Life Sentences (10 page)

“Enough to duck her,” Gloria said.

“Easy for you. But she's an old friend of my sister's, from back in the day, and she just buttonholed me outside my office. I can't avoid her.”

“Ask your father-in-law what to do. Or his brother. They always had all the answers.”

There was something dangerous in Gloria's voice, a challenge Reg decided to ignore.

“Andre retired last year. Julius is as good as.”

“Right, I saw that in the
Daily Record.
So you're the managing partner now, and Howard & Howard is Howard, Howard and Barr.
Well
done, Reggie.”

Hard to say who hung up first, him or Gloria. Had they really been
best friends once upon a time? His office spouse, as his young associates said now, a curious term to Reg's ear. Who wanted another spouse? He had noticed two of the new crop, a boy and a girl, who were always laughing together, going to lunch, and he risked teasing the girl about her romance. “Oh, he's just my office spouse,” she said dismissively. “I have a fiancé, and Dwayne has a live-in girlfriend.” Office spouse. So that's what he and Gloria had been to each other, all those years ago. They had made a good team—plain, overachieving Gloria, dashing, just-getting-by Reggie.
I didn't backstab you over Callie Jenkins,
he wanted to say to her.
I didn't know, either, not for the longest time, and when I did put it together, it was just guesswork, same as you, Gloria. But then, you were always smarter than me.

TEENA AND HER NEIGHBORS SHARED
walls but little else. They were either remarkably quiet people or the rowhouses—wide and generous, by Baltimore standards, with individual touches that relieved them from cookie-cutter sameness—were exceptionally well insulated. Teena seldom heard any sound, from either side. No footsteps, no music, no raised voices. Five years ago, when the Morgans, the new family, as she still thought of them, moved in to the west of her, she had thought she heard a baby crying in the night. Weeks later, when she saw the family on the front porch, posing in Easter outfits for a snapshot, she had managed a rare sociable outburst and inquired after the littlest one's whereabouts.

“Doesn't the baby get to be in the picture?” she had asked.

“What baby?” the mother had asked, perplexed. “It's just the twins.” Indicating, with a wave, the boy-and-girl pair, who were saddled with too-too cutesy names and, on this Easter Sunday, disastrous outfits in pale blue and egg-yolk yellow. Paul and Polly? Jack and Jill? Something like that.

“I thought—never mind.” Teena didn't want to consider, much less explain, how she had come to imagine a baby crying in the night. Yet after that day, she never heard those cries again.

The Morgan household, like most households with children these days, orbited around the twins and their activities, so there was little reason for their lives to overlap with that of an older, single woman such as Teena. Occasionally there was a pity invitation, as Teena thought of it—a Fourth of July barbecue, a holiday open house. It was hard to make excuses not to attend, as she would then have to figure out a way to leave her house for the duration of the event. Instead, she forced herself to put in an hour or two, but the effort must have been visible, and the invitations stopped. She wished there was a way to tell the Morgans that she liked them, or would have liked them, under normal circumstances. She might have even been intrusive, appointing herself Auntie Teena to Paul and Polly, Jack and Jill. Whoever.

She also wished there was a way to tell them that she wasn't an alcoholic, not exactly. She could never forget the look on the mother's face—more correctly, the
lack
of a look on the mother's face—when Teena's recycling bags had ripped one summer morning. That was before her discovery of box wine and before the county began the all-in-one recycling system, with no bags, no separation required, just discreet plastic monsters to swallow all your trash.
No worries!
She had caroled to the Morgan mom.
It looks like a lot more than it is.

Her neighbor to the east was a male version of Teena—alone, self-contained, reserved. The only difference was that Mr. Salvati was in his eighties, a widower of many years. In the summer, he liked to sit on a
metal glider on his back porch and listen to the Orioles on WBAL. Teena found this charming. He no doubt had a television, and he definitely had air-conditioning, as she could see the compressor humming next to his concrete parking pad. Still, he sat outside on even the most sweltering nights, preserving a tradition started, most likely, in Little Italy or Pigtown, one of those places that people used to leave. No matter how hot it was, he wore trousers and a short-sleeved dress shirt over an undershirt, his snowy hair topped by a little straw hat. Teena had always heard—and seen, with her own father—that men were not as well equipped for widowhood as women, that they quickly followed their wives into the grave. But Mr. Salvati's home almost glowed with his self-sufficiency, from the always clean car on the parking pad to the perfect yard to the back porch with vinyl covers that protected the furniture and old-fashioned charcoal grill. In winter, weeks went by without her glimpsing or hearing him, so Teena was glad for summer, his regular vigil by the radio. During the winter months, she worried about him. Not enough to do anything, of course, but she did worry.

Luckily, she caught a glimpse of him by the garbage cans Monday evening. Mr. Salvati's garbage cans were pristine, of course, gleaming silver in an alley lined with utilitarian plastic. He and Teena exchanged their usual semiverbal hellos—a raised chin and a grunt of a syllable from him, a shrugged shoulder and a smile from her. Teena was halfway up her flagstone path when he called after her.

“That gal find you?”

She turned quickly, almost twisting an ankle. “What
gal
?”

“A lady stopped by here today, said she was looking for you, asked where you worked. I said I figured that your friends know where you work. Think she left something in your mailbox, though.”

The day was colder than forecast and Teena's hands were killing her. She needed to get inside.

“Did she say she was my friend?”

“No, she was clever that way. She wanted me to think she was your friend, but she wouldn't lie outright about it.”

“What did she look like?”

“About your age, big fur hat. When I saw her on your front porch, I thought for a minute she could be someone you know. She didn't look like she was selling anything. But she was trying to peek in, through your fanlight. That's when I came out and asked what she needed.”

“Was she—” But there was no polite way to ask the question, not that it would bother an old-timer like Mr. Salvati. “Was she white or black?”

“Oh, white, of course.”
Of course?
But Mr. Salvati probably couldn't imagine white people having black friends. The bigotry was part of the package—the proper clothes, the hat, the tidiness of his surroundings. They were all qualities instilled in another generation, and it was a generation that was not particularly generous toward people unlike themselves. If Mr. Salvati had seen a black woman on Teena's porch, he would have called the police. Fur hat or no fur hat.

But why did Teena feel disappointed? Why did she want to believe, for a second, that Calliope Jenkins sneaked over to her house during the day and tried to peer through her fanlight? Could it be because she wanted to believe that the haunting wasn't just one-way, that she remained as fixed in Callie's mind as she was in hers? That she, too, heard crying babies that weren't there?

“Thanks for keeping close watch, Mr. Salvati. I do appreciate it.”

“It's what neighbors do,” he said, easing into his spick-and-span Buick. Watching him back his car into the narrow alley was terrifying, a process that required five to six turns of the steering wheel, the car moving a few inches back, then forward. It was nothing short of a miracle when he ended up perpendicular to where he began, ready to head east to York Road. For the first time, Teena wondered where Mr. Salvati might go at six o'clock on a Monday evening, if he had friends or family somewhere in the city. Where would she go, alone and retired—God, she hoped she was retired by the time she was his age. How long would it take her to back her car into the alley?

She was so distracted by these thoughts of her future self that it was
twenty minutes or so before she remembered to check the mailbox. In addition to her mail—all junk tonight—there was a stampless letter addressed to Sistina Murphy. Rendered in green ink, her first name looked especially strange and unfamiliar. No one called her Sistina; she had never even met another Sistina. It had been her mother's invention, an attempt to impress her own heritage on her daughter. Her mother had been hurt when her daughter chose to be Teena instead, varying the spelling to create that much more distance from her given name.

The envelope opened, Teena's eye went almost immediately to another name, Calliope Jenkins, in the body of the letter, and jumped again to the signature, which also began with a “Ca.” But, no, it had been signed by Cassandra Fallows. This was the woman who had called Lenhardt. He had tried to warn Teena that she was too easy to find.

She poured herself a brimming glass of wine—Banrock Station shiraz, because on a night as cold as this, she needed red—and sat down at her dining alcove, her laptop open in front of her. She didn't use her computer for much, although she had taken to paying her bills online. Everything with her hands was a negotiation, a compromise, a game of what-hurts-more. Bill-paying, with all those pen strokes, was more painful than the series of mouse clicks she had to make, but real-life solitaire was far more manageable than the computer version. Surfing the web, reading blogs? Her hands ached just thinking about those activities. She did shop online, using her insider knowledge to find bargains. Even then, she mainlined Advil beforehand.

A Google search on Cassandra Fallows yielded too much, and Teena couldn't figure out how to narrow it. How did someone produce so much
existence
? It was like watching her own recycling bags split again, her wine bottles clattering into the alley as Mrs. Morgan tried not to register any reaction. Curious, Teena typed her own name, in full, and found only a website that helped people track down high school classmates. Then she tried Fallows's name with—it hurt just to type it—Calliope Jenkins's. Nothing, a goose egg, zilch. She paired
herself with Calliope Jenkins, knowing it would yield nothing, given that her name alone had offered only one hit. How had Fallows found her?

The PIO had handled all the press inquiries in the Jenkins case. Besides, the focus had been less on the murder investigation than on the fact that a murder investigation had come to pass. The media had harped on the social worker's failure and while the DSS spokeswoman was one of the most magnificent stonewallers of all time, the social worker had decided to give a television interview, against all advice. A national interview, yet. It was like watching someone's skin being removed with a penknife, one inch at a time. The social worker believed that she had a side, that if she was heard, people would sympathize with her, understand it wasn't her fault that she had skipped those visits. She had failed to see that the story required a villain, a role that Calliope had ingeniously sidestepped through her silence.

The poor woman was dead. Drove her car into a tree off Route 140 in Carroll County. Clear day, sober as a judge, according to the tox screen. And, wouldn't you know, there it was in the news story of her death, a few paragraphs in, as if this one-car accident could be construed as a case of cause-and-effect, which Teena believed it was. Calliope Jenkins killed that poor social worker as surely as she killed her own son. And, again, she would never answer for it.

Her right arm throbbing, Teena reluctantly turned off the computer, reread Cassandra Fallows's letter. The woman used words prettily, but words on paper had little effect on Teena. She heard Mr. Salvati pulling in, a much easier operation than leaving, but still one requiring several adjustments until the car was exactly in the middle of his parking pad. Then the night was silent, as usual, the only sound the drone of her own television, tuned to a reality show where proper British nannies magically fixed dysfunctional families. Dysfunctional families that usually resided, Teena couldn't help noticing, in big suburban houses with plenty of land and few worries about money. Tonight, a child was throwing a
tantrum and Supernanny held her by the shoulders, instructing her, kindly but firmly, to use her words.

Hey, Supernanny,
Teena longed to say.
Come with me to a rowhouse in Southwest Baltimore, travel back in time. You can time-travel. You're Supernanny. The only thing you have to do is find the baby. Find the fuckin' baby, Supernanny, then have a go at fixing Calliope Jenkins. Make a job chart, shower her with rewards, tell her to use her big-girl words and give up the location of her baby. Use your words, Calliope, use your goddamn words.
Teena had, in fact, grabbed her by the shoulders once or twice, and not so kindly, but it never worked.
Use your words.

CASSANDRA HAD TO DRIVE
to the suburb of Columbia to meet Tisha for lunch, a location that surprised her. Tisha, as she recalled, had been quite specific about her desire to live in a big city, bigger than Baltimore. She had definite ideas about her apartment (a penthouse), her husband (an architect), and her children (three—girl, boy, girl).

Then again, Tisha had been no more than twelve when she had outlined that. Cassandra would not want to be held accountable for the plans she had made in sixth grade. (Investigative journalist, married to a doctor, three children, a modern house in some unspecified New England wood.)

Still—
Columbia.
In 1967—Cassandra could date it precisely, because
it was the year before her father left—Cassandra's parents had taken long drives to what had then felt like a faraway world. Her father was intrigued by the concept, this egalitarian “new town” conceived by the developer, James Rouse. Her mother, trapped in the endless battle that was the renovation of her aging house, liked to fantasize about fresh starts, houses without history.

“Rouse is a good man, but he hasn't read his Toynbee,” her father said, even as her mother sighed over the compact kitchens with breakfast bars. “Decadence will not be stopped.”

Her father, as was his infuriating wont, was right. The rural county that Cassandra remembered from those long-ago Sunday drives was a blobby suburb now; Rouse's dream of a heterogeneous town that was truly integrated, by race and income, had been overbuilt with McMansion monstrosities. Could Tisha really live here? At least the restaurant she had recommended looked promising. An old stone house, it had been converted into a wine bar and restaurant, and it had the good fortune to face one of the few undeveloped vistas on this two-lane highway.

Cassandra took a seat on the banquette, not too close to the door, but affording an unobstructed view. She didn't want to appear to be overeager.

The fact was, it had been anticlimactic, connecting with Tisha. After her adventures in skullduggery—engineering her encounter with Reggie, finding Sistina Murphy's home in the online property records—it had seemed, well,
commonplace
to return someone's voice mail message, ask for a lunch date, and have the wish granted within twenty-four hours. Tisha hadn't seemed surprised that Cassandra wanted to see her, merely…skeptical. But then, that was a key facet of Tisha's nature, even when young. She had always been a little reserved, as if evaluating people. She thought before she spoke, too, and there had been an especially long pause when Cassandra proposed lunch.

“I'm self-employed,” Tisha said at last. “An hour in the middle of
the day—that's two hours of work time, when you include getting there and back.”

“I'm self-employed, too,” Cassandra had said.

“But you'll be working, right?” Tisha had always been direct, too. “Reg said this was for a ‘project.' By which, I guess, he means another
story.
”

She gave the last noun a lot of spin.

“A book, yes,” Cassandra said. “But what I really want, more than picking your brain, is to catch up with you.”

“Huh,” Tisha said, then named the restaurant and the time in a way that did not allow for Cassandra to counter. If she wanted to see Tisha, it would be on her turf, at her convenience, on her terms.

She's beautiful,
Cassandra thought when she saw her walk into the restaurant at the stroke of noon. Not that Tisha hadn't always been pretty. But the usual pattern, when seeing a long-ago friend, was to be dismayed by what age had done. In her fiftieth year, Tisha was more striking than she had been at fifteen, with close-cropped hair and a strong sense of style. She was one of those women who used clothes as a canvas, relieving the black of her turtleneck and trousers with a spectacular necklace, twisted strands of silver hung with asymmetrical rectangles of semiprecious stones. She was smart enough not to pair dangly earrings with such an overwhelming piece, wearing small studs of tiger's-eye the same shade as her eyes. Her cheekbones were more prominent than ever, and her generous mouth showed no signs of thinning, an encroachment of age that Cassandra found especially dismaying in her own face.

“Tisha,” she said, rising, grateful for the table between them, as it meant she didn't have to puzzle through the physicality of the greeting. Hug, cheek kiss, handshake? Nothing seemed exactly right.

“Cassandra. It's still Cassandra, right?”

“Of course. What else might it be?”

“I always thought,” Tisha said, settling into her chair, “that you'd give in, shorten it to Cassie, stop dragging that long thing around.”

“You remember, then, how my father was adamant that I never have a nickname.”

“I remember lots of things,” she said, her voice perfectly friendly. “Not necessarily the way you do, but I remember them.”

Oh. So it was going to be one of
those
conversations. Tisha wouldn't be the first person to approach Cassandra with a chip on her shoulder, a determination to settle scores. Funny, the more marginal the person was to Cassandra's memoirs, the more adamant they were about what they always called
setting the record straight.
Her father, her mother, Annie—their lives had been laid bare, but they hadn't objected. Even her ex-husbands had been good sports, relatively. It was always someone at the edge of the story who wanted to quibble. Not that she considered Tisha marginal to her life. But she hadn't played that large a role in the two books.

She decided to treat Tisha's implied gauntlet as an excuse to get down to business. “Do you remember Calliope Jenkins?”

Tisha smiled as if she had always known where this was headed. “Somewhat. She was never really a friend. And she went to middle school with you, not us, and she didn't make it into the A course, so that was that.”

“But she came to Western in tenth grade, right?” Under the complicated system in place at the time, A-course students started high school in ninth grade, while the others arrived in tenth.

“Yeah, but we didn't mix much. We had been apart for three years by then. Friendly, sure. But not friends.”

“Yet your brother ended up working on her case.”

“My brother also ended up marrying my best friend. Baltimore's small that way. Especially
our
Baltimore.”

“Candy—Reggie—married Donna?” It bothered Cassandra that this information bothered her.

“He prefers to be called Reg these days. Donna prefers it, which means Reg prefers it. He's been in love with her since he was seven.”
Tisha laughed. “But he had to wait his turn, watch her marry her shit of a college sweetheart, make a botch of that. They celebrated their fifteenth anniversary last summer.”

It felt as if Tisha was taunting her, but that had to be in Cassandra's imagination. She had barely admitted to herself that little flame of attraction she felt for Reggie—
Reg
—Barr. There was no way his sister could have picked up on it. Maybe he had said something that indicated he found Cassandra attractive? She shouted the idea down as impossible, insane, even as her heart skipped in careless loops around her rib cage.

The waitress came to take their order, and Cassandra tried to set the tone, ordering an appetizer and entrée salad, asking for a three-ounce pour of the recommended wine pairing. Tisha got a chicken-salad sandwich and a glass of iced tea, looking pointedly at her watch.

“You said you were self-employed,” Cassandra said, “but you didn't tell me what you do.”

“I'm a graphic artist.” She paused, seeming to expect some reaction. “I wanted to be a painter, but, well, I knew that wasn't in the cards. I had to make a living. I took time out when the kids were born, started over when they got to school.”

“I remember your drawings,” Cassandra said. “The future renderings of your family. Remember fifth grade, when we all drew pictures of girls getting ready for dates?”

“You said Donna was the artist,” Tisha said.

“What?”

“In your book. You said we all imitated
her.
But I was the one who started it.”

That was it? This was why Tisha was coiled with fury? The lack of credit for her childhood artistry? Cassandra had told eight hundred thousand readers that her second husband was impotent unless he paid for sex, and this was what Tisha felt needed to be set straight? It was hard not to laugh.

“I did? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything by that. Donna's
drawings stood out in my memory, for some reason. Remember, her girls were always slightly dog-faced in profile, more snout than nose?”

Tisha was not ready to be appeased. “You were always giving my stuff to Donna,” she said, stirring sugar—and she used real sugar, not one of the pink-, blue-, or yellow-packeted substitutes—into the tea that had arrived. “That whole story about the record party. That was mine, too. You got it confused with the graduation party, which was at Donna's.”

“Are you sure?” Cassandra had used her childhood diaries to help her reconstruct some sections of her life. She couldn't imagine being wrong about something as seminal as their first boy-girl party.

“You had Reg there, dancing. Why would Reggie be crashing a party at Donna's house? That party was at
my
house, and you didn't know half of what was going on.”

“Such as…”

“Such as Fatima going upstairs with Karl, the one who had a mustache in the sixth grade—probably because he had been left back three times—and going into one of the bedrooms, and he asked her for oral sex and she didn't know what it was, but she didn't want to seem ignorant, so she said sure—and used her teeth!”

Cassandra laughed. “I wish I had known about that.”

“So you could put it in your book?”

“No—well, maybe. I wish I had known because it's the essence of Fatima, game for anything.”

“Was, maybe. She's churchified now.” Tisha looked worried. “Don't go putting that in a book. She would
die.
”

“I won't,” Cassandra promised, although she couldn't help feeling wistful. Not about the missed opportunity for using that anecdote, but for the reminder that there had always been a few things to which she was not privy, information limited to the inner circle of Tisha, Donna, and Fatima.
My best friend,
Tisha had said of Donna. Callie didn't go to junior high with
us
—Tisha, Donna, Fatima. Had Tisha always thought that way? Had she not seen the quartet as even, balanced? They had sat
together for four years, their desks pushed together. Didn't that make them a foursome, at least when they were young?

“Do you keep in touch with Fatima? I assume Donna is part of your life if she's married to your brother.”

“Fatima doesn't keep in touch with us. She's not comfortable with anyone who knew her before she went to Spelman. My, she did put on airs about that.”

Tisha seemed amused by this, and Cassandra felt she was missing some subtle distinction. Spelman was a good college. Why shouldn't Fatima, who had grown up in a chaotic household, be proud of that?

“I mean, I went to Northwestern,” Tisha continued, “and you don't hear me going on and on about that.”

“That is a good school.”

“Tell me about it. My oldest wants to go there and he doesn't begin to have the grades. Where did you go?”

Cassandra would have given anything to avoid answering this question, but it had been put to her too bluntly to evade. “Princeton.”
Sorry, Tisha, but you were the one who wanted to play this game.

“Undergrad?”

“Yes, with an English major yet. No wonder I didn't have a real job—well, ever. I temped and freelanced through most of my twenties, worked briefly as an editorial assistant at a big publishing house, then began picking up adjunct teaching gigs and doing corporate writing, freelance. But until I started writing, in my late thirties, I was pretty lost.” She hoped that admission would balance things.

“I have an MBA. One of those kinds that you get on the weekends, but it's been good for my business, small as it is.”

“And you're married, with kids.”

“A boy and a girl.”

“I remember when you wanted three kids.”

“Oh, lord, two are enough.” There was a flash of something genuine, a feeling that the real Tisha had finally shown up, and Cassandra relaxed.

“Three kids, and your husband was going to be an architect.”

“Orthodontist,” Tisha said. “Regular hours, not a lot of emergencies, and there's always a new crop of snaggle-toothed children coming up.”

“You like living out here?”

“Love it. It's a lot of driving—when the school day ends, I'm a full-time chauffeur—but it's been great for the kids. Besides, the oldest is a senior in high school, the youngest two years behind him. We might downscale, sizewise, but I think we'll stay out here. It's where Michael's work is. Where do you live these days?”

“Brooklyn.” She added quickly, “I bought in more than ten years ago, when it was still a relative bargain, and I borrowed against the equity to help my dad buy his place.”

“You're pretty rich, aren't you?”

Even by Tisha's standards, the question was direct.

“I don't have to worry too much about money, about small emergencies. I'm not sure I would describe myself as
rich.
”

“Your books are bestsellers.”

“You'd be surprised what that means on a balance sheet. And I'm all I've got, all I can count on. I may not worry about money in the present tense, but I do have to prepare for an illness that could wipe me out and think about retirement. I don't have near enough put away.”

Tisha nodded absently, using a fork to pick the pistachios out of her chicken salad. She wasn't so much eating her food as deconstructing it.