How Will I Know You?

by Jessica Treadway

  But he didn’t believe any of it. He knew better. Those parents were entitled to an answer; he’d had a job to do, and he hadn’t done it. Worse than that, he lied. Given up the body and given up, in all likelihood, any chance he’d ever had of proving to Doug that he wasn’t a loser, that he could be trusted.

  He watched his father-in-law go over to tell the parents their daughter was still missing, and found himself hoping—praying, if he were to be honest, though he wouldn’t have thought he knew how to pray—that his baby was a son, so he’d never have to go through what they were enduring. At the same time, he recognized that nobody in that moment deserved a prayer to be answered less than he.

  After

  Monday, December 14

  I probably should have known this, but I did not: when the grand jury is deciding whether to indict you, you don’t get to be in the room. I’d pictured it like a court proceeding in a movie—Ramona and me sitting behind one table, the prosecutor, Nelson Kovak, and his team behind the next. The jury members seated in their box as they listen to all the witnesses, keeping their faces impassive so as not to give anything away to either side.

  But when I asked Ramona on the phone yesterday what I should wear, she set me straight. Only if I were testifying would we be allowed in, and I was not going to testify. So I asked her where she would be while they were in session, and she said her office, which means she is not even coming up here from New York for the day. It took me a moment to remember that of course she has other cases, other clients besides me to defend. Though secretly I think my case must be the most important—murder, with implications pertaining to race—I tried to sound as if I wasn’t bothered by the idea of having to wait alone by the phone as a bunch of strangers (most likely all white) considered the evidence against me.

  But as it turns out, I won’t be alone. Violet and Cass are taking me to the movies, a double feature of The Blind Side and Invictus. When Violet suggested it, I wanted to ask if she were insane. That was only in the first few moments, though; as soon as I let the idea settle, I saw how right it was. Without being able to work, or to move through the world unafraid of attracting attention I do not want, what I need is the chance to be absorbed in a drama other than the one of my own life. If I can be in the dark while I do it, friends at my side, all the better.

  If need be—if by the end of the second movie I haven’t heard a report from Ramona yet—we will stay for a showing of anything other than The Lovely Bones, which I chose from the listings purely by title but which Violet quickly assured me I did not want to see.

  I will open this book next on the other side, once I know the decision. I’ve tried to imagine how I will feel if they indict me, and I know I can’t, quite—which scares me, because I can sense the rage gathering in my belly, and it feels stronger than any willpower I might be able to muster to keep it down. I don’t stand a chance if they send me to trial. Not here, and not being an outsider with black skin.

  But stop thinking this way—stop it, stop, until I have to. Don’t close the door till you’re out of the room, Grandee would tell me. It’s not open very far, but it’s still open. That’s something.

  You Are Commanded

  The Monday following the funeral, the hallways in school felt hushed. It was as if they’d all been punished, Harper thought. There was also a sense of waiting. What for? she wondered. The worst was over; one of them had been murdered and was never coming back. Police had taken a man into custody, but some people doubted he was the killer. On the news every night she saw people protesting Martin Willett’s arrest. Then there were the protests against the protests, and it seemed a competition to see who could have the last word. Of all the collective chants, the one that lingered in Harper’s mind was He did it, let him fry! Was it that this cry was so much louder than the others? Or was it just because she felt so guilty about what she had done?

  She was in a hole; it was a phrase she’d learned from Mrs. Carbone in English, about what makes a good story. When people are in a hole, she told the class, other people like to watch them try to get out. The holes were metaphors, of course. For trouble. Situations they didn’t want to be in, that threatened them somehow. Mrs. Carbone said she herself had always been most interested in stories that depicted characters trapped in holes of their own making, but you could also fall in as the result of other people pushing you, or because of fate—circumstances you had no control over.

  The man in the Jack London story, who died when snow fell off a branch and put out the fire he’d managed to build: he was in a hole of both kinds. He shouldn’t have started his journey in the first place, because the cold was too dangerous, but he couldn’t control the snow (although, as Mrs. Carbone pointed out, he should have realized the danger the branch posed and built the fire someplace else). Odysseus fell into a different category: his hole consisted of obstacle after obstacle he had to overcome, in order to get home after the war. Being who he was, he hadn’t had a choice about going off to fight, so you couldn’t really say he’d gotten himself into the trouble he faced along the way.

  The case of Bigger Thomas was more complicated, Mrs. Carbone told them when they read Native Son. Or maybe you could say he was in more than one hole at the same time. Yes, he smothered the white girl with the pillow, but he hadn’t set out to kill her—he was only afraid that her blind mother would know he was in the room with her daughter, and then he’d really be in for it, because he was black. He chose to use the pillow, but he hadn’t chosen being black, which was its own hole. They had a big argument in class that day. Keith Nance said you couldn’t have it both ways—either you were responsible for what you did, or you weren’t. And being black, or being poor, was no excuse. The only person who had an excuse—maybe, Keith said—was the retard in Of Mice and Men. (Don’t use the word “retard,” Mrs. Carbone had told him.) Otherwise, Keith went on (ignoring her), if you were stuck in a hole you’d dug for yourself, that was your own fault and nobody else’s.

  But sometimes, Joy argued, you don’t realize you’re digging your own hole until it’s too late.

  Harper’s head had hurt during that class, because she understood both sides—or were there more than two sides?—but she wasn’t sure what she would have said if someone asked her opinion. She was glad when the bell rang and she was relieved of having to think about it anymore.

  Now she understood only that she was in a hole. She’d been presented with an opportunity that seemed it might lead to two things she wanted: first, her mother started driving again, which was a kind of metaphor for her reentry to the world. She went out to buy groceries instead of ordering them online. She’d rejoined her old book group and skipped a few meetings of Saturday afternoon therapy.

  On top of which—the second thing—Harper felt less like a loser at school, maybe because now she mattered. The DA had talked to everyone else from the pond that day, including Delaney and Tessa and Lin, but none of them identified the black man who’d been at the shack right before Joy disappeared. Harper was the only person they’d found to testify that he’d been wearing a mask, once they lost track of the pothead store clerk who’d also been on the witness list.

  She’d stepped into the hole without thinking about the consequences. But why she was in it didn’t really matter, she realized; what mattered was that she didn’t know how she was going to get out.

  And the hole was this: she did not think Martin Willett was guilty. When she saw him on TV, saying that he would never have done anything to hurt Joy or anyone else, she believed him. Plus, he was an artist, and sometimes she thought that making art must be like baking: you loved putting ingredients together to create something that hadn’t existed before. You took care to choose the right color to put on the canvas, the same way you kept tasting your icing to make sure it was just sweet enough. That was not the kind of person who killed someone, was it?

  When it came right down to it, would she really be able to say she’d seen him in a ski mask, when she had not?
Was such a lie worth what she seemed to have gained by promising it to the prosecution?

  Nobody at school was talking about who might have done it. That wasn’t as important or as relevant as the mementoes—flowers, stuffed animals—that began piling up outside Joy’s locker. The locker itself was covered in photographs kids taped up of themselves with Joy from the time they’d all been in preschool—blindfolded under piñatas at birthday parties, riding scooters, flashing peace signs from horses on the merry-go-round at the county fair. Since Harper’s locker was next to Joy’s, she couldn’t help seeing the photos, though she didn’t linger to study them. She did not put up any of her own, though she probably possessed more of these tangible keepsakes of Joy than anyone else.

  Nobody talked about the funeral, either, or how weird it had been to see teachers in a church and at the reception, some crying, all looking stricken in a way they did not allow themselves to appear at school. And though Harper had anticipated it with dread, no one mentioned her outburst in the line at the ladies’ restroom at the church; even Delaney Stowell herself barely gave her a glance in the hallway on the way to homeroom.

  She went to school only for her first-period class, after which her mother planned to pick her up to drive her to the courthouse, where she was scheduled to appear before the grand jury. Please excuse Harper from school after 8:45 today, her mother had written in the note, as she has been subpoenaed. That word, SUBPOENA, appearing in big letters at the top of the summons she’d received from a court officer who knocked on the door, apologized for the intrusion, and handed over the envelope.

  The next day, Martin Willett’s lawyer had come to talk to her. Harper felt more comfortable speaking with Ramona than she had answering questions from the police or the prosecutor (whom she found even scarier than the police chief), but still her mother insisted on sitting in as she had during those sessions. For the visits from people interviewing Harper, her mother put on outfits she used to wear to work. She put on makeup. Her eyes were clear and her voice was steady; she’d told her family that she was weaning herself off the medication. Harper could tell that her father and Truman wanted to but didn’t dare trust her mother’s resolution.

  But she herself could not have been more hopeful, even as she tried to defend against it. And this hope was what she tried to focus on, instead of the fear she felt as she repeated to Ramona what she’d told the others already: how she had separated herself from the other girls gathered on the ice that day, after Joy yelled at her, the harsh sound of the words exchanged between them causing Harper’s head to start pounding. (This part was all true, but as she anticipated what was coming next and what she would have to say, her temples started to twitch all over again.)

  “And did the police show you a photo array and ask you to pick out the man?” Ramona Frye poised her pen over a pad already half-filled with notes.

  “No,” Harper said, though she was not sure what “array” meant. “They showed me a picture and asked if he was the guy.”

  Ramona held up a finger. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” she said. “They showed you a picture? One?” She sounded excited and agitated at the same time, as she flipped through pages that looked like a police report. “They say here you picked him out of an array. A group of six photos.”

  Feeling her breath accelerate, Harper tried to tell herself that she wasn’t the one in trouble now; the police had shown her only a single photograph. If that wasn’t the way they were supposed to do it, that wasn’t her fault.

  “Sorry,” she told Ramona. “It was just one.”

  Ramona had asked a few more questions after that, but clearly her attention was not on Harper’s replies, which made it easier for Harper to repeat the lie about the black man wearing a mask before he drove off. Had there been anything else going on with Joy that Harper wanted to mention, aside from her presumption that Joy had been involved in the selling of drugs? Some way Joy might have acted that seemed out of character for her?

  She had not thought of it before in terms of any relevance it might have to Joy’s death, but when Ramona put it that way, Harper remembered the day that she’d finally gotten the courage to take the SATs. Most of her class had already done so, but she’d let the first deadline pass without registering. The practice test was one thing—she hadn’t timed herself on it, and it didn’t really count. She knew her mother had been right in suggesting that Harper take a few of them before the actual test day, to make herself “more comfortable” when she sat down in the room with the pencils and the proctors, but she also knew that no matter how many questions she answered leading up to that point, it wouldn’t help. Her brain would freeze, her breath would speed up, and she’d have to put her hand on her chest because it was the only way she could think of to try to calm it down. Three pints of red dye and two pints of yellow make orange dye, and two pints of blue dye and one pint of yellow make green dye. If you mix equal amounts of green and orange, what percentage of the new mixture is yellow dye? She would never feel anything other than panicked, let alone “comfortable,” trying to answer that.

  Truman dropped her off at the test center, a high school in Canandaigua, ten minutes before it was scheduled to begin. She’d asked him to get her there in plenty of time, but he refused to wake up when she told him he needed to. “Why are you taking it way the hell out here?” he asked her, but she didn’t feel like explaining that she preferred to take the test surrounded by strangers, instead of the kids she saw every day. The people out here didn’t know she was a loser, or that her mother was weird. Their not knowing might make her perform better. At least, that’s what she hoped.

  Late because of Truman’s dawdling, she ran into the Canandaigua lobby with her nerves on fire. She was grateful to find that the line for early-alphabet last names was one of the shorter ones, and she made it through quickly after proffering her ID with a shaking hand. Rushing toward the girls’ room, she knocked into someone standing in the end-of-the-alphabet line, and muttering Sorry with a quick glance backward, she did a double take at seeing that it was Joy.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, forgetting for a moment that she needed to pee, and also forgetting that since school had started, she wasn’t sure if she and Joy were friends anymore.

  Joy flushed, which Harper could see through her friend’s effort to assume an unflustered expression. “Uh, taking SATs,” she said, then tried to distract Harper from her confusion by adding (in what would once have been a jokey tone but now sounded at least halfway genuine) “Duh.”

  “But you already got a perfect score.”

  Over the speaker came the announcement that it was almost time, so Harper swallowed her next question—why, if Joy was taking the test again, she was doing so in Canandaigua instead of at home. Did she have some reason to stay anonymous, this time around? “You’re in the wrong place,” she said, just noticing then. “You should be in that one.” She pointed at the line she’d just left, under the sign that said A–L.

  “It’s okay, they’ll take me,” Joy said, moving forward with her ID closed inside her fist. “They just want everybody in there now.” She flicked her fingers toward the auditorium entrance, as if Harper were a bug she wanted to send that way. “You should go.”

  Harper joined the herd surging toward the doors, telling herself that needing to go to the bathroom was just mind over matter, she could hold it until they got a break. But when they were instructed to begin and she looked at the first essay prompt—Is there any value in uncertainty? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your opinion on this issue—all she could think about was how much she had to pee.

  At the break she bolted for the bathroom, already knowing she would get a bad score and feeling hopeless about the remaining sections, including the one she was worst at, math. She considered calling Truman, just cutting her losses on this attempt and taking the test the next time. But he wasn’t expecting her to need him for another three hours, so she was here for the duration; she
might as well do her best to answer the questions and hope to get lucky.

  Joy caught her arm on the way in and ushered her to the side of the auditorium. “Don’t tell anyone you saw me here, okay?” Harper felt her heart lift from the touch and from the confiding nature of her tone; maybe Joy did still want to be her friend.“It’s just that I didn’t really do as well as I said,” Joy went on, in a whisper. “The first time. But I couldn’t tell people, since I knew I was supposed to get a good score.” She gave Harper a smile, but it wasn’t a real one; Harper could see the difference right away. Joy’s next words sounded wry, self-deprecating (“deprecate” being one of the vocabulary words Harper had put on her flash cards): “I have my reputation to protect.”

  The thrill of receiving such a confession—the intimacy of it—lasted only a moment, but Harper still felt its warmth as they resumed their seats. Maybe whatever had been bothering Joy, and causing her to gravitate toward Delaney, had run its course; maybe there was still a chance that things would go back to the way they had been. Not long after, Delancey offered to come over to Harper’s house so they could study The Odyssey, and she told Harper about her mother’s affair, Then, at the Halloween party, everything had fallen apart.

  Ramona Frye took more notes as she listened to the story. “Does it mean anything?” Harper asked her. “I mean, I don’t think it means anything—that she lied about getting a perfect score. She was only telling people what they expected to hear.”

  “We’ll see,” the lawyer said. She seemed to be choosing her words carefully as she began packing her notes away and stood to leave.