Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (29 page)

“Yeah.”

They sat together on opposite sides of the bench. Amid gentle, rolling hills, a gray lake sprawled and steamed under the summer sun. Houses dotted the periphery, just visible through the trees. A few Canada geese glided lazily on the water.

Arlen cleared his throat to speak. “So, all I’m asking here . . . is why
her
?”

Will started to say,
I don’t know.
But he did know. He knew exactly. He’d known since way back when, since he’d first seen her on television when Arlen was tried. He put his hands in the loose pockets of his cargo shorts. “I feel like this is the part where I promise to stay away from her.”

“And . . . ?”

“And I don’t know if I can.”

Arlen gave a low laugh. On the lake, a few ducks began a noisy argument, splashing water with their wings, then settling down.

“Are you going to ask me to steer clear?” Will asked.

“Naw.”

“Why not?”

Arlen put his arm over the back of the bench, sprawling out in the heat. “Not my business. And besides, not for nothing, but she’ll be outta here soon. She’s only gonna stick around for so long. That’s what the note said.”

Will looked down. A goose was wandering toward them cautiously, probably looking for food. It stopped about ten feet away and settled in to watch them.

“An eavesdropper,” Will said.

Arlen didn’t reply—and Will hadn’t expected him to. But he wished it were easier to talk to his old friend. Arlen’s stint in prison had erected a wall of bricks between him and the rest of the world, and Will wished that he knew a way to break through it.

“Hey, remember that time we got that old moose head and scared your mom?” Will asked.

“What made you think of that?”

“The goose, I guess. Taxidermy.”

Arlen chuckled, shaking his head. “The moose head. Yeah. We could hardly carry it—the two of us.”

“But we did,” Will said. Arlen’s mother had been having dinner with a couple of ladies from her church, and Will and Arlen had found the stuffed head left out on the curb with somebody’s garbage. They’d walked it to and fro past the window until they heard one of the women shriek. “It was worth the grounding.”

“Yeah. Getting in trouble was fun back then.” Arlen glanced at him across the bench, then looked back to the low and thirsty lake. “I should tell you I lost my job.”

“At the coliseum?”

“Yep.”

“What happened?”

Arlen shrugged. “I did something stupid.”

Will didn’t ask for details; he didn’t need them. “Did they fire you?”

“No. I just left. And I didn’t tell the church people yet. But I’m sure they already know.”

“Will they cut off the money they’re giving you?”

“Doubt it. They’re real salt-of-the-earth types. Anyway, I just wanted you to know.”

“Well, you’re welcome to keep working for me.”

“I appreciate it. I do.”

“Why do I get the feeling there’s a
but
in there somewhere?”

Arlen sighed heavily. He picked up the white front of his shirt and fanned it up and down. “All these handouts. All the help. I’m grateful; I really am. But I keep on wondering, when’s it gonna be that I give the handout? That I can help? You know? When am I gonna be in a position to do some good for somebody, instead of the other way around?”

Will could have said,
You do good
. But he wanted Arlen to know he was heard, and so he kept quiet.

When Arlen spoke again his voice was tight. “Look. About that woman. Whatever you do or don’t do, I don’t care. I’m the last person to stand in the way of anybody being happy.”

“You should be happy too,” Will said.

“I’m learning,” he said. They watched as a young woman on an old bicycle rode past. She wore the tiniest shorts on the longest, tannest legs Will had ever seen.

“Yeah, I’m definitely learning,” Arlen said.

Will chuckled.

“You remember the time we found that dog out back behind your house—what’d we call it?” Arlen asked.

“Twitch.”

“I thought for sure your ma was gonna kill you when she found out you were feeding it your dinner every night.”

“She thought I had a tapeworm,” Will said.

Arlen laughed, a high and soft hooting, and he slapped his leg. When his face relaxed there was a new light in his eyes that Will was glad to see. “Good times,” he said.

Will smiled. Arlen was talking—not just answering questions or being polite. But talking. Though the sun beat down hot on the paved paths, the warm lake, the parchment-dry trees, neither of them made a move to go.

“Yeah,” Will said. “Good times.”

  *  *  *  

Eula had never meant to live alone in the house that she and Arlen had bought, and in the beginning, her mind played tricks on her. She saw things out of her peripheral vision—movements that, when she turned her head, were not movements at all. She caught herself talking on more than one occasion to people who weren’t there, and she wasn’t sure if that was more or
less
crazy than talking to herself. She sometimes cooked dinner only to realize that she’d cooked too much, and when she grew tired of leftovers, she walked them across the street to a neighbor who also lived alone.

Gradually, the notion that her house was too big for a single woman began to fade. She took lovers occasionally. She got a dog. She got engaged to a new man, who moved in with her for six months before he began to feel underfoot, and then they went their separate ways. Though she had no husband or family, the house took on her life, her stories. At times, she liked being single: no one’s mess to clean up but her own, no one to fight with over the bathroom in the morning. She’d had to struggle and make sacrifices in order to hang on to the house, to pay the mortgage by herself. Some days, she didn’t know why she stayed. But other days, she liked the feeling of mastery she had over her own space, decorating it with her mother’s cookie jars, framed posters of nature scenes that caught her eye, and oversized pottery.

Lately, her house had begun to feel strange to her. And the feeling of not being alone was nagging her once again. In the morning after her last date, after she’d sent the good doctor home with a virtuous kiss good night, she’d gotten up and made herself pancakes for breakfast. She poured herself a tall glass of orange juice and breezed through a kitchen utensils catalog. Life was not bad. There was nothing to complain about.

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flicker of movement. But when she turned her head, nothing was there.

Because Lauren knew she didn’t have many hours left in Richmond, she decided to take aggressive action. She had no more patience for waiting around to see if Arlen would hear her out. She wanted to do something good for him before she left town, and she had only one card to play.

At Maisie’s house, her leg twitched involuntarily against the side of the bed while her laptop seemed to take forever to boot up. With fingers shaking from coffee and the sense of time bearing down, she looked for Eula’s address. It was simply a matter of doing an Internet search. But where Eula’s name came up, hers did too. The words about her, though she’d read them before, still glared:

She shut down the Web page. Nine years ago, Arlen had been the monster and Lauren the hero. Now they’d switched. At times, Lauren wished she could shout to the world:
I meant well!
But then she wondered: Did she? Or had she cared more about her career than justice? She knew there was no single answer. Instead, all the
minor elements of Arlen’s case—the judge, the jury, the evidence, her own ambition, the natural human urge for settling scores—all of it had cemented together and created a singular and monolithic mistake.

She scanned the search results. There was a new page, one that she hadn’t seen before, that mentioned her name and Eula’s—a blog post by some anonymous, antigovernment anarchist. She couldn’t help herself; she took a moment to read:

Lauren shivered. Typos and spelling errors aside, she’d never gotten used to the idea of perfect strangers wishing harm on her—though she could tell from the writer’s out-of-control style that he was just blowing off steam. She’d run across militia guys before in her travels. They were volatile and angry, their rage fueled by an infinite and natural resource: helplessness. Sometimes she wished she could talk back to them, say,
You do realize that Arlen had a defense counsel, right?
But in the eyes of her critics,
she’d
been the
all-powerful and tyrannical aggressor, and Arlen’s defense was a puppy dog. If any one individual person deserved censure, it was her.

She had no time for getting fearful and wobbly now; she had things to do before she left Richmond, and no time to do them in.

She drove with her hands tight on the wheel, drove until she found the house that her GPS system said belonged to Eula. At the front door, she knocked and waited. Her heart felt fizzy and pressurized, and at the very edges of her peripheral vision, the light was going blurry. She blinked the dizziness away.

A woman opened the door. The youthfulness of her face, her smooth skin, her high cheekbones, was startling. Lauren hadn’t expected her to be so young-looking. “May I help you?”

“Eula?”

“If you’re another reporter, I’m calling the cops.”

Lauren gripped the cast-iron railing at her side. “So they’ve been getting to you too.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Lauren. I was part of Arlen Fieldstone’s trial. I . . . I stepped in as the prosecutor when he—”

“Uh-huh. I know who you are now,” she said. “You okay? You’re looking a little green.”

Lauren nodded. “May I come in?”

“Come sit down,” Eula said, frowning. Lauren followed her inside.

Eula was a petite woman, but she was not small or frail. She held her shoulders pulled back under a deep V-necked shirt that showed significant cleavage. She was shoeless, but she wore black tights with a run on her foot that had been painted with purple nail polish. Her skirt was small and black.

“Here you go.” Eula gestured to an armchair. “You need water or something?”

“I’m fine,” Lauren said, and she found that once she was sitting down, inside Eula’s home, she
was
fine. Her heartbeat went back to normal, a tentative peace.

“What is it that brings you here, Lauren?” Eula asked. She did not sit, but stood in the center of the room, her arms crossed, her stance wide. Lauren read the signs: she wasn’t up for a long conversation.

“I’ve been in Richmond. Hoping to apologize to your ex-husband for my part in his conviction.”

“Is that so?”

“I feel some personal responsibility for what happened. I’m doing my best to make things right.”

“But let me guess: Arlen won’t see you.”

“No.”

Eula chuckled and shook her head. “I’m not surprised. The man always did know how to hold a grudge. Better than anyone I ever met.”

“He’s got reason to,” Lauren said.

Eula’s face darkened. “You asking me to apologize too?”

“No—”

“Because as far as I’m concerned, I did the best thing I could do at the time. Not much more a person can ask of herself than that.”

“I know,” Lauren said. “I’m not here to make you feel bad.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“I’m here because I want to know if you would consider going to see him.”

Lauren watched her, the twitch of her upper lip, the brightness that flashed in her eyes before she managed to smother it. When she spoke, she’d regained her poise. “Did Arlen ask for me?”

“Honestly? No. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go anyway.”

Eula walked to the mantel over the little fireplace in her room. The living room was quaint—more comfortable than stylish, with
soft pinks and soft greens and ruffled beige flounces on the windows. In some ways, it was a room for a woman much older than Eula. A woman still living a decade ago.

Eula stood beside the shadowed, glassed-in fireplace, drumming her fingers on the mantel. “You see that?”

Lauren followed Eula’s gaze to a small silver box that was sitting not a few feet from her. It was tin, etched with motifs of elephants and baobab trees. Eula touched it; Lauren wondered if she knew how tender the gesture appeared.

“It’s empty,” Eula said. “Arlen gave it to me as a wedding present. Said that he was gonna fill it up with gold and diamonds, a little something for every year of our marriage, until it overflowed.”

Lauren did not have to know human behavior to understand. There was something universal about the countenance of heartbreak—and of a woman still in love.

“But don’t feel too bad for me,” Eula said. “I made a choice, and now I have to stick with it. I thought Arlen did it. Just like everybody. I thought he was guilty. I can’t believe he would want to see me now.”

“You don’t know that,” Lauren said, leaning forward on the cushion beneath her. “He’s hurting too. At least give him the opportunity to
not
see you, if he doesn’t want to.” She stood and went to Eula, whose eyes were clear and tearless. She pulled a bit of paper from her pocket; she’d written down Arlen’s contact information before leaving her car. “Here,” she said, and she pressed it into Eula’s hand. “I hope you’ll think about it.”