“Ain’t it just like the sixties,” Judith said in Naomi’s ear in a strained, flat tone. Naomi thought for a moment that she must have meant this to be funny, but hadn’t, after all, been able to muster the humor. Indeed, she held Naomi’s elbow in a frantic grip, as if, without it, she might altogether sink from sight.
Chapter 40
Some Lives Won’t Blend
IN HER FIRST MATERNAL SHORTCUT SHE HAD taken to giving Polly those freeze-dried noodle soups from Japan, where the ratio of noodle to actual soup is so utterly stacked that you don’t really need a spoon at all. Just as well, Naomi thought, since she barely had energy to make the long trip into the next room. Polly adored the noodles. She sat delightedly making them wiggle through her fingers on the white plastic tray of her high chair and flinging them like rubber bands at the dining-room table, where Naomi, too, was attempting dinner.
But she had even less appetite than energy. It amazed her how swept away she felt, dragged on and under by the crowds of shouting women, the infamy of Charter and his experts, even the tug at her elbow as Judith forged her own indecipherable path through this madness. And to what possible future? The woman she herself had been, a woman living alone in a leaky little house, selling useless objects over the phone by day and then coming home at night vaguely bitter at something she could neither isolate nor name, that woman was gone. Just as she’d known it would happen on the first day, at that first moment on the riverbank. Gone, and only this suspension to replace it. Naomi’s future was one week long, after all, and no longer. In only one week’s time, the trial would end, and Polly must either return to her mother and whatever life Heather could provide or stay with Naomi in the ongoing tentativeness of their unnamed relationship. And when she thought of this, she was infused with rage. And when she knew it was rage, she understood how badly she needed a plan of her own.
She pulled Polly out of her high chair, the little girl dangling noodles. She was still hungry, so Naomi carried her to the kitchen and spooned her a few mouthfuls of yogurt right out of the cup; then she went to run a bath. Outside, it was inky dark: moonless and windless, the only sound the sucking of mud and the brook running its continuous loop of chatter. She peeled off Polly’s clothes and removed her diaper, then helped her scramble in. She had a pink sand bucket and a shovel, which she used to consolidate the froth of her bubble bath, and this proved so distracting that Naomi was able to sneak a shampoo into the event—a rare occurrence. She was just combing through the detangler when she heard the car.
Instantly, Naomi went stiff with fear. No one was expected, of course. It was not possible that she had made some arrangement tonight and then forgotten. In fact, no one came over at all but Judith, and Naomi knew Judith would not come without calling, especially since she had been so exhausted only two hours earlier. Naomi’s steep drive, moreover, was not the sort of place drivers chose to turn around in. There was no benevolent outcome she could conjure now, crouched by the bathtub, the comb suspended over Polly’s bobbing head. This was a bad thing, like that thing from Macbeth, Something wicked this way comes, or the 4 a.m. phone call that cannot possibly be from somebody wanting to say hi, or the approaching stranger at the end of “The Monkey’s Paw.” She thought—inevitably—of Ann, rigged up with another posse of the righteous, ready to circle her sorry house with a line of fire. She thought of Sue Deacon, itching for another fight. Or any of the others—those authors of her hate mail, those breathy admirers on her answering machine, who might have decided it was time to meet, in person. The car sounds ground down the muddy drive.
Naomi scooped Polly up in a towel, grabbed her bucket of thinning bubbles, and set her on the kitchen floor. She picked up the phone and dialed the Goddard police, then, while it was ringing, withdrew the largest knife from her knife block and gripped it in a damp hand.
“Goddard police. Is this an emergency?”
“I don’t know.” Naomi’s voice came out soft. “There’s somebody at my house.”
“Ma’am?”
The car door slapped shut. The squash of mud under heavy feet.
“Somebody’s at my door,” Naomi insisted. “Listen, will you just stay on the line for a minute? I’m—”
Then a knock.
“Who’s at your door?” the voice on the other end of the line said.
“Hold on. Stay on the line. I’m going to see.”
She put it down on the counter. Normal, normal. She held the knife behind her and walked toward the door. “Naomi?” a voice said, clear through Daniel’s cheap pine.
She stopped in amazement.
“Can I speak to you, please?”
“Wait,” she said. “Wait one minute.”
Naomi went back to the telephone. “I’m sorry. It’s a false alarm.”
“Nobody there?” the voice said.
“That’s right. Thank you for your time.”
“Not at all.” The man hung up. Naomi went to the door.
He was not wearing his uniform. He stood on the porch in corduroys, a big gray sweater with a raveled collar, and heavy boots.
“I just called you,” Naomi said. She smiled a bit, since that struck her as funny.
“You called me?” Nelson said. “But why?”
“Because there was some unknown person coming down my drive. I got scared. So I called the police.”
“And here I am. Who says we’re slow on the uptake?” He gazed past her at Polly, on the floor. “Why is your car parked up at the road?”
“The mud. I’m scared of not being able to get it up the hill till summer. My ex-husband didn’t exactly grade it properly.”
“No,” Nelson said. He frowned then. “When you talked to them just now, did you say it was me?”
“No. I said no one was here, after all.”
He nodded, biting his lower lip. “That’s good.” He saw the knife she still held. “I don’t think you’re going to need that on me.”
Naomi looked down. “No. Sorry.”
“You really were scared.”
“I’ve been getting calls. Judith has, too.”
Nelson sighed. “Naomi, I need to speak with you. May I speak with you?”
And there it was: that flash of before. The chill blue of his eyes, and the withered places beneath them, that she had loved. The skin through his thin hair.
“Of course you can,” Naomi said. She went back to get Polly, who held up her arms, shivering. “I need to get Polly ready for bed. You come, too.”
He followed her. They went into Polly’s little room, and he stood in the doorway watching her as she put on a new diaper and Polly’s footed pajamas and finished combing her wet hair. She filled a spouted cup with water and placed it in a holder over the rim of the crib. Polly chose a book and Naomi read it to her, hearing as if from some distance the high, slightly disingenuous musicality of her voice as the little story—a small bird, ironically, in search of its mother—came around to its end. She did not want to sing Polly her lullaby, because she was embarrassed in front of Nelson, but Polly would not be left alone without it, so Naomi leaned close and crooned: Now I’m glad to be a woman, glad to be alive, glad for the children to take my place, glad for the will to survive …
Polly looked up at the doorway, her face blank but her eyes large and hard. Then she let Naomi cover her and watched them without protest as they left her to sleep.
“You’re good at this,” he said. His voice was quiet.
Naomi shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s pretty easy.”
“The way you talk to her. You’re good at it.”
“Thanks.”
“I always thought she was a strange child,” Nelson said. They were in the kitchen. “A little strange. The way she stared.”
“She’s very contemplative. She takes things in, that’s all.”
“She makes me uncomfortable, to tell you the truth.” He looked at Naomi, reddening a bit.
“Well, Nelson, you came into her house and took her mother
away. What do you expect?”
His eyes widened. “You think she remembers that?”
“Remembers? Well”—Naomi put Polly’s dish in the sink—“probably not the way we remember things. You know, not sequentially. But it must have been a big event for her.”
“Yes,” he agreed. He was frowning again. “God, I wish it hadn’t happened. You couldn’t guess how terrible …” He petered out.
“Please don’t compare your suffering to Heather’s. Or Polly’s. Or mine, for that matter,” Naomi said dismissively. “Just don’t do that.”
“I won’t.” He shook his head. “I won’t.” He seemed to be considering what he would say next. She decided to help him along.
“So why are you here, Nelson? What am I supposed to do, forgive you?”
He looked up at her, momentarily taken aback. “No, not at all. You’re just supposed to listen to me. There are things I need to tell you.” Nelson stopped. “You could give me something to drink.”
She had a bottle of wine in her fridge, and two cans of Rolling Rock. She gave him one, and he thanked her. His hand, brushing hers, was hot against the cold metal. He opened the tab and sipped. He had never been a heavy drinker. She led him out to the living room and sat him down on the couch, brushing a few of Polly’s toys off the Indian blanket that covered it. She wondered if Nelson ever thought of this couch.
“What things,” Naomi said, “do you need to tell me?”
He closed his eyes. “Of course, I shouldn’t be here.”
“No?” Naomi said evenly.
“I shouldn’t be talking to you. In talking to you I’ve already decided not to go on being a police officer. I want you to understand that.”
Taken aback, Naomi stared. “Okay. But I don’t want you to do anything that will make you lose your job.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He shook his head briskly. “I couldn’t do this anymore, anyway. Not now.”
She held her own beer in both hands, nervously popping the metal tab in and out. “Okay, then.”
“I went with Charter, back last fall. He was going downstate to meet with the attorney general. He wanted me there, so I went.”
Naomi took a sip and waited.
“I was still kind of out of the loop. I didn’t know what he was planning, really. I was just supposed to sit there and play the local sheriff. You know, the man on the scene. So it wasn’t just like Charter came in and messed up a local investigation. I was supposed to make out that we never could have solved it on our own, if not for the D.A.”
He laid his head back against the cushion, not looking at Naomi.
“You’ve got to understand, I didn’t foresee any of this.”
“Who could have?” Naomi said, trying for a comforting tone.
“So Warren says to Charter, Can we really win this case? He’s been reading the reports, you see, and it seems farfetched to him, and he has a lot to lose if it all falls apart. He tells Charter he can go ahead, but only if he’s sure this stuff about the two babies and the two fathers will hold up. He can see what they’re going to make of this if it turns out Charter picked the wrong girl and the real person who stabbed the kid and killed it was just someone else completely. I mean, he can understand why Charter made the mistake, but he doesn’t want to go forward with it if there’s any doubt at all.”
Naomi waited.
“So Charter says, The girl confessed to the stabbing. And he knew it was her, for both kids.”
She sighed. “All right, Nelson. But you know, this isn’t really news. I really could have imagined this exact scene, even without your telling me.”
“No, there’s more. So then Warren looks at Charter and asks him if there are any holes in the interrogation. Legal holes. Like, is it absolutely foolproof? Because if this thing is going to rest on the confession, it had better be perfect. And Charter says yes, it is.”
“Naturally,” Naomi said, shrugging.
“And then Warren looks at me and asks me the same thing.”
She began to feel funny. It was the way he stopped here, where it made no sense for him to stop. He was waiting for her to prepare herself. Naomi looked at him. Nelson’s eyes were closed, and she found herself watching the tiny pulses of motion beneath the lids, as if he were looking for the next words in that darkness.
“And what did you say?” Naomi asked.
“I said there was no problem with the interrogation or the confession.” He considered his own hands. “That was a lie.”
So, she thought. So.
“There was a problem with the interrogation. It wasn’t clean.”
“I see,” she said softly.
“The confession wasn’t clean.”
“Okay.”
They sat for a moment like this. Nelson took small sips of his beer. His legs were crossed, the corduroy worn and shiny where they met. He looked, suddenly, flushed. She thought that she ought to say he should take his sweater off if he was hot, since she would have asked him to take his coat off by now if he’d come in wearing a coat, but that seemed awkward, so she said nothing. He was looking past her at the dining table, and beyond to the Eliot Porter poster on her wall, the same one everyone had, with the pink-tinged woods. Then he was looking at her.
“I’m sorry, Naomi.”
She nodded, though she felt somewhat fraudulent accepting an apology that was more appropriately due Heather. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
“Because I’m going to do something about it. I’m going to do what I should have done last fall.”
“You’re calling Warren, then?” she said, her voice full of incredulous hope.
“I’ve already done it. This afternoon. When Heather collapsed like that, I felt like such a colossal piece of shit. And I never dreamed, all this stuff they said about her in court. That doctor talking about her, and the shrink saying she was a psychopath. And Ashley! Who gave it to just about every woman in town, pretending he was a family man! I knew I could have stopped this. And I’d lied, which I was miserable about. On the stand. So it’s over for me, anyway. A police officer who commits perjury … Well.” Unaccountably he smiled. “I mean, they do, of course. But a police officer who admits to committing perjury, that’s the end of his life as a police officer, do you see?”
She looked at him, amazed and admiring. “I see. I’m sorry.”
“My decision.” His voice was thick, though he nodded when he said it. “I’ll tell Judith to recall me. I’ll say what actually took place.”
Naomi swallowed. “You’re really a decent man, Nelson.”
“No. A decent man wouldn’t have let it get this far. And that girl in jail all this time. And the little girl.”
“It’s all right. The important thing is, you’re doing it now.” She touched him. She touched the back of his head. He let his head sink back against her hand.
And there they sat for a moment, neither moving, both testing the weight of this contact. Finally, he turned his head, still in her palm.
“Naomi. Can I please stay a little longer?”
She kissed him. Her mouth remembered his mouth, her tongue his tongue. She felt his hand against her face. So he does, she thought vaguely. It wasn’t only she who had wanted …
“I wish,” he said, though somewhat indistinctly. His fingers were beneath her hair, lifting it. He seemed to pull it over his own face, burying himself beneath it.
Now he took off his sweater, and he was hot, after all, she saw, with dark spots under his arms that smelled sharp, though clean, as if he had washed before coming here to sweat. She wished she had done the same. She let herself imagine she had bathed with Polly, the two of them as they sometimes did, lapped in bubbles, but then thought how even more afraid she might have been if she had been naked that way and the car came down her drive, how vulnerable to cross the bathroom floor dripping water and bubbles to the telephone, how she would not want him to see her like that, barely wrapped in her towel, because she was not beautiful. �
��I didn’t know you were coming” was what she managed to say at the end of this.
“You look wonderful,” Nelson said, his weight across her. “I love how you look. You smell wonderful.”
The mechanics of first sex, she was thinking. That compulsion at the outset to just get it done. And the debate over whether a finger’s insertion made you a non-virgin, and how the clutch of a breast was supposed to give either party any pleasure. Matthew Kaufman explaining why a French kiss was not the same as an ordinary kiss in the spare room of his father’s weekend house in Pound Ridge. The terror of being thought a prude (What are you, hung up?) or worse, a romantic, and the determined we’re-way-past-that nocturnal meanderings in the college house she shared with three men and two women. The shock of coming with another person in the room; then, all too soon, the tedious politics of orgasm, and Daniel, and their efficient, egalitarian fucking: one for you, then one for me. And Ashley, whose excuse was that he loved women and what was the matter with that? And now this.
The Sabbathday River Page 48