Life Sentences Read online

  Now she was back at the top of the hill, keen to roll down, crazy for it. But scared, too, because she had learned the consequences of abandon. There were always consequences. They would put her mother in some horrible place that would make her current nursing home seem like a palace. They would reopen the case against Callie. No statute of limitations on homicide, as she had been reminded so many times. The seven years you did for contempt won’t be applied to what you owe the state for that. We can’t protect you if you tell.

  Besides, why should she disrupt everything? She was happy, right? Not happy, exactly, but content, as content as she was going to be in this life. What would all this telling accomplish? For years, not-telling had been proof of her strength, a testimony to the force of her love, her essence. Now—now it proved that she was a fool. He had played her. So what? Everybody got played.

  You’ll feel better if you talk, the little detective had told her over and over again. She had tried to convince Callie that she was weighted down by her secrets, tortured by them, that she could free her baby’s soul if she would only explain what happened to Donntay. But Callie had understood that her secret kept her grounded, that it became the evidence of a love that the world otherwise denied. Even now, she still believed she had been loved, was loved. No matter how badly he had behaved, he truly loved her. It was all she had, the treasure of her life, and if she opened her mouth, she wouldn’t have that anymore.

  She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, went to the refrigerator and got ice to tame her swollen lids, wrapped her hands around the now cold mug of tea. Was the tea cold, or was it that her hands were chilled from the ice? She sipped the tea and still couldn’t tell. The extremes of life—hot, cold, high, low—had been lost to her long ago.

  “I guess the first thing I want to say is that I don’t think I killed my boy, Donntay. But nobody was going to believe that because my first child was taken away from me, right?”

  She saw Cassandra’s hand snake into her leather bag, remove a small recorder, and hold it up quizzically, seeking permission. She shook her head.

  “Listen,” she said. “Listen.”

  To her amazement, Cassandra returned the tape recorder to her bag. Someone would do as she said? She had never had that power over anyone. Except him, in the very beginning, and in the beginning, she hadn’t wanted to tell him to do anything, except to keep doing what he was doing. Keep calling her, keep loving her, keep telling her how special she was. Funny how that worked, how you had the power when you didn’t need it, then couldn’t get it back when you were desperate for it.

  “When I was in community college, Fatima told me I should come and work on Julius Howard’s campaign for city council president. She said he was going to be the state’s first black U.S. senator and it was worth being a part of, even if there was no pay. She was right. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I fell in love.”

  “With Julius Howard,” Cassandra said, and Callie wanted to laugh at how sure she was, how smart Cassandra Fallows still thought she was. She was still a hand-in-the-air girl, after all. Only she was wrong this time. Perhaps that had been his intention all along. Anyone would make that assumption, Callie saw now. She was almost proud of him, in spite of herself. He always was smart. That’s why she had been flattered when he dropped Fatima and chose her, because he was smart. Fatima said it wasn’t love, that he didn’t work that way, that you had to take what you could get from him and move on. But she knew it was love with them and she wouldn’t take anything. Oh, he left her alone for a while, but he always came back. Until she got pregnant.

  “Not with Julius. With Andre. Donna’s father. We had an affair that lasted almost two years. And then I got pregnant, and he broke up with me, and I went a little crazy. I think that’s where it starts. I guess that’s where it begins.”

  She couldn’t help enjoying the look on Cassandra’s face. Back in school, Cassandra’s arm was always shooting up straight and tall, quivering like the tails on those dogs that hunt. Not that Callie had ever seen such a dog outside a cartoon, not as a child. Living here on the shore these past—oh, God, was it really thirteen years?—she saw both pointers and retrievers in the late fall, flushing birds from the marshes, happy and eager to be of assistance to their owners. Why? she always wanted to ask. What’s in it for you? A pat, a kind word, a treat, but you never get to keep the duck. There are others who will love you, who will give you the same deal, food and shelter, and require nothing more than your devotion.

  But she understood because she had sold her own life as cheaply. She had dropped her babies at the feet of the man she loved, exchanging their lives for a pat on the head, a scratch behind the ears, a few murmured promises of love.

  CHAPTER

  32

  CASSANDRA WAS SO FULL of tea by the time she left Bridgeville that she needed two bathroom breaks before crossing the bay. The second time, at a McDonald’s on Highway 50, she realized that, other than a few bites of cookie, she had not eaten since that unsatisfying breakfast with her father. She ordered a Quarter Pounder with cheese, à la carte, which the counter girl found disturbing, trying to cajole her into a Value Meal. “There’s no value,” said Cassandra, “in paying for things you don’t want.” It was the kind of thing her father often said. The Quarter Pounder, however, was disturbingly good, Proustian good. She remembered being seventeen, walking that razor-thin line between slut and popular girl. The key had been confining sex to boyfriends, but a relationship could last as little as a month and still be legitimate. But then Cassandra had fallen hard for one boy, Chris. He hadn’t been particularly popular or outstanding, although such reputations meant much less in a place like the Gordon School. In a graduating class of sixty, there was room for more nuanced personalities, less of an emphasis on cliques. Chris had been allowed to be Chris—a Dungeons and Dragons freak, a pothead, a musician, a cross-country runner.

  Brainy and sardonic, he was a good match for her. Then he broke things off, without explanation, without even an official good-bye. Without any words at all, in fact. Worse, he didn’t start going with someone else. It was one thing to be dropped in favor of another girl, harsh as that was. For someone to dump you and choose solitude meant you must be really boring.

  Cassandra had started eating to console herself, consuming Quarter Pounders in great quantities. Although boys usually brought her home from school by then, her father still drove her every morning. She had stopped confiding in him, however. The September of her senior year, after her summer of conciliatory eating, her father intoned one morning, “Quarter Pounders. Aka four ounces. You’ve added, what, the equivalent of forty, sixty of those to your frame?” She had gone on a diet and, in essence, been on one ever since. Dieting was a kind of martial law in her life—never suspended, sometimes relaxed, frequently tested. She wondered if Callie ever thought about what she ate. Over the course of their long, halting conversation, she hadn’t managed to finish her tea and didn’t even nibble at her exquisite cookies.

  Cassandra pulled out her Moleskine notebook and began writing from memory. Callie’s story was simple almost to the point of banality. She had an affair with Andre Howard, became pregnant. He broke up with her, she broke down. About six months after her child was born, she was reported for neglect and the baby was taken from her and put up for adoption. She had drifted through the next few years, self-destructive and aimless, incapable of holding a job, indifferent to returning to school, although that was the one thing that Andre Howard offered her. The state senate had a scholarship program with virtually no oversight, Callie had explained. That, along with Julius Howard’s recommendation, had been Fatima’s ticket to Spelman. Callie didn’t want to admit that her relationship with Andre Howard was anything like Fatima’s, and she refused his help, holding out for love. Other men liked her, she liked using them, and when she was with a man, she took up his habits, good or bad. She was smoking crack—on the pipe, as she put it—when she gave birth to Donntay, which put her
back under the supervision of social services. She insisted she wasn’t a fiend, as she called it, just a casual user. Once Donntay’s father left, in the final month of her pregnancy, she barely smoked at all.

  Then she woke up one morning and Donntay was dead. She hadn’t done a thing, had never laid a finger on him, but who would believe her? A sometime crack smoker, a party girl, one baby already taken from her. Hysterical, she had called Andre Howard. She had called him off and on over the years, and he was invariably kind. He swore he loved her, wanted to be with her, but there was always a reason he couldn’t be. His brother’s political ambitions. His wife’s sadness over Donna living far away. He even cited Donna’s inability to have children. He couldn’t abandon his wife and start a new life with Callie if his wife didn’t have the consolation of grandbabies. That’s what he told Callie when she sat in jail, and upon her release. He had to stay with his wife because she was never going to have grandchildren.

  Yet he had concealed her second child’s body, protected her from prosecution, at great risk to himself. This, to Callie, proved he loved her.

  God, what a sad, deluded story. Who would believe it? Cassandra wasn’t sure that she believed it. Oh, that wouldn’t keep her from writing it. Let the competing versions of the truth fight it out on the page. Only—this story could not be confined to the page. Callie was alleging that Andre Howard, one of Baltimore’s most venerated citizens, had conspired with her to hide her child’s body, preventing a proper inquiry into his death. That wasn’t the sort of thing that would go unchallenged, starting with Cassandra’s publisher’s lawyers, then moving into the criminal courts, where a new inquiry would be inevitable. Andre Howard would probably deny everything and what would she have then? The word of an admitted crackhead versus that of a man famous for propriety and good deeds.

  She had more than Callie’s words, however, even if Fatima refused to corroborate the details. There were the campaign finance records, the obvious payoffs. Could those be explained away so easily?

  Her sandwich demolished, Cassandra ate the pickle that had slipped from the burger and nibbled that, although she didn’t really like pickles. She had called Teena within minutes of beginning the drive home, thinking she would be excited by the news. But Teena had been angry, dismissive.

  “What, she’s claiming sudden death syndrome? That’s brilliant, especially with no body. Did she wait all these years to spring that shit because it’s uncheckable now?”

  “Why would she lie?”

  “Sheesh, Cassandra, because that’s what people do. They lie. Especially when they’re still vulnerable to being charged with murder. She’s had twenty years to come up with this story. Frankly, I think she could have done better.”

  “What about Andre Howard? If he believed that her baby wasn’t a homicide victim, couldn’t he at least say that he didn’t conceal a murder? I guess he would be guilty of obstruction of justice, but nothing more—”

  “I don’t believe her on that score, either. The guy had an affair with her, fathered her first child—okay, he’s a sleaze and he wouldn’t want that found out. But would he become a coconspirator in a murder on that basis? I don’t think so.”

  “Still—” It was a good point, but Cassandra knew there was a counterargument to be made. She was simply too overloaded to find it.

  “The first baby is enough to explain the blackmail,” Teena insisted.

  “But the payments don’t start until after Donntay dies.”

  “As far as we know. They might have funneled money to her directly, then started using the campaign after she became a murder suspect, which made her more problematic. Look, she got into trouble and she reached out to a powerful man she could force to help her, because she had something on him. He came up with a legal strategy that allowed her to avoid being charged. But the idea of Andre Howard arranging the disappearance of the baby’s body? No one will ever believe that. I think she’s claiming his involvement now because she’s terrified of losing his financial support. He’ll find a new way to get money to her, and then she’ll deny everything she told you. Did you get this on tape?”

  “No, she asked me not to record her.”

  “Aw, Jesus, Cassandra. You’ve got nothing.”

  “I’m not building a court case, Teena. I’m a writer. All I need is a story, and I have it.”

  “Until she recants,” Teena said. “She’s using you.”

  Who was using whom was highly problematic in this situation. Cassandra had the answer she had been instructed to find. It was not, Cassandra admitted to herself in McDonald’s, a particularly satisfying one, but then, most answers fail to satisfy. Presented with a mystery, the human mind snakes out in a thousand directions; it is the possibility of an answer that seems thrilling. But when the puzzle is solved, tension dissipates. That is the nature of questions. Even on a quiz show, the real excitement comes in the moment before the answer, the agony of waiting to discover if the contestant is right or wrong. Cassandra had her book, if she wanted it, an ending toward which to write. It was more of a straightforward true-crime story than she had anticipated, albeit one filled with contrasts and symmetries. Callie, the poor child of an abusive single mother, finding a father and a lover in Andre Howard. Donna, the prized princess of one of Baltimore’s most prominent families. She considered for the first time how close the two names were, Donna and Donntay. It was almost as if Callie were trying to establish some sort of connection to the Howards. Cassandra would simply take herself out of it, write a straightforward narrative about the Howards and this quiet girl who had gone off like a bomb in their lives.

  Except—Cassandra couldn’t take herself out of the story because she had slept with Callie’s lawyer, who happened to be the Howard son-in-law. What was she going to do about that?

  She found herself fixating on an image of herself at the microfiche machines in the library, her first glimpse of Reg. She had a flash of Reg in bed, but she tried to put that out of her mind. “‘The Obvious Child,’” Gloria Bustamante had said. Well, hinted, suggested. She was as cagey as her client had been naïve. Cassandra had assumed the child was Donntay, then Aubrey, whose mere existence had unlocked Callie’s long-held silence. But what if the obvious child was the first one? The child taken from Callie permanently based on an anonymous tip about her mental state. The child Cassandra said Andre had fathered. Cassandra saw herself at the microfiche, the days of 1988 literally flashing by her, the machine’s movement and smell making her faintly queasy. A stray fact had boomeranged out, striking her as odd but not vital, then skipped away before she could grasp it.

  Then she knew. She understood what Gloria had figured out, what Callie could not bear to admit to herself. Andre Howard had made a mistake, but it was not a unique one, far from it. He could have weathered the fact of an illegitimate child. It was Andre Howard’s way of handling his mistake that would have earned him public contempt.

  Cassandra ordered a diet soda for the road, prompting a lecture from the counter girl on how she should have gotten the Value Meal after all. Everyone loves to say I told you so. Back behind the wheel of her car, she dialed a number that she knew better than to call on a weekend. But it was business, of a sort, and undeniably urgent.

  CHAPTER

  33

  REG HAD ASKED ALMOST NO QUESTIONS when he returned Cassandra’s call about a possible meeting, saying only that he would see her at his home on Sunday afternoon. She had assumed that the choice of location was to underline the professional aspect of the encounter. He probably thought that an empty law office would be an invitation to trouble.

  It had never occurred to Cassandra that Donna would be present.

  “Reg wanted me here,” Donna said, composed and lovely, still in her churchgoing clothes. Even Donna, proper as she was, wouldn’t sit around in a green knit suit on a Sunday afternoon. “Given that your book touches on my life, too.”

  “Your life?” Cassandra echoed.

  “As a child. Was
n’t that part of the plan? To write about several of us as we were when we were young, and how we are now?”

  “It was one idea,” Cassandra admitted. “It’s taken a turn, though—”

  “Of course, I guess you get to be the most successful one,” Donna said. She was good at managing the trick of talking over another person without appearing rude or impatient. “That’s what makes it interesting to you, right? Tisha is a nice suburban mama, Fatima has had this amazing transformation from good-time girl to church lady, and I’m mainly known as someone’s daughter and someone’s wife. But you’re our little star.”

  Her voice was good-natured, her face smooth. Cassandra might well have been imagining the crackle to the tone, like the very thin crust of frost that snaps beneath one’s feet after the first true cold night of the year. She glanced quickly at Reg, trying to read him, but he kept his back to her as he fed kindling into a fire, which seemed de trop on a March afternoon. In fact, Cassandra suddenly felt extremely warm and almost wished it was a hot flash. Perimenopause would be preferable to this creeping sense of shame and humiliation. Had Reg told Donna about their affair? She should have broken off things with him definitively before she visited Callie. She never should have started in the first place.