And When She Was Good (13 page)

“Yes. Or I will—”

She doesn't even wait to hear the threat, and she doesn't flinch at the mess she's about to make. She takes the wine bottle, unconcerned that it's not even half empty, and cracks it on the edge of her table. The wine splatters everywhere, and a dim part of her mind registers the warning that wine stains need to be removed as promptly as possible from granite and tile, or they will set. She'll get to them soon. She holds the jagged neck of the bottle at his crotch and says, “I will cut it off. I've seen men killed. I've had men killed.” One man, her mind amends, and she didn't “have” it done, but she was responsible for it. “I'm going to write this off to the pressures you've been under during tax season. So why don't you leave? Go home and sleep on what you've done tonight, and we'll talk later about whether you're still my accountant.”

It's a bluff, and if he calls it—if he attacks her, if he forces her—she can't imagine how it will end. Scott is probably snoozing upstairs by now, and she can't decide what would be worse: allowing herself to be raped as he sleeps or having him hear her screams, being forced to call 911.

But Leo is weak, inexperienced. He doesn't have the fortitude for this game. He skitters out, zipping up as he goes. Heloise locks the door behind him and leans there for what seems like a long time, willing herself back to composure. Then she channels her namesake—gets out the granite cleaner and the tile cleaner, soaks her clothes in OxiClean, sweeps up the glass and puts it in the trash, figuring that the little pieces will be too dangerous in the recycling bin. Helen makes messes. Heloise cleans them up.

Upstairs, she finds that Scott has fallen asleep as the television plays a reality show about men with some horrible job. Do you know, Scott had asked her the other day, what the most dangerous job in the world is?

Mine,
she thought,
mine.
Statistically that's not true, not even close. She's not at physical risk doing what she does. But her job threatens her life every day, in a sense.

She lets Scott spend the night in her bed, worrying that it's inappropriate, then smiles at her own fears.
Yes, Helen Lewis,
she says, which is how she addresses herself when she's rattled.
That's what Social Services is going to bust you for—letting your eleven-year-old son sleep in your bed.

1999–2000

I
t had begun four or five years earlier, with a shovel, a child's toy, discarded under the dock, rusty and insubstantial. Yet, used with care and patience, it was capable of digging and then filling a small hole, something that wouldn't call attention to itself.

Not that anyone but Helen spent much time outdoors. After she had dug a hole or two with her shovel, she persuaded Val to let her take up gardening, a hobby that he allowed because he was house-proud in an odd way. He liked the subtle improvements to the grounds—and he liked not having to pay an outsider. He gave her better tools. She began hiding bills, the tips she cadged from her clients, in defiance of Val's rules. She wrapped them in napkins, then placed the little bundles in Ziplocs. The trick was remembering where she put them, how many there were, but she trained her memory as one would train a muscle, forcing it to take on more and more weight. She used all sorts of marking systems—stones and twigs, strange knots on trees. Her mother had liked to garden and Helen had worked by her side when she was a child, before Hector decided it was a waste of time and money and paved over much of the backyard. She planted bills with the fall bulbs, scooped out new hiding places while cutting back the liriope. That's how she came to find the gun. She was looking for a place to hide some money.

That would have been two years ago, give or take. Her little shovel, lacy with rust, yet still a sentimental favorite, almost broke when it hit whatever was hidden in the velvet Crown Royal bag. She rocked back on her heels, considering her discovery. Why had Val buried the gun on his property, with the bay right there, ready to carry away anything on its tides? True, Martin's body had been given to the bay, but it's not as if the two would wash up side by side. Val was cheap, the gun had value. Perhaps he hoped to recycle it one day.

Or maybe he just wanted a souvenir of the most reckless thing he'd ever done.

She put it back and found another place to hide her own money. But she never forgot where the gun was. She never forgot where her own money was either, and once Val was in jail and the household had been ordered to disperse, it was a simple afternoon's work to retrieve most of it. She didn't have even three thousand dollars to her name. It was enough. It would have to be.

Helen had told Val a semitruth: She did need to go home. But it was her father, not her mother, who was dying. She just figured a dying mother was more credible. Girls in her line of work don't tend to have close relationships with their fathers, and Val had inferred, over the years, that Helen's was the clichéd SOB. He even assumed that she'd been raped by her father, and Helen had let that assumption pass, much as she wanted to contradict it, to say she wasn't like Bettina, with her pervy uncle, or Shelley, whose own brother had initiated her, then shared her with all his friends.

Hector Lewis was managing to die with as much inconsideration as he had lived. Ungrateful, belligerent, he disdained Beth's expert care yet also seemed in no hurry to arrive at his destination despite his oft-stated belief that he would be treated to something spectacular in the afterlife. Because he had never married Beth, he didn't have her health insurance. And Helen did not offer him any of her money, rationalizing that it would be like tossing a crumb to an insatiable ogre. Her savings would be wiped out in less than a month if she contributed them to Hector's care.

Instead she paid her mother for room and board, then helped her navigate the maze of Social Services. It quickly became obvious that they would have to bankrupt Hector and get him into a state Medicaid program. For once in his life, Hector—with his lack of bank accounts, no property in his name, all the ruses set up to keep the first Mrs. Lewis at bay—made something easy. It took less than a month to establish that he was indigent, with no money in his own name. He complained bitterly about the facility where he ended up, and in truth it was unpleasant. But it was still too good for him, as far as Helen was concerned. She visited him just often enough to deny him the pleasure of accusing her of abandonment.

To her dismay, her mother went to his room almost every evening, directly from work. She loved him, Lord help her. She was devastated by the idea of losing him. Her mother's devotion to Hector made Helen hard, harder. How could anyone love this man?

Yet even the first—technically only—Mrs. Lewis visited him on occasion. Helen saw her there one afternoon, looking disturbingly good—hair freshly dyed, nice clothes. She had finally granted Hector a divorce last year, just in time to avoid the messy complications of his final days.

“Helen,” she said after a pause.

“Hello, Mrs. . . . ” Her voice trailed off. How could she call another woman by what should be her mother's name, even if that woman held the title fair and square? “Barbara,” she amended.

“Your mother didn't tell me you were married.”

Helen started to disavow matrimony, then realized that the comment had been based on her now-bulging belly.

“I just started to show, and we were superstitious through the first trimester. You know how it goes. Besides—do you and my mother talk that much?”

“Meghan is married,” the first Mrs. Lewis said, referring to her youngest, not quite six months younger than Helen, Hector's going-away gift to his first wife. He had doted on Meghan, but it was a Hector Lewis kind of doting—sporadic, fickle. Yet when it was time for Meghan to go to college, it turned out he had a little fund put aside for her, or so Helen had heard from her mother. It was perhaps the only time in Helen's memory that her mother had allowed herself to admit that she was angry with Hector.

“She met a very nice man at college, a real up-and-comer. She's pregnant with number three.”

Helen realized that made her an aunt, or half aunt. She supposed she was expected to ask questions about the husband and his prospects, so Mrs. Lewis could continue to brag, but all she said was “That's nice.”

“What does your husband do?”

“He's in pharmaceuticals. He travels a lot. That's why I came home.”

“And to see your father, of course.”

“Not really.”

She had not bothered to lie to her parents about Val. She simply refused to tell them anything about the father of her unborn child. When she first began to show, her mother said, “Oh, dear.” Her father said, “Once a whore, always a whore.” He was right, but he didn't know it, so she took offense. As far as Helen's parents were concerned, she had been working as a secretary in Baltimore since things didn't work out with Billy. She said nothing, offered no information about herself. They were not entitled to it. Like her father, she had no health insurance. But, reunited with her Social Security number and an address that she could prove was hers, she qualified for welfare. She quickly became expert at ferreting out any additional help offered to pregnant women. There was a pilot program for prenatal care, and she was the star participant, doing everything right. At the monthly meetings, the other women eyed her skeptically, knowing she didn't really belong. Helen didn't care. She never belonged. She was never going to belong anywhere.

Back in Baltimore, Val's confidence was beginning to erode. Martin turned out to have been a gabby type, who had told lots of people what he knew about Val's business and practices. Val was also bitter to learn, as the trial drew nearer, that the confidential informant who had told police where to find the gun was dead. A fiend, he apparently had done drugs with Bettina, exiled by Val long ago for her drug problems. She had told her drug buddy what it was like to see a man shot in front of her; he had sold the information to detectives. Because that's what it was, Val reminded Helen, a straight-up business transaction. He couldn't fault the CI, but Bettina was stupid, talking that way.

“If I ever find her—” he growled once on the phone.

“Be careful,” Helen warned him, as if she cared whether the line was tapped. “Besides, she didn't mean to get you in trouble. It was only gossip. She didn't tell the cops. This guy did.”

“Still, I wonder whatever happened to her.”

“Lord knows. Nothing good.”

Helen honestly didn't know what had happened to Bettina and doubted she was still alive. Bettina had a lot of bad habits. Besides, she had tried to fight Helen that one time.

“And now George I has flipped on me. Isn't that a kick in the ass? They pulled him in on a distribution charge, and he turned so fast that he left his shadow behind.”

“I never liked George I,” Helen said. This was true.

“That's interesting. He told me to watch out for you.”

“See? That's what I mean. I've been nothing but loyal to you, and he tries to stir up shit. He's a troublemaker.”

She had these conversations while lying in her parents' bed, evenings when Beth was at the hospital. She felt as if she was finally experiencing the teen years she had never known—hours on the phone talking to a boy, feeling him out, trying to be so entertaining that he would like her. Back in the day, Billy had never called her.

Of course, Val called collect. He had to, but Helen resented it a little, the way every conversation started with a demand that she “accept the charges.” It was a loaded phrase between Val and her. At the same time, his calls to her mother's house strengthened her alibi. She was where she was supposed to be, if not doing what she said she would be doing. Sometimes she would claim to hear her mother shouting for her, beg off the call so she could tend to her.

“Maybe we should get married,” Val said one day, out of the blue.

The odd thing was that part of her wanted to sing out,
Yes!
Her feelings for him were like a reflex. Hit it right and it would pop, just a little.
They could get married.
No one had wanted to marry her, not even Billy.

“Why?” she asked, nervous because it was out of character. “It's not as if I would testify against you anyway, for any reason.”

“But it would make me look respectable, in front of the jury. You could wear a nice suit, sit in the courtroom every day. You look classy. When you try.”

“That's not a good reason to get married, Val.”

“Best one I can think of.”

“Exactly. Marriage is not for you. You were always honest about that, and I never minded. Anyway, it's better if I stay here in Pennsylvania, look after my mother.”

“You could testify
for
me. Character witness. You could say the opposite of whatever George I says.”

“I'm not good at that.” She didn't want to say
lying
because she understood that Val no longer realized it was a lie, that he had succumbed to his defense attorney's notion that all of this was a matter for debate, dueling theories, nothing more, like arguing over what really happened in a confusing movie.

“No, you're not,” he agreed. Thank God he believed that she couldn't lie. His conviction in her inherent honesty was all she had going for her. She stroked her belly as she spoke to him. The boy inside her was a considerate child, who seldom kicked or caused her any discomfort. She swore he had figured out a way to position himself so she had less pressure on her bladder than the other women in her prenatal group had on theirs.

She was eight months pregnant now, but she tried to walk every day, even as the days grew colder, rawer. She waddled around the town with no destination in mind. One day she walked past the McDonald's, where she remembered seeing her father with Barbara Lewis. What if she hadn't seen them? Would he still have turned on her? Probably.

And one day she found herself walking past Il Cielo, reinvented as a Mexican restaurant and cheaply at that, with the name reconfigured to read “El Chappos.” Helen was pretty sure that
chappos
was not a Spanish word, and the menu, posted in the front window, indicated that the owner's first language was neither English nor Spanish. Later her mother told her that El Chappos was run by a very nice Albanian family. Awful food but nice people. That put it one up on Il Cielo.

Standing outside the restaurant, seeing its past life—
her
past life—in the little bits of blue that peeked out at the corners and eaves, Helen remembered herself at seventeen, up to her elbows in Marshmallow Fluff. Now it was as if her whole life were stuck in Marshmallow Fluff. Once the baby arrived, she would be worse than stuck. She had no illusions about what it would mean to be a mother. Everything would be harder. The only possible reward would be the satisfaction of knowing she was a good mother, succeeding where her own had failed. No one would come before her child. Certainly no man.

But how to provide for her baby? What could she do? What kind of life could she give a child, with no degree, no education? The kindly social worker at the prenatal group wanted her to go to work as a motel maid or a cashier. “You'd be manager in no time,” she said cheerfully. But Helen didn't want to stay here. She had to find a job where she could be her own boss, make her own hours. How did someone do that?

Luckily for her, Val was in the market for a new protégée, locked up as he was for killing the last one.