Say You're Sorry

by Sarah Shankman

  She’s headed for Natalie’s, Jane thought. She’s going to throttle Natalie.

  But her firstborn daughter, as lightning-quick in her bare feet as any Ethiopian runner, her slender legs flashing beneath her red-and-green plaid shorts, ran on past Natalie’s house, on down the sidewalk and turned up, toward the hills.

  Ah, thought Jane. Then probably she’d turn north toward Tilden Park, where she’d run her whole girlhood. Maybe Frannie would find some salve for her pain on those familiar paths.

  That’s good, thought Jane. Frannie’ll go that way, and then I get to kill Natalie all by myself. With my bare hands. With my teeth. I’ll show her how bloody a mother’s rage can be. A mama grizzly defending her cubs will have nothing on me.

  But still, she wanted Frannie to stop. She wanted to comfort her child, to hold her to her breast, to rock her to and fro. “Frannie!” she called, a half-block behind her daughter now. Jane was keeping up better than she’d have thought, her sweaty hours in the gym paying off. “Frannie, honey, stop!”

  But Frannie took no heed. Maybe she didn’t hear her mother calling. Frannie ran and she ran, flew faster and faster up the hill toward Broadway.

  “Frannie! Please!” Jane cried. Very soon she wouldn’t be able to speak. She was running out of breath. Her side hurt. She couldn’t keep up this pace.

  Ahead, Frannie stretched way out. Even on these broken sidewalks, zigging around old trees, she ran with exquisite form. Her coach would have been proud of her as she ran from the hurt, ran from the pain, tried to escape the humiliation that she knew was barreling down on her. Frannie was in overdrive, full-out, nothing held back, burning gas. Brakes were out of the question. Brakes were a joke. Brakes weren’t even a possibility for Frannie Millman on this fine morning in May, two weeks before she was to step up on the stage and deliver her valedictory and leap into the bright and shiny future of the young and blessed.

  On Frannie ran, a fresh bay wind at her back, wings on her heels, and fury in her heart. Frannie didn’t pull up, she didn’t slow, she didn’t even acknowledge Broadway, the busy thoroughfare, when she hit it. Frannie, the valedictorian, the golden girl, ran, ignoring that most primary lesson her mother had taught. That cardinal rule: Look both ways before you cross.

  The driver of the silver Mercedes never even saw Jane’s darling daughter—fleet of feet, keen of mind, and sweet; Jesus, that child had been so loving in her ways—until she tumbled like a crazy gymnast over and up his windshield. He hadn’t even had time to register the ka-thunk before Frannie’s fatal somersault began. He never had the chance to see how beautiful Frannie was without the scarlet gushing from her mouth, without that terribly wrong angle of her slender neck.

  *

  Now, it was September, over a year later. Fifteen interminable months, to be exact. Jane and Max had just returned from getting Hope settled in at Stanford, only an hour south down the Peninsula.

  Hope had applied for early admission and had snagged it. Jane and Max were thrilled for her, of course, but they were doubly glad that, in lieu of an East Coast school, she’d chosen to stay so close to home. “I want to, Mom,” she’d said, “for all of us.”

  They’d had such a terrible time. People say that the death of a child is the fiercest loss, and Jane had certainly learned the truth of that. They also say that such a death frequently rips through a marriage like a tornado, that there’s so much pain that the center of a union, no matter how strong, simply cannot hold. Max and Jane were also testament to that view.

  A psychiatrist friend of Max’s said that they should have another child, that a new life to nurture would be their salvation.

  “Is she crazy?” Jane said. “I’m much too old. And I wouldn’t if I could.”

  “We could adopt,” said Max, late one night when they’d been up, fighting. They hardly ever used to fight. “I want you to seriously consider it, Jane. If you won’t, then I’m going to think about leaving you once Hope’s off to school.”

  Since that conversation, Jane had been thinking about it quite a lot. And she was almost there. Not a baby, of course, but a youngster who needed them as much as they needed her. Or him. “What do you think about a little boy?” she’d said to Max just this morning. “You still up for teaching somebody how to play catch?”

  Max’s answering grin was the best thing Jane had seen since that awful morning, Frannie’s last morning.

  It had been only hours after Frannie’s funeral that Bethany Marks had fessed up to the thefts. She was a strange girl, lovely enough to be a model, but badly troubled. Obsessed, it turned out. Bethany seemed incapable of doing anything but hurting herself and those around her. Bethany explained that she shoplifted the skirt and the pearls and then took the bracelet from Lisa Broadhurst and “gave” the things to Frannie, skipping classes and walking in the Millmans’ unlocked back door, because she wanted to be part of Frannie’s crowd. Actually, she said, she knew in her heart that Frannie was meant to be her best friend. She had thought that Frannie would figure out that the gifts were from her. She had just known that Frannie was going to call her, any day, and tell her that she loved her. She’d waited and waited for the call that never came.

  What was there to say to that? You could no more blame Bethany than you could blame the rain.

  Natalie, of course, was a different story. Natalie was not a troubled youngster. Natalie, Natalie, was the Judas, the traitor, the user, the murderer who, to Jane’s mind, had taken their beloved Frannie as surely as if she’d put a gun to Frannie’s head.

  Not that Natalie had thought that Frannie would die, of course. But what exactly had she thought as she’d sat and typed that column, as she’d pushed the button to Send?

  Jane didn’t know. No one knew. Natalie had packed up and vanished within hours after she heard about Frannie. She had never returned to the Bay Area, as far as they’d heard. An agent had sold Natalie’s house, completely furnished, to a nice man from Atlanta.

  What Jane did know—what she counted on, what kept her going—was that one day, one day, dear God, Natalie would sit in her kitchen once more. Sooner or later, Jane was certain of it, down to the marrow of her bones, Natalie would come forward. The guilt which Natalie had been so talented at instilling in others would turn on her and chew her liver until she would have to seek forgiveness.

  Her ego would demand forgiveness.

  Ah, yes. Natalie would come to Jane on bended knee and pour out the sorrow of her heart. In carefully constructed sentences. In perfect paragraphs. It would be a masterpiece, Natalie’s plea for absolution. And Jane would somehow be transformed into a priest, a Father O’Leary, or better yet, an angel of mercy, who would give Natalie her penance, then perhaps lash her about the head and shoulders a few times so she would have the proof. “Look,” Natalie could say. “Look at my bruises.” Then Natalie could dine on her deliverance, feast on forgiveness, gorge on her pardon.

  Yes, Jane knew, someday, one day, Natalie would appear, hungry for Jane’s mercy.

  Then, this very morning, it had happened. In the fullness of time, Jane’s desire had borne fruit.

  Jane had been in her office, at her desk, about to make a call, when, suddenly, she was seized by a shudder. Earthquake! she thought at first. Then, Someone’s walking on my grave. No, Frannie’s. She stared at her hand for a long moment, poised above the phone.

  Then the phone pealed.

  And Jane smiled, for then she knew—her blood sang, her very corpuscles shouted Hosannah!—what that frisson had meant.

  Natalie.

  “Jane, will you please talk with me? Please?”

  “Oh, yes.” Jane didn’t miss a beat. “I will.”

  They made the arrangement: Natalie, who said she was in town for only one day, was to arrive at the house about five-thirty, before Max got home. “Come to the back door,” Jane said. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

  Jane left the office early and went food shopping in Oakland’s Chinatown. She picked up long slender
eggplant, ran her fingers through bean sprouts, marveled at the vitality of the fresh produce. What, she wondered, had she and Max and Hope survived on?

  Ashes. Bitters. Rue.

  She decided on the menu as she shopped. The tapioca pudding was a given; she’d long known what sweet she’d serve. She’d start with the hot and sour shrimp soup that Max so loved. A green curry with chicken. Steamed jasmine rice, of course.

  Now the prep was done. Jane sat and waited, the pudding, which she’d made first, cooling on her counter. The water chestnuts, peanuts, taro chopped. The parade of custard cups, blue bowls, the one scarlet.

  Here it came. The knock at the back door. Soft. Tentative.

  “Come in,” Jane called.

  And there stood Natalie, the white blaze in her dark curls wider, but otherwise much the same. Natalie was still plump, even chubbier than before. Jane hadn’t thought that crow would be so fattening.

  “Come in,” she said, pulling the door closed behind Natalie, throwing the dead bolt. She seated her old friend at her accustomed stand at the counter. She poured her a cup of coffee.

  Natalie’s coffee was still steaming when she began her chant of mea culpa. Her words tumbled and rolled. Sorry. What was I thinking? Seemed at the time. Never make it up to you. Forgiveness. Sleepless nights. Horrible. Wracked with guilt. Dear Frannie…

  “Yes,” Jane said. “No.” She murmured, cooed, made the kind of sounds one might use to soothe a baby. “Go on. Yes, I know.”

  Finally, it was her precious daughter’s name, obscene on this woman’s lips, that was Jane’s cue. “Yes, yes, well…,” she said, then with one hand offered forth the soothing sweet, the comfort of tapioca. Baby food.

  “Oh, Jane,” Natalie cried. So touched, so grateful.

  Jane pushed the tapioca closer, then followed with the four bowls of condiments. Three blue, one the scarlet of danger. “For texture,” she said. “Crunch. The raw taro—that’s the red bowl—is very hot.”

  Natalie smiled. Jane remembered.

  “Actually,” said Jane, “it’s probably too hot, now that I think of it.” She laid a cautionary hand on the bright bowl. “Here. Let me take it away.”

  “No, no.” Natalie clutched at the raw taro.

  “This is really hot,” Jane insisted. “You won’t like it. Just have the peanuts, the cooked taro, and the water chestnuts. They’ll be fine.”

  Jane didn’t elaborate any further, though she could have. She’d done quite a bit of research on taro. The tuber, in its cooked form, is a popular starch in Asia, sometimes known as poi. Raw taro, however, is highly poisonous. Jane’s Thai cooking teacher had once pointed out the tuber in the market, on a field trip, and casually mentioned its danger. Jane hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but later, after Frannie’s death, all sorts of things, surprising things, dark things, had floated up.

  How dangerous? Jane had wondered. Highly acrid, she’d learned from her library research. The milky juice is used on poison darts and for killing tigers. Almost insipid to the taste at first, the ingested root then produces an intense burning and itching to the mouth and throat. Severe gastroenteritis follows, and a massive inflammation of the mucous membranes, which, if not treated immediately, results in cramps, convulsions, and death.

  Natalie grasped the scarlet bowl.

  Okay. Jane shrugged as Natalie dumped half the raw taro into her pudding. She stirred twice, then spooned it all down, licking her lips. “Yummy,” she said. “And not hot at all. You never developed much tolerance for heat, Jane, but you’re still a wonderful cook.”

  Jane smiled, then watched as a frown crossed Natalie’s face. Natalie lifted a hand to her mouth. She blinked rapidly, and the tears began to stream. Her mouth opened and closed convulsively. Before Natalie could manage more than a howl, the phone rang.

  “Excuse me,” said Jane, picking up the cordless phone and turning toward the door to the dining room. “I won’t be but a moment.”

  She’d asked Max to call her about quarter of six, before he left the office, to see if she needed him to pick up anything on the way home. A roasted chicken. Deli food. The sort of thing they’d been subsisting on since Before.

  “Hey!” she said, raising her voice a bit over Natalie’s wheezing and thumping. It was time to leave the kitchen now, much as she hated to. “Just a sec,” she said to Max as she walked into the dining room, reaching with one hand behind her to shove a dining chair beneath the doorknob. The other door out of the kitchen, she’d secured when Natalie arrived. She patted the key in her pocket, the key to the kitchen door’s dead bolt.

  Locking the barn door too late—she knew that’s what Max thought every time she did it. Too late to keep out Bethany, too late for Frannie, but not this time. No, not this time.

  “Guess what?” she said to Max. “I’m making Thai food. Yes! I know! Shrimp soup. Green curry. Tapioca pudding. Yes! No, no wine. But pick up some beer, okay? Yes, that’d be great. And I have something to tell you. You won’t believe who called. Stopped by. In fact, she’s in the kitchen right this minute. No, that’s okay. I have a minute. Go ahead and tell me.”

  Jane made her way with the phone into the living room, where she settled onto a sofa. Out the window she could see the house where Natalie, her friend, her bosom buddy, had once lived. The sidewalk down which Frannie had taken her last run.

  “Unh-huh,” she said to Max as the minutes ticked by. The sounds from the kitchen were fainter now. And then they stopped. Finally, she said to Max, “I’ll tell you about it later. Let me get back now. Yes. I love you too, sweetheart.”

  But Jane didn’t hurry into the kitchen. She picked up a magazine from her coffee table, a copy of Saveur, and flipped through the pages, noting with a smile an article on peppers, turning down the corners of an interesting recipe or two. Then, finally, with a sigh, Jane rose. It was time to go back in the kitchen, to put away a few things, to wash the scarlet bowl, and to see how her old girlfriend was getting along.

  Real Life

  If there were a space more deadly than Room 1517, 100 Centre Street, New York, New York, Clare Meacham didn’t want to know about it.

  She’d been sitting in the dreadful room for two hours, and her bones were overdone linguine. Her neck could barely support her curly head. The room had sucked off what energy she’d packed in with her—which had been precious little, God knows, on this steamy rotten morning. A month into the heat wave of the century, Manhattan had all the appeal of an overripe dinosaur carcass.

  Besides which, since David dumped her, Clare had been mightily depressed and hadn’t been sleeping worth a damn. She yawned now, and Room 1517 seemed to open its jaws in answer around her. The giant municipal maw filled with long rows of dark blue cushioned armchairs. Cream-colored walls, splotched as an adolescent’s complexion. Cheap particle-board wainscoting. White acoustic ceiling tile mushed whispers into a slow steady hiss. On the floor, patched beige linoleum squares cheated at hopscotch.

  Dust motes floated in the refrigerated air, recycled, no doubt, thought Clare, through the dead dinosaur’s respiratory system. Yes, the very air itself was dank and dangerously gelatinous. Teeming, one felt, with tuberculosis, cholera, hantavirus, Ebola. (Good. Maybe she’d contract one of those and die a spectacular lingering death, and then David would be sorry.) God knows, the fluorescent lighting, which cast a greenish pallor over the room’s captives, gave them the look of disease.

  The two hundred and seventy-five prospective jurors slumped and lumped in the blue armchairs.

  Oh, God, could it be borne, their faces asked, that this was only the first, the number one, the maidenhead of their ten endless days of jury duty? Ten, that is, if an actual trial didn’t glue them even longer into some angry crouch of deliberation.

  Clare shifted in her seat, careful not to upset the notebook computer perched on her lap. Thirty-nine, a tall, languorously attractive brunette despite the dark circles of despair beneath her eyes, Clare wore brown woven leather lo
afers, a short khaki skirt, a red-and-white striped shirt, and gold hoop earrings. Her long, dark, curly hair was pulled back off her face with a tortoise barrette. She was as presentable as she could bring herself to be under the circumstances.

  The circumstances being (a) a broken heart and (b) the fact that this little trip down the lane of civic responsibility was most certainly going to cost her her livelihood. Her inevitable financial ruin and bankruptcy proceedings could later be traced back to this precise and fetid A.M. Not only was she not in the mood, but Clare could not, goddammit, afford to be on jury duty.

  Try telling that to Norman O. Goodman, New York county clerk of court. Or any of his stiff-necked minions. Did they care? Ho ho. That was a good one.

  The freshly blondined woman in the appalling gold-braided fuchsia suit behind the desk in Room 105 or 106 or whatever it was downstairs, where Clare had gone two weeks earlier to beg for just one more reprieve from her civic responsibility, had said, “Forget it, Ms. Meacham. No more excuses, no more deferments. We, the puffed-up jealous, self-righteous, civilly employed we, hereby sentence you to jury duty. Or else.”

  That had been the peroxided bitch’s final word. On the exact same day that Arnie, Clare’s producer, had called her in and said, “The ratings go up, Clare. Or else.”

  It was the O. J. trial that had set in motion the avalanche of the viewer share of Real Life, the soap opera on which Clare was head writer.

  “Court TV is a fucking vampire,” Arnie had said. “We’ve got to jazz Real Life way up, Clare. Pick up the pace. Add some sizzle. Give those sofa tuberettes some blood and guts along with their romance. Real Life’s gotta be more like real life. Grittier. Sexier. Meaner. Hotter.”

  Then his terrible last words. “The whole story line has to be in overdrive in the next three weeks—even if you have to write ninety-six hours a day.” That had been two weeks ago, and Clare, bleak and blue, hadn’t written a word. Now, with one week left to save her ass, here she was locked in Room 1517. Squashed cheek-by-jowl with almost three hundred of her fellow Gothamites of every race, nationality, and socioeconomic category.