Conviction

SIX

THE BAYVIEW DISTRICT IN LATE AFTERNOON ENVELOPED TERRI in the deceptive lassitude of danger awaiting night to bloom: cleaning women returning home to lock their doors; aimless youths playing pickup basketball or loitering on the streets; a squad car with a shattered side window cruising down Third Street past a clump of girls sharing a cigarette no doubt laced with crack; a burglar alarm jangling that no one seemed to notice. The bus in front of her belched exhaust.

Turning, Terri drove up a narrow street past what had been Flora Lewis's house, a peeling remnant with missing shutters. But she did not stop until she reached the neatly tended stucco home to which Thuy Sen had never returned.

* * *

The door was protected by a wrought-iron security gate, for Terri a disturbing echo of death row, made more unsettling by her hope that the Sens' desire for Rennell Price's death might have lessened through the years. She rang the bell.

After a moment she heard someone stirring inside, the rattling of a chain. The door cracked ajar. A small Asian woman regarded Terri through the bars with eyes more scared and stricken than the appearance of a female stranger would account for.

"Are you Chou Sen?" Terri asked.

The woman froze. When it came, her nod was barely perceptible, as though this admission stripped her of defenses. Her eyes drilled Terri's like a bird's, both penetrant and deflective.

"I'm Teresa Paget." With deep reluctance, she finished, "I represent Rennell Price."

The woman's face was so taut that the only sign of comprehension was a brief flutter of eyelids. "What you want?"

The words seemed barely to escape her throat. Briefly, Terri bowed her head in a gesture of respect. "I was hoping we could talk."

"About what?"

"The case." Terri paused. "Rennell's scheduled to be executed in forty-one days, Payton in twenty-five."

Crossing her arms, Chou Sen clasped both shoulders tightly. "They just tell us that. Years since they tell us anything. Now you."

Terri was unsurprised: over time, as memories faded and personnel changed, the District Attorney's solicitude for survivors too often lapsed into forgetfulness, no less unkind for its inadvertence. "I'm sorry to come here," Terri said. "But there'll be publicity, hearings where we try to stop the execution. I expect that people from the Attorney General's Office will ask you to attend."

The tight mask of Chou Sen's face began to crumble. "Fifteen years," she said.

Her voice was etched with incredulity. "I know," Terri answered. "I'm sorry for that, too."

"You don't know sorry." Each word held sibilant precision. "Sorry is a picture of a child who never gets older. Sorry is a father looking at his living daughter with questions she can never answer."

Terri felt the tremor of a long-ago psychic explosion, still reverberating, which this woman would feel in her bones until she died. Cautiously, she asked, "How is your daughter Kim doing now?"

Chou Sen stood straighter. "Leave Kim be," she hissed at Terri. Tears in her eyes, she softly shut the door.

* * *

Alone, Terri stood on the desolate spit of land where—in Eddie Fleet's telling—Thuy Sen had begun her journey to Candlestick Point.

The druidical piles of sand were gone. But enough remained—the stunted shrubs, the tallow factory with its stench of burning animal remnants. The neglected pier was now a few worn posts sticking from the water like rotted teeth, and the old, wrecked barge was a ghost of Terri's imaginings. Across the steady current of the channel, loading cranes cast fading shadows on black water.

Walking to the dirty sand along the channel, Terri tried to envision a large black man bearing the frail body of a child, waist-deep in the current. But she could not summon Rennell's face. Perhaps that was because of the darkness she imagined—she could not fault Fleet's description of the place itself, as chilling as the water which had borne Thuy Sen away. As chilling as Terri's own memories.

* * *

In the dark of her bedroom, Terri awoke.

Shirtless, Chris slept beside her, his face still softened from their lovemaking. But though long hours of work separated Terri from her meeting with Chou Sen and her visit to the water's edge, Terri could not stop thinking of Elena.

With a mother's intuition—or perhaps the incessant worry, she acknowledged, of a woman who believed, despite Chris's generous heart, that she alone truly loved this damaged child—Terri went to her teenage daughter's room.

The door was cracked open, the inside dark. Uncertain of her purpose, Terri opened the door, pausing at the threshold of Elena's room to hear the whisper of her breathing.

Her daughter spoke from darkness. "Why are you defending him?"

Terri felt gooseflesh on her skin. Words of answer sticking in her throat, she crossed the carpet to sit at the edge of her daughter's bed, then reached for Elena's hand.

Elena snatched it away. Jerking upright, she snapped on her bedside lamp and scrutinized her mother, steadily and fiercely, as Terri blinked at circles of yellow from the sudden flood of light.

"What do you know about him?" Terri asked.

"I went to your library," Elena answered without apology. "There were papers on your desk."

Terri felt her stomach clench. "And?"

"I read about the dead girl, and what he did to her." Elena's voice filled with fury. "How can you do this? How can you not care?"

Terri felt a moment of disbelief, the wish to turn back time, followed by a hopeless sense that no words could be adequate. "I do care," she tried. "More than you can ever know. But Rennell Price doesn't have anyone else."

"He could have," Elena snapped back. "Don't be such a fucking martyr. Like you're the only lawyer in America, and nothing's more important than you and him."

The words made Terri flinch. She gazed at her daughter, trying to remember the bright-eyed child with the riot of curls and elfin face, unsullied by the knowledge of violation, of solitude and secrecy and boundaries betrayed, resurrected, again and again, in weekly visits to a child therapist. Now Elena's face and body seemed an external map of her confusion—new breasts and a woman's roundness emerging from a gangling frame, a lineless face at war with burning eyes. She would not be a classic beauty, Terri guessed, but hers would become a face hard to forget.

"There are other lawyers," Terri answered as calmly as she could. "But I'm good at what I do."

"That's because you don't do anything else."

This indictment, so unfair in its starkness, resonated with a years-old accusation. How can I not have known? Terri asked herself yet again. That Richie and she had been separated when he started on his daughter—perhaps his twisted means of revenge for Christopher Paget—would never soothe her pain.

But that guilt was hers to bear. Softly, she said, "I know I work hard, Lainie. It takes too much time from us."

This acknowledgment, with its absence of excuses, seemed to still Elena's wrath. "But why for him?" her daughter asked, an undertone of plaintiveness beneath the vehemence.

"Because I don't think the State should kill people, no matter what they've done, or what we think they've done." Pausing, Terri sifted the arguments Elena might accept. "There's too big a risk of innocence. And some of my clients have suffered in ways it's hard for a lot of people to understand, and harder to get over." But not, I hope, too hard for you.

"I read about what he did," Elena repeated flatly. "What he made her do."

Terri looked into her adolescent daughter's brown eyes, too reminiscent of Elena's father's. Richie had betrayed Elena, and now, in her daughter's mind, Terri had betrayed her, too. Quietly, Terri amended, "What the jury believed he did."

Elena closed her eyes. "I hate him," she said with quiet vehemence. Only when she spoke again was Terri certain that Elena was referring to her own father. "I remember it all now," the girl continued. "I still dream about it. I am so damned glad he's dead."

So am I. Though Terri's stomach wrenched at the truth of this, she could not slow the current of her thoughts. We never have to see him. He'll never show up at your wedding with his little boy's smile, expecting the forgiveness to which he'd feel entitled. Demanding that Chris and I welcome him for your sake.

"Forgive me," Terri said at last. "I don't know what Rennell Price did. That's part of why I'm helping him." After pausing, she finished. "Sometimes it's hard to explain, even to myself. Like loving you more than I can tell you but still working like I do."

Eyes hooded, Elena turned her face on the pillow. Terri reached for her hand again. Elena said nothing. But after a time, her fingers curled around her mother's, perhaps from need, perhaps from a pain too deep to express.

Terri lay on the bed beside her, and after a time, Elena slowly drifted into sleep, perhaps to face her troubled dreams. Awake, Terri faced her memory of where her daughter's dreams had come from.

* * *

It was night, and Elena had been seven then. Terri had pulled the comforter beneath her daughter's chin, placed the book they had read on the child's bedside table. Turning out the light, she kissed Elena's cheek. The girl's skin felt soft, her hair and face smelled fresh and clean. At that moment, Terri could not imagine loving another person as much as this child, the vulnerable life Terri once had carried inside her.

On the table, the elephant night-light flickered, casting light and shadow across Elena's face. The light was dying, Terri realized; tomorrow she would replace it. "I love you, Elena."

"Can you stay with me, Mommy?" The little girl's arms reached out for her. "Just for a while, okay?"

Terri smiled at the child's bargaining. How many times, she wondered, had Elena said "just a minute" or "one more time"? And how often had Terri spent the time Elena needed?

"Okay," she said and lay down on the comforter.

"Get inside the covers with me, Mommy. Please."

Terri slid beneath the covers and turned on her side. Automatically, Elena turned and curled her legs and back against her mother, waiting for Terri to put her arms around her. Terri felt an almost primal familiarity: she and Elena called this "making spoons," just as Terri's mother had, lying next to Terri when she had been so young that she now remembered little else. Lying beside Elena, Terri remembered her own father's angry voice, could still feel the rage that had driven her mother to Terri's bed, until Terri herself had not known who was giving or receiving comfort.

"I love you," Terri told Elena.

Elena burrowed closer. "I love you, too, Mommy."

Gently, Terri stroked Elena's hair until the child's breathing became deep and even, the pulse of sleep.

She herself should not fall asleep, Terri realized. She might have her lifelong dream of Ramon Peralta and cry out in fear, making Elena's own repeated nightmare that much more frightening to her. It was the adult's job to seem strong and competent, Terri told herself. At least until the child is old enough, and secure enough, to accept the doubts beneath.

Next to her, Terri felt Elena stirring and she hoped that her daughter would not dream again.

* * *

In her dream, Elena Arias was in a pitch-black room.

The little girl was alone. Her night-light was out; Elena sat up in bed, stiff and fearful, eyes adjusting to the dark. Her mother was gone and could not help her.

Someone was banging on the door.

It was the black dog; Elena was certain of this, although she had never seen him. Her mouth was dry.

The dog had never come through the door. But tonight, Elena knew, he would.

The knocking grew louder.

Elena trembled. Tears ran down her face.

She already knew what the dog wanted from her.

Desperate, Elena turned to the window, looking for escape. But it was nailed shut; even in the dark, she remembered that Grandma Rosa feared the vagrants in Dolores Park.

The door began to splinter.

Elena tried to scream. But the cry caught in her throat; suddenly she could not breathe.

He was coming.

The door burst open.

The pale light in the hallway was from candles. Shivering and silent, Elena could hear and feel the dog's breath. But still she could not see him.

Elena hugged herself, and then his shadow rose above the bed.

It was more human than dog. For an instant, Elena prayed that it was her mother, and then his face came into the light.

Standing over the bed, her father smiled down at her.

Elena woke up screaming.

* * *

In the flicker of the night-light, Terri had seen her seven-year-old daughter's eyes as black holes of terror.

"Sweetheart," she cried out, and held Elena close.

The little girl's heart pounded against Terri's chest. "It's okay," Terri urged. "I'm here."

Terri could feel her own heart race. Elena's trembling arms held Terri like a vise. "It was just your nightmare," Terri said in a soothing voice. "Only the nightmare."

Elena could not seem to speak. Softly, Terri stroked the little girl's hair again, and then Elena began to cry.

Terri kissed her face. "What was it, Elena?"

The little girl kept on crying, softly, raggedly, pausing to breathe. After a time, her keening became half spasm, half hiccup, the residue of fear.

All at once, Elena was still.

Gently, Terri pulled away a little, cupping one hand at the side of Elena's face. Fearful, the child looked back at her.

"Tell me what it was," Terri said softly, "and maybe you won't feel alone."

The little girl watched her face, afraid to look away. Her mouth opened once, closed, and then opened again.

"Yes, sweetheart?"

Swallowing, Elena said softly, "Daddy was here."

"In your dream?"

Elena nodded. "I saw him."

Terri wondered what to say. "It was a dream, Elena. Daddy's dead now. He died in an accident."

Slowly, Elena shook her head, and then tears began again, ragged and shuddering.

"What happened?" Terri asked.

Elena clutched her mother's nightdress with both hands, voice suddenly higher. "I was scared, Mommy."

"Why?"

Elena's lips trembled. Half-choking, she whispered, "He was going to hurt the little girl."

Terri swallowed. In a calm voice, she asked, "How?"

Elena looked away. Her voice was small and shamed. "He was going to take her panties off."

"Who?"

Elena seemed to choke. And then she whispered, "Daddy."

Terri swallowed. "What else was Daddy going to do?"

"Touch her." The little girl's face twisted. "It was just their secret."

Terri stared at her. "Why is it a secret?"

"Daddy feels lonely. Sometimes he needs a girl." Elena looked into her mother's face. "To put his pee-pee in her mouth and feel better. Because you left him for Chris, and Daddy's all alone now."

Terri's sudden rage was almost blinding. "Did he do anything else to you?"

"That's all, Mommy." Elena's eyes shut, as if at what she saw on her mother's face. "But he let me light the candles for him. To make it special."

Terri pulled her close.

She did not know how long she held Elena. Terri asked her nothing more; through her grief and shock and impotent anger, she knew that she should not push her daughter. It was some time before Terri realized that she, too, was crying—silently, so that Elena could not hear her.

Perhaps, the reasoning part of Terri had felt with pitiless shame, she had always known this. Perhaps she had simply chosen not to believe it, with the same preconditioned numbness that had protected her since the day she discovered, as a child smaller than Elena, that to know her own father was to know a fear she could not endure. So that she, Ramon Peralta's daughter, was able blindly to live with a man who could do this to her own daughter.

"Elena Rosa," Terri had murmured at last. "How I wish you could have told me . . ."

But Elena had not, and now, six years later, the dream still overtook her, the price of sleep.