Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (17 page)

His brothers went into the kitchen without being escorted, talking loudly and making a big, rowdy fuss over Arlen. Will was filled with unspeakable gratitude for them. The terrible oppression he’d felt earlier in the evening seemed to be lifting; their loud voices drove the demons out of the dark corners of the house. He waited as Rourke walked the last few steps to the door.

Rourke nodded. “Hey. What up?”

Will swung his arm around for a brisk handshake. He left the front door standing open, then showed Rourke inside. His brothers were already opening Will’s refrigerator and cabinets, grabbing for pint glasses and arguing about the best way to avoid Richmond rush-hour traffic. Arlen stood looking pleased but awkward, not quite sure how to join in.

“Rourke?” Will gestured for his friend’s attention. “I want you to meet Arlen Fieldstone. Arlen, Rourke.”

“Heard so much about you,” Rourke said, and Will thought he saw a little glint of wariness darken Arlen’s eye. “I mean . . . I heard about you from Will. Not— I didn’t mean the newspapers.”

“Nice one, Rourke.” Will’s brother Scoot kicked out a kitchen chair and dropped into it. “Arlen’s used to it by now. He’s a regular celebrity.”

A bitter noise caught in Arlen’s throat.

“So what’s next for you?” Rourke asked. “Writing a book? Getting a reality TV show? The offers must be pouring in.”

“No offers. And no TV.”

Will clasped Rourke on the back and smiled. “How ’bout we quit the gossiping and play some poker?”

“Fine by me,” Arlen said.

The Mexican restaurant was the color of cantaloupe, with flamingo-pink accents and a teal ceiling painted with clouds. If there was an air conditioner in the building, it was either completely broken or exhausted of all cool air, and everything Lauren touched—the door, the lip of the bar, the stool when she pulled it out—was sticky. Revelers sat jammed in elbow to elbow, and the noise of the crowd was deafening—people struggling to be heard, each laugh louder than the next. But the margaritas were cheap, the nachos were piled sky-high, and a wall covered in pictures of Elvis and pinup girls ensured that no topic was prohibited for a night among new friends.

Lauren was enjoying herself. At first, a pesky and useless feeling of anxiousness had gripped her. She kept thinking she was forgetting something: an appointment, a phone call, an e-mailed document that perhaps hadn’t gone through. But as the minutes passed and the surface of her red-pink sangria descended into the bottom of her glass, she began to have fun.

Laughter flowed, sweet and full. The conversation wasn’t exactly challenging—discussions of shoes, television shows, husbands’ bad habits—and Lauren adored it all. She
missed
this. As undergraduates, she and Maisie had shared a close group of girlfriends who got together in their pajamas to watch movies and drink wine. But once she’d moved back to Albany for law school—and Maisie had moved to Richmond—Lauren had thrown herself body and soul into her career. Her friends dwindled to a number that she could manage, which was not much of a number at all. It
made her wish she had more time to give to others—and more time to give to herself.

“So how long are you here for?” Maisie’s friend Corina asked.

“It’s a little up in the air. Not very long.”

“You seem so familiar,” she said. “But there’s no way I’ve met you before, right?”

“I come to Richmond to visit Maisie as often as I can. But no, I don’t think we’ve met.”

Corina nodded and lifted her highball for a quick sip. She had long brown-black hair that was flat and parted straight down the middle like an open book. Her face was narrow and her eyes were big. She’d smiled at Lauren with real gladness when they were introduced, but now her mouth was slack and her gaze tipped to the ceiling. This was Behavior 101: the tendency to look up when recalling a visual memory.

“I remember where I know you from,” she said, lifting her hand, then dropping it on the bar with a smack. “You were on the news.”

Lauren smiled.

Corina was delighted, her face lit brightly and her smile wide and white. “Why did I see you on the news? I can’t remember for the life of me . . . ”

“Lauren has a book out,” Maisie put in. “She gets called to the news stations because she’s an expert on body language.”

“No, I don’t think that was it.” She leaned her wrist against the bar, her brow furrowed with thought. “No—it was . . . Oh. You’re that lawyer . . . ”

“Was,” Lauren said. “Now I do consulting work.”

“Wow.” Corina picked up her mojito, swirled the ice and mint around in the glass until it began to fizz. “It’s crazy what happened. About that guy being innocent and all.”

“Yeah,” Lauren said. “Crazy.”

She drained the last swallows of fruit-laden wine from her glass. Since she’d come to Richmond, there were moments when she almost felt as if she were on vacation—a break from daily life. But there was no getting around the reason she’d come down to Richmond in the first place. She wondered if it would always be like this, if she would always have to feel like the past was jumping out at her from dark corners or stalking her in a crowded room. If everyone in the bar simultaneously fell silent and pointed their fingers at her, she wouldn’t have felt any less guilty than she did now.

“Excuse me,” she said to Maisie.

She shifted on the bar stool, pulled her phone from her purse as if it had been vibrating. It hadn’t—but she did have a number of unchecked messages. She’d never before realized how often she used work as a retreat or excuse, and yet, here she was reaching for her phone as a refuge for the second time today. She wondered if those days and weeks when she was floating in work—when there was so much work to be done it felt like wading into water over her head, and stretching every bone in her body to keep a toe on the very bottom and her nose an inch in the air—were those entire, exhausting days nothing more than a kind of escape from life, as opposed to life itself? Did her passion for work mean she lived
more
intensely than the people around her? Or did her passion for work mean she lived
less
hard—because of all the experiences that she’d sacrificed in the name of her job?

She glanced through her messages, feeling Maisie’s eyes on her. She felt not as if her messages were an infringement on the present, but rather that the present was the aberration, and her many voice mails and e-mails and texts were the persistence of her real life poking through.

“Everything okay?” Maisie asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “But I’m so sorry. I’ve got all these messages
in.” She held up the bright pane of her phone; the blue and white pixels gave Maisie’s skin an alien glow. “I have to go.”

She offered a few more polite sentences—excuses, apologies, insistences that she didn’t need a lift since she could get a cab—and then she was out of the bar, and she could breathe again. She was heading for the street, for the friendly gray and white of her laptop, the glass of sparkling water she liked to keep beside her while she worked, and the silence that was so companionable and understanding of her need to get things done.

Often enough, there were cameras at the Albany courthouse. White television vans. TV anchors with expensive jackets and comfortable shoes. Loitering reporters who threw their cigarette butts on the ground. For Lauren, all of this was expected and usual on any given day at the courthouse. And so on the afternoon that Arlen’s conviction had been overturned, she hadn’t realized right away that the two reporters at the bottom of the stairs—who were flirting so heavily with each other that they’d nearly missed their opportunity—had been waiting, in part, for her.

She’d meant to walk past them briskly, to avoid catching someone’s eye. She’d perfected the art of brushing off reporters with no more thought than if they were wearing cardboard placards and handing out summonses about the End of Time. But that day, she hadn’t been able to make herself invisible. A man with a microphone and a woman with a camera came after her. They blocked her path.

What do you have to say now that Arlen Fieldstone will be retried based on faulty eyewitness testimony and questionable forensics?

Lauren had meant to keep walking—to brush off their question
even before they posed it. But Arlen’s name on the man’s lips had caught her off guard. She’d heard a rumor that Arlen’s case was being appealed, but she had nothing to do with the appeals process and hardly gave it a thought. Appeals were common; what convict wouldn’t want to appeal, if only to assuage the boredom of life in prison? Appeals rarely changed a thing. But to hear that Arlen’s appeal had ended with a judge throwing out the previous verdict—
her
verdict—she’d barely managed a reply to the reporter before he fired at her again.

How do you feel about the accusation that government misconduct and bad lawyering also played a role in his conviction?

She could only remember stuttering.

Do you hold yourself to be personally responsible for his wrongful incarceration?

For a moment, she thought of her brother, then of Arlen, until they both seemed to swirl together in her mind so one was indistinguishable from the other. And in that moment, which felt as if time had been skewed and drawn out like a lengthening shadow, she did something foolish: she let her guard drop.

For days, the networks replayed the clip: the reporter’s question, the slack-jawed look on Lauren’s face—such naked shock—then a tactless dodge. The image of her face recurred like a familiar nightmare, replayed again and again, for a full twenty-four-hour news cycle before it finally went away.

She’d given the reporters some rote answer; she couldn’t remember it now. Something trite about “just doing her job” and “we’ll have to wait for the results of the retrial” that didn’t even get replayed because of how jumbled and ridiculous it had been. Her mouth was saying some words, but in the back of her mind, she was thinking of her brother. The prosecutor who’d bagged Jonah had also been “just doing his job.”

She’d hurried around the reporters as quickly as she could,
trusting that they wouldn’t follow her. After a time, they didn’t. The sounds of shouted questions died down. When she was out of sight, she stopped and leaned against the wall, forcing herself not to think about Arlen Fieldstone—the man, not the case—and pushing him back into the furthest recesses of her mind, as if she could seal him, brick by brick, safely into the prisons of memory, where she’d done nothing wrong.

Around one a.m., Arlen was starting to get sleepy. A haze of cigar smoke hung in the air. Colorful plastic bowls held only greasy shards of salty snacks. The radio station had changed from music to talk. And yet, Will’s friends seemed to have no interest in packing up. The lighthearted banter of early evening had faded, and it left in its wake the surly, resolute silence of weary men who had nothing to do but prove one last point to one another—though what the point was Arlen couldn’t say.

Now he and Rourke were the only two guys left in the game—the last hand, Arlen hoped. He hadn’t won a round all night. Five hours of poker and not one single hand had gone to him. He’d begun to get angry—frustration strangling from the inside out. He’d learned many lessons about anger, but the most important one was that a person who wasn’t angry at one specific thing found himself being angry at everything. A dangerous state of mind.

Now, though, his luck was turning around—and just in the nick of time. Though they played only for pretzels, he wanted desperately to win. He had a full house: twos and eights. He’d barely been able to hide his excitement—it threatened to come bursting up out of him like a geyser. He was sure everyone at the table knew exactly what he was holding, as if they could see the reflection of the numbers in his eyes. He trembled to anticipate laying his cards down, a win that felt as if it had taken lifetimes to earn.

Over the fan of his cards, Rourke eyed him. Will’s kitchen was dim except for one bright light that shone over the center of the table, and it reflected off Rourke’s angelic blond hair. “I’m all in.”

Arlen nodded and tried to stay cool. Then, as slowly as he dared, he lowered his cards to the table. He didn’t even bother pronouncing the obvious. The hand spoke for itself.

Rourke’s face fell. He folded his cards up, tapped the bottom edges on the table, then tossed them so they landed with a skid. “Well, I’m cooked. You win, Arlen.”

“About time,” Will said.

“Hold up.” Arlen didn’t move to grab the pretzels in the center of the table. He had no interest in making a big show of pulling that pile toward him as if it was a heap of gold coins. But the cards . . . those he wanted to see. “What’d I win against?”

“What’s it matter?” Rourke asked.

Arlen leaned his forearms on the table. “Gloating rights.”

“Gloat away,” Rourke said, waving his hand. “Weren’t nothing but a couple pair.”

“So let’s see.” Arlen reached out for Rourke’s neat stack of downward-facing cards.

Rourke put his hand over Arlen’s, pinning it down. “It ain’t necessary.”

Arlen’s stomach soured. “I should say it is.” He held Rourke’s gaze with all the power he’d learned he had in himself one day when a man tried to jump him in the showers. “Show me the damn cards.”

Rourke drew his hand back.

Arlen turned over the cards and spread them out, one by one, to see. Four perfect little tens were looking back at him. Four tens and a six.

He started to laugh—laughter that rose up from some black and burning place within him. The anger rolled over his body in
waves; he felt as if a demon had climbed up from some awful place inside him, making him nothing more than a puppet of bones and meat. He stood up so fast his chair hit the floor. And then hands were reaching over the table to grip the front of Rourke’s shirt. Fear clouded the older man’s eyes.

“What the hell was that?” Arlen demanded. “You think I need to be babied? Like I’m some kind of charity case?”

“Naw, man. Easy. Let go.”

“You don’t
let
people win,” Arlen said through his teeth. He heard Will calling to him as if from a great distance. He gripped Rourke tighter, and when he spoke, his spit flew in the other man’s face. “You only let somebody win if you feel bad for them. Do you feel bad for me? Huh? Do you?”