Because Ester’s cries aren’t the only thing keeping me awake at night. The radio voice from the operating room before I was put under plays in a constant loop during every dark hour: “Murder rocks the East Side of Providence tonight. A woman, identified by exclusive sources as twenty-seven-year-old Belina Cabrala, has been found at Swan Point Cemetery off Blackstone Boulevard.”
A week after I was out of the hospital, Jack agreed to talk about Belina. I had a nap and then a shower and felt as if I could focus on something other than Ester. She was asleep in the living room for her late-afternoon nap. We shared a beer and finally spoke like two adults for the first time since she was born. Jack had saved some articles from the paper, which I’ve since underlined and analyzed, hiding them all in Ester’s room.
We sat in silence as I read over them, searching for answers in the few facts: At approximately 7:30 p.m., Belina was stabbed in the chest inside a mausoleum at Swan Point Cemetery. Her body was dragged to the river, where her right arm was cut, most of her blood drained. A cemetery guard found her shortly after. There were no witnesses. No suspects. Jack added only that the mayor needed an arrest.
You could have done something.
I hold Ester tighter, trying unsuccessfully to focus on her instead of my grief. I see Belina everywhere on Hope Street, one of the main roads on the East Side of Providence. “That’s capital E and S,” Belina would say as she rolled her large brown eyes.
I made her laugh when I told her the story of when Jack and I moved here, newlyweds fresh from our ten years in DC. I was ready to jump into being a Rhode Islander. The cab driver asked where we were headed. I proudly said, “East Side,” because it made me feel local. Jack cringed.
The cabbie quirked his thin lips and said, “East Side, huh? Good for you.”
Belina explained that in Rhode Island, good for you (pronounced as one word: guh-fa-yoo) basically means go fuck yourself. “Just say you live in Providence now, if anyone asks,” she said with a smirk.
Assumed snobbery aside, I loved strolling with Belina through the neighborhood. I’d grown up in what I’d classify as a ghost town, a former mining metropolis long abandoned by the companies that took anything valuable from the land and didn’t even bother to clean up after. All that was left were people too stubborn and poor to leave. But Providence and our East Side house are the opposite. Not only is our home a charming butter-yellow Cape Cod, but it’s only two blocks from quirky local shops and packed restaurants. A place with a pulse and vibrancy. A place worth living and raising a family.
I cross Hope Street, heading toward Blackstone Boulevard, both large streets that run parallel to each other with a swath of neighborhood blocks in between. Closer to Hope Street in our section of the East Side, homes are somewhat more affordable. It’s easy to picture the happy families in them, front yards cluttered with bikes and red plastic wagons and water tables abandoned for the winter.
They’ve got real love in their homes.
Mothers who know how to take care of babies.
Babies that don’t cry all the time.
I pause at the turn I’d usually make to head toward Swan Point Cemetery. After the moment by the dogwood there, when I realized Belina was the new nanny for my friend Alec’s son, we took a walk together. She asked me a lot of questions about her new employer. My friendship with him went back to college.
After a while, she revealed a few things about herself.
She’d taken the job nannying Alec’s son, Emmett, because it was time to change. Not for a change. It was time to change.
I nodded as if she’d hardly said anything, but the words were powerful. They were key to who I’d become. What I’d had to do.
Then I asked what else she’d done for work.
“I was raised in Newport but not fancy. I worked in boutiques on Thayer Street. Was a hostess for a while. What you’d expect of a college dropout. Smart enough to talk to rich people but not enough to become one. I did finally get away. From my mom. From that gossipy town.” Then she said softly, “I should have finished college.”
That was when I knew: We were the same because we had wanted to be different. We wanted more.
On the surface, we might appear to be poor social climbers trying to make it up a few rungs of the ladder. But it’s not about money, not that type of wealth. It’s about people with fully lived lives, artistic points of reference, and happy Sunday plans with smart, boisterous families. Playing the piano at Christmas. Making a real cheese soufflé and arguing about a review in the New Yorker. That’s the “more” worth leaving your mother behind in Newport for. Worth never looking back at your parents and their abandoned Kansas town.
College is a passport for people like us, people who want to be different. When we aren’t born with much and need more than a shitty high school education to get somewhere else. The difference between Belina and me is that I made it out. She had still been treading water, focused on the sunny shore of “more.”
Being a nanny for a family on the East Side must have felt like progress. She was certainly good at it. But she was still on the outside. What would she have done to get inside?
Nothing worse than you did.
You should be dead. Not her.
I rub a shaking hand along Ester’s back as the road slopes steeply. If we’d had a snow or ice storm, no way I’d be able to brave the sidewalk. But the sun is shining, and I’m breaking a sweat when I’m only a few blocks from Blackstone Boulevard. Now I’m close to my end point and where the real money lives.
The streets are wider and the yards precisely landscaped; rarely is a hedge unshaped, a lawn not the perfect inch and a half. Slate roofs for the oversize English cottages and stucco turrets with leaded windows for the Tudors and thick columns lining the grand porches of Georgian Colonials.
They’ll see trash like you coming a mile away.
I unzip my coat but keep most of Ester protected from the cool breeze. Tipping my head back, I blink into the sun as I near my destination. The moment echoes in my mind, and I see Belina warming her face a dozen times.
I stand on the corner of Cole and Ogden, breathing fast, not sure what I should say to Alec. I can’t cross to his house. It’s too easy to see Belina hurrying out the door, pushing the stroller with Emmett. She’d wave my way with an extra coffee or smoothie she’d made for us. I often wondered if she needed these walks together as much as I did.
My reverie is interrupted by an older lady power walking past with three Chihuahuas. With a wicked curve of her wrist, she hurls a neon-blue plastic poop bag onto Alec’s lawn. Her bag is not alone. There are dozens of poop bags, all kinds, in fact, from white CVS to purple biodegradable, littering the unkempt landscape like malformed croquet balls.
“Oh my God,” I say, almost unable to believe what I can see. Unable to imagine why a neighbor strolling by would drop shit on his lawn.
The large wooden front door flies open, and Alec shuffles into the yard. He’s carrying a small wastebasket and starts picking up the bags.
Still shocked, I hurry across the street. “Hey, Alec.”
“Devon,” he says, stumbling at the fence. “You had the baby already?”
He’ll see what a terrible mother you are.
What an awful child you’ve had.
“Her name is Ester.” I glance down as my chest seizes at the prospect of Alec seeing her, judging us both for her crying or not being as big as normal newborns.
My fingers stroke up Ester’s covered back to the hat pulled down over her dark hair. My touch confirms she’s fully wrapped and protected from judgmental eyes. I relax slightly at how safe she is against me.
“You should have called,” Alec says without enough enthusiasm for me to believe him.
I’m not surprised Jack didn’t tell him. I only texted Alec to check in, hoping he’d share something about what was happening with Belina’s case. “Would have dropped off your Up-All-Night-Dorito-Nacho-Supreme?” I tease with a joke from our c
ollege days.
“Saved us from plenty of hangovers,” he says with a grin, letting out a pleased little sigh that quickly disappears. “I don’t think I’ve smiled since . . .”
I see some tears in his eyes. “How’s Emmett?” I quickly ask about his son.
“He’s okay,” Alec says as if that were the wrong question.
I nod toward the yard because I can’t not ask. “What on earth is with the shit bags?”
His gaze drops to the ground. I take a step back and really study him. He’s in a cinched bathrobe and looks like he hasn’t shaved in days. His face is gaunt and his eyes bloodshot with purple rings from sleeplessness. He steps toward me, trembling, an intensity radiating from wide eyes. “I didn’t do it.”
“What?” I shake my head. “What are you talking about?”
“Belina . . . they think . . .” Alec’s long fingers cover his face, and he begins to cry, something I’ve never seen. After a few sobs, he swears and wipes the tears on the sleeve of his robe.
“No,” I stammer. “You would never . . .”
Pulling me close, he releases a whisper-sob. “Everyone thinks I killed her.”
Chapter 4
I remember the feel of Belina’s skin the day she died. Her touch was delicate like the dogwood bloom, and the olive color of her fingers contrasted with my own, pale and freckled. Her last day on earth, I held her hand on a bench. We were as quiet and ominous as the tombstones around us in Swan Point Cemetery. The place I first met her and now the last place I’d ever see her. The place she was murdered.
It should have been you.
The way Alec cries into my shoulder, I wonder if he also knew Belina’s touch, shared the generosity of skin against skin. Alec and I have a friendship that goes back a decade, but still I can’t ask.
“Who said you killed her?” I ask, incredulous, glaring at the bags of poop. I know what it’s like to feel stares. To experience the heat of embarrassment every time you step outside your house and the feeling barely subsiding when you’re in.
Alec slowly rubs his forehead against my shoulder, something he hasn’t done since he was drunk at college. “You know I’d never hurt her . . . She is . . . was . . . so remarkable.”
I’ve seen Alec upset plenty, but he’s usually quick to rebound. Ready with a joke and an offer to buy a drink, which is important for someone who screws up a lot. But we’ve never been anywhere close to a situation like this.
Oh, but you have.
Blood on the pillow.
Knife in your hand.
How he screamed.
How you ran.
I met Alec before Jack, my first day at Georgetown University. He plopped down next to me in the back of a class full of girls with good highlights and Coach bags and guys who knew each other from lacrosse. All I could think was that everyone could see through me, smell the Kansas bumpkin who came from trash and who’d always be trash.
Nothing has changed.
Alec elbowed me, whispered for a pen and paper with an apathetic laugh. He never knew, but my hands were shaking under the desk. My nails dug so deep into one palm that I could feel the blood. I was about to stand up and leave and likely never return. But I stayed.
He asked me to go out with him and some friends that night, but I said thanks but no thanks.
“Come on, daddy-o,” he said. “Don’t be a—” He paused and made a square with his pointer fingers.
I laughed and asked what the hell he was doing.
He smacked his forehead with his hand. “You haven’t seen Pulp Fiction? Come on, Kansas. We’re watching it right now!”
And we did. We even danced like John Travolta and Uma Thurman after the fifth replay of their “Twist” contest scene. I’d never fallen so platonically in love with someone so quickly in my life.
Alec’s music and movie selections were epic. In my small town, the closest theater was almost an hour away, and I didn’t have a car. Even the movie rental place was three towns over. Alec wasn’t shy about helping me catch up with the real world. A place I’d never dared to imagine I’d really belong.
“You just have to know Radiohead,” he said. “How can you talk to anyone without an opinion on Pablo Honey versus Kid A?”
Alec did end up getting me to go out that night after the movie. He already knew so many people, bartenders, a professor who summered in Newport near where he grew up. The evening was a swirl of jokes and shots and stories ending on a punch line. He kept bringing up Pulp Fiction so I could easily join in. I watched him carefully, wanting to be like Alec.
He took me to parties, bought dinner while I forced him to study, and most important, introduced me to Jack. They were complete opposites but also the only two guys from their Providence prep school to go to Georgetown. The logistics made a friendship that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
Freshman year, the three of us were always together, exploring DC, crashing parties, and following that with all-night movie marathons. That first Christmas, Alec bought Jack and me great tickets to Radiohead. It was the first gift I could remember getting that meant anything to me. I didn’t tell Alec that, of course. How I savored every moment of that night. Held tight to the thousand moments of a freshman year full of freedom and joy I never imagined were possible. All because of Alec.
But sophomore year, I was changing again. Wanting more. Jack and I studied regularly, already focused on what it’d take to get into a good law school. The more we were in the library, the less we saw of Alec.
Then Alec’s LSAT wasn’t strong enough for him to stay with Jack and me for Georgetown Law. He returned to Rhode Island for the only school that accepted him, Roger Williams. A perfectly fine option, but it created more distance. After starting our careers in DC, Jack and I got married and moved to Rhode Island. I hoped our friendship with Alec would start again.
But we had all changed. There were occasional drinks, and Alec pitched us a few investment opportunities but never followed up. I helped him get an investor for one of his ideas but never heard anything about it.
I side-hug him tighter, my fingers digging into the bathrobe. Knowing Belina rekindled my friendship with Alec. Not to what it was in college, but he was back in my life again. I was grateful.
Alec pulls away from my shoulder, his whole body sagging. “No one understands,” he says in a cracked whisper, as if it’s our secret.
The front door flies open, and Alec’s wife, Misha, stomps onto the front porch. Her wide eyes snap from him to me. Hands on hips, she’s a sentry in yoga pants. “Can you two do this inside?”
Misha will know you’re a terrible mother.
That your child cries all the time because this is the child you deserve.
Shrill little baby.
Evil like her mother.
I consider coming back later, not wanting Misha’s judgmental stares on Ester and me. I picture my exit as I trace the outline of Ester’s arms and legs hidden within the soft cocoon of the wrap beneath my coat.
Alec whispers, “Please, Devie,” a nickname from college that warms me to my core, making me feel like the cool kid has called me over to his table.
You didn’t deserve his friendship.
You used him to get to Jack.
One more rung up the ladder.
Alec sulks over to the last few poop bags in the yard. It’s so familiar, the grit of shame, that I follow him, mustering a nod at Misha, who leads us inside.
She’s always wrestled for control. We first met her during law school when we’d come back to Providence to visit Jack’s family. We grabbed a last-minute drink with Alec and his new girlfriend. Misha barely said hello before she began bragging about the huge house her parents had bought. The expensive trip she’d taken Alec on and the next one she had planned. Then she nagged us into joining them for dinner somewhere Jack and I couldn’t afford.
While it would have been easy to assume she was just some rich snob, I could see there was more. The need to be seen as wealth
y, to throw money into every conversation, meant she hadn’t always been living that way.
At their wedding reception, Alec confirmed as much. He drunkenly told me he mostly married Misha for her new money and that Misha was getting his “good” family name out of the deal. That was the side of Alec I liked to ignore. The privileged Newport golden boy who took everything for granted. Alec had a melancholy streak, so I hoped he was only feeling sorry for himself. That he did really love Misha. That he hadn’t taken love for granted like so much else in his life. I didn’t bring it up in the sober light of day.
We follow Misha through the entryway as she makes a few comments about Ester and how tough babies are and how I should get good help. I bite down my response (“Help that isn’t murdered?”) because Alec flinches as she says it.
Misha knows you need help because you were never meant to be a mother.
Even a bad mother knows that much.
We stand in their sleek kitchen overlooking the sunken living room. What did Belina say?
“Copy and paste from any HGTV Dream Home. They don’t have the money for a real decorator, so Misha faked it, like everything else.”
This house is worth north of one million, so the money point stuck out. My brain typically files most details like that away for later. I also wonder how Belina knew about their finances. Maybe her nannying checks bounced?
Misha heads toward the back sliding door, where I can see their large city-issued trash can. She dumps the wastebasket into it and leaves it outside before returning to the kitchen to wash her hands, murmuring about East Side assholes.
She digs in a drawer and pops a coffee pod into the Keurig. Misha is in her lululemon uniform, complete with a low-cut workout shirt that shows her high, fake breasts.
Dressing like that might keep her husband’s head from turning but not yours.
You don’t have her body.
The voice knows my insecurities. I once had a little vanity about my naturally slender shape, but even that feels obsolete, sharp edges and pleasing curves now mushy. Even the opportunity to have larger breasts is lost. They are feed bags, swollen with milk for Ester and dotted with painful blisters from pumping.
Little Voices Page 3