When You Go Away (28 page)

     "They want her to plead guilty?"  Noel asked.  "Why should she plead guilty?  She was sick.  You know we don't want that."

     "Yes, yes.  We know she was sick.  They know the same thing.  Peri's a credible witness.  The story is sad.  People aren't behaving like monsters.  There’s the state system that failed.  That's why they don't want to go to trial on this.  But if we plead to the misdemeanor, we avoid one, a trial, two, jail time if the jury finds her guilty--"

     "Guilty?"  Noel said again.

     "Yes, Noel.  It's possible.  You know how people think mental illness is just a sign of bad character or a personality flaw.  Most people would think Peri should have pulled herself up by her own bootstraps and figured another way out.  And they’ll point to all the
normal
things she did.  They’ll suggest she was sane enough to move, sign a lease, hook up the cable, register the older kids for school.  It looks thought through.  Premeditated.”

     Noel squeezed the space between his eyebrows with his thumb and forefinger.  He was scared, and Peri began to feel a nervous lightness in her stomach.

     “And then there's three, the publicity.”
Preston
went on. “I think the story has died out in the papers now, and a trial would only bring it back.  You have to think of the kids on that one."

     Peri focused on her nails, pushing back the cuticles that she hadn't tended in well over a year.  Before, back in her other life, she'd gone to Alysse at the Village Circle Beauty Spot for once a week manicures, twice a month pedicures.  Now, she wasn't sure what her toenails even looked like.

     "Peri?"  Noel stared at her.  "Well?  What do you think?"

     "I don't know.  What does it mean?"

     Preston pushed back and crossed his legs.  "It means we go straight to sentencing."

     "I know that.  But what does it mean for the custody case?" she asked.

     "Well, it can mean a couple of things.  One--" Peri grimaced. 
Preston
seemed to be talking to her from an outline he'd written and memorized.  "One, it helps your case
because you weren't convicted of a felony, and two, you plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of neglect.  However, if you, three, throw in the mental illness and the reports from Phoenix and your new doctor, there's hope."

     "It's on her record though," Noel said.  "It will always be there."

     "That's true."

     "What about the sentencing?  What will the judge do to her?"  Noel asked.

     "That's up to him.  He's one of those judges we can't pin down, lenient one minute, a hard-ass the next.  But it's possible. . ."
Preston
turned to her and she tried to look at him, her eyes starting to water.  "It's very possible that you might serve some time."

     "Shit," Noel muttered.

     "Or--and this is a big or, Noel--the judge might go with time served and commute the rest, opting for parenting classes and therapy and visits from social services.  Or maybe probation.  There are a number of options he could pick from."

     "I was only in jail for three days.  How would that count?"  Those three days had been forever, Sophia's scabby legs, the nighttime din of sobs and horrible dreams, the harsh closing clack of heavy doors keeping her from her children.  But to a judge?  Or a jury?  Three days wouldn't seem like enough punishment.  They would want her to do more and more and more.

     "You don't know what I've seen,”
Preston
said.  “I've seen a man who beat another man to death get off with a two-year probation and 500 hours of community service. 
This man wanted to kill the other guy and did, with a bat.  All sorts of people who meant to do what they did don't serve even three days, so think about your case.  You were ill; you didn't mean to do it in the same sense.  You are sorry.  Those are things a lot of guilty people can't claim." 
Preston
looked at the clock, and Peri knew their hour was up, an hour Noel and her father were paying for.

     "I'll call you later," Noel said.  "We need to talk about this."

     "So, Peri?  The kids?  How are they?"  Peri looked at him, this man, her lawyer, and saw for a moment he'd dropped what drove him, the case, the puzzle of the legal system, the desire to patch up another person's life and claim victory.

     "Good.  Brooke is doing really well.  My mother-in-law.  Ex. . . well, Garnet called and found the private physical therapist we used to use. Brooke's already stronger." She knew that how much better Brooke was reflected on her wrong mothering.  "And I had a good visit with Ryan and Carly yesterday.  They're . . . they're okay."

     "And you?"

     "Better."  Her body was adjusting to the Zoloft and her new drug, Zyprexa, her mind righting itself back to a time even before Graham left.  With Dr. Kolakowski's daily help, she'd begun peeling apart the last year, one layer at a time, and managed not to die while facing her mistakes.

     "Great.  Look," Preston said.  "They are pressing me for an answer, but I can wait a day.  Go home.  Talk with your dad.  But my advice is to take this offer.  Custody can be reevaluated.  A felony can't as easily.  Trust me on this."



That afternoon while Noel and her father sat in the house drinking beer and talking about her case, Peri went to the garage and found a garden trowel, work gloves, and the twenty foxglove seedlings her father had bought for her on his way home from clearing out her apartment.  Dr. Kolakowski had suggested she get outside, walk, garden, or just sit in the sun, so her father had cleared a corner of the yard for her to plant.  Dirt and plants seemed so much more manageable than obsessing about the varied ways she might spend the next months or even years of her life--jail, probation, a half-way house for the mentally ill, or home, with her dad, or even better, home with her kids.

     Outside, a fog pressing in from the Bay had finally cleared just in time for evening, and the ground was wet under her gloved fingers.  Kneeling on the lawn, she bent over the patch of earth her father had cleared for her, digging the exact four inch holes the containers suggested and smoothing the dirt over the exposed roots, pressing down gently to keep them in the soil.  After planting almost half the seedlings, Peri stood up and stretched, taking off her gloves and pushing the hair away from her eyes.  In the moment of lifting her newly shorn bangs, she saw that the person in the SUV across the road--the Suburban she hadn't paid more than a split second of attention to--was Graham.

     The last time she'd seen her husband had been the night he packed and left the house without waking the children.  She'd followed him to the door as if in a dream, everything
slightly hazy and slowed down, as if she would wake up and find his absence part of a nightmare.  What she remembered was his back, his white shirt reflecting in the outside lights, a drizzle illuminated and dancing in swaths, the neat click of his shoes on the wet asphalt.  Then the car started, the lights beaming into her face, and he pulled out of the driveway.  She stayed by the door for a long time, maybe even an hour, the rain soaking the hem of her nightgown.  She blinked, waiting for the moment she would wake up, one, two, three . . .  but she never did.  She still hadn't.

     The Suburban’s door opened, and Graham stepped out, looking at her without saying a word.  Preston would say, "Don't talk to him.  Don't say a word."  Her father would want her to tell him off, saying all the things she'd kept inside since the night he'd driven off leaving her with three children.  Maybe her father would want to take a swing at him.  And that would feel good. 

     Even from across the street, he was still so handsome, still the man she’d fallen in love with in college, amazed that he sat down next to her in the cafeteria.  He was still the man he’d been before Brooke.  She would like to transform his face so it matched hers, the pain under her skin transmitted to his.  She'd thought about this moment for a long time, many of her afternoons under the blankets a prolonged fantasy of this very minute.  But now, she had no idea what to do, so she stood there, moving her feet back a couple steps, and then stopped and stared at him, this man, her husband.  Her ex-husband.

     As if taking her stillness for opportunity, Graham walked across the street, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on his shoes.  Noticing he wasn't paying attention to traffic, she looked down the street to see if a car was coming.  If a truck or an armored car or a
special education bus was barreling toward him, would she scream out?  Or would she let him get hit, spin to the concrete, die in front of her, die as she felt she would a hundred times.  But he made it to the sidewalk, and Peri swallowed down the drug dryness in her mouth so she could say what she had to.

     "Peri," he said, putting his hand on a white picket, looking down at her work.  "Planting?"

     "Yes."  She said, looking down at this work, the first she'd done in so long that showed, the plants spaced exactly twelve inches apart, the soil rich, sprinkled with the blue fertilizer her father had told her to use. 

     "How are you?" he asked, leaning against the fence now, his arms folded across his chest.  Why was he was so comfortable when he clearly was in danger?  After all, wasn't she the same woman who had battered down his door just weeks before?  Wasn't she the one who had injured their children?  She was clutching a trowel, and it was deadly, the tip sharp, the dirt stuck to it rife with bacteria, tetanus, chemicals.  In half a second, this happy discussion could be over, Graham bleeding as she had bled, needing stitches as she had needed them, her arm still red and puckered from the stitches' kiss.

     "Better--good," she said.  "I have to go in now." 

     "Wait.  Don't go in.  I need--I need to talk."

     Peri dropped the trowel and stepped on it, as if that would keep her from using it on his forehead.  "About what?  And why now?"

     He rubbed his mouth and chin, sighing.  He wasn't really as handsome as always, his eyes red, his skin blotched and puffy as if he'd been drinking.  But her old self, the one who had fallen in love with him so long ago, was still inside her, waving from the dried up pool of her heart, saying, "It's him."

     "I want to know why."

     "Why what?"

     "Why you did it."

     "I can't talk about that.  You know that.  Whatever I said to you now, you'd use it against me.  I have to go in--I don't want to talk about it with you."

     Peri turned to go, and he grabbed her arm, exactly where her stitches were.  "Ow!  Let go!"

     Graham let go and pulled back.  "I'm so sorry.  I forgot what happened."

     "You're lucky.  I can't."

      "You didn't mean it, did you?  You didn't want it to happen."

     Peri brought a hand to her heart and imagined squeezing silent her old self, squishing her in her fist until she was gone, nothing left but a last cry and then nothing but the air around her.  She looked at Graham and finally saw him as someone who left, someone who walked away from her and their children, someone who was almost able to pretend that years of his life had never happened.  "No.  I didn't want you to leave.  I didn't want to take care of them all by myself without money.  I didn't want Brooke to fall back by
years because I couldn't afford
Leon
and then had to drive her to the clinic.  I didn't want to sell our house and move to an apartment.  I didn't want any of it, but I was too tired and too sad to care.  Everything seemed so hard, so dark, so all up to me.   And then I woke up strapped to a bed in a strange city, knowing that all I wanted was you to fix it."

      Graham stared at her, his face pale, the freckles on his cheeks dark constellations. 

     "But you can't fix it.  Even if all the courts and lawyers and social workers say that you can, you can't.  You can never come back to the past and be the man you were supposed to be, see that there was something wrong with me, take care of us all.  It's too late.  The kids had to see me depressed, and I can’t take that back.  And now, look what's happened.  Look at our children, Graham.  Look what we've done."

     She was still clenching her fist, and when she stopped talking, she felt her hand throb and opened it, almost expecting to see the lifeless corpse of her marriage flat in her palm.

     "You're right," he said.

     "Now, maybe."

     "Peri.  Oh, Peri," he said, and she closed her eyes.  “I’m—I’m sorry.  I don’t know how to explain . .  Brooke.  She’s so hurt.  She’ll never be . . .”

     “Normal.  Is that the word?” Peri asked.

     Graham almost nodded, and she remembered the way he’d looked when the doctors gave them Brooke’s diagnosis.  Graham had almost waved away their words, wanting
them to start over and change the script, make it so his girl could be fixed.  But she would never be fixed and probably get worse, and that’s what he’d run away from.

     “I want to make it up to . . . her.”  Graham moved closer to her, almost leaning over the fence.

     "You can’t.  It’s too late now.  I've got to go back in the house," she said, turning without looking at him again, rounding the house and leaning against the wall in the side yard where he couldn't see her.  Pressing her body against the stucco, she listened to him walk across the street and then slam his door, the engine starting after a couple of minutes and then idling for a while before he drove away.