by Rae Meadows
“I was mad,” Grace says.
“You didn’t say anything.”
“Maybe I learned from the best.”
Her mother presses her lips together.
“Karen says our daughters resent us because they have too many choices now. They wish they had the built-in excuse of a traditional role,” she says.
“This coming from a woman who followed her husband to France when he ran away with another woman, begging him to take her back,” Grace says.
“She didn’t beg him. She knew what she wanted.”
“Oh please,” Grace says. “I suppose the facelift was for her, too.”
“Cynicism does not become you,” her mother says, standing and brushing crumbs from the table into her hand.
“What would become me? Fake cheer? A husband?”
Her mother shakes her head and empties the crumbs into the sink.
“We’re leaving for the club in an hour,” she says, as she walks out of the kitchen.
After Callie died, her mother spent days in her room, emerging occasionally when friends came by, her face tight, her eyes remote. She sipped at tea but that was the extent of her intake. Grace lurked just out of view, listening to the murmurs, the tinkling of spoons against china cups, feeling such enormous weight from above and pull from below that she thought if she gave in to it, she’d be sucked down into the center of the earth.
Her father shuffled between the bedroom and his closed office. He never looked at her.
###
They drive onto the meticulous grounds of the country club, canopied under the branches of 300-year-old oaks. Grace has avoided the club ever since college, appalled by the discrimination and the tacit approval of her parents and their friends. As a kid she didn’t notice that everyone was white and Protestant, but she was acutely aware that in their town, one’s family was either in or out, and when a club application was turned down, it was the subject of dinner-party whispering.
The grand old clubhouse is still impressive from the outside, colonial white with black shutters, but inside it is faded around the edges; the carpeting needs to be replaced, the gaudy chandeliers in the dining room are dated, and the old fox hunting–themed cocktail lodge is losing its luster. But out in back, where the manse spreads out into acres of verdant growth, the club is the same, stately with the ramshackle elegance of old money. The air is cool and frenzied birds call from leafy overhangs. From the wide balcony of the stone patio the first tee is visible below.
Grace hates that even now she feels the lulling familiarity of this place. She thinks of Charles reading a book of quotations in his cell, the walls the same color as the ceiling, in the greenish tinge of a single overhead lightbulb.
They walk down to the tennis area, where an aging pro with dyed-brown hair air-kisses her mother hello. Grace avoids an introduction and takes to the court.
She wears a faded black T-shirt and cut-off jeans, clothes she found in a giveaway pile in the garage. Her mother is in a sporty, navy and white striped tennis dress, legs toned and tan, and she is quick around the court. Grace drags her heavy, clunky feet, her chest tight after every point. She has to lean over to catch her breath. She misses every first serve and has to dink in a second. She hits wildly, going for winners and missing, unable to get her torpid body to the ball on time.
They play two sets. Her mother gleams, trouncing her 6-2, 6-1.
“I guess that settles it,” her mother says, toweling off her brow.
Grace sucks down water but it doesn’t help.
###
“It’s not like I didn’t want to have friends,” Charles says. “I just didn’t know how other people did it.”
“Friends are overrated,” Grace says. “You know my only friend is my bartender back in Brooklyn?”
He laughs a little.
“I managed to shed everyone else.”
“How come?” he asks.
“I prefer to be alone. I feel safer keeping things to myself.”
“You’re funny,” he says.
“I’m going back to New York tomorrow. You can call me there,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I’ll visit you.”
He sighs.
“I’d like that, but unfortunately I’m only allowed three visits a week. And those are taken up by doctors and lawyers working on my defense.”
“Oh. Maybe sometime soon, then,” she says, trying to disguise her disappointment.
“You know, Sarah was so pretty and I’m not even sure she knew it. When she smiled it was like, pow!”
It’s the most animated he’s ever sounded.
“When I first saw her she was walking with two girls who I kind of knew from the fraternity house. It was like they were in black and white, and only Sarah was in color. I waited for her after class so I could introduce myself. I felt okay about the whole thing, not like I was putting on an act or anything. She came to one of the happy hours in my room. Other guys talked to her and stuff but she talked to me, too. She listened. She was cool. And she didn’t even have to try.”
He stops talking.
“What else?” she asks.
He pauses, tired out by his remembrance.
“Her favorite album was Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan. It wasn’t my type but I grew to like it because she did. I used to drive her to yoga class and wait for her, then drive her back to campus. I don’t know. We were friends.”
Her mother calls her down to dinner and Grace is not quick enough to cover the mouthpiece of the phone.
“You’re so lucky,” he says.
“Sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“There’s something I wanted to tell you,” Grace says. “An image you might think about when it starts to get dark. This morning when I woke up, I saw spring tree leaves of a million shades of green from the window. A clear pale sky. And each time the wind blew, there was a flutter of pink petals from a crabapple tree.”
“Wow,” he says. “Nice.”
###
In the morning, when it’s time to leave for the airport, Grace finds her dad in his office where he has spent the night in his chair, slouched down, his head cocked to the side, mouth open as if mid-gasp. A dribble of pesto from dinner dots the front of his shirt just below his chin. His once-chiseled face hangs under white stubble. A half-empty bottle rests beside him, the picture of the four of them hand in hand crookedly replaced on the wall.
She straightens the frame but doesn’t wake him to say goodbye.
———
Investigators are still trying to determine if sexual contact occurred after the Shafer killing, which would be characteristic of a sadomasochistic sadosexual murder. Still, they acknowledge that some questions may never be answered.
———
CHAPTER 23
After the disorienting third-world quality of JFK, Grace pushes her way outside the airport only to be greeted by the onset of a terrible New York summer. It’s like walking into a billow of noxious steam. The air-conditioning is out in the cab she gets, and the maniacal maneuvering of its driver, jerking stop-and-go through potholed narrow lanes, leaves her ready to throw up in her purse.
Her apartment is a baked, stale tomb, blandly without character. After nine years, it looks like she’s here only temporarily. There are three messages: one from her mother, checking that she made it back, one from Brian confirming her appearance at the office tomorrow, and one wrong-number fax that beeps for ten minutes. When she opens the window, the faintly sweet odor of decaying garbage with a hint of urine drifts in.
She stuffs a twenty and her keys in her pocket.
Inside the heavy door of Chances, it’s cool and dark, with blues playing low. Jimmy leans against the bar with a towel in hand, watching a Mets game on the television in the corner. After a strikeout he turns and grins wide when he sees her.
“Well, well,” he says.
“Hello there.”
“Did
you miss me?”
“Always,” she says.
He sets a wine glass in front of her usual seat. She has a flash of sad recognition when she sees herself in the mirror behind the bar, a woman who drinks too much and who is most comfortable here. But her first sip wipes it away.
“Good to have you back,” he says. “How’s things?”
“Okay. I had to go home for a while. My dad had a stroke.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. You look a little tired, Gracie.”
“I am,” she says, drinking down the wine.
“I was thinking about you the other day. I heard they might go for the death penalty for that kid who killed the girl.”
“Yeah,” she says.
“Do you still think he’s innocent?”
“Who is, Jimmy?”
“Touché,” he says.
Grace doesn’t have the energy to explain. She wants to put her head against the smooth oak of the bar and sleep.
A rowdy group of post-softball-game men bursts in from the bright outside, commandeering some tables and dropping their gear. One of them, red-faced and sweaty with a pointed nose and big teeth, approaches the bar, shouting a pitcher order. He smiles at her but she turns away.
She slips out as Jimmy busies himself with the tap.
###
It’s as if Grace has been gone from the office for months and everything shifted in her absence—the flecked gray carpeting is new, as are the two girls who titter by in short skirts, and the copier has been moved. The horrible fluorescent lighting is harsh and revealing, leaving nowhere for her to blend in unnoticed. Her heart beats like a jackrabbit’s, like she is all of a sudden the only non-alien in a sci-fi movie, in danger of being discovered. Anxiety pools in her chest. She sucks in mammoth breaths to try to quell her panic.
But then she sees the familiar bounce of Brian’s mop-top head and she knows she is cornered.
“Grace!” he says as he rounds the padded wall.
He has a new look going, with cowboy boots and a large trucker belt buckle, an outfit he has surely trotted out for her return.
“Hi, Brian,” she says.
She half-stands to meet his hug, then quickly disengages.
“Welcome back. I’ll let you get settled in.”
He snaps his fingers to punctuate his exit.
“Hey, Grace?” he says, turning back.
“Yeah?”
“Do you have plans tonight? I was thinking we could grab a drink?”
She wants to be away from here and alone. She wants to be numb.
“Yeah, okay,” she says.
He waves and walks away.
There is a layer of dust on her computer screen; she wipes it off with a tissue. She picks up a stack of layouts from her inbox and sets them on the desk in front of her. The small printed letters blur. She reads and rereads the headlines but can’t get beyond them. She abandons the pages and opens up her email, only to find 236 messages: meetings, announcements, jokes, birthdays, goodbyes from people she never knew, 401(k) updates, IT server warnings, emergency-preparedness guidelines. She deletes them all.
Online she finds the same news bits on Charles she has already pored over. She hears the drone of the lights overhead, the lite FM from another cube, the loud ad-sales guy on his speakerphone down the hall.
What if the key to the story lies with Sarah? Was she just pretty and fun and nice? Grace remembers Amy, the girl from the dorm. She was trying to fit in, too. Though more successful at it than Charles, she was still watchful, hungry, monitoring everyone else around her for cues about when to laugh, what to say, how to look, who to know. She would have observed everything she could have about a girl everyone liked.
An email arrives from Brian about a status meeting. Grace can’t will herself to click it open. How can I care, she thinks, when a person’s life is at stake? She feels frazzled, sick, eroded.
She grabs her bag and makes a run for it. Outside, she catches a cab to Grand Central and finds a Long Island Railroad train heading out to Emeryville.
###
Grace goes straight to Charles’s dorm but finds the door locked and no one milling about. Campus is quiet. A kid walks through the breezeway carrying a plastic tub with a basketball, a comforter, and a fan inside. He’s in Birkenstocks and cargo shorts, his hair grown out and chlorine-tinged at its ends.
“Hi,” she says. “Can you help me? I’m looking for Amy. Amy Monroe.”
He bobbles the box and hikes it up on his hip.
“Yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t seen her. I think she lives in there?”
He motions with his head to the dorm and walks toward the parking lot.
In the phone booth out front, Grace gets Amy’s number from the campus operator and dials.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Amy? This is the woman who you talked to a few weeks ago. About Charles Raggatt.”
“Look, I don’t know how you got this number, but…”
“I just wanted to speak with you. For a minute.”
“I don’t think so. Listen, please don’t call me again.”
“It’s important. For Charles.”
Amy hangs up. Grace sits on the bench and waits.
An hour later, Amy exits the door of the building, grappling with a pile of books. Her red roots are showing more and she looks younger without makeup.
“Hello,” Grace says, standing.
Amy looks up and squints a little, then quickly looks to see if anyone else is around.
“Please, I told you,” she says.
But in her weak refusal Grace sees her way in. Amy starts walking and Grace moves in step next to her.
“I can’t talk to you about that stuff,” Amy says.
“Can I help you with those?”
“I’m fine.”
Amy’s arms strain, her white knuckles gripping the bottom of the stack.
“I don’t want to talk about Charles,” Grace says.
Amy glances at Grace through her hair.
“I wondered if you knew Sarah.”
Amy tries to straighten up and a book falls off. Grace picks it up and then Amy lets her take some of the textbooks.
“I need to go sell these back.”
She points with her shoulder toward the bookstore.
“Anything you remember about her,” Grace says.
Amy blows hair from her eye.
“Sarah was great. Everybody liked her.”
“Were you friends with her?”
“I mean, we weren’t super-close or anything, but whatever. We were in the same yoga class.”
A bell chimes for noon as they walk past a clock tower.
“It sounds like she had everything going for her,” Grace says.
“Yeah, I guess. I think it’s kind of weird that they painted such a spotless picture of her, you know? No one’s that perfect,” Amy says.
She looks behind and wipes her cheek with her shoulder.
“How so?” Grace asks.
“I don’t know. She was a total partyer, for one.” She lowers her voice. “She did a lot of drugs. It wasn’t that big of a secret.”
Amy makes an exaggerated sniff noise.
“Cocaine?”
“By the spring she’d gotten super-skinny.”
They pass a guy in an Emeryville Swimming sweatshirt.
“Hey, Amy,” he says without stopping.
“Hey, Doug,” she says with a fake smile.
A few steps later Amy stops.
“I know it’s not cool of me to say bad stuff about a dead person. But it’s not like she was a saint.” She bites a piece of skin on her lip and frowns, then resumes walking. “I saw him give her money once.”
“Who?”
Grace’s stomach hardens.
“Charles. I saw him give Sarah money.”
“What? Money for what?”
“I don’t know. I just saw it, okay? He gave her a bunch of twenties when he didn’t know I was lookin
g.”
Drugs. Money. The revelations cast a crooked light, and doubt edges its way into the periphery of Grace’s conviction.
“You have to tell me everything you know,” Grace says. “What were they involved in?”
“That’s it. That’s all I know,” Amy says. “I shouldn’t have even said that. Listen, I have to go. I can take these from here.”
Grace stacks her books on top of Amy’s. Amy walks away, stooped under the weight, her shoulders rounded, her eyes on the ground.
On the train back into the city Grace slumps into a window seat and rests her head against the glass. She sees Charles’s face when she closes her eyes. When she opens them she thinks, for the first time, What if I have been wrong?
CHAPTER 24
They are in your rearview mirror, your parents and your sister, small and framed, watching you drive away. This is how you will remember them, miniature, your mother with her coral-colored lips—you imagine she gives a beauty pageant wave—and your father, relieved, already starting to walk back inside, checking you off his list. Caroline is waving like crazy, her bright face filled up by her smile, by white teeth. You could squeeze them all between your thumb and forefinger. Glorious, so glorious is this moment that a tear leaks out of your eye. Who the new you will be is almost too much to take. You are free to try again, to become someone else. It’s going to be the turning point. The next time you come back to Hunter, it will be triumphant.
It’s late by the time you arrive at Emeryville College and find your dorm. The high that has kept you company across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York teeters a little when you step out of your car into the dark parking lot and a group of attractive students walks by, laughing and talking on their way to a party. You smile at them but only after they have already passed by.
You are a little disappointed that there is no welcome table set up, not even a banner above the door, but you tell yourself it’s okay, you’re okay. In the lobby there is a map on the wall with photos of incoming students and where each is from. There’s you but it’s not the you that you imagined on the drive out. Your face is puffy, filling up the little square, your smile forced, your hair too gelled. It was your senior picture and your mom must have sent it in. The other kids look pretty and handsome and happy. You hear someone playing guitar down the hall and then the tinkle of a girl’s laughter. From upstairs you hear people talking in the way that you could never do. Just talking. Has everyone already made friends? Did you get here on the wrong day? Breathe.