And When She Was Good (16 page)

2001

M
otherhood was a revelation to Helen. Scott was a dream baby. He had a sweet, logical nature and seldom seemed to want things he couldn't have. He was mellow during diaper changes, loved bath time, went to sleep with a gurgle of pleasure, then awakened the same way twelve hours later.

It was the hardest fucking thing she had ever done in her life.

Being alone was what made it hard, although Helen doubted that things would be much better with a husband, unless she had one of those touchy-feely ones, and she had a feeling she would never end up with one of the touchy-feely ones. Even Tom, who still came around to check on her and had started throwing her longing looks, wouldn't be a hands-on dad. From what she heard—really, overheard, because she could not afford to make close friends—from the mothers who crossed her path, the hands-on father might be a bit of a unicorn. Everyone wanted to believe in it, but no one had actually seen one.

Still, it would be nice to have someone other than paid baby-sitters to spell her. To sleep in on Mother's Day, to have someone hold the baby while she took a shower or even a pee. Now that Scott was more than a year old, she sometimes found herself holding him on her lap while she went to the bathroom, which made her think of the wildly dysfunctional things mothers did in novels where their little boys grew up to be serial killers. She could prevent Scott from knowing what Mommy did for a living, but she couldn't shield him from the fact that she also was in thrall to certain bodily functions.

She read books. She had always read books. But in this circumstance the books let her down. She needed more from them. She also needed less. More practical advice, less generic hysteria. What she required was a very particular volume, written just for her:
What to Expect from Your Toddler When You Are Trying to Put Together Your Own Escort Service.

First there was the matter of the baby-sitter. She wanted someone trustworthy yet capable of not noticing anything about Helen's life. It frightened her, bringing a stranger into her home. But it was an unavoidable risk. She interviewed several girls from the local community college and UMBC, hiring the incurious one who never stopped talking about herself. Helen didn't like her much, but at least she could be certain that this girl would never notice anything.

Helen and Scott were living in Catonsville now, not that far from where Madame Dundee had plied her trade and her tarot cards. It was a pretty suburb, very grand in places. Helen rented a small house on one of the more modest blocks. She chose the house for the neighbors—none on one side, an elderly couple behind her, an elderly woman on the other side. She thought long and hard about what kind of relationship she should have with them. Her neighbors didn't venture out much, especially the one who lived alone. They had lawn services, so there were no conversations along the back or the side fence. They did not bring Helen gifts when she moved in, or make a call to introduce themselves, or offer assistance. Helen supposed most people would have found that daunting, but it was exactly the kind of coolness she required.

And yet—she felt she should be on good terms with them. She introduced herself and explained that she had a toddler but hoped he wouldn't be a nuisance. (As if sweet Scott could ever be a nuisance.) She carried their newspapers to the doorstep on inclement days. She offered to run errands. The couple declined all her offers, politely. They were a self-contained unit, together almost sixty years, not even particularly perturbed by the infrequency with which they saw their grown children. They were like two trees that had grown together, and they would probably topple together.

But the woman living alone, Mrs. Sampson, brightened at any attention from Helen. And if Scott was with Helen, Mrs. Sampson lowered herself to the floor, all seventy-five creaking years, and tried to engage him. Scott was cool to strangers, but he was kind to Mrs. Sampson. He scooted around the rug in her living room, offering her found treasures from among her own things—a magazine, a piece of lint, the back of an earring that had probably lived in the rug for decades.

“His father is—” Mrs. Sampson probed with delicacy.

“A redhead, too,” Helen said.

“I mean—where is he?”

“Dead,” Helen said, flinching at how cold her voice sounded. She would have to pretend greater affection for this mythical creature once Scott was old enough to ask and wonder.

“Oh, I'm so sorry. How long has it been?”

“Before Scott was born.”

“That must have been horrible.”

“Yes.” Right, yes. It would be especially horrible to lose a beloved husband in the early weeks of a pregnancy. Helen had so little cause to speak of her circumstances that she had not thought of the emotional authenticity she must bring to the story.

“What happened?”

“An accident.”

That was good enough for Mrs. Sampson. But others might not be so easily satisfied. Helen needed a story at once more precise and generic.

“I can't imagine.”

“Neither could I—until it happened to me.”

They both watched Scott, scooting across the floor with impressive speed. He found many dangerous things in Mrs. Sampson's house, but Helen knew it was her responsibility to protect him there. Mrs. Sampson had no reason to babyproof her house.

“I hope he had life insurance,” Mrs. Sampson said.

“No, I'm afraid he didn't. That's why I have to work.”

She saw the question hurtling toward her, realized she had seconds to come up with an answer. It didn't have to be the forever-and-ever answer, but she would need one eventually. She would never be nostalgic for her time in Val's house, but it was easier when someone else was the boss.

“What do you do?”

“I'm a librarian,” she said, thinking of the sweet boy she had known at the Enoch Pratt Library. “But I'm going back to school to get my M.B.A.”

The latter was not quite true. Helen had started taking classes online but had to settle for an unaccredited program, one that didn't require a transcript.

“How marvelous,” Mrs. Sampson said. “You young girls today—so much ambition. I was a teacher. What will you do with your M.B.A.?”

What would she do? She realized at that moment that she had a tiny fantasy, so deep inside that she hadn't admitted it to herself. She had thought she might go out into the world and look for a real job, that the online degree, phony as it was, could be her passport to a straight life. But it would mean working for someone, and while there were advantages to not being the boss, Helen was finding she
liked
being the boss. She had three girls working for her. Like her baby-sitter, they had been recruited from the local colleges, only with a very different ad. A subtle blurb in the classifieds, because she was looking for subtle girls. The ad had promised “freedom” and “flexible hours” for “just the right girl,” someone “outgoing.” A “people person.” Of those who had applied, a few assumed it was some sort of sales job. They weren't right for her. Others knew exactly what they were signing up for but were simply not attractive enough. Finally Helen found three beauties who got it, who wanted to work much less and make much more.

In each case the girls she ended up hiring put the cards on the table first. “This is an escort service, right?”

“What makes you think so?” Helen asked. She met them in a downtown hotel, over coffee. She wore a suit, one tailored to emphasize her figure, and put her hair up. The concierge in the hotel was one of her contacts, and the waitstaff knew exactly how much attention to lavish on her. The smart girls took this all in, but they weren't particularly awed. They were pretty. They had grown blasé when it came to special treatment.

No matter how well the conversations went, Helen didn't commit herself, not during that first interview. She culled the best ones, then set up dinner appointments where specifics were discussed. The final “interview” was a date with one of her regulars, Dwayne. A carryover from her Madame Dundee days, he was comfortable with Helen watching the date on a closed-circuit television. Four girls made it to that part, but she had to drop one, who was unnerved by the knowledge that she was being watched. If she was that prissy with gentle Dwayne, she wasn't tough enough.

Eventually the girls asked her advice about how to explain their flush incomes and short hours. What should they tell their friends, their parents, about their part-time jobs? Helen had been wrestling with this for several weeks, counseling them simply to not talk, but she knew that did not come naturally to beautiful young women. And now here was Mrs. Sampson asking the same thing. Helen needed a better answer.

T
he question continued to plague her, even as she took on new clients. While most escort services rely heavily on impulse buys, men reaching for the phone in an hour of need, Helen was determined to reduce risk by working with as many regulars as possible, cultivating men who were committed to paid sex the way some men are committed to golf. One of her new clients was Paul. She asked to meet him in public before committing to a date; she wanted to test his temperament, see if he was the nervous type. There were, in Helen's assessment, three types of public figures to avoid: The super famous, who are always under scrutiny. Really not a risk for her, although the hotel concierges sometimes made inquiries for big-name actors. Hypocrites, whose public images are based on being do-gooders. They're juicy targets, too. Finally Helen was determined to avoid the kind of nervous Nellies who would be too quick to flip, cooperate with an investigation to save themselves. She wanted to see how Paul would behave with her in public, if he could lie as smoothly and well as she could.

“Everyone's going to think you're a lobbyist,” he joked when they walked into the Maryland Inn. She knew the term in the vague way that most Americans knew the term—something unsavory yet legal, people in the employ of special interests. In some ways the lobbying profession was held in even lower esteem than hers, which she found intriguing. But the trick was to create a professional identity about which people had no questions. If she said,
I'm a lobbyist,
people would say,
For what causes?

She needed to encourage people's lack of interest in her, to create the professional equivalent of what her father had called her nothing face. What was it that bored people? Other people, in her experience.

One day, heading for an appointment in an Annapolis hotel, a Paul referral, she saw a short, stocky woman in a red suit having coffee with two delegates in the lobby. The men could not have been more obviously bored—glancing at their watches, using their BlackBerrys. The woman suffered their rudeness in good humor, waiting her turn to speak as they spoke on their cell phones or interrupted her to glad-hand others passing through the hotel. The woman reminded Helen of an exceptionally well-trained dog, one who sat and waited for his treat despite having a mercurial master who might not remember the treat at all. She was the kind of dog one saw lashed to street signs outside coffeehouses and bars, left alone for hours, hopeful and forlorn.

An hour later, her appointment done, Helen waited in the same valet line as the woman in the red suit. Helen, who never spoke to anyone, found herself wanting to talk to this woman, to ask about what she did.

“I saw you meeting with Rheems and Jones,” she said with a sympathetic smile, as if she knew how difficult they were. Rheems was, actually, forever disputing the time. She asked her girls to take kitchen timers to their meetings with him.

The woman smiled and sighed simultaneously. “They're not bad guys. It's my job to make them care about what I care about. That's what I get paid for. But women's issues—they never seem to be in vogue down here. When the economy is good, all these guys want to do is make sure they get their pork, and when it's bad, they say there's no political will to change things. They like to think that everything got solved back in 1968 and there's nothing left to talk about.”

“You lobby for women?”

“Officially, no. I represent tech-industry people who want to address the lack of women in their field. Women are still overwhelmingly employed in so-called pink-collar jobs—”

Helen wondered if her job counted as a pink-collar job. Certainly the field was dominated by women. She always thought part of the reason prostitution was illegal was that so few men could make a living at it. Criminalized, it created jobs for men like Val, but legalized— She realized that even she was tuning out this nice, well-meaning woman.

“Well,” she said lamely, “keep up the good work.”

“You, too,” the woman said. “You, too.”

Had she really mistaken Helen for one of her own? Helen looked down at her own red suit, the white silk blouse buttoned to the throat, the heels high enough to flatter her calves but not so high that anyone would call them fuck-me pumps. If a lobbyist thought Helen was a lobbyist, why couldn't she be one?

By the time the valet pulled Helen's car around, she had named her new business, the Women's Full Employment Network. It took its initials from the radio station to which she had listened so many years ago, WFEN, the home of those soupy, soppy ballads meant to cheer women as they prepared dinner and cleaned the kitchen. It worked just as Helen hoped. All she had to say was “income parity” and everyone was ready to change the conversation.

W
EDNESDAY,
O
CTOBER 19

I
t is easy to date Heloise's last journey home: It was for Scott's birth and Hector's death, at the dawn of the new millennium. She is not officially estranged from her mother. Beth has her address—well, the P.O. box where Heloise receives her mail, hating the use of communal mailboxes in Turner's Grove. She sends Christmas cards and birthday cards, presumably. “Presumably” because they go straight into the shredder. It's not just easier for Heloise to allow Scott to believe that his grandmother is dead. It's safer. If Scott met his grandmother, he would want to know about his grandfather, and Heloise could never stomach the lies that Beth would tell, the endless rationalizations about how misunderstood he was.

But now, as she heads north on a brilliant autumn day, Heloise finds herself worrying about how isolated Scott is. One parent, no siblings, no grandparents. He was thrilled, during the years that her half sister lived nearby, to discover his four first cousins. He still visits them, down in Florida. Heloise isn't crazy about that arrangement, but it means the world to Scott. Besides, Meghan has her own secrets, and they have an understanding: Heloise won't disturb the neat fictions of Meghan's life, and Meghan won't poke at the web of lies holding Heloise's together. The two women don't like each other. Fact is, they despise each other. But they respect each other, Hector Lewis's two daughters, not even six months apart. And if anything should happen to Heloise, Meghan will be Scott's guardian. At least that's Heloise's plan. For all her discipline and organization, Heloise has never named a guardian for Scott nor drawn up a will, although she has spoken to Tyner about her general desires. She has life insurance, a good sum, purchased when she was in her early thirties, and Scott is the beneficiary. Still, like everyone, she has a hard time planning for her own death. Even now, knowing that Shelley was murdered, she doesn't feel vulnerable.
She
wasn't in the photo.

Her town is little changed. It's a small town, by anyone's standards, not even twenty-five thousand people, a number that has stayed static since the middle of the twentieth century. Nothing really changes here, although the neighborhood where she grew up looks improved, spruced up—except for her mother's house.

She rings the bell and does not know what to do with the woman who answers the door. Hug her? No. Shake her hand? No. They stand, arms by their sides. Despite her mother's stooped shoulders and gray-brown hair, Heloise sees similarities between them that she never noticed when she was young. Nothing Face, meet Nothing Face.

“Thank you for coming, Helen,” her mother says. Her meekness is irritating. Heloise enters the room, glancing at the clock with the mirror that still hangs in the stairwell landing. Her mother stays loyal to
everything.

“Would you like lunch? I've put out a spread.”

Heloise wants to say no, to hurry through this meeting, but she finds herself unexpectedly hungry for her mother's food—the German potato salad, the bowl of Utz potato chips, the hearty sandwiches, local pickles. She sits at the kitchen table and can almost remember the relatively nice days, before the bad times began.

Almost.

“Soda?” Her mother proffers generic cans from the Giant. “I've got one lemon-lime, one black cherry. You gave me so little notice I didn't have time to get to the store.”

“Sure. I'll take whichever one you don't want.” Heloise ends up with the black cherry, although she suspects it's what her mother prefers, that she can't help giving her daughter what she thinks is the better of the two choices. Lord, the endlessly twisted passivity of women, the inability to say,
I want this.
She tells her mother to take the soda she wants. Her mother thinks she's lying and gives her the soda she actually wants, assuming that's what anyone would want. And Heloise really preferred the lemon-lime. It's exhausting, this relationship.

“So what's the problem? Why do you have to sell the house? Are you being evicted?” The house should have been paid off long ago, but Beth is the kind of financial naïf who would have borrowed against a house in the boom times, then ended upside down in it.

“No, I'm fine, moneywise. For now.”

“Then why are you moving? Why did you summon me here?”

Her mother stares into space as if she can no longer remember. She seems far away, lost in some private reverie. She sighs, shakes her head, brings herself back.

“I have ALS. Lou Gehrig's disease. In a typical diagnosis, that means I have three to five years.”

“Three to five years to what?”

“Three to five years to live.”

The news jolts Heloise. She's not sure she can burn through all her hate for her mother in that period of time.

“Typical—what determines if a case is typical?”

“That's not predictable.” Her mother's voice takes on her professional tone, her nurse voice, soothing a patient's family, although she is the patient and Heloise is all the family she has. “Twenty percent live more than five years. Ten percent live up to ten years. And five percent live more than twenty years. But I think we both know I've never been one out of five, or even one out of twenty. I have to prepare for when I can't take care of myself.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, I'm selling the house and moving into an apartment. Something on one floor. The money from the house, along with what I get from Social Security disability, will mean I can afford assisted living.”

“I can help,” Heloise says, wondering if it's even true. She still hasn't figured out what to do with Sophie.

“That's not why I asked you to come see me.”

“Why, then?”

“I want you to help me kill myself, when the time comes.”

Her mother's manner is calm, resigned, as if she's asking for nothing more than a commitment to a potluck dinner. She actually seems happy.

“Are you absolutely sure of the diagnosis? I mean, no offense to the local hospital, but—”

“I went to Hopkins for a second opinion.”

She thinks of her mother at the Baltimore hospital, not even a mile from where Val is in prison. Depending on the day, they might have passed on the street, the highway.

“Why can't you be one of the five percent? Isn't there some drug for ALS?”

“Only one. It's a thousand dollars a month.”

“You have insurance, right? And again, I can help—”

Her mother shakes her head. “No. That's not what I want. I want to die, Helen.”

“That's a terrible thing to say.”

“Is it? My husband died more than a decade ago. My only daughter doesn't speak to me, and my grandson thinks I'm dead. He does, doesn't he? That's why he never writes, never acknowledges the birthday cards. I mean, I know it's not much, the five- and ten-dollar bills I send, but I know you, Helen. You're proper. You care about appearances. You've raised him to write thank-you notes, I bet.”

She has, actually. And now she feels guilty about the money, insignificant as it was, that has passed through her shredder because she never opened the envelopes.

“Well, now you'll get to make your story true. Frankly, I thought you'd enjoy it.”

Why does she feel guilty? Her mother is the one who should be squirming, the one who should be held to account. Her mother sat by while her father pushed her down the road that would destroy her—into Il Cielo, into Billy's arms, which led to Val. Passive for most of her life, Beth wants credit for being active now, for choosing her death?

“It was easier,” she says. “Not seeing you. For a lot of reasons. You can't blame me for feeling that way.”

“I don't. But you know what, Helen? There's going to come a time when you won't blame me anymore. I did the best I could. I really did.”

“You stayed with an abusive man who started abusing me. You let him undercut my education, make me take that stupid job—”

“All true, all true. But you know, I worked my way through nursing school when I had a baby. A part-time job wasn't the end of the world.”

“Billy was.”

“Who chose him, Helen? Who sneaked out to see him? That's one area of your life where listening to your father wouldn't have been the worst idea in the world. If Hector knew anything, it was that a man could ruin a girl's life.”

It's hard to remain at the table. She wants to flee her mother's house, escape this conversation. She's not at fault. It couldn't possibly be her fault.

“Mother, do you know what I do for a living?”

“No. I Googled you one time, but I didn't find anything.”

Heloise has designed her life for just that answer, but now it feels like the saddest accomplishment in the world, a statement of nonexistence. Invisible to Google.

“I own my own business. I'm quite successful.”

“That's great. I'm not surprised. I see how you dress, the car you drove up in. But I don't want your money, I want you to—”

Heloise holds her hand up. “Please don't keep saying that. Can't we agree that you'll at least try the drug or find a clinical trial? You have to have hope.”

“Why?”

Such a simple question, yet as impossible to answer as most simple questions. Why does there have to be hope? Because the old myth, the one about Pandora's box, told us hope was in there? Because without hope how does one get out of bed in the morning? But what if hope is an illusion, a pretty story we tell ourselves? Why does there have to be hope? Heloise can't begin to answer the why of hope, but she discovers, in this moment, that she does believe in it.

“Because I say so.” And she smiles at her own joke, a daughter using a mother's line back to her.

Beth doesn't smile.

“That's fine for you,” her mother says. “But I'm determined to do this my way. If you help, I can risk going a little longer. If not, I have to be prepared to take measures into my own hands while I still control my hands But there's something else you could do for me.”

“Okay.” Wary, not committing. One doesn't have to be a cynic to suspect that the first request was meant to shock her into agreeing to what her mother is going to ask now, that Beth was never serious about the assisted suicide.

“I want to see my grandson before I get really sick.” Anticipating what Heloise might offer, she quickly adds, “Not at a distance, on some playground, and not as some mythical old friend. And not just one time. I want him to know me as his grandmother.”

“How would I ever explain that?”

Her mother appraises her coolly. “I don't know, but my hunch is that you're good at thinking of things. If I'm dead to my grandson, Helen, you can resurrect me. It's the least you can do.”

“I have to think about this,” Heloise says, rising to go. When her mother wrote that she was selling the house and it was imperative that Helen come see her before that happened, she had thought they would be tagging things for storage, packing. Now it looks as if she could have kept one of her afternoon appointments and met Scott at soccer practice.

“Helen—I know you hate me. And it's not without justification. I loved your father. I loved you. I couldn't choose.”

“But you did. You chose him.”

“He stayed, you left.”

She can't believe that this is her mother's argument. Children leave. They are supposed to leave.

So she does. Again.

T
raffic is bad, and it's almost five when Heloise finds herself at the exit to Turner's Grove. Famished—she walked out of her mother's house after only a few bites—she stops at a wine bar to get something to eat. It is happy hour, and she is surrounded by people who seem pretty happy. She long ago surrendered the notion that she would ever be one of these people. But it was what she wanted for her son. Perhaps wanting a better life for one's child is not selfless. Perhaps it's just another type of selfishness. Heloise wants to be able to provide Scott with a childhood free from all wants, material and emotional. She wants him to wake up every day knowing he is loved and safe. Heloise can't remember the last time she felt those two things. Probably when she was not much older than Scott is now. Even then she was aware that things were precarious in her household, that they didn't have what others had, that there was some nasty whiff of a rumor clinging to her parents. Okay, she's selfish. She wants her son to grow up to be one of the self-assured young people in this bar, people who can afford a ten-dollar glass of wine on a Wednesday afternoon. She wants his life to be better than hers, and according to the news that's not likely.

Funny thing, incomewise, Heloise is in that fabled 1 percent, that sector of the economy that is being blamed for everything. It takes a lot less money than people think to be in the 1 percent. She thought that money would protect her, save her, and, by extension, protect and save Scott. Now she sits eating food that might as well be dust in her mouth, overwhelmed by the way things have mounted up. Sophie's blackmail, her mother's illness. Shelley's murder—which, to be honest, bothers her primarily because it brought her to the attention of a cop.

And all because Shelley was on Val's visiting list. What was that about? She'll find a way to ask him at next week's visit, super casual, so it won't be apparent it bothers her as much as it does.

She is paying her bill when a man comes in, tries to catch her eye. She shrugs on her coat, shrugs him off at the same time. But he blocks her path.

“Are you following me?” he asks with a smile.

It's the man from the grocery store.

“I'm kidding,” he says. “I guess it's just one of those things.”

She manages, “Are
you
following me?”

He laughs. “I would if I knew who you are. But you wouldn't tell me, remember?”