Above the Law (37 page)

She let her mind journey, conjuring images formed from secondhand experience, of burning leaves in the fall, golden retrievers running across soccer fields, swimming in quarries, tailgate parties at football games, snowmen in the winter.

She found the address she was looking for without much difficulty. A substantial brick-and-wood split-level on a shady, tree-lined street. A Diamond Back mountain bike, similar to the one her younger daughter had, was lying where its owner, probably also a teenager, had dropped it on its side, midway up the flagstone walkway that bisected the lawn from the curb to the front door. A mud-splattered 4Runner was parked in the driveway in front of the open garage doors that revealed a lawn mower, shop tools, the accoutrements of the comfortable upper-middle-class suburban life.

Home sweet home. Would it be as sweet an hour from now?

She pressed the doorbell, shifting her soft briefcase from one shoulder to the other. Sounds of footsteps galloping down a hallway, the door flung open. A tall, gawky teenage boy loomed over her. Without a word he turned and called over his shoulder.

“Mom, it’s for you.”

They sat in the pine-paneled family room. From behind a door somewhere else in the house Kate heard the muffled sounds of a computer game. Her younger daughter was a computer freak, she had all the latest games, Kate knew the sound. Diane Jerome Richards, the boy’s mother, sat across from her. A tall, athletic-looking woman, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Her red hair was short now, utilitarian in cut. They were drinking iced tea. A plate of homemade cookies sat on the coffee table between them.

“Thank you for seeing me, Diane,” Kate said. “May I call you Diane?”

The woman smiled. “Of course, Ms….” She scrounged in her jeans for a card.

“Blanchard. Please, call me Kate.”

The woman nodded, glancing at the business card she’d put in her pocket, the card that had come with the letter. “Kate.” She wasn’t ill at ease, but her expression was solemn. “Your telephone call came as a shock, I have to admit,” she said. “I’d buried that part of my life. I’d hoped it would never be resurrected.”

“I’m sorry. But I have to do this.”

“I understand.”

“Have you lived here long?”

Kate didn’t want to plunge right in to the point of her trip halfway across the country. Her desire was to help Diane Richards, the former Diane Jerome, feel comfortable with her; or at least not uptight, the normal condition people have with strangers who suddenly drop into their world and turn it upside down.

“Ten years. My husband’s a professor at Notre Dame. Economics. We came when he was finishing up his thesis and stayed on when they offered him tenure.”

“You have a lovely home. Do you work, also?”

“Thank you. Yes. I teach. Fourth grade.”

The doorbell rang again. Without moving from her chair, Diane called out, “Kenny, your pizza’s here!” She explained, “Ron, my husband, is teaching tonight. Kenny has evening spring basketball practice at the high school. I’m not going to cook just for me.”

Kate smiled. “I have two teenagers of my own. Rusty’s Pizza’s the first number on our speed-dial.”

The tall boy barged into the room. Diane handed him some bills from her purse. He took them and left without acknowledging Kate.

Time to do what she had come for. Kate reached into her bag and pulled out the yearbook she’d taken out of the Stanford library. Opening it to a Post-it-marked page, she showed it to her hostess.

“This is you?” Kate pointed to the woman’s picture from two decades past.

Diane barely glanced at it. “Yes, it’s me.”

Kate flipped the page. “And you know him.” Her finger hovered under the tiny photograph of Reynaldo Juarez.

“Yes. I knew him.”

“He was…”

“My boyfriend.”

“And Sterling Jerome is your brother?”

A curt nod of the head. “One of them. By two years. He’s the closest in age to me.” She broke off her look from Kate. “That was so long ago. I used to have wishful fantasies that it didn’t happen, that it was all a dream.”

Turning to Kate again, she said, “It did happen. I can’t will it away.” She hesitated for a moment. “Not that I want to. It’s part of me, who I am.” Her voice was suddenly sorrowful. “Who I’ve become.”

They met the first semester of freshman year. They were in the same dorm, segregated boy-girl by floor, but the traffic flowed up and down the stairwells like water out of a faucet. They were as opposite as two eighteen-year-old kids could be, which was the initial attraction. A classic pairing: he the barrio hood with a brain, an attitude, and a reputation, driving a fancy car and spending piles of money in San Francisco on the weekends, she the protected daughter, the only girl, the baby of a hard-drinking Chicago Irish clan, her big, red-knuckled fireman father and big, hardheaded brothers full of old-fashioned Irish prejudice, ready to stomp any boy who would look sideways at her, especially if his skin was brown and his name was Juarez. As lazy and shiftless as niggers, her father would say, and as smelly, her mother, no stranger to bigotry herself, would add.

This was when she was younger, going to parochial school all the way through high school, when black and Latino kids started infiltrating the Irish-Polish-Italian closed circle. She heard her parents and didn’t say otherwise, although she had secret girlfriends she knew her family would disapprove of, a black girl and one from El Salvador.

No boyfriends, she traveled with her friends in a safe pack, all the parents and families knowing and approving of each other. She finally began dating her senior year, acceptable boys, from acceptable families. Nothing serious, no going steady, no staying out past midnight. Irish, like her family, and one Polack boy whose father was an important alderman and drank with her father and uncles. But that was where the line was drawn.

They didn’t want her to go to Stanford, all the way out there, De Paul and Loyola were good enough for her brothers, what was wrong with those fine Catholic colleges, but the priest who was the principal of the high school, a scholarly Jesuit, convinced them it was all right. She was a smart girl, it was in her interests to broaden her education. Stanford was no hotbed of radicalism like Berkeley, up the road. And it was a great school, they should be proud that one of their children was so smart, so qualified.

They gave in, and she went.

Reynaldo was full of swagger, but he was shy around her. Her pale beauty, the purity of it, overwhelmed him. They looked at each other and away from each other for months, finding excuses to be in the common rooms at the same time. By the luck of the draw they had two classes together, chemistry and calculus, so they found themselves in the same lab at night, or studying in the same small group with the graduate assistant math tutor.

Finally, he asked her out. For coffee. She said she wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee.

A week later, they were lovers.

They were cool about it. Their friends knew they were hot for each other, but they didn’t know how deep the feeling was. He lavished money on her, took her out to dinner, to restaurants of a caliber she’d never stepped foot into in her life, first locally, in Palo Alto, then up to San Francisco, to fancy establishments where the waiters handed them leather-bound wine lists and unfolded their napkins onto their laps. Driving his Porsche Carrera, the Eagles and the Police blasting from the speakers.

She exposed him to movies, plays, to the symphony. Growing up, she had been to movies, to plays, to the symphony and the Chicago Art Institute with her friends. He had never been to any of those things, but he had a new life now, and a new woman, who could show him the ropes. He loved the symphony, the big romantic pieces, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, and he loved the art, too, especially the Impressionists. An entire new life was unfolding for both of them, and they savored it, they devoured it. And the sex was fantastic, they couldn’t get enough of each other.

He bought her clothes, so she’d be properly dressed when they went to these fancy places. Expensive designer clothes, on the flashy side, he was Latino, he had colorful tastes. Her mother would have ripped the dresses off her body. She felt self-conscious when first she wore the new dresses and blouses and skirts, but she quickly got used to them. She loved the way she looked in them, how the silks and cashmeres and fine cottons felt on her. After being in drab Catholic school uniforms her entire life, this was like being a movie star.

He drove her to the airport to catch her flight home for Christmas. Standing in the stale air of the terminal, waiting for her plane to board, he told her, for the first time, that he loved her. She told him that she loved him, too.

Her family knew how to celebrate the holidays. They ate too much, they got drunk, they had a wonderful time. They were all together, the boys, the oldest with their wives, and Diane, the baby, home again, in the bosom of her family.

Her mother confronted her between Christmas and New Year’s.

“You’re pregnant.”

“What’re you, nuts?” Her heart was pounding like there was a sledgehammer slamming way inside her chest.

“Who is he?”

“You’re crazy, Mom. I’m not sleeping with anybody.”

“We’ll see what Dr. Schwartz has to say.”

She didn’t want to see the gynecologist, her mother had to practically tie her up and drag her.

“Don’t tell Dad we’re going, Mom,” she pleaded.

“Don’t worry. I’m not gonna. Because I don’t want to see him kill you. My baby. My littlest angel, who’s gonna ruin my life.”

“Don’t talk like that, Mom. For God’s sakes.”

“Mother Mary of God, pray for us sinners.”

The test came back positive.

“I’ll ask you again, once,” her mother said. They were in a bar a few blocks away from the clinic. Her mother was on her third 7&7. She was drinking a Coke. “Who’s the son of a bitch?”

She broke down. “A boy from school.”

Her mother slammed her fist onto the table. “I knew it! We never should’ve sent you away. Fucking Jesuits! Fucking Jesuit bastards who said it would be good for you! Since when is getting knocked up good for you!” she shouted.

“Mom, please.” She looked around wildly. People were watching them, but nobody here knew them, thank God. “It’s not the end of the world.”

“For me it is. And your father…”

“You don’t have to tell him. Please, Mom. Don’t tell him.”

“He’s your father. He has to know.”

“Mom.” She was fighting to stay calm, because her mother was off the wall. “We can keep this between us.”

Her mother looked at her over the rim of her whiskey glass. “Are we talking about an abortion here? Taking the life of an unborn innocent?” She sighed, finished her drink.

“I…” She loved Reynaldo, but she couldn’t have his child. She couldn’t have a child, period. She was a freshman in college, she was going to go to law school or med school. She was going to have a career. Having a baby at eighteen wasn’t part of the great plan.

“You’re gonna have to,” her mother said, signaling the bar waitress for another round, holding up two fingers to signify she wanted a double. “You can’t have some…who’s the father?”

“Just…just a boy. From school.”

“A boy from school. Does this boy have a name?”

“Oh, God, Mom, does it matter? If I get rid of it, who cares who the father is?”

“Because I want to know who you’re fucking,” her mother said, ice-cold. “What is he, a kike? A nigger?”

“No, Mom.”

Her mother exhaled a massive sigh of relief. “At least it’s a white man’s baby you’re carrying. So who is he already? Is he rich? What’s his father, some bank president or something? All those kids out at Stanford, they’re all blue bloods, aren’t they?”

The waitress brought her mother’s drink. She slammed down half in one gulp. “Maybe you should keep the little bastard” She chuckled. “The little bastard. That’s a good one. So, all right, I’m calming down now. Maybe it isn’t the end of the world. The name, Diane. What is this boy’s name?”

She told her mother Reynaldo’s name. Her mother fainted, right onto the floor.

“What happened then?” Kate asked. It was dark outside now. She was breathless, listening to this. They were alone in the house.

“We have to tell your father.” Her mother was revived now, slumped against the back of the booth, a drink in one hand, filtered Camel in the other, the ashtray in front of her overflowing.

“For God’s sakes, Mom, no! You promised.”

“I didn’t know it was a spic.”

“Don’t use that word, Mom. He’s Mexican, not Puerto Rican.”

“They’re all the same.”

It was as if a sea change had come over her. From girl to woman. She got up from the booth.

“They’re not all the same, Mom.”

She walked out, took a cab home, packed her clothes, took another cab to the airport, and flew back to Stanford calling Reynaldo’s house in Los Angeles from the airport to tell him when her plane was arriving.

He was there to meet her. Of course.

There was only one solution. They would get married, at the end of the spring term. The baby wouldn’t be born yet, their child would not be a bastard. It was fine that they had to get married, they were in love, they would have gotten married sooner or later anyway.

Her mother told. Not right away, she wrestled with it for some time. She knew that to tell Diane’s father, her brothers, would be tantamount to issuing a license to kill. But she did, over Easter Sunday dinner, when the celebration of the Resurrection and its message about everlasting life was more than she could bear. Plus she and all the clan, gathered from all over into the bosom of the family, had consumed copious amounts of whiskey and Guinness, especially her husband and her boys, Sterling foremost among them. The horrible truth spilled out.

Diane wasn’t home with them. She’d stayed in Palo Alto. She got the news over the phone from her brother Mike.

“We’re coming out.”

She didn’t run from them, she didn’t hide. Nor did Reynaldo, he wasn’t about to back off from anyone, he was a man, he was only nineteen but he’d been a man for years. If he could survive and flourish on the mean streets of East L.A., doing what he did, he could handle these prejudiced assholes. And she was his woman, protecting her was his job. He arranged, through her, to meet her brothers, the three who had come out to deal with this. The meeting would take place in the library. A public place, where they would all have to act civilized.

Diane wasn’t going to come to the meeting. After Reynaldo and her brothers talked, she would join them, if he told her things were okay. She was reluctant to do even that. She didn’t want to see her brothers at all, her pregnancy was beginning to show. That would inflame them, even more than they already were. She didn’t care if she never saw them again. She had cast her lot in a different direction. Reynaldo convinced her they had to do this—they couldn’t run from her family.

He shaved, showered, put on some good clothes, left his room to meet them, to show them that he was worthy of their sister’s love. But her brothers didn’t deal honorably with Reynaldo. They laid in wait outside his dorm, until he emerged, alone, to go to the library. Catching him by surprise, they jumped him, tied him up, took his gun, which he had hidden tucked into the back of his pants under his shirt (he was from the street, he always carried when a situation might be dangerous), threw him in the trunk of the car they’d rented at the airport, a big Buick with a big trunk, plenty big enough to hold a body, and drove to a deserted area near the beach, twenty miles away.

Waiting in her dorm room to hear, Diane knew something had gone wrong. She was petrified.

At the beach, the Jerome brothers, Mike, Joe Jr., and Sterling, hauled Reynaldo out of the car trunk, where they proceeded to beat the living shit out of him, teaching him a lesson, so that he’d never come near their sister again. Beating him unconscious.

After they’d finished administering their punishment, they left him for dead on the beach, drove back to the campus, abducted Diane from her room kicking and screaming, and drove her to San Francisco, where a doctor performed the abortion they had already arranged, in a hospital, under a false name. They paid the bill in cash.

They stayed overnight, making sure she would survive okay (the operation, not the emotional trauma, they didn’t care about that), and to ensure that her spic lover wouldn’t find out where she was and try to join her. Then they went home, having done the job they had come out to do, leaving her with a warning: Never see him again, or we’ll kill him.

She did see him again. Two days later, when she went back to the campus, feeling hollow inside, and found him in the university hospital, recovering from the vicious beating her brothers had inflicted on him. He was too tough for them to kill. He had crawled to the highway and flagged down a car, the driver called an ambulance.

He didn’t tell the police who had done it. He said he didn’t know who it was. The police, after their inquiry revealed his background, concluded it was a gang thing, like a drive-by shooting. They weren’t inclined to put energy into investigating it—he was a former drug dealer. Case closed.

It took him a month to recover. She came to the hospital every day. It was hard for them to be with each other. She wasn’t carrying their child anymore, and he had almost died, both at the hands of her family. Who didn’t know any other way to show their love.

They finished up the school year after he got of the hospital and resumed classes. Neither of them was interested in schoolwork, but they both struggled through, maintaining their grades by sheer force of will.

The semester ended. They were going home for the summer. They would see each other again, in the fall. They would start over fresh.

It was hard to stay in touch, she had to call him from friends’ houses. As the summer wore on, they communicated less and less with each other.

Love can survive almost anything, but not everything. Theirs didn’t survive this battering of their hearts, bodies, and souls. When the fall semester began, neither of them was there to begin sophomore classes. She transferred to Northwestern. He didn’t transfer anywhere, as far as she knew.

And then she stopped hearing from him altogether.