Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (4 page)

Lauren laughed. “I owe you. We’ll go out for tequila when I get back.”

“Are you the DD?”

“Yep.”

“I hope to God they do make you a partner. Somebody’s got to get me a new copy machine.”

Lauren’s father was less sympathetic than Rizzi when she called to tell him the news that she’d left Albany. Lauren walked down the street as she spoke to him, searching for a gym. She would need a good hour on the treadmill after she got off the phone with her dad.

“Is there a man?” he wanted to know. “Is that what this is? Some moonstruck-lovers kind of thing?”

“Yeah, right,” Lauren said. “It’s business. In a way.”

“How is apologizing to Arlen Fieldstone business?”

“I have to be able to hold my head up in a courtroom, don’t I?”

“Not if you lose your job.”

Lauren stopped on the sidewalk and looked behind her, wondering if she’d walked past the gym. She’d decided that the best way to break the news to her parents that she was going to take a tiny little hiatus from work was to tell them over the phone,
after
she’d already done it. She would have preferred to drive over to their big stone house overlooking the Hudson River and then settle into their outdoor living room for a heart-to-heart. She wished she could tell them—could talk with them—about Arlen, about how his conviction had undermined everything she’d believed in.

But her parents, who were always supportive, weren’t always
understanding. Her father had pushed her to graduate high school early—for her own good. He’d pushed her to earn her JD in an accelerated program. He’d coached her, and cheered her, and used his political connections to help make her what she was. But when it came to matters of the heart, “Go tell it to Oprah,” was what he liked to say.

“So where are you staying?” he asked. “A hotel?”

“No. You remember Maisie—my roommate from college. I’m staying with her for a while.”

“What do you mean by ‘a while’?”

“I don’t know. Not long.”

“Well . . . what about Jonah?”

A pang of longing for her brother swept over her as she crossed the street. The picture of him that she carried in her mind was a snapshot of the way he’d looked a few years ago—when his hair had been buzzed to protect against lice, and the severe cut had made his eyes look bluer, bigger, even more vulnerable. He would be horrified to know she still thought of him that way: her brother who used to make charcoal sketches of the night nurses and who’d worn his name on a bracelet at his wrist.

“I said good-bye to Jonah,” she said.

“Well, then, what about Dakota?”

Lauren laughed. “She’s
four
. And I’m only going to be here a day or two. She won’t even notice I’m gone.”

“Well, your boss certainly notices.”

“It doesn’t matter. Dad—”

“It most certainly does matter,” he said. His voice was scratchy on her eardrum. “You’ve dedicated your whole life to that firm. You can’t just go blow it all because you’re confused about how you feel right now.”

“I’m not confused. Don’t you understand? I need this. Maybe . . . maybe Arlen needs it too.”

“What could you possibly say to Arlen Fieldstone that would make up for nine years in prison?” her father asked.

Lauren was glad her father couldn’t see her, because she winced.

“And besides, it’s not your fault. All the evidence was there to convict him.”

“That’s not what the appellate court thought.”

Her father gave a frustrated
huff
. “If that woman’s cocaine dealer—what was his name?”

“Chris Witte.”

“Right. If he hadn’t gone and started bragging, Arlen would still be in prison to this day. There’s nothing you could have done differently.
Nothing
.”

Lauren found the gym and leaned against the wall outside the door. She knew her father wanted what was best for her. To him, she was blameless. He simply couldn’t understand why she felt such personal responsibility about Arlen’s conviction, and because he couldn’t understand, he was annoyed. He was a man who loved with grit, gumption, and authority. He was pitiless—yes—but it was love that made him that way. He’d never held Lauren to standards that he didn’t hold for himself.

Lauren tried to look natural leaning against the brick of the old building, her cell phone at her ear. Her chest felt tight and pressure was building between her temples. She forced herself to relax. She wished she could tell her parents about her heart, her trip to the doctor’s, his warning that she find a way to make the palpitations stop. But how could her father understand what she was going through if he didn’t believe she was going through anything at all?

Better to keep him out of it.

“Well, is it
safe
?” her father asked. “I don’t want you agreeing to meet this guy in the middle of the night in some deserted parking lot.”

“You’re watching too much
CSI
,” Lauren said. “And anyway, that’s exactly the point. Arlen is
not
a murderer.”

“But he’s a stranger that you helped incarcerate. Don’t think Burt doesn’t tell me about the threats.”

Lauren sighed. She’d been over this a hundred times with her father, who’d been her boss’s golfing buddy since before she was born. Working on high-profile cases meant she
did
get the occasional threat. She’d received a new letter just last week, before she’d decided to leave town. They were always the same—passionless Times New Roman font, misspellings that would make a five-year-old cringe, and usually some kind of vague and dramatic overture like “watch your back.”

More than once, she’d left her office to discover that her tires had been slashed (she’d had them insured after the first incident, since the parking lot security was worthless). And last year, someone had keyed her passenger-side door—but she’d decided to be amused by it rather than angry, because the vandal had spelled the word
whore
wrong.

In the beginning, when her work had first attracted public attention, the threats had scared her—deeply. She’d gone to the police department, but there was little they could do. She took self-defense classes and got a home security system. She refused to walk to the parking lot alone if the sun was down.

Years passed. The threats trickled in now and again . . . and yet, apart from mildly annoying acts of vandalism, nothing ever happened. Logic replaced fear as Lauren began to understand the type of people who hated her.

The threats were about some anonymous and angry person blowing off steam, not about actual violence. In her heart, she began to feel a sort of tenderness toward people who had resorted to such cowardly acts. They weren’t the kind of people who had
learned to express themselves through art, or dance, or writing, or even professional therapy. They had no outlet—except for a few symbolic yet largely harmless acts of rage.

“Just promise you’ll be careful,” her father said. “And promise you’ll come home soon. You’ve spent your whole life working to get where you are today. I’d hate to see you blow it on an unnecessary apology to a man who doesn’t even know your name.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“I’m always looking out for you. You may be the first woman partner in the country’s most prestigious jury consultancy—”

“I’m not a partner yet.”

“Either way, you’re still my little girl.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she said. Then, with a blast of air-conditioning hitting her in the face, she pulled open the door and went into the gym.

In prison, Arlen had learned to sit for hours, not moving, with nothing in his head except the thoughts that floated here and there as gently as feathery seedpods on a summer wind. His mother used to have a cat that lazed in the window and blinked at the sun. He’d felt bad for the animal, for how bored it must have been to do nothing but sit and stare at the blowing cornstalks across the road. Now he understood just how much there was to see, when a person really could see what there was.

Richmond—Carytown—was fascinating; he felt greedy with the need to take it all in from his place at the window. Sometime in the last decade, men had started dressing like women in tight shirts and skinny jeans, and the women had started dressing like hobos—or, at least, the young ones did—walking out the door in whatever slouchy and mismatched things they happened to grab. He couldn’t look away. People were always doing two things at once, talking to
a friend and playing with their phones, hurrying and listening to Walkmans the size of postage stamps, or walking without looking where they were going and working a flattened-out computer with their thumbs. Arlen—who could barely do one thing at a time and feel he was doing it well—was rapt.

A teenage boy rode past on a bicycle, and Arlen’s own muscles twitched as if he could feel the pedals under his feet. White cords from the boy’s headphones dangled down his chest and disappeared into a pocket. As the bike moved through the frame of the window, Arlen turned his body to the side, put his head against the glass, to watch the boy push into the periphery.

And when a car in an intersection stopped fast, and the boy flew headfirst over his handlebars, Arlen saw that too.

The adrenaline came quick—a shot of energy and strength. His armpits prickled with sweat and his heart sped. Nine years in prison, and his body responded to danger in the time it took a bolt of lightning to jump from clouds to ground. He didn’t think about what he was doing—he just ran downstairs, through the antiques shop (where Will was polishing a banged-up trumpet), and to the door.

But when his foot hit the concrete step that led to the sidewalk, he stopped as if he’d been turned to stone.

Outside.

The outside world in full swing—Richmond on a Monday evening. His heart pounded hard in his chest, blood heating his muscles.

“What’s wrong?” Will stood behind him, but Arlen didn’t turn. He once saw a guy get jumped in the prison yard with a shank made out of a toothbrush. The man’s throat was slit from earlobe to earlobe, and he bled out on the pavement before the guards and medics could do a damn thing. Arlen had stood by then too, paralyzed. It was the first time he’d seen a dead body, but it wasn’t the last.

Now, when he spoke, he felt as if he’d needed to pry the words out of his brain one by one. “The boy . . . on a bike . . . an accident . . . ”

Will shouldered past him. “I’ll be right back!” Then he was gone.

Arlen slunk backward into the shop.

Fifteen minutes later, Will returned; his cheeks—which were always a little reddish—had become a deep mauve in the heat. His red-blond hair was messy, curls nearly translucent as a baby’s, matted by heat and sweat.

“The boy’s fine,” he told Arlen, breathing hard. “Just a bump on the head. He was up and talking, no problem. They called the ambulance just in case.”

“Crazy kid,” Arlen said. “That’s what they get for trying to walk and chew gum.” He had no reason to hang around in the antiques shop, feeling so much like an antique himself, so he started back toward the stairway that would lead to his bedroom on the floor above.

“You were gonna help that boy,” Will said.

“I didn’t.”

“You can’t leave?”

“Course I can,” Arlen said. “Just didn’t care to.”

Then, because he didn’t want to have to explain what he didn’t quite understand, he walked foot over foot back upstairs, back through the living room, back to the window, where he saw the ambulance going down the street, the lights and sirens muted, and the people on the sidewalk having no sense that anything was or had ever been wrong.

Lauren kicked off her sandals and propped her bare feet on the railing of Maisie’s balcony. She leaned her head back against her chair and breathed in. The air, so saturated with humidity, was not
entirely unpleasant, and she thought that at any moment it might slide down her skin like water droplets on a cool glass. Above, a striped green awning blocked out the sun’s last rays, which were pinkened with haze and heat. The streetlights were starting to flicker.

Lauren had spent a full day in Richmond, and she hadn’t seen Arlen. One day down.

She jumped when Maisie punched her in the arm. “Hey. Enough of that.”

“What?”

“I can hear you thinking from a mile away.”

Lauren laughed. Maisie was lazing at her side, one hand hanging limply off her armrest, the other clutching a highball of sweet tea. Ice tinkled when she moved. “I thought
I
was supposed to be the people-reader.”

“We lived together in a dorm room the size of a shoe box for two years. I can’t read people, but I can read
you
.”

“Oh, really?”

“Like a book.”

“What am I thinking now?”

“That your friend Maisie is the best hostess in the whole world?”

Lauren touched her forehead. “My God. That’s amazing! We’ll have to train you in speed-reading next. So you can size up a person even before they say hello.”

“No, thanks. That would take the adventure out of dating.”

“Don’t I wish!” Lauren said. And out of a bad habit, she glanced at her cell phone on the table beside her. But there were no calls.

“So spill.” Maisie propped her legs up on a small stool. After her shift at the hospital, she’d changed out of her scrubs and put on an emerald sundress so slouchy and elastic it might have been pajamas. “How did it go with Arlen?”

“I didn’t see him. His landlord recognized me. He wouldn’t let me upstairs.”

“So what will you do?”

“I don’t know.” Lauren thought of work—of the things she’d left undone. Leaving had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. She’d left a half-sipped glass of wine on the kitchen counter; the vacuum in the living room was plugged in. When she got back, it would all look the same as when she left it. “If I don’t hear anything by tomorrow afternoon, I’ll go back over there.”

“You’re really in a hurry to go home.”

Lauren glanced at her friend. Where Lauren was small and athletic, Maisie was broad and curved. Her blue eyes spoke of beaches and palm trees, even in the winter. Her brown hair bounced with natural curl, caught in a ponytail. On Lauren’s rigidity scale—a system she’d invented to help her estimate a potential juror’s nature—Maisie was a marshmallow.