Where is the Baby? (24 page)

Tally found an old Chanel suit of her mother's that seemed perfect for the occasion and wore it when she surrendered herself to the surprised sheriff, who said in an undertone, ‘Go home, girl, and talk to your lawyer.'

‘Just lock me up and be done with it,' Tally said tonelessly.

‘Natalie Paxton, I've known you your whole life. You're no murderer. You've had lousy luck and that's the God's honest truth. It's a goddamned shame. But you're young; you still have a future. Don't go along with this bullshit! There's no case!'

She was deaf to his words.

When she learned what Tally had done, Alba immediately phoned Warren and he got on the next flight, arriving at the jail in a rental car that afternoon.

‘We'll fight this,' he told Tally, having made some calls from the airport before he'd boarded his flight. ‘They have no grounds. This DA is blowing smoke, making noise to get attention so she can win re-election.'

‘I don't care, Warren,' she said, defeated. ‘I just don't care.'

‘Tally, the penalty for second-degree murder is fifteen years in prison!'

‘I don't
care
, Warren.'

‘If you plead guilty, Tally, if you allocute, it can't be undone. Let me get a Nevada criminal lawyer in to defend you. Any halfway decent attorney will get the case thrown out. For chrissake, a first-year law student could get this thrown out!'

‘Thank you for caring, Warren. Would you please draw up papers to transfer ownership of the ranch to Alba and Joe? Annalise would have wanted them to have it. And will you take care of everything for me while I'm away? Whatever needs doing.'

‘You know I will,' he told her with unshed tears in the rims of his eyes.

‘Good. I'm very tired now. I'd like to lie down.'

Seeing she would not be swayed, he kissed her forehead and left her there.

In a special session the next day, with only Warren, Alba and Joe in the courtroom, Tally waived her right to counsel and confessed. ‘I must have done it,' she told the judge. ‘No one else was there.'

Even the judge asked her to reconsider, but Tally said, ‘Let's finish this,' and sentence was passed. Fifteen years, as Warren had warned. She didn't care; she was beyond caring. Her life had started to unravel with Clayton's death and had ended with Anna's. She was as dead as they were.

‘And that's the story,' Tally said, taking a swallow of her now-cold coffee. ‘The district attorney did not win re-election, by the way.' She looked down to see that Faith's hand was wrapped around her own, as if tethering her to the present. She looked into the girl's eyes and for a moment she knew how it might have been to be mother to an eighteen-year-old Anna. It was possible, she thought, that surrogates appeared through some cosmic mutual need. Whatever it was, Faith felt to Tally like an unexpected and very valuable gift: a daughter to stand in for the one she'd lost.

You can be my mother
, Faith thought, sensing Tally's thoughts.
I want to be a daughter
.
I need so badly to be someone's child.

Hay's thoughts were on the dead soldier and he recalled Tally's comment that day they'd spent together in the snowstorm. He remembered saying to her,
Those of us who did come home . . . we weren't the same.

And she'd replied,
No. Not the same at all.

‘Maybe,' he said quietly now, ‘it had something to do with Clayton's philosophy on sunshine. To me, it didn't feel as if the sun ever shone benevolently in 'Nam.' He shook his head. ‘Things happened over there . . . beyond belief. It was hard to wrap your mind around the stuff that went on. And most of the guys were still teenagers. So young, too young really . . . It was like some novel of insane horror fiction, a book that just would
not
end.'

Gazing intently at Hay, Tally said, ‘Clayton talked all the time about how the sun didn't shine anymore. I couldn't make sense of what he was trying to tell me, no matter how hard I tried.'

‘No one who wasn't there could
ever
make sense of the things that went on, Tally. There was no rhyme nor reason to any of it.' He took a deep breath and shook his head again. ‘We ended up with thousands of dead kids and five or ten times as many wounded or eternally damaged ones. And for no real reason.'

His eyes on his hands as he rolled a fresh cigarette, he said, ‘I signed up as a translator. Completely clueless.' He shook his head, a mix of disgust and bewilderment in his expression. ‘My mother was French. We lived in Paris the first five years of my life,' he explained, glancing up briefly. ‘My dad was head of the European arm of an American corporation. Anyway' – another shake of his head – ‘I was just graduating from Princeton with a major in French and a minor in communications. I was fluent, thanks to my mother, and the military needed French-speakers in Viet Nam. The recruiters offered most of the guys in my graduating class commissions. Second lieutenant. I didn't think of it as going to war. It just seemed as if it'd be an interesting job with an impressive-sounding title.' He rolled his eyes at his youthful naivety. ‘There was no limit to my ignorance.' He paused to light his cigarette, then said, ‘The short version is I was captured just walking along the street in Hanoi one afternoon. They thought I was someone important because of the uniform and the insignia. Two men grabbed me, threw a burlap bag that smelled of chickens over my head and shoved me into the back of a car. I couldn't believe what was happening. And they refused to believe I had nothing of any value to tell them. So after their efforts with small hand tools failed to get them any useful information, despite my willingness to spout their propaganda or say any damn thing they wanted me to say, I got put into a “black box” for seven months.'

His eyes filled and he had to pause to pull himself together. Even all these years later, the mere thought of that box made him feel he was on the verge of death, unable to breathe or see properly. Terrifying shapes in the narrow darkness, eerie sounds in the near distance, the sense that insects were crawling over him so that he couldn't stop clawing at his skin.

He took a hard drag on his cigarette, then continued.

‘After the first couple of weeks I couldn't think my way past it. I just cried all the time. Couldn't stop. Could
not
stop. Pitch black, no room to stand up. Everything got utterly distorted. Even when they let me out for an hour now and then I couldn't function. I remembered how to do things, simple things like washing myself, but it took me some time to actually do them. I could feel myself slipping away, letting go. And all the time I kept crying, on and on.

‘I probably would've been in the box a lot longer, until I lost my mind altogether or until I died, but a group of relatively new POWs staged a breakout. And suddenly I was outside, able to move, and there was a bit of light again in the world. By the second day out, the tears stopped.

‘The newer guys brought along the older ones who were still mobile, and we all helped carry the ones who couldn't walk; everybody helping everyone else. Somehow, amazingly, the whole group was able to cover the miles to Hanoi.

‘About half of us were given honorable discharges and after getting checked out by the medical staff, we were to be shipped home. The rest of the guys were given a few weeks' R & R and then put back on active duty. I was one of the group that got discharged – for which I was then and still am now grateful to the bottom of my soul. I'd been terrified that they'd make me stay in country.

‘While I was awaiting transport, all I could think about was getting home to my parents, especially my father. We were very close . . .

‘Then the mail caught up to me – a big envelope stuffed with almost a year's worth. I learned in a letter from my father's lawyer that there was nothing left of home. A dryer fire set the house ablaze one winter night five months earlier, and my parents were asphyxiated in their sleep.' He gazed off into space for a long moment, then shook his head yet again and took another drag on his cigarette.

‘I took a couple of downers one of the other guys en route home offered me. And for the first time in a year I slept through an entire night. It felt like a gift, beneficence. I woke up feeling physically a little stronger and mentally shredded. I started shopping among the men and by the time I was on-board the transport home, I'd amassed enough pills to help me sleep for a thousand nights.

‘I went through them in less than three months,' he confessed. ‘I started taking speed to stay awake and Benzos to go to sleep. Day and night got turned around. I moved out of the motel room I'd been renting and put a tent up in what used to be the back yard of our house in New Jersey, behind the ruins, amid the debris. I lived in the tent until the neighbors complained and the police started coming around to warn me. I was making a lot of noise day and night and didn't even know it. The neighbors wanted me gone but I didn't know where to go. So I stayed in the tent and tried to keep quiet – I actually put tape over my mouth. Picture it: this not very clean, grisly guy, sweating and shaking, popping pills and living in a tent. No wonder they wanted me gone. I was scaring people but nobody would come near me.

‘The only one who cared was my high school friend Katie Henshaw's mother. She would check on me every few days, bring me a plate of food now and then. And one afternoon she walked down the road and sat with me on what used to be the back steps of my house. She held my hand and told me how Katie had OD'd while I was in 'Nam. Mrs Henshaw said she felt she hadn't intervened in time with Katie but she was damned if she'd stand by and watch me die in front of her. “I did all the homework and begged Katie to let me send her to The Farm up in Connecticut,” she told me. “But Katie wouldn't listen. She insisted she was just
dabbling
, didn't have a real problem, she was in control of it. A couple of months later she wound up dead at a room-by-the-hour motel on Route 22 with a needle still in her arm. It's a cliché, until it's your kid,” she said. “Hayward, your parents would be devastated to know you were doing this to yourself,” she said. “I loved your mom and dad; they were good friends and helped me tremendously when Katie died. If you'll agree to go to The Farm, I'll drive you there myself. Please let me do this for you.”

‘So I agreed and she brought me here, told me to phone any time if I needed anything or just to talk. It's almost ten years later and Mrs Henshaw died of a stroke three years ago. I still miss her. Her kindness saved me and I'll never forget that.' He took a last hard drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out. ‘Anyway, the thing of it is, most of the time these days, when the sun is shining, I can see it, I can feel it. I was lucky.'

‘Hay,' Tally said softly, ‘that black box experience. Is that why you're living in a thrown-together shack in the middle of nowhere at the top of a hill?'

‘Basically, unh-hunh. If I need to be outside, I'm there instantly.'

‘I'm so sorry,' she said.

‘Don't be, please,' he told her. ‘Things are fine. It's a working situation.'

‘You know something?' Faith interjected, getting the attention of the other two. ‘We are three seriously messed-up people!' she declared. ‘I am
so
glad I've found you two. I thought it was always going to be just me.'

Tally and Hay just stared at her.

‘Well, it's a lot easier being with you guys than being messed-up all by myself.' Faith defended her assertion, unable to stop the smile that was overtaking her face.

Hay let out a yelp of laughter. Tally put her head down on her crossed arms and laughed helplessly.

‘Really!' Faith insisted. ‘Why are we
laughing
? It's the truth. We've had such fucked-up experiences. Are we crazy to be sitting here, laughing?'

Lifting her head to look at this girl she'd taken instantly to her heart, Tally said, ‘It
is
the truth. And we probably are crazy. I think we're laughing because the three of us are all cried out. It's time for some lightness. It doesn't mean any one of us is over the proverbial hump. But we've actually got each other to talk to. And, dear one,' she addressed Faith, ‘it was the way you said it. Misery truly does love company.'

‘I have to tell you,' Faith whispered. ‘I'm not really an alcoholic.' She looked around furtively, as if there might be someone present she'd overlooked who would hear and report her as the imposter she was.

‘Never thought you were,' Hay said. ‘But I knew you had a really good reason for being here, and that's all that matters.'

Before leaving her outside her room, Tally and then Hay hugged her. Faith could still feel their arms for quite some time after she'd gone inside. As if her parents – or two people who felt parental – had at last found her.

When Hay pulled into her driveway a short time later, Tally turned to him. Her hand on his arm, she said, ‘Would you like to spend the night?'

In answer, he put the truck into Park and pulled the key from the ignition.

W
hen the telephone rang early one morning in October, Tally assumed it was either Faith or Hay.

Thrown, she heard, ‘Hello, Tally, it's Dad.'

‘Dad! How
are
you?' Tally exclaimed. ‘It's so nice to hear your voice. But how did you get my number?'

‘I called Warren,' he explained. ‘I've been wanting to talk to you for a very long time . . . but, well, you know.'

‘I know.' She did. Her mother famously controlled the things her husband did. Tally had known since early childhood that her father had the idea – not altogether arbitrary – that Ivory would know of any unapproved actions he might take and would punish him accordingly. So he tried not to do anything to upset her. Ivory tried to control Tally too, but couldn't. Tally was defiant because she knew her mother had no feelings for her. Childhood mishaps were seen to by the housekeeper or by her father. Ivory had no interest in dealing with the messy realities of childhood. Until her grandmother explained matters, Tally couldn't make sense of her father's consistent capitulation to his demanding wife. Tally knew that her father loved her, but it was a secret between the two of them that they tacitly kept from Ivory.