Life Sentences (18 page)

TEENA WISHED THAT CASSANDRA HAD
asked her to do something more difficult, although she wasn't sure what that might be. Still, it was too easy, pulling up the home address of this woman, Fatima, from the billing department. Teena even had the perfect cover story: She wanted to write her a note to thank her for a recent purchase, a tack that Teena did use, as did several Nordstrom sales associates. Cassandra most certainly would have gotten a note if Teena hadn't essentially extorted her.

Once she pulled the account, she couldn't help noticing that Fatima, who had a store card, sometimes paid only the minimum balance and every now and then missed a payment. Never more than one, and never more than once or twice a year. Her buying seemed to follow a
bingelike cycle; the account would lie fallow for months, then she would come in and drop a thousand, give or take. She also spent a lot of her money at the basement level, the Rack. Quantity over quality, then.

Teena mentioned that observation to Cassandra, keen to offer something extra. A mere address itself was a puny gift, even if that was all Cassandra had requested.

“Hmmm,” Cassandra said. “That would fit with the girl I knew. And the woman I saw. When you buy clothes that memorable, you need more of them.”

Her voice was muffled and a little subdued, but Teena chalked that up to the cell line, buzzy and unsteady from the train. Most people didn't think twice about cell phones these days, but the thought of speaking on one from a train, a train returning from New York, was glamorous to Teena. She wondered what Cassandra's apartment looked like, what filled her days back in New York. It was hard to hold on to the idea that Cassandra was only another Baltimore girl, not that different from her. More educated, sure, but Cassandra's professor father had probably earned less money than Teena's dad, who had his own heating and cooling business.

Teena didn't remember the old neighborhood over by the racetrack; they had moved the year she was born. But they had gone back, from time to time, so her parents could impress upon their children how far they had come. They would drive around Park Heights on a Sunday afternoon, then head up to the Suburban House for what her father called, with no malice, good old-fashioned Jew food. Teena, a picky eater, made do with a bunless hot dog, shocked at the things her father ate with such obvious enjoyment. Gravlax. Kreplach. Borscht. Even the names sounded threatening, like creatures in a science fiction film. But she liked the drive, the tour of what they had left behind. Her brothers remembered where the bike shop was and—this shared in hushed voices—the pet shop, where a neighborhood girl had been murdered. The crime had taken years to solve and turned on the kind of obscure
detail now omnipresent in television shows: Sand found on the girl's body was determined to be from some exotic, faraway locale, not indigenous to the United States. That sand had led detectives to the pet store and a clerk who had snapped one day merely from encountering a privileged, pampered girl.

It would be a stretch to say that this story made Teena decide to become
a police,
as she would learn to say. Certainly, such details figured hardly at all in her life as a cop. There hadn't been much Caribbean sand or many criminal masterminds in her career. Perps were stupid. The job wasn't about matching wits but matching wills, and the detective had the advantage of being able to shift tactics, tone, even facts. The detectives also had the privilege of movement—the freedom to stand, to pace, to leave the room. Yet Teena seldom availed herself of it. She sat. She sat until her ass, which lacked for padding, went numb, then continued to sit some more. It was in her stillness and her silences that she broke people down. Men, especially, treated her like a blind date they had to appease, make conversation with.

Then she met Callie, who could challenge her on every front. Quieter, stiller. It was eerie how long that woman could go without speaking, how immobile she became. She made Teena think of some impossible plot, from
Batman
or maybe
The Wild Wild West,
where the hero slowed his pulse until it was almost nil and people took him for dead. Callie Jenkins's eyes were dead, but her squared shoulders and straight spine indicated
something
was inside her, holding her together. God? But if God kept Callie strong, that suggested Callie felt righteous, which meant—what, exactly? Under what scenario did a woman kill her baby and come to believe she was justified? Insanity, of course. But Callie submitted to psych test after psych test and always came back sane. Or sane enough to hang, as Lenhardt liked to say.

What new tools did cops have now, what could they do? Teena recognized that the television depictions were bullshit, but things must have come pretty far since her day, when she entered data on those
green-gray monitors with the pulsing cursor. Now a home computer could do things undreamed of when she first started working homicide. But it couldn't find Callie Jenkins. She had tried. Of course, with a call or two, someone downtown would help her. Maybe not in the city homicide squad, where McLarney was the only survivor from her time. But Lenhardt, out in the county, he could help and would, without a single question.

But Teena never asked anyone for anything, ever. That was another thing that fascinated her about Cassandra, the ease with which she requested favors from people. Sure, she said “please” and “thank you,” she had manners. Still, she had a way of asking that indicated she expected people to do her bidding. Where does that kind of confidence come from? Money, fame? No, Teena had known plenty of losers who were the same way. Some people were comfortable with building up favors. Teena had kept her balance sheet clean, neither asking nor giving. And when she ran into trouble, there had been no one there for her.

 

THE ACELA HOME WAS DELAYED,
one of those mysterious malfunctions where the train slowed to what felt like five miles per hour for long stretches. They were inching through New Jersey south of Trenton, having just passed the put-upon slogan along the bridge:
TRENTON MAKES/THE WORLD TAKES
. Cassandra said good-bye to Teena and returned to the Quiet Car from the vestibule where she had made the call, happy to be alone with her thoughts. She was pleased, of course, and grateful to Teena for her assistance. But she had cottonmouth and a headache. Not exactly a hangover, although she had drunk quite a bit the night before. Too much.

The breakup with Bernard had been far more troublesome than she had imagined. He had
cried.
In public. At her favorite restaurant, a place she went to at least twice a month when she was home.

“Bernard, this isn't love,” she had said as softly as possible. The ta
bles were very close together here, a storefront that used to be a pharmacy and had kept some of the old-fashioned fittings.

“It is for me,” he said. “I was ready to—”

She wouldn't even let him say what he had been prepared to do.

“I'm wrapped up in my work. I don't have time for a lover.” This did not seem to console him. “Besides, it's wrong. You're married. I can't do this anymore.”
Because I've moved on to sleeping with an old friend's husband who's integral to the book I'm trying to write. Nothing wrong there!

Bernard had settled down and even ended up enjoying the meal. The restaurant was that good; its food transcended heartache. By dessert, he was in such good spirits that he began enumerating all the reasons that Cassandra was right about the breakup, which was really an excuse to list all the things he disliked about Cassandra. She was a little full of herself, did she know that? Not an out-and-out narcissist, but self-centered. She thought everything was about her. They had dated only six months and had few interactions with others, but on those rare occasions they did, she was already correcting his version of stories.

“You're always saying, ‘No, no, you're telling it wrong.' As if there's one right way, and it's your way.” He went on to say that she was passionate in bed but a little cold elsewhere, too good at taking care of herself. Self-contained in a way that wasn't attractive, yet bossy and needy, too.

The only part she had bothered to contradict was the bit about storytelling. “You're an investment banker,” she had said. “If I attempted to do what you do—or even explain what you do—you'd almost certainly correct me. I'm a storyteller. It's what I do. I can't bear it when a story isn't told right.”

“Jesus, Cassandra, everyone tells stories.”

“Yes,” she said. “But I do it better than most.”

“On the page,” he said. “Where you write and rewrite and rewrite. But that doesn't mean you're some great raconteur, you know. You're not…Homer.”

“Well, I'm not blind,” she said.

They had both laughed at that, which had soothed his feelings, let him assume she agreed with his other points. She didn't, but she had to let it go. She had to allow him to sit there, counting up all the ways in which he didn't like her. It was the price of breaking up with a man. God, how many breakups had there been like this? When did it ever end? At thirty, she had assumed
that
was all over. By
that
she meant the ups, downs, stomach-twisting ways of infatuation and love. Then at forty, she thought she must be off the hook, that her second marriage, while a little passionless, was a mark of her newfound, hard-won maturity. Instead, it was only proof that she was still capable of marrying the wrong person. Then Bernard, in fact, had seemed evidence enough that she had finally entered the phase of cool, composed, not-losing-one's-self love. But it hadn't been love at all.

Reg was
that
all over again.
Candy.
How she longed to call him that, to remind him how far back they went, but some instinct warned her that Reg would not welcome his nickname. Still, she loved that they were familiar with each other's previous selves, even if they never alluded to that fact. She had known the silly, laughing, dancing pest. He remembered the frowsy-haired girl. They admired the new outer shells, so smooth and shiny, but recognized them as the façades they were.

The train, designed to go one hundred miles per hour, chugged lazily toward Baltimore, stuck on a track that could never handle its full speed. Cassandra didn't mind. Nothing was waiting for her in Baltimore tonight. She and Reg had plans to meet tomorrow afternoon, in her apartment.
Reg will be proud of me when I find Callie without his help. I'll have to be careful of his feelings, not flaunt it in such a way that it makes him feel inadequate. But the more I leave him out of it—well, the more I can leave him out of everything.

He had a child and a wife he adored, according to no less an authority than his own sister. His reputation was such that even Teena knew he ran around. This was the kind of affair immortalized in popular
song. Too hot not to cool down, et cetera, et cetera.
Epic poetry does it better,
her father would contradict, displeased whenever anyone claimed pop culture could have a power that art did not. But this was one area where she had to disagree with her father. Poetry—hushed and proper—had nothing on music when it came to expressing these kinds of feelings. Stupid songs competed in her head, the songs of her early teenage years, gooey with feeling. If she had a blue denim notebook, she would have doodled his initials on it and entwined them with hers. It was going to end badly. It had to end badly. She told herself she didn't care.

EVERYONE KNEW BALTIMORE WAS SMALL;
it was almost banal to make the observation now. But it was a fitful, unpredictable smallness. Gloria could go years, literally, without seeing someone and then the person suddenly seemed to be everywhere.

That was the case with Reg Barr, the whole Barr-Howard clan. Reg truly had receded from her thoughts over the years. Now he was practically omnipresent. There was the writer's query, then Reg's own call. A new billboard advertising his legal services had gone up on North Avenue, visible from Gloria's daily drive into the city. Gloria chose a new route. She opened the newspaper, only to find herself staring at Reg's wife—the boss's daughter, as Gloria still thought of her—opposite the
comics, cooperating with a particularly vapid feature, “Five Things I Have to Have Right Now.” Gloria would have assumed Donna Howard-Barr was above such things, but she was apparently willing to pimp herself out to draw attention to a fund-raising event for the Alpha Kappa Alpha scholarship fund.

Donna's five “urgent” needs fascinated Gloria. A high-end gas grill, sustainable patio furniture in Brazilian cherry, a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes, the new translation of
War and Peace,
a Gee's Bend quilt. Gloria couldn't help Googling the last item, which turned out to be a specific kind of quilt from Alabama. Not to her taste, but undeniably striking. Overall, the portrait Donna presented was quite deliberate.
I'm homey, I care about the environment, I'm girly, I'm intellectually engaged, I have exquisite taste.
But then, Donna had always been a canny custodian of her own image. Gloria bet that Donna would have those items, too, before spring ended. Donna Howard-Barr was not one to put off her urgent needs. Except, perhaps, that copy of
War and Peace.

And here was Reg yet again, this time in the courthouse elevator on a gray Wednesday morning, holding the hand of an exquisite little girl. Gloria almost didn't get on, but there were too many people around and she wouldn't want anyone to think that she was avoiding Reg, because that could be interpreted as a weakness. Not because anyone remembered or even knew their history, but because Gloria believed she was always being scrutinized for chinks in her armor.

“Take Your Daughter to Work Day?” Gloria asked.

“That's April,” the girl said with a child's literal-minded need to provide accurate information. “Besides, it's children now, not just daughters. It's spring break.”

“The babysitter is ill and Donna has some big luncheon today,” Reg said. “My sister's coming down to pick her up later this morning.” Then, as an afterthought, “This is Ms. Bustamante, honey. She and Daddy used to work together. Gloria, this is my daughter, Aubrey Barr.”

“Aubrey Howard Barr,” the girl said. “My mother's last name is my middle name.”

Aubrey.
Gloria was trying to remember if she had known that Reg and Donna had a daughter. She must have, but seeing the child produced an almost visceral reaction.
You son of a bitch,
she thought, knowing she was being unfair, even irrational. A daughter, about eight or so. Pretty, of course. Reg and Donna couldn't have anything but a pretty child. Poised, like her mother, but with the spark of Reg's personality. A daddy's girl, her hand tucked in his, dressed in a contemporary version of fifties finery—wool coat, hat, pink tights, and postmodern Mary Janes, the toes almost whimsically bulbous. What was it like for a womanizer such as Reg to have a daughter? Gloria thought it rather neat, the perfect O. Henry ending for a man whose conquests were working their way down, chronologically, according to the rumors she had heard. In a year or two, he would be sleeping with his friends' daughters. The actual daughters, toothsome interns, although probably not at his own firm. Reg had some boundaries. How horrible it must be for a man like Reg to have a daughter. He would be almost sixty when she made her way into the world, his power fading. He would watch impotently from the sidelines, his knowledge of men a grim prophecy from which he could never protect his daughter.

Good.

“Don't you look like the Cheesy Cat,” he said. Gloria wasn't aware that she was smiling.

“Cheshire Cat,” his daughter corrected primly. She was quite a stickler for accuracy, little Aubrey Howard Barr. Only in this case, her father hadn't misspoken.

Gloria got off at the next floor, although it wasn't hers. She had forgotten the private joke of Cheesy Cat. What had been its origins? Something to do with the horrible vending machines in the old Howard & Howard headquarters, the off-brand snacks they downed late at night. They called them Cheesy Cat Chips because they tasted more
like pet food than something humans were supposed to eat. Gloria was the one who always had change or crisp dollars—this was back in the day when vending machines were finicky about the bills they took—while Reg or Colton Jensen, another associate, volunteered to make the run down three floors. The chips turned their fingers orange, and they had to keep a roll of paper towels nearby, lest they leave orange thumb-prints on documents. “The curse of the Cheesy Cat,” they would joke.

They had a lot of jokes. Reg and Col had performed their own version of “You Can Call Me Al,” changing the lyrics to reflect the endlessly mundane things they were asked to do.
You can get me coffee. You can do my photocopying.
There was an apple-shaped partner who was forever hitching his pants up over nonexistent hips, punctuating his fatuous pronouncements and incessant instructions. One night, Reg had taken to imitating him, while Col—Jesus, Col, dead from AIDS almost seventeen years now, one of the early casualties—shook a bag of chips behind him. They had laughed until they had collapsed in tears. “You see, Gloria”—pants hitch, the sound of rattling chips—“the rule of habeas corpus dictates”—pants hitch, rattling chips—“that the law may not be an ass, but the lawyer most certainly is.”

Perhaps one had to be there. Gloria had been there, and she could no longer remember why it was funny, just that it was. They were ambitious, they were giddy, they were never going to be like the people for whom they worked. And then, one day, they were exactly like them. How did that happen?

People understood mourning a lost love. If she'd had romantic feelings toward Reg, even if it were one-sided, people would sympathize with the kick she felt when reminded of their former closeness. But the intimacy lost with a friend—that could be just as intense. He had been young then, and if she, in her thirties, couldn't quite claim that, she was his peer in the office hierarchy, his running buddy in a running conversation about the weaknesses and peccadilloes of their bosses. She had thought such conversations were intended to do nothing more than
pass the long evenings. “For amusement purposes only,” as the video poker machines in Baltimore bars said. But it was a lie on the machines and it turned out to be a lie in their relationship as well. Gloria excelled at the law, but Reg understood the culture of law firms in general and Howard & Howard in particular. That made all the difference.

To be fair, he hadn't pushed her out, not at all, but he also hadn't followed her. Reg wasn't the type to jump out a window just because Gloria said the building was on fire. Reg couldn't see the smoke, much less the flames. Besides, she never told him why exactly she quit so abruptly. But he had to suspect it was something dire, something big. She wondered if he had ever figured it out. She wanted to believe Reg wouldn't tolerate it if he knew. One could argue that he was the only winner in this sad game, getting the partnership and the boss's daughter. Ignorance was bliss. Did Reg deserve that bliss?

 

TISHA WAS SO DELIGHTED
to have her niece for an afternoon that she didn't bother to call Reg on lying to her about why he needed a babysitter. Not that she was sure what the lie was, only that he was misrepresenting the situation for some reason. Could have been as simple as guilt—Reg and Donna should have been able to roll a little better with life's contingencies, such as their child care being shot straight to hell. Tisha certainly never asked Donna to bail her out when her kids were small. Or it could have been—but she didn't want to think about what else it could have been. She had her suspicions about her brother, but she had never confronted them even in her own mind, much less tried to bring him to task. He loved Donna, she was sure of that. In fact, she often thought he loved her a little too much, tilting over into worship.
Then why did
—but she could not go there. Not about her brother. She knew, she suspected, but when the idea threatened to become too concrete, she all but stuck her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes.
La-la-la-la, I can't hear you.

Ushered into her brother's office to fetch Aubrey—feeling, as she always did here, terribly suburban, such a
mom,
a kind not usually seen in the overdone offices of Howard, Howard & Barr—she asked only, “What's up?”

“Not much. Got everything under control.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing, Tisha. I'm grateful to you for bailing me out, is all.”

“It's a favor you're doing me. Aubrey and I are going to have fun, aren't we, baby?”

The girl beamed. It
was
going to be fun to spend an afternoon with an eight-year-old. Tisha's kids were generally sweet, for teenagers, but her company was not their first choice, not anymore. She tried to remember what eight felt like, from the inside. She had been eight when she met Cassandra, that first day of school back at Dickey Hill. Why had she grabbed that bony white elbow and invited that strange girl to join the threesome of her, Donna, and Fatima? The world knew Cassandra's version, and Tisha was glad for that. She came off better in Cassandra's version. But it wasn't how she remembered it.

Fact was, there was a girl from their old school whom she didn't like and Tisha had to put someone else in that fourth desk,
fast,
or she would have joined them. The first day was like a game of musical chairs; there were enough seats, but not enough good seats, and as the minutes ticked down, a few kids were milling about, looking not only for a place but for a place where they would be welcome. Tisha had wedged Cassandra into their group to avoid—she could call up the face but not the name, see the girl in her blue plaid dress, her processed hair ragged at the ends, a home-done job. Even at eight, Tisha had a big-picture view of things, made lightning-quick decisions with a surprising ruthlessness.
You're in, you're out.
Aubrey, like her mother back then, seemed innocent of such motives and judgments.

Or—again like her mother—perhaps she trusted there would always be someone like Tisha to do her dirty work.

“Can we go to Frank's Diner?” Aubrey whispered in the elevator, glancing anxiously at the ceiling, almost as if she thought Howard, Howard & Barr was keeping watch on her, reporting back to her mother.

“We sure can.”

“And can I have French fries with gravy and a slice of cake?”

“You can have French fries with gravy and a slice of cake and a milk shake.”

“Can I have French fries with gravy and a slice of cake and a milk shake and…onion rings?”

“You can have French fries with gravy and a slice of cake and a milk shake and onion rings.”

It was their version of the old memory game Johnny Has a Ball of String in His Pocket. Tisha always let Aubrey win. Although, come to think of it, there was less and less
letting
as of late. Aubrey's memory, required to hold nothing more than eight years of life, was sharp, while Tisha's was increasingly mushy. She felt like an old PC going up against one of those new Macs with the Intel chip.
Everything under control
—why did she want to attach so much meaning to a simple phrase? What was Reg up to?

“You lose,” Aubrey said with a happy squeal of a giggle after their menu had grown to almost a dozen items. “You forgot the milk shake.”

“Brings the boys to the yard,” Tisha muttered.

If her own children had been with her, they would have mocked her for the outdated reference, hooted at her for thinking she could keep up with pop culture and by doing so keep up with them. Tisha did listen occasionally to the music her children favored, if only to monitor the kind of ideas they were absorbing in spite of themselves. But Aubrey, who didn't even understand the double entendre of Kelis's milk shake, put her hand in her aunt's and skipped down Baltimore Street. Had Tisha ever been this happy, at any age? She must have been. The problem was that such simple, ordinary bliss seldom formed memories.
It was too smooth and silken to adhere. It was the bad stuff, ragged and uneven, that caught, like all those plastic grocery bags stuck in the trees of Baltimore. It was—Babette, that was her name, Babette, standing in the middle of Mrs. Klein's third-grade class, wounded and puzzled by Tisha's snub.

 

CASSANDRA WAS SPENT. ALTHOUGH SHE
seldom napped, she found herself drifting off as Reg showered. He would need to stay in there a long time to rid himself of the scent of sex, of her. She wished they could go out now, have an early dinner, but she knew the rules, how things worked. Just on the edge of wakefulness, she relived the last two hours. Thinking about it was almost as good as doing it had been. She understood brain chemistry, recognized that this kind of passion was impossible to sustain, but, boy, was it fun while it lasted. It was strange, how little they talked, but what was there to discuss? They knew each other's pasts and the present wasn't a topic on which either wanted to dwell. She blinked her eyes, broke back into full consciousness, glanced at the clock. Had an hour really passed? The water was off, the apartment quiet. Would he have left without saying good-bye? She put on a robe and walked into the living room, where Reg was at her laptop, wearing only a towel.