The Ancient Rain (20 page)

TWENTY-SIX

It was hot, the Day of Remembrance, unseasonably so. Elise Younger wore her yellow dress, and it was soaked through with perspiration, wet under the arms, before the march had managed five blocks. The marchers had started at the Sacramento River and would end with a gathering on the north steps of the State Capitol.

Up ahead, the road narrowed, and the marchers funneled into a bike lane. At close quarters like this, she caught the odor of sweat in the air, not a healthy sweat, but rancid. Although Elise had had three tequilas the night before, she told herself it was the man beside her who stank.

The man was Mike Iverson, Blackwell's assistant prosecutor. Blackwell had planned to be here himself but something had come up in San Francisco. So Blackwell's man walked alongside her, at the head of the march, and on the other side was Barbara Golan, an assemblywoman facing a stiff challenge in her district. Elise had visited the assemblywoman's office some years ago, unable to gain an audience, but things were different now, and the woman had embraced her today like an old friend.

“You are a brave woman,” said Golan. “Your endurance is admirable. An example to us all.”

“Maybe I should run for office.”

When the assemblywoman laughed, tilting her head under her straw hat, Elise saw the woman's teeth. Iverson took Elise by the arm as if to guide her away. His touch was gentle, but there was a pained look on his face. The smell, she thought, definitely came from him. Everywhere the junior attorney went, he wore his prosecutorial outfit—his black slacks, his suit coat—as if he were stepping out into the Civic Center Plaza, into that gray wind that blew down Van Ness. But there was no breeze here in Sacramento, not today—only the Indian summer heat and the glimmer of the capitol up ahead.

Yes, it was Iverson who stank.

Elise had been to a number of these events over the years. Too many, perhaps. Her ex-husband had grown to hate them after a while and would not let her take the kids. But the early marches had been smaller, there had been a camaraderie. Now people came by the busload, it seemed, from all over California. From the Delta. From Shasta and Riverside. Here in their baseball caps, their stretch pants, their bright blouses. Here to spend the night in the Holiday Inn, to lobby for the dead. For victims or relatives of victims. Little girls who had disappeared from front yards. Boys gunned down on street corners. Women raped, dismembered.

The marchers held placards. They carried pictures. Their numbers extended back several blocks through the capitol mall.

What do they want?
she remembered her husband pleading.
What do they expect anyone to do now?

Though this march was bigger than the others, she felt more alone. For one thing, Guy Sorrentino was not here, walking alongside her, as he had been these last few years, and she missed his presence. Also, she marched at the head of the crowd, and though this was the envied position—it meant your case was a cause célèbre—she felt cut off. Isolated by Blackwell's people and the coming trial.

And she herself was scheduled to speak.

But it wasn't just those things. There was a buzz in the air, a hardness. There were more flags. There were soldiers and firemen and a man upfront, walking with his two children, whose wife had been killed in 9/11.

Everyone was a victim now.

“
Newsweek
is here,” said Assemblywoman Golan. She had dressed more practically than Iverson, a cotton blouse—bright red, for the cameras—but a touch prim, buttoned-up. Even so, she was sweating, too. “They are running a story.”

Iverson tipped his head toward Elise. “Remember, it's wiser if you don't talk to the press.” He spoke to her as if she were a child. “With the trial approaching.”

“I understand.”

“You have your speech?”

“Yes.”

“You don't want to deviate.”

“I won't be a problem.”

“I'm not worried, Elise. I know you understand. The press likes you, because you shoot from the hip. It makes for a story. But it's just not wise.”

They had been through this more than once—and it was true, the press sought her out. Just a few nights ago, a reporter from the
Chronicle
had called, wanting to know about her friendship with Guy Sorrentino. Despite the continual admonitions, she had talked to the reporter for a while—until suddenly, out of nowhere, the man raised the question of money, wanting to know if her investigation had been privately funded.

It spooked her and she hung up.

She hadn't told anyone other than Sorrentino about the money, twenty grand, sent anonymously, a donation to the Eleanor Younger Justice Fund, set up twenty-seven years ago by her father—all but bankrupt these many years.

“Stay with the script,” Iverson said.

She had been in front of crowds before. She often went with notes, things she wanted to say, but she could not be bound by them. She was not a professional speaker. She stammered, she twisted in midsentence, she strayed from her notes. To make contact, she had to look into the eyes of someone down there in the crowd. It was in those moments, those hesitations, that she felt the upswelling of words. If her words then came spontaneously—if they were ugly and jagged and if she offended the newspapers or some person in an office someplace, some lawyer—then at least they were real, and sometimes they got to the heart of the matter. But her spontaneity, she knew, frightened Iverson, because part of his job was to make sure she did not talk to the press.
There is a trial approaching
. There were more people listening now, and the case was on its way.
You don't want to look foolish, you don't want to look rash
. There were reporters, always circling. One of them was talking to the man whose wife died in 9/11.

“Why is he here?”

“Who?” asked Iverson.

“What does he want, the man whose wife is dead?”

“The same thing as you. An investigation. Justice. We can't let the bad guys win.”

She couldn't argue with that, but it was a different thing somehow. The police chief, the war veterans, the men with flags on their lapels—they were here for other reasons. Still, if this is what it took.

The reporter eyed them now, looking Elise up and down in her yellow dress, but Iverson steered her away. Behind her, Assemblywoman Golan stepped into the brink. “It's about self-sacrifice,” she was saying. “It's about standing together. All of us.” Elise saw Iverson cast an envious glance backward. He was ambitious, she knew; he wanted his moment. Regardless, when the reporter came, Iverson sent him away.

Iverson had his fingers on her forearm. It seemed they were always there. “After you speak at the podium, the press is going to come at you again. Tell them no comment.”

“All right.”

“You don't want to say anything to jeopardize the case.”

“Okay.”

“I'm glad you understand.”

Though the distance was not far, the group crawled slowly in the October heat. Cars honked, people waved. Pamphleteers worked through the crowd from the opposite direction, slowing them down, handing out religious fliers. When they reached the stairs at last, there was a podium set up already, a microphone, but Elise and the others had to wait for the rest of the crowd to catch up. How many there were, she didn't know; several thousand, perhaps. The sun was hotter now, and the sunlight gleamed off the marble, and Elise smelled the stench again and felt the dampness of the yellow dress where it clung to her arms, to her stomach. Her perspiration would leave salt rings, she feared, all over the yellow dress.

The governor's man had come down and was waiting to say a few words.

Elise had been inside these halls on more than one occasion. The officials and their secretaries had dealt with her politely, at first. When she persisted, though, when she returned, they regarded her as a nuisance, it was clear—as someone who did not understand social boundaries. Someone who had been damaged in some way, but for whom their sympathy had worn out. Someone who did not understand the limits of what could be done.

The speech she had prepared was not long. It told of her struggle, a struggle that went back to that day twenty-seven years ago … but it told the story with the anger trimmed out because the people who had ignored her once, they had taken on her cause now, they had chosen to listen, and she could not afford to make them angry. It was a speech that thanked all of those who had stood beside her for so long; but it was a lie.

No one had stood beside her these last few years. Only Guy Sorrentino. And him, she had been forced to push away.

She had another speech inside her head, different from the one on paper.

The crowd had gathered, and the governor's man was at the podium now. “This day, this gathering, it really isn't about our grief. Or even about those whom we have lost.”

Then what's it about
?
What
?

For what reason had she been shuffled from office to office in these halls? For what reason had she suffered the condescending stares of secretaries and the condolences of people who squeezed her in between appointments? Why had she listened to a counselor saying it was time to go, to move on—to the implication that after a point the problem was not what had happened to her mother, no, but instead an indication of a problem within, a deformity, an inability to cope, a flaw that needed to be healed. They all stood behind her now, but she was the one who had broken down, who had been reduced to following Owens and his wife in a shopping mall, full of some awful revenge.

What was it about, then?

She knew the answer. It was not about her mother, no. It was not about herself or the people in the crowd. The governor's man was right about that.

No, it wasn't about us, it was about them.

About the prosecutor and his promotions, the newspaperman and his story, the next election and the allocation of the budget. About this assemblywoman whom she would never see again, more than likely, once this march was over.

Elise stood at the podium.

The people were below her, on the steps, gathered along the sidewalk, standing in the grass, under the sun. There was a line of trees in the distance, and the sun came hard over the buildings. For an instant, she remembered old Sacramento; she remembered the heat and dust and her mother's face as they drove along Interstate 99 through the tomato fields. Now she squinted into the light. She shielded her eyes, but it was hard to see their faces. She could no longer make out the writing on their placards, or the pictures of their loved ones.

“My mother,” she said. “Twenty-seven years ago, she was my age. She walked into the bank…”

She paused.

Iverson looked at her with a glimmer of panic, worried she was about to stray.

She searched the crowd. There was a girl in the audience below, off to the side in the shade, a small girl, maybe ten years old. She had brown hair and was wearing a white hat and held in her hand a photograph. Elise lowered her eyes, trying to glimpse the face in the picture—a parent? a child?—then all of a sudden, without explanation, Elise began to sob.

Then Barbara Golan was at her side, and despite herself, Elise tilted toward the woman. The assemblywoman put an arm around her, and for an awful instant Elise sobbed into the woman's shoulder, into her bright red blouse. The woman smelled of perfume, of dry-cleaning fluid. Elise could hear the cameras clicking, she could hear the stirring of the crowd. She tried to pull away but the assemblywoman held her close.

“Just read the speech, honey,” she whispered. “Just read what's on the page.”

*   *   *

Afterward, lying on the bed in her hotel room at the Sacramento Sheraton, still in her yellow dress, unbuttoned now, she did not remember the details of what had followed so much as the sensation: the feeling that something had been let loose in the air as she stood at the podium. She had stayed on message, as the expression went, but the truth was she did not remember speaking. She did not remember the moment so much as the moment after, the applause, Iverson nodding his head, Golan smiling, the people pressing around after she was done, and the feeling of celebrity, later, as she walked away, head down, and Iverson led her through the crowd.

So now she lay on the bed, exhausted, arms at her sides.

She had a tremulous feeling and remembered how it had been at the time of her breakdown. She felt that feeling again now, the rootlessness. A week ago she had seen that man Dante Mancuso at the sidewalk memorial in front of the construction site. She had seen him kneel down and pick up the portrait of her mother, the flowers that had been knocked over by the wind on the corner out in the Sunset District. What right did he have to touch her mother's memorial? That had been her first thought, and when their eyes met, perhaps he'd seen that in her posture. But there was something else about the man, too.

There had been something gentle in the motion, something sad. His fiancée had been injured in the bombing, she knew that. For an instant, she thought, perhaps he is not the enemy. Then the anger got ahold of her … and she found herself in the darkness again, watching from the shadows. Mancuso worked with Owens. Likely he knew where the man was staying now. Likely they met for coffee, for lunch …

She knew where that train of thought was leading, but she had a hard time pushing it away. If she was not careful, the feeling grew. Sorrentino had kept her grounded, in some odd way. She fought the panic in her chest, breathing deep, like the psychologist said, then pulled one of those little bottles of Cuervo from the minibar by the bed.

Later the phone rang. It was Blackwell, back in San Francisco. There was something unpleasant in his voice.

“You spoke with the
Chronicle
?” he asked.

“Iverson was with me the whole time, I didn't speak to anyone.”