No One Tells Everything (10 page)

A young man emerges. He’s thin, almost dainty, his brown skin shiny, his eyelashes curling up from his almond eyes. His uniform top is black with gold buttons and it’s too big around his neck.

“You would like a room, miss?” he asks, with a smile of long white teeth.

“Hi,” she says. “Is there a chance you were working the night of April 23rd?”

“Listen. I can’t talk about it.”

“You were here then?”

“You can direct all inquiries to my employer.”

“I won’t use your name. I’m just looking to find some things out.”

“I told the police everything.”

“Do you remember Charles Raggatt?”

“I checked him in in the evening. He was alone. When he checked out, he was still alone.”

“Did he say anything when he checked out?”

He looks at the door and shakes his head.

“I can’t talk to you,” he says.

“Anything?” she asks.

“He said that he cut himself, okay? He said he’d had an accident and that I could use his credit card to hire a cleaning service.”

“And you believed him?”

“Yes, I believed him,” he yells, slapping his palm against the counter, startling her. “I believed him enough to take care of it. What do you think, I knew he’d done this crazy shit in there and I didn’t do anything about it? Do you think my boss wants to know every time the cleaning woman finds something?”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“He was nice. That’s what I remember,” he says, his voice back in control. “He said he was just passing through and wanted to sleep. He seemed normal. And he had an American Express gold card. It’s not often I get one of those here.”

###

Grace stops in the parking lot of a liquor store near the highway. She wants wine to calm her nervous heart and shaky hands, but she sits in her car and hangs onto the wheel, watching the rain, testing her will not to falter. Focus. Sarah Shafer ended up at the hotel, too, after Charles had checked in. If he were going to drug and abduct her as they claim, why would he have risked a public place?

Her jeans are soaked and stuck to her thighs. Her mascara has left deep smudges under her eyes. She wolfs down two of the donuts, chocolate glaze coating her mouth and sticking to the corners of her lips. She checks the time but her new watch has already stopped working.

###

Brian sits at a dingy place in the East Village that has two pinball machines and a pool table. Despite the city smoking ban, the kids smoke openly, ashing into bottle caps and soda cans. He’s wearing his purple sneakers again, his laces tied in childlike double knots, and when Grace walks in, she catches him turning his eyes from the door to hide his eagerness.

“I thought you might not show,” Brian says.

“Give me a little credit,” she says.

She looks around and feels old; the bartender, with her pierced lip and her jet-black, baby-doll bangs, looks barely old enough to drive.

When Brian orders Grace gets a whiff of mint, which means he stopped home to brush his teeth before coming here. He hasn’t given up on her yet. She orders a Coke.

He takes her in, then sips his beer.

“So,” he says.

She waits, glancing down at the chocolate donut stain on her chest.

“Are you okay? I mean, don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but you don’t look so good,” he says.

She takes a long slug, finishing half her soda. She can’t bring herself to say anything to help him out. It’s more energy than she can muster. She knows she is daring him to cut her loose.

“Grace. I’m just worried. Are you sick? Are you doing drugs? Are you depressed? What? You can tell me.”

“I know,” she says. “Thanks for your concern. But I’m okay. Really. I’m distracted. Tired. Maybe I just need a vacation.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he says. “You should take some time off. You never use your vacation days.”

“Maybe a trip to Bermuda would be just the thing.”

He smiles.

“Nice watch,” he says, eyeing her wrist.

“I think I broke it by wearing it in the rain.”

“Let me see it for a minute?”

She slides it over her hand without unbuckling it and hands it to him.

“You just have to wind it. See?”

He holds it out to her and she pulls it and him closer. She kisses him. His lips, soft and young. And she goes in for more.

“No. Grace,” he says, his hand pushing her back by her shoulder. “Sorry.”

He is red, even in this shitty light she can see his neck splotch, his cheeks blaze.

She reaches for her purse on the floor and laughs in a lame attempt to make it right. She shrugs with exaggerated girlishness, embarrassing herself even further. She feels sorry for him and for herself. She forces the tears back.

“It’s okay,” he says, rising. “You don’t have to go.”

“I do,” she says. “But I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? And I’ll be on time.”

The rain abates to a soft mist as she stumbles home, slipping on the wet sidewalk. In the mailbox, amidst the junk mail and utility bills, is an envelope addressed to her in her own hand. Her stomach plummets. By the time she gets the door open and finds the light she is afraid to open it. It could be a Xeroxed form from the jail saying that the prisoner did not accept her letter, that he has refused all future correspondence. Or it could be the beginning.

She tears the seal of the envelope. The unimaginably neat black print hovers just above the lines of the paper. And with a deep breath, she starts.

Dear Grace,

I wish I had a computer to write this letter. I hope that my handwriting isn’t too bad. I’m under mental observation so I’m not allowed normal pens. I have to write with the bendable inside tube. If you’ve ever taken a pen apart you know what I’m talking about.

Thank you for writing to me. Yours is the first letter that didn’t include phrases like: “you deserve the chair,” “rot in hell,” and “enjoy the rest of your life in prison.”

You were right that I can’t discuss the case. But I can tell you that much of what the news reported is not the truth. Maybe one day I can share more with you, but there isn’t a lot about it I can tell you now.

I can’t begin to imagine the pain and the suffering that Sarah’s family is going through. I think about them all the time. I hope one day I can show them that I’m not the monster I’m being made out to be. But I don’t think they’ll want to talk to me anytime soon.

So I will end this letter now. I hope to hear from you again.

Sincerely,

Charles T. Raggatt

P.S. There are many questions that I probably can answer, you just have to ask.

###

It’s midnight and Grace lies on the floor, staring at the ceiling, unable to move even though she has had to pee for an hour. When she finally gets up, she sees the light on her message machine blinking, which she hadn’t noticed in all the excitement. No doubt Brian trying to make her feel better. She presses play on the way back from the bathroom, peels off her clothes, and falls into bed, ready to bury her head under her pillow.

“Grace. It’s Mom. Where are you? Call as soon as you get this. It’s your father. He’s had a stroke.”

Grace bolts upright. She grabs her pillow and hurls it across the room, knocking over a glass of water on her dresser.

She calls home. Her mother answers on the first ring.

Y
our cell door buzzes, announcing the guard’s entrance.

“Raggatt, you alive in here?”

This is a little joke, since he is the one to monitor you for suicidal ingenuity. He also brings you a little paper cup with your pill in it that he watches you take, then inspects under your tongue so you can’t stockpile for an overdose. They’re giving you something so you don’t off yourself. They’ve taken everything you could possibly construe as having an ulterior use from your cell. Instead of a mirror you have a semi-reflective sheet of metal bolted to the wall, which makes for some uneven shaving with your safety razor.

The guard looks at you with pity.

“If you want to shower today, be ready at two and someone’ll take you. Our shifts are screwed up.”

He leaves while he’s talking, and the door clacks closed and locks with all its satisfying finality. For the briefest moment there is silence.

It’s eight a.m. You have reserved an old People with Julia Roberts on the cover for the day’s entertainment, then lunch, then a shower, then perhaps a visit from your lawyer. You write the day’s plan down on a piece of loose-leaf notebook paper (no spirals or binders allowed). Then you write: wake up, take pill, breathe—all of which you then cross out—then: try to sleep, pee, eat. You add at the bottom ‘find God,’ and laugh, but you’re only laughing because you’re supposed to laugh at something like that, like a character would do in a movie. But there’s no camera here and you don’t think it’s funny anyway. So you stop and drag your pen over and over and over it.

“How are you feeling today?” your attorney asks.

He wears a pinkie ring and he drives a gold Lexus–or so he tells you. He seems to like you better lately. Well, you know he doesn’t like you but he is less fearful of you, less disgusted. He thinks you seem a little more in control.

“Fine,” you say.

He’s all business. You wonder how much he makes for this visit, how much Charles Sr. shells out to have him drive here to ask you how you are. In the fluorescent light of the visiting room, you can see stray hairs on his smooth head and you make yourself look elsewhere. The hairs are there, though, in your periphery when you look at him and when you close your eyes.

“We’re conferencing Thursday to try to work out a tentative proposal for a trial date. The longer we wait the better. The further out from media accounts the better. Did you see the doctor this week?”

“Yeah,” you say. “I see him every week.”

Dubno looks different now than he did to you at first. Smaller. Less powerful. He doesn’t ask much of you other than to believe that you are mentally ill, for the good of the case. You know he believes you did it though he’s never asked you. But to be fair, you know it doesn’t matter to him or his job. He says he believes you were sick, and that makes you not entirely culpable.

“Good. His testimony will be important,” he says.

On the yellow legal pad that rests on his crossed leg, he scratches down notes even though you are not saying anything. The letters he makes are long and narrow and the lines that form them don’t connect. The words he writes float on the page and when you stare at them they start to move, as if to rearrange themselves.

“We’re weak on people who can testify on your behalf. None of the boys from the fraternity. We’ve contacted all of them.”

Even though you knew this, it hurts to hear.

“She would have,” you say.

“Who would have what?” he asks.

“Sarah.” You laugh silently as you cry. “She would have testified on my behalf.”

Inside your skull you can feel the battle between self-preservation and the powerful beast of your memory. If you look closely you think you can still see blood under your fingernails.

“Okay, okay. Take it easy.” Dubno reaches his hand to touch your arm, then stops and rubs his chin instead.

You lean back to make him feel better, to make him feel further away from you. The suppressants go to work and blanket the bubbling crevices of your brain.

He underlines something three times then checks his watch.

“Charles. Your parents want you in treatment, not in prison. This is only going to happen if we win. Insanity is not an easy thing to get a jury to decide on.”

The stray hairs on his head flutter, though you feel no breeze in the dead air of the room. You wonder if he senses with them, like antennae. You want to smooth them down.

“They’ll be here next week?” he asks.

“Who?”

“Your parents,” he says, trying to look like it’s not weird that you didn’t know to whom he was referring.

“Oh. Yeah,” you say.

Kathy and Charles Sr., dressed up, so painfully out of their element in the jail. They’ll look like forms cut from plywood when they stand in the vestibule waiting for your arrival, his arm around her waist like they are posing for a formal portrait. Your mother, as always, in freshly applied coral lipstick. She has been wearing the same shade all your life.

“I talked to your father last night about some particulars,” Dubno says.

He taps his notepad on the table as if to straighten loose papers, to announce the end of his visit.

You wonder if he thinks you are awful. But you also wonder if it makes him feel better to know you, to lessen his own guilt for the bad things he has probably done.

“Okay, then,” Dubno says, “We’ll talk soon.”

Particulars. The weeks before your arrest are proving the most problematic to your defense. You were your other self then. The Charles who was separated from you, leaving a space, an airshaft, between you and your actions. When you drove around the next day, certainly you were aware of a presence, a heaviness to the smell inside the car, a sense deep in your bones that somewhere in the corroded folds of your cerebral cortex lay the horror, the reason why you refused to look at the tarp-covered mound in the trunk.

With your eyes you trace the ridges and pits of the cement ceiling of your cell, back and forth. It is like when you were little and you pretended the ceiling was the floor and you had to step over the chandelier, which bloomed up like a huge bejeweled flower.

T
he A train car is fairly full, but Grace gets a seat next to an empty one and pulls her suitcase close. Across from her are two junkies wrapped in mangy army coats despite the warmth of the afternoon.

“I love spring on the subway,” one says.

“How come?” the other answers.

“Because of all the nipples. Especially when it rains,” he says.

His laugh gets tangled in a phlegmy cough.

“Right on, man, right on. It’s paradise.”

Grace crosses her arms across her chest and looks at the floor. A leaking can of root beer rolls by, only to get stuck on a wad of neon green gum. It’s humid and rank and the open window only lets in the dirty, subterranean air. Her stomach muscles strain to hold everything down.