“Home. I haven’t worked in years.”
Dr. Silverstein blinked, suddenly awkward. He was one of the people who had never had a chance to say, “I’m sorry,” because the tragedy was almost a year in the past by the time he saw her at her annual exam. Cynthia’s life was full of such acquaintances, well-meaning types who had been left stranded by the tenuousness of their connection. Doctors, mechanics, accountants. She remembered the April immediately following, when Warren asked the accountant how one calculated for a dependent who had not survived the calendar year. Did they take the full credit, or did Olivia’s death mean they had to prorate the deduction? For Warren and Cynthia, who had already asked a thousand questions they had never planned to ask-questions about burials and caskets and plots and the scars left by autopsies-it was just another dreary postscript. The accountant had looked so stricken she had wanted to comfort him.
She was beyond that now.
Cynthia went blinking out into the bright day, remembering, as she always did upon leaving the eye doctor, that first pair of glasses when she was ten. The wonder of finally seeing the world in sharp, clear focus had been dwarfed by the fear of her classmates’ taunts. The other girls at Dickey Hill Elementary, even her friends, were always looking for a way to prick the self-importance of Judge Poole’s oldest daughter. Another girl might have begged her mother to let her carry her glasses in a case, putting them on only as necessary. But to take them on and off would be an admission of weakness. So Cynthia wore those tortoiseshell frames wherever she went, holding her head high.
“Four-eyes,” one girl had tried. “Four is better than two,” Cynthia had said. And that was that.
She climbed into her car, the BMW X- 25, a sports utility vehicle chosen not for its status but its heft. At 4,665 pounds it was heavier than the Lexus, even heavier than the Mercedes, and easier to maneuver than the Lincoln Navigator, which was a bit ghetto, anyway. Cynthia had actually wanted something a little less glamorous, because high-end SUVs were big with local carjackers. But the BMW had the best safety rating, so she bought the BMW and withstood the usual teasing about her love of luxury. Yes, she had once cared about things like expensive shoes and fine jewelry, had deserved her family’s fond observation that Cynthia believed herself to be, if not at the center of the universe, just a few inches to the left. But that Cynthia was long gone, even if no one else could bear to acknowledge this fact.
Her cell phone rang. Headsets weren’t the law in Maryland, but Cynthia had opted for one anyway. It amazed her to think of how she had once driven one-handed through the city behind the wheel of a smaller, sportier BMW, heedless of her heedlessness.
“Cynthia?”
“Yes?” She recognized the voice, but she would be damned if she would grant this caller any intimacy.
“It’s Sharon Kerpelman.”
Cynthia didn’t say anything, just concentrated on passing the cars that were entering the Beltway from the tricky exit off I-83. The Beacon-Light had recently run a list of the most dangerous highway intersections in the city, and this spot was in the top five. Cynthia had memorized them without realizing it.
“From the public defender’s office?”
“Right,” Cynthia said.
“I guess this is a courtesy call.”
As if Sharon Kerpelman were even on speaking terms with courtesy.
“I guess,” Cynthia said, “that if you don’t know what it is, I don’t either.”
“Yes. Well. How have you been?” Sharon asked, as if reading from a script. Maybe she had finally gotten a copy of Dale Carnegie, which she sorely needed. But Sharon, being Sharon, would go straight past the part about winning friends and skip ahead to trying to influence people.
“Why, just fine,” Cynthia drawled. Not that Sharon would ever notice anything as subtle as a tone. “But I’m driving and I don’t like to talk on the Beltway unless it’s urgent. So-”
“This is-well, not urgent, but important.”
“Yes?” Spit it out, Sharon.
“Alice Manning is coming home Thursday.”
“For a visit?”
“For…ever. She’s being released.”
“How can that be?”
“She’s eighteen now. After all, it will be seven years in July-”
“I think I remember,” Cynthia said, “when it happened.”
The headset was suddenly tight on her temples, squeezing so hard she felt as if those soon-to-be-rigid muscles behind her eyes might fly out of her head. How unfair. How unfair. The juvenile lament was her instinctive retort whenever this subject came up. Her father, who usually snapped at such idiocy, who had devoted his professional and personal life to establishing Solomon-like standards of fairness, had agreed with her. “Yes, it is,” he said on that not-long-enough-ago day when the deal had been struck. “We have bent the law as far as we can, but we can’t go further without breaking it. They are children in the eyes of the law.”
“And in the eyes of God?” she had asked her father.
“I suppose they are children still. For God has to shoulder responsibility for all of us, even the monsters among us.”
Today, her rage found its outlet in childlike cruelty. “Was Alice the fat one or the crazy one?” She could never forget their names, or their faces, yet she always had trouble matching them up. It was a kind of selective dyslexia, like her tendency to confuse surnames such as Thomas and Thompson, Murray and Murphy. Cynthia thought of the two as grotesque Siamese twins, connected at the waist, tripping over their four legs as they came down her street, up her porch, into her life.
Sharon ’s voice was prim, intended to be a reproof, as if Cynthia could ever be shamed on this topic. “ Alice was the one with blond hair, worn straight back with a band. Here’s a tip: think Alice in Wonderland.”
“What?”
“As a mnemonic device, I mean. Or Ronnie-Aran, if you prefer, as in Isle of Aran, for she had dark hair and light eyes. The look they sometimes call Black Irish.” An embarrassed laugh. “I mean, I don’t call it Black Irish, but you hear that sometimes, among people of a certain generation-I mean-”
“I know what you mean.” Sharon had said so much worse to Cynthia, so blithely and unknowingly, that it was hilarious she would fret over this minor gaffe. The last time they had spoken, in a chance meeting outside a shopping mall, Cynthia had yearned to box her ears. But Judge Poole’s daughters didn’t fight with their fists.
“Anyway, I just wanted you to know. So if you saw her. Alice, I mean.”
Everything made sense now. Her eyesight was getting better because she needed to see. Come to think of it, her hearing was sharper, too, so intense that the softest sound jarred her from her dreamless sleep. She didn’t exercise, it seemed idiotic now, going around and around on a treadmill or a stair-stepper, yet she had never been stronger, leaner, had more stamina. Maybe she should write a book, The Black Coffee and Cigarette Diet: How to Mourn Your Way to a Better Body. Good line, she would save that one up, throw it out to her sister, Sylvia, the next time they talked. Sylvia was the one person in Cynthia’s life who didn’t flinch at her sarcasm.
The significance of Sharon ’s call finally worked its way into the center of her brain. “She…is…coming…home. To my neighborhood.”
“Technically, I don’t think the Mannings live in Hunting Ridge. They’re a few blocks outside the boundary.”
Technically. How Sharon loved technicalities, legal and otherwise.
“She is coming home,” Cynthia repeated. “To a house that is no more than six blocks from my house.”