The Secret Life of Ceecee Wilkes (4 page)

“Part of it.”

“He’s paranoid. He thinks every sound is something coming to get him. And he doesn’t trust people much. If you could’ve known him before, you would have liked him. You’d understand why I care about him. I’m just glad he came back alive. So many people didn’t. And he’s still smart. Smarter than my sister and me.”

“You have a sister? Does she live here, too?”

“Nope,” he said in a way that told her the subject was off-limits.

She sat up, hugging her knees through the blanket, and surveyed the dimly lit trash heap that was his room. She had to face it: she was in love with a slob. An idea popped into her head. A way to put a smile back on his face.

“I’d like to clean up your house for you,” she said. “I’m a fantastic organizer.”

“No way,” he said.

“I want to do it. Please let me.” It was the least she could do for someone who’d, in all likelihood, given her five thousand dollars.

He stroked her bare back with his fingers. “Are you going to apply to go to school in the spring?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Then the house is yours,” he said. “Do what you like with it. Just…stay out of Marty’s room.”

“I plan to stay out of Marty’s
way,
” she said.

“Good thinking.”

“Do you have some studying to do?”

“I need to do some typing,” he said. “But I don’t need to—”

“I’ll start right here, right now,” she interrupted him. “You don’t mind me doing things in your closet and your drawers?”

He laughed, reaching beneath the sheet to stroke the side of her breast. “You’ve already done some pretty good things in my drawers,” he said, and it took her a minute to get it.

She gave him a little shove. “You study and I’ll straighten up,” she said.

He got out of bed and pulled on his jeans. She followed close behind him, feeling his eyes on her body as she got dressed. When she looked up he was smiling at her. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to just sit here while you’re slaving around in my room looking cute as a button.”

“You won’t be just sitting there, you’ll be working.” She flipped on the overhead light, took his arm and guided him to his desk. “And I
love
doing this kind of thing. Honestly. When I left one of the homes I was in, my foster mother told the social worker she’d miss how I always straightened up after everyone.”

“I’d miss a lot more than that,” Tim said, taking a seat at his desk.

She bent over to kiss the top of his head. It was hard to believe that twenty-four hours ago she’d thought this relationship was over. Now she felt at ease, as though they’d been together for years. She hoped that’s what was ahead of them: years of being together.

She started with his clothes, tossing the ones that were obviously soiled into the overstuffed hamper and hanging and folding the others. Then she worked on his bookshelf, where papers and notebooks were piled helter-skelter. Tim typed at his desk. He was a good typist, and she worked to the clacking sound of his fingers flying over the keys.

After an hour or so, he pushed back from his desk and looked down at her. She sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by piles of books and papers. She rested her hand on one of the stacks.

“These are things I don’t know what to do with,” she said. “And what’s this?” She held up a packet of papers she’d found stapled together. On the cover sheet was a line drawing of a man with his head over a block, an executioner standing next to him, ax raised and ready to fall. The picture gave her the creeps. Across the top of the paper, in large handwritten letters, was the word
SCAPE
. “What’s SCAPE?” she asked.

Tim looked at the sheaf of papers in her hand. He stared at it a long time as if trying to remember where he’d seen it before. Then his eyes met hers. “If I tell you something, can you keep it between us?”

“Tim,” she said, as if she couldn’t believe he’d ask such a question. “Of course,” she said. “Look at everything I’ve told you.”

He still looked dubious. Then he stood up and held out his hand for her. She got to her feet and walked with him from his room, down the hall and into a huge bedroom that she guessed had belonged to his parents. It was a relief to be in a room the brothers had yet to trash. The queen-size bed was a four-poster and the floor was covered by a red-and-beige Persian rug that stretched nearly wall to wall.

Tim sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up one of the framed photographs from the marble-topped night table. She sat next to him, and he put his arm around her as he held the picture on her knees. It was of three teenagers, two boys and a girl, grinning at the camera in a moment of simple joy. The boy on the left was Tim. His blond curls were longer and wilder, and his smile was different than it was now. More open. Less jaded by time and experience.

“That’s you,” CeeCee said.

“Right.” Tim pointed to the boy on the right. “And that’s Marty.”

The grinning young Marty bore the clean-cut, steel-jawed good looks of a soldier. “Wow, I wouldn’t have recognized him.”

“He’d just turned eighteen here,” Tim said. “Shipped out the next week. Andie—” Tim pointed to the girl standing between them “—and I were fifteen.”

“She’s your…this is your sister?” CeeCee asked.

For the first time since she’d asked him about SCAPE, Tim smiled. “My twin,” he said, his fingertips lightly touching the glass over Andie’s picture. His voice sounded swollen with love for his sister. “And that’s where SCAPE comes in.”

“I don’t get it,” she said.

Tim let out a long sigh. “A couple of years ago, Andie was arrested for murder.”

CeeCee caught her breath. “Murder?” she asked. “Did she do it?”

Tim didn’t answer the question. “When she finally got her day in court last summer, the jury came to the conclusion that she did.”

CeeCee suddenly understood Tim’s concerns about prison reform. “Why did they think she did it?”

“Because they didn’t really know her. Andie couldn’t hurt anyone. And the thing is… Marty screwed things up for her. I don’t blame him for what he did, but he still feels like crap about it.”

“What did he do?”

Tim stared at the picture. “See, what happened was, this photographer was supposed to come take pictures of our house to do a spread for
Southern Living Classics.
You know, the magazine?”

She nodded, although she didn’t know the magazine at all.

“My parents were in Europe,” Tim continued, “so the guy was just going to photograph the exterior and do the rest when they got back. Andie was home, but she was studying in her room. We were both finishing up our sophomore year at Carolina. She’d—we’d—just turned nineteen. Anyhow, she said she didn’t even know the guy was here taking pictures, and the next day, one of our neighbors saw him dead in the backyard. He’d been stabbed about a dozen times with a kitchen knife. The neighbor said she saw Andie outside talking to him the day before.” Tim set the photograph back on the night table and stood up, running his fingers through his hair. “So, then things got all screwed up,” he said.

CeeCee tried to mask her horror. A man had been murdered in the yard behind the house she was sitting in. Stabbed a dozen times. She shuddered at the thought.

“The cops interviewed Andie and Marty and me separately.” Tim idly touched objects on the long dresser. Another photograph. A hand mirror. A silver cigarette lighter. “And we all said different things. I told the truth. I said I was on campus around the time they figured the guy was murdered, which I was, and that I’d met Marty for lunch. He’d just gotten back from Vietnam and was kind of a mess.”

Tim opened one of the top dresser drawers and pulled out an unopened pack of Winstons. CeeCee sat quietly as he lit a cigarette and let out a stream of smoke. He held the pack toward her and she shook her head.

“Marty lied, though,” Tim said. “He said he was home with Andie all afternoon, that she never went outside. He said it to protect her, of course.” He laughed mirthlessly. “This is so screwed up,” he said.

“And what did Andie say?” she asked.

“That she was home alone and never saw the guy. Her prints were on the knife, and she said that was because it was from our kitchen and she used it all the time. So, Marty got a slap on the wrist for lying and Andie got put in jail for a year and a half while she waited for a trial. My parents came home right away and got her a decent lawyer, but Andie’s story was screwy and the jury knew it. The prosecution made the case that it was premeditated. That Andie killed him for his camera equipment, even though they could never prove anything was missing. The thing is, Andie never believed she’d be convicted, so she never told anyone what really happened. She lied during the trial and lied to her lawyer because—” he took a long drag on the cigarette and looked squarely at CeeCee “—because she really
did
kill him, but thought things would go worse for her if she admitted it.”

“She did it?” The scene in the yard grew more vivid in her eyes. She saw the pretty blonde in the photograph plunging a knife into a stranger’s heart. Twelve times.

“She told the truth
after
she got convicted. It was…devastating. We were all in the courtroom when the verdict was announced. My mother started sobbing, and Andie stood up and shouted, ‘I want to tell the truth! I want to tell the truth!’ It was a little late for that.”

“What
was
the truth?”

“The guy
raped
her.” Tim raised the cigarette to his lips, his hand trembling. “He got her to let him inside to shoot some of the interior and then he—” Tim stopped himself. “Let’s just say he was a brutal son of a bitch. She went a little crazy after he left the house and she grabbed the knife and went out in the yard and let him have it. Got him back for what he did to her. I believed her. We all did. But her attorney didn’t and it was just too little too late. If she perjured herself once, she’d do it again. That’s what they figured.” Tim leaned against the dresser, his arms folded across his chest, and looked directly at CeeCee. “She got the death penalty,” he said.

Everything fell into place. “Oh,” she said.

“And our mother couldn’t take it. Mom always had problems with depression and she felt guilty that she and my father traveled so much and she hadn’t been there for Andie. Even though we were all old enough to take care of ourselves. So,” Tim said, and raised his hands in a helpless gesture, “I came home a few days after the trial to find my mother dead of an overdose.” He looked at the bed where CeeCee still sat, and she knew that’s where he’d found his mother. She stood up.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, overwhelmed. His family, apparently once prosperous and happy, had quickly turned to dust. A daughter sentenced to death. A brother gone crazy in Vietnam. A mother’s suicide. She wrapped her arms around Tim, pressing her cheek to his bare chest. “It’s all so horrible,” she said.

He returned the embrace and she felt his chin rest on the top of her head. “You still want to be here with me?” he asked.

“More than ever,” she said. She could comfort him. They could comfort each other. “Is Andie…is she still alive?” she asked.

“On death row,” he said. “And I still haven’t told you about SCAPE,” he said.

She leaned back to look up at him. “What is it?”

He put out his cigarette and drew her back to the bed again. “We—Marty and I and some lawyers—have been trying to get her sentence reduced. SCAPE is an organization of people who are against the death penalty. It stands for Stop Capital Punishment Everywhere. But it’s kind of an underground group.”

“What does that mean?”

“Did you ever hear of the Weather Underground?”

CeeCee shrugged. The name was familiar, but she didn’t know why.

“It was a group of people who believed things needed to be different and who gave up on conventional channels. So, in the case of SCAPE, we try to find ways to get rid of the death penalty. We protest and…that sort of thing.”

“Have you tried writing to President Carter?” she asked.

“It’s really not up to Carter,” Tim said. “The only person who could stay her execution is Governor Russell. We’ve written to him and tried to get in to see him. He doesn’t give a shit. He’s a hard-liner who’s glad to see the death penalty back. He’s an asshole. I think he sees Andie as someone he can use as an example. ‘See? Even women will pay if they disobey the laws of the land.’”

“There’s got to be
something
you can do,” she said.

He looked at her and for the first time since he’d started talking about Andie, there was a smile on his face. “I love your optimism,” he said. “And I think I’m falling in love with you.”

They were the words she was waiting for. “I
know
I love you,” she said.

Tim wound a lock of her hair around his index finger. “I can honestly say I’ve never felt this way about a girl before,” he said. “You’re young, and I thought that might be a problem at first, but you have such a way about you. You’re so positive and you make me feel more positive. Thank you.”

She nodded.

“And
please
keep this…this stuff about SCAPE between you and me.”

He looked worried and her heart filled with love for him. “I would do anything for you,” she said, and she meant it.

E
very moment she spent with Tim, her love for him deepened. In the coffee shop in the morning, she felt the sweet secret of their relationship in the air between them. Oh, Ronnie knew how much she loved him, but she didn’t know—and she could never understand—the bond that was growing between them. Ronnie was still into playing games with guys. She told CeeCee to flirt with other customers in the coffee shop to make Tim jealous. She told her to fake orgasms in order to boost his ego. The orgasm problem
did
worry her, but for the most part, she laughed off her friend’s advice.

She’d not been loved this way since she was twelve. Everything she did was appreciated, even applauded. They were lovers and best friends. He was helping her with her application for Carolina. The deadline was mid-January, but he said the sooner she applied, the better. She had to get her high-school transcripts and write an essay, among other things, and she felt him holding her hand every step of the way. She thought her acceptance would mean as much to him as it would to her.

She’d moved from organizing Tim’s room and closet to straightening the rest of the house. The once-filthy kitchen was now spotless, every pot and pan in its place. She’d polished the living-room furniture with lemon oil and scrubbed mildew from the tile in the bathroom. Tim told her she didn’t need to do any of it, but it gave her a sense of satisfaction. He did so much for her; she loved being able to give back, and she began to feel some ownership in the beautiful mansion.

Pictures of Andie were everywhere. She’d pick them up and study the girl’s eager smile, thinking,
You had no idea what fate had in store for you.
She would imagine Andie being raped by the photographer, and even though she knew the rape had occurred inside the house, in her mind it took place at night on the front porch—a front porch that didn’t even exist at the mansion. Tim told her childhood stories about his sister, how she brought home stray kittens and how, at age seven, she tried to sneak into his hospital room when he’d had his appendix out because no one would let her visit him. How she’d tried to climb into the coffin at their grandmother’s funeral. The love CeeCee felt for Tim began to expand to encompass his sister.

“Can I meet her?” she asked one night when he was telling her Andie stories in bed.

“I’ll look into it,” he said. “She’s in Raleigh and they limit who can visit, but I think you
should
meet her. Y’all would really love each other.”

Funny how love could double and then triple. She even felt some of it toward Marty. Marty began to see her as friend rather than foe, and the night he said that her fried chicken was the best he’d ever tasted, she knew she was winning him over. That same night, he’d brought his guitar into the living room and played a lot of Creedence Clearwater Revival songs that he knew all the words to, while she and Tim stumbled through the lyrics. He’d had a guitar in ’Nam, Marty explained to her, and music got him through some rough times.

The day before Halloween, she bought three pumpkins and she, Tim and Marty sat in the kitchen, carving jack-o’-lanterns and nibbling roasted pumpkin seeds. At first she’d wondered if it had been a mistake to put a knife in Marty’s hands, but he was careful with his carving, and his design turned out to be the most intricate, if also the most frightening, of the three.

Her mother had liked to dress up to open the door to trick-or-treaters, so CeeCee made a Jolly Green Giant costume out of green tights, a green turtle neck and an abundance of green felt. She had the feeling that Tim thought she was going a bit overboard, but he still told her she looked adorable in her outfit.

On Halloween night, she put on her costume, lit candles in the jack-o’-lanterns, and set them out on the front stoop. When the first trick-or-treater arrived, though, Marty panicked.

“Don’t open the door!” He’d been sitting in the living room with Tim, but now he headed for the stairs.

“It’s all right, Marty,” Tim said. “It’s just a kid looking for a handout.”

“Don’t open it!” Marty stood at the top of the stairs, and CeeCee, cradling a bowl of chocolate kisses, saw real terror in his eyes.

“It’s okay, Marty,” she said. “I won’t open it.”

Tim looked at her with gratitude. “Sorry,” he said.

She went outside and blew out the candles inside the jack-o’-lanterns, then Tim turned out the front lights. Standing in the middle of the foyer in her Jolly Green Giant outfit, she looked up at Marty, who was now sitting on the top step like a little kid, elbows on his knees and his chin resting on his hands.

“Get your guitar, Marty, and come downstairs,” she said. “We’ve got some chocolate to eat.”

Four weeks after their first date, Tim called her when he got out of his evening class. It was nearly ten-thirty, and CeeCee and Ronnie were lying in their beds reading, but when he asked if he could come pick her up, that he had something important he wanted to ask her, she didn’t hesitate.

“I’ll wait for you out front.” She hung up the phone and hopped off her bed. “He said he has something important to ask me,” she said to Ronnie as she stripped off her pajamas.

“Oh my God!” Ronnie put down her magazine. “Do you think he’s going to propose? Today is, like, your one-month anniversary and everything, right?”

That had been CeeCee’s first thought as well, though she and Tim had never even mentioned marriage. The tone of his voice, though, told her that whatever he wanted to ask her was serious business.

“I don’t know.” She pulled a T-shirt over her head, not bothering with a bra. “I just can’t see him asking me to marry him right now.” Did she want him to? She wasn’t sure.

“You’re practically his wife already,” Ronnie said. “You do his
laundry,
for Pete’s sake. Maybe he figures he should make it legal.”

CeeCee ran a brush through her hair, bending low to see her reflection in the mirror above the dresser. “It’s probably nothing like that.”

“I bet it is.” Ronnie sat up on her bed, hugging her knees. “What will you say if he asks you?”

She gave her hair one final swipe with the brush as she thought about the question. “I’d say no,” she said finally. “I mean, I know he’s the right one, but I want to be out of college and supporting myself before I get married. I don’t want to be dependent on him.”

Ronnie held up the issue of
Cosmopolitan
she’d been reading. “You need to take a look at this article,” she said. “He’s
rich.
Let him support you.”

CeeCee opened the door, then turned back to her friend with a smile. “One day,” she said. “But not today.”