What It Was Like (41 page)

She just smiled and watched the road. “From now on, everything is going to be much, much better.”

She looked sure of herself, gripping the wheel. I wanted to believe her, but I couldn't help thinking about what we'd left behind, under that black water. And back at her house. And everything.

“Be careful when you come out,” I said. “I don't want anyone to see us.”

“No one's going to see us,” she said. “We . . . are . . . invisible.”

She gave the car some gas and rolled up to the end of the trail. It was light now. The first rays of the rising sun were filtering through the trees. The dawn of a new day: I could definitely use a new day.

We looked both ways out onto the highway. No one seemed to be coming, either way.

“I think we're good,” I said. “Go.”

Rachel gave it gas and spun some gravel as she drove from the end of the fire road across the shoulder. She steered around the guardrail erratically and onto the road with a big bump, but she made it.

“There!” she said when she got the Mustang up onto the blacktop. She floored it, and the Mustang took off, fishtailing down the road.

I took a big, deep breath. I couldn't believe it. We actually were finished. This horrible task, something that seemed so insane and awful to do, was over.

But as we drove away, I felt no real relief. My life had changed, and nothing would ever, ever be the same again. The morning light was beginning to burn through the early mountain mist, and I was just beginning to realize how bone-tired-exhausted I was, inside and out. Maybe I should take a hit of that speed.

“So where do you want to go for breakfast?” Rachel asked. “How about some Atomic Brittle at the Kandy Kitchen?”

For a moment, my mind blanked.

“Are you
insane
??” I said, turning in my seat to her.

She just laughed at me. I should have realized that she was joking, but it really wasn't a time to joke, was it? I felt all hollowed-out inside, and she was driving her Mustang happily down the highway, as if nothing had happened.

“Don't you have any heart?” I asked her.

She looked straight ahead and said, “Oh, baby, baby, baby . . . You know they cut that out of me a long time ago.”

I saw a tear form in the corner of her eye. But it would not fall.

After a moment, she said firmly, “But it's just like you said:
just
like you said. ‘We're going to do everything right.' You said that a long time ago, and I believed you. I believe everything you've ever said, and you were right all along. And now, for the first time, I feel free. Really free.”

She was laughing and crying at the same time.

“This is what I've been waiting for. I won't have to worry about Eleanor yelling at me, or trying to control every inch of my life. And
Nanci
! That ungrateful pig,
spying
on me the whole time, after all I did for her! Can you imagine? And Manny? He's actually going to be happy! I mean, he'll be shocked, at first, of course. But when he realizes that he's not going to have to pay alimony anymore to that witch . . . Dammit, I might get to trade this in for a Corvette!”

She drove on, tears streaming down her cheeks, speeding up and taking the curves with ease.

“You'll see,” she said, her voice breaking with bravado. “We'll get through this: we'll forget about this, people will forget, and we're going to be all right.”

I felt a deep emptiness inside, where there used to be what I thought was the purest love, and said, “No, we're not.”

That's when I looked in the side view mirror on my door and saw what I knew I was going to see eventually, but not really so soon: a police car was following us. At first glance, I thought it was my imagination, but no, it was real.

“There's a police car behind us,” I said.

Rachel flinched.

“No,” Rachel said. “He's not following us. I'll slow down a little.”

She let up on the gas pedal, and the Mustang died a little.

“They can't be after us,” she said. “We can't be seen in The Zone.”

But the cop stayed right behind her. He was definitely on our tail.

“You know I can lose him,” Rachel muttered, and she pressed down hard on the gas.

Instantly, the Mustang surged ahead, and Rachel gripped the wheel harder, taking the curve of the highway

“Don't!” I said. “Just pull over.”

“No!” she said, leaning forward into her driving. “You don't know how fast I can go in this!”

I checked in my side view mirror: the police car had turned on his lights, blinking all across the top of the car.

“Pull over, Rachel!” I shouted. “Please! You've
got
to!”

I reached for the steering wheel, but she swerved the car, throwing me back against my door.

I rolled down my window, turned around, and stuck my head out of the window. The wind whipped against the back of my head as I saw that there were now
two
police cars behind us, both cars blinking wildly.

“Pull over, Rachel!” I shouted.

“I can't!” she cried desperately, and drove even faster, thrusting down on the gas. “I can't let her win! I'm
not
gonna die!!”

I was thrown back into my seat with a thud. There was only one thing to do: try to stop the car myself. But as I reached over to try to grab the steering wheel from her, the oddest thing happened. From out of the forest, a huge deer bolted across the highway, right across our path. I remember several things occurring simultaneously, but almost in slow-motion. I braced myself, knowing that we were going to hit the deer
and
that it was the same white-faced deer – Bambi's Mother! – that we saw at the Quarry during the summer. I remember thinking,
what a strange coincidence
, as Rachel screamed “I love you!” and there was the sound of squealing brakes, smashing glass, crunching metal, and then nothing: absolute, total, perfect blackness.

That was the first ending.

≁

I woke up in a blank, white room I don't know how many days or weeks later. It took me a very long time to wake up and focus my eyes, and even longer to realize that I was in a hospital. Nurses came and went, but I couldn't speak and nobody would tell me anything.

At first I could not move. Everything – my mind, my senses, my memory – was frozen. My body felt sunken into the mattress. I thought that I was paralyzed, but then realized that I could move my head and my upper body a little.

I think I had some casts or something on my legs, but when I tried to move and look, I felt that my left leg was attached to something at the foot of the bed. Painfully, I raised myself, little by little, onto my elbows and saw that my left ankle was handcuffed to the post of the footboard of the hospital bed. I fell back against the mattress, exhausted and defeated and disgusted with myself beyond measure as I remembered
everything
.

Then two policemen came to see me. They wore suits, but they told me that they were policemen, so I believed them. An older one and a younger one.

“Your girlfriend's dead,” said the older one with a lifeless voice that I will never forget. “She went through the windshield. You got lucky and were thrown from the vehicle.”

When I heard that, my heart broke . . . for good. But at the same time I was glad that Rachel wasn't going to have to endure what I was going to have to endure.

“
Lucky
 . . .” I either thought or mumbled.

“We know what you did,” he said. “We found the car at the bottom of the Quarry. Long Island detectives went over your girlfriend's home and your parents' house with a fine-tooth comb. They found everything except for the money.”

“What money?” I said. And what did
my parents
have to do with any of this? Nothing!

“‘What money?'” he repeated sharply. “How about the two grand we found in your girlfriend's purse and the other four grand that's missing?”

“What four grand?” I said.

“And there's some jewelry missing too,” he continued. “The victim's jewelry box was ransacked.”

“What jewelry?” I said, my head spinning. “I don't know what you guys are talking about . . . honestly.”

“‘Honestly'?” the old cop repeated with a huff of a laugh and a sour smile.

At that moment, I knew that no one was ever going to believe me and my side of the story. Ever.

The younger cop said, “First, we're gonna take your statement. Then you can see your parents. They're waiting outside.”

That's when I felt a new kind of pain: deep, deep, ineradicable
shame
.

“Don't,” I mumbled.

“What?”

“Don't let them in,” I whispered. “Don't let them see me.”

“Sorry, punk,” said the older cop. “Live with it.”

≁

I don't want to talk about what it was like when my parents came in to see me at the hospital, that first time. I'll just say what I told them – and what is true:

“
I didn't kill anybody
.”

Even as I said it, it really didn't make me feel better. The words felt like cold ash in my mouth. It was the truth, but my actions were nothing to be proud of. I should have – I don't know –
known
that Rachel was going to do something to Eleanor, and stopped her. I should have done something when she was fighting with Nanci. Instead, what I did was help her conceal the two deaths. I was loyal to Rachel instead of to any normal code of morality, and it was simply wrong. I put blind love above common decency, and that's really not a good love, is it? What we did
dishonored
our love, and to this day that still makes me sad. Very, very sad.

It was the first time that I ever saw my father cry. I had seen my mother cry a whole bunch of times, but to see my father cry was . . . well, I was discovering new lows by the hour.

A doctor came and told me that both my legs were broken: compound fractures of both fibulas, both tibias, and my right femur. I also had a severely collapsed lung and several crushed ribs.

“Does he have to be attached like that?” my mother asked the doctor, pointing to the handcuffs that chained my ankle to the bed.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Sheriff's orders.”

“He's not going to run away with two broken legs,” my mother said louder.

“I'm sorry,” the doctor repeated. “But that's what I've been told.”

“Stop it, Ma,” I said. “It's all right.” The handcuffs actually were uncomfortable around my ankle, but I already knew that it made no sense to ask for what I wasn't going to get. I remembered the stony looks on the faces of those cops, a look that was soon to become quite familiar to me.

I was in the Towanda State Hospital for a long time, learning to walk again. I was kept in the prison ward, handcuffed to my bed whenever I wasn't released for physical therapy, some test, or some other reason like an operation. I had five. My legs were pretty well smashed in the accident, and my right lung was damaged, too, so my energy level was low at the beginning. I wasn't getting enough oxygen so I couldn't build my strength back up, but I couldn't build my strength back up because I wasn't getting enough oxygen.

My surgeon was a dry, old guy with a very thick German accent.

“You're young,” he said when he showed me the before-and-after x-rays on the light board in his office. “Theoretically, you should have a complete recovery.”

I wanted to tell him, “All theory, dear friend, is gray,” but I didn't. I kept my mouth shut and did all the physical therapy as hard as I could. Whenever they uncuffed me from my bed, I was down in the Rehab and Fitness Center, trying to learn to walk again. And I did. Today I don't walk with much of a limp, and I'm working on it every day. No one would ever know that my legs were once smashed to pieces on a highway in the middle of nowhere on the last drive ever with my one true love.

I don't want to talk too much about the trial; there was enough of that on TV, in the newspapers, and on the radio. It was all so humiliating, day after day, to be so exposed to public disgrace, but then again, Eleanor Prince and Nanci Jerome were dead, day after day, so I had no right to object to getting what I deserved.

By then, I had been moved down to the Nassau County jail. For a while, I was in the medical wing. Then they moved me to “protective custody.” Fortunately, I was not put in with the regular jail population. By then, I was the famous “Ivy League Killer” and prey for anybody who wanted to get some notoriety by killing a famous killer.

What I actually was, was an accessory to murder. They charged me with murder in the first degree because there was evidence that Rachel had planned this whole thing for a long time. There was no evidence that
I
knew about her plans, but that didn't seem to bother the Assistant District Attorney.

Before the trial, my first lawyer and my parents got this psychiatrist who was an expert on trials to examine me. We talked for a very long time. (He was a smart guy, though not as smart as he thought he was. But, then again,
who is
?) He's the one who told my lawyer and my parents that they shouldn't put me on the stand, that I shouldn't testify on my own behalf. My first lawyer felt that since there were none of my fingerprints found on the poker – and there
were
Rachel's, as well as traces of her blood (I guess from that scratch on her hand) – that proved that I didn't have any contact with the murder weapon (which was the truth). Add to that, Rachel's bite marks on Nanci's cheek and Rachel's previous statements and behavior, he felt that would establish “reasonable doubt,” enough to convince a jury that I had nothing to do with the actual killings.

I would have told the jury outright that I didn't hit anybody, with anything. I would have told them the whole damn story. But they didn't let me testify, which they tell me is not so unusual in cases like mine. Often defendants in murder cases just have to sit there and take it in silence.

How did I stay silent during my trial? I had to, that's how. I sat at the table and tried to look innocent, whatever that is. My first lawyer told me time and time again not to make any sour faces, and I did my best. I sat there stone-faced while the prosecution called, one after the other, Stanley Marshak, Roommate A, and Professor Brilliant to the stand, boom-boom-boom, to testify what a bad counselor, roommate, and student I was. Just for fun. Just to make me look like a complete maggot. They tried to depict me as some kind of sullen, subversive rebel, when I was the most obedient, most follow-the-rules kind of kid my whole life. Except with Rachel.

To my shame, I allowed my first lawyer to put Rachel on trial. He put on several witnesses who testified how “troubled” and “disturbed” she was. Her therapist testified that Rachel suffered from “adolescent depression and security concerns.” She said that Rachel occasionally burned herself with cigarettes. I
knew
that was a lie. Or I thought I knew it. And it turned out that Rachel had seen some kind of child psychologist from when she was nine until she was eleven. The psychologist had passed away two years ago, but they subpoenaed the notes from his treatment of Rachel, which revealed “empathy issues.” There was testimony from a boy at Oakhurst High who said that Rachel had actually said that she planned to kill her mother and tried to talk him into helping her. When he refused, she supposedly said, “That's OK. I know someone who can help me.” When the Assistant District Attorney asked the boy if Rachel had mentioned the name of the person who might help her, my first lawyer strenuously objected, citing “hearsay” and some other things, but the Oakhurst boy had gotten out my first name, and the damage had been done.

It got even worse when the Assistant District Attorney started doing some improvisatory arithmetic as he was stalling for time and mentioned Rachel's age and mine and the words “statutory rape” in the same sentence. All hell instantly broke loose: my lawyer jumped to his feet in vehement objection, the crowd went completely ape, and the judge had to send the jury out of the courtroom. Later, everyone was directed to forget everything that the Assistant District Attorney had said. How can a person forget something that they've heard – really? The bell had been rung. More damage.

The trial was filled with lies, and it took all my self-control not to jump up out of my chair and “object.” But I had my lawyer to do that; I had to trust him. Still, it churned me up inside, to hear falsehoods and willful misinterpretations of the truth, day after day. Part of growing up is realizing how much of life is filled with lies. Did I mention that someone told me that when Stewie Thurman left Camp Mooncliff early at the end of camp because his grandmother had “died”,
that
was a big lie? It turned out that Stewie just wanted to get back to his stupid college because he had been called up from the junior varsity to the varsity football team. He arranged a fake phone call and used the old “dead grandmother” lie to get out of his Mooncliff contract early. You cannot trust anybody in this world!

Also, the prosecution made such a big deal out of all this money and jewelry – stuff that I didn't even know about – that Rachel must have taken from upstairs, or even before. They found some of it in her purse: cash and some of Eleanor's jewelry. But I wouldn't be surprised if Manny or Herb ransacked the place once they realized that Eleanor was gone, took everything, and tried to pin it all on dead Rachel.

As if I would kill for money! That was the most absurd allegation of all. I sat there at the defendant's table, not moving a muscle, as they lied. I knew deep, deep, deep in my heart that whatever I did, however misguided, I did for love.

The morning the verdict was read I wore my lucky blue blazer, the one I wore to my Columbia interview and that first dinner at the Costa Brava with Eleanor and Herb. They had confiscated my lucky RFK pin long ago, as a potential weapon. I always changed from my orange jail uniform into street clothes before the court proceedings, so that the jury wouldn't be prejudiced against me. Sure.

The courtroom was packed with spectators, eager to see me fry. Supposedly, people were selling their places in line outside to get in to hear the verdict read. There were all the regulars – reporters, photographers, my parents, ordinary/nosey spectators, and the ever-present Manny Prince.

Manny sat in the first row behind the Assistant District Attorney for the entire trial. He looked at me with such hatred in his eyes – I could almost
feel
his stare burn the back of my neck – that the judge had to caution him about prejudicing the jury. I can't say that I blamed him, but it's a shame that he never seemed to care so much about his daughter while she was still alive. Other than buying her that damn car.

Herb came to the courthouse once, but he was mobbed by reporters – pun intended – both coming in and going out, so that he never came back. At first, a couple of the newspapers had played up the angle that Herb might have been involved in the murders someway, and that I was doing a “hit” for someone. The theory was that Eleanor had been killed in revenge for some recent killing of some other Mafia girlfriend from some other “family” in New Jersey, but that idea died away after a while. On that one day that Herb did show up, he sat in one of the back rows on the aisle, on the prosecutor's side, as far away from Manny as he could get. From what I understand, they never exchanged a word.

Nanci's family – the Jeromes – were maybe the saddest case of all. (Except for my parents, of course.) They were quite a bit older than my folks. Mrs. Jerome was enormous; probably like what Nanci would have looked like in thirty years. She wore a black dress as big as a tent to the trial almost every day, a mink stole, and a string of pearls the size of grapes. Ultra-skinny Mr. Jerome looked like he'd stepped out of a Brooks Brothers ad, with his pin-striped suit and matching silk tie and handkerchief. He used a cane to help him walk and had a big strawberry for a nose. The two of them took about a half hour to walk up and down the aisle to their seats, right behind Manny, right behind the prosecution. Once my father tried to say something to them, but he was rebuffed in quite a nasty way. I can't say as I blame them: there was nothing really to say. But they shouldn't have been quite so dismissive to my Dad.