“You can stay with relatives, can’t you? Or with my aunt Viola, she knows you’re coming.”
Knows you’re coming. Here was a man used to making decisions forcibly and without opposition; a man accustomed to giving orders.
I told him no, I didn’t want to stay with relatives. I didn’t want to stay with his aunt. He said he could call a motel for me, from his car. When we approached Sparta—“If you’re anxious about this.”
He’d been fingering his car keys. He was impatient to be moving on. In his face there was a glimmer of male superiority, subtly sexual, coercive. It was unconscious in him, I felt a stab of dislike. Badly I wanted to protest: Why hadn’t he called me, before coming all the way to Peekskill? Why, in seventeen years, hadn’t he made any attempt to contact me?
What had hurt was, when my father died, Aaron had not called me. Had not tried to see me. There was the deep, intimate connection between us, deeper than the connection between Ben and me, that could not be undone.
For Aaron Kruller had felt the blood beating in my throat. He’d felt my life coursing through me. And I’d felt the heat and urgency of his male-adolescent body, through his hands and through his groin he’d ground against me, in a trance of desire. There had been nothing like this in my life, there would be nothing like this in my adult life, what had passed between us could never be undone.
It was only by chance that I’d returned to the brownstone offices of Prosecution Watch, Inc. on Seventh Street, Peekskill, instead of returning home. Though it was past 4:00 P.M. and a number of my colleagues, as well as my supervisor, had departed. What had happened in the prison had badly shaken me, the back of my head throbbed with pain and humiliation, my navy blue wool jacket had been torn, my plaited hair was partly undone. I could not bear the emptiness of the apartment that awaited me.
“I can leave in an hour or so, I suppose. But I have to go home first. And I’ll drive my own car to Sparta.”
“No. I’m driving.”
“And then—what? You’d drive me back to Peekskill, tomorrow?”
“Sure. I can do that.”
“Six hours? That’s ridiculous, Aaron.”
Casually I spoke his name: “Aaron.” I wanted this name to sound flat, ordinary. I wanted it to sound like a name that meant nothing to me. The man had called me “Krista” in this way—I had to wonder if it had been deliberate.
Were we quarreling? There was the sense that Aaron Kruller didn’t like to be contradicted in even small matters. He’d planned on driving me to Sparta with him, and now I was objecting, quite sensibly I was objecting, as Aaron might have anticipated that I would object; it was only common sense for me to take my own car. Maybe he didn’t trust me to drive capably enough to get there, and it was crucial that I come with him so that Jacky DeLucca could speak to us both, together.
Or maybe he wanted us to be together, in his car. On the drive back to Sparta in the night, north along the Thruway bounded by stretches of desolate landscape. Arriving late at a Sparta motel.
No love like your first.
I felt a constriction in my chest, a need to resist the man’s will, to oppose him. I was not a Sparta girl now, I was a young woman employed by Prosecution Watch, Inc.; I had university degrees, I supported myself and lived alone. I was not married or engaged: my left hand was ringless. There were men in my life but not crucial to my life. I wanted Aaron Kruller to sense this.
I told him that I would drive myself. I told him that I was a capable driver. I said he could keep my car in view as we drove, ahead of him on the Thruway.
He objected that in one car, it would be easier. If it began snowing, as it was predicted upstate.
Predicted upstate? I had not known this.
“Probably you aren’t used to driving at night, Krista. I am.”
“How do you know—‘probably’?”
“Are you? For six hours?”
Six hours. I felt a touch of panic. In my exhausted state, this was folly. This was not a good idea. Yet I would not retract my words, I would drive by myself, and I would leave within an hour. I said:
“I want my own car, Aaron. Without my own car, I’m not going at all.”
Rebuffed, Aaron finally gave in. He laughed, to show he was a good sport. “O.K., Krista. Have it your way.”
EXCEPT IF YOU HAVE A GHOST LEG THAT HURTS LIKE HELL
YOU CAN’T GET AN ARTIFICIAL LEG TO WORK
On the windowsill facing my desk this remark made by a client of mine is affixed, in hand-printed letters on stiff paper.
I would have liked Aaron Kruller to have noticed it, and commented on it. But that wasn’t Aaron Kruller’s way.
My client was a heavyset diabetic woman sentenced to an indeterminate “life” sentence on a charge of second-degree murder, for having stabbed her chronically abusive husband to death in 1974. By the time her case had been brought to the attention of Prosecution Watch, Inc., Jasmine had been incarcerated in Lyndhurst for twenty-seven years. She’d had inadequate medical treatment for her diabetes, her right foot had become gangrenous and had had to be amputated; eventually, her entire right leg had had to be amputated. She continued to feel sensation in these missing parts, sometimes severe pain.
Yet, Jasmine believed that the “ghost pain”—the phantom pain—was necessary so that, in her mind, she could locate the missing foot and leg. Without the pain, she couldn’t have used the artificial leg she’d been fitted with.
The non-profit organization for which I worked succeeded in getting Jasmine’s second-degree murder charge reduced to voluntary manslaughter and so Jasmine was released from prison for “time served”—after nearly twenty-nine years.
Which was three times the amount of time she’d have probably served under the lesser charge.
By then, Jasmine was sixty-one. You could say that most of her life had been taken from her and was lost to her but Jasmine had not been bitter, she’d been grateful. No client of Prosecution Watch, Inc. had ever been more grateful.
Thank you THANK YOU! You have given me back my life and my hope Krista.
Taking my hands in hers. My smooth unmangled white-girl hands in her sixty-one-year-old dark-skinned hands that trembled with emotion. And when taking my hands wasn’t enough Jasmine hugged me, hard.
Know what Krista, I’m praying for you. You are the one I am praying for not me, my prayers are answered.
I wanted to think it was true, I had helped to give this woman back her life and her hope.
I wanted to think it was true, though I had virtually no power to modify my own past, and what remained of my future, yet I could help others like Jasmine. I could do this!
Through the power of Prosecution Watch, Inc., I could try to do this.
In my office that afternoon, I’d hoped that Aaron Kruller would notice the statement on my windowsill. I’d hoped that he would pause, and peer at it, curiously; read it aloud, as other visitors had done, and ask me about it; and so I would tell him its genesis, and what it meant.
Aaron would say That’s wonderful Krista.
Or, Aaron would say Krista that is profound. That is something to think about Krista.
Or What wonderful work you’ve done, to bring justice to people who’ve been cheated of it. Like your father, and mine.
Of course, Aaron Kruller said none of these things. Aaron Kruller may have glanced at the printed statement on the windowsill, but he had not come nearer, to read it; still less, to read it aloud in a wondering voice. Instead he said he’d wait for me downstairs at the front entrance, badly he needed a cigarette and there was no smoking in this building.
On the Thruway Aaron followed me in his car which was a new-model Buick. My car was a 1999 Saab bought from a colleague at a great bargain. In my rearview mirror his headlights held steady. In these driving conditions—icy rain, wind—I could not drive beyond sixty miles an hour. I mean, I did not want to drive beyond sixty miles an hour. Behind me Aaron Kruller was patient, overseeing. After seventeen
years he was protective of me again. I wanted to think so.
My thoughts were in a turmoil: Aaron Kruller had re-entered my life.
Though in ways that would have been astonishing to him, he had never left my life.
And Jacky DeLucca. Of whom women like my mother had said contemptuously Has she no shame?
Or maybe it was Zoe Kruller of whom my mother had spoken. The two women, living together on West Ferry Street. “Cocktail waitresses” out on the Strip. A way of saying “hookers”—who deserved whatever happened to them at the hands of men.
Lucille Bauer had not lacked for shame. Not her! My mother’s soul saturated in shame as in grease.
Driving north along the Thruway, I recalled Jacky DeLucca: the pale, heavy, vividly made-up face, the widened beseeching eyes and a craving for love so powerful it smelled of her fleshy body. Zoe was my heart she’d said wistfully stroking my arm, making me shiver for it was a strange intimate thing for an adult woman to say unlike anything my mother was likely to say in even a weak emotional moment.
Come back to see me Krissie promise?
I’d promised. But I’d never gone back.
No one called me Krissie now. No one in my family, even. Not since Sparta.
Only Daddy had loved me in that way, I thought. That way that was unconditional, unquestioning. Which did not mean that Daddy might not be cruel to me—but Daddy had loved me, so Daddy’s cruelty had been just a part of Daddy’s love. You know your Daddy loves you Puss don’t you and I had known, yes.
Trying to recall, how Zoe Kruller had come into our lives. One afternoon when I’d returned unexpectedly from school, and there Zoe was—in our kitchen! She had entered my mother’s kitchen once my mother was away, like a princess in a fairy tale entering a beggar’s hut and always with surprising consequences. I seemed to have known, even as a girl, that Zoe Kruller had entered other rooms in my mother’s house, like my mother’s bedroom, she had shared with my father.
My mother’s bed, beneath the beautiful oyster-white crocheted quilt that was an “heirloom”—Zoe had entered that bed, too.
There was no mistaking this: Zoe had looked at me with loving eyes, Zoe had looked at me and called me Krissie!
Zoe had given me an ice-cream cone infested with weevils! I’d had a hard time forgiving Zoe for that, and for my father’s anger at me afterward. But I’d forgiven her of course.
Though thinking how unfair it had been, Daddy had seemed to blame me for the weevils. And if the person who’d sold us the cone had not been Zoe Kruller, Daddy would have been happy to bring me back inside Honeystone’s for a new cone, for no charge.
Back there, and back then. It’s better not to think of it, that numbing wound in the region of the heart.
At the Amsterdam exit beyond Albany, we left the Thruway for a late meal. This, too, Aaron had planned. It was nearly 8:30 P.M., we had not made good time on the Thruway which was still thunderous and perilous at this hour with enormous trucks. In the dimly lighted and inexplicably named Lighthouse Café attached to the cinder block Wile-A-Way Motor Court we sat stiffly self-conscious across from each other in a booth. An ill-matched couple. Something wrong between them. Not looking at each other—why? Aaron was leaning on his elbows, on the tabletop, rubbing his fists in his eyes, yawning. He’d driven approximately six hours to Peekskill, to get to me; now he was driving back to Sparta with virtually no rest in between.
An obsessive and willful personality. A dangerous personality perhaps.
We tried to assess our clients before we took them on. If their personalities were likely to bear up under the strain of a re-opening of their cases, a re-investigation, possibly a retrial; for some of them were long-incarcerated, and had given up hope. Some of them, in prison, had become mentally deranged. The ideal goal was a commutation of sentence, a governor’s unqualified pardon, a prosecutor dropping all charges and a judge ruling a sentence void. But a retrial was a double-edged goal.
Returning to Sparta was something of a retrial. I would wonder how good an idea this sudden decision had been.
A waitress came to take our orders. Clearly she was attracted to Aaron, they laughed together like old friends, Aaron’s eyes moved over her with easy familiarity but with me, he was quiet. He seemed not to know what to make of me. There was an obduracy in him, an air of self-possession that excluded me. I was hurt, and I was angry. I was chagrined.
There was something sexual here, I could not interpret. As in my office Aaron had disdained to take much notice of the surroundings, the colorful posters on my wall or the card on the windowsill.
Finally, drinking ale, Aaron asked me how I was doing?—but he meant the Thruway drive, not my current life.
I told him that I was fine.
I told him that I was accustomed to driving alone and often in bad weather, I liked driving alone. I told him that I listened to music.
I told Aaron that I’d been listening to Bach harpsichord preludes and fugues, clavier concertos. I told him there’s no one like Bach to calm the mind—“To give hope.”
Aaron said he’d been listening to Axe, Mr. Big, Metallica. He had satellite radio, he said. In the trucks he drove, tow, flat-bed—he’d had satellite radio installed, too.
He spoke in a flat slightly sneering tone. There came that sharp little barking laughter, that grated against my nerves.
Did I know what satellite radio was? I wasn’t sure. I had never heard of Axe, Mr. Big, Metallica. But I could imagine what this music was.
Aaron had removed his sheepskin jacket and jammed it in a corner of the booth. The cuffs of his flannel shirt were unbuttoned, rolled up. I stared at his muscular forearms, what I could glimpse of purplish-spiderweb tattoos. I stared at his hands with their large knuckles, covered in scars. And the thick man’s-nails, edged with grease. A workingman’s hands. Like my father’s. I thought He knows that I loved him, then.
He could not know how I felt about him now. I wanted to think that I had no discernible feelings for him, now.
Aaron ate quickly, distractedly. He ate like one accustomed to eating alone, paying little mind to food. He drank, ale from the bottle. He would have lighted a cigarette midway in the meal, but smoking was forbidden in the Lighthouse Café.
I had to know: was Jacky DeLucca going to tell us who had killed Zoe? Was this the secret Jacky DeLucca would “reveal,” after nearly twenty years? Yet I could not ask.
For how to utter such words to Aaron Kruller: kill, Zoe. It was not possible.
In the Lighthouse Café in our dimly-lit booth, in the background a throb of music, the murmurous voices of other customers, I was made to think of the County Line Tavern to which my father had taken me that evening. I felt now a sensation of vertigo, helplessness. To think that my father had been alive then, and was not alive now; as Aaron Kruller was alive now, seated across from me.
How distracting Aaron’s presence was! His hands that reminded me of my father’s hands, badly I wanted to take hold of those hands. As if a fissure had opened in the earth before me, one of those nightmare incidents that occur from time to time, you read of in the newspaper, in fact such an incident had occurred at the Sparta Gypsum quarry when I’d been a girl: a worker driving a bulldozer had fallen into an abyss in the ground that had not been there a second before.
Buried in tons of gravel. Body not yet located.
Suffocated. Declared dead. Body not yet located.
Aaron reached over, nudged my arm. I had not expected this. His touch was abrupt and unnerving. “Hey. You O.K.?”
Quickly I told him yes. I was fine.
Maybe a little dazed—dazzled—by the drive. The Thruway. Pavement, headlights. Those damned trailer trucks.
“…thinking about the gypsum mine. Out Quarry Road. In your neighborhood. I was wondering if Sparta Gypsum was still operating.”
“Sure. There’s friends of mine work there.”
“And your father’s garage—is that still there? On Quarry Road?”
&nb
sp; How naive I sounded! As if Aaron Kruller would need to be told the location of his father’s auto repair.
“No. It isn’t.”
To this, I didn’t know how to reply. Aaron was drinking ale, eating. His jaws were dark-stubbled and his gaze was down-looking, sullen. Or seemed to me sullen. The waitress returned to our booth brightly asking in a fluttery-breathy voice, “What c’n I do for you?”—Aaron lifted the ale bottle to her, to signal he wanted another, but didn’t trouble to speak, nor even to glance at her. The gesture was condescending and dismissive and I felt a thrill of satisfaction, small and mean, petty.
“Do you still have that old bicycle? The one that looked like pipes fitted together.”
“Jesus, no.”
We laughed together. Suddenly, we were laughing. My question had been an utterly foolish question like my question about Quarry Road but it had the effect of making us laugh. My heart was beating rapidly as if, turning, I saw the earth fallen away at my feet, I could not move away, paralyzed in wonderment.
“What’d you think? I’m still a half-ass kid? Riding that damn broken-down bike?”
Now Aaron was looking at me more openly, I wondered what he saw. If I had surprised him, in Peekskill. I was thirty-two years old which seemed to me an appropriate age for me, who had ceased being a girl at fifteen. I liked my name too, that had a sharp crystalline ring: Krista Diehl. And my public manner which was a matter of poise: holding myself very still as in armor, or a straitjacket, even as others—like Claude Loomis—break down. My hair was so pale it seemed to lack color, a shimmery-silver hair, and I wore it plaited and clamped about my head. A man who’d hoped to be my lover had said that I was a blond Modigliani. I said, But Modigliani’s women have only empty sockets for eyes.