Acts of Love (20 page)

He laughed. “What's wrong with here?”

Julia did not answer, only stepped up her pace. “I'm going to leave as soon as I can. I hate it here.”

The vehemence made Peter stop short for an instant, but he quickly regained his stride, matching it to hers. “I lived with my mother, too, after my father left.”

“I don't want to talk about my mother.”

“Okay, we don't have to talk about anything you don't want to talk about.” He fished into the pocket of his khaki pants and pulled out a pack of Doublemint gum. He unwrapped a piece, put it in his mouth, and offered the pack to Julia. “Want a stick?”

Julia glanced at the pack, the silver tips of the remaining sticks sparkling in the sunlight. “No.”

Peter shrugged, put the pack back into his pocket. They had turned three corners now, and Julia, anxious to return to the steps, to Ali, quickened her pace.

“Your father's a builder, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I bet he has some temper on him, huh?”

Julia stopped, turned brusquely toward him. “Why are you talking to me?” She looked directly up at him, his handsome, tawny face, chiseled and fine, and his tousled, tawny hair. His tongue darted about his jagged tooth.

“I told you,” he answered easily, “I thought you could use a friend. I'll tell you what. Why don't I give you my phone number? That way, if you ever want someone to talk to, you can give me a call, okay? About anything.” He handed her a slip of paper with his name and numbers at both work and home already neatly inscribed in black ink.

She took it and put it in her knapsack. “I'd better get back.”

Gorrick, cracking his gum, watched her hurry away. An only child, he had spent hours when he was young holding covert conversations with a made-up companion, Spencer, writing him lengthy letters about his life, his bickering parents, the indifference of his classmates. Sometimes he had fashioned letters from Spencer in a different-colored pen, words of encouragement and advice and understanding, and then he would put the letters aside for a few days so that he could pretend to be surprised by them. He took out his gum, wadded it carefully in its paper wrapper, and returned to his car.

 

A
LI STOOD ON THE STEPS, ALONE
. The clusters of children who had surrounded Julia had largely dissipated, but Ali smiled eagerly at those who remained, even those she did not know. Some smiled back, some ignored her, some turned, whispering and giggling, to their friends. She looked to the left, where the edges of the flat playing fields abutted the street, and then to the right, beyond the parking lot, but still no Julia. She fidgeted nervously with her ponytail, twirling it round and round her finger, chewing on its ends.

She had just turned to peer back inside the heavy glass doors as they swung silently closed behind the boys' gym teacher when Ted stole up beside her, wrapped his arm around her back, puffy with quilts of down, and put his forefinger to his lips.
“Ssshhh.”
He smiled reassuringly, complicitously, and pulled her down the steps with him. He did not speak until he had secured her behind his car, kneeling low, his daughter before him.

“Lord, am I glad to see you,” he exclaimed. He gently brushed a stray curl behind her ear, lingered on the soft plump doeskin of her lobe, squeezing it tenderly. “Are you okay, sweetie? Are they treating you all right?”

Her voice was low, mistrustful and cautious, and cracking just slightly with longing. “I'm okay.”

“I miss you like hell, you and your sister.”

“I miss you, too.”

He could not help folding her for just an instant in his arms, feeling her body deep within the down tense and then open to him, warm to him. He released her and placed his hands on her shoulders, his eyes level with hers. “We'll be together before you know it. You just wait and see. Ali, honey, would you like to help me?”

Her chin dipped almost imperceptibly to her chest and back, all the answer Ted needed.

“You want us to be together again, don't you?” He smiled. “I want you to think hard, sweetie. All you have to do is remember seeing Julia jump on me. You remember that, don't you?”

“I was in the kitchen.”

“I know, but I thought you poked your head out and saw Julia leap at me. Think hard, Ali. Don't you remember that?”

“I don't know.”

“Try,” he said.

She looked at him blankly.

The edges of an impatient scowl emerged, and he hastily laminated a smile on top of it. “Ali, I want you to talk to Julia.”

“About what?”

“About what happened that night. I don't know why, but she's very confused. That's okay, I'm not mad at her. But we have to straighten it out. All you have to do, sweetie, is have her say it was an accident. Okay? It was, you know. I would never do anything to hurt your mother. Or you girls. Never. You know that. All you have to do is get her to say it.”

Ali dug her hands, fisted, taut, into her pockets, didn't speak.

“We could be together again before you know it. Just talk to Julia, okay?”

Ali stared mutely at him. “I miss Mommy,” she said finally.

“I miss her, too.”

Ted glanced nervously about and then straightened up. “Why don't we keep this our secret, okay? Lets keep this little talk just between us.”

Ali nodded. Ted leaned down one last time and kissed the top of her head, a loose strand of hair getting stuck on his lower lip. “I have to go. Remember, not a word. Our special secret.” He smiled one last time and disappeared into his car.

When Ali returned to the school steps, Julia was waiting impatiently for her. “Where were you?”

“Nowhere.”

“Come on. Let's go home.”

They began to walk down the broad street, covered with a soiled film of icy residue from the first snow that had fallen two nights ago, melted the next day, and refrozen.

“Julia?”

“Yes?”

“Why did you tell them Daddy aimed the gun at her head?”

“Because he did.”

Ali looked up at her, and then straight ahead, and they continued walking.

 

T
HAT NIGHT
, they lay three feet apart in their new twin beds under matching white eyelet quilts still redolent of the milky plastic reams they had come wrapped in. The sheets, too, were adorned with white eyelet, stiff and scratchy. There was a rectangle of fresh paint on the wall where the foldout couch used to be. Sandy's desk, newly cleared, sat massive and empty in the shadowy room.

The lights had been out for forty-five minutes when Julia heard Ali's breath begin to quicken, until it was tumbling over itself in a rapid staccato of abbreviated gasps and moans. She slid out of her bed and climbed in beside Ali, just as Ali's own terror awoke her, sweat-filmed and confused. She shot upright, still tangled in her nightmare, and Julia pulled her gently back, held her head, stroked it until Ali's eyes gradually began to relax and then to flutter closed.

It had been like this almost every night for the past week, and each time, Julia tried to get there before the moaning became too loud and someone else might hear, might come. She stroked Ali's moist hair in long, slow motions.

When she was at last satisfied that Ali was once more asleep, Julia climbed cautiously from the bed and tiptoed to the desk, where her knapsack sat neatly in the corner. She unzipped it slowly, looking back at Ali, who stirred slightly and then withdrew back into her slumber. In the dusky light, she fished out Peter Gorrick's note, smoothed it between her fingers, and traced the tight arc of the numbers and the letters. She bent down and carefully pulled out the bottom left drawer of the desk, where, in the very back, she had stashed a paper bag. Inside, there was the underwear she had taken from Sandy's bureau, a lipstick she had stolen from the five-and-dime, Raspberry Ice, and the note Ann had stuck in Julia's pack the day they went camping. She placed Peter's note in the bag and began to roll up the top, but at the last moment she reopened it and pulled out her mother's note. It was on pink lined memo paper, the top edge smooth and still gummy from the kitchen pad it had been ripped from, the same pad Ann used for all of the lists she deposited in drawers and diaries and purses. It had been folded in quarters and refolded so many times on the same lines that the creases were beginning to wear precariously thin. Julia took it back to bed with her and, reaching beneath the mattress to where she kept the flashlight her father had given her that same weekend, she tented the quilt and shone the light on the note, reading it slowly, though she had long since memorized it.

Julia neatly refolded the note, clicked off the flashlight, and walked across the room to put it back in the brown paper bag.

She stumbled once in the dim and unfamiliar room as she made her way back to her own bed. She could never fathom why her mother liked to sing so much, despite her off-key voice, laughing because she knew how it embarrassed Julia and her rigid sense of propriety,
Mother,
Ann grinning mischievously, “I've grown accustomed to your face, it almost makes the day begin…”

Without quite realizing it, Julia began to hum the tune softly to herself. “Like breathing out and breathing in…”

She stopped suddenly. Far away, she heard the soft murmur of John and Sandy's voices, a low, steady flow like lava, and somewhere within she made out the shape of her own name. She lay still as still, listening.

 

R
EARDON ROSE
. “The people call Nolan Parsell.”

Parsell, who had put on a majestic amount of weight in the last few years, lumbered down the aisle of the courtroom, but even he was dwarfed by the height of the ceiling, surely designed, like the soaring of cathedrals, to remind one of a higher power. The rubber soles of his bucks squeaked when he came to a stop to be sworn in. His hand, resting on the Bible, was crablike, a glistening red swell over his wedding band.

Reardon approached the witness stand. He looked, in comparison, even neater, trimmer, all outlines and angles in his starched white shirt and narrow black tie. “Mr. Parsell, do you know the defendant, Ted Waring?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know him?”

“He was my employee for seven years.”

“And in that capacity, did you have occasion to observe Mr. Waring closely?”

“Not as closely as I should have, considering what he did to me.”

“We'll get to that shortly, Mr. Parsell. Tell me, how did Mr. Waring get along with his fellow employees?”

“They kept their distance from him. He's not what you'd call a people person.” When Parsell smiled, the pink fat of his cheeks threatened to engulf his mouth.

“Can you explain what you mean?”

“Let's just say ‘compromise' was not his middle name. You spend enough time with Waring, you learn that you do things his way or not at all. He was fine when he was in charge of a project, but if he had to work with someone else as an equal, forget it.”

“What about his temper?”

“He had one, if that's what you mean.”

“Can you give us an example?”

“Just one?”

“One will do to start.”

“He's got this thing about respect. He thinks anyone's not paying him the proper respect, he goes ballistic. Like some Mafia don.”

“Objection!” Fisk called out. “Inflammatory.”

Reardon stopped without so much as cocking his head in Fisk's direction. He had not once, since the trial began, made eye contact with Fisk, and Fisk, noting what he could only view as yet another slight, bristled more noticeably than he would have wished.

“Please stick to specific facts and incidents,” Judge Carruthers instructed.

“Okay, I got one for you,” Parsell said, so excited that a globule of spittle fell from his mouth to the wooden banister before him. “This one time, Shepard, another guy in our office, goes on vacation, to, what's it called, the space center in Florida, where they launch all the shuttles from? Anyway, he brings us each back mugs with our names on them with pictures of the shuttle. So he gives Ted one with ‘Ted' in red, white, and blue, and Ted just grimaces and hardly says thank you. So anyway, maybe twenty minutes later I hear this loud crash coming from Ted's office and go back to see if he's okay. You know what he did? He threw the mug against the wall, crashed it right into a framed poster and broke it. Shattered glass everywhere. So I ask him, ‘What did you do that for?' You know what he says? He says he hated the mug, 'cause he didn't want to think there were a thousand other Teds out there using the same thing. ‘I'm the only one,' he said.” Parsell shook his head and laughed. “You believe that?”