She will sleep in the chiffon of pretend royalty tonight. She can change in the morning, before school.
These days I worry what her teacher, or some of the mothers must think, when they see my daughter. Her clothes are clean but not pressed. Perhaps it is merciful that Sarah, who was born a clotheshorse, has with her mother’s passing lost the fascination for things feminine. The dresses she used to wear, frilly things of pride to Nikki, now hang like listless ghosts in Sarah’s closet. My faculty for color coordination has never embraced my own tie rack. It is painful to the senses when applied to a little girl’s colored tights and tops. The braids and fine ponytails that seemed to take Nikki five minutes defy my thick fingers, so that most mornings Sarah’s bountiful hair now looks like hay in a Kansas windstorm. When we play games together these days it is not jump rope or jacks, but baseball, or tossing hoops in the yard, where I hold her up near the rim so she can do her own version of slam-dunk. When she trudges off to school each day, backpack slumping across her scrawny shoulders, I wonder if by yoking her affections to her widowed father’s wagon my daughter has doomed herself to life as a tomboy.
I pull off her socks, cover her, a peck on the cheek, then flip on her night-light.
Down the hall in my room I can hear her breathing in the child monitor on my nightstand. I rummaged through a dozen boxes in the garage to find this. Nikki had packed it away when Sarah turned three, when the worries of SIDS and other parental paranoia had passed. But in the weeks after Nikki’s death, Sarah suffered bouts of crying that tore at my soul. I would go to her in her room and hold her, cradled in my arms, while she asked questions I could not answer. Why her father, who could do all things, could not bring Mommy back? Where had she gone? Would we ever see her again? Staring down in her round baleful olive eyes, I soothed her with a litany of faith — that her mother was with God, that she was happy, that from the clouds in heaven she watched over her little girl — and that one day we would all be together again, for ever. And in my soul of souls I hoped beyond all that I knew that this was true. Then Sarah would sleep, secure in the promise of a father’s wishes.
In a daze I step into the shower tub. Cold water laps my legs to midcalf. I’d forgotten drawing Sarah a bath, hours ago now. As I pull the plug I hear the phone ringing on the bedside table. I run, wrapping a towel around my waist for fear the phone may wake Sarah. Who the hell can be calling at this hour? It cannot be good news.
‘Mr. Madriani.’
‘Yes.’
‘Gail Hemple here.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’m at Jack Vega’s house,’ she says. ‘You’d better get over here as fast as you can.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘The police are here,’ she says. ‘I got a call an hour ago from Vega’s lawyer.’
It hits me like an iced dagger — in the cynical center of my lawyer’s brain — Laurel and her temper. She has done some foolish act of harassment, broken a window, smashed a windshield, inscribed her initials with a key in the satin finish of Jack’s state-leased $80,000 Lexus. After the allegations of drugs in court, I knew I should have had her here in the house, overnight. I spent two hours before dinner grilling Julie and her mother on the charges. Each in her turn denied them roundly.
‘What did she do?’ I say.
There’s a stutter on the phone as Hemple regroups. She knows who I’m talking about. Clearly her client has done something.
‘I can’t talk now,’ she says. ‘Don’t say anything more. I’m in my car, on the cellular. Just answer one question. Is she with you now?’
‘Laurel?’ I ask.
‘Just yes or no,’ she says.
‘No. She’s probably home.’
‘She’s not,’ says Hemple.
‘Where are the kids?’ I ask. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
‘Can’t talk. Get over here,’ she says, ‘now.’
‘Sarah’s sleeping,’ I say. ‘I’ll have to get someone to watch her.’
‘Do it,’ she says, and hangs up.
Mrs. Bailey, the next-door neighbor, may never forgive me — a phone call in the middle of the night, another urgent request for help. She is every family’s grandmother, sixty-two, straitlaced, and alone. A churchgoing lady of conservative habits, she lives for the welfare of little children and her weekly Bible classes, in that order. I’m afraid I’ve taken advantage of her weakness for kids. She’s been my perpetual crutch, baby-sitting in every pinch since Nikki died. She will not take money for this, so I wait for her back fence to blow down in a windstorm, or her car to conk out some morning, any way to reciprocate for her kindness by the performance of some manly duty. To date, everything she owns is upright and working, more than I can say for myself at this moment.
I’m wiping sleep from my eyes, gripping the steering wheel with both hands as I drive.
Jack and Melanie Vega live on a cul-de-sac off of Forty-second Avenue, in a large colonial gambrel, white pillars on a setback of manicured lawn larger than some city parks.
Two blocks from their house and there is an ethereal glow to the night sky, fogged by the vapors of early autumn, the ghostly colors flashing blue, amber, and red. Two patrol cars have the intersection leading to Jack’s house blocked off, the only way in or out.
I lie to one of the cops at the intersection, tell him I am a relative, present tense. He passes me through, directs me to park on the other side of the street.
A fire truck is at the curb directly in front of Jack’s house, its diesel engine droning a dull monotone.
I wonder for a moment. I have never thought of Laurel as any kind of firebug, then dismiss the thought. These days if your kid samples snail bait they dispatch a hook-and-ladder, the vehicle of choice in any emergency.
There’s a growing crowd at the curb, a few drive-by rubberneckers and neighbors on my side of the street. Some bold souls are across on the other side, closer to the house, pressing one of the cops and the firemen for information. I look for Gail Hemple, but see no sign.
I park the car and walk, milling with the neighbors, most of whom are in bathrobes and slippers, a guy in pants, his jacket zipped to the throat, and sockless loafers. His collar is muffled up against the cold. He’s plying an older woman for the latest rumors wafting through the crowd, what she saw or heard. A lot of shrugging shoulders from the old lady.
‘One of the policemen said something about a victim inside,’ she says.
Suddenly there’s a knot in my stomach, cold sweat on my forehead. Hemple’s voice on the phone, her tone, was not the siren of concern over some mild monkeyshine cast as vendetta.
The driveway, the only break in a six-foot wrought-iron fence that seals off the front of the house, is barred with yellow police tape. Guys in plain clothes are wandering back and forth between the house and parked cars, the little satchels of forensics in their hands.
The portico of Jack’s house is a miniature of the executive mansion, everything but an honor guard and the Secret Service. Impressing the world is what Jack lives for. I have a clear view of the entry, wide open, lit like a Christmas tree, Corinthian columns all around.
There is a message conveyed by all of this — a victim without the urgent care of racing ambulances. The thought, the limited possibilities, leave me with a chill.
I tried four times to call Laurel at her apartment on the cellular on my way over here. There was no answer. I figure the kids must be with her.
‘Mr. Madriani.’ I hear a soft voice behind me and turn. It’s Gail Hemple. She’s standing with a small group twenty feet away, another woman and a couple arm-in-arm, near some bushes in the driveway of a house. The woman with Hemple looks vaguely familiar, a face I recognize to which I cannot put a name, someone from a past life. The couple, man and woman, young and shivering in the cold, stir no embers of recognition.