Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954)

by Dale, Lisa

  “We can take my car, if you want,” she said.

  “Which is your car?”

  “That one.” She pointed across the street. Her black BMW gleamed like candy in the sunlight—prettier now because of the junker idling beside it. Something in Will’s gut went sour. But he forced himself to grin.

  “Aw, come on,” he said. “Look at this thing. It’s a rocket ship. It’s a piece of history.”

  She climbed in. “It smells like wet dog.”

  “So it does. You might wanna roll down your window there, darling Lauren. We’re going au naturel today. No AC.”

  She had to use two hands to crank the window open. It stuck halfway. The car gave a soft clunk when he put it in drive. He took them out of Richmond, past the red stone masonry of the old train station, and west until the buildings loosened their grip on the soil and were replaced by trees. He’d started to say, “So, how do you like Richmond?” when her phone rang.

  “Excuse me,” she said, though there was no apology in her voice. She flipped open the phone and turned her face toward the window. While he drove, she talked about work: bits of a conversation he couldn’t understand except to glean that she was up for some kind of promotion. After a moment, he knew she’d forgotten about him entirely, so that she was completely absorbed by the person on the other end of her phone. A little fissure of jealousy opened inside him; he muscled it closed.

  When he’d watched her on his parents’ beat-up television all those years ago, nobody in the whole courtroom had ever made him feel worse than she did. His clothes had been literally threadbare; his teeth had been crooked as country tombstones in his mouth. He hadn’t gotten braces until he was twenty-two. While she spent her twenties making television appearances, he was scrambling to collect junk—anything to make a buck. Some part of him wanted to rub it in her face—how opposite they were. How hard he had it and how easy she did.

  When he was downright honest with himself, he had to admit that he hadn’t really needed her today, but he’d been obsessed by the idea of bringing her along. He couldn’t explain that to her—he hoped he wouldn’t have to.

  She had him all knotted up. Maybe it was because of how reserved and cucumber-cool she always seemed to be. Maybe it was because she’d thrown his best friend in jail. Or maybe it was because he thought it the most hideously unfair and cruel thing in the world that a woman as smart, rich, and sexy as she was could be so morally deformed under all that blinding beauty. She’d claimed she’d come to apologize; he wasn’t so sure.

  As the highways thinned to a mere trickle of country roads, and Lauren went from talking on the phone to dashing off e-mails with it, Will watched her secretly out of the corner of his eye.

  In Beaufont, not far from the Cloverleaf Shopping Center, nobody needed to tell Eula Oates that her ex-husband had been let out of prison, and certainly nobody needed to tell her for the tenth time. And yet, here she stood, doing something as innocent as buying a book of stamps at the post office, and Mrs. Lawry was standing in line in front of her wearing her big blue net hat and sticking her nose where it didn’t belong.

  “Do you think he’ll look you up—you know—even though you divorced him so fast?”

  “Well,” Eula said. “If he does show up at my house, I’m sure somebody in this town will ring you up and let you know even before I can answer my front door.”

  She left without waiting for her stamps, and she hurried out to her car. When she opened the driver’s-side door, heat blasted her like she was climbing into the jaws of hell. She leaned her forehead against the steering wheel, just for a moment, before she put the car in reverse.

  Nobody faulted her for doing what she did after Arlen got convicted; if anything, they felt bad for her. Poor Eula. Marrying a murderer. Who could have known?

  But now that it turned out Arlen wasn’t guilty after all … she might as well have been Lady Godiva riding naked in the street, for the way people’s tongues wagged. Eula could read between the lines: If only she’d been a more faithful wife. If only she’d trusted him more. If only she wasn’t so selfish as to let him go.

  If only, if only, if only.

  Arlen wasn’t guilty—that was fact. And in the papers, they lauded him as a man who was nearly a saint—all sweet and gentle as a newborn calf. But Arlen was as capable of violence as anybody, if not more capable. And only Eula knew.

  On the day she heard that they were letting him free, she finally got around to changing the locks of the house that she’d bought with him all those years ago, the house where they were gonna rock their babies, and nag each other about the dishes, and grow old, sleeping in each other’s arms.

  The sun had done nothing to make the morning less steamy. Moisture rose up from the fields and hung heavily in the air. The clouds seemed to boil in the sky. Half an hour ago, Will had sent Lauren to pick among the falling-down outbuildings and oxidized piles of car parts that dotted the ground in the shade. He’d assigned himself to the old cow pasture, where the sun scorched the grasses to brown. Anything unusual, he’d told her. That’s what I’m looking for. Something that catches your eye. So far his traipsing and trudging and climbing had led only to a few old oilcans and a bee sting.

  He listened for the sound of her. He hoped she hadn’t gotten too far away. Properties like this could be endless—miles and miles of junk strewn like leaves on a forest floor. Will understood why people kept their old baby cribs and worn-out dressers in buildings that let in rain and snow and mice. Maybe the antiques left to bleach in the sun were ignored, but that didn’t mean they weren’t wanted.

  He caught the sound of Lauren’s voice on a gentle wind—Who was she talking to?—and he traced it back until he found her. From behind an old shed he watched her a moment. She was crouched down, poking at something in the dirt. Beside her was a little boy who might have been five or six. He crouched too, and whatever he was looking at had him fascinated and a little afraid.

  “It’s okay,” Lauren said in a soft voice. “Look. It won’t bite. It’s nice.”

  The boy’s face, a smaller version of the face Will had seen when the property owner had greeted them, was freckled and tanned. He wore a ragged red T-shirt with a frayed hem, shorts that were two sizes too big, and a pair of small work boots. Lauren dropped the stick and moved to pick up whatever they were looking at. Probably she wanted a better look. But the boy was staring at her.

  Will came out of his hiding spot. “What you got there?”

  The boy leapt up and jumped behind Lauren, and Lauren, too, turned to him with a startled gasp.

  “Oh. Sorry,” Will said.

  “It’s okay. We found something. Look.”

  Lauren stood and Will walked toward her to peer into her hands. Inside was a fire-orange newt. He wouldn’t have pegged Lauren as the type who would pick it up.

  “Oh, that’s great!” he said with too much enthusiasm. The boy eyed him suspiciously. A moment ago, the kid had been talking a mile a minute. Now he just glared. “How ’bout it? Did we catch ourselves some dinner?”

  The boy looked for one more long moment at Lauren, then abruptly turned and went running and hopping through the woods like a startled deer. Lauren put the newt on a decaying log. “I think he likes you,” she said.

  He watched the newt hurry into a deep greenish fissure in the center of the tree trunk. “And you must miss your lawyer friends.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Hanging out with slimy, cold-blooded bottom-dwellers—”

  “I get it,” Lauren said, and she laughed a little. She wiped her hands on her shorts, leaving a loamy smear. “Believe me. There’s not a lawyer joke I haven’t heard.”

  “Oh no?” He crossed his arms and thought for a moment. “Okay. How about … Why does the law prohibit sex between lawyers and clients?”

  She smiled. “Double billing for the same service. You’re going to have to do better than that.”

  Will tried to ignore the way the mornin
g’s anger was beginning to soften. Dealing with Lauren was easier when she was a heartless egoist bent on world domination—as opposed to a woman who played in the dirt with lizards and kids. “So did you find any actual antiques for me? Or just reptiles?”

  “Actually I did find something,” she said, gesturing for him to look toward the ground. “It’s a telephone. Cool, right?”

  He looked at the old phone, an oak wall mount with a hand crank, by Lauren’s feet. He saw that it was coated with moist, fresh dirt, and that Lauren’s bleach-white sneakers had suffered a similar fate. She must have had to pry the phone out of the ground. When he looked up at her face again, she was beaming with pride. He knew that feeling well: the joy of discovery. Some part of her pleasure echoed in him.

  He said, “Not bad for a beginner.”

  “How old is it?”

  “I’m not sure. Old. Maybe around 1906?”

  “How much can you get for a phone like that?”

  “’Bout as much as a person is willing to pay for it,” he said. “Maybe five, six hundred. But if somebody wanted it bad enough, there’s no telling.”

  “So it’s really just about how bad a person wants a thing… ”

  “Everything in the world’s about that.”

  They stood a moment in silence that wasn’t as awkward as Will might have expected, staring down at the phone Lauren had found.

  “Will?” Lauren was looking at him. The light caught her eyes, lit them like a sunbeam through a glass of iced tea. “Are you the one who paid for Arlen’s lawyer? At the retrial?”

  “Do I even have to reply if you’re just going to know the answer anyway?”

  She smiled. “I knew it was you. I’m glad you did it.”

  “Someone had to,” he said.

  “I know,” she said, her face stricken with what could only be guilt. “I should have been paying more attention. I just … I need to apologize.”

  Will held her gaze. He knew what she was getting at. She wanted to know if he’d talked to Arlen—if he was going to make something happen for her. He hadn’t, yet. “But apologizing … that’s about you, isn’t it? Not him?”

  “I’d like to think it’s for both of us.” She took a step closer. He wondered if she was thinking of touching him—like she might reach for his shoulder or take his hand. But her arms stayed at her sides. “You’ll help me, won’t you? You’ll talk to him for me?”

  Will needed some space. He couldn’t think. How could a person have such guileless eyes and yet be so disconcertingly knowing? He took a few steps away for no reason except that she was standing too close. “I don’t know if I can help. He’s carrying around all this anger like nobody I’ve ever seen. It’s unlike him. And I’m worried … ”

  “You’re worried that the old Arlen is gone.”

  He tried to conceal his reaction. He hadn’t expected her understanding. He didn’t want her to know how much it mattered. “Everybody keeps telling me to watch my back. I don’t think Arlen’s bad. But he could go bad if he doesn’t change course. I won’t let that happen.”

  “That’s why you came looking for me.”

  He nodded. “You show up in town, hoping that Arlen’s gonna be nice to you. Hoping he’ll forgive you and you can start feeling better again. But here’s the thing: Everything Arlen hates about the world, everything he’s angry at, all of it is condensed down into one single point.”

  “Me,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She took in a deep breath and when her phone buzzed in her back pocket, she did something to silence it. “And you feel the same way about me, don’t you? I’m a symbol of everything you don’t like in the world. Everything that went wrong.”

  Will held her stare. In some small way, she brought out the boy he was when he was fifteen—rejected, poor, and pissed off at the world. He was annoyed that she knew what she did to him. “This isn’t about me. There’s only one reason I’m doing this. If Arlen can forgive you, he just might have a chance.”

  “That makes two of us,” she said.

  A light wind made the leaves above them whisper, and the anger that Will had managed to hold on to throughout the course of the morning left him, suddenly and completely, like a rope slipping between his fingers. Lauren looked up at him. Her eyes hid nothing. He wondered what kind of woman she was, to work all the time, to bear the burden of insight into people’s secrets, to drive herself all the way to Virginia to see a man who hated her guts. She had demons. Just like anyone. Just like him.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll try to get you out of here soon.”

  There was no blasting of trumpets or sounding of alarms when Arlen stepped out of the antiques shop in the middle of the day. No one on the street paused to gawk. Time did not stand still. No cameras flashed. The street just went about its business as usual—never mind Arlen’s fraught rebirth into an afternoon that smelled of yeast, asphalt, exhaust, and something newly fried.

  Arlen had decided that the way to break out of the antiques shop was not to talk himself out of it, but rather to simply not talk himself into it in the first place. He’d been clinging to the idea that going outside would take great courage, and determination, and precise timing. But as it turned out, all it had taken was the realization that he’d run out of beer. He needed another beer more than he needed another episode of The Price Is Right. He wished he’d known earlier that escape was just an easy shift of mind.

  He turned right heading out of the shop. The streetscape gave him a strange feeling of being out-of-body. Stoplights changed from red to green, morning glories in window boxes swayed slightly in

  a nearly imperceptible breeze, the traffic roared, and pedestrians passed by with such indifference that Arlen wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if it had turned out they could go right through him. It made no sense, how mindlessly everyone went about their business, as if his walking down the street was entirely normal, when in fact it was anything but. Didn’t they realize Arlen Fieldstone was walking among them? Convicted murderer who hadn’t murdered? He didn’t know what he’d been hoping would happen when he left the shop. But it wasn’t this. It wasn’t nothing.

  When they let him out of prison, a guard had driven him to the public parking lot in a dingy gray van that smelled like cigarette ash. The door to the van slid open—a roar in his ears—and then a wall of a thousand television cameras pointed at him like some kind of firing squad. He climbed down from his seat and paused a moment before he put his foot on the pavement—there were no fences, no bolted doors, no shatterproof plastic panes, no bars.

  What now? the reporters had asked. Are you going to sue somebody? Are you going to find your ex-wife? What was it like to be in prison when you didn’t do anything wrong?

  Arlen had just smiled a little and waved, and it took him a while to realize that one of the faces in the crowd was familiar—was Will. The closest thing to kin he had left. Will’s expression was grave; he stepped forward out of the tangle of wires and lenses and microphones and pulled Arlen into a long, tight hug. Flashes snapped.

  At that moment, Arlen understood what it was to belong fully to himself and only himself. Freedom was the taste of the sky on his tongue. Anything had been possible. Anything. He was free. What more did he need?

  Now he walked past the shops on the block—the nail salons with painted windows, the take-out restaurants with their menus posted on their doors, the boutiques of old clothes made trendy again. He forgot about the beer. He walked and walked, and soon he didn’t know where he was. All the streets were unfamiliar. All the streets looked the same. And yet, there was no begrudging guard to tell him what to do or where to go next. No cameraman asking for an interview. No senators or congressmen promising to help him make a new life.

  Arlen had to jump to avoid a car when a stoplight turned green. Sweat made constellations on the front of his gray T-shirt. No one cared. And he didn’t either. He didn’t think about the antiques shop, his promise to Will that he would watch it, t
he fact that he’d left the door unlocked.

  He had no idea where he was or where he was going or why no one gave a crap. And there was something safe in the feeling of total indifference, so that nothing and no one mattered. He thought, Maybe not caring is what it means to be a free man.

  Lauren had never wanted a shower more in her life than when Will pulled his old beast of a car up to the curb in front of the antiques shop. Her shorts were sticking to the backs of her legs. Her hair was damp with sweat. She had the same hot and sticky feeling she’d had as a kid after a long day of playing in the ocean surf. She’d almost fallen asleep on the ride home.

  “Looks like you got some color,” he said.

  She touched her face; her skin felt hot. “Maybe.”

  “What do you think of picking? Ready to quit your day job?”

  “Not exactly. But it was fine. Interesting.”

  “Interesting?”

  “I learned things,” she said. She glanced at him across the cab of the car. His face was brightened by a streetlight. “You’re like a walking Wikipedia.”

  “Walking Wiki—what?”

  “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  He looked at her, straight-faced and with dire gravity. She started laughing, and he did too. She leaned back against her seat, caught off guard by Will’s teasing. She liked him—when he wasn’t busy hating her.

  When her laughter faded, he pulled the key from the ignition. His voice was low and smooth. “Why don’t you come inside with me?”

  A fiber of heat snaked through her, a longing that was entirely unexpected and entirely sexual. Her muscles tightened; her skin flushed.

  Will went on. “Arlen’s inside.”

  Arlen. “Oh. Of course.” The heat that had been coursing through her hardened into ice, and her heart did a slow roll that made her touch her chest. She took in a deep breath.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine. I’m fine.”

  “You’re nervous. You’re really nervous.”