by Bev Marshall
Mama was so pale I was afraid she was going to faint again, but she squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. Gradually the color returned to her face. “When? What happened? Where was I?”
I didn’t have any details worked out yet. There hadn’t been time to flesh out my story, and now heat was rising inside my chest. Right now, there wasn’t a lie left in me. My brain couldn’t handle any more on this day. “Can we talk about it later?” I begged. “I want to go home now.”
Dr. Harrington saw that I was near tears and he rescued me.“Maybe you should take her home, Frieda. We’ll let you know the results of the test. But my guess is she’s telling the truth now. There were no tears or bruises around the cervix. I’d guess she wasn’t raped recently.”
Mama stood up. She clutched her red patent purse against her chest and bobbed her head up and down like a Kewpie doll on the dashboard of a car. “Okay, okay, okay, we’ll go home.” She stared into my eyes for a long time then said, “But you’ve got to talk to me, Layla Jay.You’ve got to tell me everything.”
“I will,” I promised. Given more time to figure things out, I was confident I could make up a story she would believe. It wouldn’t be nearly as hard to counterfeit a rape as it had been to fake salvation.
Chapter 20
THE CHAPTER IN MY STORY I HADN’T FIGURED ON WAS MAMA’S. She blamed herself. “I knew you hated him. I knew something and I just wouldn’t look at it, ignored all of the clues. I’m so selfish, thinking about me me me all the time, leaving you to deal with all this by yourself. How could I have ignored the facts, not known about this? I’m an awful mother. Horrible. Terrible.” She ranted on and on like this sitting beside me in Papaw’s truck all the way home from the hospital.
Papaw never said a word. Driving like we were three criminals being chased by a fleet of cop cars, he chomped down on his cigar so hard, it broke off and fell onto his lap. After he ran up onto our lawn, he didn’t bother to back up, but got out and slammed the truck door before I could open mine.
I tried to reassure Mama. “You’re a good mother,” I told her. “I should have told you. It’s my fault, not yours.”
“No, no, it’s mine. Girls never want to tell. I’ve read that.They feel so terrible they can’t talk about it.” She clenched her fists and pounded her thighs. “But a good mother would recognize the signs, would know to protect her child.”
“You couldn’t have protected me,” I said.“Wallace threatened to kill me if I told. And he would have.You saved my life.That’s protecting your child.”
Mama wanted to believe me so badly, she hesitated before she said, “Well, but still I should have done something, suspected.” Her eyes widened when she said, “And you know I did in the beginning. I remember asking you about why you were so glad I threw Wallace out that time.”
“Yeah, you did, and so did Grandma, and I just lied to you both. He wasn’t having sex with you because he was raping me,” I said.
“More than once?”
“Well, no, just that once on the way home from church at New Hope.” I had chosen the backseat of Mama’s Volkswagen for the crime scene, trying to stay as near the truth as I could. I had lost my virginity in a car.
THE NEXT TIME we saw Mr. Albright we went to his office where I was to repeat the story I’d rehearsed over and over as I paced around my room.
Mr. Albright’s office was the most beautiful I’d ever been in. It was in the old McCroy’s building, which he owned, and he’d converted the front store space into a reception area with plants and oriental rugs and brass floor lamps. Down the hall were three offices, a coffee room, and a huge library. One office was filled with a copy machine and file cabinets, the second door led to the office of Mr. Blankenship, Mr. Albright’s partner, and at the end of the hall we entered Mr. Albright’s haven. As soon as Mama and I walked into the room, I smelled the rich aroma of leather and lemon oil polish. There was a chocolate brown leather love seat, two wingback chairs, a cherry coffee table, and a desk nearly the size of Mama’s wrecked Volkswagen. Shelves of books bound in kelly green and wine and tan lined two walls, and a tapestry covering the windows that looked out onto an alleyway hung behind the love seat. I wanted to live in that one room for the rest of my life. Mama preferred bright colors and she said, “Kind of dark in here, isn’t it?” as she flung her purse down on the coffee table and plopped onto the love seat.
Mr. Albright laughed. “Well, Frieda, I can turn on more lamps for you,” he said, switching on the brass floor lamp, a twin to the ones in the reception area. Mama’s beautiful face glowed in the soft light, and I marveled that she could look so radiant when her life had turned so dark.
Mr. Albright seemed disappointed that the test results proved I hadn’t been raped on the day Wallace died, but he said that Wallace’s raping me earlier certainly improved Mama’s chances with the judge. He asked a lot of questions about the day I had been raped, and I tried to reinvent my night with Roland as closely as possible. I had to fabricate much of the story though since I’d willingly climbed into the backseat of Roland’s Mustang, and there were a lot of other differences. With Roland it was summer, Wallace, winter, so what was I wearing? Only kids parked at the gravel pit, so where did this occur? How did I disguise my bruises? What did I do with my bloodstained panties? What did Wallace say exactly? What were the precise words of the threats he made to me if I told?
On and on the questions came firing at me like a hundred kids playing dodgeball against just me. Then Mr. Albright leaned forward and said, “Have you told anyone before now about Wallace raping you? Maybe a girlfriend? It would help if someone could corroborate the time of your rape.The DA might try to say you made this up just to get your mother off, that maybe you and a boyfriend ...”
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said, thinking not of Roland, but of Jehu.
“Okay, but if we go to trial and someone could testify that you told her or him about this and were afraid for your life ... before the day Wallace was killed ... well, that would help us a great deal.”
I thought of June. If I needed someone to back up my story, June would be perfect. After all, I knew plenty about her to use as blackmail, and I nearly smiled thinking about the time in church when she’d taken money out of the offering plate. I had gotten a lot of mileage out of that little sin, and now I knew something she wouldn’t want known that was a much bigger sin. I hesitated. I looked over at Mama, who was drumming a cigarette on the armrest of the couch, her eyes searching around the room for an ashtray. I wanted to save her more than anything in the world. June owed me, too. She’d told lies about me, so I knew for sure that she was capable of backing me up. And further, there was the last resort: If June didn’t care about her debt to me or didn’t care about my telling on her, she might trade another afternoon with me for telling another little lie. But was I willing to do that? Mama put her cigarette back in the pack and bit her lip. She looked so young today and sad.Two dead husbands now and all those lovers who didn’t give a damn about her.
“Well, there is one person who could ...”
Mr. Albright uncrossed his legs and practically rose up from his chair. “You did tell someone about Wallace?”
“Yes, but she’s away at camp for the summer. I don’t know when she’ll be back.”
“June, of course,” Mama said with a big smile. “We can call her mother, find out when she’s expected to return.”
WHEN I CALLED MRS. MCCORMICK later that afternoon, she said they would be driving up to Tennessee over the weekend to bring June home. She’d be sure to tell her that Layla Jay needed to talk to her as soon as she returned. She was so sorry to hear about my stepfather and my mother. It was just unbelievable!
You don’t know unbelievable, I wanted to say. Look to your own house, but I thanked her and immediately after I hung up the phone, it rang.
It was the coroner’s office calling
to tell Mama that the autopsy had been completed and they could release the body for burial. “You can throw him in the trash.That’s where he belongs,” Mama said. Evidently the members at New Hope expected Mama to say as much because they had already asked for her consent to sign over the body to them. “They’re welcome to him,” Mama said when she got off the phone. “They can pray all they want to for Wallace’s soul, but it won’t do a damned bit of good. He might have fooled them, but God knows him for the piece of shit that he is.”
I was as nervous as a dog in heat about seeing June again, but when she called, I calmed my voice and asked her to come over as soon as she could. She sounded so happy and excited over the invite, I felt a twinge of remorse for what I was about to do. But then I imagined Mama living out the rest of her life sitting in a cell wearing a drab prisoner’s outfit, and I knew I would do anything necessary to save her from that fate.
When I opened the door, June threw her arms around me and hugged me so tightly, I could barely breathe. “Let’s go out in the backyard,” I said, not wanting Mama to hear what I was going to say.
June was predisposed to come to our aid. As we sat down side by side on the metal lawn chairs, with tears in her eyes, she said, “Layla Jay, when Mother told me what all happened, I felt like I might throw up. I feel so bad for you and your mama. I wish there was something I could do to help.”
I smiled inside, but kept the sorrowful look on my face. “Well, maybe you can, June,” I said.
My smile turned upside down when I saw the horrified look on June’s face. “Me? I don’t know how I could help. I mean, I didn’t know your stepdad. I barely saw him the few times I was over here.”
“But you know me, June,” I said. “You know me better than anyone.” I stared at her breasts, reminding her of just how well she and I knew each other.
June brushed a mosquito off her leg. She had finally turned a light tan color and gained some weight back. Camp had obviously agreed with her.“I knew you hated him if that’s what you mean, but you never said why exactly.”
I turned my chair around to face hers. “If you’d asked, I would have told you.You’re my best friend.”
June busied herself tightening the rubber band around her ponytail. She was suspicious now of where this conversation was headed, and I knew she was having second thoughts about her offer to help. No one would want to get publicly involved in the mess Mama and I were in. I kept my eyes on June’s face and finally she said,“I’m sorry I never asked. I guess I just figured if you wanted me to know, you’d tell me.”
“I want you to know now.” I worked up a few tears. “It means the world to me that you understand, June, that you know what he did to me. You’re my best friend,” I said again. “We’re more than friends. I’ve thought about that day in your house when it was raining and you took the picture of me over and over, and June,” I swallowed, barely able to get the words out, “I missed you so much.”
June’s body went limp in the chair. “Oh, Layla Jay. Me, too. I missed you awfully. I didn’t like any of the girls in my cabin.”
I reached out and took her hand while I told her the story of my rape, which had become so real after all the telling that I almost believed it myself. When I finished, I squeezed her hand and said, “So June, all you have to do is repeat what I just told you. The only difference”— I was careful not to use the word “lie”—“is you have to say I told you back in January instead of today. If you’d just do that one little thing, you could help save Mama, and I’d be grateful to you for the rest of my life.”
June drew her hands back and crossed her arms, hugging herself as she slid farther back into her chair.“I don’t know, Layla Jay. Wouldn’t that be a crime, lying to a judge or a lawyer even? It’s called something, perjunery or something like that.”
“Perjury,” I said. “Yeah, but people do it all the time. I’ve heard that just plenty of people lie on the witness stand and it’s okay if it’s for good, if it’s to make sure they don’t convict the wrong person for a crime.”
June looked doubtful. She wasn’t as dumb as I had thought she was for all these years.“What if someone found out though? Can’t you go to jail for lying in court?”
I tried for a smile like Grandma gave me when I was little and used a word wrong in a sentence. She’d given me the perfect opening to use all of my ammunition and buy insurance.“Who’s going to find out? No one will ever know except you and me. I haven’t ever told any of your secrets, and I know how bad you feel about making up those lies about me. But this is different. Besides, if the case gets dismissed like we hope, we won’t ever go to trial.”
She blinked twice. She had caught on to the fact that she didn’t really have any choice if she wanted to continue our friendship and keep her secrets safe. She half-smiled. “Yeah, I guess there’s no way anyone would ever know.”
“Not unless the squirrels learn how to talk,” I said, pointing to a gray squirrel darting across the lawn.“How about a Coke? I’m hot; let’s go in. You can tell me all about camp,” I said, pulling her up from her chair and pushing her toward the door. As we walked across the yard, I looked down at the grass and imagined Wallace far below standing in a circle of flames. I hoped he knew that I had just added a keg of powder to the fire.
Mr. Albright was pleased that June was willing to come in and tell him what she knew. He said it didn’t matter if she remembered my exact words, only the date of my saying them. He wouldn’t allow me to be present while he questioned her, so I waited in the front reception room sitting on one of the soft leather chairs across from Mrs. McCormick. She was wearing a pink shirtwaist dress from her closet that I hadn’t tried on and the short eight-inch pearls that I had tried on with the blue two-piece suit. They looked better with the suit. She hadn’t spoken to me during the first fifteen minutes we sat listening to the receptionist answering the phone intermittently as she typed on the humming IBM Selectric. I picked up a Time magazine and flipped through the pages without reading any of the articles about what Lyndon Johnson was up to. Mrs. McCormick sat as still as one of the lamps, staring at the picture of a flying duck on the wall.
“They’re taking a long time,” I said.
Mrs. McCormick looked at her white-gold watch. “Mmmm. Lawyers are all long-winded. And June talks too much to everyone.” Her eyes went back to the flying ducks.“Now I know that you’re pretty garrulous, too.”
I knew that she didn’t want June involved in our sordid story, and I couldn’t blame her. I understood that June’s testifying to save Mama’s disorderly life would be terribly upsetting to a woman who would never mix the colors of her towels, leave dirty clothes on the living room floor, or let milk sour in her refrigerator. But she was also a woman who believed in doing the right thing. She was a Pink Lady volunteer and the clubs she belonged to raised money for the needy and collected toys for tots at Christmas. Now Mama and I had become another of her projects.
When she came out of the office with Mr. Albright, June circled her thumb and forefinger in the okay sign. She’d done it. Lied for me. For Mama. For the good of all mankind it now seemed to me. I hugged her and she squeezed my hand as we walked out of the cool air-conditioned office into the stultifying heat on Main Street.
As we walked to June’s mother’s white Lincoln, June said, “Let’s go swimming.The pool should be open now.”
I had forgotten that June hadn’t heard the rumors about my suicide drowning. “I can’t swim anymore,” I said, and as soon as I said those words, another inspiration came shooting into my head like a rocket. What if those kids were right? What if I had tried to kill myself because I couldn’t live with the fact of Wallace’s raping me? Wouldn’t my being tortured by the memories of the rape and the fear of Wallace doing it again put an exclamation point at the end of my testimony! I saw the headlines: “Daughter tried to kill herself; mother kills the monster instead.”
; “Why not?” June wanted to know.
My face instantly rearranged itself into the mask of sadness and reluctance to confess that I assumed so effortlessly now. “Oh, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Mrs. McCormick unlocked the driver’s side door and rolled down the window.“Fine. I need you to help me weed the garden anyway, June. We’ll take Layla Jay home.”
June and I slid in beside her mother, sweat popping out on both of our foreheads. “It must be a hundred degrees, Mother. Let’s wait till it cools off. I want Layla Jay to spend the day with me.” She turned to me. “You loved to go to the pool.What’s happened?”
Mrs. McCormick interrupted. “We have things to do. Layla Jay has to go home and that’s final.” She turned the key in the ignition and glanced in the rearview mirror.“Where’d all this traffic come from?” she said as a line of cars moved down Main behind us.
I was determined to get the news of my suicide out while I had another witness sitting in the car with us.We were backing out of the parking place and it wasn’t far to Fourth Street from here. I lowered my voice, injected with as much pain as I could muster in my tone. “I tried to drown myself in Dixie Springs Lake,” I said.
Mrs. McCormick slammed on the brakes. “You what!”
“It was the Fourth of July. My family went on a picnic to Dixie Springs Lake, and some kids were skiing. I swam out to where their speedboat was headed, hoping that it would hit me.”
June grabbed my arm. “But why, why would you want to die?” “Wallace,” I whispered.“I was afraid he’d rape me again. He told me he would. And after he moved back in with us, I thought that I’d rather die than have it happen again.”
Mrs. McCormick had pulled back into the parking place, and now she cocked her head across June and stared at me. “Well, obviously you weren’t successful. Does your mother know you did this crazy thing?”