by Cathy Lamb
“Nonsense,” I said. “I refuse.” I cut two thick slices of the salted caramel chocolate cake, added forks and napkins, and handed it over.
They were surprised and delighted. Free cake! They would remember this. They would remember the rainy, windy day they met on San Orcanita Island at Evie’s Books, Cake, and Tea. They thanked me profusely, and he invited her over to sit by the windows overlooking the rainy bay.
They were there for three hours. I brought them ice water. Then free Jasmine tea.
When they left, still chatting, she turned and waved and mouthed “Thank you” to me.
When they were at the door, the gentleman turned his head and winked at me. “Thank you,” he mouthed.
“You’re welcome,” I said, in turn, to each of them.
I love happy premonitions.
* * *
I saw Marco at Lupita’s Mexican Restaurant, out on the patio with a group of men from the island. One is our doctor. Two are fishermen. One is a builder. They were laughing, being guys, talking, drinking beer.
I didn’t want him to see me, so I scurried around the corner.
I paused and leaned against the wall of the hardware store. Marco was so hot. I liked his jawline. I liked his hands. I liked his shoulders. I liked his eyes the best. Dark and rimmed with black, with flecks of gold. I liked him. It’s important, I think, to deeply like someone whom you’re madly attracted to. There can always be lust for someone, but liking someone is the most important.
I brushed away a few tears, then my throat clenched as I remembered, once again, what would happen to Marco if we were together.
My heart about split in two. If a physician had an X-ray machine, he would see two half hearts right there, I was sure of it.
Nothing could help me and this cataclysmic romantic situation at all, except for, maybe, fettuccine alfredo.
I’d still hurt, but at least I’d get pasta.
Chapter 14
Betsy Baturra
Multnomah County Jail
Portland, Oregon
1976
Six months after her baby was taken out of her arms, Betsy was cuffed at the wrists and ankles and led out of jail in her orange jumpsuit. In a specially equipped van that was made to haul prisoners back and forth to the courtroom, she sat shackled, two armed guards with her, their faces stony.
When she arrived at the courtroom, she went to a holding area and changed into the clothes her attorney brought her: blue blouse, black skirt, and a blue suit jacket. She had on flat black shoes. She knew the clothes were supposed to make her look conservative, serious, slightly frumpy, and innocent.
She was not the femme fatale the press said she was.
She was not the greedy girlfriend.
She was not the master manipulator.
She was not a cold-blooded murderer.
She was a young woman, defending the life of her boyfriend.
Betsy was numb. She was devastated. After the birth of her sweet Rose, her milk had come in and her breasts became rock hard and infected. She had shown the doctor, a male doctor, and he’d shrugged at her, gave her some pills, told her it would “get better on its own especially since your baby is gone,” and that was that. The infection hadn’t gone away. She caught a cold, and it went straight to her chest, caused pneumonia, and gave her a hacking cough. She was sick, weak, and depressed. She couldn’t eat, and when she passed out in the lunch line it was back to the infirmary.
The doctor, a woman this time, was appalled at the infection in her breasts, and she took care of it as it should have been taken care of in the first place. Betsy’s fever was at 103. She had no desire to fight anymore, even for her own life, but the medicine overruled her wish to die.
The ride to court from jail was bumpy and made Betsy nauseated. She knew that she and Johnny would be tried together. That was unusual, but the prosecutor wanted it that way. They were eighteen, Johnny still in high school, but they would be treated like any other adults.
The press was clogging the entrance of the courthouse. Her case, Johnny’s case, had captured the eyes of the public. Peter, born Pyotr, Kandinsky had been murdered by his son and the son’s girlfriend! Betsy knew what the press was saying: MURDER FOR MONEY . . . PAMPERED SON PLUS GREEDY GIRLFRIEND EQUALS A MURDER . . . YOUNG WOMAN LURES BOYFRIEND INTO KILLING HIS OWN FATHER . . . BEAUTY, LIES, DEATH: HOW TWO LOVERS PLANNED THE MURDER OF THE DECADE.
Not only was the case making national headlines because of the two young lovers, but both of the young lovers said they had murdered the father.
Betsy had told the police that she had stabbed Peter.
Johnny, to Betsy’s utter shock, said he did it. She told the police Johnny was lying, she did it. Johnny said that Betsy was lying, he had killed his father.
Both of their fingerprints were on the knife, but the knife had come from Johnny’s kitchen so his prints were expected.
The only other person in the room who could tell what truly happened was Tilly, Johnny’s younger sister, who was seven years old at the time and had not spoken since the stabbing. Not one word. She was, as the press reported breathlessly, “almost in a trance . . . mentally comatose . . . lost her memory . . . not speaking.... Poor thing! Traumatized by watching her brother’s girlfriend stab her father . . . or was it her brother who stabbed her father?”
The courtroom was noisy and chaotic. The rows were crammed with journalists and spectators who had managed to get in. No one could resist it: Betsy was young and beautiful. Johnny was young and handsome. And there was a dead dad.
Betsy should have been scared to death, but she wasn’t. All was lost. She knew it. Her baby, Rose, was gone. Even her own attorney said that she could get twenty years, maybe life. Maybe the death penalty. It looked premeditated. But none of that mattered. She wanted Rose and could not have her, or her beloved Johnny. Her depression was black and oppressive, sucking out all hope of light. She felt done with life and living. The only thing that kept her from killing herself in jail was her premonition, the one that showed her driving and crashing amidst fir trees and orange poppies.
Betsy was manhandled out of the van, two deputies beside her in bulletproof vests, more in front and behind. She could hardly walk, a few shuffles at a time. She had taken a shower the night before because the woman in the cell next to her, Devina—a woman who was addicted to heroin five years ago and bought and sold the drug to feed her habit—insisted she do so. The heroin addict had attended an Ivy League school. She’d crushed her knee skiing and become addicted to the pain medicine, which then morphed into the heroin addiction.
“Shower. Please, Betsy. You look . . .” Devina paused, shook her head.
“I don’t care how I look.”
“You should,” Devina said. “It’ll help you. You look like a ghost.”
Rainbow said, “Aquamarine. Carnation pink. Orange. You are many colors, Betsy. Let’s bring out the bright ones. Gold. Silver.”
So Betsy had showered and washed her thick black hair for the first time in a week.
Her eyes caught Johnny’s and held. She teared up, and so did he. They had exchanged letters the entire time they’d been in jail awaiting trial. They still loved each other. They had cried over the baby they knew they would probably never see again, their tears staining their letters. They had been realistic, but they had been clinging to hope, too. They had been deadly pessimistic, and they had been determined to get out one day to see their daughter.
I love you, they wrote. I love you so much.
The judge hammered his gavel. The trial began.
* * *
Johnny and Betsy met at a café in downtown Portland where Betsy worked as a waitress. Johnny went there after school, after sports practice, for chocolate milkshakes, then started coming each day to visit Betsy.
They started talking, light chat, then they progressed, slowly, to opening their hearts. Betsy saw in him someone like herself: Lost. They dated, they fell in love. Johnny did not want to work in his father’s com
pany, or with his father. He hated his father. His father was part owner of a used car dealership that regularly ripped people off.
He wanted to be a farmer. He had been, every summer, to his grandma’s farm, and he loved it. It had been sold by his father when she died. Even his grandma couldn’t stand his father, who had tried to steal her money. Johnny wanted to sell fruits and vegetables, and specialty items, too, like cheeses and wine. He hoped to have a vineyard one day.
Farming sounded perfect to Betsy. She could be outside. She could have animals. She could hide from her parents and be away from people. The more people she was around, the more premonitions she had. It was fraught, it was exhausting. She wanted to help people, but it was tearing her down, wearing her down.
Betsy and Johnny had their first kiss at a picnic. Second kiss hiking. Third kiss by a waterfall. Their romance was slow, steady, awash in friendship and kindness. Betsy talked about her parents for the first time, their fanaticism, the violence of her father.
She told him about the beatings with a brush, sticks, a wooden spoon, and her father’s belt. She told him about all the times her father hit her with the Bible, all the verses she had to memorize, how her mother stood back and didn’t help her when her father berated her, told her that she was the devil. How she’d crawled out her window in the middle of the night and left home after graduating early from high school, determined to be independent even though she wasn’t yet eighteen.
Betsy told Johnny about the time, only a few weeks ago, when her parents found her at her apartment, the one she lived in now. The building was filled with students because it was near a university. She was working and going to college classes. She was still in her blue waitress uniform, splattered with ketchup and mustard, when she walked down the hallway and saw her parents by her front door. Music pounded out of a couple of the other apartments, doors open, students milling around.
“What are you doing here?” she said to her father as his face filled with a purple, throbbing rage. He hid behind his religion. He quoted the Bible; he had it memorized. But it was an act. There was no true love there, or compassion, or faith, only a desire to control her and her mother—a squat man using religion to manipulate and abuse.
“Don’t talk to me like that, young woman,” he hissed. “You sinful, disobedient, slutty wretch,” his voice rose sanctimoniously, “Betsy, you will come home now and repent.”
“No,” she said, tilting her chin up. She was always tired from working and going to school, but she was proud of herself. She had escaped her parents, and she was living a whole new life. She still had nightmares about her father: He would chase her through her dreams, he would catch her and smack her across the face, and her mother would stand there and whimper and wring her hands but do nothing to stop the beating. She would wake up panting, sweating, angry, pained, then so incredibly relieved she wasn’t living with him anymore.
“I’m not going home with you.”
“Yes, you are.” Her father’s hands were clenched at his sides. She knew he was trying not to grab her, shove her against a wall, and tell her to “begin reciting Luke.... Name the books of the Bible.... Tell me the story of the woman by the well, you devil whore. . . .”
Her mother told her to “obey her father” in her spindly, frail voice, her eyes filling with tears. “Please, Betsy. Come home. We’ll pray about this together. Right, Hansen?”
“Shut up, Mary,” her father said to her mother, and her mother’s head dropped. It made Betsy sick. It made her furious.
“You will never defend me, will you, Mom?” Tears rushed to Betsy’s eyes, every tear a hundred cries she had never let herself have. Every tear a sign of the continuous betrayal of her mother. “You let him hurt me. You never tried to protect me.”
“Betsy,” she said, barely above a whisper, wringing her hands, her gold eyes anguished, the same eyes as her daughter. “Come with us. We’ve been so worried about you.”
“I am safer here than with him, and you know it, Mom. You know what he’s done to me. You know how he’s hurt me. Why do you want me to live with that again?”
Her mother’s expression showed all her guilt, her fear, her fearful selfishness, her powerlessness.
“You are an ungrateful, Godless woman who has embraced the blackness of this world,” her father’s voice boomed. “You will burn for this, but not until I have put you back on God’s righteous path.”
“I said I am not coming home. I will never live with you and Mom again. Why don’t you try being nice to Mom? Then you’ll have at least one woman who won’t leave you.”
Her father’s face became even darker, his fat fists clenched and unclenched, his eyes narrowed. How dare she say no to him! How dare she defy him! How dare she disrespect him! She was only a girl. His daughter. He owned her. “You are a disgrace—”
She turned and walked back down the hallway. She would enter her apartment later, after they left. Tears spilled out of her eyes. When she had lived with them, she endured. But after leaving, after coming here, to college, to her job, where people were nice to her, gentle, funny, she was able to start seeing her life with her parents for what it was: Abusive. Lonely. Freezing cold.
Her father thundered up behind her, whipped her around, and smacked her in the face, her head twisting about before she crumpled onto the floor. Before she could struggle up and cover her head with her arms, two young men who lived down the hall shouted and intervened. They shoved Hansen away from her and slammed him up against the wall, his bald head crashing into the plaster. He was stunned, dropping heavily to the floor like a sack of potatoes.
One of the young men, who was studying biology in hopes of going to medical school, said, “How do you like being hit, dick?” He hauled Hansen back up and punched him in the face. “How do you like it now?” The bio student hit him again, Hansen’s head snapping back, and dropped him.
The other young man, who was studying to become a nuclear physicist, said, “You sucker punched a woman!” His face was outraged, sickened. “What the hell is wrong with you?” The physics student hauled him up and shoved him back into the wall, Hansen’s head again slamming into it.
Her father, on the ground, his head wobbling, stared up at the furious young men standing protectively in front of his daughter and was shocked. What had happened? How dare they hit him! His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, like a gaping fish. His wife was peering down at him. What was in her eyes? Was it . . . triumph? Was it vindictiveness? Joy?
“Get out of here,” Betsy said quietly, but the rage was evident. “Go. I never, ever want to see either of you again. I’m not taking this anymore. If you don’t leave right now, I will call the police.” She couldn’t believe she’d said that. Even though her face was aching, her neck already knotting up, she was proud of herself.
Her father, trying to recover, trying to stand up, his stiff cheap suit rumpled, croaked out, “You are a girl and we will make you come home with us! Call the police and I will tell them the truth about your rebellious, slutty nature, your lies and your crimes. God will strike you down. He will punish you for your disobedience to your father.”
To which one of the young men said, “No, dude. He’s going to strike you down because you hit your own daughter, and I’ll bet you’ve been hitting her for a long time. That’s called abuse, asshole. Didn’t you know that?”
And the other young man said, “I was raised a Christian, and this isn’t the way a father treats his daughter. My dad never treated me and my sisters like this. Anyone tell you that you’re supposed to act with love if you think you’re a Christian?”
Her father cursed them then, his “faith” completely leaving him as he used the f-word, her mother huddled against the wall.
The kid who was going to medical school said, “I don’t like the f-word,” and punched her father in the gut. He doubled over.
“Get out,” Betsy said again. She could feel her face swelling. “Get out.”
They
left, her father hobbling, her mother crying. Her mother turned to hug Betsy, but Betsy held up her hands as in “Stop.”
“You never helped me, Mom. If you wanted to live with a man like him, fine. But you never should have let me live with him.” Something sharp and pained flashed in her mother’s eyes, and Betsy knew what her mother knew: She was a terrible mother. She should have left her husband to protect her daughter. “You have premonitions, Mom. You chose to cower. You chose not to act, not to help people. You chose not to help me.”
That her mother knew what she should have done, and didn’t, made Betsy more angry, and sadder than before. She had been repeatedly abused by her father, and even now her mother chose her father over her. Hard to know who she hated more.
Her father turned, unsteady on his feet with his head all messed up. “Mary!” he boomed, spittle and blood flying out of his mouth. “Come! Now!”
Her mother shot one last look at Betsy, shame in her eyes, defeat in her body, grief on her face, and left to go to her father.
Betsy hugged the two boys who protected her, and they later became friends with both her and Johnny.
She told Johnny about how she had gotten herself declared an emancipated minor, though her father shouted and railed in court against it. His uncontrolled temper tantrum, his citing of the Bible and his “legal control” over her, his “God-given role as the man, the leader of this family, all in it shall follow my rules,” had the judge signing the emancipation papers lightning quit.
The judge said, “I can see why you can’t live with this anymore, Betsy. Are there more children at home? No? Good. Or I would have Children’s Services on you, Hansen, in a heartbeat. You should not have children in the home. You are free to live your life, Betsy, as you see fit. Sit down, Hansen! I said sit the hell down! Now! Bailiff, remove him from the courtroom immediately. You are in contempt!”
So Betsy told Johnny the truth about her childhood, and Johnny told her the truth about his own father: He hated him.
* * *
Peter, Johnny’s father, came in to the café one time when she was working, when Johnny was there having a burger.