Down Here

“Yes. We even went to different schools.”

“Parochial school?” I guessed.

“I did. He didn’t,” she said.

Her answers were getting shorter, more clipped. I shifted gears, asked, “How did your family react when he was first arrested?”

“My mother had been dead for years,” she said. “So she never knew about any of it. And my father had already retired, moved to the Sun Belt. I don’t know if my brother told him what was going on at the time. Maybe he didn’t—my father’s got a bad heart.”

“So that left you.”

“Not really,” she said. “I was just starting to make headway in my job, trying to put enough money together to risk a few little moves of my own. Working eighteen-hour days, sometimes. I was frazzled, a real wreck. And, to be truthful, I never took it seriously.”

“Him being charged with rape?” I asked, allowing just a trace of disbelief into my voice.

“I thought it was some kind of mistake,” she said. “I was so sure I’d get a call from him saying they realized they had the wrong man.”

“Did you go to the trial?”

“I was supposed to,” she said. “I even arranged for some time off. But I got the dates wrong. By the time I showed up, the jury was already out.”

“You were in the courtroom when they came in with the verdict?”

“Yes. It was . . . it was about what you’d expect. A shock.”

“Did they let you speak to him before they took him away?”

“I was too stunned to even move,” she said. “It was like, I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, he was gone.”

“Did you visit him in prison?”

“No. John wrote and asked me not to. He said the visiting conditions were disgusting. The guards were very abusive to women. He didn’t want me there. Besides, he expected to be released any day.”

“He never lost faith?”

“Never once. But, with John, it isn’t ‘faith,’ exactly. It’s more like . . . certainty.”

“You really don’t know much about the case itself, then?” I asked, walking the tightrope.

“Well, I know John didn’t do what he was accused of. What more is there?” she asked, blue eyes on mine.

“The . . . impact thing, remember? Are you saying that your brother’s faith—his certainty—that he’d be vindicated made the whole thing less hard on you? And maybe on your father?”

“I’m sure that’s true,” she said. “Although I never thought about it until right now. Is that common?”

“In a way, it is,” I lied. “For other families I’ve interviewed, it was always the belief that someday the truth would come out that kept them going. I guess the difference is, sometimes the families had an awful lot more faith than the person who had been convicted.”

“But they would be the only ones who really knew, isn’t that true?”

“I guess that is true,” I acknowledged. “In some of the cases, the evidence was so shaky, or there was such outright corruption, or there was a journalist already on the job, beating the drums so hard, that the public got to share the sense of innocence before the courts ratified it. But in your brother’s case, that wasn’t so. Until he was actually set free, I couldn’t find one line of coverage of the case after the trial was over.”

“And when he got shot . . .”

“Exactly. Truth is, Laura, if that hadn’t happened, I never would have heard of your brother’s case at all.”

“I’m not surprised,” she said. “It wasn’t that big a deal.”

“I’m sure it was to you.”

“I know how this must sound, but when I told you my brother and I were never close, that’s an understatement. When I heard about it, my first thought was how . . . humiliated I was at the idea of anyone connecting me to him. We don’t have the same name. . . . You think that’s disgusting, don’t you?”

“I think it’s human,” I told her. “After all, for all you knew . . .”

“Who knows what anyone’s capable of?” she said.

“Exactly.”

“This doesn’t do a lot for your book, does it, J.?” Her expression shifted, too quick to read. “Can I call you that? J.? ‘J.P.’ sounds like you should be a banker or something.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Does anyone do it? Call you that?”

“Never in my life,” I said.

“I never liked my name,” she said, wistfully. “When I was a little girl, I always wanted to change it.”

“To what?”

“Oh, all kinds of different things. ‘Laura’ always sounded so old-fashioned to me. I wanted a fabulous name.”

“Like Hildegarde?”

“Stop it!” she laughed. “You know what I mean. I went to school with girls named Kerri, and Pandora, and Astrid, and . . . names like those.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I did some research into this, for a story I was working on. All you have to do, to change your name, is file a petition in court.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. You have to file a notice in the papers—in case you’re trying to duck a bunch of debts and get some new credit—but it’s no big deal.”

“I could never do that now,” she said. “In my business, a name is very important. Not what the name is, what it represents. Like a brand. ‘Laura Reinhardt’ isn’t what to call me, it’s what I do. Understand?”

“Sure.”

“So I guess I’m stuck with Laura the Librarian.”

“That’s not how I see you. Although I bet you’d look real cute in glasses.”

“I have glasses,” she said. “I never really use them—I wear contacts—but I have them. I always thought I looked dorky in them.”

“Let me see.”

“I . . . All right, wait here.”

I thought I heard the bottle tree tinkle as she swept out of the kitchen, but I couldn’t swear to it.

She was back in a minute, wearing a pair of plain round glasses with rust-colored frames.

“All you need is your hair in a bun,” I said.

“I knew it.”

“It’s your own fault,” I said. “You picked out the glasses, right?”

“Sure.”

“But you didn’t pick them out the same way you picked out your dresses. Or your jewelry. Or your apartment, even.”

“I see what you mean. . . .”

“They’ve got thousands of different frames. You could get some that would show off your eyes. Like putting something especially beautiful under glass.”

“Oh God, that’s so . . .” She started sniffling.

Thanks, Little Sis, I said to myself, holding Laura Reinhardt against me.

^“I should go home,” I said, later.

“Am I making you—?”

“I just feel grungy in these same clothes,” I told her. “I need to change.”