Acts of Love (39 page)

“No.”

“Not at any time?”

“No.”

“I have no further questions.” Reardon had not moved an inch from his desk. He gently took his fingers from its edge and sat down in the large wooden chair behind it, his back perfectly straight.

“You may step down,” Judge Carruthers informed Ted.

He did not move, did not seem to hear. He only stared at Reardon, with his easy lines and his easy answers and his easy life. “It was an accident,” he muttered angrily.

“You may step down, Mr. Waring,” Judge Carruthers insisted.

 

T
HE LATE-AFTERNOON LIGHT
made Sandy's eyes water after the hours in the dim, khaki-colored courtroom. Her fingers still ached from clenching her fists while she listened to Ted's testimony. She hurried down the stairs, away from him. She stopped when she came to her car, half a block away, and put one hand on the hood to steady herself as she dug for the keys in her purse. But just as she found them, amid the knotted tissues and the loose change, she shook her head with one sudden motion, and swung the large bag back onto her shoulder. She pushed off from the car like a swimmer from the end of a pool and once more started moving, with long and rapid steps. She had never liked walking with no goal, no object in mind—she did not stroll—but now she simply went, went quickly, the velocity an end in itself. She walked past the stone library, where a clump of children were just getting out of story hour, and headed for the start of Main Street, crossing at the stoplight just as it flashed red.

She slowed only when she got to the last large lot at the far end of the street, a bookend where the town began to thin out. It had been years since they had torn down the old beige school building here that she and Ann had attended to make room for the Grand Union. She still wondered each time she passed what had happened to the battered rock out front where she and Ann used to meet.

It was there she had waited for Ann the day they ran away.

A car honked impatiently, and she realized she was standing in the supermarket's exit lane.

It had been Sandy's idea, of course, hatched and warmed in the small musky bedroom at Rafferty Street when they were eight and ten. She had been thinking of it for as long as she could remember—the desire for escape concurrent with the coming of consciousness, of memory—but she knew that she would never be able to convince Ann to join her, Ann who saw the romance of it but never the necessity. What had happened to make Ann change her mind?

Jonathon had cooked dinner that night, frankfurters and mashed potatoes, and set the table with the mismatched plates they had gotten when they were first married, now badly chipped. Estelle smiled up at him with a worn radiance, grateful for his effort, she had been so tired lately. She pushed her fork into the mound of potatoes he had lumped on her plate. He watched as she brought it to her mouth, holding the fork in her plump fist like a child.

Suddenly, her face reddened and twisted. She reached her fingers into her mouth and pulled out an inch-long screw covered in gelatinous white. “You're trying to kill me,” she cried to Jonathon. “I've always been a burden, and now you've found a way to kill me.”

He laughed at first. “Don't be absurd. I have no idea how that got in there.” Really, it shouldn't have been surprising, considering the state of the house.

But she was carried away, carried off, beyond such rationales. “You want to get rid of me! You've always wanted to get rid of me. Murderer!”

He went over to her, her face wet, contorted, and grabbed her and held her tight. “I would never want to get rid of you. I love you. I love you,” he repeated again and again, until the sobbing subsided and she looked at him anew, bleached pure and limp by her own hysteria. “You're the only thing in the world to me,” he whispered.

He bent down, kissed her, and she opened her mouth to him greedily, unendingly, while Ann and Sandy sat at the table, their hands in their laps, watching. Jonathon and Estelle never turned around, never said a word to them, only left the room, their arms around each other, moving and squeezing and grabbing each other's flesh in gluttonous handfuls as they walked back to their bedroom. Ann and Sandy listened to the door close tightly shut, and then they got up and emptied the full plates into the trash. It was that night that Ann finally agreed, okay, yes, let's go.

They took what money they could gather, four dollars and thirty-two cents, to school the next morning. They did not eat their lunches, but saved them for when they would need them later. At three o'clock Sandy and Ann met at the rock and began to walk out of town, past the Mobile station and the Methodist church, and out onto the road.

“Where are we going?” Ann asked.

“I don't know.”

They followed old Route 93 up into the hills, climbing gradually above Hardison. It grew cold and dark, and before long they were hungry. They stopped by the side of the road and ate their sandwiches quickly and began to walk again, the previous night and its imperatives growing farther and farther away with each step.

It was not yet six o'clock when Ann asked, “Where are we going to sleep tonight?”

“On the ground.”

“It's cold.”

“It's not that bad.”

They walked on, following the unlit road.

“I think we should go home,” Ann said at last. She stood still, would not take another step. Below them, they could see the town's lights, a more carefully ordered geometry of white and black than it had ever seemed before. Ann turned around resolutely and began walking back.

And Sandy followed her. Followed her without another word. Without argument or attempted persuasion or feeble protest. She simply turned around and followed her silently back.

Sandy had long since left the Grand Union parking lot without noticing where she was headed. What she had never known, still did not know, was if Ann had ever really thought, the way Sandy had, that they would truly run away, or if Ann had merely gone along to humor her—if, for her, it was just a lark. She had thought of that often in the years that followed and had even asked Ann once. Ann laughed. “Jeez, I forgot about that. Well, we wouldn't have gotten very far on four dollars and thirty-two cents, would we?”

But Sandy had never forgotten that afternoon, had played it over a million times in her mind, for she had learned something that day that had so startled and shocked her that the glare of its realization would never completely fade. It was the first time that she had come face to face with her own timorousness, and the taste of it, the taste of her own cowardice where she had previously thought there was only limitless bravado, remained in her mouth, a warning, a doubt, a haunting sour taste that she could never fully get rid of.

She kicked a stone willfully out of her way and headed back to her car.

 

T
HAT EVENING
, while Sandy cleared away the cardboard containers of their Chinese dinner, Julia turned to her and asked, “What do you think is going to happen?”

“With what?”

“With Daddy. With the trial. Is he going to be free?”

Sandy sighed and looked away. “I don't know.”

“But he might?”

“He might.”

“Would we have to go live with him?”

“I just don't know, Julia.”

Julia left the kitchen, and did not reappear again that night.

 

J
ULIA CREPT DOWN THE HALLWAY
to Sandy's room, peered in, watched her sleeping, so silent and so still. She took a further soft step, listened to Sandy's breath, saw her arm, slender and bare, slip farther off the side of the bed. Her hair, a dark tangle, fell across her face, down her back. Her toes, sticking out of the blanket, had chipped red polish. Julia stepped back carefully, still watching Sandy as she closed the door.

She returned to the window seat in her own room, hugging her knees to her chest so tightly that the joints ached. The night stretched around her, some hours seeming long and distorted, others short, compressed. She had never stayed up this late before, but all she was conscious of was the steady tick of her own mind.

At 6:00
A.M
. she rose, slipped out of her long white nightgown, and began to grab at her clothes, sleeves, pant legs, socks, flinging them from the bureau, getting twisted in their appendages.

There was only this: the twirl of ideas clanging into each other, bouncing away, hitting the walls of her brain, jangling any thought save one—No.

She was just yanking a heavy sweater over her head when Ali opened her eyes. “Ssshhh,” Julia whispered. “Listen to me, Ali. I have to leave early. When you go downstairs, tell Sandy that I went to school to work on a science project before class.”

“But school doesn't open this early.”

“She won't know that.”

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Are you coming back?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“I don't know.”

“You won't leave me, will you?”

“No, Ali.”

“Please, can't you just tell me where you're going?”

“I can't. You'll find out later.”

“Can't I come?”

“No.”

Julia crept past Sandy's room, peering in one last time, and then she carefully made her way downstairs and out of the house.

The morning rested dank and shallow on the quiet streets. A few of the kitchen windows on the first floor of the houses Julia passed were just beginning to light up; here and there a car pulled lazily from its driveway as she ran, stopped to catch her breath, and ran again. As she entered town, an elderly couple in running suits and down jackets came out of the magazine store with the morning's paper. She turned the corner onto Fieldston Street.

He was just coming out of the shower when he heard her knocking.

“Julia.” She stared at his thin but muscled torso, smooth and hairless, as he began to button his shirt. “Shouldn't you be on your way to school?”

“I have something to tell you.”

“Okay.” He looked at her anxious face, the top of her forehead rimmed with beads of sweat. “Sit down.”

She perched on the edge of a chair at the kitchen table while he poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down across from her. “What is it?”

Julia felt her face flush, burn. She looked past him to the counter, where a box of frosted flakes stood open. She stared at it for a long moment before turning slowly back to him. “My father slept with Sandy.”

The coffee splashed in Peter's cup as he put it down. “Whoa, back up there. Where did you hear this?”

Julia's eyes glistened and she averted them before answering. “I didn't hear it. I saw them.” Her voice was so strained that he had to lean across the table to hear her.

“You saw them?”

She looked up, directly at him, apprehension and defiance battling across her face. “Yes.”

He sat back in his chair, ran his tongue over his teeth, and blinked. “When?”

“A while ago.”

“When your mother was still alive?”

Julia nodded.

“Was your father still living at home then?”

Her lip trembled slightly. “Uh-huh.”

“Julia.” Peter leaned forward, pushing aside his coffee cup. “How did you see them?”

“One night, I was walking home from my friend's, Jenny Defoe's, house. She lives near Sandy. It started raining, and I thought Sandy could drive me the rest of the way home, so I took this shortcut I knew to her back door.” Julia tucked her lips into her teeth.

“Go on.”

She twisted the edges of her shirt before continuing. “I saw them through the kitchen window. They were lying on the floor.” She looked at Peter, her eyes wider now, resolute, indignant. “Naked.”

“You're sure it was your father?”

“Yes.”

“It might have been someone else.”

“No. I'm telling you the truth,” she insisted.

Peter ran his hand across his freshly shaved chin, thinking. “Why are you telling me this, Julia?”

“Doesn't it prove he did it?”

“No, it doesn't.”

“But he lied to my mother. He
lied
to her.” Her voice climbed in precipitous jags as she looked at him. “Can't you write that?”

“Do you know what this will do to Sandy?”

“So?”

“You never told anyone about this? You never told your mother?”

Her mother, so easy to cry, to bruise. Julia shook her head.

“Are you willing to go on the record?” he asked.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you're my only source at the moment. I'll need to quote you.”