He is a tall, skinny sixty-year-old man with deep dark pockets under his eyes. “Did you find any fingerprints on the murder weapon?”
Guzman asks.
“No, sir. The can was wiped clean.”
“Did you find fingerprints in the rest of the apartment?”
“We found only a few partials on the bathroom window and the cabinet below the sink in the kitchenette.”
“No other fingerprints?”
“No.”
“In your experience, is finding so few fingerprints unusual?”
“Very. It’s obvious the murderer tried to wipe the apartment clean, too.”
Fishkin stands up. “Objection!”
“Sustained,” Judge Sanders says. “Just answer the question, Officer, without offering opinions.”
“The fingerprints you did find, who did they belong to?”
“Some to An-ling Huang.”
“And the other fingerprints, were you able to establish who they belonged to?”
“Yes sir. They belonged to the defendant.”
Emma
I took walks around the Columbia campus after my classes. I was tired most days and told myself the walk was a way to lay aside thoughts of work, to catch my breath before going home. Amy had folded herself into my thoughts again. Morning was the worst time. I’d wake up with the feeling of her soft weight curling into me, her neck, hot with sleep, on my arm. Contentment would spread under my skin, and for a few moments, I’d breathe in unison with my daughter once again. Then a sound—the shower being turned on, a door being opened,Tom’s electric razor—and Amy would be gone. I’d turn to the bedroom window and see that it faced a wall. I was in Manhattan, not in Mapleton with Amy. I would close my eyes and pretend to be asleep, hoping my face betrayed nothing to Tom.
I held Amy in the ambulance, carried her into the hospital, embraced her until a nurse pried her from my arms.No one stopped my screams.
I would lie on the floor of Amy’s room at night, running the reel—hopelessly short—of Amy’s life in my head, sometimes ending up asleep, more often not. I can’t remember for how long this continued.
During Christmas break,my walks around the deserted campus grew longer.Everyone had gone home to family, friends, to Vermont, the Caribbean. I sat on the steps of the library and smoked a rare cigarette, yearning for what, I didn’t know.
Something out of reach, beyond the range of my vision.
Along Riverside Drive, the Hudson had turned into a long slab of concrete. New Jersey was walled in by heavy mist. Christmastime makes me gag. In the apartment, I tossed the mail on the kitchen table and went to the study to input a new lesson plan on my laptop—a collection of words and sentences culled from hip magazines with which I hoped to snare my new class. On an impulse I called Tom at his office.
“Did it happen?” I asked.Tom had been waiting to hear whether he’d be the new chairman of the Economics Department.
“No,” he said, then asked me to check the refrigerator.
“We’re running out of orange juice.” He sounded busy, unfazed by the news, even though he had coveted the position for the past six years.This was the third time he’d not been chosen.
“Let’s go out,” I offered. “Dinner at the Terrace.” It’s the only really fancy restaurant in our neighborhood. Familiar, comfortable, expensive, where we celebrate birthdays and wedding anniversaries.
“I’m working late.”
“We’ll wait.”
“I’ll tell Josh about the chairmanship.”
“Of course.” But I was sure he would tell him nothing and Josh wouldn’t ask.We live in a realm of silence.
“I’ll make a dinner reservation for nine o’clock.” I hung up the phone and went to the basement, following the trail of Josh’s drum beats along the narrow corridor. Sometimes they are so ferocious, you can hear them pulsing through the turn-of-the-century marble of the lobby. The small rooms in the basement had, in another era, been maid’s rooms. Now most apartment owners used them for storage.
I knocked.How could he possibly hear me above his battering? He used to sit on the kitchen floor, two years old, banging on the table leg with whatever object he could get hold of, his face shining with joy.
I tried the door—for once it was unlocked—opened it just enough to stick my head through and wave an arm to get Josh’s attention.When he looked up, his expression was dazed. I’d awakened him from the deep of his music.
“Sorry, Josh. I did knock.We’re going out to dinner, the of us.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Max and me have to study for a chem test.” His eyes turned back to his beloved drum set.
“Max and I,” I corrected, suspecting that he preferred studying to a two-hour meal in dress-up clothes.
“There’s nothing to eat in the fridge, Mom.”
“I’ll leave money for takeout.We’ll miss you.” I closed the door. Josh started up again. Drum beats were Josh’s words and I didn’t pretend to understand them.
Upstairs, I opened the refrigerator.The guys were right: empty. I told myself that my husband and son were perfectly capable of buying their own food and slammed the door shut.Then I thought, Josh is just thirteen and Tom was not picked as chairman, and my little outburst felt selfish.
I made the reservation and asked for a table by the window, with its northern view of the city, a stunning display. Then I went out to buy orange juice and some food at a grocery store on Broadway. I picked up frozen creamed spinach, buttered French beans, and wondered if it was Tom’s intensity, his rigidity, that kept his colleagues from voting for him. They didn’t know what life had dealt him, but they might have sensed his anger. Some students complained that he was harsh, that he expected too much. Most revered him.
At the checkout counter, I heard the rumble of a train beneath my feet and on an impulse, with the shopping bag digging into my arm, I rode the subway to Macy’s.
At the restaurant, with the reflection of multicolored Christmas lights blending with the lights of Harlem and in the distance the George Washington Bridge. Tom opened my “Top Dog” present. He eyed the sweater, thanked me, kissed my cheek.“Feel it,” I urged him. I wanted him to recognize its softness, to know it was made of cashmere.
Expensive, special.
He shook it out of the box, held it up under his face, imitating my way of checking out a new item of clothing. “You won’t lose me in a crowd with this.” He was teasing me, but I realized that the color, a fire-engine red, was wrong. Tom likes discreet colors. Heather green is his favorite.
“I’m sorry; it’s too loud. I’ll exchange it. I don’t know what I was thinking.” Red for happiness, An-ling had said.
“Give it to Josh,” Tom suggested. “He could use some grown-up attire.”
“No. It’s for you.” I took the box from him.“I’ll exchange it.” I touched his fingers coiled around the wine glass. “I’m sorry,Tom.”
He raised his glass, took a small sip. I looked at my empty hand on the tablecloth, retracted it to my lap. “It’s fine, Emma. I’ll have more time to write. There’s an article I’ve been working on that may turn out to be the first chapter of a new book.”
“What about?”
“The impact of terrorism on the buying patterns of the American public. Stop looking at me in that maudlin way. As Josh might put it, getting turned down for chairman is ‘no big deal.’ ”We both knew he was lying.
We ate in silence. I ended up drinking most of the wine. As the alcohol took effect, I wondered why he had married me, why I had let him.There he was in the movie line, jingling his keys, instantly familiar, like the guy who’s been living next door all your life, the kindred soul my grandmother used to talk about—a gift you would receive from God if you were good enough, devout enough. He’s the one, I had thought, making music so that I can hear him. It was nonsense and yet I had wanted to believe, as I had wanted to believe in Lazarus rising from the dead and
the loaves and fishes multiplying. Let it be, this story of twin souls, let sweetness and love be.
That resolve would come and go the first year of our relationship. I could see the puzzled look on Tom’s face when I retreated from him.A test, maybe, to see if he would come back. He did.Always. He was constant, loyal. He cared deeply. That was why I married him, why I loved him. So much has changed in our lives, but I still love him.
“I depend on you,” I said as we finished our desserts.
He paid the check. If he’d heard me, he didn’t let on.
Back at home I eyed the living room sofa and wanted to make love on it, to play at being young and carefree, something that perhaps I’ve never been. I wanted to groan and roll and heave with Tom in our pristine living room, in our kitchen, anywhere but the bedroom, the only room sanctified for sex.
I ended up making love to Tom on top of the bed, undressing him, taking off my clothes on my own. I was in charge of our lovemaking for once.Tom stayed with me as I took a long time in coming, not the usual half-hearted moan that let Tom know he could stop.Afterward I groggily wondered if I was too old to get pregnant.
In the morning, lying in the empty bed with a headache, a hot flash reminded me I would never have another child.
THREE
Tom
I USED TO watch my wife and my daughter kiss each other’s hands, fingertip after fingertip, two kids delighting in each other’s sweetness. They were so filled with love they could not stay apart for more than an hour or two. I watched, fat with pride, and assumed that life would continue to treat us fairly. Hard work rewarded, love reciprocated, good health as long as we took care of ourselves. It was what this country was all about, what I had been led to expect.
Twenty months after we met, Emma and I got married and moved to Westchester, picking Mapleton because it had a good school system.We wanted kids right from the start. We both had careers in teaching. I had obtained an assistant professorship in the Economics Department at SUNY Purchase, a tenure-track position. Emma was a substitute teacher for a year after our move and then taught fourth grade at a private school in Armonk until Amy was born.
Emma had two miscarriages before Amy. She was still religious then. Mass every Sunday without fail, confession every week. When she got pregnant the second time, she began praying every night on her knees in front of the bed like a little kid, going to Mass in the morning before school, lighting candles to the Madonna and St. Francis. After she miscarried again I think Emma would have given up sex if she had thought God would send over the Archangel Gabriel to get her pregnant. I don’t mean to sound flippant. I was glad she had faith to comfort her. When she got pregnant with Amy she made vows. No movies for six months. She gave up restaurants, pasta and chocolate. She wanted me to abstain too, afraid her resolve would break down. On class days, at lunchtime sometimes I’d drive over to our favorite restaurant in Silver Lake, and gorge myself on spaghetti and meatballs. I brushed my teeth before going home.
We held our breaths through the dreaded first trimester. It passed without incident and we spread the good news, bought too many toys and baby clothes. We turned the study into a baby room. I scraped the old paint off the walls, papered them with green stripes, added the rabbit border on which Emma had set her heart.
While I shaved in the morning she’d sit on the lid of the toilet, an ecstatic expression on her face, and prattle on about the delicious visions her raging hormones had released during the night. Her eyes, her skin glowed. It is possible to shine with happiness. I saw it with my own eyes. The only dream of hers I remember was of her surrounded by baskets filled with babies as tiny as chicks. The babies kept multiplying and Emma kept turning the baskets over and spilling the babies over herself until she disappeared underneath them.
Two months before the due date, Emma’s placenta started peeling from the wall of her uterus, a condition that confined her to bed, where she fought hard to keep calm, breathing in and out with a steady rhythm that tired her and kept her from hysteria.
Luckily, I was only teaching two classes then and had plenty of time to take care of her.
Emma asked me to go to Mass in her stead to pray that the baby would be safe, and I went, believing none of it. But when Amy was born, a healthy seven-pound baby, I filled the church with flowers.
Becoming a father was a powerfully altering experience.
Amy’s presence in our lives left us dazzled. In Emma’s view we’d been pulled out of a deep hole in the ground and radiated with sunlight.We were blinded by it.
As Amy grew, as she touched, explored, learned to walk, talk—normal things that babies do, I suppose, but to us they were miraculous—she became a guiding light, a constant beam in our lives. Everything else—work, sex, our love for each other—diminished in importance, became background to Amy.We had almost lost her, but she had fought to be born, and when I held her in my arms or watched her suck from Emma’s breast, we assumed the battle was over, that she would be with us for the rest of our lives. That assumption made us cocky, made us careless.
At her funeral, Emma’s priest said, “Thank God for giving you the joy of Amy, even if only for a short while.” I was filled with too much anger to respond, but with time I came to accept that Father Caputi was right. Not to have known Amy is inconceivable to me.
There was no reaching Emma. After Amy’s death, she crawled into a mental room and locked herself inside. She refused to see Father Caputi or our friends and never, to my knowledge, did she set foot in a church again. I suggested that we go to a grief therapist, but she wouldn’t have it.
The department allowed me to take the rest of the semester off. I hired a woman to come over a couple of hours a day and stay with Emma so that I could drive to other towns in Westchester, park the car in some cul-de-sac and run for ten, twelve miles, on roads where no one knew me, where my anger and grief could pour off my body with my sweat. Then it was back home to hours of never letting my guard down, listening for every sound in case she called out to me, in case she asked for help. At night Emma slept on the floor of Amy’s bedroom. I slept in an armchair I dragged into the hallway outside the open door. “Slept” is an exaggeration in this case. I caught naps off and on, despite the cramp in my stomach. Later, when Emma took up living again, I realized I’d been on a suicide watch—the cramp was plain and simple fear. But at the time, I couldn’t see it. I thought I was simply trying to be there for her, to show her I still loved her.
I tried to help Emma with all my heart. I’ve thought about it a great deal and I know I didn’t come up short. I bought her books on grief, took her out for rides, rented movies she never watched, tried to get her to talk, cry. I did the best I could. It’s useless to ask for more from a person. Each of us comes equipped with a given capacity for generosity, for love, caring, patience, even for grief. Genes, experience, parents, whatever, determine that by a certain time— your teens, your twenties—there it is, a jugful of emotions, a specific quantity.There’s no refilling. Once the quantity gets used up, there’s no more.
Emma
I was driving home, to Tom and Amy. In the back seat was a big stuffed dog, a Lab, bought to appease Amy for the puppy she kept crying for, that I couldn’t give her because of my allergies.The afternoon shone, as if wiped clean with Windex.The leaves on the trees had turned and pumpkins grinned on the front steps next to wooden vats of chrysanthemums. It was a cinematic day, precious in its prettiness.
I turned the sharp corner onto Longmeadow Road and relaxed my grip on the steering wheel. Home was an easy mile and a half away. I revved the Buick up to fifty miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed zone.There were never any police on this stretch of the road and I was eager to get back.
At the turnoff to my street, my neighbor’s golden retriever stood on the corner, wagging her tail at me, her milk-filled teats swaying rhythmically.A dog as dumb as she was sweet, she was always running off. I swung into my street. Our home was four houses down, on the rig
ht, a small white two-story with a short front lawn edged with rhododendrons that needed pruning. I’ll get to it tomorrow, I promised myself.The dog barked, her tail now whipping the air.
“Go home, Sandy!” I called out.
The dog lifted her head, ears cocked.
“Home!”
She streaked in front of my car. I jerked the steering wheel to the right, away from her.The car skidded. Out of the corner of my eye I caught colors shifting low on the sidewalk, a darting movement I had no time to comprehend. A yelp was followed by a soft thud.The right front tire lifted, then dropped back on the road. Then the back tire lifted and dropped back.
Up and then down.
I hit Sandy; Sandy is dead!
I cried out, yelled, as I tried to regain control of the car.
A dog barked.
From the sidewalk across from where I had first seen her, Sandy wagged her tail.The surprise lifted my hands off the steering wheel.
The car kept moving for another thirty-seven feet, according to the police report. It was stopped by the fifty-year-old maple, the tree that had made Tom and I fall in love with our property. The report stated that I walked away from the accident shaken, but unharmed.Amy died in the ambulance.
Tom
One night in March, six months after Amy’s death, with pellets of rain hitting the windows, I sat at my usual post in the hallway, on my fourth Scotch. Emma was lying in a tight curl on the floor of Amy’s room, her nightgown bunched up high, showing the whiteness of her thighs, her face covered by her thick, glorious hair.Watching her sleep, I felt rage surge in my blood faster than the Scotch and I heaved myself out of the armchair.
“Emma.” I stood in the doorway.“Emma, look at me.”
She didn’t respond.
“Emma, please.”
I walked into the room, knelt down. “Emma. Answer me.” I reached over and shook her shoulder. She cringed at my touch with a protesting whimper.
“Damn it, Emma, stop shutting me out.You’re going to sleep in your bed tonight, next to your husband, the father of our dead child.You hear me? Our child, Emma!” I pulled her to me to lift her up, carry her back to our room. She recoiled, grew rigid, rolled herself out of reach. Since Amy’s death she hadn’t let me hold her or touch her. Not in the hospital waiting for Amy’s body to be released. Not at the funeral. Not once in six months. I lay on the floor next to her, pulled her to me. She went limp.The sudden feel of her, soft and warm against my chest,my groin, started me crying.
The Price of Silence Page 3