“And then what?” Vonnie asked.

“What do you mean?”

“He confesses to you. So what? Has it occurred to you that it won’t be considered valid if his lawyer isn’t present? That it might not settle anything, just stir things up? It’s occurred to Peter, I can tell you that much.”

So Peter and Vonnie had discussed this, outside her hearing.

“When did you and Peter hash this out?”

“Last night. He was up late, working. As was I. I went downstairs to scare up a glass of wine. You know, someone should tell Peter that just because wine is expensive and French, doesn’t mean it’s good.”

Oddly, that offhanded criticism softened Eliza’s anger. It, at least, was classic Vonnie, careless and thoughtless.

“Back when we were teenagers, you once said that everything would be about me from now on. Isn’t it possible that your own perceptions became reality? That you see what you look for?”

“Yes,” Vonnie said. “But isn’t it also possible that I’m right? That I’ve lived my entire life in my sister’s shadow?”

“Not in the world at large.”

“Fuck the world at large. It’s the family I care about.”

That was news. “Are you worried that what I’m doing will become public? That all the old stuff will be dredged up again?”

“No. I know that’s not what you want.”

“So why are we talking about this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we’re talking about it because it’s always there and yet we never have. Maybe it’s not a big dog but just the old clichéd elephant in the room. I’ve always understood that what happened to you happened to you. But it happened to the rest of us, too. To Mom and Dad. To me. We were there. Not Peter. Yet it’s Peter whom you trust, more than any of us. It’s Peter who shapes your life. You follow him wherever his job leads him, make the sacrifices necessary to make his career possible, even as you give up on your own.”

“Vonnie, this may be the hardest thing for you to understand, but I never considered dropping out of graduate school a sacrifice. If I hadn’t withdrawn, I’d probably still be there, trying to write a thesis on the children’s literature of the 1970s, and bored to tears. I learned a long time ago that I just didn’t have that much to say about Judy Blume’s Forever and why a boy would name his penis Ralph, given its associations to vomiting. Talk about semiotics.”

Vonnie laughed, and the air cleared. They continued to laugh throughout the day, old stories bubbling up to the surface. The Stuckey’s log (again) and their attempt to feign innocence as peanut-fouled water overflowed their bathroom at the charmingly quaint Martha Washington Inn. More memories followed throughout the day in Richmond, as they strolled through the fan district, ate dinner at the New York Times-anointed charcuterie restaurant. Vonnie remembered the terrible woman who had threatened to run them down at the beach, but also how Mr. Sleazak, their society painter neighbor back in Roaring Springs, had asked Inez to pose nude for a portrait, saying it would be “Just for me.” It was a most satisfactory day and one that had done the impossible-taken Eliza’s mind off tomorrow. She wouldn’t be surprised if the fight itself had been Vonnie’s attempt to distract her. She was a good sister, in her way, and her way was all she had.

But that evening, as Eliza tried to fall asleep in a strange bed, away from Peter, Iso, and Albie, she found herself reviewing the day’s events. Of all the funny stories she and Vonnie had shared, almost every one came from before. Was that because Vonnie had left for school? Or because the Lerner family lost its ability to be silly after Eliza came home? Strange, but she had never considered until now the totality of what Walter had taken, from all of them. From the day she came home, the Lerners had lived with a sense of remission, grateful yet skittish. They were well today, but that could end tomorrow. Of course that was true of every happy family. The difference was that the Lerners knew. Having been unlucky once, they could be unlucky again. There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.

42

“BACK AGAIN, MISS LAFORTUNY?” asked the young woman at the Hampton Inn’s front desk.

“You know me. I like to check on my boys.”

The clerk, a sweet-faced girl who should have taken better care of herself-everything about her appearance screamed poor nutrition and lack of exercise-smiled noncommittally. Like most people that Barbara met, she seemed torn between admiring her advocacy work and being horrified by it, with horror having a slight edge.

“How many you got now?”

“Just three, and they never let me see the one on death row. But I have the two others, and I am allowed to visit them from time to time. If they’re good. And I’m good.”

“I’m sure you’re always good, Miss Barbara,” the girl said. Not even two hundred miles from Baltimore and yet the manners were markedly different here.

“Oh, you’d be surprised. I can be a rabble-rouser.”

“I bet you can,” the girl said agreeably, going through those mysterious computer clicks that seem required of every transaction these days. Barbara wondered if teaching, too, now required moving through computer screens. Grading was probably done electronically, come to think of it. In her day, she had pressed hard, in ink, so her judgment would pass through multiple sheaves of paper. Cs. She had mainly given Cs, which had been slightly better than most of her students deserved. She’d never make it in today’s more lenient environment.

Barbara had started writing her two “boys” at Sussex after she began her relationship with Walter. She had sought them out specifically for their location, keen to have a reason to drive down here, although she realized that she would never be given visiting privileges with Walter. Still, it made her feel closer to him, just passing through the gates of Sussex. And the two men she had chosen did need her. Both were African-American, and there was no doubt in her mind that their sentences were harsher because of that. Bobby Ray, the one she would visit tomorrow, had been a drug addict who ended up killing two women in a robbery attempt that could only be described as pathetic. The women were addicts, too, and also African-American. If they had been white, he almost certainly would be on death row with Walter. But that was small consolation to Bobby Ray, who yearned to take his sober self into the world, to find out what it might have been like to live clear-headed. He didn’t go so far as to say it was unfair for his sober self to be locked up for what his drugged-up alter ego had done, but Barbara could tell it pulled at him. She believed he deserved a second chance, but she also had a hunch he would blow it, should that day ever come. Sobriety may have been forced on him in prison, but responsibility had not, not in any real way. Bobby Ray was not equipped for the real world, not that she would tell the parole board that, if the day ever came. She would file a brief in his favor and do everything she could to help him succeed.

She unpacked her small bag, although she would be in the room no more than fourteen hours, checking out on her way to the prison. She wondered if Eliza Benedict was in this very motel, or if she had opted to drive down tomorrow. Perhaps she would see her at the breakfast buffet in the morning. She called the front desk, asked to be connected to Eliza Benedict’s room. “No one by that name has checked in, Miss Barbara,” the desk clerk said. Lerner, then? “No, ma’am, and no one with a reservation under either name.”