Young Wives (37 page)

Jada had merely nodded, and the two of them worked together, rehearsing for forty minutes at a time and then taking little coffee breaks, though Jada didn’t drink any of the coffee. Angie kept focused on the work. Jada had been spending more time at the bank, too. After all, what else was there to do? Her empty, childless house was a misery to her. She couldn’t read, she couldn’t stand television and the shows her kids liked to watch. All of the unfinished work that Clinton hadn’t done—that he would never do now—drove her more mad than ever.

She looked across the desk at Angie. Jada might have been wrong about Angie’s NUP. She wasn’t the spoiled brat she’d thought. What was her suffering like, alone in that small, empty apartment? Neither one spoke of it.

It was lunchtime and Jada looked at the ham and cheese sandwich she’d ordered as if it had come from another planet. She hadn’t been able to really eat in…well, she couldn’t exactly remember how long. Every now and then she forced herself to open a can of Campbell’s Chicken ’n’ Rice soup, and then she drank it right out of the can. She looked away from the sandwich.

“Maybe I better call the office,” she said. As if all of this wasn’t enough, she had to worry about her absences from work. She didn’t want to tell Mr. Marcus anything more than she had to about her personal life. She looked over her sandwich to Angie. “You know what’s pretty ironic?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Angie said. “Just about everything I do know is ironic. But why don’t you add your irony to my list.” Angie smiled to soften her harsh words.

The girl had a really nice smile. Jada didn’t just pity her, she truly liked her. “Well, I was going to say it was ironic that my husbands—”

“Your future former husband,” Angie corrected, just as her mother had corrected her.

Jada nodded. “My soon-to-be-ex-husband is trying to prove that I’m a bad mother because I work too much, while my boss may be trying to prove I’m a bad worker because I mother too much.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” Angie said with very exaggerated sarcasm. “What a funny irony, Jada. Let’s throw it into the women’s smelter with all the other irony we’re trying to melt down.” She gestured to the food on the desk. “Eat your sandwich,” Angie directed. Then she paused and asked, “God, did I just sound like my mother?”

“You could do a lot worse than sound like your mama,” Jada told her. “I’m not hungry. Can I use the phone?”

“You need privacy?”

Jada made a gesture at all the papers and notes that were already such an invasion. “You gotta be kidding,” she said.

She dialed her office. Anne answered and read out a list of messages. Most of them were things that Jada could deal with tomorrow. She asked Anne to fax one document, had to give her the instructions twice, and then, just as she was about to hang up, Anne added a little bonus.

“Oh! I don’t know if it’s important, but I think that Michelle Russo called you,” Jada’s secretary said. “It sounded like Michelle, but she wouldn’t say who it was.”

Jada realized how much she truly disliked Anne and wondered if she could get her transferred or something. She thanked her coldly and hung up, then punched in Michelle’s phone number. “Michelle?” she asked when she heard the hello, but it sounded like an unfamiliar voice.

“Jada, I’m sorry I called you at work. I didn’t want to but…”

“I know,” Jada said. Boy, it must be an emergency if Michelle, with all her pride, had spoken to Anne. “What’s up?”

“When will you be done with your lawyer stuff?” Michelle asked.

“I don’t know. In another hour or so.” She looked over at Angie, who nodded.

“And then you see the kids?”

“Yeah, I pick ’em up after school. But I have to get them back to Yonkers by six. What is this about, Michelle?”

Michelle began whispering. “I can’t talk about it,” she said. “Not now, and not over the phone. But I have to ask a really big favor. Really big. And it will be okay if you say no.”

“Okay,” Jada said, trying to sound neutral.

“Really, you can say no, Jada. It’s just that I have no one else to ask.”

Little goosebumps rose on Jada’s arms and the back of her neck. She had never heard Michelle sound like this. It was worse than after the bust. “Hold on a minute,” she said. She turned to Angie. “Can we be done now?” she asked.

Angie looked down at her notes and the file. “Give me another half hour.” She picked up half of Jada’s untouched ham and cheese. “God, I haven’t been hungry in weeks,” she said. “Now, all of a sudden, I’m famished.”

“It happens like that,” Jada said, but didn’t want to bring up the pregnancy or anything she shouldn’t.

“You’ve got an emergency?” Angie asked.

“Apparently,” Jada said, and spoke into the phone again. “I’ll be at your house in an hour,” she told Michelle.

“No. No,” Michelle pleaded, her voice sounding breathless, almost panicky. “I’ll meet you at the 7-Eleven on the Post Road next to the First Westchester Bank. You know the one.”

“Yeah, sure,” Jada said. “I can be there in forty-five minutes.”

“Thanks, Jada. And remember, you don’t have to say yes.”

“I want you to open a safety deposit box,” Michelle told Jada. Jada was leaning back in the driver’s seat of the Volvo, parked beside Michelle’s Lexus in the 7-Eleven lot. She was trying hard not to stare at her friend’s profile. Jada knew how precious some boundaries were. “I need it to be in your name, and I want you to keep both of the keys.” Michelle took a deep breath. “You have to hide them somewhere—not in your house or in the office.”

Jada looked at her friend. She hadn’t said anything about the sunglasses or the awful bruise under Michelle’s eye. She hadn’t asked why Michelle, always perfectly dressed, with her hair beautifully tousled and her makeup perfectly applied, looked like something that washed up on a Barbados beach after a bad storm. But she figured she knew.

Jada had seen enough women beaten by their husbands, and enough violence in her old Yonkers neighborhood to know not to ask. But poor Michelle. Poor Michelle, who had not only worshipped Frank but had always depended on him. She looked like she was falling apart, and Jada was too good a friend to touch Michelle’s arm and try to comfort her. She knew that Michelle was using everything she had to keep it together now, and Jada wanted to help her.

She wondered what Frank was really up to. She wondered what Michelle knew, or what she suspected. Jada was too wise in the ways of police and lawbreakers to believe that a bust and an indictment meant guilt. Frank, in her opinion, could be anything from framed to a Mafia hit man and she wouldn’t be surprised. But she could tell Michelle was more than surprised. She was shell-shocked, and had been for days. Now, though, something had changed. “I have to ask you a question, Michelle,” Jada said, her voice as calming as she could make it.

“You can say no,” Michelle said quickly. “I totally understand. It was a lot to ask and it’s okay, Jada. Really it is.”

“Michelle, I’m not saying no. I just need to ask you if there are drugs in that bag. You know I’m not trying to insult you, and you know I’ll believe what you say. You understand why I have to ask that.”

Michelle’s lip trembled. “I know,” she said. She reached across the seat of the Volvo and took. Jada’s hand. “I promise you, it’s not. It’s not drugs. But it’s stuff I don’t want Frank to have access to.”

“Okay,” Jada nodded. She knew she was taking a risk, but she trusted her friend. “So I’ll drive alone next door to First Westchester—our biggest competitor, I might add—take out a large box, and come back to you here.”

Michelle nodded, and when she did, Jada could see that the bruise wasn’t just on her cheek, but that the eye behind her glasses was swollen and angry-colored. “Michelle, you don’t have to stay there,” Jada told her in a low, sweet voice. “You can stay with me.”

“It was an accident,” Michelle said. “It really was. And it won’t happen again.”

Jada didn’t believe the first part, but something in Michelle’s tone made her believe the second. Jada took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. Oh, Lord, there was a whole world of sadness out there, and at that moment it felt to Jada as if she and Michelle were drowning in it.
Keep us afloat, Lord
, she prayed silently. Then she let go of Michelle’s hand. “Buy yourself some wrap-around sunglasses,” she told Michelle. “I’ll be back here in about twenty minutes.”

When Jada picked up the children, they weren’t interested in talking about school, Tonya Green, their grandma, or any other subject except going home. Jada, already worn out from the legal workout and the frightening episode with Michelle, didn’t have her best coping skills available. All she wanted was to kiss them, hold the baby, smell Kevon’s delicious boy-smell, and do Shavonne’s hair. Touch them. Love them. But the kids had another plan. “Can we go home now, Mama?” Kevon asked the very second he climbed into the car.

Jada strapped Sherrilee in beside him. Of course it wasn’t possible, but she didn’t want to spoil the few hours she had with them immediately. “Maybe later,” she said, though she knew the maybe was a lie. There was no maybe about it. “Who would like ice cream?” she asked as she got into the driver’s seat.

“I wanna go home,” Shavonne said. “I don’t care about ice cream.”

Jada turned to her daughter. “Something very hard is happening now, Shavonne,” she said.

“Yeah. You and Daddy are going to get a divorce, right?”

It was the first time Jada had heard one of the children say that. “Did Daddy talk with you?” she asked.

“Grandma did,” Shavonne said, and then her face crumpled up in a way that was unbearable for Jada to watch. “I just want to go home,” Shavonne said.

“Look,” Jada responded, “I only have a little bit of time with you before dinner. I—”

“Let’s have dinner at home,” Kevon said. “I wanna have dinner at home.”

“Hey kids, work with me,” Jada told them. “We’ll go home for a little while, but then I promised Grandma that you’d have dinner over there.” Jada didn’t add that she would leave them at that point, or that the court wouldn’t allow them to stay with her, or that she was fighting to keep their home right now. She wondered if she was doing the right thing. Once she had been so sure of herself, so positive that everything she did was right. Now, between her morning with Angie and her strange errand with Michelle and this drive with the children to the house, she wasn’t sure of a single move she made.

It was already dark when she pulled up to her mother-in-law’s in Yonkers. Sherrilee was the first one to begin crying, but with that encouragement, Kevon joined her almost immediately. “I don’t want to go back there,” Shavonne said. “Not even just for dinner.”

“It’s not going to last long,” Jada said. “I have a lawyer and we’re trying to get everything straightened out, so I’ll just leave you here and I’ll see you in two days.” Jada turned to the backseat. “Shh, babies, shh,” she said. When she turned back to Shavonne, her daughter’s face was a mask of fury and betrayal.

“You mean we’re not going back home after dinner?” she asked.

Sherrilee’s wails had become overwhelming. Kevon was unbuckling his seatbelt. Jada was forced to get out of the car and lift Sherrilee from the backseat, and Shavonne met her on the sidewalk. Then there were lights, and Jada looked up to see Clinton with the video camera and the spotlights on, videotaping them as if this were a happy Christmas morning. But Shavonne paid no attention.

“You lied,” she said. “I hate you.” And she ran toward the house and Clinton. Sherrilee cried even louder, her little body stiff against Jada’s. Kevon had put his hands up to his eyes to avoid the harsh light and perhaps to avoid looking at her. She shouldn’t have taken them home. It had made it worse, not better.

She looked toward Clinton. “Stop that,” she yelled. His mother was approaching her, her arms stretched out to Sherrilee. Kevon ran into the darkness, somewhere behind Jada’s line of vision, and she was forced to hand her daughter over.

Jada paced from wall to wall, from the empty living room through the unfinished dining room and across the plywood floor in the kitchen. She couldn’t sit down, she couldn’t lie down, she couldn’t cry, and there was no comfort anywhere. She kept walking, a sort of horrible version of one of Kevon’s motorized toys that banged into walls, adjusted slightly, and moved forward until it banged into another wall.

This visit had destroyed her hope that somehow she could normalize the family or calm the children. She could think of nothing to do to comfort herself. Finally, in despair, she picked up the telephone and punched in the Caribbean number.

“Mama,” she said. “I need to tell you what’s going on.”

Trial and error

Angie was getting dressed with a lot more care than usual. She’d even used some of her new salary to buy a pretty good suit (at discount, at Loehmann’s, with Natalie’s help). Not that she thought the new suit would help her win this case, but she figured it couldn’t hurt, though having to buy a size twelve did.

Angie couldn’t help it—she’d been working like a dog and eating like a horse. Her caseload was enormous; not only was she trying to handle Karen Levin-Thomas’s ongoing cases, but she also felt that she should take her place on the sofa, interviewing new clients. That way, if and when Karen came back, she’d have her own client list, a better shot at a permanent job. Because, oddly enough, she really
wanted
to be on the permanent staff at the clinic. It seemed right for her. She really liked and respected the other staff members. She also liked the variety of the work. And she felt deeply for her clients’ plight. She couldn’t say any of those things about the job in Marblehead.

So she’d prepared for Jackson vs. Jackson with every moment of spare time she had, and to tell the truth, with time she shouldn’t have taken from her other cases. She knew this was a kind of test by fire. The clinic would judge her by this performance. Thank God Michael Rice had helped so much.

She went into her apartment’s tiny bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Not a pretty picture. There were dark circles under her eyes. They no longer looked blue, and her skin was mottled. Well, too bad. She brushed her wet hair back and decided to just secure it with a scrunchy. She didn’t need to look attractive, just professional and honest.