Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (36 page)

He stood up, tossed his bottle into the recycling bin. “Yeah. The worst is over,” he said.

As usual, Lauren couldn’t find parking. So she left her car in front of a fire hydrant with the hazard lights flashing, a few blocks away
from Maisie’s house. She’d been halfway out of Richmond before she remembered: she’d left a file in Maisie’s spare bedroom. It was incredibly unlike her to be so forgetful, especially about work. In the back of her mind she was suspicious of herself: she’d forgotten the folder so she could not leave.

She walked down the dark sidewalk toward Maisie’s and, as usual when she walked alone at night, her senses were heightened, including her awareness of herself. Her heels clicked as she walked hard and fast down the cement walk; her heartbeat was a little high. The street was unusually dark and quiet, quiet enough that Maisie’s question posed earlier in the evening was echoing in her head:
What’s the worst that can happen if you decide you want something else?

She walked faster. The worst that could happen, she thought, was that she would make the wrong choice—and then where would she be? How could a person spend her entire life knowing exactly what she wanted, only to second-guess herself because of a single, atypical week? She could go slowly and as planned into a future that was pretty much guaranteed—one in which she would get her promotion, her raise, and then perhaps everything else would fall in line. Or she could rush headlong into a future that had nothing guaranteed at all but might give her a shot at love, at a different kind of work, and a thousand other tempting but elusive things.

She shook her head to clear it. She simply needed to push forward as planned—to get herself up to Maisie’s spare room, grab the wayward folder, and head home. She was nearly to Maisie’s house when she noticed the man. He was standing on the sidewalk, leaning against a street sign. He was bent slightly as if talking on a phone. She didn’t know why, but she felt a jolt of warning. She took stock of him: the fact that it was summer in the South, and he was wearing a hoodie. His white sneakers and baggy pants. She
reassured herself: She had her pepper spray on her keychain. And the street was relatively bright where he stood leaning against the sign.

Her heart was beating a little harder as she neared him, and she readied herself to look him square in the eye. Firm eye contact could be enough to put someone off because it signaled that she would not be an easy target. She was almost to Maisie’s house now and she laughed at herself silently: most likely, there was no reason to be afraid.

The man looked up when she walked past him, though not all the way, and she met his gaze. He seemed startled for a moment. He was very young and baby-faced. His hair was so blond it was nearly white, and buzzed close to his head. His eyes were wide-set and militant blue. She walked past him and saw his profile: he hadn’t much chin to speak of, and his triangle nose made the shape of his head look vaguely sharp and triangular like a blade.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” the boy said. And then he was walking beside her. He was short for a man—about her height. She was caught between the urge to run and the desire not to be rude. He was just a kid, after all. She gripped her pepper spray. “Can you tell me whereabouts is Jefferson Avenue?”

“No, I can’t,” she said curtly. She was only a few steps from Maisie’s door. She was hurrying. “Sorry.”

“Oh,” he said.

And then, quicker than she could have imagined it, he’d grabbed a big fistful of her hair and was pulling her toward Maisie’s door. It was then that she realized he hadn’t been waiting for just anyone: he’d been waiting for
her.

Her fingers weren’t working and she couldn’t activate her pepper spray. She reached for her self-defense training, tried to stop his foot, to grab and twist, but it was like he held her everywhere at once.

She called out loudly, “Help!” but the man’s hand wrapped tightly around her mouth, crushing her lips against her teeth, her spine against his belly. He’d gotten a knife from somewhere and he held it up before her face. It was a tiny little blade, but it was enough to make her stop yelling.

“Open the door,” he said. And when she didn’t, he pulled her hair so hard she thought it would come out. Tears filled her eyes. “I said,
open it.
”

She could hardly feel her hands. Some small voice said that she could not let him drag her into the privacy of Maisie’s house. She flipped her key chain around in her hand, making to open the door like he’d asked. But instead of turning the lock, she tossed her keys as high as she could over her head and backward. She heard the clink of them behind her, hitting the street.

The man yelled in her ear—at least, it sounded like yelling. It might have been a whisper. He pulled hard now on the hair on the side of her head, not letting up on the pressure for a moment. “You want to do this the hard way? Fine. We do it the hard way.”

He walked her, jostling, deep into the alley that separated Maisie’s building from the house next door. When he tried to reorient her to face him, she took the advantage: she kneed him hard, began to run. She called for help. But she’d barely gotten a word out before he was on her. Her head connected with the brick wall. His hand was over her nose and mouth. He stomped her foot so hard that she suddenly understood what it was to be blind with pain. Among garbage cans and roaches, he pushed her face down. She thought:
So that was it.
She no longer had anything to decide.

Years before the Arlen Fieldstone trial, before the word
trial
had become a regular part of Lauren’s everyday vocabulary, a good friend and professor had called Lauren into her office and began
asking questions.
You’re different,
her teacher had said.
You can see more than the rest of us. Isn’t that true?

Lauren was not modest about her talents, and so, sitting on the worn-down love seat in her teacher’s tiny office, she talked about Jonah, of how he saw even more than she did, and how she had a knack for people-reading, but it was Jonah who’d taught her everything she knew. Her professor had listened carefully, and when the story was over, she suggested that Lauren would make a good jury consultant. Lauren had said she hoped to go into law. But she’d never known a jury consultant and she wasn’t yet sure what she wanted to do, exactly. She’d had no plan at the time. She told her professor:
I’ll
think about it.
She felt a slight shiver—that was all—and then the conversation, and the years, went on.

Arlen had walked the long blocks of Monument Avenue enough times now that he half wondered if the police weren’t going to question him for suspicious behavior. He’d tried knocking, and when there was no answer, he’d wondered just for a second if Eula had given him the wrong address. Then, he’d started walking. The night air was cooler and fresher than it had been in some time. He felt lighter in his shoes. He needed to be careful, he knew, about falling in love. About
re
-falling. But something about Eula—she’d always made him reckless, which he supposed was another word for
brave
.

He was near the house where Lauren was staying when he heard voices. A woman. A man. And the erratic and primitive sounds of struggle that he might not have recognized before he’d gone to prison but which now made his ears prick up with alarm. Instinct kicked in. He ran without hesitation.

In the alleyway he found them. He knew the man by the shape. But the woman—he couldn’t see her. He could tell she was there
only by the sound. He grabbed with two hands for the man’s shoulders, picking him up off the ground. He was surprised to find that the guy was small.

“What the—”

The kid didn’t have a chance to get out the word. Arlen threw him. The boy was scrambling to his feet, cursing, and the woman was facedown and scrambling to get away. He had only a moment to register these things before the boy’s feet were pounding the pavement, his sweatshirt billowing behind him like a cape.

Arlen thought about chasing him. But the woman was still there and he hated to leave her. She was sitting up now, her back against the brick wall. She had her phone next to her ear.

“You okay?”

“I’m calling nine-one-one.”

He waited at a distance, to let her know he was with her, that he would protect her, but that from him she had nothing to fear. She argued for a moment with the operator about not needing to stay on the line. When he heard her phone click closed, he moved closer again. He wanted to be sure she wasn’t going into shock.

“My foot,” she said.

He crouched down. Her high heel had come off and was lying on its side in a damp spot. Her ankle was swelling. Arlen rubbed his face.

“Will you help me get out of this alley?” she asked. “It’s too dark back here. I want to wait out there, in the light, for when the ambulance comes.”

“If you’re sure you can move . . . ”

“I’m fine,” she said.

He helped her stand. All her weight was balanced on one foot. She brushed herself off and, in the near darkness, lifted her head. He couldn’t make out her face, but there was something about her that he recognized. She relied for balance on his hand, then
hopped—just an inch, on one high heel, toward the light. She hopped again.

Arlen cleared his throat. “May I?” he asked.

“Yes. Please.”

He bent down, picked her up. He felt the cool sweat behind her knees where they folded over his forearm, the slight drape of her arms around his neck. “Did he get anything? Your wallet? Money?”

“He didn’t want those things. He just wanted to hurt me. He kept saying it was punishment.”

“You knew him?” Arlen asked, making his way around garbage cans and boxes to the front of the alley.

“No. But I think I knew his brother, once. In my line of work, a person makes enemies.”

He was nearly to the street now. He could hear sirens in the distance, too far away. “What on earth could a woman like you do for a living that would piss a person off like that?”

“You’d be surpri—” She stopped talking as they reached the sidewalk, the gold wash of the streetlight. Arlen had been eyeing the far end of the neighborhood, looking for the flash of blue and red. But he stopped looking when she stopped talking. And then he saw her face.

“Arlen . . . ” she said.

He held her, barely registering her weight. Her head was bleeding, though not much. Her pupils were so big that her eyes seemed nearly to be black.

“You’re—”

“Yes,” she said. “I think you just saved my life.”

He must have smiled, unintentionally, because when his head cleared and he looked down into Lauren’s face, he saw that she was smiling timidly back. Something fiercely protective rose up within him. He felt triumphant. He shifted her weight in his arms.

That was when he heard the sound. Behind him. Sneakers,
beating the pavement. A dog’s bark. And then the boy in the sweatshirt, this brother of someone he didn’t know, raised his arm in front of him and squinted. Arlen heard angels. The streetlight wasn’t light anymore; it was beaming music. The dark was bright as day. He knew what was going to happen. He turned away.

When the shot rang out he was ready, Lauren protected by the wall of his body. In the distance, he saw the faint wash of red and blue lights, splashed like watercolors up against the brick buildings. And behind him, he heard the sound of someone running away. He dropped to his knees, careful with his cargo, and he set her on the ground before he fell onto his shoulder.

“Arlen? Arlen!” Lauren leaned over him. “Arlen!”

He tried to tell her. Everything was going to be okay. But he was dreaming with open eyes. He saw his mother; she was touching his shoulder like she used to when she woke him up for school. His dog’s tail thumped the ground. He knew he was in his house, the house where he grew up, because wintry drafts were blowing in through the closed window, making his skin pebble with cold. And he knew that today was another day, for school, for friends, for chores, for all those overlooked things that—when he saw them,
really
saw—he loved so much it broke his heart. He finally understood what freedom was and what it meant to be free. His whole body filled with gratitude that was unspeakable, inflating him until he became light as air, light as light, gladness so big that it carried him like a balloon, high over Richmond, over the clusters of lighted neighborhoods, over the silver slick of river, over all the sleeping people who couldn’t begin to know what it felt like, sailing toward the moon.