“Yes?”
She bit the corner of a nail.
“What is it?”
“Look, I have no right to ask you this, I know, and I—I really don’t know how even to begin—”
He remembered himself four years ago, the first parole hearing, his own trembling.
“Andy, I know you’re here for the hearing tomorrow and I know I have no right but if you would just consider—if you would just consider—”
She bit a corner of a different nail while he stared.
“He was just a boy, Andy, when it happened. When he was sentenced.” She realized she was chewing on her nails and stopped. “If he gets out now he could still have some kind of life.”
“What do you want me to consider?”
“What happened to your wife will never be undone, Andy. No matter how long my son is in jail, no matter how guilty he feels, everybody feels, no matter how much we hurt for the rest of our lives we cannot bring back your wife, and my son sitting in jail will not bring back your wife.”
He didn’t say anything, but he could feel the anger coming on.
“He got his degree in industrial drawing, Andy. He’s a real good—he’s always been a talented artist and he wants to work at a factory somewhere, designing, I don’t know. He’s the first member of our family to get a college degree, you know that? You’re a college professor, right? It’s an accomplishment.”
“He got his degree in jail,” Andy said, thinking of Exton Reed, its shabby quad, its lumbering architecture. He found that he was chewing the inside of his cheek. “What kind of accomplishment is it to get a degree in jail?”
“Well, you could argue—maybe you could argue it’s an even bigger accomplishment, because there are all sorts of obstacles. Things happen—things happen there you don’t even want to know about, and there are fights, and people fight him all the time. He’s had to get really hard in jail, he was never such a hard kid, but he’s had to get very hard and learn to protect himself and at the same time he got an arts degree from the University of Florida, there was even a graduation ceremony at the jail.” She fumbled through her purse for a cigarette.
“Could you not?” Andy asked, as she lit it. “Could you not smoke?”
She inhaled, then stubbed the thing out with her orthopedic shoe. Andy thought he had never had a more pathetic conversation in his life.
“I guess what I’m asking is—”
“I know what you’re asking, Joyce—”
“Is for a little mercy.”
He felt the parking lot start to spin, held onto the car roof to steady himself. A little mercy. Sure, there were probably evolved people out in the world who were more than capable of being merciful, those nuns who campaigned for killers on death row, the 9/11 families who opposed the war in Afghanistan, the mothers of murdered sons who paid for their killers’ defense. He had read these stories, he knew they happened—and one time, in the office, Linda Schoenmeyer said to him, casually, “So do you have a correspondence with the person who did it?” meaning did he and Oliver McGee correspond, and although Andy was not a particularly icy person he heard the ice in his voice: “What kind of correspondence do you mean, Linda?”
“I just wondered—you know, if he’s written to you. Apologized, that sort of thing.”
“Why would he do that?”
Fat-faced Linda blanched by the coffeemaker.
“My life isn’t a movie,” he’d said to her, and left her there in the faculty lounge, and she’d avoided him for weeks after that rather than apologize.
But maybe, maybe if a drunken Oliver McGee had mowed down Linda’s lumpy husband in front of a Steak ’n Shake, maybe if she’d had to raise her children alone, maybe evolved Linda would have struck up a correspondence with the killer in his cell, maybe they would have exchanged Christmas cards, maybe she would have visited him in prison and advocated for his rehabilitation and testified on his behalf the first time he was up for parole. Maybe Linda Schoenmeyer was that kind of excellent person. Maybe that’s what divided the good people of the earth from the bad, their capacity for mercy.
You are here for a reason.
His reason, at this moment, was to keep Oliver McGee in jail for as long as he possibly could. He had no capacity for mercy nor did he want any.
“I cannot be merciful about this, Joyce.”
She lit another cigarette because, fuck him. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “But he’s paid for this crime, you know that, Andy? He’s paid and paid and paid.”
“He hasn’t even served his full term.”
“The things that have happened to him in there,” and now, yes, she was shaking, “the things that happen to a nineteen-year-old boy, and he wasn’t hard when he went in there. And I thought you, a college professor—you might understand—”
“My children don’t have a mother, Joyce.”
“I’m losing my son!” She brought the cigarette to her mouth and inhaled on it like it was saving her life.
Andy opened the car door, got in the car. There was nothing to be gained by this conversation because the next thing he wanted to say to her was fuck you, Joyce, you lost your son when you didn’t get him into fucking treatment seven years ago. That would have been a fucking accomplishment, Joyce.
He peeled out of the parking lot without looking where he was going and drove blindly until he found 95, took it to 708, got to his room at the Travelodge, took a Valium, fell asleep. He was up at 6:00 before the alarm and was waiting at the prison gates by 7:15. The corrections officer who accompanied him to the waiting room asked him how he was doing. “Just fine,” Andy said, and meant it.
The same windowless room. A three-member panel, but different members this time. Joyce McGee in her orthopedic shoes. Oliver McGee in his orange jumpsuit. Andy read his statement clearly: “Members of the parole board, it is with great sadness that I discuss with you the myriad reasons that Oliver McGee, prisoner N24633, should probably never be released from prison, and certainly not released before his time is served. Let me begin with my scientific research into alcoholism and behavior—”
He finished his statement. He signaled to the corrections officer that he wanted to leave before any statements were made in support of Oliver McGee’s quest for parole.
He was back home in Mount Deborah by seven o’clock that night. As he walked up the path to his house, his mother opened the front door. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Oh, honey, I’m so glad you’re home.”
ELEVEN
The parole board would take several weeks to make its decision, and Andy knew better than to wait by the phone. He busied himself preparing elaborate tests, attending to his daughters’ homework, and seeing Melissa Potter. He was, in fact, seeing too much of Melissa. She babysat for him all the time, occasionally just showing up at his house to see if he needed a hand. When she arrived, she urged him to get research done, to go to campus, even. “Don’t you want me to stay?” he’d ask her, when his daughters were in another room.
“Go on,” she’d say. “Do what you need to do. I’m here to help.”
“But you don’t have to,” and then he stopped protesting. Why should he protest? She cleaned the house while he was gone, she ferried his girls to dance, she helped Rachel bake fat-free angel food cakes with strawberry sauce. She knitted Belle a blue and white striped scarf. She admired the trophy Rachel brought home at the end of soccer season, and polished it for her with Sparkle Wax.
“Did you hire, like, a nanny?” Sheila asked him, Sheila who noticed Melissa’s dented Civic parked in his driveway at all hours.
“I guess I did,” Andy said, embarrassed to be caught out. “She’s a student. She needs a job.”
“Ah,” Sheila said. “I was starting to think you were dating her.” She let the silence fester for a minute, then broke it with uproarious laughter.
Andy felt his jaw tighten, but forced himself to laugh along.
“Like I would ever date a student. C’mon.”
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Yet how his heart flooded when he heard her pull into the drive.
“You know, I mean it, you don’t have to pay me, Doc,” she said. “I like doing this. I like being here.”
“Take the money, Melissa.”
“What are you even paying me for? Playing with your daughters?”
“I’m paying you for your time,” he said, thinking, please don’t ask me why I’m paying you. Thinking, I need to keep up this pretense.
In truth he and Melissa were rarely alone. When they were, they usually coexisted in a froth of stanched erotic feeling. (Didn’t they? Didn’t she tingle the way he did when he accidentally-on-purpose brushed her arm?) “I just like being near you,” she said, “and your family.” The girls were in their bedroom, he was looking for his wallet, and he couldn’t help it, he kissed her on the mouth and neck, the girls only a door and a hallway away. Then he gave her a twenty and practically pushed her out the door. She honked her horn twice on the way out.
“When is Melissa coming over?” Rachel asked one icy Saturday morning in February as she laid out clothing on her bedroom floor. The fifth-grade father-daughter dance was at the end of March and evidently this required wardrobing. She stretched out a pair of jeans with rhinestones on them he couldn’t remember buying her, black T-shirts. A pink miniskirt with zebra-print trim.
“Where’d you get all that stuff?”
“Borrowed,” she said. Belle was sitting on the top bunk, surveying the landscape. “A lot of it came from Lily Dreisinger.”
“Who’s Lily Dreisinger?”
Rachel shrugged, as if it would be too difficult to explain. “I hate all this stuff anyway. When is Melissa coming over? She said she’d take me to the Cherry Hill Mall.”
“I’ll take you to the Cherry Hill Mall,” Andy said, sitting down on the floor to riffle through his daughter’s clothing. Some of it was in women’s sizes now, 2 or 4. He had thought she was a kid’s size 14; in fact, was proud of himself for knowing not only who his kids’ teachers were and the names of their dentists and dance teachers but also their sizes in both shirt and shoe. “Is this a training bra?”
“God, Dad, no! Ew! It’s a tank top!”
“Yeah, but it has—”
“Give it to me!” Rachel said, snatching it away, her cheeks red, her arms folded around the top as though it were a victim.
“It’s like a tank top with a bra inside,” Belle explained from the top bunk. “It was Lily Dreisinger’s sister’s.”
“Oh my God, Belle, shut up,” Rachel said.
“Don’t say shut up,” Andy said, absently, wondering what to make of Lily Dreisinger and her sister. Were these enemies or friends of his cause? Did Rachel need a bra? Was he supposed to notice? How was he supposed to notice? He was unable and unwilling to inspect his daughter’s chest, and, unlike his plan to handle menstruation (on her twelfth birthday, he would put a box of maxi pads in her T-shirt drawer) he couldn’t just buy her some training bras (did they still call them training bras?) and stick them in her T-shirt drawer. Unless he could. Maybe that’s what he would do.
He’d ask Melissa.
“What about this?” Andy said, picking up a flowered skirt his mother had bought Rachel when they were in Ohio over the summer. It was from the Gap, a store he thought she liked.
“Too small.”
“It’s mine now,” Belle said.
“But we just got it,” Andy protested, feebly. “Shouldn’t it still fit you?” What did he know about skirts, or girl’s sizes, or his daughters at all? What did he know about girls? Wasn’t it unfair that he had to know it at all? He knew about his mice and his students, he knew their teacher’s names and their dentist’s name, he knew—
His phone buzzed. Thank God it was her. “Did you say you were going to take the girls to the mall?”
“I did,” Melissa said. “Is that okay? Rachel wanted to find an outfit for the father-daughter dance.”
“Sure,” he said, wondering if he could ask her about bras, not her bras, which he hadn’t seen enough of—and here, he remembered, in a flash, Sheila’s beige no-nonsense bra, and his dead wife’s, who had small breasts and wore lacy things without wires, who should be here now, who should be here, who wasn’t here.
Melissa appeared in his driveway half an hour later and returned with the girls at the end of the afternoon; both flounced into the house with more clothing than he had given them money for, and he knew Melissa had bought them things with her earnings, and he also knew he wasn’t going to ask her about it. They displayed their wares fashion-show style: cut-off shorts, a tight-ish plaid shirt for Rachel, purple with lace for Belle. “What do you think?”
He had no idea how to judge a fashion show; the whole thing made him irritable. But he thanked Melissa chastely, waved to her from the door, and she waved and disappeared, and Sheila Humphreys waved too, from her front yard, bundled into her winter coat, because she mistook the direction of his good-bye.
Those early weeks of the semester, Melissa still came into his office to talk about intelligent design, and about God generally, only now she was starting to talk about God in a more relaxed manner, as though he were a friend she thought Andy should meet. In the office, they would tangle with each other’s feet, or he would brush the back of her hand as it riffled through the pages of one of her books, but they didn’t touch each other more than that, and he didn’t argue with her when she talked about her beliefs. He was glad he was not teaching There Is No God this new spring semester. He didn’t know how he would be able to argue with Lionel Shell with the necessary vigor.
“Tell me more about this God of yours, anyway.”
“What else do you want to know?”
Really, he just liked hearing her talk, and he liked letting her talk him into things. “I mean, how do you imagine him? Does he have a white beard? Sit on a throne?”
“What does God look like? I have no idea,” Melissa said. “We’re supposed to be created in his reflection but I really don’t know—I don’t think that means we look just like him. I think it means that we’re supposed to operate the way he would, do our best to be godly.” She paused, absently scratched her knee like a child might. She was wearing a short blue skirt which showed off blocky knees. Andy wanted to lick them.
“I’ve been trying to picture him,” he said.
“Have you?”
“Just to have—just to have some idea of what you’re talking about when you talk about God. You act like you have a personal relationship with him, but the only God I ever thought about was distant, not really involved in, you know,” he felt silly, “in our day-to-day lives.”
“When did you think about God?”
“As a kid—I don’t know. It’s been a long time. Until I met you.”
“A little kid or older?”
“I can’t really remember,” he said, although he knew that even as a small child, he didn’t take the God idea seriously. He came from a proud line of teachers, Midwesterners, nonbelievers. “I guess the last time I really considered the subject was in high school history class. Learning about pilgrims, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards. Sinners in the hands of an angry God. I still remember that one—being dangled over the fires of hell.”
“You didn’t go to church as a kid?”
Andy shook his head. “My mother taught high school biology,” he said. “She didn’t have the time or patience for church. I remember I asked her where people came from—I was talking about babies, seeing if I could goad her into telling me about sex—but instead she started talking about Darwin. I guess I was eight.”
“Where was your dad?”
“He worked all the time. He ran a handyman business,” Andy said. “He died when I was twenty.”
“Oh.” She looked saddened; he loved her expression when she was sad. Her eyes grew crinkled at the corners, mouth fell open. “You’ve lost a lot of people in your life.”
“It’s really Lou,” he said. “Nobody else matters as m
uch to me. She’s the loss that stings.”
Melissa wasn’t going to try to analyze this, which was good—she only touched his wrist for a minute.
“Did Lou believe in God?”
“No,” Andy said. “We were compatible that way,” although of course it was more complicated than that: Lou believed in more than she admitted—she’d baptized Rachel—and Andy believed in ghosts.
And now it was time to change the subject. Although they were in his office, he leaned toward her, kissed her neck, the softest part.
“No, not here,” she said. “We’re talking.”
“Are we?” But she had pulled away, adjusted her collar primly. He found this girlishness so attractive; Louisa had been sexy, but not particularly girlish, and he had never before reveled in the softness of the skin on the inside of a twenty-one-year-old’s wrist. The softness of the skin under her neck. He touched her neck where he had just kissed it.
“What about art?” Melissa said.
“What do you mean?”
“You know, music, art. Classical music is often religious—Bach’s works, Handel’s Messiah. And if you look at old paintings they’re all like Jesus and the Madonna over and over again. I took art history at Salem County,” she said. “It was impossible to tell all those old paintings apart. But you can’t look at them and not think about, you know, the spirit.”
His honeymoon had been to Paris, a whole day at the Louvre. The Renaissance galleries: Botticelli, Raphael, Caravaggio. An entire afternoon, hand in hand with Lou, admiring the slope of the pregnant Madonna’s belly, or the baby Jesus with the receding hairline. And the rolling Tuscan hillsides standing in for ancient Bethlehem, and the sheep, and John the Baptist, and the thin halos painted on in real gold. The altarpieces and the triptychs and the miniatures. An afternoon in Lou’s hand.
They were not going to talk about this. His hand in Lou’s. He leaned forward to kiss Melissa, and this time he did not let her pull away.
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, UPS delivered Rosenblum’s manuscript in an envelope labeled Briggs Watson, Attorneys-at-Law. The note attached: “As per your request.” Andy snickered out loud with joy. Rosenblum!
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