Acts of Love (33 page)

“What is it you wanted to tell me?” Peter asked.

Julia was silent for a moment. “If I tell you, will you write it in the paper?”

“Do you want me to?”

“No.”

“Okay, then I won't. We'll call it background. That's when someone gives us information that we can't use directly or quote. But it will help with the investigation.”

“Investigation?” Julia asked.

Peter backed up. “I won't write what you tell me. I promise.” He swerved down Harcourt Avenue and leapfrogged past two cars.

“It's about Ali.”

“What about Ali?”

“She's lying.”

Peter glanced over at Julia. “What do you mean, she's lying?”

“She's lying about being in the kitchen. She came out just before it happened. She saw it. She saw him aim the gun at her head.”

Peter slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road. He turned off the ignition and looked directly at Julia. “Why is she lying?”

Julia picked at the hem of the long white shirt that spilled from the ends of her jacket, pulling a loosened thread until it gathered and caught. “She doesn't want him to go to prison. She wants us to live with him again.”

“Are you sure about this? Are you absolutely sure she's lying?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know? Did she tell you?”

“I saw her. I saw her come out of the kitchen just before it happened.”

“I see.” Peter looked away, considering what she had told him. “Do you think she'll change her story? Will she testify to what you say?”

“I don't know.”

He nodded. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“You said if I ever wanted to talk to you…”

“Of course.” He smiled reassuringly at her. “You did the right thing.” He started up the ignition and pulled back onto the road. They drove for a few minutes in silence.

“Do you ever go to New York City to visit?” Julia asked after they had made a U-turn and were headed back to the school.

“Sometimes.”

“Would you take me with you next time?”

He looked at her, surprised. “Is that what you want, Julia?”

“Yes.”

He smiled. “We'll see.”

They pulled into the parking lot. “Is she here now?” Peter asked.

“Who?”

“Ali.”

“No.”

“Where is she?”

“She's at a friend's house this afternoon.”

“I'd like to talk to her,” he said simply.

“No,” she replied curtly. “I mean, she's not ready yet. I'll talk to her.”

“You'll call me?”

She nodded.

Peter smiled at her and then reached over and gently rubbed a thin slash of Raspberry Ice lipstick from Julia's front tooth.

 

J
ULIA WATCHED FROM BEHIND
as Ali rearranged the four stuffed animals on the shelf above her bed, moving them about with intense concentration, the bear here, the lion here, just here. Over a year ago, Ali, in her rush to mimic Julia in the abandonment of childhood, had ostentatiously retired the toys, with their worn and patchy fur, their smudged, glassy eyes, but she'd lately had Sandy exhume them, and Julia often found her now holding whispery secret dialogues with one or the other, which she stopped as soon as she thought she might be overheard.

Ali twisted the brown monkey's tail across the shelf, pulling and pulling, until it fell into the precise curlicue formation she preferred. She knew that Julia was watching her, waiting to begin the evening's lesson. But Ali did not turn around, did not want to give Julia the opening, the wedge to pry herself into. There was nothing Julia had to say that she wanted to hear anymore; she no longer knew whom to believe, she no longer cared who was telling the truth.

“Ali?”

“I'm busy.” She started again on the lion, its soft brown velvet muzzle speckled with ancient milky stains.

“Ali,” Julia ordered.

“No.”

Julia stormed as loudly as she could in her bare feet to the desk and slammed down her English textbook, flipping the pages wantonly.

Ali stroked the muzzle, rubbing its smooth nap against her cheek. “Sugar bum,” she whispered.

 

S
ANDY STOOD OUTSIDE THE CRACK
in their door, peering in, watching them, listening. They had become shadow puppets to her in the last few days, real only in the reflected images—now sharp, now faint—they cast across the blank screen of her mind. She could no longer
feel
them. During her restless, wrestling nights, her unfocused days, she practiced moving them about this way and that, melding and separating them. “I mean business,” Ted had said. But always, in the end, they eluded her control, began suddenly to initiate their own movements. She heard him now, heard him always: “I don't care how you do it, just do it.”

Fisk had called twice in the past week asking her to bring Ali in so that he could pre-interview her before he called her to the witness stand. Sandy had so far managed to put him off, but she knew that he would call again.

She watched as Julia returned angrily to her desk, Ali to her stuffed animals, and she slipped just an inch inside the room. “Ali?”

Ali looked up, the monkey's tail firm in her hand. “Yes?”

“Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Julia, pretending not to notice, scribbled furiously in a notebook while Ali stepped out into the hallway and followed Sandy a few feet from the door.

She looked up at Sandy expectantly. Ali's face had lost none of its rounded softness, and Sandy thought, looking down at her, that in a bright enough light she would surely see the fingerprints of everyone who had ever touched her. She crouched before her, their heads level.

“Honey?”

“Yes.”

Sandy glanced away, picked up a piece of lint from the carpet. “That night, the night your mother…”

She saw Ali's body tense, gird itself. She squirmed now, waiting for the words, any words, but they remained a snarl in her throat. She shook her head and sighed. “Never mind.”

Ali stared at Sandy a moment longer. “Can I go back to my room now?”

Sandy nodded and watched as Ali turned away from her. Her knees cracked as she straightened up.

She walked to the bathroom. Her own face in the medicine-cabinet mirror was alien. She studied the frail but unmistakable lines that fanned from the corners of her eyes and wondered whether they had just appeared or had grown gradually without her noticing. She pulled her skin taut, released it. She could hear the phone ringing in the bedroom, but she made no move to answer it. She knew that it was Ted, that it had been Ted in the office this afternoon, refusing to leave his name with the receptionist, Ted wondering what she had decided, what she had done, Ted reclaiming his daughters. She leaned in close to the mirror and smoothed a stray brow hair with her finger. Estelle had had perfect eyebrows; it was one of the things she prided herself on, the naturally delineated arc that framed her limpid eyes. “And you girls inherited them,” she had said, smiling. Body parts were one of the things Estelle thought about. They had also both gotten her thick ankles, she sighed apologetically. The phone stopped ringing.

Sandy splashed cold water on her face and forced herself downstairs to make the girls some dinner.

 

S
HE SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM
—Julia and Ali having long since escaped the dinner table, with its overcooked spaghetti and its paltry pleasantries—and stared at the five stacks of color-coded index cards, the pile of notes, spread on the coffee table before her. She had pleaded the burden of too much work when John had asked to come over, and, in fact, her story on the latest efforts to block the construction of a waste dump two miles outside of town was way behind schedule. She flipped apathetically through her notes on different kinds of garbage: toxic, low-level radioactive, biodegradable. It was something that had once fascinated her, the refuse and detritus of life, and the natural impulse to foist it off on someone else, somewhere else, but she could no longer quite remember why.

It was close to midnight. She shuffled the index cards like a deck of tarot cards and laid them out in geometric patterns. The phone rang once, startling her so that she knocked them to the floor. She reached quickly to the phone by her side and unplugged it. She bent down and scooped up the cards, laid them out once again in a star formation and watched them, as if waiting for them to reorder themselves, but they only seemed to whirl like spin art. Often now, in the wavy moments just before sleep, she saw John's face before her, driving to work, his face, learning the truth, his face, pulling just beyond her reach, crumpled and closed and gone. And the girls, their faces, too, even worse. “I mean business,” he had said.

Still, she did not know how to do it, even if she was willing, did not know how to hold on to what had never felt like hers to begin with.

She continued to watch the cards until she fell asleep on the couch, waking at dawn with thick curlicued red lines twisting up the side of her face from the spiral notebook her head had fallen onto.

 

C
ARL
F
REEMAN LOOKED DOWN
at Ted from his perch on the witness stand and smiled confidently before he returned his attention to Fisk. He had been carefully prepped for his role as character witness, and he seemed at times to answer the questions even before they were fully phrased. Fisk, worried about how this might look to the jury, was trying subtly to slow him down, but had so far managed only to draw out his own questions.

“Mr. Freeman, let me ask you one or two more questions about the finances of your company, if you don't mind. Do you and Mr. Waring have equal access to the funds?”

“Of course.”

“In the years that you have been in business together, has Mr. Waring ever had even the hint of shady dealings with the books?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Do you trust him with the company's assets?”

“I'd trust Ted Waring with my last dime. He's as honest a man as they come.”

“And how did clients seem to feel about Mr. Waring?”

“Nothing they liked more than working with him. They knew that when he was in charge of a job, it would come in on time and on budget. They knew that he'd work eighteen-hour days if he had to, to see that happen.”

From the rear of the courtroom, the sounds of pistachio nuts being cracked and eaten provided a steady backdrop to the testimony. Judge Carruthers, who had been attempting to ignore it all morning, finally looked up at the two old gray-haired men who had haunted her courtroom on numerous occasions in the past, whispering and bickering and second-guessing her decisions in their croaking but resonant timbres, and issued a warning. “This is a court of law, not a baseball stadium,” she said. “Let me remind you that people's lives are at stake here. There will be no more eating or talking in this courtroom.” She turned back to Fisk. “You may proceed.”

“Let's move on, Mr. Freeman. I understand that you saw Ted Waring and his family together on numerous occasions?”

“Yes.”

“How would you characterize his relationship with his daughters?”

“He was, is, devoted to them. He was as proud a father as I've seen.”

“Did he appear affectionate?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see him hit either of his daughters?”

“No. Absolutely not. As a matter of fact, he once chastised me for slapping my boy. Don't get me wrong, I didn't hit him hard, but he was misbehaving something awful, and I slapped him twice across his behind. I know that's not fashionable these days, but in my book, sometimes it's the only thing that works. Anyway, you should have heard Ted read me the riot act about how bad it is to hit children. I think in all the years I've known him, that was just about the most upset he's ever been with me.”

“Did you ever witness any violence between Ann and Ted Waring?”

“None.”

“Mr. Freeman, was it your impression that Ted Waring still loved his wife?”

Freeman glanced over at Ted, who nodded imperceptibly. “I'm sure he did, yes.”

Ted looked down at the jagged crease in his pants he had been studying all morning and bit his lower lip.

“How can you be so sure?”

“When was it, maybe the Tuesday or Wednesday before, before”—he lowered his voice—“you know. He came into the office that morning with a glimmer in his eyes. Well, Alice, that's my wife, Alice and I had seen them the night before at the school play. Our little Bobby was in it with their Ali. Anyway, anyone could see they still had a thing for each other. As a matter of fact, I think they left together. So when he comes in the next morning, whistling like a teenager, it wasn't too hard to guess what had happened. He didn't give the details, but he made it clear they were going to get back together.”