“SO WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN up to?” Walter asked Eliza. It was a natural question. So natural it seemed even more unnatural.
She found herself tempted to tell him about their perfect Sunday. Of course, she would not. She would not speak of her children to Walter, ever, and, so far, he had the good sense not to inquire about them. Besides, it would have been insensitive to prattle on about her happiness, cruel and taunting. That, of course, was part of the appeal. It would have been a way of saying, indirectly: I am where I am, I have what I have, because I am a good person at heart. You are where you are because you’re bad. Just because I was dragged into your life for almost forty days doesn’t make me bad, too.
But the more pressing need was to have the conversation with someone, anyone. She had tried to engage Peter on the topic, but satisfactory husband that he was, he was a man and not one inclined to wax poetic about a day of cupcakes and movies. Vonnie had no patience for such conversations, and Eliza’s own mother often ended up talking about how difficult Vonnie was when Eliza spoke of her trials with Iso. As for friends-she had yet to make any. People were friendly, but they seemed to think she was reserved. Funny, because Eliza had been considered ebulliently capital A American during her London years, and now her countrymen-countrywomen?-seemed to find her cool, detached. Or perhaps she had yet to make friends because most of the parents she met were in Iso’s peer group, where Eliza was probably known as the mother of the subtle bully. Maybe, in retrospect, she should have overlooked Iso’s lie about the mall if only to form an alliance with that friendly-seeming mother.
And here was Walter, someone who knew her in a way that almost no one did. With the exception of her parents and Vonnie, there was no one left in her life who had ever called her Elizabeth. She remembered being sixteen, filling out the papers for her new school. “Why can’t I change my name?” she had asked her parents. “Legally?” her father asked. “I suppose it could be done.” “No, I mean, just change it, call myself something else.” “Bureaucracies are bureaucracies,” her mother said. “Your name has to match the name on your birth certificate or they won’t enroll you.” “But I could shorten it, say it’s something else, or use my middle name.” “Of course you can,” her mother said.
Her full name was Elizabeth Hortense Lerner, after her maternal grandmother. Elizabeth Hortense Babington had lived on Baltimore ’s North Side, walking distance from the Quaker meetinghouse she attended. But then-she walked everywhere and didn’t even own a car, relying on cabs for journeys that could not be made on foot. If she had been someone else’s grandmother, Elizabeth and Vonnie probably would have considered her queer, this thin, black-clad woman with long, woolly hair, out of time and out of place as she marched through the city’s streets. Elizabeth had always been proud to carry her name, Vonnie a little bitter that she had been named for their father’s mother, Yvonne Estelle. It was awful to cut down her grandmother’s elegant name, almost like cutting up a wedding dress for bedding. But it presented so many possibilities: Liz, Lizzie, Beth, Betsy, Bette, Bets…Eliza! It retained more of her real name than any other version yet sounded different enough that it was plausible no one would put it together. It was Uh-liz-a-beth Lerner who had been kidnapped a county over. E-Li-Za Lerner was the new girl.
So she had amputated “Beth” and never looked back.
“My life is very ordinary,” she told Walter. “It doesn’t produce much drama.”
“Same here,” he said, with a laugh. That was new. She didn’t remember Walter being able to laugh at himself. “But I guess, in your case, that’s a good thing. You’ve put together a very nice life for yourself.”
“That wasn’t what you said in your letter.”
“What do you mean?” Puzzled, on the boundary of hurt.
“You said you expected more of me.”
“No,” Walter countered. “I said it wasn’t what I envisioned for you.”
She couldn’t argue the words; she had shredded the letter. But she could contest the meaning. “But that was the implication. That you expected me to achieve in a career setting.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Walter said. “I mean, no offense”-she braced herself for the insult that inevitably followed those words-“but you didn’t even like kids. You were always pointing out how grubby this one was, or complaining about the ones who cried.”
“I was?” She had been fifteen. She didn’t remember thinking about children one way or another, but neither had she been thinking about a career. Her only goal was to be…grown-up. Which she thought meant being some version of Madonna, crashing with a friend in a funky apartment where the phone was covered with pink fuzz and seashells, and where there was enough money for carry-out pizza, if not much else. Later, in college, she was the type of student who truly dreaded the question “What’s your major?” not because it was such a cliché, but because she couldn’t answer it until junior year, when she began to study children’s literature with an eye toward becoming a librarian. Even then, she wasn’t choosing a career path. She had been drawn to children’s literature because it gave her an excuse to reread fairy tales, and her own young favorites, The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. But her intellect had been engaged by the work in a way it never had been before-and never was again. Although she started graduate school in Houston, she dropped out when she was pregnant with Iso.
“No one likes children when they are a child,” she said now.
“Do you remember going to Luray Caverns?”
“Yes.” The answer was actually more complicated. Her time with Walter-it existed in some odd space in her brain, which was neither memory nor not-memory. It was like a story she knew about someone else, a story told in great detail so many times that she could rattle it off. It was The Three Little Pigs, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Little Red Riding Hood, one of those grim Grimm fairy tales filled with horrible details-collapsing households, devoured animals, Red and Grandmama stepping out of the wolf’s sliced-open belly-made tolerable by their happy endings.
“I tried to leave you there that day.”
“You did not.”
“I thought about it. There was a group of schoolchildren, a few years younger than you, and they were loud and rowdy, and I thought, I’ll just back away and she’ll start talking to those kids and as soon as she’s distracted, I’ll run to the parking lot and drive away.”
She was weeping, as silently as possible, determined that he not know. “I don’t believe you.”
“That’s understandable. I don’t doubt it sounds self-serving. You know what I did-taking you-it was so stupid. If I had had a moment to think about it, I would have realized that you didn’t know anything, that you couldn’t hurt me. I thought, I have to kill her. She’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. But-look, whatever you think about me, whatever the law says about intent and first-degree, I never planned to kill anyone. It happened, yes, but I would be in this, like, other state. I wouldn’t even really remember doing it.”
“Walter-this is not a conversation I can have with you.”
“I’m sorry, I’m just trying to explain why I couldn’t hurt you.”
“Walter, you more than hurt me. You raped me. Which would have been awful enough, under any circumstances, but I not only had to endure the rape, I had to endure it while assuming that you would kill me afterward, as you did with Maude.”
“I never told you what I did.”
“I found you at a grave. I understood what had happened. And then there was Holly…”
He sighed, the misunderstood man. “I didn’t kill Holly. And the thing is, you know that. You’ve always known that, but people talked you out of it, told you it couldn’t be.”
“Stop.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to upset you, Elizabeth. But if we can’t speak honestly of what happened that night, to each other…”
“I didn’t see anything. I wasn’t there.”
A long pause. “I’ve clearly upset you, and that’s the last thing I want to do. Truly. Where were we? Talking about you, as a mother. As I said, I just didn’t think it interested you much. That’s all I meant, when I wrote you that time. I wasn’t denigrating what you do. I just never thought that was what you wanted.”
“You don’t know me, Walter.”
“Now that’s just hurtful, Elizabeth. Yes, I harmed you. There’s no doubt in my mind that I victimized you, and I only wish I had been called into account for those things. That I wasn’t is not my fault.” He had her there. She and her parents had asked that Walter not be prosecuted for rape, and he had accepted a plea bargain on the kidnapping charge, meaningless in the larger scheme of things, years attached to a life sentence that wasn’t to have lasted this long. “And I don’t know all of you, no, but, then-do you know me? Can you understand that I have changed, that I do understand the importance of making amends to those I’ve harmed?”
She felt she should apologize. Then she felt furious, being put in the position of thinking, even for a moment, that she owed Walter Bowman an apology.
“ Elizabeth -I wish I could say these things face-to-face, let you see how remorseful I really am. Clearly, I can’t persuade you over the phone. But if I looked into your eyes, I think you would see I am a different man.”
“I don’t think so…”
“If I could see you-maybe I could apologize for everything.”
“You did apologize. You apologized the last time we spoke. You apologized just moments ago.”
“No, I mean for everything. Maybe, if I saw you, I would talk about those things I never talk about.”
“Are you saying-?”
“I’m not going to be more explicit over a phone line. But if you come to see me-you might be surprised by what I would say.”
His comment about the phone line, the implication that it was insecure, jogged her memory. “Walter-did you call Sunday?”
“No.” Adamant, but not defensive. “You told me during which hours I could call, and I’ve followed that to the letter.” He almost seemed to expect praise.
“Someone did. Called and hung up, at least twice. Have you given this number to anyone else?”
“Well, it’s on my sheet. And Barbara knows, but I’ve told her not to use it, ever. But, no, I haven’t given it to anyone. I wouldn’t want anyone else to have it.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“You’ll visit?”
“No. I mean-I’ll talk about it-I mean, I’ll think about it.” Again, she didn’t want to admit to the intimacy of her marriage, how she reviewed all important decisions with Peter.
“Time is running out,” he said.
“I realize that.”
“And once I’m dead-well, let’s just say that some secrets are going to go with me. But maybe that’s what you’re counting on?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. A person gets a little ornery, at times, living as I do. I’m not a saint. And I’m offering you something pretty big, Elizabeth. But it’s only for you, no one else.”
“Walter-I need to go.”
“Right-there’s soccer practice on Wednesday.”
How do you know that? But she didn’t ask. He wanted her to ask, she was sure of that much. Still, he knew he had rattled her. The pause alone gave her away.
“Good-bye, Walter. We’ll talk soon.”
“In person, I hope. Eventually.”
“We’ll see.” But, again, she had paused, given herself away. He knew she was considering it.