“How is it?” she asked, knowing it was terrific by the sparkle in Noni’s eyes and her soft humming as she chewed. Hmmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm. She dipped the silver fork into the mashed potatoes then the zucchini, mixing it together in one bite. The two women ate slowly, enjoying every morsel of flavor, sipping their wine, each complimenting the other on her culinary skills.
“Bernadette, where did you learn to make such good gravy?”
“Hmmm, I guess I was paying more attention than you thought.” Just as Bernie took a bite of turkey smothered in thick gravy, the telephone rang loudly, piercing the candlelight dining experience.
“Who could that be?” Noni asked, a deep crease forming in her forehead as she jutted out her chin and frowned.
“Oh, I bet it’s Don, you know, my friend,” Bernie said, emphasizing the word friend. She pushed away from the table and hurried to the kitchen and the nearest phone. “He probably changed his mind once he got together with all of his family, didn’t want to leave, or something came up.”
“Well, more for us then.” Noni went on eating, quivering bite after quivering bite.
“Hello,” Bernie said, her voice so light and airy it almost sounded like a song.
“Hi, this is Jerry Duncan from Apollo Alarm. I hate to bother you on a holiday, but the alarm has gone off at your office, and I need to let you know.”
“Oh no, did someone break in?” The words now rushed out, anxious to be heard, no longer worried that she sounded carefree.
“What? Who is it?” Noni called from the dining room, sounding irritated at the unwelcome intrusion.
“I don’t know that,” the man said, “the police are on their way over there now. I wanted to let you know in case you wanted to go check it out yourself. You can wait to hear from them if you want, but someone needs to go and reset the alarm. We can shut it off after the police clear the call, but only you can reset it.”
Bernie hesitated, bit her lip. “No, I’ll go now. It’s my responsibility.” She hung up the phone and hurried toward the front closet for her jacket. “Noni, I hate to do this to you, but I have to leave and go check on my office. The alarm went off.”
“Was it a burglar?”
“That, I don’t know. Listen, you stay and finish eating, I’ll be right back.” She pulled her jacket close and zipped it up.
“Can I go with you?” Noni was already backing up from the table.
Bernie thought about the hassle of getting her grandmother out the door and into the car. She could walk from the house to the car well enough, but it was a slow process. She desperately wanted to say no, just stay here, I need to move quickly, but instead, she answered, “Of course you can; let me get your coat.”
Traffic was non-existent on this Thursday evening. It was the time of day when most people had finished their big holiday meal and were either napping or plopped in front of a television, watching football or old movies. Bernie was turning onto L Street in under ten minutes. Two police cars were parked at the curb, their red lights flashing. Another car was also there, a dark-colored Volkswagen Rabbit. The alarm was still ringing, loud and shrill. One officer was shining a powerful flashlight up and down the sides of the old house, checking the windows. Another officer was back at the curb, talking to a woman standing nervously on the sidewalk alongside her car.
“I’ll be right back,” Bernie said as she parked in her usual spot at the side of the building. “Stay here.”
Darkness had descended completely during the short drive and Bernie struggled to see if she recognized the woman speaking to the officers, but it was no one she knew. She hurried up the steps and used her key to unlock the front door. The alarm was deafening. Shutting off the noise was the first thing she had to do. By the time she pushed the door open, the officer with the flashlight was beside her, blocking her entrance.
“I’m Bernadette Sheridan,” she told him. “This is my office.”
“Good evening, Ma’am. I’m Officer Watkins; why don’t you let me go in ahead of you, just to be safe? In fact, stay out here for a few minutes.”
“Oh, sure. I just wanted to shut the alarm off.” Bernie backed up a couple of steps, folded her arms close to her chest to keep warm and looked back to the woman and the officers. She seemed familiar, but her head was turned away, looking down. Bernie leaned over the porch railing to get a view of Noni sitting in the car. She smiled, nodded and waved in assurance that all was okay, then motioned that it would just be a minute.
The officer entered the building and shined his light up and down the stairway, stopping for a moment to examine the stained glass at the top of the stairs, then turned the beam down toward his feet. “And there it is,” he said, “just like she said.” He bent down and picked up an envelope.
“There’s a light switch just to your left,” Bernie said, watching him shine his light around the dark room, wondering what he had found on the floor.
And with the flick of switch, the stairwell and reception room were illuminated. He walked through the office and turned the next bank of lights on, slowly moving from room to room, lighting the whole place up as he went, even climbing the creaking stairs to investigate the second floor, the floorboards groaning at the unfamiliar weight of footsteps. Occasionally, Bernie would look back to the officer standing with the woman near his patrol car. When the policeman searching the inside finally made his way down the stairs, he spoke into the small mic clipped to his shoulder. A crackle of static was his response and he repeated louder, struggling to be heard over the still ringing alarm, “All clear in here.”
“Can I go in now?” Bernie asked. “That noise is terrible.”
“Yeah, go ahead and turn it off.” He stepped aside to allow her to pass.
For a brief moment, Bernie feared she had forgotten the password, but her fingers moved automatically, and the ringing alarm was silenced. “That’s better,” she said.
“This is the culprit,” he said, handing her a pink envelope, the one he had picked up from the floor, just inside the door below the mail slot.
“What’s this?” Bernie asked, flipping the envelope over to see simply her name scrawled across the front.
“The woman standing over there with Officer Douglas says she dropped it into the mail slot and the alarm just went off.” He used his elbow to indicate the pair standing at the curb, then used the back of his hand to wipe at his running nose, sniffing loudly.
A pink envelope, the size used with personal stationary and greeting cards. This was no hand-delivered last minute motion or official letter. She recognized the envelope and handwriting immediately; it was from Julie Randall, and it was hand delivered. She looked over to the woman standing with the officers, and before she took one step toward them, she knew. It was her. Twenty feet away from her at this very moment stood her mother, the one who gave her away thirty-seven years ago. Despite the cold, her cheeks flushed warm. Her eyes burned for just a moment and her stomach muscles tightened involuntarily.
Oh shit, she thought, Noni’s in the car. Shit . . . shit . . . shit . . . right there . . . this could kill her . . . seriously. She was suddenly grateful for the darkness surrounding them. The brightness of the house lights kept Noni hidden in the darkened car, the length of the porch and old house the only thing visible from where she sat waiting.
“I’m going to turn these lights off and lock up,” Bernie told the officer. She hurried through the door and started toward the back of the office, pausing there briefly, holding onto the back-stair banister, breathing in deeply, then out, in three audible sighs, feeling it deep in her belly, as low as her navel. Another valuable residual from years of therapy and law school, too, she thought, the ability to gain composure and confidence in emotionally tense situations. She imagined a flow of warm water running down her back, her arms, wiggled her fingers, took one more deep breath, then began her journey. A slow sequence of darkness followed as she worked her way back toward the front door, turning off all the lights that the off
icer had turned on, double-checking to see for herself if anything had been disturbed. She reset the alarm and locked the door behind her. She felt her back stiffen, the sloping S of her spine transforming to a rigid bar before descending the steps to the sidewalk where she would meet the woman who gave birth to her. Bernie inhaled deeply one more time. Just as her fingers moved automatically to set the alarm, her body moved on autopilot, out the door and down the same steps she used every day.
Her heart raced and her legs felt numb as she walked toward the officers and the woman, but still she kept walking, one foot in front of the other, then the next. Once there, if the strange woman really was Julie Randall, her birth mother, everything would change. In a matter of seconds, life could veer as it so often did. She wondered why the alarm had gone off. Had Julie Randall tried to break in and set the thing off, or was this some kind of fated incident? Or maybe it was the handiwork of Mrs. Gordon? She blamed everything else she couldn’t explain on a ghost that she didn’t even believe in, why not this too?
“Hi,” she said to the small group gathered on the curb. “I’m Bernadette Sheridan.” She stood tall, her feet directly under her hips, no waver in her stance, her voice rich with feigned confidence.
The woman standing in the shadows with the officer looked at her; she was biting her lower lip, or maybe she was just licking her lips, but her mouth kept moving. Her pale eyes were a reflection of Bernie’s own, but they were a softer, faded shade of grey. Despite the terrified look in her eyes and the lip chewing, she held her head high, her chin set and ready for any blow, as if she knew something bad was coming and was ready for it. Officer Douglas, whom Bernie had not yet spoken to, nodded and motioned for her to move away from the others, to speak with him alone. “Good evening, Ma’am.”
“Hello, Officer; so, what’s going on?” She swayed a bit now, side to side, pressing down on the bottom of her pockets, assuming an air of camaraderie with the man in dark blue, silently urging him to share his findings, even the smallest bits of information with her.
“I think everything is pretty well taken care of, no sign of forced entry or anything missing, as far as we can tell.” The porch light didn’t extend as well to where they stood, shrouding the pair in darkness, while the other two remained visible in the light. “I just want to make sure you don’t have something to add; it’s your business, so you might notice something more than perhaps we did.”
“Do you think she tried to break into my office? Is that what really happened?” Bernie looked over her shoulder quickly, getting another look at the person who had dropped the pink envelope in her mail slot; her mother, she was certain of it. Julie stood, returning her gaze, her hands like blocks of lead, hanging limp in her pockets.
“No, not at all. Apparently, when she dropped a letter through the mail slot, the alarm went off. Has that ever happened to you before?”
“Never.”
“Sometimes those motion detectors will be pointed in the direction of a mail slot and pick up the motion and go off. It wouldn’t be the first time.” He used his flashlight to point to the front door.
“Well, it’s the first time it’s happened to me,” she said, her tone now leaning toward agitation, “and I’ve had this alarm system for two years, so it seems a little odd. I mean the mailman drops mail in there all the time, and it doesn’t go off. Why would one letter suddenly make it go off?”
“Well, you might want to have it checked. Perhaps something caused it to move slightly. We just happened to be parked right around the corner when the alarm went off, so we heard it and got over here before any call came through. This woman was getting into her car to leave, so we stopped her. She said she was just dropping off a letter, but we couldn’t be too sure, so we held her until we could check things out. If you say it’s all okay in there, I’m going to let her take off.” He spoke gently, an unusual tone for a big man in a uniform, a gun at his side, handcuffs at his back. “But if you think she was attempting to break in, and things seem disturbed, tell me now, and we’ll take her in. I ran a check on her license; she’s clean.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you know her?” He looked over to the woman and his partner, both of them standing and staring in their direction, the woman looking more anxious by the second, now clutching at her dark raincoat, pulling it tighter and tighter around her as if she was freezing or perhaps simply trying to shred it in two across her back.
“Look, I think I know who she is. If I’m not mistaken, she’s my . . .” Bernie looked back over to the side of the building where her car was parked, the streetlight providing an outline of Noni sitting and waiting, watching everything, “she’s my . . . her name is Julie Randall, right?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Go ahead and let her go,” she said. This was one of those times Bernie wished she was a smoker; it would give her something to do with her hands, her nervous energy. She could inhale deeply, exhale slowly, flick ashes, grind the half-smoked butt out in the pavement, blow a wild cloud of smoke in the air, and look tough. “She’s an old client.”
“That’s what she said, that she was a client.”
They moved back to the other pair and he said something quietly that Bernie couldn’t hear. “You have a nice Thanksgiving; what’s left of it,” he said louder, but it wasn’t clear if the message was to her or Julie or both of them.
“You too,” Bernie answered. Julie simply nodded in agreement.
They watched the two officers confer briefly before climbing into their separate cars. Bernie was quickly considering her options of how to handle this awkward and difficult situation. A weaker person, someone like Crystal, or a guest on one of those sappy daytime talk shows, would dissolve in a puddle of tears, reach out for her long-lost mother, wrap her arms around her, and promise a lifetime of love and devotion from this day forward. Not her, not now. The only person to whom she owed a lifetime of love and devotion was shivering in the passenger seat of her car, oblivious to the drama that was unfolding right before her. If Noni knew what was going on, she’d probably have a stroke. She wouldn’t like this at all, not at all.
Julie Randall continued to clutch the bottom edge of her jacket as she took an uncertain step toward her daughter. “Bernadette,” she said, her voice hoarse and weak. Bernie wondered if it was fear, anxiety, or simply the icy wind that whipped around the corner that caused Julie to sound so diluted. “I, uh . . .” She lifted one thin hand to her own face, and lightly touched her lips.
Numbness, Bernie decided as she took stock of her own feelings, considering the moment at hand. She was numb, her senses altogether dulled for this huge moment, one she had only dared to imagine for most of her life. But after years of training, therapy, and reflection, years of facing opposing counsel, steeling her emotions to appeal to a judge, a jury, the world; she knew how to perform, to take command of any situation, and that was what she intended to do. Control the situation.
“Look,” she said, trying her best to sound sincere, but firm, too. “I know who you are. I don’t know why you’re here, but whatever the reason, I can’t help you right now.” Her lips pressed tightly together into an awkward smile that clashed with her shaking head that said no, no, no.
“I never meant to bother you,” Julie said. “I planned to be gone before you ever got the letter. I don’t know why I’m here. I’m sorry about all this . . .” she jerked her hand about, as if to conjure up the absent officers and the blaring alarm.
Bernie stood motionless, her face a blank slate. She didn’t offer back one of those favorites of Don Fielding, the it’s-no-problem type answers that soften difficult moments. She didn’t say anything at all. She simply prayed her body would not betray her; that she would not melt or even sway, that she would remain a solid sculpture of ice while she carefully memorized every detail of her mother’s face.
The silence between them lingered, awkwardness intensified by Bernie’s learned ability to detach from all emotion—no guilt, no lo
ve, no hate, nothing. Julie closed her eyes briefly, wincing from unimaginable pain, her daughter’s icy response a splash of vinegar on an old, festering wound. It was a look that ultimately moved Bernie to finally speak.
“Like I said, I can’t help you right now.” Now would be a good time to take a drag on that imaginary cigarette, she thought, it would give her that extra beat in time, make her seem sturdy. She took a deep breath, inhaling only a wash of cold November air, skipping the three exhaling sighs of therapy. She has hair like mine, she noticed, just shorter, and a lighter color. “I asked that social worker, Bennett, Joan Bennett, to call you and tell you to put all this on hold.” The wind caught a lock of her own fine hair, lashing it across Bernie’s face, but she didn’t brush it away. Her gloved hands dug deep in her pockets, the right one fidgeting with the unread letter in the pink envelope. “You really should go home now. There are reasons I can’t go into right now.” She looked over to her car, to Noni, still there, still watching.
Julie tucked her chin as if to turn away, but her body moved forward, leaning in closer, invading the safe distance maintained by strangers, daring to look closely into her daughter’s eyes, her fingers reaching out to lightly touch Bernie’s cheek. “You’re beautiful,” she said, a quiet sob escaping with the words. “I’m sorry.” She shook her head vigorously, as though she could shake away the events of the evening, and turned away.
A quick gasp of air escaped from Bernie’s tight lips, and Julie stopped to look back. Once again, she examined her daughter’s face, searching for something, anything.
“Julie,” Bernie said, drawing another cleansing breath, searching for the loose fragments of an unfamiliar lifeline that had been severed long ago. “I have my grandmother in the car. She’s elderly, and not well, and I don’t want to upset her. You being here would upset her, so that is why I can’t deal with any of this right now.” Her frame remained a solid fortress, ever aware of Noni’s eyes boring in on her, but it was a stronghold built of pumice, crumbling away bit by bit. She was still standing, a bit shaky at the core, but upright. “There are things I would like to say, and I have questions for you, but for now I’m just going to ask you to walk away. One more time.”
The Circle Game Page 22