No One Tells Everything (8 page)

Now that they are wrong about. She was not a child.

Count eight: first-degree attempted sexual abuse.

No. Not that either. Abuse is something you do to inflict pain.

“It was the most disturbing murder scene I have been to in my twenty-five years,” the Assistant District Attorney says.

This you hear, the words chiseled as if out of a block of ice. That makes you, according to this man, pacing and jerking his hands around, the murderer. You wonder what he means by the murder scene. Does he mean the room? There was only blood left there.

Your lawyer touches your shoulder again and you wonder if this is his attempt to be reassuring. You don’t tell him that nothing will help. You don’t say, “I know you are being paid by my father so you have to try to be nice but you really don’t have to.” The chain around your waist is digging into your spine against the back of the chair. You can feel it and you can’t feel it at the same time. Your head itches but you know not to attempt to raise your hands. Even though you are not listening, your body senses that the proceedings are coming to a close. Voices are coming into focus. The judge laces his fingers in a teepee. He is what—perplexed, sad, tired? Maybe he is just bored.

You hear the rustling now of other people in the room, a cough, a foot tapping, a pen clicking. It is getting too hot to breathe.

All sharp objects are kept from you so your fingernails are long and dirty. You want nothing more at this moment than to bite them. You ball your shackled hands into fists; your sharp nails slicing into your damp palms. Sounds are at once all around you, magnified, startling. It seems like you have bionic hearing. You identify a car door slam in the courthouse parking lot, the judge breathing through his nose, your lawyer’s watch, its ticking slowing down until it stops altogether. You wonder what else is expected of you in this whole affair. Another yes? Maybe a no this time? The lawyer will tell you, and you’re glad for that. Your eyes settle on the kind-hearted Judge Castiglione, but then again, you’ve never been very good at reading people and he might really be cold and spiteful. You hope not. You hope he cares about you at least a little.

Your lawyer says it’s clear that you were not in your right mind, which in the eyes of the law means not guilty by reason of insanity. So in the best case, you will be declared insane. You find it a little comforting. It explains a lot of things over the years. It will show your parents that it wasn’t a matter of just trying harder. Even with the humiliation that comes along with it, insanity gives you a slight power over everyone else. Okay, that’s pushing it, you tell yourself. The trouble is, some of the time you don’t feel insane and that is when, in the coming months, you will want to die.

“You have ninety days,” the judge says to your lawyer, “to enter a circumstance of mental incapacity.”

Circumstance. You wish it were all just circumstance but you know it goes deep down, to the bone. It is as inseparable from your being as the blood that warms your veins and collects in your chained-together, leaden feet. Your mind has been misfiring for years.

Judge Castiglione cracks his gavel down. You thought that was just something they did on TV.

“Okay,” your lawyer says, “they’ll take you back now. We’ll talk soon. I’ll be in touch with your parents.”

You think that he’ll probably be much more in touch with them than you will.

You are escorted outside and it’s too sunny and your eyes tear. You are relieved when the door of the police cruiser is shut and you can rest your head against the cool glass of the window. As you pass the donut place you know you might not ever be allowed another donut and your mouth waters and you close your eyes.

Up until now you haven’t thought much about Sarah’s parents and now you can’t stop thinking of them. A wave of infinite sorrow makes you feel wobbly. The police radio crackles. You imagine she liked her parents a lot more than you like yours. You imagine they will miss her more than yours will miss you. Your parents, you guess, will never talk about it. Your parents will move to another town so that no one associates them with you. They will take your sister on a trip to Bermuda or the Caribbean or even Hawaii to take her mind off of you.

The car stops and you are back at the jail. The patrolman doesn’t say anything to you as he opens the door. You don’t move at first because you are looking at the sky beyond his head.

“Out,” he says.

His hand is warm and tender on your head to keep it from hitting the top of the car. You feel like crying all over again for this kindness. You want to tell him that you are not evil but your jaw is locked like a vise and you are being walked across the pavement and his grip is around your upper arm and you wish he would hold onto you forever. Don’t let me go, you want to say. Don’t make me go in there. But you are already inside the sickly green cement corridor and he hands you off without saying goodbye.

———

The police discovered what they believe was the murder weapon, a small kitchen knife, in a knapsack in Mr. Raggatt’s apartment.

“‘Charles Raggatt is a faggot’ was just one of those stupid things kids say.”

“There was this one time when as a joke someone wrote a love letter to him from Hadley Jameson, who was the hottest girl in school. He thought it was really from her and wrote her back. It was hilarious.”

———

I
t’s three a.m. and Grace drinks champagne, a bunch of mini bottles, all she could get at the one open store down near the Gowanus Canal, amidst the hookers, addicts, and lurkers. It’s a place she wouldn’t even walk to during the day but she felt fearless, protected by her manic mood. One of the empty bottles rolls under her bed. She is on the verge of discovery and it makes her feel alive.

She hasn’t felt this way since she was a girl. It makes her think of the summers of her youth before everything started to slide. When her dad could make her mom laugh, when she and Callie ran around and got grass-stained, when they watched the Fourth-of-July fireworks from their old army blanket on the golf course at the country club, the four of them, some fried chicken, carrot sticks, and cupcakes speared with little American flags. Grace knows that she was the same then as she is now, too aware of longing to be carefree, too sure of disappointment to forget herself in the moment. But if she closes her eyes she can conjure her mom’s luminous laugh, the rich, deep sound that changed irrevocably when Callie died, that grew shallow, then fizzled. If she closes her eyes she can believe that it wasn’t her fault.

###

It’s Saturday. Grace wakes up on the floor, her head under the bed. As she tries to extricate herself, she bangs her head on the bed frame, the metal bar hitting above her eye. She recoils into the deep, focused pain of it, closing her eyes against the stinging light of day. An overturned champagne bottle has soaked her sheets. This is it for me, she thinks. I am going to stop drinking altogether. The rug has left a red, rash-like patch on half her face and her ripeness disgusts her. Her stomach howls—she hasn’t eaten anything since the bagel she ate yesterday on the way to the courthouse—but it quivers with nausea at the smell of her neighbor’s frying bacon. Deep breaths through her nose. Six steps to a scalding shower. She stands with her face in the streaming water for ten minutes. She focuses on the words on the back of her shampoo bottle and copyedits them in her head.

Coffee helps a little and she spreads out her Charles notes on the floor. She imagines him in high school, believing against reason that the popular pretty girl liked him. She wonders if there is a way to track the moments in a person’s life to reveal exactly when a course is set in irrevocable motion. She reaches back to the whorl of her hair where her bald spot used to be; the hair that grows there is softer than the rest.

The super and his wife are sitting on the stoop enjoying the sunny afternoon outside her apartment. Grace is hungry but she can’t face their questions, their neighborly chitchat, their optimism. She is trapped inside, behind her pulled curtains, with no means of escape. She has never cooked a real meal for herself and her empty refrigerator gapes back at her. She cuts the mold off a nub of old cheddar and scrounges for some stale saltines in the cupboard.

She calls the jail and the clerk gives her Charles’s inmate number and cellblock. She turns on her laptop. Dear Charles. But she can’t type anything further. She doesn’t even know what she is asking for. Dear Charles, I would like to meet you, to hear your side. No, that’s not right. I don’t believe you were some type of predator. No. She tries again.

Dear Charles,

I have been following your case and I am very interested in learning about you. I live in Brooklyn but I grew up in Cuyahoga, Ohio, which kind of makes us from the same place. I imagine that because of the unsettled legal status of your situation there are events that you will be advised not to speak about. I understand this. However, it is the rest of your life that I am interested in. Maybe we can get to know each other.

I hope you will write me back. I am enclosing a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

Print. Fold. Seal. She double-checks the address. She bites her thumb. Her heart hammers in her chest and she feels slightly faint. It is quiet outside her door, and when she peeks through the blinds, the stoop is empty. She slips out to the corner and deposits the letter, checking twice that it has disappeared down the mail slot.

###

On one of her many scattered pages Grace finds the number of Steve Daniels, a high school classmate of Charles’s, now finishing his freshman year at NYU. He responded immediately to her email—she pretended she was a reporter from the magazine—and said he knew Charles. When she calls him she guesses from his breathy, conspiratorial tone that he can’t wait to talk.

They agree to meet at a new NoLita bar that’s all brushed steel and cement. He’s in a tight T-shirt, jeans, and black cowboy boots, and when Grace arrives he is flirting with the strapping, overly bronzed bartender. Steve’s hair is a lustrous black, closely cropped, and his long-lashed eyes sparkle with the newfound freedom of college. Unlike Charles, he is small and graceful, and she wonders what he’s hiding beneath the immaculate exterior construction.

She holds out her hand and he kisses it like they are courting. She orders a club soda and he orders a Red Bull and vodka. His movements are mannered and theatrical. He plays his part with relish.

“Oh. My. God. So crazy, right?” he says as he situates himself. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard.”

“So you knew Charles?”

“I knew who he was. We had a couple of the same classes.”

“But you weren’t friends?”

“Have you seen that thing he posted on our high school’s alumni page for our class? They must have taken it down already. Oh man.” He covers his mouth for a moment with his hands for emphasis. “He said something like ‘What’s up Hunter High School! When not hanging out with my girl, I’m hazing pledges. My life is dedicated to keeping my fraternity number one on campus, my girlfriend smiling, and my Land Rover clean. I don’t work but who the hell has time to when happy hour starts at 4?’ Did he really think people would be like, ‘That dude’s so cool now’?”

Steve shakes his head and looks out into the bar. He catches the eye of someone at a table behind Grace and gives a barely perceptible head nod.

“Was he picked on in high school?” she asks.

“He was fat. A nerd. It was painful how he tried to get people to like him by paying for stuff. I mean, yeah, high school sucked. But lots of people get picked on. Lots of people don’t fit in. But murder? Jesus.”

Steve’s mask has started to slip. He has not yet learned how to cement it fully in place. Time and practice will help. And denial is good. He sucks down his drink and touches his hair.

“Did he have any friends?” she asks.

He shrugs and gives her an empty look. His eyes flash and betray his affected distance.

“I think he hung out at lunch in the drama department, probably so he wouldn’t get his ass kicked. There was this girl Kelly who ate there sometimes. She was kind of a punk chick. Or goth or whatever. She went to art school in California.”

Steve pretends to search for an eyelash in his eye.

“Where did you eat lunch?” Grace asks gently.

Steve smiles but only with his mouth, then his eyes dip and he looks away. He looks chastised and his shoulders sag.

“Okay, yeah. I ate with him sometimes,” he says.

She waits.

“We were friends by default, I guess. If you could call it that. It was better than being alone. I kind of hated him. I hated that he was in love with a cheerleader and thought that she could like him. I hated that he thought he could dye his hair blond and look better. I made fun of him.”

Grace opens her eyes in surprise.

“I know it sounds harsh,” Steve says. “But I didn’t want to see him make more of a fool of himself than he already did. And I didn’t want it to rub off on me. We didn’t talk about real stuff. We kind of didn’t want to know. Talking about it would make it more true or something.”

“Did you ever talk to him after you left home?”

“Nah. We had a fight toward the end of senior year. That was kind of it. I told him I didn’t want to be his friend. I had a plan, and he wasn’t part of it. It was every loser for himself.”

Steve looks uncomfortable and unsmooth, still a teenager trying out a new part.

“Why did he do it, anyway?” he asks, his voice now quiet and small.

“I don’t know that he did,” she says.

He finishes the rest of his drink and vigorously shakes his head to dislodge the mantle of bad memories. Perhaps by talking about Charles as a distant character Steve thought he was creating a new, less painful past for himself. It doesn’t seem to have worked.

“I have to go,” he says, sliding off his stool and digging for money in his front pocket.

“I’ve got it,” Grace says.

“Okay,” he says. “Thanks.”

He hugs her without pretense and she gets a final glimpse of the unsure kid he once was, the one he has decided to pack away for good.