“Would you like a chair?” Walter, the original Walter, asked.
“No, that’s okay.”
“This may take a while.”
“You’re standing.”
“That’s because I can’t pull a chair up to the bars. If I could, I would. But there’s no reason for us both to be uncomfortable.”
There’s not a chair in the world that could make me comfortable right now.
“I’m fine.” She watched Vonnie snake her hand into the deep pockets of her jacket, a laughably fashionable wrap that only heightened the dowdiness of Eliza’s suburban mother garb of slacks and sweater. But the pockets were a boon. Vonnie was starting the microcassette recorder.
“You look wonderful, Elizabeth.” Her full name hurt in Walter’s mouth. “But then—I saw your photo, I knew how you’d look. How do I look?”
“Well,” she said. He wanted more. “Fit.”
“I’m only forty-six. It’s hard for us to get exercise, but you’d be surprised what you can do in a cell, with no equipment but your own body. Barbara got me into yoga. I’m not much on flexibility, but my strength—I’ll show you.” To Eliza’s surprise—and apparently to the deputy’s consternation, as the man seemed to tense all over—Walter put his palms on the floor and then leaned forward until his knees rested against his elbows, his feet up in the air, his entire weight balanced on his arms.
“The crow,” he said, holding the position nonchalantly. “Hey, do you root for the Ravens or the Redskins?”
“What?”
“I mean, I know you grew up in Baltimore and its environs”—environs—“but now you live in the D.C. area, so it just popped into my head, which football team do you choose?”
“Walter, I don’t think this is an occasion for small talk.”
“Oh, so it’s going to be like that?” Standing up, dusting off his palms, but not particularly offended as far as she could tell. Relieved, almost playful. “Okay, but before we cut to the chase, as people say, there is something else we have to talk about first. The night that Holly died. And what happened after.”
She looked at the deputy, who had the good grace to try and pretend that none of this was happening, that he was watching them because it was his duty, yet unengaged. “I—” She looked at Vonnie, who understood her distress but had no solution.
“Hey, Walter?” That was Walter behind bars, talking to Walter at the desk.
“Yes, Walter?”
“Do you need to hear what we’re going to talk about?”
“I need to watch. You know that. I have to watch.”
“Watching’s okay. Do you have to hear?”
The deputy thought for a moment, nodded, took an MP3 player from his desk drawer, and plugged in the earbuds. Eliza couldn’t identify the music, but she could tell it was loud, loud enough so she could hear a tinny buzz. But he kept his eyes fastened on them, and she was not sorry for that.
“Tit for tat,” Walter said, inclining his head toward Vonnie.
“But—?”
“Just us. That’s nonnegotiable. She can go back to wherever they want to hold her, but she can’t stay here.”
The two sisters exchanged glances, but it was hopeless. Vonnie had secreted the microcassette player in her pocket precisely so her purse could be examined by the deputy as Walter looked on. They had made a great show of having their bags examined when they entered. They would have to forgo the taping. Vonnie knocked on the door, and another deputy came to escort her away.
“Hush, hush,” Walter said. When she looked at him, stony-faced, he added: “It was a joke, Elizabeth. Remember how much you liked that song?”
“I did. I liked a lot of songs that summer. I don’t like them now.”
“I ruined them, I guess.”
She selected her words with care. “When you hear a song, it’s natural to remember where you were when it was popular.”
“I ruined the songs.” He looked genuinely contrite. “I hadn’t thought about that. I may have ruined the songs, but I didn’t ruin you. Look at you, Elizabeth.”
She considered this. Her life had not been destroyed by Walter, far from it. She had an unusually good life, especially for these uncertain times. She had Peter, she had Albie and Iso. She had her parents—hale and hearty into their seventies. And, as the past forty-eight hours had reminded her, she could even rely on Vonnie, impossible, exasperating Vonnie. What did she lack, what had been denied her?
The world at large. No truly close friends, just Peter’s friends and some acquaintances. And this wasn’t a function of the multiple relocations or the temperaments of the women she had met in Houston and London and now Bethesda. It wasn’t, as she had always rationalized, because she was too eastern in Texas, too American in London, too Baltimore for Washington-centric Montgomery County. She couldn’t even blame her lack of friends on being the mother of the girl who might be renowned as the subtle bully and sneak thief of North Bethesda Middle. Eliza didn’t have friends because friendship led to trust and confidences. The thick black line drawn through her life, demarcating where Elizabeth ended and Eliza began, had always made that impossible, at least in her mind.
“No, you didn’t ruin me. But the fact that you didn’t destroy me doesn’t mitigate what you did.”
“I’ll say it: I raped you.” Walter’s voice was low, as if to ensure these words would be heard by her, and her alone. Out of consideration or shame? “I did. I would never deny your experience. You were raped, and I did it. But can you see that it felt like love to me, Elizabeth? Just a little.”
She shook her head. “This is not what we’re supposed to be discussing. There is no point in talking about this.”
“Actually, there is. Because before I can tell you anything, you need to understand this—that night with you was the first and only time in my life that I had sex.”
“No—” She wanted to turn her back on him, hide her face as she sorted through her emotions. It was a lie, it couldn’t be, why was he doing this to her? “You’ve said…I read…”
“I lied. I lied because I was ashamed. That’s how screwed up I was. I was more ashamed of my lack of sexual experience than I was about the things I’d done. I made up this whole story about how I’d done it back home and everyone assumed I’d done it to the other girls. The true first time—the only time—was with you. Remember? That hotel near the Blue Ridge Mountains?”
IT WAS THE NIGHT after Holly had died. Walter had barely spoken throughout the day. He was dazed, semicatatonic, and Eliza had to prompt him to do the smallest things. Moving forward when lights turned green, speaking up when the waitress asked his order at dinner that night.
The hotel was a nice one, an actual hotel, with a restaurant, the kind of place that had linen tablecloths and an elaborate mural that showed people in old-fashioned clothes picnicking. Had there been that much money in Holly’s little tin box? A credit card? Walter urged Elizabeth to order whatever she wanted, but her stomach was sour, and she knew he would be angry if she wasted this food, expensive as it was. Yet Walter wasn’t eating at all. He cut his steak into ever smaller pieces, mashed his baked potato as if it were something he wanted to kill.
“Your dad eats even less than you,” remarked the waitress.
“I’m not her dad,” Walter said, and something in his voice made the waitress flinch. He softened his tone. “I’m her brother. She was a change-of-life baby, and now our parents are dead and all we have is each other.”
“That’s…nice. Real nice.”