Final Appeal

“You have a problem, Ben. I don’t have a gun like Armen did.”

He laughs abruptly. “He wasn’t very good with it, Grace. I had the letter opener, but he couldn’t bring himself to shoot me. I grabbed his hand and pointed it at his own head. It was over in a minute.”

Poor Armen. I imagine the scene with horror. I can’t speak.

“Don’t think too badly of me. I did give him a last chance to come out the right way in Hightower, even brought him a draft opinion. We discussed the case law for some time, even the policy issues. It was sort of a final appeal. For him, and for me.”

He makes me sick, outraged. “How are you going to pull this off, Ben? You going to make me shoot myself, too? Your fingerprints are all over your gun.”

“Oh, you won’t use my new toy, Grace. You’ll jump.”

I feel my mouth fall open. My mind reels. “From where?”

“The window.” He gestures with the gun barrel.

I wheel around toward the window, petrified at the thought. Then I glimpse the cudgel right near the window, on the chair. Armen said it was used to kill. Can I kill? “Ben, you don’t mean this.”

“Yes, I do.”

My blood runs cold. “But the windows.”

“I’ll break them. They’re just a single layer of glass, not even thermapane. This building was built in the sixties.”

“But the marshals will hear it.”

“Not from inside. We’re eighteen floors up. Even if someone sees it, they’ll think it’s the wind from the storm and phone GSA. They should be here by tomorrow morning.” He cocks the trigger on the gun and it clicks smoothly into operation. “Sign the paper. Now.”

He’s thought of everything. I feel a stab of stone cold fear, then will myself to stay calm. Remember Maddie. Use the cudgel. It destroyed families, now it will protect one. “I’ll sign it,” I tell him, “but ease off the trigger. You want them to find me shot?”

“Now you’re thinking.” He relaxes on the trigger and I pick up the pen. My hand is trembling as I read the letter one last time. What if I can’t get to the cudgel. What if I blow it? “Hurry, Grace.”

I scribble my name, then lift the pen from the paper. Just in case, underneath I write, I love you, Mads. You are the best. I blink back the tears that seem to come.

“Get up,” Ben says. “Stand near the window.”

Good, you bastard. That’s just where I want to be. My whole body shivers. Get a grip. I’m not within arm’s length from the cudgel, not yet. It’s too close to the window.

Still aiming the gun at me, Ben crosses the room. He picks up a chair and swings it into the wall of windows. The huge panel shatters instantly into brittle shards; cracks race all over the pane like nerve endings, electrified. Breathing like a madman, Ben hurls the chair into the cracked window again, at full speed. It bounces off with a crashing sound. The glass explodes into a million pieces. Slivers fly in all directions. The window collapses and falls away, hurtling down the side of the courthouse, leaving a jagged opening like the mouth of a dark cave.

Wind and cold rain blast into the office, gusting hard off the Delaware. Glass particles and loose papers flutter wildly around the room in crazy currents. My hair whips around. The rain soaks my face and clothes. Glass stings my cheek, my forehead. The room seems to hang in the middle of the thunderstorm. Wind buffets my ears.

“Walk to the window!” Ben shouts against the wind.

I brace myself and step closer to the cudgel near the window. The wind howls. The rain drenches me.

“Now, Grace! Jump or I push you out! Your choice!”

I take another step to the window. The city glitters at my feet. The cudgel is at my right, and behind it is Independence Hall, lit up at night. I face the wind and take one deep breath, then another. One, two…three!

I grab the wrapped cudgel by its end and whip it full force into Ben’s face. It makes contact with a dense, awful thud. I drop the weapon, horrified.

Ben staggers backward, shrieking in pain and shock, blood pouring from his mouth and teeth. His jaw hangs grotesquely and his hands rush to it. His gun slips onto a pile of broken glass. I dive for it a second before Ben does and scramble to my feet, my own hands cut and slippery with blood.

I point the gun at him as he lies on the floor, in the whirling holocaust of splintered glass and paper. “Stay down!”

But he won’t. He staggers to his feet, moaning in agony. It’s a wild animal sound, as loud as the wind. Blood runs in rivulets between his fingers.

“Stay back! Stay away!” I can barely look, but he keeps coming toward me, backing me up against the conference table. I hold the gun up. I don’t want to shoot him, please don’t make me. “Ben, stop!”

Suddenly, he stops and shakes his head, still cupping his chin. His suit is heavy with rain and blood. His dark eyes brim with tears as they meet mine, and for an instant he looks like the Ben Safer I remember.

“Ben, I’m so sorry.” I start to sob. “You’ll go to a hospital, they’ll fix it.”

He shakes his head again, then turns toward the window. I feel a cold chill as soon as I understand what he’s going to do.

“Ben! No! Don’t!” I scream into the rain, but he won’t hear me.

He runs headlong toward the darkness, and when he reaches the edge of the carpet, he leaps mightily into nothingness and the thunderstorm.

The next sound I hear is a heartless clap of thunder, then the shrillness of Ben’s scream.

And my own.

  31

I wake up in silence and semidarkness. There’s a bed table at my side and a boxy TV floating in the corner. Moonlight streams through the knit curtains, casting a slotted pattern on a narrow single bed. A hospital room. I lie there a minute, flat on my back, taking inventory.

I am alive. I am safe. I wiggle everything, and everything works.

I hold up my hands in the dark. There are bandages on some of my fingers. My face aches, the skin pinching like it doesn’t quite fit. I can only imagine what I look like. My fingers go instinctively to my cheeks. The surface is rough underneath, cottony. More bandages.

I hear myself moan, remembering slowly how I got to be here.

It comes back to me like a gruesome slide show, with hot white light blinding me between each freeze frame. Ben, entering with the gun. Click. The suicide note. Click. The cudgel at the window. Click. Independence Hall at my feet.

Oh, God.

Poor Ben. I hurt him, and he died a horrific, painful death. And Armen, dead too. Even Faber, beaten to death. It’s too awful to dwell on. I feel wretched and totally, miserably alone, until I turn over. There, asleep in a shadowy corner near the door, her silvery head dropped onto a heavy chest, is my mother.

Who else. She has been here for God knows how long. She probably arranged for Maddie to go to Sam’s.

I lie still and look at her sleeping in a hard plastic chair. Even in the dim light I can see she’s fully dressed. A matching sweater and slack set, cheap leather slip-ons, and stocking knee-highs, which she buys in gift packs. Her chest goes up and down; her shoulders rise and fall. In her hand is a paper cup, sitting upright on her knee, even though she’s sound asleep. On the cup I can make out a large blue circle.

I know that circle. Pennsylvania Hospital, at Eighth and Spruce.

My mother was born in this hospital in 1925, and it was here that she gave birth to me, and I, in turn, to Maddie. One after another, each picking up the thread and advancing it, like an unbroken line of stitching in a fabric’s seam. Three generations of us, each making her own way. Raising her daughter in her own way, without men. A tribe of three women only.

How curious.

Our blood, our very cells, must be constitutionally different from other families. Families of four, for example.