Before the trial, Claudia’s family moved to Virginia and her parents wouldn’t let her return. So the state attorney said I’d have to testify to protect other girls. But that’s not why I did it. I was nursing Andrew, expelled from high school, depressed, and blind with rage. I did it for myself, for raw, rank revenge.
Karl was my father’s step-brother, younger by ten years. They weren’t related by blood. But when the judge pronounced a sentence of twelve years, he said Karl was guilty of incest. As he was handcuffed in the courtroom, I was thunderstruck by the reality of what I’d done, and in paroxysms of tears, I cried as I had when my father died.
Counselors said that I was looking for my father in Karl. Of course, I didn’t believe them. Karl and I had simply fallen from different stars, landing on earth in each other’s arms.
I was taking Andrew to school when I last saw Karl alive. Wearing only his undershorts, he was bathing with rags and a garden hose in the side yard of my apartment complex. The night before, violating the terms of his parole, he’d shown up drunk, bellicose, and tried to push his way in, but I blocked the door.
Andrew screamed, “Don’t fight! Don’t fight!”
Karl said he was hungry. I gave him twenty dollars.
The next day, we found Karl sprawled on his back in the carport in the unmistakable throes of rigor mortis, his mouth agape, his eyes wide open, his frozen face a rictus of terror, mirroring the horror that instantly transformed Andrew’s face. An overdose, the coroner said. If only I’d let him in, fed him, gotten him help. No one said it was my fault, but I blame myself anyway.
This morning I woke up at five and ran six miles. Now, eighteen hours later, I’m exhausted. I brush my hair, which falls below my shoulders. Not bad for thirty-six, I decide: five-eight, one hundred twenty pounds.
But perfection requires diligence. The ends are split. I make a mental note: Estella, get a trim. Maybe I should wear it up; maybe I should cut off six or seven inches instead of only one, or bob it. A new look is what I need— a new me.
I lie on my bed dressed in powder-blue sweats. In their final moments, fragments of light beamed by stars long since dead stream through cracks in the Venetian blinds and flicker on the ceiling. Arcs of shooting stars blaze across the South Florida nighttime sky.
I doze, wake up, doze. My neighbor flushes his toilet, the pipes gurgle. I’ve never gotten used to it. A disharmonic hum of the refrigerator blends with a high-pitched whine from my computer. I vow to move, get a place with a view of Biscayne Bay, a place without a bedroom for Andrew. A new life.
I think about sending the Queen to prison. I feel better.
I doze again, sleep fitfully at first, then fall into a slumber so deep that my dreams become hypnotic, as if I’ve been drugged, my body struggling to move in slow motion through liquid glue. Or am I dreaming? It’s a dream, I tell myself, an erotic dream. How long has it been since I made love to someone, since someone made love to me?
Hands caress my face, neck, breasts, the backs of my legs, and I caress the hands with my body as they caress me. Sweet breath, subtle cologne. Nice. I try to open my eyes. I want the feelings to be real, to be held, to be loved. But the more strenuous my efforts to awaken, the deeper the dream becomes and the more erratic my sleep.
Hands slip under my sweatpants.
“Derek?” I say.
Hot breath on my neck.
“Shut up.” A British accent.
I gasp.
A fist slams into my mouth, shattering bones, exploding colors. I spit blood and slivers of broken teeth in a shriek I don’t recognize as my own. The face of a man emerges from purple shadow, on his forehead a crimson scar glows in moonlight. Young. Buck teeth. Blond. Ponytail.
“Andrew owes me,” he says. “Understand?”
My jaw ablaze, I understand nothing.
He pulls my sweatpants down around my calves, clutches my hair, pulling my head backward, squeezing a breast.
I sock his stomach, hit his face, first his eye, then his jaw, knocking him back. But he still holds my hair, and as he falls off the bed, he yanks hard, pulling me after him. My head strikes the corner of the bed frame, tearing my scalp.
The room whorls as if I’d had too much to drink. I wobble as I try to scramble, wanting to get to my dresser, top drawer, my father’s Glock 17, 9 mm semi-automatic. But my ankles tangle in my sweatpants, and I stumble. He jumps on me, knocks me to the floor where blood drips onto the carpet from the gash on my skull. Pain sears my chest. A broken rib— or two. I can’t breathe. A punctured lung?
He presses the end of a gun barrel against my neck.
“Get up,” he says.
His forearms, one tattooed with the word Nirvana, are massive— like a home-run hitter’s. He’s shorter than me, solid, one seventy-five. An eye puffy, pink turning to purple. It’s my father’s gun he’s pointing at me.
“You want money? Take it . . . my purse . . . on the dresser,” I say.
“What do you think I am? A thief?” He spits on me. “Strip.”
I hesitate, unsteady on my feet, my bedroom spinning around and around, faster and faster. He cocks the gun, his hand steady as a surgeon’s. I hold onto my bed as I step out of my sweatpants.
“Your shirt,” he says.
I pull my sweatshirt over my head.
“Sweet,” he says, kicking off his shoes, unzipping his pants, letting them fall. No underwear, he’s enormous, uncircumcised, erect.
Hot acid rises in my throat. I’m going to vomit.
“How much?” I say. “I’ll pay what Andrew owes you.”
“Yes, you will,” he says, rotating the barrel of the gun in a small circle. “On the bed, on your stomach.”
The second hand on my nightstand clock sweeps the dial in slow motion.
“Spread your legs,” he says, pressing the gun barrel into the nape of my neck. “Wider!”
Thirty seconds. Forty. Sixty. Eighty. My personal best swimming one hundred meters, an eerie dissimilarity between then, when the seconds flew, and now, each one punctuated by terror, promising distinct new sources of pain.
He climbs on to the bed, his knees between mine, my father’s gun unwavering is still in his hand.
My breath erratic, I struggle to get out words. “Will you use a rubber?” I say. “Please.”
“Will you kiss me,” he says. “Puhleeze?”
Blood trickles down the side of my face. He plays with my hair, then he jerks my head back and all I see is the ceiling blurred by droplets of warm blood dripping into an eye. I hyperventilate, pray he’ll hurry, get it over with.
“This is from Andrew,” he says.
Suddenly, his weight shifts. A fuse of pain sears up my spine from my anus to my brain.
In the blush of a silver half-moon, dark edges soften. In the grip of ague, in silence as still as a courtroom before the reading of a verdict, I run my tongue over broken teeth.
His smell, rank as urine, is on me. In my vanity mirror I see blood smeared on the back of my legs, my face, my comforter. I don’t turn on the lights. I don’t know why.
On my dresser under Andrew’s wallet is a note. Andrew was right. u r a great fuck! calling cops would be unwise.
I listen. No animate sounds. I wish there were.
My thoughts jumbled, my shotgun loaded, my naked-broken body carries it and creeps down the stairs, a tidal wave of pain held temporarily, mercifully in abeyance by homicidal rage.
Andrew’s room is ransacked; my study’s untouched. I descend another flight. The kitchen? The dining room? Spotless.
Suddenly, my head is squeezed in the grips of a vise that tightens until I lose sight. I grab hold of the bird’s-eye maple sideboard, struggle for breaths so shallow I fear I’ll suffocate. When sight returns, my breathing merely labored, I think of calling my neighbor. He must have heard me scream, yet he didn’t call the police. Son of a bitch. I call Derek.
Kathi answers his cell phone. I struggle to keep an even voice.
&
nbsp; “Christ, Estella,” she says. “It’s four o’clock.”
I don’t want to cry, don’t want Kathi to hear me cry. But I do.
“Estella, what’s wrong?”
“I’ve been . . .” What? “Raped.”
Like a hunter tracking wounded prey, I follow a trail of blood up the stairs, every step slicing through me like a razor of ice.
In my bathroom, I see a sticky-white glob in a knot of my hair. I throw up, then cut off the gooey clump, cutting, cutting, letting my hair fall— first in handfuls and then in strands onto the chemical-flower-smelling tile floor. Blood seeps from my scalp.
I turn on hot water in the shower. The bathroom fills with steam. I step in, the water almost scalding, but I find this out later. I scrub my stomach, my ass. Blood drips between my legs, swirls in rivulets into the drain.
Derek and two uniformed cops, guns drawn, burst in. Why are they here? What’s happened?
Derek turns off the water, covers me with a towel. “Estella?” he says, “Estella? Estella?” as if he isn’t sure it’s me.
I choke out the words: “Andrew, Andrew.”
Rough Justice
I awake among cascades of roses, azaleas, and orchids, the fragrance of heliotrope. My mother, though she’s petite, wears a floral muumuu and no jewelry: for her an unusual statement of fashion. She’s reading, which is not surprising. Usually it’s astronomy or philosophy: arcane, remote, dense, boring. The hard- or-soft-cover book she’d habitually carried for as long as I can remember was replaced by a tablet years ago. But today she has a hard-cover book propped up on her thin lap. At least she’s not plugged in to her iPod, sparing me thoughts of her atrocious taste in music.
Derek, his new partner, Edgar, and uniformed cops stand just inside the room, talking softly.
“Where’s Andrew?” I say. The words muffled. My jaw wired shut. My head bandaged. My neck braced. A tight corset under my nightgown, an IV in the back of my hand.
My mother is at my side, caressing my face. She’s holding Shamanistic Psychotherapy, the last book written by my dear, long-since departed aunt, Charlotte Crow Abiaka. Why is my mother reading it again? Why is she reading it now?
“In jail,” a cop says.
I’m lightheaded, muddled. Morphine.
“What charges?” I say.
“Hold on, Estella.” My mother’s authoritative voice. She faces the cops, raises an open hand to shoulder level, her palms toward them. “No questions.” She’s a commanding presence for a tiny woman.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“It’s not okay,” my mother says. “Those were the doctor’s orders.”
My mother has a look on her face I recognize all too well. Someone could get hurt, but Derek now stands between my mother and the cops.
“Betty Mae, let me handle this, please.” He knows what the cops don’t know: my mother can be dangerous. He says to the cops, “Get out.”
“Conspiracy to commit rape,” a cop says.
“We’d like to ask you a few more questions, Ms. Verus,” another cop says.
More questions?
“No Andrew way,” I say. “He couldn’t, wouldn’t. Who’s the . . .” I search for the words. “. . . alleged . . . victim?”
The men stare at me with incomprehension. Moisture wells in my mother’s eyes. With surprising alacrity, Derek and Edgar are herding the cops out of my hospital room.
“Don’ worry, Momma,” I say. “Andrew be home before sundown.”
How do I reconcile what’s happened with the truth? I’ll talk to Andrew, then bury myself in work. But my boss, Aurora, has other ideas.
Aurora’s been my mentor since I went to work for the Justice Department right out of law school, and we have a lot in common, especially considering our age difference, seventeen years, and that she’s white and Jewish and I’m half white, half black Seminole, and accept Jesus as my savior as my father did. We have a bond, a deep bond that forms an essence of who we are. We don’t often talk about it, but it’s always there. Her father and my father were military pilots, naval aviators, killed in combat while piloting their aircraft. This happened to Aurora’s father when she was fourteen. And it happened to my father when I was fourteen.
Now she stands at my bedside, dark, penetrating eyes, burnt-brown hair coiffed, ebony peep-toe stilettos, wearing a double strand of cultured-black pearls over a gray silk blouse, a single-breasted charcoal linen suit, dark-red fingernails and toenails.
I’m not sure I like her new hair color: almost black with a hint of lavender. Maybe it’s a reflection of the white-hot sunlight blending with the purple cast of the fluorescent light in my hospital room. Maybe all my senses are impaired by the Vicodin that’s replaced the morphine drip.
Through my wired jaw I manage to say, “You rehearsing that outfit for my wake?”
“Nice work,” she says. “Already got yourself appointed fashion police.”
“I wish. They won’t let me wear my Jimmy Choos.”
“You bought them? Muted-metallic silver, slinky straps?”
So long ago. My body gives new meaning to feeling stiff. But I manage a nod.
“A shame. By next week they’ll be so last week. Best you let me take them for a test spin.”
“They’re for rent,” I say, “by the hour.”
“Is there still pain?” she says, “Physically?”
“I’m as good as a girl sustained by soup can be. Be back to work, be dancing in just a few days.”
“The doctors say at least two months medical leave.”
“No law against breaking doctors’ orders,” I say.
She takes my hand. “I’ve brought you a few books,” she says. “Your favorite authors: Annie Proulx, Margaret Atwood, and—” – she rummages through a bag of books she’s brought – “what’s his name, the award-winning novelist who’s acclaimed for writing about Vodou and shamans and the living and the dead living side by side?”
“Madison Smartt Bell,” I say. “But it’s more complicated than—”
“Forgive me,” she says, “I’m not being judgmental, but do you talk about that stuff in church?”
“What stuff?” I say.
She flips through the pages of one of Bell’s books she’s brought, All Souls Rising. She says, “You know, the loa, spirits, zombies—”
“Aurora, bring me some briefs,” I say. “I don’t have to be in the office to supervise the junior attorneys.”
“You can’t come back for a while,” she says.
Sadness surprises me. I want to cry but I won’t, and what’s with the crying anyway? The last time I wanted to cry was when I heard about Andrew’s drug dealing.
“Why?” I say. “Why can’t I work? I’m not the criminal.”
“We have to investigate,” she says.
Any attack on a law-enforcement officer is an attack on our system of justice. And prosecutors, like other law enforcement officers, are especially vulnerable to violence at the hands of criminals. But that has nothing to do with my privilege of participating in that system, of working to enforce the law, protecting our people, our constitutional liberties, our ways of life.
I say, “That’s ridiculous.”
“Debut your Jimmy Choos in Paris,” she says. “But check your e-mail.”
At least I can talk to Andrew. Or so I think. Andrew has counsel and they also have other ideas. Between his inheritances and his monthly stipend from the tribe, he can afford a good lawyer. He should have talked to me before retaining counsel.
He’s hired a Georges Bohem and a Connie Knight of Collins, Dickens & Swift, an ultra-white-shoe, ultra-expensive law firm. I know the members of the criminal-defense bar, but I’ve never heard of Bohem or Knight. They must be very young, recently admitted to the bar, the top of their class at a prestigious law school. But the bottom of the totem pole at their firm. Andrew’s hired the least experienced lawyers in the most expensive law firm in the state.
And what’s the first
thing these clowns have done to defend my son? They’ve had me served in the hospital with a temporary restraining order, prohibiting me from talking to him to ensure that his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination isn’t compromised by undue influence. It’s signed by the Honorable Pola Zielinski, the newest county judge. Figures. But I’ll enlighten her, open her eyes to the injustice of the TRO, help her find her judicial bearings.
I must talk to Andrew, hear from him that his keys and wallet were stolen, explaining how the perp knew his name. I must hear from him that the perp finding my father’s gun was coincidence. I devise my legal strategy and look forward to hearing this newbie judge rip these newbie lawyers a new one. Talking to his mother undue influence? This is a new low for the criminal-defense bar.
When I’m discharged from the hospital, I’ll go to my mother’s place where I grew up, a veritable mansion on Osceola Island in the Intracoastal Waterway between Miami and Miami Beach, a palace of beauty, of magic, of majesty.
Momma drives a Land Rover, but she’s waiting for me in my father’s ‘59 pearl-white Cadillac Eldorado convertible. It’s nine-teen feet long, has spaceship fins and conical thrusters, visual velocity with a ride like floating on a cloud.
She refuses to part with this vestige of my father's flamboyance. “A great car,” she says, “is like a spouse— ’til death do you part.” My father’s been gone for a long time. I’m more than twice as old now than I was when he was killed, older now than he was when he lost his life. He no longer inhabits the earth, but my mother loves him still and he still lives in my her heart, in her everyday memories, and in mine.
On the road, she turns on the radio.
Will you please turn off that hippie music,” I say.
“‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’”?” she says. “Everyone likes the Beatles.”
“Momma, it’s glorifying drugs. The girl with kaleidoscope eyes? She’s stoned, hallucinating on LSD.”
“‘Diamonds in the sky’ was a metaphor for the stars long before anyone knew anything about LSD,” she says. “The song is about not taking everything at face value. It’s about keeping an open mind to all possibilities, so you can distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.”
The Speed of Life Page 2