Authors: Amy Gentry
The concubines bathed and perfumed her and braided her hair.
“I have to bathe you,” she said. “You have to be made clean.”
The girl began moving her legs again, but slowly this time, as if tired out by her initial fury, bracing her feet against the floor to push herself around, leaving her head limp. Still flat on the ground, she rotated clockwise by inches, like a fat white goldfish in a koi pond. Every minute or two, she would stop and lie still for a moment. Then she would start again. When she was facing away from Esther, she stopped and lay completely still.
Esther got up and walked around to Charlotte’s other side so she could see her face, wondering if Charlotte would begin inching around to escape her again. But Charlotte appeared to be looking at something.
Esther got down on her knees and put her head close to where Charlotte’s head was and looked. And she saw them. The lids, curled up on the floor like they were hiding under the bed.
No, like trash.
They smelled like trash. The whole room did. It reeked with a faint sickly-sweetness that Esther had never noticed before. She’d been sleeping on a bed of garbage. Her stomach turned. She looked around at the tiny, windowless room. Not a basement. You can’t have basements at sea level. A prison. A torture chamber. The bed covered with its tattered blanket. Her whole world, so small.
When she looked back at Charlotte again, she knew that Charlotte didn’t belong here. She’d never submit to this atmosphere. She would disrupt everything, had disrupted everything already. She had twisted the room inside out, changed it somehow, like the inside-out T-shirt. Esther could almost read a message coming through the thin fabric of her reality, but the letters were backward and didn’t make sense. She had to straighten everything out.
She had to get rid of Charlotte, and she knew how. It would be a sin, but then, John David had told her often enough she was a sinner.
Esther crept up the stairs. John David lay on the sofa, unmoving, and she was struck by how peaceful he looked. With his newly shaven face and without his towering height above her, he looked more like a boy than a man. There, as she’d remembered, was the tiny red bump on his Adam’s apple where he’d cut himself shaving.
He’d
cut
himself.
There was a razor in the house.
The most logical place to look was the bathroom attached to John David’s bedroom, but she had never gone in there. All of the bedrooms were off-limits, so that even stepping into the dark, doglegged hallway gave her a shiver of discomfort. She had seen only the kitchen and the bunker, though she was allowed to use the half-bathroom up here instead of the tiny metal toilet in the bunker, which required buckets of water to operate. When she peered into the bedrooms at the end of the hall, she understood for the first time that it was an ordinary house, even comfortable. The beds were covered with bedspreads and sheets. There were lamps, teal carpets, and wallpaper—one room covered in flowers, one pebbled with gold. On the nightstand in the unused bedroom stood a bronze deer and a box of tissues with a knit cozy over it and a dust ruffle sewed to the bottom. The upper reaches of the single white tissue were coated with dust, and a few severed threads of cobweb floated in the still air.
John David’s bedroom looked much the same. She had pictured him on a pallet of some kind, but he slept on a king-size bed under a painting of a landscape, somewhere dry with mountains, as different from Houston as she could imagine.
The bathroom cabinets still held grandparent clutter: Nearly empty bottles with varying degrees of stickiness settled around their bottom edges. Small, beaked vials of eardrops and eyedrops. Silver cards bubbled with fading pills. Plastic pill cases marked with the days of the week. Nothing useful.
As she turned to go, she spotted one more thing: a trash can behind the door. She could just see, under a wad of tissues and curled-up dental floss, a wicked glint.
She looked down at Charlotte, whose eyes wobbled with tears, her penciled eyebrows tilting upward at the middle, chin dimpled beneath the duct tape. Esther put a finger to her lips. “Shhh,” she warned.
Then she ripped off the duct tape.
They stared at each other. Charlotte’s eyes were so big that for a moment, the rest of her face disappeared, and Esther felt like she was looking into a mirror, staring into her own eyes, and the rest of her became disconnected. Esther took a bundle of used Kleenex out of her pocket and began unwrapping it cautiously until she felt the razor blade in her hands: a small, wicked thing. A sin.
She showed Charlotte the blade and said, “Hold still.” The duct tape around Charlotte’s wrists was accordioned into thick, sweat-stiffened pleats. Sawing at the tape, she felt all the girl’s resistance—to John David, to the hole they were in, even to her. The tension was hot in Charlotte’s wrists. Charlotte had fought John David. She would fight anyone, and she’d never stop fighting.
Julie, that worthless whore, had lain down without a struggle.
The names popping into Esther’s head were tumbling over one another, confusing her. Every tug of the blade through the duct tape freed her a little more—freed whom, though? Charlotte? Esther? Or the other girl? She kept cutting, hearing the soft protesting squeak of the tape against the absurdly small blade as she worked it patiently back and forth, the heavy tape grabbing and twisting at the tiny blade so that she had to stop and unstick it from time to time with a small smacking noise. After an eternity, the last fibers on one side of the thick sleeve of duct tape gave. Charlotte wrenched away from her, twisting her arms apart so that the skin stretched white and red until one of them pried itself free. Her arms were surprisingly strong for being so short and thin, but Esther knew they must be sore from being taped behind her back.
Charlotte was the bravest, strongest girl she had ever seen. Tears came to Esther’s eyes, and she started wriggling out of her nightshirt, keeping it right-side out as she shrugged it off over her head.
“Here,” she said.
Charlotte took the warm shirt right away and slipped into it without so much as glancing at Esther. Then she held out her hand for the razor and started hacking at the tape on her shins. Esther grabbed the sheet off the foot of the bed and wrapped it around her torso and shoulders, tucked it under her arms. She’d worn a sheet many times before.
“Give me a hand, would you? Get this off,” Charlotte said, and Esther started peeling the damp swaths of slashed tape away from her calves while Charlotte kept working on the tape with the razor. “Okay,” she said. “I’m getting the fuck out of here. You’re going to help me, or I’ll cut you with this.” She held up the razor blade. “Got it?”
Esther nodded with a smile. She knew Charlotte wouldn’t really hurt her.
“What’s your name?” Charlotte asked.
“Esther.”
“Is that your real name?”
Esther thought about that, but Charlotte was already back to working on her knees. “That guy is a sick fuck,” Charlotte said. “Come on, tell me your real name.”
“My name is Esther.”
“Like hell it is,” Charlotte said, and with a snap, she jerked the blade through the last strand of duct tape. As she clawed the tape away from her legs and stood up, the blade dropped to the floor. The barest nudge from Charlotte’s foot sent it skittering away as lightly as a leaf. It stopped and spun in place on an uneven bit of concrete for a moment before coming to rest. “Come on. Look, you helped me. You have guts. We’re going to get out of here. Now, what’s your name?”
Julie started to speak, but Charlotte wasn’t looking at her anymore. She was looking at something right behind her and opening her mouth.
The visitation room at the Harris County Jail is a hellish, echoing cacophony; there are no handsets to use to communicate through the Plexiglas windows, and the speakers embedded in them barely work, so dozens of visitors, many with children in tow, are reduced to screaming through the glass. After Tom’s first visit, I tell him not to come back, and please, for the love of God, not to let Julie come either.
Instead, I call Jane. Once a day, in the morning, I dial her cell phone using an insanely expensive third-party account and listen to her talk until my fifteen minutes is up and the call auto-terminates. She sounds remarkably normal—tells me about her summer makeup classes, complains about finishing her papers, contemplates joining a kickball league. It’s like my transgression has opened a floodgate in her, and Jane is bubbling over with the details she’d wanted me to work so hard for before. They are details of a life that turns out to be gloriously mundane, only superficially rebellious, on the level of hair dye. Having to define herself in relation to someone who wasn’t there and who was therefore always perfect was existentially confusing for Jane. Now, with an actual person to compare herself to, she doesn’t seem to need the big gestures anymore. From what I can tell, she is flourishing.
It’s a little exhausting to listen to, but she repays my years of neglect by not asking me any questions about myself, not even a
How are you?,
which I appreciate. She doesn’t ask about Julie either, but Tom says she and Julie e-mail regularly.
(“Of course I knew it was her,” Jane said when I finally got up the courage to ask, speaking in a tone that suggested I was not a bad mother, just stupid. When I reminded her she was the one who told me Julie was lying about the cell phone, she said, “I don’t see what difference that makes. I lie all the time, but it’s still me.”)
A tiny, lonely part of me is angry that Jane hasn’t offered to come home, but long days of contemplation have convinced me that she’s waiting for me to ask, and until I stop being afraid she’ll say no, we’re at an impasse.
In the meantime, I can’t say I don’t enjoy living vicariously through Jane, a little bit. How exciting to believe in your own ability to defy the world’s expectations of you even as you fulfill them, one cliché after another. I have spent my own life looking to my left and right and finding only the well-worn tracks of my own thoughts and behavior hemming me in. Maybe it’s a side effect of studying the Romantics, those fetishists of originality who unwittingly invented two centuries’ worth of platitudes; maybe that’s why I can’t seem to respond normally to those who love me and whom I love. But I try, with Jane. I listen, I imagine the thwack of a wet kickball against a shoe on the quad, and at the end of every phone call, I feel the dingy, fluorescent-lit jail cell settle a little heavier on my shoulders.
There were witnesses—a teenage couple trudging up the lawn to make out by the glowing waterfall that night. The young man has a criminal record that will keep him off the stand, but the young woman will testify that, although she couldn’t see Julie and me from where she was, the victim was clearly visible in the fountain lights, holding up his hands and pleading for his life. She heard a shot and saw him sink into the water, but she didn’t make the 911 call.
I did that.
As luck would have it, the judge assigned to our high-profile case is a former district attorney, notorious for following her cases up the chain of appeals, attaching herself to the prosecution, and even submitting testimony condemning defendants she’s already ruled against. She’s also vocal about her relationship with Christ, and, if I had to guess, I’d say Chuck Maxwell donated to her campaign. The thought of a godless academic rotting away in the county jail, a facility well known for abuses, perhaps getting softened up for a plea bargain at the hands of her cellmates, must appeal to Judge Crofford as much as it does to the prosecution, who file motion after motion to delay my bond hearing, using every excuse from the live-stream footage of Julie whispering in Maxwell’s ear to the inflamed public sentiment over this appalling attack on a pillar of the community.
It’s true that jail is dirty, overcrowded, humiliating, and excruciatingly boring—you can’t get phone calls, incoming letters are limited in length and heavily censored, and the official process for getting a single book approved and ordered from the publisher can take months. I’d pay a lot of money for something to read to take my mind off my dismal surroundings. But if Crofford expects the inmates to harass me, she’s wrong. The women leave me alone. Word must have spread pretty quickly among them that I shot the man who kidnapped and raped my daughter.
That’s the rumor they’ve heard anyway. Proving that’s what happened is much harder, of course, and my self-defense claim rests on it. At the police station I begged them to check his DNA against the bunker-house crime scene in River Oaks, and I used my one phone call to leave a message for Alex Mercado. I have to admit that although I can see the resemblance in the shape of Maxwell’s low brows and hooded blue eyes, the bearded, square-jawed billboard minister doesn’t otherwise bear much resemblance to ten-year-old Jane’s police-artist sketch of a skinny, ponytailed guy in a hoodie.
And then there’s what Maxwell is saying: that Julie and I were blackmailing him together.
Yes, Maxwell is very much alive. Not for lack of my trying. My shot hit him low on the shoulder, and he went down on his back into the shallow water before I saw the bullet wouldn’t kill him. That’s for the best, because if I had seen right away, I would no doubt have kept on shooting until there were no bullets left. I’m glad I didn’t, and it’s not because I feel Maxwell’s death would have been such a great loss to the world; it’s not even that I prefer to see him humiliated and exposed and put away for life rather than dead. It’s just that if he’d died as a result of my shooting him, prosecutors might be pushing for a capital murder charge right now—in Texas, even an accidental death that occurs during the commission of a felony can be punished with the death penalty, and blackmail is a felony. When I pulled the trigger, the preservation of my own life was not high on my priority list.
But everything’s different now, because I have my daughter back.
I wish I could say it happened in a flash, that standing there at the Water Wall with a gun pointed at Chuck Maxwell, I could suddenly see thirteen-year-old Julie in twenty-one-year-old Julie’s face, like a Magic Eye poster you’ve been staring at for weeks that suddenly leaps into focus. But that wouldn’t be right, because I always saw her there, from the very beginning, from the moment she appeared on our doorstep. I knew; I just didn’t
believe.
Her lies and evasions made doubting easier, gave me something concrete to focus on. My new version of Julie was like the optical illusion of the candlestick-shaped negative space between two profiles. Imagine two faces—Julie then and Julie now—staring at each other in profile across a gash of grief. All this time I’ve been seeing only the ugly shape of what’s between them. The negative space of trauma.