Winner Take All (6 page)

The child listens between the songs as other parents are scorned and dismissed. She sees the way others speak of their homes. She finds malignant comfort in not being so alone
.

By the third party, it all seems pretty much normal
.

Gradually her friends become restricted to girls from these gatherings. The child watches as one by one these friends allow themselves to be pulled into the game. That is what they call it, especially when around people who aren’t included. The girls who depart from the no-fire corner begin urging the child to come on and join the game. The child can’t say exactly why she resists. But it seems to her that they are becoming replicas of those they despise. Gay and lively on the outside, bitter and drugged within
.

Even so, the child knows it is only a matter of time
.

The night after her sixth game, she watches her parents with the detached interest of an eternal refugee. Their house is filled with a crowd of other false faces. The child helps the maid serve drinks and watches as her parents offer these strangers reptilian grins and chatter they do not even hear themselves. When the guests leave, her parents strip off the happy masks and reveal a steadfast hostility. They slide over to two opposing sofas, the last drinks charged like late-night ammunition. Her mother’s final cigarette adds to the smoldering cauldron. They snipe carefully, little wounding bullets that have been collected and charged over the night’s course
.

Two nights later the child becomes trapped in a taxi with them. They are returning home from a party where the hosts had a clown act for the children, when a torrential downpour halts all traffic. For torturous
aeons she remains locked between them on a seat that smells of a hundred thousand miles of angry chatter and thwarted dreams and rain splashing against the window. The child tries her best not to hear a thing. Just the same, she inspects herself afterward in the bathroom mirror, and is astonished to find she does not bleed from the wounds to her heart. As she lies in her bed that night, the child decides there is no reason not to go ahead and enter the game
.

Then four days later, her grandmother dies
.

At the reading of the will, which the lawyer insists the child attend, she learns that a trust fund has been set up in her name. An education fund, the lawyer calls it, to be released upon the child’s seventeenth birthday. One hundred and ten thousand dollars, every cent the grandmother has remaining after a long and lingering illness the child has not even known about. Her parents observe her with mute astonishment as the lawyer describes the precise terms of the child’s ticket to freedom. She is to have total control of the money. Until the release date, she has the sole right to determine how the funds are to be preserved. Although the child does not understand much of what is said, the lawyer’s words hold the delicate perfume of a foreign love song. She understands the most important thing, however. Silently she chants the phrase the entire way home while her parents fight viciously, for they have received nothing
.

Total control
.

The funds are moved into a passbook savings account. That night she calculates the amount of interest she will have accrued by her seventeenth birthday. She writes the sum down on a slip of paper. One hundred and thirty-seven thousand, four hundred and twenty dollars. She hides the paper in the back of her desk drawer, where she can take it out and look at it whenever she wants
.

Two weeks later, she enters the school’s student counselor’s office and announces, “I want to graduate a year early.”

The woman is heavyset in the manner of one who has long resigned herself to a life of uncomfortable chairs and bad air and school food. “Aren’t you a little young to be planning such things?”

“No.”

“Do your parents know about this?”

“No. They can’t ever know.”

The woman is neither dumb nor new to her job. “Is there a problem at home we need to talk about?”

“No. We have a perfect home.”

“I see.” This is not the first time the counselor has heard that one either. She rises from her desk. “Wait here a moment, please.”

The counselor comes back with the child’s records. “Are you serious about this?”

“Very.”

“Well, the first thing you’re going to have to do is improve your grades. Which means applying yourself a good deal harder than you have so far. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

The child’s terseness does not seem to bother the counselor at all. “We can increase your load a little, put some meat in here and there. What about summer school, are you up for that?”

“All right.”

“Let’s say we give it a couple of months, then if you stay serious about this, we’ll have another chat.” When the child rises from her seat, the counselor adds, “Sometimes the hardest lesson to learn is when to ask for help.”

“There’s no problem,” she replies and leaves the office
.

And there isn’t. Not anymore
.

She severs all connections with her friends and the game. In fact, she stops almost everything that is not directly tied to school and her work. That term, she receives one C and manages to raise the rest of her grades to B’s and A’s. The crowd of former friends rename her Casper. The next term, she receives her last B ever. By that spring her former friends no longer even greet her in the hall
.

Two weeks before her seventeenth birthday, she graduates with honors. Two universities offer her full rides. She accepts the offer from Georgetown because they agree to defer her entry a year
.

The day she turns seventeen, she gives herself a ticket to Europe as her birthday present. Her parents do not even know she has left until they receive her one and only letter, sent the week after her arrival in London
.

Two months later she has made her way across France and down the length of Italy. Her passport and a wad of traveler’s checks are stuffed deep inside her backpack. She likes introducing herself as Casper, and by the time she arrives in Rome it is the only name she uses. She makes no plans further along than the next seventy-two hours. She wears Gortex ankle boots and high wool socks and hiking gear and a Gypsy kerchief sewn with silver spangles to hide her hair
.

She meets some Dutch backpackers at the hostel in Naples who invite her to take the train over to Bari. From there they will catch the two-day ferry to Athens. On the train ride they talk about mystic beaches untouched by tourist hordes—the southern coves of Crete, Cleopatra Island off Turkey, Lamu Island near the Kenyan coast, Niias in Indonesia. The child listens and laughs and shares a wineskin of fiery red. As the day trundles on, she aches with the realization she has finally found a reason to use the word happy and mean it
.

If only she could hold on to that feeling a little while longer
.

The second night of their boat crossing, three of the backpackers drug her wine and rape her repeatedly on the upper deck between the two smokestacks
.

All she remembers afterward is their drunken laughter and the way smoke keeps rising to stain the star-flung sky
.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Kirsten worked in Marcus’ front garden forming a periwinkle border around the central elm. She dug between the roots and tried to hold to a circular formation. A high summer wind blasted through a cloudless sky. Heat squeezed sweat from her forehead like a weightlifter working a sponge. Why she remained here at all was a question that only aggravated the fissure in her brain. Two warring factions battled in fierce mental salvos. Impossible choices. Impossible decisions.

Six months ago she had started working as Marcus’ research staffer. Almost immediately the neighbors had taken her presence as a sign of something deeper in the making. They welcomed her with flowers and shrubs from their own gardens. It was the clearest possible message both of her own acceptance and of the affection they felt for Marcus.

It was also a quiet signal of their watchfulness, for never did she receive the next gift until the previous one was planted. Half this neighborhood attended Deacon’s church. While they were far too polite to say a thing, Kirsten knew the eyes were scouting carefully. Her comings and goings were the subject of the same stream of gossip as their own children. This she knew from Netty, who had heard the mildly approving chatter at the supermarket checkout counter.

The only exception to the community’s cordiality was Deacon’s wife, Fay Wilbur. She was inside right now, doing her thrice-weekly cleaning. The woman had said nothing, but Kirsten sensed the storm brewing. Fay eyed her with the same distaste she would a worm among her vegetables. There was going to be a reckoning. It was only a matter of time.

Her internal foment and the day’s searing wind masked the man’s approach entirely. Then a shadow fell over her and a man’s voice said, “You just gotta be the Yankee dolly they warned me about.”

Kirsten scrambled to her feet. “Can I help you?”

“Soon as they heard I was stopping by, they said I was gonna fall in love with this dolly and I might as well get used to the idea right fast.” He was a redheaded behemoth with a blade for a face. All his features slanted sharply toward the arrow of a nose, the angles so tight even his forehead appeared retooled. The swept-over curl of greasy red hair almost met with his eyebrows, which only accented the barbed glint to his eyes.

When his gaze drifted down her sweat-stained front, Kirsten shifted her grip on the trowel. “I asked you what you wanted.”

His grin ridged out in taut compression until his eyes almost disappeared. “Just came by to deliver this check. You ain’t so rich you’d pass up some extra greenbacks. Not with Glenwood camped over here on the trashy side of the river.”

“I don’t recognize you as one of Mr. Glenwood’s clients.”

“That’s all right, dolly. We know Marcus.” A blast of wind pried back the sleeve of his rumpled jacket like the lid of a filthy gray jar. Tattoos crawled down his wrist and over the back of his hand. “Somebody oughta told you by now, it ain’t healthy to do your planting in the high heat.”

She took a step away, backing toward the porch. “Unless you are registered as a client I can’t help you.”

He tracked her, moving closer in the process. “I’m the one doing the helping, or I would, if you’d stop this two-step across the lawn.”

“Are you or are you not a client?”

“I’m what you might call an interested third party. Never had the occasion to meet old Marcus personally. Couldn’t hardly pass up the opportunity to call on the man himself when I heard he was knocking on New Horizons’ door again.”

She kept her face to him and tried to angle her backward motion toward the house. “Please come back another time and talk with Mr. Glenwood directly.”

“You don’t look all that busy to me.” He paced lightly along with her. “Hot and bothered, maybe. But I’ve always liked my ladies to glisten.”

Kirsten aimed the dirt-flecked trowel straight at the man’s heart and screamed,
“Netty!”

Quick as a striking cottonmouth, the man snatched the trowel from her grasp. He tossed it in the air and caught it at shoulder height, such that it was now aimed for a downward killing blow. His grin was a distillation of menace.

“What on earth’s going on out here?” The front door slammed back. “Sephus Jones, are you messing with that lady?”

The grin relaxed a trifle. The man leaned down and jammed the trowel so hard it disappeared into the earth up to his fist. He then reached into his jacket and plucked out an envelope. He whipped forward and jammed it into the front pocket of Kirsten’s shorts. In and
out so fast she did not have time to scream. “Deliver that check to Marcus for me, will you?”

“
Sephus!
You leave that woman alone!”

Kirsten scampered for the front steps and Netty’s comforting fury. Her entire frame was trembling so hard her footsteps were as unsteady as an infant’s. She could still feel his hand in her pocket.

“I’m calling the police, you don’t get offa my lawn!”

The man cast Kirsten another tight spark from those half-seen eyes, and said, “You have yourself a nice old day, now, you hear? Oh, and tell Marcus for me I’m glad to hear he’s decided to dance another tune with us.
Real
glad.”

The two women watched him saunter to his idling truck and drive off with a tattooed wave. When Kirsten’s breathing stopped shuddering, she said, “He said New Horizons sent him.”

Netty squinted into the sun-drenched distance. “I’m not the least surprised.”

“You know him?”

“Know of him. Sephus Jones.”

“He threatened me.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.” Netty’s face bore the pinched quality of someone looking for a place to spit. “Folks around here refer to him as Skunk. Whenever he’s disappeared off for a spell, there’s no question but Sephus has been sent up. Again.” She pointed to where the envelope’s corner poked from her shorts. “What’s that he planted in your pocket?”

“A check.” She used two fingers to pull the envelope free. “My guess is it’s a retainer from New Horizons for Dale Steadman’s legal fees.”

“You want me to burn it?”

Kirsten entered the front hall and set the envelope upon the side table. She then headed upstairs for the guestroom shower. Sephus Jones’ imprint was on her skin like a rising bruise. “I think Marcus should see it.”

“Why spoil the man’s Friday? I could dig a hole and bury it out there by your plants, he knows where it is if he’s interested.”

T
HE
W
AKE
C
OUNTY
C
OURTHOUSE
was just another Raleigh downtown high-rise, banded across its center by three stories of windowless concrete. These middle floors housed prisoners awaiting trial and those sentenced to anything less than ninety days. A second jail had recently been erected across the street and was connected by a fourth-floor walkover. The courthouse foyer was a tidal wash of everything wrong with the legal system. The currents moved in predictable fashion, rushing in at half-past eight, out at noon, in at two, out at five. When Marcus arrived, the lines at the metal detectors were ninety strong. Marcus waited while a rat-haired mother with a squalling baby explained to a bored deputy why her common-law man really didn’t mean to kick the kid. Staffing the courthouse information desk was one of the most hated duties a deputy could pull. The accused and their families loved to use the deputies as a captive audience, practicing their spiel before moving upstairs to the judges’ chambers. The deputy waited for the mother to draw breath, then directed her to the crèche, as no children were permitted in family court unless called there by the judge.