Strangers at the Feast (36 page)

“I just thought I’d try a few pages, nothing that would take up too much time, and that maybe once Colleen gave me some encouragement…”

“You don’t need this kind of stress. She’ll understand if you back out. It happens all the time in the working world.”

“But I already sent it!” She whirled around and plucked one of the balled-up pages from the bed. “Look! I wrote seven of these and sent them along. Oh, I felt so happy! So proud of myself! I thought…” She had to swallow hard to continue. “I thought they were
quite
good
. Then Colleen phoned ten minutes later. She took one look, for
ten
measly minutes, and that was that. My prose style isn’t for their magazine, but thank you for putting in so much effort. I said I could try a different approach but she said, ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ and practically
hung
up on me. That’s it! No second chances! When is something like this ever going to come my way again?”

“Eleanor, try to calm down.”

“I can’t be expected to read minds! How could I have known what she wanted? I could have done it differently. Taken a different approach. I’m good with feedback, you know that. I don’t take criticism to heart. The editors at the Wellesley paper said I was a pleasure to work with!”

What could he do to make her feel better? “Ellie, sweetie, lie down for a while.”

He led her to the bed and she curled up on her side. Then she bolted upright. “You won’t tell Ginny, will you? Please, please, please don’t tell her. I should have listened to you. I wish I’d never wasted any time on this stupid thing. Now all I feel is awful, awful, awful.”

“No one will know.”

She took a sleeping pill and poured herself a glass of scotch. She took a long sip, wiped her mouth dry, and pressed her face to the pillow.

“You shouldn’t drink with pills, Eleanor.”

But she had grown calm, tranquil. “Please, take them away. I don’t ever want to see those pages again.”

He collected the crumpled pages, put them into a plastic bag, and carried the bag downstairs. In the kitchen, he made a cheese sandwich, opened a beer, and thought about how she’d been working in
secret. It seemed strange to think of his wife doing anything secretive. He took one of the pages out of the plastic bag and flattened it.

Long after a mother provides milk for her children, she provides the metaphorical milk, the emotional nourishment, like adult milk combined with a vitamin of love. She gives of herself without asking; she becomes like a psychic, someone with extrasensory perception, anticipating the needs and wants of her family.

Her husband is like the captain of the ship. Sometimes, it may seem as though he is far away, aloof. But it is his duty to stand on deck and watch for storms, to steer the family clearly toward safe waters, and a wife must never nag and ask him to leave his watch.

He set his dish in the sink, threw out the rest of the pages, and, repentant, went upstairs to lie beside her.

DETECTIVE BILL O’SHEA

As O’Shea expected, the case got the entire city talking.

Diana Velasquez was the
Advocate
reporter who finally realized that five white adults plus two dead, unarmed black kids equaled one major story. Having worked at the paper for a decade, she knew to double-check the police blotter every night in the hopes that the cub reporters missed something. She knew that a shooting in the North End would sell papers. When word got out about the stone knife in Kijo Jackson’s pocket, a Siwanoy Indian relic, Diana dubbed the incident the Thanksgiving Day Massacre.

In the week following Thanksgiving, parents and children, even gang members and drug dealers from the city’s West Side, gathered outside the police department jabbing picket signs into the cold gray air, shouting, “Justice for Kijo and Spider.” News about the hand wipes used to clean the gun prompted signs that read:
YOU CAN’T WIPE US AWAY.
Television reporters filmed the protestors, whose breath steamed in infuriated clouds. The occasional egg landed on a squad car. Still, the district attorney wouldn’t prosecute Gavin Olson.

At sunset, candles were lit before photographs of the dead boys. As the crowds went home, the empty parking lot remained a galaxy of sad remembrance, at the center of which sat an old woman.

For days, Kijo Jackson’s grandmother presided over a milk crate across from the police station, accepting brown-bagged sandwiches and thermoses of soup from the other protestors. She spoke extensively to the reporters about how Kijo had always taken care of her, how he’d
never raised a hand to anyone. O’Shea could see her from his window. She spoke with an almost violent animation, jabbing her cane in the air. But when she fell silent, when she sat looking at the photos of her grandson, the life seemed to drain from her body.

One night, as O’Shea was leaving the station, she called out to him from her perch.

“My boy didn’t deserve what them folks done,” she said. Her voice sounded weak and the candlelight danced slowly across her face. “Nobody deserves five bullets just for stepping in a house. You don’t like what someone’s doing, you point a gun and you say ‘freeze.’ Just like the police. You give a boy a chance.”

O’Shea should have slipped into his car, but he paused. He had seen her grandson’s body, had helped to protect the man who had shot him; he felt he owed the woman some peace of mind.

“In situations like that,” he said, “it’s all chaos, confusion—”

“Five bullets. You imagine what that felt like?”

O’Shea was silent. He had, in fact, never been shot.

“You give a child a chance,” she cut in, her voice going hoarse. “A chance. You don’t kill a child for using spray paint. That man took our house. Kijo did wrong, but he was trying to do right.”

O’Shea found it a sad irony that even with all the news stories about how Kijo and his grandmother had been dislocated by Obervell Tower, about the designation of blight, the protests actually spurred talk of tearing down Vidal Court. The station got word to arrest for any disorderly conduct in that area and O’Shea suspected the mayor was hoping a protest would get out of hand, that a small riot would make the case for cleaning up the city’s last project, the final bastion of drugs and crime.

Whenever he took a seat at a bar, O’Shea told of his small part in the case; it got people’s attention, brought out heated opinions about everything from handguns to eminent domain. Everybody had a theory of what he would have done in the same situation, as did O’Shea. He was certain he would have unloaded his weapon, yet he
never told anyone, not even his wife, how he had explained the Castle Doctrine to Gavin Olson. He never spoke about the fact that he could tell Ginny Olson was hiding something.

Afterward, however, he wondered about it. Wondered if he had missed some piece of the puzzle. Whenever he heard the 911 recording, his mind always tripped on the phrase
We used our gun.

He often recalled how, after the Olson family had gone home, after he had locked up Gavin Olson’s cell, he returned to his desk to finally call his wife.

“Bill, for God sakes, it’s after ten o’clock at night!” Brenda cried.

As they always did when he had to work a holiday, they argued that morning about the nature of his job. As he left, she grumbled about the hours, the fact that he did little more than sit at his desk and read the sports pages. Now, on the phone, he was eager to tell Brenda about the incident on Deerkill Road. He whispered, the way he would if they were lying in bed in the dark.

“I was the first one on the scene.”

“My God, Bill. That could have been dangerous.”

“I was prepared.”

“What on earth were those kids doing there?”

“Spray painting, it seems. But you know, the economy’s taking a dip. We might start seeing all sorts of crime coming back.”

“Did the family seem weird? Rich-people weird?”

“They seemed like perfectly nice folks with a dead body in their house.”

He could hear her pacing the living room, pictured her settling, barefoot, into her favorite reading chair. “I didn’t know you were out on a call,” she said. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.” He loved the sound in her voice—and he could detect every slight change in his wife’s tone—when she thought he was doing something important.

“I just have to write up a few more notes, then I’ll be on my way.” It would be a long ride home, though, a good thirty minutes to Port Chester. It was as close to the station as they could afford.

“Oh, Bill. The food is all cold,” she moaned. “I took it out of the oven two hours ago.”

“Don’t worry.” He couldn’t tell her he’d already eaten the food Carl Dundee’s wife had brought to the station; it would break her heart. “I’ll make myself a turkey sandwich.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Don’t worry, hon. Look, let me wrap up and get on my way.”

“I love you,” she said, as she always said when he’d had a brush with danger.

“I love you, too.”

The station was virtually empty. He wrote up a few more notes and made his way out into the parking lot. As he walked, he was thinking of the dead boys, who were just about his daughter’s age, and the Olsons, the way they had huddled together in the station, folding in on one another, as though any physical distance might separate them forever.

When something like this happened, he had to wonder: Was this an aberration? Or was he looking at the beginning of something bigger, that first little crack that eventually opens up the ground?

The parking lot was quiet. He was tired and he was happy to finally be making his way back to his family. And then, he wasn’t sure why, he looked over his shoulder, with the strangest sensation that something, unnamed, was coming.

EPILOGUE

It was March, and Ginny sat beneath the fluorescent lights in the vast auditorium. Beside her sat Douglas, tapping a rolled magazine nervously on his thigh. Those days, he always kept something in his hands—a noisy box of Tic Tacs, his cell phone, which rarely rang, or the keys to Ginny’s house in Mamaroneck, having moved there after Denise filed for divorce.

For Christmas, Denise had taken the children to Pittsburgh, returning alone with a trunk full of empty boxes. On a bitter cold day just shy of the New Year, she carried her belongings from the house while Ginny watched quietly from the stoop. Denise had asked Ginny to come help, not to carry things, but to keep Douglas calm. So Ginny watched as a ghostly version of her sister-in-law—Denise’s tan had faded to an unsettling shade of white—hoisted each box with her hip into the trunk of her car.

Douglas had been relegated to the kitchen, but every few minutes he rushed to the front steps and tried to help Denise carry things. She refused, but once, he wrestled a box from her and planted his feet on the ground.

“Don’t go,” he said.

For a moment it looked as though Denise might slap him. Then she said flatly, “Keep it,” returning inside for another load.

He stood alone on the lawn, hugging the box, staring up at the house. His shoulders shook as he fought back sobs. Ginny gently
pried the box loose, and he whispered, “I never want to see this place again.”

A
FOR SALE
sign was, in fact, already pitched on the lawn, since Denise made it clear that in addition to petitioning for sole custody of the children, she wanted the proceeds from the house. She told Douglas that if he contested either, she’d stand in court and belt out the details of what happened on Thanksgiving, even if it meant admitting she fired the first shot and went along with the cover-up.

What Ginny remembered most about the day Denise left, the last day Ginny saw the house on Deerkill Road, was that they never once spoke of what happened there. And yet, with all the carrying of boxes, the walking inside and out, she, Douglas, and Denise deftly avoided stepping in the areas where the boys had lain.

Their father was not charged and the protests eventually faded, but the media kept the case alive by putting the entire family under the microscope. Having exhausted insinuations about excessive violence, the newspapers began portraying the family as victims; they became the innocent “every family” whose lives could, in an instant, be torn apart. Her mother’s Wellesley yearbook photos were printed, as were excerpts from Ginny’s poems. Photographs of the house on Deerkill Road appeared with sidebars detailing the size of the sunporch and wine cellar. But a well-intended profile on Ginny’s adoption of a special-needs child prompted a journalist to contact the home-study agency for information. When it became clear there had never been a home study, Ginny was accused, in print, of “buying a child.”

Ginny and Priya were eating breakfast when a child-services official arrived to remand Priya to the state until the matter could be settled in India. Priya, who seemed to immediately grasp the situation, ate her oatmeal in slow, deliberate spoonfuls while Ginny tried desperately to explain to the woman—a plump woman whose teeth were large and white, like piano keys—that she had worked in the orphanage where Priya had been, that leaving her behind would have been neglectful. Ginny’s pleas were met with bureaucratic silence,
and she was instructed to pack Priya’s clothes or risk immediate arrest.

For a moment Ginny thought she would risk arrest. She even glanced through the kitchen window to see if the official had blocked her car—which she had. The large-toothed woman seemed familiar, almost bored, with Ginny’s desperation. She soon offered what was surely the perfect, and no doubt practiced, falsehood that brought all such heartrending moments to a calm conclusion:

“I’m certain you can sort out any misunderstandings and get her back. But right now I have to take her.”

This lie helped to steady Ginny’s hands as she packed the suitcase she had once helped Priya carry from the orphanage. As Ginny lugged the heavy bag down the stairs, she stilled her panicked heart by telling herself this was temporary. She set the bag beside Priya, who had not budged from her seat at the breakfast table.