Three Women (24 page)

Elena

Elena felt deeply ashamed, not because she had been with Jim, although being walked in on that way was totally tacky. She felt ashamed that she had believed passionately in a frail lie. She had believed he did not care about his wife, that their marriage was over and dusty, and that he loved her as strongly, as purely, as devoutly as she loved him. She had made herself believe all those foolish lies, she had been willing to hurt everyone around her, all for a piece of self-hypnosis. She’d been a blind idiot.

When she had thrown herself in front of Jim, she had expected to die. Now it seemed like silly melodrama, but she could not shake that sense of once again having brushed against violent death. When Chad had blown his head open and Evan had been shot, most of her old classmates made it clear they thought she should have died with them. Someone left a note on her locker, IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED…and a drawing of a gun with a balloon message BANG!

Elena was impressed with Marta. She knew how to put real fear into them, but she hadn’t lost control. Marta had sure scared the shit out of Jim. Elena would never forget the sound of his quavering voice begging for his life, begging for forgiveness. Even when she and Marta were bending over Beverly crumpled at the bottom of the steep back stairs, he was going, “I was depressed. It was a stupid midlife thing. I never meant to hurt you, Marta. She’s a kid! That’s all.” He ignored Beverly. He ignored her.

She had seen herself in a great romance. Now she was just a fool and Beverly was paying the price. She could not stand it if her grandmother
died because of her. Chad and Evan had died in the desert and she had not gone with them. If she caused Beverly to die, she did not think she could continue. She had made a mess of her life. She had to go out having done something she could feel good about. She was not used to feeling so small, so mean. Love had been a roaring inside her that drowned out everything else. She had wanted that old intensity so hungrily she had pretended to herself, lied to herself to get it. She had ruined everything for the people around her, out of her need for a lie.

They came back to the house together and Elena shut herself in her room.

“Stay out of Marta’s way for now,” Suzanne said.

No fucking problem, Elena thought. That was her intention.

“Although you’re going to have to have a real conversation with her. But wait until she’s ready. I’m going upstairs now.”

Elena did not want to lie and listen for Jim passing over her head. She did not put on her usual salsa. Instead she found her old tapes, Judas Priest, that song that she had played again and again after Chad and Evan, “Night Comes Down.” She put her Walkman over her ears and spaced out. That music filled with pain and energy and lightning had once felt like reality turned into sound. Mötley Crüe’s “Bastard.” She kept playing the two songs over and over from fourteen, thirteen years ago. What a loser she was still. If she was not going to die, she needed to change herself. Into what? A pumpkin? She had no idea.

Still she had actually dozed off with the music still thundering in her head when she felt rather than heard the door open, and Suzanne came in. She shut off her music at once and sat up, embarrassed because she had fallen asleep, embarrassed because she had been able to sleep.

Suzanne sat down on the chair in front of the desk, turning it to face her. “She’s thrown Jim out.”

“For real, or just because she’s pissed?”

“I don’t know if
she
knows. He doesn’t believe it yet either.”

“I better find another place to live, fast.”

“Elena, you just lost your job. It wasn’t much of a job anyhow. Just hold on. We have to work this out, all three of us, and running away won’t fix things.”

Marta could have killed her. Easily. She kept thinking about that. No more Elena. Zero. When she was younger, she had brooded about
death. It seemed like this cool thing, the place where all troubles vanished and everything was quiet. It was the place that gave you peace and made everybody else sorry for you. It was the dark place at the center of the best music, at the center of orgasm when she thought she would die of pleasure. It was the most real of all realities, the ultimate rush, the fire at the core.

After she had been brought back to her mother and school, she had wished many times she had died with Chad and Evan. They were heroes. She was a failure. A coward. But she had not tried to kill herself. At first she felt she wasn’t good enough to deserve it, because she had not done it when she had the chance. Other times she remembered Chad’s head blown open. She could not want that. Then slowly her life recommenced, the boredom and the tiny pleasures and the minor troubles and anxieties and occasional victories.

She said to her mother, “I have to figure it all out. Why I’m alive.”

“Why shouldn’t you be alive? Marta didn’t really want to hurt you.”

“But my life has to have a purpose. Twice now I’ve faced gunfire and survived.” She could not explain to Suzanne the shame she felt. She knew Beverly would understand, but her grandmother was still unconscious.

“Just being you, Elena, is purpose enough.”

“Not any longer. You of all people must see it, Mother. I need a reason. I need to find it.”

Suzanne would understand by and by. But first she had to understand it herself. She was not sure what she was looking for. She didn’t intend to go off and join Mother Teresa’s order or start licking lepers. Jim had fooled her, in part because she had wanted so badly to believe in passion, in absolute love. That had been her religion. Now she needed a new one. She needed something real to do with the rest of her twice broken life.

Suzanne

Suzanne had to go to Framingham to see Maxine, whose case was approaching the court date to hear her appeal. She needed some points of testimony clarified. She also knew her visit was necessary to keep hope alive for Maxine, for whom prison was an unending nightmare.

Maxine looked gaunt, seemingly thinner each time Suzanne saw her, as if she were wasting away, burning up from some internal fever of despair. She had always been a sharp-featured woman, but now she was frighteningly angular. In the two years since her conviction, she had aged ten years. Suzanne felt if she could not work a judicial miracle for Maxine, then she would simply turn her face to the wall and die inside.

At least sitting in the visitors’ room with Maxine was some kind of pretense that her life might return to normal, although the assortment of families scattered around the room and the vending machines trying to squeeze intimacy out of a limited time slot was hardly typical family life. Little kids ran around overexcited and the women tried to read hope from the faces of their boyfriends and husbands, mothers and others.

“What happened to your arm?”

Maxine shrugged and looked over her shoulder to make sure no one was listening. “I got shoved and kicked.”

“By a guard?”

“Another inmate. They hate me. They think I did it.” Maxine’s head drooped on her shoulders. “They can’t stand people who abuse children. A lot of these women have children outside, and they worry about them. I understand. But they don’t believe I’m innocent any more than that jury did.”

“We’ll win on appeal. Either this time or the next level. You were railroaded. I know that, and sooner or later, a court will recognize it too.”

When Suzanne returned, Elena was reading the help-wanted columns with a Magic Marker in her teeth. The house smelled spicy. “Did you make yourself supper?”

“I made supper for both of us. If you’re willing to eat it.”

“I’ll eat anything,” Suzanne said. “Thank you.”

“I’ve been keeping it warm. Beef burritos. That okay?”

“Wonderful.” Suzanne never ate Mexican food, so she wasn’t completely sure what a burrito was, some kind of chip? It sounded as if it should be a small donkey, but not having to cook was a blessing. She had planned to graze on anything she could find in the refrigerator, probably cold and standing up. She heard voices from upstairs. It sounded like Jim yelling.

“I wonder if she took him back,” she mused, listening. She couldn’t make out any words, only loud voices.

“No,” Elena said. “She’s not that stupid. I am, but even I won’t take him back. He knocked on the door down here, but I wouldn’t let him in.”

“No good can come from him,” Suzanne said fervently, shoveling the food in. “I want to get to the hospital to check up on Beverly.”

“I was there,” Elena said. “No change.” Elena had been going to the hospital every afternoon, while Suzanne took the evening shift.

They both heard Jim when he left, thumping down the stairs cursing. Then he slammed the outer door. Suzanne decided she had to catch Marta before going to the hospital.

Marta answered the door, but she was on the phone. Even across the room, Suzanne could hear Adam yelling through the receiver. “That is the shittiest stupidest thing I ever heard in my life! Is he crazy? Is she crazy?”

“Your father has had affairs before. I forgave him, but I can’t this time.”

She could not hear Adam’s reply. Apparently his voice had dropped to normal decibels.

“No, I can’t continue with him this time. I won’t!” Marta said firmly.

Suzanne knew that Adam had his caring side. He was wonderful with small children and animals. He was also a master whiner. Adam was superb at sulking and accomplished at getting his way. He took this
situation as a personal affront, but he would get over it. He had always been close to his mother, and he would support her no matter what, Suzanne was sure.

“Adam, you’re at school. You’re twenty and you can surely survive a divorce now. You can see both of us separately when you come home—”

Another long pause. She could hear Adam yelling but not what he was saying.

“Oh, by the way, I’m pregnant.”

Marta put down the phone with a deep, prolonged sigh. She rested her hands on her slightly swollen abdomen. “It’s good to see you. How’s Beverly?”

Suzanne told her and then added, “Have you really thrown Jim out?”

“Really. And he’s furious about it.”

“How can he be? You caught him in bed.”

“Somehow he makes it my fault that I walked in. He keeps talking about me shooting at them.”

“Elena says you didn’t shoot at them. She says you carefully aimed over their heads. But what were you thinking of?”

“I just wanted to do something. I wanted to express how much at that moment I wanted to see them both dead and bleeding. I wasn’t going to do it. Having a baby in prison is not my idea of the way to start a new life.”

Suzanne came over to the chair where Marta was sitting and put her arms around her. “Thank you for your forbearance. Elena’s a real pisser in some ways, but she’s my daughter, and I love her. I couldn’t stand to lose her, Marta.”

“I know that.” Marta put her hand over Suzanne’s, where it rested on her arm. “Jim is going to make trouble. He’s trying to fight the divorce.”

“But you walked in on them.”

“He’s got Harvey Saunders. Harvey’s a tiger.”

“Have you reached the point of thinking of a lawyer?”

“I talked to Miles the first night.”

They had all known each other for twenty-odd years, since they had worked in the same law collective over a furniture store in an old Cambridge building. Miles was of medium height, medium build, with sandy hair and light brown eyes. He was the sort of man easily overlooked in
a crowd, a class, a party. In fact he had married later than any of them, to an ambitious lawyer who went into politics and was now a state representative from the western suburbs. In court no one ever overlooked him twice. He had a deep persuasive voice, polished when he wanted it to be, full of emotion or dry and trenchant. He was actually a fine singer who loved choral music, but in court, he sang solo, and the jury often listened and was moved. While he usually did criminal law, he had handled difficult divorces before. He would push hard for Marta.

“What were you fighting about earlier?”

“He appeared without any notice and started berating me about threatening him. He’s all worked up about the shooting. He seems to have fixated on it as something he can hold over me.”

“Marta, it was an easily misunderstood gesture. Harvey can use it.”

Marta shook her head slowly. “It wasn’t as violent as I wanted to be. I’m too sane to do more than the gesture. But I don’t want to see Jim outside court and I’m not ready to see Elena yet….”

At the hospital, she sat by Beverly’s bed with her briefcase beside her, working, preparing for tomorrow. As if anybody ever could prepare for tomorrow, because the troubles that were pelting, bruising them all in a rain of bloody earth were nothing she had ever anticipated or for which she had in any way prepared. Every few minutes, she put down her paperwork and took Beverly’s limp hand in hers. How cold she felt. That worried her. She chafed the hand, held it to her cheek. Every so often she would address Beverly, in case she could hear.

Jake had called her twice. She had not returned his calls. If she dialed his apartment now, she would surely get his answering machine and be able to leave a message that would alert him to her situation. She could not speak with him. She had not an ounce of emotional energy left for him or anyone else. It was absurd. She had finally met a man who was truly interested in her, and she simply did not have time to see him. Her family had closed over her head, and it was all she could do to teach her classes, meet her students, and try to hold on to her cases that were proceeding inevitably to court.

As it happened, she was there at the right moment. Her mother’s eyelids fluttered several times as had happened before. Now, however,
her eyes opened a slit and she moaned. “Mother,” Suzanne said loudly, unsure if Beverly could hear her. “Mother! I’m here.”

Beverly moaned again and Suzanne ran into the hall to tell the nurse. Suzanne could not tell if Beverly knew where she was. Suzanne stood by the side of the bed while the nurse checked her mother over, checking pulse and pressure. Then they made her leave. She thought that unfair, since she desperately wanted to find out what kind of shape Beverly was in.

Still, she and Elena mildly celebrated Beverly’s return to the living with a couple of big cookies Elena picked up at the local bakery. Suzanne said, “It makes me nervous, him trying to see you.”

“Don’t worry. It was stupid. I was stupid. Marta and you were stupid to throw us together. He’s a sleaze, Mother.”

“Did Beverly know what was going on?”

“Well, of course. She was home all day. She liked to know what was going on. It made her feel more…real. Connected. In touch.”

“She should have told me.”

“And betrayed my confidences? Come on. Grandma’s always been on my side.”

“Someone truly on your side would’ve advised you to clear out, and fast.”

“Grandma’s like me. She likes intense emotions and drama. But I’m going to change. I’m going to be calm and mature. I’m going to be like a rock. That’s what I’m going to be when I finally grow up: a boulder.”

“Elena, precious, you don’t have to go from extreme to extreme.”

“Maybe I do, Mother. Then someday I’ll end up in the golden happy middle. But maybe I can only get there by banging from one side to the other.”

She noticed suddenly that all three cats were lying in a heap on the plush chair, clutching one another in sleep. Some peace accord had been reached. Perhaps they understood that chaos had come and things would never be the same. Mao lay between the two larger orange cats, sleeping soundly. At least someone was benefiting from the troubles that had beset her family.