Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel

by S. A. Lelchuk

  In return they had left an injured gas station clerk, some damaged property, and my dead parents.

  The Surf Town Slaughter, the papers had called the crime. A high-powered San Francisco lawyer volunteered to defend Jordan Stone pro bono, the free media attention worth more than any fees. Almost overnight he worked out a plea bargain and a new narrative. A naive, susceptible kid who’d fallen under the Manson-like influence of the older man. They both looked the part. A cheap shirt and tie couldn’t hide the ominous tattoos across the neck of Carson Peters, his menacing eyes and shaved head. He had been sentenced to death, which in California meant life. He currently occupied a comfortable single cell in San Quentin, at a cost to taxpayers of about $150,000 a year.

  Jordan Stone looked like a scared teenager. Blond bangs falling over his forehead, blue eyes welling with tears. No prior arrests, a bright future, one mistake. He had been a star athlete on his school’s track team. At the trial, his line of character witnesses stretched around the block, everyone from ex-girlfriends to his AP U.S. History teacher. His parents and siblings—who all still happened to be alive—told emotional stories about his generosity and kindness.

  The trial taught me that people liked clear roles. Liked to see other people—strangers—and think they knew them. After the trial Peters went off to death row and settled into an endless round of appeals. Jordan Stone pled guilty to manslaughter, went off to juvenile detention, turned eighteen, and was transferred to state prison where he got his GED, attended chapel, tutored other inmates.

  He did everything one would expect from a person seeking rehabilitation.

  He had been a model prisoner, the parole board would unanimously agree.

  * * *

  After the trial, I was bounced around for a couple of years, from a tough state home to foster parents who I still tried hard not to think about. Eventually I wound up in Davis with a second set of foster parents, Elizabeth and Jeff Hammond. I arrived expecting the worst, but the Hammonds were different. She was a librarian, and every day that summer I walked to her library to read. The library was a modest, one-story building and soon it felt closer to home than anything I’d had in a long time. The smell of dry paper and bindings, the fresh ink and cedar of the newspaper rack, the sunlight that poured through the windows in the reading room and bounced dust motes around in a languid, silent dance. That feeling of wandering alone between high shelves, the outside world forgotten, neck craned sideways to better make out titles dim against dark hardcover spines, feeling with each step the pleasure of a solitarian mixed with a pioneer’s fascination at a new discovery.

  That summer, the last before high school, was spent almost entirely in the library. I reread all the classic children’s books: the Little House on the Prairie series, The Secret Garden, Little Women, Black Beauty. I read The Swiss Family Robinson, wondering why there was no daughter, and pictured my own family, marooned on some island somewhere, out of my reach forever. Then Island of the Blue Dolphins, imagining myself on some similar island, again alone. I found James and the Giant Peach, poring over the beginning again and again—parents slaughtered by a rampaging rhinoceros, alive one moment, brutally dead the next, a small boy sent to live with the two horrible aunts, beaten and abused before being freed to explore the world. I spent hours paging through From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, raptly imagining myself as Claudia Kincaid, running off to New York with my brother and hiding out together.

  I found my way to the adult section and read dozens and dozens more books, cutting eagerly across time zones and time periods. I never talked to anyone by choice. I disliked when library patrons commented on my concentration or the impressive thickness of the book I held, like I was a dog that had dug up an especially sizeable bone. Talking made me uncomfortable. Strangers made me uncomfortable. Grown-ups made me uncomfortable. I hated feeling looked at or noticed and so I made a habit of taking the books away from the comfortable armchairs of the reading room, preferring to sit on the thin carpeting in a corner, away from everyone.

  At that point in my life I only trusted books. Nothing else, no one else. Not even myself.

  One type of book drew me more than any other. I read Wuthering Heights, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Count of Monte Cristo, Carrie. Even then I was thinking about people who were wronged and people who did wrong. Even then I was wondering if wanting to do bad things to bad people made me the same as them, and if I cared. Even then I was thinking about Carson Peters and Jordan Stone. About the people in the books I read, and the many more people who must be out there in the world, planning evil. Hating the fact that I was a gangly teenager who had never saved anyone.

  I had let my parents die. I hadn’t been there for my brother.

  I had failed everyone in my life who mattered.

  The thing that separated me from all those characters in my books was that unlike them, I was helpless to help myself, let alone anyone else. At that time, I was filled with many different unpleasant emotions, but the helplessness was the worst. I hated it so much. I opened my eyes each morning thinking about Jordan Stone and Carson Peters opening their own eyes. I pictured them eating breakfast, walking around, talking, laughing. I didn’t talk much to anyone. Mostly I read, and thought, and remembered. But as I read, as the summer days passed, I began to hate myself a little less. I had books to thank for that. Books saved me, that summer. If it had been up to me, I never would have left the library.

  Instead, the summer ended and there was school.

  From the first day, I had a hard time making friends. Talking about boys or complaining about biology homework seemed impossible. I pretended, wishing I could care, and my disinterest was noted. I joined the soccer team and hated it. Rumors about me swirled. Even though I was pretty and athletic I was branded a loner, a misfit. The problems started immediately, those first few weeks of ninth grade. A boy announced that the people I lived with weren’t my real parents. That afternoon the Hammonds joined me to talk to the principal, who explained that while playground scrapes were to be expected, it wasn’t normal for a boy to leave school with a broken tooth and needing stitches, even if he had instigated things.

  The Hammonds took me home and talked about self-restraint. They were called in again a few weeks later. Different kid, different details, basically the same outcome. “Nikki has been through a horrific tragedy,” the principal acknowledged. “And I gather that her last foster experience was … very difficult and ended quite badly. We all want to help, but she stuck a sharpened pencil about an inch into this boy’s arm. He’s lucky there wasn’t nerve damage. And what if it had been an eye?”

  The Hammonds lingered at the dinner table that night, talking in hushed voices. Before I went to bed that night I packed my clothes. Came down to breakfast the next morning with my suitcase. The two of them exchanged glances. “Where are you going, Nikki?” Elizabeth asked.

  “You’ll send me back,” I said. “So I’m ready to go.”

  I hadn’t meant to make her cry. She hugged me. “We never will,” she said. “I promise.”

  That day after school, instead of me walking to the library, Jeff Hammond picked me up and we drove to a shabby building marked by a red pair of boxing gloves painted on plywood. Inside was a blue-floored square ring surrounded by a triptych of red padded ropes. Two older boys circled each other in the ring, gloved hands flashing out, bodies shifting subtly. I took in the cylindrical black heavy bags, patched with electrical tape. In front of a mirror a man faced his reflection, ducking and moving. Another guy jumped rope.

  I didn’t know it then, but Jeff Hammond had boxed in the navy as a young man. “Nikki,” he said, “hundreds of years ago, boxing began as a sport of violence, where the bigger, stronger men always won. Gradually, other men began to study movement and technique. And then the stronger, more violent men started losing to the boxers who possessed control. A lot of violent people have come to places like this gym and learned control. I think it would be a good
thing if you could, too.”

  I took another look around. “They’re all guys in here.”

  Jeff Hammond followed my gaze. The trainers, the boxers—I was right. All men.

  He looked back at me. “What’s your point?”

  I thought about it. “I’m not sure.”

  That day he didn’t do anything but show me how to tape my hands up. He gave me a pair of cloth hook-and-loop wraps and wrapped my hands for me, starting at the wrist, working up around the back of the hand and over the knuckles. Then he unraveled the strips of black cloth. Did it again. Then had me try. Ten times, twenty. Until I could have wrapped my hands with my eyes closed. That night I slept with the hand wraps next to me in bed.

  The next afternoon I was back in the gym. Jeff Hammond showed me how to place my feet, how to hold my hands, how to move. I was left-handed. That was the first time I heard the word “southpaw.” He didn’t let me throw a punch for a week. I didn’t put on actual gloves for a month. By that winter I was sparring, mostly against older, bigger boys. I was naturally good and got better. I started competing in amateur fights. At school, the problems stopped.

  I wasn’t able to become Brandon’s legal guardian until I was eighteen. By then it was too late. Drinking and pot and disobedience had given way to harder stuff, worse misbehavior. I didn’t buy the gateway argument. I figured whatever gateway Brandon had gone through, it had been a long time ago. Now there were just the symptoms. He ran away three times before he started high school. By the time I began my freshman year at Berkeley, Brandon had more or less stopped going to school. He was past the point where I had any idea of how to help.

  By my senior year he had discovered heroin.

  I did my best to get him out of trouble. He made it to my graduation. Sitting in the audience with the Hammonds as a stream of important speakers explained all the great things we’d go on to do. Everyone clapped. People liked a narrative, especially if it involved their own success. As for me, I had no idea what I wanted to do after college. No idea of what I might be good at or find value in. No idea about what I was supposed to do with my life.

  It was a woman with haunted eyes and a rotted marriage who would teach me those things. A woman and, of course, her husband.

  I pushed the memories away as I got home. I poured myself a glass of wine and sat on the couch, watching as the bright daylight filling the room was gently throttled by evening shadows. I got up for more wine, returned to the couch, sitting quietly in almost total darkness. The past didn’t matter. Not right now. Now, I needed answers. Which meant I had another woman I had to see, another rotted marriage hiding more secrets.

  And another husband.

  38

  The Johnsons lived in Pacific Heights, an exclusive San Francisco neighborhood full of commanding homes high above the Bay. Their street sloped upward in the kind of ferocious angle that would have been unthinkable in any American city except San Francisco. The Johnsons’ house was a large Victorian set into the top of a hill. Curtained picture windows looked blankly out at the city. The weather was turning colder as October reached its final days. Halloween decorations were up, scarves and hats appearing with more frequency. I had stared at my face in the mirror that morning, seeing the same bags under my eyes, the same lines of stress, that I had seen on Karen’s face in Mendocino. I wasn’t sleeping well. Care4 was in my mind constantly. The company was getting to me. Too many shadows, too many unknowns. I needed time that I didn’t have.

  Brenda Johnson had been surprised to hear from me, but she suggested that we meet at her home willingly enough. I waited outside and saw her walking up the street toward me. She must have been coming from the gym, wearing white sneakers and plum-colored leggings and a stylish athletic jacket made out of some kind of stretchy composite fabric. The kind that was marketed to joggers and yoga studios with words like “sweat-wicking” and “airflow” all over the labels. Athleisure. The word, summoned suddenly into existence by parties unknown, was everywhere.

  “Hi, Nikki,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

  I was glad that she looked good, flushed and healthy and confident. Very different from the anxious and uncertain woman I had last seen the month before. I held up a cardboard tray, two large cups stuck into it. “I brought coffee. It might be a little cold.”

  * * *

  Before we sat in the spacious living room, she opened the blinds, revealing panoramic views stretching out to the Bay. The kind of room made for entertaining, clearly furnished by a professional decorator. The paintings fit the walls almost too well, as though they had been chosen chiefly for horizontal and vertical spacing. The house had an open floor plan, a large chef’s kitchen separated from the living room only by a granite island. A bookcase ran against one wall. The books seemed a mix of leather-bound law texts and newer nonfiction titles. Eat Pray Love, The Secret, A Return to Love, How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed. I made a mental note to send Brenda some fiction.

  “How have you been?” I asked.

  She sat comfortably, a glass coffee table between us. “Lots of changes, but I’m better. Definitely much better. I suppose there’s been a lot to get used to.”

  “Is he staying here now?”

  “Who, Silas?” That drew her first smile. “I had the locks changed that same week we met. You should have heard him squeal the first time he realized his key didn’t work. I think he’s in a hotel for the time being. One of those fancy places off Union Square that makes you feel like you’re entombed on the Titanic. I hope they forgot to get rid of the asbestos.”

  I smiled but kept quiet. She wasn’t done talking.

  “As it turns out, the personal trainer was the tip of the iceberg. I found out more. A lot more. He’d been carrying on with different women for more or less our whole marriage.” Her face wrinkled in distaste. “Not to mention the escort services and God knows what else.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s okay—better that I know.” She smiled again. “The divorce will take awhile to formalize, of course, but then I can make a clean start.” She stirred her coffee even though she’d stirred it three times already. “Thanks again, Nikki, for your help. And for not … taking me up on that rash request I made. I know it wasn’t a good idea. Maybe that’s why it felt so good asking.”

  “You were angry,” I said. “You had a right to be. I get it.”

  “Thank you for understanding.”

  “Can I ask you a question? How much did Silas talk about his work to you?”

  She was surprised. “His work? His legal work, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  She considered. “A little, over the years, but never in great detail. Frankly, the corporate law he practiced sounded boring. He liked to name-drop, and he worked for a lot of high-profile people and companies, but he didn’t tell me much about the work itself. Just boasted how we’d be invited to some movie premiere or sports event because of his work with so-and-so.”

  “Did he ever mention a company called Care4? In the last few months especially?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Why, did something happen?”

  “Nothing you need to worry about.”

  She took that in. “Meaning something someone needs to worry about.”

  “Maybe.”

  Brenda took the spoon she’d been stirring her coffee with and put it down on a saucer with a clink. The coffee was untouched. The paper cup looked out of place on the glass coffee table, next to the china saucer and silver teaspoon. “May I be blunt with you, Nikki?”

  I nodded. “I like blunt.”

  “Good. My husband is a piece of shit. He lied to me and deceived me for over two decades. He broke every marriage oath in the book and I wish him anything but well.” Her eyes were hard and determined. “You don’t strike me as the type to make random coffee drops. You came here to ask me something. Well, you did me a favor, once—a big favor. You helped me to see the truth about my marriage, and you did
n’t let me overreact after I found out.” She leaned toward me. “I’d like to return that favor. I don’t know what you want or what you’re up to or how it fits in with my husband and, honestly, as long as it doesn’t improve the quality of his life I don’t care. Anything I can do—just ask.”

  The sun was coming in bright through the east-facing windows. I shifted a little so it wasn’t in my eyes. “Last time we talked, you mentioned that you had copied the key to your husband’s office. Do you still have it?”

  She was surprised. “I can’t believe you remember that. But yes, I think so. One second.” She got up and went over to the kitchen island for her purse. She searched through it and came back over with a single brass key. One side was engraved with the words DO NOT COPY.

  “Does he know you have this?”

  “I did it secretly.” She smiled. “It took me forever to find a locksmith who would do it in spite of the ‘Do Not Copy.’ I had to pay him an extra hundred dollars. Why do you ask?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I do need a favor from you. Can I borrow that key?”

  39

  People could be funny. They often seemed to like things to happen without caring much about how. For example, offices. People who worked in offices liked them to be clean, but they didn’t like actually seeing the cleaning process. Partly a matter of convenience. No one wanted to be on an important phone call with a vacuum cleaner going in the background. There was something more, I’d always thought. People preferred not to think about someone scrubbing a toilet or mopping a floor. They just wanted the toilet to be pristine and the tiles on the floor to gleam like they’d never been stepped on. So it made sense that custodians tended to be nocturnal. The fewer people they encountered, the happier everyone was. They could work more efficiently, and employees could walk in each morning without having to think about coffee stains or dirty sinks. An arrangement that suited everyone.