“Well,” she said, standing up from the chair and pulling the hoodie more tightly around her, “at least you stopped—you know. With my mother.” What had she been going to say? Sleeping with, again? Having sex? It was hard for me to believe she would have used the term “fucking.” She let the phrase slide, whatever it was. “That’s something.”
There was no point in letting her know that this had been her mother’s idea, not mine. That if I’d had my way, we would not have stopped.
I was about to close the door behind her when she asked, “Where do you work?” as if it had suddenly occurred to her. She turned on the threshold to look back into the apartment. “Didn’t you tell me you had a studio here somewhere?”
“In the attic,” I told her, recognizing immediately that I had made a mistake. But when she asked if she could see, I felt I had no choice but to say Sure and lead her up.
Immediately she walked over to the canvas containing the first few strokes, the hesitant beginning of my father’s face. I couldn’t deny the pleasure I took in the exclamation Joy made when she saw it. “That’s awesome,” she said, as if she’d forgotten entirely (if only for that moment) the reason she had come. I know it’s the word all teenagers use (like “sucks”), but in her exhalation of it now I heard more than just politeness or habit.
But I was feeling nervous; what if someone had seen her enter my house? It was one thing for Cass to look the other way, do her best to hide her disapproval when she saw Susanne with me. A white teenage girl was another matter entirely. I was on the verge of saying that she could come over another time, if she wanted (though I already knew I would discourage this if she took me up on it), when Joy stepped toward the window and peered into the round pencil holder containing the bouquet of bookmarks Grandee had made. “What are these?” she asked, picking one up.
I described the tradition to her, how each year my grandmother would take some leftover fabric from a piece of clothing she’d sewn for herself and stitch it around cardboard to make me a bookmark. I only ever used two at a time—one for my commonplace book and one for whatever book I was reading—but I rotated them and kept the others in this container and another in my bedroom. “These colors are unbelievable,” Joy breathed, picking up the orange one Grandee had fashioned out of the scarf I’d painted for American Commonplace.
“You can have it, if you want,” I told her, though as soon as she was gone I knew I would regret having given the keepsake away. But my slight trepidation had swelled to a near panic as I imagined Cass watching and waiting for the white girl to emerge, or a group of mothers from down the street escorting their children up to my stoop for candy and encountering Joy on her way out.
Joy thanked me and stuck the bookmark in the pocket of her hoodie, then allowed me to usher her back downstairs. At the door she thanked me again, told me she was sorry for being a jerk when she first got there, and tripped lightly into the night. Looking out after her, I saw with relief that my stretch of the street was empty.
Back in Grandee’s chair, I reached for the pad I’d set aside before Joy’s appearance, turned to a new page, and began sketching quickly, trying to remember all the details I’d noted as we spoke. All the expressions she had exhibited during the half hour of her visit: dread when she asked about my affair with her mother, resignation when I confirmed that she was right, admiration when she saw the results of my first brushstrokes, pleasure when I gave her the bookmark to take home. Dark spaces occluded her eyes, but the face I drew was bright, intelligent, alert. I knew from Susanne that it was a face Joy had kept hidden from her mother for quite some time now, and I knew it was the face Susanne would want most to preserve.
When I finished, I sat back and remembered with a short stab that Susanne would not be following through on her request for me to paint Joy’s portrait. For a moment I thought about crumpling the sketch up and tossing it in the trash. But in the end I ripped the page out and stuck it in the drawer I reserve for things I probably won’t ever need again, but don’t want to get rid of, just in case.
Diversion
Though they knew that everyone at Belle Meadow—the nurses, the aides, and as many residents as could follow the action—would be watching the Yankees try to win the World Series on the big screen in the Solarium that first Wednesday in November, Susanne and Gil decided to go ahead and throw the party they’d planned for Emilia’s eighty-sixth birthday. They assumed Joy would want to stay home and watch Derek Jeter while she worked on her Othello paper, so they were pleased when she volunteered instead to come and help with the party, serving cake and ice cream on paper plates to Emilia and the other Belle Meadow residents after dinner. Emilia reached up to take off her bib (the staff delicately referred to it as a “clothing protector,” especially when family was around, but they all knew a bib was what it was), and when Mirabelle asked, “Don’t you want to eat some of your own nice cake? It’s your birthday, you know,” Emilia ripped the bib off and flung it to the floor, and Susanne saw that it was all Gil could do not to applaud.
When the police entered the room, Susanne saw them before Gil did, and instinctively she understood that whatever had brought them to Belle Meadow meant her family was in trouble. The older officer, with blue eyes that made her think of Paul Newman though this man’s face was not as symmetrical or handsome, approached and asked, “Mr. and Mrs. Enright?” Next to him Joy stood staring down at the floor, and it was this more than anything—her inability or unwillingness to look her mother in the eye—that signaled to Susanne how serious it was. “We’re arresting your daughter, I’m sorry to say.”
Susanne breathed “What?” at the same time Gil demanded, “What for?”
“Possession of a controlled substance without a prescription.” Gil opened his mouth to say something else, but Doug Armstrong held a hand up to indicate Don’t interrupt. “Criminal sale of a prescription for a controlled substance. Illegal sale of prescription drugs.”
“That’s horse pucky.” Gil actually laughed, and for a moment Susanne was tempted to, too, but for the wrong reason: most people would have said “bullshit” to what the cop told them, but Gil stuck to his old-fashioned profanity even in a situation like this. Joy had been standing to one side of the officers, but when she heard why they’d come, she moved away, not meeting her mother’s eyes. The impulse toward laughter left Susanne, who abruptly felt sick to her stomach.
“We don’t understand what you’re saying,” she told Armstrong. “I mean, we do, but it can’t have anything to do with our daughter. Joy doesn’t do drugs.”
“You may be right about that.” He nodded to concede her claim, which made Susanne feel absurdly gratified. “We’re not charging her with taking them. As in ingesting.” He pantomimed the tossing of pills into his own mouth, and Susanne had to look away. “Just the possession, and the selling. But that’s bad enough. Worse, in some ways, when we’re talking about the law.”
Gil said, “You’ve got the wrong girl. You must have. And anyway, what are you doing here? This is a nursing home, for God’s sake. We’re celebrating my mother’s birthday.”
“I’m sorry to crash the party,” Doug Armstrong said. “I mean that sincerely.” Susanne tried not to show her irritation at his words; in her experience, anyone who went out of his way to say he meant something “sincerely” didn’t mean it at all. “But we can’t help where a crime takes place.”
“You’re saying a crime happened here?” Now she couldn’t keep her own voice from scaling.
“Well, not in this room precisely. But the facility itself, yes. It originated at that development out by the lake—I think you were working on that some, weren’t you?” Armstrong nodded at Gil. How much else does he know about us? Susanne thought. About everyone in this town? “We’ve been following your daughter and one of the employees here,” Armstrong added. “We wanted to make sure of it before we moved in.”
One of the employees here—it had to be Jason, of course. Joy’s crush. Although A
rmstrong was suggesting that it wasn’t because of a crush, or because she wanted doughnuts, that Joy had allowed Jason to lure her away from her parents that day; she’d followed him so that they could trade drugs and cash. If someone wanted a source for drugs to sell, wasn’t a nursing home the perfect front? Staff handed out Ativan and Norco like candy here, to keep the residents docile if not asleep. And who would ever expect a sedate, respectable place like Belle Meadow to be tied up in illegal drug trafficking?
Armstrong told them, “We apprehended a customer who purchased drugs from your daughter. Xanax. Hydrocodone. Klonopin. Plus a blank prescription from a psychiatrist, the father of one of your daughter’s friends.”
“Delaney Stowell,” Susanne told Gil, but she could tell he’d already guessed.
“Also, we just confiscated these from her jacket.” Armstrong held up a cellophane bag filled with small yellow pills. “They look like benzos to me.”
“Why are you looking here in the first place?” Gil asked. Then he repeated, “This is a nursing home.” Her husband seemed literally stunned, Susanne thought. As if from a blow to the brain.
Armstrong answered, “We’ve been keeping an eye on one of the aides here.” Yes, Jason—of course, Susanne thought again. “We knew he was part of the whole thing. There were cell calls back and forth between him and your daughter; one call wouldn’t have meant much, but there were enough to where we were pretty sure we had something.”
“Then you’ve absolutely made a mistake.” Gil wore an expression Susanne didn’t see in him often: triumph in anticipation of proving the other person wrong. Ordinarily, he was not that kind of man, but she knew that when it came to somebody accusing his daughter, what kind of man he was might change. “Joy doesn’t even have a cell phone.”
Armstrong raised his eyebrows. He looked at Susanne, and when she didn’t back Gil up, her husband raised his eyebrows, too.
“I was going to tell you,” she told Gil. “There just hasn’t been a right time.” The truth was that she’d been afraid to announce another betrayal when the truce between them, and Gil’s return home, was still so fresh. Joy seemed to have understood that she should keep the phone hidden. Even Susanne hadn’t seen her use it after the first week since they’d made the trip together to purchase it.
Though she could tell Gil was cringing inside, he would not show this to the police. “What happens now?” he asked.
“We’ll need to take her down to the station for processing, but then it’s up to a judge. Those blank scrips can go for a hundred and fifty a pop, and the pills are worth a lot, too. What she did is a felony”—Armstrong paused at the sound of Susanne’s gasp—“but I wouldn’t let that scare me too much right now, if I were you. They’re a lot easier on youthful offenders. She’ll probably get off with diversion and counseling.”
“A felony,” Susanne whispered.
“I know this is hard. A shock,” Armstrong said. “You know I have a daughter myself.” Only then did Susanne remember that this was the father of Joy’s English teacher.
Over Joy’s protests that she had been set up and that it was all a mistake, the officers took her to the station, completed their procedures, then released her to Gil and Susanne, telling them they’d have to bring Joy to the courthouse for arraignment the next day. Susanne dreaded other people finding out about it, but it turned out that Joy’s name was not released to the media because of her age.
And they hadn’t been home more than a half hour—Joy still insisting that she didn’t know what had happened, or how the drugs had gotten into her pocket (“Jason must have slipped them in there for some reason, but I don’t have a clue why he would do something like that”)—when a police clerk named Natalie called to tell them the charges were being dropped. Susanne answered the phone, and when she asked “Why?” Natalie said she wasn’t sure, she didn’t have all the details, but probably they were after bigger fish and that prosecuting Joy would just be a distraction. When Susanne asked if that meant they considered Joy innocent, Natalie said that she had no more information than what she’d been told to convey. The police chief himself, Natalie added, wanted to express his apologies for any inconvenience.
“That doesn’t sound right,” Gil said with a frown, when Susanne repeated the conversation to him. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, I know. But maybe she is telling the truth, and Jason did set her up? It would benefit him if he could throw the blame somewhere else, wouldn’t it?”
“I guess.” She could tell he was trying to convince himself, as she was.
“I mean, we’re not going to argue with it, are we?”
“No, of course we’re not.”
They went to Joy’s room, where they found her curled on her bed around Salsa. When they told her about the call, she smiled and said, “See?” as if she’d proven a point. “I told you.”
“It’s not that simple, Joy.” Gil looked pained. Susanne herself felt almost euphoric about the charges being dropped, but she didn’t want to show it in front of her husband; if Joy had been guilty of anything (and wasn’t it likely that she at least knew about Jason’s stealing and dealing drugs, even if she hadn’t participated in it herself?), she didn’t want him to think she was celebrating Joy’s having gotten away with something she shouldn’t have. “We still want to understand what was going on.”
“Nothing was going on. They just told you that, didn’t they?”
“No. They told us they weren’t pursuing charges against you. They didn’t say they made a mistake.” Gil lowered his voice, and Susanne knew it was an effort to mitigate the sting of his next words. “You’re still guilty of what they arrested you for: you had those drugs in your possession.”
“Because he planted them on me!”
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” She was sputtering. “How would I know what’s in some random guy’s head?”
“Okay. We can hear you.” Gil held up a hand against the heightened volume of her denial.
“But you don’t believe me.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to say it.” Joy reached beyond Salsa for the earbuds on her nightstand and put them on.
“This isn’t over,” Gil told her, and Susanne could tell that their daughter was only pretending she hadn’t heard him. Outside Joy’s closed door, he repeated himself to Susanne. This isn’t over. She nodded to show solidarity, even though secretly she hoped he was wrong.
After
Friday, December 11
I knew that attending the funeral was out of the question, a fact I accepted though it frustrates and angers me. But this morning I did call to arrange for flowers to be delivered to the church. The florist enumerated the various options—bouquets and wreaths and sprays with names like Greater Glory, Remembrance, Display of Affection. When I hesitated to choose any of those, she said, “How about Uplifting Thoughts? A beautiful collection of bright gerberas,” and I said, Fine, that sounds good, not because it did sound good but because I could tell she was wearying of reading the list to me. She asked what the card should say, and I hesitated before responding. “‘Thinking of you in this time of loss’?” she suggested, and I repeated, That sounds good. How did I want the signature to read? This I had considered before making the call, and I told her, No name or anything, just “Love.”
The florist’s tone and manner were friendly and solicitous, a practiced art. But when I proceeded to give her my credit card information, there was a silence on the other end after she confirmed the spelling of my name. “Is this some kind of a sick joke?” she asked, her voice hardening and distant, as if she were holding the phone away from her ear in anticipation of hanging up. I told her it was not. “I can’t help you,” she said, the last words barely audible before she went ahead and killed the connection.
The reporters were still stalking me, camped on the street outside Cass’s house. I haven’t been able to work sinc
e my arrest on Monday, though I tried after returning home when the bail was posted, thinking (hoping) that sitting in front of the easel with my palette would transport me, the way it always has, to the state of suspension I only ever achieve when I’m painting and that I need more desperately, now, than ever before. Of course, it didn’t work. What’s happening to me now—what’s happening to all of us—defies transcendence.
After the florist rejected me, I called Violet and told her I was going crazy, alone in my apartment. “You have to get out of there,” she said. We’ve been speaking twice a day and it’s the only thing that’s saved me, along with the time I spend talking to Ramona about my case. The small bit of hope my lawyer’s given me, suggesting that I might survive this—be acquitted—has kept me sane.
If you can call it sane. Yesterday, when I went up to the attic and tried to work on the portrait of my father, I ended up dipping my thickest brush in alizarin crimson and, making a sustained sound in my throat I’d never heard or felt before (it scared me, even as it brought relief)—a sound I was sure the reporters would have called “savage” if they had heard it—I began streaking the windowpane, not stopping until the glass was completely covered. The attic was high enough that they wouldn’t see, but in some ways, I wished they could. I wanted witnesses to my torment. I wanted—I want—to be believed.
“Get out of there,” Violet told me again, when I went silent on the phone.
“That’s easy for you to say. How? Where?” I moved the curtain an inch to see that only two news trucks remained; the funeral itself, I realized, must be the day’s bigger story.
How Will I Know You? Page 20