Joyride (19 page)

The night of his death by lethal injection Sherry received the news shortly after twelve through the ever-efficient prison grapevine—death by lethal injection being of special interest to its population. There had been no last-minute stays of execution nor had one been expected despite the public outcry over her own complicity in the crimes once the substance of the videotapes became general knowledge. In the two years since his trial she had neither seen nor heard from him. Only what was in the papers or reported on the TV news. She kept no photos of him or of the two of them together. Only of her mother and her father and their miniature poodle Sasha and her sister Talia.

Word came to her through the bars from a lifer named Felicity. They knew each other well. Three months ago Felicity and Sherry had modeled swimsuits and little black cocktail dresses at Sherry’s birthday party. Another of the inmates snapped photos of them and sold them to the newspapers. They didn’t mind. They looked good in the pictures. Felicity had entered a plea of not guilty to four counts each on charges of kidnapping, forcible confinement, sexual assault and sexual assault causing bodily harm along with her live-in boyfriend Jimmy. The plea was a mistake for both of them. As Sherry told her more than once she should have taken the deal.

Sorry, Sherry,
she said now. Just that.
Sorry.

Felicity was never big on emotion.

She fell back upon her bed and began to cry.

Her cell mate was a pretty twenty-two-year-old black trustee named LeeVonne Amber Anderson. LeeVonne was in her fifth year of doing ten to twenty for armed robbery but the Andersons were a big family and had seen their share of human tragedy. So she was not without compassion. She sat down beside Sherry and tried her best to comfort her.

“You got to be strong now, baby,” she said. “You know that. You knew it was gonna happen someday, right? Can’t go on appealing forever.”

“I know, I know. It’s just…I loved him, ‘Vonne. I loved him so fucking much…”

“ ’Course you did.”

“Despite what he did to me. Despite him beating me and all.”

“He was your man. Of course you loved him. Sure you did.”

“You should have seen the wedding, ‘Vonne. Everybody was there. And he was so handsome. We were like, the perfect couple. You know? We were perfect. Everybody said so.”

“I bet you were, honey. Listen, you want me to get you anything? Something from the refrigerator? Bottle of water? Can of Sprite maybe?”

“No thanks. You’re a doll.”

“How about some tea? I can fire up the hot plate for you. Some Mello Mint maybe.”

“Before we got married we used to drive up to the lake and go swimming. Everybody thought he was a lifeguard, he had the most beautiful body. He was like this beautiful young Adonis, this young god.”

“He’s gone to his maker now, honey.”

“I never would have married him if I knew it would end up this way.”

“Sure you would have. You loved him.”

“I got him killed, ‘Vonne! Jesus!”

“No you didn’t, honey. He got himself killed. You know that, girl. Now come here. Come on.”

LeeVonne held her and let her cry it all out and they were silent for a while after that and then as was her custom she drew her hand slowly down inside Sherry’s prison-issue orange jumpsuit and beneath her Victoria’s Secret panties and rubbed her and slid her fingers into the warm thick wetness inside of her until she moaned and turned and kissed her and they spoke no more until each of them was done.

The morning of her release Sherry was nervous. Just a little scared.

She was famous after all. Being famous on the inside was one thing. That was good. Outside was a different story. There were death threats on the Internet. There was even a betting-pool site—
“The Sherry Jefferson Death Pool: When the Game’s Over, Everybody Wins.”
While it stated that the site did not condone violence against her it took bets on the exact day she would die. Players were not allowed to fix the results of the pool by killing her or having somebody else kill her. But the pool had thus far amassed over 30,000 dollars.

So nervous was natural.

She sat with LeeVonne in the dayroom watching CNN waiting to see if she’d be mentioned. Hoping she would not. The big news that morning was that some seventeen years after the massacre of 5,000 Kurds in Iraq an international tribunal in the Hague had finally ruled that it indeed did constitute genocide and handed down a maximum sentence of fifteen years in prison to businessman Frans van Anraat for selling poison gas to Saddam Hussein.

It was followed by a story about a cat who had gone repeatedly back into a burning apartment building to save her three newborn kittens. That all four cats were
being adopted together by the same family was so sweet it nearly made her want to cry.

When the prison guards came for her she still had not been mentioned and that was all to the good. She kissed LeeVonne good-bye and promised to write.

They took her out a private entrance while the press had been directed to another and wearing sunglasses and a scarf over her head she stepped into a taxi and gave the driver the address. If the driver recognized her he didn’t show it. Against the possibility that he or anyone else might Sherry had dyed her hair brown and lost fifteen pounds so that she was thinner than she’d been since she was a teenager and wore hardly any makeup at all.

“Sixteen thirty-three Rosewood,” she said.

Sixteen thirty-three Rosewood was not her parents’ house though despite everything she knew she was welcome there. But the house would be mobbed by reporters. What she needed now was anonymity.

In February of that year she had briefly met Joseph “Handy” Handie at the inmate library where he was boning up on criminal law and she on back issues of
People
magazine and they’d hit it off immediately. Joseph had stalked and strangled his former girlfriend but he was repentant about it and very quiet and very nice. She’d been corresponding with him ever since. She had a pair of his underwear in her suitcase now as a matter of fact—not boxers, briefs. Somewhere in his cell he had a pair of hers.

Joseph had directed her to a boardinghouse on the edge of town a few miles from the prison which was run by a woman who was an old lover of his and he’d written to her about Sherry and her situation. The woman wrote back and said certainly, she’d be happy to have her. In
fact she knew of a job. One of her ex-boarders had since done very well for himself in the flower-and-gardening business. He was also clean. The conditions of her parole stated that Sherry could not be associated with any ex-felons.

Did Sherry like flowers?

Sherry did.

It’s nice here,
she wrote.
Jerry (that’s my boss) is really easy to work with and I think he kind of likes me because he doesn’t work me all that hard. (Laugh!) I never knew I had a green thumb but I guess I do. We’ve got kids to haul the heavy stuff and Jerry’s the one with the knowledge about plants and grass and flowers and so on so mostly what I do is water things and do inventory and run the register. He landscapes on the side so many days it’s just me and the kids who are fun to tease and joke around with.

Best thing, Handy? Nobody—and I mean
nobody—
seems to know who the hell I am here. My lawyers have done a great job of keeping things hush-hush and it looks as though the media types are even getting sick of bothering my parents from what I hear. There’s been nothing about me in the papers or on the news for weeks.

It appears that the media seem to have gone on to the latest flavor of the month—some family in Wisconsin who kept their seventeen-year-old daughter locked up in the basement for three years without anybody knowing. Not even the neighbors! They had three younger daughters who all went to school just like any other kids, had friends and all, but nobody knew this one girl even existed. Isn’t that amazing! They shocked her with this dog collar, burned her with an electric iron, shot her with a BB gun, knocked out her teeth with a hammer, all
kinds
of weird shit.

You’ve got to wonder what the poor kid did to deserve all that, right?

They were churchgoing baptists. But then aren’t we all?

Anyhow, it sure has helped to get everybody’s attention away from me. I could almost write that girl a fan letter, know what I mean?
Thanks for the misdirection. Sorry about your teeth!
(Ha!)

But seriously I want to thank you, Handy, from the bottom of my heart. Your friend Lori is absolutely the greatest. We talk all the time, usually over a beer or two or three after work, about my past and about Owen and prison and about you—and I know more than ever now from talking to her that when you did what you did to your girlfriend Suzie you were just completely out of it with pure male passion, you weren’t responsible for your actions. No way, Jose. If anybody was responsible she was—that jury was just plain wrong.

Lori loves you like a brother and so do I. Maybe when you get out—and you
will
get out, despite what your dopey lawyers are telling you—we can arrange something a little more than…um, brotherly? Like maybe a threesome? Would you like that? I bet you sure as hell would!

Anyhow, we both send you loves and cuddles galore,

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOX

Always, your

Sherry

Joseph never did get out but in three months’ time she met Arliss in the flower shop and then later the same night in a bar called the Lion’s Den though the yellow roses he was buying were for his girlfriend. To make up for calling her a bitch before going to work that morning. Yellow was for regret she told him.

Arliss was six years younger than she was—the same age Talia would have been had she lived. He had inherited a contracting business from his father. His jacket and tie were Brooks Brothers and he drank Glenfiddich neat and Courvoisier neat after dinner. At which point she finally got around to asking him about his girlfriend.

I don’t think it’s going to last, he said. I liked her better in the secretarial pool than I do in bed.

Then you just wasted twenty-five dollars on roses, she said.

He grinned. I don’t know. We’re sitting here, aren’t we?

Yes we are.

Well, then.

How are you going to explain this to her? Dinner out, I mean.

I already did. You’re a client. Sometimes I’m out until the wee hours of the morning with a client.

Is that so.

Yes it is.

The wee hours. I haven’t heard that expression in a long time.

I’m an old-fashioned guy.

You want to get out of here?

Finish your drink. No rush.

She got him started while he was driving. Squeezing and rubbing his penis beneath the light sheer summer trousers. After a while they stopped talking and she could hear him breathing. His cock was big and thick and very hard.

Do you know who I am? she said.

He smiled. No, who are you.

I’m Sherry Jefferson.

Not Samuels?

No. Sherry Jefferson. Now do you know who I am?

Yes. I guess I do.

Does it matter?

No. Should it?

It doesn’t feel like it matters.

No it doesn’t, does it. But if you don’t cut that out pretty soon
something’s
going to matter, that’s for sure.

In her apartment with him standing before her kneeling on her bed she freed him and put him in her mouth and lightly stroked his shaft but she wouldn’t let him come. She unbuttoned and shrugged off her blouse and unsnapped her bra. Her tits were good and still firm and men were amazed at the length of her nipples and she wanted him to see. She continued to stroke him while she reached over to the nightstand and opened the drawer and took out the handcuffs and let them dangle.

For you or for me? he said.

Whatever you want.

For you, he said.

Two months later the girlfriend was long out of the picture and they were lying on his much-larger bed, his bedroom bigger than her whole apartment for god sakes and she unlocked the handcuffs on his wrists and ran her hands down over his sweat-slick body to his penis, cupped it in her palm and said, how would you feel if I wanted to see you rape somebody?

For real?

Yes. Of course for real.

I’ve never done that, he said.

I know you haven’t. But how would you feel. If I wanted you to?

He thought about it.

No problem, he said.

Janine Edmundson was now Janine Turner and her husband was Owen. The coincidental irony of his surname wasn’t the least bit lost on her. But her first sweet high school boyfriend possibly excepted,
her
Owen was the kindest, gentlest man she’d ever met.

His pediatric practice had grown to the extent that he’d recently acquired two younger partners and a brand-new office just to handle the overflow. It seemed impossible for him to turn a patient away or in fact to say no to anybody. Owen was gentle with the children and maybe even more so with their worried and sometimes maddeningly demanding mothers. He was given to saying that until his hands started to shake or he couldn’t find his way to work in the morning he had no intention of retiring.

She couldn’t have asked for a better husband or father.

Which made her own situation all the more intolerable.

Janine hit her kids. Suzie, eleven. Debra, nine. She hit them both. There were times she just couldn’t help it. Especially as they grew older.

They made her crazy. They were both so goddamn
innocent.
The world, she knew, was not.

In one of her rages she was perfectly capable of lashing out at Owen too. Swinging on him with all her might, her mouth spewing the vilest things she could imagine saying as though he were the other Owen, the first

Owen—as though she could turn back the clock and do now what she was incapable of doing then. Tearing at him. Hurting him.

And the night they watched
American Justice
was worst of all. The show was new to them and they always had enjoyed it thus far but this time it blindsided both of them.

She’d been drinking of course. Vodka laced with cranberry juice. Owen didn’t drink anymore. The girls were at a sleepover thank god.

She took one look at his face on the television. The handsome tanned young man on the beach with his lovely bride-to-be.

“Turn it off, Janine,” Owen said gently. “Switch the channel. You don’t need this.”

“That son of a bitch.”

“Come on. Turn it off.”

“You’re wrong. I do need to see this. I want to see it.”

He sighed and got up from his chair.

“Leave it!” she said.

“Come on, Janine.”

“Leave it!”

They were talking about the rapes now.
Her rapes.
Though neither her face nor those of the other girls were seen.

They hadn’t gotten to the murders yet.

It was only when they arrested him on the murders that she learned who her attacker was. That was years ago and after reading what else he’d done she’d felt lucky simply to be alive. She’d seen his face on the first page of the newspaper that morning just like she was seeing it now on the television and her legs went out from under her. So that suddenly she was sitting on the curbside
stunned and nearly unable to comprehend exactly what she was reading and she heard that voice in her head again.

Here’s what I want you to say. I want you to say Merry Christmas I’m a bitch I’m a cunt I’m a dirty little whore I love you this is my Christmas present to you lover, I hate my boyfriend I’m a cheating fucking lying little cunt. What’s your name? Tell me your name. Janine? That’s a nice name. Very nice name. How old are you? Where do you go to school, Janine? Tell me you want it up the ass. Tell me you want me to put it right up your ass. That’s right. Now tell me you want to suck your shit off my cock you dirty little bitch you see the knife? do you see it? do you?

And she was hearing that voice once again now with snapshots flying by on the TV screen. Owen and Sherry at their wedding. Owen and Sherry dancing at the wedding and opening up Christmas presents and on their honeymoon in Maui on the beach and smiling for the camera.

“You motherfucker,” she said. She finished off her drink.

“I know, Janine. I know, honey. I know.”

“No you
don’t
know! Don’t
say
that! Don’t you ever say that to me. You can fucking
never
know! Don’t you give me that
I know
shit!”

“Hey. All I meant was…”

“Mr. Sweetness and Light says he knows! Fuck you,
Owen!
Fuck all of you!”

“Okay. That’s it. That’s enough.”

So that he got up and walked over to the TV and picked up the remote and that was when she threw the tumbler and caught him directly in the center of the back. The tumbler was thick and heavy at its base and light and thin at the rim and the sound of it on his backbone
was at once a single hollow drumbeat and a shattering. He fell forward and sideways with hands outstretched so that the television went over with him, tumbling off its stand with a metallic crash and ping of light and a sudden dark silence that the room somehow seemed to augment. He said
aw jesus, oh shit
and clutched his back with his left hand while he tried to wrench his right arm out from under him.

She remained where she was. Frozen in her chair.

“Jesus, Janine. Help me. Would you please help me out here?”

How could she help him. There wasn’t help for anybody.

“I don’t think I can move, honey. I think you hit a nerve or something. God!”

There was blood on the back of his white oxford shirt and it was spreading. A shard of glass glinted in the lamplight as he moved.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait.”

“What? Help me up, will you? Honey?”

“Okay. Wait. I’ll help you up. Wait.”

When she got up and went to him she realized that she was sober now all of a sudden though how that should happen she didn’t know any more than she knew how or why she in particular should be chosen as a girl fit for rape by that other Owen so long ago or whether it was possible to know if her own daughters would be similarly chosen but only that she was going to have to help this Owen and herself too if their lives were ever to peaceably go on.