Don’t Look Back

Peter held the letter at arm’s length, although he was not the least bit farsighted, not yet. He was actually a year younger than she was. He inspected the letter as if it were a painting, an abstract portrait of Walter Bowman, or one of those 3-D prints that had been popular for a time. Examined up close, it was words, in that furious, fastidious purple ink. At a distance, it melted into a lavender jumble, an impressionistic sketch of heather-colored hills.

Peter had arrived home at seven thirty that evening, early for him these days, but Eliza had waited until the children went upstairs to tell him about the letter. She might have been able to reference it covertly, using a familiar code: the summer I was fifteen. Over the years, this had been used to explain any number of things. Her need to leave a film that had taken an unexpected plot turn, her disinclination to wear her hair short, although the style suited her better than this not-long, not-short, not-anything haircut. Come to think of it, they hadn’t used the code for some time, not since Peter returned to the States earlier this year and began house hunting on weekends.

‘The Victorian that you like, it’s near – well, one county over – from where Point of Rocks is,’ he had told her via Skype. ‘It’s about an hour out of the city, but on the commuter line and it’s really pretty up there. Lots of people do it. But I thought—’

‘You thought it would bother me. Because of the summer I was fifteen.’ They were meeting each other’s eyes, yet not meeting each other’s eyes. She could never quite master that part of Skype.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not sure it would, but if you’re willing to commute, what about Roaring Springs, where I grew up?’

‘The trains on that line don’t run late enough, hon. And we’d have to have two cars, because I’d have to drive to the station.’

‘Oh.’ She still wasn’t sure why Point of Rocks was in contention but Roaring Springs was not. Wouldn’t he need to drive to the train station out there, too? ‘Well, I’d rather you had less of a commute, so if we can afford something closer in, something near a Metro line, that would be my choice.’

They could – barely – so they did, and that was that.

‘That stupid party,’ he said now, still studying the letter. ‘And you didn’t even want to go. It never occurred to me that we should worry about such things.’

‘Or me, to be fair. I didn’t want to go to the party because, well, I didn’t want to go to the party. I never thought – he never, all these years, made any overture to me, or even my parents or Vonnie, who are much easier to find, still being Lerners. Between taking your name and moving, first to Houston, then to London . . .’

Peter poured himself a glass of white wine and Eliza, as she sometimes did, took a sip. No, even as Peter upgraded the wines he drank, she still found the taste acidic, harsh. She preferred the Albie cocktail of fruit punch and seltzer.

‘So, he’s on death row, reading the party pages in Washing tonian—’

‘It’s almost funny. Almost.’

‘Are you going to write him back?’

They had been sitting on opposite ends of the sofa in the family room, her feet in his lap. Now she put his sweating wineglass on a coaster and curled up next to him, indifferent to how warm the room was, even with the house’s various window units droning away. She thought once again of the house in Roaring Springs, cool on the hottest summer nights with nothing more than window fans. Global warming? The fallacy of memory? Both?

‘I don’t know. And the very fact that I don’t know bothers me. I should be appalled, or angry. Which I am. But mainly, I just feel exposed. As if everyone knows now, as if tomorrow when I leave the house, people will look at me differently.’

Peter glanced at the letter, now lying on the old chest they used as a coffee table. ‘No reference to the kids.’

‘No. All he knows is that I have a prominent husband and a green dress. But it came to our address, Peter, from a Baltimore PO box. Someone did that for him. Someone else knows.’

‘A woman, I’m guessing. A woman with a purple pen. Walter’s sister?’

‘I doubt it. His family essentially cut all ties after his arrest. They didn’t even attend the trials.’

She pressed her face into his neck. He smelled of an aftershave that seemed particularly British to Eliza, crisp and citrusy. She wasn’t sure where it was made, only that Peter had started wearing it during their London years. Their growing-up years, as she thought of them, although two thirty-somethings with small children should have been much further along the road to being grown-ups. Peter’s jobs had always dictated their sense of themselves. When he was a reporter at the Houston Chronicle, they had felt young and bohemian, right down to the funky little house in Montrose. His jump to the Wall Street Journal had dovetailed with the arrival of the children, but they remained in Montrose, although minus the wild parties for which they had been known, parties famous for benign drunkenness and unexpected couplings. At least three marriages in their circle had started at one of their parties, and two had ended. It was as if Peter, with his serious, stuffy job at the Journal – not to mention a wife and children – needed to prove he was still a young man.

London changed that. They were certifiable grown-ups within months of arriving there, and Eliza wasn’t sure if that was because of Peter’s job, as bureau chief, or the city itself. Perhaps their newfound maturity was a result of the sheer distance from everything and everyone they had known. Now, back in the States, she felt old, on the verge of dowdy. Yet her own mother didn’t even have her first child until she was thirty-six and remained exuberantly youthful in her seventies. Maybe it was their old-fashioned roles – full-time mother, full-time breadwinner – that were weighing them down, making them middle-aged, out of touch.

‘I know this sounds odd, but I kind of forgot about Walter. That is, I forgot they were going to execute him. He never thought he would die that way.’

Peter shifted, redistributing her weight, moving her arm, which had left a damp stripe across the front of his shirt. ‘I don’t remember that in the letter.’

‘Then. The summer I was fifteen. I think he thought it would end in a slow-motion hail of bullets, like a movie. As opposed to a routine traffic stop at the Maryland line.’

Peter kissed the top of her head. His skin was warm, but then, it always was. Energy poured out of him, even when he was still.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I love you, too.’

‘You don’t know what love is.’

This was a joke, their own private call-and-response, so ingrained that Eliza couldn’t remember its origins, only that it always made her feel safe.

‘Gross.’ It was Iso, standing on the threshold. ‘Get a room.’ Eliza wondered how long she had been standing there, what she had heard and whether she could make sense of any of it. The summer I was fifteen, hail of bullets, routine traffic stop.

‘What do you need, baby?’ Eliza asked.

Iso made a face. Possibly because of the word baby, or possibly because the mere sound of Eliza’s voice irritated her. ‘I came down to remind you to wash my Spurs jersey, in case you forgot. I want to wear it tomorrow.’

‘I did. Wash it, that is. Not forget. But, Jesus, Iso, that jersey is made for damp England, not ninety-degree days in Montgomery County. Can’t you wear a T-shirt like the other kids?’

‘No. Did you wash my socks, too? I had to dig a pair out of the hamper this morning.’

‘Socks, too.’

‘You know,’ Peter put in, ‘if you can work an iPod and the television and the computer and TiVo, you could probably learn how to operate the washing machine, Isobel.’

Iso looked at him as if he were speaking Portuguese. Peter didn’t annoy her as much as Eliza, but she refused to acknowledge he had any power over her. She stalked off without a reply.

‘I don’t want them to know,’ Eliza said to Peter. ‘Not yet. That’s all I care about. Albie’s just gotten over those awful nightmares, and even Iso is more impressionable than she lets on.’

‘It’s your call,’ Peter said. ‘But there’s always the risk of someone else telling them. Especially as the execution draws closer.’

‘Who? Not you, not my parents. Not even Vonnie, volatile as she can be, would go against our wishes.’

Peter shrugged noncommittally, too polite to say that he considered his sister-in-law capable of just about any kind of bad behavior. It was funny how Peter and Vonnie, who had so much in common – similar intellects and interests, even some parallels in their career paths – remained oil-and-water after all these years. You say funny, Vonnie sneered in Eliza’s head, I say Freudian. He wanted a mommy, so he married one. Peter was more diplomatic about Vonnie: She’s a feisty one. You always know what’s on her mind.

Eliza pressed him for agreement: ‘No one else knows.’

‘Walter knows, Eliza. Walter knows, and he found you. Walter knows, and he might tell someone else. He has told someone else. The person who wrote the letter. Who clearly has our address, not that addresses are hard to find these days.’

‘Well, there’s no one – oh, shit. That asshole. That alleged journalist, Garrett. But I’m sure he’s moved on to other lurid tales, assuming he’s still alive. Is it a proper use of irony to say that it would be ironic if he died in some hideous, salacious crime?’

‘I don’t know if it would be irony, but it has a certain poetic justice.’

‘Walter never spoke to him, though. Not during the trial, and certainly not after that book. He probably disliked that book even more than I did.’

‘But his book is out there. Nothing really disappears anymore. Once, that kind of true-crime crap would be gone forever, gathering dust in a handful of secondhand bookstores, pulped by the publishers. Now, with online bookstores and eBay and POD technology, it’s a computer click away for anyone who remembers your original name. For all you know, he’s uploaded it to Kindle, sells it for ninety-nine cents a pop.’

Eliza wasn’t worried about computer clicks. But if she complained to the prison officials, that would be another set of people who knew definitively who she was and where she was. Why should she trust them? Better to ignore Walter, although she knew that Walter was most unpredictable when someone dared to ignore him. Only not where he was now, locked away. And usually not to her. The One Who Got Away, to borrow the hideous chapter heading from that nasty little book. As if she were a girl in a jazz ballad, a romantic fixation. The One Who Got Away. The one who was, as the book said repeatedly, ‘only raped, allegedly.’ Only. Allegedly.