Читать книгу The Murderer's Maid - Erika Mailman - Страница 15

CHAPTER 8

Brooke

JULY 4, 2002

That day the lake had sparkled with a blue Brooke had previously only seen in ads. Even the color of the water was affluent, different from the brackish blue-brown of the river that sidled through town.

The Carr family lawn ran lush and rolling down to meet the lake, except for two terraces built for a croquet court and a massing of wicker chaises with fat cushions—such decadence to have something soft outdoors that could be ruined by unexpected rain. Brooke’s own backyard, spattered with patches of grass painful on bare feet, held only plastic versions of Adirondack chairs, easily tipped by wind.

“My dad’s putting steak and shrimp on the barbecue for you,” the elder Carr boy had informed her. “Because you never have it.”

What a kindness, but she didn’t understand the sneer that accompanied his words. So guileless she was, that his cruelty didn’t penetrate.

“Your mom’s not as pretty as our mom,” said the younger one. She’d always remember his name, Ezekiel. Who named their child such a mouthful? But Biblical names often did require total commitment from tongue and teeth, her own mother’s name being the same number of syllables yet somehow melodic rather than dire: Magdalena.

This cruelty Brooke understood. “Yes, she is,” she said loyally.

Mrs. Carr was as short as her mother, but plump and buxom where Magdalena was slim. Mrs. Carr favored pink and cream to complement her frosted blond hair, and her pink manicured nails—hands and feet as Brooke noticed through the open-toed sandals—were soft and unused looking. Blue eyes just a shade too large, and a mouth clearly too thin, created a mom who passed muster in the PTA swift-glance gauntlet, but appeared to Brooke as lacking her own mother’s true beauty. Magdalena’s brown eyes, always alert and rimmed with mascara to emphasize her long lashes, seemed like a face much more worth looking at. Her brown skin, slim body, and rough hands looked like the epitome of womanhood to her daughter.

“Your mom’s from Mexico,” said Abraham, the elder brother, pronouncing the country as if he were talking about rat droppings in the kitchen.

The three of them were on the dock, but still wearing regular clothes instead of swimsuits. Brooke was told she had “the run of the house,” the friendly Mrs. Carr saying so, but instead made her way to the water where she could survey the mansion from a comfortable distance. Cicadas added their laconic complaint to the heat of the day, and Brooke watched smoke rise in some alarm, but it was only the rose-clad Mrs. Carr moving coals on the outdoor grille.

“Yes, she’s from Mexico, but she’s American,” replied Brooke. She wished the boys would go away and leave her alone. She liked squinting up at the house, sprawling white on the top of the rise, and pretending it was hers.

“No, she’s not. My dad said she’s illegal. He’s just hiring her to be nice.”

“Like today,” added Ezekiel. “We have to spend the day with you guys just to be nice.”

“She’s not illegal!” Brooke stood up at this. “My mom is a citizen, and she has every right to be here!” She wanted to shove that boy into the lake. He was placidly sitting there, legs dangling, shoes nearly touching the water, unruffled.

“Maybe if she marries someone and gets her green card,” he said.

She felt her cheeks flush. Always this aimed at her, and with no rejoinder she’d ever developed to pull out of her pocket and devastate inquirers. Where was her dad? And who was he?

“You just don’t know!” she fired at them both, mildly smiling up at her. The calm of the empowered. “She’s married! She’s just . . .”

“She doesn’t wear a ring,” Ezekiel pointed out.

“My dad’s a great guy, and he has so much more money than your dad!” she lied. “His house is like a huge mansion, and it’s three stories high!”

“Then why’s your mom a maid?”

“It’s just a job,” Brooke sputtered, before she turned and ran back up the hill, fragrant from a recent mowing, past the beds of lilies and irises, the weeping willow with a wrought iron bench beneath its natural curtains.

She was out of breath before she reached the house. She paused to wipe tears off her heated cheeks. There was something wrong with being a maid, she could tell by the boy’s tone as he said the word. She hadn’t known before that there was anything shameful to it. A maid, a cashier, a policewoman: what difference did it make?

Mrs. Carr was bent over, snapping a white linen tablecloth on the outdoor table, and didn’t see Brooke pass her.

Brooke stepped into the kitchen where she’d last seen her mother. It was a huge shining affair, with cupboards lit from inside like museum cases, displaying blown-glass bowls and goblets. An island as large as Brooke’s entire kitchen held dominion.

Her mother wasn’t here. Brooke went into the living room with its lifeboat-sized sofas and built-in bookshelves. Ancestor portraits were here, the original Abraham and Ezekiel who had traded wampum with the Indians and promptly built fences on the land they purchased. Enormous picture windows gave onto the lake, where she saw the two boys still sat on the dock.

She padded along to the foot of the staircase, which curved in double lines like the one where Cinderella made her grand entrance at the ball. Brooke knew it was wrong to walk around someone else’s house—but she liked the thrill. And after all, Mrs. Carr had said, “Mi casa es su casa,” and Brooke’s mom had immediately congratulated her on her accent.

“I’m learning!” Mrs. Carr had said. “It’s good to have you around. Maybe the boys will pick up some Spanish.”

So Brooke didn’t pause too long before climbing the stairs, gliding her hand up the fat, polished banister.

“I’m going up to bed,” she pretended, banishing the boys from her head. She daydreamed that upstairs held only a bedroom with a canopy bed for her. Even Mrs. Carr, she decided reluctantly, would have to go, nice as she was. Brooke wanted her own mom in the master suite.

And handsome Mr. Carr?

Maybe he could stay.

After what seems like a slow workday, Anthony shows up at 5:06. Brooke ignores Maria’s sly grin and gets her purse, thinking about how carelessly she’d shaved her legs in the shower that morning. Had she known, she would’ve taken more time.

Because, if she lets Anthony in, it’ll be just for one night.

The woman who moves to a new city every half-year or so and adopts a new identity can’t get deeply involved. Fielding questions, letting them get to know her: it can’t happen. So she’s made the decision in recent years to allow only one-night stands. If Anthony says the right things tonight, he’ll get everything he wants from her, and then she’ll throw him back like a fish, for his own good as well as hers.

“I was wondering if you like Thai food?” he says as they stand on the sidewalk outside the coffeehouse.

“It’s not really my favorite,” she reluctantly admits.

“How about a burger, like a good one?”

“That sounds perfect.”

“There’s a gourmet burger place a few blocks away that doesn’t take itself too seriously. We can walk there.” He gestures the way with his hand still in his trench coat pocket so he looks like a magician brandishing his cape.

They start out, and their paces match each other’s. She’s always been a fast walker, veering around people slowly meandering down the middle of the path.

“Well, you’re not vegetarian; we’ve got one thing figured out,” he says.

“No. But I’m sure if I went to see how the animals are treated, I would be.”

He smiles. “A convenient ignorance always abets a carnivore.”

She almost stops walking at that. He’s out of her league, this guy who uses the word abets in casual conversation.

“What are you?” she blurts out.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you a . . . you look like a stockbroker.”

“Thanks! I think. Assuming that’s a good thing?”

She nods.

“You’re close. I’m an attorney.”

“Oh.”

She thinks of the courtrooms she’d been in after her mother’s death, close, windowless, low-ceilinged affairs in which advocates decided her fate while consulting the notes in their files. “Family court,” it was called, and until she’d attended, she could only picture it as a dinner table, with a mom at the head wearing one of those British barrister wigs and wielding a gavel at the loud witnesses who wouldn’t eat their vegetables.

“What kind of attorney?”

“I work in a criminal law firm.” He coughs. “It doesn’t really work to say I’m a criminal lawyer, because then it sounds like I’m the criminal.”

He knows well the world she was thrust into, both with her mother’s murder and then with the books she’d turned to for answers.

“What?” he says after too much time has passed.

“My mom wanted me to be an attorney.”

“But you were not inspired?”

“I didn’t have the . . .” grades, she’s about to say, but it’s more than that. It’s that attending college and then law school would’ve required her to put down roots and become a stationary target. “I guess I wasn’t on fire to do it.”

“Yeah, you can’t really be lukewarm.”

“You always knew you wanted to be a lawyer?”

“Pretty much. People always told me I was a good arguer.”

“It’s nice you knew what you wanted.”

“And you?”

“You mean, was it my life’s goal to work in a coffeehouse?”

“Well, you’re young,” he says.

She doesn’t respond.

“I have to take that back, because it implies that where you are isn’t your final stop, and it may well be.”

She laughs. “Don’t worry, I’m not offended.”

“Good.”

But the moment does seem to have been a conversation killer, underscoring the fact that he’s on an upward trajectory and she’s not.

“You work with murderers?” she asks after they’ve walked a half block.

“Everyone deserves fair representation.”

“No,” she says firmly. “I don’t think so. Some people are evil.” She tucks her hair behind her ears, a nervous habit.

“The law provides that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.”

“But what if it’s clear as day that they’re guilty? It’s already proven? They’ve got blood dripping off their hands, standing over the victim, their bootprint in the victim’s face: Why do they need a trial?”

They continue in silence as he formulates his answer, past a closed bakery still radiating a smell of sweetness out to the street, and a bodega where the shopkeeper wears headphones and winks salaciously at Brooke as they pass.

“In that—let me just say, graphic and awful—case, it’s to ensure due process of the law and to decide sentencing for that clearly guilty individual.”

“That’s what I mean,” says Brooke doggedly. “Due process of the law. They don’t need it. They’re guilty.”

In a sudden rush, she dislikes him for his mouthful of multisyllabic words, for the way she knows he derives pleasure from saying them, especially in a courtroom faced with someone like her or, even worse, someone whose grasp of English might not be stellar. Those assholes in their expensive suits take great satisfaction in using words only other lawyers know, a parade of formal language to befuddle the poor soul on the witness stand.

It doesn’t help Anthony’s cause that he smiles, not at her, but privately. She is sure he’s thinking she’s stupid, doesn’t “get” the beauty of his well-oiled law machine. And that she’s a hot-headed Mexican who wants murderers to go straight to the chair. Thank goodness for cool-thinking intellectuals like him. He doles out fair treatment contemplated at hole 14, while some relative of the accused follows at his heels lugging the golf bag so he doesn’t have to.

“If you were ever accused of a crime,” he says, “you would want someone like me on your side. Sometimes the people who appear to be guilty aren’t. Or there are extenuating circumstances, and we want to take them into consideration while sentencing.”

“Extenuating circumstances.” She wants to spit. “That example I thought of, someone straddling the victim, blood literally dripping off their elbows . . . I want to hear how you think that person should get off.”

“Suppose the accused acted in self defense,” he says mildly. “Maybe that dripping blood is her own.”

“Okay, what if there’s no sign of injury to the, the . . .”

“Accused. Well, then, let’s say that there’s been a long history of attacks on the accused, and she believes that another is about to rain down on her. She preemptively—”

“Then it’s not self-defense.”

“Perhaps not, but it would affect the court’s leniency in determining how long this individual should be kept away from society. It’s not like there’s a chart somewhere that says, strangle someone, you get thirty years. Well, actually, there kind of is . . . but it’s more that there’s a span of time, fifteen to thirty years. And so the due process of the law might determine this wife has been beaten for years and so this time when her dirtbag of a husband brandishes his baseball bat, she goes after him. Do you think we’d want her to serve at the minimal or maximal end of the sentencing limit?”

She turns away to stare at the display in the store window. She can’t even tell what she’s looking at. All she can think of is his use of the word dirtbag. What her mother, Magdalena, had called her father on the birth certificate.

Tears don’t come. They never do. She’s never been a crier. How she hated the sobs in the group home. With the little kids, okay, but the teens should’ve been able to clamp it down. She has nothing to cry about anyway. She doesn’t know if her father hit her mother. She doesn’t know if he was in her mother’s life, or a one-night stand, or a rapist. She has no idea what he was to her—which means he is a nonentity to Brooke.

“I read a lot of true crime,” she says. “I know there are some people who walk this earth . . . well, let me ask you this. Have you ever been the victim of a crime?”

“No, other than having my swim goggles stolen out of my car once. What about you?”

She could kill herself for directing the conversation exactly where she didn’t want it to go. This was the question she’s spent years dancing around, maneuvering ways to not talk about her past. And she led him straight to it.

“No. I’ve been lucky.”

“I’m glad to hear it. So, you were making a point?”

“I just . . . I’ve read so much. I’ve thought about it a lot.”

“And?”

“It seems so clear that there are some people who can’t be rehabilitated.”

“I respectfully disagree,” he says. “I just took over a case from one of the older attorneys in our firm. I worked hard with the client for his parole hearing, and it was invigorating to see what I could do for him. He was young and stupid when he committed his crime, and now he can rejoin society as a productive member.”

She looks Anthony straight in the eyes and a wash of blackness pulls at her skull from inside. He’s so nice. He’s handsome. He’s doing what he thinks is right. And she’d love to go home with him and feel his skin under her palms and his taste on her tongue, but it just isn’t happening.

They’re so close to the burger place she can smell the fries in their oil from the exhaust fan on the roof.

“I feel awful saying this, but I just got hit by the worst headache,” she says.

She sees by his face that he gets it instantly. All that pressure, all that build-up, released in a second. There will be no dinner, no seduction. Her past has gotten in the way of enjoying things, once again. For him, their discussion was probably light and interesting; for her, it was like digging a nail into a paper cut.

His eyes search her face, and his shoulders slump almost infinitesimally.

“Let me walk you back,” he says. “I don’t want you to run into someone who’ll make blood drip off your elbows.”