For Good (10 page)

They were so far apart. Kristen couldn't even touch the tip of her shoe to Marydale's sneaker.

“You're leaving,” Marydale said, her voice suddenly hollow. She sank her head into her hands.

“Marydale? Honey?” Kristen wanted to say,
No.
She wanted to say,
I'll stay. We'll make it work.
She knew how Marydale's smile would open up like the sun rising. “I got fired.” Kristen knew if she didn't speak now, she would never be able to force the words out of her mouth. “I'm so sorry.”

“No.” Marydale didn't look up.

“I'd never get work here. There aren't any firms, and if I open my own practice, I'll be the lawyer who got fired from the DA's office. I wish there was a way you could come with me, but I've got to go back to Portland.”

“My parole officer will never let me leave.”

“Marydale,” Kristen said quietly. “We both knew this couldn't last. Isn't that why you didn't tell me? We had something really beautiful together, and it's still beautiful even though it didn't last forever.” It felt like a loophole, the kind of cheap, slimy exemption that made people hate lawyers. “I will miss you so much, Marydale. But you want to get out of here, out of Tristess. They're not going to leave you alone if I'm here. You told me you have to go three years without a sanction. What happens if we've been together for two and a half years and then we get caught? All that time wasted? You have to be perfect, and their version of perfect…doesn't include me.”

“I don't care about my parole.” Marydale looked up.

“You got beat up in jail,” Kristen pleaded.

“It's worth it.”

“I can't let that happen to you.” Kristen felt tears well up in her eyes, and she felt the guard's gaze on her, and from the great distance of imagination, she felt her mother smile.
You always were my girl, Kristi.

“If it means I can be with you…” Marydale began.

“Marydale, what if you got really hurt?”

Marydale pulled up the hem of her shirt. “See this?” She pointed at a faint scar on her side.

From the corner of the room, the guard warned, “Inmate!”

Marydale lowered her shirt. “I got pushed off a staircase at Holten. I hit the railing below. And here.” She touched her top lip above the missing tooth. “I can barely remember this. I think there was a fight. It had nothing to do with me. You know how I stopped the bleeding? Salt. You mix it with deodorant or toothpaste. It stings like hell, but it doesn't matter.” She leaned forward, her breasts heaving with her breath. “It's just a body. You know what it's like to be a rodeo queen? It puts you on the other side. Everyone thinks if they were beautiful enough, somehow everything would be different. But you get up on that float with everyone looking, and you know how much it's really worth.”

“I'm sorry,” Kristen whispered.

Marydale's skin looked pale against her uniform, but she was still so incredibly beautiful. Kristen thought,
You're wrong. It matters. It makes a difference.

“I'll get another PO,” Marydale said. “Cody will quit eventually. Ronald will forget about me.”

“I can't get a job here,” Kristen said. “I worked hard to go to law school.”

Marydale leaned back, running her hands through her hair, staring up at the ceiling. “I know. I know. I know.”

“And I have to set an example for Sierra,” Kristen said. “I can't tell Sierra that I gave up on my career, that I'm with a felon. She's got no one in her life except me, and if I make a bad choice—”

“A bad choice?”

“Marydale, you're different…what happened to you…but Sierra won't understand that…and this isn't a life. We're not a couple.” Kristen heard her words bounce off the cement walls. She looked around, surprised that no one was staring at them. “We can't
be
together.” She lowered her voice. “We can't cook a dinner or see a movie or get a drink or buy groceries or wake up in the same bed. We can't even go to the next county together. Your parole officer can come into your house at any time without a warrant. They could come in when we were…together. They could drag you away. They could beat you. And it would be my fault for staying. That's not a relationship.”

“We could run.” Marydale laughed, but there was no joy in her voice. “I know where there's a trailer and an old well on BLM land.”

Tears stung Kristen's eyes.

“Will you call me?” Marydale asked.

Kristen took a deep breath. She felt like she was standing on the edge of the Firesteed Mountains, looking out at the future. She would move back to Portland and go out for flights of pinot noir with Donna and talk about firm politics. Marydale would call, and it would get harder and harder to find anything to say. And there would be a man eventually, an associate attorney with thinning hair and a good eye for personal finance, and Marydale would still be waiting, longing, dreaming, because Kristen wasn't the one sparkling exception in Marydale's life. Marydale was gay. She always would be. She wanted a girlfriend. She probably wanted to pick out a cat together. If she lived in Portland, she'd have a Prius covered in rainbow flag stickers.

“I don't think I should call you.” Kristen laid the words out carefully one by one. “I think that would be too hard for you…and for me. And I don't want you to hope for something that won't happen. I can't be what you need.”

“You are, Kristen.” Marydale dropped her face into her hands again.

“Maybe we'll see each other sometime,” Kristen said. “Maybe in Portland. Maybe we'll be walking down a little cobblestone street in Old Town, and there we'll be. Who knows? You never know. We can't know. But right now I have to go, and I think a clean break…”

She couldn't bear to finish the sentence. She couldn't touch Marydale under the guards' watchful gaze. And as she left the jail, she felt like someone fleeing a burning building because there were only two choices: to save herself or to burn together.

Kristen Brock stood in the Falcon Law Group's conference room beside the floor-to-ceiling windows. On the street below, the first snow in five years blanketed the Pearl District. In her hand, she held the obligatory piece of Black Forest cake from the Windsor Bakery. Rutger Falcon had even asked his paralegal to open a couple bottles of champagne, from which the firm was drinking with sober discretion.

“I'd like to take this moment to thank all of you for being an essential part of the Falcon Law Group,” Falcon began.

The senior partners continued their conversation in the corner of the room. At the far end of the conference table, the paralegals nodded in inverse proportion to how essential they actually were. The youngest, Willow—whom Kristen guessed they had hired either for her father's political connections or for her amazingly buoyant breasts—beamed and bobbed her head up and down.

“I know we get busy during the year,” Falcon went on. “I don't always take the time to appreciate each one of you the way I should, so I'd like to say it today.”

When he was done, Willow bounced up and down, her breasts levitating in front of her.

“Guess what time it is?” She didn't wait for an answer. “It's eleven fifty-eight.” It was almost noon. “Let's have a countdown!”

Donna Li sidled over to Kristen. “Stick a pin in her,” she said. “See if she pops.”

The girl pulled out her cell phone, waited a moment, and then counted. “Ten, nine, eight…Happy New Year!” She giggled. “Happy new afternoon.”

A moment later, Falcon joined Kristen and Donna by the window. “So, Ms. Brock. Are you celebrating the New Year with anything better than sheet cake?” he asked.

The Windsor cake probably cost upward of four hundred dollars.

“Strippers and cocaine,” Kristen said with a shrug that said
I'm kidding, but I don't care if you get it
. She'd earned the right to joke with Rutger Falcon a year earlier, when she won the Mesterland case and netted the firm almost half a million dollars.

“You're going to spend all night working on DataBlast, aren't you?” Falcon clamped his hand on her shoulder the way he did with men in the firm.

“You got me,” Kristen said.

“Says the woman who's going to make partner,” Falcon added.

Before Mesterland it was
the girl who
wants
to make partner.

Kristen nodded. “It's an important case.”

Falcon squeezed her shoulder and moved on to honor the next employee with half a minute of small talk.

“So what are you really doing?” Donna asked.

“Working on the DataBlast case.”

“How's it going?”

“Still looking for the unicorn.”

“Someone who's willing to talk?”

“And who knows what they're talking about. They all know the company was up to something, but some guy at the call center isn't going to know how and when.”

“You think you'll get someone on New Year's Eve?”

“Somebody's day drinking and wondering what they're doing with their life,” Kristen said. “I'm here to provide an opportunity for them to unburden themselves.”

Donna skewered her fork in the middle of her cake and set it down. “Smart,” she said. “So, what I was thinking was this. Once we find your so-called unicorn…”

Kristen gazed down at the street a story below. A toddler slipped in the snow, and his father scooped him up. The doors to the Market of Choice opened and half a dozen girls spilled out, their scarves flapping in a parade of pinks and yellows. And for a moment Kristen saw a familiar flash of blond hair, a girl turning her face to the sky.

Marydale!

But of course it wasn't. It was just the sudden, unexpected miracle of snow—so rare, the city didn't have enough plows to clear the bridges, let alone the streets—that made Kristen see Marydale in the face of passing strangers. When she had first returned to Portland five years earlier, she had imagined Marydale everywhere. Now she went whole weeks without thinking of her.

“I'm going to get back to it,” Kristen said, setting her uneaten cake on the table next to Donna's. “I've got to get to my day drinkers before they forget exactly how DataBlast cheated a quarter million suckers out of their money.”

Two hours later, Kristen had placed almost thirty calls, mostly to voice mails. Around her, the office was quiet except for the occasional whir of the fax machine. Even Donna had headed across the river for dinner at the Golden Lucky Fortune with her parents and then off to a party at which she would, almost certainly, break her record of twelve months without a dysfunctional romance.

Kristen's phone rang. She picked it up quickly. “Falcon Law Group. Kristen Brock speaking.”

“Happy New Year!” It was Sierra. In the background, cheers and whistles told Kristen she had found day drinkers, just not the day drinkers she was looking for.

“Kristi!” Sierra said. “We're heading out in about an hour. Do you want a ride?”

“A ride?”

“To the Deerfield Hotel for the whiskey festival. Do you want us to pick you up? We've got four-wheel drive, and don't say you've got too much work to do.”

“I…The Deerfield Hotel is all the way out in Troutdale. The roads are a mess.”

Someone turned up the music on Sierra's end.

“You forgot.” Sierra's voice was still cheerful. “How can you be a lawyer and you can't even remember New Year's Eve? You have to come! We have to catch up!”

Just that morning, Kristen had vowed to be a better sister. It wasn't just a New Year's resolution. It was a holiday-season resolution, a birthday resolution, a solstice resolution. The thought had probably crossed her mind on Arbor Day.

“I am so sorry,” Kristen said.

“We talked about this,” Sierra whined. “We did!”

Kristen tried to remember the conversation. Sierra had mentioned something about New Year's Eve…about an open bar at the historic hotel. Kristen had thought it sounded like a tort waiting to happen. Had she also said yes?

“I…look…I don't have anyone to watch Meatball. That's my fault. I forgot. We'll get together later. I promise. We'll have tea at the Heathman.”

The light for the second line flashed on Kristen's phone. She scrawled the incoming number on the back of a file.

“You missed the Halloween party.” Sierra's voice had lost a bit of its cheer. “You missed vegan Thanksgiving. And I saw you for, like, two seconds on Kwanzaa. Tonight's going to be great. They're going to have tastings and three different local bands. Fishbowl Pocket Moon is playing! They never play small shows! This is once in a lifetime. This is bucket list. And you said you'd come. And it's snowing!”

On the street below, a pair of young businessmen picked up handfuls of snow and threw it at each other. The snow made Portland happy. Stores closed and restaurants served pancakes. Even the partners had been calling other firms, checking on their fax lines and their copiers.
If you need anything, just give us a call.
It made Kristen sad. In a few days it would all melt, and the partners would go back to yelling at each other's receptionists. And no one's life would have been transformed, not that Kristen wanted her life to change, she reminded herself. A woman in her midthirties about to make partner at the Falcon Law Group was exactly where she was supposed to be.

“I wouldn't be any fun,” Kristen said. “I've got so much work to do.”

“It's a whole whiskey-tasting thing. I picked it because you love whiskey,” Sierra said. “This is for you.”

“I don't love whiskey.”

“You always have a bottle of that awful Poisonwood stuff.”

“Yes. Right. I know.”

There had been a moment, five years earlier, when she could have told her sister everything. Instead she had told Sierra that she left Tristess because big-firm work offered more growth potential.
You have to think about a career, not just a job,
she had said. A moment later, Kristen had realized it was the wrong lie. She could just as well have said,
I came back to Portland to be closer to you.
Now they were the kind of sisters who didn't see each other for months on end even though they lived in the same city.

“It's really nice of you to think of me,” Kristen said.

She was ready to interject over Sierra's protests, but Sierra said nothing for several seconds. Then she said, “Okay,” with a finality that Kristen had never heard before. “I don't want to force you to spend time with me.”

In the background, Kristen heard a man ask, “Is everything okay? She's coming, right?”

“Wait.” Kristen exhaled heavily. “Does this place you're going…? Do they take dogs?”

Sierra's voice brightened again. “Of course they take dogs!”

“I have to make a few more phone calls,” Kristen said reluctantly.

“We'll pick up Meatball, and I'll pack you a bag. You can work right up until we leave. We'll honk the horn when we get there. I know your window.”

“We?” Kristen asked, but Sierra was already hanging up, saying, “You'd better be there when we get there.”

Two hours later, Sierra arrived in her company car, a retrofitted, first-generation Range Rover with
BIODIESEL
emblazoned across the top, like a warning to low-flying drones. Reluctantly, Kristen headed downstairs. Sierra was already standing on the snowy sidewalk.

“We're going to have so much fun. I promise!” Sierra said. She glanced at Kristen's Burberry coat open over her gray suit. “Look at you. See? You
are
ready for a party.”

Kristen did not point out that Burberry and Max Mara weren't whiskey-festival attire. It didn't matter. The moment to avoid the trip had passed, and now she was committed.

In the backseat of the SUV sat two men, their hair pulled up in matching buns on top of their heads. One wore a sweater with snowflakes embroidered on it. The other wore a heavy canvas skirt with pockets and loops for as-yet-unidentified tools. It was Frog and Moss. Kristen recognized them from half a dozen house parties she had stayed at just long enough to pound a vodka-spiked kombucha and invent a crisis in the office to call her away.

Meatball sat on Frog's lap, his pointed ears twitching back and forth. The men motioned for her to take the front seat, smiling encouragingly. Sierra had probably regaled them with stories of Kristen, her sad, workaholic sister who preferred a normal office job to pressing apple cider by hand or drawing mandalas of her vagina or whatever the latest edition of Sierra's online magazine, the
HumAnarchist
, suggested the readers try.

Sierra hopped back into the driver's seat, offering a high five to both of the men. “And we're off!” she said.

Frog leaned forward and grinned at Kristen. He had a remarkable array of milk-chocolate-colored freckles.

“You want a joint?” he asked.

“No!”

“It's legal,” Sierra said, pulling a lighter out of her shirt pocket.

“It's not legal to smoke in a moving car,” Kristen said.

Moss produced a plastic bag and pulled out something that looked like Silly Putty or human skin. Meatball whirled around with surprising agility and goggled at him, his bat ears trembling slightly.

“Don't worry,” the man said. “It's soy curl.” He popped the substance into Meatball's wide mouth. “Something for everyone, right?” He took the joint from Frog, and the smell of marijuana filled the Range Rover.

“Don't worry. I'm not smoking,” Sierra said. “I'm driving.”

“You'll get a contact high,” Kristen said.

“That was just propaganda DuPont used to stop the production of hemp-based fiber products,” Moss declared, shoveling another soy curl into Meatball's mouth.

“I'm so glad we're doing this,” Sierra said, making more eye contact than Kristen thought appropriate for someone driving sixty-five miles an hour through what newscasters were dubbing
Snowpocalypse
. “I'm so psyched you could come, Kristen. We are going to have the time of our lives.”

Kristen stared at the blur of highway, contemplating her own death at the hands of her sister's weed-addled driving.

“Please, watch the road,” she pleaded. “I have things to live for. I'm going to make partner.”

Sierra shot her a long, pointed look.

“Drive!” Kristen protested.

But a voice in the back of her mind said,
Partner, really?
Another case? Another half marathon? Another corporate banquet? Would it make her happy? A glimpse of Marydale's face flickered across her memory like the last frames of a black-and-white movie, but it was just the snow. It made the city look like Christmas and the end of the world all at once, and it made it easy to revisit old memories, Kristen told herself. For the rest of the drive, she forced herself to think through the details of the DataBlast case, making a mental list of all the people she had called and all the calls she had yet to make.

By the time they reached the historic Deerfield complex, the sun had set and the parking lot was blanketed with white. The early cars were already snowed under. More recent arrivals were parked at odd angles, wedged around mounds of snow. Kristen's foot had cramped from pressing an imaginary brake pedal as Sierra flew, albeit without mishap, along the icy highway. Now Kristen climbed out, accompanied by a wave of marijuana smoke. She teetered a little bit as her heels slipped on the packed snow.

“Kristen.” Sierra placed her hand on Kristen's laptop bag. “You don't need this. It's New Year's Eve.”

“I'll just put it in my room,” Kristen said.

“But you're carrying the psychic weight.”

Reluctantly, Kristen handed it over. “Lock it up, okay?” she said.