Authors: Laura Whitcomb
“Well?” Cathy demanded.
“No.” Jenny looked dazed. I knelt beside her and took her hand.
“There was no baby,” I whispered, but the loss caught in my throat.
Immediately Jenny’s tears were back, rolling down her cheeks. I let go of her and jumped away.
They were my tears.
“You did not have a miscarriage.” Cathy held a box toward her and Jenny pulled out a tissue, rubbed her eyes and face.
“Okay,” she told her mother. “I get it.”
My baby,
I whispered. To see if I was right. Jenny’s chin began to tremble and she pressed the tissue to her eyes.
I was the cause of her grief. My sorrow was making her ill. My Jenny, whom I would fight demons to protect, I was haunting her. Being so long away from heaven had clouded my thinking. I tried to shift my thoughts to something that wouldn’t grieve her so, but I could only think of how I was darkening her spirit and how I might lose her and how I had no one on earth but her.
She sobbed into her hands.
I took a step back from her and she pulled in a deep breath. I took another step away and she dried her cheeks and tossed the tissue into the trash basket. I backed away into the bathroom wall, and Jenny’s voice sounded stronger and brighter.
“I’m okay,” she told Cathy. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
My heart shrank as I stepped backwards into the dark, through the wall of the house, into the still night garden, away from my girl.
The backyard was as far as I went at first. I hid against the garden wall. I knew I would have to leave her—it was clear I was hurting her. The worst part was that I had no idea what damage had already been done. I wanted to be safe and fly far away, but something about it still felt like a sin. I was abandoning her.
I worried my hands together, which strangely seemed to create a small cloud of mist to form around me, sparkling the bricks with dew. I couldn’t leave her a note and was afraid any message I might try to send through words or thoughts might upset her. So at last I resolved to go back the way I’d come.
Having scaled this mountain before, you’d think I would find it easier to climb the second time, but I couldn’t see how it worked. Heaven felt to me now as far away as Wonderland or Oz—I believed, but I had no map. No key. I felt there was some trick to do with the horizon folding like a piece of paper, but I was muddled again.
The lights in the house were all dark now. But as I began to worry that I would never find my way to heaven, I saw Jenny’s bedroom lamp come on. She couldn’t sleep. My fault, no doubt. I was ashamed. I couldn’t help myself—I floated to a place along the garden wall where I could see into her bedroom window. She sat in bed, looking around the room, holding the back of her hand up for me to send her a message.
But I couldn’t risk bringing her pain that was not her own. Without a plan I began to run through the wall in her backyard and into the next yard and the next, through fence and hedge and over the silver surface of swimming pools.
I tried to remember the moment I’d climbed into heaven when I left her the first time, but there was a darkness in the place of that memory like a night sky where stars refuse to gather. I stopped running and found myself in the driveway of a stranger’s yard, the light from their kitchen window tilting down into the grass.
If I couldn’t recall how I’d entered heaven the first time, I’d have to retrace my steps from my arrival in Jenny’s life the second time. I’d left James in heaven and come back to Jenny. There was a path there, there must have been.
When I tried to imagine heaven and being there with James, images came to me so vague and small, I hardly believed them. There was a table under a tree and someone played piano. Could I have actually left him by simply slipping my fingers out of his grasp and turning away, stepping down a staircase, or perhaps the slope of a hill? I moved toward a place where the shadow of the path ahead and the trees on either side became one darkness.
Now I began to walk forward through this stranger’s yard and felt distinctly as if I was moving farther and farther from my destination. So, like a fool, I stopped and placed my right foot back behind me, then my left, walking slowly backwards toward what I hoped was heaven.
I closed my eyes, since I was not using them to guide me. The harder I tried to remember how to get back, the more the idea became confused. A shadow, a blank wall, an empty road. I would briefly, every so often, forget what I was trying to concentrate on. Finally all I was left with was the peculiar idea that when I came to earth and landed beside Jenny’s bathtub, what lay ahead of me just before I slid back to earth had become still, like a scene from toile de Jouy wallpaper, thin and then unreadable, as if I was passing out of the room and the wall was shortening. The picture became darker and narrower and eventually unrecognizable.
That’s what had happened, wasn’t it? I found the thin place in the curtain between heaven and earth by moving toward the tilting, narrowing focal point on the shadowed horizon. That’s when I slipped through the slit like a letter, as fragile as a pressed flower.
I wasn’t walking anymore, I was running blindly backwards, causing spider webs to tremble and owls to startle and flutter to other branches. Crickets hushed as I rushed by. Though invisible, I set off a motion light in one backyard, and while I crossed a street a plastic bag swooped up after me, drawn by my anxiety rather than my disturbing the actual air.
But by and by my lack of direction curled my path into a circle and I slowly spun to a stop in an empty lot crisp with dead weeds and dry grass. I feared that my failing to protect Jenny, my abandoning her, was keeping me from finding my way. I shook with horror—I tried to steel myself with anger.
“It’s not fair!” I shouted.
My voice rang around me, vexing me with echoes. I curled in on myself and huddled on the ground. I tried to comfort myself by picturing James or the sweet face of my daughter, but they were clouded. I couldn’t recall the needle-eye slit of heaven, but now in my wretchedness I remembered the other place.
It didn’t take anything more than that, just the admission that I could remember hell. The space was small, only a little larger than a coffin, really. The water was higher now, nearly to the ceiling. It tasted of metal and earth and an odd mix of plant spices, a recipe made by nature in a wild tantrum. Sage, mint, and honeysuckle, but also anise, parsnip, and the bitter bloom of chrysanthemum.
Above the cellar door, as seen through a gap where a tree limb had torn through, lightning flashed, sending a moment of blue-green brightness into the water. The storm danced outside to its perverse music—the familiar din of thunder cracks, the hiss of rain, and that singular howl that always sickened me.
It used to be that my hell was alive and screaming, winds blowing, water spraying, thunder and lightning in full flash and roar. Now, though, it stopped, still and mute. The cold was there, though—I could feel the chill deep in my soul. Perhaps this pause in my hell was worse than its past torment. Movement might imply the possibility of an end someday. But this stillness was unbearable. Perhaps it wasn’t that time had frozen but that it was now moving at the pace of infinity. A moment now becomes a century.
I could see through the dark pool two pale shapes, my hands, like drowned doves floating just under the surface two feet before me. Tickling at my scalp, a crown of water, for I had been swallowed up.
CHAPTER 24
I
COULDN’T BELIEVE MY MOTHER WANTED
me to go to the library. Billy wouldn’t be there. I had no reason to go anymore. But she gave me lunch money and her phone.
“Some of the women from church are coming over,” she explained.
I assumed they would be talking about my father. “I could stay in my room,” I told her.
But she dropped me off at the usual stop and all she said about it was “I’ll call when I’m ready to get you.”
I climbed the steps to the entrance as slowly as if my veins were filled with lead. Helen had left me. I waited until after midnight for her to speak to me, but she never answered. Not this morning, either. Maybe she was done watching over me. Maybe I was crazy and had just imagined her. Nothing would surprise me anymore.
And Billy had had enough of me too. He’d told his brother that I’d broken up with him, but it didn’t feel like that to me. I wanted to see him again—I hadn’t said goodbye. So I stood on the steps to get decent reception and used my mother’s phone.
Instead of hello, a man answered saying, “Mitch?”
The voice didn’t sound like Billy or his brother.
“No,” I said. “It’s Billy’s friend.”
“Yeah?” He waited.
Mitch had said something was going to happen to Billy today. I had nothing to lose—I started lying. “I was supposed to go with them,” I said. “Am I too late?”
“They left half an hour ago.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I thought so. Can you give me the address? I’ll meet him there.”
“It’s the Prescott building, the one downtown that looks like a resort, with the palm trees.”
After hanging up I went inside the library long enough to find out where the Prescott was and which bus would take me there.
It was a three-story building covered in blue mosaics. I walked in and read the directory by the elevator. I had no idea where Billy was or what he was doing in this kind of place—most of the offices belonged to lawyers. I couldn’t hear Billy’s voice, or any voices, but I started walking down every hallway listening. As I came up to conference room number nine on the first floor and looked through the window in the door, I saw Billy. He wore a blue pullover sweater and sat in a wooden chair in front of a long table. The room was huge—they were only using one end. Billy looked tired but sat straight, his sneakers planted firmly on the floor. He wasn’t facing the door, so he didn’t see me spying on him.
A woman and a man, both wearing dark suits, sat at the table taking notes, though there was a microphone and a recorder doing the same thing. Four people were sitting in folding chairs near the table: Mitch and an older woman and a middle-aged couple. They sat several seats apart as if they didn’t know each other.
The woman at the table had a cardboard nameplate that read
MS. IVERS
and the man’s plate read
MR. SAWYER
. At the far end of the table, a man in a light blue suit sat behind a nameplate labeled
A.D.A. FARMINGTON,
and next to him was a bald man with a tripod and camcorder aimed at Billy.
Mitch hung his head, playing with a piece a nicotine gum in its domed packaging.
A security guard walked up to me from down the corridor. “That’s a private deposition.”
“I’m family,” I lied to him.
He motioned me to be quiet, led me to a second door at the far end of the room, and silently pushed the door open just enough for me to slip in. I found a folding chair against the wall just inside and sat. No one noticed me. I held myself perfectly still, trying to blend in with the wall. I’d come to talk to Billy, but I’d have to wait—he seemed to be giving a statement. From my seat I could watch Billy in profile.
Ms. Ivers played with her pen as she spoke. “Mr. Blake, did the district attorney offer you probation instead of incarceration in this case?”
“Yeah.” Billy picked at the threads of a tiny hole that was starting in the knee of his jeans.
“Why?”
Billy glanced at Mr. Sawyer. “They wanted me to testify against Grady and Roth.”
“That implies my clients are guilty and you’re innocent,” said Ms. Ivers. “But weren’t you an integral part of this crime?”
“I don’t know about integral,” said Billy. “But I don’t think I’m innocent.”
Mr. Sawyer shifted but didn’t speak. Mitch looked like he was about to get up and shake some sense into his brother.
Ms. Ivers leaned forward. “You’re not innocent? What are you guilty of?”
“I should have stopped it,” said Billy.
“You could have been the hero?” she asked.
“I just mean, I think I could have stopped it if I tried.” Billy thought for a second. “I’m sure I could have.”
“Didn’t Miss Dodd make a statement that you were an eyewitness to the assault?”
“That’s incorrect,” Mr. Sawyer interrupted. “Miss Dodd amended her statement.”
“Yes, I’m sorry,” said Ms. Ivers. “Miss Dodd later says that it was Mr. Roth who observed.” Ms. Ivers made a note on her legal pad. “But she recognized you. Seeing you on campus at your high school was how she was able to track down Mr. Grady and Mr. Roth, isn’t that right?”
“Yeah,” said Billy. “She probably remembered me because I was the first one to talk to her.”
Ms. Ivers made another note. “Isn’t it true you have a memory gap of over two weeks in length?”
Billy seemed to sense a trick. “Yeah.”
“Isn’t it true that when first arrested you claimed you could not testify against my clients because you didn’t remember the event?”
Billy nodded.
Mr. Farmington said, “Please speak your response.”
Billy cleared his throat and sat up straighter. “That’s what I was told. Yeah.”
“That’s what you were told?” Ms. Ivers asked. “Meaning you don’t recall making that statement?”
“Right.”
“So you do in fact remember the crime in this case.”
“Yeah.”
Ms. Ivers twirled the pen in her fingers. “Six days ago you visited your father, who is in prison, correct? That’s when you changed your story?”
Billy glanced at Mr. Sawyer, who said nothing. “The story never changed. I just couldn’t remember what happened until that day.”
“Was it getting a glimpse of prison life that made you suddenly remember what supposedly happened, that it was my clients alone who committed the rape?”
The word hit me so hard I couldn’t breathe. The room seemed to tilt—my stomach shifted. Maybe I hadn’t heard right.
“I’m telling the truth,” Billy said. “Give me a lie detector test if you want.”
“Just answer all questions honestly,” said Mr. Farmington. “And remember that you’re under oath.”
My body was rebelling—the instinct was to run. My legs, acting on their own, started to tense as if I was about to stand up. Now I was breathing too fast—my vision started to go salt-and-pepper. I thought of putting my head down so I wouldn’t faint, but I didn’t want to look away from Billy.