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Eventually the path led back into the old neighborhood, her mother’s Brigadoon. It was unchanged, almost as if it had slumbered through the past two decades. Although they probably had cable now, Eliza thought, noting a small satellite attached to one roof. She walked among the stone houses, assigning each one its past, astonished at how much she remembered. The Sleazaks had lived there, old man Traber there. (She had been stu
The primary difference, Eliza deduced from the cars, was that the neighborhood’s residents were more prosperous now, or more inclined to flaunt their wealth. Her mother wouldn’t have cared for that. And she wouldn’t have liked the fact that a woman in a BMW slowed when she saw Eliza and Reba, regarding them with frank suspicion. She drove past them, turned around, and came past again, rolling down her window as she pulled abreast of them.
“Can I help you?” she asked Eliza. “Are you looking for someone?”
“Just taking a stroll down memory lane. I lived here, as a child.”
Eliza pointed to the house where she had grown up, the house she had never fully appreciated until her family decided to leave it. Could they have stayed? Were they wrong to cut themselves off from their pre-Walter life? Hers was not such an unusual name. Media exposure was not as intense then. She wasn’t Patricia Hearst. If she told this woman her maiden name-that quaint term, yet also literal in her case-the woman would probably evince no recognition. Who remembers names, anyway? The runaway bride, the girl killed in Aruba, the girl killed in Italy-they made headlines, yet Eliza couldn’t name one of them to save her life.
“Well, it’s almost impossible to buy here now,” the woman said. “Houses are sold before they even go on the market.”
“Even since the mortgage crisis?”
“Houses here never lose their value,” the woman said. Eliza felt like a blasphemer for suggesting that Roaring Springs could be touched by anything as commonplace as the world economy.
“What do they go for these days?”
Judging by the look on the BMW driver’s face, Eliza had progressed from blasphemer to merely classless. The woman lowered her voice:
“I heard that the Mitchells got almost $500,000.”
The number was at once laughably low, relative to what Peter had paid for their house in Bethesda, and shockingly high. Eliza’s parents had paid no more than $40,000 for the house in the 1970s and felt like robber barons when they sold it for $175,000 in 1986. We could have lived here, Eliza thought. The commute would have worked out. Iso and Albie would have attended her old schools, walked down Frederick Road to the Catonsville branch library, eaten gyros at the old Greek diner, although Maryland ’s gyros were thin pleasures when compared to the falafels they had known in London.
They could have walked along the Sucker Branch, too, wandered into the park. Did parents still allow children to do such things? No, probably not. But that detail did not derail Eliza’s fantasy. She had never blamed the location, the park. No, the problem with this spasm of nostalgia was that she was longing for her children to reclaim the territory she had ceded, Elizabethland, the realm of her pre-fifteen-year-old self. And if they wandered back into her past, she would have to tell them everything about the girl that she used to be. As far as they knew, there was no home between the Lerners’ early years in Baltimore City and the house they owned now. An entire chapter of the family’s life was missing, and Eliza’s own children had never noticed.
“That much,” she said to the woman in the BMW, widening her eyes in what she hoped would appear to be wistful awe. In some ways, it was. She and Reba turned around and headed out of the neighborhood. She had a feeling that the woman watched her go. That was okay. It was good to be vigilant. She wouldn’t deny anyone that right.
Passing Maude’s temporary grave again, she stopped and examined the bouquet. So sad, but then-what did the parents of the missing do? What territory did they mark, what did they visit? I’ll tell you things, Walter had promised. Things I’ve never told. But was it her obligation to listen?
Part V.HOLIDAY
Released 1983
Reached no. 16 on Billboard Hot 100
Spent 20 weeks on Billboard Hot 100
33
“A PRISON IS A CORPORATION, a world unto itself,” said Jefferson D. Blanding, Walter’s lawyer. “Entrenched, committed to its own rules and policies. They don’t like to make exceptions for anyone.”
“So I learned,” Peter said, “when I called. That’s why we’re here, in hopes that a two-prong approach might help.”
“Here” was Blanding’s office in Charlottesville, Virginia, near the bricked-in Main Street mall. It was a Friday, and the children had an in-service day, which meant that teachers reported but students did not. Eliza remembered these from her Maryland youth, but she certainly didn’t remember so many of them on the calendar. At any rate, the three-day holiday had given them a chance to drive here on the pretext of a visit to Monticello, a trip so drearily self-improving that Iso didn’t smell a rat. Albie was game, if a little vague, about who Thomas Jefferson was. All the more reason to visit Monticello.
“You assume that I’m in favor of this,” Blanding said. “I’m not sure I am.”
“It’s what Walter wants,” Eliza put in. She didn’t mind letting Peter be the more aggressive one in this conversation, but she liked to keep her hand in, not allow Blanding to think she was some sort of throwback who let her husband call the shots. Peter just had more experience in arguing with people.
“I serve my clients’ best interests. That doesn’t mean I blindly do their bidding. Walter has not always been the best steward of what is good for Walter.”
Eliza nodded. “He wanted to take the stand in his first trial,” she told Peter. “He had a different lawyer then and-well, he probably wouldn’t have helped himself, insisting that everything that happened was an accident. But that was a very long time ago. In our conversations, he does appear to have changed. He’s more thoughtful, more measured.”
“Agreed,” Blanding said. “Still, I’m skeptical.”
What could Eliza say to that? Walter’s current lawyer had good instincts. Of course, they hadn’t told him what Walter had promised in return for Eliza’s visit. Peter saw their decision as strategy, nothing more, but Eliza was also protecting herself against the perception that she was being played by Walter, that he was toying with her. She would not be surprised if Walter was luring her to the prison with a promise he had no intention of keeping. Oh, he would tell her something, reveal some nugget of information that fell short of full disclosure, then argue the technicality, claim she had misunderstood. Walter was like a ten-year-old boy that way. Eliza’s mother had long believed that Walter had experienced something particularly wounding in his youth and that he reverted to the boy-self when threatened or upset. There had been times, all those years ago, when Eliza had felt older than Walter, or at least more knowledgeable in the ways of the world. She remembered watching him grab a handful of the pastel mints in a bowl by the cash register at a diner, then telling him later, as gently as possible, that he should have used the plastic spoon. He had been humiliated, offended, and gone on the attack. “I’m clean,” he said. “I wash my hands after everything, which is more ’n you can say.”