“Look at them,” I said. “They’re fixing him up already and he could be a potential mass murderer. And he hasn’t even seen a house yet, much less made an offer. Wait until those real estate harpies get their hooks in him. He’ll be toast.”
One of the regulars, a guy named Carl, was paying his check and overheard me. “You girls just can’t stand to see us single and happy,” he said.
“Shut up, Carl, before I tell that sweet young wife of yours what you think about marriage.” Babe handed him his change and returned to my end of the counter.
“You never told me about that wedding you and Lucy went to,” Babe said. “Did you find your soul mate?”
“That doesn’t happen in real life. In real life one bridesmaid looks fabulous because she lobbied for the dress that was most flattering to her, and the rest of them look ludicrous in it, and they’ll never wear it again no much how much it’s shortened. She may be the one who gets lucky. The other guests are not hooking up. They’re wondering which of their friends will marry next and whether they’ll be the last lonely member of their group, rolling her walker over to the center of the banquet room to try to catch the bride’s bouquet in her gnarled, liver-spotted hands.”
“Wow. That’s a depressing image,” Babe said. “Is that what you were thinking?”
“Only once or twice.”
Babe herself had been single for many years since her husband, Pete, had died in a motorcycle accident. They’d moved to Springfield with their twin boys and opened the diner years ago. Not long after, Pete went out for a ride with a buddy and had a smashup on Route 7. She didn’t talk much about the years right after that. It must have been hard being a single mom and the sole breadwinner with a young family and a fledgling business to get off the ground. When she did share memories, they were of her happier days with the Jimmy Collins band.
I’d had no idea who they were and had had to look them up. They’d had a few hits back in the days when Babe was a backup singer named Wanda Sugarman-before the band had dubbed her Babe and Pete had given her his own last name.
“Look at that guy,” I said, pointing with my cup. “All he had to do was smile and say, Aw shucks, ma’am, I’m new in town. If a woman had done that with a group of men, she’d have been handed a scarlet letter and a needle and thread.”
“It’s a cruel world.”
On the day I was to see Caroline, I headed to the Paradise for a hearty meal before our meeting. I was leaning toward Caroline’s side of the fence now and wanted a base in my stomach just in case Caroline decided to seal our partnership with a toast or three.
Babe hadn’t seen Caroline for days. I tried her again on my cell and I got the same message I’d gotten the previous week-disconnected.
“What’s the matter?” Babe asked.
“Her home phone’s disconnected. Don’t you think that’s odd?”
“Plenty of people are dropping their landlines and just going with cells,” Babe said. “It’s the economy. Don’t you have her cell number?”
“I do but her house is in a dead zone. She never uses it at home. Besides, I don’t see Caroline and Grant belt- tightening in that way. I’m going to go see what’s up.” We had a date and Caroline was so anxious to talk to me; it wasn’t like her to disappear without leaving me a message. I finished breakfast and headed for the Sturgis house. Halfway to Caroline’s I thought perhaps I had screwed up the days. Was this the day she was accompanying one of her friends to the doctor’s on a bizarre mission to see whether or not the friend’s three-year-old was biologically suited to be the next Roger Federer? What the hell. I’d go anyway. If I had the date wrong, I’d leave a note. When she got home, she’d be thrilled that I was more interested in her proposal than I’d been when we last spoke. And I was. Between losing the real estate gigs and being sent home with hand-me-down clothing, I was a lot more inclined to consider her offer than I thought I’d be. I hadn’t seen her business plan yet, but she was a smart woman. And so was I.
When I pulled into the Sturgises’ driveway, Caroline’s silver Land Rover sat at the entrance of the house. The driver’s side door was wide open. I parked behind it. I took my time walking up the front steps and rang the doorbell, expecting to see Caroline, perfectly coiffed, perfectly clad, and given the early hour, holding the perfect Bloody Mary in a lead crystal glass. There was no answer, so I rang again. This time I noticed a sliver of light between the door and the jamb. It wasn’t latched. I gave it a gentle push and it creaked open.
“Caroline? Caroline, are you here?” The vestibule was empty. Entering her house uninvited was a breach of suburban etiquette and I wasn’t sure I should. Then I heard a sound coming from the family room-a gasping or choking sound.
“It’s Paula. Are you okay? Can I come in?” I waited for an answer, then tiptoed into the cathedral-ceilinged room, not knowing what I’d be interrupting.
Caroline wasn’t there, but her husband, Grant, was. He was on the sofa, clutching a huge pillow to his chest and mouth and rocking back and forth. Tears were streaming down his face, and his eyeglasses were fogged and slightly askew.
“Where’s Caroline?” I asked. I was afraid to know the answer. “Is she all right?” He didn’t seem surprised to see me. He took the corner of the pillow out of his mouth.
“Caroline’s not here. They’ve arrested her. They say she’s…she’s not Caroline Beecham Sturgis. I don’t know who she is, but she’s not Caroline Sturgis. My wife is a stranger.”
Eight
When you’re my age, it’s easy to look back and say I should have done this or shouldn’t have done that. It’s like the aerial view of a garden maze. From above it looks easy. The pathways are clear and it’s obvious which way you should go. When you’re on the ground, of course, it’s much easier to make a wrong turn.
If I’d had that nice clean aerial view when I was nineteen, I wouldn’t be walking through O’Hare Airport with two federal marshals, a barn jacket thrown over my handcuffed wrists, rushing to catch a flight to Detroit, back to the city and state I hadn’t even wanted to fly over for as long as I could remember.
I’d thought about this moment every day for the last-what is it-twenty years? Twenty-five? Who remembered? Early on, I jumped every time I heard a siren or if the front door open unexpectedly. Gradually, that feeling faded, like an old scar you forget you have until you look for it and see that it’s still there, right where it’s always been, and you were crazy to think that it had ever disappeared. Now it’s over. They know. And I can exhale.
That time and place, B.C., before Caroline, seemed like fiction, a novel I’d read or a movie I’d seen before my real life began. If only.
My friends and family were in shock when I was arrested at cheerleader practice, on the football field with the rest of the squad around me and Coach, who looked stricken. I sleepwalked through the trial and sentencing until I heard the words, twenty years. Only then did it become real for me. Twenty years was longer than I’d been on the planet. I’d be almost forty when I got out, older than my father. Way older than my mother was when she died. People kept saying thank God she wasn’t there to see me, but I didn’t thank him, I wanted her with me. To tell me what to do. Maybe if she’d been with me, I wouldn’t have been in such a mess.
In prison I spent months crying myself to sleep every night-afraid during the day and more afraid to let my defenses down and go to sleep at night. It was like that for eighteen months until one day a dozen of us were chosen for a work release program that was to last two weeks. After a few days I noticed cracks in security, the times when a guard could be distracted and frequently was. I stayed on my best behavior for twelve days. On the morning of the thirteenth day I simply didn’t get on the bus that took the others back to prison. Only one other inmate saw me slip away behind a delivery van and all she did was close her eyes, a slight curl to her lips. Maybe she was laughing to herself as the van pulled away with me hunkered down in the back. When the driver stopped for gas and a bathroom break I crept out of my hiding place.
I walked for miles, tearing off my work shirt and tying it around my waist. I turned my prison-issue T-shirt inside out, and in those days the look passed for grunge. Then I hid at a construction site where I knew my brother Luke would be at 6:30 that night. He’d gotten a summer job as a security guard making sure no building materials disappeared overnight. Once I was sure all the workers were gone, I scooted over to the hut where the blue light
