The Year of Needy Girls Page 16

  The front door opened. A man and woman, both white, both in suits, entered and flashed IDs at Earl. He buzzed open the door that led to the inside of the jail.

  “So, there’s no way to get a message to anyone in here? No way to let a prisoner know I’d like to see him?”

  “Nope,” Earl shook his head. “No visitors who aren’t on the list. No messages for inmates. No exceptions.” He slid the glass window shut.

  The guard in the corner jingled the keys on his belt and glanced over at SJ. There was nothing to do but leave.

  October 3

  To the Editor, Bradley Register:

  I am writing in reference to the letter dated October 1 by “Concerned Citizen.” I, too, cannot imagine the horror that the Rivera family must face each day, knowing how their little boy met his end.

  But it seems to me barbaric to already condemn the man in custody, before we know the extent of his involvement. I am urging my fellow citizens to remain calm and let the legal system work as it is supposed to.

  Beth Ann Farraday

  Bradley, MA

  Chapter Three

  In the park, most of the leaves had fallen now and drifted into piles in the grass and on the walkway, the late-morning sky pulsing with seventy October degrees. SJ looked over her shoulder. She kicked at the dry leaves and pushed up the sleeves of her sweatshirt.

  She hated seeing Deirdre so unhappy. At night when Deirdre slept—she claimed she wasn’t sleeping at all these days but SJ was the witness—SJ looked at her face, quiet and unguarded, and remembered their first nights together, the wonder and terror of sleeping with another person. SJ always thought that aside from the possibility of pregnancy, teenage sex wasn’t the huge issue people made it out to be. No, it was the euphemism for sex—sleeping with someone—that was the bigger issue. Sex in cars, on beaches—furtive, groping sex—that wasn’t intimate at all. Too often it was embarrassing. But sleeping. Sharing a bed while you slept, while you dreamed, while you were at your most unguarded and vulnerable, that was the most intimate thing imaginable.

  Did Deirdre sleep gratefully, able only then to ignore what was happening in her waking life? SJ’s greatest adult fear—one that she might not be able to admit out loud, one that she could hardly admit to herself in those private, dark moments—was that someone might find her incompetent. Now, with hindsight, she understood that her . . . thing with Mr. Freeman had happened in the first place because he had seen SJ as smart and dedicated. For SJ, that was everything. So it threw her off to have the police questioning her at the library. She thought it made her colleagues wonder about her and so they might gossip and tell stories and question her professional judgment too. Librarian circles were tight, and SJ hated to think that her association with Mickey was now the preferred topic of conversation.

  Deirdre, on the other hand, seemed so unconcerned about what people thought. How can you do it? SJ wanted to know. How can you get up in the morning, go for a run, buy groceries, while being that person other people don’t want? She thought about it now, walking through the park, looking left and right, conscious that she might bump into Deirdre on her run. When you weren’t a teacher, an attorney, a librarian, or stockbroker anymore, how would you know who to be? How to act? What your place was in the world?

  An ambulance screeched past. Two women pushed small children on swings. One yelled, “Higher, Mommy, higher!” The other squealed. It bothered SJ that Deirdre couldn’t admit her own responsibility in what had happened at Brandywine. Deirdre couldn’t see that she’d crossed boundaries way too often, much more than was advisable for anyone working with young people. SJ wondered whether teacher training programs should spend more time on helping new teachers develop that distance they needed to establish between themselves and their students—though whether or not teacher training programs spent any time on that topic, SJ had no idea. Besides, Deirdre hadn’t received any formal training. She had her degrees in French—BA and MA—and that’s it. All the teacher training had occurred on the job. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t see her own role; she didn’t realize she’d played any role whatsoever. But it was so clear to SJ.

  She kicked at the dried leaves. It had been about a year ago that her colleague Paula had been fired outright from the library. SJ remembered coming in that morning and hearing the news, the reference librarians gathered around the front desk, gossiping. SJ looked at Paula differently from then on. She couldn’t help it; Paula who had been fired just wasn’t the same person in her eyes as Paula who headed up Technical Services. And when Florence suggested they meet Paula for drinks the following week, “to perk her up,” SJ wouldn’t go. She didn’t want to hear Paula’s version of what happened. She didn’t want to commiserate and rally against the library administration (didn’t Florence feel funny about that too?); nor did she want to feel like a traitor, which is exactly how she’d end up feeling. Paula would go on about how she’d been treated unfairly, about how it was overly critical for the library to expect her to be on time every day, and so what if her lunch breaks were longer than usual? SJ would want to say: So the rules, then. They don’t apply to you? And SJ would feel bad for liking her job, for feeling that the administration was right in letting Paula go, and that Tech Services would be better off with someone who toed the line.

  On the far end of the park, on the track, a runner sprinted, slowed to a jog, and then sprinted again. SJ couldn’t understand how anyone could make themselves run like that, force themselves to sprint when there wasn’t anything at stake. Deirdre said you got a high from going fast, from beating your own best time, but SJ couldn’t imagine it. At a glance, the woman on the track looked like Deirdre. Her hair was about the same length. Narrow shoulders. But the hips were too wide, too rounded, and the gait, too halting. Deirdre ran in long, steady strides, fluid, the same way she spoke French, the way she tried to cajole her students to speak, her accent so perfect she was often mistaken for a native speaker.

  A bird chirped—SJ couldn’t identify what kind—high-pitched and urgent. She sat on the bench nearest the park’s Maple Street entrance, overlooking the empty basketball court, and laid her head against the top of the bench, closed her eyes, and absorbed the sun, felt it penetrate deep into her scalp and the cells of her skin. Would Deirdre notice her on the bench when she ran past—if she wasn’t already long gone, well beyond the park by now, maybe past the school? Would she even be looking? Of course, today Deirdre might have taken a different route altogether.

  The sun warmed SJ’s skin. How she wished this warmth could work some kind of magic, make things better between her and Deirdre. She didn’t know how much longer she could talk about the situation at school. Each time they got into a conversation about it, SJ was flooded with . . . was it shame? She could only describe it as a heaviness, a dread, a longing to scream out to Deirdre that the way she was with those girls was wrong; didn’t she see that? You couldn’t blame Anna for falling in love with her. Why couldn’t she see that at least?

  In the twelve years since high school, SJ had thought of Mr. Freeman occasionally, but the minute her mind conjured a memory, she brushed it aside. It was almost possible to convince herself that she’d imagined the whole thing. At graduation, Mr. Freeman had slipped her a congratulatory card, given her the requisite teacher hug. SJ tried, now, to recall what she had felt then, at the end of things. Nothing. Was that possible?

  Relief?

  She couldn’t remember. But sitting here in the park, the sun like goodness on her face—it was difficult to feel anything but a kind of happiness, contentment in spite of everything.

  It was the kind of day that fooled you into thinking nothing bad could happen. By now SJ should have known better. Like last Tuesday. She remembered because it was Tuesday she and Deirdre had made love for the first time in a long while—a surprise for both of them—and SJ had been late to work. She’d spilled coffee on her favorite tan sweater on the way to the library and there, when she pushed through the front door, g
athered in a circle in front of the main desk were the reference librarians, Margo and Elliot, heads tilted toward each other, and Florence’s boss, the head librarian, Sam.

  All of them had turned at once as she entered. The clock had ticked, there was no erasing all the minutes, and Sam, his red bow tie crisp, nodded at SJ.

  The rest of the day had been a blur of all other workdays—cataloging, ordering, checking on OCLC updates. And then, waiting like a bad birthday surprise when she returned from grabbing an afternoon coffee, the official reprimand. A written copy for her to sign. It mentioned other, lesser infractions too that SJ thought were petty and punitive. She had waited until she was sure Sam was gone and slipped the signed paper beneath his office door.

  Two boys appeared on the basketball court. SJ heard them first, their slang loud and jarring. She opened her eyes. The boys looked misplaced, their pants droopy, belted around the tops of their thighs. These two weren’t exactly the athletic type, either. They bounced the basketball back and forth; loud, hard bounces that reverberated on the asphalt, their laughter and words echoing harshly. The boys couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. Old enough to look menacing; young enough to look like kids. The boy holding his pants up threw the ball in an easy arc and it hit the backboard, dropped through the metal net.

  “Momm-ee!” From behind SJ, the high-pitched voices singsongy, like faraway recess sounds. The women stood apart from the swings now, paying attention only to each other while the little ones, a boy and a girl, jumped from the swings, chased each other onto the grass.

  “Get me!” one of them yelled. They ran in that little-kid way, oblivious and free. SJ smiled watching them. She wished she could remember feeling like that, though she doubted that she’d ever really been that type of child. Even back then, she’d been cautious, an observer. She’d been a perfectionist, her parents praising only the most exceptional accomplishments. The rest had been expected. Ordinary. So SJ grew up with the feeling that she had to excel—and if she wasn’t ready to excel or wasn’t sure she could, she didn’t try. She watched.

  Her feeling about childhood was that it was a time of nervousness and challenges. She envied these boys, not athletes, not even physically fit, out here shooting baskets, laughing, obviously not caring what anyone thought, or if anyone saw. She could never do that, not even now. That’s why she avoided parties. Deirdre thought it was because she was so judgmental of other people—but it wasn’t that. It was because of her fear that she herself would come up short.

  SJ got up from the bench and tugged at her sleeves. The runner was stretching now on the track, bending over, her body pliable. She bent to one leg then the other. The basketball players watched her, one of them nudging the other. They laughed loudly. SJ turned and walked out of the park, passing the stately Victorians and the houses converted to condos. Round, fat pumpkins sat on stone steps, some carved into scary faces, most of them full and orange. Other houses had potted mums, plum and maroon and gold, arranged on porches. Here was a hanging mobile of black cats, some fake cobwebs, a bit early still for Halloween, but people these days merged one holiday season into the next. A tabby cat rolled on the sidewalk, stretched its paws long into the sunshine. SJ felt a little guilty for calling in sick but she just couldn’t handle Florence and her questions right now, or the way the student workers and colleagues whispered and then stopped when SJ appeared. She knew they were all dying to ask about Mickey, and that Florence had probably told them not to. SJ didn’t know if the police had questioned anyone else besides herself and Florence, or what any of the others might say about Mickey.

  In any event, Florence probably thought she was in turmoil over the state of things with Deirdre, which was partly true. But mostly, SJ just didn’t feel like seeing anybody today. And she really, really didn’t want to talk with Florence about Deirdre. Florence had seemed relieved when she found out that SJ had decided not to move. “Oh good,” she’d said. “That makes much more sense.”

  And SJ had reminded Florence how much she had been against SJ’s moving in with Deirdre in the first place.

  “True,” Florence acknowledged, “but now that you’ve done it, I think you should stick it out. Make it work. Relationships aren’t easy, you know.”

  How irritating. SJ had wanted Florence to revel with her in the decision to leave Deirdre, to admit finally what a silly move it had been in the first place. She had expected Florence to say something like, It’s about time! But instead, Florence seemed to be rooting for the relationship. SJ accused her of “flip-flopping.”

  What SJ couldn’t tell Florence, and what she certainly couldn’t admit to Deirdre, was that she had decided not to give up the apartment after all. She wasn’t going to move into it—not yet. She really did want to help Deirdre through this thing, but somehow the idea of the apartment was comforting. She jiggled the key in her jeans pocket. It was almost like having a lover but not, though if Deirdre knew, she would definitely feel as threatened as she would be by another person. SJ couldn’t really explain why she had decided to keep the apartment, not even to herself. She knew how right it had felt when she looked at it and when she signed the lease. Certainly she could have gotten out of the lease, even if she’d had to pay a month’s rent in advance, but the more she thought about it, the more she decided it was right to hang on to it. She wasn’t yet certain how she would use it, if at all, but just the knowledge that her own private place existed provided her with a sense of comfort and a secret thrill.

  She turned onto one of the quiet side streets. Funny how empty and lonely a neighborhood could feel. SJ thought about the street where she had rented the new apartment; the two neighborhoods couldn’t be more different, except for the one thing most places in Bradley had in common: a lack of parking spaces.

  SJ headed away from the park and her neighborhood and in the general direction of the East End. She fingered the apartment key. In their house, it was difficult to be alone, especially now that Deirdre was there all the time. And SJ needed time to think and figure out what she was going to do. It was hard to turn away from five years together, hard to know the exact right thing to do, for both of them. For now, it seemed best to stay and help Deirdre get through this tough time. No matter how much SJ felt the relationship was over, she could not up and leave right now. It just wasn’t possible.

  SJ passed the main branch of the public library, such a stately building, all brick and important looking. And up ahead, the town hall. If all you saw of Bradley were this green and the brick New England buildings, the white Unitarian church, you would think: Charming. You would think you were in small-town America. You would expect lobster and clam bakes; you would expect town meetings, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But you would only get half the picture. In order to really know the town, you had to continue on, the way SJ was headed, over the river and into the East End, where the triple-deckers weren’t converted into condominiums, where you heard Brazilian music, smelled grilled beef and onions, and where dried bouquets still stuck in the metal fence surrounding Most Precious Blood Elementary.

  SJ could hear the voices of kids at recess. How did they cope with Leo Rivera’s death? Were they afraid all the time now? she wondered. How strange that in the early days of September all anyone heard about was Leo Rivera. You saw his face on the evening news and then, once Mickey was arrested, that was it. Tragedies were like that. They occupied the collective imagination for a while, and then everyone went on to something else. It didn’t seem possible that right here in Leo and Mickey’s neighborhood, though, people could forget that quickly. The people most affected lived here still. Mickey Gilberto’s mother, right next door to the Rivera family, and a street away from Leo’s grandmother.

  SJ knew little about Brazilian culture, but she knew that Mondays were important and devoted to the souls of the dead, which might be why, as she came upon Most Precious Blood, she saw devotional candles, their flames flickering, just outside the schoolyard fence. The kids did
n’t seem to notice, or at least they didn’t pay any particular attention to the candles grouped there beneath a picture of Leo, smiling as always in that Red Sox cap. SJ crossed the street to get a closer look at the picture. What a sweet face on that poor child. How hard to imagine anyone hurting him—how really hard to imagine it might be Mickey. She wasn’t so naïve to think that it wasn’t possible, but given what she’d seen of Mickey in their few classes together, she could not imagine it. Mickey had seemed genuinely upset by the murder too, called Leo the little brother he’d never had. Well, just as it was possible Mickey had been involved in the murder, it was equally possible that the police had arrested the wrong person.

  The TV vans were no longer a constant presence outside the school, though SJ noticed a police cruiser idling alongside one edge of the fenced-in blacktop and she wondered if there was often a police presence at the school or if the cops were here for something else. She pressed up against the chain-link fence. A nun wearing an old-fashioned habit opened the heavy front door and stood at the top of the steps, ringing a little bell. The kids stopped what they were doing and merged into a couple of ragged lines to head back inside. They giggled and whispered with each other. The nun motioned for the children to hurry along, called out a name or two to keep them moving: “Felipe!” “Marie Elena!”

  “SJ!”

  She was startled to hear her name and for a moment thought the nun knew her somehow and had called out to her.

  “SJ,” the voice said again. “On lunch break?” It was Detective Rodriguez. She smiled but didn’t offer a hand.

  “Yes,” SJ replied. “No—I mean, I took the day off.” She shrugged as if to say, How could I pass on a day like this?

  “What brings you here?” Detective Rodriguez raised her eyebrows just slightly.