Moment of Truth

by Lisa Scottoline

  Jack visualized the scene. Paige happy about delivering news that was Honor’s worst nightmare.

  “I said, ‘I’m pregnant, Mom … that’s why I’m so hungry. So I have to eat and … there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Because I’m going to … have a baby.’” Paige stopped suddenly. “That’s the beginning of the migraine. It’s … coming. I’ll tell it … fast. I looked at her expression … and I couldn’t believe it. Her eyes … they were so big … and angry. She looked like … a witch.”

  Jack couldn’t even guess at the look.

  “Then … she hit me.” Fresh tears came to Paige’s eyes and her face flushed with emotion. “She hit me … right on the face. Like a really hard slap … she called me things but she never … hit me before. Ever. She hit me so hard … I fell off the chair. She knocked me right off the chair … onto the floor. I couldn’t believe … it.”

  But Jack could. Though Honor wasn’t a violent woman, this news would move her to it. This news would unhinge her, undo all of them. He wanted to tell Paige the truth right then, had the impulse to explain, but fought it. This wasn’t the place or the time. She had only a few minutes before the migraine hit full force. She’d become incapable even of speech.

  “I got up from the floor … my face was hurting, and I started to cry. Then she grabbed me and … threw me down again … and started kicking me. Kicking me … Dad … over and over. Like in my stomach.” Paige’s sobbing started again, and Jack’s gut twisted. “She had on her mules … with the pointy toes, and she was, like … aiming for my stomach, Dad. Really hard … with the toe. For the … baby. Like she was trying to … kick it out of me.”

  No. Jack just kept shaking his head. No. He didn’t know if he had even said it aloud.

  “She started yelling … ‘You kill it or I’ll kill it!’ … ‘You kill it or I’ll kill it!’ Dad … my head. I can’t … I really can’t—” Paige covered her face and doubled over, falling forward on the counter and collapsing into tears. “I don’t know what … happened next. I just don’t, Dad … I swear.” Paige was crying full bore, but trying to talk. “I started to hurt … all over, from my belly … and my chest…. I started to hurt, so much … I rolled away from her. I said … I wasn’t getting an abortion. But she kept … coming at me … kicking.”

  No. He didn’t want to hear any more. He didn’t want to put Paige through any more.

  “I was so scared … and hurt so much … I couldn’t even see. I mean, I didn’t think she’d kill me, I only know I got so angry, for me, for my baby, it was like … I was angry for so long, my whole life. Then, I think … I got up … and grabbed the knife. I remember … I grabbed the knife.” Paige looked up, tears streaming down a face contorted with pain. “I can’t … think.”

  Jack blinked away his own tears. It was his fault. He hadn’t been there. Not only tonight, but for all of her childhood. He hadn’t known how bad it had been, but that was no excuse. He should have known; it was his job to know. He had deserted his own daughter and when he had finally realized it, he was too late. Guilt engulfed him, drowning him like a wave.

  “I went kind of … crazy. I was yelling and crying … it was like everything came back at me … I mean … I knew I was mad at her … but I guess I just got out of control … and I stabbed her and when I was done, she was … she was” — Paige’s expression was a frieze of agony — “she was lying there … on the floor. I dropped the … knife. It was all … bloody. I didn’t mean … I just left her there … and ran out. I just ran … I’m sorry, Dad. I’m so sorry.” Paige’s words dissolved into tears, and her shoulders collapsed as easily as a dollhouse.

  Jack couldn’t help but raise his hands, even handcuffed, to the plastic barrier between them, touching it with his fingertips. It was cold, hard, and lifeless, so unlike the warm, silky hair of his little girl. How often had he touched Paige’s head? Not often enough. Now he had to save her. “Paige,” he said, “what did you tell the lawyers?”

  “I said … I wasn’t there.” Paige was sobbing hard. “That … I didn’t go over.”

  “Okay, so you were never there tonight. You never went over. Stick with that story, understand?”

  “It’s … a lie. God, my head. The … lights.”

  “I know it’s a lie. I don’t care.” Jack lowered his hands and leaned forward urgently. “Never, Paige. Never breathe a word. If you do, you and your baby are lost.”

  “My baby?” Paige looked at him through her tears. Her eyes were red and swollen. Her skin was a mass of hives. “What about my baby?”

  “Think about the baby, Paige. We didn’t even get to talk about the baby. What are you planning to do?”

  “I don’t know, for sure.” Paige’s weeping stilled. “Get married. Trevor wants to.”

  Jack cringed inwardly. “What about college? You told me you’d set aside modeling for college.”

  “I’ll go later, after the baby.”

  Jack bit his tongue. “Okay, let’s assume for the moment that’s the right decision. If you come forward and tell the police what happened, who will raise the baby? Trevor? Of course not. You have to think of your baby, not me. Please don’t interfere with me. If the police question you, say you weren’t at the house. Say you were surprised by what I did. Don’t go to my arraignment or any other court proceeding. Let me do what I have to do.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Put your hand on your tummy, right now. Do it, Paige.” Jack’s tone was so commanding he sounded strange even to himself. Something was happening to him. He felt like he was coming into his own. Maybe even redeeming himself. “Put your hand on your tummy.”

  Paige did as she was told, crying as she rested her slender, pale hand against the slick black leather of her jacket. She was listening to him, Jack could see.

  “That’s your baby, in there. Inside you. That baby is your first obligation now, not me. You’re a mother now. You are the mother. Be a mother.”

  “Okay, Dad,” Paige said in a whisper, and Jack knew from her eyes that she had yet to think of herself that way. She would do what he said. She owed a responsibility to someone other than herself, as he did. In one horrific, rainy night, she had become a parent.

  And so, finally, had Jack.

  10

  It was late at night when Mary grabbed the C bus, sitting with her Coach bag and briefcase in the blue plastic seats in the front. The bus was one of the new SEPTA models, white and sharply boxy, with advertisements for TV shows sprayed all over, even the windows. At this hour, the bus was almost completely empty and barreled hollowly down Broad Street. The business day was long over, the in-town shoppers had gone home, and Mary, by any account, should have done the same.

  Instead she was going to her parents’ house, in South Philly. She told herself it was on the way home, but it really wasn’t, and in time she stopped trying to justify her decision. After an evening spent glimpsing the interior of the Newlin family, she yearned to be reminded of what a normal family was like, or at least, her family. Where nobody knifed each other and the only serious fights concerned the Pope. Whoever said you can’t go home again didn’t grow up near the C.

  Mary gazed out the bus window in the dark, watching Broad Street change from the marbled-and-mirrored financial district to the neon funkiness of South Street, surrounded by modern rowhouses filled with lawyers, doctors, and accountants. The gentrified district disappeared in five or six blocks, and businesses began to appear among the less desirable rowhouses; nail and funeral parlors, the omnipresent McDonald’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts. She was entering the Italian neighborhood in which she grew up, and though it was only fifteen minutes from the center of Philadelphia, it could have been across the country. Still, the streets of her neighborhood felt more real to her than the law firms downtown.

  Mary thought about it as she rode along, and the farther south she went, the better she felt. She remembered that Judy was very attached to her hometown in California, and had told her once abo
ut something called land memory. Either you have it or the land does, Mary had never been completely sure, but the bottom line was that you felt best on the land you and your family had grown up on, and in time you made it your own. And no matter what happened to you or to the land, you still felt best there. Standing on it. Being there.

  The bus rattled ahead and she watched the land change to dingy rowhouses with city grit blown into each crevice, darkening the mortar. The color of the brick managed to fight its way through, showing the spunk of a weed in a sidewalk crack, and each house had been built with a different color brick; some were the yellow of dark marigolds, some even a pumpkin orange, and the conventional dark red. Each rowhouse had different decorative touches in its façade; in some, the bricks at the top were tilted so the ends stuck out and made a cute line of baby teeth, and in others a layer of narrower brick underlined the flat roofline, an inner-city underscoring. The stoops were the focus of the homes, like the smile of each place; there was marble, concrete, and flagstone, a classy touch.

  Mary swayed with the bus, her eyes on the cityscape. The houses were only two stories, so the night sky shimmered above as broad as over any grassy plain, and the luster of the stars wasn’t diminished by the telephone wires. She smiled to herself. She was going home. The land didn’t have to be the soaring, craggy mountains or cool shady forests that Judy had described. The land could be concrete, couldn’t it? Grimy, gritty, shitty, too-close-together, gum-spattered South Philadelphia. If you had spent your childhood there — playing, laughing, walking to school — even a city block could be your land, and you had as much right to the land memory as anybody else.

  The bus approached her street, and Mary grabbed her briefcase and got up to go. She held the stainless steel bar, reading the curved ads running along the top of the bus, the ever-popular yellow PREGNANT? and RÉSUMÉ SERVICES. The bus lurched to the same sudden stop it had every day since she’d taken it home from high school, guaranteed to hurl Catholic schoolgirls through the windshield.

  But Mary wasn’t to be outsmarted. She held tight to the pole through the stop and then thanked the driver on the way out, which was something else the nuns had taught her. Turn the other cheek, even when people shit on you for no reason. Mary had had to overcome that thinking to be a lawyer; parochial school hadn’t prepared her for anything except sainthood.

  And the job openings were so few.

  The rooms on the first floor of her parents’ rowhouse were strung like beads on a rosary: living room, dining room, and kitchen. The tiny kitchen was the only room in which the DiNunzios spent time. It contained a square Formica table with padded chairs and was ringed with refaced white cabinets and a white counter with water cracks in each corner. Mass cards and Easter palm aged behind bumpy black switch plates, though the faded Pope John photo had fallen off the wall last year and cracked its frame on the thin linoleum. Mary’s mother had taken it as a bad sign and made a week of novenas. Mary had declined to remind her that Jesus Christ didn’t believe in the evil eye.

  “Is it too late to stop by, Dad?” Mary asked, her face brushing against the worn plaid cotton of her father’s bathrobe. He was giving Mary a hug in the warm kitchen, and when he pulled away, his eyes looked hurt at the question.

  “Whadda you mean, baby?” her father said softly. “Sure, you can always come home, no matter how late. You know I’m up, watchin’ TV.”

  A short, soft man, Mariano DiNunzio was almost seventy-five, with pudgy cheeks in a barely lined face, and full lips with deep laugh lines. Bifocals with dark frames slipped down a bulbous nose and he wore a white sleeveless T-shirt and pajama pants under his bathrobe. Though he had gained weight, he had the build of the tile setter he had been before his back had given out; his body was shaped like a city fireplug and was twice as solid. The DiNunzios specialized in low centers of gravity.

  “Thanks, Pop,” Mary answered. She knew it was exactly what he’d say, and the sound of it comforted her. She had always been her father’s favorite and remained close to him as an adult, when she became aware that their conversations included complete paragraphs of call-and-response, like a priest to his congregation. Et cum spiritu tuo.

  “I’ll make the coffee,” he said. “You wanna set the table?”

  “Sure.” Mary smiled, knowing that the question was part of the same Mass, celebrating the making of late-night coffee. While she went to the cabinets to retrieve cups and saucers, her father shuffled to the sink to fill the stainless steel coffeepot with water. The DiNunzios still used a percolator to make coffee, its bottom dent the only sign of wear in thirty-odd years. Progress was something that came to other households. Thank God.

  “You should stop by more often, Mare,” her father said, as water plunked into the coffeepot. He turned off the water, set the pot on the counter, and pried the plastic lid from the can of Maxwell House, releasing only the faintest aroma. He scooped dry grounds into the pot’s basket, and the sound reverberated in the quiet kitchen, as familiar to Mary from her childhood as a toy shovel through wet, dark sand down the Jersey shore. Scoop, scoop, scoop. And though it was only the two of them, her father would make eight cups of coffee. A veritable sandcastle of caffeine.

  “Come more often? Dad, I’m here every Sunday, practically, for dinner.” Mary snared two cups by their chipped handles and grabbed two saucers in a fake English pattern they had bought at Wanamaker’s, a store that didn’t exist anymore. They were just perfect, but she couldn’t resist teasing. “Think we’ll ever get mugs, Pop?”

  “Mugs?”

  “Coffee mugs. They have them now, with sayings on them. It’s a new thing.”

  “Wise guy,” her father scoffed, blinking behind his bifocals. They were thick, but not as thick as her mother’s. Her mother could barely see, from a lifetime of piecework sewing in the basement of the house. Her father had good eyes but could barely hear, the result of living with Mary, her twin, and her mother. Mary had bought him two hearing aids before he consented to wear the one he had now. It sat curled in his ear like a brown snail.

  “No, really. I could get you a mug that says World’s Greatest Father.”

  “Nah. Mugs, they’re not so nice. Not as nice as cups and saucers.”

  “People use them all the time.”

  “I see that. I know things. I get out.” He smiled, and so did Mary. It was a game they were both playing.

  “And computers, they use, too.”

  “Computers?” Her father cackled. “I see that, on the TV. All the time, computers. You know, Tony. Tony-from-down-the-block. He got on the Internet.” Her father wagged the blue scoop at her. “Writes to some lady in Tampa, Florida. How about that?”

  “There you go. You could have girlfriends in Tampa, too.”

  “Nah, I’m more interested in my daughter and why she don’t go to church with us on Sunday.”

  “Oh, Pop.” Mary went to the silverware drawer for teaspoons. “You gotta start on me?”

  “Your mother would like that, if you went with us on Sunday. She was sayin’ that to me just tonight, before she went to bed. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if Mary came to church with the family?’ Angie goes with us now.”

  “Angie has to. She was a nun.” Mary’s voice sounded more bitter than she intended, and her father’s soft shoulders slumped. She felt a twinge at disappointing him, and guilt gathered like a puffy gray cloud over her head, ready to storm on her and only her. “Okay, you win. Maybe I will go with you, sometime. How about that, Pop?”

  “Good.” Her father nodded, one shake of his bald head, with a wispy fringe of matte gray hair. He set the coffeepot on the stove, twisted on the gas, and turned around as it lit with an audible floom. The pilot light on the ancient stove was too high again. “This Sunday, you’ll come?”

  “This Sunday?” Mary plucked two napkins from the plastic holder in the center of the table, where they had slipped to the bottom. “You drive a hard bargain.”

  “I bid construction, remember?”


  She laughed. “Okay, this Sunday.” She eased into her chair at the table. It was the one on the far side. “If I don’t have to work.”

  Her father turned to the stove, the better to watch the pot, and Mary noticed his heavy hand touch his lower back. In recent years, back pain kept him up at nights, but he pretended he liked to watch TV until two in the morning, and she had always cooperated in this fiction. To do otherwise seemed cruel, but now she wondered about it. “Dad, how’s your back?” she asked.

  “No complaints,” he said, which was what he always said. Et cum spiritu tuo.

  “I know you don’t want to complain, but tell me. How is your back?”

  “It’s fine.” Her father opened the bread drawer and pulled out a plastic bag with an Italian roll in it. He would have bought it at the corner bakery that morning, coming home every day with exactly three rolls; one for him, one for Mary’s mother, and one for extra. The rolls would be buttered and dunked in the coffee, leaving veins of melted butter swirling slick on its surface and enriching its flavor. He took the roll out and set it on the counter, then folded the plastic bag in two, then four, and returned it to the drawer, to be reused for tomorrow’s rolls. It wasn’t about recycling.

  “Are you taking your pills, for the pain?”

  “Nah, they make me too sleepy.” He put the roll on a plate and set it down on the table, near the butter, and Mary knew they would fight over it, each trying to give it to the other.

  “Do you do your exercises?”

  “I go for the newspaper in the morning, at the corner. In the afternoon, I buy my cigar with Tony-from-down-the-block.”

  “But your back hurts. How do you sleep with it?”