by David Ellis
She remembers the nights, when Jessica was a child. Midnight, usually, when Allison would rise from bed and go to her young daughter’s bedroom, shake her awake and take her to the bathroom. Jessica always defiant, swinging her arms and moaning, her eyes sunken in sleep, her wispy hair standing on end, mumbling complaints, as she sat on the toilet and tinkled.
Allison was certainly relieved when Jessica’s bedwetting ceased around her tenth birthday, but she would always concede a sense of loss as well. These were the times when her love was most tested—casual, everyday moments when her daughter was most annoying and unwieldy, when she was most vulnerable, when Allison herself was incredibly tired. Times like these were when she recognized most palpably the concept of love.
Allison accepts that she cannot judge this young woman with any degree of objectivity, but she finds her captivating. She sees tremendous beauty and cannot imagine how anyone could miss it. Her cinnamon hair, a compromise between Mat’s dark brown and Allison’s red. Her thin eyebrows arching over liquid brown eyes. Soft, clear skin that most would describe as Caucasian, though the Latin influence is there, too.
Yes, she is beautiful, and that knowledge has always tugged Allison in opposing directions. A mixed blessing. She knows how men think. She knows Jessica will catch their eye, has already done so. There is such a thing, Allison believes, as being too beautiful, so glamorous that things come too easily. So stunning that men will be drawn to her for only one reason. Mat was the first to comment on that. I was sixteen once, he said, when Jessica was that age, with the wariness of a man who could read the minds of the young men—boys, really—who called on Jessica.
Allison had tried to keep watch over Jessica the way Allison had wanted it when she herself was that age. She tried to give her space, not appear overly inquisitive, create an atmosphere in which Jessica would feel comfortable sharing.
Look what that had gotten her. She had thought it was odd that her daughter, at age seventeen, had no boyfriends at school. Looking at this young woman, Allison couldn’t understand how boys could not be interested, and despite Mat’s growing suspicion that perhaps Jessica didn’t like boys at all, Allison knew better. She asked, and her daughter put her off. They’re so immature, she would explain.
When the police called, Allison didn’t understand, at first. It didn’t register. Her daughter and her sophomore geometry teacher, in the parking lot by the school’s baseball field. A patrolman had come upon them, late in the evening on a school night. There was nothing automatically incriminating about it. Jessica was fully clothed and the teacher was, too, though the patrolman explained to Allison that the teacher’s shirt was pulled out and it wasn’t too hard to figure what had been happening before they saw the squad car’s headlights.
Did she want to press charges? Request an investigation? Allison didn’t know what to say, when she picked up her mortified daughter at the station. They drove silently home. Mat was at the capital, so they had the chance to talk woman-to-woman without the hysteria of an irate father. Allison demanded that Jessica explain herself. So it came out, finally. She admitted it. It had been going on for almost a year, since she was a sophomore and in his class.
“I do,” Jessica says, to the court reporter swearing her in.
They didn’t press charges. It would be all over the place if they did. An underage girl’s name would be kept out of the press, but somehow it would get out. Jessica pleaded with her mother and father, and they ultimately agreed to keep it quiet. The teacher agreed to resign his position immediately and to never teach again. And Allison was left trying to figure out how she missed the whole thing for almost a year.
She never looked at her daughter the same way again. She had expected secrets but not like this. She felt betrayed and inadequate. She explained to Jessica that it was the teacher’s fault, that he was the controlling adult, but that Jessica had to take responsibility for her own actions, too. She wanted to teach this responsibility while, at the same time, she wanted to hover over her daughter’s every movement but knew she could not.
Had Jessica known, even then, that her parents’ marriage was in trouble? Did that play a part? Allison had deliberately stayed with Mat until Jessica graduated and moved on to college. For Jessica’s sake. Had her decision had the opposite effect?
And now there are secrets, again, since the divorce. Jessica has taken her father’s side, and Allison’s questions surrounding Jessica’s love life are once more met with derision. She remembers last December, her daughter being not only evasive but openly hostile to Allison’s queries.
There’s a guy, she told Allison over dinner, but you probably wouldn’t approve.
Jessica gives the appearance of being composed. She is acting, Allison thinks. She has always been good at that. Folding her leg, placing her hands in her lap, lifting her chin and looking over the courtroom. She listens carefully to the questions and takes a moment before answering. She has told them that she is a junior at Mansbury College, with a double major in political science and history. She has told them that she worked part-time at Dillon & Becker as a research assistant, that she is considering law school. She has told them that her parents separated more than a year ago and were divorced by last Thanksgiving, about seven months ago.
It’s okay to tell them, Allison has assured her daughter repeatedly, as if Jessica had any choice.
“Tell us about the seventh of February,” Roger Ogren says. “A Saturday evening.”
The day Sam was murdered.
“I had been on campus all day,” Jessica answers. “About eight that night, I went home.”
“ ‘Home’ being your mother’s home?”
“Yes.” Jessica tucks a hair behind her ear.
“Why did you go to your mother’s home, Ms. Pagone?”
“To study. I had a couple of papers due and it’s—sometimes it’s hard to study at the dorms. So I’ll go home and study. I’ll do my laundry sometimes, too.”
The judge smiles; he must recall when his children did the same thing, took advantage of their time at home for meals and the washer and dryer. Jessica looks at the judge as if she has been left out of the joke. She couldn’t smile right now if someone tickled her feet.
“What time did you arrive at the house? You said ‘around’ eight?”
“I think it was about eight-thirty.”
“Was your mother home at eight-thirty on the evening of Saturday, the seventh of February?”
“No.”
“When did you see your mother that night?”
Jessica looks into her lap. “I can’t say exactly.”
“An approximate time, Ms. Pagone?”
Allison, her hand resting on a notepad, catches herself crumpling the sheet.
“I had fallen asleep,” Jessica says. “I hadn’t been keeping track of time.”
She’s being difficult. They already know this information. It will have the opposite effect, Allison realizes. The more Jessica fights with the prosecutor, the more it highlights how hurtful her testimony is, how reluctant she is to part with the information.
“Was it before or after midnight that your mother came home?”
“I—I guess it’s hard to say,” she says quietly.
“Your Honor,” says Roger Ogren.
“You can lead, Counsel,” says the judge.
“Ms. Pagone, it was after midnight, wasn’t it?”
“I—yes, it was after midnight, I believe.”
“In fact, it was after one in the morning. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Closer to two, in fact.”
“Yes.”
“Where in the house were you when your mother came home?”
Jessica’s eyes fill. “On the couch.”
“And your mother came in through the garage door?”
Jessica nods.
“Please answer out loud, Ms. Pag—”
“She came in through the garage. Yes.”
“Describe h
er appearance.”
“She was probably tired,” Jessica says. “It was late. It was two in the morning. Of course she would be tired.”
“Tell us what she was wearing.”
“She was wearing”—Jessica extends a hand—“a jacket. A sweatshirt and jeans.”
“A sweatshirt.” Roger Ogren retrieves the evidence bag holding the maroon sweatshirt, emblazoned with MANSBURY COLLEGE, and shows it to her. “This sweatshirt.”
“Yes, that might be the sweatshirt.”
“It might be?” Ogren asks. “Jessica, does your mother, to your knowledge, own more than one maroon sweatshirt with the words ‘Mansbury College’ on it?”
Jessica shakes her head. “I bought it for her. At the campus store.”
“So, having the chance to consider it,” says Ogren, shaking the evidence bag, “are you confident that this was definitely the—”
“That was the sweatshirt she was wearing. Okay?”
“Okay.” Ogren replaces the evidence and turns to Jessica again. “Tell us what you saw on your mother’s face,” he requests. He is clearly trying not to cross-examine his own witness, even though the judge has given him permission to do so. “Did you see something on her face?”
“There might have been some dirt on her face.”
Jessica is speaking so quietly that Ogren and the judge lean forward to hear her.
“Dirt on her face.” Roger Ogren corrects the problem by speaking at a high volume himself. “And what about her hands?”
“Yes.”
“Yes—she had dirt on her hands, too?”
“Yes.”
“She had dirt on her face and on her hands. And what else? Her coloring? Her hair?”
Jessica, with hooded eyes, speaks quickly into the microphone, as if to get the answer over with as quickly as possible. “Her hair was matted down. Like she was sweating. She was pale. She looked sick.”
“And did you talk to her about these things, Ms. Pagone? Did you ask your mother about the dirt on her face and hands? Her matted hair? Her pale coloring?”
“Mother—what did you do?” she had cried. “What happened?”
“I asked her.”
“Tell me, Mother. Tell me what happened.”
“And what did she do or say?”
“She went to the bathroom.” Jessica looks away, as if to avoid the entire thing. That is an impossible task now. She is trapped on the witness stand, surrounded on all sides by people very interested in what she has to say.
“What did—”
“She vomited.”
“Your mother came into the house, went right to the bathroom and vomited?”
Jessica reaches for the water placed on the witness stand for her. She does not answer the question, but Roger Ogren probably doesn’t care. He just wanted to repeat the fact that Allison threw up the moment she walked into the house.
Tell me what happened, Mother. Tell me.
“Did you talk to your mother after that, Jessica? Did your mother tell you where she had been, what she had done, why she had dirt on her hands and face at two in the morning?”
“Objection,” Ron McGaffrey says, half out of his chair.
“One question at a time, Counsel,” the judge says.
“She didn’t say much,” Jessica says, before a new question is posed. No one seems inclined to stop her, under the circumstances. “She—I asked her what had happened. She said she didn’t want to talk about it. She went upstairs and that was that.”
“And what did you do?”
“I—she went to bed. I asked her if she wanted anything. If she was feeling well. She just wanted to go to bed.”
“And you didn’t talk to her again that night?”
“No. I finally went to my bedroom and went to sleep.”
“Then let’s go to the following morning, Jessica. The day after Sam Dillon’s murder.”
Allison’s attorney objects. This being the first day of the trial, there has been no testimony fixing the date of Sam’s death as Saturday night, February seventh. The judge sustains the objection. Roger Ogren rephrases.
“Sunday morning,” Jessica says. “I woke up about ten. I went to get the paper. I made some eggs and started studying.”
“When did you see your mother?”
“I went upstairs at about noon. She is—she’s usually an early riser, so—I was wondering, I guess, if something—if she was sick or something.”
“And when—”
“She was in her room. She said she didn’t feel very well. She said she was still feeling sick and wanted to be left alone.”
“And what did you do?”
Jessica pauses. She has not looked in Allison’s direction yet. She is concentrating on something other than the question, to the point that Roger Ogren steps forward to ask the question again.
“I went into her bedroom. I offered to make her something to eat. Get her some aspirin.”
“Where was she at this time?”
“She was—still in bed.”
“Did she respond to you?”
“She said—” Jessica clears her throat. “She said that she wanted to tell me something. She said that I might be hearing—”
Allison closes her hands into fists as her daughter breaks down quietly on the witness stand. Her lawyer, Ron McGaffrey, begins to move out of his seat, but Allison takes his hand.
“Let her get it over with,” Allison whispers to her lawyer.
An uncommon quiet falls over the courtroom as Jessica struggles to control herself. She finally raises her head again, her eyes dark and wet, a shade of red coloring her face. She inhales deeply and continues.
“She said that I might be hearing things about her. She told me that she had been having an affair with Sam Dillon. She said she was sorry she had done it and she wanted me to hear it from her first.”
“Your mother said that she had an affair with Sam Dillon?”
“Yes.”
“And how did you respond?”
“I . . . walked out. I was very mad. I . . . had always hoped my parents would reconcile, I guess. I . . . didn’t like hearing about another—” Her eyes fall. “I left the house and went back to campus.”
Roger Ogren asks Jessica questions about what came next, after Sam Dillon’s death. Jessica had read about his death in the papers, like everyone else, she says, the following Monday, one day after Sam was found dead and a day and a half after he was murdered.
“Did you discuss this with your mother, Jessica? The murder of Sam Dillon?”
“I called her. I left a message on her voice mail.”
“This was Tuesday, February the tenth.”
“Yes.”
“Did she call you back?”
“She came to see me,” Jessica says. “At my dorm at the college.”
Allison stood outside her daughter’s dorm room. She had knocked, several times, to no avail. Jessica wasn’t there. She didn’t know how long she would be gone. Allison didn’t know her class schedule, which was unusual. This was the first semester since Jessica had enrolled at Mansbury that Allison couldn’t recite the title, professor, and time of each class. She had been like that with her only daughter, twenty questions all the time, trying to involve herself wherever possible in the life of a child who had slowly grown independent of her mother, trying to keep the bird who had flown from the nest on the radar screen, at least.
But that had changed this year. Jessica had blamed Allison for the breakup of the marriage. She had left no room for doubt on that subject. It was terribly unfair, in Allison’s eyes; Jessica was focusing only on the result, not the cause. Allison had raised the subject, had wanted the divorce, and that was all that mattered to Jess. Her daughter did not know the details of why, and Allison wouldn’t supply them, at least not in a way that placed all the blame on Mat. She didn’t want it that way; she didn’t want Jessica in the middle of a he-said, she-said. We drifted apart, was all she told her daughter, unsure of wha
t, exactly, Mat had told her.
She didn’t know when Jessica would return to her dorm room. She didn’t know Jessica’s classes, the friends she was making, any boys she might be interested in. She couldn’t even be sure she had the right room anymore. She had to ask a young girl who emerged from a neighboring room, who was waking at a little before noon, if this was where Jessica Pagone lived.
She stood in the hallway for more than an hour, watched students return from class, heard them talking on the phones in their rooms. She couldn’t entirely relate; she hadn’t gone to college like other girls her age. Allison had gotten pregnant as a senior in high school and hadn’t started taking classes until Jessica was in grade school. She had desperately wanted Jessica to have this experience, the college life.
Her daughter walked down the hallway just after one o’clock, a backpack slung over her shoulder, her eyes down, frowning. When she saw her mother, she went blank, face turned ghostly white. She became immediately aware of her surroundings, of two other young women walking through the hallway, to whom Jessica offered a perfunctory smile.
She didn’t address her mother in any way, simply unlocked her dorm room and let Allison follow her in.
“This was Tuesday, the tenth of February,” the prosecutor clarifies. “Two days after Sam Dillon was found dead. A little after one in the afternoon.”
“Right.” Jessica breathes out of her mouth.
“Tell us what happened, Jessica. What you said. What your mother said.”
Jessica clears her throat, grimaces. “She told me I shouldn’t call her on the phone.”
“You never know who might be listening,” Allison had told her daughter. “And they can record the fact that you called. They can look at that later.”
“She didn’t explain why,” Jessica continues. “She just said, don’t use the phone.”
“And what else, Jessica?” Ogren places his hands behind his back.
“She told me that she had been sick yesterday and the night before.”
The prosecutor nods along. “She came all the way down to your college campus to emphasize to you that her behavior that weekend could be explained by the fact that she had been feeling ill?”