Life Sentences (23 page)

“Even with all this, she still might not talk,” Teena warned. “After all, you're threatening her livelihood.”

“I can promise her part of the book's profits, if it comes to that, replace the income she's going to lose. But you're right, she might be reluctant to speak. I'd like to go alone, if you don't mind.”

Teena opened her mouth as if to object but ended up nodding. “Yeah, change it up. Seven years, she never said more than a dozen words to me, the same words over and over. Maybe it will be different with you.”

And maybe it won't,
Cassandra realized.
What will I do then? What does it take to make Callie Jenkins talk?

“WHAT DO YOU THINK?”
her father demanded the next morning.

“Very striking,” Cassandra said, inspecting the restaurant, housed in one of Baltimore's old mill buildings. These reclaimed mills made Cassandra feel old, given that she had grown up less than a mile from the Dickey Mill in its final years, when the trucks still rumbled in and out. Then again, on four hours of sleep, everything made Cassandra feel old.

“Not the décor, the
food.
It's part of the locavore movement, devoted to area foods.”

“All I've had so far is a cup of coffee, and that's not local, surely?”

“It's March,” her father said, defensive of his discovery. “And they're
not a hundred percent local or all we'd be eating would be, I don't know, some kind of roots with eggs, I guess. But, philosophically, they're trying to use as much local food as possible.”

Cassandra usually admired her father's proclivity for novelty, especially now that it was fixated on food. He often surprised her with his knowledge of odd cuisines, many of which weren't even available in the Baltimore area. In fact, she often found herself wondering as he spoke, say, of Malaysian food, if his knowledge was secondhand, gleaned from reading. But then, how else did a classics professor approach anything, except via text? And dining with him was more agreeable than eating with her mother, who chose the same old places and worried about the prices, expressing shock if Cassandra dared to order a starter and an entrée, and never mind the anxiety prompted by the very words
à la carte.

“I'm sure it will be good,” she said. Her head was pounding from lack of sleep. It had been 2
A.M.
by the time Teena had left, although their additional hour of searching had provided no new leads. Still, she couldn't complain about what they had discovered: Myra Tippet, Fatima, Callie Jenkins, all receiving money via Julius Howard's campaign. She hadn't had time to check with a lawyer on the legality of this, not that she cared. The main thing was to persuade Callie, once she tracked her down, that she had something to lose by not confiding in Cassandra.

“Cassandra, are you even listening to me?”

“I'm sorry,” she said automatically. “Late night. The book took an interesting turn. I think I've found Callie Jenkins.”

“Ah.” Her father waited and she realized that he expected her to fill him in on the latest developments and, as usual, seek his counsel. She suddenly realized she no longer wanted to. For one thing, she couldn't tell him the whole story, the complication of Reg. He would scold her—not for the affair, of course, he wasn't that much of a hypocrite. But the ethics would disturb him. Her father was funny about that. However
abominable his personal behavior, he had always been ethical in his professional life. His personal life had cost him dearly at Hopkins, which had been unfair. He was far from the only philanderer on faculty and, unlike some others, he wasn't a serial seducer of students. Besides, whatever his personal failings, he was a terrific teacher, demanding yet fair. He had taught until his seventy-fifth birthday and never phoned it in or gone on autopilot.

In his final year of teaching, Cassandra had sneaked into the back of a lecture hall and listened to her father speak about Homer. “The wine-dark sea,” he had intoned, “also known in various translations as the wine-red sea.” He had reviewed the problems of translation, the doubts that some scholars had about Homer's description. He touched lightly on the Fagles translation, which had broken his heart, largely because he could not deem it objectionable in any way. It had been, Cassandra knew, her father's fantasy that he would produce such a work, a seminal translation. But it had been a mere fantasy, and it had been wrecked when someone else achieved what he could only dream of.

Abruptly, he had broken off from his prepared talk and asked, “How many of you are in the writing sems?” The latter being Hopkins shorthand for the writing seminars, an MFA program of considerable reputation. A few hands went up. “With all due respect,” he said, “you will probably never come up with anything that will rival Homer. Even a phrase as deceptively simple as ‘the wine-dark sea' will prove to be beyond most of you.” Then, in an exceedingly kind tone: “But it's still worth trying.” Cassandra had realized she was being held to no less a standard, despite the fact that the writing sem students would have killed to reach her level of success. She would never write a line as good as Homer. Was that an unfair standard? Or was her father admirable in his obstinate principles, his refusal to lower the bar even for his daughter?

Now she found herself wondering if she might at least have his admiration for her enterprise, if not for her writing.

“Callie is in Delaware, although I'm not sure where. I have to check to see if I can get the address through the Department of Motor Vehicles or some other source.”

“And what will you say when you confront your Holy Grail? Are you prepared?”

“I think so.” Again, refusing the implicit invitation to share, seek his counsel.

“Real life,” her father said, “can be disappointingly banal. Suppose she says, ‘Yes, I killed my child, leave me alone.'”

“It would be an answer.”

“Answers are overrated.”

She tried again. “It would be a beginning.”

“Toward what end?”

“I don't know. That's what makes this interesting to me. I've lived my other books before writing them. I knew the endings and I shaped my memories to justify them in a sense. Even with the novel—”

“Not your best work,” her father said. “You're a good writer, Cassandra, but fiction doesn't suit you.”

She had to swallow hard to keep from crying. How embarrassing, to be fifty and still capable of being moved to tears of shame by a parent. Childish, petulant thoughts warred within her, eager to escape.
My words were good enough to help buy you the apartment at Broadmead. No, fiction was your métier, as an adulterer. I could never come up with better stories than the ones you told Mother.

Instead, she found herself asking, “Did Annie feel bad about breaking up our family? That's one answer I wish I could have.”

“What an interesting transition,” her father said. He was many things, but not obtuse. “I've never liked that term—
breaking, broken
—when it comes to families and relationships. They're not vases. They're dynamic organisms that grow, change, and adapt. Imagine if we applied Darwin's ideas to our relationships and saw them as evolving, changing in order to facilitate our survival.”

“But living organisms—at least vertebrates—have things within them that can be broken.”

“Bones, not hearts. The heart does not break. The heart falters, the heart stops, the heart develops fatty deposits—”

“
There's
a poetic image.”

He laughed and Cassandra joined him. She didn't have the will to push him forward, to demand emotional reparations at this late date. She didn't have the
heart,
as a muscle or as a metaphor. Then again, perhaps she would ask him onstage at the Gordon School, use her five hundred onlookers to demand the answer that had long eluded her.

 

CASSANDRA WAS GETTING READY
to leave for Delaware when her cell rang. She saw her mother's name, thought about not answering, felt guilty for the thought, then picked up just before it went to voice mail.

“About dinner tonight…,” her mother began.

Had she double-scheduled her parents? How could she have made such a mistake?

“Oh, Mom, I was about to call you. Something urgent has come up and I have to cancel.”

“That's all right.” It clearly wasn't.

“It's for the book. I've found Callie, I have an appointment with her.” She hated to lie, but it was easier than admitting that she was driving almost two hours to confront a woman on her doorstep.

“Of course. You probably should have left earlier, but then you had breakfast with your father, right? He just called.”

“Really?”

“He said you looked tired. And a little thin.”

“I was up late, that's all. I doubt I've lost any weight.” Although perhaps she had. Since meeting Reg, she had been buzzing along on that amphetamine-like high, uninterested in food. Then again, her father's choice of restaurant, while interesting in theory, had been challenging
in practice. He hadn't been far off about the root vegetables and eggs. The so-called local cheese had been appalling.

“Can we reschedule for tomorrow, Mom?”

“Well, it's a Sunday and I hate going out on Sunday, everywhere is brunch, brunch, brunch, you can't get a BLT. I'm not saying that I want a BLT, that's only an example—”

“Dinner, then.” She hated to interrupt but saw no other choice.

“You eat so late.” Cassandra generally liked to eat dinner at seven or seven thirty, no later than eight.

“Dinner,” she repeated, making it an edict. “Someplace new. But we can go at six or so.”

“I'm not sure I know any new places—”

“I'll figure it out, Mom, and call you with a plan.”

 

ON A SUMMER SATURDAY,
the drive to Bridgeville would have been choked with beach-bound traffic, but Cassandra made good time, even on the long two-lane stretch of 404, and found herself there in less than two hours. She took the bypass by mistake and had to backtrack, finding herself in the heart of one of those small towns that declared, “If you lived here, you would be home by now.” Was that a tautology? The houses along the main streets were charming enough, inviting even, and Cassandra wondered if she could live in such a place, then decided immediately that she never could. Everyone would know her business. In fact, she had obtained Callie Jenkins's address not through the Department of Motor Vehicles, but because Teena had asked a cop friend to call an acquaintance here, chat him up, ask if he knew Callie by name or description. “Oh, yes, the tall black gal,” he had said. “Keeps to herself, drives a maroon Chevy Beretta, has a mother in a nursing home over to Denton, I think. Lives on Walnut.” All Cassandra had to do was cruise the street and look for the car.

There it was, in a driveway. The house was plain, nothing special,
not one of the Victorian charmers on the central road, but a white-vinyl-sided Cape Cod with green shutters. Cassandra circled the block, circled again, and would have gone around a third time if she wasn't worried that she would draw suspicious glances from neighbors. She forced herself to park. Even then, she needed another five minutes before she got out of the car and went to the door.

Her knock didn't bring forth any sound at first and she was almost relieved. Good, she could go home. But then she heard a slow, gentle tread, someone light-footed, not at all in a hurry to see who was calling unannounced on a Saturday afternoon.

“Yes?” the woman said, peering at Cassandra through the storm door.

There are people you can recognize ten, twenty, forty years after childhood. Tisha, Donna, even Fatima fell in that category. They had changed, but they were still recognizably themselves. But Cassandra hadn't seen Callie Jenkins since she was fourteen and she had undergone the kind of metamorphosis that was straight from a fairy tale, “The Ugly Duckling” to be exact. The newspaper photos of her had not captured her extraordinary beauty, which was worn yet still very much in evidence. She must have been a knockout in her twenties, yet the photographs had been singularly unflattering. The editors had probably always chosen shots of her frowning or grimacing. Or perhaps it was simply that she was so often looking down in those pictures. But given how she appeared now, at fifty, she must have been amazing in her twenties. Tall, lean, yet not without curves. Strong features, huge blue-green eyes. Her hair and clothing, the things that she controlled, were less remarkable. Not that she was unkempt or messy, just that she had expended very little effort on them. She wore green slacks and a black sweater; her straightened hair was pulled back into something that was neither a ponytail nor a chignon.

“Can I help you?” she said, her voice polite and curious, nothing more.

“Callie? I'm Cassandra Fallows, we went to school together.”

Callie took a step back, one arm braced against the door, as if Cassandra might try to break it down.

“I remember,” she said. “You always were a hand-up-in-the-air girl.”

“What?”

“One of those girls who knew all the answers. What do you want?”

“I'm a writer, I'm working on a book—”

“No.”

“But—”

“I can't talk to you. Just can't. I'm sorry.” She took another step back, started to close the main door.

“I know about Amuse Catering.”

That stopped her.

“And your mother.”

“Leave my mother out of this.”

“Fatima, too. Did you know that? She gets money, too, through the campaign, presumably for keeping silent.”

“I am a caterer,” Callie said. “I make baked goods for a local school.”

“Do you bake enough to pull in sixty thousand a year?”

“Look, call the cops if you want. Call a press conference, tell everybody how smart you are. I still won't talk to you.”

Cassandra didn't want to say the last thing she had to say, in part because she didn't want to find out why it mattered. But she had no choice.

“Reg Barr has a daughter.”

Callie Jenkins narrowed her green eyes, stared Cassandra down. If she had been lying, she would have folded then and there. So this was the woman whom Teena had faced, the one who had defeated her.

“With Donna?”

“Of course with Donna.” She bristled at the implication that Reg was faithless, despite her firsthand knowledge that he was exactly that.