“Go to school. It’s private property, right? Go for a swim or something. Get security to throw them out, if they harass you there.”
It had not occurred to me. She was right; Percy would have my back, if I could just make it to campus. And that shouldn’t be so hard, right? Within the jurisdiction stipulated by the judge, I am allowed to come and go as I please. I am still innocent, at least in the eyes of the law. They can bother me only so much before they become guilty themselves.
There might be other people there, too, who’d be glad to see me. I tried to convince myself of this as I dressed, taking care to choose nicer clothes than I would normally wear for a day at school. Stuart and Lizzy, from Students for Obama—they’d understand I was being framed. Wouldn’t they? And the sign they’d lifted in support after my release—INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY—may have been crudely scrawled, but the two of them had shown up and defended me. If they were on campus today, I’d seek them out.
Doing my best to breathe normally, I picked up my gym bag and my portfolio and, deciding to face the reporters because my victory would be that much greater, walked through the front door instead of the back.
They jumped when they saw me, scrambling, looking surprised. I took a few steps in the direction of the bus stop, out of habit, then doubled back and kept my gaze straight ahead until I reached the Fury parked in the driveway and backed out. The news trucks followed me through town and up the hill toward campus. Because there were fewer classes on Fridays, I found a spot right away. But so did they, and when I got out of the car, there they were in my face again.
Just get to Percy, I thought, repeating the mantra to myself as I walked more quickly than usual.
“Have you spoken with Susanne Enright?” one of the reporters asked. “Are you aware she’s burying her daughter today?”
No, I imagined saying. Really? I haven’t been paying any attention. What would they think if they knew how much time I’d spent trying to figure out what Susanne must be feeling, about Joy’s death and about my arrest? Dying to talk to her, but knowing I had to obey my lawyer’s instructions about not returning her calls?
I began sweating from the fast pace I was setting, hoping it didn’t show. Finally I reached the doors of the athletic building. The newspeople followed me inside. Behind the desk, Percy set aside his paperback and rose, coming toward us all. I felt the relief of a kid whose big brother has come to the rescue.
“Thanks,” I whispered, when Percy closed his big hand around my bicep. I waited for him to tell the rest of them that they had to leave.
But instead Percy whispered back, “Sorry, Pablo” and began moving me toward the door I’d just entered.
“What are you doing?” I didn’t bother to keep my own voice down, and Percy told me, “I got orders. It’s not up to me.” As the cameras whirred, recording it all, he picked his radio up from his waist and made a call. When I tried to shake his hand off, saying Okay, I got it, I’m leaving, Percy told me that wasn’t an option—I had to be escorted off campus by security.
That was the final straw. Which is how I thought of it later, looking back: of all the surreal offenses and the indignities that had been piled on me that week, beginning with the officers ringing my doorbell five days earlier and then carting me away, this was the one I could not, finally, abide.
“You can’t do this!” The words actually hurt my throat as they came out, I yelled them so loud. “I’m a student here! I haven’t done anything, I did not commit this crime, you’d better fucking let me go!” I don’t say “fuck” often—there’s something in me that believes Grandee might hear me—but when I do, another part of me feels a rage that would be delicious if I didn’t know from experience that what always follows isn’t worth it.
“Hold on,” Percy told me, still in an undertone. “For your own good, for God’s sake, shut up and calm the hell down.”
It was too late for that, I knew. Too late to do anything for my own good. The scene had already been captured on camera; it would lead the news, with my expletive censored: SUSPECT ERUPTS IN OUTBURST AS VICTIM IS LAID TO REST.
Are you happy now? I told Violet in some corner of my mind, as three more guards arrived and joined Percy in pulling me out of the building (I have bruises up and down both arms now). I stood up for myself like you said I should, and see where it got me?
Even the reporters seemed unsettled by the scene unfolding before them. “Careful, dude,” one of the cameramen urged, as I nearly tripped over the camera cord despite being held up on both sides by guards. They shoved me into the Fury, and Percy tossed my bags in after me.
“Better not come back,” he told me. “If you know what’s good for you.”
That phrase again. I sat behind the steering wheel, feeling more separate from myself—and the world I’d thought I inhabited—than I ever could have imagined. Then I started the car and drove home without being aware of it, only barely registering the distant sound of a church bell as it tolled in remembrance of Joy.
The Departed Child
The night before the funeral, they lay next to each other without sleeping, as if waiting for someone to come and shoot them in the head. Each apologized if a limb or hip brushed the other, the way strangers apologize for touching by accident.
Once, Susanne had accompanied Joy and her class as a chaperone on a field trip to a Shaker village. What Susanne remembered most from the visit were the adult-sized cradles designed for “soothing bedridden patients.” At the time she’d felt revulsion at the idea of spending her days in bed, but now she found herself imagining the comfort of being rocked to sleep in a cradle big enough to contain her, and maybe to double as a coffin if she never made it out.
As a young woman before she met Gil, and then after she married him and before they conceived Joy, Susanne had resented the need for sleep because she imagined it was making her miss all kinds of things she could have been doing with that time. When she was pregnant and felt sick so often, not only in the first three months and not only in the mornings, sleep became both blessing and torture—a blessing at night when she managed to shed consciousness, a torture when she woke up to the dread nausea pounding in her gut. Once Joy was born, of course, sleep was more precious, so she craved it and coveted it and stole it whenever she could. Then for a few years she almost returned to the attitude and stamina of her youth, working late hours in the tiny extra bedroom that served as her studio and still rising rested with the sun. That was when she was making the sculptures for Show of Hands, and she remembered feeling, for a brief time, that somehow she’d managed to do what the magazines told you was impossible: have it all. Of course the feeling didn’t last, as she knew it could not. She knew no one could have it all, except through those momentary delusions. Still, she was happier back then than she could ever remember being. Her mother had always told her, Put your good feelings in the bank to draw on when the bad ones come. It made sense to Susanne at the time. Only later—only now—did she understand what a naïve concept it was.
The clock on her nightstand read 2:07. She put the clock in the drawer to hide the neon numerals, but still she lay awake.
After her mother-in-law had entered Belle Meadow, Susanne’s sleep became disturbed again. She lay in horizontal, stationary free fall, her heart thudding when she thought of all the residents (she couldn’t help thinking of them as inmates) in wheelchairs, some needing to be fed, all needing help at the toilet, their pleasure now consisting only of as much freedom from pain or discomfort as the nurses and aides and medication could offer. After she began the affair with Martin, it occurred to her that maybe part of the reason she’d deviated from her marriage had been to alleviate the existential panic she felt at night: now it was guilt that gave her insomnia, rather than despair. At least the guilt was focused. She could perseverate on what a bad person she was, and how horrible she felt about betraying Gil, instead of the misty, inchoate notion that someday she too (if she was lucky! That was the hell of it!) woul
d be committed to the care of others—would be, essentially, someone other than herself. Waiting to die. In her vision, Gil had either died already or was still able to live at home; though she didn’t understand why, she’d never pictured them together at the end, one at the other’s bedside. When she imagined herself in a place like Belle Meadow, she thought about Joy coming to visit, with her own husband and maybe a little girl, Susanne’s granddaughter, who would chase the resident pet cat and provide tiny pockets of joy to Susanne and the other inmates with her cute voice, her funny questions, her outsized smile. She’d remind them of their own ancient innocence, of being able to govern their own movements and especially of what it had been like to look ahead with hope.
But now that could never happen. No grown-up Joy, no granddaughter. The idea that her daughter had died, had experienced this most profound mystery before she did, was beyond fathoming. The doctor had prescribed sleeping pills, but no matter how long before going to bed she took them, they didn’t take effect right away after she lay down. It was the same feeling she’d had while pregnant: that she might vomit at any moment, and that to do so would be a relief, but she wasn’t sure she could endure what she would have to, to reach that point. And then on the other side of sleep, if it did come, was waking up and remembering. Gil slept a few hours most nights, but he was always awake in the morning next to her, looking up at the ceiling. Most days they had to grab each other, arms or hands or shoulders, before they got out of bed. Making sure to touch something alive and solid. Coming apart after that contact was its own little grief, on top of the insurmountable one that threatened to knock them over (the wave they saw coming but couldn’t avoid) as soon as they stood up.
She was not going to sleep this night. Beside her, Gil had begun snoring—a troubled, tortured sound she’d never heard from him before. Moving lightly, she got out of bed and went into the bathroom. She closed the door and turned the light on, without looking in the mirror.
All Joy’s life, Susanne had imagined the worst things possible when it came to her daughter. She forced herself to persist in conjuring these scenarios, rather than setting them aside, because superstitiously she believed this would keep them from happening. The scariest and most vivid vision came the summer they rented a cottage on Cape Cod from friends of Susanne’s parents. Joy was eleven and newly lovely, her face a combination of the trusting, outgoing child she had always been and the wiser but still winsome woman Susanne and Gil saw emerging, to their shared delight (when they weren’t feeling nostalgic for the child she’d so recently been), as their daughter grew taller than her mother and began both making and understanding adult remarks. One morning Gil had gone out for an early swim at the beach and Joy wanted to sleep in, so Susanne left her alone in the house while she walked to the bakery in town and back, a quarter mile each way. When she returned half an hour later, Joy told her that a man had come by to check on the furnace in the cottage’s basement. “You let him in?” Susanne asked, trying not to let out the gasp she felt, and Joy shrugged and said, Yeah. As it turned out, the stranger’s visit had been legitimate; the homeowners had arranged the plumber’s visit but forgotten to mention it to their guests. “Next time, honey, just ask him to come back when your parents are here,” Susanne said as casually as she could manage. It was no big deal, Joy told her. Susanne said, I know. But that day and for weeks afterward, all she could think about was what might have happened if some pervert had been watching the house, seen a beautiful young girl staying there, waited for the parents to leave, and then pounced. She never told Gil about it, because she knew he’d say she shouldn’t have left Joy alone like that, and he would have been right.
In all of her disaster fantasies, Susanne was guilty in some way—mostly for allowing her attention to wander elsewhere than with her child. She’d always recognized this, and always tried to dismiss it as the natural but unfounded fear of not being a good-enough mother.
But now that it had actually happened, she saw she’d been right all along. She’d let her fight with Joy escalate to such an extent that Joy felt the need to flee. What kind of mother did that? And she’d taken Joy’s phone away—or let Gil take it—despite having a bad feeling about it, despite believing that they should have come up with a different punishment. If Joy had had her phone, wouldn’t she have been able to call for help?
At the moment she died, Joy would no longer have been angry at her mother; she’d be more afraid than she’d ever thought possible, wanting her mother there to save her, or at least to hold her as she slipped out of the world. Susanne had not been there. She would never be there, except in the dreams she’d have for the rest of her life, in which she said to Joy, after Joy yelled at her You are such a hypocrite, “Let’s just stop this, honey, okay?” She allowed herself to believe that Joy would have relented—would have wanted to make up, too.
In the bathroom she opened the cabinet and took out the bottle of pills. In a few hours she would have to sit in a pew near the box containing her daughter, then lay her baby to rest. Lay her to rest: an impossible task. There was no way, she understood in that moment, that she could do what she was expected to do. Required to do. And yet there was no avoiding it. She shook out a handful of the pills and swallowed them with water she caught in her cupped hand under the faucet. As soon as they were down, she lifted the toilet seat and retched, and when she was finished she slumped against the sink and made sounds she did not recognize as they came from her own body, scalding as they emerged.
Gil was at the door within seconds, seeing the pills in the water before she could flush. Immediately she identified the look on his face as a mix of fear and fury. “You would do that to me, too?” he yelled, taking her first by the wrists, then hugging her so close that she had to fight for breath.
“What difference does it make?”
He didn’t bother to respond to this. “Did you get rid of them all?” She nodded. He yelled, “Are you sure?” Then they were both crying as he led her back to the bed.
“I didn’t want to die. That wasn’t it,” she told him, when she could speak again. “It’s just—”
But there was no way to identify what it just was.
“I know.” His voice had drained of anger, and in some ways this was worse. “Listen, we just need to get through today. Then we can figure something out.” Susanne knew they both understood that there was nothing to figure out and that getting through the day would make nothing better, but they both pretended he was right, for their own sakes and for each other’s.
Some hours later, having dressed and made their way to the funeral home without remembering doing so, they held each other up as they walked down the aisle toward the front pew. As at their wedding, Susanne did not actually see the faces of the people turned toward her, so intent was she on reaching her destination. As they were about to take their seats in the front row, her knees buckled, and Gil barely managed to catch her before she would have sunk to the floor. For a moment she resented him: Just let me go, I don’t care, it’s better down here, it’s safer. Why the word “safe” occurred to her, she did not know; she did not expect to feel safe again for the rest of her life.
It was the second Friday of December, six days since Joy’s body had been found in the woods that should have been searched more thoroughly but were not, because everyone thought she was submerged in the frozen pond. Five days since they’d determined it was not an accident but murder. Anybody who wanted to attend Joy’s service could miss school without being marked absent. When she’d first learned this, Susanne thought vaguely (all of her thoughts were vague, these days) that she appreciated it; turning to watch all those kids come into the church, though, it occurred to her that maybe she shouldn’t trust the swelling of her heart at the sight, because wasn’t it possible that some of them were just taking the free pass from classes?
Then again, maybe not. It wasn’t as if they’d been excused to go skiing or snowboarding, something fun. Probably a lot of those she was seein
g, tugging at their ties or wobbling on heels more suited to a wedding or a job interview, would have preferred sitting in those hard chairs at those hard desks, learning hard things, to crowding into a church pew with the closed coffin of a dead schoolmate in full view. She decided to assume everyone had come for the right reason, the real reason: to honor Joy’s life. To tell her parents they were sorry. And to show, by turning out in such numbers, that her presence among them had meant something they would not soon forget.
The smell of flowers was overwhelming, and yet she welcomed it as something to focus on. Dozens of arrangements—hundreds of flowers—circled the casket and decorated the steps to the altar. Do you want flowers? the funeral director had asked, when he helped them write the obituary. Or do you want to do an “in lieu of” and donations instead?
Gil suggested that people might send money to the art school in Joy’s name. Maybe they could start a scholarship, he said.
No, Susanne told them, surprised that she possessed enough energy for such a strong opinion. I want the flowers. In the end they decided on both.
And there they were, the flowers, in every color imaginable except black. If she squinted, their shapes became blurry and indistinct, like one of Joy’s drawings. She kept squinting, until Gil asked her to stop.
The minister, a blond and uninspiring man named Donald Putnam who looked unhealthily skinny even under his clerical robe, had visited them briefly to plan the service, even though after he left, neither Susanne nor Gil could remember what any of them had said. He was new to the congregation since they’d last gone to church, back when Joy was in sixth grade. She’d attended Sunday School here and sung in the children’s choir, but after that year she announced she didn’t want to go anymore, and her parents agreed that she was old enough to make this choice for herself. Secretly, each was relieved; neither of them enjoyed attending services, or got much out of them aside from the social aspect and the feeling that it couldn’t hurt to have their daughter taught some of the things they themselves had learned in Sunday School. “Also it’ll help if she ever goes on Jeopardy,” Gil had said. “There’s a fair number of Bible-related questions on there.” Susanne laughed at the time, but she felt guilty about it now. What if she had only worked harder to have faith, like developing an underused muscle? Wouldn’t it be paying off for her now?
How Will I Know You? Page 21