Life Penalty

T
he nightmare began at exactly seventeen minutes after four on the last afternoon of an especially warm sunny day in April. Up until that moment Gail Walton had considered herself a lucky woman, and if one of the reporters who later thronged to her house at 1042 Tarlton Drive had asked her to name her reasons for so considering herself, she would have been able to do so easily.

Holding up the hands she would later use to shield her face from their cameras and the relentless, blinding flashes of lights, she would proudly enumerate the reasons for her good fortune with her long, elegant fingers. The first reason had to be Jack, a man as straightforward as his name, nothing fancy about him and perhaps a little rough around the edges, but a giving and honest man to whom she had been married the last eight years. The next two fingers would mark off each of her daughters, Jennifer and Cindy, two very different children by two very different men, which would bring down the fourth finger, the fourth reason Gail Walton considered herself a lucky woman, her ex-husband Mark Gallagher. Not all women enjoyed the easy, relaxed relationship Gail could claim with her ex-husband, and though it hadn’t always been such, the last few years had brought each of them to the pleasant realization that perhaps their five years
together had not been so misspent after all.

She was approaching forty with the energy and ap pearance of a woman at least a decade younger, and her health had always been good. She lived in a nice house in a nice city, and if Livingston, New Jersey, didn’t exactly spell the excitement and romance of New York, it was still a safer and calmer place in which to live and raise a family. Besides, New York was less than an hour’s drive away, even in the worst of traffic, and thanks to Jack’s very substantial income—he was a veterinarian—they were able to make the trip into the city as often as they liked. Jack’s income also afforded her the luxury of not having to work at a full-time job herself. She’d had enough of that in the years following her separation and divorce from Mark, when she’d been forced through necessity to leave her small daughter with her mother while she worked as a bank teller to support them. Now she was able to relish long lunches with her friends who, more often than not, had to dash off to return to their jobs, leaving her to linger over her coffee and to contemplate their parting looks, filled with an equal mixture of envy and confusion. Envy because she didn’t have to rush to a job she found less than satisfying, and confusion because didn’t she know that working out side the home, having a career, was essential to a woman’s satisfaction? What was she doing spending all her time at home looking after a six-year-old?

She’d given up trying to explain her motivations to her working friends. The fact was that she simply
enjoyed
being a stay-at-home mother, being there for her daughters when they returned home from school and it was her deep conviction that her sixteen-year-old needed her there every bit as much as her six-year-old. She remembered how much she’d liked having her own mother at home in the years when she was growing up. Besides, she was not entirely without outside ambitions. A gifted piano
player all her life, she had recently taken to giving piano lessons to a number of children in the area, and her pupils now numbered five, one for every day of the school week. Ranging in age from eight to twelve, they came to her house at four o’clock every afternoon for half an hour. Jennifer was busy with her homework at that time; Cindy was addicted to “Sesame Street.”

Another reason to be considered lucky, she would have told anyone who asked, was her parents. Both were alive and well and retired to Florida where they lived in a bright and spacious condominium right by the ocean. In the four years since they had moved to Palm Beach, Gail and Jack had visited them at least once a year, always with the girls, and once a year her parents journeyed back to Livingston to look after the children while Gail and Jack took some much needed time to themselves. Their close friends, Laura and Mike, both professionals, he a lawyer, she a social worker, childless by choice, were always chiding them over their seeming rut. Florida with the kids in the winter, Cape Cod by themselves in the summer. Laura and Mike were always disappearing into the more exotic locales on this earth—India last year, China the year before that. Gail had no deep desire to see India or China. They seemed so far away from everything that made her feel safe—her home, her family, the city she grew up in.

Maybe she was in a rut, Gail would have had to confess, but it was one of her own choosing. She had never felt comfortable with too much excitement. It was one of the reasons her first marriage had ended and her second was so successful. Mark had been unpredictable; Jack plotted out every move. Mark would get into his car—always a foreign sports car, sleek and metallic and bright—and just drive. He never knew where he was headed; he never consulted a map. If he got lost—and he was always getting lost—he would drive for hours rather
than stop to ask for directions. He didn’t seem to care if he ever got where he was supposed to be going. Jack Walton, on the other hand, was a man of lists. His time was highly organized and each minute was accounted for. As each item on his list was accomplished, it would be crossed out with a neat black line. If Jack was going anywhere, to another city or just another part of town, he would get out the map the night before and plan his route. He drove a new car every two years, always American, always white, and he was never late. Mark had made Gail very nervous; Jack made her feel secure.

More than anything else about her life, Gail liked this feeling of security. Her sister Carol was entirely different, more like Mark, and Gail had often thought her first husband would have been much happier with her younger sister. But Carol, who had obviously adored him, was too restless to wait out the five years it took for Gail’s marriage to fall apart and had moved to New York, where she had taken up residence with first one painter and then another before moving on to dancers and then, probably for the sheer perversity of it, a stockbroker with whom she had been living for the last two years. Mark himself had gotten married again three years ago to a wonderful woman named Julie who seemed devoted to him and who treated Gail’s daughter Jennifer as lovingly as if she’d been her own. It was something else that Gail felt thankful for.

Life, she would have told the newspapers that later clamored for her statements when she was too weak and sick to answer them, was exactly as she would have wished.

She rarely varied her routine. Her alarm went off at precisely seven-fifteen on school days and she never had any trouble getting out of bed. Always an early riser, mornings were her favorite time. She would shower quickly and dress and then go downstairs to get breakfast ready, giving everyone else in the house the extra time to
sleep. She liked this time to herself, her hands busy setting the table and making the coffee, her mind free to wander without having to think about anything in particular. It relaxed her for the next hour when she was rushing around frantically trying to get everyone ready and out of the house in time for school and the office.

Jennifer was the worst. A typical teenager, she stayed up too late at night and had trouble waking up in the morning, no matter how long Gail tried to let her sleep. In the end, after gentle shakings and soft words had inevitably failed to reach her subconscious, Gail was forced to physically drag her older daughter out of bed, and only then, when she was sprawled across the floor like a rag doll, would Jennifer’s eyes begin gradually to open.