Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (6 page)

 . . . 
guilty as charged . . . 

That night in her bed, her head swimming with alcohol and compliments, her legs exhausted because she was not yet used to working a full day in high heels, she saw flashes of the future before her. Her proud parents (she would buy a house to rival theirs). The wardrobe she would have when she got her new job at Burt’s firm (which was just about in the bag). The respect she would command when she walked the marble corridors across the country. She fell asleep half dreaming that a great road was becoming clear before her—a path that she herself had cleared even though it stretched far out in front of her, into places she hadn’t yet been.

If she thought of Arlen Fieldstone again—as a
person
rather than an
event
—it was only in passing. The Fieldstone conviction was washed away on a tide of vodka, congratulations, and then the rush of wildly successful years.

From his little apartment—which he’d come to think of as a prison tower—Arlen had studied the mechanics of the antiques trade. It seemed simple enough. Will lugged armfuls of junk into the shop; strangers lugged them right back out. Rusty tricycles, advertisements for gasoline, plastic superheroes still in their boxes . . . The place was an ant farm for pack rats. Yesterday, Will had wheeled in a cigarette vending machine that, far as Arlen could tell, had no hope of being useful again except for target practice. But Will had whooped and smiled like it was Christmas day over the thing, even as flakes of rust were falling from it like snow.

Now, Arlen stood in the shop. Will had put him in charge—walking out the door even while Arlen argued. “Back in twenty,” he’d said.

That had been an hour ago. But luckily, nobody had come in. Arlen was alone with empty fish tanks and costume jewelry and pull-string dolls. Over the counter, Will had hung a sign: Work Is for People Who Don’t Collect Antiques.

Arlen wondered: What did Will see in all this junk—this stuff that smelled so bad, coated in dirt and rust? He’d thought Will had meant to get all rich and upstanding when he grew up. Instead, he collected old crap.

He noticed, for the first time, a shelf within eyesight of the office and a sign that had curled in at the edges:

NOT FOR SALE
.
AND NO, YOU CAN’T TALK ME DOWN
.

Arlen peered closer. A cast-iron dog. Tickets to a Redskins game. Keys and a replica Ford truck. Will’s old Ford. And a whistle that Arlen himself had whittled one day with his very own hands.

He stepped back.

These were Will’s things. His personal things. Arlen reached out, thinking of what it would be like to hold that old whistle—he could remember sitting on his mother’s porch when he’d made it, stopping now and again to watch the sky change and the robins peck at the dirt. But then something dark twisted around in his belly and stopped him from picking it up.

“Hellooo?”

He jumped clear out of his skin. He hadn’t heard the front door open.

A customer.

He pulled his shoulders back and walked slowly, slowly to the front of the store, all his senses alert and his brain screaming and telling him to just slink away before anyone knew he was there. He emerged from behind a tall bookcase, and there in the middle of
the entryway, standing and looking befuddled, was a middle-aged white woman. Her shin-length skirt was printed with tiny green and white flowers, and her blouse was buttoned down over giant breasts. She wore an old visor over her tufts of coppery hair.

“Oh, there you are,” she said.

Arlen managed to nod. He couldn’t get enough air.

The woman tipped her head and smiled. “Hot enough for you?”

He tried to speak, but the words got stuck, so he made a sound to show he agreed.

“Well, then,” the woman said, clasping a shiny red purse before her in two hands. “It’s my husband’s birthday next week and he collects bottles. The little blue ones. I’m wondering if you have any.”

Arlen didn’t have to think long about the answer. He’d seen a few blue bottles on a shelf in the middle of the heap that was Will’s store. He gestured for the woman to follow him. And to his surprise, she did. No hesitating because he was leading her back into the maze of junk, away from the door. No saying,
I’ll come back another time
. She just followed him. Totally unafraid. He realized she had no idea who he was.

At Will’s glass display—which was a few shelves of dusty vases and bowls—she stood for a moment, looking at the jewel-blue apothecary bottles. She held them up one at a time. They caught the light and shimmered like tropical fish. On the shelf, they’d been lifeless; they came alive in her hand.

He clasped his fingers together in front of him. He missed women—boy, did he ever miss them. This woman smelled like an imitation of the lilac bushes that bloomed beside his mother’s clothesline. In the spring, his shirts and coveralls used to pick up a bit of the scent. The smell of the outside world was one of the things he’d missed most in prison; he’d spent ages breathing filtered, temperature-controlled air. But Richmond, it was a feast for the nostrils. He couldn’t help himself; he leaned toward the woman,
her faint cloud of lilac so thick she almost seemed to be in a haze of purple, and he breathed in.

“I’ll take this one. And— Oh!”

She turned her head. Arlen straightened up, caught. The woman’s eyes grew wide under her white visor, and her mouth was open so far that he saw she had lipstick on her teeth. He knew enough not to apologize, because if he said he was sorry he would have to explain himself. He wasn’t certain she knew
why
he was leaning toward her; she knew only that he was.

She turned bright berry pink and held up a few more bottles for Arlen’s inspection. “I’ll, um, I’ll take these as well.”

Arlen nodded. She hurried to the front of the store a little more quickly than she’d walked into it, and Arlen followed. Behind the register the cashbox was locked up, but Will had shown Arlen where he hid the key. Arlen made change for the woman, then carefully rolled each blue bottle in brown paper and secured it with a bit of tape. And it felt good—so good—to be packing them up and handing them off. He liked the idea that the woman thought he did this all the time.

“Thank you,” she said. “You have a nice day now.”

“Same to you,” he said.

And he realized they were the first words he’d spoken to anyone but Will since he’d been freed.

Lauren and Maisie had breakfast in the sun-filled kitchen—hazelnut coffee, toast, and sliced melon. Maisie’s sleep-rumpled hair and foggy eyes reminded Lauren of mornings spent on the beds of their dorm room, chasing mild hangovers with cups of orange juice and analysis of the night before. Before Maisie left for work, Lauren thanked her and gave her a long hug in the doorway. If Lauren connected with Arlen today, she would leave right away.

With the house empty, Lauren dialed her brother, tucked her cell phone against her shoulder, and washed the dishes. Jonah’s phone rang and rang. She was just about to disconnect when her niece picked up.

“Hello, this is Dakota speaking.”

“Kota! It’s Aunt Lauren.”

“Hi!”

“How are you?” Lauren asked.

“Fine.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Doing anything fun?” Lauren asked.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Playing.”

Lauren put a mug into the drying rack. She’d fallen head over heels for her newborn niece when Dakota had burped on her shoulder and ruined her favorite shirt. Lauren wanted to keep her talking, just a little more.

“What are you playing?” Lauren asked.

Dakota made a good effort at conversation. She was trying—Lauren could tell. But the fact remained that human beings weren’t designed to talk to each other via screens and fiber optics. Adults learned to work around the relative “blindness” of cell phone calls and text messages. But Dakota had yet to develop the proper brain muscles and attention span for artificial communication. She just wanted to get off the phone.

Eventually, Lauren let her go and her brother got on the line.

“Hey, Laure! Checking up on me?”

“Just calling to get the latest from my favorite stay-at-home dad.”

“Dakota’s driving me crazy,” he said. “She just learned about tap dancing. Now she wants to be a Rockette.”

“I thought she wanted to be president.”

“That was last week,” he said.

Lauren smiled and adjusted the phone on her shoulder, careful not to get suds on her cell. Jonah and his wife—who had been his nurse when he’d been incarcerated—had managed to work out a good life for themselves despite Jonah’s early setbacks. He didn’t have a good track record when it came to holding down a job, but he was an amazing father. Some people said he was immature; Lauren liked to think that he’d simply never lost his innocence.

“So did you see Arlen?”

“I’m working on it.” She turned off the faucet and put down the dish sponge. “I have to be honest. It didn’t occur to me until I got down here that Arlen might not want to talk to me.”

“I could have told you that.”

“I figured he would
want
to see me. You know, for closure.”

“Did you at least get a look at him?”

“No.”

“Let me know when you do. We’ll take him apart—figure out a plan. We’ll win him over yet!”

Lauren opened a cabinet and grabbed a clean dishcloth to dry the wet plates. “What would
you
do if the person who put you in jail showed up at your house and asked you to forgive her?”

“It’s different with me.”

“But what would you do? If you were Arlen?”

“Let’s review. What do we know about him?”

“What I remember most is how quiet he was,” Lauren said. “Soft-spoken. People would have called him a man of few words. But I don’t think the quietness was because he lacked things to say.”

“Right. He’s quiet not because he doesn’t have opinions, but he feels like he doesn’t need to express them. His opinions belong to him and him alone. So keeping quiet becomes a kind of power, in a way.”

“Maybe his only power, given the situation.”

“He had a crappy defense attorney,” Jonah said. “That woman thought he was guilty.”

“Maybe,” Lauren said. Since they were children, Jonah had always been the better people-reader of the two of them. Lauren’s teachers and parents had assumed she was a natural—that she had an inherent talent for seeing beneath the surface of things. But while she did have
some
talent, she was no match for her brother. He saw everything. Every secret was a broadcast. Every minor emotion that crossed someone’s face was magnified tenfold. People thought that her gift had made her a prodigy.
His
gift had once driven him insane.

He said, “Arlen might not want you to know whether or not he forgives you.”

She stopped drying dishes. The towel sagged in her hand. “It would be nice if I knew. But even if I never know, fine—maybe I don’t deserve to. I still have to tell him that I’m sorry for my part in what happened. It’s the right thing to do.”

Jonah sighed. “I wish I could have watched the trial. I probably could have told you he wasn’t guilty right off the bat.”

“Probably,” she admitted. Her mind flashed to an image of herself as a young woman scrutinizing the jury, looking for reactions—the flash of a frown, the twitch of an eyebrow—so she could better lead them, guide them,
force
them to reach the conclusion she had already reached: that Arlen was guilty. Unfortunately, she’d never thought to look at Arlen.

She heard Dakota singing in the background. “I should let you go.”

“Laure?”

“Still here.”

“Don’t you dare come home early because you’re worried about me. You stay down there till it’s done.”

She smiled. She thought she’d called her brother because he needed her to. Now she knew that was wrong. “I don’t think I’ll be too long.”

“
Be
too long,” Jonah said. “Be very long. What’s up here for you except a bunch of old, egoistic curmudgeons who get off on arguing with each other?”

“Those egoistic curmudgeons are considering me for a promotion.”

“Great,” he said flatly. “So you’ll be head curmudgeon.”

“I’ll call you later.”

“I’m here if you need me.”

She dried her damp hands, then shut her cell phone. It rang, almost instantly, again.

The granite along the shore of Belle Isle was knotty and muscular, stone stretched like taffy, then left in the hot sun to bake. The air smelled of sweet green leaves and the coppery tang of river. Lauren stood among sunbathers, splashing infants, children hopping boulders and squealing. A family had made a picnic on a large flat rock surrounded by white water. Lauren couldn’t help herself: she pried off her sandals and slipped her toes in the cool, swift river. When her legs tired, she sat on the heated stone so her feet could dangle in the current. Will Farris was late; she didn’t care why. She’d lost track of time.

Finally, a cool shadow came over her—not a cloud or a bird—and when she craned her neck to look, he was there. He wore a ragged white shirt and wrinkled shorts the color of dried clay. Even sitting down she could see that he hadn’t shaved since yesterday. His stubble was fuller and blondish red.

Her mind went to work. Did he always look so disheveled? And if so, where did it come from? Laziness? Poverty? Or did he simply
not realize how people might see him? He hadn’t seemed quite so slovenly yesterday. He’d seemed comfortably and practically dressed, but not slovenly, not like this . . . 

She told herself,
Knock it off.

“So what do you think?” he asked. He gestured to the swift river, the Robert E. Lee suspension bridge, the sweeping vista of the city, and Hollywood Cemetery on the distant ridge.

She climbed to her feet, not bothering to put her shoes back on.

“It’s fascinating.”

“Not the word most people would use.”

She shrugged. She liked the juxtaposition of motion and stillness, of the wild water rushing over the rocks and the blocky shapes of buildings and highways. But she could see a trace of mockery in Will’s eyes, and she wasn’t about to explain. She crossed her arms and gave him all her attention. “What did you want to talk to me about?”