Don’t Look Back

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Peter held the letter at arm’s length, although he was not the least bit farsighted, not yet. He was actually a year younger than she was. He inspected the letter as if it were a painting, an abstract portrait of Walter Bowman, or one of those 3-D prints that had been popular for a time. Examined up close, it was words, in that furious, fastidious purple ink. At a distance, it melted into a lavender jumble, an impressionistic sketch of heather-colored hills.

Peter had arrived home at seven thirty that evening, early for him these days, but Eliza had waited until the children went upstairs to tell him about the letter. She might have been able to reference it covertly, using a familiar code: the summer I was fifteen. Over the years, this had been used to explain any number of things. Her need to leave a film that had taken an unexpected plot turn, her disinclination to wear her hair short, although the style suited her better than this not-long, not-short, not-anything haircut. Come to think of it, they hadn’t used the code for some time, not since Peter returned to the States earlier this year and began house hunting on weekends.

‘The Victorian that you like, it’s near – well, one county over – from where Point of Rocks is,’ he had told her via Skype. ‘It’s about an hour out of the city, but on the commuter line and it’s really pretty up there. Lots of people do it. But I thought—’

‘You thought it would bother me. Because of the summer I was fifteen.’ They were meeting each other’s eyes, yet not meeting each other’s eyes. She could never quite master that part of Skype.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not sure it would, but if you’re willing to commute, what about Roaring Springs, where I grew up?’

‘The trains on that line don’t run late enough, hon. And we’d have to have two cars, because I’d have to drive to the station.’

‘Oh.’ She still wasn’t sure why Point of Rocks was in contention but Roaring Springs was not. Wouldn’t he need to drive to the train station out there, too? ‘Well, I’d rather you had less of a commute, so if we can afford something closer in, something near a Metro line, that would be my choice.’

They could – barely – so they did, and that was that.

‘That stupid party,’ he said now, still studying the letter. ‘And you didn’t even want to go. It never occurred to me that we should worry about such things.’

‘Or me, to be fair. I didn’t want to go to the party because, well, I didn’t want to go to the party. I never thought – he never, all these years, made any overture to me, or even my parents or Vonnie, who are much easier to find, still being Lerners. Between taking your name and moving, first to Houston, then to London . . .’

Peter poured himself a glass of white wine and Eliza, as she sometimes did, took a sip. No, even as Peter upgraded the wines he drank, she still found the taste acidic, harsh. She preferred the Albie cocktail of fruit punch and seltzer.

‘So, he’s on death row, reading the party pages in Washing tonian—’

‘It’s almost funny. Almost.’

‘Are you going to write him back?’

They had been sitting on opposite ends of the sofa in the family room, her feet in his lap. Now she put his sweating wineglass on a coaster and curled up next to him, indifferent to how warm the room was, even with the house’s various window units droning away. She thought once again of the house in Roaring Springs, cool on the hottest summer nights with nothing more than window fans. Global warming? The fallacy of memory? Both?

‘I don’t know. And the very fact that I don’t know bothers me. I should be appalled, or angry. Which I am. But mainly, I just feel exposed. As if everyone knows now, as if tomorrow when I leave the house, people will look at me differently.’

Peter glanced at the letter, now lying on the old chest they used as a coffee table. ‘No reference to the kids.’

‘No. All he knows is that I have a prominent husband and a green dress. But it came to our address, Peter, from a Baltimore PO box. Someone did that for him. Someone else knows.’

‘A woman, I’m guessing. A woman with a purple pen. Walter’s sister?’

‘I doubt it. His family essentially cut all ties after his arrest. They didn’t even attend the trials.’

She pressed her face into his neck. He smelled of an aftershave that seemed particularly British to Eliza, crisp and citrusy. She wasn’t sure where it was made, only that Peter had started wearing it during their London years. Their growing-up years, as she thought of them, although two thirty-somethings with small children should have been much further along the road to being grown-ups. Peter’s jobs had always dictated their sense of themselves. When he was a reporter at the Houston Chronicle, they had felt young and bohemian, right down to the funky little house in Montrose. His jump to the Wall Street Journal had dovetailed with the arrival of the children, but they remained in Montrose, although minus the wild parties for which they had been known, parties famous for benign drunkenness and unexpected couplings. At least three marriages in their circle had started at one of their parties, and two had ended. It was as if Peter, with his serious, stuffy job at the Journal – not to mention a wife and children – needed to prove he was still a young man.

London changed that. They were certifiable grown-ups within months of arriving there, and Eliza wasn’t sure if that was because of Peter’s job, as bureau chief, or the city itself. Perhaps their newfound maturity was a result of the sheer distance from everything and everyone they had known. Now, back in the States, she felt old, on the verge of dowdy. Yet her own mother didn’t even have her first child until she was thirty-six and remained exuberantly youthful in her seventies. Maybe it was their old-fashioned roles – full-time mother, full-time breadwinner – that were weighing them down, making them middle-aged, out of touch.

‘I know this sounds odd, but I kind of forgot about Walter. That is, I forgot they were going to execute him. He never thought he would die that way.’

Peter shifted, redistributing her weight, moving her arm, which had left a damp stripe across the front of his shirt. ‘I don’t remember that in the letter.’

‘Then. The summer I was fifteen. I think he thought it would end in a slow-motion hail of bullets, like a movie. As opposed to a routine traffic stop at the Maryland line.’

Peter kissed the top of her head. His skin was warm, but then, it always was. Energy poured out of him, even when he was still.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I love you, too.’

‘You don’t know what love is.’

This was a joke, their own private call-and-response, so ingrained that Eliza couldn’t remember its origins, only that it always made her feel safe.

‘Gross.’ It was Iso, standing on the threshold. ‘Get a room.’ Eliza wondered how long she had been standing there, what she had heard and whether she could make sense of any of it. The summer I was fifteen, hail of bullets, routine traffic stop.

‘What do you need, baby?’ Eliza asked.

Iso made a face. Possibly because of the word baby, or possibly because the mere sound of Eliza’s voice irritated her. ‘I came down to remind you to wash my Spurs jersey, in case you forgot. I want to wear it tomorrow.’

‘I did. Wash it, that is. Not forget. But, Jesus, Iso, that jersey is made for damp England, not ninety-degree days in Montgomery County. Can’t you wear a T-shirt like the other kids?’

‘No. Did you wash my socks, too? I had to dig a pair out of the hamper this morning.’

‘Socks, too.’

‘You know,’ Peter put in, ‘if you can work an iPod and the television and the computer and TiVo, you could probably learn how to operate the washing machine, Isobel.’

Iso looked at him as if he were speaking Portuguese. Peter didn’t annoy her as much as Eliza, but she refused to acknowledge he had any power over her. She stalked off without a reply.

‘I don’t want them to know,’ Eliza said to Peter. ‘Not yet. That’s all I care about. Albie’s just gotten over those awful nightmares, and even Iso is more impressionable than she lets on.’

‘It’s your call,’ Peter said. ‘But there’s always the risk of someone else telling them. Especially as the execution draws closer.’

‘Who? Not you, not my parents. Not even Vonnie, volatile as she can be, would go against our wishes.’

Peter shrugged noncommittally, too polite to say that he considered his sister-in-law capable of just about any kind of bad behavior. It was funny how Peter and Vonnie, who had so much in common – similar intellects and interests, even some parallels in their career paths – remained oil-and-water after all these years. You say funny, Vonnie sneered in Eliza’s head, I say Freudian. He wanted a mommy, so he married one. Peter was more diplomatic about Vonnie: She’s a feisty one. You always know what’s on her mind.

Eliza pressed him for agreement: ‘No one else knows.’

‘Walter knows, Eliza. Walter knows, and he found you. Walter knows, and he might tell someone else. He has told someone else. The person who wrote the letter. Who clearly has our address, not that addresses are hard to find these days.’

‘Well, there’s no one – oh, shit. That asshole. That alleged journalist, Garrett. But I’m sure he’s moved on to other lurid tales, assuming he’s still alive. Is it a proper use of irony to say that it would be ironic if he died in some hideous, salacious crime?’

‘I don’t know if it would be irony, but it has a certain poetic justice.’

‘Walter never spoke to him, though. Not during the trial, and certainly not after that book. He probably disliked that book even more than I did.’

‘But his book is out there. Nothing really disappears anymore. Once, that kind of true-crime crap would be gone forever, gathering dust in a handful of secondhand bookstores, pulped by the publishers. Now, with online bookstores and eBay and POD technology, it’s a computer click away for anyone who remembers your original name. For all you know, he’s uploaded it to Kindle, sells it for ninety-nine cents a pop.’

Eliza wasn’t worried about computer clicks. But if she complained to the prison officials, that would be another set of people who knew definitively who she was and where she was. Why should she trust them? Better to ignore Walter, although she knew that Walter was most unpredictable when someone dared to ignore him. Only not where he was now, locked away. And usually not to her. The One Who Got Away, to borrow the hideous chapter heading from that nasty little book. As if she were a girl in a jazz ballad, a romantic fixation. The One Who Got Away. The one who was, as the book said repeatedly, ‘only raped, allegedly.’ Only. Allegedly.

Only a man who had never been raped could have written that phrase.

‘Let’s wait him out,’ she told Peter. ‘He’ll either drop this, or he won’t. As he said, he doesn’t have long. And he’s not being put to death for what he did to me.’

That night, in bed, she surprised Peter by initiating sex, quite good sex, with those little extras that long-married couples tend to forgo. It was, by necessity, silent sex, and she had to clap her hand over Peter’s mouth at one point, fearful that the children would hear him. But it was important to remind herself tonight that her body belonged to her, that this was sex, this was love. She deserved her life. She had created it, through sheer will and not a little help from Peter and her family. She had every right to protect it.

But as she fell asleep, spooned by her husband, the other girls came to her as they sometimes did. Maude and Holly, followed by all the faceless girls, the ones that Walter was suspected of killing, although nothing had ever been proven. Two, four, six, eight – the estimates climbed into the teens. They were, all things considered, remarkably kind and forgiving little ghosts. Tonight, however, they were mournful in their insistence that she was not alone in this, that they must be factored into any decision she made about Walter. Holly, forever the spokeswoman, reminded Eliza that her life was theirs, in a sense. Polite even to her phantoms, Eliza did not argue.

Eventually the others slipped away one by one, but Holly lingered in Eliza’s thoughts, keen on some private business. ‘I was the last girl,’ she said. ‘They shouldn’t have called you that. I was the last girl, and he’s going to die for what he did to me.’

‘Oh, Holly, what does it matter? Last or next-to-last? Ultimate or penultimate? They’re just words. Who cares?’

‘I do,’ Holly said. ‘And you know why, even if you always pretend that you don’t. Ha-ha!’

Chapter Four

1985

Point of Rocks. He had always liked that name, seen it on signs for years, but somehow never managed to visit. Now that he had – well, it wasn’t that much different from any of the towns along the Potomac. From his own town, in fact, back in West Virginia. Almost heaven, the license plate said, and Walter agreed. Still, he liked to drive, wished he could see more of the world.

When he was a child, no more than four or five, his father took him to a spot in Maryland, Friendsville, where it was possible to see three states – Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania. He had been disappointed that the area wasn’t marked, like a map or a quilt, that one state was indistinguishable from another. He told his father he wished they could go out west, stand in the four corners, which he had heard about from his older sister.

‘If wishes were Mustangs,’ his father said. It was one of his favorite sayings. He didn’t believe in vacations. Years later, Walter felt a bit betrayed when he started working at his father’s repair shop and found out just how steady the business was. They could have taken trips, known a few more luxuries. Maybe not all the way west, but to that big amusement park in Ohio, the one with the tallest roller coaster in the world. Or his father could have sent Walter, his mother, and his sister on a vacation if he really felt he couldn’t close up for seven days, or leave the place under the care of one of his employees. The only trip Walter ever took was to Ocean City, Maryland, after high school graduation, and it felt like he spent more time on the bus than in the town itself.

Now that Walter worked for his father, he didn’t get vacations, just Sundays and Wednesdays off. What could he do with that mismatched pairing of days? Today was a Sunday, and he was thinking about turning back, going home. There was no law that a man had to do anything with his day off, no rule that said he wasn’t allowed to spend the afternoon watching television, then enjoy Sunday-night supper with his family. Lately, his mother seemed to be dropping hints that he might want to get his own place, move out and on, but he was ignoring her for now. He didn’t want to move out until it was to move in with someone, set up his own household. But, wait – maybe that was the problem? Maybe the reason he had trouble meeting women was because he didn’t have a place to take them? There were all those jokes about men who lived with their parents, but he didn’t think that applied to him. He worked in his father’s business. Why shouldn’t he stay at home until he could afford a proper house, not one of those cinder block motel rooms that people rented by the week, making do with hot plates and mini fridges. Living that way, in a single room, wasn’t living at all. He’d wait for the real thing. Real love, real house, a partnership in his father’s business. Already he had asked his father why they couldn’t change Bowman’s Garage to Bowman and Son’s Garage. His sister, now married but living on the same street, said it didn’t sound right, and his father said he didn’t want to pay to change all the signs and stationery, and when Walter had said the sign would be enough – wait, was that a girl?

It was, a tall, shapely girl brushed with gold, her hair and skin almost blending with the cornfields on either side of the road. She had a funny walk, kind of a lope, but she was otherwise lovely and her body was magnificent, like a movie star’s. He slowed down.

‘You want a ride?’

She looked confused, on the verge of tears. ‘One-oh-three Apple Court, Point of Rocks. One-oh-three Apple Court, Point of Rocks.’

‘Sure I can take you there, just tell me—’

She shook her head, kept repeating her address. She looked to be at least eighteen, but she was acting like she was six. Oh.

‘Calm down, calm down, I’ll get you home. We’ll have to find someone who can tell me the way, but I’ll get you there, okay?’

She climbed into his truck. Gosh, she was pretty. Too bad she was slow, or retarded, or whatever it was called now.

‘You got lost?’

She nodded, still hiccuping from her tears. Eventually she gulped out that she had been in a store with her mother and she had gotten thirsty, gone to find a water fountain in the store, but when she came back, she couldn’t find her mother, so she had decided to walk home.

‘You still thirsty? You want something to drink? A soda or something?’

‘Home,’ she said. ‘One-oh-three Apple Court, Point of Rocks.’

‘I’ll take you home,’ he said. ‘But I have to stop anyway, to ask directions. If you want a drink or a snack, you just let me know.’

He pulled over at the next convenience store he saw, a Sheetz. His father loved to say that name, drawing out the vowel sound to the t. Sheeeeeeeeeeeet – then waiting a split second before adding the z. And his mother laughed every time, as if it were new. That’s all Walter wanted. A wife, a world of private jokes. It shouldn’t be so hard.

He parked at the far end of the parking lot, where his truck wouldn’t be in view of the cash register. Inside he bought two sodas and some candy. He did not ask directions, at least not to 103 Apple Court. Instead, he asked if there were any good fishing spots nearby.

She liked it at first, he could swear that she did. He told her it was a game, and he fed her M&Ms for each step she mastered. Fact is, she might have done it before. It happens, with retarded people. They get up to all sorts of things. That was why the girl in his grade school had to be transferred, because she was doing things with the older boys. She had a woman’s body and a little girl’s mind. That was no way to be. He was doing this girl a kindness, if you thought about it. But, in the end, it wasn’t right. He needed someone who could help a little. He wouldn’t make this mistake again.

Later, when he shouldered her body and carried it deep into the woods, trusting that no one would be looking for her here, not soon, he found himself feeling very tender toward her. She wasn’t happy in this life, couldn’t really be. Everyone was better off now.

He was home in time for supper.