As a child, she liked to burn those shells, hear them pop and singe, a little pile of amber cracklings, something that she never should have told Harvey about; there are little books of matches in the pockets of his pants every time she does laundry. Where does he even find those matches, with names of restaurants and hotels that haven’t been around in years? She used to collect shells, all shells—locust and turtle and crab—because of her name; in fact, she knows that her name perhaps served as prophecy for who she would be, because she does have a shell, a good hard shell, and she has needed one, oh my, yes, she has needed one, growing up the way that she did. How many even survive such a thing? How many can come out of such a place and wind up with two wonderful sons and a job that comes with benefits at a time when benefits are so hard to get.
Yesterday, she was thinking of all of this and had to ask that the judge repeat herself: “Excuse me, Your Honor, too much coming in at once. Could you please repeat what you said?”
Judge: I said, “Objection overruled.”
Oh no, but what was objected to? She has worked in the court with this particular judge many times, a middle-aged woman who makes Judge Judy seem like Glinda the Good Witch, and of all the judges, she is the one most people are afraid to get. They say she has had death threats, and that some lawyers do everything they can not to get her. They call her the Ice Queen and say she will chew nails and spit tacks, that she is known for giving the harshest sentences, especially when women and children have been harmed. She also has the best clothes that Shelley has ever seen.
Perhaps this particular case has haunted her even more than normal because the girl was not unlike who Shelley once was, a young woman raising a little boy alone, someone who had not been dealt a good hand but had still survived the childhood part and was slowly getting some traction. And on top of that, this was someone people loved, an underdog of sorts who was actually making a go of it all. In fact, that young woman was so loved by a circle of nice people that Shelley has even found herself feeling a little bit envious of the care and concern that had existed for her. And how stupid is that? The girl is dead, found dead right there in her own little apartment, there in a chair that had once belonged to her mother; that’s what the friend of the young woman said on the witness stand. And Shelley realized she has nothing that belonged to her own mother except her blue eyes. Or did she? Maybe she has something tucked away somewhere, and she made a note that day, to look, to search, to see, or did she agree with her brother that she wanted absolutely nothing? All of that is so hard to remember sometimes, the pieces out of focus.
But imagine a chair being your prized possession even though it connects you to such a sad legacy; the young woman’s mother had ended her own life, and the murderer, thinking he was so smart, had staged it all so it looked as if the young woman had simply followed the same path. The part Shelley keeps thinking about is the courage of the person who could have that chair and love it in spite of all the reminders. The woman on the witness stand described a fighter, that girl, someone determined to get beyond it all, to not be scarred by her mother’s poor choices, to not raise her young son the way she had been raised. “She was so strong,” the woman said. “We were all betting on her,” and she looked over to a whole gathering of people, most of them really old, who were nodding and wiping their eyes.
Sometimes when Shelley is on her break, she sits quietly and writes little notes to herself in shorthand. This case has made her remember things she doesn’t want to remember, but it has also left her to note how lucky she is that Brent is Brent and not like the monster there in orange. Brent did not physically hurt her; he didn’t even really threaten her. He just called it quits and left, so how lucky is that?
She has thought that perhaps she will someday write an exposé, or maybe even a novel or movie about all this, and so she jots down her notes about the real story and how she would tell it, and how she would describe people if it were a television show, because that is so much easier than thinking about herself. Then, if she has time on her break, she types it all up. She types all that comes galloping into her head, things like: There once was an ugly, pompous asshole given a pass in society because he had money and a degree, and not even a great degree, but what do you call the worst student at the worst medical school in the world? Doctor. So, ladies, pay attention; it pays to be choosy.
The accused withheld important information from the young woman he murdered. She trusted him, and that was her big mistake. He wanted to be in charge of everything and was capable of compartmentalizing, so he dealt with it block by simple block, his brain no more advanced than a preschooler—apologies to preschoolers everywhere. And that is why this case is so disturbing. How many have willingly trusted someone they loved? How many have wanted to believe in someone with whole heart and faith? How many hear someone has this degree or that or this job and think that means everything else lines up? The young woman made a terrible mistake and paid for it with her life. He promised her a house. He promised a future of love and devotion, the two of them raising their little boy together. But the young single woman working hard in a nursing home and living over a fast-food drive-through (Harvey calls her the Dog House Girl) couldn’t have really liked that man in the beginning. How could she? Why would she? He’s a squat pig—apologies to pigs everywhere.
Then, Shelley drew doodles of pig snouts and tails in the margin to keep herself alert while the judge called a recess. Two little things gave the man away. Two little errors. There was a scrap of paper and there was a blouse, both found by the woman who discovered the dead girl. Harvey’s head is full of local kid tales about how she now haunts the little drive-in on the way to the beach. Her favorite hot dog was the Chihuahua, Harvey has said. It has salsa and guacamole on it. “She was nekked,” Harvey said. “Naked,” Shelley told him. Even she has never said “nekked,” even though she certainly grew up with plenty of people who did. “She had matches,” Harvey said. “She burned all the evidence.”
But there was evidence, and the woman who found her also took note of the label of the blouse hanging on the chair, a blouse the woman had seen her young friend wearing earlier in the day, surprised by how out of character such a blouse was for her. And that is the kind of detail that always breaks a case: a wrapper for peanut-butter crackers in a nut-free kitchen, a cigarette butt where no one smokes, a receipt for that chest freezer that happens to coincide with someone disappearing.
And there was a note in the playpen of the young woman’s apartment, in square neat print: Go home. Dinner is waiting. The woman who found her was smart enough to have taken photos of both the label and the note, and the handwriting expert said the bearing down of the letters showed tension and aggression. The dishonest person tries hard not to reveal something, but they always do, and you did not need to be a rocket scientist to know this if you looked over and saw the murderer there in his orange outfit. The woman on the stand said that she knew immediately that her friend would never have killed herself. “She loved her little boy more than anything on earth,” the woman said, and Shelley knows that, yes, that was absolutely true. You would protect that child with every ounce of strength even if there was no father around to help you. Even if you were filled with fears that something or someone was haunting you, creeping into your life in ways that were disturbing and upsetting, you would take care of your baby. It has been impossible not to imagine herself there, naked in a chair and looking out the window, the needle in her arm thickening her thoughts of her son—her son—or perhaps she was berating herself, thinking she should have known better. Oh, why didn’t I know, why didn’t I know?
When the handwriting expert came to town, the people who worked at the courthouse all scribbled anonymously and then listened to the man explain what he saw there. When he said things like “honest” and “dependable,” people jumped to claim that it was them, and so Shelley pretended one of the good ones was hers, even though hers really showed signs of someone who is “not always
telling the whole truth,” someone “secretive,” so she worked hard to change those letters and not add those extra little loops that lock everything down, only to later hear that expert say they can really tell when someone is working to correct what is so obvious. The expert said it’s a liar who stabs those o’s, and Shelley is pretty sure that she has never stabbed an o, perhaps punctured one a little bit from time to time, but never stabbed, and she certainly doesn’t do the “felon’s claw,” that sharp, aggressive hook, thank God.
What she really wants to know is, What did those women see in that awful man in the first place? How did he trick them so badly? This balding narcissist with a prescription pad and a scalpel, and a head shaped like a football like in that cartoon Jason used to watch all the time? And Shelley knows she shouldn’t talk about people’s appearances that way; in fact, she has even wondered if Harvey’s little lip was punishment for all those times she thought things like: Good Lord, fix your hair, or Get some bigger pants that fit, why don’t you, or Clean those toenails. Floss your teeth. Still, it seems that a horrible murderer should be fair game for what anybody wants to say, and Shelley has enjoyed picking apart all those things that money couldn’t help him fix—like a football head and thin lips, and eyes that are set back deep in the sockets—but women have always been more forgiving of the physical appearance, it seems, if there are the capabilities of providing what they want, or think they want, in a home. Would Shelley have fallen for him?
The woman who broke the case is a hospice volunteer who refused to let the case go cold and is raising the victim’s child, the man’s son, orphaned by it all. The doctor stares at that witness like he could kill her, so she rarely looks at him but instead keeps her eye on that group of elderly people who sit as if in the theater. Every day, they arrive in vans, from retirement facilities as far as two counties over; Shelley was told this is their show of support for the young woman who had spent her time washing and grooming their hair and feet. One woman sits and takes notes the whole time in a way Shelley finds impressive, especially given her age.
The first night Shelley thought she saw someone in the house, a lean figure rushing past her door, she assured herself it was a dream caused by all of Harvey’s night-terror talk and drifted back into sleep, the sounds she heard—a knock, a sigh—attributed to the limbs of the maple tree grown too close to the house, their old Labrador retriever, Peggy, turning on her arthritic hips before slumping onto a cool patch of floor, Harvey tossing and turning in his lower bunk in anticipation of another morning he would fight going to school. All last year, every morning when she walked him the four blocks, he’d clung to her hips, hands gripping and squeezing, as he had done nearly every day of first grade; she had to pry his hands from her clothes and push him away, often not looking in his eyes so that she wouldn’t weaken.
“It’s okay,” the teacher had said, a young, clear-faced woman who didn’t even look old enough to be a teacher. She was always in front of the long brick building, ushering her charges from buses and cars and parents like Shelley into the main hallway, where they would line up and wait to walk together to their classroom. Once the other children were watching Harvey, he stood a little straighter, and then, with the teacher’s assurance that everything would be okay, he walked into the building without looking back. Shelley would spend the rest of the day taking notes in the courtroom, imagining that someday, as a grown-up, he would do that same thing, just walk away from her and never look back. Her brother had done that, and, really, she had, too. She learned early that she was treated best when not noticed—average student, average looks, invisible, and out of the way—no one wants what the average or below-average person has, and so they leave you alone, and sometimes being left alone seems the best choice.
She’d escaped into music and videos: Nirvana, Janet Jackson, and Salt-N-Pepa. But her favorite album for a whole year was by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and she played “Under the Bridge” a million times, because she did feel like she was her only friend, but who she wanted to look like was Mariah Carey, and she tried all kinds of ways—tiny curlers, sleeping in braids—to get her hair to do what Mariah’s did. Some days, she left early so she could fix her hair and makeup on her way to school; she ducked into the Quik Pik, and then bought gum or a pack of cigarettes on the way out so they wouldn’t get mad at her for being in the bathroom so long. She practiced singing “I’ll Be There.” If her mother had seen her—if her mother had noticed—she would have said, “What’d you do, stick your finger in a socket? You look like a clown.” But as soon as the house was behind her and she started walking, she felt better, soothing herself as she had for as long as she could remember: It’s okay. You can do this. They don’t know you. They have no idea who you are. And the same words worked at school. The same words work now—it’s okay, you can do this—though sometimes it’s harder than others; sometimes there is a lot more at stake.
She feels happy those days when Harvey is able to walk away without looking back, but it also hurts a little. She would be devastated if someday he flew the coop and never looked back. But Jason hasn’t ever turned away from her, and he has even more reason than Harvey might, given his early years in life when it was just the two of them moving from place to place. Her heightened sense of how terrible humans can be is the price one pays for being in the courtroom every day, an occupational hazard of one whose whole life is about recording the pounds and pounds of notes about weapons and threats and murder and guilt. How can it not invade your personal life?
“It’s okay, Harvey,” the teacher had said every morning. “And just think, next year you will walk in all by yourself.”
“It’s okay, Harvey,” Shelley says when there’s talk of seeing ghosts or when he comes to her in the middle of the night to say his bed is wet, always in a way as if he is surprised and has no idea how it got that way. Or when he asks the hard questions about where his dad might be. Alaska in an igloo? On a desert island? Inside a whale? The whale had caught her off guard, wondering where Harvey had learned about Jonah, since that is another ball she’d dropped in the lives of her children—no religion—or so Brent thinks, or thought, past tense; he is in past tense. But, no, not Jonah. Pinocchio. That’s where it came from, Geppetto inside of the whale. The church of Disney has been a much easier church for her to attend all these years. Sure, Walt had a dark side, but doesn’t everybody? Like certainly a God who smites this and that when he gets pissed off has a dark edge about him, right? Brent had been raised by people who believed that.
“Backwards,” she once muttered when he quoted something his mother had said, and he pulled off the road to set her straight. That’s what he said: “Let’s set you straight.” And then he said: “Who do you think you are anyway? Look at where you came from.”
Oh God, did she have to?
Every time she vacuumed that house Brent had rented in Georgia and emptied the bag, there were some old, putrid things to discover: hair and fingernails (whose?) and God knows what. It reminded her of her childhood. As soon as she’d moved in, she had wanted to rip out and burn the carpet, take up the linoleum yellowed with age and depression, the very molecules screaming of sadness and abuse, and Brent had promised in the beginning that she could fix things up, take down the heavy old waxy drapes and let in light and air. But it had never happened, and now she’s on her own in another old house, vacuuming somebody else’s putrid remainders, like maybe that old guy and his people who died here, and why does he want to get in so bad anyway? It’s creepy. She would never go back to where she came from.
Last Christmas, Shelley set up a wildlife camera to photograph the birds that came to her feeder. It was a gift from Jason, but now she is afraid to look and see what is recorded there. The birds looked so strange the one time she looked; she hadn’t had the heart to tell him that the camera he gave her didn’t show everything in color, like at the Audubon place, but in a gray fuzz, like a surveillance camera, like those eerie images of people at bank machines
or convenience stores, like Princess Di and Dodi had looked in that last picture, or the young man who was murdered after getting money from the ATM; she’d worked that trial, too, his parents there in the front row.
Those pictures always look like a warning of something bad to come, perhaps because that’s when we see them, after the fact. After something bad has happened and then people are interested, then people pay attention, like at the trial when they studied the screenshots of that young man closely enough that they could see that, yes, there was a gun pressed to his head.
When Shelley looked at the footage that one time, there were squirrels, and a deer, way too thin—eerie and misshapen-looking—as it tried to eat the bulbs somebody else, maybe that old man or his dead mother, had planted.
“That was my room.” The man had pointed at the back window overlooking the side yard. “And I spent a lot of time there in that strip of woods.” He seemed relieved that that little bit of woods was still there, and so is she. When she moved in, her landlord said he and some others had fought to keep it; otherwise, their houses would practically be on the interstate. The woman, Lillian, had been waiting in the car that day, and she lifted her hand and waved at Shelley. She waved like she knew her, like maybe they had spoken a million times before. It gave Shelley a chill to think that; it reminded her of that old ghost story where the girl who died ages before in a car wreck keeps coming back home from the prom. But these people were real enough, because she saw the man’s face up close, where he had nicked himself shaving, and she saw him trip on the undergrowth and catch himself when he walked back near the tracks. They are real people, and she knows where they live.
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