Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954)

by Dale, Lisa

  “Wow.” Corina picked up her mojito, swirled the ice and mint around in the glass until it began to fizz. “It’s crazy what happened. About that guy being innocent and all.”

  “Yeah,” Lauren said. “Crazy.”

  She drained the last swallows of fruit-laden wine from her glass. Since she’d come to Richmond, there were moments when she almost felt as if she were on vacation—a break from daily life. But there was no getting around the reason she’d come down to Richmond in the first place. She wondered if it would always be like this, if she would always have to feel like the past was jumping out at her from dark corners or stalking her in a crowded room. If everyone in the bar simultaneously fell silent and pointed their fingers at her, she wouldn’t have felt any less guilty than she did now.

  “Excuse me,” she said to Maisie.

  She shifted on the bar stool, pulled her phone from her purse as if it had been vibrating. It hadn’t—but she did have a number of unchecked messages. She’d never before realized how often she used work as a retreat or excuse, and yet, here she was reaching for her phone as a refuge for the second time today. She wondered if those days and weeks when she was floating in work—when there was so much work to be done it felt like wading into water over her head, and stretching every bone in her body to keep a toe on the very bottom and her nose an inch in the air—were those entire, exhausting days nothing more than a kind of escape from life, as opposed to life itself? Did her passion for work mean she lived more intensely than the people around her? Or did her passion for work mean she lived less hard—because of all the experiences that she’d sacrificed in the name of her job?

  She glanced through her messages, feeling Maisie’s eyes on her. She felt not as if her messages were an infringement on the present, but rather that the present was the aberration, and her many voice mails and e-mails and texts were the persistence of her real life poking through.

  “Everything okay?” Maisie asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “But I’m so sorry. I’ve got all these messages in.” She held up the bright pane of her phone; the blue and white pixels gave Maisie’s skin an alien glow. “I have to go.”

  She offered a few more polite sentences—excuses, apologies, insistences that she didn’t need a lift since she could get a cab—and then she was out of the bar, and she could breathe again. She was heading for the street, for the friendly gray and white of her laptop, the glass of sparkling water she liked to keep beside her while she worked, and the silence that was so companionable and understanding of her need to get things done.

  Often enough, there were cameras at the Albany courthouse. White television vans. TV anchors with expensive jackets and comfortable shoes. Loitering reporters who threw their cigarette butts on the ground. For Lauren, all of this was expected and usual on any given day at the courthouse. And so on the afternoon that Arlen’s conviction had been overturned, she hadn’t realized right away that the two reporters at the bottom of the stairs—who were flirting so heavily with each other that they’d nearly missed their opportunity—had been waiting, in part, for her.

  She’d meant to walk past them briskly, to avoid catching someone’s eye. She’d perfected the art of brushing off reporters with no more thought than if they were wearing cardboard placards and handing out summonses about the End of Time. But that day, she hadn’t been able to make herself invisible. A man with a microphone and a woman with a camera came after her. They blocked her path.

  What do you have to say now that Arlen Fieldstone will be retried based on faulty eyewitness testimony and questionable forensics?

  Lauren had meant to keep walking—to brush off their question even before they posed it. But Arlen’s name on the man’s lips had caught her off guard. She’d heard a rumor that Arlen’s case was being appealed, but she had nothing to do with the appeals process and hardly gave it a thought. Appeals were common; what convict wouldn’t want to appeal, if only to assuage the boredom of life in prison? Appeals rarely changed a thing. But to hear that Arlen’s appeal had ended with a judge throwing out the previous verdict—her verdict—she’d barely managed a reply to the reporter before he fired at her again.

  How do you feel about the accusation that government misconduct and bad lawyering also played a role in his conviction?

  She could only remember stuttering.

  Do you hold yourself to be personally responsible for his wrongful incarceration?

  For a moment, she thought of her brother, then of Arlen, until they both seemed to swirl together in her mind so one was indistinguishable from the other. And in that moment, which felt as if time had been skewed and drawn out like a lengthening shadow, she did something foolish: she let her guard drop.

  For days, the networks replayed the clip: the reporter’s question, the slack-jawed look on Lauren’s face—such naked shock—then a tactless dodge. The image of her face recurred like a familiar nightmare, replayed again and again, for a full twenty-four-hour news cycle before it finally went away.

  She’d given the reporters some rote answer; she couldn’t remember it now. Something trite about “just doing her job” and “we’ll have to wait for the results of the retrial” that didn’t even get replayed because of how jumbled and ridiculous it had been. Her mouth was saying some words, but in the back of her mind, she was thinking of her brother. The prosecutor who’d bagged Jonah had also been “just doing his job.”

  She’d hurried around the reporters as quickly as she could, trusting that they wouldn’t follow her. After a time, they didn’t. The sounds of shouted questions died down. When she was out of sight, she stopped and leaned against the wall, forcing herself not to think about Arlen Fieldstone—the man, not the case—and pushing him back into the furthest recesses of her mind, as if she could seal him, brick by brick, safely into the prisons of memory, where she’d done nothing wrong.

  Around one a.m., Arlen was starting to get sleepy. A haze of cigar smoke hung in the air. Colorful plastic bowls held only greasy shards of salty snacks. The radio station had changed from music to talk. And yet, Will’s friends seemed to have no interest in packing up. The lighthearted banter of early evening had faded, and it left in its wake the surly, resolute silence of weary men who had nothing to do but prove one last point to one another—though what the point was Arlen couldn’t say.

  Now he and Rourke were the only two guys left in the game—the last hand, Arlen hoped. He hadn’t won a round all night. Five hours of poker and not one single hand had gone to him. He’d begun to get angry—frustration strangling from the inside out. He’d learned many lessons about anger, but the most important one was that a person who wasn’t angry at one specific thing found himself being angry at everything. A dangerous state of mind.

  Now, though, his luck was turning around—and just in the nick of time. Though they played only for pretzels, he wanted desperately to win. He had a full house: twos and eights. He’d barely been able to hide his excitement—it threatened to come bursting up out of him like a geyser. He was sure everyone at the table knew exactly what he was holding, as if they could see the reflection of the numbers in his eyes. He trembled to anticipate laying his cards down, a win that felt as if it had taken lifetimes to earn.

  Over the fan of his cards, Rourke eyed him. Will’s kitchen was dim except for one bright light that shone over the center of the table, and it reflected off Rourke’s angelic blond hair. “I’m all in.”

  Arlen nodded and tried to stay cool. Then, as slowly as he dared, he lowered his cards to the table. He didn’t even bother pronouncing the obvious. The hand spoke for itself.

  Rourke’s face fell. He folded his cards up, tapped the bottom edges on the table, then tossed them so they landed with a skid. “Well, I’m cooked. You win, Arlen.”

  “About time,” Will said.

  “Hold up.” Arlen didn’t move to grab the pretzels in the center of the table. He had no interest in making a big show of pulling that pile toward him as if it was a
heap of gold coins. But the cards … those he wanted to see. “What’d I win against?”

  “What’s it matter?” Rourke asked.

  Arlen leaned his forearms on the table. “Gloating rights.”

  “Gloat away,” Rourke said, waving his hand. “Weren’t nothing but a couple pair.”

  “So let’s see.” Arlen reached out for Rourke’s neat stack of downward-facing cards.

  Rourke put his hand over Arlen’s, pinning it down. “It ain’t necessary.”

  Arlen’s stomach soured. “I should say it is.” He held Rourke’s gaze with all the power he’d learned he had in himself one day when a man tried to jump him in the showers. “Show me the damn cards.”

  Rourke drew his hand back.

  Arlen turned over the cards and spread them out, one by one, to see. Four perfect little tens were looking back at him. Four tens and a six.

  He started to laugh—laughter that rose up from some black and burning place within him. The anger rolled over his body in waves; he felt as if a demon had climbed up from some awful place inside him, making him nothing more than a puppet of bones and meat. He stood up so fast his chair hit the floor. And then hands were reaching over the table to grip the front of Rourke’s shirt. Fear clouded the older man’s eyes.

  “What the hell was that?” Arlen demanded. “You think I need to be babied? Like I’m some kind of charity case?”

  “Naw, man. Easy. Let go.”

  “You don’t let people win,” Arlen said through his teeth. He heard Will calling to him as if from a great distance. He gripped Rourke tighter, and when he spoke, his spit flew in the other man’s face. “You only let somebody win if you feel bad for them. Do you feel bad for me? Huh? Do you?”

  Panic had set into Rourke’s face—a wild, grasping, searching look. He held Arlen’s wrists in his two hands. “I said, let go—somebody—”

  Will picked up the edge of the table and dropped it so it slammed the tile floor, and Arlen came to. He had the odd feeling of just having been woken up from a vivid dream. Will was looking at him. His eyes were harder than Arlen had ever seen.

  “Let him go,” Will said.

  Arlen didn’t move. He felt like he was shrinking.

  “Let him go.”

  Reluctantly, he released the other man, giving him a slight jerk for good measure. “Letting me win. Jeez.”

  “I think you’d better let me drive you home,” Will said.

  “Call me a cab.” Arlen straightened his shirt. He still had some money. “I’ll be outside.”

  He managed to hold his head high as he walked toward the door. He tried not to let himself hear Rourke’s complaining, the brothers asking if he was okay, the peeved murmurs as he left the room. He tried not to care that he’d been looking forward to playing poker tonight, to meeting Will’s friends, to having a normal evening with a bunch of guys who weren’t convicts and didn’t care that he’d done hard time. He let himself out. And then, when he was at the far, dark edge of the lawn, he let himself cry.

  Lesson Eight: Sometimes when we rub our eyes it’s because we’re tired or we’ve got an itch. But other times, rubbing, covering, or closing our eyes can be an unconscious gesture to block out things that make us uncomfortable or that we don’t want to see. It is a retreating inward, when the world within is more acceptable than the world without. Think of it: People rubbing their faces in long meetings at the office. Parents taking a little “break” from their unruly children by closing their eyes while they wait for the traffic light to turn green. Our body language mirrors our thoughts about our surroundings—how they are and how we wish they would be.

  CHAPTER 8

  For a long time after he left her—after she told him, Go—Lauren thought of Edward. She thought of him when she was at the grocery store, because he’d loved cashews and she’d fed them to him one by one on a rainy afternoon. She thought of him when the evening news came on, because he’d once insisted that she not put her clothes on for the rest of the day so that when he called he would know she was naked. She thought of him when she opened a bottle of wine, when the torque and twist of pulling the cork made her think of the way he’d made love to her on the ice-cold tile of her kitchen floor.

  They’d made love so often. Lauren should have realized that was all they did, all they were doing, even when they weren’t engaged in the act. When they went to dinner it was a precursor to making love. When Edward called her in the afternoon, whispering words that burned with audacity, it was to tempt her toward making love. When they watched a movie on her couch, never his, his hand inevitably found its way to the drawstring of her pajamas. She’d thought he was romantic. That sex was bringing them closer and closer. And yet, it was all smoke and mirrors—an illusion of intimacy that disguised a gap a mile wide.

  As the summer slogged on, thoughts of him were being squeezed into oblivion—she had other things to occupy her. But she’d yet to shake him completely. In the morning light on Friday, she sat up in bed and realized how late she’d slept; it was almost seven. She knew from the soreness of her body, the hypersensitivity of her hot skin, that she’d dreamed of Edward. The feeling of his presence was as strong as if he’d just gotten up for a glass of water and would at any moment come back to her bed. She leaned over her bent knees and ran a hand through her loose hair. Already, the blurred memories of the dream were leaving, swiftly carried off by the current of consciousness. She could no more grasp the details—the mathematics of a bent elbow, the music of a gasp—than if she were to try to catch a ghost with her bare hands.

  She padded down to the kitchen in bare feet, still reeling with the aches and pains of longing. It irritated her, how a dream she could not remember could be so troublesome. There had been heat, of course. Skin. Sweat. Sex that was not like some race to the finish line, that was not the athletic coupling of two competitive people, each striving for perfection. Instead, in the dream, sex was a path she and he walked together, and now the memory of that tenderness—so unusual that she wondered if she’d ever felt it at all—was a wish of her heart as bitter as it was sweet.

  She grasped at the edges of fading images as she pulled a tin of coffee from Maisie’s cabinet. She fished out the requisite grinds, then ladled them into the filter. The smell perked her up. She filled the coffeepot with cool white tap water, willing the ache of need to subside like water swirling down the drain.

  It wasn’t until midmorning, when Maisie called and asked where she was headed and Lauren heard herself say Will’s name, that the shock came. The dream—skin and sweat, heat and greed. Lauren closed her eyes. It hadn’t been about Edward at all.

  Arlen sat in Will’s office on a ripped green leather chair that might have been from the fifties and that made his back cramp. Will’s office was as cluttered as his store—knickknacks, an old-fashioned radio that didn’t work piled up on a heap of old-fashioned other things—stoplights, fans, typewriters—that also didn’t work. Will picked among and moved around his treasures like a kid on a jungle gym, easy and free. But Arlen wasn’t so comfortable. He sat among the stuff, thinking, and waiting, swiveling the chair from side to side.

  The computer beeped, and he spun to face a monitor the size and shape of a small fish tank. His experience with the Internet was little more than anecdotal. From other inmates, the ones who came and went, he heard about screens that let you look at the person you were talking to, like a videophone. And from television shows, he heard new words and acronyms that made no sense and might have been an alien language: emoticon, gravatar, jpeg … Even innocent words, like window and wall, had turned slick in his grasp.

  Now that he was out, he saw that everyone was caught in the Web, whether they liked it or not. Only recently was he beginning to understand how dramatically the world had leapt forward into the future while he’d been made to stand still.

  He watched the computer turning on—the shimmery graphics and friendly little beeps and chimes. Will had given him a crash course in Web su
rfing, and now he worked the mouse with the awkward concentration of a child learning to use a fork for the first time. With two fingers he typed G-O-O-G-L-E, a stupid name for a company, and waited until the page came up. There was nothing but a rectangle, waiting like a slit in a door that had the universe on the other side.

  He clicked. The cursor blinked.

  Eula …

  His skin prickled as if he were about to hack into the FBI or rob a bank. Did he even know his ex-wife’s name anymore? Had she remarried? He felt something deep within him trembling, though his hands seemed steady as ever. Here he was, an ex-convict afraid to do something that wasn’t even breaking the law.

  He cracked his knuckles, then typed her name, her name that was his too: Eula Fieldstone.

  When nothing familiar came up but some old articles about his trial, he tried not to feel defeated. And yet, to not find her on the first try had stung. It made him wonder if he wasn’t meant to find her. He didn’t know if he had it in him to try again, and he sat for a time, staring at the computer screen, waiting for courage.

  His fingers had strength his heart did not.

  He typed, this time using her maiden name. He plodded awkwardly and uncertainly through the maze of links and text that was the Web. And when she finally did turn up in a white pages listing, buried so far in his search results he nearly missed it, what he found made him feel as if someone had cinched a belt around his lungs.

  The Internet told him everything. Her name, her age, her phone number. And the location of her house—the house they’d bought together, the house where she still lived.

  She hadn’t moved.

  She was still there.

  He leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, remembering. She hadn’t wanted to buy that house—the one she still lived in. She’d said it was too big for them. It had patchy grass, a little garden along the back fence for tomatoes and herbs, a birdbath in the stamp-sized front yard, and five small bedrooms on the second floor.