Acts of Love (12 page)

Sandy, clutching a folded-up copy of the day's issue, made her way through the main editorial room, where desks sat in parallel lines and a television tuned to CNN glowed mutely overhead, and stormed into the office in the rear. She flung the paper down on Ray Stinson's desk before saying a word, knocking over his wire statue of a fisherman casting his line.

“Would you mind telling me who's responsible for this?”

The managing editor righted the fisherman before looking up. “Calm down, Sandy.”

“Since when did we become the
National Enquirer?
”

Ray looked at her patiently. He was a sandy-haired, lanky man with slightly crossed eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses who spoke with the halting rhythms, pausing on the precipice of words, of a stutterer who had learned with great will to control his flow. “I'm sorry about your sister, but this is a big story. One of the biggest this county has seen for as long as I can remember.”

“This is not a big story. A big story is something that affects people's lives. A change in the school board. Abortion laws. How the governor stands on the death penalty. This is just gossip.”

“Weren't you the one who taught me the feminist principle ‘The personal is political'?”

“Did you give one minute's thought to the girls?” Sandy went on, exasperated. “Did you? Did you think about the fact that they have to go to school tomorrow? That they have to face their friends? Did you think about that before you smeared this all over the front page?”

He moved the fisherman an eighth of an inch with his forefinger and thumb, so that it occupied the precise space it had before she knocked it over. “That's not my job.”

Sandy looked at him incredulously. “That's not your job? That's great, that's fucking great.”

“And it was never your job as a journalist, either.” He returned her gaze. It was her very lack of sentimentality, the complete absence, as far as he could discern, of nostalgia, that helped make her so valuable. Despite the fact that she had grown up there, she never betrayed a knee-jerk reaction to any changes in Hardison, structural, political, attitudinal, but seemed to welcome each addition or subtraction, each reassessment, with a clear eye that he found both useful and unnerving. “All we can do is write it fair,” he added.

“You call this fair? What's this ‘tragic accident' shit?”

“It's a possibility, that's all. Waring has the right to a fair trial same as everyone else. And that means in the press as well as in the courts.”

“Do you plan on keeping Peter Gorrick on this?”

“Yes.”

“How long has he been out of journalism school, three months?”

“Four.”

“He's not even from here.”

“Exactly.”

“What court experience does he have? What investigative experience?”

“Sandy, I want you to stay out of this. Conflict of interest. As a matter of fact, why don't you take a couple of weeks off? You're due some vacation time.”

“Why? Is my presence here inconvenient to you?”

“You're going through a lot right now, that's all. I heard you took the kids in. Call it maternity leave, if you want.”

“I've always believed in working mothers.”

“Fine. Then finish up the recycling series. The town council is meeting again on Thursday. Be there.”

“They've been meeting for eight months and they still can't agree on what color bins plastics should go in.”

“It's your job. You don't want it, leave.”

“I want it, I want it.” She began to walk away. “I love it, okay? I fucking love it.”

She left the door open on the way out because she knew it would annoy him and made her way back through the newsroom, avoiding eye contact with her co-workers, who were glancing up surreptitiously from their desks. Her head thrust forward, she had almost made it out of the room when she was startled to find her path blocked by Peter Gorrick, his feet planted firmly in her way. In his early twenties, all Shetland and tweed and handsome, dewy face, he had affected from his first day a certain casualness and nonchalance, only occasionally betrayed by the fact that when he was nervous or distracted, his tongue flicked rapidly over a chip in his front tooth. Sometimes she had looked up from her computer to find him watching her, his eyes narrowed in concentration, his long, thin fingers tented before him, the tip of his tongue a moist pink dot.

“Sandy? Do you have a minute? I thought maybe we could go over some background material about the, you know…”

She glowered at him and muttered “I'm busy” as she swerved deftly around his pedestal legs while the six other people in the room averted their eyes.

He followed her a step. “It'll only take a minute.”

She turned around to face him. “You think you're pretty hot shit, don't you?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Well, hell, you got the big story, right?”

“I just take what they assign me.”

“Oh, please.”

“What's your problem, Sandy? Ray couldn't very well have assigned this to you.”

“I just don't happen to like you Ivy League glamour boys who come here looking for some good clips before leaving all the dirt for someone else to clean up. Slumming, that's what it is.”

Gorrick, though stung, remained impassive. In truth, he had not gotten into a single one of the Ivy League colleges he had applied to and had been forced to attend a small college in the Back Bay of Boston that specialized in “communications” and was rife with performance artists and video jocks. He had spent four years trying to distinguish himself from them and dreaming of the time when he would catch up and overtake those who had been more fortunate. “I'm a reporter, same as you,” he replied.

“You don't know anything about me,” she said, and hurried away.

Gorrick watched her go with a bemused look he had devised for public consumption. Only when he returned to his own desk did he allow his face to sag. He had, in his four months at the
Chronicle,
tried to befriend Sandy, asking about the history of the town and its inhabitants, bringing her coffee, complimenting her work, and though she had always been polite, she had rebuffed any attempt at further camaraderie. He was left to scrutinize her copy, marked by a clear-eyed sharpness that he was determined to emulate.

Sandy had just gotten out the front door when she saw John walking through the parking lot in her direction.

“What are you doing here?” she asked before he could kiss her hello.

“You sure know how to make a guy feel wanted.”

“Sorry. Did you see today's paper?”

“Yes.”

“Is that all you can say, ‘yes'?”

“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” he asked.

“Food shopping.”

He looked at her suspiciously. “Food shopping?”

“Well, I can't expect Julia and Ali to live on my yogurt and Snickers bars forever,” she retorted.

“Where are the girls, anyway?”

“I dropped them off at some after-school thing. I thought maybe it would help ease them back into it.”

John nodded. “Can we go someplace to talk?”

“What is it?” she asked.

“Not here.”

Sandy shrugged. “Come with me to the supermarket.”

“All right.” John watched as she got into her car and then hurried to his own, several spaces away.

He trailed her Honda as she drove, ten miles above the speed limit, to the Grand Union. Once when she stopped at a light he pulled up next to her, and he could hear the music blasting from her radio but could not catch her eye. He wondered when mourning would come, grief, sorrow; wondered how long she could cling to the shimmering anger that kept these at bay. Even their lovemaking had become a fierce and lonesome battle, a staccato clamoring against phantoms he could not see.

 

T
HEY PUSHED
an overflowing grocery cart through the wide, neon-lit aisles. Sandy absentmindedly reached for one box and jar after another and threw them atop the growing heap. She and John had shopped together before only for a single well-planned dinner or breakfast; it had been romance, play, with every ingredient private and fraught with seduction, those first approximations of intimacy. Now she grabbed the first four boxes of sugary cereal she came across.

“I was thinking that maybe you could take Julia and Ali into the store with you on Saturday,” she said as she added a fifth box to the pile. “You could have them help out in the back, put away sneakers, things like that.”

John put three of the boxes of cereal back on the shelf. “There are child labor laws, you know.”

“You could name them unofficial advisers. Hell, they probably know a lot more than you do about what kids want to buy.”

“You have this all figured out, don't you?” He walked quickly ahead of her.

“I just think it would be good for them, that's all. Some continuity. Besides, I think they'd like it. Just because the thought of exercise makes me break out in hives.”

She frowned as he turned the aisle and momentarily disappeared from view. “Is something wrong?” she asked, catching up with him.

“Nothing.”

“Right.”

He faced her and was about to speak, then changed his mind.

“It was just an idea,” she said. “I don't see what the big deal is. Will you at least think about it?”

He took a step away. “I thought you and I were going to go to that auction out in Haggertyville on Saturday.”

One wheel of the cart twisted sideways and Sandy bent down to straighten it, taking longer than was necessary. She stood up slowly and stepped purposefully ahead of him, picking up a five-pound bag of rice and dropping it into the cart with a thud. “I can't just pick up and leave the girls for the day.” She leaned over the frozen vegetables, staring at the neatly aligned, colorful boxes.

“Of course not.”

“So what is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“It's about Ted,” he answered carefully.

She turned to him. “What about him?”

“He's out on bail.”

“He's what? How could that happen?”

“I guess they figured he's a pretty good risk.”

“About as good as getting into a bubble bath with an electric blanket.”

“He's always been a good father. No matter what happened, they don't figure on him bolting and leaving the kids.”

“If he so much as goes near them…”

“I filled out the forms for a restraining order. You just have to go into the police station and sign them.”

“You did?”

“Yes.”

She looked at him closely; it was gawky and disquieting and new, having someone take care of you, your business. She wheeled the cart to the cookie section and picked out three bags.

“I think we have enough here,” John said, putting two back.

 

T
HE AFTER-SCHOOL GROUP
of the Hardison Middle School had been started four years ago, to deal with the children who had two working parents and no place else to go. Ali and Julia had spent occasional afternoons there in the past year, when Ann could not rearrange her schedule at the hospital, but their sporadic attendance had left them ignorant of the rapid shifts of alliances and prejudices of the group. Ali, with the blithe goodwill that she still assumed others would naturally share, had immediately wriggled into the very center of the knot of children and could be seen there now, anxiously smiling at jokes she did not quite get.

Julia sat alone on the cold metal bench in the corner of the playground, reading a travel guide to Milan. She took them out of the library, whatever was available, guides to Eastern Europe, Miami, France, Australia, San Francisco, and memorized the walks, the restaurants, the neighborhoods, the history. Travel in and of itself did not interest her if it meant return, snapshots in hand—travel as anecdote. She was looking for nothing less than a new location, a new route, to be embarked upon as soon as she was free. She tried on each city, each country, to see how it would fit, imagining what street she would live on, what job she might find (always practical, she was careful to study indigenous industry), how she might dress; she memorized key phrases phonetically. Just now she was reading up on the printing business in Milan, known for books as creamy and rich as the art they reproduced. She imagined herself riding to work each day on a moped through winding cobblestone streets wearing sunglasses and a chiffon scarf.

Whenever she sensed a schoolmate's eyes on her or heard approaching footsteps, she pulled the book closer to her face, loudly turned a page, and they quickly hurried away. She had a reputation, even before recent events, of being somehow dangerous. Last year she had thrown her small metal file box meant for index cards for book reports at her teacher's head and spent months in detention. Since then, her violence had been verbal, incisive jabs at classmates' intelligence, hairstyles, personal habits, until finally no one came close enough to hear. Which was fine with her. But from her distance, she made a minutely detailed study of popularity, who had it, how they got it, how they held on to it. She could see its uses, and though it was too late for her, it was what she wanted for Ali. The nighttime lessons often centered on whom to befriend, whom to sit next to, how to roll her jeans in just the right way, how to laugh. Julia was certain that popularity could be broken down, element by element, and taught to Ali like algebra. She turned to a section on Milan's design district and underlined a paragraph on the Centro Domus.