When he called that night, I was happy, impatient to tell him the news.
“Hi, love,” he began. He sounded lighter, almost relieved. It had been a long time since he called me that, too. Did he know somehow that I was going to get him out?
He kept speaking, but it took me a minute to realize what he was saying. “What did you say?”
“I worked out a plea bargain,” he repeated. “They reduced the charge to involuntary manslaughter. I pled guilty to that. My lawyer says he thinks I’ll get off with five years.”
The money for Richard’s bail was in my purse, but it might as well have been blowing down the street. I realized the phone was beeping, that Richard had hung up as I stood there mute. I called Sharon.
Before I could tell her, she cut in. “Kathy, I was just trying to call you. Please get up here as soon as you can. Dad’s had a heart attack. He’s in the hospital. Please, Kathy.”
I stuffed the money into my piggy bank. Then I packed a few things in a suitcase as fast as I could. I was almost to the curb when I remembered the car was gone.
~ 28 ~
February 1975
New Orleans
Lacey
After the hellos and pleased to meet yous were said, there was a babble of questions about Kathy. I looked Willis’s way. He wanted to handle it his way, now let him handle it.
I was dumbfounded by the performance he put on. He told them enough of what they already knew to make them think Kathy had taken us into her confidence, that we had some right to speak for her. He wove the most seamless web of honesty and lying I’d ever heard. In all the years I’d been married to him, he’d never done anything like this.
At least, he hadn’t as far as I knew. That was a thought.
“Kathy’s doing all right, but not great,” he said. “She came to work with my wife back in December, and Lacey got concerned about her. It was obvious she was in some kind of trouble. Lacey’s the kind to take in stray kittens anyway, so she decided to help if she could.
“So, she called Sharon back in December,” Willis went on, not mentioning that I’d lied about what I wanted—and Sharon, still smiling, didn’t say anything about it, either. “After Lacey learned that Kathy’s dad had passed away in the fall, she wouldn’t have wondered why Kathy was unhappy but would’ve just tried to comfort her. Except it seemed peculiar that Kathy would run away from her sister’s house in Baton Rouge right after their dad’s funeral.
“Kathy’s résumé had disappeared, and Lacey was sure Kathy had pulled it to keep the company from checking her references. And then Lacey saw the address from an envelope Kathy received”—once again, he was telling the precise truth, but lying in his teeth in the implication—“the address of a convict in Angola state prison.”
They all looked up sharply, like a bunch of terriers when a cat runs by. Willis didn’t turn a hair. He kept on, smooth as a politician.
“We had no idea what Lacey should do,” he went on. “She didn’t want to take it up with the management of her company. She was afraid Kathy would lose her job. But Lacey has her responsibilities, too. She had to look into it. By accident, we found out about Richard and the baby.”
He skipped over the fact that this discovery was exactly half an hour old. “But we’re not real clear on what happened, and we didn’t want to upset Kathy by asking too much.”
Good lord! And he’d said I was devious! I shut my mouth hard to keep my jaw from dropping.
I jerked my attention back to the group. Eddie was talking. “What do you know about Jamie?” he asked Willis.
“Only that Kathy had a little girl. What happened?”
I stole another look at Willis, wondering if there was an Olympic event for skating on thin ice. If so, he was a shoo-in. But no one seemed to mind him asking.
“She died,” Sharon said. “We never found out exactly how.”
“Kathy didn’t tell you?” I asked.
Sharon shook her head. “She doesn’t know. Richard got arrested, and he plea-bargained guilty to involuntary manslaughter. And he never did say why.”
“Didn’t she ask the police about it?” I asked. I couldn’t believe she wouldn’t at least do that.
“She didn’t have any rights, since she and Richard weren’t married,” said Sharon.
“Did Richard do something to the baby?” Willis asked.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” said Eddie. “We wish we knew. But there wasn’t an autopsy, there wasn’t a trial, and Richard won’t say anything. We all gave up on him.”
Sam spoke up unexpectedly from the corner. “I didn’t.”
Part 5
~ 29 ~
April 1975
San Pedro
Kathy
“Hey, Kathy, want to take our lunches to the park?” Lacey called to me from the office kitchen, outshouting a mixer truck in the driveway.
“It’s raining.” I didn’t even check. It had to be raining. It had rained every day for weeks.
“No, it isn’t.” The truck pulled away, but her voice was still set at yelling pitch. She came to my desk and repeated her words in a normal tone—a sort of corrected replay. “It isn’t. It’s gorgeous outside.”
“Lacey, it has rained every day since you got back from New Orleans. I think you brought the weather with you in your suitcase. We ought to be building an ark, not a bunch of buildings.”
“Huh. A concrete ark. . . . Sounds like a Giannini project, all right. Grab your lunch, girl. The sun’s out.”
I did. The truth is, I was so stir-crazy from the wet weather, I might have gone on a picnic even if it had been raining. We picked our way through the puddles to Lacey’s car, and she drove to a park with a panoramic view of the harbor, with its all-green suspension bridge standing up against the water and sky.
She spread the comics section of a newspaper on the damp concrete picnic table and split the sports section for us to spread on the benches.
“I think our company must have built this one,” she said, wiggling a crumbly-looking piece at the table edge. She set her lunch down and gave it a doubtful look. “Bet you a nickel we get ants.”
“No bet—you’d win for sure,” I said. I looked around. “Nice view. The bridge is pretty.”
What I really felt was something close to panic at being on a hilltop, so much in the open. The sky was too big. I had a dizzy realization that I was standing on the side of the earth, that I could fall into the sky.
“The Vincent Thomas?” said Lacey, looking over her shoulder at the bridge. “It’s kind of stubby. Not like the Golden Gate. You ever see the Golden Gate?”
“I did once. My family drove out West once on vacation.”
The openness of the hillside reminded me of Dad and Jamie underground. And Richard locked up in a cell. I took a deep breath, pushing against the tightness in my chest.
Lacey sorted through the rest of the newspaper and looked at the headlines. She showed me the front page. Pictures of helicopters and people scrambling to get on them. “I see the war is finally over.”
I wondered if Thu had any family over there. And I wondered about Richard. Will he care? Did he ever care about anything? Or is he still just an artilleryman, destroying things too far away to see?
Lacey squashed an ant. “I knew it.”
“Eat fast,” I suggested. I folded the plastic wrap from my sandwich, then unfolded it again. “Lacey . . . .”
“Um-hmm?” She was still looking at the paper.
“What would you do if someone wanted to talk to you and you didn’t want to talk to them?”
“Depends on the circumstances.” She looked up, interested and sympathetic.
I floundered on, trying to remember what I’d told her, truth and lies. “There was this guy, and he did something bad . . . or I thought he might have. . . .”
“You’re not sure?”
“Well, I can’t decide. But now my sister wrote me and said I should talk to him. She says it’s not
the way it looked.”
“But you don’t want to?”
“I don’t know what I want.”
I didn’t say any more about it, and Lacey didn’t push me. Out in the harbor, a cruise ship was inching toward the ocean. I wondered what it would feel like to be the kind of person who went on cruises.
We drove back to the office to make concrete picnic tables or something else equally uninteresting. As the days went by, and then weeks, I didn’t get in touch with Richard. I just couldn’t take any more.
It was all I could do to keep going at all. I only did things I had to, like go to work and buy food. I did visit the library, but that felt necessary.
Other than that, I more or less hid in the apartment. It was bare, and I made no effort to fix it up. I owned only the things I had to—a single mattress and some kitchenware. And work clothes, all from the Salvation Army. As far as I’m concerned, they still belong to their former owners. They’re like a crowd of unwanted guests crammed behind the closet door. For all I know, they talk to each other in there. I’m not listening.
Every weekend, I spent most of my time sitting on the mattress, my back propped against the wall, reading mysteries. I never tried to guess “whodunit,” because I didn’t care. More and more, I couldn’t even look at the words. I’d open a book and stare at a page. Or I’d read the same paragraph over and over without getting the meaning.
The time when I could push Richard and Jamie out of my mind for even a little while was past. I hadn’t written to Richard, because I was waiting for him to get out of prison. I knew what I’d do then. I’d go wherever he was and ask him to his face if he’d done anything to Jamie. It wasn’t a question I could ask in a letter. Or on a prison telephone line. So, I had to wait and imagine.
“Richard, what did you do that night?”
“Nothing. I didn’t do anything.”
“Then why did you plead guilty?”
“It was a white man’s court. I couldn’t expect any justice.”
“Lots of white people were trying to help you. Why wouldn’t you let my father help, or Sam, or me? Why wouldn’t you let your friends visit? Why wouldn’t you let me pay your bail? I sold my car to pay your bail.”
“I should never have been arrested. I was innocent.”
“Then why did you say under oath you were guilty?”
I went through this discussion over and over. When I got to the last question, Richard always disappeared. The day I could ask him in person, he’d have to face me and answer me.
No, I wouldn’t write to him. I didn’t write to the Motleys, either. I couldn’t, not until I talked to Richard. Maybe they thought Richard had hurt Jamie, that he’d done it all along, that I knew. When he pled guilty, he pled guilty for me too.
And maybe I was guilty. I felt like it was my fault. Maybe I didn’t take good enough care of Jamie, didn’t feed her right or keep her warm or something. Maybe I should have noticed she was sick earlier, that day at the zoo.
“Was your little pickaninny worth killing your father for?” Mom’s voice. “Kathy, it was all your fault. You were a bad mother.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“I refuse to spend eternity next to a colored child.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say. And I wasn’t a bad mother.”
“At least it was a closed-casket funeral.”
“You were the bad mother. Not me. I loved Jamie. You never loved me.”
“You’ve always been so difficult.”
I pushed her voice away, but I knew she’d come back. Maybe I was losing my mind. And I had four and a half years to go.
San Pedro had no seasons, so I didn’t notice the time passing. One Saturday, I realized it was June 28, the day Jamie had died. I wanted to get away, but I had no place to go. I decided to at least get out of the apartment.
The sidewalk was bumpy, with weeds coming up through cracks in the cement. Phone poles were staple-studded, covered with vertical litter about last month’s rock band performances. As I went south, the stores got seedier, then gave way to rooming houses. Peeling concrete steps were bleachers for men with bottle-shaped paper bags. I strode right past them. I wasn’t afraid like I had been when I first came to San Pedro.
I had never walked more than a block or two this way on Pacific Avenue. The ocean was in front of me somewhere, I knew. I expected the street to end at a beach, but instead there was a shaky fence and a tumbledown cliff, with a long view of water and rocks beyond. I slipped though the fence.
The slope was terraced, not as steep as I’d expected. On the flat part of each terrace was a strip of asphalt, all that was left of a neighborhood street, complete with curbs and palm trees along the crumpled parkway. Spaced at city-lot intervals were concrete foundations, open to the sky now. I scrambled down onto the first terrace and actually looked both ways before crossing the street. Two feral cats bolted into the underbrush.
I sat on a flight of concrete steps that went nowhere, watching the surf. Watched and listened: first the thump when a wave hit, then a hiss as it was sucked back through the rocks, along with a rattle of sea stones like a load of bricks falling off the back of a truck.
I’m worn out, thinking about Jamie. Wondering why. What I did wrong. Whether it had to happen and why it had to.
I looked up, out to sea. The larger waves broke far out, smaller ones came closer. If I swim out past the surf, I’ll never make it back. They’ll think it was an accident. I picked my way down the steps, then down the slope toward the ocean.
I didn’t get that far. My foot skidded on a stone and I fell. I slid almost ten feet, and came to rest against a tall, feathery plant with licorice-smelling leaves.
My ankle hurt like hell, and I started crying from the pain and then kept on crying about everything that had happened, going back to the day I first met Richard.
The good things hurt worse than the bad, because they’ve all turned into nothing—Richard’s love, Jamie’s sweetness, even Dad’s change of heart. I can’t face my friends now, my family’s gone, and my stupid little dreams about a husband and a baby are like the splinters of a kicked-apart dollhouse.
I was almost retching by the time I ran out of tears. I looked around to see if anyone had heard me.
There was no one in sight. In the mist over the ocean, I could see a faint blue island. Beyond it somewhere would be Vietnam. Everything that had driven Richard was there.
Most of Thu’s life, too—her city, invaded and bombed, her friends and family dead, for all she knew. The theater, where she’d hidden, where she’d saved Martin. She’d lost almost everything and survived anyway. Now she had Dom and Joss, her artwork, her friends, her faith, Martin, and the puppets. I’d never asked her how she did it, but now I remembered she’d told me:
“Like a dancer on a tightrope, don’t look down.”
“We did all we could. Everything beyond that is fate.”
I would have to borrow her stubbornness awhile, since I had nothing of my own to go on with. I stood up. I was exhausted, feeling bruised in the middle, almost hung over from crying. I needed to get home.
A motion in the bushes startled me, but it was only a stocky ginger tomcat. He looked like Mew, only grown up. He strolled out into the sunlight and stood at my feet.
“Kitty?” I said tentatively, feeling foolish. He came to me, and I sat beside him, stroking his head. When I finally started back, he followed as I limped up the slope, scrambling in the steep places. At the fence, I bent and picked him up. He stayed in my arms all the way home, looking around and acting as if trusting me wasn’t stupid at all.
I left him at the apartment and limped to a store to get him food and other things. When I got back, he rubbed against my legs and meowed. After he ate, he sat on the bed with me and purred. I petted him and he curled up next to me. What’s your name, kitty? Henry, that’s his name. I’ll call him Henry. After a while, we drifted toward sleep. He’s not afraid he’ll die in the night because I don�
��t know how to take care of him.
I went to work on Monday, but I wasn’t good for much. I was still limping and I felt sick. Lacey took one look at me and gave me a bunch of filing I could do sitting in the back room. She didn’t check to see whether I was getting very far with it, either. I appreciated her being so understanding.
Still, when noon came, I tried to give her the slip. But she caught me taking my lunch out the back door.
“Want to go for a picnic?” she asked.
“No, I have to . . . . I mean, I guess not.” I couldn’t even think of a decent excuse. Another heart-to-heart was the last thing I wanted.
“Something wrong?” She looked at me with searching concern.
“No. I mean, I don’t know. No.”
“You okay?”
“I don’t feel too good. But I’m not sick or anything, just tired.”
“Why don’t you sit in the lunchroom, then? Better than back there in the yard with the trucks. I have to go out, so you’ll be on your own unless the phone rings. I brought in some strawberries, too. Willis and I went to Oxnard last weekend, and we got a flat of them. Help yourself, ’cause they won’t last.”
Perfect. I had no idea where she was going, and I didn’t care. I sat and nibbled at my lunch without much appetite. I wasn’t thinking of Mom much anymore, or Richard either. Thu, if anyone. Martin, becoming a father after the shot had crippled him. And Sam, warning Richard not to get so sidetracked on the bad things that he couldn’t see the good.
I ate a bowl of Lacey’s strawberries. I cried a little at the idea that I couldn’t give one to Jamie. She would have liked them. They were sweet and juicy.
For the rest of the day at work, I faked it, and I went to bed as soon as I got home. I ached all over. I was half asleep when someone knocked on the apartment door. I tried to ignore it, but the knocking kept on.
I got up and opened the door to Marilu Collins. She waved an envelope. “Brought your mail up.”
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