“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.”
“Helen Manning’s a city schoolteacher and a single mother. She doesn’t have the resources to pick up and move.” How quickly Sharon always switched from contrite to self-righteous. The defensive public defender, Warren had called her. You must understand, Cynthia…What purpose can be achieved, Cynthia…They are little girls, Cynthia…Your tragedy, great as it is, Cynthia…There will always be some ambiguity, Cynthia. You, of all people, must value justice, Cynthia. Cynthia, Cynthia, Cynthia.
As if what Cynthia wanted was anything less than justice. She had let them talk her out of justice.
“Can’t you make it a rule that she has to live someplace else?”
“Of course not.” Sharon ’s voice was huffy now, hurt. It was the paradoxical mark of the offensive, in Cynthia’s experience, that they were offended so easily. The only feelings Sharon safeguarded were her own.
“When that man on North Avenue got pardoned, they made it a condition that he couldn’t go back to the neighborhood where he had shot that child.”
“It’s not the same.”
“No, he killed a thirteen-year-old boy. This was a nine-month-old child. Oh, and he was pardoned.” Cynthia did not add: He was a black man who killed a black child. These were white girls who killed a black baby. She let her silence say that part, let what was unsaid make Sharon squirm, in her little cubbyhole in that sad-ass state office building. All your scheming, all your planning, and you sit today where you sat seven years ago. What was the point?
“You live in two different worlds,” Sharon said. “You’ll probably never see either one of them again.”
“We lived in two different worlds seven years ago, too.”
“You know, I’ve always felt that the only way to understand what happened was to think of it as a natural disaster, almost like a tornado, or lightning.” Sharon ’s voice was so reasonable, so sure of itself, the voice of a girl who had been on her high school debate team and still considered this a notable achievement. “A series of events came together and formed something horrible, something destructive. Wouldn’t it make you feel better to see it in that light?”
Answers crowded Cynthia’s tongue, backed up into her throat, until she thought she might choke on them. It would make you feel better. You always try to have it both ways, and you won’t even let me have it one way.
Brake lights flashed ahead of her, traffic coming to a stop for no discernible reason, and her reflexes were off because of the phone call, so the 4,665 pounds of BMW squealed and shimmied, coming within inches of the rusty little Escort in front of her, a ready-to-disintegrate heap with a Kings Dominion bumper sticker and a Confederate flag decal. Cynthia didn’t mind Confederate flags. She’d like to see a law that required every white trash hillbilly to have one tattooed on his or her forehead. You would see them coming that way.