Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  In the hospital the private nurses left it on so they had something to watch when they gave the meds, suctioned the trake tube. They thought I was out of it, heavily sedated, and half the time I was. They went out in the hall and chatted and left the TV on, perhaps thinking it would entertain me in my stupor. That’s his wife? I heard one of the staff nurses say. Half the time they didn’t know what I heard, or what I saw.

  I saw the whole downfall story. I saw footage of Milo being led away from the scene. There’s the bloody front porch, red stains on the steps. The big bush of ornamental grass by our driveway looks pale in the nightwash of the camera lights. Milo’s face is washed out, too, bruised and smeared with gleaming dark streaks. His lip is cut and his light shirt has red splotches. He has a hangdog head. He looks like someone else. His hands are behind him, cuffed, and police are holding him by the elbows as he walks. He is limping. Then an officer pushes down on him like he is bobbing a ball underwater, pushes to get him into the backseat of the patrol car. Milo looks back at the camera, and in that moment, his eyes are wild, they are deranged. He jerks his head to get the cop’s hand off him. He tosses and wings his elbows up behind him to get them away. He’s trying to see something, get to someone. To me, I thought, when I saw it, to be with me. He tries to turn back. Hallie. He looks bloody and dangerous, unless you know him. If you know him, he looks scared. Young. His eyeballs stand out, white and crazed, and that’s of course where they freeze the frame, every time. From that, they go straight to footage from one of the Cade movies, to stills of Milo as a blue-blazered sports reporter, and then all the way back to the footage of his 1976 medal, that moment I remember so well, of him lifted up and carried on the shoulders of his teammates, and snow coming down like fairy dust all around.

  They cut from his victory to his wife, Charlotte Halsey, modeling something, with my milky smile, and my hair glaring. They cut from me to our daughter, from her to the mistress. There she is. Geneva. The Dancer. She is long-necked and dressed in white, some Swan Lake costume, and her arms make an oval frame for her graceful head. Then up pops Bobby Armstrong on the screen: dark suit, red tie, hair gray-wolf gray at the temples. Milo’s lawyer.

  Here is what Armstrong says. What he claims. This is the defense:

  “Mr. Robicheaux came home and found his wife gravely wounded. He attempted to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When the police arrived, Officers Paladino, Cruz, and Stoddard did not stop to ask questions but beat Mr. Robicheaux. Brutally. Severely. And he defended himself. The police did not follow proper procedures. They have no evidence against our client, and his right to bail has been denied illegally. We demand his immediate release. That’s all we have to say at this time, except that Mr. Robicheaux loves his wife, loves his daughter, and expects to be reunited with them when this tragic matter is resolved.”

  I know Bobby Armstrong. He’s a friend of Darryl’s. Darryl calls him “Bo-bo.” He specializes in rights. Not civil rights, but foreign rights, serial rights, licensing of products, like the Cade doll. He’s an entertainment lawyer, balding, with the beginnings of jowls. I’ve met him several times, at parties. He and Darryl were friendly. Never more than now, with the two of them out there saying the same thing: “My client is not guilty.”

  Darryl said that on TV. There he was talking to a bank of microphones, “Darryl Haynes, Robicheaux’s Agent” supered under his face while he talked:

  Milo Robicheaux and I went out on the evening of April 20, the night of this hideous crime. We had dinner, as we have many times over the years. We had a few drinks. We left and went home somewhere around twelve-thirty. Milo Robicheaux is not just my client, he’s my friend—

  Well, a couple of things got me right there. The word client. The word agent. Because I had been operating under the idea that Darryl was no longer employed by Milo. Now here he was, saying client.

  And there he was, being Milo’s alibi.

  We talked that night about his wife, Charlotte, Darryl said. He told me his concern that she has a severe alcohol and drug problem, and career problems due to what I like to call the fascism of the fashion business. Due to her age, and whatnot. Age discrimination. She was suicidally depressed. My friend Milo was trying to get his wife professional help. We are all now praying for her recovery, and for Milo Robicheaux’s release from his wrongful imprisonment.

  As usual, Darryl is full of shit. As if I would choke myself and slash myself. The fascism of fashion. As if that were what depressed me. Moreover, Darryl is not praying for my speedy recovery. He sent flowers. “Thinking of you,” said the printed note from the florist. Thinking what? I said to him in my head. Thinking it serves me right? Thinking you wish the job had been done properly?

  The flowers were carnations, all pink.

  “Who do you believe?” goes Darryl’s big ad. It’s a double-page spread in the L.A. Times. Who do you believe? Who do you trust? As usual, Darryl is asking the right questions. And as usual he answers, too. He says: When white folks say justice, what they mean is “just us.”

  Who do I believe? Who do I trust? Bobbie. She wrote to me.

  Dear Charlotte,

  Words cannot begin to convey all our worry about you and what has happened. We are praying for you and for Milo of course, and little Hallie. My heart is breaking for you all. Please, Charlotte if you can, do not believe what they say. You know down deep what is true. You must have faith in your own heart. Please, for Hallie’s sake especially, be strong. I will come and see you if you ask me, but under the circumstances I will wait for you to send word, as I tried phoning and was told you were not receiving any visitors. Understandably, perhaps, Mom and Dad are too overwhelmed right now to come. They have been to see Milo and are doing as well as can be expected. We would do anything to support you both and help you recover. I know with all that has happened you must be sorely put—as we are, too—to believe or have faith. But if you can, for all our sakes. For Hallie’s.

  Love Bobbie.

  But Bobbie, you do not know. I would like to have your faith, any faith. I would like to know in my heart. But the more I know the harder faith is to have. For example, Bobbie, if you knew that your brother saw me kissing Jack; if you knew that was not a door I walked into; if you knew that he lied about a woman and she says he has a son. There is a picture of them kissing, and now this latest one in the newspaper! the one Hallie saw, of the two of them, emerging from a restaurant, it says, in New York, but not when.

  She has written me a letter, too, that woman emerging from a restaurant. I gave it to Detective Phelps. Why it would matter, I don’t know; but they asked. I cooperated. Such a nice letter, beautiful penmanship. Please accept my apologies for any part I may have unwittingly played in this tragedy. Sincerely, Geneva Johnson. As I said, unwittingly is the word I question. Also apologies. Also Sincerely.

  Do you know I don’t care about any of that? Not about the clues and the picture, who took it, or who sent it, or what time it was when he left the restaurant. I don’t care about anything at all except Hallie and whether it was him. Or not. I just want to know.

  And I don’t know.

  If I knew, if I had the truth, then I would … what would I do? I would get up. I would get on with things. I would make plans. If yes, then A. If no, then B. If this, then that. It would help. Save me from this paralysis, this room with this bed and chair, this ignorance.

  “The system works,” is what Claire says. “They didn’t arrest him for no reason. You’ll just have to let the system work.” Yesterday she was up here with me by the window, reading magazines. She seemed to have given up trying to talk to me, and I knew that soon she would have to go back to New York. I sat, afraid of moving, of dislodging clots of tears. I stared in a trance at nothing, but she was suddenly looking at me so hard I had to close my eyes.

  “Was it him?” she asked me then.

  I looked at her as if she’d hit me.

  “Was it him?” she asked again, and then a third time. “Was it Milo
?”

  I don’t know! I got my own pen and wrote this down so angrily it tore the paper, mouthing the words.

  I can’t remember! I thought it was him in the house but I’m not sure!

  “But you said you had had so many arguments,” she reminded me, almost as if she was trying to talk me into it. “You told me you fought constantly. Do you remember an argument that night?”

  No. I shook my head.

  Claire was the one who told the police Milo hit me. They used her statement at the bail hearing.

  “Charlotte,” she said, after a long time, “something like eighty percent of all murders and attempted murders are crimes of passion.” Her voice with me now was gentle and narcotic. “These things are crimes of passion. It’s just a sad true thing.” For a moment, I thought she meant that the passion itself was the crime. Charlotte and Milo as a crime.

  Milo’s handwriting on the envelope slants hard to the right as if it is leaning into a strong wind. Charlotte H. Robicheaux, it says, 29149 Cliffside Road, Malibu, California. I imagine him writing my name, and I wonder what he was thinking, if he pictured my face while he wrote.

  When my mother put it down next to me this morning she announced, “One of his legal people delivered it. With instructions to give it to you.” The sight of it, just the envelope, set me off. I’ve been reeling and crying, jagged for the day.

  “I knew it,” my mother said, tightly. “I knew this would happen. I should never have.” And moved to take it back.

  No. I shook my hand at her and shooed her away, backhanding the air with my wrists flapping, the way you wave off flies. My poor mother. I should like to tell her Sorry. That I love her. But I don’t have the strength for it.

  Everything now is basic. Yes or No. Stay or Go. Him or not him.

  She left and the letter shook in my hands.

  I held it against my face. I don’t know what I was expecting. For it to smell of him. For it to kiss me? Hurt me? I was afraid of it, what it might say, what it might not. When I opened it and took out the paper my hands were trembling. I couldn’t look. Couldn’t read for the longest time. The lines of his writing blurred across the page.

  Dear Charlotte. Dear Charlotte. Dear Charlotte.

  I hear Hallie out on the back lawn. She has a playmate, a little girl with flyaway hair. I see them twirling till they are dizzy. They fall down laughing, looking up at the trees, then get up and do it again.

  The world is spinning all the time, Milo told Hallie, just a few weeks ago, was it? If you want to see it move, you have to twirl yourself around, too, like this. And then he spun with her, their arms spread out like wings, turning in circles till they tumbled to the grass side by side.

  Dad, she said, I see it. It’s whirling.

  It frightened her at first, until something he said made her laugh and she did it again. She did it constantly, as she is doing now, she and her small friend giddily twirling toward the front of the house, where cameras are lurking. I want to get up, call them back, shout Stop! Save her, if only from those cameras. Their high-powered lenses are everywhere, day and night, up in the hills, hungry for footage. Of anything. Of our shrubs and driveway gravel. Our toolshed. Those dizzy children. Various channels and tabloids have hired helicopters to get aerials of the house. I’ve heard them hovering overhead. They will milk anything. One lingering shot of Hallie’s overturned bicycle by the driveway has aired frequently, a zoom in to the wheel, spinning in the wind. As if it stands for something. Perhaps it does.

  “Tell them everything,” Claire said.

  I have been trying to think it out: What I would say, what I would write. What the police would do if I told them.

  Officer, you see, I was kissing my old boyfriend Jack in the parking lot, just in a crazy way to get even with Milo, because Milo—

  Don’t say why. Don’t write why or you’ll cry.

  Milo saw us. In the car. I think he saw us kissing and leaving together. This was—just that night. Just hours before.

  They would be taking this down, following the Jealous Husband line of inquiry. It would provide a motive, fit with their theory, make sense of the senseless, the cuts in my neck.

  Detective, see, my old boyfriend, this man Jack Sutherland, had been calling me, asking that I see him. I told him never to contact me again. He was angry about that. Once he nearly choked me. Once he threw a ski pole at me. Where is he? Do you know?

  There has been nothing from Jack since I hung up on him that night. No more calls, no notes or word. He was calling me that night. Calling and calling. But then, at a certain point (when?), he stopped. Gave up, I assumed. What did he do then? Where did he go? Where is he now?

  “This is absolutely a crime of passion, of rage,” Claire said so gently yesterday. “It happens with a man who has a terror of losing. Someone controlling and possessive, a man who is used to winning, to getting what he wants.”

  I listened.

  “Like your husband,” she said. “Am I wrong?”

  So it was only yesterday that I told Claire about Jack. I wrote it out, the part about the kissing and the letter he saved insanely for fifteen years and the flashes of havoc on his face. I told her what Milo probably saw. Her eyes got solemn and sober and she nodded her head as if she could see right away what I meant by my question.

  The police, I wrote. Who would they believe?

  “Still,” she said, “you have to tell them.”

  If I told, the police would find Jack and see how charming he is. He would buy them beers. He would wink and backslap and say: Hey, guys, it was just a kiss good night, for old times’ sake. Charlotte was a slam hound anyway. Always was. And if her husband was watching, it was just some sick thing he was into. He always was a violent man.

  Claire looked at me so hard. Her eyes went right through me. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, full of pity. “Charlotte—oh honey—for him to come back. That can’t happen. Just get it out of your head. Unless of course you remember—” she stopped. “You know that the human mind forgets what it can’t bear to know, don’t you?”

  I nodded. I was just wooden. She hugged me a long time and left. Last night she went back East. I tore up all the notes I wrote her and flushed them down the toilet.

  Claire is right. I will tell them, the detectives. Soon. I have to, don’t I?

  In dreams I can speak. I sing, in my dreams, me and Hallie in the car belting John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt! That’s my name too! Whenever we go out, people always shout! There goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt! We do it at the tops of our lungs, Hallie just shouts “Schmidt!” and then we do it all over again. I sing in my dreams, and talk.

  It’s possible I will speak again, my doctor said. “Some of the nerves to the voice box, Charlotte, were severed, so, you have some paralysis.” As she talked, Dr. Hovnanian lifted her chin and pointed to places on her own crepey neck. “After your larynx heals completely, we’ll see.” My larynx, the voice box, was smashed. The ambulance crew cut a hole so I could breathe, right in the hollow between my clavicles. The speed bump, Milo always called that hollow, running his finger across the bones in the dark, Slowly … now … watch the speed bump.

  “Try to whisper if you can,” Dr. Hovnanian says, “I think you should be able to.” I try but no sound comes out, only wisps of air. It’s exhausting and it hurts. It’s futile. I can’t do it. I just can’t.

  “Not to worry,” Dr. Hovnanian says. “Give it time.” She has set me up with speech pathologists already. She has an upbeat attitude. “The glass missed all the important veins!” she said. “The carotids and the jugular, so, you’re extremely lucky.”

  I’m a lucky duck.

  I was lucky that night I got choked and cut in the throat. Lucky to have that high-necked dress on, yes indeed. Lucky about that silver necklace, the jagged break in the bottle. They found shards of it everywhere—in the kitchen, on Milo’s shoes, stuck to my dress. But the neck of it and the shoulders, the part that stabbed me, wa
s crushed too completely for any fingerprints, ground to bits on the kitchen floor.

  Hallie’s laugh peals out and up to my window. Hearing it, watching her skip, you’d never know her family was a shambles. But in the night she cries. She has been waking up and calling for me, for her daddy. I rest in the day and save my breath for Hallie, all my words made of air.

  Last night in the dark I went to her. She couldn’t see my scars in the dark, couldn’t see my eyes, couldn’t see what a sliding, raw, cracked egg of a mother she has.

  Mommy! she said, holding on.

  Hallie girl. I couldn’t sing but I could make my breath say words.

  She was shaking. She held on to me crying.

  Everything will be all right, I whispered, desperate. You’ll see. I promise. I would promise anything, moons and planets, stars for her. A fishy in a little dish. I said it with just the barest husk of sound. And she knew. What I meant. What I was saying.

  Daddy, she said.

  Yes, I told her. It will be all right. How could I not say that? I had to.

  Milo’s letter rests in my lap, weightless as fire, burning holes of questions right down through my skin. Dear Charlotte. I am holding still. A bird’s caw startles me so I jump. I don’t feel safe. There is nowhere to go to be safe. I lift my hand to my throat and feel it. I am ugly.

  People tell me to let it go, as if it were just a decision about whether to put your sick old dog to sleep. My mother, Claire, my sister, they say: Put that night behind you, it’s in the past. Heal up by moving on. It’s over. That’s not possible or even true. It’s still happening, and will be happening now forever. Trauma gets passed down through families along with the silver and the china, heirloom trauma, just as the mauling of her mother and the jailing of her father are being passed down to Hallie right now.

  It’s important for her to feel safe, for her routines to continue, the doctors all say. You must be strong for her sake. And of course, as she’s ready, you must tell her as much of the truth as she needs to know.