“Spared by whom? Only you, our parents, and Peter know about me. And our grandparents, but they’re gone. No one else can see this dog. If you want to talk about how you feel, have at it. But don’t put it on me.”
“Okay, fine. I’ll own my feelings.” Vonnie paused. She was going to say something difficult, Eliza realized, the kind of thing that could never be unsaid. “From the day you were taken, I’ve always felt that our parents became less interested in me, and my achievements. They almost lost you, so you’re more precious to them. They can’t help it. They try, because they’re smart and compassionate people, but nothing I do can compare to what you give them simply by existing. And, no offense, Eliza, but existing is pretty much all you do.”
It was the last bit that stung. Until then, she had been okay.
“I’m a mother and a wife. You probably couldn’t survive a day in my life. In fact, the reason we’re making this trip is because Peter didn’t think you could handle a day in my life.” That was cruel and would only damage the already tenuous bond between her sister and her husband, but Eliza was too angry to fight fair.
“Don’t twist this into some mommy-war argument. You know I’m not that simplistic. You…float through life. You let life happen to you. I think you’re a great mother, and I know you put a lot of energy into what you do. But you live the most reactive life of anyone I know, Eliza. Jesus, if there’s one thing I would have learned from your experience, I think it would be to never let anyone else take control of my life. Instead, you’ve handed yours over. To Peter, to the children. And now you’re giving it back to Walter Bowman.”
“I’m going there because he’s agreed to tell me what he’s never told anyone else. How many girls he killed, where they are.”
Vonnie was silent for a few minutes, and Eliza focused on the car’s GPS, which was narrating their way to the B and B, not having an alternate location to offer. She hated the GPS voice. It always sounded a little smug to her. She rather enjoyed it when construction or some other unanticipated problem put the GPS in the wrong, not that the voice ever admitted that she had screwed up.
“And then what?” Vonnie asked.
“What do you mean?”
“He confesses to you. So what? Has it occurred to you that it won’t be considered valid if his lawyer isn’t present? That it might not settle anything, just stir things up? It’s occurred to Peter, I can tell you that much.”
So Peter and Vonnie had discussed this, outside her hearing.
“When did you and Peter hash this out?”
“Last night. He was up late, working. As was I. I went downstairs to scare up a glass of wine. You know, someone should tell Peter that just because wine is expensive and French, doesn’t mean it’s good.”
Oddly, that offhanded criticism softened Eliza’s anger. It, at least, was classic Vonnie, careless and thoughtless.
“Back when we were teenagers, you once said that everything would be about me from now on. Isn’t it possible that your own perceptions became reality? That you see what you look for?”
“Yes,” Vonnie said. “But isn’t it also possible that I’m right? That I’ve lived my entire life in my sister’s shadow?”
“Not in the world at large.”
“Fuck the world at large. It’s the family I care about.”
That was news. “Are you worried that what I’m doing will become public? That all the old stuff will be dredged up again?”
“No. I know that’s not what you want.”
“So why are we talking about this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we’re talking about it because it’s always there and yet we never have. Maybe it’s not a big dog but just the old clichéd elephant in the room. I’ve always understood that what happened to you happened to you. But it happened to the rest of us, too. To Mom and Dad. To me. We were there. Not Peter. Yet it’s Peter whom you trust, more than any of us. It’s Peter who shapes your life. You follow him wherever his job leads him, make the sacrifices necessary to make his career possible, even as you give up on your own.”
“Vonnie, this may be the hardest thing for you to understand, but I never considered dropping out of graduate school a sacrifice. If I hadn’t withdrawn, I’d probably still be there, trying to write a thesis on the children’s literature of the 1970s, and bored to tears. I learned a long time ago that I just didn’t have that much to say about Judy Blume’s Forever and why a boy would name his penis Ralph, given its associations to vomiting. Talk about semiotics.”
Vonnie laughed, and the air cleared. They continued to laugh throughout the day, old stories bubbling up to the surface. The Stuckey’s log (again) and their attempt to feign innocence as peanut-fouled water overflowed their bathroom at the charmingly quaint Martha Washington Inn. More memories followed throughout the day in Richmond, as they strolled through the fan district, ate dinner at the New York Times-anointed charcuterie restaurant. Vonnie remembered the terrible woman who had threatened to run them down at the beach, but also how Mr. Sleazak, their society painter neighbor back in Roaring Springs, had asked Inez to pose nude for a portrait, saying it would be “Just for me.” It was a most satisfactory day and one that had done the impossible-taken Eliza’s mind off tomorrow. She wouldn’t be surprised if the fight itself had been Vonnie’s attempt to distract her. She was a good sister, in her way, and her way was all she had.
But that evening, as Eliza tried to fall asleep in a strange bed, away from Peter, Iso, and Albie, she found herself reviewing the day’s events. Of all the funny stories she and Vonnie had shared, almost every one came from before. Was that because Vonnie had left for school? Or because the Lerner family lost its ability to be silly after Eliza came home? Strange, but she had never considered until now the totality of what Walter had taken, from all of them. From the day she came home, the Lerners had lived with a sense of remission, grateful yet skittish. They were well today, but that could end tomorrow. Of course that was true of every happy family. The difference was that the Lerners knew. Having been unlucky once, they could be unlucky again. There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.
42
“BACK AGAIN, MISS LAFORTUNY?” asked the young woman at the Hampton Inn’s front desk.
“You know me. I like to check on my boys.”
The clerk, a sweet-faced girl who should have taken better care of herself-everything about her appearance screamed poor nutrition and lack of exercise-smiled noncommittally. Like most people that Barbara met, she seemed torn between admiring her advocacy work and being horrified by it, with horror having a slight edge.
“How many you got now?”
“Just three, and they never let me see the one on death row. But I have the two others, and I am allowed to visit them from time to time. If they’re good. And I’m good.”
“I’m sure you’re always good, Miss Barbara,” the girl said. Not even two hundred miles from Baltimore and yet the manners were markedly different here.
“Oh, you’d be surprised. I can be a rabble-rouser.”
“I bet you can,” the girl said agreeably, going through those mysterious computer clicks that seem required of every transaction these days. Barbara wondered if teaching, too, now required moving through computer screens. Grading was probably done electronically, come to think of it. In her day, she had pressed hard, in ink, so her judgment would pass through multiple sheaves of paper. Cs. She had mainly given Cs, which had been slightly better than most of her students deserved. She’d never make it in today’s more lenient environment.