left her untouched, and she felt like sticking her tongue out at it as she made it to the overhang without getting any wetter than she already was. Closing and shaking the umbrella as she went up the shallow concrete steps, she did a quick mental inventory and decided that except for the gray sneakers from the gym bag she kept in the car, which, having shed her ruined hose, she now wore over bare feet, she looked relatively normal.

Which was important, for Ben's sake.

She had to try three of the four side-by-side front doors before happening upon the one farthest to the right, which was unlocked. Keeping the others locked was one of the security measures, she supposed, that were now being implemented in even the safest schools. A sign printed on red construction paper was taped to the glass part of the chosen door:
PTA meeting, Thursday, 7:30 P.M., Cafeteria.

Kate felt a constriction in her chest. Since Ben had started kindergarten, she had made it a point to be at every single PTA meeting, no matter what. Having a mother who attended PTA meetings was part and parcel of the life she wanted him to have. A
normal
life. A life so different from her own hardcore childhood that they might have been lived on different planets.

She was still finding it almost impossible to believe that the world she was so carefully constructing for the two of them was in danger of being shattered.

Unless she did what Mario wanted.

Kate felt herself beginning to shake inside, and gritted her teeth.
Not now. Don't think about it now.
"Ms. White?"

The secretary—they were new to the school, and she was rattled, and thus Kate couldn't quite remember the woman's name—greeted her in a low, pleasant voice as soon as she stepped inside the wide front hall, which was painted creamy white with a gray linoleum floor and garlanded with streamers of colorful autumn leaves cut out of construction paper. In her early sixties, a grandmotherly type with short white hair and bifocals and a fluffy blue cardigan with a ring of white benchies embroidered around the neckline, she sat at her desk behind the counter that separated the office area from the main hall that ran the length of the school. She was positioned so that she could see all the comings and goings through the front door: another security measure, Kate had no doubt. When Kate had been looking at the school in conjunction with looking for a place to live after she had been hired as an assistant DA, the parent volunteer who had shown her around had assured her that at Greathouse they were, among other things, very security-conscious.

"Yes. Hi. I'm sorry it took me so long." Kate dodged a giggling quartet of ponytailed girls as they carried a piece of plywood supporting what was obviously some kind of class project down the hall. She crossed to the counter and glanced over it and into the office area. Like the hall, which was brightly lit and cheerful despite the rain darkening its windows, the office area appeared kid-friendly and welcoming, with a cherry-red back wall adorned with magnetic strips crowded with children's pictures. "I came as quickly as I could."

"Oh, listen, I understand. With everything that's been going on downtown—well, I'm just glad you called back when you did. Ben was really getting worried. The TV was on back there, but I had to turn it off. They started showing live pictures of what was happening on every channel, and he was just sure you were in the thick of it." She stood up as she spoke, and Kate saw that she was comfortably full-bodied in her beige polyester slacks and white blouse, and was also able to read the name tag pinned to the sweater: Mrs. Sherry Jackson.
Right. Got it.
The secretary's voice grew hushed. "They're saying that ten people were killed, including a judge."

She looked at Kate as if for confirmation.

Kate felt her stomach tighten.
Don't think about it.
She shook her head. "I don't know."

"Well." Mrs. Jackson smiled at her. "Ben's lying down in the back. If you'll just sign him out"—she indicated a clipboard on the counter— "I'll go and get him."

While Kate signed Ben out, Mrs. Jackson disappeared through a door at the rear of the office. Loud voices and the sound of running feet coming toward her made Kate start and glance around. The noise was coming from a group of six or so boys who looked to be about Ben's age. They were wearing sneakers and bright blue gym uniforms— Kate recognized them because she had shelled out fifty bucks for two sets for Ben just a little more than a month before—and one was clutching a basketball. Kate didn't know them—she was still too new to the school for her to recognize many of the children—but she smiled at them anyway. One grinned back at her as they ran past, and then they turned a corner into a stairwell and were gone. The thunder of their footsteps echoed through the hall as they headed down to the walk-out basement level.

"Mom?"

Kate's head whipped around at the sound of Ben's voice. He was emerging through a door to the right of the office with Mrs. Jackson right behind him. His backpack, which she knew from experience would be unbelievably heavy for a nine-year-old, hung from one shoulder, giving him a lopsided appearance. Kate's eyes softened as they moved over him. Towheaded and shaggy-haired, a handsome boy with her own light blue eyes, fair complexion, and fine features, he was small for his age, and thin. Today he was wearing jeans, a blue-and-green striped polo, and sneakers. His hair was, as usual, falling in his eyes, and he brushed it aside with one impatient hand.

Considering what had almost happened, what they had almost lost, the sight of him brought tears to her eyes. Her heart swelled with overwhelming love for him even as she forced the tears back so he wouldn't see. She would have hugged him, but he was at the age where being hugged by his mother in public embarrassed him. Instead, she smiled at him.

He didn't smile back.

"Hi, pumpkin."

Ben grimaced, and immediately Kate knew that she had said the wrong thing. Now that he was in fourth grade, "pumpkin" sounded babyish to him. In fact, she was forbidden to call bim anything except (and these were his instructions) plain old Ben. Because she was a very good mother, she had only succumbed to the urge to call him all three words once or twice.

To his annoyance, of course.

If I don't
do what Mario wants, what will happen to Ben?
The tinny taste of panic flooded her mouth. She swallowed.
Don't think about it now. Later
...

"He says he's feeling better," Mrs. Jackson reported as Kate stepped forward to relieve Ben of his backpack. As she had suspected, the thing felt like it was loaded with bricks. Another pack of boys in blue gym uniforms burst into view at the end of the hall, but upon seeing Mrs. Jackson slowed to a decorous walk. As they approached, Kate became aware that there were four of them, and that Ben was sidling behind her, clearly trying to get out of sight. She frowned.

"Hi, Mrs. Jackson," a couple of the boys chorused. Kate could feel their curious glances at her, and, she thought, at Ben, who had all but vanished behind her. She could sense his shrinking, feel the shape of him close against her back, and her heart contracted. Leaving their little apartment and the tough South Kensington neighborhood where they had lived while she had attended first Drexel University and then Temple Law School had been hard on him, she knew. But she wanted so much more for him than to grow up in an impoverished area where she was afraid for him to go outside without an adult, or to attend a school where gangs walked the halls, fights were a daily occurrence, and apathy had set in among the staff. She wanted him to have a happy, ordinary childhood in a normal, middle-class suburb where bike rides and neighborhood trick-or-treating and children playing summer games of flashlight tag in front yards was part of the fabric of life. She wanted him to get a good education in a warm, nurturing school, like this one was reputed to be. She wanted a sense of security to be so much a part of his life that he never even thought about it. In short, she wanted him to have everything she had not had.

"You'd better hurry up. Mr. Farris won't like it if you're late for gym," Mrs. Jackson warned the boys as they passed.

"How can we hurry up? We're not allowed to run in the halls," one of the boys answered, and the group started snickering.

"And you would never do anything you're not supposed to, would you?" Mrs. Jackson asked in a mock stern tone as she planted her fists on her hips and watched them go by.

This brought forth more not-quite-smothered laughter and a round of answering head shakes, and then they were past and speeding up until they reached the stairwell, where they vanished.

"With this weather, playing basketball for gym class is about all Mr. Farris can have them do." Mrs. Jackson glanced at Ben, who was once more visible, having sidled back into view as the boys disappeared. "Some of those boys are in your class, aren't they, Ben?"

"Yeah," Ben said glumly. He looked up at Kate. "Mom, could we go? I don't feel so good."

"Sure." Kate smiled at Mrs. Jackson, who smiled back. As the secretary headed back toward her office, she called over her shoulder to Ben, who was already trudging for the door, "Hope you feel better tomorrow."

"Thanks," Kate answered when Ben didn't.

He slid into the backseat while she hurried around the front of the car and got in. Shoving the wet umbrella and his backpack into the front passenger-seat footwell, she started the Camry and glanced around at him at the same time.

"So, you want to make a pit stop by the pediatrician's office?" Putting the car in gear, she pulled away from the curb. No.

The
swish
of the windshield wipers, the hum of the heat, and the heavy patter of rain on metal combined to almost drown out Ben's muttered reply. The smell of burning, which always seeped from the vents in the first few seconds after the heat was turned on, started creeping into the five-year-old car. Knowing that Ben hated the smell, Kate switched the heat to defrost and turned it way down.

"If you're sick ..."

"I'm not that sick."

Kate sighed.

"This wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that they're playing basketball in gym today, would it?"

Silence.

Which she translated to mean
Oh, yeah.

As she turned left onto West Oak Road, the quiet residential street that ran in front of the school, Kate glanced in the rearview mirror at her son. His thin shoulders were hunched, and he was looking gloomily out the rain-drenched window. He looked small and defeated sitting there, and she felt a familiar burst of love and guilt and worry. She was trying so hard—but what if she was doing this mother thing all wrong?

What do I know about raising a kid?

"Ben White, did you even really throw up?"

More silence. Translation:
no.

"Okay, let's have it. Tell me the whole thing."

She braked at a stop sign, waited her turn as a red Honda splashed through the intersection in front of her, then turned right onto Maple Avenue. They lived on Beech Court, which was just a little way farther along, within walking distance of the school, in one of the least expensive sections of Foxchase, an upscale neighborhood that she had to really scrape to afford. Of course, she had signed the year's lease on the small house with visions of a smiling Ben and his buddies skipping along the tree-shaded sidewalks to and from school. The reality was that every morning she drove him to school and Suzy Perry, mother of Ben's friend Samantha and two other younger children, picked him up afterward and drove him to her house half a mile away, where he stayed until Kate fetched him after work. The rest of the reality was that Ben didn't seem to have any buddies except Samantha, who was a grade below him and was (as Ben would say despairingly)
a girl,
and Ben rarely smiled anymore. Which killed her. "I suck at basketball."

The small voice from the backseat was truculent and pathetic at the same time. Kate sighed again, inwardly this time. After one of the most horrific events of her life, after the terror and trauma that had struck out of nowhere, this was only a small pain. But it was nonetheless sharp.

"You do not," she protested loyally, glancing at him in the mirror. He was looking at her in the mirror, too, and their gazes met.

"I do too." His voice grew even smaller, and with all the other sounds in the car, she had to strain to hear it. Then, after the briefest of pauses, he added, "Nobody wants me on their team."

Kate's heart broke. He didn't usually tell her when things went wrong for him—
You've got enough to worry about, Mom,
as he had said on one memorable occasion when she'd asked him why he hadn't told her that some bigger kids at his previous school were stealing the lunch she packed for him every day—so, since he was telling her this, it must be bothering him a lot. She almost said,
Sure they do,
because her instinct was to deny the pain in his face, to buck him up, to do what she could to persuade him that he was mistaken. But the thing about Ben was, he was good at spotting bullshit. Especially hers.

The other thing was, he really wasn't very good at basketball, or any other sport. He took after her in more than looks: Jocks they were not. He was good at school, especially language arts and math. He was a whiz with computers. He watched the Discovery Channel with the same fanatical devotion some people lavished on sports teams. He loved to read, and one of the reasons his backpack was always so heavy was that he always had a couple of books—the one he was reading at the moment and the one he meant to read next, in case he should finish the first one unexpectedly and be caught unprepared— stashed in there along with his schoolwork. When he got the chance—before class started, when he completed an assignment early, even at lunch or recess, unless an adult objected—he would pull out his book and bury his nose in it. This tended to endear him to teachers, but to classmates, not so much. Add that to the fact that he was small for his age, shy around strangers, and just getting started in a new school, and it shouldn't be surprising that he was having trouble making friends.