And When She Was Good (10 page)

T
UESDAY,
O
CTOBER 11

T
he official name for the prison in which Val has lived for more than a decade now is the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, an odd name to give to a facility that houses men in perpetual solitary, with no contact permitted among inmates. They are kept in their cells twenty-three hours a day, allowed only one hour out, except for the weekends, when they have to stay inside for twenty-four hours. They may receive only four visits a month. Heloise sees Val twice a month. As far as she knows, no one else ever visits him at all. She is unsure where his parents are, if they are even alive. Val has always been very good about not sharing information about himself.

As is she.

“Hi, Helen,” he says, one of the last people in her life, along with Tom, to use that name. Although her mother would probably use it—if Heloise ever spoke to her.

“You look good.”

“Don't bullshit . . .” He doesn't bother to finish the cliché.

“I'm not.”

She isn't. Val has grown very pale in prison, but it suits him. His red hair has darkened. The freckles that bothered him when he was younger—his twenties? thirties? Val's actual age is also unclear to her—are gone. He has finally gained weight yet exercised intensely, so his frame remains wiry and muscular. Scott might look like this one day. Scott's short for his age, which bothers him. He often asks Heloise how tall his father was. “Normal,” she lies. She's not sure why. But Scott could still get a growth spurt. Hector Lewis was very tall, and Heloise did contribute some genes to her son, even if they aren't overwhelmingly apparent. The only real resemblance between mother and son is their hair, and she dyes hers, in part so she will look more like him.

Val is angry today, distracted. It happens. Although he can be good company, he has never reconciled himself to the circumstances that brought him here. He blames his lawyer. He blames the witnesses. He blames the state's attorney. Sometimes he even blames Martin.

“I thought you would be in better spirits,” Heloise says, then remembers: Paul has spoken to her in confidence. Val probably doesn't know about the compromised ballistics expert. Yet. The state, according to Paul, is trying to assess what the damage will be, how many cases might have to be retried.

“Why?”

“I don't know,” she says, moving toward a lie with her usual smoothness. “You always seem a little less restless in the fall.”

“Really? Because I've lost all sense of what the seasons are like. I'm aware of time passing. It's like a drip from a faucet. Drives me crazy, but if the drip ends, so do I. Yet I don't really notice the seasons. Does that make sense?”

“Sure. What are you reading?” After his conviction Val owned up to his illiteracy and received intensive tutoring through a pilot program. He was the star pupil. Most adults who learn to read can't expect to develop much more than basic proficiency, but Val reads at a very high level, albeit slowly. “What's the rush?” he jokes. He gravitates toward history, military history in particular. It pains Heloise how similar they are in this regard, their love of history, their autodidact natures. It's hard not to imagine a parallel universe where the un-fucked-up versions of themselves meet and marry, carry out the normal lives denied them. Not that she yearns for such a thing, not even for Scott's sake. She fears Val too much to love him, and Val's feelings for her could best be described as high regard. He holds her in high regard. She is a singular person in his life. But they could have loved each other, in another world.

“Shelby Foote.”

“Ah, more Civil War.”

“I read the Bruce Catton. Might as well hear the other side of the story, although I don't get why people are drawn to the Confederacy. They lost. If they were fighting for something great, maybe, but to be pro-slavery
and
losers.” He shrugs. Heloise knows that it's the losing part that bothers him. Being here, as Val sees it, is the only defeat he has experienced in his life.

“You ever go to those places?” he asks Heloise, a segue that makes sense to him but leaves her stranded. Val spends a lot of time in his own head, which makes him a tricky conversationalist.

“What places?”

“The nearby battlefields. Gettysburg. Antietam. I'd like to see Antietam, at the same time of year as the battle.”

“It's never occurred to me,” she says honestly.

“You should get out more, see things. If I ever got out of here—the things I would do, the places I would go. I can't believe how much time we spent cooped up inside that house.”

If I ever got out of here.
No. Tom said it was impossible.

“Yes.” She doesn't mention that their agoraphobic lifestyle was at his behest, that he wouldn't go out and he didn't want anyone else to leave the property. That they couldn't leave the property because of the cameras everywhere. It had taken her a long time to figure out the spots not captured by his various surveillance cameras. It had taken even longer to start hiding money, digging holes with a toy shovel, of all things. She wondered if some of those little caches of bills were still out there. As it ended up, there wasn't enough time to go back and get them all. But she needed them to be placed haphazardly, messily, so it looked like a child's game. If she put all her money in one place, it would be obvious to Val that she wasn't reporting the tips she sometimes extricated from her customers, the cash she got by returning items she had shoplifted.

“What do you do when you're not working?”

The question surprises her. Val has never shown much curiosity about her life, only her business, which he helped her conceptualize when it became clear that he wouldn't be able to run any kind of enterprise. In return she still kicks money back to him every month. He has no use for money, not really, yet that was the deal they struck, and she abides by it. Locked up, Val has nothing but money with which to keep score. He records the amounts on legal pads, keeps the figures in his head, questions her closely when revenues go down. He thinks he's getting 50 percent of the net, but it's more like 35.

What
does
she do when not working? Almost all the answers lead to Scott.

“Read,” she says. “Watch television. Shop on the Internet. That's my primary vice. Now,
that
should be illegal.”

“Shopping?”

“These ads that stalk you, drawing on your own Internet history. That creeps me out. I'll be composing an e-mail, and bam, there's a pair of beautiful shoes dancing across the top of the page, almost as if someone's reading my mind, although it's just my own browsing history. Then again, if I could advertise, I wouldn't mind having ads for the business pop up on other people's screens. I don't deal with impulse buyers, but it wouldn't hurt to have an ad that allowed them to jump to the application page.”

“E-mail? Who would you write an e-mail to?”

Who indeed? Scott's school. Scott's teacher. The mother who sometimes picked Scott up after band practice. And Coranne Blake, the mother of his best friend. Why do all roads seem to lead back to Scott today? Why has Val become so curious?

“I have that half sister down in Florida.”

“I thought you hated her guts.”

“I do, but keep your friends close—”

“Your enemies closer,” Val finishes. “So she's an enemy?”

“She's a very angry woman who knows what I do for a living. I can't afford for her to nurse any grudges against me.”

“Do you have to pay her off?”

“No. I have something on her, she has something on me. That's sufficient.”

“Mutual assured destruction, huh? Be careful. You never know when the Berlin Wall is going to fall.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You become used to a current reality, then the reality changes. That's all. The way things are today may not be the way they are tomorrow. Just because you've got everything figured out, that doesn't mean you've got
everything
figured out. If you learn anything from my situation, that should be it. I thought I was so smart—”

“You were. You are.” Placating him remains automatic.

“And they got me. I don't know how, but they did.”

This conversation is unsettling. She's used to seeing him in funks, but Val's mood today is not quite like any she has encountered over the past ten years. She decides to turn it on herself, see if she can make him feel sorry for her.

“Lately people in my life, people who know what I do, have been suggesting I need an exit strategy.”

“They're right.”

This catches her off guard.

“I thought you of all people would want me to keep going as long as I can.”

“You should move over into management. You had to wear two hats when you started out, building the business. But there's no reason for you to continue to see clients.”

“I would make less money that way.”

“You also would be exposed to less risk.”

“If I took a pay cut, would you take a smaller cut of what I make?”

“Do you think I ever let anyone pay me less?”

He is taunting her, baiting her. Why? Because he can. Because he's on the other side of a glass, in a world without people, and Val in his odd way had liked having people around him, as long as they were quiet. He was happiest when the house was full of slumbering bodies and he stood vigil. Sat vigil, actually, watching the enormous television in his den.

“You're very crabby today,” she risks.

“My apologies.”

“You're entitled.”

“Why, thank you. Thank you for giving me permission to be in a bad mood because I've been locked up for over a decade for something I didn't even do.”

She shoots him a look. Val has always maintained in official interviews that he didn't kill Martin. But has he forgotten that she was there? That she saw everything?

He smiles. “Gotta be consistent, my love. Remember that. Whatever you say, keep saying it.” He taps the phone on which he speaks. “The walls have ears. There are very few secrets in the world when you get down to it.”

Later, as she weaves through the city toward the interstate, she can't help thinking he was warning her. Stranger still, he was warning her about
him.
He knows something or suspects it. Where has she slipped up? When has she been inconsistent? Why did he want her to know that he suspected her?

She will take his advice, go to Antietam, bring Scott, then report back to Val. Perhaps that will soften his mood when she sees him next. He always liked playing the mentor. For a while. The trick was for the protégé to get out before Val tired of him. Or her.

1999

S
he got pregnant when she was twenty-five. She was old for the life she was in. The other girls made fun of her, called her Granny, asked her if she was having hot flashes. They were jealous and dismayed by her staying power, especially Mollie, a new girl. Helen looked good, all things considered. She had become adept at home-spa treatments, so her skin was soft and her nails immaculately groomed. She started practicing yoga for the mental benefits and found that the physical benefits were almost as impressive. She wore a hat in the sun. She didn't smoke, and she drank sparingly, largely because she felt she couldn't afford the looseness that came with a few drinks. Twenty-five. There were people, she realized, whose lives began at twenty-five, or even thirty, forty. If she had been able to go to college and graduate school, find a teaching job, she might be coming up for tenure now or moving on to a bigger, better school. It was a perfectly reasonable age at which to get pregnant—if one wasn't a whore.

There was no doubt that the baby was Val's. He liked to have sex without condoms, as long as he knew that the girl was clean—and he was obsessive about his girls' cleanliness. On the edge of the next millennium, a certain complacency had settled in about AIDS, with most men convinced that they couldn't get it from straight hetero sex. Still, Val sent the girls in for regular blood tests. If someone came back infected, he gave her money and sent her away. Val didn't want to see anyone die, not unless he was the one pulling a trigger. A slow, wasting death disturbed him more than anything. He understood, accepted, and even facilitated sudden death. Day-by-day dying was different. Helen always wondered if someone close to him had died this way, but Val revealed even less about his origins than she did. The others gabbed, including the Georges. They got melancholy or mellow and began to tell stories about themselves, looking to make some kind of connection. The tricks did it, too, sometimes, telling long, pointless stories that were meant to justify how they ended up cheating on their wives with paid sex. It was baffling to Helen, this belief that personal knowledge would lead to intimacy, something good, anything good. It was information. Information was power. Why would she give away any more power?

Yet it was on such a night—people sitting around talking, drinking, smoking, trapped in the house by a vicious blizzard—that her child was conceived. One of the girls, Bettina, told a long, hard-to-follow story about her father, and Helen must have rolled her eyes or shrugged at what was supposed to be the heartbreaking moment, because the girl came at her, went airborne across the debris-strewn coffee table and began pulling Helen's hair. Which made Helen laugh. What was this,
The
Jerry Springer Show
? George I pulled Bettina off, also shaking with mirth. Val was laughing, too. Everyone laughed, except Bettina.

Later that night Val came to Helen's room. He almost caught her reading one of her stolen books, but she heard his footsteps and slid it beneath her bed, exchanging it for one of the fashion magazines she kept there. Val almost never came to the girls' rooms, instead summoning them to his, where he had everything as he liked it—the big bed, the television that was never off. Yet here he was, and his desire for her was touchingly straightforward. It felt almost like an encounter between a normal man and woman, although Helen's only experience with such things was with Billy, a decade ago.

Perhaps because her body was her business, she knew within a week that he had knocked her up. She shoplifted—or tried to shoplift—a home pregnancy test from the Rite Aid, only to have the cashier pull it out of her purse at the register. “Forget this?” he said. “Oh, yeah. I put it there because my hands were full,” she said. The clerk was going to make a fuss, but a cop stepped in, said, “Let me handle it.”

That was how she met Tom.

An undercover vice cop, he had been watching her for quite some time, it turned out. He took her in on the shoplifting charge, hoping to scare her into becoming an informant, but she was far more scared of Val than she was of the Baltimore Police Department. She gave him nothing. Then. And they couldn't hold her for shoplifting because she hadn't left the store with the kit.

Still, Tom thought he might be able to use Helen, and Helen began to wonder if she could use Tom.

A week later they met for coffee, and he tried to convince her to be his confidential informant.

“I don't know anything,” she said.

“You work for someone who runs a lot of drugs, sort of like a wholesaler. Maybe firearms, too. By Baltimore standards he's organized crime. True, our standards are pretty low.”

“I don't work for anyone.” They were sitting in a diner, a really crummy one. “I don't even work.”

“I've been watching you for a long time. I know what you do.”

“You've been watching me?” She gave her voice a flirtatious lilt.

He squirmed. Good. The hook was in.

“It's my job.”

“Do you like it? Watching me, I mean.”

“It's my job.”

“Nice work if you can get it.”

“You think it's such a good gig, watching you?”

She smiled as she took a sip of the horrible coffee. Places such as this diner fascinated her. All mediocrity did. How did a diner with bad food and bad coffee survive? The service was the bare minimum, the location wasn't that great. But Helen knew: It survived because it took for granted that certain customers were beaten down enough to come back, that the world was full of people whose expectations were so low that they couldn't be disappointed. And she was on the verge of becoming one of them.

She assumed they were going to have sex, accepted it as the freight she had to carry. But Tom had brought a pregnancy kit to replace the one she had tried to swipe. He waited for her to take it in the diner bathroom. Maybe he supposed that a positive would make her weaker, willing to do whatever he wanted, beholden to him, more in need of his protection.

Ten minutes is a long time to wait for a mark on a stick. She sat in the stall, crouching, really, as there was no lid and she wasn't going to sit on that seat a moment longer than necessary. She felt like someone in a legend, King Arthur perhaps, waiting for a sign. Her future was about to be foretold.

T
he woman who came out of that diner bathroom was a thousand times stronger than the one who went in. She had stared at the stick, the blurry mark, reread the instructions on the box, but she knew. She had known all along. She was going to have a child. How would that work? How could that be? She looked in the clouded mirror.
This child must never know its father.
She could not save her baby from Val's genes, but if she could keep the knowledge of Val from his child—then it must be done. How, where to begin? How would she support herself? How would she keep Val from knowing? Val would want his child, she had no doubt of that. The baby would be raised in the house with the same care and tenderness lavished on the various pets. Only the baby wouldn't be a pet. It would grow, it would have a mind of its own, it would challenge Val—and Val would turn on it.

Helen splashed water on her face, dried her hands on the old-fashioned towel, the kind that hung in a single loop. You pulled down and supposedly dried your hands on the fresh part, but when had it last been replaced? Her life was like this. She pulled and pulled but always ended up making a full circle, and each pass was dirtier than the last.

She took her seat across from Tom. “I can give you Val Deluca on a murder. I can give you the gun. You already have the body. But no one can ever know it was me who told, ever. I mean until the end of time, because Val will find a way to kill whoever is responsible for locking him up, even if it takes the rest of his life. Can you make that happen?”

“I think so.”

“You have to be sure.”