Life Sentences. Laura Lippman
that her mother had loved and gloried in, and not because of the small material benefits that came her way. She adored turning on the radio and hearing Cassandra’s voice, basked in being in a store and having a neighbor comment on one of Cassandra’s television appearances. Once, in the Giant, Cassandra had seen how it worked: Her mother furrowed her brow at the mention of Cassandra’s most recent interview, as if it were impossible to keep track of her daughter’s media profile. Was it Today? Charlie Rose? That weird show on cable where everyone shouted?
You must be very proud of her, the neighbor persisted.
And Lennie Fallows—it had never occurred to her to drop the surname of the man she detested—said with steely joy, ‘I was always proud of her.’ In her mother’s coded lexicon, this was the rough equivalent of Go fuck yourself.
Cassandra opened the refrigerator to browse its contents, a daughter’s prerogative. It was huge, the kind of double-wide Sub-Zero one might find in a small restaurant. The kitchen had been Lennie’s latest project, and superficially, it looked great. But Cassandra knew where to find the corners her mother never stopped cutting, a legacy of the lean years that had left her so fearful. The refrigerator and the stove would be scratch-and-dent specials, with tiny flaws that prevented them from being sold at full list. The new porcelain sink would have been purchased at Lennie’s ‘professional’ discount—and, most likely, installed by her, along with the faucet and garbage disposal. She had kept the palette relatively plain. ‘Better for resale,’ she said, as if she had any intention of putting the house on the market. Like Penelope stalling her suitors, Lennie continually undid her own work. By Cassandra’s reckoning, this was the kitchen’s third renovation. Lennie was desperate not to leave the house, which had been big for a family of three, almost ruinous for a single mother and daughter, simply ridiculous for a woman now in her seventies.
But this conversation was already too fraught to take on the subject of the house, which her mother had come to love and defend against all comers. Instead, Cassandra asked her mother, ‘Do you remember Calliope?’
‘An organ? You mean at the Presbyterian church? And I think it’s pronounced differently, dear.’ Her father would have made the correction first.
‘No, in my class. Callie Jenkins. At Dickey Hill, starting in fourth grade. She’s in one of the photographs. She wore her hair in three fat braids, with those little pompon things on the ends.’
Cassandra bunched up a fistful of her own hair to jog her mother’s memory.
‘Three—oh, she must have been black.’
‘Mother.’
‘What? There’s nothing bigoted in saying that. Unless you’re me, I guess. I’m not allowed to notice the color of anyone’s skin.’
Cassandra had no desire to lecture her mother. Besides, she had a point.
‘At any rate, I was watching CNN and there was a story about this case in New Orleans—a woman’s child is missing and she took the Fifth, refused to say where the child is. Someone said it was similar to a case here years ago, involving Calliope Jenkins. It has to be the same person, don’t you think? The age is about right, and how many Calliope Jenkinses could there be in Baltimore?’
‘More than you might think.’
Cassandra couldn’t tell if her mother was being literal or trying to make some larger point about infanticide or her hometown. ‘Don’t you think that would make a good book?’
Her mother pondered. That was the precise word—she puckered her forehead and considered the question at hand as if she were Cassandra’s literary agent or editor, as if Cassandra could not go forward without her mother’s blessing.
‘True crime? That would be different for you.’
‘Not exactly true crime. I’d weave the story of what happened to Callie as an adult with our lives as children, our time in school together. Remember, she was one of the few girls who went to junior high with me.’
‘One of the few black girls,’ her mother said with a look that dared Cassandra to correct her for referencing Callie’s race.
‘Well, yes. And race is a small part of the story, I guess. But it’s really Callie’s story. If I can find her.’
‘Even if you do find her, can she speak to you? I remember the case—’
‘You do?’
‘Anyone who lived here at the time would remember.’ Was there an implicit rebuke in her mother’s words, a reminder that Cassandra had disappointed her by moving away? ‘I didn’t recognize her name, but I remember when it happened. The whole point was that she wouldn’t talk. But if she did kill her child, she can still be charged. If she didn’t, why didn’t she cooperate all those years ago?’
Cassandra was well aware of this particular problem; her editor had raised it first. They had agreed the book wouldn’t be dependent on a confession, or even answering all the questions, but the reader would need to believe that Cassandra had reached some kind of conclusion about her old school friend. Old school friend was the editor’s term, and while Cassandra had initially tried to correct the impression, using classmate and acquaintance, she soon gave up. What was a ‘friend’, after all, when you were ten or eleven? They had played together at school, gone to birthday parties together.
‘I can’t plan this book in advance. That’s what makes it exciting. With the first two books, they were already constructed, in a sense. I had lived them, I just didn’t know how I would write them. And they were very solitary enterprises. Solipsistic, even. But this time—I’m going to interview Callie, once I find her, but also other girls from the class. Tisha, Donna, Fatima. And Callie’s lawyer, I guess, and the police detective who investigated her…heavens, I’m not sure three months here will be enough.’
‘And, of course,’ her mother said, staring into her tea, ‘you’ll be here for all the hoo-haw surrounding your father.’
‘One event in a week of events,’ Cassandra said. ‘A simple onstage interview, and I’m doing it only because it will raise money for the Gordon School’s library building fund. We do owe the school a great debt. Besides, it will be interesting, interviewing Daddy in front of a captive audience. He’s the king of digressions.’
‘Yes,’ her mother said. ‘Your father loved digressing.’
‘It’s not a big deal,’ Cassandra said. She wished, as she often did, that they were a family comfortable with casual touches, that she could place her hand over her mother’s now.
‘I know,’ her mother said. ‘I just hate the way he…romanticizes what he did, to the point where he won’t even talk about it. Or her.’
Cassandra respected her mother for holding on to that ‘Or her’ for all these years, refusing to say Annie’s name unless forced. It might not be particularly healthy, but it was impressive. Cassandra shared her mother’s talent for grudges—it was, she liked to say in speeches, a useful quality for the memoirist, the ability to remember every slight, no matter how small. They called it their Hungarian streak, a reference to her mother’s mother, who had gone thirty years without speaking to her son and lived just long enough to see her granddaughter immortalize this fact in her first book. Nonnie hadn’t minded, not in the least. It had given her a little bit of cachet in the retirement center where she lived, largely indifferent to her neighbors. On what would prove to be Cassandra’s last visit with her, Nonnie had insisted on going to the dining hall, parading her successful granddaughter past the other residents: ‘My granddaughter, she’s a writer, a real one, a bestseller.’ Cassandra wasn’t sure if her grandmother had even read the book in which she took such pride; the volumes—only one book then, but Nonnie had purchased the hardcover and paperback—stood on a table in her apartment. They were, in fact, the only books in the apartment, perhaps the only books her grandmother had ever owned. Nonnie had been mystified, but proud, when her daughter had married