by Lisa Aurello
Once we were there, in his parents’ finished basement, he’d taken a condom out of his wallet and led me to a small room with a couch. It was there that I lost my virginity—happily. To Mason Caldwell. I couldn’t believe my good luck.
He was gentle. He looked just slightly surprised when he pushed into me and I gasped in pain. He had to have felt the hymen tearing since he had to work hard to get in. He never said anything, though, and neither did I. I was so happy to be with him, to be touching him, to have him inside me. The sex itself didn’t feel so great to me to be honest, but Mason looked pleased afterward. That was all that mattered to me.
Later I wondered how long he’d been carrying around that condom because it failed. It took me more than two months before I realized I was pregnant.
Oh. My. God. I was pregnant with Mason’s baby.
Now so much makes more sense where before it didn’t. That’s why I kept getting the feeling there was more to my relationship with him. That’s what was connecting the Halloween party with the Valentine’s Day accident. That’s what the annihilating sadness was all about.
My pregnancy.
My miscarriage.
The accident caused me to miscarry. I’d been almost fifteen weeks pregnant. No one knew except the ER doctor, and then naturally he told my parents. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during that conversation. But I was too broken to have enjoyed it. My beautiful little baby gone in the turn of an hour. The heartache was unbearable and unrelenting. I almost wish I didn’t remember it… but it’s important that I do. I want to always remember. I begged the doctor to tell me the gender. He didn’t want to… but he finally did.
It was a boy.
Chapter 33
At precisely one o’clock the next day, Sulu was waiting at the prison to see her. When Jane was led out and saw her old high school pal sitting there, she nearly burst into tears. For one thing, it was good to see her best friend from school. Sulu helped get her through those awful years and Jane truly did enjoy her company even if no one else did. Sulu’s personality was an almost irresistible concoction of misanthropy and sarcasm.
She looked exactly the same as she did in high school. Unlike Jane who had progressed and drastically improved, both in appearance and personality, Sulu had remained static—and stagnant. She wore ill-fitting tan khakis, red and white running shoes, and a purple blouse that wreaked havoc with her skin tone. Sulu wasn’t overweight in school: she was thin and wore thick glasses and had greasy hair. Now she’d picked up some weight, enough so that she looked plump. After Jane’s initial joy at seeing the familiar face, Sulu’s appearance depressed her. Nonetheless, she plastered a big smile on her face and greeted her.
Sulu stood uncertainly as Jane approached the table.
“Hi, Sulu.” They embraced in an awkward half-hug—minimal contact was allowed—and quickly pulled apart to avoid breaking any rules.
“How are you? Are you working?” Jane asked once they were seated.
Shaking her head, Sulu put her hands on the table as she was probably instructed to do by the prison guards. “No, I left my last job two months ago… actually, it’s been more like three now… and I haven’t been able to find another one. I really should have finished my degree.”
“It’s never too late, you know.”
She rolled her eyes and Jane had to bite her tongue to keep from saying anything unkind. Sulu always saw the downside of everything. Always.
“So what do you need to know?” Sulu asked her once they’d gawked at each other for a protracted minute.
Jane pressed her lips together, abruptly realizing the futility of this meeting. What did she really hope to glean from Sulu anyway? She cleared her throat and forged ahead nonetheless. “Let’s start with what kind of person was I. How did I treat other people?”
Screwing up her face, Sulu said nothing for a minute or so. “You were like me, Jane: sarcastic and bitter, but it’s not like we didn’t have reason. People were mean to us and every day was like running the gauntlet. We had to survive by growing claws.”
Jane leaned in closer and then remembered herself before the guard had a chance to reprimand her. “So I was mean to other students?”
“Only if they were mean to you first. You were OK, Jane. Like I said, we needed to survive.”
“Su, what about Mason Caldwell?”
“What about him?”
“How was I with him? I mean, I remember having a huge crush on him, but he never knew I even existed, right? I just want to know if there’s anything I’m not remembering.”
“You were obsessed with him. You’d just talk about him for days, analyze everything you saw him do or say, the minutiae of his life. It was incredibly pathetic and annoying.”
“Well, thank you. OK, so I was obsessed and annoying. Anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Did I ever threaten any of his girlfriends or say anything like that?”
Sulu’s nostrils flared as she looked all around her. “Jane, I don’t think this is the time and place for this conversation. I really don’t think it will help you.”
“Sulu,” Jane started, feeling her desperation climb as she began to perspire, “do you understand the dire straits I’m in right now?
The other woman just stared back at her old friend with a stony expression. If she heard the tremor in Jane’s voice, she gave no sign of it. “Yeah, I understand. What I don’t get is why you think I can help.”
Sucking down her agitation, Jane mustered all of her self-restraint to deal with the infuriating person in front of her. “You can help,” she began in artificially calm voice, “by assisting me in filling in some of the blanks. You have to understand, Sulu, that I’m operating completely in the dark here. I’ve been arrested for a murder that I don’t even know if I committed or not. I’m pretty sure I didn’t, but since I have no memory, I can’t be certain. You and my parents are the only ones who know who I was—am—exactly.”
The homely woman shrugged her shoulders in an exaggerated manner. “You could be a nasty bitch when pushed, but I don’t think you’d kill anyone. People were shitty to us, so we returned it in full measure. But you liked Mason, and I don’t think you’d hurt him… or his wife. That’s all I can say really, Jane. I’m sorry you’re in this awful predicament…”
It was no use. Jane took a deep breath, folded her hands on the table in front of her, and changed tacks. “So what have you been up to?”
Sulu smirked. “Filling out paperwork and applications to finish my doctorate. I already did a lot of the course work while I was pursuing my master’s. Mainly I have to take about three more classes and do the dissertation. Almost an ABD.”
“Oh, when you said you should have finished your degree, I thought you meant your bachelor’s.”
“Of course not,” she sniped. “What kind of a loser do you think I am, Jane?”
Jane ignored the comment. “Wow, good for you. What exactly are you going for?”
“Applied sciences. I’m focusing my research, though, on biochem. I think it’s the best fit for me. I’d like to get a job with the CDC.”
“You’d have to relocate then, in all likelihood.”
“Yeah.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “But New York has lost its edge anyhow. It looks like Any City, USA. It’s a little more interesting but not by much.”
Jane nodded. “I really appreciate your coming here today, Sulu. I hope I’ll be able to put this nightmare behind me soon, and if so, I’ll take you out to dinner.”
She pushed her chair back and the legs scraped the tile floor. “I guess I should be going. Are your parents here?”
“No,” Jane shook her head. “I don’t know if they’re even planning to come. But then, they’ve never been the greatest parents.”
She turned a level gaze at Jane. “No, they haven’t.”
Chapter 34
Jane’s Journal, late December
My father’s attorney came th
rough for me and got me out of Rikers within an hour of his appearance on Friday evening, after I spent thirty-six hours in that hellhole. I took a cab to the city and checked into a Midtown hotel, afraid to go home. I texted Mel to let her know I was out and that I’d call her in the morning, and then I ordered room service, ate everything in sight, and went to bed exhausted. I slept ten hours straight without waking up once. After I took a shower and had coffee, I called Mel.
“Jane, where are you now?”
“Still at the Marriott. The one in Midtown. On 40th Street. I have an hour until checkout but I might stay a bit longer if the room is available.”
“Uh-huh. I have your journal and I’ll meet you for breakfast and bring it to you. Let’s go to Artie’s—it’s about halfway between my place and the hotel.”
So we met and that’s when Mel told me about the furniture. It was such good news that I almost actually cried. I left a message for my attorney while we were still in the restaurant.
My hotel room was booked for the next week and I would have had to move to a different room so I decided to just buck up and go home. I’d have to do it sooner or later. Depending on how bad it was or how unsettled I felt would cement my plan to list the house for sale sooner rather than later. I hated the thought of selling before I even had a chance to live in the charming home, but if I didn’t feel comfortable there, what was the point? There were tangible reminders everywhere of this traumatic experience, and all I wanted now was to move on as quickly as humanly possible. The double whammy of car accident and murder arrest was savage on my psyche—I had to get away.
I woke up in my own bed on Sunday morning, but I’d slept drastically better in the hotel. I probably should have stayed a little longer. I didn’t feel safe in my home. The graffiti painted on my driveway scared me, and right next door was a man who believed I contracted a hit man to kill his wife. How safe could I be?
I hired someone to clean off the spray paint and repaint my front door but the words wouldn’t erase in my mind. There were people out there who wanted to do me harm. That’s not something that’s easy to get used to.
One week after my arrest I was lying in my bed on the cusp of sleep when a riptide of memories began swirling madly around my head, causing chaos in my brain as they streamed in from wherever they’d been dammed up. Like flotsam in a river, I saw flashes of faces, words, smells, songs—everything associated with them. Most were of my life in high school, the minutiae of it, the miseries; it all came flooding back into my conscious.
And I realized something that everyone else seemed to take for granted already: along the entire odyssey of my adolescence, I watched Mason Caldwell. Watched him… and adored him from afar.
It’s astonishing that I ever forgot who he was.
Mason Caldwell, the third. His friends called him alternately Tri, Trey, and Three Sticks.
Stalker. That’s what they’re calling me, what the police labeled me since my arrest. I hate the word. I don’t see what’s so terrible about showing interest in a person who practically demands it? It’s not too much different from his being a celebrity and my following his career, except that maybe public people have an expectation of this sort of thing and he doesn’t. But, in any case, he didn’t know—couldn’t know.
Now he does. Now the world knows. Now I’m a pariah.
Most or all of the top tier of popular kids in any high school aren’t kind—they’re by and large the polar opposite of kind—but Mason, he was. He was kind and relatively decent even to the lower castes in the school. He never went out of his way to be cruel. Occasionally, he might have laughed when one of his friends was bullying a weak student—I never said he was a saint—but Mason himself never went there.
For that reason, I forgave him for a multitude of sins I might not have otherwise overlooked. In the main, for his very pedestrian taste in girls.
True, they were beautiful; he dated the glossiest girls in school. Sarah Needham in ninth grade: 5’6”, blond hair, pale eyes, big white teeth, cheerleader. I loathed her. Tess Gardner with shiny dark red hair and giant boobs in tenth. Shannon Graham, Barbie doll, in eleventh. She lasted until twelfth and graduation.
Then again, out of a graduating class of over two hundred, Mason was without question in the top five of the most perfect males. In my book, he had no peer.
And another memory: Mason went to Tufts. I remember that. I wasn’t too far from him at Brown and it made me happy. I think I even remember seeing him at Brown events. Boston and Providence. Yes… that’s right. He was dating a girl who went to my school. I hated her for it. I guess I lost track of him at some point, probably after we both finished college.
Meantime something extraordinary happened in my life. I finally found appreciation.
At my heaviest I tipped the scale at 189, not too bad since I’m five-nine. Probably about forty or fifty pounds overweight.
I was also in the top five percent of my class.
Ergo, I had only two friends, both of whom were outcasts like me. For fun, we worked out math problems.
People like me are invisible. I got my job because of my talent with numbers, but I never expected to ever get far. My first day was awful. The train was eleven minutes late; the subway had problems too. I got to 1850 Broadway at ten after nine when I was supposed to check in with human resources at 8:45. The woman behind the desk gave me an ugly scowl and practically threw the papers I had to sign at me. I almost did an about-face and left, but my misfit-girl stubborn streak kept me there, filling out the paperwork.
Then the stars realigned and my fortune changed dramatically. Thank God I stayed that day. Now I’m earning six figures and have a cushy job while that scowling HR cunt was let go a few months after I started. Plus, I’m appreciated at MT.
It was a whole new concept for me.
Up a little and now down even further. I might go to prison for the rest of my life, for a crime I may not have… no, I probably didn’t commit. I don’t feel like a killer. I cannot imagine being so coldhearted as to pay someone to kill another person, especially someone innocent like Cate Caldwell. The motive the police and prosecutor are assigning to me is a feeble one.
I keep thinking about it, contemplating the possibilities versus the probabilities. I suppose if I hated someone enough, hated him or her with everything I have in me… I suppose I might want to kill that person. I think every human being has that capacity but the majority are able to temper it. Logically, if I ever would have been pushed to murder, it would have been when I was miserably bullied in high school—and yet I never committed murder then.
So what could Mason’s wife have done to me to push me far enough to want to kill her? If somehow I did hate Cate Caldwell with such ferocity as to pay to have her executed, I don’t remember it at all.
In fact, I don’t remember ever meeting the woman. I’ve seen photos of her and her face is not at all familiar to me. I just cannot conceive of the possibility that I’m guilty of this crime, and my predicament makes me want to bang my head against a brick wall.
Chapter 35
For the past three weeks Mason Caldwell kept crossing paths with his high school friends. He’d been staying at his parents’ Pleasantville home pretty much since his wife’s death, finding it easier than being alone in the house he shared with her, albeit for only a few weeks. An old football buddy, Todd Tennant, was the first one he encountered. They ran into each other at the local coffee shop.
“Duuude,” Todd called out from the back of the queue. Mason turned around and jolted when he saw his old bud’s face. He waved him up front, risking filthy glares from everyone behind him since Todd was now effectively cutting the long line. One older blonde’s eyes blazed with fury but she kept her lips stitched closed. Good thing. These days, Mason’s nerves were overwrought. He didn’t need any more grief from anyone.
A high-school star running back, Todd had kept himself in football-ready shape. Tall, broad-shouldered, with Nordic blond hair and pierci
ng green eyes, he’d been in serious demand with the teenage girls and had run in the same circles as Mason. He wiped his hand on his pants before shaking Mason’s hand—he looked like he’d just been exercising. “Hey man.”
“Bike ride?”
“Exactly. A quick ten-miler with a colleague.”
“Where are you working now?”
“My dad’s BMW dealership.”
“Does he still sell Porsches too?”
“You know it, bro. Come see me; I’ll fix you up. So… howya holding up? God, I can’t believe that double-Dalmatian bitch did what she did. For fuck’s sake, it’s a shame we lost the death penalty in New York. She should be strapped down and injected. Poison for poison.” He snickered. “Probably take a lot of dope to kill that fat bitch.”
Mason bobbed his head, trying to refrain from making any comment. It would only spur Todd on even more, and there were people all around them. He’d just as soon keep his private life just that although it was impossible now. His whole life was smeared on the front page of every local publication, print and online.
“Did you have any clue the crazy bitch was stalking you?” he persisted. “Or was it, like, out of the blue?”
Mason casually eyed the knot of people standing around them—to his relief none seemed to be paying attention to Todd’s big mouth. Or they were pretending not to, more likely. Outside the sky had darkened as a storm approached. Shit, he’d left some tools outside his father’s garage. He needed to hurry. “We moved in to our new house and discovered she had just moved in next door a few weeks before.”
His blond eyebrows arched. “She moved there first? Either bad luck or talented stalker.”