“Get back! Get away from me!” I scream. I point the heavy gun at him and rise to my feet, weak-kneed. I hold the gun with two hands, like Marv said.
“I’ll get help!” Judy shouts. She opens the door and runs out. As fast as she is, two stairs at a time, it’ll take her just minutes to get to Avarice and back to Gluttony.
“Back up, Judge!”
“You can’t be serious,” he says, in a voice suddenly dark with malevolence. His tears have stopped completely, as have his mutterings.
“Get back!” I aim the gun higher, right at his eyes. “Now!”
He backs up against the bookcase, sneering at me.
“Stay there! I mean it!” I lock my arms out straight. The gun wobbles slightly as I grip its grooved wooden handle.
“You would never hurt me.”
“Stay back!” I try to hold the gun still. There’s engraving on its steel barrel. S&W .357 MAGNUM. Jesus, it’s terrifying to have something like that in your hand. To hold something that packs so much power. It can kill in the blink of an eye. I could kill in the blink of an eye. The realization hits me with as much impact as any bullet. There are no witnesses. I could get away with murder.
“You couldn’t hurt me. You love me.”
“No. I love Mike.”
Bitter Man flinches. “The teacher? Forget him, he was dog shit. That’s why I killed him. He died like a dog, too. Road kill.” He laughs softly.
I can’t hear this. I look down the barrel of the gun. At the end is an orange sight. I line it up with the small American flag that is Bitter Man’s tie tack. My hand shakes slightly, but it’s easier to aim the gun than I thought.
“He was nothing. Insignificant. Weak. If you had seen his face—”
“Stop it!” I use the flag like a bull’s-eye. I focus on it and breathe deeply. Once, then again. An absolute calm comes over me. Bitter Man is three feet away, a large target. I have the weapon, I can use it. He killed two innocent men, men I loved. They didn’t deserve to die. He does, and I can kill him. All I have to do is pull the trigger. The ultimate in fucking back.
“He whimpered like—”
“Shut up!” I spit at him, in a voice I’ve never heard before. I have a split second before Judy gets back.
“Mary—”
“Shut up, I said! Shut up!” I look down the barrel at his expression of contempt and disgust. I ease the trigger just a fraction. The hammer, with its corrugated pad, falls back ever so slightly. There’s the loud, metallic click I heard before as the chamber rotates a millimeter. It’s all very mechanical. A very handsome killing machine, precision engineered in the United States of America. If I pull the trigger a fraction of an inch more, Messrs. Smith and Wesson will kill Bitter Man for me. I don’t even have to do it myself.
I raise the gun and get the flag in my sight. And then my hand isn’t shaking anymore.
“Give me one good reason,” I say to him.
33
That’s when I hear the voice. I recognize it suddenly. I know now who it is.
I thought it was Mike’s voice, but it’s not him at all. And it’s not the devil’s voice, or an angel’s either. It’s my soul’s own voice, gamely trying to climb out of the hole I’ve been digging for it steadily, daily, since the hour of my birth.
It’s me, trying to save my own soul.
Thou shalt not kill.
But I have killed. And I want to now. So much.
Spare him. Redeem yourself.
Redeem yourself. It resonates inside me, at the core.
Redemption.
I can’t change the past, but I can make the future. I know what it cost me to kill before. This time I have a choice. I choose no.
I release the trigger. The hammer snaps forward with a final click.
At the same moment, a terrified Judy appears at the doorway, followed by Berkowitz, Einstein, Golden Rod, and a crowd of appalled judges. In the instant that I look back, Bitter Man hurls himself into my arms. “Give me that gun!” he roars.
His weight sends me crashing back onto my desk. I feel his hands scrambling at my breast for the weapon. Suddenly, the gun goes off, with an earsplitting report. I hear myself scream. The force of the explosion reverberates in my ears and vibrates up my arm. For a minute I’m not sure who’s been hit.
One look at Bitter Man tells me the answer. His face is twisted in pain and surprise. He falls slowly backward, then slumps heavily to the floor. His shirt, in tatters, is black with smoke; his tie is shorn into two ragged halves. A crimson bud appears over his heart, then bursts into full vermillion bloom as he lies, contorted, on the carpet. The air stinks of fire and smoke.
Berkowitz rushes over to Bitter Man, stretched out on the floor, his blood staining the carpet. “Jesus,” Berkowitz says, looking up at me. “He’s dead.”
The judges, all of them assembled, look at me in disbelief. In shock. In revulsion.
I freeze at the judgment in their eyes. I’m stunned, shaking, in shock. I want to explain, but I can’t. All I can do is look back at them. It’s Judgment Day. I knew it was coming. It was just a question of time.
“Jesus, Mary!” Berkowitz cries out. He takes the revolver from me and gathers me up in his arms. I feel an enormous weight in my chest, the wrench of my heart breaking. I start to cry, first in great hiccups, then out of control. I’m not crying for Bitter Man. I’m crying for Mike and for Brent.
That night, after a chastened Lombardo has come and gone, Berkowitz drives me home himself. I feel utterly drained as I sit in the gleaming Mercedes-Benz, with its odor of fine leather and stale cigarettes. Berkowitz opens the car door for me and offers to walk me upstairs, but I turn him down. There’s no need. I’m safe now. No more telephone calls, no more notes. My empty apartment is my own again.
The door closes behind me, and I lean against it in the dark. I stand there for the longest time, thinking of Mike, who brought me from fear into love, using only his patience and his heart. I can’t believe he’s gone; it’s so awful that he died, and in so much pain. I feel newly grief-stricken; it makes me wonder if I ever let myself truly mourn him. Maybe I did the Next Thing too soon.
My thoughts run to Brent, who was so innocent. A wonderful friend, a loving man. His voice coach was right; he was full of joy. He’s gone now, cut down by the same man, mistakenly. Somehow that makes it much worse.
Bitter Man. He was bitter and evil for a reason no one can ever fathom. The devil, truly. Their deaths were his doing. It was his fault, not mine. Now he’s gone too. That much is my doing, that much I’m responsible for. No more.
Soon I’m crying, sobbing hard, and I can’t seem to make it stop. I feel overwhelmed by grief; it brings me to my knees in front of the closed door. I can’t believe that Mike is gone, that Brent is gone. That I’ll never see either of them again.
I wish I could stop crying, but I can’t, and soon I hear a loud boom boom boom against the door. Only it’s not someone else pounding on the door.
It’s my own skull.
34
FEDERAL ATTRACTION! screams the three-inch headline in the morning edition of The Philadelphia Daily News.
FEDERAL JUDGE ATTACKS WOMAN LAWYER: D.A. FINDS SELF-DEFENSE, reads the smaller headline in The Philadelphia Inquirer, its calmer sister publication.
I don’t read the newspaper accounts, don’t even want to see them. I just want to know if Berkowitz kept my name out of the papers, so I can practice law again in this city. Someday.
“I don’t see it anywhere,” Ned says, skimming the articles at my kitchen table. His tie is tucked carefully into a white oxford shirt. He stopped by on the way to work to see how I was, bearing blueberry muffins. He didn’t try to hug or kiss me. He seemed to sense that I needed the distance.
“Good.”
“You should take your time going back to work, Mary.” The muffins lie crumbled on the plate between us.
“I will, this time.”
“I’ll take care of your desk. Don’t
worry about a thing.”
“Thanks. I’ll return the favor.”
Ned smiles mysteriously.
“What?”
“I’m not telling you now. You’ve had enough surprises.” He folds up the newspaper and sets it down on the table.
“Tell me, Ned.”
“Actually, it’s a good surprise. You really want to hear it?” His green eyes shine.
“Sure.”
“I’m leaving the firm. As soon as you come back.”
“What?” It’s so unexpected, it draws me out of myself for a minute.
“There’s no future for me there. I’m not going to make partner.”
“How do you know that?”
“Berkowitz told me.”
Now I’m totally confounded. I sit up in the chair.
“He told me one day in his office, when I went in to ask him how many partners they were making.”
I remember, the conversation he materially omitted at dinner that night.
“Berkowitz told me I wasn’t going to be one of them, no matter how many they made.”
“Why?” I feel hurt for him.
“He said I didn’t have what it takes. The fire in the belly. The cipollines, I think he meant.” He smiles crookedly.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“No, it’s not. He’s right, Mary. I didn’t realize it until he said it, but he’s right. I don’t have the heart for it. I don’t even like being a lawyer. I was only doing it to prove something to my father.”
I don’t know what to say. Silence comes between us.
“I did talk to him, you know,” he says.
“Your father?”
“Yes. I told you I would. I called you about it, but you weren’t returning my calls.” He winces slightly.
“Ned—”
“That’s okay, you explained it. With the last note, even I would have suspected me. Anyway, my father never had you followed, but he did do a lot of research on you. He searched your name in Lexis and pulled all the cases you worked on.”
“Why?”
“To see what the competition was like. To size up my chances of making partner. That’s why he watched you at your dep.”
“Jesus.”
“He researched Judy, too, and me. He said he wanted to know what I was working on. I guess it never occurred to him to pick up the phone.” He picks idly at a blueberry crumb.
“Did he say anything about tampering with files?”
“No. I don’t think he’d do that, he’d think it was unethical. Wife-beating is okay, but tampering with case files, no.”
“How was it, seeing him again?”
“He looks older. His hair is all silver.”
“Are you two going to—”
“No, we’re not going to be pals, if that’s your question. We’ll talk from time to time, but that’s it. Nothing’s changed but his hair, I can see that. I asked him if he wanted to go into therapy with me. That went over real big.” He smiles, but it’s sour.
“So what are you going to do now? For a job?”
Ned pops a blueberry into his mouth. “I don’t know yet. Teach law, teach sailing. Get married, stay home with the kids. All ten of them. What do you say?”
“Am I supposed to answer that?”
“I drive a Miata, what more do you want?”
“A continuance.”
“Just like a lawyer, DiNunzio. Just like a lawyer.” He laughs loudly, throwing his head back. He looks happy and free.
“So do I get it?”
“Motion granted,” he says.
And Alice, who has been sitting under the kitchen table, rubs up against his leg.
35
It’s June 28, the first anniversary of Mike’s death.
I cruise up the smooth asphalt road that leads to the pink magnolia tree. I think of it as Mike’s tree, even though it shelters at least sixty other graves. They fan out from the trunk of the magnolia in concentric circles, ring upon ring of headstones.
I pull over at the side of the road, where I always park. I cut the ignition, and the air-conditioning shuts down with a wheeze. Outside the car, the air is damp and sweet. The radio called for thundershowers this afternoon, and I believe it. The air is so wet you know the bottom’s got to tear open, like a tissue holding water.
The cemetery is silent. The only sounds are the cars rushing by on the distant expressway and the intermittent quarreling of the squirrels. I make my way to Mike’s grave. Only a year ago, it was on the outermost ring, but now it’s somewhere toward the middle. More graves are being added, more people are passing on. Like the rings of the magnolia tree itself, it’s just time moving on, life moving on.
Death moving on, too.
I walk past the monuments with names I don’t recognize until I reach the ones I do. I feel as if I know these people. They’re Mike’s neighbors in a way, and they seem like a good lot. ANTONELLI has a new DAD sign; his family is very attentive to him. LORENZ’s grave is bare, though her monument bears its chipper epitaph: ALWAYS KIND, GENEROUS, AND CHEERFUL. I love Mrs. Lorenz, how could you not?
I pass BARSON, which stands alone, off to the right. It’s a child’s grave, and its pink marble headstone has a picture of a ballerina etched into it. There’s a Barbie doll there today, sitting straight-legged in tiny spike heels. I can never bring myself to look at BARSON for long and hurry by it to MARTIN. Something’s always going on at MARTIN. It’s a hubbub of activity, for a final resting place. Today I note that the showy Martin family has added yet another bush to the border that surrounds their mother’s monument. I wonder about these people. I don’t understand how they can bring themselves to garden on top of someone they loved.
I reach Mike’s monument and brush away the curly magnolia petals that have fallen on its bumpy top. I pick a candy wrapper off his grave, like I used to pick cat hair off his sweaters. Just because I’m not planting shrubs on his head doesn’t mean I don’t care how he looks. I bunch up the debris in my hand and sit down, facing his monument.
LASSITER, MICHAEL A.
It’s a simple granite monument, but so striking. Or maybe I feel that way because it’s Mike’s name cut into the granite with such finality and clarity, and I hadn’t expected to see his name on a gravestone. Not yet. Not when I can still remember doodling on a legal pad during our engagement.
Mrs. Mary Lassiter.
Mrs. Mary DiNunzio Lassiter.
Mary DiNunzio-Lassiter.
I eventually stuck with my own name, but I confess to a politically incorrect thrill when the mail came addressed to Mrs. Michael Lassiter. Because that’s who I was inside, wholly his.
I still am.
I’ve learned that you don’t stop loving someone just because they die. And you don’t stop loving someone who’s dead just because you start loving someone else. I know this violates the natural law that two things can’t occupy the same place at the same time, but that’s never been true of the human heart anyway.
I breathe a deep sigh and close my eyes.
“Look!” squeals a child’s voice at my ear. “Look what I have!”
I look over and find myself face to face with a blue-eyed toddler in a white pinafore. In her dimpled arms is a wreath of scarlet roses and a couple of miniature American flags. Plainly, the child has gone shopping on the graves. “You have a lot of stuff.”
“I have a lot of stuff!” says the little girl. “I found it! That’s okay!” She jumps up and down and a flag falls to the ground. “Uh-oh, flag.”
A woman in a prim linen suit rushes up and takes the child by the arm. “I’m sorry that she bothered you,” she says, flustered. “Lily, wherever did you get those things?”
Lily struggles to reach the fallen flag. “Flag, Mommy. Flag.”
“She’s no bother. She’s sweet.” I pick up the flag and hand it to Lily.
“Tank you,” Lily says, quite distinctly.
“Where do you suppose these things belong? I’d hate to pu
t them on the wrong… places.”
“The flags go with those soldiers, in the bronze flag holders. The VFW gives them the flag holders, I think. That one over there, HAWLEY, he was in Vietnam.”
“Oh, dear. Poor man.” She turns around worriedly. “Where do you think the wreath goes?”
I take a look at it. I have no idea where it belongs. “I’ll take the wreath.”
“Thank you. I’m so sorry.” She hands it to me gratefully and hoists Lily to her hip. “Can you make sure I find the soldiers?”
“Sure. Just look for the flag holders.”
Lily howls with frustration as her mother drops the flags into the flag holders at MACARRICI, WAINWRIGHT, and HAWLEY. I give her the thumbs up.
I stand and examine the wreath. The roses are a velvety red, fastened to the circular frame with green wire. There’s even a little green tripod to make the wreath stand up. I take it and set it at the head of Mike’s grave, right under LASSITER.
On its white satin sash, it says in gold script:
BELOVED HUSBAND
I look at it for a long time.
It looks good.
36
A month later, I’m in my new office at Stalling & Webb. On the wall hangs an antique quilt that I bought in Lancaster County, from the Amish. It’s called a friendship quilt and has the names of the quilters and their best friends sewn onto spools of a dozen bright colors. The other day I read all the names. Emma Miller, from Nappanee, Indiana. Katie Yoder, of Brinton, Ohio. Sarah Helmuth, from Kokomo, Indiana. I like to think about these women, whose lives were so different from my own but who valued each other so much. That much we have in common, and it ties me to them.
I’m thinking about this as Judy sits on the other side of my new desk, an Irish farm table that cost Stalling more than an Irish farm. She sports the latest example of Kurt’s handiwork, a spiky haircut that looks like Jean Seberg’s. If only by accident, the cut brings out the richness of her blue eyes and the curve of a strong cheekbone. She looks beautiful in it, especially when she laughs. She’s a good woman; I feel blessed in knowing her. In having her in my life.