Local Knowledge

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I told him. “You don’t stop loving someone because he made a mistake.”

  “I think you do,” Paul replied, reaching for my hand again, and this time I let him hold it. “I think you do, if that mistake is so bad it could ruin your life.”

  “That’s why I’m saying: you have a choice.”

  “What? Between more time in prison and betraying Luke?”

  “No. The choice is between Luke and me,” I told him. “I’m willing to wait for you. I’m willing to support you in any way you need. Because I love you, Paul. But I have to know you love me, too, more than anything else. That you want to be with me, marry me, start a family with me, as soon as we can. You have to prove to me that our life together is more important than anyone else’s. That’s what I’m asking. I’m willing to give you everything. But you need to do this one thing for me. For us.”

  They both pleaded guilty, though Paul’s charges were reduced to drug possession and conspiracy to commit money laundering. At the sentencing hearing, District Attorney Stanford MacIntosh spoke approvingly of Paul’s “sense of guilt and spirit of cooperation.” He was sentenced to eighteen months’ incarceration in the County House of Corrections, to be followed by five years’ supervised release. They were a lot tougher on Luke, just as Riccio had predicted they would be. Even with family connections that still crisscrossed the power grid of state politics, he was given one of the stiffest sentences ever handed down to an eighteen-year-old in county history: eight years’ imprisonment in the state penitentiary, followed by five years’ supervised release, along with, in legal language, forfeiture of assets representing total estimated proceeds of the marijuana conspiracy. What that meant, in fact, was a further whittling down of the Barnetts’ already greatly diminished fortunes. I don’t think that it helped matters for Luke that Paul’s information did not bring the big break in the larger case that Riccio had been hoping for. Who knows? If they’d been able to penetrate the Albany ring, and finally make some key arrests, they might have gone easier on Luke in the long run. But that didn’t happen.

  I still have a photo that I cut out of a Times-Dispatch article from the day of the sentencing. It’s of Paul and Luke on the steps of the courthouse. They’re both in handcuffs. The shot was taken just as they were being separated halfway down the steps to be led off to different police vehicles—and then on to their differing fates. Paul’s face is turned away. But Luke seems to be looking directly into the camera. For many years, it was the only photo I had of Luke. I used to take it out, unfolding it carefully as its creases stiffened and yellowed, and gaze at it for minutes at a time. I’ve always known that Luke’s look of scornful defiance, seemingly caught by chance by some news photographer, was actually planned and calculated. He’s staring straight at me.

  13

  I became adept at lying. In front of my parents, I was subdued, sometimes withdrawn—the embodiment of someone who has been deeply hurt and disappointed. They were so solicitous of me, tiptoeing around subjects that might touch, even tangentially, on Paul, the trial, anything to do with a scandal that was still the main staple of local gossip. They encouraged me to join the student orchestra. They were delighted when I told them I was thinking of tutoring a freshman girl in music. I’d been playing the piano since third grade and had become proficient, if not inspired, at the keyboard. My father sent away for catalogs to Mannes and Juilliard and carefully studied the sections on scholarships and financial aid.

  “You could do it,” he told me. “You’ve got talent. Discipline. There’s no reason not to start thinking about it, Maddie. Your future is wide open. The sky’s the limit, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “It’s not very practical, Daddy,” I told him. “Being a musician. And I’m really not that good. I’ve got a heavy touch, according to Mr. Lockhardt.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” my mother said. “What does he know? A part-time piano teacher in a little town like this all his life! I agree with your father. And I believe you’re a lot better than you give yourself credit for. You’ve just got to start setting your sights a little higher.”

  I know that their sudden interest in my future was in many ways fueled by their feelings of guilt about my recent past. Shouldn’t they have been able to protect me against what had happened with Paul? I’d been young and impressionable, easy to influence. Shouldn’t they have been able to see through his big talk and bluster? I was aware that, supposedly out of my earshot, they debated these questions, analyzing their mistakes, indulging in endless speculative hindsight. But, at this point, I know they also felt that we had all dodged the bullet. Paul was gone, punished. And I was safe. Unscathed. Theirs again.

  Their belief in and love for this person I pretended to be touched me deeply. As I played to their sympathies and fabricated rehearsals and tutoring sessions, as I became more and more skillful at hiding my true feelings and motivations, my affection for my parents only grew. I looked upon them with a new tenderness and concern, our roles reversed. Their childlike trust in me made me feel old beyond my years—and filled me with sorrow.

  In the beginning, it was mostly Kenny who drove me up to see Paul. The County House of Corrections was in north Harringdale, a run-down neighborhood of a once thriving manufacturing town that had been down on its luck now for more decades than it had flourished. Kenny would pick up Ruthie and me after school and, like our earliest days together, we’d make the forty-minute trip north with the radio blaring and Ruthie skipping up and down the AM dial. With Luke lodged in the state penitentiary, Ruthie turned all her needy attentions on me. Her brush with the notoriety surrounding the arrest and trial had freed her to be even more emotional and histrionic. I think she felt she herself was in the spotlight, or at least warmed by the scandal’s reflected glow.

  In spite of Ruthie’s self-important airs, I was thankful for her help and protection—and by extension, Kenny’s. I still don’t know if she browbeat Kenny into all those hours of chauffeuring, or if he did it willingly. He was a mute but reassuring presence on these excursions. He didn’t seem to mind waiting in the car or walking around the parking area, smoking and checking out the other vehicles, while Ruthie and I visited inside. Eager to take up what she saw as a noble cause, Ruthie had started volunteering at the jail, reading to illiterate and aging inmates.

  When I think back on those days it seems always to be winter, bitter cold, the fields of feed corn showing an uneven stubble under frozen-over snow, a hawk circling above a deserted farm. The little towns we passed through with their white clapboard and pink brick houses were bundled up, silent in a somnolent landscape.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. How are you? What have you been doing? How are your folks?”

  “Good. Nothing. They’re good. How are you?”

  But he didn’t need to tell me. I already knew. His self-disgust was palpable; you couldn’t miss seeing it. But you could see something else, too: I had become everything he wanted to go on living for.

  “You look so pretty. I like your hair like that.”

  “It’s the same as always, really.”

  “No, something’s different. It’s a little longer, right? God, what I would give …”

  He’d spoken to his father. Swallowed his anger and pride. Made his amends. He’d return to the dairy. He had no choice, really. Who else would take him on? Nothing mattered to him now except our future. He worried endlessly about my situation at home, the fact that my parents still didn’t know we intended to marry. Wouldn’t it be better if I told them the truth? His own father had come around; he was certain my dad would, too

  But I knew my father would never change his mind. I was sure of this. He was not a passionate man, and yet he’d allowed himself to be seduced by Paul. My strict father had been taken in by Paul’s exuberance and optimism. He’d believed in him. Maybe, if he hadn’t cared so much, things would have worked out differently. But he couldn’t forgive Paul—or himself
—for being deceived. And Paul was almost too eager to reassure me that our future was secure, though his plans lacked the enthusiasm he’d shown when he was going into business with Luke.

  “I’ve been talking to Bob and Ethan about the dairy. We’re all going to give it another shot. Really work together this time. Bob’s been talking to that organic farming cooperative in Lakeview. Now, of course, we’re going to have to talk Dad into making some changes… .”

  But there was no joy in his voice. No real passion. He’d given all that up. It was one day at a time now. It was as if he’d sworn off any sort of larger ambitions. No more dreams. He was afraid to let himself think big. He was learning to contain his true feelings. Keep a rein on himself. My heart broke every time I saw him, because he was so fundamentally changed. Humble. Grateful to me. No, it was more than gratitude. It was the beginning of his need to idolize me. To put me up on that damned pedestal, where I felt even more remote and alone. I was all too well aware that I’d helped create the man he had become. He was doing this for me. For us, as I’d made him promise. But I was beginning to realize that bargains are never really equal or fair.

  One day in late March, as Ruthie and I were leaving the prison, we ran into Paul’s younger brother, Bob. Of course, I saw him at school, but he tended to keep his distance there. I was a little surprised when he stopped and grinned at me in that lopsided way of his.

  “Hey, Maddie,” he said. “Ruthie. So Kenny’s been driving you up, huh? I just saw him in the parking lot.”

  “Yes.”

  “Listen. I got my license now and Paul’s Jeep. You can come with me sometimes, if you like.”

  The timing couldn’t have been better. Ruthie had recently met Lester Hall, the marine she would eventually marry. And as her interest in him flared, it started to flicker for the work she was doing at the prison. She still stood by me, I’ll give her that, but her attention was elsewhere now. So I began to make the trip with Bob and sometimes Ethan, too. Though Paul’s parents had forbidden his sisters to visit, once Louise also snuck along. It was the first time I’d been with any of them without Paul around. Slowly, I began to get to know them as individuals, as well as how they fit into the overall family structure, which was still something of a mystery to me. Both brothers shared Paul’s fair-haired, round-faced good looks, though Ethan was already putting on weight and Bob was a short and wiry version of the standard large-boned Alden issue. They shared some of Paul’s traits, as well: they had the same rolling gait and wide-open smile. But Bob was laconic, soft-spoken, shy; Ethan was far more talkative and expansive. The two brothers were unfailingly polite, even gallant, in their own ways. I suppose Paul had filled them in on my difficulties at home, and I was treated like some kind of valuable and potentially breakable cargo.

  “We’ll be waiting for you outside, Maddie,” Ethan said one afternoon after we’d all hung out with Paul for half an hour or so. “Watch your backside, bro.”

  By then, the worst of that winter was behind us, and when I left the jail twenty minutes later, flanked by Ethan and Bob, the sunlight dazzled across the surface of the wet parking lot. I closed my eyes briefly against its glare, and when I opened them again I saw a familiar figure leaning against a police cruiser at the bottom of the ramp, talking to someone. It was Harry. It turned out that he’d made a private arrangement with the sheriff, who was a college buddy of Harry’s younger brother, to keep an eye out for who visited Paul Alden. I’m not certain why it mattered so much to him. Perhaps he was just getting back at my father and me for involving him in any of this in the first place. Or else he was one of those men who cared more about the idea of family, the sanctity of the Fedderson name, than in the individuals who formed it. Because he’d never been particularly close to my father, it seemed to me, or interested in our family’s existence until that point. On the drive back to Red River in his car, he told me he was doing it for my own good.

  “And how would you know what that is?” I asked him. I’d never been fresh with him before, but then Harry had taken it upon himself to meddle in something that could only bring heartache to everyone concerned.

  “I can tell you what it isn’t, young lady,” he replied. “It isn’t hanging around with drug dealers and other scum. It isn’t dragging your good name through the streets like some rag. It isn’t shaming your parents and your family, especially after we stood beside you, after we jeopardized our own reputations in the community to help you.”

  “Oh, I see, so this is all about you then,” I told him. I was so young and righteous. Angry and stupid. If only I’d held my tongue. If only I could have thought ahead. I didn’t understand how easy it is to make enemies. And, once made, how impossible it is to undo the damage.

  “No, I’m telling you. You’re not,” my father said. “I forbid it.” It was evening now. Harry had gone. Many words had been exchanged. Tears shed. My mother, exhausted and terrified, was clattering around in the kitchen behind us, trying desperately to normalize the situation by making supper.

  “You can’t, Daddy. We love each other. I’m my own person. You can’t stop me.”

  “I can. You’re underage. You have no money. I refuse to support you if you insist on throwing your life away like this.”

  “I have no life without Paul. We’re meant to be together. Don’t you remember how that feels? Don’t you—”

  “Don’t you ever equate your mother’s and my marriage with whatever you think you share with that person! It makes me sick. You have no idea what you’re saying, Maddie. You’re just too young to understand what love really means. Don’t you see how naive you’re being? How selfish? And after everything we’ve done for you—”

  So it went. In tighter and tighter circles. For another hour at least. I understood that my deception had only made matters worse. I sensed that my parents were thinking back over the past few months—and all the seeming harmony and closeness of that time was burning through and disintegrating in their minds like film from an old home movie caught in the projector light. They were shocked by all the lying I had done. What kind of person had I become? How could I hurt them like this? My mother put something on the table that nobody even looked at. My father, finally beginning to realize that he might actually lose this battle, began to spew out his bitterness and rage. I wish he’d hit me instead. Words are so much worse than blows. They never really heal.

  “Don’t imagine you can come crawling back to us once you take up with him,” he said. “You leave this house now, and that’s it. You’ll never be welcome here again.”

  “No, John, listen, Maddie, please—” my mother said. Though practical and disciplined for the most part, she tended to lose her head in a crisis. And I don’t think either one of us had really understood until then just how thoroughly my father was consumed by his hatred for Paul. Even in the best of times, my father nursed grudges the way some men do alcohol. He’d despised Howell Barnett just on basic principles. And now it seemed that the world had actively turned against my father, slowly robbing him of his livelihood, stripping him of his self-respect. He desperately needed someone to blame for his downfall, and he’d found him.

  “That’s your choice,” I said. “And this is mine.” I think I can recall everything about that moment: the close cooking smells in the kitchen, the dull sheen of the linoleum as I crossed the floor, the feel of the cut-glass knob in my hand. I remember a sense of déjà vu, of time shuddering back and forth like in an earthquake. Had I done this before? No, it was that I would do it again, over and over again, as I thought back on it in the years to come, leaving and not coming back, my mother weeping and my father dry-eyed, leaving for the first time, the doorknob turning in my hand, and leaving forever.

  Part Five

  14

  I’d finished work early and was helping Anne and the kids in the vegetable garden, when I looked up and saw the police car making its way slowly up the Zellers’ driveway. It was the second week of July, and we were in the middle of a
heat wave. At nearly six o’clock on that Friday evening, the thermometer was still hovering in the low eighties. The garden was thriving in all the heat and humidity: arugula, Boston lettuce, and the mesclun mix grew in thick ranks, the cherry tomatoes were tiny fists of bright hard green, the purple and white bush bean flowers heavy with promise, and the morning-glory vines, their sky blue parasols tightly furled in the late-day shade, scaled the trellis that Anne had set up at the juncture of the four raised beds.

  The front window of the cruiser was down, and I recognized the beefy arm that was draped nonchalantly over its frame. It belonged to Tom Langlois, Red River’s chief of police. He’d been three years ahead of Paul in school, a member of one of the extended families of French Canadians who migrated south at the beginning of the last century, lured by the rolling farmland and a relatively gentler climate. Tom was third-generation law enforcement; he’d joined the department shortly after coming back from the first Gulf War, and had taken over as chief a few years back.

  “Damn,” Anne said when I pointed the cruiser out to her. “I didn’t hear the security alarm, did you? I hate this system. A mouse sneezes and it goes off. It’s been triggered for one silly reason or another four times since we moved in.” We started up the hill together, leaving Rachel in charge of the children.

  “Legally, or whatever, the cops have to come by and check things out if we don’t respond right away,” Anne said. “But after the third call they get to charge us twenty-five dollars a visit. So, of course, they don’t mind.” She wiped her hands on the back of her khaki shorts. We were both sweating. I felt damp and uncomfortable, my fingers grimed with dirt, but somehow Anne, slim and tanned in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, managed to project a casual elegance. Tom’s dark glasses were mirrored, but I could tell his gaze was on her as he climbed out of the cruiser and started toward us across the turnaround. He still carried himself with military pride, though his body had long since given way to fat, his stomach bulging out over his low-slung belt and holstered revolver.