by Robyn Carr
She laughed. “Has she been in touch?”
“She’s making my life miserable....”
“Ahh...” There was a definite sound of satisfaction.
“She’s threatening to visit.”
“That would be nice,” Gerri said, smiling to herself. “We haven’t had a common enemy in years.”
“It would finish me off.”
“You said you’d do anything,” she reminded him.
“I did,” he said, scrolling through documents. “I was thinking public evisceration, castration, mutilation—not my mother.”
“She adores you.”
“Not lately,” he said. He turned back to her, plucking off his specs. “She suggested I buy you some flashy jewelry, take you on a trip to the islands or something.”
“Really? Why didn’t you offer that?”
“Because I knew your idea of amends would be much closer to the soul—like moving me out. Telling my mother.” She laughed at him and he turned back to the keyboard, the screen. “You’re getting too much pleasure out of my comeuppance,” he said.
“It has been interesting, I admit. Listen, I had to tell Muriel. One of the kids was going to slip. You understand that.”
“I know better than to suggest constrictions, Gerri. You do what you do. I’ll grovel. I think that’s the recipe here.”
“Oh, you make a fabulous victim,” she said. “I’m sick of laughing about this. I’m still pissed off.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re—” He stopped talking and studied the computer screen. “Two hundred and nine arrests of women named Barbara Jean Something between the ages of thirty-three and thirty-six. Note to self. Our kids can’t name any of our grandkids Barbara Jean.” He scrolled through arrest documents slowly, reading the screen. Then he turned his chair away from the computer and pulled off his glasses. “I don’t think you’re ready for this.”
“What?” Gerri asked, standing and moving away from her chair. She glanced over his shoulder and read the screen. “Dear God,” she whispered.
There on the screen was BJ’s picture. And a headline. Barbara Jean Smith Spraque Stands Trial for Husband’s Murder.
ten
IF THERE WAS one gift in the news about BJ, it was that Phil’s office had not prosecuted her—it happened in a different county. He logged off the prosecutor’s database and left the rest to Gerri. Once he was gone she got back on the computer, researching news articles about Barbara Jean Spraque—Smith was her maiden name. And she stayed at it until 2:00 a.m.
There were undoubtedly many more details to the story, but the gist was she’d been battered by her husband. Married at eighteen, a mother at twenty-three, she was hospitalized several times. Her husband went to jail on occasion, though never for long. He was charged multiple times with battery as well as other offenses. By the time BJ’s children were four and six years of age, he’d been hitting, shoving and shaking them, as well, and she’d tried just about everything from orders of protection to shelters. And then on one dark and dangerous night shortly after he’d hit them all again, he started to party with a few of his friends...and lots of alcohol, pot and his favorite, cocaine. BJ put her children to bed, told them not to leave the room for any reason, and she served the drinks. She added small amounts of cocaine to her husband’s drinks all night. Then, late that night, right about the time most of his friends had either moved on or passed out, she fixed his final cocktail. She scraped a large amount of coke into his drink. According to her own testimony, he was a big man and she was afraid it hadn’t been enough. When he passed out, she loaded her children into the car and drove to her mother’s house where she waited for her husband to find her and beat her senseless, or for the police to arrest her.
BJ’s attorney pled her charges down to manslaughter, and she had served three years in a women’s state penitentiary—Chowchilla. The timeline suggested she’d moved to Mill Valley right out of prison.
She was just reunited with her kids after three years of separation. No wonder she’s so private, Gerri thought. She was skittish around people, no doubt afraid they’d find out. Gerri couldn’t imagine what that might be like—constantly worrying the kids would pay again and again as neighbors, people around school, looked at them as the offspring of a murderer. And children could be so unbelievably cruel. If the news got out, it could be horrible. BJ had undoubtedly prepared herself to do a lot of moving around.
In over twenty-five years with CPS, this was only the second time Gerri had been faced with a situation this dramatic. Phil had been involved prosecuting similar cases a number of times. Gerri had supported him when it tore him up, prosecuting a woman for a crime she had to commit to stay alive, to keep her kids alive. To his credit, when moral if not legal innocence was implicit, he did whatever he could to keep the sentencing reasonable. But the law is the law. Killing is not justified unless you’re in immediate danger.
They’d had their share of arguments about that, naturally. Gerri was convinced the perspective of the law and the prosecutor’s office were based in testosterone. Of course men didn’t kill sleeping men! They’d have a gun or a knife handy for that next attack and the self-defense would be indisputable. The thought of that couple in the parking lot came to her mind. What was a five-foot-three, one-hundred-pound woman supposed to do to defend herself against a six-foot-three, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound man? Unless she had some kind of special training, he’d take her weapon away from her and use it on her before she could even aim. Special training, hah! Gerri knew abused women couldn’t sign up for marksman training or karate. In most cases, they were barely allowed to use the phone.
And yet it was the thing women and men alike always said they’d do if they couldn’t escape the abuse—kill the son of a bitch. Gerri had always said she would. She wouldn’t live under that kind of oppression. She’d go to prison to keep her children safe. Phil said if his daughter was in such a situation and couldn’t get out, was hopelessly locked in and ruthlessly battered, he’d kill the son of a bitch. Talk, talk, talk. When truly faced with it, how many people actually could?
If Gerri was a betting woman, she’d lay odds that BJ had known exactly what was going to happen to her. She knew she’d be tried and convicted of something if not murder one. She knew she’d go to prison. And yet it must have seemed the only option left to her. Better Mommy in prison than everyone in the ground.
Gerri knew there would come a time when she would ask her about that. She wouldn’t tell even Andy what she’d learned, but she would eventually level with BJ. Gerri wanted to know how she could have been sure her children would be safe while she was locked up. How did she know she’d get them back? Who was on her side? Obviously she had her brother’s support—but what had happened to the husband’s family? The abuser’s kin were notorious for denial, for going after the killer until the end of time. And that house—whose house was it really? Gerri could barely remember the original owners and didn’t know if it had sold privately, without signs or open houses. Then Gerri realized the last renter had been a single mom who also kept to herself. Hmm—a recovery house? Owned by some philanthropist?
Too stirred up to sleep, she took a rather large brandy to bed. She turned on the TV but it didn’t drown out her thoughts, all jumbled up in a mess that included BJ then and now, the couple in the parking lot, her job.
Inevitably, her thoughts moved to her own situation and her friends and their marriages—all in various states of flux. Andy and Bryce were over and it seemed like Sonja and George were headed that way, as well, for entirely different reasons.
She thought maybe she and Phil might salvage something, but she had a secret and desperate fear—that they’d get back together, sleep in the same bed, talk about the stock market while naked in the bathroom, attend the kids’ college graduations and weddings as proud parents and then, after they’d done all the work, done all they could, they’d give up in exhaustion because getting it back wasn’t possible. And starting over was
just a romantic idea that couldn’t be achieved.
* * *
With the end of school, the early morning walks had been suspended for the neighborhood women. Andy had no reason to rise at the crack of dawn, Sonja was sleeping in these days and occasionally Gerri got out there by herself, but she was slacking, taking great pleasure in the days she could languish in bed until seven or seven-thirty.
For Andy, the summer was shaping up differently than ever before. She usually planned a long visit with her father in San Luis Obsipo, but this summer she had hedged on such plans. She had such a nice routine with Bob. He had cut back on his evening work most nights so he could be with her, and she loved that he would do that. Almost every weekend they toured model homes and open houses. Bob was always looking for new ideas and Andy loved looking at houses, something she never indulged alone, since she wasn’t in the market to buy. In her entire life, she’d never had a man interested in the same things until now. They went out to dinner at least once a week, sharing each other’s favorite places, holding hands across the table. There were a couple of TV shows he liked and sitting beside him to watch them, rubbing Beau’s belly with her bare feet, was more pleasurable than a trip to the islands. Bob was a big reader, about an hour or two every night, and the book he was working through always stayed on the table that was on what had become his side of the bed. And he spent the night often—three or four nights a week.
Noel had done as instructed—he came to dinner. He was still on the quiet side, maybe not entirely sure his mother was playing with a full deck, taken with this man who, even Andy could admit, was far different from the men she was usually attracted to. Maybe Noel wasn’t as enchanted by Bob, although Andy thought Bob came off well—his usual affable and interesting self. Or maybe Noel was slightly embarrassed by his last encounter with Bob, which was simply rude. In any case, it wasn’t a bad dinner. But it sure didn’t reel Noel in. He left right after they ate.
Andy was already feeling the impulse. She wanted Bob all to herself. She wanted his overalls hanging across from her clothes in the closet, his shoes by the door. She hadn’t breathed a word to anyone because she’d always been accused of needing a man, of moving too fast. In her private thoughts, she knew there was a kernel of truth in that. But this was different. She was feeling a strong need for Bob. Her plan was to gut it out until a respectable period of time had passed before asking him if he and Beau would consider a change of residence.
They returned from a Saturday evening at a local bistro and the message light was blinking on her home phone. “What’s this?” she asked herself.
She put the phone on speaker and dialed in the code while Bob let Beau outside. Her ex-husband Rick’s voice, panicked and angry, came blistering into the room. “Andy! You’re not answering your cell! Call me the second you get home! We have a problem! Hurry up!” And right after that, a second, a third and a fourth similar command. She pulled her cell out of her purse and saw there were messages and texts and her ringer had been off.
“Oh, God,” she muttered. “Noel. Noel.” It was simply the only thing she and Rick had in common.
Bob looked at her from the back door. He had a look of concern on his face, a very rare expression for him. “Call,” he said.
Feeling afraid, feeling vulnerable, she left the phone on speaker when she called Rick. He came on the line all worked up. “Do you have any idea what’s going on with your son?” he demanded loudly, sounding enraged.
“I talked to him twice today,” she said. “I see him at least twice a week if not more. What—”
“He’s gay, that’s what! Your son is gay!”
“What?” she said. “What did you say?”
“He’s gay, I said!”
“Did he tell you he was gay?” she asked, in a state of shock.
“Of course not! I went to that apartment where he likes to hang out and it’s full of faggots. Fairies! And your son is right at home there!”
“Rick, he works a lot in theater arts—he has a lot of gay friends....”
“I confronted him!” he blustered. “He admits it! Said he was afraid to tell me.” He laughed meanly. “Smart kid. He should’ve been afraid!”
“Wait,” she said. “Wait a minute. You went there? Why?”
“I wanted to see what he was up to, what he was hiding. I’m not paying child support and college tuition if he’s using drugs and that’s what I thought was going on. He sure wasn’t coming around here much. I wish it had been drugs, but it’s not. He’s a fag!” He coughed in disgust. “Obviously you had no idea where he was....”
“Of course, I knew where he was—I checked it out, saw that it was in a good complex, asked the apartment manager if she’d had any trouble there because my son liked to hang around there with friends. She said those boys were good boys. But Jesus, I didn’t barge in. I wouldn’t do that!”
“I blame this on you!” he stormed. “You and your weird boyfriends!”
“Wait a minute,” she replied angrily. “If it’s true, it has nothing to do with my boyfriends. They were all incredibly straight.”
“Yeah, right. I always thought that Bryce guy was a little light in his loafers.”
“Oh, bite me, Rick. How about you? Leaving him with a mother and no father for at least a couple of years while you ran off with the school nurse!” She put her hand up to her mouth. “Oh, God, what am I saying? If Noel is gay, it doesn’t have anything to do with either of us. You can’t make a person gay!”
“Yeah? Well, he sure didn’t get it from me!”
“How do you know?” she asked. “If he is gay he was born gay!”
“Not possible! No way!”
“Yeah, that would be a tough pill to swallow, wouldn’t it? Because all I have are all these big, hetero Greeks in my ancestry.”
“Yeah, Greeks—they started this, right?”
“Oh, for God’s sake! Don’t you have a couple of gay uncles you’ve crossed off your Christmas card list? Get a grip! He didn’t do this to you! Whatever is going on with Noel, it’s not about you!”
“I’m through with him,” Rick said. “He’s all yours. I’ll be damned if I’ll have some queer around my kids!”
“Oh, you didn’t do that,” Andy said. “Please, Rick—you didn’t do that to him!”
“When he straightens out, he’s welcome back. Till then, I’m not going to have his influence around the boys!”
“Rick, what have you done? If he’s confused or scared you could’ve done terrible damage. For God’s sake, Rick! If you’re angry with me, don’t take it out on Noel. He’s just trying to grow up.”
“Trying to grow up a fag! I’m not having him in my house! I’m not paying any more support while he’s in college. I’m through with that!” He disconnected.
Andy just looked at the phone for a long time, numb. Shocked.
“That was awful,” Bob said.
She looked at him. “What am I going to do?” she asked.
“You should call Noel. Tell him you heard from his father and you’re sorry his father’s so angry and worked up. And he should come talk to you because you’re not going to act crazy like that. But you’d like to know what’s going on with him and you want to know he’s all right.”
She stepped toward him. “Did you know?”
“Know?”
“Did you know my son was gay? Did you get that vibe from him?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Why would I? Because my wife was a lesbian? He seemed like just your average, regular kid to me. Listen, there aren’t always a lot of signals. I’m proof of that, right?”
“I wasn’t missing anything, was I?”
“Andy, what were you going to do if you were? Deprogram him? Come on, you know we don’t control this part of life. I mean, mothers are incredibly influential, but really, you don’t have that kind of power.”
“Do you have any gay kids in your family?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I might
have a gay nephew back in Connecticut, but if he is, he hasn’t come out. Why? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Are you comfortable around gay men?”
He shrugged. “Gee, they’re so good with color...”
“This isn’t funny!”
“It’s also not a catastrophe, Andy. You don’t really think your son got to thinking, Gee, let’s see what I can do to make my life more difficult, more challenging. It’s not an easy life, even around here. I mean, look what the boy just went through with his dad. Noel had to know that wasn’t going to be easy. Cut the kid a break. We’re all pretty much stuck with who we are.”
She shook her head. “Why aren’t you a father?” she asked softly.
“I got to the real thing too late in life,” he said with a smile. “Call him. Tell him it’s okay to come home. Tell him you’re not upset. He’ll be glad to get that message.”
* * *
Gerri answered her front door and found Andy standing there, clutching a coffee mug in one hand and her cell phone in the other. It was very clear from her reddened eyes that she’d been crying. “Is your house a little on the quiet side?” Andy asked.
“Oh, God, what is it? Is it Bob?” Gerri asked, reaching out and pulling her inside.
“No, no. It’s Noel. Please, could we talk? Do you have a lot of people around?”
“Just the opposite. Phil didn’t come by tonight, he has a big case. Jessie’s babysitting, Matt and one of his friends are playing video games in his room and Jed has a phone growing out of his ear. What’s the matter?”
“Oh, you’re not going to believe it. Or maybe you will, I don’t know.”
“Come on,” she said. “Deck.”
Gerri lit a couple of patio candles and through some tears, Andy explained the events of two nights earlier, the horrible phone conversation with Rick. “Now Noel won’t return my calls or come over,” Andy said. “I know Rick must have really upset him, but I’ve left messages asking him to please talk to me, let me see that he’s okay, and I’ve promised I’m not going to react the way his father did. Oh, Gerri, he’s scaring me to death. I’m going to have to go over there, to that apartment his friends have. I just don’t want to make things worse.”