Category: Murder Confessions

Chapter Twelve — Mendacity

Morning found us all back in our own little circle of hell; like chum cast upon the haters.
Fawna was in fine form decked in navy blue and white, hair sharply cut and curled. She smiled at the jury and they smiled back. Our guy, Craig, looked like an unmade bed.

“The state calls Shea Moira Shortall.”

A woman I recognized as my aunt rose to her feet and moved with the forward lope of someone unused to high heels. I regarded her with a well-nourished hostility. This was our sworn enemy, the woman whose letter to the prosecution had opened my mother’s grave. She was having more peace there than she could ever have again. Artists competed now to sketch her wounds for the public in all their ghoulish glory.

Aunt Shea wore one of those mass-produced, vaguely African-themed outfits favored by big women –identifying with hippos, I guess, or elephants. She had a mess of what looked like zebras running across her back. Alone among my mother’s happily married sisters she was the anomaly, the single one, the “artistic” one. She had no children. When she was at art school there had been some kind of abortive attempt at a fake green card marriage that soon collapsed; Oz called her as “the dyke”.
She sent me art kits every birthday and Christmas; origami sets suitable for a five year old received on my fifteenth birthday. If I ever had talent, we’ll never know now; she must claim responsibility for my loathing of the graphic arts.

Her hair looked a bit more presentable today than yesterday; less of a bird’s nest. It was twirled up artfully and secured with jeweled combs. Maybe they had a salon at the hotel to pass the time, while Oz read Spinoza and I ate beef. She might have even been wearing makeup. She stared at the jury, bright-eyed, and they looked back at her with interest.

Like a big animal trainer, Fryssen marched her witness through her paces.

“My name is Shea Moira Shortall,” said the witness, touching the Bible like she knew her way around it.

There was one lie, anyway. I happen to know that when she was born those names were reversed. She was Moira Shea Shortall.

“I live in Prairie Nouveau, Nevada, and I am a retired teacher of art.”

“Did you once have a sister named Mary Elizabeth?”

“I did. She was a year and a half my junior.”

“Can you recall the circumstances in which you learned of her death?”

“I received a transatlantic phone call in the middle of the night from a man calling himself Oz White. He told me my sister had passed away and I should inform the rest of the family.”
“Did you know who he was?”

“I thought he had something to do with the school where she worked. I asked him if we should hop on a plane and come over but he said instability in Algeria rendered air travel uncertain and he promised he would personally escort the body and the children to wherever we wanted them to go.”

“And what did you say?”

“I was very upset, but to the best of my ability I thanked him. I said I’d have to speak to my sisters to find out whether they wanted her in the family plot in California or out in Arizona where we all lived. I took down his numbers and asked how she died.”

“So what did he tell you?”

“He said the doctor described it as an aneurysm. He said they need to embalm bodies very fast in the hot countries and asked if we wanted her embalmed or cremated.”

“What did you say?”

“I said in our religion, cremation was a sin. We needed the body whole. For the resurrection.”
Little did she know what resurrection lay in store! I shuddered and Trevor moved his shoulders comfortingly against me.

“Tell us what he said.”

“He made some flippant remark… I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it certainly disparaged our beliefs. I thought it was very inappropriate, bordering on cruel. That’s when I realized he was just a friend of Mary Elizabeth’s and not in the employment of the Franciscans. They would have known better.”

“What was the next thing you recall happening?”

“I rang off. I guess I was in shock. I woke my sisters with a conference call and we all agreed on the family plot. I called him back in the morning to give him the details and spoke to his wife.”

“Renée White?”

“That’s correct. She seemed a thoughtful person. She said he was unavailable, so I gave her the information.”

“Did he at any time mention that he was the executor of your sister’s estate?”
“Not then.”

“Did he mention he was the administrator of her dead husband’s estate?”

“He did not.”

Jake jerked at Mina’s collar and demanded to know why Craig didn’t object. Mina hissed that it was better not to prolong this testimony.

“Did Mr. White or the girls actually attend the funeral?” Fryssen had a way of standing alongside the witness box with her back to the jury and staring at Oz as she spoke. Then they all stared at him, like he was a captured alien.

Shea had been awaiting this question. She spat out her indignation as if it was a poisoned tooth.
“They did not. He called me from his new home in Washington to say he had thought about it and decided it wouldn’t be good for the girls. That’s when he mentioned that Mary Elizabeth had appointed him guardian before her death. Of course we had assumed they would come to us and had made our preparations in that regard. Mr. White – he wasn’t remarried at that time – described funerals – especially open casket services – as barbaric and unnecessarily traumatizing.”

“How did you respond?”

“I was incredulous…I barely understood. I told him there wouldn’t be an open casket service because our funeral director described the body as “excessively embalmed”– beyond repair. I really think his objection was to any service whatsoever. He seemed to think “out of sight-out of mind” – about their own mother – would be better for the children!”

Her voice quivered with outrage and set to vibrating the various scarves and necklaces strewn about her person.

“What disturbed you most about this phone call?”

“This awful fact about guardianship…I couldn’t believe it. None of us had daughters. We were so looking forward to welcoming them, to telling them about their mother. About their family. Mr. White told me he would be sending copies of the documentation.”

“Did you ask him anything further?”

“I did. I had got the death certificate interpreted; it said “aneurysm subsequent to a fall.” That was the first I ever heard about the swimming pool. So I asked him about that.”
“What did he tell you?”

“That she had been out walking late one night and fallen into a disused swimming pool. That there was no one around to hear her cries or help her to get out. Apparently she succumbed to her injuries. Alone.”

Fawna swiveled her hips to check the jury out and make sure they were getting all this. She then changed course, resting her elbow on the side of the witness box as if leaning into a friend’s car to chat.

“Let’s switch to this recent case. When did you come to hear about the death of Mr. White-Hawke’s current wife Colleen?”

“My sister Gemma clipped her obituary from the Post. I think that was in July. I went on the Web and looked up the stories about this so-called-accident. I thought” —

“Never mind what you thought, what did you do?”

Unchewed words fell from her lips like crumbs of disappointment.

“I wrote a letter.”

“Addressed to whom?”

“I didn’t have a name so I addressed it to the Head Prosecutor whom I have come to understand is Mr. Buford. I pointed out the similarities between my sister’s death and Mrs. White-Hawke’s.”
“Thank you,” said Fawna. “No further questions.”

Craig rose and simply looked at Shea for quite awhile, as if she was a particularly interesting specimen. I knew he was feeling aggressive because he played with his tie.

After a moment he shook his shoulders and said,

“Permission to treat as a hostile witness.” He had figured out how to use this judge’s thirst for speed to his own advantage.

“Granted,” said his Honor, crisply.

Craig continued to gaze at the witness for a moment, arms akimbo. Then he said,
“How many legal actions have you and your sisters brought against Mr. White-Hawke?” Emphasizing Colleen’s name.

Shea sat up as straight in the witness box as a pointer dog and said, “Two.” Sharply.

“Describe these actions. What were their dispositions?”

“The first was to contest Mr. White’s guardianship of the children.” That one was dismissed, to our sorrow. The second was directly for custody of the children. We dropped that in 2003 because the case ran on too long – he did everything to block it and the children were getting too old.”

“Too old for you to love?” Craig mocked her.

“Too old to have guardians.”

“You really mean too old to be compelled to do something they don’t want to do, don’t you?”

“Objection!” shouted Buford, “Argumentative.”

“Hostile witness, counselor,” the judge chastened, “not hostile attorney.”

I saw Mina write that down.

“Move on.”

“The first suit was really about depriving Mr. White of his position managing Ms. Barringer’s estate, was it not?”

“She didn’t leave him any money personally. It was all for the children’s benefit. He was just a trustee. We would have liked to see an accounting.”

“Wasn’t the money primary and the issue of the children secondary?” Craig asked silkily. “I have a copy of your suit if you’d like to refresh your memory.”

She was wearing makeup; I could see it now, standing out in patches against her reddening skin. Third witness in a row to testify in blood. Craig did have a way of getting to people. Her voice rose to a squeak.

“We wanted the children to have what had been their mother’s! We were trying to have the entire will set aside!” As an aside she muttered, “We realized too late”—and stopped herself. Too late.
“What did you realize?”

“We didn’t care if he kept Mary Elizabeth’s things. We just wanted the children. That was the burden of the second suit. Certain facts about his character were emerging…it had come to our attention…”

“Or your private investigator’s attention”—Craig interjected.

“That Mr. White’s behavior was questionable as a role model. And then there was the way they lived—“ “Please don’t just ramble, Miss Shortall. Answer the questions that I ask. Why did you drop the case?”

“We had some communication with the children before the suits, but afterwards…that stopped. It just seemed…self-defeating.”

Was that a tear in her voice? I was beginning to be enough of an old hand to realize that trials bring out the actor in everyone.

Craig said sonorously, “I put it to you that you dropped the case after the judge interviewed Miss Brontë White-Hawke and she said she did not wish to change families.”
“I believe I heard something of the sort.”

Aunt Shea looked at me for the first time and I braced myself for a death-to-the-enemy-shot from my tongue ring but her eyes flickered over me gently. Trevor put a hand on one of my wrists and Jake covered the other. Seems they thought I might vault the defense table.

“Of course she was loving and loyal to the family in which she was raised.” Her voice softened. “It was a characteristic of my dear sister.”

She wasn’t going to give Oz any credit at all, if she could help it.

“Did Mr. White ever express to you his own love for these girls?” Craig was going to get her to admit it.

“Many times. I take their absolute lovability as a given. Anyone would love them.”

“Didn’t he tell you that he had to spend their entire estate fighting the case, that he was supporting them with his own funds, but that he didn’t care because he would never give them up?”
“Hardly,” said Shea coldly. “He offered us Shelley.”

There was a stunned silence.

Then pandemonium broke out. I thought I’d heard wrong. I think Shelley stood up, then staggered forward. I thought she was going to fall. Trevor and Jake grabbed for her but they were too late because they’d been concentrating on restraining me. They found themselves wrestling with an empty coat. She was gone. Spike shot out after her.

“Objection!” cried Craig. “Your Honor, this is a setup!”

“You opened the door, Mr. Axelrod. Now you’ll have to walk through it.”

The angry defense attorney said coldly to his witness, “I put it to you that this is a lie engineered to divide the family.”

“It is not! He wrote it in a letter!”

Buford lifted a paper above his head. “Your Honor, we would like to offer this letter as –”
“Mistrial!” shouted Craig. “The defense has not seen this purported document. I understand surprise witnesses are de rigueur in the glorious state of Virginia but surely surprise documents are too “star chamber” even for this great commonwealth. If not offered during discovery it should be irrelevant.”

Mina disappeared after Spike and Shelley. Oz put his head in his hands but when Trevor touched his shoulder, he whispered, “Go after Shelley.” Jake rose obediently. Trevor and I were alone.

“The prosecution concealed something – who knows what – to spring upon us at this moment in order to further upset this family and violate this defendant’s rights. This is clear ground for a mistrial.”

Buford stepped into the center of the room wringing his hands in a palliative fashion.
“Ms. Shortall moved recently and she only just recovered the letter, bringing it East with her. There was no bad faith here. I have a copy for the defense. The state—“

“Mistrial, your Honor! I demand a ruling. We were deliberately blindsided.”

The judge tossed his gavel around in a nearsighted manner.

“Mistrial motion denied,” he said.

“Then I ask that this letter not be admitted and the witness’ words stricken.”

The judge spoke. “Mr. Axelrod, I don’t see how the defense is encumbered by this little matter. It concerns a subject entirely ancillary to the case at hand.”

“This entire testimony is ancillary to the case at hand,” Craig insisted doggedly.

“Court is dismissed until nine a.m. tomorrow pending my ruling,” said the judge.

And this is the judge so in love with speeding these things along! Trevor steepled his brows in my direction.

There was Jake hovering outside the ladies room, and Shelley inside, crying her eyes out. When I hugged her, I could feel her heart hammering away.

“He always loved you best,” she wept.

That’s bullshit,” I insisted. “Trevor says every kid always thinks that about the other kids.”
It was too claustrophobic in the toilet stall and was she was holding me too close for comfort. I don’t like feeling small; it feels like I’m going to disappear. Anger at Oz made me want to thrash and flail, but there was no room and in any case Shelley wouldn’t let me go.

“You know when they finish with Oz, they’ll be coming after us,” she gasped, her mouth quivering. “We’ll have to change our names and run away.” She dried her eyes with toilet paper. “I always wanted to live in Paris.”

Did she mean the prosecution or the Shortalls? In just a couple of days I’d been offered Georgetown and Paris. I wondered if I could talk Trevor into going to the Sorbonne. We needed to survive this first.

“I’m afraid to go back to college!” she wailed. “Remember that seventeenth century Scottish cannibal family? The law killed them all, even the children.”

I had always wondered why she seemed so taken with that grisly tale of a family of highwaymen who not only robbed travelers, but ate them.

“That’s just a nightmare,” I said. “Long ago and far away. Not going to happen. Come on. The judge is letting us out of here. Let’s go to the mall. Besides, Jake is waiting for you.” I laughed as I kissed her. “You know he always loved you best.”

She blew her nose but refused to be comforted. “Take my advice, Brontë. Never love a guy who’s prettier than you.”

“Don’t worry,” I told her. I like the Bad Boys.

Spike had been keeping everyone at bay, re-directing them to the first-floor john. As soon as Shelley emerged Jake pounced, gabble at the ready, grabbing the back of her neck to guide her to the conference room.

“Oz explained it. He was playing for time. It was just a legal ploy to slow down the case. You were almost of age, so it didn’t matter. He knew you wouldn’t agree… He suggested everything he could think of… things he never would have actually done…”

In the conference room Shelley threw herself into Oz’s arms.

“I’m sorry I made a scene,” she gasped. “It’s been so hard. We’ve all been on edge.”
Shelley was apologizing to Oz for disrupting his murder trial! Now that’s what I call perfect manners.

He patted her back.

“Don’t even think about it. It was just something my lawyers suggested…”
He hugged her, then pulled me in too for one of those disappearing-act embraces that I loathe so much. “You girls are my heart,” he said as he knocked our heads together. “I was there when both of you were born.”

We had heard that story already, many times before. Oz was our mother’s labor coach and attended both our births, cut the cord because our own father wasn’t there. Oz hadn’t been allowed to attend his own sons’ births because his wife didn’t want him seeing her like that. In my opinion that squeamishness really backfired on her, the way squeamishness often does. Without all the mud and the blood, what do we really have of each other? Nothing.

Craig ordered lunch and we had a family picnic that would have seemed almost normal if it hadn’t been for the gunslinging deputies guarding the door. Oz regaled us with his contemporary version of scenes from The Life of Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower.

Before court reconvened he made a point of pulling me aside.

“I’ve never seen Trevor looking so happy,” he told me, eyes bright. “I didn’t think he even had the happiness gene.”

I was thinking Oz always knew exactly what to say when he tightened his grip on me and whispered, “The two of you would make such a fantastic kid. Are you using protection? Don’t.”

Chapter Eleven — Metamorphosis

The men declared a need for beef. Big, big, beef. It started when Craig announced that he and Mina would prepare dinner. He was determined to grill. Beef.

The men were as enthusiastic as Eskimos on a seal hunt, so it seemed unsporting for me and Shelley to point out that we’d pretty much stopped eating red meat. That was Colleen’s influence; she was vocalized about toxins lurking in one’s cells causing death and damage to the skin. She claimed she could smell as well as recognize beef eaters. I was starting to think there were other forms of damage she should have paid attention to.

Craig says hindsight’s the only truly twenty-twenty vision. Oz was in agreement; the-living-forwards, understanding-backwards thing. I take it seriously. If I didn’t keep a diary how would I even know what’s happening to me?

Oz didn’t make it up. It was probably a quote; something borrowed, trailing provenance. Oz loved history, he was less excited about originality. The following unoriginal rule applies entirely to myself; I pledge to eat anything if only someone else will cook it.

Beef was another one of those things Spike turned out to be an expert on. Did you know there is a black market in restaurant-grade beef? Of course there is and it’s flourishing right here, (Jake says there is a black market for everything.) I went along, on the theory that writers should see all there is to see. As an artist I try to stand outside the capitalist frenzy – these people haven’t heard that by getting and spending they are laying waste their powers.

Court was dismissed early so that’s when the party started. Leaving the pursuing press in his dust (he has tricks aplenty) Spike drove us to a collection of storage lockers on a hill outside of town. Craig insisted on coming to check out the beef although as an “orifice of the court” – what he calls himself – he isn’t supposed to observe anything illegal. (He says it’s not up to him to figure out what’s illegal — that’s the prosecutor’s job. I thought he solved the problem neatly by concentrating on his silver flask. If at least one person is having fun, isn’t that the definition of a party?

Spike took an unbecoming glee in dumping the beef right on Craig’s lap, still in its black garbage bag serial killer wrapping. Craig lifted up the duct tape, peered inside. We all observed a pregnant hush as Spike asked,

“This OK?”

“This is gorgeous,” said Craig, gathering the ripply red and white hunks to his bosom and staining the oxfordcloth beyond repair. Now he looked like a crime scene. Why is it men like that marbling on food and not on women? Life is so unfair. I suppose they need to be able to tell the difference between dinner and a date, even “three sheets to the wind.” As Oz would say.
The sellers looked Asian so God knows where this meat was from. Trevor paid them in hundred dollar bills.

Over Vermillion the sky was dark. The press had set up tents that the rising wind began to threaten.
I took a long hot shower in Skylar’s bathroom to flush away the indignities of the day while the men set up a grill on the back terrace, beneath the portico. I had survived the first day of what Craig called “the trial within a trial” and I needed to be alone, to think about what I had seen and fit it in with the rest of my knowledge.

Just when you think you understand something the Matrushka doll breaks apart, revealing hidden versions of itself. The suspended animation of waiting for the trial to be over meant I was living a life inside my life, just as my stepped-up relationship with Trevor was a relationship-inside a relationship. So how could I write anything new? It seemed to me the poems assembling in my head were chopped up versions of what I had seen.

Outside the shower I found a spiral of blood along my towel. My period wasn’t due, but I had noticed that my untrustworthy body had a habit of punishing my passing enthusiasms. Colleen used to say that her periods came whenever she traveled – that is when she used to get them – just to make life hard. You’d think a person feeling that would welcome menopause.

If my body was determined to squelch my sexual escapades I wouldn’t give it the chance, I was already feeling that delicious build-up to a promised night of sexual adventuring where one can do anything and be anybody; heart-pounding exercise followed by a deliciously new depth of sleep. Every touch on my body was inherently masturbatory. I looked different, being loved; had to tear myself away from looking at my naked self emerging in the steamy mirror. If Trevor had come upstairs for any reason I would have fallen on him like a wolverine.

I stuck my head in Shelley’s room to borrow a tampon; she saw my pinned-up hair and asked, “Are you dressing for dinner?”

“Of course,” I answered. Good idea! The best presents are the most exotically wrapped; we are willing to cut and bruise ourselves to open the inside. “Are you wearing your body-stocking dress?”
She sighed happily, “Jake hasn’t seen it.”

It’s a wonderful outfit, an Arabian Nights tale of a gown that seems to consist only of gold coins stuck randomly across her pale body.

I would have to work hard to be worthy of my sister, but I had a dress in mind; Colleen’s ruby-red velvet. As a child I was fascinated by the little looping chains across the arms that shimmered and fell whenever she moved. I recall reaching up my hands to touch them, Colleen laughing as she pulled away. She hadn’t worn that dress in years but I had seen it in her collection. I guess it was mine now.

Tampon in place, wearing only a towel, I ventured into the other side of the house. I always consider it the height of luck to find myself alone and I was lucky again this time; the others were preoccupied.

Searching for black stockings I found gorgeous lace underthings still sporting their LaPerla tags. I guess those were mine now, too. Could mere youth and will dispel the inherent creepiness?
When I saw my gorgeousness in black lace and garters even I was intimidated. Had she had bought these for Oz? Because I couldn’t imagine him buying them for her; alas. No man buys black lace and garters for his valet.

Thankfully I was clothed when Shelley came in search of me. I’m not sure I should even let Trevor see me thus transformed.

“Looking good,” she whistled, zipping me. The dress was so tight my breasts mashed upwards, giving me some unexpected cleavage.

“I remember this dress,” said Skylar. “God, Colleen was tiny.”

Was that why we liked and trusted her so much the day we first met. She was like an intermediate adult.

“I’m not tiny,” I snapped. It is the greatest sorrow of my life that I am so short. Look at Shelley in her stilettos, gracefully towering over everyone. If intensity of will could add inches, I would be so tall!
“You’re not tiny,” Shelley comforted. She’s so loyal. “You’re the biggest person here.”

“But what can I do with my hair?” I asked my sister.

“It looks perfect exactly the way it is,” said Shelley. “Let me put in a clip to hide the rubber band and we’ll pull more tendrils down.”

As she snapped in a rhinestone butterfly I studied myself in Colleen’s Empire mirror. Tendrils released by the hot steam fell around my face. I looked so different to myself, darker and more grown up, my eyes expanding into depthless pools. Was I inhabited now by both Trevor and Colleen or did they cancel each other out? There can be loving, as well as demonic possession. Oz used to say we belonged to him until we were old enough tom belong to ourselves. Had that time finally come and if so, what accomplished it? Sex? Orgasms? Murder trials?

As we descended the stairs we were rewarded by a chorus of gasps.
Jake said, “Wow.”

Spike sat down hard on a chair far too small — it struggled but held.

Craig, looking clownish in floral mitts and a matching apron, said, “My eyes. My heart. My arthritic loins.”

Trevor, dusty in the basement doorway, snapping the wine cellar key back on his watch chain, declaimed, “Rose Red and Snow White stepping out of a storybook to toy with our frail hearts.”
Mina, sweatily stuffing potatoes, said, “Good God, y’all. Am I going to have to get my French maid’s outfit?”

Jake said, “Please.”

“Well, too bad for you. I gave it back after Halloween.”

I, armpits stinking of Trėsor, attacked the job of setting the table. Colleen’s got lots of beautiful, beautiful things and I used all I could find. The Havilland china, the damascened chargers, the Baccarat crystal, the Georg Jensen silver with spoons like trowels, the pearl handled steak knives like little Moroccan daggers.

“Go for baroque,” Oz suggested. I guess it’s my nature to understand excess.
Shelley brought in candles and hurricane lamps as I laid out the dark green damask napkins edged with lace, napkins Colleen deplored because they needed dry cleaning. All the flowers in the vases were dead, but at least I could strew the table with their still-fragrant petals.

The red-walled room with its black cherry wood furniture was transformed into a cave of enchantment. I did consider hanging a sheet over the leering, disapproving portrait of Oz’s father, The Scary General. Looking at him explains why Oz seems to have spent the majority of his childhood on his knees; I never met He Who Must Be Obeyed, but even in his portrait his face bristles with rage.

In the end I left him alone; I thought it might do him good to observe the scene. Unless the afterlife evens up our deficiencies, resetting us to “start” so to speak, he was in dire need of softening up.
Outside it had started a depressing Virginia winter rain. Trevor appeared silently behind me, leaned down, kissed my neck and rubbed his cheek in the downy hairs of my nape.

“This is so good of you,” he said, and set himself to opening the wine. Trevor treasures family dinners.

I almost snapped, “I’m not doing it for you,” until I thought how rude that was, so I said nothing. I don’t like quid pro quos in sex and love and until now I’d planned to get along without them. His compliment meant I had to ask, why was I doing it? You almost escape, then they pull you back in. It’s a writer’s truism that nobody knows why they do anything. That’s why they need us.

Was this somehow symbolic of the dinner parties my mother attended and enlivened, the ones we heard about today? Did she watch me in my black stockings and ruby red velvet, and if so, what was she thinking? Maybe it was a coming out party for the maiden chosen by the eldest son, or a case of lighting-the-lights-and-banging-on-the-pots to scare away the dark and ghosts?

Speaking of ghosts, did you know living people can have them? Oz might be absent, but his presence vibrated strangely among us, his power increasingly erratic like a vanishing power source. Though I would never have confessed it, in some ways he felt deader than Colleen. Tonight we used the tools she chose; he had approved, loving history and quality, but surely these possessions belonged to the one who cleaned them and preserved them. As a result Oz, lost in the playgrounds of flesh and ideas, had melted away.

Or were the different stories I had heard about him this morning transforming him before my eyes? Would he ever come back, to dine with us in this room? Perhaps we celebrated now for the same reason people no longer delay sex until after marriage, because the longer you wait the sadder things get. In my experience you have to do things when you have the energy if you want them done at all.

I felt understood everything the moment Trevor put the first glass of blood-red wine in my hands and I drank. I understood everything. That’s why they call it “stun-gravy.” The revelation drink. It may be completely specious, but it sure feels authentic.

Mina had prepared a plain green salad, garlic bread and a recipe she likes to call “once, twice, three times a potato.” The miracle of that dinner was the beef, charred on the outside, raw on the inside, soft and buttery, delicious beyond compare. It made you want to eat it with your hands.
“I hope nobody has allergies,” Mina told us as she passed the potatoes. “There’s a little bit of everything in here.”

Oz and Colleen raised us tough, guaranteed to gag down our peck of dirt before we flew. Proud of being tough. Disapproving of finicky eaters, Oz forced on us kidneys, sweetbreads, brains and tripe. If he told the story about the meshwi at which he was given the honor of eat ing the dead sheep’s eyeball once he told it a hundred times. Surely there was no longer a germ we could catch. We thought ourselves invulnerable.

Looking in Colleen’s wine book I can see that night we drank three bottles of Domaine la Grange des Peres Rouge 2001 and three bottles of Domaine de Trevallon Rouge 2001. Both were judged “rude, rough and aggressive” by Craig whose signature is almost illegible; I made a note that I preferred the Trevallon.

Did we drink all that wine to soak up the beef or did we eat all the beef to soak up the wine? I used to be accused of bringing home “undesirables” when I invited fellow public school denizens to sample the contents of our refrigerator; watching Jake and Craig fighting over the meat juices I wondered if I had done it again.

Over the meal we discussed religion, of all things. Craig introduced the topic by shouting, “That fucking religion! I blame it for every bad thing happening to this country.”

“It’s not religion that’s the problem,” corrected Trevor, who never seemed to show the effects of alcohol, “It’s education. People can only think with the brain their education gives them.”
“It’s genetics,” said Jake. “You have to have a brain to think with.”

“Let me get this straight,” asked Mina. “You’re blaming Christianity for how the trial is going?”
“I am,” said Craig, drawing himself up and puffing out his reddened cheeks, “Face it, Mina. Christianity is a conspiracy of old women against the male libido.”

“Hear, hear,” said Jake.

“That’s so totally untrue,” Mina challenged him, and Trevor backed her up.
“Jesus was a man,” he pointed out.

“Not so you could tell,” grumbled Jake.

“All religions were invented by men to control women,” said Mina. “Name me a religion started by a woman.”

“Uh oh,” said Jake. “Feminazi alert.”

“Christian Science,” retorted Trevor.

“Yeah? And what’s the first word of that? Doesn’t count. It’s a modification of a pre-existing religion.”

“You can’t lump all religions together,” Trevor insisted. “It’s ignorant. It’s like talking about “all education”. There’s good education and bad education.”

I knew all about his thoughts on that.

“Or sex,” I said. “Because there’s good sex and bad sex.” Was that Trevor kicking me under the table?

“You think this jury is going to differentiate between good sex and bad sex?” asked Craig sourly.
“I thought you did a pretty good job setting up the parameters today,” Jake said, lifting his glass.
“You definitely exposed the weaknesses of their witnesses,” Trevor agreed.

“They don’t have a case,” snapped Craig. “Just wait till I get my hands on that family.”
I knew who he meant. My mother’s sisters.

“If only it mattered.” Craig collapsed, boo-hooing into his booze. “I feel like I’m trying this case in a foreign country. Asking them about their religion is a no-no and yet it’s going to control the outcome.”

“People don’t tell the truth about themselves anyhow,” said Mina. “I think the best we can hope for is a couple of closet gays. And maybe some of those women have kids that are gay.”

Craig snarled in disagreement. “This case isn’t going to turn on homosexuality; it’s going to turn on recreational sex, period. Did you hear that woman call him a “swinger”? Codeword! Who cares what happened in Tunisia fifteen years ago? Who cares what he did with his weekends? None of this has nothing to do with his stoned wife falling into the deep end of an empty swimming pool. I saw those women’s faces. They just want to punish him for jumping the fence.”

“The prick wants what it wants,” intoned Jake.

“I don’t think it’s the women we need to worry about,” said Mina. “Women are a lot more forgiving of sexual peccadilloes than men are.”

“Bullshit!” exploded Craig. “Men are naturally polygamous.”

“Not any more than they are naturally murderous,” argued good old Trevor. He’s s cute. “A commitment’s a commitment. Civilized people make them and keep them.”

He was going to make some lucky girl a fabulous husband someday. I knew I would never get one as good. I felt downright envious.

“Everybody knows its women who are the possessive, jealous sex,” Craig insisted.

“No, they’re not.” Mina seemed to enjoy arguing with her boss. “This whole marriage thing was invented by men and I can prove it.”

He gaped at her. “You’re on.” Slapped down a Benjamin.

Mina rattled her empty wine glass, calling for more. Spike sprang into action.

“Imagine a religion – an institutionalized religion — big, successful, millions of adherents — where ten guys share one woman. I dare you.”

God. She had us there. All were silenced. We couldn’t imagine it.

“Boo-ya,” said Spike. “Talk about mayhem.”

He made a ceremonial show of filling Mina’s wineglass. “Touché. Lady takes table.”

He’d been so quiet before, sitting in the outsider’s position, eating quietly just outside the circle of light. That’s the writer’s position. Where I should have been. Enviable ability to disappear into background, especially when you’re big like he is.

Mina scarfed up Craig’s Benjamin and inserted it where she should have had cleavage.
“So how do you think it’s going to go?” I asked Spike. Our man in Havana played it safe.
“No telling with juries,” said Spike.

There was a slow deflation of energy – like the expulsion of a sigh — across the table. This was still only the beginning. The next day hung over us, and the day after that. Not like television where you can change the channel.

“I don’t think I can stand it,” I said aloud.

Jake spoke for all of us. “Isn’t one of Dante’s circles of hell sitting in court day after day? What did we do to deserve this?”

Just beyond the candle glow, something ran across the Chinese rug. Shelley rocketed nervously to her feet.

“It’s just a chipmunk, Shelley,” I reassured her. The cats had taken to bringing in their prey and releasing them inside, prolonging their amusement. It might not have been a chipmunk at all, but I know chipmunks are something Shelley’s not afraid of.

“The poor thing,” mused Shelley, sitting back down. “Like trapped on a strange planet.”
If the wine was gone it must be time for coffee.

“Dessert?” I queried, hostess-like, knowing my dessert waited upstairs in the Bed of a Thousand Kisses, where Trevor would crouch above me, balls coiled like springs.

“Pass,” said Jake, rubbing his stomach. “I ate too much.”

“You didn’t eat that much,” I said to Trevor, who is always abstemious. “Want ice cream?”

“No, thank you,” said Trevor.

“There’s brandy,” Jake suggested.

Accepted by all but Trevor, who asked rhetorically, “Who appreciates food more, the glutton or the hunger artist?”

“Don’t pay him any mind,” Jake said, filling Craig’s glass, “Professional buzzkill.”

But I knew what he really meant. A special glance passed between us. Keeping himself in fighting trim for later. I put a hand over my brandy glass.

“You know what we need,” said Jake. “That Perry Mason moment. You know, you put someone on the stand and he says, “I did it!” No offense, Craig.”

“None taken,” Craig agreed glumly. “At this point I’d appreciate a miracle. I wouldn’t look in the horse’s mouth. Know who I really want to put on the stand? Colleen.”

“She probably doesn’t know who did it,” said Trevor. “She was stoned, remember?”

“She knows now,” I said excitedly. “Let’s ask her! Let’s have a séance!”

“That’s a terrific idea,” said Shelley. “I’ll get the Ouija board.”

“You don’t need an Ouija board for a séance”, said Mina. “We just ask her to manifest herself.”

“This is in the worst of taste,” objected Trevor.

“Hey,” I told him, “You’re the one who insists there’s an afterlife.”

“I’ll ask the questions,” said Craig. “I need to get a lot of things straight.”

“I’m going out for a cigar,” said Spike, and Trevor said, “I’m joining you,” until I grabbed his hand.
“Stay with me.”

He sat reluctantly back down.

“We should all hold hands,” I suggested. This made it less obvious that Trevor and I were holding hands. Mina moved into Spike’s chair and extended her fingers.

“Sorry,” she apologized to me. “My hands are always cold.”

She had little bony fingers like a monkey’s.

Jake said, “We should get something of Colleen’s.”

I said, “Everything was Colleen’s. Look at this table.”

“Something intimate. Personal.”

God. I was wearing the underwear she’d chosen. But how intimate can it be if it still has the tags on?

Shelley said, “Brontë is wearing Colleen’s dress.”

Jake gave me an unflattering look. “It looks completely different on you,” he said snidely in a once-a-squirt-always-a-squirt voice.

“Well then,” said Mina, “We’re ready to start. Everyone close your eyes.” She cleared her throat. “Colleen White-Hawke, we summon you from beyond the grave.”

The things you don’t know about people! I would never have figured Mina for a medium.
For a long space of time I listened, sorting out the different sounds. Craig’s wheezing breath, Jake breathing through his “perfect” nose, broken once by Trevor and again by a Bulgarian fencer, re-built by experts. Trevor began stroking the palm of my hand with his middle finger. It occurred to me that spiritualism is a religion invented by a woman. So there.

“Colleen, we feel your presence,” whispered Mina. “Speak to us. Let us know who caused your death.”

Through the slits in my eyelids I could see pools of wax overrun the flower petals like lava. Was that a foot touching mine? Bare foot out of a shoe? Couldn’t be Trevor; he wore lace-ups. There was a long silence, then a thump as something hard hit the table. Shelley screamed and her chair turned over. We all pushed back and Trevor hit the lights. But it was only Colleen’s Persian, licking up meat juices. There’d been a kill so he thought himself invited.

Spike came running in, a cigar in one hand and a 45 in the other.
“You can’t shoot ghosts, Spike,” said Mina.

“Or cats,” I said.

“There are no ghosts,” said Spike, but Craig quoted,
“Yet as the old lady said, I’ve never met a person who wasn’t haunted.”

“Get out of here!” Jake shook his napkin at the cat, who absolutely ignored him.

“Colleen says let him have the rest of it,” I said, putting the tray on the floor.

“That’s it,” proclaimed Trevor. “I’ve out of here. Totally bushed.”

There was general agreement that the party was over. Shelley and Jake looked at each other longingly, and I saw the benefit in avoiding Trevor’s bathroom. Why witness my sister canoodling with Brownie, the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome poster child? Upstairs in the Honeymoon Suite Trevor wrestled me impatiently out of my dress.

“I’d say this is one size too small,” he said. “At least.”

I’ve got news for him; girls don’t like hearing this. It was true I’d eaten too much at dinner and was probably puffy from my period. When finally I fought free of the damn dress I rose up to my full height (such as it is) and said, “Ta da!”

My erotic display fell flat. Trevor turned away.
“Take them off.”

Was this the “buyer’s remorse” I’d heard of? Indio would have killed to see me in this outfit. He was always very critical of my patched Lady Jockeys.

“What’s the matter? Aren’t I perfect anymore?”

“Don’t gild a lily until it stinks,” he said, undressing himself. Still turned away from me. “You were born perfect. That’s not the issue.”

“What’s the issue?” I joined him in nakedness on the bed. He lifted one shoulder to embrace me, smiling. He began kissing me all over my face, light butterfly kisses.

“You and I are beyond fetishes, beyond mementoes,” he said. “Don’t you see? I’m a man with a plan, put upon this earth to make sure you become yourself, and don’t get derailed onto someone else’s template.”

Still I felt somewhat cranky and offended. Was he really saying I couldn’t grow up and change his idea of me? I know I was gorgeous in that lace, so gorgeous you would not believe.

“Georgetown is going to accept the real me?” I queried in a spoiled child way. “They’re not going to force me into their template?”

He rolled me over, pulled back and looked down at me with pride. Pride and love.
“I’ll be there to make sure they don’t,” he said. “Admit it’s possible that I know you better than you know yourself.”

“It’s impossible,” I objected. “By definition.”

“Why can’t you trust me?”

Why couldn’t I? I had to give him that one.

“I do trust you.”

“Well,” he said, smiling, “I trust me, too.”

Softening me up. I’m beginning to see why men will do anything for sex. If you know you’re going to get an orgasm like the eruption of Krakatoa out of it, it becomes a whole different deal.
He certainly was the best kisser in the Western hemisphere, playing with my mouth, my lips, my tongue, with his own soft lips. Yet I hesitated to let myself go. What was wrong with me? I know lovers don’t need to agree about everything just to have sex. But I felt some need to badger him. Maybe it’s the power equation. You know. That brother-sister thing.

“Maybe when we summoned Colleen, we got her,” I teased. “Do you think Colleen’s soul went into her Persian?”

He interrupted his palpating and savoring long enough to say, ‘How can a person go to church for fifteen years, be baptized and even confirmed, and remain so theologically naïve?”

“Maybe I wasn’t paying attention.”

“I’ll say you weren’t. I had to personally wipe the drool off your face countless times.”

I loved it when he talked about my childhood. It lived on in him; I could enjoy it without the obligation (and the pain) of reliving it. All pleasure. No powerlessness.

“There’s no reincarnation,” he lectured patiently. “There’s no transmigration or transmutation of souls. Cats don’t even have souls.”

“So Colleen’s in heaven?”

“Sleeping till judgment day, presumably,” he said. “Not up to us. Fortunately.”

“I think your religion is just impossible,” I argued. “When you get to heaven and see the cats are in charge, won’t you be surprised.”

“I’ll be very surprised,” said Trevor, gnawing on my hipbone.
“And then she’ll be judged? We’ll all be judged? Oz too?”

“Oz too.” He licked my inner thigh. “Thank God for mercy, eh?”

He had reached my crotch. I had forgotten about my tampon.

“Oops,” I said. “Sorry.”

Delicately he removed it with his teeth.

“Oh Cherry Vanilla,” he sighed, “You know I love all your flavors.”

Even through shuddering blasts of pleasure I recognized truth when I heard it. He’d been licking clean my cuts as long as I could remember.

Chapter Ten – Meretricious

“The state calls Ira McWhiggin,” said Buford triumphantly, as if he’d won something. He gleefully wrenched control of the state’s jalopy from Fawna and was riding high and proud. Probably gave her the “less important” witnesses, giving us a handy key to the proceedings.

Ira McWhiggin was shorter than me. He really was a dwarf. He had a gingery crust of hair surrounding a bald spot, and he walked with a strange hitch in his gait suggesting a painful series of increasingly unlucky medical interventions. In spite of all that he was fussily dressed in a suit whose ice cream candy color seemed a little too summery for Virginia in December and definitely too festive for a murder trial. His collar was white, his shirt striped – a combination Oz particularly loathes – and he wore a tie of brocade so shiny it resembled leather and displayed a pocket square of the same nauseating material. Oz would describe such a man as a “poseur”. The witness looked markedly away from us as he passed the defense table.

When offered a Bible, he said, “I prefer to affirm.”

“See?” hissed Trevor. “That’s what liars do.”

The witness carefully spelled out his name, described his residence as “Lucerne Switzerland” and his current employment as “tutor in the private household of Prince Lubingen” and then Buford was off to the races.

“You recognize the defendant?”

“I do.”

“Can you describe to the jury where and when you met the defendant?’
Was that a tattoo on his neck or a bulging vein? Colleen had a beautiful mother-of-pearl set of opera glasses in its own sequined bag but I was pretty sure Trevor wouldn’t allow me to bring them to court. Anyway they were Skylar’s, now.

“It was the end of August, 1987, in Tunisia, at Franciscan International. I was a mathematics professor, just starting my first term, as a matter of fact, and his wife was a professor of history. I got the impression that he – Mr. White – was attached to the State Department in some way; some government service anyway. We met at a reception for new faculty.”
“What was your impression of the defendant?”

McWhiggin looked at Oz for the first time. “I thought he was a breath of fresh air,” he said. Buford waited, and so he went on, “He was amusing and had so many clever stories. He was iconoclastic and irreverent, a rare combination in that locale. He made particular fun of the college and the faculty, but really no one was spared. I had just emerged from a repressive background and I found his attitude refreshing. He could make anyone laugh even under the dourest circumstances. He had such a glow about him.

That particular evening I recall he held forth about an occasion when the military required him to investigate some supernatural incident and he just kept manufacturing outlandish miracles of his own and reveling in the consequent excitement.”

McWhiggin had a glow himself describing Oz. That alone told me plenty; I’d met people like him before. I couldn’t say if the jury was as observant. Buford, though, wanted to rub everything in.
“You saw a lot of Mr. White and Renée White, his wife at that time?”

“I did. They had the most wonderful elaborate dinner parties. His wife was an impressively capable gourmet cook who cleverly combined classic French with the local cuisine. Fusion, I suppose you would say. They made such fun of all the people who weren’t there you daren’t stay away…it was like a little club.”

I pictured Vinca Verna, holding a serving dish, hovering on the edge of the laughter. Could she muster up a contact high, or was resentment growing?

“Mary Elizabeth Barringer attended those parties also?”

“She did. She was often present. Renée swore by an equal division of the sexes to maintain the right spark and I was odd man out because I wasn’t married, and she was odd woman out because her husband was posted elsewhere. So we were often invited together.”

“What was your opinion of Mrs. Barringer?”

“She was a lovely woman, very intelligent. Sweet in a quaint, old-fashioned way. She was the perfect foil for Oz – Mr. White’s type of humor. If she had a fault, it was perhaps her naïveté…I recall Mr. White challenging her one evening that no great work of literature had a happy ending and she countered with Jane Austen. She specialized in just those nineteenth-century novels ending with a marriage and it limited her worldview. I recall Oz taking her literary education rather aggressively in hand, trying to upgrade her to some of the moderns. Ferlinghetti, Henry Miller – just the basics, really. She could just about stomach Virginia Woolf and Dubliners but she bailed at D.H. Lawrence and Finnegan’s Wake. I don’t think she really cared for the twentieth century. She was the only faculty member without a computer and it was quite inconvenient sometimes, as I recall.

She certainly was brave about stating her views even when we all disagreed with her. I remember her arguing against the findings of depth psychology that our group accepted as gospel. She seemed to think everything could be cured with long walks, fresh air, and thinking hard about something else. She was also quite religious in a rather sweet way…self-perfection, the efficacy of prayer, and all that. Reading Thomas á Kempis each night before bed, that sort of thing. Oz called her a throwback. He used to say – right to her face – that he despaired of her, but he was never as cruel to her as he could be to others.”

“Do you think she liked him?”

The witness’s face lost the expression of animation that had fueled his memories. It was almost as if he had suddenly remembered where he was. He said sadly,
“I think it would be fair to say that she loved him, but I very much doubt she realized it herself. I think she was a romantic woman who was terribly lonely – she only saw her husband twice a year — and Oz was quite a meteor in his own way. She appreciated his uniqueness. He talked a lot about his years in the service, what it felt like to confront physical danger, and how to manage not just one’s own responses, but other people’s. I think she saw him as the kind of nineteenth century hero that’s died out, you know, Byronic…and I think he knew that and played to it.

“She failed to realize he represented in fact quite an earlier era… I think it’s safe to say she admired him and delighted in him. We all did. None of us had ever met a person like him before. She adhered adamantly to the most stringent concepts of marital fidelity so she wouldn’t have taken it further…we all saw their interchanges played out most entertainingly, right in public for all of us to see. They obviously both enjoyed their spirited arguments, even though he usually bested her. I’ve heard that women secretly yearn to be dominated, so perhaps that was it…

He was so easily bored that any attention from him was a compliment. In a way they had a lot in common. He liked to pose as a modern thinker but in fact was something more antique; an aristocratic elitist. We were all a bit shocked by his “après moi, le deluge” kind of approach to the problems of the universe. He shocked her – in a way he shocked all of us – by being very anti-meritocracy, even anti-professionalism. He had a particular thing about manliness — in fact, he said that it was being ruined by the modern world. We basked in his energy.

He demanded love really. He wasn’t a man you could just like. You either loved him or hated him.”
The sourness with which he spat these words into the absolutely silent courtroom told me all I needed to know about Ira McWhiggin. Ira McWhiggin had been burned. I’ve seen his like before. I know exactly what he must have looked like to Oz, this talky little dwarf; an exotic pet with a high portability. When Spike says of someone, “I can take him,” he means one thing. Oz uses the same expression to mean something else. Oz loves teasing people in an almost scientific way, poking them gently to discover what they’d respond to, carefully fanning resulting sparks into a blaze for his own amusement.

“So when her husband died, nobody was surprised that she chose Mr. White to manage his estate?”

“I’m not sure she even chose him so much as he made himself constantly helpful…he wasn’t employed at that time – he was on some sort of leave of absence. Most academics are paycheck to paycheck but he had been born to wealth and he was comfortable with the full range of international investing. Currencies, futures, that sort of thing. Referred to them as “instruments”. He said people were poor by choice. We were all impressed. He took it for granted that the ultimate goal was the personal freedom of never having to satisfy the standards of others again, but rather spending your time honing your gifts and following your own pursuits. It sounded ideal to all of us.”

“You didn’t suspect him of nefarious intentions?” Buford asked, head cocked to one side as if expecting an objection from the other side of the room. Craig, Mina and Oz were dead silent, staring at the witness as if at a riveting spectacle. I thought of Craig’s previous statement that given enough rope prejudiced witnesses lasso themselves. I was glad he didn’t object; my mother had taken life in the courtroom and hovered there before us, however insubstantially; a fascinating combination of Shelley and me.

“I certainly didn’t suspect him then,” said McWhiggin carefully.
The defense table rallied. The specter vanished.

“Your honor, your honor, your honor…” begged Craig, rolling his eyes and rocking helplessly, a sorely abused tourist in a country whose natives are robbing him blind.

“I offer it not for the truth of the matter but for the state of mind of the dead woman who is not here to testify,” Buford repeated his mantra virtuously. “This witness corroborates the previous witness’ testimony that Ms. Barringer“ – he called her “Miz Barringer” as if her family came from down the street – “was becoming disenchanted with Mr. White’s financial management.”

“Mistrial!” shouted Craig. “He has not testified to any such thing. It is the prosecutor who is testifying here and it’s an absolute abuse of this defendant’s rights.”

“Well, he’s about to testify,” said Buford.

The judge barked, “There’s no mistrial here, but keep it short, Mr. Buford. I don’t want to send this jury out. It’s a great waste of the court’s time to hear everything twice.”

“Your honor, may I remind you, we cannot take too much care,” said Craig. “We have a man on trial here for his life.”

“You don’t need to remind me, counsel,” said the judge acidly, as if death cases were two a penny in his region. Probably they were. “Proceed.”

Trevor and I squeezed hands. I passed my palm over his gray-suited thigh without touching it, feeling the power of his electrical field; knowing the very hairs on his leg turned towards me like sunflowers.

“Did you and Miz Barringer ever have occasion to converse privately about Mr. White?”
“We did. It was shortly before her death.”

“Will you repeat what was said?”

“She said she’d discovered that he really didn’t like women. She said he didn’t seem to have much respect for her mind. She told me she had figured out that his philosophy was dangerously self-serving. She called him “an anarchist.”

“An anarchist?” The word sounded idiotic in Buford’s cornpone accent.

“She compared him to Lord Byron’s Corsair, “a man of one virtue and a thousand crimes.” I recall the quote clearly. She said he used words differently from other people. She said his whole philosophy was nothing more than a rationalization allowing him to do whatever he wanted. She said such a program while promising to perfect the will in fact vitiated it to the point of slavery. She told me she wanted to take the girls back to the States and put them in school and she said she was afraid he would do something to stop it.”

“Those were her exact words? That she was afraid?”

“Her exact words,” said the witness solemnly.

Was it true? Wasn’t it true? Craig had told us about the scientific studies that prove people can honestly “remember” things that never happened. Emotion is memory. Trevor adheres to the Freudian theory of “screen memory”; people remember what didn’t happen precisely so they won’t have to think about what really happened. We artists have the universe as our palette. Our memories are the engine of the living dreams we seek to create.

I was not that surprised to hear someone express fear of Oz. Oz likes people to be afraid of him. He just likes getting what he wants; nothing “anarchic” about that at all. If he managed my mother’s estate then she was his source of income; in his view any manly man would fight to keep that from slipping away.

“Did you attend the Whites’ dinner party the evening before her death?”

“No, and no one else did. It was just her and the Whites, discussing their situation. Making plans for the future. Oz told me all about it later.”

So he was the confidant at that time. Entitled to see the wizard behind the curtain.
“What did he say?”

“She’d misinterpreted things erotically, he told me. He said he had to achieve an understanding with her, in the presence of Renée.”

“What did you take that to mean?”

Craig vaulted high.

“Objection! The prosecutor can’t back this up. This is hearsay and the rankest speculation!”
Apparently the prosecutor couldn’t back it up. He said,

“I’ll withdraw. Tell me about the morning you learned of Miz Barringer’s death.”

“I was teaching a class, and the provost came to my door to tell me.”
“What did you do?”

“I couldn’t believe it. I went straight to the swimming pool.”

“What did you see?”

“A lot of our friends…people in shock. Crying. The body was covered with a tarpaulin, but I could see the blood. Oz was there, speaking in Arabic to the officials. I could see him making drinking motions…He told me later she’d had too much to drink, but she rejected his assistance, because she felt rejected by him. He told her she needed the help of a psychiatrist and she took it amiss. He described it as a thoroughly bad evening.”
A bad evening celebrated with champagne?

“What did you make of the crime scene?”

“Well, it looked like she’d been attacked. There was so much blood… I asked Oz if any of her clothing was missing or disarranged… I thought she must have been assaulted. Local men didn’t often come on campus, but there was nothing really to prevent them. We knew that they thought all Western women were loose. Available.”

“Did you mention your theory to Mr. White?”

“I did. He said Arab men really aren’t interested in women except for procreation.”
“Did you believe him?”

“Well, clearly he can’t speak for all Arab men. I asked if there would be a rape test. He said, “Her family won’t want that.” I realized he was probably right. It would only make it harder for her girls. In Arab countries, rape is more of a crime against the family than the victim herself or even the state. Imagine her children waiting around while the police try and then fail to find some anonymous rapist. They were decades behind on every kind of technology, and of course there’s the language barrier. I agreed it was better for them to go straight home and start a new life. They were fortunate in a way, being so young. They wouldn’t remember any of it. They wouldn’t even miss her.”

Miss her? I must have. Without language, who can recall such things?
Buford turned and faced us with a satisfied expression.

“Thank you. Your witness, counselor.”

Craig rose and stood for a moment with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the little man.
“So Mrs. Barringer compared my client to Lord Byron, did she?” he asked with a genial chuckle.
“I believe she compared him to the Corsair,” said McWhiggin pedantically, “A character of Lord Byron’s.”

“That’s right. You compared him to Byron,” agreed Craig affably. “A corsair is a pirate, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” sniffed McWhiggin. “I am not personally familiar with the poem.”

“The late, lamented Mrs. Barringer was a very imaginative lady, was she not?” Craig’s voice rippled smooth and folksy.

“I wouldn’t say so,” returned his witness, refusing to give an inch. “She said she wished she could write, but she lacked talent. She was, however, very well read.”

“In a rather narrow range, as I believe you pointed out yourself,” said Craig, jingling the change in his pockets.

“True.”

The witness wasn’t going to call himself a liar.

“She preferred tales of high romance? Pure young heroines at the mercy of dastardly, villainous aristocrats? Heathcliff, Lord Rochester, that sort of thing?”

McWhiggin’s brow furrowed as he scented trouble ahead.
“I believe the genre is not utterly lacking in moral ambiguity,” he returned.

Buford vulcanized. “Your honor, what is the relevance of this? Is Mr. Axelrod implying that this jury needs lessons in nineteenth century literature to understand this case?”

“I’m not implying anything,” said Craig. “You’re the one dragging in people’s “states of mind” fifteen years and gone!”

“You’re making fun of the process of justice in this courthouse,” barked Buford.

“Well, if the process of justice has become sufficiently perverted to allow my client to be accused to piracy by a dead woman, then I reserve the right to make fun of it.”

The judge played right into his hands by banging tempestuously away on his gavel like a tyrannical three-year old.

“You may not, Mr. Axelrod!” he roared. “Do anything of the sort in my courtroom and find yourself in contempt! Change the subject!”

Craig bowed. I have heard him say that if he isn’t threatened with contempt of court at least three times during a trial he isn’t doing his job, so I assume he was satisfied. Nobody was prepared for what he did next. He changed the subject, all right. He approached the witness and inquired conversationally,
“You and Oz White-Hawke had a sexual relationship, did you not?”

The courtroom erupted, doors bursting outwards from the change in pressure. Trevor raised a quizzical “here it comes” brow at me. Buford crossed his arms at the defense table and leaned back in his chair.

“Why doesn’t he object?’ Jake asked Trevor.
“He probably doesn’t care what the jury hears at this point,” said Trevor told him. “From his point of view the more mud the better.”

Well, I was surprised. Oz’s taste these days runs to hard bodied centerfolds on hot military stud dot com. How could he ever forge a sexual relationship in this odd little being? He did favor experimentation. Variety? Bragging rights? Oz’s version of Ecclesiastes’ “there is a season” means “try anything once”.

McWhiggin’s face cycled through a hot series of Disney sunsets. Blood came and went in waves. Maybe he thought they couldn’t ask this; he didn’t look prepared. Oz says you have to feel around in people for what he calls “the ignition point”. Well, he had found it, long ago, on this guy, and Craig was in there again. McWhiggin never got over it.

“Let the record reflect the time it’s taking for the witness to answer the question,” said Craig sonorously.

“I’m trying to be accurate,” the witness admitted in a low voice. “I thought I was having a relationship. God only knows what he was having.” He couldn’t look at Oz who was sitting ramrod-straight and attentive.

“Who initiated the relationship?” Craig softened a bit. Possibly he had thought McWhiggin would deny the whole thing. He would if he was smart.

“He did.”

The air in the courtroom seemed to thicken. From press to jury everyone leaned forward as if determined not to miss a thing. I felt sorry for the dwarf. Most people live and die without ever having to explain themselves in court.

We would all look bad, every one of us; if you are old enough to talk, you are not innocent. I like to consider truth my business. Can truth be reached this way? Or will brains get sprained from swinging our necks back and forth? Craig says juries are monsters because people’s tastes have become degraded by the thirst for celebrity laundry; Trevor would say they never had any taste to lose. Oz would say – well, Oz would answer the question as he often did; with a quote. What is truth?

Craig was going to feed the monster.
“How did it happen exactly?”

The witness puckered his face as if he could turn it monkey-like inside out.
“About two weeks after we met he asked if I realized I was gay.”
“What did you answer?”

“I told him the truth…I didn’t know what I was. I’d had no opportunities. I had been forbidden to think of myself in a sexual sense and apparently nobody else thought of me in that way. My upbringing said masturbation would send me to hell. I was resigned myself to a lonely life.”
“And then what?”

“He told me I was probably gay and there was an easy way to tell. He…offered himself….as my instructor.”

The jury appeared rapt and self-forgetful, as if the drama unfolding before them flickered on their private TV screens. Two sat with their mouths completely open. Catching flies.

I couldn’t see Oz’s face but his body was relaxed in his chair. He probably enjoyed himself more than the witness, who glanced longingly at the prosecution table for protection, while perspiring enough to make use of his pocket square. Buford and Fryssen exchanged smug expressions: here was the homo stuff getting in and they hadn’t even had to fight for it.

Probably they cared nothing for this poor little queen. Throw him to the wolves.
“And…?” prompted Craig.

“Well, as you said. We became lovers.”

It seemed in the end he was going to cheat us, forgive the expression, of our blow-by-blow description.

“Was he correct about your sexuality?”

The witness squirmed. The judge looked over at the prosecution table and began shuffling papers in an annoyed fashion.

“He was correct,” the witness affirmed. “I even recalled some childhood instances I’d forgotten.”
Trevor looked at me significantly.

“Did he ever offer any explanation for his apparent bisexuality?”

“He said all the recreational sex on offer in Arab countries was homoerotic. He said it was just like the military, or prison. He told me wives are grateful because men can absorb more…raw carnality, and women are only really jealous of other women.”

Craig turned and waved a hand at the witness as if unveiling a work of art. He was too self-satisfied. If he thought he had just defused one of the prosecution’s most powerful explosives I was afraid he’d misjudged this jury. It’s a neat trick to make a prosecution witness testify for the defense but in my opinion only lawyers could appreciate the subtle suggestion that Oz was too uxorious a husband to risk entrusting his excess sexuality to potential home-wreckers. Around here a popular bumper sticker is, “Kill ‘Em All And Let God Sort ‘Em Out”. Maybe this was Spike’s fault for not educating our side better; nobody listened to me when I said anything. You know what they say in chess, don’t surround yourself with yourself. Not if you want to win.

“Who broke off the relationship?”

“We both did. On numerous occasions.”

Craig shook his head, smiling seductively. The witness’ eyes followed this trajectory with a kind of hopelessness, a rabbit dancing with a cobra.

“Now, that’s just not true, is it,” corrected Craig. “Didn’t you ask the defendant to leave his wife and come away with you?”

“People say a lot of things,” said McWhiggin desperately. “If I did, I didn’t mean it. It would never have worked. He could be physically…very cruel. He liked to pretend I was a child!”
Craig skated away from the court pandemonium and the judge’s stirring outrage with a fresh line of questioning.

“I believe you testified that Mrs. Barringer told you she was fearful Mr. White might raise some sort of objection to educating her daughters in the States?” “That’s right,” said the witness. His party handkerchief was dead; he had strangled it. Now it lay limply in his hands.

“After her death, do you know where he took them?”
“To the States. But that was –”

“Thank you!” barked Craig. “Answer only the questions that I ask you, please!”

He found a way to effectively shut the witness up; advancing towards him. Was it his diminutive size that made McWhiggin such a timid little man? Did he think Craig Axelrod would reach into the witness box and drag him out by the scruff of the neck? I saw McWhiggin looking at the clock with the exact same expression he must have seen on so many of his students’ faces. Now he knew what it was like to yearn for lunchtime rescue.

“When did you leave your employment at Franciscan International?”

“Later that spring. Right after Oz left, in fact.” He gathered up his courage and his dignity and flung them at his tormentor. “I was dismissed, if you want to know.”

“I think the jury needs to know. And why were you dismissed?”

“Someone gossiping about my sexual orientation. I always thought it might have been Oz. He could be vengeful. He liked leaving people worse off than he found them.” The witness looked at Oz, his lips pouting, “Why?”

“If you thought so, it must have made you angry,” suggested Craig.

“Actually it was a relief to start over, to lead a more authentic life,” said the witness. But the expression of hurt anger did not leave his face.

“So perhaps he left you better than he found you,” said Craig, smoothly. “Thank you for coming to court and testifying today.”

The judge gaveled for recess, even as we all — except McWhiggin — wanted more. Oz would say some appetites respond to feeding and some awaken only to deprivation. Inconsiderate of our personal hungers the marshals summarily ejected all of us out into the surprising sunlight.

Chapter Nine – Moribund

“Is there anyone in this courtroom whom you recognize?” Fryssen resumed her stride.
Verna looked out over all of us, her mouth pulled down at the corners, her eyes anxious, as if suddenly fearful of saying the wrong thing. Did she think it was a trick like the one played on Joan of Arc when they hid her sovereign in the audience? I felt her eyes linger over me as if I were in a lineup. Because Oz was in front of me I couldn’t see his expression, but I could imagine what it was. Sardonic. Removed.

“That man, there,” she said, pointing. “The defendant.” She got it right.

“Let the record show that the witness has identified Osmond White-Hawke,” said Fryssen. “Was there ever a time when you and the defendant were friends?”

I heard Oz growling in a protest.

“Yes,” said the witness. “Between 1985-1990. In Bouclem, Tunisia.”
“Tell us how you came to know the defendant.”

“My husband at that time worked for the Franciscan College there, and so did the defendant’s wife. We were a small group of Americans in a foreign place; everyone knew everybody. I had a little business looking after the children of faculty members in my home, and so I watched his sons. Then I got to know Mary Elizabeth Barringer — a literature professor — because she was expecting. She was so excited.” Her eyes strayed out over me and she smiled.

It was creepy. She knew who I was, probably recognized my hair. The fourth wall collapsed, I felt all of them looking at me and I recoiled against Trevor in my loss of invisibility. I was beginning to see why my mother dyed her hair.

“Did you and Mrs. Barringer become good friends?”

“Oh,” said the witness enthusiastically, “We were great friends. She was a wonderful person. I looked after both her girls as soon as they were born.”
“Can you tell us about her?”

Craig lumbered to his feet. “Let’s not go a-wandering, your Honor,” he said wearily.
“If the witness could just sum up,” said the judge, making wrapping motions with his hands.
The witness said, “She was a very nice person. Shy. A real straight-arrow. She was totally against gossip so some people thought she was difficult to talk to. She agonized over ethical choices that didn’t seem to bother most people. She always said if you ever had a complaint, you should take it right to the person involved, and that’s what the Bible says. But on the subject of ideas she was very well informed.”

I admit I was fascinated. This was my mother she was talking about. It was like uncovering an album of unseen photographs. I stole a glance at Shelley, but her expression was stoic. She has a tendency to chew on the side of her right thumb, usually ragged from texting. Not that there was anyone to text, anymore. Even Twitter had fallen silent. She may not have been listening.
“Can you tell us specifically about the morning of March 12, 1992?”
Was that the day my mother left the world?

“I was expecting Brontë and Shelley at eight am as usual and they never showed up. I called over to Mary Elizabeth’s house but no one picked up the phone. Then I phoned over to Mike Zwilling. He was her faculty supervisor – and I asked him if she had come to work. He said she hadn’t. So I thought–”

“Irrelevant what she thought, your honor,” said Craig, his eyes closed as mentally elsewhere.
“Confine your remarks to what you actually did,” said the judge.
“I went over there,” said Verna. “To her house.”

A photo of a house flashed up on the screen. A cute little sand-colored stucco house with a gate and blown-glass windows. The house I was born in. I didn’t remember it at all. Nothing.
“Is this the house you went to that morning?”

“Yes. That was Mary Elizabeth Barringer’s house.”
“Was it locked?”

“No.” She gasped, hyperventilating a little. “In fact, the front door was part way open. I went in –”
“Did anything in the house seem disarranged?”

“No. She was an immaculate housekeeper. I called for her. I searched everywhere for her but she wasn’t there. The children were sleeping in their beds.” She looked at us, distressed. Shelley stared back, thumb dropped, mouth open. “They were always particularly heavy sleepers.”
“Did you try to wake them?”

“No. I phoned over to Oz’s house.”

A map of lines and boxes flashed up on the screen.
“Would you situate us on this map?”
Verna took the laser pointer.

“Here’s the college. My husband and I had rooms over the car block. Here’s Mary Elizabeth’s house. She had a private residence because she got a bit of money after she was widowed.”
“Approach, your honor.” Craig threw his papers aside so explosively they slid to the floor. Spike rose to pick them up. Mina and Craig and Buford and Fryssen all approached the bench and there was a heated argument none of which we could hear.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Well, Fryssen asked her about buildings and she introduced money,” suggested Trevor.
Were they trying to introduce motive, I wondered? Verna seemed so sketchy. Was she a cockroach? Hard to credit the prosecution following any subtle game plan starring her.
“…last remark be stricken,” said the judge.
Ridiculous, right? I mean the jury heard it.

The dancers resumed their places. The laser pointer’s pink dot wavered over the box.
“So this is Mary Elizabeth’s house…” wandered three boxes, “And this is where Oz lived.” The dot quivered over a long rectangle. “He was known as Oz White in those days. And this is the swimming pool.”

“Why did you phone over to Oz White’s house?”

“I knew Mary Elizabeth had dinner there the night before. She told me she was going.”
“What did Mr. White say when you spoke to him?”

The witness’ lower lip trembled. “He said he’d be right over. But he didn’t show up. I felt I had to stay with the children.”

“How did you find out what had happened?”

“Not from Mr. White,” said the witness. “I heard from someone else. They found her in the swimming pool.”

There was a gasp in court, just as if everybody didn’t already know.

“Did you visit the crime scene at any time that day?”

“YOUR HONOR!” Craig shouted. “This was officially ruled an accident! It was AN ACCIDENT SCENE.”

“Everything in its proper order, Ms. Fryssen,” said the judge indulgently. He was looking at Fryssen as if he thought she was edible. How come we had only Mina, and not a sex goddess? Craig missed a bet there.

“Boy, I bet he has the hots for her,” whispered Jake, stating the obvious.

“Did you visit the site where the incident had occurred?” Fryssen recovered smoothly.

“I did. After a couple of hours my partner replaced me so that I could go. I was giving the children breakfast and Jane came over. She told me about…the swimming pool.”

It was funny to hear myself talked about and not remember a thing. I tried to picture the baby I had been – the redheaded, red-faced, red-fisted baby from the photographs – sitting in a high chair and being ministered to by this woman. Eager for breakfast, like usual. Not knowing Mom was dead.

“I went right to the pool. There were a lot of people there from the college, and Oz – Mr. White was talking to the local police.”
“Did you understand what was said?”

“No. Because he spoke Arabic and the rest of us did not. He kept touching his head. I was afraid he was making the “she’s crazy” gesture. I asked him what he meant by that. He told me just that it was late and they’d been celebrating her announcement that she was moving to the States. She didn’t drink, she wasn’t accustomed to booze – but she did drink champagne and they’d had rather a lot – he said she was unsteady on her legs. I asked him why he hadn’t accompanied her home if that was the case. He answered that she was very independent and liked being on her own. But that’s not accurate at all. She –”

“Did you look into the pool?”
“Yes.”

“Can you describe what it was like?”

The witness shook her whole body from side to side as she said, “There was a lot of blood. Too much blood for someone just falling into the deep end and banging their head.” She closed her eyes and her whole body throbbed as she remembered, “There were bloody handprints on the walls. My best friend’s blood.” The witness wept.

A group shiver, sort of like the wave they do at football games, ran through the crowd. Fryssen rushed forward with tissues.

“Do you know, of your own knowledge, why the pool was emptied?”

“The college was in some kind of quarrel with the town. The town said there wasn’t enough water to fill a big pool. The college administrator told me what there wasn’t enough of was baksheesh.”
“Baksheesh?”

“Bribes.”

“Wasn’t there some kind of fencing around the pool?”

“There was a chain link fence, but it was in disrepair.”

“Did you voice your sense of disturbance to Mr. White?”

“Yes. I said, “What happened?” He said, “She fell in and I guess she couldn’t get out.” He said she’d been complaining of headaches and she had a history of strokes in her family so she wanted to see a doctor but she was going to wait until she got back to the States.”
“Had Mrs. Barringer ever mentioned anything about headaches to you?”

“No. Her usual complaint was sleeplessness, but that hadn’t been bothering her lately. She was happier than usual, I thought. She told me she had recently made a decision to be more proactive –”
“Objection! Beyond admissible hearsay, your Honor!”

The judge looked over at the prosecutor.

“Your rationale, Mr. Buford?”

“Pattern of conduct, Your Honor.”

With a gesture of irritation the judge summoned his players forward.
“Welcome to the Gulag,” muttered Craig as he rose to comply.

There was a lengthy bench conference about exceptions to the hearsay rule. We must have lost because when the lawyers backed away Fryssen pursued the subject.

“Will you tell us exactly what Mrs. Barringer told you about Mr. White?”

“She said he was getting too bossy and acting like it was his money. She said she’d realized that if she wanted her girls raised her way she was going to have to do it herself.”
“Anything else?”

“That’s all I remember specifically. I tried to state it word for word,” said the witness with nervous virtue.

“Did Mr. White ever inform you of the ultimate medical ruling on Ms. Barringer’s death?”

“That she died of an aneurysm. So I assumed they’d done an autopsy, or how would they know? I know there was pressure to embalm her body right away to ship it back to the states.”
“Were any photos taken of the accident site, to your knowledge?”

“I didn’t see anyone with a camera there. It was just the local police; they didn’t have crime technologists. Afterwards the pool was filled in with rubble. The college officials said no one would want to swim there. That was within a day or two, I would say.”

“Did you have a conversation subsequently with Mr. White’s wife, Renée? Specifically a conversation about the night of the accident?”

“I saw her at the pool that morning, when everyone was there and milling around. I said, “Why didn’t your husband insist on escorting her home?” And she said, “He did. They left together.” But later on her story changed. “

“When was that?”

“The college gave Mary Elizabeth a memorial mass. Renée came up to me and said she wanted to explain, that she was afraid she’d given me the wrong idea. She said they left together that night, but Mr. White said Mary Elizabeth only allowed him to escort her part way home.”

Ms. Fryssen studied the map.

“The swimming pool isn’t really on a direct route from Mr. White’s house to Ms. Barringer’s house, is it?”

“No. She would have had to go quite out of her way.”

“Did Ms. White say anything more to you at the service?”

“She said Oz was leaving for the States because he was the executor and Mary Elizabeth wanted the girls raised there, but Renée didn’t want to go back. She said—“

Craig shot up like a gamebird. “Your honor, for the record I would like to re-state our absolute objection to this entire line of questioning. Poring over seventeen year old gossip in an uncharged incident is the most outrageous violation of my client’s rights!”

“Your objection has been noted, Mr. Axelrod. I have ruled on the matter. You’ll be able to cross examine the witness about it,” said the judge mildly. “Do you have corroboration, Ms. Fryssen?”
“Your Honor, both the State and the defense have issued subpoenas for Mrs. Renée White to testify. She hasn’t responded to our subpoenas, but perhaps the defense will have better luck,” said Buford smarmily.

“If I can’t cross-examine the person who made the statements, I request this entire line of questioning be stricken,” snapped Craig.

Oz whispered to Mina. From the way his head was shaking back and forth I think he was probably saying his ex-wife would never willingly return.

“Would she be for us or against us?” I whispered to Trevor. The fact that Oz had no communication with his ex-wife for seventeen years suggested bad feeling.

Trevor gave me the wild eyebrow. “Of course she’d say anything to help, but she isn’t coming. We don’t need her.”

How could he possibly know what she would say? Did they have communication I didn’t know about? I didn’t like to think there were things about Trevor that I didn’t know.

Fryssen returned to her gossip. “Did Mrs. White give a reason for her husband’s sudden decision to leave?”

“She said he was suing the college on behalf of Mary Elizabeth’s estate, so it would hardly be comfortable to stick around. He was guardian of the minor children and she wanted them educated in the States, but she didn’t leave much of an estate so that was the only way he could think to swing it financially.”

“Were you surprised by that?”

“I was. She always seemed so well off…I thought her husband left her lots of money.”

“Objection, your Honor, no foundation. This is not the proper way to introduce financial information! If they have documents, let’s see them.”

“I offer it not for the truth of the matter but to explicate the witness’ state of mind,” said Fryssen.
Even Verna looked startled by this suggestion that she had a mind.

“Then I think you’ve gone far enough with that line of questioning,” said the judge.

But Fryssen was a dog with a bone. “So what happened subsequently?”

“Mr. White took the children back to the States. Mrs. White stayed on, and later I heard they were got a divorce.”

“Thank you. Your witness.”

Craig rose, flapping his tie. I knew this was something he did when he was upset. He paced in front of the witness who watched him with tired eyes.

“Ms. Verna, this accident scene that you saw, this shocking scene. You were suspicious, I think you said. You found it upsetting?”

The witness relaxed her guard. “Very much so.”

“Accident scenes can certainly be upsetting, can’t they? Did you report your suspicions to the authorities?”

The witness’ jaw hung down. “The police were there.”

“I mean afterwards. Did you report it to the American police? The embassy? Consulate? Anybody?”

“Well, no,” said Verna fecklessly. “They called it an accident.”

“Yes. It was, wasn’t it? Did you contact Mrs. Barringer’s family?”

“Well, no.”

“You must have gossiped about it. To somebody.”
“I don’t gossip,” said the witness stiffly.

“That accident happened fifteen years ago, didn’t it? Fifteen years went by and you were so troubled by the suspicious death of your friend that you did exactly nothing about it, is that right?”
“Well, there was nothing to do,” said the witness.

“Until now, isn’t that right? When the state asked you to take a plane and a hotel room and to smile for the cameras?”

The judge spoke over Buford’s objection. “Point made, counselor,” he said. “Move along.”

Craig put his hand on the wooden surround of the witness box. The witness leaned back as far as she could, blinking like a deer in the headlights. As if they were two buddies having coffee down at Starbucks he asked her,
“Ms. Verna, did you like Mr. White?”

The witness glanced at Oz briefly, as if seeking a clue. “I liked him… at first.”
Craig stopped directly in front of her. “Why?”

The witness jumped as if jabbed with electrodes.
“Why what?”

“Why did you like him at first?”

“He was very ingratiating. He made an effort to be charming.”

“And there wasn’t a lot of that in your life?” Craig inquired with crocodilian sweetness. “You and your husband also divorced within the year, isn’t that true?”

“That’s true, but it didn’t have anything to do with my knowing Mr. White, or even anything that happened at the school,” said the witness hotly.

To my surprise, although he seemed to have her on the run, Craig didn’t pursue it.
“So what did appeal to you about Mr. White?”

Verna considered, seeming to make a great effort to be fair and honest.

“I’d never met anyone like him. He knew everything. He had been everywhere. He was so entertaining and well-educated. He had all these opinions about historical and political things. He knew all kinds of inside information. He was always correcting people, but not in a mean way, just giving us the benefit of reading and experience.”

“Can you give us an example?” Craig queried mildly. The witness pulled her brows together in fierce contemplation.

“One thing that stuck in my mind all these years was his statement at one of his dinner parties that the popular idea that Aristotle’s fatal flaw was “hubris” was just a vulgar error, an incorrect translation. The fatal flaw wasn’t “pride” but too much “animal energy”. Not separating the animal from the human. Failing to take one’s place as the crown of creation. Something like that.”
The witness had relaxed, seemed animated, but I saw disturbance signals rippling between Fryssen and Buford. Probably they’d warned her about cruelty, attacks, humiliation. They hadn’t warned her about interested politeness.

“I understand he and his wife gave legendary dinner parties. You must have been a guest at these dinners?”

The witness glanced downward, as if she had written the answer on her cuff. Flushed beet-red.
“Not exactly.”

“So the remark you quoted was not addressed to you.”
The witness nodded.

“Could you say yes, please, just for the record?”
“Yes.”

“Let it be noted that the witness answered in the affirmative. How then did you overhear this comment you’ve just quoted?”

“I was helping out. Renée asked me to help out.”
“What form did this helping take?”

She gaped at him. She was certainly making it easy for him.
“You know. Serving and cleaning up and such.”

“Were you paid for this contribution?”

“I think they gave me something,” said the witness uneasily.

“And you were certainly paid to look after his sons.”
“Yes.”

“So when you realized that Mr. White thought of you more as an employee than as a friend, is that when you stopped liking him?”

“No. That wasn’t it at all,” the witness burst out. “He was so inappropriate.”

“Ah.” Craig put his arms behind his back like a magician hiding his hands. Buford and Fryssen conferred, but they evidently couldn’t come up with an objection that wouldn’t make things worse.
“Can you give the court an example?”

“He sexualized everything,” said the witness. “I’ve been reading about it and –”
Craig turned a sorrowful face to the judge.

“Your Honor, will someone please explain the boundaries of testimony to this witness?”
Buford rose threateningly. “I don’t like that tone,” he began but the judge waved him back to his seat.

“Miss Verna, please don’t introduce anything that happened after the time in question,” said the judge.

“On second thought,” said Craig, as if suddenly inspired, “Perhaps it would do the jury good to hear how this witness has been shaping her testimony through contemporary research.”
“No, it would not,” said the judge. “Move along.”

“Your Honor, I object!” said Buford.

“Are you objecting to your own witness?” questioned Craig, outrage gone. It was as if nothing could astonish him anymore. “That’s a first.”

“I’m objecting to what you just said. I object to counsel slandering my client. He’s testifying himself when he puts out ideas in open court that are not subject to cross-examination or the rules of evidence.”

“Somebody has encouraged this witness to think anything that drifts through her head is important,” retorted Craig. “You just don’t like it when it goes against you.”
“Gentlemen, approach!” roared the judge.

“I’ll leave it alone,” said Craig, showing his palms. Our side looked all-exultant, but they had all been to private school. I knew making fun of the witness might be dangerous.

“I believe we were discussing sexualization,” said Craig, bowing to the witness. “Inappropriate sexualization. If you could favor us with an example?”

The witness shifted nervously in her chair. Buford and Fryssen looked nervous too. Finally Verna said,

“He talked about sex all the time. He made sex jokes.”

Craig spat out a sudden question, “Ms. Verna, why did you leave Franciscan College?”
He had startled her. After long consideration, she said uneasily, “There was that divorce we spoke of. I wanted to come home.”

“Weren’t you asked to leave?”

“Well, they didn’t like divorce.”

“Come, that wasn’t the reason, was it? The divorce came afterwards.” “It was time for me to make some life changes,” said Ms. Verna helplessly.

“One of which was to partner romantically with a woman, wasn’t it? And you’re still together, aren’t you?”

Buford, clearly not a man who liked to get up once he had made himself comfortable, rose. “Your Honor, this is just a mud-throwing fest,” he objected.

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” barked Craig, hitching his pants angrily. “This woman has been offered to the jury as some sort of a gossip clearinghouse. Reference has been made to her “state of mind”. I think it’s only fair that the jury see she may have had ulterior motives.”
“I’m allowing it,” said the judge.

“It’s true that I have made a life commitment to a woman I met at Franciscan College,” Ms. Verna said, trying to lift her chin and keep it steady. Her voice wobbled up and down the scale.
“I think you described yourself as Ms. Barringer’s best friend,” said Craig smoothly. “Ever hope the relationship could be more than that?”

A series of micro-expressions cycled rapidly over Ms. Verna’s face. For a moment it almost looked as if she was going to agree with him.

“No,” she said finally, but I thought the jury knew different. Trevor squeezed my hand excitedly in Morse code communication I didn’t bother to interpret. I had other things to think about.

“Perhaps you were the one who sexualized everything,” suggested Craig. “Eyes of the beholder, eh?”

“No, no, no,” insisted the witness. “He came on to everybody. He was a swinger.”

“Ms. Verna, you’re on oath, I remind you. Are you saying the defendant came on to you?”
The witness hesitated pathetically. Trapped, she summoned up her dignity.
“I didn’t let it get that far,” she insisted.

“Ms. Verna, you’re the gossip expert. Wasn’t there gossip about the relationship between Ms. Barringer and Mr. White?”

“There was a lot of gossip,” said the witness unwarily, eager to change subjects. “Mary Elizabeth never would have had an illicit affair with anyone, ever. She respected Renėe White. He’s the one who wanted more. He wanted everybody. After Mary Elizabeth’s husband died he just injected himself into her affairs. Started acting like they had an arrangement.”

“He was acknowledged to be a clever investor, was he not? Didn’t Mary Elizabeth invite him to manage her affairs?”

The witness backpedaled, waffling.

“She was bereft. Alone. She needed somebody.”

“Ms. Verna, when somebody becomes an executor, a guardian, a financial manager, there are legal papers involved. Didn’t Ms. Barringer consult an attorney?”

“All I know is she thought Oz was getting pushy,” Verna said mutinously. “She told me she didn’t like it.”

Craig pressed his advantage. “Sounds like you jealous of their relationship.”
“Certainly not,” said Verna in a high, thin voice. I felt sorry for her. She sounded jealous to everybody.

Craig paused to let this interchange sink in. In the silence the witness seemed to get even more flustered, as if that were possible, tossing her hair and rocking her bony behind in her seat. I felt sorry for her.

Finally Craig smiled. He was her buddy again, friendly Mr. Crocodile. He checked his notes as if he had any need for them and asked her,
“I believe you described yourself as a spiritual healer?”

You could see the flutter of panic ripple across the prosecution table.

Fryssen and Buford poked each other back and forth like children initiating a dare. He lost.
“Your honor, I fail to see the point of this.”

“Is that an objection, Mr. Buford?” asked the judge. “On what ground?”

“Relevance?” Buford waved a hand in the air as if picking a cherry off an invisible tree.

“I would like to show a general framework of bias on the part of this witness,” said Craig smoothly. “She has a philosophical commitment to destroying my client that I would like to expose.”
“I’ve been a spiritual healer since 1998,” said the witness in a loud, firm voice, as if she just discovering solid ground.

“Why don’t you wait for a question,” suggested Craig.

“Your honor, what she was waiting for was a ruling,” said Buford. “Don’t let him badger this witness, your honor. She came a long distance to render this state a service.”

“Bet she gives readings on the steps of the courthouse,” snickered Trevor sotto voce.

“We’ve established you’ve been a “spiritual healer” since 1998,” said Craig. You could hear the quotation marks. “Is that regulated by any licensure?”

“I’m a member of the American Association of Spiritual Practitioners,” said the witness.

“That doesn’t sound like a license to me,” said Craig. “I take it you’re unregulated. You charge money for your services?”

“On a sliding scale. Sometimes I don’t charge at all.”

“And what is it you actually do when you heal, spiritually?”

“Objection!”

“Your time is up, Mr. Axelrod,” said the judge. “I’m pulling the plug on this.”
“Just one more question, your honor. I think you’ll agree with me that it’s relevant. Did you ever “heal” Mary Elizabeth Barringer?”

The judge was seduced, in spite of himself. We all wanted to know the answer to this question. The judge waved a hand and his amanuensis typed something on her machine.
“Sometimes I was successful at helping her sleep.”

“So she invited you over in the evening?” Craig pounced.

“I dropped by a couple of times. I felt…I felt she might need me.”

“Anything sexual take place on these evenings?”

The witness turned bright red. “Absolutely not. I massaged her temples until she could sleep. Then I tiptoed away.”

Funny hearing that my mom, too, was plagued by insomnia. Those devilish genes.
“How many times would you say this occurred?”

The witness shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “Twice? Three times?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Craig. “I wasn’t there.”

The audience tittered. The witness rallied.

“It wasn’t often, at any rate.”

“How about Mr. White? Ever extend any healing to him?”

The witness covered her face with her hands and began to sob.

“We’ll take that as an answer,” said Craig. “The witness is dismissed.”

Jake clapped Craig enthusiastically on the back as the defense attorney sat down. Too publicly, alas. This crew would never learn.

“Re-direct!” shouted Buford, quivering. “We aren’t in the business of leaving the jury with misimpressions. Apparently the defense is.”

“That’s uncalled for,” said the judge as Craig rose.

“Then I apologize,” said the prosecutor stiffly without looking at Craig. He walked up to Verna.
“Why are you crying, Ms. Verna?”

“This is all just so upsetting,” she gasped. “I guess I’m too sensitive.”

“What is your answer to the defense attorney’s question? Did you offer healing to the defendant?”
“He made fun of what I did,” gasped the witness. “He referred to it as “dowsing”. There wasn’t any point offering because—healing is never successful with a person like that.”
A ripple of amusement shook Oz’s shoulders.

“Thank you! Now the witness is dismissed!”

Chapter Eight — Malevolence

Monday arrived, as Mondays will. I lay late in our new bed, allowing Trevor to bring me my coffee, luxuriating like a Jane Austen heroine conserving strength before The Big Dance. The greatest luxury was watching Trevor ‘armor-up’; sliding on his boxers, locking his French cuffs into place, buttoning the vest of a (thankfully) clean suit and positioning his Phi Beta Kappa key to maximum effect. What thoughtful being could grudge Oz a romance with the young male body? There is nothing in the world so beautiful. Women are fruit on the edge of spoiling; men are sculpture. Is there anything as glorious, as evocative, as the male clavicle? It’s a boat, a cave, a tunnel, a whirlpool. Trevor’s is taut like a bow anchoring his shoulders.

“See you downstairs,” said Trevor, peering into the mirror, not really seeing himself but pressing down his cowlick, which sprang back instantly. I pulled the covers over my head. Damn. I had to “armor-up” too; this was the battle even women have to fight. It couldn’t be so bad today; I had Trevor. This time I really had him. I had him before and I fully intended to have him again. I get why couples long to have a child (though it’s a longing I don’t share); that human yearning for incarnation. They need to see a physical embodiment of their attraction. Every coupling, every recombination of DNA is a new person, with fresh powers. And when it’s your foster brother you’re coupling with it’s your very childhood you’re rewriting. We were the children our own selves created.

I for one would never be my old self again, and I was glad of it. The thing I most like about being young is that you can wear a different face every day, and yet it can really be your face. Teenagers are always Walt Whitman. We contain multitudes.

I dragged myself to Colleen’s closet to study the possibilities. What mask to wear today?
I ran into Craig clutching his forehead and wearing an embarrassingly small “happy coat” across his embarrassingly hairy person. Probably the correct translation from the Japanese would be “gag coat;” both meanings of the word intended, I am sure, by the Japanese flight attendant who passed it along to him. I diagnosed a hangover, or possibly a particularly savage case of jet lag; to him I was just one of the many ghosts haunting that part of the mansion. I doubt he even recognized me.

The ghost was gone from Colleen’s closet; Trevor successfully exorcised it. Goodbye Colleen, wallowing in the light. Leave life to the living. They were just dresses and did not speak. I quelled my thirst for color; Trevor was so generous sexually, here was a tiny gift to give him compared to those he heaped on me. Colleen had so many “little black dresses”; I guess that’s female armor; so from the possibilities I built our child; combination of the pair of us. He was the little black dress; I was the cropped red jacket. Colleen said mourning has phases. In my opinion, when your whole family is on trial for murder, you’re in the fire phase.

There was frenzied cooking going on downstairs. Mina, steamy hair sticking to both sides of her face, was making individual omelets to order.

“We’re going to need more eggs,” she said.

See? Why go shopping in the first place if you know you’re only going to have to go shopping again? Why contribute to what is obviously a vicious cycle?

I found Trevor seated at the eighteenth-century secretary in the foyer, raving about the price of oil.
“We have heat?” I teased. “Really? Can’t tell in the servants’ quarters.” Skylar’s fireplace had come in particularly handy last night. I leaned down, hissing in his ear, “Time to burn the place down and collect the insurance?”

He knocked over his chair rearing up; face red, cords standing out in his neck, eyes blazing the coldest blue. Spitting.

“You of all people should appreciate what it is I’m trying to do around here! As if I would split another dime with Skylar!”

“Jeez,” I said, “Excuse you. I was only joking.”

Was it a clause in the mysterious honeymoon contract that I could no longer rib Trevor? Arson isn’t worse than murder. He wasn’t this worked up about Colleen’s death. The more I thought about my idea the better the idea sounded, a sort of Roman justice. They get revenge; we get hotels with room service! “We’re not admitting anything, but would it make you feel better if we burned down our house?” Let the jurors tour a smoking ruin. I could play tour guide. “This is the very place Trevor pulled my panties down.”

“Spoils claim the victor,” I snapped and Trevor said,
“Don’t you go all Beautiful and Damned on me.”

I was sure my quote came from a different novel but at that moment Spike appeared to tell me my omelet was ready.

“Better leave him alone,” he warned, whispering. “You’ll get more out of him later. You can heat him up, but you can’t cool him down.”

I was so angry I was almost speechless. Because Trevor was sitting at the check-writing desk Spike assumed I wanted something, when all I wanted was to play with the tendrils lying unguarded along Trevor’s beautiful neck.

“Paugh,” I said. Pronouncing it correctly.

Even Mina was in a bad mood – Jake said her omelets were too “set.” The only thing he likes hard is his own self. See? Doesn’t take much to rev up the whole gift-giving resent-a-thon.
In the limo I consulted my notebook. I was considering a poem cycle to be called: “What To Do If You Wake Up In a Dostoevsky Novel.” The first poem would be: Expect Brain Fever. Maybe I could ignore the court proceedings entirely and just sit there scribbling. I had to be there but I didn’t have to pay attention.

My prose seemed stilted, flat and precious. Girly. Katharine Mansfield says that when you find yourself in the boat of death, pulling inexorably away from the shore you must uncover your eyes and look. This case was the only thing I could write about.

Trevor slid in beside me, bony hip against mine, arm around me, holding my hand. Just as if he’d never yelled at me. If I closed my eyes I could imagine dissolving into him, the way a baby kangaroo becomes its mother. He gave me the reassuring smile, the shoulder clasp. No oil, no anger, no arson. Spike was wrong. With me, he could always cool down. Courage bubbled up within me. The two of us could take the rest of them on, no matter how many of them there might be.

The monsters were proliferating, springing up the steps of the courthouse like dragon’s teeth. Craig said there was a special entrance the prosecution could have let us use, but they made a choice to let the press assault us, hoping we would back away from Oz’s side and leave him twisting in the wind alone. They underestimated us. Thank God for Spike and downfield blocking.

There were people from France, from Africa, from the BBC. It must be a slow news day indeed when people care so much about some Virginia woman falling into her swimming pool. Then Skylar appeared out of nowhere and grasped my arm. Spike didn’t protect me from her. In all the years we lived together we had never been so close. We could have been having sex. She pushed her face right into mine.

I saw a nonsensical glitter of face powder drifting across her pores. She looked worse, if that was possible, bony, but with her skin puffed up, doughy and swollen, maybe the antidepressants had finally kicked in. She pressed my hand; we were passing notes in school. I looked down; but it was my own note, coming back, a bad penny. To her it was worse than contaminated, a curse you could only get rid of by passing it on.

“Take everything,” she hissed at me. “The clothes. My mother would have wanted you to have them. You look good in them.” Tears scored her cheeks; her fingers encircled my wrist like handcuffs. I felt rather than saw Trevor approaching in rescue, but the demon inside her gasped in my face, “He killed your mother, too.” And then she was gone.

“What did she say?” asked Trevor, sheltering me, gazing after her retreating back, scurrying back to the bride’s aisle. I felt a flush of sorrow over the reality of a honeymoon contract, that even although Trevor and I were closer than we had ever been, there were things I could have told him before that I could no longer say. Now we were hostage to each other’s pain and progress and the oath of protection our bodies took foreswore total honesty.

“She said I could have her mother’s clothes.”

I looked down at myself as if surprised to find myself dressed like a Junior Leaguer. This was my dress now. I had wanted to wear the dress because it was Colleen’s. I didn’t want to wear it if it belonged to me.

“Was she nasty about it?” Trevor gazed after her angrily, his jaw locked. The hatred in his face was unmistakable. It’s too late, I thought. We’ve been corrupted by “sides”. We left school and joined different teams, and I can’t cross over and join Skylar just because she looks lonely.

Oz was already in his place, the only figure seated at the defense table as the lawyers milled about. To me, suddenly, he looked little and sad. Was he shrinking or was I growing? Oz too, I suddenly realized, had taken the oath of protection when love took him hostage; he’d had to drink the Kool-Aid. Was he just pretending to be brave because we were there? He must be able to feel how much they wanted to convict him.

I felt so guilty. Caught up in our honeymoon we never did visit. I know Trevor called him but Trevor’s not the same as me. To him it must have seemed a long weekend, that same weekend I had hoped would last forever. I put a hand on his shoulder to reassure him and he grasped it gratefully; Trevor leaned across the wooden bench to whisper in his ear. I wished I’d asked him not to tell about us but it was probably too late now.

I don’t know what he said. Men’s much vaunted “honesty” can be just a need to brag. Oz used to say we would hook up one day; why deny him the pleasure of being proved right? I saw Oz expand and glow under his son’s words. The curse of the freckled; I blushed as my foster-father winked at me.

The judge came in and we dutifully rose. He didn’t care what we were really feeling just so long as we demonstrated obeisance. He wasted no time but handed down his ruling in his plummy voice; photos of the Barringer autopsy were too inflammatory and would not be admitted. The prosecution could use drawings. Craig tried to object again but the judge cut him off sharply with a “Let’s get this show on the road” demeanor. He too, apparently, had had a bad weekend. Golf rained out? Country club crowded? Prime rib less than prime? I knew he’d had the gall to pity me and I hated him.

Craig didn’t look happy but clueless Mina gave us the “thumbs up” sign, just as if no artist could create anything as ghastly as a photograph. I imagined the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch introduced as exhibits, passed around and laser-pointed, I guess she wanted me and Shelley to feel excited and victorious about seeing some dauber’s “take” on our dead mother. Now I held Trevor’s hand, and he was holding mine. I was the one responsible for the blue shadows around his eyes. They were happy blue shadows, and I felt better. We were now the keepers of each other’s sleep; that exhausted sleep that comes from every muscle locked in synergy with its opposite.

This court was convened to expose secrets; I exulted over everything they didn’t know. I was an initiate into the ultimate grown-up secret; the power of naked versus clothed. I was the only one to precisely count the hairs that marched like soldiers from Trevor’s bellybutton to his pubis. Even if tortured, I would never share. Someday I would transform these truths to a greater truth, but now I was invulnerable. I felt I could bear anything, now.

Trevor smiled and squeezed my hand; he knew what I was thinking. Spike slid in beside me and we all moved down, like the kids in the lullaby. Trevor and I melted, blissfully, into each other.
The jury trooped in, gazing at us with hushed glee as if touring the set of a reality show. No prime rib for them. They looked as if they might have been interrupted while dining on the local specialty; stuffed raccoon. (The joke is it’s stuffed with your neighbor’s garbage.)

Fawna Fryssen, wearing a skintight royal blue short-skirted suit that looked catalog-fresh, (probably in every color), stood up and claimed the center of the floor.
“The state calls Vinca Verna,” she said.

I saw Jake dig his elbow into Trevor’s other side, “She’s got a rockin’ hot bod,” he said, meaning the assistant prosecutor, not the witness. Also the triangular nostrils that scream “nose job”, I wanted to say. But Jake doesn’t care about “modifications”. To him it’s just “customizing”.

No modifications for me. It’s a subtle battle of the wills; who’s on approval and who’s “the approver.” If they can get you to admit that you weren’t “quite right” to start with, they’ve got you forever. You never will be “right”; there’s always one more thing in need of fixing. I know I’m a mess; it’s adorable that Trevor doesn’t notice. Call it the “palimpsest” effect; he not only sees every me I used to be but all the future possibilities. Trevor thinks I’m perfect. I guess love is as rare as they say.

Vinca Verna was a tall whipping-post of a woman with a sad sack expression that she probably considered appropriate courtroom demeanor. She spelled her name and took the oath, touching the Bible in a distant manner like someone allergic to books.

“Where do you currently reside and what is your employment?”
“I reside in Taos, New Mexico, and I am a spiritual healer,” she said.

There was a moment’s pause while Fryssen was stayed in her flight. Either this was news to her or she had never heard it put exactly that way. Like a cat spotting a flutter, Craig stiffened and leaned forward. Something good for our side.

I’ve overheard Craig comparing litigation to a “cockroach race”. Only God knows what your cockroach is going to do. If you rehearse them too much they sound stilted, but if you let them be spontaneous they risk opening up a line of questioning the other side can drive tractor-trailers through. In other words, you can lead a cockroach to water, but you can’t make it think.

Chapter Seven — Marriage

When I woke in the morning, we were stretched out side by side in my narrow bed, holding hands, the marble knight and his lady atop the tomb. Shouldering each other aside the better to spring into the afterlife. In the morning light I could give his beautiful body the attention it deserved, tracing with my fingers the snail tracks of my own slime. So sharp, so hairless, so spare; all bone, like the curve of a boat. So glad he was still beside me, proving it hadn’t been wishful dreaming. I know it’s traditional for the male to skulk away unless awakening on his own terrain: then it’s her turn. It’s a skulking race; last cadet through the door gets punished. Glad we didn’t have to play that game.

I needed to see just how he’d act to adjust my own grip on reality. Trevor usually has a firm attachment to the stuff. Had we become surgically sealed conjoined twins, pasted romantically together; or could I unstick myself and make it to the bathroom? I found it easier to wake him up.
“Go to the bathroom for me,” I moaned.

“Are you awake?” His hand tightened on my thigh as if to prevent escape, but he spoke guiltily; a sentry accused of leaving his post. Sleep was a crime. He sat up so fast he tore a hole out of my side.

I had other questions. “What time is it?”
“Seven. But there’s no court today.”

He fell back, remembering. Our hips barely fit on the narrow bed; easier if I twist sideways; pulling myself out of the frame. His eyes searched out the absent pack of Camels. I raged inwardly at the notorious distancing technique.

“You regret it,” I accused. It was my fault; I hate having no escape hatch. Never enter a room that hasn’t at least two doors. Says Oz.

But Trevor gifted me with the rarest Trevor smile, years falling away to the unselfconscious glee of childhood. What a different face he had then! Nobody meeting him now would recognize him. He maneuvered an arm behind my shoulders and drew me to him.

“Au contraire,” he asserted. “I’ll never be sorry again.”

Glad, glad, glad. Guilt is sick-making, a most unpleasant feeling. I’ve gotten this far pretty much guilt-free; relief to return to the edenic state. Trevor tells me what I should worry about. I mean, it’s not like we’re related or anything.

“Don’t squeeze,” I said. “I have to pee.”

He ripped off the sheet so fast my breath went with it; he tossed it to the farthest corner. Suddenly the room was just a bed full of naked people.

I clambered awkwardly over, as he doubtless wanted, sensible of his perusal.
“Don’t ever wax your beautiful pink fur,” he chastised.
“What? Not even in bikini season?”

Crazy talk. I’m not going to the beach looking like a radioactive gorilla for him or any man.
“It’s such an astonishing color,” he said. “No painter could do it justice. It’s like a sunset.” He corrected himself. “Maybe Raphael.”

He followed me into the bathroom. I tried to close the door on him.

“Amscray.” I share this antiqued white emporium and its massive Victorian fixtures with Shelley. She could show up any time.

“Oh, relax,” he said, striding to the mirror, “I won’t peek.” Sniffing, commented, “I smell like a girl,” and grabbed my washcloth.

There’s a fair amount of “clothes-optional” casualness at our end of the house – Oz calls it “the nude beach” but we don’t usually pee in front of each other. But you know what men are like. Whip it out at any opportunity.

Handy thing to take to a picnic, as the old lady said. Fortunately Trevor made so much noise splashing water over his head and shoulders that I was able to go.

“This is a horrible bathroom,” he said, flicking me away from the toilet with his wet towel. “Hasn’t been updated since the nineties. And I don’t mean the nineteen-nineties.”

He was at least well behaved enough to lift the toilet seat up and to put it back down again.
“I thought you only liked houses where everything is original,” I challenged.

Oz rhapsodized routinely about the majesty of Vermillion; it hadn’t been ruined (the last owners were too poor.) He liked showing off the spur marks of British soldiers on the wide wooden floor boards; the diamond scratchings on the mullioned kitchen windows, the fact that the logs holding up the whole thing up in the basement still wore bark. Think of it! Three hundred year-old bark full of three-hundred year old worms.

“One is deserving of a decent style of comfort,” said Trevor. “Without submitting to brick-face and shag.”

He means kitchens and bathrooms with all the latest gizmos. Skylar’s bathroom had been redone at least twice in memory, Jake’s and Trevor’s once. Skylar needed a Jacuzzi because she played hockey and Jake and Trevor needed one because men don’t know how to clean themselves. And Jake is at constant risk of sex injuries. I almost gave him some.

“I like old things,” I said. I have a magnificent Victorian claw footed tub with its own copper boiler.
“What’s that, guvnor?” said Trevor. “Can’t hear you through your tongue stud.”

There’s the old Trevor. Miming the swollen-lipped, twisted-tongue diction of the deaf mute and pretending that it’s me. Throwing in a cockney accent for no reason at all. When in fact it’s a point of pride with me that no one can tell about my piercing. Not by ear.

When he returned to the bedroom I was trying to squirm my way into a t-shirt. He put a hand out to stop me.

“What are you doing? Don’t.”

“I thought I’d get us some breakfast,” I said. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“Yes,” he told me, “But not for food.”

Before breakfast would come again, so would I, and many times. He was kissing my neck now; erecting all the tiny hairs and making them sway to his baton like an orchestra conductor.
Afterwards we subsided blissfully against our sticky sheets, stickier even than the hottest Virginia summer when koi boiled in the pond. He lay between my legs, stroking my glistening pudenda.
“I don’t think you should ever get dressed again,” he said.

Uh oh. Don’t like the sound of that.

“You’re right,” I teased. “If I show up naked in court, of course they’ll Oz go. Why didn’t we think of this before?”

He sighed as he rolled over. “You’re such a buzz-kill.”

“Well, I hate it when you act like I’m your prisoner.”

“Who ever acts like that? I’m your prisoner.”

“No, sir!” I saluted him. “I insist on surrendering to you, sir!”

He jostled me, laughing. “I haven’t left my senses, if that’s what’s worrying you. I’m trying to leave something on the plate for the other guests. I know you’ll get married someday.”

I pulled back haughtily. “Poets don’t get married.”

“They do. Again and again. And when you do…I’ll give you away.”
All this sex was making me giddy. I mock-gasped, “You’ll tell?”

No shaking his seriousness.

“I mean I’ll be there for you. I want you to know, I’ll never stand in your way. This is about what you want. What you need. I’m not going to let this…” sifting pink fur through his fingers…” ruin your life.”

Sex ruins people’s lives? Lament of the deflowered. No more flower. All gone.
“I knew it,” I said. “I knew you wouldn’t respect me in the morning.”

He seemed not to recognize my teasing.

“Not true.” He flew up against me, chest to chest, a man in the bed where only boys had been. “You can’t help but worry this will change our relationship and I’m trying to tell you, nothing ever can. You’re not just safe with me, you’re invulnerable. Nothing can touch you. Solemn promise.”
Strange Jesuitical rationales. Everything had changed forever and only a dummy wouldn’t see it.
“I trust you utterly,” I harrumphed. “When do we eat?”

“In a minute. I need you to write to Sunstroke U.”

A little creepy, don’t you think? He’s so determined! Brings out the bull headedness in me.
“I don’t have a computer,” I balked. “The police took them all.”

Oz said Lenny Bruce died from an overdose of police. I could see what he meant. I’m surprised Homeland Security didn’t get involved. They took Oz’s Koran, a personal present from His Majesty Moulay Hassan Deux, King of Morocco, plus the priceless eighteenth century de Sade annotated by the Scary General himself. If we ever get it back it’ll be covered in day-glo fingerprint powder and human yum-yum juice. Oz says that to the cops sex itself is a crime scene.

“You’ll be needing a laptop anyway,” Trevor told me, “And probably a car. You and Shelley can use it while you’re here, and then when you go to college, you can take it with you.”

I was impressed. He wouldn’t give Fayette a friendship bracelet and I was getting a laptop and a car after one night’s tumble! Of course as head of the family he’s supposed to take care of me, but it did feel kind of uncomfortable getting all these things after sex. Although honestly, the perfume I got before. Did it make a difference that I hadn’t asked for them?

“What if Oz isn’t acquitted?”

I whispered this forbidden worst-case scenario. Because then we wouldn’t get Colleen’s estate.
“I swear to you he will be,” Trevor said confidently. “He’s innocent.”

Glorious having the kitchen to ourselves for a long, leisurely breakfast. We made eggs, bacon and toast; Trevor fried tomatoes; a heart-stopping feast. Unlike Trevor, I leave nothing on my plate for the next person. Fuck ‘em, I say. Besides, I usually am the next person, and as I think I said before, I am uncommonly hungry.

“Oh I’m going to be a fat little poetess,” I hummed, blissing out. “Completely spherical.”

“Greed is a great quality in sex,” said Trevor. “Don’t lose it. Now that I’ve finally experienced someone who has it besides me, I have to say it seems essential.”

Another peek into a different Trevor.

“So…. how long have you thought about doing… what we did?”

He shrugged. “Forever. I used to pretend Fayette was you.”

“Really,” I was amazed. I felt almost sorry for that bitch Fayette. I wonder if he told her he keeps that Arthur Rackham print beside his bed because the redheaded sprite looks just like me.

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

He closed his eyes, the better to reminisce.

“There was one day in the swimming pool that I especially remember. The first time you wore a thong. You were thirteen. I was nineteen.”

I remembered too.

“The pink bikini,” I said. “I never did get up the nerve to wear it away from home.”

Never did. Buttocks are just too problematic, and in looking over my shoulder into the mirror, I thought I spied some extra pairs. I recall noticing Trevor noticing me, and it gave me confidence, especially coming from his hard athleticism. I recall his chest hypnotically shiny with the water streaming down it. We were both in slow motion, then. He seemed like a grown up man, diving and diving. It occurred to me now that he was showing off. Showing off for me.

“You didn’t do anything about it.”

“Who says?” He sighed. “I ravished some poor unsuspecting girl.”

And I knew who she was! Betsy Urquhart. In the pool house, while I listened. I had been jealous of her too, because she had real breasts with little pointy ends to snare Trevor’s full attention. What if I drowned without him there? His hands were all over her; she glistened like a mermaid.

“Not that she was any competition for you,” Trevor finished.

“Do you think she knew?”

“Probably could tell something was off. But it always is at that age. Take it from me, the teens is a desert to crawl through. Emerge alive on the other side and it’s a miracle.”

“Thanks for telling me,” I said. “I have two years to go.”

“I was thinking about men,” he said, then, because of Jake, “Sentient men. God only knows what girls go through.”

I wasn’t willing to let him off this delicious hook.
“I don’t believe you really felt that way about me.”

But he was thoughtful. Remembering.

“They could always tell I was pining for somebody,” he recalled thoughtfully. “Alexa used to tease me about “the one that got away.” Fayette called me “The Man Who Wasn’t There.”

Alexa…what was her last name? She was an import he met at a Washington youth leadership conference and took to the Napier senior prom. Colleen gave her Skylar’s room to dress in; I discovered the erotic thrill of voyeurism as I spied her preparations. Men should realize that when women anoint their bodies they’re imagining other hands, so dressing is an act of masturbation.

Alexa too was my exact opposite …tall, calm, soignée. Watching I became frecklier, stubbier and snottier. What sane person would trade that goddess for a dappled, scruffy little tagalong?
But even if Trevor was rewriting his own past, maybe we have to, since life is only understood backward.

After breakfast it was up to the Children’s Attic to drag down the Christmas decorations. It’s called the Children’s Attic because it can only be reached by the sort of miniature door usually encountered in fairy tales. I guess in the old days servants were a race of miniature people, probably growing more and more stunted through abuse and starvation until extincted, like pygmies. Poor Colleen complained about their absence. She ended did most of the work herself.
Vermillion is a cool old house, no question. Living in the midst of all that history is wonderful and we’re all very fortunate, yada, yada, yada. But when Trevor got the termite bill I thought he was having a coronary. At twenty-five! Let’s face it, at least a third of the rooms are unlivable at any given time, and when it finally dawns on you how expensive historically-certified non-leading plasterers, beveled glass restorers and boutique carpenters are, drywall and vinyl siding start to sound pretty good.

When I was growing up, the thing I liked most about living here was that it never mattered what the weather was like. Plenty of places to play out of sight of the grownups. Those dynamics of interior play – (The French Resistance versus the Columbian Guerillas; the Stupids versus the Smarts) — stand us in good stead now when we can’t step out of doors without seeing statues sporting telephoto lenses. Not the effect Colleen was going for.

It also meant that if you ever needed to be really alone, it was easy enough to arrange, although I must say Trevor showed a psychic ability to locate me when he needed to. Big Brother Global Positioning. Still, he would retreat when I yelled, and he never gave my hiding place away.
I’m ready to move on. It’s not like it’s some ancestral estate. We’ve only lived here fourteen years. There are other cool places in the world – such as the rafters of Paris or the dockside of San Francisco. I don’t mention these heresies to Oz, or even Trevor. They both act like a pair of vampires forced to seek the magic dirt every evening. Masculine blindness is akin to gambling; when the stakes keep doubling, they only want it more.

We sent the decorations down in the dumbwaiter that used to be my favorite hiding place (I was the only one who could fit inside) and suggested trying Oz’s recipe for Tom and Jerries but Shelley said we’d get salmonella. Neither of the Stupids were any fun. Jake said an international murder trial is an ideal opportunity to throw out all the crappy homemade ornaments from our childhood and buy less shame-making things. I think the whole point of Christmas tree decorating is laughing at the old stuff. (I decorated a carrot with glitter!) I whispered to Trevor that we should have Christmas alone next year but he said that isn’t Christmas.

Trevor defended the gaudy, glitter-soaked paper chains I made when I was five and what he says, goes. Arguing, too, is traditional at Christmas time, especially with two Memory Keepers together in the same room. Maybe trying to recapture the past is always a bad idea.

Dealing with Trevor’s groceries was another level of scary. First, he totally forgot cat food, but perhaps it doesn’t matter, since either they have gone completely feral or the neighbors are feeding them. Oz kept them from the vet, fearing if they got fixed what would they have to live for? Probably they prefer it outside; we can hear them in the bushes, the sounds of breeding and fighting are virtually indistinguishable. Shelley says maybe they attack trespassers. It’s a charming thought.

What he had bought were huge bags of rice and beans and potatoes and onions like we were getting ready for the siege of Stalingrad. Food in its raw state needs so much preparation. Who has that kind of time any more, especially when you have to rest up for more sex?

When it was time for dinner, of course no one wanted to cook. That’s the thing he didn’t buy. Colleen’s recipe book is in some kind of shorthand – I doubt even Skylar could make sense of it. I pulled out Mrs. Beeton because at least she’s always good for laughs – (my favorite recipe says “Take a trout from the tank and stun it with a bat” — now that’s freshness)– but I didn’t want to cook either. Plus no trout to hand, not in the milk, not anyplace. It’s a whole lot easier to just collapse in front of a movie with a nuked pile of chicken, but I couldn’t talk Trevor out of a full-blown dining room meal with six kinds of forks. At least we made our own barbecue sauce out of lime salsa, pineapple marmalade and ketchup and it turned out to be pretty good, with the worthy assist of a Riesling Sylvaner from Oz’s cellar. Wine upgrades any event. Trevor brought up extra bottles to put in the fridge, including a bottle of Tattinger, though it’s plenty cold down there. But there are spiders. I didn’t ask him what the champagne was for. I thought I knew.

I soaked the labels so I could enter them in Colleen’s wine book. That’s a tradition I’m happy can get behind. All the great celebrations are in that book, menus, seating plans, thank you notes. Sometimes she added photos and other mementoes if she had the time.

Dessert was cherry vanilla ice cream; no Moolage bars for Brontë, alas. Away at college, he hadn’t noticed my taste upgrade to diet cappuccino. Oz says we always want what we can’t have. Or maybe he said we only want what we can’t have. Anyway it seemed heartless to complain when Trevor tried so hard.

All and all, a superior weekend. Considering. At any rate I’m spoiled for honeymoons. One is all you ever really need. Maybe one is all you can stand. The only rule we used was that the Desires of the Other are sacred. Mostly I want to experience everything and he wants to do everything to me so I’d say we’re well-matched. The worst moment came when he tried to talk me into moving into Skylar’s room, because not only is Skylar’s bed bigger but she has her own fireplace. And a private bathroom. No Jake, no Shelley.

I hated agreeing to a situation where returning to my own room would seem like an act of secession, but I knew if I fought, I’d lose. Serves me right for making such a big fuss about letting go of the past during dining room versus coffee table debate. (I lost that one too.)

My feeble revolt was why not his room; he ruled that flatly out. And why, do you think? Not because of Jake in the bathroom, but because it was the room he and Fayette shared. “Ruined by post-coital tristesse.”

A new word on me (Trevor is full of them) but when I asked for a definition, he said, “Buyer’s remorse.” Kind of funny considering he bought Fayette “consumables” only; never any valuables. Subtly reminding her she’s a consumable, I daresay.

So, out of arguments as usual (force majeure) I grudgingly schlepped my stuff over to Skylar’s. It was kind of a painful admission that childhood was over. She would not be coming home. But because of all her mother’s decorating Skylar’s stripped-down boudoir had a hotel-like quality that made making it ours so much easier. No tristesse in sight. So far, anyway.

On Sunday morning, after a breakfast of Trevor’s only specialty, egg foo yung (which seems to be an omelet with salad in it) Trevor forced all of us to go to church. Trevor loves church.
When Jake wailed, “I just hate all that fucking dogma,” Trevor said, “It all comes down to love, bro. Read the gospels. You’ll see what it’s all about.”

“Well, I’m down with that part of it,” said Jake.

“I hate the way those hypocrites stare at us,” Shelley protested, but she was already dressing. She knew when she couldn’t win.

“We’ve got to go, to help Oz,” said Trevor, and I understood what he meant, in spite of the fact that to Oz religion is at best an adorable antique folkway, and at worst, a bizarrely murderous superstition. He was prone to shouting out, “The king must die!” when he was supposed to say, “Hallelujah.”

I don’t like church either. I think it’s a conspiracy to ruin spirituality the way marriage is a conspiracy to ruin sex. Colleen said, “Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.”

The people in the sin hospital didn’t appear to know that they were sinners. They stared at us so much it was like that scene in Village of the Damned where your mind is a brick wall crumbling brick by brick. I survived by thinking possessively and pleasurably about Trevor’s body beneath his clothes. My body, now. The first male body ever to belong to me. After church old Mrs. Urquhart came over and said comforting things about how Oz couldn’t possibly have done it and how everyone envied his relationship with Colleen. The whole time she was talking I was thinking of the things Oz said about her, that she was a “carpetbagger” and that all her taste was in her mouth. She didn’t know about that. It’s a benefit of having your foster-father on trial for murder that people stop asking you to smile. Don’t say, “Why the long face?” They expect you to be miserable.

After church Jake wanted to go out to eat but I couldn’t bear being looked at one more minute, so we compromised by driving to Wal-Mart where you can buy the boxed macaroni and cheese Jake loves and will eat by the gross, just so long as it’s mixed with garlic and sour cream.

Trevor was the commando we sent in to do the dirty while Jake and Shelley huddled in the Lexus faces averted, so no one would think they ever shopped at Wal-Mart.

When Trevor came out, he had an extra bag he refused to show me. A present. A consumable? No. I thought it might be a cookbook since everyone had been so rude about poor Mrs. Beeton, but when we were alone and I unwrapped it, it turned out to be queen size white flannel sheets covered with hearts for Skylar’s bed. They really did look kind of sweet with the white canopy and all that mosquito netting. Our own private world.

We brought in personal items to home-ify the place, but inevitably got into yet another argument about decorating. Trevor’s tastes are rather staid; “beauty” is “symmetry” in his book. He claims he can prove this. I rushed into the argument all unprepared (which you should never do with him) insisting its just the opposite. Beauty is surprise. Shock, even. You should be all stirred up, not soothed.

Fortunately champagne is the adult’s Band-Aid; blesses the boo-boos and makes them go away. Holding teetering glasses, we collapsed exhausted into the oyster satin wing chairs on either side of Skylar’s gas fireplace. Press a button and the logs are roaring. I noticed Trevor didn’t argue for old-fashioned values here — who wants to haul logs up three flights of stairs? Even if you have a dumbwaiter (which is really too small, you’d have to cut the logs to bits) it would get messy. I gobbled the damn champagne, trying to feel I was gaining a new room, not losing an old one. It’s like going away to school, isn’t it? Changing old things is much harder than getting something new entirely. Somehow you want to believe the past exists somewhere, and it just doesn’t. Some things are gone for good — like Colleen — and it just seems so brutal. Maybe it’s time for me to cultivate an artistic detachment from possessions. It’s going to be hard when I’m so greedy and I want everything. This is why couples go away for the honeymoon. If they tried merging their pasts at the same time as their bodies there would never be anything but divorce.

Of all the Goddamned things, Trevor wanted to talk about the trial. As if it wasn’t coming soon enough.

“The worst hasn’t even happened yet,” he said glumly, as if my mother’s long-ago death couldn’t possibly be the worst. So what could it be? Would they produce those letters Oz wrote to the local paper, calling the police Nazis for interfering with our underage drinking parties?

Trevor topped off our anti-depressants. “Craig says they’re going to play the gay card. It’s so horrible I haven’t told Jake.”

I groaned. It’s a basic tenet of Oz’s philosophy that everyone’s “polyamorous”. I’ve never felt even a flicker around girls, but Oz says lacking a mother has made me too masculine. He said ultimately it’s a good thing because writers have to be “coldhearted” in order to “pare down”. But enough about me. The question before us is how to explain that Oz took the rugged camaraderie of all-male societies and up-down hierarchies just a little further than a Virginia jury might be comfortable with. No use appealing to their respect for the ancient Greeks. Oz’s taste for soldiers would not look good in open court.

“It’s irrelevant,” I moaned. “What does it have to do with anything?”

“Craig says you can rely on the state to throw all the muck they can dig up, and in seventeen years there’s plenty of muck in anyone’s life. They’re making it a motive.”

Oz likes muck — because of its fertility — and says people fear the primitive because it reminds them of being out of control. But the point is that Oz would never trade Colleen’s home-making competence for having some macho schoolboy around 24-7, nor would he want to live in a society exclusively of men. He’d hate prison.

“ Colleen knew all about it,” I protested. “It’s the opposite of motive.”
Trevor seemed surprised. “How’d you figure?”

“Well, she was tired of sex. Wasn’t she? Going through menopause? ”
“Maybe. But she was still jealous.”

“Who could be jealous of hired escorts? Oz didn’t bring even any of them home. I used to think it would be better if he did find a nice boyfriend with some domestic skills. Give Colleen a break.”
Trevor laughed out loud. I had cheered him up, anyway. He looked at me fondly as if my naiveté was just too, too adorable.

“But Brontë, he needed four hundred dollar an hour hookers for his “specialized tastes”. Wouldn’t that make you jealous?”

I considered. The problem was S & M. Colleen was not into that and Oz was. I wouldn’t be with a guy whose tastes were so different. Certainly I knew what jealousy was. It meant you didn’t want to share. Colleen just did not seem to me like a jealous person. She shared everything with everybody. She put up with so much.

I tried organizing my thoughts but realized I was just too drunk. Trevor can argue when he’s drunk; I can’t. I’m out of my league. What would I do, for instance, if Trevor suddenly developed a fascination with threesomes? That’s the chic thing nowadays; even though Trevor is just the last person on the planet you can imagine splitting his intensity in half. Never say never. So what would I do? Well I would back off, because it would be a totally different deal.

Colleen liked the way Oz was. Lots of people did. He was too big to be confined to just one person. Testosterone poisoning makes some men want sex that’s more like fighting, but not that many women are into the rough stuff. If they are, it usually means they are suffering from testosterone poisoning too. Colleen was too tired all the time. She used to fall asleep over her computer. Just thinking about it made me yawn. I was the tired one now.

Trevor picked me up and carried me deep into the mosquito netting. “Time for bed, sleepyhead.”
Like so many people, what he said was not exactly what he meant. As he undressed me, he was facedown in my belly, kissing it. I was almost not in the mood for sex; my mind was so full. It required a special adjustment. Trevor used to be an Eagle Scout. He knows how to be patient. He can start a fire from practically nothing. Starting without so much as a spark, he soon rewarded both of us with a satisfying blaze.

Chapter Six — Monogamy

When I woke it was dark. You know that moment of inchoate panic coming out of a dream, when you’ve forgotten who you are? I could be a character in a novel or the philosopher’s dreaming butterfly. Maybe Trevor’s right and my imagination’s a runaway horse – but am I the horse or the rider?

I admit I like thinking that poets get to be always partially disembodied, like souls in Limbo awaiting incarnation. Who wants to ossify? Once you’re “set”, you’re done.

A shape moved around the window against the light and I sat up in bed and gasped but it was only Trevor lighting the scented candles along my windowsill.

“Thanks.” Fell back, relaxed. Trevor knows I don’t like sleeping without a light.

He came to sit beside me. His tie and jacket and shirt were gone and there was a hole in his t-shirt. I put my finger through it and shook loose the comforting smell of his lemony sweat.
“So how are you feeling?”

Through the semi-darkness his eyes boiled at me, like this was going to be a question very hard to answer. He always meant so much more than he said. If words are symbols, his are clues.
“Better, thanks. Maybe a little funny. Do you think I should make myself throw up?”
“No,” he said. “It’s so bad for your teeth. I brought you a ginger ale.”

In a Tom Collins glass. I accepted it gratefully, enjoying the spark of prickles up my nose. He was right. Enough throwing up already. There had to come a time to learn how to keep things down.
As I drank, I admired his avian profile in the half-light. Talk about a palimpsest! – I could see not only his face now, but the way he had looked as a boy and how he would look when he as old. A sharp, spare, dignified old man.

“Did you buy a Christmas tree?” I asked him.

“Did,” he said. “I bought everything you asked for and some things you didn’t.”
“Was it a forty-footer?”

Trevor always went for the biggest trees. It was given to Oz to cut his dreams down to size, using a chainsaw.

“No. Twenty feet I swear. Just a little guy.”

He stroked my face, the little bit of goldish fur along my cheek-edge. A legacy, says Trevor, from my bobcat ancestors.
He sighed, “A mourning tree.”

“A mourning tree…” how Colleen would have appreciated that! Her Regency desk in the kitchen bay was well-stocked with mourning cards and notepaper for every degree of closeness and respect. Mourning is a Southern art form. Our wakes and funerals are legendary. The food is fantastic, better than at any other kind of event, weddings included. It is just when you are most bereft and suffering that you need to force down peaches, marshmallows, ham and whipped cream for the good of those who must remain behind.

In my mind’s eye I saw Colleen writing, writing with her mother-of-pearl fountain pen on a dove-grey notecard in her backward-slanted script, “Sorrow doesn’t last forever. Love does.” Believing it, too.
If she had really loved the lost one, she would enclose a pressing of one of her “resurrection” irises, flowers no one can transplant or plant, flowers which come up when they want to all by themselves. That’s how we know it’s spring. For Colleen irises, not lilies, were the “resurrection flower”.

“Are you crying?” asked Trevor. He touched my tear.

“I guess so,” I sighed.

“That’s why I’m giving you your present early,” he said, lobbing a black and gold gift-wrapped box into my lap.

I sat up and squealing with glee. “But it’s not Christmas yet.”

“Oh,” smiled Trevor, the delayed-gratification poster child, “Call it an Advent gift. You should get one every day of Advent. Why wait?”

“Why wait for breakfast when the eggs are scrambled now?” That’s what Oz would sing, so that’s what I sang. I tore into the package.

It was a huge bottle of perfume. Trésor.

“See how its name is almost like mine?” he teased me. “When you’re away, it will remind you of me.”

When you’re away…I shivered. I wanted to travel, I wanted to conquer, I wanted adventure. I didn’t want to be “away”.

“Must have been expensive,” I said feebly. It weighed a ton.
He shrugged. “The best things always are.”

If he had given this perfume to Fayette, would she have left? He wouldn’t give poor Fayette a dime-store ring.

“So where is everybody?” I asked.
“Mina’s driving Craig to the airport, Shelley and Jake unpacked the groceries and ordered a movie.”

“Lean forward and let me fix your hair.” His cowlick was acting up again. It’s short everywhere except for the little piece at the front, which stands up like a steeple above his face. It’s not enough hair for a true faux-hawk, so it’s often crooked. I’ve been “fixing” it with water, gel, spit — anything I could find — since I was three; loving the submission on this tall man’s face while he bent down allowing me to play with it. For that moment I’m the boss, and I’m in charge. The universe is my toy-box and Trevor is my unicorn to ride. He can take me anywhere.

“There,” I said, “That’s better,” dragging my fingers over the prematurely silver paths.
“Feels good,” he said. Surrendered while he closed his eyes.

That’s the moment I decided. Why wait indeed? Oz says men have an extra, primitive brain in the penis. Evolutionary holdover from when dinosaurs needed a special brain to control their tails. I dropped my hands and threw back the covers.

Trevor opened his eyes and looked at me. I let my hand run down his shoulders into his lap. He was hard, all right. I was thinking even if I had him only once that would make him part of me forever. I would never be “away”. Or maybe I thought that later. Anyway, nobody ever needed to know, and actions unseen can be mentally canceled. It has been definitely proven that Trevor keeps his secrets.

He shuddered at my touch but didn’t pull away. He clamped his hand over mine. I sat up, feeling the trapped heat pouring off my naked body. I pushed my chest forward and he brought up his against me. I wanted that t-shirt “gone”.

“Why shouldn’t we comfort each other?” I suggested. A line too good to waste. Jake doubtless got it from someone else and I was just passing it along. Trevor groaned, but clutched me so tightly I was almost afraid. They say a girl can always pull back, but we ladies know that isn’t true. There’s a point of no return, and it always comes sooner than you think. Had I reached the point of no return with Trevor?

“God I want to,” he moaned.

Lovely giving someone something they so badly want, extra nice to banish that customary moment of regret before someone sees me naked. Trevor knew my body well. He wouldn’t be disappointed that I didn’t have the biggest chest in the world.

“Tell me you’re not a virgin,” he gasped.

Poor Trevor! He wanted me to be a virgin, yet if I was, he couldn’t touch me. Cleft stick! Poor guy! If you ever get trapped into answering a question like that it’s lose-lose. They’re angry whatever you say.

“I’m not a virgin,” I said in my siren voice, tearing off that repellent t-shirt and throwing it away. Dust to dust and dustcloths to dishcloths. Trevor has such a beautiful chest. I had to do something pretty outrageous. Oz told me that when I grew up I would have to “beat them away with a stick”, and Trevor had always been my stick. Trevor went all “stick” on me.

“Was it that dude with the dreads? The guy you were with at the graduation party?”

Yes, Indio, the “dude with the dreads” whose snakebite piercing and plethora of ink seemed so glamorous to me at the time — Indio and others. A girl has to experiment. I mistook Indio for a revolutionary, but even revolutionaries have a line for you to toe. Can’t admit any of this to Trevor. Duck and cover.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” I teased. This bed was too small for two people, much less four. Or twenty-four.

He shook my shoulders like an angry parole officer. “What about birth control?”
“Shelley and I are both on the pill.”

“Do you take it every other day and twice on weekends, like Fayette? Couldn’t trust that woman, so I had to use two rubbers. Tell me you take those pills as recommended.”
“Strictly as recommended.”

I was determined to kick Fayette out of this bed and I was not looking for the rubberized boyfriend experience. In my opinion, condoms are too “penocentric”. Sex goes wrong when it becomes penis worship. Once the condom appears, foreplay’s officially over. And how can that ever be good? You’ve lost the battle to get the guy to take his time. Who wants to race a timer just about to go off?

Speaking of racing, in a flash he was naked beside me. No different from Sardines, crammed in close together; but this was an adult, more pleasing game. My choice; if I wanted to stop being the baby, the orphan, or the invalid, and become a sophisticated poet reeking of Trėsor. It was all up to me.

With my thumb I traced upon his back the nettle-rash of scars acquired by hauling me out of every briar patch. My scars soon faded; Trevor’s never do. Maybe he re-opens them secretly; and counts them like stigmata. They say in a big family the eldest doesn’t get a childhood.
We had kissed many times, but this was the first time I felt his tongue. Seemed so odd, when everything else was so familiar.

“You’ll never know how much I wanted this,” he whispered.
But I knew.

My faith, my hope, was justified; Trevor is a pore-explorer. He knows how to take his time, consecrate each part of me, not just pouncing on my jennies like a townie. A dream lover, like a prescription badly needed I could write myself.

He overpowered me with his desire, so I fell back, allowing him to bless and tenderize my freckly, scabby, leathered hide. That inner voice, the narrator’s voice each of us drags around to comment on our lives, said, This is the way it’s supposed to be.

Trust and surrender, two games of sex I’d never played. He kissed me everywhere, suckling at my inner creases. When he dragged my labia through his teeth I convulsed like an electroshock patient. It was like that moment in Free Bird when your eyes roll back and the top of your head flies off. I submitted while the fireworks tore me apart, a pleasure previously experienced only alone, by using fantasy, Johnny Depp and elbow grease. This is the way it’s supposed to be.

We woke up upside down and turned around, our heads at the foot of the bed, our feet locked like the claws of eagles connecting in flight.

“Wow,” said Trevor. “I never knew it could feel like this. It’s true what they say about tongue-studs.” He sighed. “I came too fast. I’ll be better next time.”

“You were perfect,” I told him. “Couldn’t you tell how much you made me come?”

“Don’t talk like such an old pro.” He shook his head. “It’s hard to tell with girls. Lots of them fake it.”

“I bet Fayette always faked it.”

He gave me a dirty look. Well, he was the one who brought her up. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Yes I mind,” I said. “Unless you give me one too.”

“Well, too bad.” He lit a Camel with trembly, nicotine-stained fingers. “They’re bad for you. And I’m only having one.”

Ours is the house of the Secret Smokers. Supposedly Oz only smokes Macanudos with his port, but I knew about the Gauloises arriving in the mail. Both Skylar and Jake are constantly sneaking half-filled packs from his jacket pockets, then ratting on each other. Colleen used to sneak outside in the evening, pretending “the children” – that’s us– couldn’t see her pack of mentholated Newports.
“I thought you gave those up,” I lectured Trevor.

“Just till I get my soul back,” he puffed. “It seems to have wandered away.”

Away. I knew where it had gone. It detached in our frenzy, and bounced up against the ceiling like Peter Pan’s untethered shadow.

I tried to snatch a smoke.

“No way,” he said, jerking away. “I’d sooner cut off my own arm.” He crushed the cigarette out in a candle bowl. “See? All gone. Last one ever.”

“But I need one if you smoked one,” I wheedled. “To match tastes. Or you’ll taste like an ashtray. What if I can’t stand kissing you?”

He shook the pack. “All gone,” he swore, “You’ll just have to put up with me. I’m going to kiss you everywhere and there’s nothing you can do about it,” and he kissed my leg from ankle to knee. He gasped.

“Look how perfect you are.”

“Except for my obese knees.”

He kissed each in turn. “Don’t be silly. They are uber-knees. They are the pattern of everything a knee should be.”

“But see how fat they are? How they stick out?” I pouted just to coax more praise.
“They stick out because they’re supposed to stick out. They stick out because the rest of your legs are thin.”

“Jake says my legs look funny because you carried me so much when I was little and wouldn’t let me walk.”

Many photos do exist of the distraught, red-faced toddler astride the bony hip of the pale-faced boy. Look closely; you can see her furiously beating heart synchronize to his more reassuring beat.
“Jake!” he scoffed. “That’s the fetal alcohol syndrome talking.” It’s Trevor’s contention that their mother’s alcohol consumption in her second pregnancy explains everything that’s wrong with Jake.
“And I’m practically a dwarf.” I whined.

“Don’t say that.” He surged over me. “It’s blasphemy. You’re perfect.”
Blissfully I surrendered to worship and the exorcism of every painful childhood taunt.
“Yes, yes, yes,” I gasped. “More of that.”

“Well, I have things I want, too,” he said, Big Brother again, back in control. “I want you to write a letter to the University of Arizona and tell them you’re not coming.”

“I did that already. They know all about it. Delayed matriculation. Until the trial’s over.”
“No.” He glared at me over my pelvic ridge. “I mean tell them you’re not coming at all because you’re going to Georgetown.”

Trevor is a Georgetowner. He’s obligated to think the sun rises and sets over its gothic campus.
“Wow. You’re kidding. Can we afford it?”

“You let me worry about that. We can afford anything once Colleen’s estate is probated.”
“Stop kidding. I can’t get in. My SAT’s are only 1430.”

“I told you, I’ll take care of it. Besides if you don’t go to an Ivy League school there’s really no point in college at all. You’ll disappear into the desert of mediocrity and never be heard from again.”
I knew that wasn’t true. It was after Georgia O’Keefe disappeared into the desert that everything exploded for her. It’s the sort of self-serving thing they used to say at Napier. If you can’t graduate from the Big Seven, Eight or Nine (depends who’s counting) the only course is suicide.

“It’s my job to see you to fly as high as you possibly can,” said Trevor. “On your own you’re unfocused to the point of impossible. Your sense of direction just hasn’t been cultivated. Maybe it’s the curse of the poetic temperament. You know you need a business manager.”

Curse Trevor for knowing me better than I want to know myself. It would be so lovely never doing numbers, not having to keep track of things. I would lift my hand and a glass would appear. What a fantasy! I felt obligated to point out things he hadn’t considered.

“Maybe I would hate it there.” More truthfully, “Maybe they would hate me.”
“Not if I’m with you. I’ve been thinking of going back, can’t get anywhere with just a bachelor’s. We could share an apartment. Georgetown’s the perfect place for you to build your street cred and become a poet.

“Plus, I know you. You need looking after. I know all about college boys’ brains, damaged through drink. Believe me, they’re not interested in leaving you a finer, better person. They’d eat you up like gravy on a biscuit.”

Here was a delicious prospect to privately consider. Now that I knew how to make gravy, I fell back against the pillows in a second orgasm. Would a relief to shirk the hard stuff, like paying bills and arguing with bureaucrats. Too much practicality clogs and shatters the fragile artistic mechanism.
Or maybe I’m just lazy. Trevor says I never do anything I don’t want to. But according to Oz you must pick your battles and tackle them nourished and well-rested.

In my mind’s eye I summoned up tall apartment windows opening out over a leafy quad; sun glittering across the hardwood floors, desks pushed together in the intense focus of a pool of light. So much much nicer than the cell block basement pullulating with fractious roomies that I’d get on my own. Damn Trevor for a seductive devil. Who’s devil’s advocate now?
I reached my arms up to him. “I’d love that,” I sighed.

He entered me so fast I wasn’t really ready this time. I gasped. He put his mouth against my mouth as if to knock the wind back into me. “God, I love you,” he gasped. “I love you so much.”
Another first. I mean I know Trevor loves me, but nobody’s said it during sex. It’s not a word you hear bandied about in public school hookups. Truth surprises. The sympathetic gush between my legs acclaimed the gravy, the long- missing ingredient.

I said it, meant it, sighed it.

“And I love you, Trevor.”

I’ve always loved him. It’s love that brings the magic gravy, baby.

Chapter Four — Malfeasance

It was worse than yesterday. The rule against cameras in the courtroom made the press go crazy; they didn’t seem human. They threw themselves at our vehicles like jackals, with one last chance at a meal. They wielded their orbs and proboscises like slingshots and spears. Pygmies are right about soul spearing, I thought, as they jabbed and jabbed at us. Don’t give your picture away unless you know where it’s going. These people are looking for what they can steal and mark and soil. We huddled together, instinctively. That spiky-haired reporter who’d had the nerve to refer to us as “the Aristobrats” threw herself across our hood like an auditioning stuntwoman.

It was going to be horrible without Trevor. We clung like survivors barely afloat on wreckage. Jake was no help. Preening for the TV cameras he put arms around Shelley and me as if we were his bitches. No substitute for Trevor. I told myself the martinet and the libertine in Oz’s explosive personality seemed neatly divided between his sons.

I hoped for a chance to speak to Skylar, and I would have, too, even if she was sitting actually at the prosecution table, but in the end even I was intimidated. She was so thoroughly enmeshed in a thicket of foes. I feared I would burn up and shrivel like paper too close to a fire. Who knew we had so many enemies?

There was Colleen’s sister Ashbel Claridge, her lacquered frosting of Jiffy-Pop hair topping a face like an anvil. Oz called her “The Pechvogel” which I think means “harpy.” And who sat next to her?
Someone creepily familiar, a gypsy, a face from my dreams. An older woman with messy white birds’ nest hair and a Kabuki countenance: black brows drawn together. I thought she might be one of my mother’s sisters, the one named Shea, but if so her red hair had gone pure white since last I saw her. Trevor, who cares as much as his father about thoroughbreds says the bad thing about a mutt, is there’s no “blueprint for growth”. You don’t know what you’re getting. I hate predictability, but still. She was on the other side. I shot Aunt Shea twice with my tongue stud.

I ripped a piece of paper from my notebook and scribbled the following message: I need to borrow some of your Mom’s clothes. I promise I will take care of them and give them back. Of course you can say no. Love, Brontë. I could give it to Spike whenever he finished parking the limo. Spike never minded running little errands for me. As a former high school football star the thing he most hated was having to sit still.

There was Oz, no Lord of the Hurricane today, but mild and professorial in tortoiseshell reading glasses and heather-mixture sports jacket. He reached out to hug me even before the bailiffs removed his chains. He was bony. He’d lost so much weight it was as if he was on a hunger strike. We were not doing any better feeding him than feeding ourselves, but I wished someone would give me all the hush puppies and fried bologna he’d probably turned down.

Jake handed him the leather bound Spinoza he’d requested; his favorite philosopher. No time to exchange many words; he just squeezed our hands and gave us each a meaningful look.
“Where’s Trevor?” he mouthed to Jake and Jake mouthed, “He’ll be back.”

The judge came in and favored us with his lipless substitute for a smile. We rose and then sat. The jury trooped in next, just to show they put in the time so they could get their $37.50. I found I could not look at the individual jury members. They looked plenty at us. They got an eyeful. They seemed so ordinary, black and white, male and female, old and young, dressed as if for some sporting event. But the “event” was Oz’ life; all our lives, maybe.

Then the jury trooped out so the lawyers could argue. We rose and sat, rose and sat. It was as bad as church, really.

Craig had hired a jury consultant to try to figure out what kinds of human beings would be least likely to confuse Oz’s many peccadilloes with murder. The answer’s so obvious the founding fathers already thought of it: a jury of his peers. None of those here.

Of course Craig petitioned for change of venue and of course it was rejected. This jury pool wasn’t just poisoned, it was too damn small. Oz’s peers are internationally based. Start with the stage and screen – playground of empathic chameleons — or better yet, the pages of history; warriors and scholars, soldiers, poets, lovers, raconteurs.

In England when a lord committed a crime, he could only be judged by other lords. That was the reason the English made Lord Byron come home, so he could sit in judgment on Queen Caroline. Yes, if Queen Caroline was lifting her skirts a bit too high for someone not her husband, Byron was the perfect person to consult.

Oz winked at me, mocking my scribbling motions, not like he was bothered by this at all. He said we were in a race to write a book about all this. His book would be finished before mine; in his head he had already written it. Now I was feeling kind of guilty for doubting him. But he seemed so confident. How could he, looking at the motley crew set up in judgment, ever believe he would be set free?

Surely only guilt-free innocence would be so powerful. Oz doesn’t like being judged, so maybe he, too saw it as a sporting event. Could he escape these bulls ungored? Craig said the government had no evidence really, no evidence at all. They were just following the practice of the ancient Romans, arresting anyone found at the scene. Once the Romans in their infinite wisdom, arrested, tried, and executed a pear tree.

God knows why the press was so interested. Is it astonishment that bad things happen to lucky people, or is it something more sinister? Schadenfreude; sadistic pleasure in the suffering of others. If the lightning bolt hits you, then it won’t hit me. Then I guess there are all those people who need someone they can feel superior to: “At least I ain’t never kilt nobody.”

Mina and Craig joined the prosecution team at the judge’s bench. Whisper, whisper. Boring that we couldn’t hear this part. Craig says it’s “protecting the record”; there’s a concept. Perfecting it by making it imperfect if you ask me. Shouldn’t “the record” be everything?

“In the past people hired champions to settle these things,” said Jake.

“This is different how?” I asked, thinking of Craig’s lists of bills and expenses.

“Completely different,” Jake sniffed. “Both sides hired duelists. The champions fight a duel, and the accused would stand there with a rope around his neck. If his champion lost, they hanged him, and if his champion won, they let him go.”

Jake, swordsman would have loved to fight for his father. He would use the saber, his preferred weapon; because it has more cutting edges and any point above the waist is fair game. He would win too, in just six moves. As he always did.

They were coming back; somebody had lost and somebody won. I studied faces trying to figure out which was which; Craig would never let on within the hallowed walls. He agreed with Oz’s dictum: never let people see inside.

The prosecution was also a male-female pair, — maybe that’s trendy nowadays, trying to get the most out of the jury, but here the female, though admittedly second chair, was far less subservient, probably because the head prosecutor, Buford, wasn’t actually her boss. I had to admit she had mad skills of appearance and persuasion. According to the talking heads of Court TV, Fawna Fryssen was a single mom who had put herself through law school by performing in a “lounge act.” They probably meant singing, but maybe because she was black – (Oz would have called her “a macaroon”– his term for any light-skinned black female) — I allowed my imagination to run wild. Juggling? Fire-swallowing? Swinging from the rafters?

Like me, she favored matador’s colors; black, gold, red.

If she was the matador, Hurley Buford was the bull. I tried to imagine bull-necked Buford fighting a duel with anyone. He wouldn’t, he would throw down the sword and rush forward with a barely human roar. I saw him in animal skins, throttling someone with his bare hands. He’d never stand across from Jake light and free in a fine white fencing suit. The state would lose big time if this dueling thing ever got started. I gave Buford two rounds of the tongue stud. Bam, bam.

Only when they stepped to one side did I get a clear view of Skylar. While her companions talked to one other, she stared bleakly ahead, looking lost. She seemed almost as thin as Shelley now, just as thin as her mother and those college prep coaches nagged her to be. Was the weight she lost Colleen? I wondered if, when you aspire to be your own person, you might actually be better off neglected and ignored, instead of dragging your family like a fat Siamese twin through life. Skylar looked angry and sleepless as well as lost. I was scared of her. Maybe her mother visited every night, raging like a Shakespearean specter, choking and gurgling “Revenge!”

I wished we were alone, so I could argue with her. Maybe she hadn’t heard our side of the case. Since I didn’t have Trevor, I comforted myself by playing his part, anchoring myself with Craig’s story that at least some of those bloodstains came from the police spraying “enhancing agents” to make every drip look worse. Lots of things look scarier than they are.

Craig says we need two experts for every one of theirs. That’s expensive, but we win because the state can’t afford to expert-shop; they’re stuck with the people they’ve got on salary. Craig says nobody with any significant career credentials willingly goes to work for the state.

The police work was shoddy. Right on the scene the junior medical examiner wrote down the cause of death as “accident”; they didn’t change that till later. Nobody prevented Oz from climbing down to hold his wife; so all the “patterns” got messed up. I was less impressed than Craig by the absence of the murder weapon — if the police didn’t find The Scary General’s Luger in its hidey-hole behind the fireplace brick how hard did they really search? Not that anyone got shot.

Our expert said Colleen’s levels of blood thinner, Xanax and alcohol would send anybody nose-diving into the nearest empty swimming pool. Skylar wouldn’t want to hear that. Her mother was feeling no pain that evening, as the saying goes. She may have been humming Bobby McFerrin’s Don’t Worry, Be Happy the whole time she was trying to climb out, falling back, and banging her head repeatedly. That’s what antidepressants are for, exactly so you won’t realize the fix you are in. You try to negotiate a poorly anchored iron ladder wobbling around on an uneven stone wall when you’re high as a kite wearing heels. That’s the field trip the jury should go on – first to The Cold Huntsman for a couple of stiff ones, next to the pharmacy for a bracer of pills, last to an empty double-sized Olympic pool in the pitch dark. See how good they do.

Our other expert attacks the state police lab as a shameful hive of scandal that never did one thing right. This guy is a very famous forensics dude who’s on television all the time although his reputation did receive a recent tarnishing in a high-profile child molester case. As Chekhov pointed out, we all have our blind spots. If he thinks six year olds can act “seductive”; what can anybody say?

I don’t see how argue with a daughter who would rather believe that her mother was the murder victim of an enraged husband rather than a way-too-happy lady who got stuck in a hole. It’s like the theory of Intelligent Design; people need someone to blame. Fundamentalist attribution error, or something like that.

I was feeling a little better when Spike, late as usual, high-fived the bailiffs and slid onto the bench next to me. He always sits too close, but where else can you sit when there’s so much of you? He’s a huge guy; Trevor calls him The Hulk. The marshals aren’t supposed to let anyone in after closing the doors but they make an exception for Spike. As the college-admission coaches say, it’s all about who you know.

Some of the marshals remember Spike before he washed out of the police academy. They reminisce about the dear old days playing wheelies and lockouts with the police interceptor. Spike says it’s the “fringes” of law enforcement where the fun is, doubtless true of any field. Maybe Spike’s habit of threatening to make people’s “eyes pop” got in the way of advancement. He’s a man of action rather than words.

In his spare time he anchors a rock band called The Washouts, and you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Spike wearing a tie-dyed headband on his bald, pit-bull-shaped head, banging a tambourine and singing Na-na-na for thirty minutes. I am privileged to have seen the video.

The press calls him The Python, (because of the eye-popping thing) but Craig says; “Mr. Munro is a licensed private investigator.”

I like making Spike laugh. It’s hard, like teasing a British Grenadier, but it can be done. You can tell you’ve succeeded when his neck muscles jerk. He rattles me by eyeing me as if speculating on my portability. I am very portable.

So here he was, smelling of some scary drugstore lady-killer cologne, parking his big football ring close to my thigh. He’s not bored yet or he’d be flexing his fingers and cracking the knuckles, but I don’t dare ask him what he’s thinking. Something unmentionable in polite society, and court counts as a very polite society, one where people go to school for years to learn how to openly discuss sex and violence without becoming sweaty and red-faced. Not that they always manage it. Fawna is unflappable; Buford has a leaky thermostat.

Back to Spike. I didn’t grow up in the South for nothing. When you catch a guy checking out your portability it’s time to start asking for favors. I slipped him my note.

“Skylar,” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth. He pocketed it and nodded.

Spike should be the one sent in to fight Buford, I thought. My money would be on him. I suggest a no-holds-barred cage match. Expect Buford to fold without even suiting up.

The lawyers had been up before the judge, hissing at each other like cats, but now it seemed things were finally getting underway. Trevor says court is oceans of boredom punctuated by moments of frenzy. It looked like a frenzy might be upon us.

Buford was speaking. Everyone in the courtroom leaned forward, either to bask in his deathless prose or to unsnarl his impenetrable accent. Buford is a local, a real down-home country boy. He knows how to say “pew,” and most importantly, when to say it. A picture flashed up on the big white screen.

We all stared at it. Was that us? It was a magical hologram of happy, sunny people from far away and long ago. I knew this picture – there’s a copy in my room – and seeing it floating in the air for strangers to goggle at felt as personally invasive as if it was a snapshot of my underwear drawer. (Which is a mess by the way.) What was Buford saying? Something about witnesses coming from far away and so this part of the case has to be presented first, and Craig was objecting about irrelevant, immaterial, prejudicial and uncharged. Prior Bad Acts, which sounds like a rock band. You could tell it was a Big Deal by the excitement among the press. Some looked ready to fall out of their very own skin they were Twittering so frantically. Mass masturbation.

I chose to disappear into the upper air and lose myself in the picture.

My favorite stories were always the ones where ordinary children find a doorway to another world. Only at certain angles can it be seen; sometimes all you need is faith that it is there. Better be ready to dive the moment you see one.

So here was my magic portal, light-filled and beckoning. I dove.

The world was again reduced to a swimming pool, but this was summer and it was filled with sparkling blue water. It wasn’t ours; the ornate design along the tiled edge suggested foreign climes. I looked up from the row of feet dangling in the water to see the pretty lady in the modest one-piece navy-blue bathing suit beside a gangly boy holding a baby on his lap and squinting anxiously at the camera.

The woebegone freckled infant with the softee-swirl of red, red hair is me, and that’s Trevor’s lap I’m sitting on. I’m not “giving him a lap dance” as Oz suggested. Trevor was afraid Oz might throw me in to test “the infant diving reflex”. He clutched for dear life as Oz snapped the picture.

Trevor at nine looked exactly like himself, the same forehead-transecting crease of worry that he was probably wearing now, at the airport, shooing Fayette towards the plane. Down in the water two other children had been caught in the act of splashing one another, whipping the water white as cake frosting. This could only be Shelley and Jake, Jake wearing glittering braces and Shelley a clown mask of white zinc oxide, juggling between them glittering crystal droplets, frozen forever.
I know I said I don’t remember my mother, but sometimes when I look at this picture, I feel the memories trembling at the edge of my mind, like surrendered dreams.

She was forty-two when I was born, forty when she had Shelley, miracle upon miracle in a barren marriage that had already lasted fifteen years. She was a professor of English Literature at the Franciscan International College of Tunisia. That was where she met Oz, whose first wife also taught there. My father was in the civil service; word was he died from some kind of valve ailment between Shelley’s birth and mine.

My mother’s name was Mary Elizabeth Shortall Barringer and she was short, like me, although it looked more elegant on her. I also know, because Oz told me, that although her hair seems brown and was styled for this photo in a modest bell, her natural color was fiery red. Oz said she dyed it because she considered red a vulgar color, but I think she didn’t like being looked at, like those orthodox Jewish women who wear wigs, accepting it as their responsibility to tamp down male fantasy.

Red hair is eye-catching. As a young girl, trying to get on in the world, I need to be looked at, but as a writer, I need to be invisible. The cat in the corner, says Bellow. So you see the conflict.
Is writing genetic? My mother kept journals, just like me (unfortunately lost). Oz said it was the second-greatest grief of her life that she wasn’t a romantic poet. Of course she was teaching Byron and Shelley and Keats, so her standards were probably too high. I, too, have a trunkful of journals, and easy, experimental standards. In fact, I’m willing to make up my own standards as I go along.
(Oz calls this trunk my “trousseau” and quotes Mae West: “Keep a diary and some day it’ll keep you.”) I went through my own phase of the English Romantics, but now I prefer the Russians. The Russians totally understand about keepin’ it real. The poor old Brits were a pale lot, except for Byron, but there’s virtually no difference between nineteenth century Russians and twenty-first century Southerners that I can see. Our nineteenth century Russian equivalents yearned for Paris, but where’s our escape? Hollywood?

Oz willingly spoke about my mother any time I cared to ask. I could tell he admired her, as much as he could admire a woman, as much as he could admire anyone who wasn’t him. She got a Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, writing her thesis on marriage in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall when she met my father and fell in love. He was the love of her life and his ill health her greatest sorrow. She came from that generation where you live for other people. Fatal for a writer. Don’t give up control of the one thing you have: yourself. Oz says their relationship only flourished because he traveled so much. Proximity is a romance killer.

Here are the other things I know about my mother; her third greatest grief was her prolonged period of childlessness and she adored word games but didn’t care for dirty jokes. Oz said that just before she died she was starting to “free herself to the great wide world.” She was raised Catholic so had all that extra mumbo jumbo stuff to recover from. Oz says it takes those types at least another decade to break the bonds. She was proud of her career but she wanted to be a mother and so when we were finally born her happiness was complete. Until her husband had his fatal heart attack.

Oz said she changed a lot after that; she started talking about going back to the States because she wanted to do whatever was best for us, and Africa was unstable at the time. (I guess it still is.) Oz was the executor of her husband’s estate and he says he backed her up in whatever she wanted to do. He was thinking of going back himself, because he’d heard Colleen was divorcing and he’d always had “a thing” for her. Then my mother got her aneurysm and died. Oz said he’d tried hard to give us the kind of life she would have wanted, and we were turning into women she’d be proud of.

Finally it was Craig Axelrod’s turn to speak. I snapped back to reality eager to hear our side. He was walking back and forth, pumping the air with his arms. Object, object, object. Nothing new there. I tried making notes for my book, but that shimmering picture was just too alluring. I feared losing eye contact with my mother, fraying that magic ribbon of connection. If she was speaking to me, what was she saying? I craned my ears but the portal failed. The picture changed. Now it was a naked skull, spliced with crosshatching.

Buford touched each one with a laser pointer. One, two, three, four, five six seven – the exact same number Colleen had suffered. But this wasn’t Colleen’s skull. What was he saying? That this was my mother’s skull? They dug it up, they shaved it, they counted the wounds, they took pictures, and now they expected me to admire their handiwork. Really, the total absolute disgusting shamelessness of some people is unbelievable. Whoever said how it’s impossible to underestimate the taste of the American public was right on. I knew I was going to lean over the bench and throw up, right in front of all these people.

Shelley was crying stormily into Jake’s shoulder. I tried to stand up. I needed to get the hell out of there. I was angry, too. I had an idea I would make a statement, or at the very least walk up to Buford and vomit on his shoes. Someone needed to tell the judge to put a stop to this. Horrible Spike’s horrible arms were round me in pythonic vise. I would have to throw up on him, instead.
Served him right. I hope I was more trouble than he had planned. I got some good scratching in, I know. He was too big for me. Couldn’t catch my breath. I saw Oz rise to his feet to protest – thank God — and heard the judge order the bailiffs to clear the room.

So I was able to throw up in private, all by myself, decently, in the ladies’ room, with Shelley in the next stall and Spike guarding the door.

This was Trevor’s fault, I remember thinking. None of this would have happened if he’d been there. Or maybe he was smart to stay away. Mina tried to warn me.

Well, I wasn’t going back in, that was for sure. Spike had to partly drag me and partly carry me into the conference room, saying, “Hey, I’m not the bad guy here.” Trevor would never have allowed Spike to manhandle me like this.

In the conference room all hell broke loose. Spike leaned against the door as if to prevent escape or rescue. Oz held me. I tried pretending he was Trevor — now that he was so thin they were more alike. I could hear Shelley yelling until Jake threatened to slap her.
Craig performed an Indian dance, complete with war whoops. He flashed me his nacreous smile, saying,

“You did it, you did it!”

“You set us up,” I accused him. “You knew this would happen.”

Mina handed water bottles. Asked Shelley and me if we wanted a Xanax. Or three. Hell, take the whole bottle.

“Calm down,” said Craig. “Everybody sit.”

We all sat down, except Craig. All eyes fixed on him. Oz had a little grin on his face. I felt Craig sucking, sucking the oxygen out of the room, forcing us to see things his way. I knew we would have to agree with whatever he said if we ever hoped to breathe fresh air.

“Of course I knew he was going to do it.” He pounded his fist on the table. “It was effin’ outrageous, but they might have gotten away with it. They want to show those disgustingly prejudicial photographs of your mother’s autopsy to the jury. Other than an actual snuff film, I can’t conceive of a sight more upsetting or disturbing, particularly if you don’t get out much.

“Yes, Buford told me to prepare you but do I get to prepare the jury? Nooooooo. So if you’d sat stoically through today’s monstrosity – or even covered your faces – or God forbid missed court – the judge might have ruled them admissible. Now, I don’t see how he can.

“If the judge rules those photos out it will be entirely owing to you girls today. This is what it’s all about, darlin’s. Listen to me, listen to me now. This is basic Gamesmanship 101, very important. I’ll bet you a Franklin he won’t let those photos in now. Plus he should be extra vigilant about that entire avenue of testimony. Prevent Buford sneaking things in. Care to make a wager?”

Jesus, I thought, that’s our money he’s betting with.

Oz put an arm around Shelley’s shoulder and a hand on my knee.
“This is war,” said. Oz “I’m so sorry. I wish I could have spared you, but this is war.”

The court clerk knocked on the door to let us know it was time to return. Shelley couldn’t keep her Valium down. This is what comes of having no breakfast. She rushed back to the ladies room.

“No more pictures till he rules,” said Craig. “I promise, no more pictures.”
I said to Oz, “So my mother didn’t die of an aneurysm?”

“Of course she died of an aneurysm. Triggered by a fall. It often happens that way. Falls are a leading cause of death. Or maybe the aneurysm caused the fall. How should we know, after all these years?”

I sought his pale blue eyes behind the glittering glass reflections, trying to read the images flickering behind them.
“But those cuts on her head—”

“Nobody knew about those. Maybe she slipped a couple of times. There were ladders standing around, buckets, rebar. It was a construction site. Something may have fallen on her. You have to realize, there wasn’t an autopsy at the time. Nobody wanted one.”

“There wasn’t a rush to judgment,” intoned Craig and Oz echoed,
“Sensitivity to bereavement. There wasn’t a rush to judgment.”

Their voices echoed falsely, the adults assuring the toddlers that monsters are unreal. If there was no investigation, isn’t that a rush to judgment? They made up their minds too soon. Too soon.
The marshals came in; slapping Spike, collecting Oz. Oz has to return to court through his special door, portal of a different kind. God forbid he contaminate the universe by standing in the public hall.

“I’ll take that Xanax now,” I said. I’m made of tougher stuff than Shelley, I thought.
Spike held the door open for me and said something as I passed through, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was thinking, the cuts came from outside, not inside of her head. You wouldn’t even need an autopsy to find them. Couldn’t they feel them? Didn’t they even wash the blood out of her hair? What did the funeral home people think when they got this body with a death certificate that said “aneurysm” but her head was all cut up?

“Not my job, boss” is what they probably said. Nobody gives a damn about anybody.
Unfortunately the arguments weren’t over. In law, they never are.

Craig went on and on about what a transparent ploy this was to convince the jury Oz was a serial killer without charging him with any other crimes. A trial within a trial, as the Court TV people say. Unconscionable, against precedent, hopelessly prejudicial. Inviting the jury to string him up without true deliberation.

“Why doesn’t the state charge him with this crime if they are so eager to tar him with it? Because they don’t have any actual evidence, that’s why, just a bunch of shocking pictures and innuendoes by persons with grudges and fading memories.”

Buford stood up to say these crimes were so similar they established a pattern of conduct. I tried to listen but the Xanax was kicking in. Both women had died in a swimming pool of seven blows to the top of the head and Oz White was the last man to be seen with either of them.

I thought I was hallucinating. I said out loud, “She died in a –“ before Spike covered my mouth. The judge looked right at me. He was a reptilian old guy sporting eye goggles behind which his eyes floated loose, like bait fish. What was he thinking? I was thinking he had so little hair nobody could get away with cutting up his head and keeping it secret. Listen up. Previously unknown benefit to baldness.

Spike had me under control in the end zone so the judge glanced away. I seriously considered biting Spike on his hand. This was war, said Oz, let the Marquess of Queensberry whirl in his grave. Everyone else was. Xanax fizzed its insidious little bubbles into my blood. I relaxed. Instead of pigskin, Spike had a rag doll.

I don’t do drugs unless really hard up for entertainment. I have the metabolism of a hummingbird so it’s all drugs to me. Booze, coffee, mustard, salt, vinegar, alka seltzer; psychedelics in my book.
The judge said he realized time was of the essence since Buford had gathered witnesses from around the world, and the state was putting them up at government expense, so he would hand down his ruling at nine Monday morning. In my imagination the judge impersonated God, draped in a tasteful bath towel, would hand a stone tablet to Buford and say, thus it is written. Then we would all dance around the tablet, grateful for the decision-making of others so we could allow our own brains to jellify. Follow, follow, follow, sang the chorus.

Spike hoisted me to my feet. I floated away up, up and away, leaving the core of my essential self, that thing Trevor calls a soul, still sitting there, goggle-mouthed, on the polished wooden bench. Soul-struck. As the poet so rightly said, you can check out all you want, but you can never leave.