Helpless as she felt in the wake of her son’s arrest in early 2005, Elisa had been obsessed with ensuring Mathis had a zealous advocate, and that was precisely what he had gotten, in the most unexpected package. Elisa had hired Clifton Cook—Maine’s answer to the proverbial eight-hundred-pound gorilla—and her gorilla had gone and hired a capuchin named Julia Hall. Elisa had been deeply disappointed with frizzy-haired, baby-faced Julia on sight. She chuckled now when she thought back on her first interactions with Julia, who’d smiled too much, espoused the values of cooperation with the prosecution, and recommended numerous social services for Mathis.
“She’s not a lawyer—she’s a social worker,” Elisa had guffawed into the phone from the stark white kitchen of her Boston high-rise.
Her boy’s voice answered from the detention center. “Clifton says juvenile court is complicated and we need her. She’s nice, Maman.”
Elisa rolled her eyes at Mathis’s words. “And cute.”
“Not even,” he lied.
The snow began to build up on Elisa’s windshield, and she activated her wipers. She checked the time. Ten minutes.
Mathis had been a fool to have even such a small quantity of cocaine in the car with him, especially while he crossed state lines as he drove to see friends in Maine. And the gun—Elisa had nearly crumbled when she learned he’d been caught with a gun. Against all odds, though, it was clean. Elisa had gone to see him at the detention center. They’d sat at a long table in a sterile room and they’d whispered to each other as they played rounds of Old Maid, an insufferably simple card game available at the facility. She’d shredded him with her words, then given him the story he needed to tell the lawyers.
There had been quiet work done in other places, of course, but over the year that Mathis’s case worked its way through Maine’s juvenile court, Elisa had watched Julia put in late nights and long hours for Mathis. Each time they returned to court, Elisa listened to Clifton update the judge about how Mathis was participating in the services Julia had arranged. Julia would sit with Elisa, uninterested in credit for what she’d done.
“He’s doing really well,” Julia said quietly at their last court date. “He’s earned such a good resolution to his case.”
Elisa leaned toward her. “Don’t discount your part in this.” In the beginning, Elisa hadn’t trusted Julia’s insistence on playing by the rules. But Julia’s method had worked.
“I’m not,” Julia said, “but he’s worked really hard. He deserves what he’s getting today.” Julia paused. “He feels a lot of pressure.”
Elisa glanced at her sideways. Julia’s eyes remained straight forward.
Then she said, “I hope he has the freedom to figure out who he is and what he wants in life.”
Elisa said nothing.
In the hallway, Mathis had embraced Julia goodbye. Call with any questions, Julia told him. When Mathis turned to Clifton, Elisa took Julia lightly by the arm and walked her aside. She had a few things to say.
She’d thought about Julia a fair amount over the past year, after watching the story of the lawyer who exonerated her own brother. The night Elisa finished the movie, she’d had a near-overwhelming urge to try Julia’s old number, but she refrained. The next morning she’d googled Julia, and Elisa was disappointed to see that she appeared not to be lawyering any longer. It had seemed strange, almost serendipitous, when Julia called such a brief time thereafter.
Earlier that month, Elisa had left the hairdresser to find a voice mail on her cell. It was Julia Hall, rambling and nervous, saying nothing of substance.
Elisa had returned the phone call the same day she received the message, but later from the comfort of her sunroom. It had been a dreary winter day on the lake; the rain ran slow down the large panel window behind her, and beyond that was only gray and mist. Elisa sat by the small woodstove and made the call.
Julia had seemed distracted when she answered. She reacted slowly to Elisa’s greeting and seemed to be moving away from someone. Elisa heard a door shut, and the quality of Julia’s voice changed—her speech was freer.
“Thanks for calling back,” Julia said.
“It’s no problem. I’m pleased to be calling you.”
“You’ve moved quite far from Boston!”
“I am a lady of the lake now.” Elisa waved her hand for the benefit of an audience that wasn’t there.
“How are the winters in Michigan?”
“They’re shit. Did you really call to ask about the weather?”
“No, and I see you’re direct as ever.”
Elisa could hear the smile in Julia’s voice, but she knew she’d sent her squirming.
“Out with it, kid.” Elisa smiled back.
The silence was too long.
“Is everything all right, Julia?”
Julia’s voice was quiet. “No.”
Julia told her about a man, Raymond Walker, and what he’d done to her brother-in-law. She told Elisa about the press, the boy’s problems, the unprecedented tension in her marriage.
“I’m sorry to hear all that. Truly,” Elisa said. Still, it was strange. She doubted a woman like Julia had some dearth of close, female confidants to air her problems to.
After a long pause, Julia said in a low voice, “I think my husband is going to do something.”
“Something?”
“Something I’ll never be able to undo.”
Elisa weighed Julia’s words. “I’m not sure I blame him. Did you think I would?” She passed her hand through the steady rush of steam escaping the cup of tea on her armrest. Remembered the conversation they had in Julia’s office one night. Remembered Mathis’s anxious confession about the family history he gave his pretty lawyer. “I know the things Mathis told you.”
“I know,” Julia said. “Tony can’t do this.”
Elisa dropped her hand away from her cup. So there it was.
“And I can, is that it?”
“I was thinking I could convince him—Walker—to leave. Even setting Tony aside, he has to know he’ll go to prison for years, decades maybe. He must have thought of running, but he’d have no help, no money, but if I helped him, I think I could convince him to leave.” Her voice dropped away, like words falling off a cliff. “Just go, forever.”
“This man will just go away. Forever,” Elisa repeated.
“Maybe, if I got it—”
“This man who is obsessed with the spotlight.”
“If I—”
“This sadist, you’ll set him free. And he’ll fade into oblivion, permanently and willingly—never to come calling on you for more.”
At that Julia said nothing. Good. She was too intelligent to play stupid like this, and with Elisa of all people.
“So, what, you’d like me to rent him a room on the lake? Help him find a job? Apply for a passport?”
Still nothing.
“I’m happy to keep patronizing you if it makes you feel better, but we both know why you called me.”
At that, Julia spoke.
“If—” She said the word and stopped. An exhale against the mouthpiece. “If I wanted your help . . . that kind of help.”
“I meant what I said, the day you left my life. You saved my son—my very favorite son, at that.”
A breathy laugh, like relief.
“I assume you have children now, you always loved them so. You know. You saved my child, and I would do anything for you. I’m guessing you thought then that you would never want anything from someone like me.”
The inhale that shook through the phone was distinctly marred by tears. Perhaps of resignation, perhaps of relief. “Yes.”
Elisa brought her finger back to her mug and trailed it along the rim. “It’s easy to be good when things are good.”
Julia said nothing.
The woodst
ove was pleasant, but the cold was radiating in on Elisa’s back from the window behind her. She shifted in her chair to pull her feet up to rest before her, so that she looked out over her knees. Her joints protested and she slid her heels forward an inch.
“How much time do we have?”
“You mean, before Tony . . .”
“Yes.”
“Not a lot. There’s a court date on January twelfth. He promised me it won’t be until after that. And if the case settles, that’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“I won’t need you,” Julia said.
Elisa doubted that Julia could be so sure, but there was no point in saying as much. Elisa could begin preparing either way.
“But, assuming it doesn’t settle so early in the process, I think I need it done that week.”
“That is soon,” Elisa said. “Do you really think you could convince this man to run? Temporarily, of course.”
Julia cleared her throat. “Maybe, yeah. As worried as we’ve been about court, I’ve heard that he is, too. He’s facing serious time, the sex-offender registry, all the stigma and trouble that comes with an allegation like this. I’ve heard he’s starting to freak out about it, so if I could make the right promises . . . but I would need your help to make it look like I was offering him everything he could need to live as someone else.”
“Passport, money.”
“Right. And tickets to get out of Maine, without using his name.”
“Why involve him in the equation at all? He could be dealt with in Maine.”
“If something happens to him here, they’ll still suspect Tony. Even if he has an alibi at the right time, obviously he could have hired someone.”
Elisa chuckled. “Obvious enough to me.” She continued tracing the rim of her teacup. “You need it to look like this man left on his own.”
“Right,” Julia said.
“Then, if you want my kind of help, send him to me.”
“Right to you?”
“Not to my doorstep. A city nearby, in Michigan or Ohio. Don’t send me driving all night. Tell him I’ll pick him up and take him somewhere to lie low, as they say.”
“And then?”
“And then you won’t have your problem anymore. And this man will get what he deserves.”
“I don’t agree with that.”
Elisa closed her eyes and exhaled a harsh laugh. “Are you so sure of that?”
Julia was silent for a moment longer.
Elisa might have registered this as weakness in someone else, and an obvious reason to hang up the phone. It was not weakness in Julia, though. She was at war within herself. The naive little house cat who believed in rules and order was being toppled by the puma who knew that some days, the only law is kill or be killed.
And she was an attorney. Thinking was her religion. She thought she could solve this like a logic puzzle, leaving her family intact and her morals unscathed. Julia did not understand what Elisa did: that all the thinking and weighing is meaningless, because in the end we are only as good as we are. And there are more important things than goodness.
“I’m not going to talk you into this,” Elisa said. “You don’t need my permission—you need your own. I’m not certain you have it yet.”
“No,” was all Julia said.
They spoke for a long while about what Julia believed she would need to get Raymond Walker on a bus out of town. She wanted counterfeit identification papers, travel tickets bought from untraceable accounts, the false promise of money waiting for Walker at the end of his journey, and, of course, the reality of an end to it all upon his arrival. And she wanted all of this from Elisa. Apparently Mathis had told Julia even more about his family than he’d been willing to admit to his mother.
Elisa sipped around the dregs of her tea as they sorted out the details of what Julia would need, and what Julia would do to get Raymond to Elisa. Julia occasionally interjected something like “if I even decide to do this,” and Elisa would respond with a gentle “of course, of course.” But she could feel her deciding.
Before they hung up, they agreed not to speak again by phone unless absolutely necessary—Julia had a clever explanation for their phone call, something to do with research for work related to her old cases, but it wouldn’t explain multiple calls to the Midwest if her family fell under suspicion. Instead, Julia would send a postcard with the specifics Elisa needed to book the tickets, and only if Walker did not depart would Julia call Elisa again, to tell her that it was off.
In the days following their conversation, Elisa had put out calls in anticipation, collecting some of the pieces Julia would need. She only had to wait a week before the card came in the mail. It was postmarked Portland, Maine.
Dear Auntie Elisa,
I’m excited to visit you this winter! I have quite a journey ahead of me. On Friday January 15 I’ll be taking the 8:15 p.m. Concord Coach bus from Portland to Boston, then the 10:55 p.m. Amtrak train from the South Station to Toledo, though I think I might buy a ticket that could bring me all the way to Chicago, I’ve heard it’s a lovely city. I’ll arrive in Toledo on Saturday January 16 at 3:25 p.m., and from there I’ll take the 3:55 Greyhound bus to Columbus, where I was hoping you’d pick me up. It would be around 12:25 a.m. on Sunday—I hope that is not too late.
Looking forward to our visit. If there are any problems, you know how to reach me!
Love,
Your niece
A couple of days later, Elisa overnighted a package to Julia: it held a fake driver’s license; a photocopy of a dead man’s passport; bank statements in the dead man’s name, holding cash from one of Elisa’s slush funds; and the bus and train tickets Julia had requested.
The baton passed back to Julia, Elisa had reviewed the postcard a final time before she flicked it into the woodstove.
Now, somewhere in the space between January 16 and 17, Elisa sat in her car and waited. Her foot drummed rhythmically against the floor in front of the pedals, sending reverberations through her body. She checked the time again.
The bus was two minutes late when it lurched into the station.
She thought back on the postcard. If there are any problems, you know how to reach me!
Julia did not want to know when it was done. She only wanted to know if it was not.
A young man stepped into view from behind the bus. The tall lights above the station cast shadows over his brow, pitting his eyes into holes as he scanned the parking lot.
Elisa flashed her lights, and Raymond Walker started toward the car.
She never did have occasion to contact Julia.
Acknowledgments
There are so many people who have had an impact on this story and its path to publication, and I’m afraid it’s an impossible task to properly acknowledge each one of them. Fear of failure is a terrible reason not to do something, though, so here are the people I want to thank:
Helen Heller, the agent who blew up my life in the span of a week. Deciding to partner with you has been the best professional decision I’ve ever made.
My editorial team, Pamela Dorman, Jeramie Orton, Clio Cornish, Jill Taylor, and Marie Michels. You turned this novel into the story I was trying to tell. Erica Ferguson, copyeditor extraordinaire, who caught more mistakes than I will ever admit to making. Everyone at Pamela Dorman Books and Michael Joseph who touched this project and made me feel at home.
Editor and writer Clarence Haynes, whose notes on Nick’s character and experience were invaluable.
Saliann St-Clair, Jemma McDonough, and Camilla Ferrier, who worked so hard to earn foreign deals for this book and then gamely answered my most inane questions about all of the weird tax forms. Ari Solotoff, my former classmate who talked me through each contract because I cannot turn off the lawyer anxiety.
My early readers, including
Melissa Martin, Anna Polko Clark, authors Maureen Milliken and Jeneva Rose, and my friends at the South Portland Public Library Writers’ Group.
Taylor Sampson, Amanda Bombard, and James, who answered very different questions for me.
My aunt Cindy and uncle John Mina at Curry Printing in Portland, who printed many drafts of this novel over the last three years and cheered me on with each one.
Chloe, my best writing friend who let me steal her name, and who batted around query letters with me until I was brave enough to send them. Susan Dennard and Pitch Wars, for teaching me how to query agents in the first place.
My sister, Hannah, who told me to breathe deep and chase my crazy dream of publishing a novel. Mum and Dad, who encouraged reading and writing all my life. Mr. Ramsey, who told my dad I should stop worrying so much about what major I picked in college because I was just going to end up being an author.
And finally, Ben. You are the steady Julia to my spiraling Tony. Thank you for every single thing.
About the Author
Born to two hippies in a small town in Maine, Caitlin Wahrer left the state for college but returned to attend law school and practice law, where she worked on cases involving some of the broad issues she writes about in The Damage. She lives in southern Maine with her husband. The Damage is her debut novel.
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The Damage Page 32