Break and Enter (30 page)

“ ‘Cause that’s the way it is,” he concluded drunkenly.

“Am I doing the wrong thing now?”

“No,” he said. “I honestly don’t think so. I’m very happy about what you’re doing.”

He turned off Market. Cobblestone thudded beneath the tires, a sound that meant they were home. There was an open parking space under a streetlamp two doors from the house.

“I love this street,” Janice whispered, shaking her head sadly. “I always have, long before we ever moved here.”

“Well, we’re home now.”

He saw fear—a trusting fear—in her eyes. It was the same fear he saw in the families of murder victims, fear that the world had been torn apart and could never be put together again, trust that he would reassure them, offer them something to help.

“You love me?” she asked.

“Yes, Janice. Yes.”

He reached for the door.

“Wait,” she whispered. “Let’s just wait a moment here.”

He pulled her to him and made an affectionate whistling noise against her eyebrow.

“Hmm?” she said.

He kissed her nose, dabbed his tongue against its tip. She smiled sleepily. He was glad they had made it home safely.

“I want it again,” she said as in a dream, gathering his hand to her breast.

He complied, then kissed her on the forehead and gently on the cheeks and nose again, then the lips; a deep, open kiss, then nuzzled in the private place behind her ear. He didn’t care if she fell asleep and
they didn’t make love, just as long as he could hold her. That was all he asked. If she fell asleep in their bed, he would feel that God loved him. That was silly and hokey, but he believed it. Maybe he would start going to Quaker Meeting again, out of gratitude. Janice would fall asleep and he would curl up with her and hold her and know who he was again.

“It’s cold out, too cold for sleepy ladies,” he whispered, tucking in her scarf. They locked the car and walked toward the dark house. Janice touched her finger to the iron railing that ran up the beveled granite steps to their door.

“You sure you love me?” she asked him. “You want me?”

“Yes.”

Inside, Janice dreamily walked up the stairs, heading straight down the hall. “It’s clean,” she said. He followed her. She let her fingernails trail along the wall. “Oh, my.” She smiled when they were both inside the bathroom. “You are not allowed in here now, mister—sir.” She checked the box beneath the sink and found her old diaphragm and the curled-up tube of contraceptive jelly. Deep within some sober sector of his brain, Peter guiltily rejoiced that he had replaced the diaphragm in its case. Was he evil for doing so? Of course he was.

“This will come in handy,” Janice said.

“Don’t use it,” he told her. “Don’t.”

“No?” Her eyes filmed and her lip quivered happily.

“Have to start sooner or later, right?”

They embraced and she kissed him, pushing her wine-soaked tongue deep into his mouth. “I do love you, Peter Scattergood, and I do wish to be your wife, forever. Now get out of here so I can do my business.”

Before he left her, he looked into the bathroom mirror, and what he saw—it was too good to be true—was his wife in his arms, her silky brown hair falling across his fingers, her nose buried into the wool of his suit, the youthful, eager flush on each of their cheeks and his own dilated, glad eyes defying the harsh light in the mirror. And wouldn’t it be wonderful to make love knowing that this might bring a baby? Finally, after thousands upon thousands of copulations, with the sense that something truly wonderful might be created? The possibility was profoundly erotic.

“Okay,” he whispered, hugging tighter. “I’ll do the door and the heat and the lights. Be back up in a minute.”

Then, having floated goofily down the stairs, something about the sound of the front-door lock as it turned made him pause. He realized that when he had passed the bedroom on his way down, the door had been closed. A minute ago it had been open.

Worried about an intruder, sweating suddenly, Peter tried to climb the stairs. But the wine made him sway from the wall to the banister. He fell forward and crawled stupidly on hands and knees to the top step. What he saw there made him stop. Janice paused naked with her hand on the door to the bedroom. She stood radiant beneath the soft hall light, her shoulders and breasts and arms gilded. Her nipples were hard, perhaps from the cool air. She was completely familiar to him. He knew all of her, every line. The sight of her naked seemed the most natural and wonderful thing in the world.

“My bathrobe’s not here.” She stuck out her bottom lip in mock sadness, then smiled at him. He was unable to talk, for he knew that smile and had craved it for weeks—it meant their history together was cherished, irrevocably intimate, that she forgave him all and forgave both of them, that her best hope was renewed. She turned the handle and walked into the bedroom.

The naked woman who walked out of the bedroom and shut the door five seconds later had been hurt so badly that she was unable to speak. She stiffened her back and looked into her husband’s face with eyes filled not with anger—though doubtless that would come later, in greater proportion than ever before—but with simple incomprehension, brute shock. Her mouth was small, her eyes wide. Peter felt a crushing pressure on his head, as if two massive hands rubbed his skull between them. Janice peered into him and well beyond toward the unfathomably horrible trick that had been played on her. He tried awkwardly to move toward her, fumbling his feet on the stairs.
No!
she mouthed. She held her hands out in front of her, motioning at him to keep his distance. She wanted no comfort from him.

Neither of them spoke.

Janice retreated to the bathroom. He heard a muffled choking noise. He sank to the carpet, somehow knowing what she had seen. Janice
emerged with her dress on and carrying some clothing. Cold sober. Her polished pumps touched the floor in front of his eyes. Janice hurried down the stairs, found her coat and purse in the living room, and slipped out the door she had walked through not ten minutes before. The car engine roared to life, and she gunned her way out.

In time he stood and lurched into the bedroom. A cigarette tingled in his nose. Janice must have known immediately. The room was dark, save for the red pin light over the bed.

“I guess I fucked things up,” Cassandra’s remorseless voice came to him. He was dead-dull inside his mind, guilty as charged, no need for a confession.

“Please,” he murmured in a low shocked voice. “Please leave here, please.”

IN THE HOSPITAL,
the shift nurse asked him to wait outside while she checked his mother, saying she had lost more blood than expected because of the growth of the tumor. Peter checked his watch. Ten minutes was all he could afford. The new week was coming at him like the Market Street subway, one second a bright light in the distance, and the next, eighty tons of noise and violence about to run him over. The events of Saturday night had more or less trashed Sunday. Cassandra had gotten out of bed, the glow of her cigarette floating through the dark. Standing in the doorway—determined to crush out any semblance of romance—he’d flipped all the bedroom lights on. She stood naked, her bony chest meager and sad.

“Your wife is a very beautiful woman,” she’d said then, either in self-deprecation or in anger, he didn’t know which. She’d walked to his closet, where she’d hung her dress, then put her jewelry back on and brushed her hair. He’d watched the muscles in her arm. She was not attractive, not now, and yet a little jolt of misplaced sexual desire ran through him then. Cassandra had turned and met his gaze. Her voice was direct: “Remember, two women were disappointed tonight, not just one.”

His response: “This time, leave the key here.” And she did.

Sunday night, the local networks, desperate to scare up some sort of new twist on the Carothers case, had provoked the Governor into looking
grimly into the camera lights and saying he was “taking a particular interest in this case.” The D.A. had also been chased down in Washington and had uttered a few sonorous words to the cameras about his faith in his staff. This activity was, of course, a non-statement but it added another concentric ring of media coverage, another piece of grist for the daily news cycle, and would make Hoskins levitate in anxiety. Lying in bed, Peter had watched the newscasts. How stupid and meaningless the speculation! A trial would be months away, yet the anchors frowned and shook their heads gravely. Soon, Peter hoped, maybe even that morning, he’d get some proof that Carothers had killed Johnetta Henry. Just a dime-sized speck of blood would do.

He was due at work an hour ago but had called in to explain where he was. Hoskins had been unforgiving, even suspicious. “Tell everybody in your family to get better real fast, Peter. We got the Governor watching us.” As if there weren’t other cases going on that the homicide unit didn’t have to worry about. Carothers had rightfully been denied bail and so was safely in custody, yet Hoskins would surely have his foot jammed on the gas, ordering further forensic tests at the sealed apartment in West Philadelphia, hollering from his desk to various innocent passersby, and acting for all the world as if his day in the sun was approaching. Using Peter as the tunnel rat while he carried the torch from a safe distance.

The nurse let him into his mother’s room. There she was, alive, apparently, on her back, a tube into her wrist. Though she was not going to die, she seemed, if not dead, then suspended between her past and the several remaining decades of her life. He pulled a chair to the side of the bed and listened to the even whisper of her breath. Above her closed eyes rose arched wrinkles. They suggested not surprise but attention and decision. Her nose, once smooth and sharp, was rounder and heavier, the pores larger and not at all clear. The lines that started above the nostrils curved heavily down to the corners of the mouth, where there was no indication of mirth. Her upper lip and chin revealed a growth of hair not there when she was younger. The lips, which had always been thin, retained a patch of lipstick, and he knew that before the operation his mother had faced herself in the mirror and, with habitual perfection, puckered, applied the stick, sucked her lips in, then dabbed away the
extraneous gloss with a tissue. Applying lipstick would not deliver her safely across the void she was to travel, and yet she was unable to do otherwise, for it was one of the small badges that ordered her life. The stern, sleeping mask of her face seemed to challenge the forces of dissolution. Life had been maintained, a family kept whole. “And in these times,” the lines of her face seemed to say, “a family kept whole is a mighty act.” A legacy few accomplish. His father, wise yet not strong, amiable yet not passionate, had needed Peter’s mother for the architecture of daily life as his career ebbed and secretaries and subordinates and business associates had fallen away from him. How they had all depended on her.

Janice, he realized, had sensed this strength and moved toward it tentatively, still needing a mother. She had been just young enough, at nineteen, to reseed the trust of a child in his mother, who, naturally protective and forever in a houseful of men, found in Janice something she had missed in never having a daughter. He checked his watch, bent down, and placed a silent kiss on his mother’s forehead. On the table he left a spray of irises, her favorite.

COFFEE AND SUGAR IN HIS BLOODSTREAM,
papers piled on his desk, he dumped out his legal briefcase, which had remained unopened since Friday afternoon. The phones rang everywhere, and for half an hour he caught up, talked to everyone, got back up to speed. But the office tedium, the small intimacies at the watercooler, the arrhythmically submerged tones of phones ringing close and far away, the men’s room strategizing by attorneys on adjacent toilets—all this which once was the familiar offstage structure, supporting his onstage efforts in court, now tortured him with its oblivious tedium. Did no one realize the pain he was in? His mother was in the hospital, his wife
gone.
Why did they all mock him by not consoling him? And yet the tedium offered, by dint of its disconnectedness to his own heart, a refuge. At work he could lose himself for several hours at a time.

And still, the tide of paper and people did not reduce his worry about what had happened with Janice; the passing of every hour filled him with the apprehension. His father had counseled that he wait awhile—why hadn’t he listened? Why hadn’t he gotten the key back from Cassandra
after she’d first used it? Maybe he
had
dawdled in that respect, stringing her along for convenience’s sake. He should have suspected she might show up unannounced, based on her previous behavior—he could spot bums begging quarters, he mused, so why couldn’t he spot a woman begging for love? Had he allowed events to slip toward this sort of outcome because he wanted to punish Janice? That was plausible. He was angry with her, angry at the rejection, but he had to believe he had not meant to hurt her. He believed himself able to temper his anger with reason and charity and perception. He had argued in court hundreds of times—clutching his fists before the jurors’ faces, reminding them to search courageously for justice—that men and women have the right to be angry but have the responsibility for how that anger is expressed.

Unless Janice and John Apple were sleeping late these days, she had arrived at work about ten minutes ago, had skimmed the overnight log, checked to see that no crises had come up, and made sure all the women in the house were accounted for. Then would begin the day of writing grant applications and solicitations and outreach coordination. At a miserable twenty-six thousand! She could be making twice that easily in private practice! He called her. Janice answered on the first ring.

“We need to talk—I’d like to talk,” he said.

Alarmingly calm: “About what?”

“What happened the other night was an accident. I, uh—”

“Involuntary behavior, Peter? Is
that
your defense?”

“Look, I had no idea—”

“Peter, I’m having a very hectic day,” Janice said with infinite control, “and my responsibilities lie elsewhere, not with crazy-gluing your ego back together, so let me say this as best I can: I don’t care if you didn’t know
that woman
was going to be in what used to be my bed—it happened and it hurt.” Her voice was neither bitter nor apologetic. “It’s finished. I’m tired of talking and negotiating. Let me go without a fight, okay? We’ll just get all the papers signed and then we can get on with our own lives. That’s not so much to ask. I don’t hate you, Peter. I still do love you very much. But we’re finished.”