The Transformation of Things (2 page)

I thought about Danny and Kat—it had been a while since I’d seen them together. Maybe they should’ve been a strange fit—his gentle quietness and her loud affection—but you could always see the way they loved each other, every second that they were together, in the way they looked at each other, in the way they clung to each other in small moments.

The last time we’d been to their house in the city was just after the birth of their younger daughter, Arabella, and even though Kat was swollen and tired-looking, Danny had been sitting next to her on the couch, his arm around her, their thighs touching. Danny looked at her like she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and she said it right back, in the way she reached up and innocently tousled his red hair.

Will walked toward his study, the study I’d meticulously
decorated with a black leather sofa and thick, dark cherry desk and bookshelves, sitting against a light cherrywood floor. The room was very dark, very judgelike, but I always thought the beige damask curtains lightened it up just enough to make it homey. I’d been so proud of the way it had turned out, the way it looked like something formal and gracious enough to have made its way into a design magazine. And Will had given me nothing more than “It’s nice.” He followed this with “You know I really don’t care much about curtains,” because I’d pressed him to give me an opinion on something specific, pointing toward the window treatments.

I stood in the doorway, staring at those curtains now. “Have you talked to Danny lately?” I asked, thinking that it had been a month or two, at least, since I’d last called Kat.

He shook his head, and I watched as he dialed Danny’s number. In another lifetime, Will and Danny had been best friends, and Danny was a great lawyer. If anyone would know what to do, it would be Danny, even if they hadn’t talked in a while.

“Danny,” I heard Will say, his voice gasping out, almost as if he was choking. “It’s Will.”

And from the look on Will’s face, I knew that Danny was saying that he’d already heard, that maybe he’d seen it on the news the way I had. Will put his head down on the desk, hanging on to the phone with his right hand and holding on to his head with his left. “Okay,” I heard him say. “Yes, okay. Okay. I will.” He hung up.

“What did Danny say?” I asked.

He lifted his head up slowly from the desk and looked around the room, as if seeing it for the first time, seeing me standing there for the first time. “He wants me to come down to the office.”

“Now?” I asked. Will seemed to be in no shape to go anywhere.

“Yes.” He nodded. He looked at me for a moment, and I had a feeling he was considering asking me to go with him. But then he stood up, grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair, and breezed by me. “Don’t wait up,” he called out behind him. “I’ll be home late.”

He didn’t wait for my response, and as I heard the door slam to the garage, I stood there for a moment, listening, waiting, for something else. But as always, the only thing resonating through our giant, well-decorated house was silence.

Two

T
o be indicted is to be charged formally for committing a criminal act.

It was right there in the
Deerfield Daily
the next morning, right alongside Will’s picture, with the headline that read: “Young Judge Indicted for Bribery.” The definition of
indicted,
along with that of
federal grand jury
(a group of jurors who decide if someone should be tried for a crime), sat in a little blurb box off to the side, as if the editor at the
Deerfield Daily
was expecting his readers not to know these things. And why would they? People didn’t get indicted in Deerfield.

Well, actually, some people did—Will was the second in as many months. That state senator I’d remembered had been from Deerfield, too. The article also mentioned this, although it failed to say what had happened to the senator, which is what I was dying to know as I perused the article. But the
Deerfield Daily,
like most small-town suburban papers, was not known for its stellar reporting.

The town of Deerfield sat in the heart of Deerfield County, just around thirty minutes from Philadelphia. Deerfield County was filled with mostly middle-and upper-middle-class suburbs, but the actual town of Deerfield itself was the wealthy upper-class center—made up of expensive shopping plazas, developments of large, newer homes—or McMansions, as my sister, Kelly, liked to call them—and a world-class country club with a Jack Nicklaus golf course. Needless to say, I was sure that my neighbors, like me, would not be up on their criminal terms, even if some state senator had already been indicted last month.

Right next to the oh-so-helpful definition box, there was another box, a fact box, that offered these little tidbits:

Judge William Kenneth Levenworth:

Elected to the bench three years ago.

The youngest judge ever elected in Deerfield
County at the age of thirty-four.

The only judge in Deerfield County ever to be indicted.

Formally charged with bribery, obstruction of
justice, and conspiracy.

If convicted, could serve up to twenty-five years
in prison and/or be fined $750,000.

Twenty-five years in prison.
My stomach felt like it was capsizing, and my head was throbbing to the point where I had to close my eyes in an attempt to make it stop, to contain the ache. Will couldn’t really go to prison. Could he?

I took a deep breath, and I read the article. The gist of what it said was this: that Will had
allegedly
accepted $250,000 from a lawyer to decide in favor of his client. The writer used
the word
allegedly
about twenty times in one paragraph—everything about Will was alleged, a word that seemed both like a redundancy and a relief to me all at once.

The article didn’t say the name of the lawyer, because he hadn’t been charged with anything yet, but it wouldn’t have mattered to me anyway. I never kept track of Will’s cases or verdicts. And it wasn’t something he ever talked about at home. Work was at work (and he was almost always at work). But at home, he was in his study, washing his car, watching football, or, on Friday nights, sharing dinner with me at the club. We ate steak or lobster, made small talk about the neighbors or the new paint samples. We each had a glass of wine. And that was that.

Will had plenty of money. Our house, our cars, my decorating, none of it came cheap. But Will had made really good money at FF&G, and he also made a very nice salary as a judge. So the idea of Will taking a bribe made very little sense to me.

I heard footsteps coming toward the kitchen, so I hastily tucked the paper in the silverware drawer, and hoped he wouldn’t find it. “You’re still here,” I said, stating the obvious. It was after eight, and he never left for work later than seven. I hadn’t heard him come in last night, and his side of the bed had been empty when I woke up, something that was not unusual, so I hadn’t thought twice about it until now.

He nodded. “Danny told me not to go back.”

“For how long?” I asked.

He shrugged, a heavy shrug, as if the weight of the world literally held him down, kept him stooping far below his normal straight six-foot stature. “He’s talking to the prosecutor for me.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. Trying to cut a deal.”

“A deal?” Though I knew very little about anything in
Will’s profession, I thought that cutting a deal was what guilty people did.

“Danny knows what he’s doing.”

I nodded. Will and I stared at each other for a minute, neither one of us sure what to say. “Do you want coffee?” I finally asked. “Or breakfast? I could make you something.”

He shook his head. “No thanks. I’m not very hungry.” And then he retreated back into his study.

I tried to remember the last time we’d eaten breakfast together, and I couldn’t. It was something we’d done every day when we lived in the city—coffee and oatmeal at the kitchen table. I used to love to watch the way Will’s blue eyes lit up first thing in the morning, as if every new day had the possibility to be something special for him, for us.

But that was a long time ago. A different life. I sighed and then headed upstairs to get dressed, as if this was any other day in Deerfield, any other morning. I was playing tennis at nine-thirty, and I didn’t want to be late.

The Deerfield Country Club sat at the end of a long, winding drive on top of a hill. It was surrounded on all sides by tall, leafy oaks and thick, lush evergreens. The building itself was large and white, with thick columns out front that looked oddly more like something out of ancient Greece than modern-day suburbia.

The inside was lush and luxurious, appearing more like a five-star resort than a simple tennis and golf club: hallways with thick red carpeting and expensive artwork on the walls. But today, as I stepped inside, I noticed only one thing: the instant and almost deafening quiet.

And then it hit me, that feeling I’d had in junior high school, just after my mother had died of breast cancer. Back then,
everyone knew what had happened. Some of them had been to the funeral or even sent cards. But the first time I’d walked back into school that day, after she was dead, there was the unbearable quiet, this silent penetration of eyes, then whispers, about me, not to me. They all knew she was gone, knew I was suffering, but no one knew what to say or how to move, so for a few minutes, as I’d walked down the hall to my locker, the world had been eerily silent. I just kept looking down, watching my feet take one step after another. Counting them. One, two, three, four …

I did it now, staring at my too-white tennis shoes collapsing against the deep red carpet that led to the locker room.

And once inside I ran into the bathroom and shut the stall door. I felt dizzy, the blue tile floor swirling and dancing beneath my feet, and I tried to steady myself by sitting down on the toilet seat and taking a deep breath.

Danny was going to know what to do. Everything was going to be fine. Will was a judge. Will was a good judge, or I assumed he must be. This was a mistake. He’d done nothing wrong.

I took a deep breath, and I felt a little better, until I heard the unmistakable twitter of Bethany Maxwell’s laugh. Bethany was one of the women I played doubles with and also my friend. Her husband, Kevin, owned a company that made fireproof materials, which had taken off of late. So they were literally rolling in it, as she liked to casually slip into conversation as often as possible.

She was talking to someone, but her voice was muffled, far away, fuzzy, and I couldn’t make out her words at first. Then, all of a sudden, her voice became clear, and I heard her say, “Did you see the paper?”

“I did.” I was pretty sure that was Amber Tannenbaum,
Bethany’s doubles partner, whose husband was some big-shot CFO in New York City.

“I mean really,” Bethany said.

“Jennifer’s nice enough, but who’s going to want to be her friend now?” Amber asked.

Tears stung hot in my eyes, and the door of the stall started swimming in front of me.
Who’s going to want to be her friend now?

I thought about another woman whose name I couldn’t even remember now, who used to play doubles tennis with Bethany and Amber before they invited me.
She just didn’t fit in with us anymore,
Amber had told me, crinkling up her nose, when I’d asked what had happened.

No.
Bethany had shaken her head, while my partner, Lisa Rosenberg, had remained silent. And I’d thought it wise not to bring it up again.

I wiped the tears out of my eyes quickly and shook my head. Then I flushed the toilet, hoping that would be enough for them to move. It was.

When I walked back into the locker room, Bethany and Amber were standing there together with Lisa, who was not only my doubles partner, but also my next-door neighbor. Lisa was putting her hair in a ponytail, while Bethany and Amber were applying their makeup in the mirror. Yes, these two ladies never played tennis without their lipstick.
It doesn’t hurt to look beautiful when you’re sweating,
Amber would say, and make a face, as if the thought of sweating was really too much to bear.

“Oh, sweetie.” Bethany ran and gave me a hug, and I had this strange detached feeling, as if I were watching this unfold like a scene in a movie, from somewhere far away, somewhere distant.

“We heard.” Amber patted my shoulder.

“He’s totally innocent,” I said, enunciating the word
innocent
more than necessary, and looking directly at Amber, who didn’t even flinch.

“Of course he is,” Lisa said. “I didn’t believe it for a second.” I smiled at her, because I believed her. Lisa was always the most genuine of all my country club friends. She was the one who’d introduced me into the tennis club, and also the one who’d gotten me involved in the Deerfield Ladies Lunch Club.