Legal Tender (7 page)

I heard another splash and felt a spray of cold water on my forearm as I hit the stroke too hard. Easy, girl. I reached far out and over my toes for the next stroke, stretching, extending every inch of my body. A powerful stroke but still controlled, always controlled. I tried stroking like that for the next ten.

One, two, three, not power strokes, just for technique. Not thinking about anything but technique. The stroke, the control, the timing. The speed of the scull and the
slip
-sound it made as it sliced through the water. The creak of the rigging. The fishy rankness of the water and the green freshness of the trees. The shock of the cold spray, the jolt of the lurch forward. The city was far away. The city was gone. Four, five, six strokes.

Soon the sound of my own breath, coming in short, quick pants, and the slickness of the sweat as it sluiced down between my breasts and under my arms. I was working hard and I wasn’t a college kid anymore. There were beads of sweat on my knees, but they evaporated as the boat picked up speed, floating just high enough in the water because the stroke was working so well. I’d finally found the rhythm and I couldn’t go wrong. Seven, eight, nine, ten.

In the middle of the river, in the middle of the night.

I
decided against crying when I got home. It never did any good and my eyes puffed up like pet-store goldfish. Instead, I showered, toweled off, and got ready for bed. Bear, my golden retriever, lay on the floor, watching me pad from bathroom to bedroom and back again. Her wavy coat was the exact color of a square of light caramel, and she was big-boned, like me.

“Bedtime, girl,” I said, and she jumped onto the mattress, circled twice, and settled on a spot in the middle. It had always driven Mark crazy. Now it wouldn’t. Things were looking up.

I climbed in beside Bear, nudged her over, then switched off the light. She yawned theatrically, and I smiled, scratching the rich folds of soft fur on her neck. She drifted almost immediately into a slumber marked by a breathy snore, but I kept scratching. I wouldn’t be sleeping for a while.

In the bedroom underneath mine, in the apartment below, my mother was in bed and not sleeping, either. I’d checked on her before I came upstairs, and she was tossing and turning. I read to her until she fell asleep, but she was awake again by the time I got out of the shower. I could hear her through the floorboards. Talking to herself and others she imagined.

But I didn’t think about that either. Something would have to be done. I would have to do it.

But not tonight.

“She’s not eating at all?” I asked Hattie, standing to pour us a cup of fresh coffee the next morning. Hattie Williams was the black home-care worker who lived with my mother and took care of her. She rose early and even at this hour was dressed in black stirrup pants and a
TAJ MAHAL
T-shirt glittery with mosques. Hattie was very short, very wide, and her straightened hair was an unlikely shade of orange, but none of that mattered to me.

“Skipped lunch and dinner yesterday,” she said. “Not even her soup.”

“Did she drink anything?”

“Only a little water, and she won’t be still.” Hattie shook her head. “Too scared to go out for her walk again. That’s three months she ain’t seen the sunshine, and she been talkin’ to herself more. Did you hear, last night?”

“Her little chat with Satan? When’s that boy gonna straighten up and fly right?”

But Hattie didn’t smile, as she usually would. The skin around her eyes, though remarkably unwrinkled for her age, was a shade darker than the rest of her face and looked even darker this morning. I wanted to make her laugh, at least for the moment.

“At least the TV stopped bossing her around, Hat. I was really beginning to worry. What if we had to get rid of it? Then you couldn’t watch
Loving.
”

“Now that’s enough. That’s enough now, hush.” She waved me off with the most begrudging of smiles, so I replaced the coffeepot and sat down at the kitchen table in my mother’s junky apartment. The table was fake Early American, the napkin dispenser a cloudy acrylic, and the cups and saucers tannic-tinged melamine. It was all the crap from our old house, I’d moved the shitload here at my mother’s insistence. Cost me two thousand dollars to move two hundred dollars worth of chemistry.

I sipped my coffee and shook my head. “Why can’t I make a decent cup of coffee? Every morning it’s the same thing. What do I do wrong?”

Hattie drank her coffee and paused. “Too much water.”

“What? Monday you said I put too much coffee.”

She laughed, tickled. “You can go in front of a jury, you can go on the TV news. You can even go argue in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. I got the feather to prove it.” She meant the white quill the Supremes give to lawyers who argue before them, sort of a consolation prize, in my case. “But you can’t make coffee that don’t taste like shit.”

We both laughed, then stopped abruptly. “Hattie, don’t look at me like that. I know what you’re thinking.”

“It’s time. I can’t get her to take her Prozac, half the time she thinks I’m poisoning her. Puts up such a fuss, damn near wakes the whole city. It makes her anxious, nervous. She paced all mornin’ yesterday. She’s upset all the time on account of that damn Prozac.”

I’d noticed it, too. “Let’s stay with it for just a while longer.”

“No more stallin’, you.” She set her plastic cup down with a clacking noise. “Even her doctor said we got to get goin’, and that was two, three months ago. She’s worse every day.”

I thought of my mother’s doctor, a soft-spoken young man with a prematurely graying beard, so thoughtful and intellectual as he explained electroshock therapy in his office that day. He could afford to be cool, it wouldn’t be his mother at the end of the extension cord. “But they don’t even know why it works,” I said. “The doc told us, he admitted it.”

“What’s the difference why? Who cares why? It works.” Hattie leaned forward and pressed her ample breasts against the table. “The doctor said every other day for a coupla weeks, that’s it. He said she’ll start to get better fast. She already signed the form for me. It will help her.”

“
Electroshock?
How can that help her? Shoot a hundred volts into her brain?”

“It’s not like you’re makin’ it sound.”

“Yes it is, it sure is. The electricity induces a brain seizure, a grand mal seizure. Sometimes they start the seizure and it doesn’t stop. And sometimes the patient dies.”

Hattie’s broad features creased into a skeptical frown. “I read the form. One outta how many die?”

“Who cares how many? What if she’s the one?” It didn’t sound convincing, even to me, but this wasn’t about odds and numbers and scientific theories. This was about my mother. “Besides, she’ll lose her memory.”

“Child, what’s she got to remember anyway? She lives in a nightmare world. She’s afraid all the time. She can’t go on like this. She’ll starve.”

My stomach turned over. “No. Give her one more day, then we admit her to the hospital and they put in the feeding tube. It worked last time.”

“And how many times you think your momma can take that, in and out the hospital? She needs shock treatments!”

“Hattie, I’m defending a kid who believes you shouldn’t do that to an animal. A monkey. A mink.” Whatever. “They think you don’t have the right.”

“This ain’t about rights, Bennie. She got her rights now and she dyin’. Dyin’,” she said softly, and I could hear Georgia in her voice, a lilt that appeared only when she was tired or angry.

I sensed she was both, and looked at her face anew. The dark circles, the downturn to her eyes. Her cheeks had grown puffier, she’d gained weight. Her blood pressure problem had reappeared, its presence announced by the tall brown bottle of Lopressor on the table. My mother’s care was taking its toll on her, and it tore at me inside. I had a choice: Hattie or my mother.

I got up from the table, it was all I could do. Bear, resting on her side, raised her head from her paws, her round brown eyes questioning. She would stay all day with Hattie, who would watch the soaps, make homemade soup, and change my mother’s diaper. Come Sunday, Hattie would take the bus to Atlantic City, there to stand before the slot machines at the casinos, pushing the button and watching the spinning bars. Letting the clanging, jangling, and clattering obliterate every other thought. I understood it completely.

I walked to my mother’s room with Bear’s toenails clicking at my heels. I opened her door and stood there, letting the familiar scent of tea roses waft over me. It was my mother’s favorite perfume, and we doused the room with it to please her and mask less pleasant odors. She wouldn’t let us open the window, so the air in the room remained heavy and close behind the drawn curtains.

I looked down at my mother in the soft light. She lay under her old chenille coverlet, having finally fallen asleep around dawn, and she made a tiny figure in the bed. A figurine in a roomful of figurines. Ceramic birthday angels, muted Hummel figures, a prized Lladro. She had collected them in the days when she still went out, days I didn’t even recall.

Her black hair had gone gray but was still wildly wavy. Her bony, hawkish nose was belligerent even in sleep, as was her pointed chin. Only her last name tied me to her, for I had none of her features and all of my father’s. I assumed, since I’d never met the man. Never even saw his picture. My mother didn’t like him much and refused to marry him. At least that was what she told me as a child, though I’d come to suspect differently.

And as long as I could remember, she had been bitter, resentful. Then the resentment turned to a rage and the rage burrowed inside her and ate her up. That’s how I saw it as a child, even though they called it “bad nerves,” then a “nervous breakdown.” Later science entered the picture and the doctors decided my mother had an “electrolyte imbalance,” as if all she had to do was drink Gatorade. We went through medication, Pamelor, then Elavil, but she wouldn’t take either. She was getting older and harder to handle. We ran out of medication just about the same time we ran out of patience and money.

Though one uncle had sent the funds that supported us, the relatives who had been helping slipped away as I grew older, attriting for various reasons that all amounted to the same reason. Some died off, and at one point I wondered if that were the only way out. But before I knew it I was coping with it, getting two jobs after school and applying for aid for her. Meeting with the doctors, even as a seventeen year old, and eventually giving up on them because they had nothing to offer her, and changing her diaper myself.

Then I found Hattie and could breathe, for the first time. Went to college on scholarship, close by to Penn, then to law school, on half-scholarship. Graduated and made the money to keep alive the figurine in the bed. A little old Italian lady, but tough; like an aging hen, wasting, exhausted, but still fighting. I used to think she was fighting death. Until I realized she was fighting life.

“Bennie, Bennie, come quick!” It was Hattie, standing in front of the television in the kitchen. Bear turned, too, ears lifted at the alarm in her voice.

“What?” I closed my mother’s door.

“Look, on the TV. Isn’t that your law firm?”

I ran to the TV and froze at the image on the screen. A black body bag was being wheeled out on a steel stretcher and loaded into a black coroner’s van. The scene changed to the brick townhouse, then a close-up of the plaque that said Rosato & Biscardi. I turned up the volume, but somehow I couldn’t hear the news. Couldn’t bear to hear it.

“Mark.” Hattie pointed. “Somebody killed him.”

M
OBILE CRIME DETECTION UNIT
, it said on the boxy white and blue van parked in front of the townhouse. Police sawhorses and squad cars blocked the cobblestone street. A group of reporters pressed against the yellow crime-scene tape. I ducked the cordon and pushed my way to the door, showing my ID to the cops who tried to keep me from Mark.

By the time I got there he was long gone, they’d taken him for an autopsy. The thought of it made me sick. I couldn’t respond, couldn’t speak sensibly when the uniformed cop started asking me questions. Mark. I’d walked out on him. I’d cursed him. They would be the last words he heard from me.

“Come along, Ms. Rosato,” the uniformed cop was saying. “The homicide detectives want to speak with you.” He hustled me into the town-house as the press cameras clicked away.

It was a madhouse inside. Marshall was standing near the reception window, crying and hugging Amy Fletcher. Wingate slumped in a
RIDIN
’
THAT TRAIN
T-shirt on the sofa, his face wan, sitting next to Jennifer Rowland, whose cheeks were tearstained. Renee Butler was talking with Jeff Jacobs in the library, and looked at me oddly as the cop tugged me down the hall. I felt a strong arm pull on my shoulder from behind.