THE NEW PHONE SAT in the alcove off the master bedroom on an end table rescued from her parents’ basement. Eliza had been shocked at how much resistance the local phone company had given her about adding a second, dedicated line to the house, but perhaps that was because she wanted the most basic package possible, with no extras and a limited number of outgoing calls a month. Why not get a cell phone? the helpful young woman at Verizon had queried. Or just use your call-waiting feature? Why indeed? She could get a cheap, disposable mobile, toss it when-well, whenever. She knew that what she wanted wasn’t exactly logical, but it made sense to her. She wanted to limit Walter’s access to her, her home, to one slender wire, one no-frills touch-tone telephone. It was bad enough that he was the one who called her, and collect at that. She could at least pick the instrument and set the time frame for when he was allowed to call, ten to two weekdays, when the house was empty.
The children had been curious about the new phone, drawn to it as children are drawn to any novelty, but its lack of features quickly dampened their interest. They had been told that this was an outgoing line for emergencies only. Peter had gilded the lily by claiming Homeland Security recommended Washington-area residents have old-fashioned desk phones, ones that did not require electrical outlets. Unfortunately, this inspired falsehood inflamed Albie’s imagination, and there was another round of nightmares. Eliza was exhausted in a way she had not been since Iso was a colicky infant, moving through the days under the fog of a constant headache.
Yet the telephone remained silent. There was, apparently, not a little bureaucracy involved in talking to a man on death row. For every rule that Eliza had invented-the dedicated line, the hours during which Walter was allowed to call-the Department of Corrections had far more. Or so Barbara LaFortuny informed them when she had taken the new number and forwarded it to Walter. It was a week since they had installed the phone, and it had rung exactly once, sending its full-chested sound through the house.
It was an automated service, claiming that her car warranty was about to expire.
Now the phone sat, beige and squat, utterly utilitarian. It was, in fact, almost identical to the phone that the Lerner family had installed in the “phone nook” in the Roaring Springs house, although that phone had seemed terribly sleek and modern at the time. Manny and Inez, permissive in most things, felt the telephone was an incursion on family life, and they insisted on having only two extensions, one in their bedroom and the other in the hall. The girls could speak as much as they wanted, but it would be in the hall, with no chair, only the scratchiest of rugs on which to rest.
Vonnie, undaunted by the public venue, sat cross-legged in front of the hall phone as if it were Buddha or Vishnu. She stalked, she paced, she sometimes even put it on the floor and circled it, almost as if it were a campfire around which she was dancing. Fierce Vonnie, who was happy to march under the flag of feminism, saw no irony or contradiction in boy craziness. She was a passionate person, someone who lived a big life with big emotions and ambitions, and reaped big rewards as a consequence. Germaine Greer-the early Germaine Greer, the feminine eunuch posing in her bikini-was her role model. It was hard for Eliza to say Vonnie had been mistaken in her self-image. Never married, largely by choice, she had enjoyed affairs with an impressive assortment of men. Older, younger, richer, poorer. One or two were famous, most were wildly successful, and even the slackers were interesting, creative types. Vonnie had a big life, something out of the novels that Eliza preferred, the ones that managed to be respectable while still being replete with all the lifestyle details-clothes, food, home furnishings-that were disdained in so-called sex-and-shopping novels.
But Eliza preferred her sideline view of her sister’s life. And unlike larger-than-life Vonnie, Eliza had been spared what their mother dubbed the Vikki Carr curse. Part of that was the simple good luck of meeting Peter when she was eighteen and falling into a relationship that, whatever its ups and downs, was pretty much without doubt. But even with her high school boyfriends, she had been…diffident. She almost never called them, for example. Vonnie sneered that Eliza was a throwback, that she was betraying all womanhood with her willingness to let men call the shots. Eliza didn’t think so. She just didn’t have that much to say.
But sometimes she wondered if Walter’s self-help book, the one that had urged women to embrace their “natural” roles, had left more of an imprint than she realized. While traveling with Walter-a euphemism, yet not-they had gotten into the habit of going to yard sales, and he would sometimes let her buy a book, if it was cheap enough. She had picked up a copy of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, of which Walter did not approve, so she had to read it during her brief moments alone, in the bath or on the toilet. She would soak in the tub-and tubs were fewer and far between, once Walter got the tent-and read until the water was tepid. She imagined what Don Corleone would do if she were his daughter, or even the daughter of a friend. He wouldn’t kill Walter, not on her behalf. That would not be justice, as he explained to the undertaker whose daughter had been raped by the two college boys. But they would do something pretty bad to him, she was sure, especially if she asked them to avenge the girl whose body had been found in Patapsco State Park.
She still had the book with her when the state police picked them up near Point of Rocks. At first the book had reminded her of the time with Walter, and she hadn’t wanted to read it. But then her high school boyfriend had said they should watch the film on his family’s VCR, and she’d decided to finish the book first. She had plunged back in, following Michael into his Sicilian exile, feeling a bizarre kinship with him-she had been exiled, too-then on to his wedding night, where he had discovered his young bride was a virgin, and a virgin was the very best thing to be, according to Mario Puzo. She had stopped reading there and forgotten about the book until Vonnie had discovered it during summer vacation, while looking for the latest copy of TV Guide. (It was an article of faith in the Lerner household that Eliza’s bed, the territory beneath it, was a kind of Bermuda Triangle where all sorts of things came to rest.) The book’s spine was broken on the page where Eliza had abandoned it, and Vonnie, emerging from beneath the bed with a few dust bunnies clinging to her hair, as unruly as Eliza’s but not as red, looked at the pages, then at her sister.
“How would he know?” she said. Vonnie was exhausting and infuriating, but also loyal. Eliza, filled with warmth at this memory of her sister, decided to call her for no good reason, although she was almost certain to be dumped straight to voice mail. She began heading downstairs to the den, the coziest spot in the house.
The other phone rang, full-throated, robust. It had no answering machine, no voice mail, another decision on which Verizon had fought with her. It would ring forever if Eliza allowed it. Phones never rang that way anymore. It was one of the interesting things about older movies, where phones might ring six, seven, eight times, or-in that one gangster movie of which Peter was so fond-something like thirty-seven times. Nowadays, phones rang maybe three or four times, then rolled over to voice mail, or got picked up by answering machines, or-
She picked up on the seventh ring, almost hoping it was news about her car warranty or mortgage or credit card. The automated voice gave her a moment of hope. But this time, the voice was asking if she would accept a collect call from Walter Bowman.
She said she would.
“ Elizabeth?”
“Yes.”
There was an echoing metallic sound that seemed to go on and on. “Excuse me,” Walter said, and the noise grew louder, swelled, then fell back, ending with a few faded clangs.
“What was that?” She had intended to ask him as few questions as possible, to put the burden of conversation on him, but her curiosity got the better of her.
“Oh, one of the guys went down to Jarratt and got a stay, so we’re kicking him back in.”
“Kicking-?”
“We kick the doors, in solidarity, when a man gets a postponement. Although I have to tell you, I don’t really have much for this particular fellow. He’s managed the trick of being both the meanest and dumbest man here.”
She was nonplussed. It felt like the polite conversation a salesman makes as he settles in, getting ready to launch into his pitch. She wanted to blurt out: What do you want? Get to it, stop stalling. Before she could ask, her cell phone buzzed from her pocket. She glanced down at its screen. Iso’s school.
“Walter, can you hold on? There’s another call coming in on my cell and…”
She did not want to explain why the call could not be ignored, but nor was she happy when Walter said: “Sure, I understand. You’ve got young kids.”
“My husband told me he might need me to pick him up at the airport today,” she lied, with a promptness that made her rather proud. The old-fashioned phone could not be muted, so she walked out into the hall, determined that Walter not overhear the conversation with Iso’s middle school.
It was the principal. “Can you come in, Mrs. Benedict? We have a…situation.”
“Is Isobel hurt? Sick?” In her worry, she couldn’t help using her daughter’s full name.
“No, just something to discuss before it becomes a problem. And we know that Iso’s brother is in elementary school, so we thought it would be easier to have you come in now, rather than complicate your life with after-school detention, which means Iso would miss the bus.”
“Detention?”
“Only if it were warranted and it’s not.” A pause. “Yet.”
She walked back to the beige phone, tried to think what she could say. “Walter, I’m sorry, but this is urgent-”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “We’ll catch up later. We have a lot to talk about.”
As anxious as she was about Iso and the unspecified situation, Eliza couldn’t take Walter’s invitation to end the call. “Do we? Do we really have that much to discuss?”
“I think so,” Walter said. “And although I know you doubt this, it will be mutually beneficial, Elizabeth. Really, you have to believe that I have nothing but your best interest at heart. I’m doing this for you.”
She said good-bye, grabbed her purse and her keys, headed out to the garage, and then, almost as an afterthought, dashed back inside and threw up in the powder-room toilet.