Страница 52 из 77
25.
“You should go to her.”
“What?” Cynthia Barnes snapped her head away from the television screen in the kitchen and fumbled without success for the power switch on the remote, as if she had been caught doing something illicit.
“You should go to her,” repeated Warren, standing there in bare feet, his golf shoes in his hand so they wouldn’t damage the stone floor. She still remembered their consternation when the contractor explained, after the fact, that stone could be damaged.
“I have nothing to say to her.” But Maveen Little had finally disappeared, and the face on the television was a child’s, beaming over an Esskay hot dog.
“You have something to share. Something in common.”
It was all she could do not to snap back: I will never have anything in common with Maveen Little.
“I’m worried she’s not going to engender a lot of sympathy,” Cynthia said, picking her words carefully.
“Because she’s unattractive and inarticulate?” Warren was being characteristically generous. Maveen Little was ugly, pale and overweight, with bad skin and a home permanent. “Oh, honey, people aren’t that bad.”
“They’re worse, and you know it.”
Warren had no answer for that, so he kissed her on the temple, more of a father’s kiss than a husband’s, and eeled out the door, his last look for the television, which he clearly yearned to turn off. When had their kisses migrated from mouth to cheek to temple? Before Rosalind’s birth or after? Cynthia couldn’t remember. She supposed a day would come when Warren would kiss the top of her head, or settle for a fond shoulder pat, and she still wouldn’t care. She loved him, possibly more than ever, but she just couldn’t work up the abandon of man-woman love, not while trying to maintain the vigilance required by mother-child love.
This mother’s grief was genuine, at least, the kind of grief that distorted face and voice. Not that anyone could really tell. People liked to say, after the fact, that they suspected the South Carolina woman was lying, that they were not surprised when her little boys turned up at the bottom of a lake. But Cynthia knew that people’s powers of observation were anything but acute.
“Dear Black Bitch,” a concerned citizen had written her seven years ago, divining her address from the numbers on the house, visible in some of the television newscasts, and the newspaper accounts of the crime, which helpfully identified the street. “Who do you think you are kidding? Everyone knows you killed your baby and are trying to get the Black People to Riot again by saying White Children did this. I will be on my roof with my rifle. Just Like 1968. You have already destroyed the city and now the county is full of Negroes, too. When will you be satisfied?”
The detached part of her mind, the part that had split away soon after Olivia was taken, marveled at the letter’s punctuation and capitalization. Just Like 1968. It was as if the writer thought these words constituted a sentence, or at least a complete thought. Perhaps they did. “Just Like 1968” referred to the riots after King was shot, when white people ran for the city-county line, and the old men of Little Italy really did take their guns to the rooftops, ready to fire if they saw black people crossing Pratt Street.
Maveen Little would get letters, too. The cruelty would be different, more about ignorance than race, although her obvious preference for black men, as evidenced by her café-au-lait child and dark-ski
Was Brittany Little’s disappearance co
But eventually, someone would put two and two together, and then the calls would start. Reporters would finally track Cynthia down, and this time she would be happy to tell them exactly how she felt. Angry, betrayed, saddened. She would play up the sad part, although it was the least of her feelings. She would find a subtle way to remind newspaper readers and television watchers that she was the one who had wanted to find a way to put these girls away for life, not a mere seven years. The public defender, the juvenile master, the girls’ parents-they had acted as if they were doing Cynthia a favor, fashioning the seven-year sentence from a trio of charges. Instead, they had left the entire city vulnerable.
Assuming the cases were co
But then, Cynthia could not accept the idea that Olivia’s death was coincidental, which everyone else, even Warren, had been so ready to believe. Cynthia had seen a rebuke, a conspiracy. “Why do they hate us so?” she had asked her father, all but crawling into his lap as if she were a child again.
The judge had patted her awkwardly, helpless as everyone else. She had never seen her father without the right answer before. But he was dumbfounded, incapable of explaining how two seemingly normal children could do what they had done. A lifetime of being a judge could not prepare a man for this. Anyone who spent time in the Clarence Mitchell Courthouse knew the city’s killers were in the end utterly fathomable. For one thing, they looked like what they were-hard, soulless, dead inside. And they had come honestly by their status, via childhoods so damaging that one wondered more at those who didn’t kill than those who did. They even had motives, however twisted. Judge Poole liked to say that what the drug dealers of Baltimore did wasn’t that different from what the corporations of America did up the road in Delaware, where the federal courts heard cases on takeovers and poison pills. “It’s just a little more direct,” he said of the city’s lethal transactions. “A little more final. But it’s still business.”
Yet even Judge Poole could not see the death of Olivia as anything other than the worst imaginable luck. Cynthia wondered if some well-meaning friend was holding Maveen Little’s hand and trying to comfort her in that inept fashion she could neither forget nor forgive. You couldn’t have done anything… You didn’t do anything… Don’t second-guess yourself… You must not blame yourself. In the days after Olivia’s body was found, nothing had made Cynthia feel worse than the people who had tried to make her feel better.