Life Sentences (17 page)

She gripped his shoulders as if at risk of falling from a great height, as if she were far above the world, Leda in the beak of a swan Zeus.
Would she put on his knowledge with his power?
How did the rest of it go? The only other line she could remember was
And Agamemnon dead,
and she had forgotten who Agamemnon was. Then she felt guilty, thinking
of a black man as a swan, an animal. Yet she was really thinking of him as Zeus, was she not? A god to her mortal? But that, too, struck her as wrong, freighted, too similar to her father's way of justifying Annie's arrival in his life by comparing her to Aphrodite. Then it came to her—Agamemnon was the warrior who took Cassandra as his trophy after sacking Troy, and the two were later murdered. Leda, pressed to the swan's breast, catches a glimpse of the future, but Cassandra was the one who had the true gift of prophecy.

“So this is the one place where you're quiet,” Reg said afterward, just, when they were still entwined. “Me, too. It's funny, isn't it, how big talkers like us go quiet in bed?”

Cassandra nodded.

MY FATHER WAS IN THE HOSPITAL
for three weeks. I wasn't allowed to visit him, according to the hospital rules, but my mother was reluctant to leave me home alone, so I would sit in the waiting room with my homework. Then, having ventured that far into the city, crossing streets that just days ago had been torn by rioting, my mother felt we deserved some kind of treat, especially on Fridays. We would head farther out Eastern Avenue, to Highlandtown and Haussner's, a Baltimore institution. A German restaurant, it had filled every inch of wall space with nineteenth-century art. The sheer volume of paintings, their random and haphazard placement, made me assume they were tacky, on a par with paint-by-numbers pictures or black velvet portraiture. In fact, my father had treated Haussner's as an object lesson in aesthetics, sneering at the paintings and encouraging me to sneer, too. But when I returned to the restaurant as an adult, I learned that the paintings are considered very fine examples of nineteenth-century art.

My mother, however, did not lecture me about the décor. She chose the restaurant because it was a good compromise for an adult and child, a place where she could get a cocktail and, say, veal or liver, while I had a Shirley Temple and potato pancakes. We ate in silence and I became aware of how much conversation my father provided, how he guided and ruled our dinner table discussions. The quiet wasn't awkward, not
in the restaurant, which had a happy cacophony. But it was strained and worrisome at home.

At the end of the second week, in the lull after we placed our order, my mother suddenly said, “You never ask any questions about your father.”

“You said he was going to be okay.” A panicky thought struck me. “He is, isn't he? You
said.
”

“He's going to be fine. They were worried at first. He was beaten very badly and—well, they couldn't be sure—the brain and all—but he's going to be fine. He may need more time to recover physically, but he'll be fine.”

“Why did they beat him?”

My mother held up her drink, something called a lime rickey, and studied it in the light.

“Things that happen in a riot, they don't make sense. People get out of control and the energy just feeds itself. If your father had stayed in the car—but he didn't stay in the car.”

“Why?”

“He saw someone being…hurt, and he went to help her. It was very brave, actually. Foolish, but brave.”

Neither my mother nor I had met Annie at that point. But the next week, my father's final one in the hospital, a woman approached me in the waiting room. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said she looked like Diahann Carroll or Diana Ross. By which I would have meant,
She's a beautiful black woman and those are the beautiful black women I know.
In fact, Annie was beautiful in a way that was new in 1968. Her skin was dark, about as dark as skin gets, her nose broad, her lips full.

But while her face spoke to a standard of beauty that was just coming into its own, her body was a throwback to the 1950s, almost cartoonishly curvy in its proportions, with a tiny waist, generous hips, and, frankly, the largest natural breasts I had ever seen on a woman. As I had already started wondering what my own breasts might look like
when they arrived—Fatima had recently purchased a training bra, and all the girls in our class were thinking about their breasts-to-be—I couldn't help staring. Could something like
those
sprout on my chest? My own mother's bosom (and that's the word I would have used at the time, although with much giggling) was modest. This was an era where our chests chose us; we did not choose our chests. One's developing body was a random, freakish event, a card dealt facedown that you got to turn over somewhere around twelve or thirteen.

I was so entranced by this stranger's bosom that it took me a moment to realize that she was speaking to me.

“You must be Ric's daughter,” she said. “I can see the resemblance.”

This took several seconds to sort out. My father was a man. Girls didn't resemble men. Besides, it was an article of faith in my family that I looked like myself, no one else.

The woman knelt down, putting her face level with mine. “I'm Annie. I was with your father…”

“Are you the woman who was being beaten?”

Her face flickered with pain. Later, I would piece things together, understand that my mother had been euphemistically inexact in describing the attack on Annie. But my ten-year-old brain could not have processed the reality of rape.

“Beaten? Well…almost, I guess. But it was nothing compared to what happened to your father. I feel awful about that.”

“You didn't do it.” A ten-year-old's insistence on fairness coming to the fore. Children, blamed for things they haven't done, are naturally judicious.

“No, I didn't. I guess you're here with your mama?”

“Yes. She's in my father's room, two oh eight. You can go in because you're a grown-up.”

“You come every day? That must get boring.”

“I get my homework done. We usually come earlier, and there's a
treat after, snowballs on weekdays, a restaurant on Fridays. Or”—I lowered my voice as if my father, down the corridor, might hear of this perfidy—“we eat off TV trays and we pretend we're on a flight to Europe and the TV is the movie.”

“That sounds nice.” Annie's face and her voice didn't match up. I could tell she thought it was queer or that I was too old for such a childish game.

“Did you come here to thank my dad? Because he saved you?”

“Well, I am concerned about him. But people in the hospital shouldn't have too many visitors. They get tired.”

“He's better. He's getting out Friday.”

“Still—I'll let him have this time with your mama.”

My mother came out then. I blurted in a self-important rush, “This is Annie, the woman Daddy saved. She came to thank him.”

My mother regarded the woman's chest, much as I had. “How nice,” she said. “You should go in now, while he's awake. He's still sleeping a lot.”

“Annie Waters,” the woman said, holding out her hand to shake. “It's nice to meet you.”

“Visiting hours will be over soon,” my mother said. “I wouldn't want you to miss your chance.”

My mother's voice was ultra-polite, the way she always was with strangers. Annie headed down the corridor and we left, driving home through neighborhoods that terrified and fascinated me. The curfew was past, the days were expanding toward their summer length, but my mother was still nervous. She didn't relax until the final mile of our journey, when we entered the leafy lane that took us through the park and into Dickeyville.

“Do they hurt, when they come?” I asked my mother.

“What?”

“Bosoms.”

“Oh—no, what gave you that idea?”

“Teeth hurt, when you're a baby.”

“Well, teeth have to break through the gum. Your breasts just…grow.”

It was hard for me to see the difference, except that teeth were hard.

“How do they know when to start?”

“They get signals from your body when you start being a teenager.”

“Adolescence,” I said sagely. It was a big word, one used to describe almost everything that teenagers did. It was, apparently, quite terrible.

 

ABSENTMINDEDLY, MY MOTHER STARTED
to turn up our street, forgetting to continue on to the pharmacy for the promised snowball. I hated having to remind her of her promise—to this day, I hate having to ask for things already promised me—but my mouth was aching for that sweet syrup.

“Mama, the pharmacy?”

“You sure it won't spoil your dinner?”

“I'm sure.”

Back home, she asked me if I wanted to play airplane, but I remembered the look on Annie's face and said I'd rather not. We never played it again, in fact. Two days later, my father came home. Two months later, he called my mother and said he was moving out. He had fallen in love with Annie Waters.
She is my destiny,
my father said.
Fate put her in my path for a reason.
My mother cried, said he was a liar, that he had always been a liar. “No,” he said. “I was a liar, but I'm telling the truth now. I was meant to be with this woman.”

I know exactly what was said because I listened in on the extension. In love, my father was as full of clichés as anyone, but there was no comfort in pointing that out. I put the phone back, neglecting to disguise the button's click, but my mother either didn't notice or didn't care.

CASSANDRA ALWAYS THOUGHT OF BALTIMORE
Penn Station as an endearingly tiny place, the kind of train station found in a Lionel set or what locals called a Christmas garden. High-ceilinged, with old-fashioned wooden benches and only four gates in regular use, it had one of everything else—one newsstand, one coffee shop, one bar, one set of restrooms, one shoeshine stand. Paradoxically, it was the more recent additions that looked run-down and tired—the electric tote board for the Amtrak trains, which never seemed to have the right information; the illuminated signs above the ticket windows, which tended to be on the fritz. It was a remarkably pleasant waiting room, even at seven on a late winter's morning, the weak, watery light forgiving, the commuters
mellow for a Monday. Most people were headed south, toward Washington, with only a handful walking down to the tracks when Cassandra's Acela Express was called, and although the northbound train was crowded, it wasn't full, and it was easy to snag a seat in the Quiet Car. Cassandra, used to New York's Penn Station, couldn't get over how
gentle
the whole experience felt.

Gentle
made her think of Reg, although it could be argued that he was anything but. Then again, everything was making her think of Reg—the rowhouses sliding by the train, so sad and ramshackle from the rear; the triptych of water crossings, each expanse slightly larger, culminating in the wide views along the Susquehanna in Havre de Grace; the Wilmington skyline. The newspaper in her hand, the laptop she had opened but ignored. Her head was full of Reg, yet she had spent no more than five hours with him since their first evening together.

She didn't want to go to New York, but the trip had been planned, entered on too many people's calendars—her editor's, her agent's, and, last and now least, her lover's. She would have to break up with him tonight. Oh, she had juggled lovers before and she wasn't foolish enough to think that this…
thing
with Reg had any potential. Or was she, in fact, exactly that foolish? All she knew was that she had no interest in faking her way through an evening with Bernard. They had been moving toward an ending anyway, and here it was. Reg had not precipitated this. Her response to Reg simply established how very
over
she and Bernard were. It wouldn't be that awful, she reasoned. She would do it in the restaurant, cold-hearted as that might seem. If she let him come back to her house, he would wheedle for one last night, and she wanted to avoid that at any cost. She would do it early, before they ordered entrées. That way he could storm out, if he wanted. Or he could stay, and they would have a companionable, civilized end to what had been a pleasant affair, nothing more. If anything, it should have been a summer fling, the kind of thing that ended when his wife came back from their house on the Cape.

The lunch with her editor actually loomed much larger in her mind than the dinner with Bernard. Should Cassandra tell Ellen about sleeping with Reg? It was a…complication that would have to be addressed at some point, an undeniable conflict of interest. If she had stayed with her old editor, Belle, whom she considered a friend, she would have been eager to sort this out with her, personally and professionally. Ellen, her new editor—the truth was, Ellen intimidated Cassandra.

The train pulled into Philadelphia, the midway point. She might as well open her laptop and review what she had accomplished on the book. She was done before Metro Park.

 

“NO PAGES?” ELLEN ASKED,
her bright eyes darting around the restaurant. “You haven't started writing yet?”

“It's hard to start writing until I know a little more,” Cassandra said. “Remember, I haven't lived this book, and it's not a product of pure imagination. I'm still poking around, trying to find Callie Jenkins. It's surprisingly difficult.”

“But you finally got to her lawyer, right?”

Oh yes.
“He agreed to meet with me but says he has no idea where she is. And, you know, increasingly I feel it's not so much about the legal battle but about this cipher of a girl. It's almost as if I'm writing the memoir that Callie can't write for herself.”

Ellen frowned, buttering a piece of bread that she would never eat. She seldom ate anything, not in Cassandra's presence, and she almost thrummed with a hummingbird-like energy. Yet she was the one who always insisted on lunch, taking Cassandra to the restaurant of the moment, whatever it might be, then fidgeting in her seat as if she couldn't believe she had to spend ninety minutes talking to just one person, ignoring the e-mails arriving on her BlackBerry, away from the phones, not that she ever picked up her own phone.

The dynamic had been different, of course, when Ellen was courting Cassandra. Seducing her, to be blunt. She had started by whispering in Cassandra's agent's ear: Cassandra's publishing company had never really understood her.
My Father's Daughter
was a word-of-mouth fluke, a child that had thrived despite almost criminal neglect. True, they had published
The Eternal Wife
very well, but a publisher would have to be stunningly incompetent to undermine Cassandra Fallows's second memoir. They didn't love her, they didn't appreciate her. Ellen did, Ellen would.

Her next move was to take Cassandra to lunch, eschewing the obvious places in favor of a low-key restaurant in Cassandra's neighborhood. Yes, back then, Ellen had come to her. “Why start gossip if we don't need to?” Ellen had said of that first meeting in Brooklyn. They had a lovely three-hour lunch, complete with a bottle of wine, although Cassandra later reflected that she drank most of it; Ellen's glass never seemed to need refilling, although she consumed gallons of water. Ellen's praise for Cassandra's work was headier than the wine, however. She spoke about discovering Cassandra's first book when she was a senior in college, how much it had meant to her. She was bowled over—her exact turn of phrase—by the raw honesty about sex in the second memoir. She would be happy to publish anything that Cassandra wrote, anything. “I would publish your grocery lists,” she said. “I bet they're poetry. I don't believe you can write a bad sentence.”

As it happened, it was only a week later that Cassandra's editor, Belle, sent a sorrowful e-mail about Cassandra's proposed novel, then a scant thirty pages and a semicompleted outline.
It gives me no pleasure to say this,
Belle wrote,
but the writing lacks something. I wish I could tell you exactly what it was. The best I can do is say that your fiction seems tentative, as if you do not believe in the power of your own imagination, the authority of your voice. In these pages, you haven't committed to the story and you seem to be papering over that fact by trying to divert us with these tangential bits of research—the history of the hospital, for example, the “open my records” movement among
adoptees and their biological parents. Those digressions worked in your nonfiction, but here it feels like padding. We probably should talk.

She should have taken Belle up on that invitation. But the e-mail stung—not because it was unfair, but because it hit, with uncanny precision, the nexus of Cassandra's own fears and insecurities about the work. Meanwhile there was Ellen, willing to pay more money than Cassandra had ever dreamed, for anything that she wrote.
Anything.
And Ellen cooed over the proposal, pronounced it brilliant, said it seemed to her a remarkable idea, a vehicle for true fusion. And when the early reviews, in essence, echoed all of Belle's fears, Ellen stood by Cassandra. “They aren't reviewing the book,” she said. “They're reviewing your contract. It's not unlike what happened when Martin Amis published
The Information,
and all the press was about his agent and his teeth and his marriage.”

Cassandra did the math: Ellen would have been in high school at the time Amis published that book. How could she know such ancient publishing history? But Ellen was a freak, the type of young girl who set her sights on being an editor when she was eleven or so, who liked to tell people that she used her bat mitzvah money to subscribe to
Publishers Weekly
and
Kirkus.
Before she was twenty-seven, she made a name for herself with her uncanny knack for picking up debut novels for bargain prices and building them up beyond anyone's expectations. Perhaps that was the problem. Both she and Cassandra had strayed from their usual paths when they joined forces. Ellen had paid a lot of money; Cassandra had tried to write fiction. Ellen couldn't take the money back, but she could nudge Cassandra to return to her more lucrative niche.

“I do think you have to answer the question,” Ellen said now, frowning at her bread and breaking it into pieces. “Did she or didn't she?”

“Only her hairdresser knows for sure,” Cassandra said. Ellen's blank expression reminded her of their age difference; she clearly didn't have any memory of that old Clairol ad. Okay, no more jokes. “It's tricky—after all, her lawyer can't comment publicly—but I think she must have.
In fact, I'm beginning to think that's why the first lawyer left the case so abruptly. She learned something—or Callie told her something—that compromised the defense, ethically. Which must be why she won't talk to me.”

“I'm not asking for a true-crime book,” Ellen said. “That's too down-market, not at all your audience. But there has to be a journey. Even if you can't say explicitly what you think, the reader has to know. You have to somehow persuade readers to feel empathy for someone generally regarded as a monster. And it's got to go beyond the ‘Oh my, she was crazy!' vibe of that Texas case, the woman who drowned her kids. There's nowhere to go with plain crazy.”

Cassandra spread taramasalata on a breadstick. Ellen's advice, crass as it might sound, wasn't off base. She still wasn't sure what she would end up doing about the inconvenient fact that she had slept with one of the principals. If she was lucky—and, in fact, she usually was—she and Reg would sate themselves quickly, no one would ever know about the affair, and they could both go on with clear consciences. But wouldn't it be fun if she could surprise Reg with her enterprise and ingenuity as an investigator? What if she ended up telling Reg things about this case that he never knew, never suspected. He didn't even know where Callie was. Teena, too, had failed to find her. What if Cassandra could succeed? Only where to start? She thought of Fatima outside the church, anxious, even fearful.
“That thing that happened to her?”
What had happened to Callie? What did Fatima know?

“Do you want dessert?” Ellen asked in a bright, cheerful way that somehow managed to indicate that she hoped the answer was no.

“I wouldn't mind coffee,” Cassandra said, feeling a little contrary. “And I always like to peruse the dessert list, dangerous as it is to women of a certain age.”

“You look phenomenal,” Ellen said. “You've always been fit, with that nice skin, but there's something…extra. Kind of glowy.”

“Microdermabrasion,” Cassandra said, blushing.