The Divide (37 page)

Sarah also relayed what Hersh had told her that afternoon about taking care what they said in their phone conversations and e-mails, that there was a “strong possibility” that they were being monitored to see if Abbie might try to contact them. Her bank account and credit cards would already have been closed, he said. And Benjamin’s and Sarah’s accounts would no doubt be under scrutiny too in case they attempted to forward money to her.

“They can’t do that, surely?” Benjamin said.

“He said it was safe to assume we would be under surveillance.”

“What, everyplace we go? All the time, somebody’s going to be tailing us? Joshie too? At school?”

Sarah shrugged. Benjamin shook his head.

“I don’t believe that. Beth, do you?”

“Maybe I’ve seen too many movies.”

Josh arrived back from school and Benjamin got up and gave him a long hug. Then Martin came home and the five of them had supper and tried to talk about other things but it all seemed a little phony. Martin and Benjamin hadn’t spoken in a long while and though they both made an effort there was clearly a mutual residue of hurt.

And the phone never stopped ringing. The FBI and Alan Hersh wanted to finalize the details for the press conference and e-mailed them a draft of the statement. Sarah and Benjamin and Beth all went into the den and stood around Martin at his computer, reworking it then e-mailing it back. All it basically said was what a wonderful girl Abbie was, how proud of her they were, and how they were convinced of her innocence. It ended with a direct appeal to her to come forward and help clear things up.
We love you, honey,
it concluded.
Please come home.

“You realize it has to be you who reads it out,” Benjamin said.

“I can’t.”

“Sweetheart, I’ll be there beside you. Joshie too. You know I’d do it, but with the way things have been between Abbie and me, she needs to hear it from you.”

Sarah argued for a while but she knew he was right. Somehow she would have to find the strength.

The Ingrams’ house had a guest annex that jutted in a typically Martinesque flourish into the back garden. It had its own deck and three double rooms, each with its own bathroom. The arrangement neatly got Beth off the hook about who was going to sleep where. Sarah and Josh had the previous night each taken a room and Ben had already put his bag in the third. After the late TV news—on which, thank heaven, there was no mention of Abbie or the murder—the Ingrams said good night and retired and the Coopers made their way upstairs to the annex.

They sat, all three of them, for a while on Sarah’s bed and talked. Josh told them about the video he and Freddie and some of the other senior-year kids were making at school. Then he got up and said good night and went to his room. Benjamin seemed to take this as his cue to leave too. Now that it was just the two of them, he suddenly looked awkward and he stood up and stretched. Tomorrow was going to be a long and heavy day, he said. And he bent and kissed her on the cheek and walked toward the door.

“Don’t go,” Sarah said quietly.

He turned and looked at her.

“Sleep here. Please. I need you with me. Just tonight.”

He shut the door and came back to the bed and sat beside her and put his arms around her and held her.

They undressed discreetly, like strangers. It felt odd to see his washbag beside hers in the bathroom and all the things she recognized but were no longer in her life. His razor, the little red leather manicure set she had once bought him, the deodorant he always used. When she came out of the bathroom he had already turned off the bedroom lights and she slid into bed beside him and for a long time the two of them lay there, separately staring at the ceiling and the slowly configuring shapes and shadows of the room.

“I miss you, Benjamin. So much.”

“Oh, sweetheart.”

“I get by without you. From day to day. But it’s as if . . .”

She had to swallow hard. Don’t cry, she told herself, don’t cry.

“. . . as if there’s only half of me now. The other half has gone.”

He rolled toward her and put his arm around her. And at his touch, of course, she couldn’t help but cry.

“I love you, Benjamin.”

He would probably think, later, that she must have planned it. But it wasn’t so. There was no plan. Just the slow, inexorable conjunction of two wounded souls. She turned toward him and put her arm around his waist and felt the warmth of his body, the familiar shape and angles of him, the press of his chest against her breasts. Her cheek against the roughness of his jaw, her lips in the softer hollow of his neck. She breathed the ever-remembered smell of him.

“Sarah, listen. We—”

“Ssh. Please.”

She had already felt him stir against her thigh and now she pressed her pelvis into him and felt him swell and harden. She reached down and lifted her nightgown and reached for him inside his shorts and held him and felt him quiver. And now he’d found her mouth and was kissing her and raising himself across her and upon her, tugging down his shorts and lowering himself between her opened thighs and sliding up and into her.

And he was hers again. If only for this sorrowful and stolen night. He was hers.

A
bbie had been to San Francisco only once before. It was on a family vacation when she was about twelve years old and they had stayed in a hotel that turned out to be a place where people came to recover from cosmetic surgery. Everybody had been wearing bandages, some with their heads and faces completely wrapped, trying to eat their breakfast through the slits that had been left for their mouths. Her dad said it was like an audition call for
The Invisible Man.
It was high summer but they never once saw the sun because the city was shrouded in a damp fog. Even so, they’d had fun, done all the tourist things, the streetcars, the cable car, browsed the stalls on Fisherman’s Wharf, bought the T-shirts.

This time it was a little different.

She was standing in the dirty little corridor outside the manager’s office, just along from the restrooms, waiting for her money. There was a single bare lightbulb and the walls were gloss red with lots of little white patches where notices had been ripped off and the paint had come away with the tape. The only one left said
Private, Keep Out
on which some great wit had inserted the word
Parts
after
Private
and, for those who didn’t get it, scrawled an obscene illustration beneath.

At the other end of the corridor, she could see the smoky red glow of the bar where the jukebox, as usual, had been commandeered by the heavy-metal freaks. They always played it so loud she’d had to learn how to lip-read to take people’s orders. When her shift ended, it was normally at least an hour before her ears stopped ringing.

It was after midnight and she had already been waiting five minutes. Behind the locked door, Jerry the manager, all two hundred and fifty disgusting pounds of him, was counting out the tips while at the same time talking on the phone to one of his crass friends. Which was presumably why it was taking so long. Multitasking was not among his gifts.

“Far out,” he was saying. “Okay, you got it, big man. I gotta go. Yeah. Later.”

The door was being unlocked now and as it swung open she saw Jerry, propelling himself on the casters of his chair back to the desk where the money stood divided into five little stacks among a decaying clutter of old burgers and pizza and coffee cups and God only knew what lived among them. The office, like everything else at Billy Z’s, including the kitchens, was a health hazard. Who Billy Z was or might have been Abbie had no idea. Maybe he ate something off the menu and died. Or survived, which was why he was famous.

“Hey, Becky, sorry about that.”

Abbie just nodded. He picked up one of the stacks of bills and handed it to her. Abbie counted it.

“There’s only eighteen dollars here.”

He took a bite of the burger and shrugged.

“It’s been quiet.”

She wasn’t going to argue. She stuffed the money into her coat pocket and turned to go.

“You okay?”

“What?”

“You don’t say a whole lot.”

“So? I don’t get paid to.”

“Hey, chill, babe. Whatever.”

She wanted to throw something at him but instead just gave him a look and turned and walked out.

“Love you too!” he called after her.

The fat jerk had kept her waiting so long that she missed her bus back to Oakland. She ran down the hill but it was already pulling away up onto the freeway, so she sat on the wall and lit a cigarette and waited for the next. Apart from the traffic up on the freeway, the only sign of life was a black cat, sitting on the sidewalk across the road, outside the salvage yard with its stacked towers of flattened cars. He was grooming himself at the edge of a pool of cold light cast by a solitary streetlamp. Every so often he would freeze and fix his yellow eyes on Abbie for a few moments, then nonchalantly go back to licking his paws.

“Hey, boy,” she called softly. “Come on now, come over here.”

But, of course, he didn’t.

It was nearly April but the night was cold and damp and still felt like winter. Maybe it was the weather that was making her feel so down. When it was clear and sunny she found life a lot easier to handle but when it was like this her spirits seemed to plummet. And when that happened all she could think about was calling her mom.

The last time she had heard her voice was on the TV, begging Abbie to give herself up. It was pretty heavy watching it though Abbie couldn’t remember all that much about it because she was a little out of her head with the pills Rolf had given her. It was just after they’d gotten to LA and were holed up with some people he knew there. One day had blurred into another, weeks into months. Just lying there on the bed with the drapes closed and the TV always on, Rolf bringing her food or something to smoke or making love to her. She couldn’t even remember Thanksgiving or Christmas. But she could still conjure the image of her mom and dad and poor Josh standing there, so pale and nervous and brave in front of all those reporters, cameras flashing and microphones bristling, her mom saying how they knew she was innocent and how much they loved her.

Maybe, if her head had been clearer, she might have called them right then and there or even walked into a police station and announced who she was. Not that Rolf would have let her out of his sight long enough to do either. She knew he’d been worried that she might do something stupid like that. He’d kept telling her that they had to give things time to blow over, let all the media madness die down. And, of course, as always, he was right.

The house where they had first laid up was in Whittier, out in the endless sprawl of eastern LA. It was a run-down but not overly rough neighborhood, the kind of place where people minded their own business and the cops kept away unless someone got murdered. There were two guys and a woman living in the house and Abbie was never quite sure what they did. Two went out every morning, as if to work, but one always stayed home. From the regular flow of visitors, she figured they were most likely dealing drugs. She knew one of the guys had a gun and she figured there were probably others. But they were all kind to her, much kinder than those creeps she had met at Rolf’s squat in Seattle. They treated her with sympathy, even with respect. Then again, she was no longer just a rich little college kid on leafy-spurge patrol.

Little by little, the horror of that night in Denver began, if not to fade, at least to settle into what Rolf called its
context
. What had happened was an accident, he kept telling her, and she mustn’t buy into the way the media distorted these things. He said—and Abbie believed him—that he felt bad about McGuigan’s son dying. Knowing his parents were away, the boy had apparently brought his girlfriend home. He must have looked out, seen Abbie, and come out with the shotgun, walking straight past Rolf. Luckily, when the house went up, the girlfriend had gotten out. The boy getting killed was a sad and serious fuckup, Rolf said, but on the front line these things sometimes happened. And it was important to remember what his father had done to Ty’s parents, how he’d ruined their lives and the lives of countless others. It was J. T. McGuigan, more than anyone, who bore the responsibility for his son’s death, not they.

Rolf said all this before they had seen the news about the cops arresting Ty. That was the moment when Abbie had cracked and almost turned herself in. She had even put on her coat and was about to head off down the street to find a phone, but Rolf had stopped her and held on to her while she hollered and screamed and tried to hit him. How could those idiot cops think Ty had anything to do with it? Rolf said it was probably just a trick by the feds to get her to come forward. And it turned out he was right because a few days later Ty was released. Luckily, he had several witnesses to prove he’d been in Sheridan on the night the McGuigan boy died. Though, according to the newspapers, the bastard feds still hadn’t ruled out some kind of conspiracy charge.

She begged and begged to be allowed to call her mom, but Rolf wouldn’t let her. Soon, he said, but not yet. It wasn’t safe. He did, however, allow her to write a letter, which he carefully vetted in case she gave something away. All she really said in it was that she was okay, that what had happened was an accident, and that she was sorry for all she was putting them through. Rolf said they couldn’t mail it from LA. He sent it to someone he knew in Miami who in turn was supposed to mail it on to New York. Whether it ever got there, Abbie didn’t know.

The cat across the street was still cleaning himself. What little interest he had shown in Abbie’s coaxing had vanished. The bus was coming now. She stood up as it slowed and when it stopped beside her and the doors hissed open, she climbed aboard. There were maybe half a dozen other passengers. It was only as she was walking toward the back that she noticed that two of them were cops.