by Amy Gentry
The bathroom cabinets still held grandparent clutter: Nearly empty bottles with varying degrees of stickiness settled around their bottom edges. Small, beaked vials of eardrops and eyedrops. Silver cards bubbled with fading pills. Plastic pill cases marked with the days of the week. Nothing useful.
As she turned to go, she spotted one more thing: a trash can behind the door. She could just see, under a wad of tissues and curled-up dental floss, a wicked glint.
She looked down at Charlotte, whose eyes wobbled with tears, her penciled eyebrows tilting upward at the middle, chin dimpled beneath the duct tape. Esther put a finger to her lips. “Shhh,” she warned.
Then she ripped off the duct tape.
They stared at each other. Charlotte’s eyes were so big that for a moment, the rest of her face disappeared, and Esther felt like she was looking into a mirror, staring into her own eyes, and the rest of her became disconnected. Esther took a bundle of used Kleenex out of her pocket and began unwrapping it cautiously until she felt the razor blade in her hands: a small, wicked thing. A sin.
She showed Charlotte the blade and said, “Hold still.” The duct tape around Charlotte’s wrists was accordioned into thick, sweat-stiffened pleats. Sawing at the tape, she felt all the girl’s resistance—to John David, to the hole they were in, even to her. The tension was hot in Charlotte’s wrists. Charlotte had fought John David. She would fight anyone, and she’d never stop fighting.
Julie, that worthless whore, had lain down without a struggle.
The names popping into Esther’s head were tumbling over one another, confusing her. Every tug of the blade through the duct tape freed her a little more—freed whom, though? Charlotte? Esther? Or the other girl? She kept cutting, hearing the soft protesting squeak of the tape against the absurdly small blade as she worked it patiently back and forth, the heavy tape grabbing and twisting at the tiny blade so that she had to stop and unstick it from time to time with a small smacking noise. After an eternity, the last fibers on one side of the thick sleeve of duct tape gave. Charlotte wrenched away from her, twisting her arms apart so that the skin stretched white and red until one of them pried itself free. Her arms were surprisingly strong for being so short and thin, but Esther knew they must be sore from being taped behind her back.
Charlotte was the bravest, strongest girl she had ever seen. Tears came to Esther’s eyes, and she started wriggling out of her nightshirt, keeping it right-side out as she shrugged it off over her head.
“Here,” she said.
Charlotte took the warm shirt right away and slipped into it without so much as glancing at Esther. Then she held out her hand for the razor and started hacking at the tape on her shins. Esther grabbed the sheet off the foot of the bed and wrapped it around her torso and shoulders, tucked it under her arms. She’d worn a sheet many times before.
“Give me a hand, would you? Get this off,” Charlotte said, and Esther started peeling the damp swaths of slashed tape away from her calves while Charlotte kept working on the tape with the razor. “Okay,” she said. “I’m getting the fuck out of here. You’re going to help me, or I’ll cut you with this.” She held up the razor blade. “Got it?”
Esther nodded with a smile. She knew Charlotte wouldn’t really hurt her.
“What’s your name?” Charlotte asked.
“Esther.”
“Is that your real name?”
Esther thought about that, but Charlotte was already back to working on her knees. “That guy is a sick fuck,” Charlotte said. “Come on, tell me your real name.”
“My name is Esther.”
“Like hell it is,” Charlotte said, and with a snap, she jerked the blade through the last strand of duct tape. As she clawed the tape away from her legs and stood up, the blade dropped to the floor. The barest nudge from Charlotte’s foot sent it skittering away as lightly as a leaf. It stopped and spun in place on an uneven bit of concrete for a moment before coming to rest. “Come on. Look, you helped me. You have guts. We’re going to get out of here. Now, what’s your name?”
Julie started to speak, but Charlotte wasn’t looking at her anymore. She was looking at something right behind her and opening her mouth.
15
The visitation room at the Harris County Jail is a hellish, echoing cacophony; there are no handsets to use to communicate through the Plexiglas windows, and the speakers embedded in them barely work, so dozens of visitors, many with children in tow, are reduced to screaming through the glass. After Tom’s first visit, I tell him not to come back, and please, for the love of God, not to let Julie come either.
Instead, I call Jane. Once a day, in the morning, I dial her cell phone using an insanely expensive third-party account and listen to her talk until my fifteen minutes is up and the call auto-terminates. She sounds remarkably normal—tells me about her summer makeup classes, complains about finishing her papers, contemplates joining a kickball league. It’s like my transgression has opened a floodgate in her, and Jane is bubbling over with the details she’d wanted me to work so hard for before. They are details of a life that turns out to be gloriously mundane, only superficially rebellious, on the level of hair dye. Having to define herself in relation to someone who wasn’t there and who was therefore always perfect was existentially confusing for Jane. Now, with an actual person to compare herself to, she doesn’t seem to need the big gestures anymore. From what I can tell, she is flourishing.
It’s a little exhausting to listen to, but she repays my years of neglect by not asking me any questions about myself, not even a How are you?, which I appreciate. She doesn’t ask about Julie either, but Tom says she and Julie e-mail regularly.
(“Of course I knew it was her,” Jane said when I finally got up the courage to ask, speaking in a tone that suggested I was not a bad mother, just stupid. When I reminded her she was the one who told me Julie was lying about the cell phone, she said, “I don’t see what difference that makes. I lie all the time, but it’s still me.”)
A tiny, lonely part of me is angry that Jane hasn’t offered to come home, but long days of contemplation have convinced me that she’s waiting for me to ask, and until I stop being afraid she’ll say no, we’re at an impasse.
In the meantime, I can’t say I don’t enjoy living vicariously through Jane, a little bit. How exciting to believe in your own ability to defy the world’s expectations of you even as you fulfill them, one cliché after another. I have spent my own life looking to my left and right and finding only the well-worn tracks of my own thoughts and behavior hemming me in. Maybe it’s a side effect of studying the Romantics, those fetishists of originality who unwittingly invented two centuries’ worth of platitudes; maybe that’s why I can’t seem to respond normally to those who love me and whom I love. But I try, with Jane. I listen, I imagine the thwack of a wet kickball against a shoe on the quad, and at the end of every phone call, I feel the dingy, fluorescent-lit jail cell settle a little heavier on my shoulders.
There were witnesses—a teenage couple trudging up the lawn to make out by the glowing waterfall that night. The young man has a criminal record that will keep him off the stand, but the young woman will testify that, although she couldn’t see Julie and me from where she was, the victim was clearly visible in the fountain lights, holding up his hands and pleading for his life. She heard a shot and saw him sink into the water, but she didn’t make the 911 call.
I did that.
As luck would have it, the judge assigned to our high-profile case is a former district attorney, notorious for following her cases up the chain of appeals, attaching herself to the prosecution, and even submitting testimony condemning defendants she’s already ruled against. She’s also vocal about her relationship with Christ, and, if I had to guess, I’d say Chuck Maxwell donated to her campaign. The thought of a godless academic rotting away in the county jail, a facility well known for abuses, perhaps getting softened up for a plea bargain at the hands of her cellmates, must appeal to Judge Croffo
rd as much as it does to the prosecution, who file motion after motion to delay my bond hearing, using every excuse from the live-stream footage of Julie whispering in Maxwell’s ear to the inflamed public sentiment over this appalling attack on a pillar of the community.
It’s true that jail is dirty, overcrowded, humiliating, and excruciatingly boring—you can’t get phone calls, incoming letters are limited in length and heavily censored, and the official process for getting a single book approved and ordered from the publisher can take months. I’d pay a lot of money for something to read to take my mind off my dismal surroundings. But if Crofford expects the inmates to harass me, she’s wrong. The women leave me alone. Word must have spread pretty quickly among them that I shot the man who kidnapped and raped my daughter.
That’s the rumor they’ve heard anyway. Proving that’s what happened is much harder, of course, and my self-defense claim rests on it. At the police station I begged them to check his DNA against the bunker-house crime scene in River Oaks, and I used my one phone call to leave a message for Alex Mercado. I have to admit that although I can see the resemblance in the shape of Maxwell’s low brows and hooded blue eyes, the bearded, square-jawed billboard minister doesn’t otherwise bear much resemblance to ten-year-old Jane’s police-artist sketch of a skinny, ponytailed guy in a hoodie.
And then there’s what Maxwell is saying: that Julie and I were blackmailing him together.
Yes, Maxwell is very much alive. Not for lack of my trying. My shot hit him low on the shoulder, and he went down on his back into the shallow water before I saw the bullet wouldn’t kill him. That’s for the best, because if I had seen right away, I would no doubt have kept on shooting until there were no bullets left. I’m glad I didn’t, and it’s not because I feel Maxwell’s death would have been such a great loss to the world; it’s not even that I prefer to see him humiliated and exposed and put away for life rather than dead. It’s just that if he’d died as a result of my shooting him, prosecutors might be pushing for a capital murder charge right now—in Texas, even an accidental death that occurs during the commission of a felony can be punished with the death penalty, and blackmail is a felony. When I pulled the trigger, the preservation of my own life was not high on my priority list.
But everything’s different now, because I have my daughter back.
I wish I could say it happened in a flash, that standing there at the Water Wall with a gun pointed at Chuck Maxwell, I could suddenly see thirteen-year-old Julie in twenty-one-year-old Julie’s face, like a Magic Eye poster you’ve been staring at for weeks that suddenly leaps into focus. But that wouldn’t be right, because I always saw her there, from the very beginning, from the moment she appeared on our doorstep. I knew; I just didn’t believe. Her lies and evasions made doubting easier, gave me something concrete to focus on. My new version of Julie was like the optical illusion of the candlestick-shaped negative space between two profiles. Imagine two faces—Julie then and Julie now—staring at each other in profile across a gash of grief. All this time I’ve been seeing only the ugly shape of what’s between them. The negative space of trauma.
I haven’t talked to Julie since I was arrested, so I still don’t know what’s in that black hole, but I’m ready to accept what’s on either side of it. Julie, before; Julie, after.
In the pretrial hearing, the prosecutors ask to have the trial date pushed back. At first I think it’s more intimidation—keep me stewing longer—but then I hear the words “River Oaks murder victim,” and I know Alex Mercado must have gotten my phone message. The lead attorney on my case asks again for bail while the police investigate a link between Maxwell, Julie, and Charlotte Willard, a thirteen-year-old girl who disappeared from her home just across the Louisiana border in Beauregard Parish about six months after Julie did. It’s Charlotte Willard whose DNA they eventually matched to the remains in the bomb shelter, and it was Maxwell’s grandmother who originally owned the house; I imagine Alex has left me messages to that effect on my phone, but I’ll have to wait to check them. I remember what Julie called the house: our old place. Alex was wrong about Julie being dead, but he wasn’t wrong about everything. He just had the girls mixed up—who’d escaped and who was dead. It could have gone either way, really. I think of the awful photograph again, and the horror that befell this girl who is not my daughter suffocates me. I cry for her mother and wish once more my shot had killed him.
The judge denies bail again, but my attorney looks hopeful. In the hallway, she tells me of an anonymous blog post whose writer claims to have been sexually molested by Maxwell at the Gate, her mother allegedly ejected from church membership for bringing a complaint. A former member of Springshire Methodist, this one named, alleges that Maxwell was fired from a briefly held leadership position in the youth group nine years ago after abusing her daughter. Both women were immediately served with cease-and-desist orders from the Gate’s attorneys.
But by this time, other people’s daughters have started coming forward.
As an inmate at Harris County Jail, I can’t receive phone calls, uncensored letters, or unapproved books, but I have unlimited access to legal documents related to my upcoming trial. At our next meeting, my attorney hands me a fat folder. “A transcript from the deposition,” she says. “I think you should read this, Anna.”
Any distraction is welcome, and I tell her so.
She sighs. “What’s in there—I want to warn you, it’s not an easy read.”
Thumbing through what look to be hundreds of pages in Q-and-A format, I see one name after another highlighted in yellow. I feel a surge of horror. “Are these all Maxwell’s victims?”
“No,” she says. “Just one.”
Julie
still feels like someone else.
She’s me. I’m her. I don’t mean to say I don’t know that.
Maybe I’m just embarrassed. Julie seems like such an idiot to me now. She used to have an imaginary friend when she was very young. It was a horse from a book, I don’t even remember which one. A white horse with a silver mane. When she rode the bus in elementary school, she used to look out the window and imagine the horse galloping alongside the bus. She’d make little motions under her backpack like she was feeding him sugar. It was more than a fantasy; she could almost see him.
I could almost see him. It was me. I have to tell Julie’s story as if it were my own. For her sake, I’m going to try.
I must have been about five when I asked my mom who God was. It’s one of Julie’s earliest memories. My earliest memories.
She laughed and said, “Just some guy.” When I asked where he lived, she said, “Probably San Diego.” Then she told me to go ask Dad.
I did, but I don’t remember what he said. I liked the idea of God living in San Diego. That’s where Grandma and Grandpa retired to—which I guess was the joke, how much better it was than Houston. At the time, I knew there was a joke somewhere in her answer, but I didn’t understand where. I knew she was laughing, but I thought she was laughing at me.
Anyway, that summer—or maybe this happened before, I’m not really sure—we actually went to San Diego to visit Grandma and Grandpa. They had these special buckets shaped like sand castles, so if you packed them with wet sand and turned them over, they looked like towers, with tooth-shaped ridges around the top and dents on the sides for windows. I remember I got sand stuck in my eye trying to look in through the pretend windows, and it hurt really bad. Dad helped me rinse the grit out, and after I was done crying, he said, “It’s more fun anyway to just imagine what’s inside.” So I did. By the time Jane put her fist in one of the towers and the whole castle crumbled to the beach, I didn’t mind. I had already built a new one in my mind, and it was better, because nobody could destroy it.
I’m not saying that these things had anything to do with what happened later on. I’m just bringing them up to say Julie had a history of belief. She wanted to believe there was an inside to the castle, even though she’d packed it full of w
et sand herself. She wanted to believe God was a beautiful man who lived with her beautiful grandparents on a beautiful beach, and maybe someday they could all live together inside that beautiful imaginary castle.
On the same trip, Dad told me glass was made out of melted sand. How was God any harder to believe than that?
I keep trying to find the before. But once something like that happens to you, there is no before anymore. It takes the before away. And if there’s no before, then there’s no order I can tell it in that makes any sense, and no reason to choose one particular place over any other.
I’d start with the shame, but everything gets there eventually. So, no hurry, I guess.
I met Charlie in Sunday school the summer after the seventh grade, when I went to church with Candyce.
I don’t know if my parents would even remember Candyce. She always wore these big bows in her hair that her mom made with a hot-glue gun to match her outfits. Julie was a little jealous of them. I was jealous, I mean. I can’t imagine caring about that, but Julie did. Candyce’s mom bought her pretty clothes and made pretty bows to go with them. My mom just sort of looked at me when I wore pretty clothes, her lips pressed together. She’s very serious; she’s a professor.
Anyway, I went to Sunday school for the first time with Candyce, and there he was—not Chuck Maxwell from the article I found all those years later, not even John David yet, just Charlie, a skinny guy with a guitar leading the class in a half hour of songs. I liked school fine, but this was different. There was one kid at school who was, I don’t know what you’re supposed to call it, but in seventh grade they said “retarded” and threw French fries at him in the cafeteria. His name was Jason. In Sunday school Jason sat with the cool kids in the front row, and nobody bothered him, not even the boys. He looked so happy, singing along and doing the arm motions that went with the songs. It was almost like he had friends. Charlie made everyone feel that way.