Life Sentences Page 19

  “Yes, she and Fatima did have a special bond. But Fatima doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  “Really? Well, she’s reinvented herself, you know how that goes.” Was Donna suggesting that Cassandra had engineered a similar reinvention or only that she understood how such things were done? “She doesn’t speak to me, either, and she wouldn’t even have that Spelman degree she’s so proud of if it weren’t for my uncle Julius. He wrote her recommendation. Fatima didn’t begin to have the grades.”

  “That was nice of him.”

  “She volunteered in his office, the summer after we graduated. Remember how special we thought we were, because we were the class of ’76?”

  “It wasn’t such a big deal at the Gordon School,” Cassandra said. Could Donna really have forgotten that she did not graduate with her? Had she not read Cassandra’s book? “We thought of ourselves as hippies, and it was uncool to be patriotic.”

  Donna shook her head. “I don’t know, Cassandra. I don’t see how these little things add up to a book. We knew a girl. She was accused of a horrible crime—which she almost certainly committed, even if she never confessed. So what?”

  “I admit I don’t know where I’m going with this. But given all the connections, how can I not talk to you and the others who knew her?”

  “And Reg. You want to talk to Reg.” It sounded like a challenge.

  “Tisha said he wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “Tisha forgets that she’s not the boss of Reg anymore. I am.” Donna allowed herself a wink, but Cassandra realized she was deadly earnest.

  “What about the first lawyer on the case, who also worked for your father? Can you get her to talk to me?”

  “Oh, Gloria.” Donna made a face. “She’s drunk half the time, anyway. And, you know, she left the firm, went out on her own, abandoned Callie. Reg was the one who saw it through to the end.”

  “So he’s the one I have to talk to.”

  “If you feel you must,” Donna said on a sigh. “I’ll ask him to make time for you, as a favor to me. But all it’s going to do is establish that this is a dead end. It’s such a…small, sad story. Do people really want to read these things?”

  “In my experience? Yes.”

  Donna smiled. “In your experience—that’s a funny phrase if you think about it. What else does anyone have? What else do we know but what we’ve experienced?”

  Her voice was benign, musing, and the questions were perfectly fair. But Cassandra couldn’t help feeling she had been put in her place somehow. She asked about the painting over the mantel—a Horace Pippin, not that Cassandra knew who he was, but the piece’s quality was undeniable—and the rest of their visit passed easily, filled with reminiscences that matched up, more or less. Unlike Tisha, Donna had no quarrels with what Cassandra had written and was unabashed in her admiration for the rewards she had reaped. It was, in fact, quite pleasant.

  EIGHTEEN HOURS LATER, CASSANDRA WAS in bed with Donna’s husband, more surprised than anyone. She was definitely more surprised than Reg, who, from the moment she opened her door to him, treated the meeting as a ruse for them to be alone. In fact, he was so sure of his interpretation that he was puzzled by her hesitance, treated it as a coy act, and, as he broke her down, she began to believe it might have been. By the time she reassembled the timeline in her head, reminded herself that her interest in Calliope had started long before she had encountered Reg—he was inside her and she was beyond caring.

  She gripped his shoulders as if at risk of falling from a great height, as if she were far above the world, Leda in the beak of a swan Zeus. Would she put on his knowledge with his power? How did the rest of it go? The only other line she could remember was And Agamemnon dead, and she had forgotten who Agamemnon was. Then she felt guilty, thinking of a black man as a swan, an animal. Yet she was really thinking of him as Zeus, was she not? A god to her mortal? But that, too, struck her as wrong, freighted, too similar to her father’s way of justifying Annie’s arrival in his life by comparing her to Aphrodite. Then it came to her—Agamemnon was the warrior who took Cassandra as his trophy after sacking Troy, and the two were later murdered. Leda, pressed to the swan’s breast, catches a glimpse of the future, but Cassandra was the one who had the true gift of prophecy.

  “So this is the one place where you’re quiet,” Reg said afterward, just, when they were still entwined. “Me, too. It’s funny, isn’t it, how big talkers like us go quiet in bed?”

  Cassandra nodded.

  SICK BAY

  MY FATHER WAS IN THE HOSPITAL for three weeks. I wasn’t allowed to visit him, according to the hospital rules, but my mother was reluctant to leave me home alone, so I would sit in the waiting room with my homework. Then, having ventured that far into the city, crossing streets that just days ago had been torn by rioting, my mother felt we deserved some kind of treat, especially on Fridays. We would head farther out Eastern Avenue, to Highlandtown and Haussner’s, a Baltimore institution. A German restaurant, it had filled every inch of wall space with nineteenth-century art. The sheer volume of paintings, their random and haphazard placement, made me assume they were tacky, on a par with paint-by-numbers pictures or black velvet portraiture. In fact, my father had treated Haussner’s as an object lesson in aesthetics, sneering at the paintings and encouraging me to sneer, too. But when I returned to the restaurant as an adult, I learned that the paintings are considered very fine examples of nineteenth-century art.

  My mother, however, did not lecture me about the décor. She chose the restaurant because it was a good compromise for an adult and child, a place where she could get a cocktail and, say, veal or liver, while I had a Shirley Temple and potato pancakes. We ate in silence and I became aware of how much conversation my father provided, how he guided and ruled our dinner table discussions. The quiet wasn’t awkward, not in the restaurant, which had a happy cacophony. But it was strained and worrisome at home.

  At the end of the second week, in the lull after we placed our order, my mother suddenly said, “You never ask any questions about your father.”

  “You said he was going to be okay.” A panicky thought struck me. “He is, isn’t he? You said.”

  “He’s going to be fine. They were worried at first. He was beaten very badly and—well, they couldn’t be sure—the brain and all—but he’s going to be fine. He may need more time to recover physically, but he’ll be fine.”

  “Why did they beat him?”

  My mother held up her drink, something called a lime rickey, and studied it in the light.

  “Things that happen in a riot, they don’t make sense. People get out of control and the energy just feeds itself. If your father had stayed in the car—but he didn’t stay in the car.”

  “Why?”

  “He saw someone being…hurt, and he went to help her. It was very brave, actually. Foolish, but brave.”

  Neither my mother nor I had met Annie at that point. But the next week, my father’s final one in the hospital, a woman approached me in the waiting room. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said she looked like Diahann Carroll or Diana Ross. By which I would have meant, She’s a beautiful black woman and those are the beautiful black women I know. In fact, Annie was beautiful in a way that was new in 1968. Her skin was dark, about as dark as skin gets, her nose broad, her lips full.

  But while her face spoke to a standard of beauty that was just coming into its own, her body was a throwback to the 1950s, almost cartoonishly curvy in its proportions, with a tiny waist, generous hips, and, frankly, the largest natural breasts I had ever seen on a woman. As I had already started wondering what my own breasts might look like when they arrived—Fatima had recently purchased a training bra, and all the girls in our class were thinking about their breasts-to-be—I couldn’t help staring. Could something like those sprout on my chest? My own mother’s bosom (and that’s the word I would have used at the time, although with much giggling) was modest. This was an era where our chests chose us; we
did not choose our chests. One’s developing body was a random, freakish event, a card dealt facedown that you got to turn over somewhere around twelve or thirteen.

  I was so entranced by this stranger’s bosom that it took me a moment to realize that she was speaking to me.

  “You must be Ric’s daughter,” she said. “I can see the resemblance.”

  This took several seconds to sort out. My father was a man. Girls didn’t resemble men. Besides, it was an article of faith in my family that I looked like myself, no one else.

  The woman knelt down, putting her face level with mine. “I’m Annie. I was with your father…”

  “Are you the woman who was being beaten?”

  Her face flickered with pain. Later, I would piece things together, understand that my mother had been euphemistically inexact in describing the attack on Annie. But my ten-year-old brain could not have processed the reality of rape.

  “Beaten? Well…almost, I guess. But it was nothing compared to what happened to your father. I feel awful about that.”

  “You didn’t do it.” A ten-year-old’s insistence on fairness coming to the fore. Children, blamed for things they haven’t done, are naturally judicious.

  “No, I didn’t. I guess you’re here with your mama?”

  “Yes. She’s in my father’s room, two oh eight. You can go in because you’re a grown-up.”

  “You come every day? That must get boring.”

  “I get my homework done. We usually come earlier, and there’s a treat after, snowballs on weekdays, a restaurant on Fridays. Or”—I lowered my voice as if my father, down the corridor, might hear of this perfidy—“we eat off TV trays and we pretend we’re on a flight to Europe and the TV is the movie.”

  “That sounds nice.” Annie’s face and her voice didn’t match up. I could tell she thought it was queer or that I was too old for such a childish game.

  “Did you come here to thank my dad? Because he saved you?”

  “Well, I am concerned about him. But people in the hospital shouldn’t have too many visitors. They get tired.”

  “He’s better. He’s getting out Friday.”

  “Still—I’ll let him have this time with your mama.”

  My mother came out then. I blurted in a self-important rush, “This is Annie, the woman Daddy saved. She came to thank him.”

  My mother regarded the woman’s chest, much as I had. “How nice,” she said. “You should go in now, while he’s awake. He’s still sleeping a lot.”

  “Annie Waters,” the woman said, holding out her hand to shake. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Visiting hours will be over soon,” my mother said. “I wouldn’t want you to miss your chance.”

  My mother’s voice was ultra-polite, the way she always was with strangers. Annie headed down the corridor and we left, driving home through neighborhoods that terrified and fascinated me. The curfew was past, the days were expanding toward their summer length, but my mother was still nervous. She didn’t relax until the final mile of our journey, when we entered the leafy lane that took us through the park and into Dickeyville.

  “Do they hurt, when they come?” I asked my mother.

  “What?”

  “Bosoms.”

  “Oh—no, what gave you that idea?”

  “Teeth hurt, when you’re a baby.”

  “Well, teeth have to break through the gum. Your breasts just…grow.”

  It was hard for me to see the difference, except that teeth were hard.

  “How do they know when to start?”

  “They get signals from your body when you start being a teenager.”

  “Adolescence,” I said sagely. It was a big word, one used to describe almost everything that teenagers did. It was, apparently, quite terrible.

  ABSENTMINDEDLY, MY MOTHER STARTED to turn up our street, forgetting to continue on to the pharmacy for the promised snowball. I hated having to remind her of her promise—to this day, I hate having to ask for things already promised me—but my mouth was aching for that sweet syrup.

  “Mama, the pharmacy?”

  “You sure it won’t spoil your dinner?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Back home, she asked me if I wanted to play airplane, but I remembered the look on Annie’s face and said I’d rather not. We never played it again, in fact. Two days later, my father came home. Two months later, he called my mother and said he was moving out. He had fallen in love with Annie Waters. She is my destiny, my father said. Fate put her in my path for a reason. My mother cried, said he was a liar, that he had always been a liar. “No,” he said. “I was a liar, but I’m telling the truth now. I was meant to be with this woman.”

  I know exactly what was said because I listened in on the extension. In love, my father was as full of clichés as anyone, but there was no comfort in pointing that out. I put the phone back, neglecting to disguise the button’s click, but my mother either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING

  March 24–27

  CHAPTER

  23

  CASSANDRA ALWAYS THOUGHT OF BALTIMORE Penn Station as an endearingly tiny place, the kind of train station found in a Lionel set or what locals called a Christmas garden. High-ceilinged, with old-fashioned wooden benches and only four gates in regular use, it had one of everything else—one newsstand, one coffee shop, one bar, one set of restrooms, one shoeshine stand. Paradoxically, it was the more recent additions that looked run-down and tired—the electric tote board for the Amtrak trains, which never seemed to have the right information; the illuminated signs above the ticket windows, which tended to be on the fritz. It was a remarkably pleasant waiting room, even at seven on a late winter’s morning, the weak, watery light forgiving, the commuters mellow for a Monday. Most people were headed south, toward Washington, with only a handful walking down to the tracks when Cassandra’s Acela Express was called, and although the northbound train was crowded, it wasn’t full, and it was easy to snag a seat in the Quiet Car. Cassandra, used to New York’s Penn Station, couldn’t get over how gentle the whole experience felt.

  Gentle made her think of Reg, although it could be argued that he was anything but. Then again, everything was making her think of Reg—the rowhouses sliding by the train, so sad and ramshackle from the rear; the triptych of water crossings, each expanse slightly larger, culminating in the wide views along the Susquehanna in Havre de Grace; the Wilmington skyline. The newspaper in her hand, the laptop she had opened but ignored. Her head was full of Reg, yet she had spent no more than five hours with him since their first evening together.

  She didn’t want to go to New York, but the trip had been planned, entered on too many people’s calendars—her editor’s, her agent’s, and, last and now least, her lover’s. She would have to break up with him tonight. Oh, she had juggled lovers before and she wasn’t foolish enough to think that this…thing with Reg had any potential. Or was she, in fact, exactly that foolish? All she knew was that she had no interest in faking her way through an evening with Bernard. They had been moving toward an ending anyway, and here it was. Reg had not precipitated this. Her response to Reg simply established how very over she and Bernard were. It wouldn’t be that awful, she reasoned. She would do it in the restaurant, cold-hearted as that might seem. If she let him come back to her house, he would wheedle for one last night, and she wanted to avoid that at any cost. She would do it early, before they ordered entrées. That way he could storm out, if he wanted. Or he could stay, and they would have a companionable, civilized end to what had been a pleasant affair, nothing more. If anything, it should have been a summer fling, the kind of thing that ended when his wife came back from their house on the Cape.

  The lunch with her editor actually loomed much larger in her mind than the dinner with Bernard. Should Cassandra tell Ellen about sleeping with Reg? It was a…complication that would have to be addressed at some point, an undeniable conflict of interest. If she had stayed w
ith her old editor, Belle, whom she considered a friend, she would have been eager to sort this out with her, personally and professionally. Ellen, her new editor—the truth was, Ellen intimidated Cassandra.

  The train pulled into Philadelphia, the midway point. She might as well open her laptop and review what she had accomplished on the book. She was done before Metro Park.

  “NO PAGES?” ELLEN ASKED, her bright eyes darting around the restaurant. “You haven’t started writing yet?”

  “It’s hard to start writing until I know a little more,” Cassandra said. “Remember, I haven’t lived this book, and it’s not a product of pure imagination. I’m still poking around, trying to find Callie Jenkins. It’s surprisingly difficult.”

  “But you finally got to her lawyer, right?”

  Oh yes. “He agreed to meet with me but says he has no idea where she is. And, you know, increasingly I feel it’s not so much about the legal battle but about this cipher of a girl. It’s almost as if I’m writing the memoir that Callie can’t write for herself.”

  Ellen frowned, buttering a piece of bread that she would never eat. She seldom ate anything, not in Cassandra’s presence, and she almost thrummed with a hummingbird-like energy. Yet she was the one who always insisted on lunch, taking Cassandra to the restaurant of the moment, whatever it might be, then fidgeting in her seat as if she couldn’t believe she had to spend ninety minutes talking to just one person, ignoring the e-mails arriving on her BlackBerry, away from the phones, not that she ever picked up her own phone.