The Cave Dwellers

by Christina McDowell

  “I will reach out to you if I experience any misconduct, Anne. Thank you for all that you are doing—for your service to these women.”

  Anne doesn’t budge. “Think about it. My door is always open.”

  Cate struts down North Capitol whispering to herself: “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The pressure from the flat white sky strains Bunny’s eyes into squints as she approaches the wrought iron gates of the graveyard in a black oversize snow coat and backpack, marking her turn to the visiting center when her cell phone rings. Bunny stops in front of the brick fence and picks up. “Hey.” She drops her backpack next to her.

  It’s Billy. “I got in,” he tells her.

  “To NYU?” she asks, beaming with anticipation.

  “Yeah,” Billy says, smiling on the other end of the phone.

  Bunny can feel Billy’s joy in how he says it. She hops up on the brick wall—it’s a moment worthy of pausing—lets her legs dangle over a headstone beside the stone statue of a praying angel.

  “Holy shit, Billy.”

  “I know,” he says in a more solemn tone.

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “Send them my regrets and rejection, I guess,” he says, wishing Bunny could save him from this truth while knowing she’ll never be able to.

  “What? Billy, come on, you have to go. This is your dream. Fuck your parents.”

  “You don’t get it—”

  “Of course I get it, and I say FUCK—YOUR—PARENTS.”

  “But my dad—”

  “You’re not your dad, Billy. I know you think you need to be, but you don’t. You just don’t.” Bunny hits where it hurts. And she knows it. She tries to backpedal. “Just accept who you are—it’s…” She kicks the heel of her boot into the brick sheepishly. “… why I love you.”

  “What’s up with you? Why are you acting like you suddenly think you know everything?” Billy says defensively.

  “What? What’s your problem? I’m trying to encourage you to be free of your dad’s fucking rein.”

  “Who’s going to pay for it, Bunny? Who’s going to pay for NYU? My father will fucking disown me if I don’t go to the academy.”

  Feeling a headache coming on, Bunny hops off the brick wall, the clock ticking before she needs to walk around the corner to make it in time to see Anthony. She checks her phone. Five minutes.

  Billy feels her distance. “Hello?”

  “Did you call to tell me or to fight with me?”

  “Would you cut yourself off from your parents?” Billy asks. It’s a legitimate question.

  Bunny starts walking briskly down the sidewalk; a branch grazes her cheek, dripping over from the graveyard, and she whisks it away, rubbing her fingers into broken skin. “I gotta go,” she says, stonewalling, unable to fathom an answer to the question, too distracted by her need to get to Anthony.

  “You wouldn’t, would you,” Billy taunts. “You’re such a hypocrite.”

  “I didn’t ask for this,” Bunny erupts, “and neither did you! Just talk to your dad, bet you haven’t even tried! Stop being so afraid of him.” She passes a man sleeping in a car, waiting for someone, to visit, or be released.

  “Whatever, Bunny, I gotta go,” Billy says.

  “Yeah, I said that first.” Bunny goes to press End, but the button’s already disappeared, Billy has hung up. “Ugh,” she grunts, and drops her phone in her pocket.

  * * *

  Bunny sits in one of the blue plastic chairs amid mothers and wives, girlfriends, sons and daughters, pulls out a Moleskine journal and pen. The heat is broken today. A fan conspicuously spins above her head, making the experience all the more troublesome and freezing. She waits and glances at the woman in the cubby beside her, yelling something into the receiver, before Anthony appears on-screen wearing an orange jumpsuit, hunched over, his left hand resting in between his knees. Bunny turns her attention to the screen, focused. She wants to tell him the truth about herself, that her name isn’t Grace, that she isn’t a reporter, that she was friends with Audrey Banks, knew her parents, knew the housekeeper, knows how they died, knew that Audrey was entitled and could be mean, but so could Bunny.… She’s afraid to tell. She can’t. Not now, and maybe not ever, as long as they’re being watched and listened to.

  “Why’d you come back?” Anthony asks.

  “Because I do care and I… question a lot of what’s been written about, or what hasn’t been written about, and I want to understand,” Bunny says, her palms sweating over her journal.

  Anthony welcomes her moxie for such a white, privileged little thing. “You ever visited a jail before you met me, Grace?”

  “… Yes,” Bunny says, trying not to blush from her shame (liar), staring down at her blank notebook. She swallows. Looks up. “How about you? Had you ever been arrested before this?”

  “Would it matter?” he says.

  Anthony’s response catching her off guard, Bunny wonders if it’s because her question affirms racist assumptions or is irrelevant given what she’s learned from the Black Lives Matter movement, which in hindsight makes her regret asking. She tries to think quickly, shamefully unsticking the question from herself: “To some it might.”

  Anthony swivels, distracted by commotion in the background again, yelling, pushing, a body slammed against the wall before two correctional officers restrain the inmates. He ducks back toward the screen when it’s clear and safe to do so. Bunny watches in distress, relieved when he spins back to her. “Is it like that all the time in there?” she asks.

  “Oh, you wanna find out?” Anthony asks like it’s a dare.

  “Why’d you show up for the visit again if you aren’t sure about me?” Bunny asks, challenging him, her fragile ego unable to help from making it about herself.

  “Why do you think?” he asks.

  Bunny tilts her head, puts down her pen. “Because I imagine given the accusations you probably don’t have any visitors.”

  Anthony chuckles at all that Bunny doesn’t know, undeserving of his vulnerability. “Nah, that’s not why.…”

  “Then why?” she asks, more interested and surprised by having not hit him where she assumed it would hurt.

  “You look like you have money.” He tilts his chin up.

  Bunny laughs, uncomfortable. “Excuse me?”

  “Your shiny long hair. Fancy jacket. I see you: you’re moneyed up. Like a catalogue behind that pen and paper.”

  In a panic, anything to prevent her from already feeling fraudulent, there’s nothing to do but take his side, take his side and get him to trust you. Bunny nods, accepting the reality of how she looks against the backdrop of the jail’s visiting center. “Yep, that’s right,” she admits, admitting the thing she’s starting to wish she didn’t have, realizing in these moments with him that it’s better to shut up and listen.

  Anthony leans back in his chair, more relaxed, surprised Bunny didn’t try to defend herself. Doesn’t say anything.

  “Okay, so you’re right, except it’s my parents’ money, not mine,” she says, her immaturity and lack of adulthood rearing its ugly head. Her eyes dart around the room, a spike of paranoia hitting her.

  “Same thing,” Anthony says.

  She’s irked, Billy’s question lingering in her head: Would you cut your parents off? Hypocrite. “What about your parents?” Bunny asks. Suddenly realizing he has parents, must’ve had parents, or still has parents? Which is weird to think, because whenever Bunny’s seen murderers in the news, it’s as if they were created (poof!) out of thin air, somehow landing on earth without ever having a family, a mother, a father, a daughter or son, without having ever been human.

  “What about my parents?” he asks.

  “Are you in touch with them?”

  “Course,” Anthony says, but Bunny’s bias is skeptical.

  “Where are they?” she asks, prodding his boundaries as if he doesn’t have the right t
o any.

  “Mom’s home.…” he says, but doesn’t continue.

  “What about your dad?” She sees Anthony fidget. “Where’s he?”

  Anthony rubs his forehead and looks down, still holding the receiver to his ear. She hit a heartstring.

  Feeling uncomfortable, Bunny fills the silence. “My dad’s not around that much either. He works a lot, he’s working so much right now I haven’t really seen him in weeks, and I turn—my birthday is coming up and he’s probably going to miss it. But he’ll certainly buy me a nice shiny present to make up for it!”

  Anthony looks up into the screen. “My pops would never miss my birthday,” he tells her with conviction. Bunny’s racial bias shatters across her feet, her hope of finding something—anything (the dad card, surely?)—in common with Anthony.

  “Oh,” she replies, embarrassed. “Well, that’s lucky.”

  “My dad’s dead, if you think that’s lucky too, and if he were alive, he’d never miss a birthday.”

  Shame flips on inside Bunny’s head. “I—I didn’t realize, I’m sorry.…”

  “You probably don’t realize a lot of things,” he says.

  Bunny grips the phone tight, clenching her jaw, trying not to show how suddenly fragile she feels. “How did he die, if… you don’t mind me asking?” Unsure of how a journalist might ask, she opts for good manners.

  The screen goes static. “Anthony?” Bunny grunts and waits a few seconds before smacking the side of the screen. “Ughhhhhh.” She grits her teeth, looks behind her to see the officer glaring do not hit the monitor, ma’am.

  “Anthony, you there?”

  His face appears and then disappears into long squiggles across the screen. “Yeah, I can hear you,” he says.

  Bunny leans over toward the screen, holds the receiver against her chin, and says in a very low voice, “This system fucking sucks… it’s garbage.”

  “Easy, they don’t like anyone starting shit over there.”

  Bunny likes the irony of Anthony telling her to behave, seesawing from believing in his guilt to believing in his innocence. She redirects the conversation back to his father. “I’ll behave—and I’m sorry,” she admits. “For saying that, or thinking that, about, you know, your dad. And, I shouldn’t have.”

  She looks down at her lap; when validation does not come to her, she looks back up at Anthony, who is silent in his gaze. Bunny wonders about his unwillingness to contain and hold her revelation, as if he somehow owed this to her? Is his silence a semblance of his guilt, or a semblance of his responsibility to protect himself? She stirs, uncomfortable in the nuance; she doesn’t understand, cramped inside her own white skin.

  “Oh, are you waiting for some kind of forgiveness?” he says.

  Bunny, tripping over her thoughts: “I… no. I’m sorry.” She is careful in her tone; a beat between them. “I’m sorry, I’m… but can I ask how he died?” Still afraid he’ll hang up again, but willing to take the risk.

  Anthony examines her, noticing the lump in her throat building. “Lung cancer,” he says.

  “Was he a smoker?”

  “Never smoked a day in his life.”

  “How do you think he got it?”

  Anthony breathes in. “From the chemical plants.”

  “Chemical plants? Did he work for one?”

  “Yep.”

  “Which one?” Bunny opens her journal again, pins the receiver between her ear and her shoulder.

  “Same one I worked for,” he says, looking straight into the monitor.

  Bunny takes the receiver back in her hand and looks up at him. “But, the company—the Banks family company?” Bunny’s heart starts to pound. So is he guilty? Confused and refraining from assumption, it hits her in the gut.

  Commotion again in the background, inmates fighting, a television blaring, the sound of metal clanking metal, doors opening and locking, static lines again.

  “Anthony…” Bunny says, hitting the side of the monitor. “this fucking thing.”

  He appears again. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you,” he says.

  “If you don’t talk to me, how am I supposed to help you?”

  “You wanna help me? That why you’re here? Really?”

  “I—I want to know the truth so I can help… but I need to know what happened,” Bunny says, trying to keep it vague, trying not to lose her sense of self, the reason she came here to begin with, selfish and self-seeking.

  “You’re not my fucking lawyer,” he says, growing frustrated, mistrustful, angry.

  “I know I’m not.… Who is, by the way? And why isn’t anyone talking about this? About your dad? I don’t understand—”

  “Who’s my fuckin’ lawyer? A broke-ass public defender is my fuckin’ lawyer, you think I got money to get a fuckin’ lawyer for myself? That’s for people like you.… It wasn’t in the news because they don’t want people like you knowing the company did anything wrong, that they’re all fuckin’ killers, that’s why.”

  “But… it would give you a motive, it would look clear why you did it, because of your dad.”

  “I didn’t fucking do anything!” he yells into the phone.

  Startled, Bunny jumps back into her chair, then composes herself so as not to look vulnerable in front of the guard. “Okay, wait, I didn’t mean it like that.…” she says, breathing faster.

  “I stormed into the owner’s office one afternoon, David Banks,” Anthony says in angst, “and I cussed the motherfucker out, screaming at him. He killed my pops. He didn’t even apologize, he just stood there with blood on his hands and pressed some button on his phone, then security came and took me away. So they blamed me for the deaths.”

  “I—I’m so sorry, Anthony.”

  “My father was a good man. He didn’t deserve that. I didn’t deserve that.” He shakes his head in trauma and disbelief.

  A moment of silence passes between them, neither one looking into the monitor.

  “They said you were disgruntled because you got fired,” Bunny says, trying to bury the terror of the possibility that he did do it, confirming the worst of her suspicions.

  “Yeah, they fired me after that.”

  “But they never said why you were fired in the news.”

  “Nope.…”

  Bunny hesitates; the ball is moving too fast and she feels a little uneasy, a little unsure if she’s up for this, if her gut is right or if she’s been misguided.

  “So would you help me find a better lawyer then?”

  “I—I need to talk to a few people first,” she says, looking back into the screen.

  “If you can’t help me, then get the fuck out,” Anthony says. He’s about to slam the phone down.

  Bunny pleads, “No, wait, I’m—I’m going to figure this out—”

  The sound of an alarm, time’s up.

  Anthony calms himself, swivels in his seat.

  “I’ll come back next weekend.”

  Visitors begin standing, phones clicking. Anthony hangs up.

  * * *

  Bunny heads for the gates of the graveyard but feels someone watching her. She spins around and looks up. A white man in an orange jumpsuit stands in the window, holding something in his hand, a broom or a mop. The sound of an alarm again. Bunny keeps walking, passing the tower of the jail covered in barbed wire. To her left sits a little blue guardhouse with mirrored windows; she tries to look inside but only sees herself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Before Betsy picks up the girls from school, she decides she will drop off the application at the Washington Club in person, for a few more minutes of face time. She has also (upon many nights filled with ambitious dread) decided that prior to setting up the interview lunch with the director, she will take a look at The Social List of Washington, DC (aka the Green Book) to prepare herself for the meeting. Because that meeting will determine whether her personality, her social position in Washington, her personal history (she’ll deal with her dead ex-husband’s
reputation later), her immediate family reputation, her husband’s job, and how much they give to charity are enough for her to be inducted into the club of clubs.

  Embarrassed by not having heard of the Green Book in her earlier days in Washington, which makes Betsy feel even more inadequate, and unwilling to ask Linda for a glimpse of her personal copy, she has made an appointment at the Georgetown Library’s archives to leaf through it.

  Upon entering the Georgetown public library, Betsy is horrified. It smells like an alleyway: garbage and piss with whiffs of old newspaper. As she passes two long tables with computer stations occupied mostly by homeless men using them to look for jobs and check e-mail, she is particularly disturbed by one white man—bald pate, rat ponytail in back—playing a computer game in which a guy in a tank is running over and shooting up civilians with his AK-47; the balding man is whispering to himself, “It means I can kill ten thousand digital bodies.”

  Betsy places her new Hermès neck scarf over her nose and walks up to the information desk.

  A young man wearing a silver bracelet looks up from his magazine. “Hi, Queen,” he says.

  “Oh. Hello!” Betsy can’t help but giggle. “Do you greet the entire general public this way?”

  “Oh no, honey.” He smiles. “I love your scarf.”

  “Thank you! I—I’m looking for the Peabody Room.”

  “Of course you are.” He grabs his set of keys on the desk. “Follow me. It’s on the third floor.”

  Betsy watches the young man turn the key next to the elevator’s third-floor button, thankful she’s on her way to a private room, which she hopes smells better.

  “You here for genealogy?” he asks.

  “More like… society.” Betsy winks, trying to make light of it. “A bit of research for a project I’m working on.”

  “Ooh-la-la, nothin’ like a little afternoon with the haves and the have-nots!” he jokes. The elevator door opens. He holds it for Betsy but does not exit with her. “No need for a key to get back down. George in the back can answer any questions you have. Ta-ta!”