LAURA LIPPMAN

Life Sentences

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the USA by HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, NY, 2009

Copyright © Laura Lippman 2009

Laura Lippman asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

Source ISBN: 9781847560933

Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007328970

Version: 2018-06-13

In loving memory of James Crumley, 1939–2008.

Take my word. It was fun.

I detest the man who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks for another.

—THE ILIAD

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Part 1-Bridgeville: February 20–23

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part 2-Banrock Station: February 25–28

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part 3-Glass Houses: March 1–2

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part 4-The Brier Patch: March 3–5

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Part 5-Collectors: March 11–12

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part 6-Low Countries: March 14–21

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Part 7-How To Cook Everything: March 24–27

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Part 8-Natural Selection: March 28–29

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Part 9-And Agamemnon Dead: March 29–31

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Part 10-Happy Wanderers: September 5–6

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Excerpt from The Innocents

Autumn 1977–Spring 1978

Author’s Note

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

‘Well,’ the bookstore manager said, ‘it is Valentine’s Day.’

It’s not that bad, Cassandra wanted to say in her own defense. But she never wanted to sound peevish or disappointed. She must smile, be gracious and self-deprecating. She would emphasize how wonderfully intimate the audience was, providing her with an opportunity to talk, have a real exchange, not merely prate about herself. Besides, it wasn’t tragic, drawing thirty people on a February night in the suburbs of San Francisco. On Valentine’s Day. Most of the writers she knew would kill for thirty people under these circumstances, under any circumstances.

And there was no gain in reminding the bookseller—Beth, Betsy, Bitsy, oh dear, the name had vanished, her memory was increasingly buggy—that Cassandra had drawn almost two hundred people to this same store on this precise date four years earlier. Because that might imply she thought someone was to blame for tonight’s turnout, and Cassandra Fallows didn’t believe in blame. She was famous for it. Or had been.

She also was famous for rallying, and she did just that as she took five minutes to freshen up in the manager’s office, brushing her hair and reapplying lipstick. Her hair, her worst feature as a child, was now her best, sleek and silver, but her lips seemed thinner. She adjusted her earrings, smoothed her skirt, reminding herself of her general good fortune. She had a job she loved; she was healthy. Lucky, I am lucky. She could quit now, never write a word again, and live quite comfortably. Her first two books were annuities, more reliable than any investment.

Her third book—ah, well, that was the unloved, misshapen child she was here to exalt.

At the lectern, she launched into a talk that was already honed and automatic ten days into the tour. There was a pediatric hospital across the road from where I grew up. The audience was mostly female, over forty. She used to get more men, but then her memoirs, especially the second one, had included unsparing detail about her promiscuity, a healthy appetite that had briefly gotten out of control in her early forties. It was a long-term-care facility, where children with extremely challenging diagnoses were treated for months, for years in some cases. Was that true? She hadn’t done that much research about Kernan. The hospital had been skittish, dubious that a writer known for memoir was capable of creating fiction. Cassandra had decided to go whole hog, abandon herself to the libertine ways of a novelist. Forgo the fact-checking, the weeks in libraries, the conversations with family and friends, trying to make her memories gibe with hard, cold certainty. For the first time in her life—despite what her second husband had claimed—she made stuff up out of whole cloth. The book is an homage to The Secret Garden—in case the title doesn’t make that clear enough—and it’s set in the 1980s because that was a time when finding biological parents was still formidably difficult, almost taboo, a notion that began to lose favor in the 1990s and is increasingly out of fashion as biological parents gain more rights. It had never occurred to Cassandra that the world at large, much like the hospital, would be reluctant to accept her in this new role. The story is wholly fictional, although it’s set in a real place.

She read her favorite passage. People laughed in some odd spots.

Question time. Cassandra never minded the predictability of the Q-and-A sessions, never resented being asked the same thing over and over. It didn’t even bother her when people spoke of her father and mother and stepmother and ex-husbands as if they were characters in a novel, fictional constructs they were free to judge and psychoanalyze. But it disturbed her now when audience members wanted to pin down the ‘real’ people in her third book. Was she Hannah, the watchful child who unwittingly sets a tragedy in motion? Or was she the boy in the body cast, Woodrow? Were the parents modeled on her own? They seemed so different, based on the historical record she had created. Was there a fire? An accident in the abandoned swimming pool that the family could never afford to repair?

‘Did your father really drive a retired Marathon cab, painted purple?’ asked one of the few men in the audience, who looked to be at least sixty. Retired, killing time at his wife’s side. ‘I ask only because my father had an old DeSoto and…’

Of course, she thought, even as she smiled and nodded. You care about the details that you can relate back to yourself. I’ve told my story, committed over a quarter of a million words to paper so far. It’s your turn. Again, she was not irked. Her audience’s need to share was to be expected. If a writer was fortunate enough to excite people’s imaginations, this was part of the bargain, especially for the memoir writer she had been and apparently would continue to be in the public’s mind, at least for now. She had told her story, and that was the cue for them to tell theirs. Given what confession had done for her soul, how could she deny it to anyone else?

‘Time for one last question,’ the store manager said, and pointed to a woman in the back. She wore a red raincoat, shiny with moisture, and a shapeless khaki hat that tied under her chin with a leather cord.

‘Why do you get to write the story?’

Cassandra was at a loss for words.

‘I’m not sure I understand,’ she began. ‘You mean, how do I write a novel about people who aren’t me? Or are you asking how one gets published?’

‘No, with the other books. Did you get permission to write them?’

‘Permission to write about my own life?’

‘But it’s not just your life. It’s your parents, your stepmother, friends. Did you let them read it first?’

‘No. They knew what I was doing, though. And I fact-checked as much as I could, admitted the fallibility of my memory throughout. In fact that’s a recurring theme in my work.’

The woman was clearly unsatisfied with the answer. As others lined up to have their books signed, she stalked to the cash registers at the front of the store. Cassandra would have loved to dismiss her as a philistine, a troublemaker irritable because she had nothing better to do on Valentine’s Day. But she carried an armful of impressive-looking books, although Cassandra didn’t see her own spine among them. The woman was like the bad fairy at a christening. Why do I get to write the story? Because I’m a writer.

Toward the end of the line—really, thirty people on a wet, windy Valentine’s Day was downright impressive—a woman produced a battered paperback copy of Cassandra’s first book.

‘In-store purchases only,’ the manager said, and Cassandra couldn’t blame her. It was hard enough to be a bookseller these days without people bringing in their secondhand books to be signed.

‘Just one can’t hurt,’ said Cassandra, forever a child of divorce, instinctively the peacemaker.

‘I can’t afford many hardcovers,’ the woman apologized. She was one of the few young ones in the crowd and pretty, although she dressed and stood in a way that suggested she was not yet in possession of that information. Cassandra knew the type. Cassandra had been the type. Do you sleep with a lot of men? she wanted to ask her. Overeat? Drink, take drugs? Daddy issues?

‘To…?’ Fountain pen poised over the title page. God, how had this ill-designed book found so many readers? It had been a relief when the publisher repackaged it, with the now de rigueur book club questions in the back and a new essay on how she had come to write the book at all, along with updated information on the principals. It had been surprisingly painful, recounting Annie’s death in that revised epilogue. She was caught off guard by how much she missed her stepmother.

‘Oh, you don’t have to write anything special.’

‘I want to write whatever you want me to write.’

The young woman seemed overwhelmed by this generosity. Her eyes misted and she began to stammer: ‘Oh—no—well, Cathleen. With a C. I—this book meant so much to me. It was as if it was my story.’

This was always hard to hear, even though Cassandra understood the sentiment was a compliment, the very secret of her success. She could argue, insist on the individuality of her autobiography, deny the universality that had made it appealing to so many—or she could cash the checks and tell herself with a blithe shrug, ‘Fuck you, Tolstoy. Apparently, even the unhappy families are all alike.’

To Cathleen, she wrote in the space between the title, My Father’s Daughter, and her own name. Find your story and tell it.

‘Your signature is so pretty,’ Cathleen said. ‘Like you. You’re actually very pretty in person.’

The girl blushed, realizing what she had implied. Yet she was far from the first person to say this. Cassandra’s author photo was severe, a little cold. Men often complained about it.

‘You’re pretty in person, too,’ she told the girl, saving her with her own words. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if you found there was a book in your story. You should consider telling it.’

‘Well, I’m trying,’ Cathleen admitted.

Of course you are. ‘Good luck.’

When the line dispersed, Cassandra asked the bookstore manager, ‘Do you want me to sign stock?’

‘Oh,’ the manager said with great surprise, as if no one had ever sought to do this before, as if it were an innovation that Cassandra had just introduced to bookselling. ‘Sure. Although I wouldn’t expect you to do all of them. That would be too much to ask. Perhaps that stack?’

Betsy/Beth/Bitsy knew and Cassandra knew that even that stack, perhaps a fifth of the store’s order, could be returned once signed. So many things unspoken, so many unpleasant truths to be tiptoed around. Just like my childhood all over again. The book was number 23 on the Times’s extended list and it was gaining some momentum over the course of the tour. The Painted Garden was, by almost any standard, a successful literary novel. Except by the standard of the reviews, which had been uniformly sorrowful, as if a team of surgeons had gathered at Cassandra’s bedside to deliver a terminal verdict: Writing two celebrated memoirs does not mean you can write a good novel. Gleefully cruel or hostile reviews would have been easier to bear.

Still, The Painted Garden was selling, although not with the velocity expected by her new publisher, which had paid Cassandra a shocking amount of money to lure her away from the old one. Her editor was already hinting that—much as they loved, loved, loved her novel—it would be, well, fun if she wanted to return to nonfiction. Wouldn’t that be FUN? Surely, approaching fifty—not that you look your age!—she had another decade or so of life to exploit, another vital passage? She had written about being someone’s daughter and then about being someone’s wife. Two someones, in fact. Wasn’t there a book in being her?

Not that she could see. This novel had been cobbled together with a few leftovers from her life, the unused scraps, then padded by her imagination, not to mention her affectionate memories of The Secret Garden. (A girl exploring a forbidden space, a boy in a bed—why did she have to explain these allusions over and over?) On some level, she was flattered that readers wanted her, not her ideas. The problem was, she had run out of life.

Back in her hotel room, she over-ordered from room service, incapable of deciding what she wanted. The restaurant in the hotel was quite good, but she was keen to avoid it on this night set aside for lovers. Even under optimal circumstances, she had never cared for the holiday. It had defeated every man she had known, beginning with her father. When she was a little girl, she would have given anything to get a box of chocolates, even the four-candy Whitman’s Sampler, or a single rose. Instead, she could count on a generic card from the Windsor Hills Pharmacy, while her mother usually received one of those perfume-and-bath-oil sets, a dusty Christmas markdown. Her father’s excuse was that her mother’s birthday, which fell on Washington’s, came so hard on the heels of Valentine’s Day that he couldn’t possibly do both. But he executed the birthday just as poorly. Her mother’s birthday cakes, more often than not, were store-bought affairs with cherries and hatchets picked up on her father’s way home from campus. It was hard to believe, as her mother insisted, that this was a man who had wooed her with sonnets and moonlight drives through his hometown of DC, showing her monuments and relics unknown to most. Who recited Poe’s ‘Lenore’—And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?—in honor of her name.

One year, though, the year Cassandra turned ten, her father had made a big show of Valentine’s Day, buying mother and daughter department store cologne, Chanel No. 5 and lily of the valley, respectively, and taking them to Tio Pepe’s for dinner, where he allowed Cassandra a sip of sangria, her first taste of alcohol. Not even five months later, as millions of readers now knew, he left his wife. Left them, although, in the time-honored tradition of all decamping parents, he always denied abandoning Cassandra.

Give her father this: He had been an awfully good sport about the first book. He had read it in galleys and requested only one small change—and that was to safeguard her mother’s feelings. (He had claimed once, in a moment of self-justification, that he had never loved her mother, that he had married because he felt that a scholar, such as he aspired to be, couldn’t afford to dissipate his energies. Cassandra agreed to delete this, although she suspected it to be truer than most things her father said.) He had praised the book when it was a modest critical success, then hung on for the ride when it became a runaway bestseller in paperback. He had been enthusiastic about the forever-stalled movie version: Whenever another middle-aged actor got into trouble with the law, he would send along the mug shot as an e-mail attachment, noting cheerfully, ‘Almost desiccated enough to play me.’ He had consented to interviews when she was profiled, yet never pulled focus, never sought to impress upon anyone that he was someone more than Cassandra Fallows’s father.

Lenore, by contrast, was often thin lipped with unexpressed disapproval, no matter how many times Cassandra tried to remind people of her mother’s good qualities. Everyone loves the bad boy. Come April, her father would be center stage again, and there was nothing Cassandra could do about that.

She sighed, thinking about the unavoidable trip back to Baltimore once her tour was over, the complications of dividing her time between two households, the special care and attention her mother would need to make up for her father being lionized. Did she dare stay in a hotel? No, she would have to return to the house on Hillhouse Road. Perhaps she could finally persuade her mother to put it up for sale. Physically, her mother was still more than capable of caring for the house, but that could change quickly. Cassandra had watched other friends dealing with parents in their seventies and eighties, and the declines were at once gradual and abrupt. She shouldn’t have moved away. But if she hadn’t left, she never would have started writing. The past had been on top of her in Baltimore, suffocating and omnipresent. She had needed distance, literal distance, to begin to see her life clearly enough to write about it.

She turned on the television, settling on CNN. As was her habit on the road, she would leave the television on all night, although it disrupted her sleep. But she required the noise when she traveled, like a puppy who needs an alarm clock to be reminded of its mother’s beating heart. Strange, because her town house back in Brooklyn was a quiet, hushed place and the noises one could hear—footsteps, running water—were no different from hotel sounds. But hotels scared her, perhaps for no reason greater than that she’d seen the movie Psycho in second grade. (More great parenting from Cedric Fallows: exposure to Psycho at age seven, Bonnie and Clyde when she was nine, The Godfather at age fourteen.) If the television was on, perhaps it would be presumed she was awake and therefore not the best choice for an attack.

Her room service tray banished to the hall, she slid into bed, drifting in and out of sleep against the background buzz of the headlines. She dreamed of her hometown, of the quirky house on the hill, but it was 4 A.M. before she realized that it was the news anchor who kept intoning Baltimore every twenty minutes or so, as the same set of stories spun around and around.

‘…The New Orleans case is reminiscent of one in Baltimore, more than twenty years ago, when a woman named Calliope Jenkins repeatedly took the Fifth, refusing to tell prosecutors and police the whereabouts of her missing son. She remained in jail seven years but never wavered in her statements, a very unique legal strategy now being used again….’

Unique doesn’t take a modifier, Cassandra thought, drifting away again. And if something is being used again, it’s clearly not unique. Then, almost as an afterthought, Besides, it’s not Kuh-lie-o-pee, like the instrument or the Muse—it’s Callieope, almost like Alley Oop, which is why Tisha shortened her name to Callie.

A second later, her eyes were wide open, but the story had already flashed by, along with whatever images had been provided. She had to wait through another cycle and even then, the twenty-year-old photograph—a grim-faced woman being escorted by two bailiffs—was too fleeting for Cassandra to be sure. Still, how many Baltimore women could there be with that name, about that age? Could it—was she—it must be. She knew this woman. Well, had known the girl who became this woman. A woman who clearly had done something unspeakable. Literally, to take another word that news anchors loved but seldom used correctly. To hold one’s tongue for seven years, to offer no explanation, not even the courtesy of a lie—what an unfathomable act. Yet one in character for the silent girl Cassandra had known, a girl who was desperate to deflect all attention.

‘This is Calliope Jenkins, a midyear transfer,’ the teacher had told her fourth-graders.

‘Callieope.’ The girl had corrected her in a soft, hesitant voice, as if she didn’t have the right to have her name pronounced correctly. Tall and rawboned, she had a pretty face, but the boys were too young to notice, and the girls were not impressed. She would have to be tested, auditioned, fitted for her role within Mrs Bryson’s class, where the prime parts—best dressed; best dancer; best personality; best student, which happened to be Cassandra—had been filled back in third grade, when the school had opened. These were not cruel girls. But if Calliope came on too fast or tried to seize a role that they did not feel she deserved, there would be trouble. She was the new girl and the girls would decide her fate. The boys would attempt to brand her, assign a nickname—Alley Oop would be tried, in fact, but the comic strip was too old even then to have resonance. Cassandra would explain to Calliope that she was named for a Muse, as Cassandra herself had almost been, that her name was really quite elegant. But it was Tisha who essentially saved Calliope’s young life by dubbing her Callie.

That was where Cassandra’s memories of Callie started—and stopped. How could that be? For the first time, Cassandra had some empathy for the neighbors of serial killers, the people who provided the banalities about quiet men who kept to themselves. Someone she knew, someone who had probably come to her birthday parties, had grown up to commit a horrible crime, and all Cassandra could remember was that…she was a quiet girl. Who kept to herself.

Fatima had known her well, though, because she had once lived in the same neighborhood. And Cassandra remembered a photograph from the last-day-of-school picnic in fourth grade, the girls lined up with arms slung around one another’s necks, Callie at the edge. That photo had appeared, in fact, along with several others on the frontispiece of her first book, but only as testimony to the obliviousness of youth, Cassandra’s untroubled, happy face captured mere weeks before her father tore their family apart. Had she even mentioned Calliope in passing? Doubtful. Callie simply didn’t matter enough; she was neither goat nor golden girl. Tisha, Fatima, Donna—they had been integral to Cassandra’s first book. Quiet Callie hadn’t rated.

Yet she was the one who grew up to have the most dramatic story. A dead child. Seven years in jail, refusing to speak. Who was that person? How did you go from being Quiet Callie to a modern-day Medea?

Cassandra glanced at the clock. Almost five here, not yet eight in New York, too early to call her agent, much less her editor. She pulled on the hotel robe and went over to the desk, where her computer waited in sleep mode. She started an e-mail. The next book would be true, about her, but about something larger. It would include her trademark memories but also a new story, a counterpoint to the past. She wouldn’t track down just Callie but everyone she could remember from that era—Tisha, Donna, Fatima.

Cassandra was struck, typing, by how relatively normal their names had been, or at least uniform in spelling. Only Tisha’s name stuck out and it was short for Leticia, which might explain why she had been so quick to save Calliope with a nickname. Names today were demographic signifiers and one could infer much from them—age, class, race. Back then, names hadn’t revealed as much. Cassandra threw that idea in there, too, her fingers racing toward the future and the book she would create, even as her mind retreated, hopscotching through the past, to fourth grade, then ninth grade, back to sixth grade—her breath caught at a memory she had banished years ago, one described in the first book. What had Tisha thought about that? Had she even read My Father’s Daughter?

Yet Callie would be the central figure of this next book. She must have done what she was accused of doing. Had it been a crime of impulse? An accident? How had she hidden the body, then managed not to incriminate herself, sitting all those years in jail? Was there even a plausible alternative in which Callie’s son was not dead? Was she protecting someone?

Cassandra glanced back at the television screen, watched Callie come around again. Cassandra understood the media cycle well enough to know that Callie would disappear within a day or two, that she was a place-marker in the current story, the kind of footnote dredged up in the absence of new developments. Callie had been forgotten and would be forgotten again. Her child had been forgotten, left in this permanent limbo—not officially dead, not even officially missing, just unaccounted for, like an item on a manifest. A baby, an African-American boy, had vanished, with no explanation and yet no real urgency. His mother, almost certainly the person responsible, had defeated the authorities with silence.

That’s good, Cassandra told herself. She put that in the memo, too.

First Words

I didn’t speak until I was almost three years old. And then it was only because my mother almost killed me. Almost killed both of us, but she had the luxury of making the decision. I was literally just along for the ride.

My mother didn’t worry about my silence, however. It was my father, a classics professor at Johns Hopkins University, who brooded constantly. The possibility of a nonverbal child—and all the other intellectual limitations that this circumstance implied—terrified my father so much that he would not allow my mother to consult specialists. He knew himself well enough to understand that a diagnosis could change his love for me. My father believed in unconditional love, but only under certain conditions.

Besides, he was not irrational to hope that I might be keeping my own counsel for as yet undisclosed reasons. I had walked early and hit the other developmental milestones more or less on time. And I wasn’t mute. I had a three-word vocabulary: yes, no, and Ric, which is how my father, Cedric, was known. I’m not sure why I had no term for my mother. Perhaps ‘Lenore’ was too subtle for my baby mouth. More likely, I didn’t recognize that my mother was a separate entity but saw her as my larger self, capable of detaching from my side in order to meet my needs. With her, I didn’t even use my three paltry words, instead pointing and grunting to indicate my desires. ‘We should have named her Caliban instead of Cassandra,’ my father said.

My refusal to speak continued until almost a month before my third birthday. It had snowed, an early-spring snowstorm that was uncommonly common in Baltimore. On this particular day—a Thursday, not that my three-year-old mind could distinguish days, but I have checked the family story against newspapers from that week—my mother set out to do the marketing, as she called it then, at the old Eddie’s supermarket on Roland Avenue.

The snow had started before she set out, but the radio forecaster was insisting it would not amount to much. In the brief half hour she shopped, the snow switched to rain, then changed over to sleet, and she came out to a truly treacherous world, with cars spinning out of control up and down Roland Avenue. She decided that the main roads would be safer and calculated a roundabout route back to our apartment. But she had forgotten that Northern Parkway, while wide and accommodating, was roller-coaster steep. The car slithered into its left turn onto the parkway, announcing how dangerous her choice was, but it was too late to turn back. The unsanded road lay before her, shining with ice, a traffic light at its foot. A traffic light at which she would never be able to stop. What to do?

My pragmatic, cautious mother killed the engine, took her foot off the brake and coasted down, turning our car, a turquoise-and-brown station wagon, into a toboggan. I bobbled among the sacks of groceries, unmoored and unperturbed. The car picked up speed, more speed than my mother ever anticipated, yet not enough to get her through the intersection before the light changed to red. She closed her eyes, locked her elbows, and prayed.

When she opened her eyes, we had come to rest in the tiny front yards of the houses that lined Northern Parkway, shearing off a hydrant, which sent a plume of water into the air, the droplets freezing as they came back to earth, hitting our car like so many pebbles. But the last might be a detail that my father added, as he was the one who told this story over and over. Careful Lenore, rigid Lenore, skating down a hill with her only child in the back of the car. My mother could barely stand telling it even once.

That night, at dinner, decades later as far as my mother was concerned—after the police came, after the car was towed, after we were taken to our apartment in a fire truck, along with the groceries, not so much as an egg cracked—my father finished his characteristically long discourse on his day in the groves of academe, which my father inevitably called the groves of academe. Who had said what to whom, his warlike thrusts, as he called his responses, an allusion to Maryland’s state song. His day finally dispatched, he asked, as he always did, ‘Anything to report from the home front?’

To which, I am told, I answered, although not in a recognizable language. I babbled; I circled my pudgy baby arms wildly, trying to simulate the motion of the car. I patted my head, attempting to describe the headwear of the various blue-and yellow-suited men who had come to our rescue. I even did a credible imitation of a siren. Within twenty-four hours, my words came in, like a full set of teeth.

‘And from that day forward,’ my father always says at the end—‘From that day forward’—he is a great one for repeating phrases, for emphasis—‘from that day forward, no one could ever shut you up.’

From My Father’s Daughter by Cassandra Fallows, published in 1998 and now in its nineteenth printing.

BRIDGEVILLE February 20–23

Chapter Two

‘Cassandra Fallows? Who’s she with?’

Gloria Bustamante peered at the old-fashioned pink phone memo the temp held out with a quavering hand. The girl had already been dressed down three times today and was now so jangly with nerves that she was caroming off doors and desks, dropping everything she touched, and squeaking reflexively when the phone rang. She wouldn’t last the week, an unusually hectic one to be sure, given all the calls about the Harrington case. Too bad, because she was highly decorative, a type that Gloria favored, although not for the reasons suspected by most.

The girl examined her own handwriting. ‘She’s a writer?’

‘Don’t let your voice scale up at the end of a declarative sentence, dear,’ Gloria said. ‘No one will ever take you seriously. And I assume she’s a writer—or a reporter—if she’s calling about Buddy Harrington. I need to know which newspaper or television program she reps.’

Gloria’s tone was utterly neutral to her ears, but the girl cowered as if she had been threatened. Ah, she had probably hoped for something far more genteel when she signed up at the agency, an assignment at one of those gleaming start-ups along the water. Arriving at Gloria’s building, an old nineteenth-century town house, she would have adjusted her expectations to something old-fashioned but still grand, based on the gleaming front door and restored exterior, the leaded glass and vintage lighting on the first two floors.

Those lower floors, however, were rented to a more fastidious law firm. Gloria’s own office was on the third story, up a sad little carpeted staircase where dust rose with every step and the door gave way to a warren of rooms so filled with boxes that visitors had to take it on faith that there was furniture beneath them. ‘I want prospective clients to know that every one of the not insignificant pennies I charge goes to their defense, not my décor,’ Gloria told the few friends she had in Baltimore’s legal community. She knew that even those friends, such as they were, amended in their heads, It’s not going to your wardrobe or your upkeep, either. For Gloria Bustamante was famously, riotously, deliberately seedy, although not as cheap with herself as she was with her office. The run-down heels she wore were Prada, her stained knit suits came from Saks Jandel in DC, her dirty rings and necklaces had been purchased on lavish trips abroad. Gloria wanted people to know that she had money, that she could afford the very best—and could afford to take crappy care of the very best.

The girl stammered, ‘N-no, she’s not a journalist. She wrote that book, the one about her, um, father? Father. I read it for book club? I mean, I did, I read it for book club.’

‘Pretty young girls go to book clubs? I thought those were for ugly old broads such as me. Not that you’ll catch me in a room full of women, drinking wine and talking about a book. Drinking, maybe.’

The girl’s eyes skittered around the room, trying to find a safe place to land. Clearly, she was unsure if she was obliged to contradict the inescapable truth of Gloria’s appearance or if she should pretend that she hadn’t yet noticed that Gloria was old and ugly.

‘It was a mother-daughter book club,’ she said at last. ‘I went with my mom.’

‘Thanks for the clarification, dearie. Otherwise, I might think you went with your prepubescent daughter, conceived, in the great local tradition, when you were a mere middle schooler.’

The girl took a few steps backward. She had that breathtaking freshness seen only in girls under twenty-five when everything—hair, eyes, lips, even fingernails—gleamed without benefit of cosmetics. The whites of this girl’s eyes were more startling to Gloria than the light-blue irises, the shell-pink ears as notable as the round, peachy cheeks. And she had the kind of boyish figure that was increasingly rare in this era of casual plastic surgery, when even the thinnest girls seemed to sprout ridiculously large breasts. Gloria remembered the tricks of her youth, not that she had ever bothered with them, the padded bras, the wads of Kleenex. They had been far more credible in their way than all these perky cantaloupes, which looked, in fact, as if they had been molded with very large melon ballers. Real breasts weren’t so round. She hoped this girl wouldn’t tamper with what nature had allotted her.

‘I grew up in Ruxton?’ the girl said, and it was clear that she intended the well-to-do suburb to establish that she was not the kind of girl who had a baby at age twelve. Oh, you’d be surprised, dearie, Gloria wanted to say. You’d be shocked at the wealthy families who have sat in my office, trying to decide what to do when one of Daddy’s friends—or Daddy himself—has helped himself to an underage daughter. It happens. Even in Ruxton. After all, Buddy Harrington happened in a suburb not that far from Ruxton.

‘I’m sure you did,’ Gloria said. ‘So Cassandra Fallows wants to write a book about Buddy Harrington? She must be one of those true-crime types who specialize in whipping books out in four to six weeks. We’ll give her a wide berth.’

Buddy Harrington was, as of this third full week in February, being held responsible for 80 percent of the murders in Baltimore County this year. Granted, the county had only five homicides so far, as compared to the city’s thirty or so. Still, Harrington was charged with four of them—his mother, father, and twin sisters, all shot as they slept. The sixteen-year-old had called the police on a Thursday evening two weeks ago, claiming to have discovered the bodies after returning home from a chorale competition in Ocean City. He had been charged before the day was out, although he had yet to confess and was pressing Gloria to let him tell his story far and wide. She was holding him back precisely because of that eagerness, his keenness to perform. For Buddy Harrington was not the kind of boy who inspired the usual descriptions of those who snap—quiet, introverted. He was an outstanding student, a star athlete, and a gifted singer, well liked by classmates, admired by teachers. The community was stunned.

Gloria, who had spent several hours with Buddy since his arrest, was not. She also knew that all the things that Buddy considered his assets—his good looks, his normalcy—would undercut him. Nothing terrified people more than an all-American sociopath. And until—unless—she got Buddy into the juvenile system, she had to keep him from tainting his future jury. Which would not, of course, be a jury of his peers, but a dozen middle-class mothers and fathers who would be undone by his poise, his composure. Especially—shades of O.J.!—if he stuck to this help-me-find-the-real-killer scenario.

‘No, it’s not about Buddy. She wants to ask you about an old case?’ The girl squinted at her own handwriting. ‘Something about a calley-ope?’

‘A calley—do you mean Calliope?’ Gloria could afford to keep her office in disarray and limit her exposure to computers because the entire history of her practice was always available to her. She had a prodigious memory. On those rare occasions when someone felt intimate enough to challenge her on her drinking, she maintained that it was the only way to level the playing field.

Not that she was likely to forget Callie Jenkins under any circumstances. She had tried.

‘Yes, that’s it. Calliope. Calliope Jenks.’

‘Jenkins.’

‘Right.’

‘What, specifically, does she want to know?’

‘She wouldn’t say?’

‘Did you ask?’

The girl’s downward gaze answered the question more emphatically than any statement-question she might have offered in return. Gloria leaned across the desk and tried to take the paper, but the girl was out of reach. She moved forward tentatively, as if Gloria might bite her, jumping back as soon as Gloria had the phone memo in her hand.

‘It’s an out-of-state number,’ Gloria said. ‘New York, I think, but not the city proper. Long Island, maybe Brooklyn. I can’t keep all the new ones straight.’ She had, in fact, once been able to recognize every area code at a glance. She knew state capitals, too, and was always the one person at a party who could complete any set of names—the seven dwarves, the nine Supreme Court justices, the thirteen original colonies.

‘But she’s in town,’ the girl said, thrilled that she had gleaned an actual fact. ‘For a while, she said. That’s her cell. She said she plans to be in town for a while.’

Gloria crumpled the pink sheet and tossed it in the overflowing trash can by the desk, where it bounced out.

‘But she’s famous!’ the girl said. ‘I mean, for a writer. She’s been on Oprah.’

‘I don’t talk to people unless they can help me. That case ended a long time ago, and it’s better forgotten. Callie’s a private citizen now, living her life. It’s the least she deserves.’

Was it? Gloria wondered after dismissing the girl. Did Calliope have the least she deserved or far more? What about Gloria? Had she gotten more than she deserved, less, or exactly her due? Had Gloria done the best she could for Callie, given the circumstances, or let her down?

But Gloria didn’t like the concept of guilt any more than she liked the word guilty coming from a jury foreman, not that she had a lot of experience hearing the latter. Guilt was a waste, misplaced energy. Guilt was a legal finding, a determination made by others. Gloria didn’t have time for guilt, and she was almost certain she didn’t deserve to feel it, not in the case of Callie Jenkins. Almost.

She called the temp agency and told them she wouldn’t be able to use the new girl past this week. ‘Send me someone new. More capable, but equally pretty.’

‘You’re not allowed to say that,’ the agency rep objected.

‘Sue me,’ Gloria said.

Chapter Three

‘Why aren’t you staying with me?’ her mother asked, and not for the first time. ‘That was the original plan.’

‘Yes, when I was going to be in Baltimore a week. But for ten, twelve weeks? I would drive you crazy.’ And you me.

‘But a hotel room, for all that time—you won’t be able to cook for yourself—’

‘It’s an apartment, the kind set up for short-term corporate renters.’ Cassandra anticipated her mother’s next protest: ‘It’s not that expensive.’

‘Did you sublet your place back in New York?’

‘No.’

‘So you’re carrying two rents for three months. And you’ll need a car here.’

‘Mom, I have my own car. I drove down. I drove here, it’s parked in your driveway.’

‘I don’t know what the point is of having a car if you live in New York.’

‘I like to be able to get away—visit friends upstate or at the…beach.’ She used the generic, beach, instead of the specific, Hamptons, out of fear that the latter would provoke another spasm of worry.

The reviews of the last book had been hard on her mother. Her mother’s e-mails had been hard on Cassandra. Until this winter, she hadn’t even known that her mother could initiate e-mail. She seemed to use the laptop that Cassandra had given her for nothing more than playing hearts and solitaire while depending on the reply-to function to answer Cassandra’s sporadic notes. Even then, she was extremely terse. ‘Thank you.’ Or ‘That’s nice, dear.’ Lennie Fallows seemed to think e-mail was the equivalent of a telegram or a long-distance call back in the seventies. It was a mode of communication to be limited to dire emergencies or special occasions, and even then brevity was required.

Then, back in January, the e-mails had started, with no ‘RE:’ in the subject headers, with no subject headers at all, which made them all the more terrifying, as Cassandra had no idea what conversation her mother was about to start.

‘I wouldn’t worry about the Kirkus.’ ‘The PW is good, if you omit the dependent clause.’ ‘Sorry about the New York Times.’

Except she hadn’t written ‘the New York Times’ or even ‘NYT’, come to think of it, but the critic’s surname, as if the woman were a neighbor, an intimate. This detail saddened Cassandra most of all. All she had ever wanted was to give her mother a sense of ownership in Cassandra’s success. She had felt that way even as a teenager, back when Lennie was, in fact, a profound embarrassment, running around town in—oh, God, the memory still grated—painter’s pants or overalls, that horrible cap on her head, tools sticking out of her pockets. Yet Lennie insisted on crediting Cassandra’s achievements to her ex-husband’s side of the DNA ledger. Even the book that had forged Cassandra’s reputation had been problematic for her mother, arriving with that title that slanted everything toward him.

But the life that book brought Cassandra—ah, that her mother had loved and gloried in, and not because of the small material benefits that came her way. She adored turning on the radio and hearing Cassandra’s voice, basked in being in a store and having a neighbor comment on one of Cassandra’s television appearances. Once, in the Giant, Cassandra had seen how it worked: Her mother furrowed her brow at the mention of Cassandra’s most recent interview, as if it were impossible to keep track of her daughter’s media profile. Was it Today? Charlie Rose? That weird show on cable where everyone shouted?

You must be very proud of her, the neighbor persisted.

And Lennie Fallows—it had never occurred to her to drop the surname of the man she detested—said with steely joy, ‘I was always proud of her.’ In her mother’s coded lexicon, this was the rough equivalent of Go fuck yourself.

Cassandra opened the refrigerator to browse its contents, a daughter’s prerogative. It was huge, the kind of double-wide Sub-Zero one might find in a small restaurant. The kitchen had been Lennie’s latest project, and superficially, it looked great. But Cassandra knew where to find the corners her mother never stopped cutting, a legacy of the lean years that had left her so fearful. The refrigerator and the stove would be scratch-and-dent specials, with tiny flaws that prevented them from being sold at full list. The new porcelain sink would have been purchased at Lennie’s ‘professional’ discount—and, most likely, installed by her, along with the faucet and garbage disposal. She had kept the palette relatively plain. ‘Better for resale,’ she said, as if she had any intention of putting the house on the market. Like Penelope stalling her suitors, Lennie continually undid her own work. By Cassandra’s reckoning, this was the kitchen’s third renovation. Lennie was desperate not to leave the house, which had been big for a family of three, almost ruinous for a single mother and daughter, simply ridiculous for a woman now in her seventies.

But this conversation was already too fraught to take on the subject of the house, which her mother had come to love and defend against all comers. Instead, Cassandra asked her mother, ‘Do you remember Calliope?’

‘An organ? You mean at the Presbyterian church? And I think it’s pronounced differently, dear.’ Her father would have made the correction first.

‘No, in my class. Callie Jenkins. At Dickey Hill, starting in fourth grade. She’s in one of the photographs. She wore her hair in three fat braids, with those little pompon things on the ends.’

Cassandra bunched up a fistful of her own hair to jog her mother’s memory.

‘Three—oh, she must have been black.’

‘Mother.’

‘What? There’s nothing bigoted in saying that. Unless you’re me, I guess. I’m not allowed to notice the color of anyone’s skin.’

Cassandra had no desire to lecture her mother. Besides, she had a point.

‘At any rate, I was watching CNN and there was a story about this case in New Orleans—a woman’s child is missing and she took the Fifth, refused to say where the child is. Someone said it was similar to a case here years ago, involving Calliope Jenkins. It has to be the same person, don’t you think? The age is about right, and how many Calliope Jenkinses could there be in Baltimore?’

‘More than you might think.’

Cassandra couldn’t tell if her mother was being literal or trying to make some larger point about infanticide or her hometown. ‘Don’t you think that would make a good book?’

Her mother pondered. That was the precise word—she puckered her forehead and considered the question at hand as if she were Cassandra’s literary agent or editor, as if Cassandra could not go forward without her mother’s blessing.

‘True crime? That would be different for you.’

‘Not exactly true crime. I’d weave the story of what happened to Callie as an adult with our lives as children, our time in school together. Remember, she was one of the few girls who went to junior high with me.’

‘One of the few black girls,’ her mother said with a look that dared Cassandra to correct her for referencing Callie’s race.

‘Well, yes. And race is a small part of the story, I guess. But it’s really Callie’s story. If I can find her.’

‘Even if you do find her, can she speak to you? I remember the case—’

‘You do?’

‘Anyone who lived here at the time would remember.’ Was there an implicit rebuke in her mother’s words, a reminder that Cassandra had disappointed her by moving away? ‘I didn’t recognize her name, but I remember when it happened. The whole point was that she wouldn’t talk. But if she did kill her child, she can still be charged. If she didn’t, why didn’t she cooperate all those years ago?’

Cassandra was well aware of this particular problem; her editor had raised it first. They had agreed the book wouldn’t be dependent on a confession, or even answering all the questions, but the reader would need to believe that Cassandra had reached some kind of conclusion about her old school friend. Old school friend was the editor’s term, and while Cassandra had initially tried to correct the impression, using classmate and acquaintance, she soon gave up. What was a ‘friend’, after all, when you were ten or eleven? They had played together at school, gone to birthday parties together.

‘I can’t plan this book in advance. That’s what makes it exciting. With the first two books, they were already constructed, in a sense. I had lived them, I just didn’t know how I would write them. And they were very solitary enterprises. Solipsistic, even. But this time—I’m going to interview Callie, once I find her, but also other girls from the class. Tisha, Donna, Fatima. And Callie’s lawyer, I guess, and the police detective who investigated her…heavens, I’m not sure three months here will be enough.’

‘And, of course,’ her mother said, staring into her tea, ‘you’ll be here for all the hoo-haw surrounding your father.’

‘One event in a week of events,’ Cassandra said. ‘A simple onstage interview, and I’m doing it only because it will raise money for the Gordon School’s library building fund. We do owe the school a great debt. Besides, it will be interesting, interviewing Daddy in front of a captive audience. He’s the king of digressions.’

‘Yes,’ her mother said. ‘Your father loved digressing.’

‘It’s not a big deal,’ Cassandra said. She wished, as she often did, that they were a family comfortable with casual touches, that she could place her hand over her mother’s now.

‘I know,’ her mother said. ‘I just hate the way he…romanticizes what he did, to the point where he won’t even talk about it. Or her.’

Cassandra respected her mother for holding on to that ‘Or her’ for all these years, refusing to say Annie’s name unless forced. It might not be particularly healthy, but it was impressive. Cassandra shared her mother’s talent for grudges—it was, she liked to say in speeches, a useful quality for the memoirist, the ability to remember every slight, no matter how small. They called it their Hungarian streak, a reference to her mother’s mother, who had gone thirty years without speaking to her son and lived just long enough to see her granddaughter immortalize this fact in her first book. Nonnie hadn’t minded, not in the least. It had given her a little bit of cachet in the retirement center where she lived, largely indifferent to her neighbors. On what would prove to be Cassandra’s last visit with her, Nonnie had insisted on going to the dining hall, parading her successful granddaughter past the other residents: ‘My granddaughter, she’s a writer, a real one, a bestseller.’ Cassandra wasn’t sure if her grandmother had even read the book in which she took such pride; the volumes—only one book then, but Nonnie had purchased the hardcover and paperback—stood on a table in her apartment. They were, in fact, the only books in the apartment, perhaps the only books her grandmother had ever owned. Nonnie had been mystified, but proud, when her daughter had married a learned man, as she called him. And, true to her own unfathomable principles about loyalty, she continued to like Cedric Fallows even after he betrayed her daughter.

‘I’ve never understood,’ Cassandra said at that last lunch, ‘why you could forgive my father but not your own son. What did he do?’

Her grandmother waved the question away, as she had repeatedly while Cassandra was working on My Father’s Daughter. ‘Pfftt. I don’t talk to him and I don’t talk of him.’

‘Okay, but what Daddy did was pretty bad. Does that mean Uncle Leon did something even worse?’

‘Your father, Uncle Leon…who knows?’

‘Someone must know.’

‘It doesn’t matter. The book is good.’ Meaning: It sold a lot of copies. ‘It doesn’t have to be true. War and Peace isn’t true.’

‘My book is true, Nonnie. It’s a memoir, I made a point to get everything right.’

‘But you can only get things as right as people let you.’

‘Are you mad that I told the story about Uncle Leon and you? I asked your side.’

Nonnie pointed a fork at her. ‘I know how to be mad at people and if I were mad, you wouldn’t be here.’

A month later, she was dead. Cassandra was surprised to see her father at the funeral, more surprised that he had the tact not to bring Annie. He seldom went anywhere without her. Still, when the rabbi invited people up to share their thoughts, Cedric simply couldn’t resist getting up to say a few words, awkward as that was. Uncle Leon didn’t get up, nor did Cassandra’s mother, but the son-in-law who long ago ceased to be a son-in-law waxed eloquent about a woman he had never much liked.

Later, at a brunch in her mother’s house, Cassandra ventured to her father, ‘Nonnie said I didn’t know the truth of the things I wrote, that I got them wrong.’ They were alone, by the buffet table, and she was struck by the novelty of having him to herself.

‘Nonnie was the queen of the mind-fuckers,’ her father said, spearing cold cuts. ‘Do you know why she was so angry at your uncle Leon?’

‘No, she would never tell me.’

‘That’s because she couldn’t remember. He did something thirty years ago that pissed her off, but she would never tell him what it was. Then she forgot. She forgot the precipitating incident, but she never forgot the grudge. Your uncle Leon was desperate to apologize, but he never knew what he did. Your mother used to go visit her and try to guess what Leon did, so he might make amends, and your grandmother would say, “No, that’s not it,” like some Alzheimer’s-addled Sphinx or a Hungarian Rumpelstiltskin, forcing the princess to guess his name when he didn’t know it himself.’

Could it really be? Cassandra decided she believed him, although her father had never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

‘Those are your mother’s people, Cassandra,’ her father said. ‘Thank God you take after me.’

Now, more than a decade later, her mother was saying, ‘Thank God you take after me, Cassandra. In your resilience. You’ll come back from this, I’m sure of it.’

‘From what?’

‘Well—I just mean that I think you’re right, this next book could be something special.’

Her mother did not mean to suggest Cassandra was a failure. Lennie simply couldn’t escape the context of her own life, which she saw as a series of mistakes and disappointments. Yet she had actually enjoyed a brief burst of local celebrity when Cassandra was in high school, appearing on a chat show as ‘Lennie the handywoman’, demonstrating basic repairs. That was when she had started to wear overalls and painter’s caps, much to her teenage daughter’s chagrin.

A more ambitious woman might have parlayed this weekly segment into an empire; after all, the cohost of People Are Talking was a bubbly young woman named Oprah Winfrey. Years later, when Cassandra took her place on Oprah’s sofa, she had asked during the commercial break if Oprah remembered the woman who had provided those home repair tips, the one with the short sandy hair. Oprah said she did, and Cassandra wanted to believe this was true. Her mother had always been easily overlooked, which was one reason she had been enthralled with vivid, attention-grabbing Cedric Fallows.

Cassandra had always thought her mother’s transformation would be the focus of the second memoir. But sex had taken over the second book—her first two marriages, the affairs in and around them, a bad habit she had renounced on the page, if not quite in life. Her mother’s cheerful solitude had seemed out of place. In fact, it had been embarrassing, having her mother in proximity to all that sex. But her mother’s story, alone, was not enough to anchor a book. It was too straightforward, too predictable. ‘It’s a little thin,’ her first editor had said. ‘And awfully sad.’ The second part had surprised Cassandra, who thought she had written about her mother with affection and pride.

‘Does it bother you,’ Cassandra asked Lennie now, ‘that I never wrote about your life in the same way I wrote about Daddy’s?’

‘Oh no,’ her mother said. ‘It’s the nicest thing you ever did for me.’ Recovering quickly, she said, ‘Not that it’s bad, what you do. It’s just not my style, to be all exposed like that. That’s your father. And you.’

‘You just said that I take after you.’

Lennie was at the sink, her back to Cassandra as she rinsed dishes. Lennie had a top-of-the-line Bosch now, but she hewed to the belief that dishes had to be washed before they could go in the dishwasher. ‘You take after me in some ways, but you take after him in other ways. You’re strong, like me. You bounce back. But you’re…out there, letting the world know everything about you. That’s your father’s way.’

Cassandra carried her empty mug over to the sink and tried to quiet the suspicion that her own mother had, in her polite way, just called her a slut and an exhibitionist.

Chapter Four

Stove hot.

Baby bad.

Stove hot.

Baby bad.

Stove bad.

Baby hot.

Stove bad.

Baby cold.

Stovebabyhotcold. Stovebabyhotcold. Stovebabyhotcold. Cold stove. Cold baby. Hot stove. Hot baby. Bad stove. Bad baby. Babystove, babystove, babystove.

She awoke, drenched in sweat. Supposedly part of the change, but she didn’t think that was the whole explanation in her case. After all, she had been having this dream for more than a decade now. Although it wasn’t exactly a dream, because there was nothing to see, only words tumbling over each other, rattling like spare change in a dryer.

But even if the nondream dream caused tonight’s bout of sweating, she knew menopause was coming for her. Up until a year ago, she had really believed there would be time to have one more child, to grab the ring that had been denied her repeatedly. First with Rennay, then Donntay. She wanted so little. Sometimes, she thought that was the problem. She had wanted too little. The less you asked for, the less you got. The girls who had the confidence to demand the moon got the moon and a couple of stars. They never cut their price. A man bought what they were selling or moved on. As soon as you began to bargain, the moment you revealed you were ready to take less than what you wanted—no, not wanted, but needed, required—they took everything from you.

The flush had passed, but she couldn’t go back to sleep. She changed into a dry nightgown, put on her robe, and went out to the glassed-in porch, which overlooked her neat backyard, her neighbors’ yards beyond it. It was a house-proud street, not rich, but well tended. Pretty little house, pretty little town, pretty little life. Bridgeville, Delaware.

She would rather be in jail.

She was in jail, actually, only this time, there was nothing to sustain her, no hopes or dreams or promises. No, not jail. Hell. She was in hell. Which was not, as it turned out, a place of fire and brimstone, of physical discomfort and torture. Hell was a pretty little house in a pretty little town, with plenty of food in the refrigerator and enough money in the bank. Not a lot, but enough, more than she had ever known. Her mind free from workaday worries, she had all the time in the world to dwell on what had gone wrong and could never be made right. What if she—? What if he—? What if they—? Bridgeville, Hell-aware. Most people would think it was a better fate than she deserved.

They would be right.

Amo, Amas, Amat

I was five when my father decided that I should start studying Latin and Greek. No one found this odd. He was, after all, a professor of the classics. He had named me for Cassandra, the ignored prophetess. This was after my mother refused to consider Antigone, Aphrodite, Andromeda, Atalanta, Artemis, any of the nine Muses, or—his personal favorite—Athena. After all, Athena sprang, fully formed, from her father’s head, while her mother, Metis, remained imprisoned inside. My father admired this arrangement.

My mother would have preferred to call me Diana, as Artemis is known in Roman mythology. But my father hated the Roman names and often railed at their primacy in our culture. When I had to learn the names of the planets, I couldn’t rely on mnemonic devices—My very elegant mother just served us nine pickles—because I had to transpose them in my head: Hermes, Aphrodite, Earth (‘Gaia!’ my father would correct with a bark), Ares, Zeus, Cronus, Uranus (‘The one Greek in a batch of Romans, that sly dog, and incestuous to boot,’ my father liked to say), Poseidon, Hades.

Again, no one found this odd, least of all me. My father was a man of many emphatic opinions, which he announced with the same vehemence of callers to WBAL shouting about the Orioles and the Colts. The Greek gods were preferable to the Romans. Nixon was a criminal—my father’s verdict long before Watergate. Mr Bubble was bad for the skin and the plumbing. Stovetop popcorn would give you cancer. Pornography was preferable to any ghostwritten syndicate novel, such as Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. Girls should not wear their hair short.

The last, at least, was mounted in my defense, when my exasperated mother wanted to chop mine off because I fought so during shampoos. ‘You take over her hair,’ she challenged my father, and he did, finding a gentle cream rinse and a wide-tooth comb that tamed my unruly mane. ‘It’s too much hair for a girl, but you’ll be glad when you’re a woman,’ he often said. One of my happiest memories is of standing in the never-quite-finished bathroom off my parents’ bedroom, my father pulling the comb through my hair, insistent but never cruel. My father—incapable of throwing a ball, bored by most sports—would have been lost with a son. The only man he understood was himself.

So, in the world according to Ric Fallows, insisting on language lessons for his only child was not at all strange. But everyone wondered why my father didn’t tutor me himself. He could read both languages, although he was far more skilled in Latin. Instead, my father took me to the home of a faculty colleague, Joseph Lovejoy, whom I was instructed to call Mr Joe, in the Baltimore fashion.

Mr Joe and his sister, Miss Jill, lived in our neighborhood in a place I liked to call the upside-down house. It was built into a bluff above the Gwynns Falls, with the living room on the top floor, the next floor down housing the kitchen and dining room, and the bedrooms on the garden level. Mr Joe sat with me in the study on the top floor, while my father helped Miss Jill prepare tea—not just the beverage but a proper tea of sandwiches and sweets. The Lovejoys were British, visiting Baltimore on some kind of academic exchange program. Miss Jill had what my father called that famous English skin, although it looked like anyone else’s skin to me. Mr Joe was tall and gaunt, and he had skin that no country would claim.

One particularly warm Saturday afternoon in May, the teakettle whistled on the floor below us. It continued to sing for almost a minute and Mr Joe decided to investigate. I could hear him walking around the floor below, then continuing down the steps to the first floor. He returned a few minutes later and announced that would be all for today. My father arrived, but not Miss Jill with the sandwiches.

‘What about tea?’ I asked.

‘There will be no tea today,’ Mr Joe said.

‘Did the kettle run dry?’

‘Did the—yes, yes, it did.’

‘And the sandwiches, the cakes?’

‘Cassandra, your manners,’ my father said.

I was almost fifteen before I figured it out. By then, I knew my father had lots of romances—‘Not romances! Dalliances. The only romance I ever had was with Annie, and I married her.’ But I didn’t know about any of the others until he left my mother for Annie and I started piecing together my father’s long history of infidelities. He rejects that word, too. ‘I was never unfaithful or faithless where your mother was concerned. Sex meant nothing to me, it was a bodily function. That was the problem. I didn’t know you could have both, sex and love, until I met Annie.’

We had this conversation a few days before I headed to college. My father had decided to lecture me on the double standard, persuade me that my own virginity was precious. He was a little late.

‘And Miss Jill?’

‘Miss Jill. Oh, the redheaded Brit. Yes, she was one. But not right away. It wasn’t a plan. Well, maybe it was a little bit of a plan.’

‘What did her brother think?’

‘Her brother? Her brother?’ My father was genuinely puzzled.

‘Mr Joe.’

‘Mr—oh, honey, he was her husband. Where did you get the idea that they were brother and sister?’

To this day, I comb my memory, certain I will find the moment of the lie. Perhaps it was my father’s insistence on calling them Mr Joe and Miss Jill, a localism that my father normally belittled. But what would have been the point in deceiving me? A sibling relationship may have kept Mr Joe from being a cuckold, but it would not excuse what my married father did with Miss Jill while ‘making tea’. A tea, I see now, that required no preparation—the cakes were store-bought, the sandwiches made well ahead of our visit, the crustless bread dry from the air yet damp from the cucumbers that had sweated on them.

Why did I think they were brother and sister? Because even my five-year-old self sensed something was off. My language lessons ended when the Lovejoys went back to England that summer. Miss Jill—Mrs Lovejoy—sent us Christmas cards for several years, but my mother never added them to our list. I spent my junior year abroad in London and discovered I hated the social convention of tea. But I loved Englishmen, especially redheaded ones—gingers—and fucked as many of them as I could.

BANROCK STATION February 25–28

Chapter Five

Cassandra had begun her last two projects by packing a laptop and retreating to a weekend resort, attempting to replicate the serendipitous origins of her first book. My Father’s Daughter had started almost by itself, an accident of heartbreak and idleness: A romantic getaway, planned for West Virginia, had become a solitary one when her first husband left her, walking out after revealing a gambling addiction that had drained their various bank accounts, meager as they were, and saddled their Hoboken condo with a second and a third mortgage that made it practically worthless, despite the robust real estate market of the mid-nineties.

Disconsolate, terrified of the future, but also aware that the room was prepaid, she had driven hours in the wintry landscape—God help her, it was the weekend before Valentine’s Day—thinking that she would spend the two nights and two days crying, drinking, and eating, but she ran out of wine and chocolate much faster than anticipated. The second night, a Saturday, she awoke at 2 A.M., her head strangely clear. At first, she chalked it up to the alcohol wearing off, but when she was still awake an hour later, she pulled on the fluffy robe provided by the bed-and-breakfast—one of two fluffy robes, she noticed, feeling the clutch and lurch of fresh heartbreak—and made her way, trancelike yet lucid, to the picturesque and therefore infuriating little desk not really intended for work.

She found a few sheets of stationery in the center drawer and began scratching out, with the crummy B and B pen, the first few pages of what would become My Father’s Daughter. She had kept those pages, and while the book changed considerably over the next six months, as she wrote to blot out her pain and fear, those first few pages remained the same: I didn’t speak until I was almost three years old. Later, when she began to query agents, a famous one had said he would represent her, but only if she consented to a rewrite in which she excised that opening.

He took her to lunch, where he explained his pet theory of literature, which boiled down to The first five pages are always bullshit.

‘It’s throat clearing,’ he said over a disappointingly modest lunch of spinach salad and bottled water. Cassandra had hoped the lunch would be grander, more decadent, at one of the famous restaurants frequented by publishing types. But the agent was in one of his drying-out phases and had to avoid his usual haunts.

He continued: ‘Tapping into a microphone. Is this thing on? Hullo? Hullo?’ (He was British, although long removed from his native land.) ‘It’s overworked, too precious. As for prologues—don’t get me started on prologues.’

But Cassandra believed she had written a book about a woman finding her own voice, her own story, despite a title that suggested otherwise. Her father was simply the charismatic Maypole at the center; she danced and wove around him, ribbons twisting. She found another agent, a Southern charmer almost as famous but sweet and effusive, unstinting in her praise, like the mother Cassandra never had. Years later, at the National Book Awards—she had been a judge—she ran into the first agent, and he seemed to think they had never met before. She couldn’t help wondering if he cultivated that confusion to save face.

She had started the sequel at a spa in the Berkshires, another shattered marriage behind her, but at least she was the one who had walked out this time. Paul, her second husband, had showed up in the final pages of her first book; she had believed, along with millions of readers, that he was her fairy-tale ending. Telling the truth of that disastrous relationship—along with all the others, before, after, and during the marriage—had felt risky, and some of her original readers didn’t want to come along for the ride. But enough did, and the reviews for The Eternal Wife were even better. Of course, that was because My Father’s Daughter had barely been reviewed upon release.

Then, just eighteen months ago—not enough time, she decided now, she hadn’t allowed the novel to steep as the memoirs had—she had checked into the Greenbrier, again in West Virginia, but much removed, in miles and amenities, from that sadly would-be romantic place where the first memoir had begun. Perhaps that was the problem—she had been too self-conscious in trying to recapture and yet improve the circumstances of that first feverish episode. The woman who had started scratching out those pages in the West Virginia bed-and-breakfast had an innocence and a wonder that had been lost over the subsequent fifteen years.

Or perhaps the problem was more basic: She wasn’t a novelist. She was equipped not to make things up but to bring back things that were. She was a sorceress of the past, an oracle who looked backward to what had been. She was, as her father had decreed, Cassandra, incapable of speaking anything but the truth.

Only this time, the answers were not inside her, not most of them. Last night, in her sterile rental, she had started jotting down, stream of consciousness, what she could remember. Her list wasn’t confined to Calliope but covered every detail of life at Dickey Hill Elementary, no matter how trivial, because she knew from experience that small details could unearth large ones. The memories of the latter had come readily: foursquare, the Christmas pageant, Mrs Klein teaching us about Picasso and Chagall, the girl group. The girl group—she hadn’t thought about that in ages, although it had been key to a scene in the first book. Now and Later candies—did they even make those anymore?—the Dickeyville Fourth of July parade, her own brief television appearance, lumpy in a leotard, demonstrating how adolescent girls cannot do a full, touch-your-toes sit-up at a certain point during their development. She couldn’t decide what was funnier—her desperation to be on television or the fact that people believed those sit-ups accomplished anything.

But where was Calliope in all of this? The girl-woman who was supposed to be at the center of Cassandra’s story remained a cipher, quiet and self-contained. No matter how hard Cassandra tried to trigger memories of Callie, she was merely there. She didn’t get in trouble, she didn’t not get in trouble. Was there a clue in that? Was she the kind of child who tortured animals? Did she steal? There had been a rash of lunchbox thefts one year, with all the girls’ desserts taken. Was there something in Callie’s home life that had taught her early on that it was better not to attract attention? Cassandra had a vague impression—it couldn’t even be called a memory—of an angry, defensive woman, quick to suspect that she was being mocked or treated unfairly, the kind of woman given to yanking children by the meat of the upper arm, to hissing, You are on my last nerve. She had done that at the birthday party, upon coming to gather Callie. No, wait—Fatima’s mother had picked the two up, and she would not have grabbed another woman’s child that way. Still, Cassandra believed she had witnessed this scene with Callie, not Fatima.

Abuse—inevitable in such a story, but also a little, well, tiresome. She hoped it didn’t turn out to be that simple, abused child grows up to be abusive mother. Hitting the wall of her own memory, but feeling too tentative to press forward in her search for the living, breathing Calliope, she decided to spend an afternoon at the library, researching what others had learned about the adult woman presumed to have murdered her own child.

The Enoch Pratt Central Library had been one of the places where her father brought her on Saturday afternoons, after the separation. That was the paradox of divorce in the sixties—fathers who had never much bothered with their children were suddenly expected to do things with them every other weekend. It was especially awkward in the Fallows family because Ric wanted to involve Annie in their outings and Lennie had expressly prohibited Annie’s participation. Ric defied his estranged wife, setting up fake chance encounters with his girlfriend. At the library, at the zoo, at Westview Cinemas, at the bowling alley on Route 40. Why, look who it is! You couldn’t even say he feigned surprise; it was more as if he feigned feigning. Annie, at least, had the grace to look embarrassed by their transparency. And nervous, with good reason. People were not comfortable with interracial couples in 1968 and not at all shy about expressing their objections.

Cassandra liked Annie. Everyone liked Annie—except, of course, Cassandra’s mother, and it was hard to blame her for that. In fact, the outings were more fun when Annie was along because Annie didn’t give the impression that she felt debased by the things that a ten-year-old found pleasurable. Annie was only twenty-six, and a young twenty-six at that, but her interest in Cassandra was always maternal. She expected to be Cassandra’s stepmother long before anyone else thought this might be possible, including Ric. In his mind, he was having a great romance, and romance was not possible within a marriage.

But Annie assumed she would be his wife. ‘She set her cap for him,’ Cassandra’s mother said with great bitterness, and Cassandra had tried to imagine what such a cap looked like. A nurse’s hat? Something coquettish, with a bow? (She was the kind of ten-year-old who knew words like coquettish.) She imagined the hat that the cinematic Scarlett O’Hara lifted from Rhett Butler’s box, the girl in Hello, Dolly! who wanted to wear ribbons down her back, the mother in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, setting her jade green velvet hat at a jaunty angle. But Cassandra could not imagine round-faced Annie, who wore her hair in a close-cropped ‘natural’, in any kind of hat, much less see her as calculating.

Annie had been literally thrown into her father’s arms, her dress torn, people ebbing and flowing around them. Then, even as Ric tried to help her out of the melee, he had been sucked in, with far more serious repercussions. ‘A riot is…an odd thing,’ Annie had told Cassandra years later, when she was trying to re-create that scene for the first memoir. ‘Remember when Hurricane Agnes came through, and the stream flooded, and that man got out of his station wagon and saw it just float away, even as he stood there, holding on to a tree? It was like that, but the water was people, the wind was people. They didn’t know they were people anymore. Does that make sense?’

Cassandra had thought it made perfect sense, and when the book was published, Annie’s passages were often the ones cited in the reviews. Yet Annie was the one person who would never speak to the press, no matter how much she was pursued. ‘I owed you my story,’ she told her stepdaughter. ‘But I don’t owe it to anyone else.’ Five years later—her words translated into twenty-eight languages, her likeness, in one of the frontispiece photos, having traveled to countries that Annie herself had never heard of—Annie was dead from ovarian cancer at the age of fifty-nine. Cassandra had worried her father would be one of those men who begin ailing upon their wife’s death, especially given that she was so much younger. But, while he had a thousand minor complaints, he remained robust. Too robust, according to the administration at the retirement community where he now lived. Cassandra was going to have to make nice with the director on her next visit there and she was dreading that visit. But for now, she had to go to the library.

Cassandra had to endure a tedious explanation of how things worked—where to find the reels, how to load them, how to print, where to return the reels when finished—before she was allowed to take a spin on the microfiche machines. Orientation done, she began yanking out the drawers of boxed reels, feeling as if she were at the beginning of a scavenger hunt. Calliope’s life as a headline had coincided with the merger of the city’s last two newspapers, the Beacon and the Light, which meant there was only one newspaper to study, but it was still more than she had anticipated. Various Internet searches had narrowed down the year for Cassandra, but not the month of the precipitating incident, and the newspaper’s pay archive didn’t go back that far. She would have to start at January and trudge through all of 1988. But the snippet of film she had seen on CNN had clearly been from a cold, wintry month—there had been a bare tree in the background.

It took her a while to establish an efficient yet comprehensive way of searching—checking the front page, then zipping ahead to the local section, pushing the machine full speed to the gap between editions and starting over. The smell and the movement made her nauseous. Should she have hired someone for this dreary task? But she had never paid anyone to do her own work. Besides, she liked immersing herself in microfiche, which she had used to research parts of her first book. She just wished she could recapture the giddy ignorance of those days, the joy in writing without expectation, the smallness of her daydreams.

She found Calliope lurking at the end of March, which must have gone out like a lion that year. Yes, in fact, the weather was part of the story. February had been full of ice storms. At least, that was the excuse offered by a social worker, Marlee Dupont, charged with checking up on the child: Roads had been impassable, especially in Calliope’s West Baltimore neighborhood, always last to be plowed. The social worker had called, but the phone had been shut off. That explained why one month had gone by without a visit; the second month was never really explained. When the social worker finally did arrive at the apartment on Lemmon Street, all she found was Calliope.

‘Where’s your baby?’ she asked, according to the article.

‘I can’t tell you,’ Calliope said.

It was, more or less, all she would say for the next seven years.

When had the legal defense, the Fifth Amendment, first been introduced? It was hard to tell because reporters had come to the story from a distance, too, after much had happened. It wasn’t even clear why Callie was under the social worker’s supervision. Cassandra jumped ahead to the resolution, finding more detail in the stories about Callie’s release, almost seven years to the day later. She began jotting down a timeline in her Moleskine notebook. March 1988: Social worker discovers Calliope’s three-month-old baby is missing. So, working backward, December 1987: Calliope’s son Donntay is born. A previous child, also a boy, had been taken from Callie for neglect, but the department, citing her privacy rights, refused to say anything else, other than that this incident was not the reason a social worker had been assigned to Donntay upon his birth.

A previous child had been taken. That detail had been missing from the television report, and it was given only scant attention here. Calliope’s parental rights had been terminated seven years earlier. That child would have to be—quick calculation—twenty-seven. How tantalizing. What had become of that child? Was that part of Callie’s story? Should it be? Cassandra had researched 1980s adoption as part of The Painted Garden and knew that various groups began pushing for greater openness in adoption in the nineties. But that wouldn’t affect Callie’s first son. He would be able to find his mother only if they signed up for a mutual registry.

Images on microfiche tend to be grainy, especially when printed out, but Cassandra pressed the button anyway, capturing the 1988 photo of Callie when she was first jailed for contempt. Calliope’s face was hard, her eyes hollow, and the cords in her neck looked almost painful. Yet, even in a shapeless winter coat, there was the suggestion of a striking figure, a model’s figure. Drugs? Cassandra had heard somewhere that heroin users have killer bodies, that drug abuse gives them raging metabolisms that never stop, even if they clean up. Callie’s eyes were downcast in the photo, but her lawyer, holding her by the arm, looked straight into the camera. That was the woman who had yet to return Cassandra’s calls, an unanticipated development. These days, everyone returned Cassandra’s calls. True, she hadn’t been able to find anyone who would help her contact the retired police detective who had worked the case, but those people had at least had the courtesy and professionalism to pick up the phone.

Studying the younger version of the lawyer, she found herself projecting all sorts of qualities on her. Bulldoggish. Homely. Cruel, but accurate. What was it like to be an ugly woman? Cassandra, like every woman she knew, was full of self-doubt about her own appearance, had several moments every day when she was disappointed by the face she saw in the mirror. The older she got, the more she felt that way. Yet she also knew, on some level, that she would never be described as ugly. What would that be like? Obviously, she wouldn’t enjoy it, although—this just occurred to her—physical attractiveness didn’t seem to have much to do with whether women were paired or single. The plain women she knew seemed to do better relationship-wise. There had been some faux-economic explanation of this recently, an appalling bit of pop journalism that had boiled down to the usual advice: You’re not getting any younger, so you better take what you can get.

Cassandra, a two-time loser at matrimony, had no interest in getting back into the pool, especially after her second husband’s attempt to break their prenup. That was pure blackmail, and it had worked: She had given him more than he deserved in the hope that he wouldn’t gossip about her. She still liked men—she had a married lover, in fact, someone ideal, who required almost no attention—but she had no use for marriage. Her father was right: Marriage had nothing to do with romance. The end of her first marriage had been truly tragic—her college sweetheart, undone by demons he had hid all those years, destroying them both financially. The second one had been a mistake, plain and simple, and her account of it had been a cautionary tale that boiled down to this: If, on the eve of your wedding, you wonder if you are making a terrible mistake—you are.

She inserted the 1995 reel, the one that held the story of Callie’s release, interested to see if the photo could reveal anything about the experience of seven years in jail. Funny, Callie was coming out of jail about the same time Cassandra started writing. In the second photograph, Callie actually looked better physically, but her expression was incredibly sad. To Cassandra’s eyes, this was not a woman who felt vindicated. But then—why would she? Callie, upon her release, was still a woman believed to have killed her child and to have evaded justice on what many would call a technicality, a trick.

The homely lawyer was gone, replaced by a man. A strikingly handsome man. He seemed happy, at least—not out-and-out grinning, but allowing a tight smile that showed the hint of a dimple. Reginald Barr—the name was dimly familiar. Tisha had been Tisha Barr and she had a little brother, but he was known as Candy, in part because he was sweet, just a total charmer. But there was another, more peculiar reason for the name. The Reggie bar? No, that came much later. Candy’s nickname was from his signature dance, the way he imitated an obscure singing group.

Cassandra’s mind, when it raced toward a stray memory, was like a horse heading for a fence. She either slammed into the limits of her own mind or sailed over, finding what she needed. But she knew this; it had come up in her first book. The Astors, another quartet of Temptations wannabes. She had watched them on some dance show—American Bandstand or Baltimore’s own Kirby Scott?—and her father couldn’t shut up about the name. ‘The Astors! The Astors! I wonder how much of the family fortune they inherited.’

But there was a part where the singers simulated bees buzzing around the sweet girl’s head, and Candy Barr had turned that into a comic bit, slapping at the horde in mock terror. He also had a funny, hop-hop pelvis move, extremely precocious, a little nasty. Whenever he started doing that, Tisha chased him from the room. Gee-whiz …something, something.

So Tisha’s brother had worked on Callie’s defense. It was the kind of small-world touch that Baltimore was known for, all the more likely in the tight-knit black community of the Northwest Side. Plus, that was pure Tisha, looking out for an old classmate, trying to save Callie once again. Cassandra knew exactly how to play it: She would let Reg lead her to Tisha, then allow Tisha to take her to—everyone. Because she was, after all, writing about them all, even if Callie was her focal point. She wouldn’t be too up-front about her interest in Callie, not at first, although she would keep trying to find that police detective. Gee-whiz, as the Astors sang. Have you seen our girl?

Chapter Six

Where the hell is Banrock Station?

Teena Murphy put the box of chardonnay on the conveyor belt at Beltway Fine Wines, something she did—damn—every six days, on average, and it might have been a little more frequently, but she allowed herself vodka on the weekends. Yet this icy February day was the first time she had been moved to consider the name of her weeknight wine of choice. Box wine had many advantages—the price, the relative lightness of the carton, a key consideration for her—but Teena preferred it because she didn’t have to confront how quickly the level was dropping.

‘You having a party?’ a voice behind her asked, a playful tenor. ‘How come I wasn’t invited?’

She turned, surprised that anyone at Beltway Fine Wines would joke with her that way. Teena had been a knockout in her prime, but her prime was a long time ago. She had also let her hair go gray, which made her look older still, as did her small, fragile-seeming frame. People didn’t joke with slightly hunched, gray-haired ladies in the after-work rush at Beltway Fine Wines.

Unless they knew you once upon a time.

‘Lenhardt,’ she said. ‘What are you doing in my home away from home?’ If she made the joke, it couldn’t be true. Right?

Her former colleague laughed. He had aged, too, but then—it had been fifteen years, easy, since they had seen each other last. Teena still got invited to the Christmas parties, the retirement parties, even the homicide squad reunions, but she never attended. Her invitations may have arrived on the same paper, in the same envelopes as everyone else’s, but there was a whiff of pity about them. Pity and contempt.

‘You look good, Teenie,’ he lied. Even in his wilder days, between his two marriages, Lenhardt had been able to compliment a woman without making it sound like a pass.

‘You, too,’ she said, and it wasn’t as much of a reach. He looked as good as he ever had. Lenhardt—now in his fifties—had always been a little stocky, and there was only a touch of gray in his sandy hair.

‘Where you living these days?’

‘On Chumleigh, off York Road.’ Quickly, defensively, always aware of the gossip that she had cashed in on her misfortune. ‘West of York Road. And it wasn’t so expensive when I bought in.’

‘Chumleigh!’ He laughed at her blank look. ‘You don’t remember the cartoon Tennessee Tuxedo? His walrus friend, Chumley? And Don Adams was the voice of the penguin? No? Ah well, as a Baltimore Countian, you’re one of the citizens I’m charged with protecting and serving, not necessarily in that order. You working?’

‘At Nordstrom.’

‘Explains the fancy duds. But then—you always liked clothes, Teenie. I remember—’

‘Yeah,’ she said, not wanting him to finish the sentence: How excited you were when you got to join CID, wear your own clothes. She had dressed beautifully once she got out of uniform. It had been the eighties, not fashion’s finest hour in hindsight, and she had gone into credit-card debt for that outlandish wardrobe. It had been the age of fluffy excess—oversize shirts, big jewelry, riotous prints. She remembered one skirt with enormous cabbage roses. Oh, and those big Adrienne Vittadini sweaters, which someone of Teena’s height could practically wear as dresses.

Her colleagues had teased her, saying she looked like a punk, not getting that the look was, in fact, a romantic take on the downtown look. She had even been called in, told to tone it down, but her union rep had stepped in and said her clothes were within the guidelines for dress. The department was used to fashion plates, but the male version, peacocks strutting in expensive suits and ties. The other women in homicide, all two of them, went for that boring dress-for-success thing, suits and little bows. Teena would have rather gone back to wearing a uniform.

Now she wore dark, somber knits purchased at her employee discount. To sell other women expensive clothes, she had found it helped to have a neutral look, one that couldn’t be pinned down in terms of label or cost. Because, of course, that was the paradox of waiting on wealthy women, the unspoken accusation hurled out when someone discovered she couldn’t wear something new and trendy: What do you know? You can’t afford these things. But Teena knew the clothes better than anyone. She lived among them, day in and day out. She thought of her life at Nordstrom as akin to a position in some strange animal orphanage, full of exotic beasts that needed new homes. She was careful about matching her charges to their future owners, determined that the rarest specimens go to customers who were worthy of them.

‘It’s funny, running into you,’ Lenhardt said. His cart was filled with what Teena thought of as reputable purchases—three bottles of wine, a bottle of Scotch, a case of Foster’s. She wondered how long those would last him, how often he shopped here, if he drank one beer with dinner, or two, or three. ‘It was only a day or so ago that I got a call from someone looking for you. But that’s how it goes. You go years without seeing an old friend, then, boom, the name’s suddenly in the air. Ever notice that?’

The clerk loaded her box back into the shopping cart. Beltway Fine Wines had a distinctive smell that Teena could never quite pin down, a combination of wood, damp cardboard, and something spicy. She wondered if the various spirits under its roof slipped into the air. She always felt a little…altered when she was here, but then, she came here after work, when she was in the middle of the transition from work Teena to home Teena. No one called her Teenie anymore, but she still couldn’t carry her full name, Sistina.

‘Someone called you, looking for me?’

‘She was shut down by the public information officer in Baltimore City, I think, so she dug around, found some of your old compadres, those of us who jumped ship back in the early nineties. I guess she assumed we were disgruntled types, more likely to break rank. She was half-right.’

Lenhardt had left when a new chief tried to force a rotation system on the homicide squad. Teena might have joined the exodus, but she had her accident a few months later.

‘She?’

‘Some writer. Kinda famous, I think—I remember my wife reading one of her books for book club. She’s working on a new book.’ He swiped his credit card, took his bagged purchases from the clerk. Teena realized she was blocking other shoppers trying to make their way to the exit. She began rolling slowly forward, but Lenhardt caught up easily and fell into step beside her.

‘Why does she want to talk to me?’

He gave her a look. ‘Do you want to talk to her?’

‘No.’

‘That’s what I thought. I didn’t tell her anything. I didn’t have anything to tell, but if I had—I wouldn’t have, Teena. You know that.’

‘But—why? Why now?’

‘She just realized she knows—what was her name, the one who never talked?’

‘Calliope Jenkins.’ She felt like a child risking the candy man. Say the name three times and she’ll appear. Not that Teena was scared of Callie Jenkins. Not exactly.

‘Right. They went to school together.’

‘And that’s a book?’ Her voice screeched a little on the last word, but the whoosh of the automatic doors provided cover. They were outside now, and the wind was cutting, carrying little pinpricks of rain that stabbed exposed skin. She had forgotten to put her gloves on and her hands ached. The medical experts hired by the other side during the arbitration said Teena’s Raynaud’s was coincidental, that she couldn’t prove it was a direct result of the accident. Small-framed women were prone to it, they said. Still, Teena never minded the cold before the accident.

‘Her name is Cassandra Fallows,’ Lenhardt said. ‘This writer, I mean.’ He had followed her to her car and she had a pang of embarrassment at its plainness. An out-and-out hooptie would have been less humiliating than this green, well-kept Mazda, which seemed to announce to the world how small and dull her life was. ‘On caller ID, she comes up as a New York area code. Begins with a nine at any rate. In case she does find you. Although I admit I tried, out of curiosity, and your number is unlisted, although your address comes up readily enough through the Motor Vehicle Administration. Not that she can get that without driving down to headquarters in Glen Burnie. Still, you know, if she’s even a half-assed researcher, she’ll be able to find your address. Unless—you own or rent?’

‘Own.’

He grimaced. ‘Well, that’s good—I mean, rent is just throwing money away—but that makes it easier to find a person. Sorry, now I sound like your father. I am a father now. A boy and a girl, Jason and Jessica.’

‘Congratulations.’ She meant it. Being a father, a parent, seemed miraculous to her. Anything normal did. But her mind wasn’t really on Lenhardt’s kids. A writer, doing a book. Every couple of years or so, back when the case was fresher, she would get a letter from a reporter, usually someone new at the Beacon-Light, an eager kid who had just stumbled over the story. She should have expected this, with the New Orleans case kicking up Calliope’s name, however briefly. She herself had started when she heard the news. But it had been so long since anyone had spoken of Callie to her. That was another reason not to attend cop parties. No back-in-the-day, no war stories.

‘Bye, Lenhardt. It was nice seeing you.’

‘Maybe our paths will cross again,’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ she said. Especially if you shop here regularly.

She drove home and, as it often happened, was shocked to find herself there fifteen minutes later, panicky to realize that she had driven so mindlessly. She had always been prone to zone out that way. It was part of the reason she almost never drank outside the house—at her size and weight, a generous glass of wine could edge her over the legal limit. Oh, it couldn’t make her drunk—based on her consumption of box wine, it took quite a lot to make her drunk—but who would believe that, should Teena Murphy be pulled over in her fancy clothes and plain car? They would expect her to be drunk. It would explain how she survived being her.

Pulling into her parking pad, she heard something—a branch cracking perhaps—and almost jumped out of her skin. The sound was the only memory she had, and she wasn’t even sure if that was true or something her brain had manufactured after the fact. But any kind of snapping, cracking noise threw her into a panic. She couldn’t be sure, but she believed that she hadn’t screamed until she heard the sound, all those breaking, snapping bones, like twigs under a giant’s foot. In her ears, it sounded like scoffing laughter, someone taunting her. Not that Calliope Jenkins had even smiled, much less laughed, in all the time she had tried to talk to her over the years. Still, Teena always believed she was laughing on the inside, delighted by her ability to play them all.

The accident happened a couple of months after they announced Callie Jenkins’s release. Now that was sheer coincidence. Teena had gone to pick up a woman, the mother of a kid who had just been charged in a homicide, and the woman freaked out. Teena had always prided herself on not making the mistake of going for her gun too early, something women police were faulted for. Small as she was, she could and would take a beat-down. But she was tired that morning—not drunk—and she had gone for her gun, and the woman had knocked it out of her hand, sent it skittering under the car. Teena had been groping, grasping for it when the car started to roll backward.

She let herself into the small, neat rowhouse she had purchased with her settlement from the car manufacturer, the deep pocket that had finally swallowed responsibility for her accident. Oh, they didn’t admit the parking brake was faulty, and they had done enough research, her FOP lawyer said, to know they could pretty much destroy her credibility in court. They just decided it was cheaper to settle and what was nothing to a big car company was more than enough to buy this house, in cash, on Chumleigh Road. Chumley! Now she remembered. She had watched that cartoon. She just forgot. She forgot a lot. She was forty-six years old and she could barely believe that she was once a little girl who had watched cartoons, who had decided she wanted to apply to the police academy because of Angie Dickinson in Police Woman.

‘She’s part of the gimp lineup, you know,’ her father would say, referring to the other popular television shows of the day. ‘There’s a guy in a wheelchair, a blind guy, and a fat guy. She’s a woman, and that’s handicap enough.’ He wasn’t being mean, and he certainly didn’t know he was being prophetic, that his daughter would one day join the gimp lineup twice over. Her father simply never understood why a pretty girl—and, although he never said it, a straight girl—would choose a career in the Baltimore City police department. Teena didn’t dare to say it out loud, but she believed she could be the first female chief in the department’s history, the first woman in the nation to lead a big-city police department. In the seventies, it wasn’t weird to believe that kind of shit. Strange, now that there really were women heading departments—in Des Moines; in Jackson, Mississippi—it seemed less probable to her. When she had joined homicide in 1986, she was the third female detective. Now, twenty-two years later, there were…two female detectives.

Teena lifted the box of wine from her trunk, favoring her right hand, and cradled it on the point of her hip, the way a woman might carry a baby. She would eat something—a frozen dinner from Trader Joe’s, soup and a sandwich—forestall the first glass of wine just long enough to prove that she could. She would wash her dishes, tidy up the kitchen. Then, and only then, she would board the train for Banrock Station, chugging past all the other little towns on the route, all the places she would never know or visit.

Chapter Seven

‘The Elizabeth Perlstein Library will go here, and the old library will be converted into more classroom space, which we can definitely use.’

Cassandra studied the blueprints with pretend interest. She was not very good at conceptualization and could not envision the future building. But the headmaster—a new one, his name quite gone from her head—was clearly excited about the addition to what had always been, frankly, a grotty little campus, one of Baltimore’s second-tier private schools, for those keeping score. Many were, as it turned out. Old-line Baltimoreans were geniuses at working a mention of Gilman, Friends, Bryn Mawr, Roland Park Country, Park School, even Boys’ Latin into some not really relevant anecdote. Some expressed surprise that the Gordon School was still around, assuming it had collapsed into the ashes of its own hippy-dippy good intentions. The school, however, had never been the Harrad Experiment/free love fiasco that was enshrined in the public imagination. It had been intellectually rigorous, owing as much to English boarding schools and St John’s College’s classics-based curriculum as it did to the open-space experiment. The famed liberality had been confined to its lack of a dress code and its no-grades policy, which had included creating essentially fake records for colleges. Gordon School had done extraordinarily well at placing its students before that latter practice was uncovered and outlawed. Luckily, Cassandra had already graduated from Princeton by then.

Whatever its flaws, the Gordon School had employed her uncredentialed mother as a lower-school math teacher. More crucially, it had offered Cassandra a scholarship for her last three years of high school. The combination of touchy-feely culture and exacting intellectual standards, but with no competition, had been perfect for a student of her temperament. She was genuinely thrilled for the chance to help the school now.

She was less happy about the ceaseless pressure to contribute more of her own money to the project. It was funny how wildly others misjudged her income. Most people thought she had much less than she did, because it was inconceivable to them that a writer could make money. But some, like the headmaster here at the Gordon School, had erred in the other direction, suggesting she might want to give at the ‘Diamond’ level, which started—started—at $100,000. God knows what kind of money was required to put one’s name on a building; Elizabeth Perlstein, class of ’88, was either one of those tech billionaires or married to one. Luckily, Cassandra had mastered the art of the graceful demurral, the ability to avoid the definitive no while never saying yes. Instead, she had waived her speaking fee, which was considerable, and persuaded her father to join her on the stage here for a fund-raiser, in which she would lead him, for the first time ever, through a public discussion of what had happened to him in the ’68 riots. Tickets to the talk alone were $50 and there was a private dinner for those willing to pay $250. The school stood to raise almost $50,000 from the event. Not Diamond level, but Platinum, and more than good enough by Cassandra’s estimation.

‘We feel so lucky to have you,’ the headmaster said. ‘We thought the University of Baltimore symposium would have snapped you up.’

‘Oh, this is so much more meaningful to me,’ Cassandra said. The fact was, the University of Baltimore had not even contacted her, nor had they asked her father to contribute an oral history to its extensive Web-based archive. She had been hurt by this omission, but not surprised, for there had been a small backlash against My Father’s Daughter once it found commercial success. The critical talking point, first advanced by a so-so lesbian African-American novelist, was that Cassandra had usurped a major political event and turned it into—she knew the words by heart—a story about a white girl’s birthday party, ruined by the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, wah-wah-wah. The words had rankled, but Cassandra hadn’t been foolish enough to respond. Still, in quiet moments, when that stinging criticism came back to her, she argued in her head with her nemesis, a one-book wonder rumored to owe at least three books to three different publishers. Don’t write me out of history. You, of all people, should know what it’s like to be silenced, to be told that you have no role—because of race, because of gender, because of sexuality. My story is my story. And my father—complicated, less than admirable man that he was—saved a woman’s life that day. Yes, her pillow had received those words many times over.

But this was only the fortieth anniversary. Perhaps by the fiftieth, they would be included. Fifty, ten years from now. Caught off guard by the realization that she was now at an age where, actuarially, she could not presume her father would be with her ten years in the future, Cassandra missed some point the headmaster was making. She smiled and nodded. Smiles and nods covered a multitude of oversights.

‘Pedant,’ Ric Fallows said a few hours later, after listening to her account of the meeting.

It was one of his favorite words, his all-purpose condemnation. Pedant, pedantic, pedantry, pederast, the last of which he seemed to use interchangeably with pedant, although he clearly knew better. The irony, of course, was that Cedric Fallows was far more pedantic, in the literal sense of the word, than those he labeled.

The pedant of the day was a neighbor here at Broadmead who had the temerity to complain about Mr Fallows sitting on his patio in his bathrobe. And nothing else. Given the retirement community’s village-like aspect, with garden apartments built around shared courtyards, he could be glimpsed by his neighbors in deshabille.

‘Only if they’re looking,’ he pointed out when Cassandra raised the issue.

‘Well,’ Cassandra said, ‘apparently they are. And they can live with the bathrobe. Just not the lack of anything beneath.’

‘That was last summer. Why bring it up now?’

‘Because spring is icumen in,’ she trilled. ‘Lhude sang the cuccu in his bathrobe.’

He smiled. ‘It’s summer that’s icumen in. And your Middle English is deplorable.’

But she had played his game, used a learned reference to lighten a tense moment. She could let the subject drop, move on to a discussion of their upcoming appearance at the Gordon School.

‘I’m not sure I want to go,’ he said, surprising her. She thought her father would be dying for this bit of recognition. He had never had the academic career he envisioned, never published the big book in his head, the one he thought would change the way people read myths. ‘Fuck Joseph Campbell,’ he blurted out from time to time. Cassandra still wasn’t sure if he saw Campbell as the usurper of his ideas or the antithesis of what he had hoped to say.

‘We’re committed,’ she said nervously, thinking of those blueprints, the advance ticket sales. ‘They’ve advertised—’

‘Oh, I’ll be there, if I must. But why can’t you tell it, as you did in your book?’

‘Because it’s your story.’

‘It was. Somehow it became yours.’

She weighed what he was saying. A complaint? An acknowledgment of a literal truth? Or something in between?

Yet her father had always seemed proud of her book. She remembered the first local signing, the one where no one had come, in a struggling independent in downtown Baltimore. Cassandra didn’t have many friends left in the city. Her friends were from college, her years in New York. In New York, at her first-ever publication party, the bookstore had been full of friends and publishing types, and there had been a dinner afterward in a restaurant. In Baltimore, where the publicist had assumed she would be championed as a hometown girl made good, there were exactly five people: her father and Annie, her mother and her mother’s best friend, and a woman who had clearly misunderstood the thrust of the book, believing it a history of the civil rights movement in Baltimore. The evening was notable, however, for it marked the first time since Cassandra’s high school graduation that her parents and Annie had been in the same room. (A midyear graduate from college, she hadn’t bothered to walk, just packed up her things and gone straight to a sublet on the Lower East Side, back when the Lower East Side was still the Lower East Side.)

She had been nervous that night, reading in front of her parents. And Annie. The section she had earmarked for bookstore appearances suddenly seemed inappropriate, centering as it did on her attempt to re-create the moment her father met Annie. Her parents had raised her to be direct and down-to-earth about sex, but did that apply to their own sex lives? Her mother had explained the biology of the matter to her when she was eight, while her father had spent his life instructing her in the more indefinable nature of desire. She had been six or seven when her father had pointed out a woman near the Konstant Kandy stand in Lexington Market. ‘That woman,’ he said, gesturing with the spoon from his ice cream, ‘has a magnificent ass. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth compared such an ass to a peach, or maybe it was a nectarine, but that’s a little flat-footed for me. What do you think? A cello, perhaps, or an amaryllis bulb, with the backbone stretching up like the stem, the head the flower?’ No, the timing was off, for Roth’s book certainly wasn’t around when she was six. In fact, she remembered seeing its yellow cover on her father’s nightstand, in the apartment he shared with Annie, and thinking, He says he’s too strapped to get me new shoes, yet he buys himself hardcover books. But her father considered books as essential as food. He would have been baffled if anyone suggested not buying the book he wanted the moment he wanted it. Besides, her father’s library was a gold mine for a dirty-minded girl. Cassandra had read Roth and Updike and Mailer. She read Candy, although she didn’t understand it until she read Voltaire in a college lit class. Her father’s contemporary books, much more than his library of classics, prepared her well for the world she entered. The books didn’t stop her from having a stupid affair with one of her college professors, but they armed her with the information that the professor didn’t have as much power as a young woman might assume.

For all of Cassandra’s hard-earned literary sophistication, she could not read the passage about her father and Annie in front of them. Or, for God’s sake, her mother and her friend, starchy Lillian. She read from the prologue instead, but she wasn’t prepared, and she tripped over words as if she had never seen them before. Later, her father and Annie took her to Tio Pepe’s—had they won or lost the coin toss? Cassandra wondered wryly—and her father tried to suggest that Lillian was a repressed lesbian who had been in love with Lennie for years, but even Annie found that ridiculous. ‘Oh, Ric,’ she said with a fluttering sigh, and he looked at her as if he could not believe she was his.

How sweet it had been, three years later, to return to Baltimore and speak in an auditorium at the Pratt library, the room brimming with people who had discovered the book in paperback. Women from reading clubs, in the main, but also some much younger girls, those who had their own problematic fathers, and even a few older men, the type who had studied her author photo a little too closely and thought they might help her with her daddy issues, whether they admitted that to themselves or not.

She wondered now if her father, despite all his years in classrooms, had a touch of stage fright.

‘You’re not nervous, are you?’

‘When have I ever been nervous to face an audience?’ he shot back. ‘Besides, you do all the work, right? You’re going to ask the questions, and I’m going to answer.’

‘Well, they bill it as a conversation. It wouldn’t be wrong if you had a few questions for me.’ Her voice caught; she had stumbled into an old psychic tar pit, her father’s incuriosity about her life. Cassandra knew the various ways her father might describe a woman’s ass, but he wasn’t sure what either of her husbands had done for a living. Ah, but if she had pressed him on it, he would have said, ‘Well, neither one stuck around.’

‘Sure, sure,’ he said now. ‘I’ll lob you a few softballs.’

‘And you’ll talk about Annie?’ Probing, careful.

‘What do you mean?’

‘About meeting her, the circumstances.’

‘If need be. But, you know, it doesn’t matter—’

‘Of course it matters.’

‘I didn’t need a riot. I would have met her some way, somehow. Annie was my destiny.’

That had always been the rationalization, but there was no doubt that her father had come to believe it. He hadn’t cheated on her mother; he had encountered his destiny and he knew enough not to defy the Oracle of Delphi. Yet her father didn’t acknowledge destiny in any other aspect of his life.

It was hard, trying to come to terms with the fact that her father had such a huge and ruling passion, much larger than any Cassandra had ever known. Sure, she knew what it was like to be swept away in the early part of a love affair, but she was amazed by those people who never seemed to abandon that wildness, that craziness. Would it have been easier if her father’s passion had been for her mother, or more difficult? In some ways, she was glad that her father’s big love was for someone other than her mother, because she at least had her mother to keep her company. Around her father and Annie, she had been lonely, the odd girl out. Especially as a teenager, she couldn’t help feeling that they spent their time with her wishing she would go away so they could have more sex. Of course, teenagers think the whole world is sex, all the time. But even now, as an adult with two marriages behind her, Cassandra still believed that her father’s sexual passion with Annie had an unusually long life span. If Annie left a room for even a moment, her father looked lost. When she returned, the relief that swept over his face was almost painful to see. He was crazy about her. That’s the kind of line her father would have red-lined in an essay as vague, imprecise, and overwrought. Yet it was true in his case. And Cassandra didn’t have a clue why.

Annie was beautiful, yes, the mild flaws of her face—the space between the front teeth, the apple roundness, the heavy brows that she never tended—balancing out the cartoonish perfection of her body. Sweet, too. Not unintelligent. But not sharp. This, more than anything, had bothered Cassandra, then and now. If her father, for all his snobbery, could choose a woman of ordinary intelligence, then what were the implications for his daughter? After an exceedingly awkward adolescence, Cassandra had grown into a reasonably attractive woman. Not necessarily pretty but sexy and appealing. Yet whenever she visited her father, she was reminded that the qualities that her father had taught her to value—intelligence, quickness—had nothing to do with the woman he declared the love of his life. The test of a first-rate mind, her father often said, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald, was to hold two opposing thoughts simultaneously without going insane. Cassandra looked at herself, she looked at Annie, and she concluded that her father had a first-rate mind.

‘Time for dinner,’ her father said. Although his apartment had a kitchen, he took his meals in the community dining room, but he always insisted on a cocktail before dinner. He seemed a little shaky getting out of his chair, and Cassandra reached a hand out to him.

‘I’m fine,’ he snapped. ‘Just a little light-headed from that expensive gin you insist on giving me. It has a much higher alcohol content.’

He had used his own gin and made his drink to his exacting specifications, but never mind.

‘Come on, Dad,’ Cassandra said. ‘We’ll climb the hill together.’

He smiled, pleased by the allusion to one of his favorite poems. ‘But I’ll beat you down.’

Tottering down

Dickey Hill Elementary, school number 201, new in the fall of 1966, opened in utter chaos. I stood in the hallway near the principal’s office, willing myself not to reach for my father’s hand. Just five minutes ago, I had shaken his hand off as he walked me to school, a rare treat. We had been climbing the hill past the Wakefield Apartments, prompting, inevitably, a recitation of ‘John Anderson, My Jo’. In a Scottish accent, no less.

John Anderson, my jo, John, We clamb the hill thegither; And monie a canty day, John, We’ve had wi’ ane anither: Now we maun totter down, John, But hand in hand we’ll go, And sleep thegither at the foot, John Anderson, my jo.

It was the first time I felt a twinge of embarrassment at my father’s behavior. Fleeting, to be sure—I was still years away from the moment when everything about one’s parents becomes unbearable, when the simple act of my mother speaking, in the car, with no one else there to hear, could make me cringe—but I remember speeding up a little so the students arriving by car and bus might not associate me with this odd man.

‘Do you know what brent means, Cassandra?’ my father quizzed me, referring to another line in the poem: His bonny brow was brent.

I pretended great interest in the Wakefield Apartments, and the pretense quickly became authentic. Apartments were glamorous to me, in general, and although these did not conform to my penthouse fantasies, the terraced units had that kind of compactness that often appeals to small children. I wanted to make friends with people who lived in those apartments, see what was behind their doors and windows. It was a frequent impulse, one that would later lead to my dismal attempt to support myself as a freelance journalist for shelter magazines. Wherever I went—the sidewalks of the Wakefield Apartments, the long avenues of rowhouses that led to various downtown destinations—I wanted to know the interiors of people’s homes, their lives, their minds.

Because I was encouraged to tell my parents whatever passed through my quicksilver little brain, I told my father what I was thinking.

‘I hope there are kids who live in those apartments and they’re in my class and they become my friends and I get to go to their houses after school and play there.’ It was lonely on Hillhouse Road, where I was the only child in the five houses. There were teenagers, but they had no use for me. We had so little in common that they might as well have been bears or Martians or salamanders.

‘Your mother won’t like that,’ my father said.

‘Why?’

‘Because your mother’s a snob.’

I pondered that. A snob considered herself better than other people. This did not fit my sense of my mother, who seemed forever…sorry about things. She was always apologizing, mainly to my father. For dinner—its arrival time, its contents. For letting me sneak television shows like Peyton Place and, a few years hence, Love, American Style, which my father found so appalling that he couldn’t stop watching it. Television, which my father despised, would become a regular feature of my weekend visits with him, a reliable way of ‘entertaining’ me. On Friday nights, I would sit rapt in front of the television, tuned unerringly to ABC, where I progressed from fantasy to fantasy—the blended world of The Brady Bunch, the domestic magic of Nanny and the Professor, the harmonious life of The Partridge Family. That Girl (my personal idol), Love, American Style. It was fun, or would have been if not for my father’s running commentary. (‘So this is what farce has become…forget Sheridan, forget Wilde…bug-eyed virgins, bugger them all.’) By the time I was eleven, I knew about Sheridan and Mrs Malaprop, and Oscar Wilde, who said anyone could be good in the country, and even virgins, who were people who had yet to try to make babies. My father managed to avoid giving me bugger, however, and I was left to assume it was what happened to the bug-eyed. To be bug-eyed was to become a bug, and, therefore, buggered. I was twenty-one before I knew what it actually meant.

On the first day of third grade, bugger was not part of my vocabulary yet, although I had other odd words. Souse, for example, my father’s preferred term for drunks. Delaine, a fine fabric for which my mother pined as she decorated our house on the mingiest of budgets. Antidisestablishmentarianism, then reputed to be the longest word in the dictionary. I knew not only how to spell it, but—at my father’s insistence—what it meant, vaguely. And, yes, I did know brent, if only from context—smooth, handsome. Entering third grade, it was my plan to use these words, super-casually, and establish myself as an intellect with which to be reckoned.

My classroom assignment unearthed, I said good-bye to my father, trying not to display any panic, and walked upstairs to Mrs Klein’s room. Mrs Klein was young and pretty, the two best things a teacher could be. The class filled up quickly and I looked around, trying to decide who would be my best friend. I recognized a shy blond girl, someone I had seen around the neighborhood, but dismissed her. She had a strange look about the eyes, which were underscored with dark circles. I drifted toward the group that seemed the most confident, three girls in all. The desks had been arranged in configurations of four and they had seized a desirable quartet, alongside the windows, in the middle.

‘May I sit here?’ I asked the smallest of the three girls.

She cast a quick glance at the other two. One was tall and a little pudgy, but I could see in an instant that no one would ever dare tease her about her weight. The other was pretty but too shy to make eye contact. All three were Negroes, the word I would have used then, and felt quite proud of using. The class was equally split between white and black children, a change from Thomas Jefferson, where there had been only two African-American girls. I did not choose the group for this fact, nor was I especially conscious of it at the time. Later, my parents would make me conscious, even self-conscious. My father would praise my friends far too much, and my mother would practically congratulate herself on how nice she found their mothers, how polite. Except Fatima’s.

My father was particularly fond of Donna, whom he called doe-eyed Donna—always in those words, doe-eyed Donna—but he liked Tisha and Fatima, too. They would not be my only friends at Dickey Hill. I would, over time, find girls who lived in the Wakefield Apartments, go to their homes, and find it almost as interesting as I had hoped, the rooms so small and cunning, like something a mouse might build. But during the school day, this was my group. We were the smart girls, the leaders, each with a clearly defined role. I got good grades. (As did the others, but I got the best grades.) Donna was the artist. Fatima was the adventurer, destined to do everything first. And Tisha was the boss, looking out for all of us. We thought we were the future.

GLASS HOUSES March 1–2

Chapter Eight

‘Good morning, darling.’

Cassandra slept heavily and those who truly knew her well—her parents, two ex-husbands—understood that she was capable of answering the phone while still asleep and even managing several seemingly coherent sentences. She was particularly disoriented this morning, confused about her whereabouts—Baltimore, right, the leased apartment—confused about who might be calling her. She had been dreaming, and it had been pleasant, but that was all she could remember.

‘Bernard,’ she murmured after exchanging a few sleep-fogged sentences. Then: ‘What day is it?’

He laughed, as if she were being droll, but it was a legitimate question. More than a decade into her life as a full-time writer, Cassandra had yet to become accustomed to how self-employment dulled the days, blurring all distinctions. Monday, Monday? She not only trusted that day, she rather liked it. As the workweek progressed, she could observe but not really share the rising tide of high spirits she saw in the people around her, at cafés and coffee shops. She especially missed the giddy high of Friday afternoons, the luxurious emptiness of Saturdays, but not so much that she would want to experience the lows of the working week. It was a bit like being on medication, she supposed, each day more or less the same as the one before.

Not that she had ever been on medication. Her father’s daughter, indeed. Ric Fallows bragged about how he never took so much as an aspirin or an antihistamine, and while Cassandra knew her father’s stance was a kind of bigotry, born of serendipitous good health, she couldn’t help absorbing his views. It amused her, a little, when he had to start taking a cholesterol drug.

There was a period, just before her first marriage broke up, when she was given a prescription, but she never filled it, although she lied and told the doctor she did. He had gotten in touch with her after she revealed that detail in her second memoir, outraged. Outraged! By telling the world—well, about 800,000 readers, give or take—that she had ignored her psychiatrist’s advice, he argued, she had branded him incompetent, unworthy. And never mind that she hadn’t named him, his e-mail continued, anticipating her defense.

‘As I will remind you,’ his e-mail huffed, ‘libel law requires only that a person be identifiable to some, not all. Your ex-husband, for example, would know that this passage refers to me, so it’s inferences may, in fact, be libelous.’

She had written back, ‘It’s hard for my ex-husband to have a lower opinion of you than the one he has long harbored, given some of the “advice” you provided at the time. In the end, I am happy with how things worked out, so I don’t really care that you were unethical and boneheaded and not a particularly good listener. But if you’re worried about your professional rep, be advised that the possessive “its” takes no apostrophe and that only the listener may infer, so the word you want is “implications”, not inferences. Cheers, your former patient, now quite sane, no thanks to you.’

She wouldn’t write such an e-mail today, fearful that it would be posted on the Internet. But it felt good at the time. She had been wise, rejecting whatever drug the doctor had been pushing on her. Not feeling wasn’t the secret to happiness.

Neither was Bernard.

‘It’s Saturday,’ Bernard said, ‘and Tilda decided to go up to Connecticut to visit her sister for the weekend. Can I come over?’

‘You could, if I were in Brooklyn,’ she said. ‘But I’m in Baltimore, working on the new project. I told you.’ She was awake now, hearing everything, even the things that weren’t actually said.

‘I thought you might come back, on weekends.’

‘Some weekends. Although it never occurred to me that you would be free on a Saturday.’

‘Me either,’ he said. ‘But you were the first person I thought of.’

‘You’re sweet,’ she said, stifling a yawn. Bernard was sweet. And considerate—not only of her but of his wife. Granted, he was cheating on his wife, but he was conducting the affair in the kindest, most thoughtful way possible. Cassandra had been able to rationalize the relationship because it was truly about sex—sex and a little companionship. She had no interest in marrying again and the men she dated eventually found this intolerable. Bernard, who really did love his wife, had seemed the perfect solution, because he could be scheduled, usually weeks in advance.

But he had become clingy of late, demanding. He wasn’t in love with Cassandra, but he couldn’t bear the fact that she wasn’t in love with him. They were on their last legs. She hoped the end wouldn’t be ugly. In fact, she had calculated that he would fall out of the habit of her while she was in Baltimore, smoothing the way for a painless breakup.

‘Maybe I could come down there,’ he said. ‘On a weekend, it’s an easy drive.’

‘I’m working,’ she lied reflexively.

‘On a Saturday?’

‘I’ve scheduled some interviews.’

‘How are things going?’

‘Okay,’ she said, hoping that was the truth. She really couldn’t tell. But Bernard, whom she had met at a lecture a year ago, needed to believe she was never in doubt when it came to her work. He had read the novel, while it was still in manuscript, and pronounced it brilliant. Bernard worked on Wall Street, and his prognostications on money were much more sound than his opinions on literature. If only he had brought the same conservative, the-bubble-must-burst mentality to her last book. All commodities crash, Bernard had told her recently, speaking of oil, but Cassandra couldn’t help wondering if it applied to her, too.

‘I miss you,’ he said in a tone that suggested he was trying to cram much meaning into those three words. At least it wasn’t ‘I love you.’ That would be disastrous.

‘I miss you, too,’ she assured him. In some ways, she did. She would be happy to have him in bed with her right now. He was a thoughtful lover and excited by the fact of the affair, which he claimed was his first. Cassandra didn’t quite believe him, but she understood that he had convinced himself of this fact. Her hunch was that Bernard was a serial monogamist on parallel tracks—he was faithful to Tilda, he was faithful to his lovers. Sort of like a subway line with an express track and a local track. On the local, he trod through life with Tilda, a sweet-faced blonde who sometimes got her picture in the Sunday Styles section of the Times, an old-fashioned New York wife with a conscience and lots of dutiful charity work. Then, on the express, he sped through affairs with women with whom he could never form a bond. Cassandra was his first creative type, and he probably would have tired of her by now if she had the good sense to pretend to be in love with him. She simply didn’t have the energy.

‘I—’ he began, and she rushed to interrupt, to block the verb she could not afford to hear.

‘I’ll come back week after next, on Monday or Tuesday, to meet with my editor. You can usually get free in the evenings, right?’

‘With notice, yes.’

‘I’ll give you plenty of notice.’ And cancel at the last minute. Which, in the short run, would not achieve anything. If she continued to be this aloof, he might decide to leave Tilda. ‘Good-bye, my love,’ she added, hoping the use of the word as a noun would be sufficient.

Only now she was awake, on what looked to be a bright if chilly March day. It really was strange how much the weather affected mood. Gray sky or blue, her circumstances were the same day to day. Was she happy? She knew she should be. She had money and health and even health care. She lived as she wanted. She didn’t have children or a husband, but those things were overrated. She had Bernard, although he represented a regression. Her second book had ended with the claim that she had moved beyond meaningless affairs, that she was content on her own.

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