Death Gets a Time-Out

by Ayelet Waldman

  The next morning I called my doctor to make my first prenatal appointment. Miraculously, they had had a last-minute cancellation, and could fit me in that morning. If I timed everything perfectly, I would be able to drive east to Los Feliz to take Isaac to preschool, dropping off Ruby at her school on the way, go back west to the doctor’s office near Cedar’s Sinai, and make it back downtown in time to meet Al at the county jail for another interview with Jupiter. I’d have to traverse the city three times, but if the traffic cooperated, I’d be fine. Ask a Los Angelino how long it takes to get somewhere and you’re guaranteed to get the response “twenty minutes.” By some magical arrangement of denial and automotive optimism, all points in the city are exactly twenty minutes away from all others. Except when there’s traffic. Then multiply that twenty minutes by a factor of ten, and you’ll still be sitting on the road, engaged in the eternal debate: Should you risk getting off the freeway and trying the surface streets?

  I had my routes down pat. I whipped down side streets, using the speed bumps as launching pads, and was on my back, knees up and feet in the stirrups, before my hair was dry from my morning shower. The doctor confirmed what I already knew. I was pregnant. Seven weeks and eleven pounds along. Well on the way to whale-dom.

  At the receptionist’s desk, I made a trimester’s worth of appointments, and received a goodie bag full of prenatal vitamins, coupons for hand lotion, and pamphlets from infant formula companies instructing me that while breast was of course best, they were ready and waiting to make my life easier with a steady supply of chemically and nutritionally perfect milk for my new baby. I hefted the bag in my hand, wondering if I should toss it in the trashcan behind the counter, or wait to throw it out until it had rolled around in my car for a few months.

  “First baby?” a voice said. I turned to find another pregnant woman standing behind me. She was tall, with one of those bullet-shaped bellies very thin pregnant women manage to acquire.

  I shook my head. “Third,” I said.

  Her eyes widened and her smile grew stiff. “My goodness,” she said, and backed away from me as if my fecundity were contagious. Hers was the first of what was to become an all-too-familiar reaction. Being pregnant with your first baby is, in the eyes of the world, cute. Your second is less interesting, but still acceptable. By the time you’ve imposed your genetic material on the universe for the third time, people are much less inclined to approve of you. Reactions range from shock to disapproval, even occasionally to disgust. Every so often another mother of three or more greets you with a sympathetic smile. I find those the most terrifying, frankly. It is a moment of kinship like that shared between strangers who realize that their jobs force them to wear the same unflattering uniform or that they are suffering from the same disfiguring disease. Rueful recognition of mutual doom. That’s what you get from those other mothers smiling down from their cereal-encrusted minivans.

  I drove back across town, imagining myself chasing three kids, juggling three sets of activities, doing three children’s worth of laundry. A nanny. I was definitely going to need a nanny. I was pretty well freaked out by the time I got to the county jail. I had planned to break the news of my pregnancy to Al, but I couldn’t seem to find the right moment. It wasn’t the kind of thing I could say while we were going through the rigmarole of metal detectors, identification inspections, and bag searches necessary to enter the jail’s visiting room. I almost said something while we were killing time, waiting for them to bring Jupiter down, but Al was on one of his tears about the conspiracy to silence libertarian voices of dissent, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

  “Do you really think it’s an accident that websites critical of the liberal media’s hegemony are so much slower to load?” he said as he pulled his notebook out of his pocket. “It’s all about AOL/Time Warner. They control the Internet. They decide what speed everything runs on. They’re counting on everyone getting restless, waiting for the truth to appear on their screens. They’re figuring Americans are so damn impatient that they’d rather click over to a website that serves up nothing but bogus half-truths than wait for a minute. And they’re right. The herd would rather slurp at CNN’s trough of lies than take a minute to learn the truth. But not me, girlie. Not me. I’m a patient man. I’ll wait until kingdom come before I get my information from a media conglomerate.”

  “Maybe you should get a DSL line,” I said.

  He looked at me, obviously pitying my inability to recognize the reality of my own victimization, and opened his mouth to launch into another explanation of why the threat of global terrorism was really a media-created stunt to increase revenues, when Jupiter finally arrived. He greeted us with a nod of his head and sat down at the table. He looked less agitated. He’d stopped chewing on his lips, and he wasn’t fidgeting quite so much.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Better, I guess. I’m working. In the laundry. It’s pretty awful work—it’s a furnace in there, and you’re on your feet, bending over and picking up these huge, stinking piles of filthy sheets and clothes and stuff. But I don’t mind it. At least I’m somewhere away from everyone. I don’t just sit there in my house waiting for someone to jump me.”

  I’ve never gotten used to hearing inmates refer to their cells as houses. There is something so sad about it—the very attempt to replicate normality serves only to highlight how truly constricted their world is. It was probably a good sign that Jupiter was getting more comfortable with jailhouse lingo, though. It meant he was getting accustomed to his situation; that he was figuring out how to swim in the admittedly poisonous waters. It was better than drowning.

  “Jupiter, I want to ask you something. Do you remember what happened to Lilly’s mother? How she died, I mean?”

  Jupiter looked up at me blankly. “What do you mean?”

  “I know that she died in Mexico, and your father said something about an accident. I was wondering if you remember what happened.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and looked down at his hands. “I was really young.”

  I leaned forward, ready to press him. “About two or three, right?”

  He shrugged again and began chewing his lip. “Yeah.”

  I thought of my Isaac. He was more or less the same age as Jupiter had been back then. I had a hard time believing that if something happened to me, he wouldn’t remember it. Jupiter remembered. I knew he did. Why wasn’t he willing to talk about it? Why wouldn’t anyone tell us anything about Lilly’s mother’s death?

  “Come on, Jupiter,” I said, letting my impatience show. “We can’t help you unless you’re straight with us. What happened in Mexico?”

  He glanced up at me anxiously, his face pinched and his teeth once again clawing at his lips. “Did Lilly tell you anything?” he asked.

  “What happened in Mexico? I asked again.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his voice the nervous whine of a young child.

  I wasn’t getting anywhere by confronting him. Maybe it made more sense to pretend to believe him. “You never talked about it with your father?” I said gently.

  He shook his head. “My father and I never talked about anything. Except what a lousy son I was.”

  None of us spoke for a minute, and then Al said, “Jupiter, we went up to Ojai. To the rehab center where you met Chloe.”

  Jupiter said, “How’s Dr. Blackmore?”

  I replied, “Fine. Molly sends you her regards.” At the sound of her name, his face brightened. “She likes you,” I continued.

  “She’s the best,” he said. “If I’d listened to her four years ago, none of this would have happened.”

  “She doesn’t seem to have been too fond of Chloe.”

  He smiled ruefully. “Molly saw right through her. She tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen.”

  “Did you know that Chloe had checked back in to the center a couple of months ago?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Did your f
ather know that she was using again?”

  He nodded his head ruefully. “He caught her doing a line in her bathroom. I thought he was going to kill her.”

  The three of us stared at each other for a moment, as it dawned on us what he’d said.

  “Did you mean that?” I asked him.

  He paused for a moment, as if considering my question. “No. No, I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t think my father could have killed her. He loved Chloe. He really did. I can’t believe he’d go that far.”

  “How far did he go? Was he angry?”

  He grunted. “You could say that. He busted open her lip. That counts as angry, doesn’t it?”

  “He hit her?”

  Jupiter nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Was that the first time?”

  “I dunno,” he said. “Maybe. Maybe not. He’s that kind of guy, you know?” Was he? Was that remarkably magnetic man really violent?

  “Did he ever hit you?”

  He rolled his eyes. “All the time, man. All the time.”

  Evidence of child abuse is terrifically useful in a mitigation case. It doesn’t work unless the jury is already predisposed to give the guy life instead of death, but if they want to save him, it can be the hook on which to hang their hats.

  “Did you ever go to the hospital?” I asked, holding my breath and hoping for medical records.

  He shook his head, and I sighed in disappointment. I looked at him intently. Was this just a convenient story, made up to shift the blame to his father, or was it the truth? I couldn’t tell.

  “What happened after he hit Chloe?” I asked.

  “He threw her out. That’s when she went back to the center.”

  “Was that a typical response for him? Throwing her out like that?”

  “Yeah. You should have seen how he lost it way back when he found out I was using. And then the rest of them were freaking out, too.”

  “The rest of them?”

  “The CCU ministers. They had this huge powwow to figure out what to do with me. I mean, can you imagine? The Very Reverend’s son, a cokehead? They never could have lived that down.”

  “Why not? I mean, I understand that the CCU is opposed to drug use, but wouldn’t your father’s parishioners have understood? Maybe it would have made him more human to them.”

  “They don’t want him to be human. He’s supposed to be closer to God than they are. It’s not just that the CCU is against drugs. My father is supposed to be a healer. He cures people of drug addiction. And homosexuality. And depression, and just about anything else. You pay for the program, and you’re cured. They guarantee it. If Polaris couldn’t heal his own kid, then why should other people pay him to heal them?”

  “I don’t get it. How can the CCU possibly guarantee a cure?”

  He shrugged. “If you fail, then it’s your fault. You weren’t pure enough. You weren’t committed enough. God saw through your pretense. Work a little harder. Take a few more classes. Pay some more money. You’ll be cured in time.”

  “Did the congregation ever find out about you?”

  “Only once I got clean. Then my dad and the other ministers billed it as a CCU success story. My recovery was attributed to CCU, not to three months of rehab.”

  “And Chloe?”

  “Same thing. Chloe was the poster girl. Polaris laid his hands on her, brought her to God, and she was transformed.”

  “So it would have looked terrible if it had gotten out that her cure didn’t last.”

  “Right.”

  “So he kept it a secret from the CCU?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Here’s something I don’t understand. Why did he take her back? Was it just to hide what happened from the CCU?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know why. I mean, I never thought he would. When he threw her out, he sounded like he hated her. But she was back a few days later. And she was the same old Chloe.”

  “What do you mean? Was she using?”

  He nodded. “More than ever.”

  “What about you, Jupiter? Were you using again?” I said.

  He began chewing on his lip again. Then he nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  “Cocaine?”

  “Yeah,” he whispered.

  “For how long?”

  He shrugged.

  “How long?” I repeated.

  “I never really stopped,” he said. “Neither of us did.”

  I stared at him. “Never?”

  He shook his head.

  “You were using as soon as you got out?”

  “Almost. I was sober while I was waiting for Chloe, all the way to the day I picked her up from the hospital.”

  “The day you picked her up?”

  He shrugged.

  I leaned back in my chair and raised my hands up. “Wait a second. Are you telling me that Chloe started using again on the very day she got out of rehab?”

  Jupiter shrugged. “It’s not really that uncommon, you know?”

  He explained that Chloe had instructed him to have a line of cocaine waiting for her in the car on the day he picked her up in Ojai. He’d cut it on the dashboard, and the two of them had snorted and buzzed their way down to San Marino. Their relationship, defined as it was by a shared addiction, and sex, had taken a brief hiatus while he was in Mexico, recovering from Chloe’s transfer of her affections to his father. It picked up again when he came home. This time, however, there was a twist. Jupiter satisfied the craving for the drugs that Chloe’s position as Polaris’s wife and partner in his ministry made it difficult for her to acquire on her own. In return, she satisfied his craving—for her. Sex for drugs. So it went, for almost four years. And then one day Chloe was dead and Jupiter was folding laundry at the L.A. county jail.

  I looked over at Al, whose lip was curled in a disgusted sneer. Jupiter had just confirmed all his worst expectations of drug users. I knew Al had figured this guy for a liar and a weakling from the moment we first met him. I had felt sorry for Jupiter; I still did. I didn’t think he was weak, just not as strong as his disease. However, I’d forgotten that trusting someone in his situation wasn’t wise. I was going to have to remember that, from now on.

  Nine

  “WHAT are the odds of the prosecutor finding out the gory details about our client and his stepmother?” Al asked. I handed him a napkin, and he mopped up the grease on his chin. He took another huge bite of his French dip and mumbled something.

  “I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” I said, trying to keep from looking as nauseated as I felt. I picked at my own soggy roll. This pregnancy was really going to be a bummer if it made me lose my appetite for Philippe’s. We’d stopped at the downtown culinary institution for a late lunch after our meeting with Jupiter. Al and I are in full agreement that the only way to get the stink of jail out of our clothes and hair is to cover it with something even smellier. Like the odor of roast beef au jus.

  “I said, are you going to eat your macaroni salad?”

  I pushed it across the narrow, scarred, wooden table. Al shoved a heaping forkful in his mouth and followed that with beet-red, pickled egg. I stared for a minute at his grinding jaws and then leapt to my feet and ran as fast as I could across the sawdust-strewn floor, dodging through the crowd of municipal employees in ill-fitting suits, construction workers in dirty overalls, and the occasional nattily dressed politician. I made it around the model train exhibit to the ladies’ room just in the nick of time. Lucky for me there was no line. There rarely was. Male customers outnumbered female by about four to one at Philippe’s. On occasion, I’d found myself to be the only woman in the place, other than the waitresses in their starched uniforms and little white caps.

  After I lost what little of my French dip that I’d managed to swallow, I stood in line for a baked apple. As I put my money down onto the metal tray the waitress extended—the woman who makes your sandwich at Philippe’s never lets her hands touch the contaminated surface of your dollar bills
—I I felt her eyes appraising me.

  “How far alongare you?” she asked. She looked, like all the other women behind the counter, like a refugee from the 1950s. Her faintly blue hair was rolled into a bun and tucked up under the white frilly cap that perched on the top of her head. Her lipstick was drawn on just a bit larger than her actual mouth and her eye shadow was a shade of sea-green that I’d begun seeing on the teenagers who shopped on Melrose Avenue. I didn’t think the waitress was expressing the same ironic retro-chic as the kids who shared her taste in makeup.

  “Seven weeks,” I said. “How did you know I was pregnant?”

  “I saw you running for the bathroom. It’ll pass in a few weeks.”

  “Let’s hope so.” I took my apple and went back to Al.

  “What’s with you?” he said.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  He paused with the remains of his sandwich halfway to his lips. “Really?”

  “Yup.”

  He crammed the sandwich into his mouth, chewed twice, and swallowed. “Congratulations,” he said.

  We sat for a moment in silence, while I took a few bites that seemed more sugar and melted butter than fruit. I handed the rest to Al, and he made short work of it.

  “What’s your plan?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How long are you planning on working?”

  “As long as I can, I guess.”

  He nodded, looking a little troubled.