Life Penalty Read online

  “‘Is this where—?” Carol began and quickly broke off.

  Gail said nothing, her eyes locked on the ground behind the bench.

  “Let’s go home,” Carol said.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Gail told her, her voice suddenly, eerily calm.

  “I’m not afraid,” Carol said. ‘“I just don’t think that it’s a good idea for us to stay here.”

  “It’s quiet here.” Gail sat down on the bench, not seeming to hear the noise of a nearby group of boys who were tossing a ball back and forth. “I came here a few days ago, when you were in New York. I sat here all afternoon.” She could see the startled expression on Carol’s face.

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “There weren’t any kids playing here then,” Gail said, ignoring Carol’s question. “I guess their mothers have told them to stay away from here. So only a few brave kids cut through. But now it’s more crowded again. Soon even the dirty old men in raincoats will begin coming back. I’ll have to start keeping track of who comes and goes.”

  “Shouldn’t you leave that to the police?”

  “How many policemen do you see?” Gail asked.

  “I don’t think that you should come here anymore,” Carol told her, sounding more like the older sibling than the younger.

  “What’s wrong with here?” Gail asked.

  “What’s right with it?” Carol demanded in return.

  “Why torture yourself? Why go looking for trouble?”

  “I’m not looking for trouble.”

  “If the rock hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the rock,” Carol said, “it’s not so good for the pitcher.”

  Gail stared at her sister for several seconds and then burst out laughing. “Where did you hear that one?”

  “Mom used to say that all the time.”

  “Really? I never heard her.”

  “Maybe she only said it to me,” Carol said, reluctantly sitting down beside her sister. “I was the one who was always getting into trouble, remember? Couldn’t keep my big mouth shut. ‘Don’t go looking for trouble,’ she used to tell me, and I’d say that I never went looking for trouble, it always came looking for me. And then she’d say, ‘if the rock hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the rock …’ And now here I am, carrying on the proud family tradition.”

  Gail smiled and put her head against her sister’s shoulder. She allowed Carol to put her arm around her and slowly pull her up beside her. They walked side by side out onto the street.

  “What’s happening with you and Frank?” Gail asked, suddenly aware that Carol had said nothing about the man she lived with since her return from New York.

  “We called it quits,” Carol said matter-of-factly.

  Gail looked surprised. “We took an hour when I was back in the city, and settled everything.”

  “Oh no! Oh, Carol, it’s all my fault. If you hadn’t been with me—”

  “If I hadn’t been with you, it would have happened that much sooner. Frank and I, or more specifically, Frank and his children and I, haven’t been getting along well for quite some time now. I wish I could say that we had this big dramatic falling out or that he caught me in another man’s arms, but the truth is that after slightly more than two years together, we discovered it wasn’t worth all the arguments. So we decided to split everything down the center—he got the stereo, I got the records; I kept the apartment, he got most of the furniture. He retained his children, I retained my sanity. We all live happily ever after.” She shrugged, “Anyway, it was time to move on.”

  Time to move on, Gail repeated silently as the two women found themselves back on Tarlton Drive.

  “How much do you want to bet that Jennifer’s inside now and wondering what the hell happened to her mother and her wayward aunt?” Carol asked, hugging Gail to her. But when they walked inside the house, there was no one home and Gail’s panic returned. “She’ll be back soon,” Carol said quickly. “Don’t worry, please. I know she’ll be home anytime now.”

  Jennifer finally walked through the front door at ten minutes to five.

  “Where have you been?” Gail demanded, suddenly bursting into tears for the first time since Cindy’s death.

  “A bunch of us went over to Don’s Restaurant for a hamburger to celebrate after the exam,” Jennifer explained with growing alarm. “What’s the matter? Did something happen?”

  “Your mother was very worried,” Carol explained, her eyes riveted on Gail. “You should have called to tell her you’d be late.”

  “I did. A few minutes after we got there, I called, but no one was home. What’s the matter? I didn’t think anybody would mind if I went out with the kids. I’ve done it before …”

  “This isn’t exactly like before,” Carol reminded her, watching as Gail sank sobbing into one of the kitchen chairs. “Your mother was afraid that something might have happened to you. She was very worried.”

  Jennifer approached her mother. “But I did phone. Oh, Mom,” she said, kneeling down beside her, “please, I’m so sorry. Don’t be frightened. Nothing happened to me. Nothing’s going to happen to me. I’m a big girl and I know how to take care of myself. You shouldn’t have worried.” Gail continued to cry, unable now to stop. “Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry. Please, Mom, talk to me.”

  “I love you,” Gail stammered. “I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.”

  “I love you too,” Jennifer told her, the words barely escaping her throat before she too started to cry. “I’d give anything to make things better for you. Oh God, I wish it had been me who died and not Cindy!”

  Gail’s fingers shot to her daughter’s mouth. “No, no, darling, don’t ever say things like that! Don’t even think them!”

  “I saw your face that afternoon when you came home and saw that I was there and Cindy wasn’t. I know that you wished it was me who was dead … I even understand … She was your baby …”

  “Oh my God,” Gail cried, “is that what you’ve been living with all these weeks? It’s not true. I swear to you. It’s not true. I love you. I love you more than anything in the world.”

  She threw her arms around her sobbing youngster, Jennifer’s arms immediately wrapping themselves around her mother.

  “Oh, I love you so much, my beautiful girl. I do. I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize what you’ve been going through. I thought you just didn’t want to talk about your sister, that it made you uncomfortable.”

  “I was mean to her, Mom,” Jennifer cried.

  “What are you talking about?” Gail asked, her tears now falling in a steady rhythm, making no move to wipe them away.

  “She was pestering me when I was trying to study and I told her to get out of my room.” Jennifer’s whole body was trembling. “And once she came in and was trying on all my shoes, and I yelled at her to stop and told her that she’d made a mess and that she’d have to clean it all up, and I yelled at her until she cried. And another time I found her in my purse and she’d put on my lipstick and she had it all over her face, and I told her that she looked stupid and that she was ugly. Oh God, Mom, why was I so mean?”

  Gail’s hands ran frantically through her daughter’s hair, smoothing down the sides. “You weren’t mean to her. You were the best big sister any little girl could have asked for. Do you hear me?” Jennifer nodded. “And just because you yelled at her a few times when she did something wrong or because she just plain got on your nerves, don’t you blame yourself for that. It’s natural. We all do things like that. What’s important is how you really felt about her.”

  “I really loved her,” Jennifer whimpered.

  “I know you did,” Gail cried. “And what’s more important, Cindy knew you did. And she loved you. Very, very much.”

  Gail buried her head in her daughter’s hair and continued to cry. When Jack walked through the door a half hour later, she was still crying, and both he and Carol looked noticeably relieved, as she was sure her parents looked when her sis
ter phoned them later that evening. Gail was going to be all right, she heard Carol telling them. She had cried. And then she started crying every day, and everyone began worrying again.

  NINE

  “People keep expecting you to get over it,” the woman was saying softly. “They keep expecting you to come around eventually, to become your old self again. They don’t understand when you tell them your old self is dead. They think you’re wallowing in self-pity; they think you’ll get over it in time. Then time passes, a lot of time, maybe years, and they begin to get impatient. They start to think you’ve gone a little crazy. It’s one thing to grieve, they tell you, as if they could possibly understand, but it’s not normal to let it consume you. You try to explain that what happened to you isn’t normal, and they tell you that life goes on. And you nod and agree. What else can you do? If there’s one thing you’ve learned, it’s that life goes on.” She laughed in sharp, bitter acknowledgment of the fact.

  The woman was barely five feet tall and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. Her hair was several shades of blond; her mascara was smeared and running in a watery black line down the length of her cheek as she spoke. Her voice came in whispered waves. Though she spoke to everyone in the room, it was clear she spoke to no one but herself. Though there were ten other people around her, she was un mistakably alone. They all were.

  “She’d gone out to study with a friend,” the voice quivered, “the same way she always did. I used to ask her all the time—to bug her, she used to say—if it was such a good idea to study with a friend. I mean, how much work did they really get done? But she’d insist that she got a lot out of it, that Peggy, that was the girl she studied with, was so much smarter than she was, and that she learned a lot this way. So, how can you argue? I mean, I’m only the mother, right?” The woman swallowed and lowered her head, wiping at her eyes. “What do I know?” She raised her eyes to Gail, who sat staring at her from across the room, unable to move, barely able to breathe. “‘So, she went out as usual. It was a Tuesday night, about seven-thirty. She said she’d be home by ten o’clock.

  “Well, I’m watching some movie-of-the-week on TV. My son, Danny, is already in bed asleep; my husband and I are divorced. So, I’m not too aware of the time at first, but then I look over at the clock during a commercial, and I see that it’s a quarter to eleven. Well, that’s not like Charlotte. She always comes home when she says she will. She was a good girl. Well, at first I thought, maybe it’s taking them longer to do the work than they thought; give them a chance to finish up. Or maybe she had to wait a long time for a bus coming home. Peggy didn’t live that far away, but I didn’t like for Charlotte to walk home alone at night, and the bus stop was right out in front of Peggy’s house. Well, I waited, and pretty soon it was eleven o’clock and the movie was finished, and I started to get a little angry. I didn’t know whether to call Peggy’s house or not. You know how embarrassed they get when they think you’re checking up on them. But I thought, damn it, if she’s embarrassed, then let her get home on time the next time out, and I picked up the phone and I called. Peggy’s mom told me that Charlotte had left over an hour ago. Well, it only takes a few minutes by bus, so I started to get worried. By midnight I was quite hysterical wondering what had happened to her. I called all her other friends, woke everybody up. No one had seen her. Then I called the police. That was a real waste of time. Charlotte was probably with a boyfriend, they said. I told them she didn’t have a boyfriend, that she was a very shy girl, and they laughed and said that all seventeen-year-old girls had boyfriends, and that only their mothers thought they were shy. They asked if we’d had a fight about something or if there was any reason for her to run away from home. I told them no. They asked where my ex-husband was. I said I had no idea; I hadn’t seen him since the divorce. They said that Charlotte was probably with him. I said how could that be when she didn’t have any more idea where he was than I did? They said that teenagers knew all kinds of things their mothers didn’t, and that I should just relax and wait until the morning, because she’d probably call, and that there was nothing they could do until she’d been missing for twenty-four hours anyway. They told me to try and get some sleep; they’d send someone around the next afternoon if she hadn’t come home already.

  “Well, I knew she wasn’t with any boyfriend or a father she hadn’t seen in eight years, and I knew that something had happened to her or she would have at least called, but the police insisted on treating it like just another runaway, even after they’d talked to all her friends and her teachers and everybody said the same thing, that Charlotte wouldn’t run away, that she never even talked about wanting to see her father.

  “Then one afternoon, six days after she’d disappeared, I was lying down in my den trying to sleep—I hadn’t slept since she’d been gone—when I saw this police car pull up outside, and I jumped up happily, because my first thought was that they had found her and that they were bringing her home, but then I saw that they were alone, and that they were walking very slowly, like they didn’t really want to come to the house at all, and suddenly I felt sick to my stomach. Charlotte and me, we’d always been real close, especially since her father had left.

  “Well, then the rest gets kind of blurry. I blocked out as much as I could. They said they’d found a body and they thought it might be Charlotte but that they’d have to get hold of her dental charts. The body had been found out in some field and was pretty badly decomposed and the animals had gotten to it. It was another day before we knew for sure that it was Charlotte. They said that she’d been raped and beaten to death, probably with a blunt object. It didn’t take much. She wasn’t any bigger than I am.

  “I didn’t go out of the house for almost a year.

  “Danny moved in with my brother. I didn’t hear from Charlotte’s father till about a month after she died, and when he did call, he blamed me. I didn’t try to argue with him. I thought he was probably right. I blamed myself too.” She stopped talking and for several moments no one made a sound. Then she resumed speaking.

  “Like I said, I didn’t go out of the house for almost a year. I lost close to forty pounds. A neighbor finally forced me to see a doctor and he put me into the hospital for about a month.

  “When I got out, I tried to kill myself. The first time, my neighbor found me and got me to the hospital in time. The second time, Danny came home—he’d run away from my brother’s—and he found me, and that was when I knew I couldn’t do anything like that again. And I haven’t. Even if I’ve never stopped wanting to.

  “That was four years ago. Danny’s failed twice in school since then and he still has nightmares almost every night. His teachers have warned me he’s going to fail again this year the way things are going. I can’t hold a job. Oh God, it just gets worse and worse. What am I telling you for? You all know. You’re the only ones who do know.”

  Her eyes searched those of the others, who blinked back tears in silent understanding. Gail held her breath, afraid to release it. Why was she here? Why had Jack been so insistent that they come? She wanted to leave. She had to get out of this room, away from these people.

  “About a week after they found Charlotte’s body,” the woman continued, “the police arrested two boys. Juveniles. Both under eighteen. They confessed. There was no particular reason for what they did, they told the police. They just wanted to see what it would feel like to watch somebody die. They picked Charlotte. They saw her standing at the bus stop, and they shoved her into this car they’d stolen earlier and drove off with her to that field.” The woman looked helplessly around the room. “They were juveniles, you understand, so they don’t actually go to jail. They go to a reformatory for a little while. One boy’s out already. The other one still has another few months left on his sentence. But I’m sure he’ll be out in time for summer camp, and of course, being a juvenile, his record will be wiped clean.” She looked at the floor. “I don’t know what I expected. I guess I still had some sort of f
aith in the justice system. The fact that my daughter’s killers were caught at all gave me reason to believe that justice might somehow be served. Now, of course, I know better. I know there is no such thing as justice, that the right of my daughter to a long and happy life pales in comparison to the rights of her killers, that a good lawyer can make mincemeat out of already weak laws, all in the name of justice. Can somebody please tell me one thing?” the woman asked, her eyes moving from face to face, although it was clear her question was purely rhetorical. “Can somebody please tell me why there seem to be so many brilliant defense lawyers and so few competent prosecuting attorneys?” She swallowed audibly. “How long,” she continued, and this time her voice begged for answers, “before I can vomit up this bile of hate that’s slowly choking me to death?”

  Gail felt the final question aimed directly at her. She turned to Jack. She wanted to leave. Why had he brought her here? Couldn’t he see how desperately she wanted to get out?

  “Jack,” Gail whispered, but Jack was lost in thoughts of his own. Gail touched his arm, trying to indicate her desire to leave without disturbing the rest of the group, ten other people whose lives had all been touched, been irreparably shattered by random acts of violence over which they had no control. How many other meetings like this one were taking place around the country? How many other lives had been altered in similarly gruesome circumstances?

  “I brought some pictures of Charlotte,” the woman continued, reaching into her purse and pulling out several photographs, passing them around. “The first one is Charlotte when she was a baby. I don’t know why I brought that one,” she giggled self-consciously, “except to show you what a pretty baby she was. The other two are Charlotte when she was fifteen, that last one taken just three weeks before she died. She had such pretty long blond hair. She loved long hair. Couldn’t even get her to trim it half an inch.” She paused, watching as the photographs were passed from hand to hand, her eyes stopping directly on Gail’s at the same moment that the pictures reached her. Gail glanced down at the photographs of the chubby and proud infant, of the smiling, fair-haired girl that was no longer. She quickly passed the photos over to Jack, trying to grab his attention as she did so, to tell him that she had to get out, that she couldn’t stand to be here any longer.