“You expect me to prove it,” Bennie said, her mouth dry as bone.
“You’re goddamn right I do. You have to prove those shits did it. I didn’t kill Anthony, they did. It goes all the way to the top. The D.A., the judge. They’re all in on it. They have to be.”
Bennie’s head throbbed dully. That much of it rang true, after the way Judge Guthrie had acted in his office. But could it be true? Could Connolly be guilty of everything
“Now you’re my lawyer, you can’t get out, and you have to prove me innocent.”
“Innocent is the last word I’d use.”
“Whatever. And while I’m spilling my guts, everything I told you about Winslow was true, except I made up that blood syndrome and the dream shit.” Connolly’s hands pressed against the glass. Her manacled wrists made her fingers look like the jointed legs of a wolf spider. “Fact is, I don’t know if I’m your twin and I don’t care. I don’t need a sister, I don’t need anybody. As soon as you get me off, I’m outta your life. Got it,
“Don’t ever call me that,” Bennie snapped, and withdrew from the divider.
51
Bennie spent the night driving around the city in the dark, with the dog asleep in the back. She didn’t know where she was headed; she had nowhere to go. She didn’t want to go home and she couldn’t bring herself to return to Connolly’s apartment. She didn’t belong anywhere anymore. She had lost herself.
At dawn she drove home and slipped into bed beside a deeply snoring Grady. The sound used to make Bennie smile, but tonight nothing could do that. She didn’t sleep, just lay there, and finally got up to work in her home office, since it was Saturday. Then she showered, dressed, and avoided her lover’s inquiries until it was time to go and bury her mother.
Bennie’s shoulders sagged in the smooth oak pew as she sat through the Mass at the Catholic church in her mother’s old neighborhood. The church was shabby and small; though neat and well kept, with brown marble arches and walls the color of cantaloupe. Red votive candles flickered in stepped rows to the right of the altar, before a statue of the Virgin Mary, which Hattie prayed to before the Mass began. Bennie didn’t bother, on the assumption that her previous prayers had been ignored. The facts spoke for themselves, as lawyers say.
Her mother’s casket remained in the aisle, draped in a white cloth, dignified except for the steel gurney peeking from under the cover. Bennie avoided looking to the left, and still couldn’t completely comprehend that her mother was gone, entertaining a child’s doubt that her mother was in fact in the coffin. Then she remembered: They’d held a brief service at the funeral home, where Bennie had said a final good-bye and lightly rubbed her mother’s hand. She hadn’t even minded that the hand felt cold, even hard, because it was the last time. Then she held Hattie when the funeral director asked them to leave the room, and Bennie knew that they were going to close the casket then and seal her mother inside. So of course her mother was
Bennie chased the thoughts from her head as the Mass began, with heavy organ music and a lone tenor who sang “Ave Maria.” She had always regarded “Ave Maria” as the Church’s trump card at funerals, but resisted tears by concentrating on the goings-on at the altar. Two young girls were assisting at the ceremony, which Bennie noted as a political matter, and she chose not to focus on the words of the old priest. At the end of the Mass, the priest stepped from the altar, his white robes swaying, swinging a large ball of incense that trailed dark and pungent smoke. The smoke filled her nose and brought tears brimming to her eyes, as the priest said something about how her mother was surrendering her body and spirit to Jesus Christ. Bennie knew her mother had surrendered her body and spirit to something quite different, a long time ago, with no choice in the matter. And it wasn’t anything half as benevolent as Jesus Christ.
She tried to think back to before her mother’s illness had taken over, gradually at first, then completely. Bennie knew her mother had loved her long after she was well enough to say so, though she barely remembered her mother’s caring for her as a child. Bennie guessed her mother had performed the routine functions that mothers do every day, for there had been evidence of it. Bennie had won awards in elementary school, tiny pins like tie tacks that lay ignored in her jewelry box, for getting good grades and having good penmanship. She had stumbled across one of the tacks this morning, dressing for her mother’s funeral, and it jarred loose a single memory: her mother teaching her cursive writing at the kitchen table, a fleeting picture of the rounded circles and elongated loops of the Palmer method as they swooped above and below the dotted lines.
Sitting in the pew, Bennie found herself inferring her mother’s acts from the evidence, almost like exhibits in a trial. In school photos, Bennie’s hair was always in braids, which she loved, with matching barrettes at the ends. But Bennie didn’t braid her own hair at age six. Somebody had braided her hair every morning. Somebody must have matched those silly barrettes. It had to have been her mother, because there was no one else around. Her mother had done those simple things and undoubtedly more, even as she was struggling with the darkness overcoming her. She had been a mother. Bennie’s mother.
Suddenly pallbearers appeared from nowhere, genuflected in unison, all six of them, three on either side of the casket. Then they stood up and slid the drape from the casket with a discreet flourish, revealing a name engraved on a brass nameplate.
After the Mass was over, Bennie sat in the back of the gray limo, sandwiched between a somber Grady and a weepy Hattie, and only then did function return briefly to her brain. She remembered her father and wondered if he’d be at the cemetery, then the thought vanished into the chilly swoosh of the limo’s robust air-conditioning. “Cold in here,” Bennie said, which gave her something to say and think about until they reached the cemetery. Grady held her hand loosely, his profile to the overwide window of the limo, the passing scenery distorted in the convex lenses of his wire-rims.
The three traveled wordlessly to the cemetery, passing through its wrought iron gates, and Bennie looked outside the window for the first time with any interest. Hattie merely grunted. To Hattie’s disapproval, Bennie had rejected the parish cemetery for a suburban memorial park. Hard to quarrel with a rolling lawn dappled with sunlight and a pond with Canada geese, which took leisurely flight, honking against a cloudless sky, as the limo cruised past. No stone angels, granite crucifixes, or mausoleums marred the natural view; the monuments were tastefully recessed, flush with the ground. Bennie knew her mother had never seen this much open land in her life, much less an actual Canada goose, yet something told Bennie her mother deserved to be here, among natural beauty. She was entitled to it, at least, in death.
The grave had been prepared as the limo pulled up, and mounds of rich, clay-veined earth lay heaped around a concrete vault. The entire affair had been set up under an incongruously cheery yellow canopy, which Bennie considered uprooting and shredding with her bare hands. One of the funeral directors waved to her with a gesture more appropriate to an airport runway, and Bennie was propelled toward him and given a single red rose. She stared at it in her hand, and it felt frosty from a florist’s refrigerator. Bennie flashed on her father’s fresh-cut cosmos and looked around reflexively. The memorial park was green and quiet. A warm breeze flickered through the distant trees. Winslow was nowhere in sight, and there were no monuments for him to hide behind. He had not come.
She thought it would matter, but it didn’t. She thought she’d want to see him, but she didn’t. She felt satisfied he wasn’t there, and neither was Connolly. After last night, Connolly’s presence would have profaned this place. In the end it was as it should be, as it had been in the beginning and throughout, just she and her mother, only the two of them, alone together.
