Lippman, Laura (15 page)

Heather shook her head. “At this point the life I’ve made for myself is all I have.”

“You have to see,” Kay said, “how impossible that will be.”

“Why?” A child’s question, asked in a child’s tone.

Gloria answered. “The Bethany case is the kind of thing that attracts a lot of attention.”

“But I’ve already told you that I don’t want to be
that
girl.”

Foolishly, Kay couldn’t help thinking of the old television show, Marlo Thomas with her enormous eyes and shiny bangs, a small-town girl breezing through the big city. Now there was a name she knew.

“You don’t want to be who you are?” Gloria asked.

“I don’t want to go back to the life I managed to make for myself and have everyone treat me like some freak, the girl of the moment—the runaway bride, the Central Park jogger, whoever. Look, it took a lot for me to get to a place of even seminormalcy. I was taken from my parents when I was a kid. I saw…things. I didn’t finish college, I drifted through a lot of jobs before I found one that suits me, allows me to have the kind of life that everyone takes for granted.”

“Heather, not to be crass, but there will be financial opportunities for you, if you choose to pursue them. Your story is a commodity.” Gloria’s smile was wry. “At least I assume it is. I’ve taken it on faith that you are who you say you are.”

“I am. Ask me anything about my family. Dave Bethany, son of Felicia Bethany, abandoned by her husband early in the marriage. She worked as a waitress at the old Pimlico Restaurant, and she preferred to be called ‘Bop-Bop’ instead of anything grandmotherly. She retired to Florida, to the Orlando area. We visited her every year, but we never went to Disney World because my father didn’t approve of it. My dad was born in 1934 and died, I think, in 1989. At least, that’s when his phone was cut off.” She rushed on, as if fearful of letting anyone else speak or ask questions. “Of course I kept tabs. My mother, Miriam, must have died, too, because there’s no trace of her. Maybe that has something to do with her being Canadian. At any rate, there’s no record of her, not anywhere I checked, so I assumed she was dead.”

“Your mother was Canadian?” Kay echoed back stupidly, even as Gloria said, “But your mother is alive, Heather. At least that’s what the detective thinks. She was living in Mexico five years ago, and they’re trying to track her now.”

“My mother’s…alive?” The collision of emotions in Heather’s face was strangely beautiful, like one of those thunder bursts in the middle of a sunny summer day, the kind that made old women nod and say:
The devil must be beating his wife
. Kay had never seen grief and joy in such extremes, trying to coexist in the same place. The joy she could understand. Here was Heather Bethany, thinking herself an orphan, with nothing to claim but a name and tabloid tale. Yet her mother was alive. She was not alone.

But there was anger, too, the skepticism of someone who trusted no one.

“Are you sure?” Heather demanded. “You say she was in Mexico five years ago, but are you sure she’s alive now?”

“The original detective seemed to think so, but it’s true, they haven’t found her yet.”

“And if they do find her…”

“They’ll probably bring her here.” Gloria made a point of capturing Heather’s eyes in hers, holding the look. It was a snake charmer’s gaze, if one could imagine a mildly exasperated snake charmer in a rumpled knit suit. “Once she’s here, Heather, they’ll want to do DNA tests. You understand, you get where this is going?”

“I’m not lying.” Her voice was dull and listless, as if to suggest that lying was simply too much effort. “When will she get here?”

“It all depends on when they find her and what they tell her when they do.” Gloria turned to Kay. “Can’t the hospital keep Heather until, say, her mother arrives? I’m sure she’ll be happy to put her up.”

“It’s impossible, Gloria. She has to leave today. The administration is very clear on that.”

“You’re playing into the police’s hands, giving them the leverage they want to rush this thing through, force Heather on to their timetable. If she’s discharged without a plan, they’re going to put her in jail—”

Heather moaned, an unearthly, inhuman sound.

“What about House of Ruth? Can’t she go there?”

“It’s a battered-women’s shelter, and you know as well as I do that it’s full up.”

“I
was
abused,” Heather said. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

“You’re talking about thirty years ago, right?” Kay felt that rush of unbecoming prurience, the desire to know exactly what had happened to this woman. “I hardly think—”

“Okay, okay, okay, okay,
okay
.” Even as her words seemed to promise agreement, Heather swung her head vehemently side to side, so her blond curls, short as they were, bounced and shook. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you, and you’ll know why I can’t go to jail, why I can’t trust these people not to hurt me.”

“Not in front of Kay,” Gloria commanded, but Heather was wound up now, impossible to stop.
She doesn’t know I’m here
, Kay thought.
Or she knows but doesn’t care
. Was it trust or indifference, a vote of confidence or a reminder that Kay was of no significance to her?

“It was a policeman, okay? A policeman came to me and said something had happened to my sister and I needed to come quick. And I went, and that was how he got both of us. First her, then me. He locked us in the back of the van and took us.”

“A man pretending to be a cop,” Gloria clarified.

“Not
pretending
. A real police officer, from right here in Baltimore, from the county, with a badge and everything. Although he wasn’t wearing a uniform—but policemen didn’t always wear uniforms. Michael Douglas and Karl Malden—
The Streets of San Francisco
—they didn’t wear uniforms. He was a policeman, and he said everything would be all right, and I believed him. That’s the only real mistake I ever made, believing that man, and it ruined my life.”

With that final word,
life
, some long-held emotion was released and Heather began crying with such raw force that Gloria reared back from her, unsure of what to do. What could Kay do, what would any feeling person do, but reach around Gloria and try to comfort Heather, remembering to be especially gentle, given the temporary splint on the left forearm, the general all-over soreness left by a car accident.

“We’ll work something out,” she said. “We’ll find a place for you. I know someone—a family in my neighborhood, away for spring break. At the very least, you can stay there for a few days.”

“No police,” Heather choked out. “No jail.”

“Of course not,” Kay said, catching Gloria’s eyes to see if she approved of Kay’s solution. But Gloria was smiling, smug and triumphant.

“Now this,” the attorney said, her tongue darting over her lower lip, as close to a literal smacking as Kay had ever seen, “
this
gives us leverage.”

One more night. One more night. Everyone had said she couldn’t stay in the hospital beyond today, but she’d gotten one more night out of them, which just proved what she had always believed: Everybody lied, all the time.
One more night
. There had been a hideous pop song with that title, years ago, a spurned lover begging for a final bout of lovemaking. It was a frequent motif in pop music, come to think of it.
Touch me in the morning. I can’t make you love me if you don’t
. She had never understood this. When she was younger, still trying to date—and, big surprise, failing miserably time and time again—the men usually ended up leaving her a few months in, almost as if they could smell the rottenness coming off her, as if they had found her secret sell-by date and realized how ruined she was. At any rate, when a man broke off with her, the last thing she wanted from him was one more night. Sometimes she threw things, and sometimes she cried. Sometimes she laughed, relieved. But she never resorted to begging for one more night, a touch in the morning, a pity fuck however you sliced or diced it. You took your pride where you could find it.

She eased herself out of the bed, everything aching, her body already sensing that the left arm was not to be counted on, not for a while, that the right arm had to pick up the slack. Amazing how quickly the body adjusted, much faster than the mind. Her mind was far from reliable these days.
Did I see a boy and think he was a girl, or was there never a face at the window at all
? She went to the window, pulled aside the curtain, and studied the landscape—the parking lot, the smudge of city skyline in the distance, the clogged lanes of I-95 at rush hour.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air
! A line of poetry stuck in her head, a legacy of the nuns, who believed you could memorize your way to intelligence. The highway was near, not even a mile away. Could she get there, put out her thumb and hitch a ride home? No, she’d be a fugitive twice over then. She had to tough this out. But how?

It wasn’t the lies that worried her. She could keep track of the lies. It was the bits of truths that put her at risk. A good liar survives by using as little truth as possible, because the truth trips you up far more often. Back when she’d been in the habit of changing names, she had learned to create each new identity fresh, to carry nothing forward. But the threat of jail this afternoon, just like the possibility of arrest that first night, had freaked her out. She had to say
something
. It had seemed pretty inspired, telling them about the cop, throwing Karl Malden into the mix. Odd, tangential details like that made everything else sound authentic. But they weren’t going to settle for Karl Malden. They were clamoring for a real name, and she was going to have to give them something, someone.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the night sky.

She wasn’t sure who worried her more, the dead or the living, who posed the most risk. But at least you could bluff the living. You couldn’t put anything over on the dead.

Agnihotra mantras are to be uttered in their original form in Sanskrit.
They are not to be translated into any other language….

Agnihotra mantras are to be uttered in rhythmically balanced tone so the sound vibrates throughout the entire household. The tone should not be too loud or too weak nor should it be done in a hurry…. The feeling of total surrender is developed through the utterance of these mantras.

—Adapted from instructions on how to perform the Agnihotra, the sunrise/sunset ritual central to the practice of the Fivefold Path

Sunset fast approaching, Dave grabbed the ghee from the refrigerator and headed into the study, leaving Chet at the kitchen table with Miriam and their mugs of tea. They weren’t even trying to speak, just sipping herbal tea and staring off into space. Everyone was exhausted and hoarse after the full day of interviews, although Dave had done most of the talking. Miriam deferred to Dave, and the detective seldom spoke at all. Sometimes Dave found Willoughby’s silence comforting. Men of action should be laconic. Other times he suspected that these still waters didn’t run particularly deep. But Chet was familiar to them now, like a dignified stray they had adopted after years of saying they didn’t want the bother of a dog.

In his study he sat cross-legged on his rug, not a proper prayer rug—other than the copper pot for the offering, the Agnihotra did not require ritual objects, which was a large part of its charm—but a dhurrie he’d found in an Indian market years ago, when he was traveling after college. His mother had still lived in Baltimore then, and he’d shipped his treasures to her apartment, despite her complaints and suspicions. “What’s in these boxes?” she had berated him upon his homecoming. “
Drugs
? If the police come to my door, I am not lying for you.”

He put a dung cake in the pot, adding a piece of ghee-soaked camphor, followed by the rest of the dung and the rice grains, checking his watch to see if the exact moment of sunset had arrived.

“Agnaye Svaha,” he said, offering the first part of the ghee-smeared rice grains. “Agnaye Idam Na Mama.”

People often assumed that the Fivefold Path was another souvenir from his travels, but Dave was married to Miriam and working for the state when he first heard about it, at a party in Northwest Baltimore. The Fivefold Path turned out to be the nexus for most of the people at the party, held at a beautiful Victorian in Old Sudbrook. Dave had not known such houses existed when he was growing up in Pikesville, much less such people, yet Herb and Estelle Turner lived less than two miles from his mother’s former apartment. The Turners were at once warm and reserved, and Dave assumed that their grave dignity derived from the Fivefold Path. It would be some time before he knew about their troubles with their daughter, or Estelle’s fragile health. And although Miriam had always been skeptical of the couple, claiming they’d been fishing for converts that night, they only brought up the Fivefold Path when Dave asked about the house’s sweet, smoky smell, so unexpected on a warm spring night. He had suspected, hoped for, grass, which he and Miriam were anxious to try. But the fragrance was from the sunrise/sunset ritual of the Agnihotra, and it was almost as if it had baked its way into the bones of the house. As Estelle Turner explained the smell, and its connection to the Fivefold Path, Dave saw it as a way to
be
the Turners—gracious, poised, living in a beautiful yet unostentatious house.

For her part, Miriam said the Agnihotra made the house smell like shit, literally. Once they moved to Algonquin Lane, she had been adamant that Dave confine the practice to his study, with the doors closed. Even then she had despaired at the greasy residue the ghee left on the walls, a filmy sheen that resisted any and all cleaning methods. Now, Dave suspected, he could set up the ’Hotra on the dining room table and Miriam wouldn’t make a peep. She never reproached him anymore. He almost missed it. Almost.

Still your mind
, he urged himself.
Focus on your mantra
. There was no point to the practice if he couldn’t lose himself in it.