Life Sentences (2 page)

She could almost smell Marcus’ discomfort when she didn’t respond, but she also knew he wouldn’t let the issue go, so his next statement held little surprise. “I want to get as far today as we can. I have to prepare for an important meeting.” He baited Pilar one more time, “You understand?”

“Sure.” Pilar’s tone could have etched glass. Of course, Marcus always put his needs before everything else. As usual, she was in the way but didn’t know why.

When she remained silent, Marcus continued, “Besides, I don’t want to meet any more of your radical do-gooder, liberal friends. I had enough of them when you went to Michigan.”

Pilar slumped into the corner. If she squeezed her eyes shut, would her father disappear? She tucked her nose into the seat. “New car?” she asked as she breathed in the scent of fresh leather.

“It’s your graduation gift,” Marcus announced, like a fulsome CEO buying loyalty from a subordinate. “It’s more reliable than that VW.”

Pilar bolted straight up. “Mine?” She slapped the leather and added with some sarcasm, “Your generosity is overwhelming. Besides, I don’t want some bourgeois Mercedes.” She’d been proud to earn the money to buy the VW.

“Bourgeois went out of style in the seventies, Pilar,” Marcus chided. His face creased with disapproving furrows as he again sought out Pilar’s reaction in the rear view mirror.

“Not among my peers, Father.” Pilar glared back.

“Oh, Pilar, get a grip on your life.” He made the turn onto eastbound I-94, heading to Michigan, dismissing her opinion, as usual. “If you plan to be a doctor, you’ll need tothink more clearly.”

Celeste, straightening her suit where it tangled in the seat belt, turned to Marcus and Pilar. “Need I remind you two that today is a celebration?” She removed her sunglasses. “Besides, Pilar, when you join Daddy’s practice, you’ll want a car that …”

Her mother’s pleas had too often trapped her in the past. “I have to return this robe before we skip town.” Pilar fanned the material up and down. “Do you think you have time for that, Father?” She no longer could accept her mother’s pretense of maintaining a happy family. Didn’t she get it? Their happy family had never existed.

“We’ll mail it back,” Marcus clipped as he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. Then he sighed deeply and stretched one arm over the back of Celeste’s seat.

Celeste smiled, though Pilar knew her mother didn’t understand. Marcus’ newly relaxed state wasn’t due to getting out of Wisconsin, but was because Pilar ignored her mother’s statement about working in his practice as a neurosurgeon.

Pilar studied the backs of her parents’ heads. It was a good thing all her personal belongings had already been shipped home. Her father probably would have left them in her apartment for the next renter. And the Mercedes — it was just like him. Appearances were what counted. Her father never missed an opportunity for him and his family to look good.

They might look good, but they’d never win an awardfor family of the year.

The car’s claustrophobic interior made it hard to breathe. Pilar sniffed deeply several times to bring oxygen back into her brain. She only smelled leather and made herself dizzy.

P
ILAR CLAWED AT HER
neck. Who was strangling her? Her body shuddered awake as she struggled to pull the robe away from where it had crept above her shoulders and tightened like a noose. She interlocked her fingers, pushed her arms forward and stretched. As the fuzziness cleared from her head, Pilar recognized her surroundings. “Can we stop? I have to pee.”

“Didn’t they teach you anything at that med school?” Marcus asked as he engaged the turn signal and exited I-94 East of Kalamazoo.

“Yes. We all must pee sometime.” Pilar’s acerbic response was wasted on deaf ears.

“I had just decided to take a break anyway,” her father remarked. Celeste’s sigh was deliberate and loud.

The illuminated arches of McDonald’s created eerie shadows over the entry to an otherwise dark parking lot. “Are you sure you can afford to eat here?” Pilar asked. “I’ve heard the martinis aren’t very good.” Why could she not resist baiting her father?

Pilar hopped out of the car almost before it came to a complete stop. She pulled the robe over her head, tossed iton the seat, and after slammed the car door. No matter her rush to reach the bathroom, Pilar couldn’t help but shout out one last comment over her shoulder, well aware that she often provoked a confrontation with her father.

“I thought as a graduate of Michigan med school, you’d earn more money.”

Before Pilar slipped inside the restaurant, she heard her mother say, “You know, Marcus, you could be just a tad more happy for your only daughter.” Pilar’s shoulders slouched at the challenge in her mother’s exhausted voice. “You should be thrilled that she wants to follow in your footsteps.”

Berating herself for making her mother’s life more difficult, Pilar stopped long enough to hear her father answer, “I didn’t ask Pilar to do that.” Leaving Celeste behind he headed to the restaurant, and yelled to her as he looked at Pilar, “She’ll just get married and waste my investment.”

At that moment, Pilar prayed her mother would get back in the car and drive off. Pilar knew she couldn’t. Where would she have gone?

A
FTER SPLASHING COLD WATER
on her face, Pilar stared at the person looking back at her in the restroom mirror. Even without makeup and with a head of thick, sometimes unruly hair, she was pretty. Over the years, she hadn’t always felt that way. She thought her full, naturally red lips overpowered her face. Who would have guessed full lips would come into vogue? Who would have guessed women wouldpump their lips with silicone to have a mouth like hers? She snickered at that image. “Little does my father know there’s not much chance that his investment in my medical career will be wasted. No man at the moment wants my full lips.”

Pilar lifted her hair to the top of her ahead and then let it drop. “You know as well as I do,” she said to the vision in the mirror like a friend, “marriage is out of the question. The one-night stands I’ve known don’t want a doctor for a wife.” She leaned into the mirror to more closely examine her features. “Besides, only Barbara Streisand could love that nose.”

Pilar thumped the mirror and headed out the door. By the time she got to the counter, her parents were in a booth eating Quarter Pounders and drinking coffee. When Pilar started to order her father yelled, “I have your hamburger here.”

The clerk raised his eyebrows as though he knew what it was like to have a father like that. Pilar shrugged in response.

“Marcus,” Celeste said with a hint of ire in her voice, “maybe Pilar would like to order for herself. She is capable.”

Though shocked by her mother’s uncommon, forceful tone, Pilar didn’t turn away from the young man taking orders and asked for a grilled chicken sandwich and a diet Coke. She paid him with a ten-dollar bill she had tucked into her pocket. When the clerk finished the order, Pilar grabbed the tray and slid into the booth beside her mother, while the other customers, clad in shorts and T-shirts, eyedthe more formal trio with suspicion.

On their way back to the car, Marcus announced, “We’ll drive straight home.”

“What? We’re not stopping overnight?” Pilar shouted loud enough to draw the attention of the group parking nearby. How many hours would she be stuck with him? “How could you make that decision without asking Mother or me?” Pilar plopped into the car and again slammed the door.

Marcus slid behind the wheel. “In case you haven’t noticed, this isn’t a democracy.”

Celeste gingerly eased herself into the passenger’s seat as Marcus started the engine. “I thought I made it clear earlier,” he stated, and checked the lot for traffic. “I must get home.”

Pilar curled up on the back seat. A familiar fatigue, induced by anger and depression, set in, as it had each time she’d gone home to Grosse Pointe Shores. Using her graduation robe as a pillow, she let the repetitive sound of the clicking tires along the highway lull her into a fitful sleep.

M
UTILATED WOMEN’S BODIES
. P
ILES
of them in a field. Murky light. A stench. Screams. Pilar woke with a start.

Marcus tapped the brake. Everyone lunged forward. “What the hell,” he shouted.

The screams were from Pilar.

“Nightmare, Father,” she whispered, feeling as though she had had an out-of-body experience. “I had a nightmare.” Pilar looked out the window at the green-and-white road sign that read, “University of Michigan next right.” They must have passed the Ann Arbor exit.

Why had she really left? Was it to defy her father’s insistence that she attend his alma mater? Susan’s smile appeared to Pilar as clearly as though her friend were in the car. Or had she really been afraid and fled because of the student murders? Had she been frightened that she would be Chad Wilbanks next victim? It was odd though, his face was plastered everywhere in the media, Pilar hardly remembered what he looked like.

M
ARCUS HAD MET
C
ELESTE
at the University of Michigan. She had thought he was quite a catch – handsome, rich, and well-established in Michigan society. Somehow, Celeste managed to ignore his need to control others. Unlike Celeste, Pilar held the opinion that her father’s arrogance overshadowed any positive attributes. She often wondered why she saw that and her mother didn’t.

As the new Mercedes sped on, Pilar stared at the back of her father’s head. Repulsed by his carefully tended hair, his manicured life, she wished that the burning in her eyes would become a laser beam and sear his locks. The wish was as dreamy and hopeless as a child’s on the evening’s first star.

True, Marcus had never been violent to Celeste or Pilar. And true, he’d always made sure his smart, talenteddaughter had attended the best schools, had the best piano and ballet teachers, gone to the best arts camp. Yet childhood memories plagued Pilar, countless times of being ignored or worse, of being ridiculed for not “having what it takes like a boy does.”

In imitation of her mother’s futile attempts with Marcus, Pilar spent the better part of her childhood trying, and failing, to please her father. Though he never said it outright, Pilar was convinced Marcus kept his distance from both of them because he harbored a deep resentment that Celeste had never given him a son, a boy he would have considered a rightful heir. That rancor spilled over into his feelings about Pilar. No matter how bright, gifted, or successful she was, she could never be the son he wanted.

She got an inkling of how hopeless her efforts were the day she won the third grade spelling bee. Victorious, she flashed her parents a radiant smile. “Exclusionary” was a tough word.

“You’ll have to do more than that if you want to make it in this world,” he said. Then he turned his attention to other fathers gathered in the auditorium, while Pilar savored what little comfort her mother’s ever-ready embrace gave her. Except for Pilar’s high school and college graduations, Marcus never attended another activity, feigning a burdensome work schedule. The same all-powerful timetable that had them speeding to Grosse Pointe Shores.

Yet, she never gave up trying.

P
ILAR RESTED HER HEAD
against the car seat. As she listened to the click, click, click of the tires, she reviewed a scene that had played over and over in her mind during the past years. Shortly after she decided to change medical schools, Pilar, at home packing, heard angry words between her parents. It was the cocktail hour, normally a time when they made small talk and sipped their evening martinis in the library, a floor below. Her mother’s hurt tone drew Pilar to the edge of the stairs to eavesdrop. Without knowing how she got there, a few minutes later Pilar stood outside the library door listening to Celeste’s accusation, “You never cared about Pilar or me.”

“Care!” Marcus’ enraged voice boomed. “Care! I’m a good provider for you and Pilar. I’ve spent my life providing for you. Look at this house, look at your clothes, your car, the servants. Look at Pilar’s education.”

As Pilar listened, an image emerged in her mind’s eye of her father flailing his arms around while his face reddened with each thundering word.

“That’s not love. And now,” Celeste stopped to take in air like an oxygen-deprived mountain climber, “now you confirm the dirty rumor spreading at the club.”

Pilar hugged her chest to stop the shaking as the word “rumor” assaulted her. She couldn’t imagine her conservative, boring father would do anything to raise an eyebrow let alone become a rumor.

Just as Pilar decided to knock and enter the library, Celeste amazed Pilar by screaming, “If you wanted a son of your own so badly why didn’t we adopt one?”

“It wouldn’t be the same — from my making. I’ve tried to explain it to you before, but you don’t want to know.”

Suddenly, Marcus opened the door. His face came within inches of Pilar’s as Celeste yelled after him, “It’s better to have a bastard born to some white trash?”

Marcus pushed by Pilar. She didn’t exist.

Pilar stood frozen, the confusing words whirling around in her head,
a bastard son, a bastard son
. All those days her father wasn’t with the family, her birthdays, her school honors and piano recitals, he must have been with his illegitimate son. Had he been with that son, too, when he didn’t take her to the father-daughter dance?

Bracing a hand against the paneled wall, Pilar steadied herself. Her chest heaved with the slamming of the front door. She was positive her father’s cowardly departure was bitter proof that there could be more to the rumor than her mother knew.

Celeste crossed the room and placed her hand on Pilar’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry you had to hear that,” she said in the same calm voice she used to console a young Pilar after she scraped her knee. “It means nothing. We’re still his real family.”

Pilar glared and said, “He’s never hugged me, Mother. How real is that?”

At that moment, Pilar vowed she would never drop another tear for her father. She finally understood that she no longer had to feel guilty about choosing a lifestyle different from her parents. In fact, Pilar began to find enjoyment goading her father into a frantic tirade about the responsibility to which a woman of her background should be committed. “Look at your mother,” he often shouted when Pilar pushed him over the brink. “She knows her place.”