“Luisa Frida Brant.” AJ was shouting now, trying to pull me off Randy. I could hear Noel laughing, which made me madder, as did the use of my full name, which I had managed to keep secret so far. I began fighting AJ, a losing battle, but I gave it my all, windmilling my arms into his stomach and chest.
“He deserves it. He made fun of my clothes. And him with only two shirts that he alternates and even then, he always smells by Friday. Who is he to make fun of anyone?” There was the true source of my rage. Not that I had been mocked, but that I had been mocked by Randy, that he had been sly enough to exploit my weaknesses so his wouldn’t be noticed. And now he knew my horrible middle name, chosen by my mother for some stupid Mexican artist that no one had ever heard of, not when I was a kid. My fists thrummed on my brother’s chest as if it were a taut drum. “What business is it of yours, anyway, Ajax Homer Brant?”
Randy, no dummy, had fled as soon as my attention was diverted, slowed by his limp. My Pepper Anderson kick had been effective. But no one cared about Randy anymore. Noel had stopped laughing and was looking at AJ, his unearthly green eyes round with wonder and mischief.
“Ajax Homer Brant? I thought you were Andrew Jackson Brant, like your father. How can you be AJ Brant Jr. if you don’t have the same name?”
“I was supposed to be,” AJ said. “It was a mistake, at the hospital. Some stupid nurse who filled in my birth certificate—she got it wrong. I’m going to change it legally, when I’m an adult. Plus, it’s not so bad. Ajax is a hero in the Iliad. That’s where the Homer comes in.”
Noel did not seem to pick up on the inconsistency in AJ’s story. He was probably too busy mulling the possibilities of knowing AJ’s true name. A chink in the armor of AJ the Perfect. Their friends would delight in this information if he shared it with them. Noel was not unlike me, I realized, stockpiling secrets about AJ, unsure how or when they might be used. Yet we never ended up exploiting any knowledge we gained because we both loved him so.
“Couldn’t your parents have changed it right away? I mean, your dad is a lawyer—”
“It’s hard to change a birth certificate. And my mom—”
“Our mom,” I corrected, sniffling.
“Our mom, she thought it was bad luck. To change a baby’s name. Dad said I had to wait until I was eighteen.”
“Even after she died? What did it matter then?”
The answer was obvious to AJ and me, if not to Noel. It mattered more than ever. After our mother was gone, nothing she touched could be changed. And she had named AJ, not some nurse. The house stayed as it had been, despite the fact that she had lived there less than a year. There was still a small pile of books on our mother’s side of the bed, and on the nights when I had bad dreams and went to sleep with my father, he was always far to one side, as if he were still sharing the bed with someone.
AJ, meanwhile, would not speak of her at all. Although not generally selfish, he hoarded his memories of our mother as if they might evaporate in the open air. I envied him, but the truth was, I didn’t want AJ’s stories. I wanted my own and I could never have them. AJ had a mother for eight years. I had one for eight days. That was an injustice that could never be righted. There are a lot of challenges about having twins, but at least one never has that imbalance of time. Penelope can’t begrudge Justin for having had a father longer than she did; Justin will lose his mother at the same time Penelope does.
Our mother had named her son Ajax Homer, her daughter Luisa Frida. That was no error and those names could never be changed. Our names were her legacy, one of the few things she left behind. They were burdensome when we were young, but not horribly so. As an adult, my only regret was that I had allowed myself to be “Lu” for so long that I couldn’t return to the fuller, sweeter name she had given me.
As far as I know, Noel kept the secret of AJ’s name. But in college, AJ was dismayed to discover that there were two warriors named Ajax—Ajax the Great, the son of Telamon, and Ajax the Lesser, who survived so many attempts on his life that he ended up boasting that not even the gods could kill him.
The gods promptly did just that.
“Maybe I was named for Ajax the Lesser,” my brother said to me the last time we spoke.
FEBRUARY 1
It is Sunday night before Lu has a chance to ask her father about Eloise Schumann/Ellie Cabot. She is not avoiding the topic. She is simply too busy trying to survive the weekend. Her kids are far from overscheduled. In fact, they have had to accept the hard truth that a single mom with a demanding job cannot be on call to take them to every practice, game, rehearsal, and activity. (Justin has his uncle’s flare for singing and dramatics, while Penelope loves soccer.) That’s what Melissa the babysitter is for. Lu does what she can and she manages to make the truly important stuff—pageants and “championships.” But she grew up without a parent attending most of her milestone moments, and she doesn’t feel she was harmed by this.
Even if Gabe had lived, Lu doubts the two of them would have been able to handle life with the twins without multiple babysitters, not as long as she insisted on working. And Gabe was too evolved to admit that he wanted her to be a stay-at-home mom. A SAHM. The very acronym looks like some dreary department within the Social Security Administration, or a form that one has to fill out for benefits. SAHM. Say it out loud and it’s just one letter away from “Om,” the chant of peace and contentment and centeredness. But the SAHM, in Lu’s opinion, sacrifices her center, hollows herself out by caring for others. Before Gabe’s death, they were probably on a collision course over this issue, although he was the person far more suited to staying at home. Is there such a thing as a SAHD? Say that out loud and it sounds like a toddler trying to describe her feelings. I’m so sahd.
But, having checked out of her kids’ after-school lives, Lu does cater to them on weekends as much as possible. They go to movies. They go to the place with the climbing wall. They go make pottery together. They go. And they are good company, her kids. For one thing, they have exquisite manners, thanks to Teensy and their grandfather. They also eat everything. Lu tries hard not to be Ms. Smug McSmugginton when the topic of fussy eaters comes up because she knows she didn’t really do anything to instill good eating habits in her kids. She was just too lazy to make two dinners from scratch every night and Teensy, bless her heart, is lazier still. This weekend, the twins asked to try a Korean restaurant in D.C. and they both ate kimchi.
Then Sunday evening comes and it’s like a bad storm front sweeping through. Much of this is due to Penelope’s anxiety over school, which reminds Lu of her own struggles with math, although she was in high school before she hit the wall. Still, she develops a sympathy stomachache as Penelope heads tearfully to bed. Penelope continues to rail at the unfairness of it all. Why does she struggle in math when Justin doesn’t? Yet Justin is not bothered by his problems in spelling, while Penelope excels in anything to do with language. They are, more than one person has noted, very much like their parents. People even think they see Lu in Penelope’s features. It’s funny how suggestible people are. They see a woman with two children and they begin to see resemblances that are not there, can never be there. And yet—Lu does see herself in Penelope’s temperament. She is competitive, more competitive than Justin. She loves to argue. Even in math, she wants to debate. The answers seem arbitrary to her. Lu understands, although she is baffled by her daughter’s resistance to geometry. Lu loved geometry, with its clear-cut rules and elegant proofs.
Penelope and Justin have adjoining rooms in the new wing of the house, upstairs from Lu’s. Until recently, she would find one of them in the other’s bed most mornings. They are still close. But they are turning out so differently. Penelope is that odd combination of baby-girl and forty-year-old divorcée, while Justin seems to live happily at the bull’s-eye of eight-year-old boyhood. Penelope often reminds Lu of Noel’s mother, that hard little number in her tennis whites. But tonight, Penelope is her baby self and she needs to be rocked to sleep. Lu a
lmost falls asleep at the same time, but catches herself, snatching up her head in a whiplash of awareness. Almost nine o’clock. She should talk to her father.
He is in his study, enjoying one last glass of wine, not yet drowsing as he often is at this hour. This room feels like a time capsule for a time that never was, a false memory of genteel contemplation—the globe of red wine, opera on the stereo. Her father, like Lu, used to fall asleep while putting his children to sleep. The days are long, but the years are short, that old cliché. The years are long, too. Will her father even remember the events of forty years ago?
“A woman came to see me,” Lu says without preamble. “Eloise Schumann. She said you’d know her as Ellie Cabot.”
“So that’s why you’ve seemed so distracted all weekend,” he says. “Or abstracted, as Teensy likes to say.”
Has she been distant? She thought she had just been enjoying her time with the twins, fully present. Sure, sometimes her mind wandered, but it was to the McNally case, not that woman outside the courthouse.
“She was waiting for me, in the parking lot at work Friday. She thinks Ryan Schumann deserves a posthumous pardon.”
“She never stops. She’s like that”—he pauses, one of those pauses that grip Lu’s heart. Her father’s pauses are more suspenseful than any horror movie with a racing soundtrack. His pauses, to paraphrase Whitman, contain multitudes. When does groping for a word become the first signpost on the road to dementia? She thinks, bizarrely, of the sign on Interstate 70, the one that shows the mileage to Columbus, St. Louis, and Denver for no reason she can fathom. How far out are they? When will they get there?
But he finishes strong: “Pink bunny, the Energizer. She goes on and on and on. Although she’s always beating a slightly different drum. What is it this time?”
“This time?”
“What’s her latest reason for claiming Ryan Schumann is innocent?”
“She—oh, she . . . Wait, is she the witness? The one who came forward in 1978 and accused you of violating Brady?”
“Yes, and she did talk to me back during the original case. But she didn’t say she was a witness.” He chuckles. “She claimed she did it.”
“What?”
“After her second story was shot down, she told yet another one. She said she was at the rest stop where Sheila Compson was dropped off. She said she told Sheila Compson it would be safer if they hitchhiked together as darkness was coming on. According to her, Sheila had pot—in a rucksack, just like the rucksack Schumann kept claiming the girl was carrying—and they hiked into the woods to smoke. And, according to Miss Cabot, Sheila Compson became violent and tried to attack her. She jumped on her and she pushed her off. Sheila Compson hit her head on a rock and died. According to this young woman. Who was, by the way, eight inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than Sheila Compson. But we humored her. We told her to take us into the woods and show us the body. She couldn’t do it. She didn’t even pick the right rest stop. So, no, our office did not provide her testimony during the discovery phase because it was false. I was doing a professional kindness not sending them down that rabbit hole.”
“Why would she do this?”
“Women fall in love with killers all the time. Girls still love bad boys, that’s never going away. And she was very young. Nineteen, I think? Eighteen? Saw his photo in the paper, I guess, and decided she loved him. And you say she’s calling herself Eloise Schumann now. Did she really marry him or is that another fiction?”
Lu is ashamed to tell her father that she didn’t even think to check for a marriage license. He wouldn’t have made the same mistake. “I probably should.”
“So he’s dead,” her father continues. “He was only . . .”—that pause again. “He was only twenty-six when he was on trial. So born 1950. Lived to almost sixty-five, then. Spent more than half his life in prison. Yet he never told us where the body was. I asked him. I asked him every year until I retired. He always said, ‘I can’t say.’ Won’t, I would correct him. You won’t say. Oh, I understood he didn’t know exactly. The woods near that rest stop were vast. Where is she, Mr. Schumann? Sheila Compson’s parents died, denied the ritual of burial. Now he’s dead. Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t really feel anything for him.”
“Hashtag sorrynotsorry,” Lu jokes. Her father looks utterly mystified. He uses a computer but has drawn a line at all forms of social media. He was horrified to learn that the state’s attorney’s office puts out press releases using the Twitter handle HoCoGov, while Lu was miffed that her office, unlike the library and the cops, didn’t merit a unique Twitter feed.
Intemperate. She remembered her father’s rage when the appeal was announced, his ill-considered words. The mild profanity he used would never inflame people today. Or would it? Even as standards for behavior seem to fall, it also seems easier, quicker, to end a career forever with one verbal transgression. An intemperate moment, a wrong choice of words, can go viral if it is captured on video, or in a screen grab.
Forever. One photograph. Girls still love bad boys. If Lu’s secret life were ever to become known—but, no, it won’t. She has built it that way. Certainly, there are no photographs. She seldom texts Bash and their phone conversations are matter-of-fact arrangements of when they might meet, no where or when stipulated. No records, except for the occasional bruise, scratch, or bite mark. She is careful. She will continue to be careful.
But it would be fascinating if a female public servant had to defend her legal-but-not-exactly mainstream love life. Fascinating as long as it happened to another female public official. Can’t you take that hit for the team, Hillary Rodham Clinton? Step on down, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now that would be true equality, a female politician coming back after an ignominious sex scandal.
There is the fact that Bash is married. That alone could be enough to torpedo Lu’s career—unless they pretend to be IN LOVE and are therefore given dispensation to break with common decency. Why are people allowed to hurt others in the name of love? Why is love given so much credit, as if it is always a power for good? Does Eloise Schumann love Ryan Schumann, a man she can’t possibly know, a man she never knew, not sexually. Only six states allow conjugal visits and Maryland is not one of them. Even if Maryland were to permit it, an inmate such as Ryan Schumann, sentenced to life in prison for a capital crime, might have a hard time earning the privilege. How had any woman managed to become attracted to him? Lu remembers him as weaselly and small, even to her six-year-old eyes. As a small woman, she is always careful to avoid small men because she doesn’t want anyone to think the man had settled, choosing her for stature alone. Gabe was slender as a reed, but a respectable five foot eleven. Bash is shockingly broad—but, no, Bash doesn’t count because no one has ever seen them together. No one will ever see them together.
Maybe when Penelope and Justin are out of the house, she will go on match.com. For now, this is the best solution she can fashion.
She sips her glass of wine, enjoying the companionable silence, the strains of—ah, it’s Carmen. Old age looks pretty good from here. And she will be all of fifty-five when the twins leave for college, far from old despite the joke she made to AJ. Some women are just getting started at fifty-five. Again, look at Clinton and Ginsburg. In Lu’s third act, whatever that proves to be, she might finally eclipse her brother and her father professionally.
Not that she’s competitive or anything like that.
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
By the time fourth grade rolled around in 1979, I had a best friend. Because he was a boy, my classmates tried to tease us, say he was my boyfriend, I was his girlfriend. We didn’t care. Two people can brave the taunts that one person finds intolerable. We left school every afternoon, their silly words bouncing off our backs.
Lu and Randy / Sitting in a tree / K I S S I N G / First comes love / then comes marriage / Lu and Randy with a baby carriage.
Yes, my new best friend was the boy I had wanted to kill a year earlier. It happens. For us, it
happened this way.
When AJ told our father about the fight on the first day of third grade—a rare betrayal on my brother’s part; I think he was mad about me giving up his real name to Noel—our father drove me to Randy’s house the next day and insisted I apologize.
Randy’s house was like a funhouse mirror version of my own—a distorted, disturbing mirror version. A motherless household, where the boy was the youngest. Chaotic and cramped and messy, with far too many people, whereas my house always felt as if it didn’t really have enough people to justify all its rooms. Randy’s father worked as a night watchman, although I think that was his second job. He was getting ready to go to work when we arrived. He looked surprised, yet not surprised.
The moment my father introduced himself, Mr. Nairn seemed to assume that Randy was in the wrong. Why else would the state’s attorney be in this postage stamp of a living room, trying to be heard above the blasting television that no one thought to turn off?
“Randy,” he screamed. “You get down here right now.” He wore a gray uniform. The living room wall had a hole in the Sheetrock, and there were what seemed like a hundred teenage girls milling about, although there were only three, Randy’s sisters.
Randy came downstairs, cowering like a pup. My father said swiftly, “I think you misunderstood, sir—it was Lu who started the fight, Lu who needs to apologize to Randy.”
I wanted to explain myself, tell the full story, how Randy had provoked the attack. But I also wanted to get out of that strange house, away from its smells and damage and the sensation that a fight might start at any minute, over anything. Staring at a point over Randy’s shoulder, which happened to be the hole in the wall, I mumbled. “I’m-sorry-I-hit-you-it-was-wrong-I-won’t-do-it-again.”
Wilde Lake: A Novel Page 17