The next time they talked, he resolved he would say “I’m sorry” first thing. No small talk, no edging into the conversation. He would say the words he had never been allowed to say to her, one on one, the words that had burned in his throat and his chest all these years. He had understood, of course, why he had never been allowed to speak to her, why even during her cross-examination he had been instructed to regard her with the blankest of faces, listening with sorrowful eyes that never quite met hers. Still, there had been a part of him that always felt it wasn’t such a strange thing to ask, a final good-bye, just the two of them, maybe in a room in the courthouse, an armed guard standing outside. He had known better than to ask, but that didn’t mean he knew not to want it. He still wanted it.
No, he had to blurt it out, straight and true: “I’m sorry.”
Then maybe she would finally say she was sorry, too.
Part III
IN MY HOUSE
25
“I’M SORRY.”
The words came so fast, tumbling out the moment the collect call was approved, that they were almost cut off. Eliza stared at the beige receiver in her hand, wondering if Walter had been speaking into space, if he was reaching the end of a long and breathless recitation.
It had been a week since his last call, although Eliza marked the passage of time as a week since the school had called. She hadn’t forgotten Walter; the telephone was there every morning, the first thing she saw. But it was Iso who dominated her waking hours. It had been a tiptoey time in their household, she and Peter trying to observe Iso without crowding her, attempting to judge if she was headed toward real trouble. When she made fun of Albie—was that bad, or typical sibling behavior? Should Eliza let that go, in hopes that it would satisfy whatever aggression Iso needed to express, or should she nip it in the bud?
Eliza’s parenting had always been natural and easy, largely uninformed by texts and experts. Even her parents, experts in their own right, had encouraged Eliza to find her own way as a mother. For years she had felt that her immersion in children’s literature had been better preparation than any parenting guide. There it was, all the fears and emotions and needs of childhood. When other mothers asked where she sought guidance, she often said, “Everything I know about parenting I learned from Ramona Quimby.” People thought she was being glib, but she felt those particular books, written from a child’s-eye view of the world, were indispensable. Inez once told Eliza she was a good mother because she had never forgotten what it was like to be a child. Like nursing mothers who squirt milk at the sound of any baby’s cry, Eliza could be catapulted into childhood by a tantrum or a plaintive whine. She remembered it vividly, perhaps because it was sharply fenced off in her mind. The before time, the Elizabeth time.
So while she could never forget Walter, embodied as he was by this bland, beige instrument—the phone of Damocles, Peter had taken to calling it—Iso was uppermost in her mind, Iso was the present, Iso was a situation that could be improved, changed, monitored. Walter was the past. And not her responsibility.
“Elizabeth?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“I’m sorry. Did you hear me say that? I’m sorry. I wanted to say it first thing, in case we get interrupted again.”
Oh lord, Eliza thought. I hope we don’t get interrupted again. She felt that her life had already reached its drama quotient for the next decade. Any more worries—a call from a neighbor that Reba had gotten out of the yard, even a rumble in the Subaru’s motor—might push her over the edge.
“I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry that I kidnapped you. I’m sorry for the way I treated you, in those early days, when I wanted to make sure you would do whatever I said, when I said all those awful things about what I would do to your family. I am sorry, most of all, for what happened the last night.”
“What happened?” She meant only to echo his words, to question the euphemism.
“When I—the sex.” He had clearly misread her tone.
“The rape.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice a somber whisper. “I am sorry that I raped you. In some ways, I am sorrier for that than for anything else I did.”
She sat on the edge of her bed, examined the quilt, the sheets, the shams, all new. Peter, who traveled widely, had wanted to fit their bed with expensive sheets, Frette or even Pratesi. Eliza had argued that their bed should continue to be hospitable to children, children who still spilled things and forgot to put the tops on their markers. She had ordered this carefully mismatched set from a catalog, mixing striped sheets with a riotous quilt. There was already a stain on the dust ruffle, if one knew where to look, and some ink on a corner of a sham, but that came from Peter working in bed. No matter how much money Peter made, no matter how mature Iso and Albie became, they were never going to be a Frette kind of family.
“Elizabeth?”
Again, that prompt, bordering on a demand. How dare he? What did he expect? That she would say it was okay? That she would offer forgiveness? This wasn’t Albie, using the guest room towels to wipe off Reba’s muddy feet, a typically dreamy, well-intentioned mistake on his part. It wasn’t even Iso, suspected of the crime of subtle bullying.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’ve never said that.”
“I never had a chance to speak to you.”
“I mean—in other, um, venues. You never spoke of it.”
“Other ven—oh, interviews. So you read them?”
“Sometimes.” She had, in fact, avoided them until a month ago, when she had reread everything, trying to figure out how Walter had gotten back into her life.
“I hate to say this, but I was told by my lawyer not to address any of the things where charges weren’t brought. Not even in my own defense.”
“The other girls,” she said, suddenly feeling protective of her little ghosts.
“I’ve never spoken of the other things I was accused of. Not even to you, not even when I wanted to…scare you.”
“No, no you didn’t. But the things I read made it pretty clear—”
“The things you read about yourself—were those true, Elizabeth?”
He had scored a point there, although she thought it unfair. True, Jared Garrett had speculated, with no seeming facts at his disposal, about Walter’s sexual proclivities. He had raised questions of premature ejaculation, necrophilia, pedophilia. It was, after all, impossible to libel a convicted killer.
But the standards for Eliza should have been different. Shouldn’t they?
“I can understand that you don’t want to talk about the crimes with which you were never charged.”
“There was a time,” Walter said, “when they wanted to bury me with every unsolved murder from South Carolina to Pennsylvania. They made my father vouch for my work schedule, went through his files.”
“Yes, but there are still a lot of missing girls…one was from Point of Rocks.”
“That was just a place to cross the river, Elizabeth, nothing more. Elizabeth”—she wished he would stop the repeated use of her name, which made him sound like a salesman, or someone who had just read Dale Carnegie—“I don’t want to go over all of this, I really don’t. I called to tell you that I’m sorry for what I did to you. That’s long overdue.”