Carthage

  Calmly Zeno asked if Juliet had any record of the phone number.

  “On my cell phone, yes. Just the number, not the message. But there’s no answer—the number at the other end doesn’t seem to exist.”

  Zeno, seated at his desk, was sitting forward now elbows on the desk and eyes shut in concentration.

  “Julie. Why would anyone make such a call, as a prank?”

  “Daddy, I don’t know! Maybe from the Internet. There’s still information online about Cressida. I never look at it, any of it, but I know it’s there because people tell me. There’s some sort of ‘mystery’ about Cressida, for some people—where she is. What happened to her body. And people do cruel things for no reason.”

  Still calmly Zeno said, “This call you received. This caller. Did she say where she was calling from?”

  “No.” Juliet thought. “Yes. I think—Florida.”

  Juliet thought again. “She said she was ‘coming home.’ I think.”

  “She said she was ‘coming home’?”

  Gripping the receiver so tightly now he feared he would break it.

  “I didn’t call Mom. I didn’t want to upset her. She’s made her peace with what happened, I think—it’s a way Mom has dealt with losing Cressida. To get her hopes up would be cruel.”

  “Yes. You’re right. I’m grateful that you called me, sweetie, and not your mother. And I’m sure that this is what you say it is—a cruel prank.”

  Carefully Juliet said: “Brett did confess. And they found the—you know—the sweater.”

  Zeno didn’t reply. So many times they’d spoken these words or similar words it was like entering a tunnel—you could not bear it another time.

  Though sometimes, discussing this matter, Juliet would say My sweater.

  As if she hadn’t known what she was saying. My sweater.

  Zeno said, “This caller—who didn’t sound like Cressida—what else did she say?”

  “In the message, what I remember of the message, she said she was calling from Florida—some place in Florida, I think. But I couldn’t hear clearly. The connection was poor. Or her voice was muffled. She said something strange—‘I am not a sick person.’ And I think she said—‘I did not think that any of you loved me much . . .’ ”

  “And what else, honey? Did she say anything else?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “But—what did you say to her?”

  “I don’t think I said anything. I think—I think I hung up.”

  In the background, at Juliet’s house, was the high-pitched chattering of a child.

  Distractedly Zeno asked Juliet about the kids, and about her husband. The very word “kids”—so relaxed, colloquial, ordinary—was a balm to him, in this bizarre moment.

  Juliet spoke in her usual animated way about her family. If there were problems in Juliet’s new family, if ever there were health or medical issues, it would be a long time before Juliet’s bright soothing manner would acknowledge these problems.

  Politely too Juliet asked her father about his woman-friend Gwendolyn.

  Zeno answered briefly, distractedly. Not troubling to correct his daughter.

  More animatedly he said, to fill in the stiff stunned silence between them: “A dozen times a day I remind myself—how God-damned happy I am to have grandchildren.”

  “Oh, Daddy. Yes! I feel the same way—about my children.”

  Juliet had married a man very different from Brett Kincaid. He was nineteen years older than Juliet and of another generation. The Mayfield name was unknown to him, with its political resonances in Beechum County. He’d been a lobbyist for the public school teachers’ union and he was now a high-ranking official with the New York State Department of Education whose office remained fundamentally unchanged through changes of state government—governor, legislature. He’d published articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Education Issue. He was from an old Albany family, a great-grandfather had been an aide of Governor Thomas Dewey. He’d served in the Peace Corps in Ghana, just out of Williams College. He’d been married before and the marriage had ended in an “amicable” divorce, no children.

  The Stedmans had made a fortune in railroads in the 1890s and retained some portion of that fortune into the twenty-first century. Why Zeno resented his middle-aged son-in-law he could not have said for truly he was grateful for David D. Stedman in his daughter’s life.

  In fact, David Stedman was a man of integrity, dignity. He was taciturn, but kindly. He’d learned to manipulate strangers in the precise way in which Zeno Mayfield had learned to manipulate them, in the snarls of the political machinery of public life. So Zeno respected the man even if he couldn’t feel warmth for him.

  All that Zeno cared about waking in the middle of the night anxious and clammy-skinned in terror of the future was that David D. Stedman loved his daughter, and wished to protect her.

  It seemed crucial too, Stedman had never met Cressida. His sympathy, pity, outrage were abstract and not particularized.

  Zeno was thinking what a good thing, his grandchildren would outlive him.

  A law of nature, younger generations outlived their elders.

  Zeno asked again about the call, since Juliet had fallen silent.

  Juliet repeated what she’d said but in a slower less certain voice.

  As in a lawyerly interrogation of a benign type Zeno asked, “Was it ‘I didn’t think that any of you loved me much’—or ‘I did not think that any of you loved me much’?

  “I think it was—‘I did not think . . .’ ”

  “ ‘Did not’—as if avoiding the contraction.”

  “Whoever it was seemed to be speaking stiffly. Formally. Like someone who didn’t know English well, or”—Juliet paused—“someone who doesn’t talk much.”

  “She actually said she was ‘coming home’?”

  “ ‘If people would want me.’ ”

  “ ‘Would want me.’ That isn’t colloquial English, exactly.”

  “It’s the subjunctive. Or, it’s someone who doesn’t feel comfortable speaking English.”

  “Someone who doesn’t feel comfortable speaking to you.”

  “But I don’t think she knew me. How could she know me.”

  “And how would she have gotten your telephone number, in Averill Park?”

  Juliet had no response. In the background, the happy high-pitched chattering continued.

  “ ‘Coming home’—well, we’ll see!”

  Zeno laughed, and hung up the phone.

  Scarcely making it into a corner of his study where he collapsed, all 199 pounds, onto a leather sofa.

  NOT THAT DAY nor the following day but the following week a call came from a Cumberland Avenue neighbor.

  “Zeno? Looks like somebody’s lying on your sofa-swing. You know, on your side deck. My wife says he’s been there for about an hour.”

  Zeno asked who it might be. A homeless person?

  Though not very likely, a homeless person in the residential Cumberland neighborhood.

  Zeno thanked his friend. He’d been planning to drive over to check the house anyway, later that day—“I’ll come over now.”

  VETERANS: THE COUNTRY was filling up with them. In obscure rural areas of Appalachia, in Hispanic communities in the West and the Southwest, in the Great Plains states as in western and upstate New York veterans of the crusade against terror: the barely-walking-wounded, the (visibly, invisibly) maimed, “disabled.” Driving along the river and into the city and through the working-class neighborhoods of west Carthage he saw them ever more frequently, young men, old-young men, on crutches, in wheelchairs. Dark-skinned, white-skinned. Casualties of war. Now that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were winding down, the veterans would be returned to civilian life, litter on a beach when the great tide has gone out.

  As a political person, as a liberal, Zeno Mayfield was sympathetic with their lot. He knew, the federal government could never begin to repay the
veterans for all they’d sacrificed in the naivete of their patriotism. Yet, as a father, he felt an unreasonable rage. They’d learned to kill in the wars and they’d brought their killing-appetite home with them and his daughter had been murdered by one of them, a killing machine gone amok.

  It was said that no other suspect in the history of the Beechum County Sheriff’s Department had given such a long disjointed candid and self-incriminating confession as Brett Kincaid. He’d seemed to be speaking of numerous murders, and not just the murder of Cressida Mayfield.

  He’d given the names of his platoon leaders. He’d given the names of his fellow soldiers. He’d had to be reminded that he was no longer a soldier in Iraq but a civilian in Carthage: he’d had to be reminded that the subject was Cressida Mayfield.

  On Cumberland Avenue, Zeno saw with a particular pained pleasure his neighbors’ houses unchanged. The procession of tall oaks, cedars. He had not been absent from his house for more than a week, of course nothing much would have changed, in the interim. Yet he felt relief, seeing his house and the Realtor’s sign at the curb FOR RENT/LEASE.

  He parked in the driveway. At first he didn’t see the figure on the deck-swing for the afternoon had begun to wane to a premature dusk, then approaching it he saw more clearly a person—male, female?—possibly a child of about twelve?—wrapped in a blanket; the rough soiled old red-plaid blanket from L.L. Bean they’d kept outdoors on the deck-swing. The figure was female: a girl. A small-boned woman. She had dark hair, her face was partly hidden beneath the blanket. She was curled up tightly as if very cold. (It was just thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit: wet snow fell, melting almost immediately.) She was breathing hoarsely. As he drew nearer, he could hear her. She didn’t look well. Should he call 911? He drew nearer. At Home Front Alliance she’d have been offered a bed in the women’s quarters, a volunteer medic would examine her and maybe prescribe antibiotics.

  Zeno stood, a few feet from the sleeping girl wrapped in the soiled blanket. So tightly curled up, her feet were hidden. He had the unreasonable notion that she was barefoot. She was ill, feverish. She would need medical attention. But he would stand there, he thought, until she began to wake sensing his presence. He could not bring himself to wake the sleeping girl for then the spell would end.

  SIXTEEN

  The Mother

  March 2012

  SHE’D JUST RETURNED from the shelter. Her long shift at the shelter that should have ended at 6 P.M. but there’d been a difficult admission that day, a psychiatric nurse had had to be summoned as well as an officer from the Mount Olive Police Department since they’d received death threats from an anonymous caller. Past 8 P.M. when she’d returned to the house on Cross Patch Lane and not ten minutes later the doorbell rang.

  Anyone at the door at this time of evening, you weren’t comfortable opening it. Their lives had been threatened numerous times. They’d been waylaid and harassed by furious husbands, boyfriends and pimps. There were ever younger girls seeking asylum in WomanSpace, Eastern European by birth who spoke little English, illegal immigrants terrified of being deported. But they’d fled their abusers, they’d taken refuge in the Mount Olive shelter and their “employers” had hired aggressive lawyers to counter the girls’ claims of sexual abuse and violence with threats of lawsuits.

  Alisandra went to answer the door. Arlette heard her friend’s voice lift—Yes?

  On the front stoop were her husband Zeno and her daughter Juliet.

  “Oh.”

  She was utterly stunned. Her first thought was—They have come to take me forcibly back home.

  She saw their faces. She knew, something had happened to alter their lives profoundly but she could have no idea what it was.

  Juliet embraced her, hugging her tight. Zeno touched her shoulder, with his anxious-Zeno smile.

  “Mom. Can we come inside? Can you maybe sit down? We have some news.”

  She was shaking now. In their eyes, a strange elation, excitement or fear.

  She was sitting: at the kitchen table. Since the cancer treatments she’d lost weight and had not regained more than a few pounds and often she came near to fainting. And sometimes in secret she did faint, and told no one. And Alisandra was saying to Zeno and to Juliet that she would be upstairs if anyone needed her.

  Through a roaring in her ears she heard them telling her that Cressida was alive. Cressida had returned to Carthage, that day. But Cressida was seriously sick, in the Carthage hospital where they could see her in the morning.

  Zeno was explaining, he’d discovered Cressida at the house, wrapped in a soiled blanket on the deck-swing. She’d been semi-conscious, delirious with fever. He’d driven her to the ER and she’d been diagnosed with pneumonia.

  En route to the hospital he’d called Juliet. He had not wanted to call Arlette just yet.

  Later he would explain he’d been in terror that Cressida was dying. He could not bear to call Arlette to summon her to the hospital in such circumstances.

  Cressida alive! Arlette could not comprehend what her husband and her daughter were telling her.

  She’d been in Florida, it seemed. How long, how she’d been living, what had happened to her in the Preserve—they didn’t know.

  Zeno had not been able to speak with Cressida, she’d been too sick.

  What did she look like?—of course, she was older; and she was very sick. But—obviously—she was their daughter, Zeno said. She was Cressida, unmistakably.

  What had happened with Brett Kincaid, in the Preserve—Zeno had no idea. He’d placed hurried calls to the Beechum County prosecutor, and to the New York State Prison Authority, and to the warden at Clinton Correctional Facility for Men in Dannemora where Brett Kincaid was incarcerated.

  Zeno would do more, when Cressida was out of danger. For obviously Brett Kincaid was innocent of manslaughter: he’d given police a false confession.

  Maybe he’d been coerced by police officers. Or maybe he had truly believed he’d murdered Cressida.

  He had hurt her, very likely. But he had not killed her after all and he had not dumped her body into the Black Snake River as he had testified.

  Zeno had no time to pursue this, yet. That Brett Kincaid had been unjustly convicted, sentenced to prison—he would deal with that later. The concern now was Cressida in the hospital, in the telemetry unit with a fever of 103.3 degrees F., a breathing tube in her throat, struggling to stay alive.

  Arlette was beginning to feel very faint. The news was dazzling as a sudden bright-blindness scalding her brain.

  In a wondering voice Zeno was saying he’d known, as soon as he’d seen her.

  Cressida? Returned? After seven years? Yet, he’d known.

  Yesterday a neighbor had called Zeno. Zeno had driven to the house at once. And there on the side-deck, on the old porch-swing, there was someone lying wrapped in a blanket and her face mostly hidden, a young person, a girl, very small, unmoving; and he’d known at once who it was.

  For Juliet had had a mysterious phone call a few days ago—a cruel joke she’d thought—a woman identifying herself as Cressida.

  “I tried to return the call—but I couldn’t. I told Dad but not you—not yet—I didn’t want to upset you.”

  Zeno was describing to Arlette how Cressida, exhausted and ill, had wrapped herself in the old red-plaid camping blanket from L.L. Bean—“You know, the one you tried to throw out but every time you put it in the trash I retrieved it? That blanket, that we’d left on the swing.”

  Arlette smiled. “That torn plaid blanket! I thought I’d gotten rid of it.”

  In the red-plaid blanket Cressida had been transported to the Carthage Hospital ER. Zeno had lifted her in his arms, and carried her to his car, and driven her to the hospital and on his cell phone he’d called 911 to report what he was doing and then he’d called Juliet in Albany to alert her and at once, Juliet was in her SUV driving from Albany to arrive at the hospital by the time Cressida had been diagnosed, and was being moved to the telemet
ry unit. Juliet had seen her sister in her semi-conscious state and had burst into tears, in a kind of terrified elation, astonishment.

  How changed Cressida was! Yet, Juliet would have recognized her anywhere.

  She had never believed it could be true, her sister was alive.

  She’d known, others had speculated, it was (theoretically) possible that Cressida Mayfield was actually alive, and not dead; it was (theoretically) possible that Brett Kincaid had not killed her, as he’d claimed; possibly she’d run away, and was alive somewhere where no one knew her. Such speculations had raged on the Internet for at least a year after Cressida’s disappearance but Juliet avoided such postings as she might avoid online pornography. She’d never believed that there could be any truth to them. But now—

  “We’ll take you to the hospital, to see her, Mom. Come on!”

  “Yes. Please.”

  Arlette was smiling faintly. Lifting her arms to be helped to her feet as Zeno gripped her in his rib-crushing Zeno embrace. Oh! she loved him.

  Of course she loved her husband, it had been a mistake to leave him. And she loved Juliet. These people who loved her had come for her, they had tried to spare her a terrible shock, a shock of such extreme happiness it could hardly be borne, and now they were going to drive her to the hospital to see her lost daughter.

  Her daughter she’d accepted as lost. Dead, and lost. She’d accepted as taken by God, for what obscure motive she had not questioned as she had not questioned the persimmon-seed lump in her left breast, nor any hurt, humiliation, sorrow of her lifetime for in truth in her innermost heart she did believe in the justness of all that existed in the innermost heart of God as humankind resides in God and could not exist without God. All this, she had accepted. And she had cast her husband from her, flailing and despairing in non-belief, she had abandoned her husband whom she loved, for his non-belief had been threatening to her. And now, their daughter was restored. And now, God was revealing to her the most profound mystery: that even the cruel logic of His mercy was beyond human scrutiny, as it was beyond any effort of human comprehension, identification.