Every Secret Thing Read online

  “No—no,” she stammered. “It’s just a very loose dress.”

  “Oh. I thought you was, but more because of your face.”

  One insult withdrawn, another offered. If Sharon hadn’t picked up her briefcase and Gordon’s file, her hand might have flown up to her cheek. But there was no texture to the mark, nothing to feel there, other than the rush of blood.

  “I thought it was, you know, that mask of pregnancy women sometimes get. I hear birth control pills can cause it, too.”

  “No, it’s just…my skin.”

  “Like a birthmark.”

  “Well, I was born with it, so yes, I guess you could call it a birthmark.”

  She herself barely noticed it, any more than she would notice how her eyes were spaced, or how closely her ears pressed to her head. She almost liked the lacy pattern on the left side of her jaw and cheek, and had convinced herself that others might, too. It was a delicate spotting, as if a grid of freckles had slipped. No one had mentioned it for years.

  Almost seven years, come to think of it. Here, in this very hallway, after the juvenile master had passed sentence on Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller.

  Sharon didn’t have to close her eyes to recapture the day. After all, they had stood just here, in this same hallway, moving quickly because the reporters who had been banned from the hearing had been bearing down on them, and everyone was intent on getting the girls out and away, into the vans that waited on the north side of the courthouse. They were also trying to provide some cover for the parents, whose images had been used repeatedly in the media accounts, given that the girls themselves were off-limits.

  Alice had looked shocked, too scared and numb to cry. But Ronnie, who had been almost catatonic throughout the whole ordeal, erupted as the girls were led away. She had actually fought her own lawyer, raking her fingernails down his cheek, kicking one of the bailiffs in the chest when her lawyer turned her around and caught her in a bear hug that was meant to still her. She bit and clawed as if she wanted to be in handcuffs, wanted them to confront the inherent lie in the proceedings. No one, not even Ronnie Fuller’s earnest young lawyer, believed she was anything but a stone-cold killer. But the state had agreed to treat her like a child. Like a human, when all those who met her couldn’t help wondering why she was so inhuman. She smiled at the wrong time, laughed at the wrong things, said whatever came into her head.

  Still, she was literally a little girl, no more than eighty pounds. They couldn’t strike back or use the usual methods to control her. Ronnie seemed to sense the adults’ tentativeness, their confusion, and her flailing limbs appeared to multiply, so it was as if she had four arms, four legs, then eight, then sixteen. She was like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil, a whirlwind of motion, and everyone else was struck dumb and motionless. Photographers, trying to find positions that would allow them to capture the moment without showing Ronnie’s grinning face, ended up tripping the lawyer, and Ronnie was suddenly free, running down the corridor. In her blind fury, she chose a dead end, and two policewomen finally managed to subdue her.

  Watching the whole episode, her hand on Alice’s shoulder, Sharon had known a horrible moment of gratitude that she had not drawn the assignment to defend Ronnie—and then such overwhelming guilt for her revulsion that she felt obligated to comfort her.

  She whispered encouragement as the policewomen rushed the girl through the corridors, Ronnie’s feet barely touching the floor. She murmured things more important in tone than content, the way one speaks to a dog. It will be okay, don’t be scared, we’re trying to help you. They were almost to the door, the sunlight creating a glare around the edges, like a passageway in a fairy tale or a science fiction film, a door leading to another world. As the policewomen carried Ronnie over the threshold, the girl turned her head and fairly spat in Sharon’s face: “Get away from me, you ugly spotted bitch. This is all your fault.”

  Ronnie’s lawyer was in private practice within a year, defending “real criminals,” as he explained the next time Sharon saw him in Au Bon Pain, where their salad tongs crossed over the stainless steel bowl of string beans.

  “I mean, you know, grown-ups,” he said.

  “They’re less scary,” he added, and they had laughed, pretending he hadn’t spoken the truth.

  Sharon looked at the client of the moment, Gordon Beamer, twelve years old and, unless a miracle happened at Victor Cullen, pretty permanently fucked. Not even ten years into her job, she was beginning to see the second generation, the children of the children she had defended when she started working for the PD’s office. The only thing that really changed was the drugs. Crack cocaine had ebbed, and now it was more heroin and OxyContin, a little Ecstasy for the suburbanites who came to the city to cop. How soon before she saw the third generation, the grandchildren of her original clients? If Sharon were really successful at her job, wouldn’t it cease to exist?

  Funny, her first and last homicide case had proved to be Alice’s. The state routinely “promoted” violent offenders to the adult system now—fifteen and up was virtually automatic, and it was rare to see anyone, boy or girl, charged with homicide at a younger age. So the young killers passed her by, and her expertise was of little use.

  “Let’s roll this rock up the hill,” she said on a sigh.

  “What rock?” Wanda Beamer demanded. “They got rocks at Cullen?”

  She didn’t wait for the answer to her own question, for she noticed her daughter had wandered off to stare at the children’s paintings that were supposed to add some joy to this grim corridor. She shrieked the little girl’s name—Amber—grabbed her, and paddled her hard. The girl cried without making a sound. Gordon Beamer stared at the ceiling. So did Sharon, thinking about how it was only a few hours until she finally got to see Alice again.

  4.

  11:35 A.M.

  Helen Manning took her lunch outside, thinking she might find a bench, or at least a ledge on which she could sit. But the day was chilly, as only early spring could be, and she ended up in her car, barely tasting her carefully assembled meal—chicken salad, which she had enlivened with tarragon and pecans and spread on a whole wheat baguette, cold asparagus in a vinaigrette sauce, a small bottle of sparkling water.

  A floater rotating among several city elementary schools, Helen usually made a point of eating and mingling with the other teachers. So much was projected onto a pretty woman if she was the least bit self-contained. Helen had accepted long ago that she had to work hard to convince others that she wasn’t remote or snobbish.

  Today, however, Helen was too depressed to summon the energy for the polite, super-interested persona she had cultivated. Instead, she sat in her car and chewed on her sandwich, staring blindly through the windshield. It was a good neighborhood, a yuppie enclave with long rows of white-flowering fruit trees that made the streets look like a lane from a fairy tale. And yet Helen had detected a dark, Grimm-like aspect, although it had taken her a while to diagnose exactly what was wrong, what was missing. Children. The yuppies all moved as soon as they had kids. The students in the public school came from the tougher, less desirable neighborhoods that fringed the area.

  Helen, who had grown up in Connecticut before coming to Baltimore for college, had never gotten used to the springs here. She had no nostalgia for the wind-whipped house on the Sound, or for her mother’s prissy formal garden, which was barren much of the year. But spring came on so fast in Baltimore. It might be cold today, but within a week the city would be lush as a jungle, riotous with azaleas, the leaves on the trees fat and swollen. It was a gaudy time, almost obscene, like the burst of hormones that surged through some of her students. This change was particularly striking to Helen because she saw the children at seven-day intervals. One week, a sixth-grade girl would be gawky and careless, skipping across the playground. The next, she would be round and juicy, hunched over with self-consciousness.

  Helen had no scientific evidence, but she was sure that girls had not developed so earl
y in her day. She wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was linked to fast food or that bovine growth hormone in milk. She had heard stories about seven-year-olds with breasts and periods. The doctors at Hopkins were trying to figure out how to arrest their puberty without turning them into midgets.

  Now Helen always had very good eating habits. She wasn’t a zealot, but she had always chosen whole grains and vegetables and fresh fruits, hopeful that Alice would follow her example. Of course Alice had ended up yearning for the junkiest of junk foods, and Helen had capitulated, taking her to McDonald’s or Arby’s at least once a week, in the belief that small indulgences would keep Alice from becoming obsessive. Hunger had been the one uncontrollable urge in her otherwise obedient daughter.

  Where would Alice ask to go to lunch today, after Sharon picked her up down at Middlebrook? Alice would probably want something fast and greasy, while Sharon would feel compelled to make an event out of it, a celebration—more like high school graduation than what it was.

  “I know you can’t get off in the middle of the week,” Sharon had said when she called Helen about Alice’s release date. “But I could meet her at the hearing in your place, and bring her home. Really, it’s no trouble.”

  Would Helen have lied if Sharon hadn’t all but offered this out to her? She wasn’t sure. But given the assumption that she couldn’t be there, she was glad to take advantage of it. She understood, however, that she would be in Sharon’s debt. For when Sharon said something wasn’t any trouble—really—she meant it was a lot of trouble, but she would do it anyway. Sharon had never quite let go of the Mannings, much to Helen’s dismay. Everyone else wanted to forget, move on, bury the past. Only Sharon Kerpelman seemed to glory in the memory of that summer, as if it were something of which she was proud. True, she had been aggressive in Alice’s defense, shrewd even. But Helen couldn’t help wondering if she should have taken her parents’ offer and hired an expensive criminal attorney who might have saved Alice in spite of everything.

  But no, that would have been wrong. She had decided early on that she could not rationalize away Alice’s role by saying she was the accessory, the dupe, the unwitting follower. There was a principle at stake. Alice had to be held accountable along with Ronnie.

  Alice had understood. Alice always understood. She was Helen’s confidante, her one-girl fan club, her best audience. Even when she saw through one of Helen’s white lies—and Alice, unlike Sharon, would know that Helen could have gotten today off if she really wanted to—she forgave her. She was a considerate child.

  A woman, Helen reminded herself. Alice had left home a child, but she was a woman now under the law, free to vote, if not to drink. Helen remembered a song from her own grade-school days: Girl, you’re a woman now. Sung, Helen suddenly realized, by the same pop star who had told the young girl to get out of his mind. Yes, the songs of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap had a lovely progression. “Young Girl.” “Girl, You’re a Woman Now.” “Lady Willpower.” And then finally, inevitably, simply: “Woman Woman (Have you got cheatin’ on your mind?).” Why, it had the arc of a novel. It was goddamn Madame Bovary. Good line. She wished she knew someone who would appreciate it.

  Helen had been a pretty juicy teenager herself, although she had waited until college to explore those options. The joke among her faster high school friends was that Helen couldn’t have sex in the same state as her parents. And the joke behind the joke was that it was absolutely true. She had come to Baltimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art as an eighteen-year-old virgin and, within weeks, was the Whore of MICA. Not that anyone called her a whore, because everyone who could was doing the same thing, and people weren’t so judgmental about sex back then, especially at art school.

  God, her generation had caught the wave just right. That was the golden time, the post-herpes-but-not-yet-AIDS era, when everyone had given up on free love, but sex was cheap and plentiful, like the marijuana of the day. All changed, changed utterly. People in the marijuana trade killed one another now, according to a “special report” Helen had seen on television just this past winter. Astonishing to Helen, more astonishing than any act of terror. Almost as astonishing as her own life.

  She was twenty-four, halfway toward her master’s, when she got pregnant. It was like hitting a reverse lottery, a 1-in-100 shot. But even pregnancy wasn’t a big deal in those days. Abortion was an acceptable choice among her friends, backup birth control, almost a rite of passage. It didn’t even require much thought. If the stick turned blue, and it wasn’t love and wasn’t going to be, you took care of it. The noble thing was not even to mention it to the guy, unless he was a live-in, because it was a lose-lose. He either tried to eel out of the situation, in which case you had to face up to the fact that the guy you were dating was a jerk. Or, worse, he made a halfhearted proposal and there it sat between you, like a jury summons—your civic duty, sure, but everyone still tried to get out of it.

  So having a baby was kind of cool. Brave, even. Especially when the father was some BG&E meter reader, Roy Durske, met at a friend’s apartment pool. They dated all summer. “Dated” being Roy’s insistent euphemism. Helen had no problems classifying their meetings as screwing. Good the first few times, but the novelty of the whole adventure had worn off fast. Sheer enthusiasm could take a man only so far.

  The bell at the Catholic church began to toll the noon hour. Helen glanced at her dashboard clock. She had used up her allotted twenty-five minutes for lunch. The early and short lunch hour was one of the antiperks that served to remind Helen how little valued her chosen profession was. She balled up the foil from her sandwich, capped her empty bottle, snapped her Tupperware, and put everything in the old metal workman’s lunchbox she’d found at a yard sale last year. People were always knocked out by Helen’s taste—“By what you get away with,” as one coworker once put it. But Helen was bored by her own originality, her irreverence. What had it gained her in the end? Twenty years of teaching art to nonartists, a life alone, and a daughter who called her bluff. Want to be daring, Mom? Want to be a true iconoclast? Try being the mother of an eleven-year-old who kills another child. And not just another child, but the granddaughter of a beloved black judge.

  Then leave your mother to face the world’s judgment.

  They couldn’t use Helen’s name, for that would have been the same as identifying Alice, but the local television stations had somehow rationalized showing Helen’s face as she ducked in and out of various government buildings that summer. She wore dark glasses, her hair pulled up in a way she had never worn it before and never wore it again. But people knew, of course. They knew which girls had been sent home from the pool party after what was reported as a “racial incident,” knew which children disappeared from the neighborhood, as if they had never existed. But no one ever said anything, because what would they say? Saw you on the news. Sorry your kid killed that baby. What are you doing this weekend?

  Helen went inside and began setting up her next class, taping newspaper to the desks, straightening the little chairs, the style of which had not changed since she was in fifth grade. For all she knew, these chairs could have been in service during her fifth-grade year. The city system was pretty poor. She definitely remembered colors like these, seventies colors, colors that embodied the promises of the modern age. Aqua blue. Mod orange. Now these were the ironic, self-conscious shades of iMacs and junior high school fashions. She remembered an outfit, purchased for her first plane trip—an orange-, blue-, and brown-striped dress with a matching scarf, from the old Best & Co. Her mother had saved all Helen’s clothes, and Helen had taken it out of a box when Alice was the same age. But she was too big for it. Hormones. It had to be hormones.

  Thank God the afternoon classes would be fourth-graders. They were still baby sweet, unlike the middle-school-bound fifth-graders. The fourth-graders reminded her of Alice, the lost Alice. In remembering her daughter, Helen always imagined her from the back—the part in her hair, two tails of yellow hanging d
own on either side of her head, tied with bows that Helen fashioned from fabric remnants and Christmas ribbon. She conjured up her smell, which was sharpest at the back of her neck, varying with the day and the weather. Chalk, soap, grass, suntan lotion, chlorine, peanut butter, pickles. She saw that neck bent over the kitchen table, intent on a project—a Christmas gift, homemade Valentines—saying to herself, as she must have heard Helen say: “Homemade is nicer.” She was so good, there was no other word for it.

  But Alice’s goodness, her very lack of reproach, became a reproach. “I did something bad,” she would say to Helen in their last days together, tentative, hopeful of contradiction. “When you do something bad, you have to be punished.”

  “Yes, baby,” Helen had said. Show them how strong you are, and then one day they’ll realize you’re really a good girl, that it was just a mistake. It was a mistake, wasn’t it, baby? A mistake, an accident? Whose idea was it, baby? You can tell me. Tell Mama what happened. I know the truth is sad, but it’s important to tell the truth. Always, always. It’s better if we know everything. Maybe it will change things. Nothing’s really done, nothing’s really decided, not yet. Just tell the truth, Alice.

  But Alice had shaken her head, refusing to tell Helen anything. “Everything’s decided now,” she had said. “I have to go away.”

  That was the night before the final hearing, the formal sentencing. On top of everything else, Alice had just gotten her period for the first time, and they were in the bathroom, fixing her up, soaking her underpants in cold water. Menstruating at eleven, not even in sixth grade. Helen had started at thirteen, and her mother thought that was young.