Laura Lippman: Every Secret Thing

“Helen Manning’s a city schoolteacher and a single mother. She doesn’t have the resources to pick up and move.” How quickly Sharon always switched from contrite to self-righteous. The defensive public defender, Warren had called her. You must understand, Cynthia…What purpose can be achieved, Cynthia…They are little girls, Cynthia…Your tragedy, great as it is, Cynthia…There will always be some ambiguity, Cynthia. You, of all people, must value justice, Cynthia . Cynthia, Cynthia, Cynthia.

As if what Cynthia wanted was anything less than justice. She had let them talk her out of justice.

“Can’t you make it a rule that she has to live someplace else?”

“Of course not.” Sharon ’s voice was huffy now, hurt. It was the paradoxical mark of the offensive, in Cynthia’s experience, that they were offended so easily. The only feelings Sharon safeguarded were her own.

“When that man on North Avenue got pardoned, they made it a condition that he couldn’t go back to the neighborhood where he had shot that child.”

“It’s not the same.”

“No, he killed a thirteen-year-old boy. This was a nine-month-old child. Oh, and he was pardoned .” Cynthia did not add: He was a black man who killed a black child. These were white girls who killed a black baby. She let her silence say that part, let what was unsaid make Sharon squirm, in her little cubbyhole in that sad-ass state office building. All your scheming, all your planning, and you sit today where you sat seven years ago. What was the point?

“You live in two different worlds,” Sharon said. “You’ll probably never see either one of them again.”

“We lived in two different worlds seven years ago, too.”

“You know, I’ve always felt that the only way to understand what happened was to think of it as a natural disaster, almost like a tornado, or lightning.” Sharon ’s voice was so reasonable, so sure of itself, the voice of a girl who had been on her high school debate team and still considered this a notable achievement. “A series of events came together and formed something horrible, something destructive. Wouldn’t it make you feel better to see it in that light?”

Answers crowded Cynthia’s tongue, backed up into her throat, until she thought she might choke on them. It would make you feel better. You always try to have it both ways, and you won’t even let me have it one way.

Brake lights flashed ahead of her, traffic coming to a stop for no discernible reason, and her reflexes were off because of the phone call, so the 4,665 pounds of BMW squealed and shimmied, coming within inches of the rusty little Escort in front of her, a ready-to-disintegrate heap with a Kings Dominion bumper sticker and a Confederate flag decal. Cynthia didn’t mind Confederate flags. She’d like to see a law that required every white trash hillbilly to have one tattooed on his or her forehead. You would see them coming that way.

“Can I have a restraining order?”

“I don’t think Alice is inclined-”

“I didn’t ask what anyone wanted to do. I asked what I could have . What the law will give me.”

Sharon sighed, put-upon. “The courts can’t write you a blank check for things that haven’t happened yet. But I can tell you that Alice will be counseled to stay away from Ronnie Fuller and your family.”

“My family? You mean she knows? You told her? Why would you tell her anything about me?” Cynthia’s voice rose, in spite of herself, frantic and out of control, and she realized someone in the adjacent lane was staring at her.

“I haven’t told her anything. I meant family in the most general way possible.”

Family in the most general way possible . Only a single woman, a childless woman, could speak of family in the most general way possible. Cynthia hung up on Sharon Kerpelman, as she had so many times before.

It took her forty-five minutes to crawl around the Beltway. That meant the end of Dr. Silverstein, Cynthia was afraid. No doctor was worth that kind of time. Between the drive and the wait in his office, she had been gone four hours, which was much too long. She parked behind the house and let herself into the back door, where she was welcomed by the security system’s polite beep.

“Hey, Momma.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Cynthia’s eyes could keep improving for ten, twenty years, and they would never be as sharp as her mother’s. Paulette Poole could see the future with her green eyes. Paulette Poole had predicted trouble when Cynthia and Warren bought this house. “Why do you want to live over there? Who are you trying to impress?” And Paulette Poole had seen from the first how the justice system, which had given the Poole family so much, would fail them when they needed it most. Paulette Poole was a witch, in the best sense of the word.

“Just traffic, Momma. Rush hour starts earlier and earlier in this city.”

“Well, you go all the way to Towson to get your eyes checked…” Paulette Poole didn’t bother to finish her sentence. Her daughter knew where she stood. Paulette Poole thought it was ridiculous for Cynthia to quit Dr. Hepple, their neighbor in Forest Park, in order to go to some white Jewish doctor just because his office was convenient to her job at City Hall.

“Where is-”

“Upstairs. With a video.”

Because her mother was there, Cynthia walked with deliberate slowness, taking the front stairs instead of the back. She heard a tinny sound from the street, the plink-plink tones of an ice cream truck, although the ditty faded so quickly that she wondered if she had imagined it. All around the carpenter’s bench / The monkey chased the weasel / The monkey thought it was a joke . She remembered a smile, a horrible, inappropriate smile, and the way her hand had ached to jump out, smack it from the child’s face.

The alcove off the master bedroom was intended to be a dressing room, but Cynthia had renovated it three years ago, insisting it was large enough. Now that it had made the transition from nursery to bedroom, it clearly wasn’t. Still, she resisted Warren ’s gentle nudging on the matter, pretending she didn’t understand why he wanted their bedroom just for them again.

Rosalind sat on the floor, eyes locked on Sleeping Beauty, singing along in a breathy baby voice. La-la-la. La-la-la . She was such an easy baby, had been from the first, and had passed through the so-called terrible twos with barely a tantrum. She had never known colic, which had troubled Olivia so, and she was seldom stricken with so much as a cold. Well, a child breast-fed until the age of two had advantages when it came to immunities.

Rosalind had also come out shockingly light and stayed that way, a trick of the blood that Cynthia’s mother claimed for her family tree, although Cynthia knew there wasn’t a fair-skinned ancestor in the bunch. No one knew what to make of the amazing hair, which hung in amber ringlets. Her eyes, however, were brown, like almost everyone else in the Poole and Barnes clans. Olivia had gotten the green eyes of this generation, and family legend held that only one child would have green eyes.

“Who dat baby?” Rosalind had asked a few weeks ago, noticing for the first time the photograph in a small oval frame on Cynthia’s dressing table. “Who dat?”

Who dat indeed? She and Warren had known they would have to tell Rosalind one day. But it had never occurred to them that a toddler would initiate the conversation with such a basic existential question: Who dat? She was your sister. Except-she wasn’t, because you and she never existed in the same plane. She is nothing to you, and never will be. And if she had not died, you might not exist, because your mother had specific plans for her life, and having a baby at age forty-one was not one of them.