“That you hired McLean to kill the reporter. You see, Faber had found out that you had killed the chief.”
I look up at him behind the large gun barrel. “Why would I kill Armen?”
“Sexual harassment is a terrible thing. He raped you that night in the office.”
“He did no such thing!”
A smug smile inches across his lips. “I heard. You were very willing, McLean said.”
“You—”
“Of course, McLean was all too happy to help you cover up the murder. He’s been nursing his hate for a decade. He thinks the chief ruined his life, so it didn’t take much convincing to get him on board. I bought him a few drinks and pointed him in the right direction.” He levels the gun at me. “Sign, please.”
I pick up the paper and unfold it. It’s neatly typed, and the last line makes me sick inside:
I love my daughter very much.
I stare at the paper. I love my daughter very much. Maddie. She’ll think I abandoned her. I know how that feels. I fight back the tears; I’d beg if it would do any good. “She needs me, Ben,” I said hoarsely.
“You were the one who wouldn’t let it lie.”
I look at the note. The typed letters seem to swim before my eyes against a vast backdrop of brown packages. PRAYER RUG. STATUE. ANOTHER STATUE. Then I remember the label on one of the other packages. BIG THING.
The cudgel. It’s on the chair by the window. Eletha called it a baseball bat. How will I reach it? I need time to think. Stall him.
“You have a problem, Ben. I don’t have a gun like Armen did.”
He laughs abruptly. “He wasn’t very good with it, Grace. I had the letter opener, but he couldn’t bring himself to shoot me. I grabbed his hand and pointed it at his own head. It was over in a minute.”
Poor Armen. I imagine the scene with horror. I can’t speak.
“Don’t think too badly of me. I did give him a last chance to come out the right way in Hightower, even brought him a draft opinion. We discussed the case law for some time, even the policy issues. It was sort of a final appeal. For him, and for me.”
He makes me sick, outraged. “How are you going to pull this off, Ben? You going to make me shoot myself, too? Your fingerprints are all over your gun.”
“Oh, you won’t use my new toy, Grace. You’ll jump.”
I feel my mouth fall open. My mind reels. “From where?”
“The window.” He gestures with the gun barrel.
I wheel around toward the window, petrified at the thought. Then I glimpse the cudgel right near the window, on the chair. Armen said it was used to kill. Can I kill? “Ben, you don’t mean this.”
“Yes, I do.”
My blood runs cold. “But the windows.”
“I’ll break them. They’re just a single layer of glass, not even thermapane. This building was built in the sixties.”
“But the marshals will hear it.”
“Not from inside. We’re eighteen floors up. Even if someone sees it, they’ll think it’s the wind from the storm and phone GSA. They should be here by tomorrow morning.” He cocks the trigger on the gun and it clicks smoothly into operation. “Sign the paper. Now.”
He’s thought of everything. I feel a stab of stone cold fear, then will myself to stay calm. Remember Maddie. Use the cudgel. It destroyed families, now it will protect one. “I’ll sign it,” I tell him, “but ease off the trigger. You want them to find me shot?”
“Now you’re thinking.” He relaxes on the trigger and I pick up the pen. My hand is trembling as I read the letter one last time. What if I can’t get to the cudgel. What if I blow it? “Hurry, Grace.”
I scribble my name, then lift the pen from the paper. Just in case, underneath I write, I love you, Mads. You are the best. I blink back the tears that seem to come.
“Get up,” Ben says. “Stand near the window.”
Good, you bastard. That’s just where I want to be. My whole body shivers. Get a grip. I’m not within arm’s length from the cudgel, not yet. It’s too close to the window.
Still aiming the gun at me, Ben crosses the room. He picks up a chair and swings it into the wall of windows. The huge panel shatters instantly into brittle shards; cracks race all over the pane like nerve endings, electrified. Breathing like a madman, Ben hurls the chair into the cracked window again, at full speed. It bounces off with a crashing sound. The glass explodes into a million pieces. Slivers fly in all directions. The window collapses and falls away, hurtling down the side of the courthouse, leaving a jagged opening like the mouth of a dark cave.
Wind and cold rain blast into the office, gusting hard off the Delaware. Glass particles and loose papers flutter wildly around the room in crazy currents. My hair whips around. The rain soaks my face and clothes. Glass stings my cheek, my forehead. The room seems to hang in the middle of the thunderstorm. Wind buffets my ears.
“Walk to the window!” Ben shouts against the wind.
I brace myself and step closer to the cudgel near the window. The wind howls. The rain drenches me.
“Now, Grace! Jump or I push you out! Your choice!”
I take another step to the window. The city glitters at my feet. The cudgel is at my right, and behind it is Independence Hall, lit up at night. I face the wind and take one deep breath, then another. One, two…three!
I grab the wrapped cudgel by its end and whip it full force into Ben’s face. It makes contact with a dense, awful thud. I drop the weapon, horrified.
Ben staggers backward, shrieking in pain and shock, blood pouring from his mouth and teeth. His jaw hangs grotesquely and his hands rush to it. His gun slips onto a pile of broken glass. I dive for it a second before Ben does and scramble to my feet, my own hands cut and slippery with blood.
I point the gun at him as he lies on the floor, in the whirling holocaust of splintered glass and paper. “Stay down!”
But he won’t. He staggers to his feet, moaning in agony. It’s a wild animal sound, as loud as the wind. Blood runs in rivulets between his fingers.
“Stay back! Stay away!” I can barely look, but he keeps coming toward me, backing me up against the conference table. I hold the gun up. I don’t want to shoot him, please don’t make me. “Ben, stop!”
Suddenly, he stops and shakes his head, still cupping his chin. His suit is heavy with rain and blood. His dark eyes brim with tears as they meet mine, and for an instant he looks like the Ben Safer I remember.
“Ben, I’m so sorry.” I start to sob. “You’ll go to a hospital, they’ll fix it.”
He shakes his head again, then turns toward the window. I feel a cold chill as soon as I understand what he’s going to do.
“Ben! No! Don’t!” I scream into the rain, but he won’t hear me.
He runs headlong toward the darkness, and when he reaches the edge of the carpet, he leaps mightily into nothingness and the thunderstorm.
The next sound I hear is a heartless clap of thunder, then the shrillness of Ben’s scream.
And my own.
31
I wake up in silence and semidarkness. There’s a bed table at my side and a boxy TV floating in the corner. Moonlight streams through the knit curtains, casting a slotted pattern on a narrow single bed. A hospital room. I lie there a minute, flat on my back, taking inventory.
I am alive. I am safe. I wiggle everything, and everything works.
I hold up my hands in the dark. There are bandages on some of my fingers. My face aches, the skin pinching like it doesn’t quite fit. I can only imagine what I look like. My fingers go instinctively to my cheeks. The surface is rough underneath, cottony. More bandages.
I hear myself moan, remembering slowly how I got to be here.
It comes back to me like a gruesome slide show, with hot white light blinding me between each freeze frame. Ben, entering with the gun. Click. The suicide note. Click. The cudgel at the window. Click. Independence Hall at my feet.
Oh, God.
Poor Ben.
I hurt him, and he died a horrific, painful death. And Armen, dead too. Even Faber, beaten to death. It’s too awful to dwell on. I feel wretched and totally, miserably alone, until I turn over. There, asleep in a shadowy corner near the door, her silvery head dropped onto a heavy chest, is my mother.
Who else. She has been here for God knows how long. She probably arranged for Maddie to go to Sam’s.
I lie still and look at her sleeping in a hard plastic chair. Even in the dim light I can see she’s fully dressed. A matching sweater and slack set, cheap leather slip-ons, and stocking knee-highs, which she buys in gift packs. Her chest goes up and down; her shoulders rise and fall. In her hand is a paper cup, sitting upright on her knee, even though she’s sound asleep. On the cup I can make out a large blue circle.
I know that circle. Pennsylvania Hospital, at Eighth and Spruce.
My mother was born in this hospital in 1925, and it was here that she gave birth to me, and I, in turn, to Maddie. One after another, each picking up the thread and advancing it, like an unbroken line of stitching in a fabric’s seam. Three generations of us, each making her own way. Raising her daughter in her own way, without men. A tribe of three women only.
How curious.
Our blood, our very cells, must be constitutionally different from other families. Families of four, for example. Or families that go on camping vacations in minivans and watch their kids play Little League. Families that leave the city they were born in, to divide and scatter.
Normal American families.
We’re not like them, like on TV, with a mom and a dad. Nor are we ethnic Americans: happy-go-lucky Italians or the truly Irish, raucous on St. Patty’s Day. We are not of those tribes, of those races. We are something else entirely. We are our own invention. We are what we do.
And what we do, what one of us in particular is doing, is sleeping. In an inhospitable chair, clutching a full cup of water. The full cup of water is significant, an act unto itself, and my heart tells me who the water is for.
For me, when I wake up.
It will be the first thing she offers, because she cannot say I love you as easily as she can hold out something to drink. Because she cannot say I worry, she issues orders and commands. And when she felt pain and loss, she could not say that either, so she drank whiskey. And lashed out in rage.
I understand that now, watching her sleep in the chair. I understand, too, how blessed I am to have her wait while I sleep, with a cup of water on her knee. I don’t feel a need to confront her any longer. There’s no reason to shake my fist in her face, to call her to account. That much is past, not present.
That much is over.
Let it go.
The door opens and a nurse comes in, luminous in a white uniform that seems to catch and hold the moonlight. She walks directly over to the bed and looks at me with concern. She bends over and whispers, “Are you in pain?”
I am not in pain. I was in pain when my face looked fine. I shake my head.
“Are you hungry?” A single lustrous pearl dots each earlobe in the darkness. She smells like Dove soap and White Linen.
I shake my head, no.
“Do you need anything?” Her teeth are white and even. Her breath is fresh, like peppermint Life Savers.
“No. Thanks.”
She pats my shoulder and leaves.
I feel myself smile at her receding silhouette. This is her job and she does it well, but her shift will end soon. My real nurse, the one snoozing at the switch, stinks of cigarettes, but ten to one she’s been sitting there for a long, long time. Her shift never ends, as mine will not.
I should let her sleep, but I owe her a rather large apology.
“Ma,” I say, and she stirs.
“Honey?” she says hoarsely.
Her eyes aren’t even open before she offers me a cup of water.
32
“Will you look at that!” Artie says in amazement at the kitchen window. We all gather around and look out at my backyard. I’m so happy my face hurts.
“I can’t believe it,” Sarah says. “She never did that before, even for Armen.”
“She’s gonna do it again,” Eletha says, casual today in a sweater and jeans.
We all watch as Bernice rolls over like a champ and comes up smiling. Miss Waxman stands over the dog like the Ubersecretary and gives Bernice a treat, delivered professionally to the mouth. Bernice snarfs it up and sniffs the grass for left-overs.
I open the window and yell through the screen, “Way to go, Miss Waxman!” It stings my cheeks, but the woman is working miracles out there. “Isn’t she great, Maddie?”
Maddie rolls her eyes. Duh, Mom.
“Wish I had a dog like that!” Eletha says. “Boy are you lucky, Maddie!”
“Roarf!” Bernice sits and barks at Miss Waxman, who frowns at her charge.
“No!” Miss Waxman says, her voice resonant with authority. Her transformation is as radical as Bernice’s, and probably as ephemeral. “No talkie!”
Artie shakes his head. “Did she really say that?”
I elbow him in the basketball. “Give her a break, it’s working. What have you done for me lately?”
“I brought you a get-well present.”
“You did? Where?”
“It’s in the living room. Wait.” He runs heavily out of the kitchen and Sarah laughs.
“Wait’ll you see this.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll see.” She smiles as Artie lumbers in with a package wrapped in Reynolds Wrap.
“Nice paper, Weiss,” Eletha says.
Artie thrusts the present at me. “It was either this or the Hanukkah paper.”
“Thanks, Artie,” I say, peeling back the foil like a microwave dinner. Underneath is a shiny black plastic I’ve seen before. “A Magic Eight Ball all my own!” I’m actually touched, which shows how soft I’m getting in my dotage. I give him a hug.
“It’s mine, you know,” he says, smiling.
“Really? Yours?”
“Putting away childish things, Artie?” Sarah asks.
“You know me better than that, Sar. I got Etch-a-Sketch now.”
Sarah laughs, and so do I.
“What? It’s more fun than Legos, and it doesn’t hurt when you step on it.”
Sarah and I exchange looks. Her expression is unreadable as usual, but mine is full of deep and powerful significance. My eyes telegraph: You are crazy to let this wonderful man leave your life, because there are not that many wonderful men around. I’ll tell her later if she doesn’t read eyes.
“Of course, the Etch-a-Sketch is okay,” Artie says, “but it’s still not my favorite toy.” He grins at Eletha. “Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.”
“Don’t you tell on me now,” she says, laughing evilly.
Sarah looks from one to the other. “What are you two talking about?”
It takes me a full minute to figure it out, but that’s because I’m such a stinky detective.
“Look, Grace!” Miss Waxman calls from the backyard.
We all look out the window. Bernice is heeling perfectly as Miss Waxman walks her back and forth. This is not what it looks like when Bernice walks me.
I wave to Miss Waxman. “Unbelievable. The dog is Rin Tin Tin.”
“Who’s that?” Sarah says.
“Forget it.”
“Tell her about the Edsel, Grace,” Eletha says.
“One more wisecrack and the dog is yours, El. And I know what you did,” I say, pointing my newly bejeweled fingernail at her. Eletha painted my nails while I was in the hospital, and each one is a masterpiece of turquoise polish with a sapphire in the center.
“Hey, girl, you owe me, from that fix-up with Ray.”
“You went out with him?”
“Lunch. Then he pounced.” She shudders.
“Oh, no.”
“Told you,” Artie says. “Man’s an animal.”
“I’m sorry, El. I thought he was nice.”
&n
bsp; “He slobbered worse than Bernice.” She snaps her fingers. “Wait a minute. I just got an idea.”
“What?”
“Maddie hates Bernice?”
“Right.”
“Ask Miss Waxman to take her.”
I look at Eletha, astounded.
The perfect solution.
Tears pour from her eyes. Her face is flushed. She hiccups uncontrollably. I’m afraid she’s going to lose dessert, right there at the dining room table.
“Mads, I don’t understand. You hate Bernice.”
“I don’t hate Bernice!”
The dog looks over the plastic fence, forlorn as a child in a custody fight.
Miss Waxman, shaken, sets down her teacup. “I’d give her a good home, dear. She could play with my poodles.”
“She’d be happier, Mads,” I say. “She wouldn’t be so lonely during the day.” And I wouldn’t have to hurdle a fence every time the phone rings, or share my bed with the Alps.
“She’d have friends, Maddie,” Artie says.
“She doesn’t need friends!” Maddie cries.
“Everybody needs friends,” Sarah says.
Maddie only cries harder. They have no way of knowing it, but we’re not talking about the dog anymore. I hug Maddie close.
“Maybe we should keep Bernice,” I say.
Miss Waxman nods. “Of course, whatever you want. She’s a very fine animal.”
“A fine animal,” Eletha says. “If Bernice were my dog, I’d never give her up.”
Maddie’s sobbing slows down and she buries a tear-stained face in my neck. “I can be her friend,” she says.
“Now there’s an idea. You sure can.”
“Can I go upstairs now?” she whispers.
“Sure.” I pat her on the bottom and she runs out of the room. I plop into my chair and take a slug of frigid coffee.
Artie snorts. “Way to go, girls. Called that one right.”
“Sorry, Grace,” Eletha says sheepishly.
“It’s not your fault,” I say. “I should have known.”