What I Saw and How I Lied (21 page)

She lay on the bed next to me. I felt her fingers on my hair and I kept sleep-breathing. I risked a look under my eyelashes.

She was in her pink nightgown, ankles crossed, head flung back against the pillows. Arm in the air, elbow bent, cigarette glowing in her fingers. Tanned legs glistening in the darkness. Blond hair tumbling past her shoulders.

I breathed in smoke and My Sin perfume. It was her smell. It filled the air.

I didn't move, but I could tell she knew I was awake. I kept on pretending to be asleep. She pretended not to know.

I breathed in and out, perfume and smoke, perfume and smoke, and we lay like that for a long time, until I heard the seagulls crying, sadder than a funeral, and I knew it was almost morning.

I tipped over the empty bottle of soda and anchored it in the sand.

I'd gone over it all in my head, and I still didn't know. I remembered all the things I'd seen. It was all there in my head, the things that happened, the things we said.
I should stay away from you, pussycat.

If I could add up the clues, would I know the truth? Would I know if Joe had planned to kill Peter? Did everything that added up for Joe—jealousy and fear and spite — make him think, yeah, this was his only answer? Or maybe he hadn't planned it. Maybe out on that pounding ocean he found his answer. Maybe Mom was "downstairs" and didn't see it. Maybe she did. Maybe she was so mad at Peter for double-timing her with me that she helped.

No. If I knew one thing, I knew that Mom didn't do it. She put her hands over her ears during thunderstorms.

The ashtray had flown through the air and shattered. Her face had been so blank.

How could I know what she was capable of? I'd seen what regular ordinary men could do. I'd seen newsreels of what they found after the war.

But I'd never thought about it before. The magazines and movies told me different, that the war was over and we were all okey-dokey, drinking Cokes and smoking Camels and saving up for the new Chevrolet.

Joe was part of that. He came back from the war and hit the ground running. I'd admired that, how the very next day he started making calls. I didn't know then what he was doing, how late at night he'd talk to Gladys, both of them with glasses of whiskey, talking low. And we were all so full of happiness because he was home that nobody thought twice.

"Let them have their time," Mom had said. "There's plenty of Joe to go around now."

He'd wanted success so badly that he'd stolen and he'd lied. How bad did he want to keep it?

If I lined up the reasons for Joe to be guilty, I could see them clear as morning. But if he was telling the truth, it just meant he looked guilty, not that he was. Sure, he'd asked Wally about the hurricane hole. But Joe was the type of guy who was interested in whatever he didn't know. He was always asking the mailman about what were the most comfortable shoes, or the milkman about how he got up so early.

Would Mom stay with him if she knew he was a murderer? She didn't seem scared of him. She seemed scared of him going away.

What did I owe you, Peter?

Truth and justice? If judges would judge, if lawyers wouldn't trick, if reporters would tell what really happened instead of what sold papers.

Fat chance.

Truth, justice ... I always thought they were absolutes, like God. And Mom. And apple pie.

But you could make apple pie from Ritz crackers. You could make cakes without sugar. We learned how to fake things, during the war.

What did loyalty mean? Loyalty to the family, to the church, to the neighborhood, to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Why did loyalty stop there? Why didn't it keep on going? It didn't seem to take a spin around the whole world, that was for sure.

I wished I could get one clean breath from this humid air. I wanted the snap of autumn, blue sky clear and deep, the familiar cracks of the sidewalks, my feet jumping so surely over them, never missing. I wanted to go home so badly.

I touched the place on my temple that her lips always found, ever since I was a baby. Did everything funnel down to that one delicate place, the place where love was?

Mom had bought four new dresses, all of them dark colors. I picked out a navy dress she hadn't worn yet, with a narrow belt and a little matching jacket. I took out white and navy high-heeled spectator pumps from a brand-new box. I slipped them on. They hurt.

I brushed my hair with hard strokes and drew it back off my forehead. I twisted it and put in the pins like an expert. I rolled up the tube of Fatal Apple lipstick and painted my mouth.

I looked like a doll, a dish. The image in the mirror — it wasn't me.

If I had the clothes and the walk, I could make up a whole new person. I wasn't who I used to be, anyway. A different me would do the thing I had to do today. The dish would do it.

"Evie?" Mom was awake now, groping for her first cigarette. She got a good look at me, and she sat straight up. "What are you doing?"

Her panicked voice woke up Joe.

I looked at them, in separate beds, the sheets tangled and twisting onto the floor. I saw a purplish bruise on Mom's arm, right where Joe had grabbed her.

Wobbling a little bit in the too-tight shoes, I walked out.

I couldn't explain, you see. I couldn't tell her that I understood just a little better what Peter was talking about when he talked about war. I found out that what you think is necessary, what you have to do — well, all of a sudden, that can cover plenty of new ground.

It's just a matter of what you're willing to do.

Noise and heat slamming against my ears. Camera shutters clicking. People yelling. Sun hitting my eyes, glinting off metal like shards of glass flying.

They thought Joe was guilty now, so the sidewalk in front of the courthouse was filled. So were the stairs and the hallways. Reporters and photographers lunged forward, flashbulbs popping like gunshots.

The instructions were clear. The three of us were to link arms and walk up the stairs to the courtroom.

"Don't stop, whatever you do," Mr. Markel had ordered us in the car. "Don't stop to look at anyone — just keep walking."

We all looked at his narrow back in his brown suit as he used his shoulders and his walk to clear the way. Our pipsqueak attorney had turned into a pretty decent linebacker.

We didn't look at each other. I had showed up at the last minute with Mr. Markel, and there was no time to talk to Mom and Joe. Their fear was in the car with us. I wouldn't meet Mom's scared eyes.

We walked hard and fast, our sides pressed together. My navy straw hat was pulled over my eyes, shadowing my face.

They called us Joe and Bev and Evelyn. The photographers said,
Evelyn, turn this way
and
Aw, come on, Bev, give us a look over here.
Like we were pals.

Not even my teachers called me Evelyn. I would give them Evelyn. Someone with cool hands and a confident walk.

I tried to make the noise into one blur of sound. I thought about the Third Avenue El. We hardly ever took it because Mom was afraid of it. She didn't like subways either — she closed her eyes almost the whole time. After all, her parents had died in a train crash. It was me who had to watch out for the stops.

I always wanted to take the El. The train raced above the avenue, and you could see right into apartment windows, especially if it was getting dark and lights were on. Just a quick look, like a snapshot someone snatches away from your hand. A man in his undershirt eating at a table. A woman putting on her hat. Someone sleeping in a chair. Down below you, noise had a shadow. Under the tracks there was the roar of the train, and then the echo of the roar, and then the bounce of it against the buildings. But you were in the middle of it, way above. You weren't part of the city; you were cutting right through the heart of it.

We turned into the courtroom.

It was so humid inside that the windows had steamed over. People stood in back and down the side aisles. They all craned their necks as we walked toward our seats. We sat in the first row, right in back of the counsel table. Mr. Markel left us there and nodded at the other attorney. He opened his briefcase.

I had called him from the phone in the lobby that morning. He'd met me at his office. Early, before Miss Geiger came to work. I'd told him what I was going to say and he didn't interrupt, just took notes on a yellow pad. When I'd finished, he'd closed it and looked up.

"Are you sure?"

I'd nodded.

"Do you have a handkerchief with you?" he'd asked. "Use it."

I felt their eyes on my back as the judge came in. Their curiosity was like a wild, living thing in the room. I had to keep wiping my hands on my skirt because I wanted to be Evelyn with cool hands, not Evie with her stomach in knots and sweat snaking from her armpits. I was concentrating so hard on being cool that I missed them calling my name. Joe had to nudge me.

I stood up so quickly that my purse fell on the floor and I tripped on it. Bad start.

I walked my new walk, the one I had because of the tight high heels, my hips swaying.
Chin up!
I heard Mrs. Grayson say in my head.

I looked up at the judge, then back down in my lap. I needed that judge on my side. I needed to keep my hands and my stomach calm. I needed not to be sick. I needed not to faint. I had to do this today, because if I had to come back tomorrow, I couldn't do it. I couldn't be Evelyn for one more day.

I put my hand on the Bible.

I swear it on a stack of Bibles.
We said it back home when we told the truth, no fudging. Because if you swore on a Bible and you lie, you'd go to straight to hell on the downtown express.

Mr. Markel rose. He told me in a warm tone I'd never heard from him before not to be nervous. I nodded nervously.

"Just tell the truth," he said. "Let's start the night of September fifth. What happened that evening?"

"We were all having dinner in the restaurant at the hotel."

"You're sure it was that evening?”

“Yes, it was a Friday night. We'd been to the movies that day."

"Who was there that evening, Miss Spooner?"

"My father and mother, and the Graysons, and Peter — Mr. Coleridge. After dinner was over, the ladies decided they'd go upstairs to their rooms, and the gentlemen would go to the lobby for coffee. Peter leaned over and asked me if I'd go for a walk, and I said yes." I hesitated. "But I didn't tell my parents."

"Why is that, Miss Spooner?"

It was hard for me to avoid looking at Joe and Mom at that moment. But I remembered Mr. Markel's instructions. I wasn't going to slip.

"Because I knew they'd say no. They thought Peter was too old for me."

"Was it the first time you'd met Mr. Coleridge without your parents consent?"

"No." I whispered the word, and the judge made me say it again.

"You were, in fact, carrying on a secret romance with the deceased?"

"Yes, sir. It started when Peter drove me and my mother places. If we were alone for a minute or two, he would ask me to meet him later. If I was able to, I did."

The crowd was completely silent now. They hung on every word.

"Did your mother have any knowledge of this?”

“No, sir."

"Did you ever go to the house he had used?"

"Yes. I didn't know he'd broken in."

"What did you do on the night in question?"

"First I went upstairs. I could hear my mother getting ready for bed. While she was in the bathroom, I went to her closet and took out one of her dresses. The blue one, because that was the prettiest."

A flashbulb popped, and the judge ordered the photographer out of the courtroom.

"I wanted to look older. So I met him in my mother's dress, and we walked for a bit, and then we stopped under this tree, and we kissed. He thought he heard someone coming, and he pressed my head against his shirt. A minute later he saw someone go by. He didn't know it was Wally, but he promised me that whoever it was hadn't seen my face."

"Do you think he was telling the truth?"

"Oh, yes. Because I heard the footsteps, too. And we were hidden by the tree, so the person couldn't have seen us until he was pretty close."

"What happened next?"

"We waited just a little bit, and then he walked me back to the road. I sneaked back into the hotel. My mother was sleeping by then, so I put the dress back in her closet."

"Did the dress fit you?"

"Yes, perfectly. My mother and I are the same size."

"Were you in love with Mr. Coleridge, Miss Spooner?"

I ducked my head. "Yes, sir, I was."

At least I got to tell one solid truth today.