Pacific Avenue (25 page)

He nodded in the students’ direction. “And we need a
permanent stage manager, so I’m hoping you’ll take that on.” He didn’t mention
Richard.
He’s keeping things flexible so he can hire Richard back or do
without him, depending on what happens.

When he phoned to tell me that, I felt my heart
squeezed like a sponge. “Do you think you’ll get a fair trial?”
A black man.
A white woman. Baby dies. Murder. . . . Good lord, a Jefferson
Parish jury. No autopsy. All my fault.

“I don’t know.” His voice was empty. He didn’t sound
like he gave a damn.

I knew he’d hang up on me again if I didn’t change the
subject. “What’s your lawyer like?” I asked.

“Well, I’m not sure he’s that interested, but maybe
we’ll work something out.”

“I have to go, Richard.”
I can’t take any more of
this. I can’t think about it anymore.

But I couldn’t think about anything else. I saw picture
after picture of my Richard—Richard who couldn’t be guilty. Richard, sitting on
the bed in his Chimes Street apartment, back propped against the wall, reading
about forgiveness.

I was sure he hadn’t hurt Jamie—until the little
whisper started in my head.
He was always strange. Even when I first met
him, he wasn’t on speaking terms with his family. Richard crawling out from
under the Thanksgiving table. Jumping out of his chair the day of the quarrel,
scaring Dad.

He never hurt anyone. He had problems and we quarreled,
but he never raised his hand. Not once.

No. Not Richard. I built a wall against the voice with
pictures of Richard changing Jamie, feeding Jamie, telling her stories.
Richard, walking with me and Jamie, glittering with puppet snow. Richard, the
last day at the zoo, digging in the pockets of his jeans for a tissue so she
could blow her nose.

The whisper came through the wall.
Richard’s an
actor. You heard him that night he didn’t know you were listening—“I’m trapped.
I can’t get out.” That’s what he really felt all along.

I made myself remember Richard setting his box of puppets
on the floor, wrapping me in his arms and his love. Richard, the idealist,
wanting to help other veterans. Richard and the puppets, working for peace.

No. He never sleepwalked.

No, not like that time. There was a big difference.
This time, she wasn’t crying. I would have heard if she was.

Not without her making a fuss. I would have woken up.
There was no way I wouldn’t have woken up. I always had, as soon as she cried.

The whisper was gone, and I knew I’d found the answer.
Richard couldn’t have done it. But no one was going to ask
me.
I had to tell them anyway. I called the lawyer.

“Public defender’s office,” said a nasal female voice
with an Irish Channel accent.

“Hello? Can I speak to Michael Heard?”

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“My name is Kathy Woodbridge. I’m calling about Richard
Johnson.”

“I’ll see if Mr. Heard is available.”

I waited a long time. “He’s in a meeting. May I take a
message?” Bored, indifferent tone. I heard gum pop.

I left my phone number. The lawyer didn’t call me back.
Over the next week, I tried over and over, hoping that someone else would
answer the phone. But it was always the same girl. She had enough phone
messages from me to paper the office, if she was writing them down at all.

I had to talk to someone. I combed my hair and trailed
up the street to Martin’s house. He and the boys were gone, but Thu let me in
with a smile and put the teakettle on.

“Richard won’t say anything about what happened,” I
said when we’d both settled on the couch. “I don’t know what to think.”

“You think he did something?” Thu asked, her voice
shocked.

“I did. I mean, I wondered. Because he never said he
didn’t. But I thought about it, and he couldn’t have. There’s no way I could
have slept through something like that.”

“But why isn’t he saying that to the police?”

“I’m not sure he’s not. But he sounds more like he’s
guilty every time he talks about it. He can’t be, but he won’t say he’s not.
All he says is that he doesn’t know. And back then . . . when it
happened . . . I should have asked for an autopsy. Then they would
have had to let Richard go.”

“And now no one will ever know.” Thu sounded bleak.

“That’s about it.” We watched the steam rise off the
tea. “Except, the longer he stays in jail, the more he’s giving in,” I added.

“Kathy,” said Thu after a moment, “I want to tell you
something I never told anyone. Promise me you’ll never tell. Not even Martin.”

I nodded.
What could she say to me that she hadn’t
said to Martin?

“When we were hiding under the stage during the siege,
well, Martin wasn’t conscious. I’d creep out to . . . go to the
bathroom, but . . . I’m sure you know what I mean . . . he
couldn’t. I tried to keep him clean, but there was a smell. Even in the cold
weather, you could tell people were in the building somewhere.”

Thu bit her lower lip and looked away. “So one morning,
when I was out of our hiding place, I took my own . . . excrement
. . . and I wrote VC slogans all over the walls with it. That way,
the soldiers wouldn’t look any farther, if you see what I mean.”

Thu was red-faced. I wondered why she was saying this.
And then I realized.
She’s telling me to do anything I can to defend the
person I love. Like she did. Like Savitri did.

I had to get Richard out of jail. He couldn’t have hurt
Jamie, but the longer he stayed there, the more they were all convincing him he
had. He had to get free and think, figure out what happened. And I had to tell
Richard I knew he was innocent.

Even if he didn’t want Dad to bail him out, I could pay
his bail with my own money.
What money?—I don’t have a thousand dollars. But
if I sell the Volkswagen, I can get it. He can’t be mad if it’s not Dad’s
money. Why didn’t I think of it weeks ago?

I set my teacup down with a crash. “Thank you, Thu. I
have to go. Right now. I’m sorry. I’ll be back. Thank you for telling me, and
I’ll never say anything to anyone.”

Selling the car took longer than I expected, but I came
home in a taxi with enough money for Richard’s bail. I gloated over that money.
I could help Richard. The autopsy wouldn’t matter.

When he called that night, I was happy, impatient to
tell him the news.

“Hi, love,” he began. He sounded lighter, almost
relieved. It had been a long time since he called me that, too. Did he know
somehow that I was going to get him out?

He kept speaking, but it took me a minute to realize
what he was saying.
“What did you say?”

“I worked out a plea bargain,” he repeated. “They reduced
the charge to involuntary manslaughter. I pled guilty to that. My lawyer says
he thinks I’ll get off with five years.”

The money for Richard’s bail was in my purse, but it
might as well have been blowing down the street. I realized the phone was
beeping, that Richard had hung up as I stood there mute. I called Sharon.

Before I could tell her, she cut in. “Kathy, I was just
trying to call you. Please get up here as soon as you can. Dad’s had a heart
attack. He’s in the hospital.
Please,
Kathy.”

I stuffed the money into my piggy bank. Then I packed a
few things in a suitcase as fast as I could. I was almost to the curb when I
remembered the car was gone.

After the
hellos
and
pleased
to meet yous
were said, there was a babble
of questions about Kathy. I looked Willis’s way. He wanted to handle it his
way, now let him handle it.

I was dumbfounded by the performance he put on. He told
them enough of what they already knew to make them think Kathy had taken us
into her confidence, that we had some right to speak for her. He wove the most
seamless web of honesty and lying I’d ever heard. In all the years I’d been
married to him, he’d never done anything like this.

At least, he hadn’t as far as I knew. That was a
thought.

“Kathy’s doing all right, but not great,” he said. “She
came to work with my wife back in December, and Lacey got concerned about her.
It was obvious she was in some kind of trouble. Lacey’s the kind to take in
stray kittens anyway, so she decided to help if she could.

“So, she called Sharon back in December,” Willis went
on, not mentioning that I’d lied about what I wanted—and Sharon, still smiling,
didn’t say anything about it, either. “After Lacey learned that Kathy’s dad had
passed away in the fall, she wouldn’t have wondered why Kathy was unhappy but
would’ve just tried to comfort her. Except it seemed peculiar that Kathy would
run away from her sister’s house in Baton Rouge right after their dad’s funeral.

“Kathy’s résumé had disappeared, and Lacey was sure
Kathy had pulled it to keep the company from checking her references. And then
Lacey saw the address from an envelope Kathy received”—once again, he was
telling the precise truth, but lying in his teeth in the implication—“the
address of a convict in Angola state prison.”

They all looked up sharply, like a bunch of terriers
when a cat runs by. Willis didn’t turn a hair. He kept on, smooth as a
politician.

“We had no idea what Lacey should do,” he went on. “She
didn’t want to take it up with the management of her company. She was afraid
Kathy would lose her job. But Lacey has her responsibilities, too. She had to
look into it. By accident, we found out about Richard and the baby.”

He skipped over the fact that this discovery was
exactly half an hour old. “But we’re not real clear on what happened, and we
didn’t want to upset Kathy by asking too much.”

Good lord! And he’d said
I
was devious! I shut my mouth hard to keep my jaw from
dropping.

I jerked my attention back to the group. Eddie was talking.
“What do you know about Jamie?” he asked Willis.

“Only that Kathy had a little girl. What happened?”

I stole another look at Willis, wondering if there was
an Olympic event for skating on thin ice. If so, he was a shoo-in. But no one
seemed to mind him asking.

“She died,” Sharon said. “We never found out exactly
how.”

“Kathy didn’t tell you?” I asked.

Sharon shook her head. “She doesn’t know. Richard got
arrested, and he plea-bargained guilty to involuntary manslaughter. And he
never did say why.”

“Didn’t she ask the police about it?” I asked. I
couldn’t believe she wouldn’t at least do that.

“She didn’t have any rights, since she and Richard
weren’t married,” said Sharon.

“Did Richard do something to the baby?” Willis asked.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” said Eddie. “We wish
we knew. But there wasn’t an autopsy, there wasn’t a trial, and Richard won’t
say anything. We all gave up on him.”

Sam spoke up unexpectedly from the corner. “
I
didn’t.”

Part 5

“Hey, Kathy, want to take our lunches to the park?” Lacey
called to me from the office kitchen, outshouting a mixer truck in the
driveway.

“It’s raining.” I didn’t even check. It had to be
raining. It had rained every day for weeks.

“No, it isn’t.” The truck pulled away, but her voice
was still set at yelling pitch. She came to my desk and repeated her words in a
normal tone—a sort of corrected replay. “It isn’t. It’s gorgeous outside.”

“Lacey, it has rained every day since you got back from
New Orleans. I think you brought the weather with you in your suitcase. We
ought to be building an ark, not a bunch of buildings.”

“Huh. A concrete ark. . . . Sounds like
a Giannini project, all right. Grab your lunch, girl. The sun’s out.”

I did. The truth is, I was so stir-crazy from the wet
weather, I might have gone on a picnic even if it
had
been raining. We picked our way through the puddles
to Lacey’s car, and she drove to a park with a panoramic view of the harbor,
with its all-green suspension bridge standing up against the water and sky.

She spread the comics section of a newspaper on the
damp concrete picnic table and split the sports section for us to spread on the
benches.

“I think our company must have built this one,” she
said, wiggling a crumbly-looking piece at the table edge. She set her lunch
down and gave it a doubtful look. “Bet you a nickel we get ants.”

“No bet—you’d win for sure,” I said. I looked around.
“Nice view. The bridge is pretty.”

What I really felt was something close to panic at
being on a hilltop, so much in the open. The sky was too big. I had a dizzy
realization that I was standing on the
side
of the earth, that I could fall into the sky.

“The Vincent Thomas?” said Lacey, looking over her
shoulder at the bridge. “It’s kind of stubby. Not like the Golden Gate. You
ever see the Golden Gate?”

“I did once. My family drove out West once on
vacation.”

The openness of the hillside reminded me of Dad and
Jamie underground. And Richard locked up in a cell. I took a deep breath,
pushing against the tightness in my chest.

Lacey sorted through the rest of the newspaper and
looked at the headlines. She showed me the front page. Pictures of helicopters
and people scrambling to get on them. “I see the war is finally over.”

I wondered if Thu had any family over there. And I wondered
about Richard.
Will he care? Did he ever care about anything? Or is he still
just an artilleryman, destroying things too far away to see?

Lacey squashed an ant. “I knew it.”

“Eat fast,” I suggested. I folded the plastic wrap from
my sandwich, then unfolded it again. “Lacey . . . .”

“Um-hmm?” She was still looking at the paper.

“What would you do if someone wanted to talk to you and
you didn’t want to talk to them?”

“Depends on the circumstances.” She looked up, interested
and sympathetic.

I floundered on, trying to remember what I’d told her,
truth and lies. “There was this guy, and he did something bad . . .
or I thought he might have. . . .”

“You’re not sure?”

“Well, I can’t decide. But now my sister wrote me and
said I should talk to him. She says it’s not the way it looked.”

“But you don’t want to?”

“I don’t know what I want.”

I didn’t say any more about it, and Lacey didn’t push
me. Out in the harbor, a cruise ship was inching toward the ocean. I wondered
what it would feel like to be the kind of person who went on cruises.

We drove back to the office to make concrete picnic tables
or something else equally uninteresting. As the days went by, and then weeks, I
didn’t get in touch with Richard. I just couldn’t take any more.

It was all I could do to keep going at all. I only did
things I had to, like go to work and buy food. I did visit the library, but
that felt necessary.

Other than that, I more or less hid in the apartment.
It was bare, and I made no effort to fix it up. I owned only the things I had
to—a single mattress and some kitchenware. And work clothes, all from the
Salvation Army.
As far as I’m concerned, they still belong to their former
owners. They’re like a crowd of unwanted guests crammed behind the closet door.
For all I know, they talk to each other in there. I’m not listening.

Every weekend, I spent most of my time sitting on the
mattress, my back propped against the wall, reading mysteries. I never tried to
guess “whodunit,” because I didn’t care. More and more, I couldn’t even look at
the words. I’d open a book and stare at a page. Or I’d read the same paragraph
over and over without getting the meaning.

The time when I could push Richard and Jamie out of my
mind for even a little while was past. I hadn’t written to Richard, because I
was waiting for him to get out of prison. I knew what I’d do then. I’d go
wherever he was and ask him to his face if he’d done anything to Jamie. It
wasn’t a question I could ask in a letter. Or on a prison telephone line. So, I
had to wait and imagine.

I went through this discussion over and over. When I
got to the last question, Richard always disappeared. The day I could ask him
in person, he’d have to face me and answer me.

No, I wouldn’t write to him. I didn’t write to the Motleys,
either. I couldn’t, not until I talked to Richard. Maybe they thought Richard
had hurt Jamie, that he’d done it all along, that I knew. When he pled guilty,
he pled guilty for me too.

And maybe I
was
guilty. I felt like it was my fault. Maybe I didn’t take good enough care of
Jamie, didn’t feed her right or keep her warm or something. Maybe I should have
noticed she was sick earlier, that day at the zoo.

I pushed her voice away, but I knew she’d come back.
Maybe I
was
losing my mind. And I had
four and a half years to go.

San Pedro had no seasons, so I didn’t notice the time
passing. One Saturday, I realized it was June 28, the day Jamie had died. I
wanted to get away, but I had no place to go. I decided to at least get out of
the apartment.

The sidewalk was bumpy, with weeds coming up through
cracks in the cement. Phone poles were staple-studded, covered with vertical
litter about last month’s rock band performances. As I went south, the stores
got seedier, then gave way to rooming houses. Peeling concrete steps were
bleachers for men with bottle-shaped paper bags. I strode right past them. I
wasn’t afraid like I had been when I first came to San Pedro.

I had never walked more than a block or two this way on
Pacific Avenue. The ocean was in front of me somewhere, I knew. I expected the
street to end at a beach, but instead there was a shaky fence and a tumbledown
cliff, with a long view of water and rocks beyond. I slipped though the fence.

The slope was terraced, not as steep as I’d expected.
On the flat part of each terrace was a strip of asphalt, all that was left of a
neighborhood street, complete with curbs and palm trees along the crumpled
parkway. Spaced at city-lot intervals were concrete foundations, open to the
sky now. I scrambled down onto the first terrace and actually looked both ways
before crossing the street. Two feral cats bolted into the underbrush.

I sat on a flight of concrete steps that went nowhere,
watching the surf. Watched and listened: first the thump when a wave hit, then
a hiss as it was sucked back through the rocks, along with a rattle of sea
stones like a load of bricks falling off the back of a truck.

I looked up, out to sea. The larger waves broke far
out, smaller ones came closer.
If I swim out past the surf, I’ll never make
it back. They’ll think it was an accident.
I picked my way down the steps, then down the slope toward the ocean.

I didn’t get that far. My foot skidded on a stone and I
fell. I slid almost ten feet, and came to rest against a tall, feathery plant
with licorice-smelling leaves.

My ankle hurt like hell, and I started crying from the
pain and then kept on crying about everything that had happened, going back to
the day I first met Richard.

I was almost retching by the time I ran out of tears. I
looked around to see if anyone had heard me.

There was no one in sight. In the mist over the ocean,
I could see a faint blue island. Beyond it somewhere would be Vietnam.
Everything that had driven Richard was there.

Most of Thu’s life, too—her city, invaded and bombed,
her friends and family dead, for all she knew. The theater, where she’d hidden,
where she’d saved Martin. She’d lost almost everything and survived anyway. Now
she had Dom and Joss, her artwork, her friends, her faith, Martin, and the
puppets. I’d never asked her how she did it, but now I remembered she’d told
me:

I would have to borrow her stubbornness awhile, since I
had nothing of my own to go on with. I stood up. I was exhausted, feeling
bruised in the middle, almost hung over from crying. I needed to get home.

A motion in the bushes startled me, but it was only a
stocky ginger tomcat. He looked like Mew, only grown up. He strolled out into
the sunlight and stood at my feet.

“Kitty?” I said tentatively, feeling foolish. He came
to me, and I sat beside him, stroking his head. When I finally started back, he
followed as I limped up the slope, scrambling in the steep places. At the
fence, I bent and picked him up. He stayed in my arms all the way home, looking
around and acting as if trusting me wasn’t stupid at all.

I left him at the apartment and limped to a store to
get him food and other things. When I got back, he rubbed against my legs and
meowed. After he ate, he sat on the bed with me and purred. I petted him and he
curled up next to me.
What’s your name, kitty? Henry, that’s his name. I’ll
call him Henry.
After a while, we drifted
toward sleep.
He’s not afraid he’ll die in the night because I don’t
know how to take care of him.

I went to work on Monday, but I wasn’t good for much. I
was still limping and I felt sick. Lacey took one look at me and gave me a
bunch of filing I could do sitting in the back room. She didn’t check to see
whether I was getting very far with it, either. I appreciated her being so
understanding.

Still, when noon came, I tried to give her the slip.
But she caught me taking my lunch out the back door.

“Want to go for a picnic?” she asked.

“No, I have to . . . . I mean, I guess
not.” I couldn’t even think of a decent excuse. Another heart-to-heart was the
last thing I wanted.

“Something wrong?” She looked at me with searching
concern.

“No. I mean, I don’t know. No.”

“You okay?”

“I don’t feel too good. But I’m not sick or anything,
just tired.”

“Why don’t you sit in the lunchroom, then? Better than
back there in the yard with the trucks. I have to go out, so you’ll be on your
own unless the phone rings. I brought in some strawberries, too. Willis and I
went to Oxnard last weekend, and we got a flat of them. Help yourself, ’cause
they won’t last.”

Perfect. I had no idea where she was going, and I
didn’t care. I sat and nibbled at my lunch without much appetite. I wasn’t thinking
of Mom much anymore, or Richard either. Thu, if anyone. Martin, becoming a
father
after
the shot had crippled him.
And Sam, warning Richard not to get so sidetracked on the bad things that he
couldn’t see the good.

I ate a bowl of Lacey’s strawberries. I cried a little
at the idea that I couldn’t give one to Jamie. She would have liked them. They
were sweet and juicy.

For the rest of the day at work, I faked it, and I went
to bed as soon as I got home. I ached all over. I was half asleep when someone knocked
on the apartment door. I tried to ignore it, but the knocking kept on.