Authors: Daphne Uviller
I heard ice rattling and peered out from under my arm to see my mother conveying their nightly sherry and whitefish salad ritual out on a small brushed aluminum tray.
My dad took a sip of sherry and smacked his lips.
“Ah, Zephy, it’s too bad you don’t like to drink. Times like this, it would do you good.”
I groaned and closed my eyes again.
I felt my mother sit down beside me. She started stroking my hair and I squirmed away from my father and closer to her. I intended to soak up every ounce of coddling before my brother the auteur arrived the following week.
“Zephy, honey, I’m not sure I understand,” she said gently. “You’ve only known this boy—”
“He’s a
man,”
I said grumpily. “I date
men.”
“This
man
for two weeks, and you’re already fighting? Maybe he’s not worth the trouble.”
“You’re just saying that because you don’t want me to date an exterminator,” I said accusingly, knowing even as I said it that I was getting myself in trouble. Her hands stopped moving and she tapped one nail lightly on my scalp.
“Zephyr,” she said sternly.
“Sorry,” I muttered, pushing myself up into a sitting position.
“Why are
you
having trouble with the idea of dating an exterminator?” she asked.
“I’m not,” I said, trying to figure out whether that was true. “I mean, do I wish he had a more exciting career, like, say, I don’t know, a … a homicide reporter for a major newspaper? Yeah, I guess I do.”
My parents looked at me quizzically—I’d successfully kept Hayden a secret from them.
“You’re the ones with these important, successful careers,” I whined, hating the sound of my own voice, but unable to resist the tantalizing allure of regression.
“You’ve
sent me subliminal messages about who’s right for me to date and who isn’t.
You’re
afraid I’m never going to succeed at anything.”
“Whoa,” my dad said, raising his eyebrows.
“Two different things,” my mom said.
“You can date whomever you want, as long as he’s kind and good to you.”
“That’s different from what we hope you’ll make of your life.”
Hope. She said “hope.” Gregory had said a parent’s responsibility was to distinguish between their hopes and their expectations for their kids. Mine actually knew the difference. A sob sprang up from my throat. I tried to gulp it back, but it exploded and I flung myself against my mother’s shoulder.
I felt her hand her drink to my dad and then wrap both arms around me. I watched the footprints on their Greek dancing instructions bounce up and down as I shook. I cried because I didn’t want to be a super; because I was trying to make cosmic lemonade out of lemons and it wasn’t working; because I couldn’t understand how I could be so ambitious and so lazy at the same time; because Gregory knew I thought he wasn’t good enough for me and I hated myself for that. I couldn’t blame LinguaFrank for Gregory’s desertion. Gregory kept trying to come back and I kept sending the message that I had better options. I hated myself for the way I’d treated him.
My dad patted my ankle. “You know, Zephy,” he began gently, “what so many people don’t understand is that true love, if you’re lucky, means in- laws, mortgages, and diapers. If you look for constant excitement, you’re going to wind up alone. Either because you won’t find it, or because your true
love will run out of oxygen climbing Everest.” He gave a halfhearted chortle.
I sat up and my mother wiped my tears away with the length of her thumb. “I’m not looking for constant excitement,” I whimpered. “I just want…”
My parents looked at me expectantly, as if they were on the brink of hearing an answer to a question they’d asked themselves repeatedly. Perhaps they wanted to hear that I was ready to resume law school, or pick up a stethoscope again, or sit for the Foreign Service exam. I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but at least now I knew who I wanted to be with.
“I want the exterminator,” I said plaintively. “And I missed my chance.”
T
HE NEXT DAY, I SLUMPED IN MY SEAT BESIDE THE BEEFY
orthodontist and bided my time until I was kicked back into the jury pool with the rest of the untouchables. I wound and unwound a loose thread on my black sweater—the only item of Tag’s I’d ever successfully fit into—hoping that the next case wouldn’t have such industrious attorneys. While Commando Suarez interrogated the doggie spa owner behind me, I tried to keep my gaze from straying to the mop of red hair in the audience. The energy it took not to look toward the fourth seat of the third row made my neck ache, and I wondered, statistically, how many times per minute I’d otherwise be inclined to look there.
The room was packed again, but now the sight of Maria Anna Mariza in an electric blue suit, whispering to her seat-mate—I still couldn’t remember which Pelarose underling he was—only depressed me. Sitting in the jury box just made me wish I was back on Twelfth Street sweeping cigarette butts out of the alley.
A court officer who’d been conferring with two of the thick- necked buzz- cuts—today they had squeezed themselves into pigeon- gray suits—straightened up and pushed his way through the swinging door into the well. He whispered to the clerk, who stood up, tottering on heels that looked like engineering impossibilities. She slipped a note to the poker- faced assistant sitting in the box adjacent to the judge’s bench. He read it and whispered to the judge, who looked, I swear, straight at me. I sat up in my seat, resisting a nervous urge to rearrange my hair.
“Mr. Suarez, excuse me,” the judge said, interrupting Clarence Darrow mid- spittle- spray. “Gentlemen, is this really necessary right now?” She addressed the buzz- cuts, who stood up from their seats in the audience to answer her.
“Yer Ahna,” the rounder one said in heavy Bronxese, “we apologize for the disruption, but we do feel that it is necessary at this time.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hayden’s head swivel between the men and the judge.
“In the future, I suggest you do your job while the court is in recess instead of disrupting my jury selection.” She looked at them sternly.
“Yes, Your Honor,” the taller one said respectfully. “We don’t foresee that we’ll need to do this again anytime soon.”
The judge sighed and looked at me again.
“Ms. Zuckerman, would you please follow these two gentlemen? I apologize to all parties for the disruption.”
I swallowed hard and felt my ears grow hot. I’d never heard of anything like this happening. Had they decided I’d lied on the stand about my living situation? But I really did live alone! Were they going to take me downtown and book me for perjury? They can’t take me downtown, I already
am
downtown, I thought wildly, gathering up my backpack.
I caught a glimpse of Suarez, his eyebrows raised in surprise. The blond prosecutor frowned and scribbled something on her notepad. She had wanted me. I knew it! Oh, it would have been a beautiful trial.
I trembled slightly as I made my way past the knees of my former fellow jurors. The entire courtroom was silent except for the sound of my footsteps and the rustle of the buzz- cuts’ suits. I kept my head down as I followed them toward a side door, but at the last moment, I glanced up. Hayden was looking right at me. Instead of his usual sexy, mischievous, infuriating grin, he looked genuinely curious. Intrigued. So this is what he looked like on the job, picking up the scent of a story.
This, I defended myself to my demons, this is why I fell for him. In fact, Hayden looked more interested in me at that moment than he ever had when we were alone together in bed. The thought was tantalizing—
finally,
I had his attention—but mostly, it was breathtakingly depressing.
Goon Number One held the door for me and Goon Number Two gestured for me to go first. The tops of their heads might have looked like freshly mowed lawns, but they were gentlemen.
“Am I in trouble?” I blurted out the moment the door shut behind us. We stood in a narrow, fluorescently lit hallway with tiles peeling from the ceiling.
“Not at awl,” said Number One, the rounder one. Number Two said nothing. Good cop, bad cop. My fingers were white against the strap of my backpack, where I clutched it to my shoulder. I relaxed my hand and wiped the palm on my pant leg.
“I’m Agent Mulrooney, and this is Agent Underhill. Just come this way,” Mulrooney continued soothingly. “We got a few questions.”
Agents? FBI? They really were going to get me for fudging
on “Do you live alone?” I felt a new quiver in my right eyelid. We turned a corner and started along an identical hallway.
But what if they weren’t who they said they were? I thought frantically. What if they were tied to the Pelarose family, but
posing
as law enforcement, and they had fooled the judge and everyone else and now they were going to dump me in the East River? Maybe, I thought, my heart pounding in time with my eyelid, the Pelarose family and the Sanchez family were allies, and they were all out to avenge my father’s prosecution of Tommy “The Manhole” Sanchez.
“Good thing that rain let up, huh?” said Mulrooney
“Yeah, I got tickets at Shea tonight,” said Underhill.
At least I knew they weren’t planning to keep me all night. Or it meant they were going to dispose of my body somewhere in Queens in time to fortify themselves with knishes before the first pitch.
We turned another corner and passed a door with a sign announcing: “Jury Deliberating. Do Not Enter.” A court officer of bouncer- like proportions was tilting back in his overtaxed chair, holding a dented phone to his ear, and squinting at a scrap of paper.
“Take duh casserole outta duh fridge. Turn duh oven tuh tree- fifty. Stickitina oven.” He paused and listened for a moment. “I dunno, half ow- ah? What am I, some kine uhva chef?” He hung up, letting the legs of his chair thunk forward, and rolled his eyes at us.
“It ain’t enough I gotta run all around fuh dem?” He jerked his head toward the citizens carrying out justice behind the closed door. “I gotta tell their fuckin’ husbands howda cook?”
It didn’t look to me like he did much running.
Mulrooney made sympathetic clucking noises and opened the door next to the one the chef was putatively guarding.
A jury room. The single window was cracked and the
table’s cheap veneer had been decimated by ballpoint- wielding jurors unable to make their fellow citizens see things their way. A government- issue water pitcher sat sweating in the middle of the table, surrounded by a dozen glasses. I was growing more terrified by the minute. Why couldn’t they have just excused me? Why had I been escorted through a rabbit’s maze to a room where no one could hear me scream?
Underhill pulled out a chair and gestured for me to sit down.
“I really do live alone,” I blurted, clutching my backpack as if it were my only friend in the world. “The apartment has its own entrance, its own kitchen. I even have a washer and dryer,” I said, my voice cracking.
Mulrooney raised his eyebrows at Underhill. “Just relax,” he said. “I’m sure you have a lovely apartment.” He poured a glass of water and pushed it across the table.
Underhill pulled out another chair and straddled it backwards. Oh, come on, guys, I couldn’t help thinking. This isn’t an audition for
SVU.
I took a sip of water.
“A few weeks ago, Saturday, the fourth of April, to be exact,” Underhill said, looking me straight in the eye, “you were seen fleeing the St. Regis Hotel.”
The wheels of my brain screeched to a halt. Crash test dummies flew into a brick wall.
“Excuse me?”
“The St. Regis.”
“We have it on tape,” Mulrooney said with a pitying smile.
I shook my head quickly, wondering if I was dreaming. Were we still in a courthouse? Was it still Tuesday?
“Have
what
on tape?” I demanded.
“You fleeing the St. Regis,” Underhill repeated slowly.
“I wasn’t fleeing,” I said, trying to get up to speed. “I was leaving.”
“You left real fast, wouldn’t you say?” Mulrooney amended.
Underhill leaned forward and spread his elbows on the table.
“You ran out of a party attended by the defendants and their colleagues.”
The crash- test dummies shimmied out of my mind, abandoning me in an alternate universe.
I licked my lips and tried to pick my words carefully. “What?”
“You were at a party with members of the Pelarose family three weeks ago, and now here you are, about to be seated on a jury that will decide whether they go to jail for the rest of their lives. Or go free,” Underhill said, emphasizing the last three words. “You’re telling me that’s a coincidence?”
“Wait,” I said, holding my face with my hands, feeling my entire life swerve horribly off course. “That party was for Spain. For Spanish people,” I said stupidly.
“The Pelarose family is Spanish,” Mulrooney said, as if to a sanatorium resident.
“I thought the mob was Italian.”
“So why were you there?” Underhill pressed, impatient with my limited knowledge of the underworld’s apparent Benettonlike breadth.
“I was just crashing a party,” I said in a strained voice. I never thought I’d be in a situation where confessing to crashing was my best option. “With my friend Tag. We do that sometimes. Crash parties.” Used to. Used to crash parties. I wanted to kill Tag. This was her fault.
“So you’re claiming it was just a coincidence?”
I nodded vigorously. “Not just claiming. Telling you the absolute truth.”
“Why do the cameras show you running for the stairs?”
I blushed. “Well, you know, like I said, we were … crashing.” Maybe Underhill hadn’t been much of a party boy in his day. “We weren’t invited. We had to leave in a hurry.”
Underhill put his chin in his hand as if he had all day to extract the truth.
“ Jury- rigging is a felony.”
“I wasn’t jury- rigged!” I yelped, a sob rising in my throat. “I mean, nobody planted me. No rigging. Nothing. I never saw any of those people before that party, and I never saw any of the defendants while I was there,” I pleaded, just as I realized that the guy Maria Anna had been whispering to in the courtroom was the hottie who’d been manning the door of the Cavendish ballroom. I groaned to myself.