Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (5 page)

“I’ll try to get back down here to see you again over Christmas,” Lauren said. “When we can spend more time together. But I’m hoping to make the trek up north again by tomorrow night.”

“Are you telling me that for all that luggage you dragged in here, you’re only staying for two days?”

“You know me. What I pack for two days is someone else’s weeklong cruise,” she said, mocking herself a little. “It’s all about being prepared.”

“Impossible. You can
never
be prepared.”

“Well, I still like to try.”

Maisie was quiet for a moment. Lauren could tell she had reservations about speaking again: her tight lips and slightly narrowed eyes gave it away. “What are you going to do if Arlen won’t see you?”

“I’m optimistic that he will.”

“You’ve got so much riding on whether or not he forgives you. What if he doesn’t? What then?”

Lauren’s heart jumped in her chest, and she waited a moment before she spoke, commanding it to settle down. “He has to.”

“But why?” Maisie asked, pleading now. “Is it because of Jonah? Because if it is . . . ”

“It’s not about my brother,” Lauren said.

“What happened to Arlen—and Jonah—wasn’t your fault.”

“It wasn’t
entirely
my fault. But it was some.”

Lauren stood and made her way to the railing of the balcony. The breeze that blew against her hot skin was barely a breeze at all. “You would want to make this right too. If you were me.”

“Probably. I’m not trying to second-guess you. I’m just trying to help.”

Lauren glanced over her shoulder and offered her warmest smile. “You help me more than you know.”

She looked back to the street, where a man was walking a huge white dog down the sidewalk. The doctor had warned her. After she’d picked herself up off the floor of the courthouse and they’d brought her to the ambulance, she’d been subjected to a series of tests. The doctors scrutinized not only her heart, but her life. They wanted to know:
Did she take illegal drugs? Legal drugs? Did she drink coffee? Alcohol? Did her family suffer from heart disease? And what about her stress levels; how would she describe them?

Forty-eight hours and one Holter monitor later, a specialist sat her down in his office. He’d told her the impulses in her heart were firing out of rhythm, so that the well-timed pulses of electricity were less like clockwork and more like lightning in a storm. He’d thrown words at her—
palpitations
,
sinus tachycardia
,
atrial fibrillation
. The doctor had told her that if the misfiring didn’t stop, she could face more serious long-term consequences. Lauren had
demanded the bottom line.
Look,
he’d said.
I probably shouldn’t put it this way. But I think it’s an old-fashioned nervous breakdown
.

Lauren had been shocked. She’d always thought of nervous breakdowns as ailments that were more made up than real—mythical “female diseases” from some other time when women wore corsets and hid their pregnancies.

How could
she
have a nervous breakdown? Her schedule was grueling, high-pressured, and dangerous—and for years she’d weathered it. No—she’d conquered it. Struggle had made her strong. There was no way she could go back to her office and attempt to explain that there was nothing wrong with her other than what was in her head, that she’d simply had a—she hated to even
think
it—nervous breakdown.

She
had
to get Arlen’s forgiveness. Closure was not merely an amenity that would allow her to look herself in the mirror again; it was necessary. Before Arlen’s retrial, she’d felt untouchable. A monarch ruling her own life—to the awe and amazement of everyone who saw how young she was and how much she’d accomplished.

But now she’d lost her confidence—and she couldn’t work cases without it. She didn’t want to have a stroke before she turned thirty-five. Arlen’s forgiveness would go a long way toward undoing what had been done. What
she
had done.

The last of the pink smears of sunset faded behind the big houses across the street. “Well,” Maisie said, “it’s nice to have you down here visiting. You need a break from all that court stuff. A few days in Richmond will do you good.”

“I wish I could stay longer,” Lauren said.

“You’re welcome as long as you like. Stay the year. Stay two. Lauren . . . ” Lauren turned, and Maisie reached across the small
balcony for her friend’s hand. “If it were up to me, you wouldn’t go back to Albany at all.”

The narrow brick alleyway alongside the antiques shop smelled of yeast—and when Will dragged the garbage to the sidewalk for tomorrow’s morning pickup, he knew why. Two days ago, he’d bought Arlen a thirty-pack of beer. Nothing fancy—just the same kind of pilsner served at picnics and dive bars. Now the whole pack was gone.

Will headed back into the shop, then up the stairs that led to the apartment where Arlen was staying. He knocked and entered. Arlen looked up from his perch at the window. The TV was muted but on.

“I’m heading out. You need anything?” Will asked.

“Naw. I’m fine.”

“You should make a grocery list. Otherwise I have to guess.”

“Just don’t get anything I have to assemble myself. Those little cups of macaroni were good. Fast.”

Will nodded, again struck by how much Arlen was like a teenager—except that he was different from the one Will had known. The last time Will had seen the Arlen he knew, the person he recognized on some fundamental level, Arlen had been a newlywed. He’d saved up a little money, and he’d been able to plan a short trip to Albany to visit a sick cousin. Almost a decade later, Arlen was finally back in Virginia, but Will had the sense that he didn’t consider himself to be
home
.

When they were kids, living in the backcountry, they’d liked to head down to the old flat brook, fishing rods balanced on their shoulders like muskets, coolers of pilfered beer in their free hands. The cicadas would wheeze in the treetops, the creek would come
alive with water bugs, and they would sit feeling alone and safe until the sun went down.

Their home lives weren’t bad, exactly, but in a town with more people than jobs, more bars than churches, they didn’t have what outsiders called “advantages.” Arlen’s mom had been a widow; his dad had died from emphysema after fifty years of working the mines in the summer and the fields in the fall. His mother managed to pay the mortgage, but not much else, by holding an illegal day care in her living room.

Will’s situation had its challenges too. His dad was gone as well; he was a trucker whose only reason for coming home seemed to be to get Will’s mom pregnant. She’d just had her sixth baby when his father took to the road and didn’t come home again. Will’s mom did her best. The government helped. It was almost enough to get by.

Will found refuge in his friendship with Arlen. In the halls of their high school, they were joined at the hip. Neither had nice clothes. Neither was popular with girls. But together, they talked about everything, sitting on the boulders beside the creek. Both of them had wanted something better, and mostly what they wanted was money. They swatted at mosquitoes and dreamed that they would start some business together and get out of town.

But these days, even when Will was beside him, Arlen seemed to consider himself alone.

“All right,” Will said. “Long as you don’t need anything. You got a key.”

Arlen turned back to the window. “So long.”

Will walked down the stairs to the first floor, the old boards creaking heavily under his weight. Twice today Arlen had scared him: First when the strength and force of his anger at Lauren Matthews had made Will’s skin crawl. And second when Will realized that Arlen couldn’t go outside.

Will wanted to
know
his old friend again. But how could he when Arlen wouldn’t let him? For one week Arlen had been out of prison. Will had searched for signs of his old friend in this new guy’s face, but Arlen remained a stranger.

He shoved his hand into the pocket of his cargo shorts, where Lauren Matthews’s note had been folded into a square. And he thought about her, much more than he meant to, as he let the Virginia roads take him out of Richmond proper, take him home.

On the evening of Arlen Fieldstone’s conviction, Lauren and her colleagues treated themselves to a night of celebrating. Lauren had taken on the Fieldstone trial after a freak accident—when both the district attorney and his assistant had been injured together in the same car crash as they went out together for their lunch break. Lauren—with all the exuberant courage of a young woman who meant to get a foot in the door come hell or high water—was called to stand in until one or both of her bosses recovered. She hadn’t needed to hear the gossip to know what the legal community was whispering about her. There was talk of finding a replacement. But she rallied, worked under her bosses’ supervision, and then, in front of national television syndicates and politicians everywhere, she made the case her own. When she won, she wasn’t lauded like some winning hometown quarterback; she was hailed as the whole team.

We, the jury . . . 

On the night of the verdict her colleagues joked about carrying her through the streets on their shoulders. And though they didn’t
lift her, the suggestion was enough to make her high. She pictured it: streamers and confetti fluttering earthward as they paraded through the concrete caverns of downtown Albany—the scene no less real because it was imagined. They rolled into the bar, the usual bar, as if they owned every napkin, coaster, and glass. At some point Lauren lost track of the number of drinks thrust into her hand.

Burt Sternfeld, who was a partner in a private firm of lawyers and jury consultants, gripped her arm.
A prodigy
, he’d called her. She was a
prodigy
. She’d heard the word before—when she’d graduated early from her private high school, when she got an accelerated BS, when she had her JD at twenty-two. But it wasn’t until Burt said
prodigy
to her that she thought,
Maybe.
He’d put an arm around her shoulders as if she—and not her father—had been golfing with him for a decade, and he said he’d heard a rumor about her interest in jury consulting. He asked her to make an appointment with his secretary. She nodded politely. Her toes in her shoes curled so hard they hurt.

All of Albany had turned its eyes on her. The bartender gave her his number—an odd but delightful occurrence given that she’d seen the man at least a dozen times before and he’d never flirted with her until that night. And Juliette Peterson, the secretary who always gave her such a hard time when Lauren asked for copies, swallowed her usual irritability and said congratulations.
Everyone
knew Lauren was not just another wannabe. She was the real thing.

 . . . 
find the defendant . . . 

Lauren’s victory was one for the history books, a victory that almost hadn’t happened. She’d stood trial in her own way, and she’d won. After the verdict had been announced, Senator Raimez had found her in a quiet corner of the courthouse. His eyes were full of tears and he held her hand somberly—not quite a handshake but an embracing.

“Nothing changes the fact that my wife is dead,” he’d said to her, right in front of the cameras. “But justice lives on.”