Lauranne’s interruption signals that she wants Lu to move on from the topic of her first murder case as state’s attorney. Lauranne has very strict ideas about sharing conversational time-unless she’s the one who’s talking. Lu speaks more quickly, not quite ready to yield the floor.
“Anyway, the killer”-she makes it a point to use this word when discussing defendants because it hardens the idea in her mind, crowds out doubt. Rudy Drysdale is not just the defendant, he’s the killer. “Oh, I forgot. You might know him, AJ.”
“I know him?”
“Well, you went to Wilde Lake at the same time, although I guess he was two years behind you. Rudy Drysdale.”
“No, no-doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Yearbook photographer, AV squad, I found him in your yearbook-”
“There were twelve hundred kids in that school, Lu. I didn’t know all my classmates, much less some AV geek.”
“Anyway,” Lauranne says, “we’re not sure what we’re going to do. Surveillance cameras? AJ hates the idea and people would just steal them, but it’s infuriating to see our work undone for no reason. I’d understand if they were junkies-”
“Addicts,” AJ corrects softly.
“But it’s not like there’s metal to steal and fence. It’s the worst, this kind of mindless vandalism. It’s like they can’t stand to see their neighbors doing something positive, they have to drag everyone back to their level.”
Lu wants to say Namaste, Lauranne. Namaste. Instead, she lets her sister-in-law take the conversational bit into her mouth and run with it. At least she isn’t lecturing them on the menu, which happens sometimes. Lauranne claims she’s not judgmental about meat eaters, then drones on and on about unappetizing subjects such as GMOs and Big Agriculture. Tonight, the grown-ups (save Lauranne) are having pork tenderloin, while the twins eat macaroni and cheese. Out of a box, but one of the organic brands. Lu doesn’t see the point of buying three pounds of cheese to produce some Barefoot Contessa-caliber casserole when this is what her children prefer.
Penelope and Justin, bored by the adults, drift off to watch television-and manage to drift out of hearing range for any chores they might be assigned. Lu’s brother and his wife stay late, AJ smoking a cigar with his father on the recently added four-seasons porch, Lauranne offering no help with dishes or bedtime. The only thing she offers is criticism, not for the first time, of the household’s failure to compost. Lu would probably have done it by now if it weren’t for Lauranne’s insufferable nagging.
But AJ loves her so, she reminds herself. And that’s enough.
It is 10:30 by the time they leave, 11:30 before Lu is ready to go to bed. Moving through the house, compulsively putting small things in order, she sees light spilling down the stairwell from the third floor. The electric bills are heart-stopping for this inefficient old house, especially in the winter. She fines the children for leaving lights on, and they are generally good about remembering. When she turns the hall light off, she can see more light seeping under the door from AJ’s old room. The light is coming from a “modern” study lamp he had in high school, probably purchased at Scan’s in the Mall at Columbia. Their father says that it might be of value, that these original Danish modern items are sought after by collectors, and AJ should take it to his home before their father redoes this room. The lamp casts a circle on AJ’s desk, but there is nothing in the circle. Lauranne was probably poking around. She has designs on some of Adele’s jewelry, and their father has said it’s only fair that she have a piece or two, but Lu has dragged her feet about making any decisions. Of course, the jewelry isn’t kept in AJ’s room, but there are other treasures-a coin collection, a drawer full of photographs, many featuring AJ’s high school and college girlfriends. Lauranne has a jealous streak, too.
Lu turns the light off, but she doesn’t leave the room right away. Here, in the house’s last untouched place, she feels more connected to her past, her family, than anywhere else. She remembers AJ and Noel locked up in here for hours. Smoking pot, she knows now, although she didn’t realize it at the time, despite her obsessive eavesdropping. Oh, and almost hanging out the window to get a glimpse of the new neighbor, Miss Maude. “And then there’s Maude,” they would say, quoting a line from the sitcom’s theme song. Then they’d laugh and laugh and laugh, as if it were the funniest thing in the world. Yep, stoned, yet never stoners. She recalls Noel making just that point. “We’re not stoners.” At the time, she didn’t understand what he was talking about, envisioned the characters in the B.C. comic. Stoners, stonemen, cavemen. It’s amazing how much of life comes into focus years later, how long a memory can drift without context, then suddenly make sense. B.C. The comics were her life when she was a child, her frame for understanding everything. She can still see the layout of the morning Beacon’s comics page, not even a full page, while the afternoon Light had two entire pages. Still, she read the Beacon every morning. Mr. Tweedy, Marmaduke-those were one-panel cartoons with the horoscope above them. Oh, and that strange little naked couple that was so madly in love. Penelope and Justin don’t even look at the newspaper, whereas Lu used to sit next to her father and read the funny pages while he studied the editorials.
Ah, but now she sounds like Andrew Brant, harrumphing about how things have changed. Everything does. Everything but this room. Lu wonders if everyone in the Brant family enjoys this little time capsule. Maybe AJ was the one who was up here tonight.
OPERATOR, CAN YOU HELP ME PLACE THIS CALL?
As spring and AJ’s fifteenth birthday approached in 1977, he began to campaign for a new telephone line in our house, a private one, to be installed in his third-floor room. And if not a private one, then an extension. Between sports and his other extracurricular activities, he was almost never home. When he was home, he usually had Noel with him. And if Noel wasn’t at our house, AJ needed to talk to him, for hours and hours. We had only two telephones, one in my father’s bedroom and one in the kitchen, a fire-engine red one that hung on the wall. The cord was just long enough that AJ could stretch it into the walk-in pantry. I would go into the kitchen after dinner and see this thin scarlet worm taut across the kitchen, hear AJ’s mutterings. But even when I could make out the words-and I always lingered as long as I could-they never seemed to be about anything important or interesting.
Yet AJ insisted he needed his own phone.
“I can’t see why,” our father said. “All you use it for is idle gossip.”
“No, we check our math homework. Algorithms are killing me in Algebra two. I don’t understand them at all.”
“Then I don’t think more time on the telephone is the remedy. A tutor, perhaps, if you’re really struggling-”
“Also, we could use a Baltimore line, couldn’t we? Don’t you need to be able to make local calls to both Baltimore and D.C.? That way, I could have a private line. Lots of kids do.”
Now in Columbia, at that time, your telephone prefix conveyed an important part of your family’s story, its roots. You were given a choice, upon moving in, whether you wanted to be “997,” which allowed you to make local calls to D.C., or if you were “730,” oriented toward Baltimore. Yet my family, who had moved to Columbia from Baltimore, always had a D.C. prefix. “For my work,” our father said, and I guess that made sense. He was in government, government was in D.C. And Annapolis, the state capital. There was nothing left for us in Baltimore. AJ sometimes spoke longingly of the house where he had lived his first eight years-the stained-glass windows, the turret, the fenced backyard. But on our rare trips into the city-usually to eat at Haussner’s, the art-crammed German restaurant that my father loved-there was always a reason not to drive by. We were running late, the house was in the wrong direction.