“I don’t need you,” I said.
“Thanks a lot!” he said indignantly, and pushed past me, waddling back to the limousine.
Harriet watched him, interested. After Prosser got in and slammed the door behind him, she said, “Men don’t like hearing you don’t need them.”
“He’s a big boy.”
She laughed forcefully, her skinny body quaking, a hand raised to stop her mouth. She was excited and embarrassed—she must have taken my remark as a sexual innuendo. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.
“I can help with Naomi,” I told her, keeping my distance, my voice gentle. “I have money, I’m healthy, I live in her neighborhood, I know her friends, her school—”
“He doesn’t trust you. He says you hate him.”
We both heard rattling from above. Naomi was trying to raise the window. She had seen me. I thought I heard her muffled voice say, “Molly!”
“Oh God,” Harriet groaned.
“She knows I’m here,” I pressed her.
“Molly! Molly! Molly!” Now I could definitely hear Naomi’s calls, muffled by a door, the flight of stairs, and the hall. “It’s not fair!” Harriet complained. I was about to argue when I realized she meant Ben’s injunction. “Come in,” she said, and stepped aside.
I ran up the stairs—they sounded flimsy, hollow—before she could think better of her offer. One of the three doors leading off the second-floor hallway was shut. I tried it. Harriet had locked Naomi in. “She’s locked in,” I said. Hearing me, Naomi’s young voice escalated: “Molly! I’m in here!” Her keen desperation pierced the wood and made me crazy.
Harriet moved without raising her feet off the floor, in no hurry. She used an old-fashioned latchkey to open the door. “I locked it so she couldn’t run downstairs,” Harriet explained. I could have hit her. I could have hit anyone at that moment. Everyone, everything, seemed demented and insane. Did that mean I was the lunatic?
In Harriet’s bedroom, the television was on, broadcasting the news. If they showed a report about Wendy’s murder, she would see it, see the sickening clip I had seen earlier, film of the state police carrying her mother in a body bag from where Ben had parked the car, while Naomi slept in the back, her head on the cold leather. She might have already.
Naomi hugged me so hard I had to drag her a foot or so to reach the power button and turn the set off. Naomi pressed against me all the while, saying, “Molly’s here! Molly’s here!” over and over in a frantic, almost unintelligible chant.
“She’s so glad to see you,” Harriet commented without envy, with relief. She lay down on the bed. She took a heating pad from the night table, bandaging her hip with it. She adjusted the dial. “Why did you turn the TV off?” She smiled apologetically. “I’m going to be on, you know.”
“Can we go home?” Naomi asked me. She pulled on my arm to get me down to her level. “I want to go home with Molly,” she told Harriet.
Her hair was dirty, greasy, dull. That bothered me, reminded me of the lice, seemed symbolic of the shelter, of Harriet’s dreary house. “No. Not until your father is…” I had to remind myself of the euphemism: “…finished helping the police.”
“I’m hungry,” Naomi whined.
“I gave you soup,” Harriet complained.
“I don’t like soup!” Naomi was exasperated. At least she wasn’t scared of Harriet.
“I don’t know what children eat,” Harriet said. She groaned. She put a hand under the waist of her skirt and seemed to massage her stomach. “I don’t feel well,” she whispered. “I don’t know if I’m up to making a meal.”
“I can make us dinner,” I said, forcing cheerfulness, like the mother in a fifties sitcom.
Harriet brightened. “Great,” she said. But then she worried, “I don’t think there’s anything to cook.”
I sent Jake for groceries. He howled at this, pretending his objection was to the propriety of my staying with Harriet and Naomi; really, I think he felt shopping was undignified. I answered his legal complaints one by one while writing out a list of what he should buy, pointing out that if we hoped to use Harriet I had to gain her confidence. Meanwhile, I would be taking care of Naomi, giving her a decent meal, shampooing her hair, and warding off Buchenwald anecdotes.
Once Harriet observed that Naomi was calm as long as I was present, and I agreed to become the housekeeper and cook, she allowed me to stay. Naomi and I went downstairs to make dinner. Harriet lay content in bed, soothed by her heating pad, waiting to see herself on the news. Prosser returned with supplies. I dispatched him to Manhattan to begin the paperwork on Harriet’s suit for custody. I promised I would plead our case to Harriet after Naomi was asleep.
Naomi helped me boil the spaghetti and heat a jar of sauce—no gourmet treat, but her favorite dish nevertheless. We brought a tray to Harriet. She was thrilled. “A hot meal,” she commented, as if it were a luxury. We returned downstairs to our own portions. While we were cooking Naomi had seemed happy; but at the sight of the meal, she sat listlessly. Her shoulders slumped, her blue eyes were rounded by sadness. She held her fork limply, poking the strands of pasta.
“When do I go back to school?” she asked.
“Maybe tomorrow. If you want to. Do you want to go back?”
She let the handle of the fork go; it clattered on Harriet’s yellow Formica kitchen table. “To Riverside?”
“Of course it would be Riverside.”
“Oh,” came out of her, a sound of relief, and her face flushed.
“Were you worried you might have to go to school somewhere else?”
She nodded, her chin quivering. “I thought I wouldn’t get to see my friends, you know”—she was crying, her eyes were dripping, her face collapsed—”and I didn’t want to have to make a whole new—”
I opened my arms. She slid off her chair and ran into them. Her head shook against my breast. She cried for a long time; obviously this wasn’t about losing her friends. I stroked her greasy head of hair and let myself go too. My first few tears felt enormous, stuck in their ducts, encrusted by the fear and horror and rush of the past few days. Letting go of them hurt, but the tears washed everything clean. When we were done, I was lighter, freer—once again able to imagine being happy.
I hadn’t wept for Wendy until then, until her daughter cried in my arms. Holding her sorrow, there was solace. That was yet another reason, a selfish one, for taking care of Naomi. Being with her made me feel better.
SHE WOKE UP SCREAMING. I FOUND HER OUT OF BED, rooted in the center of the guest room, dressed in the over-long pink nightie borrowed from Harriet, shoulders bowed, face down into her hands, alone and in terror.
I put my arms around her and felt all bone; the sounds vibrated through her fatless ribs, as if she were hollow inside. For a while the screeches shattered her words. Eventually the sounds were glued together into, “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!” Said over and over, in twos, with a moan, an inward gasp of breath between each set.
“He’ll be back,” I interjected, and we were soon a duet of hysteria and comfort.
The evening had been a series of failures. Once Naomi was—I thought—asleep for the night, I had called Prosser. Since I sent him back to Manhattan he had done nothing. He was pouting at what he called my high-handedness and wanted thanks for all he had done so far, as well as an apology for my insulting behavior at Harriet’s house. I used my grief as an excuse. Although in fact I don’t think any of my actions were flighty or irrational, I pretended to Prosser that since Wendy’s body was discovered I had been in a daze, that my dismissal of him was due to nerves, to the loss I had suffered. His feathers didn’t smooth easily—they were still puffy with indignation even after my apologies. He ended the call in a disdainful tone; he said he would get on it in the morning, once he had taken care of a more urgent case.
Screw you, I thought. If Prosser needed to be stroked for every good deed, then he was too much trouble.
Stoppard confirmed my assum
ption when he phoned minutes later. He said I was foolish to ignore Prosser’s advice against spending the night at Harriet’s house. “You’re handling Jake clumsily. After all, he’s doing you a favor,” Stoppard lectured. I realized Stoppard might also be speaking for himself as well as the firm’s view of my own billable time. En route to the shelter I had wondered how long their professional goodwill would stretch, vaguely imagining at least a distance of a few weeks. No matter. Although I hoped against hope, already I could see the road ahead, the only real choice open to me.
Still I made the effort. I went into Harriet’s bedroom. She was flushed, talking on the phone (to her sister Miriam), drinking cold tea, her eyes, no matter where her head went, tied by invisible strings to the television. She had seen herself on the five o’clock news, the six o’clock, the eight o’clock, and now she awaited the ten o’clock.
I asked if she could interrupt her call with her sister and she complied. Then I botched the pitch of Jake’s strategy, stumbling when I got to the main point—that Harriet would have to petition in family court to get custody away from Ben. While she listened, she twisted a few hairs of her dark eyebrows around and around, distracted by each changing image on the set (she had muted the volume), and seemed in a trance when I was done.
“Oh…” she said, and paused, staring ahead. Her face seemed to lengthen. “Ben’s my family—I can’t do that to him. I can’t take him to court.”
I fancied I heard reluctance, that she was attracted by something in my proposal. The promise of more notoriety? The promise of money? I was unsure and worried that I might offend if I became more explicit.
“Of course, after you get custody, you might want to move into Manhattan and live with my husband and me. We have a large apartment, three bedrooms, and we’ll hire a cook. There’s plenty of money. Perhaps we could even persuade Ben to sell us his apartment, he’ll need the money for his defense, and you and Naomi could live there.”
“No.” She had made up her mind. She pushed the heating pad off her and sat up in bed. “I can’t.”
“It’s really not a betrayal of Ben. In the end, it’s the best thing for him and his daughter.”
She shook her head no. “I can’t live in Manhattan.” She continued to shake her head. “I’m too high-strung for that pace. That’s why, even if I had recovered from my injury, I couldn’t have rejoined Graham and danced. I can’t take that kind of pressure. Makes me unhappy.”
Her phone rang. “This is she,” Harriet said after a hello. She covered the receiver to tell me in a thrilled whisper, “It’s the New York Times!” The reporter had only to ask one question and Harriet was off on a marathon. Harriet spoke of her close relationship to Wendy, her history as a virtual second mother to Naomi. Harriet’s pale face flushed while the lies grew more fantastic; prudently, she turned her body sideways away from me and my gaze. I pictured grabbing her mass of hair and shaking her rag doll body until I held nothing but the empty fabric of her robe. Witch, I called her silently, and wished I could pour water on her and watch her melt away.
You feel rage, Stefan likes to say to me, when you can’t control what’s happening.
Who doesn’t?
I had spoken to Stefan earlier, called him first, before all the others, while Naomi and I were cooking.
“Did Amelia get you?” he asked.
I quickly launched into a review of recent events, not only to report to him, but to forestall more talk of the memorial service.
“What can I do to help?” he asked, sweetly, although I sensed he didn’t approve of my actions. “Should I come out there?”
I asked him if I could offer up our lives, or at least our bedrooms, to Harriet and Naomi.
“You really think that’s necessary? There’s no other way to get custody?”
“It’s a desperate situation, Stefan.”
“I know.” He hummed, a habit, one of many stalling mannerisms. “Hmmmm.” The phone line buzzed from the sound, almost a mantra. “Do what you have to for Naomi. We’ll work it out.”
That is goodness. Do what you have to for Naomi. Stefan doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t evade with possibilities. From time to time Wendy used to be overcome with admiration for Stefan; she’d jump to her feet, rush to him, pinch his cheeks, and squeal; “You’re so good! I can’t believe how good you are!”
Listening to Harriet give her interview to the Times, I regretted that I had told Stefan to stay at home. He might have impressed Harriet, might even know how to deal with her. She could easily be one of his patients, although she couldn’t afford his fee.
“I’m surprised,” Harriet said when she hung up. The edges of her hair were wet with perspiration, her cheeks were red, and she panted between words, winded—she could have just finished a two-mile run. “You expect the Times to have culturally sophisticated people,” she commented about her interview. “He hadn’t heard of Graham.”
“Harriet,” I tried again, “in the long run Ben is never going to be able to devote the kind of attention to Naomi that she needs, given what’s happened. He has his defense—”
“Look, I don’t like all this going behind people’s backs—it’s ugly. It’s not the kind of person I am. I’m not a crafty person. I’m not shrewd. Never have been. I know you’re a lawyer, you’re a suspicious person. You have to be. But I trust people. I love people. Ordinary people especially. And I find that if you trust them, they’ll do right by you. What I’ll do is ask Ben straight out. He’ll need money, you’re right about that; he won’t have a lot of time to devote to Naomi, you’re right about that too. If we ask him straight out—instead of behind his back—he may say yes.”
So my plea had ended in a disastrous ruling. And obviously she would also be a disaster as a surrogate parent. Prosser had said I would stand no chance against her in family court if Ben were found guilty and named her as guardian. Momentarily, I experienced what my favorite law professor at Yale called “Common Sense Silliness,” namely, the phenomenon when you assume the court will rectify an obviously unjust condition. I thought, surely a judge would give me Naomi over this nut. Common Sense Silliness. The court neither could, nor would. She was blood, I was water. The same with Ben. More so. Ben was thicker blood.
Again, Harriet’s phone rang and this time it was an Associated Press reporter, someone with whom she had apparently already become great friends from a previous conversation. “I have to help him with some fact checking,” she whispered to me. “Would you get me another cup of tea? I’m hoarse from all the talking.”
I kept her throat lubricated and she continued to give interviews until past midnight. “I’m exhausted,” she told me then. “Are you staying up?”
“I’ll read for a while.”
“If there are more calls, tell them I can’t give any interviews until after lunch tomorrow. Don’t you think that’s right? I can’t be at their beck and call.” She had become accustomed to my role as her servant in only one evening.
I agreed to everything. Anything to shut her up. “And when you go to sleep, maybe you should take the phone off the hook.” That was her last instruction.
I couldn’t fall asleep because I was busy thinking murderous thoughts about her. I had just calmed down when Naomi’s screams started my heart racing again and brought me, breathless, to her side.
“I want Daddy!” Naomi said in the grip of her night terror. “I want to see my daddy.”
“He’ll be back soon,” I reassured her. I stroked her back and rethought the evening. I was alone, really. Harriet was obviously unreliable and I could already hear, in a few weeks, both Prosser and Stoppard saying, quite reasonably: “There’s nothing more we can try. The law is against us. Once he’s found guilty we can make another effort.” And they would be right. Only it meant that Naomi, longing for her father, needing a parent and a hero, would live with Ben while the world turned against them. And Naomi—as would any loving child—must take his side and see it through his eyes. Through the eyes of
her mother’s killer.
I got Naomi into bed and patted her back.
“Could you sing to me?” She turned her head and kept one eye on me.
I couldn’t think of anything except “Rock-A-Bye Baby.” Naomi didn’t protest my selection, although she was too old for it. When I sang the verse, “And down will come baby, cradle and all,” I was surprised by the lyrics. That was meant to be soothing? “And down will come baby, cradle and all”?
Disturbed, I hummed something else, I didn’t know what at first. I recognized it in midhum to be a number from the Three Penny Opera, one of Stefan’s favorites, and then I remembered the lyrics: “There was a time, but now it’s all gone by, when we were poor, but happy, she and I.”
I suppose Stefan would think there was significance in my choice—I know he would. I didn’t seek the words, though. I wanted the melody, music both sad and strong.
Naomi’s eyes closed. Her breathing sounded congested. I raised the blankets to her chin and kissed her cheek. “Good night,” I whispered.
“Good night, Wonder Woman,” she answered.
I shivered, thrilled. Wendy had told Naomi her secret nickname for me. That was a surprise. The indirect contact was almost scary—it was as if my friend were still alive, telling me what to do.
OF COURSE BEN FLIESS SURPRISED ME. WHEN HE phoned Harriet at six-thirty in the morning and found out I was there, instead of blowing up he asked her to put me on.
I had fallen asleep only two hours before, into a sweaty, headachy tunnel of dreams, all filmed in silver colors, dreams of the dead: my sad broken-faced mother; animated Wendy; and my benefactor, Naomi, baked brown on her beach in Maine, smiling from under her huge horn-rimmed sunglasses, singing lullabies.
Harriet’s pasty face, looming over me, seemed to be part of the quiet nightmares: “It’s Ben. He wants to talk to you.”
But he’s dead too, I thought, and stumbled after Harriet into her musty bedroom, remembering, as I took the hot receiver (did Harriet sleep with it in her hand?) where I was.
The Murderer Next Door Page 11