Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

Lyle wiped the tears from his eyes and hurried out before the ceremony was over. He sat for a long time on the stairs that led down to the locker room, his knees as bony and angular as the metal treads, his khaki shirt blending in against the cinder-block wall, and his inner chambers as empty and echoing as the stairwell. He was proud of Will for going off to make something of himself, and he wondered if it was too late to spread his own wings. There had to be a job for him in Phoenix. He and Maggie could get a fresh start there. Now and then a group of students burst through a fire door from the hallway, their high spirits propelling them up a flight or down and out into the sunshine, and only by flattening himself against the wall did Lyle manage to avoid being kicked by a polished battalion of special-occasion shoes. When August Winslow rushed past followed by the mayor, Lyle craned his neck to watch them through the balusters.

“Goddamn it, Buddy,” Winslow hissed. “Keep those kids out of the creek! I don’t care what you tell them. No, don’t say it’s toxic! Chrissakes, isn’t that the whole point? Make up something about venomous snakes — it doesn’t matter what. Just get it done.”

Whether it was Winslow’s words or Will’s absence or the fact that he hadn’t eaten yet that day, Lyle experienced the kind of phantasm people who died and came back to life claimed to have had of the light-filled paradise that was waiting for them on the other side. What Lyle saw wasn’t paradise, though, but a parallel world of privileged information and secret contacts and clandestine assignations. It was as if he had broken through the walls of his existence to find that what he had thought were hard limits and bolted doors were only flimsy illusions woven from the thread of his expectations and lack of confidence in himself. Now he saw that anyone who wanted to could tap on the barrier and break right through. He felt powerful and alienated, as if there was an important reason for his suffering and he was about to find out what it was. His own passivity made sense now too. It was what the people in charge wanted from people like him, and he had been only too willing to comply.

It was the sensation of finally seeing beyond the curtain that caused Lyle to drive carefully home, staying well within the speed limit even on the New Road Extension, where he had always revved the engine and banked the curve. It was what caused him to search through Maggie’s things for some hint of what the police had been looking for or for some clue as to what she had meant about the Iraqi babies. But he found nothing, only a couple of sweaters and a few magazines with their pages missing.

The next afternoon, a representative from the bank that held the mortgage arrived to change the locks and post a sign in the front yard. “What are you doing?” asked Lyle, but the man merely handed him a business card and a pamphlet and asked him if he had somewhere he could stay.

“Why do I need a place to stay?” asked Lyle.

“Read the pamphlet,” said the man. “If the pamphlet doesn’t explain everything to your satisfaction, you can call the number on the back.”

11.5 Maggie

Lyle’s calls became less and less frequent. Neither of them said so outright, but with Will gone, there was little for them to talk about. “If I can’t come home,” Maggie had said the last time they spoke, “maybe you should come to Phoenix.”

“That’s an idea,” Lyle had replied. And then he had asked, “Are you making progress on the case?”

“We should hear something any day now.” Since Maggie had been working for the attorney, two of his clients had been granted new trials, so the office was busier than ever. “Everyone wants representation,” she said to Lyle. “But hardly anyone can pay.”

“Maybe if you prove Tomás is innocent, they’ll forgive you for taking his prison records and you can come home,” said Lyle.

“So they figured it out?” said Maggie.

“I expect they did,” said Lyle.

Maggie didn’t say that Tomás’s records weren’t all she had taken, and she wondered if each stolen document would count as a separate strike when they added up the charges against her.

When several Mondays went by and Maggie didn’t hear from Lyle, she dialed her home number only to find that it was out of service. A lump of panic rose in her throat, and whenever she swallowed, the lump reasserted itself and made her gag. She called True, who promised to get a message to Lyle. Then she called Misty, who told Maggie the police were still sniffing around. “We would have heard if they’d found something new, but you probably should lie low for a while longer just in case.”

That night Maggie tossed fitfully and awoke when it was still dark to find Dino whining and licking her face. “Okay, boy, okay,” she said, but it took her a minute or two to remember where she was. When she took him out for his morning walk, she thought she saw Tomás dressed as a soldier. Good for you, Tomás, she thought. As she followed him up a side street and into an alley, she noticed he had put on weight and seemed taller than she remembered, but just when she got within shouting distance, he was swallowed up by the crowd. A few minutes later she saw him coming out of a coffee shop with a group of friends, and then she saw him selling magazines from a darling little cart. “Tomás!” she called out.

“Hello!” the magazine vendor called back, and it was obvious even before she crossed the street that it wasn’t the little prisoner after all.

“Even if that’s not Tomás,” she told Dino, “it’s someone he might easily have been. And it’s someone who isn’t in prison, thank the lord for that.” Her voice scratched in her throat when she spoke, and the unfamiliar sound of it made her think that she was only one coin toss away from being someone she might have been too.

In the confusion she had gotten her turned around, and when she started up again, Dino planted his feet until she agreed to go in the opposite direction. “Okay, boy, okay,” she said again, because just then she spotted a woman who looked like Sandra Day O’Connor. She hurried to catch up with her.

“What are you following me for?” asked the woman in a gruff voice.

By the time Maggie found her way back to the church, her head was spinning and her forehead was hot. She set out food and some fresh water for Dino and only saved herself from collapsing by grabbing on to the communion railing. Kneeling and letting bits of colored light from the stained glass spatter her face as the sun made its way up the firmament, she prayed. She prayed for Lyle and Will, of course. She prayed that someday Tomás and George would walk the verdant paths of freedom and warm themselves before a fire in a sitting room with rough pine floors and a worn corduroy couch that bore a striking resemblance to her own sitting room floor and her own sagging couch. But now she also prayed that the men could bear their incarceration bravely, that they wouldn’t break on the wheel of American justice the way so many others had broken. She now knew that true Justice had been set far out of reach on some celestial shelf — more, she thought now, to taunt people than to teach them anything useful.

But she also knew that there were small pockets of justice locked deep inside each person’s heart, so she prayed for the judges and the jurors — not only the ones who had convicted and sentenced Tomás and George, but for all judges and all jurors everywhere — good people, she knew, but people who had limited access to Truth, which reposed on the high shelf alongside Justice, people who pondered the facts as presented to them and who struggled with growling stomachs to put the pieces together the way, as a girl, she had put together the jigsaws in the forty-watt light of the lamp that sat on the game table in the lakeside cabin where the Rainbow Girls had gone together to spend the month of July and strive to understand Fidelity or Nature or Immortality or whichever of the bow stations was paramount that year.