Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954)

by Dale, Lisa

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flicker of movement. But when she turned her head, nothing was there.

  Because Lauren knew she didn’t have many hours left in Richmond, she decided to take aggressive action. She had no more patience for waiting around to see if Arlen would hear her out. She wanted to do something good for him before she left town, and she had only one card to play.

  At Maisie’s house, her leg twitched involuntarily against the side of the bed while her laptop seemed to take forever to boot up. With fingers shaking from coffee and the sense of time bearing down, she looked for Eula’s address. It was simply a matter of doing an Internet search. But where Eula’s name came up, hers did too. The words about her, though she’d read them before, still glared:

  Standin prosecutor Lauren Matthews, a fresh-faced young woman who might be playing Frisbee at SUNY-Albany instead of trying the most hyped-up case of the decade, misses nothing. She scans the jury with eyes that bore in; one wonders if she has X-ray vision, the ability to see lungs, ribs, hearts. At times it seems she can look at a bench of jurors and can watch their brain waves lighting up in quadrants that signal a vote of guilty or not.

  She shut down the Web page. Nine years ago, Arlen had been the monster and Lauren the hero. Now they’d switched. At times, Lauren wished she could shout to the world: I meant well! But then she wondered: Did she? Or had she cared more about her career than justice? She knew there was no single answer. Instead, all the minor elements of Arlen’s case—the judge, the jury, the evidence, her own ambition, the natural human urge for settling scores—all of it had cemented together and created a singular and monolithic mistake.

  She scanned the search results. There was a new page, one that she hadn’t seen before, that mentioned her name and Eula’s—a blog post by some anonymous, antigovernment anarchist. She couldn’t help herself; she took a moment to read:

  The problums with the SO-CALLED justice system is that nobody gives a crap about anything except HOW MUCH MONEY THEY MAKE and whether or not they get envied when they go out to steak dinners at the Four Seasons or wherever. THIS IS NOT PARANOIA! THIS IS FACT! EGO TRUMPS TRUTH AND MONEY TALKKS!

  If we were all our own SOVEREIGNS like God himself put us on this earth to be, then innocent men woudlnt’ go to jail because each man would have his own justice. If you ask me, justice would be Arlen Fieldstone going after Lauren Matthews by mailng her a improvised explosive device IED of the explosively formed penetrator variety. THAT’S JUSTICE. THE BROTHERHOOD HAS SISTER’S IN IT, AND WECAN’T DESCRIMINATE.

  Lauren shivered. Typos and spelling errors aside, she’d never gotten used to the idea of perfect strangers wishing harm on her—though she could tell from the writer’s out-of-control style that he was just blowing off steam. She’d run across militia guys before in her travels. They were volatile and angry, their rage fueled by an infinite and natural resource: helplessness. Sometimes she wished she could talk back to them, say, You do realize that Arlen had a defense counsel, right? But in the eyes of her critics, she’d been the all-powerful and tyrannical aggressor, and Arlen’s defense was a puppy dog. If any one individual person deserved censure, it was her.

  She had no time for getting fearful and wobbly now; she had things to do before she left Richmond, and no time to do them in.

  She drove with her hands tight on the wheel, drove until she found the house that her GPS system said belonged to Eula. At the front door, she knocked and waited. Her heart felt fizzy and pressurized, and at the very edges of her peripheral vision, the light was going blurry. She blinked the dizziness away.

  A woman opened the door. The youthfulness of her face, her smooth skin, her high cheekbones, was startling. Lauren hadn’t expected her to be so young-looking. “May I help you?”

  “Eula?”

  “If you’re another reporter, I’m calling the cops.”

  Lauren gripped the cast-iron railing at her side. “So they’ve been getting to you too.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Lauren. I was part of Arlen Fieldstone’s trial. I … I stepped in as the prosecutor when he—”

  “Uh-huh. I know who you are now,” she said. “You okay? You’re looking a little green.”

  Lauren nodded. “May I come in?”

  “Come sit down,” Eula said, frowning. Lauren followed her inside.

  Eula was a petite woman, but she was not small or frail. She held her shoulders pulled back under a deep V-necked shirt that showed significant cleavage. She was shoeless, but she wore black tights with a run on her foot that had been painted with purple nail polish. Her skirt was small and black.

  “Here you go.” Eula gestured to an armchair. “You need water or something?”

  “I’m fine,” Lauren said, and she found that once she was sitting down, inside Eula’s home, she was fine. Her heartbeat went back to normal, a tentative peace.

  “What is it that brings you here, Lauren?” Eula asked. She did not sit, but stood in the center of the room, her arms crossed, her stance wide. Lauren read the signs: she wasn’t up for a long conversation.

  “I’ve been in Richmond. Hoping to apologize to your ex-husband for my part in his conviction.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I feel some personal responsibility for what happened. I’m doing my best to make things right.”

  “But let me guess: Arlen won’t see you.”

  “No.”

  Eula chuckled and shook her head. “I’m not surprised. The man always did know how to hold a grudge. Better than anyone I ever met.”

  “He’s got reason to,” Lauren said.

  Eula’s face darkened. “You asking me to apologize too?”

  “No—”

  “Because as far as I’m concerned, I did the best thing I could do at the time. Not much more a person can ask of herself than that.”

  “I know,” Lauren said. “I’m not here to make you feel bad.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  “I’m here because I want to know if you would consider going to see him.”

  Lauren watched her, the twitch of her upper lip, the brightness that flashed in her eyes before she managed to smother it. When she spoke, she’d regained her poise. “Did Arlen ask for me?”

  “Honestly? No. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go anyway.”

  Eula walked to the mantel over the little fireplace in her room. The living room was quaint—more comfortable than stylish, with soft pinks and soft greens and ruffled beige flounces on the windows. In some ways, it was a room for a woman much older than Eula. A woman still living a decade ago.

  Eula stood beside the shadowed, glassed-in fireplace, drumming her fingers on the mantel. “You see that?”

  Lauren followed Eula’s gaze to a small silver box that was sitting not a few feet from her. It was tin, etched with motifs of elephants and baobab trees. Eula touched it; Lauren wondered if she knew how tender the gesture appeared.

  “It’s empty,” Eula said. “Arlen gave it to me as a wedding present. Said that he was gonna fill it up with gold and diamonds, a little something for every year of our marriage, until it overflowed.”

  Lauren did not have to know human behavior to understand. There was something universal about the countenance of heartbreak—and of a woman still in love.

  “But don’t feel too bad for me,” Eula said. “I made a choice, and now I have to stick with it. I thought Arlen did it. Just like everybody. I thought he was guilty. I can’t believe he would want to see me now.”

  “You don’t know that,” Lauren said, leaning forward on the cushion beneath her. “He’s hurting too. At least give him the opportunity to not see you, if he doesn’t want to.” She stood and went to Eula, whose eyes were clear and tearless. She pulled a bit of paper from her pocket; she’d written down Arlen’s contact information before leaving her car. “Here,” she said, and she pressed it into Eula’s hand. “I hope you’ll think about it.”

  Eula
nodded, her face resolute.

  Lauren squeezed her arm gently; then—because she thought Eula could understand her, could know more than anyone else what it felt like to have messed up—she hugged her.

  For a long moment, Eula hugged her back. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  *

  Will’s attic—what was left of it—was so crammed with stuff and junk and things that to make his way through it was to do a kind of spelunking. He’d had to wedge open the door with his body to get inside, because the swing of it was blocked, and now he climbed carefully through the dark and dusty space with a flashlight. At midday, the attic was as dark as something out of a nightmare—ragged-edged shadows, dolls with missing hair and eyes, stacks of books like brick chimneys, clothes and shoes he hadn’t been able to throw away. All of the unique things that he’d collected over the years had, at some point, stopped being unique at all and become instead one large mass. He made his way as best he could to the far end of the attic, half thinking that he should be wearing a hard hat, half thinking that he could get stuck here if the great walls of clutter ever tumbled. He could picture the headline: MAN TRAPPED IN OWN ATTIC FOR DAYS.

  As far as he knew, Lauren had no idea of his problem, despite her ability to see things that others could not. He’d been nervous to bring her to his house last week, when she’d hurt her hand. He’d worried that she might have discovered him. His ex-girlfriends—if he could call them that—became restless when he wouldn’t show them the upper floors of his home. They had asked him, playfully, where he was keeping the bodies. They hinted about crazy wives locked in the attic. They told him: I want the Grand Tour.

  But not Lauren. She’d seemed content to stay with him on the first floor only. When he was feeling paranoid, he thought the reason that she hadn’t asked to look around was because she knew. And then he thought of how liberating it would be if she did find out by accident. He fantasized for a moment about the way she would look at him and the relief he would feel. He supposed the line between paranoia and fantasy could be thin, deceptively thin.

  With the flashlight beam going before him, he moved through the bulk of the attic, picking his way over half-remembered finds. He righted a toy boat with a moth-eaten sail, leaning it against a crate. Despite the damage, he guessed it would be worth a lot some day. The monkey with the cymbals; that too, someone would love to collect. The longer he could hold on to these things, the more money they would be worth. And the more they ate him alive.

  Finally, he climbed to the farthest end of the attic away from the stairs. Under the pointed roof, a single square window let in a trickle of choked light, so that the space felt like some perverse monastic’s refuge. He cleared a spot to sit down on the dusty floor. He could trace his years in this house, almost six years now, on a timeline of junk. The newest accumulations were in one of the second-floor bedrooms. But here in the back corner of the attic, this was where it all began. He’d put a box here, a plastic container there. At the time he’d thought: Just until I clean out the barn.

  It seemed almost funny now.

  He sat feeling small and swallowed up by the piles of things: a beat-up Monopoly board, a box of fishing lures, a basket, a single geode bookend, a lamp, a couple of two-by-fours. These things that kept him grounded also weighed him down. He thought perhaps if he had a reason to dig himself out, to find the superhuman courage that it would take to begin dismantling his compulsion to hoard, he might be able to get free. Maybe if he had a chance at a normal life, he could drum up the focus and drive to not only tread water, but to swim.

  Lauren might have been that temptation. That lure. He might have used the possibility of a future with her as a target; if he could change, maybe they would have a chance. But since she was going back to her life in Albany whether he fixed himself or not, there was no goal line to run toward. Not now, anyway.

  He picked up a bag of marbles; they caught the light of his flashlight and glowed in swirls of blue, red, and green. He sometimes felt like he was a prisoner with mortar and trowel, building, brick by brick, his own jail. He tested the weight of the bag in his hand. Then tested himself. Could he do it? Could he throw this thing away? This, and all the others?

  The desire was there, but the will was missing.

  He sat among his things, listening for what they had to tell him, waiting for them to speak.

  Lauren had meant to wait until dark. She could picture herself showing up at Will’s house, standing under the porch light, the Virginia hills falling into shadow behind her, the cows in the fields having wandered in for the night.

  But now that she’d made the decision to leave Richmond, the hours were so thin and stretched that she did not have the luxury of waiting to make a dramatic entrance under the curtain of dark. She reached Will’s house by eight o’clock in the evening, when the sun still was shining bright and golden. Not the time for a romantic liaison at all. But it was what she had.

  Her heart was beating hard when Will opened the door. Her skin felt hot.

  “Lauren?”

  “Hi, Will. Um … surprise?” she said, though the word sounded like a question.

  A smile tugged the corners of his lips, and Lauren knew he wasn’t shocked to see her. She’d texted him earlier to ask where he was. She supposed she was predictable—of course she would show up after what had happened in his office today. And yet, even if he’d expected her, he didn’t welcome her in.

  She pulled herself up straighter. She’d only half prepared herself for the possibility that he might reject her. She should have thought about it more, to lessen the potential sting.

  “I have to tell you something,” she said.

  He leaned against the doorjamb and smiled, friendly enough. But he didn’t move aside. “Shoot.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Now?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  He regarded her long and hard, his arms crossed over his chest. He was wearing a cotton T-shirt and black workout shorts. His feet were bare. “Come in,” he said, less welcoming than resigned.

  He turned sideways and she walked past him. The scent of juniper was in his cologne. His chest, turned in the doorway, seemed wide as a gate, and already she was second-guessing. He was cagey and suspicious. She wondered if there was a chance that he didn’t want her after all, that she’d read their interlude in the antiques shop all wrong. Maybe what he’d done to her had been nothing more than a minor and temporary kink. As she made her way into the kitchen, she resisted the urge to flee right back out the door she’d just walked through. She thought: I shouldn’t be here.

  In the kitchen, Will leaned the small of his back against the center island; she stayed a few feet away.

  “I thought you weren’t leaving until you talked to Arlen,” he said.

  “That was the plan. But I think, at this point, it’s probably safe to say he won’t see me. I mean, it’s been a week. And if I don’t get back to Albany, I’m going to lose an important opportunity,” she said, and she heard in her own voice the inflections of her father and her boss.

  “Sure. I understand. You wanna get back to work.”

  “I have to,” she said.

  “You don’t have to do anything.”

  “No,” she said. “I do.”

  He was quiet. He made no move to come toward her. And while she hadn’t ripped her clothes from her body or thrown herself at his feet, they both knew why she was there. She was certain they’d been on the same page—and yet, Will was making this difficult for her. All this talking. She’d always been good about saying what she wanted, but now she found herself in an uncertain and unusual place—one in which speaking her intentions did not mean she would get what she wanted. She was bargaining from a position of weakness—and she was sure her body language said as much.

  “I think I should go,” she said. She adjusted her purse a little high on her shoulder, but didn’t move to leave.

  Now Will pushed off the counter so he no lo
nger leaned, his hips directly over his feet. “You came all the way out here to tell me that you’re leaving? That’s it?”

  “It seems so.”

  “You could have called,” he said.

  She clenched her teeth. She had the sense he was stringing her along, dragging things out unnecessarily—but she didn’t know why. “I thought I needed to say good-bye in person.”

  “That’s all you want?” he asked. “That’s all you came here for? To say good-bye?”

  She lifted her head with as much pride as she could summon, but it was all bluster. Her legs were shaky and her head felt light. “No. That’s not all.”

  He walked toward her. “Lauren …

  She lifted a hand, felt the flatness of his chest, the pumping of his heart. She closed her eyes, awash with need and unexpected gladness to feel his heartbeat so steady and strong. Some ancient cultures believed that emotions, thoughts, decisions … all of them resided not behind the eyes, but behind the breastbone. Today, she could almost understand.

  When she opened her eyes again, Will was looking down at her with desire so fierce it was both thrilling and frightening. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” she said.

  “Yes.” He took her hand from his chest, kissed the back of it so firmly it felt less like a kiss than a pact. “You want to stay the night.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you just … go?”

  “Do you see any other way?”

  His eyes were focused hard on her, a smokier gray green than before. She held her breath, saw that he was weighing his options. She trembled to be kept waiting. She hated that he made her wait.

  The moment he decided, his eyes darkened. His breath filled up his lungs. “One thing at a time,” he said. And he kissed her.

  The evening was long and drawn out, as summer evenings in Richmond could be long and drawn out, so that when the sunset finally came it was like the colors of the sky were being sucked down the horizon like water down a drain. Heat lightning flashed silently in the distance, though no one noticed, and all of Richmond turned lazy under the summer sky. Even the birds seemed to fly more slowly, less like darts than smears.