Wilde Lake

INTEMPERANCE

On a snowy evening just before Valentine’s Day 1978-I was sitting at the coffee table, dutifully addressing twenty-seven cards to my classmates, knowing I would return home with only four or five cards from the other kids like me, kids whose parents insisted on an all-or-nothing policy-my father arrived home at five o’clock. That was unusual enough. We were lucky to see him at six thirty most evenings, and dinner was often as late as seven. (Teensy grumbled about this a lot, under her breath. “Lincoln freed the slaves, I thought.”) Far stranger, our father walked straight to the little butler’s bar in our living room and poured himself a half glass of whiskey. He then asked me to leave the living room, as he needed to be on the phone. I didn’t dare remind him he had a phone in his room.

I asked Teensy if she knew what was going on.

“Mind your own business,” she said, as she improvised in the kitchen, trying to make a dinner that would lift my father’s spirits, but it was Thursday and she shopped on Friday. AJ was out, as always. He had basketball practice most afternoons, then rehearsals-school plays, choir, madrigals-in the evenings. He had tried to persuade our father that he should be given a car for his sixteenth birthday in April, but our father was firm that he could not afford such an extravagance, even with the Straight-A-Student discount offered by auto insurers at the time. AJ had to count on Bash or Ariel, who had early winter birthdays and more generous parents. Bash had a very sharp, bright red Jeep because his family lived so far out. AJ hitchhiked, too, sometimes, another one of his secrets that I banked. I think he hitchhiked home that very night. His shoes squeaked and there were drops of water clinging to his hair when he finally arrived home.

AJ didn’t ask our father any questions about his taciturn gloominess. Instead, he did all he could to distract him from his funk, telling stories about practice-Bash had been trying to impress a cheerleader and ran straight into a wall, Davey shot free throws in the way girls are taught, dropping the ball between his legs and arcing it underhand. He had made five baskets in a row that way, AJ said, on a bet. Stories like that, harmless and aimless.

Our father smiled absently, picked at the pork chops that Teensy had tried to defrost in cool water, not entirely successfully. (I’m not sure if most people had microwaves at the time, but I know we didn’t. Didn’t and still don’t. My father loathes them. It’s a principle with him, not having a microwave. He says time is not meant to be manipulated that way.) At one point, he almost poured ketchup on his salad, but my warning came just in time. It was odd enough that we even had bottled dressing on the table. On a typical night, my father’s salads were an evening ritual, that kind of eccentric family thing that makes a kid proud and embarrassed at the same time. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and dressed the salad at the table in a battered wooden bowl, pouring oil and vinegar, squeezing a lemon wedge. The bowl and the glass cruets were his only family heirlooms, along with the planter’s desk in his bedroom. When his grandfather died in the early 1970s, my father had driven down to Virginia and returned with these items, nothing more. He called his salad bowl and cruets his “lares and penates.” For years, I thought that was Latin for oil and vinegar.

“What’s up?” I asked AJ in a hoarse whisper as we cleaned up. Teensy always left as soon as dinner was on the table, and it fell to us to tidy the kitchen each night. True, this was little more than rinsing things for the dishwasher and putting away leftovers. But given AJ’s busy life, I did this alone more often than not and I bridled at the unfairness of it all. There was so much unfairness in life, especially when one was the youngest, and a girl. I planned to change that one day. I was going to be an astronaut or a president, maybe an astronaut and then the president. And here we are, more than thirty-five years later, and we have plenty of female astronauts and we’re within spitting distance of a female president. But you know what I consider true progress? The fact that we had a female astronaut disturbed enough to make that famous cross-country trip in adult diapers, intent on killing a romantic rival. When your kind is allowed to be mediocre or crazy-that’s true equality.

“There’s been an appeal,” AJ said. “That man who killed Sheila Compson. He’s filed an appeal.”

“What do you mean?”

“He says the state withheld information about a key witness, someone who can confirm that he dropped her off alive, just as he testified, and that her shoes were in a rucksack. Dad said something-intemperate to a television reporter.”

“Something cold?”

“Not temperature. Intemperate.” AJ, still doing PSAT prep, wedged a lot of big words into his sentences for practice. “He lost his temper. And you know he never gets angry, he prides himself on that. But the TV reporters got to him before he heard and he was caught off guard.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, he said”-AJ looked around, lowered his voice anyway-“he said ‘That son of a bitch is lucky he’s not on death row.’”

I know, it sounds quaint now. Son of a bitch. Small children probably say it for laughs on cable channels. But it mattered at the time. So many things mattered that don’t anymore. Remember, Ed Muskie’s presidential hopes had been torpedoed by tears only a few years earlier. “Son of a bitch” at least had the advantage of being masculine, but it was not something a future attorney general or congressman or senator should say. Intemperate, as AJ characterized it. Our father had been intemperate.

There was an editorial in the Beacon, although it didn’t really seem to say much in the end, other than to appeal to all elected officials to uphold the standards for public decency. The real controversy was that our father had been steadfastly against the death penalty, which had only recently come back in to use in Maryland after a series of constitutional challenges. He said he would, of course, uphold the laws of the state, but he was personally opposed to capital punishment. Now here he was, seemingly contradicting himself, wishing a man dead because he had dared to appeal. An unfair interpretation of events, but his political rival was under no obligation to be fair. For the first time in his public life, my father’s gracious persona had cracked and he was not beloved.

And he had not, as many realized, addressed the central argument of the man’s appeal, which was that there was a witness who would testify that she saw Sheila Compson get out of the man’s car near the highway, just as he had said all along. This was a serious charge. Detectives maintained that they had interviewed the witness and found her not credible. My father said he didn’t even know about her.

And the witness was unreliable. She told a different story from the one she had told three years ago. Back then, she claimed she saw Sheila at the concert, did drugs with her in the bathroom. Now she was trying to say that she was at the rest area where the killer dropped her off, that they hitched the rest of the way together and Sheila Compson definitely had a rucksack. She said she lied before because she did not want her own parents to know that she hitched to the concert. Still, her story should have been made available under Brady, the Maryland precedent for prosecutors withholding evidence.

But her story fell apart now, as it had fallen apart then. What about those other drivers who picked up Sheila Compson? They were adamant that she had no rucksack. And the new girl took detectives to the wrong rest area when asked to retrace her steps. She couldn’t even tell them what songs were played that night at the concert. The state’s attorney’s office is not obligated to make false statements part of the discovery process. The guilty man remained in prison for life, and my father, true to his principles, never pursued the death penalty in any capital case, even when that would have been the popular thing to do. He was thrilled when Maryland moved toward a de facto suspension of the death penalty, then vacated it entirely in May 2013. My father was a Quaker, in his own way, a religion he had embraced after leaving military service. But his interest in Quakerism extended only to the occasional-the very, very, very occasional-meeting at the Quaker society in North Baltimore. I don’t think he ever attended after the move to Columbia. He left AJ and me to make our own religious decisions, which is to say, we had no religion at all. And I was fine with that, and my children are fine with that now that I’ve abandoned Gabe’s plan to have them bar and bat mitzvahed. When Gabe died, I discovered that religion offered me no comfort, nor was it much use to the twins, so young at the time. When I started researching private schools in Howard County, I didn’t even realize that the one I chose had Quaker origins, but it pleased me when that was pointed out at my first visit.

It also was pointed out to me that the school would allow me to have my children board there, when they reached the upper school. I worried that I had somehow transmitted a sense of desperation, of being over my head in those early years of widowhood and authentic single parenting. Don’t worry, we’ll take those kids off your hands when they’re teenagers. My father went to boarding school, but he never would have sent us. And I would never send my children away. When they were younger, only four or five, Justin asked if I would go to college with them. I said yes, and meant it. But I won’t hold them to that promise, much as I would like to.

The oddest thing to me, about my job, this vocation to which I gave my life, is the ritual oath. Of course, they don’t make people put their hands on Bibles anymore, but they might as well, given that more than 80 percent of U.S. citizens identify as Christians. (These are the kind of stats you know when you’re in politics.) But I could put my hand on any book and tell you a thousand lies. So you will have to trust me when I tell you my story is true. I guess I could swear on my children’s lives-but that strikes me as distasteful. Sometimes, I think we hold the truth in too high an esteem. The truth is a tool, like a kitchen knife. You can use it for its purpose or you can use it-No, that’s not quite right. The truth is inert. It has no intrinsic power. Lies have all the power. Would you lie to save your child’s life? I would, in a heartbeat, no matter what object I was touching. Besides, what is the whole truth and nothing but the truth? The truth is not a finite commodity that can be contained within identifiable borders. The truth is messy, riotous, overrunning everything. You can never know the whole truth of anything.

And if you could, you would wish you didn’t.

JANUARY 17

“So Fred is going to defend the guy and invoke Hicks? What could he be thinking?”

AJ and Lu are at Petit Louis at the Lake, not far from where the beloved Magic Pan of their youth once sat. AJ probably would prefer to be at the Magic Pan right now, if it still existed. Her brother has come to hate restaurants with cloth napkins and wine lists. He also loathes the locavore places that would seem to embody the philosophy he espouses. Instead, he grumbles that they make food precious, another designer brand, only one to which poor people don’t aspire. He’s also not that keen on food trucks, for reasons that Lu can’t be bothered to remember. It’s hard keeping track of AJ’s ethics.

But when AJ asked to take Lu to lunch to discuss “something confidential,” she couldn’t resist picking a restaurant she knew would annoy him. He’s taking her away from her Saturday afternoon with the twins, after all, the one carefree day on a weekly calendar that looks more like a battle plan, with babysitters ferrying Justin here, Penelope there.

She can’t recall the last time her brother asked to be alone with her. Maybe never? Over the years, they were always good about staying in touch, no matter the distance between them. Their father implemented a weekly call during AJ’s college years, then encouraged Lu to choose Bryn Mawr because AJ had embarked on an MBA at Wharton. Nine years of education-four at Yale, three at Columbia, two at Wharton-and now he’s basically the world’s coolest, richest farmer. At least he’s wearing a shirt with a collar to their lunch. Not exactly Brooks Brothers-it’s a little sheer, with some hippy-dippy print-but it’s fine. For Columbia, on a Saturday afternoon. She wonders if her brother even owns ties anymore. Probably one tie, one suit, and one shirt, suitable for funerals and weddings. They have reached that age when the funerals begin to creep into people’s lives. The parents of friends, mostly, but older work colleagues and even the occasional peer.

Then again, AJ and Lu had a big head start on death, first with their mother, then Noel. Almost thirty years after the fact, she still can’t believe he’s gone. For all the changes her father has made at the house, the kitchen window still faces the lilac bushes where they first saw Noel, spying on them. At night, when the window throws her own reflection back at her, she sometimes thinks it’s his eyes she’s seeing.

As for death-there’s Gabe, too, of course. But that’s more like a nightmare from which she can never awaken. “Mrs. Swartz?” “Ms. Brant.” “But you are married to Gabriel Swartz?” “Yes.” Irritable-it was dinnertime, she had twin toddlers, it had been a long day. “He was found in his hotel room, not breathing.”

To which she asked what seemed like the most logical question in the world. “But he’s started again, right? Breathing?”

He had probably died almost twelve hours earlier. He missed a meeting, but those things happen, and no one had tried anything but his cell, which had gone unanswered. He was discovered by a housekeeper who assumed the room was empty.

Lu says to her brother: “I’m sure Fred’s thinking he has a huge advantage-one case, no administrative duties-and that I can’t possibly keep up. But I will. I’m a better lawyer than he is. I proved that time and again when I was his deputy.”

She glances out at the lake. It is one of those January days that feels like a hangover. The holidays are past, her birthday is past, even her new job is losing its shiny-new luster despite the challenge of the Drysdale case. The Ravens, as of last weekend, are no longer in contention for the Super Bowl, not that she really cares. She often thinks that’s why the Super Bowl was invented-to give people a reason to party into February. The beer companies have been pretty effective at giving people reasons to drink at least once a month-Super Bowl, Mardi Gras, Cinco de Mayo, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Halloween. She’s surprised they haven’t figured out a way to make MLK’s birthday a bacchanal. Civil rights Jell-O shots for all! This Bud’s for you, Dr. King. She remembers when Penelope, age four, came home from school and began telling her there was a man, a very good man, who died too young and he would cry if he saw what life was like today.

For a moment, Lu thought Penelope was talking about Gabe.

“Maybe you should plead this one out, Lu. Take the air out of his tires.”

“No.”

“And here comes the famous Lu Brant chin action.”

It is family lore that Lu, when stubborn, sets her jaw and sticks out her chin. “Bridle” is the correct term. It refers to a horse in bridle, the way the jaw extends when the bit is forced into the mouth. She has never heard the term used to refer to a man. Bridle. Bridal.

Their food comes and she is delighted that AJ has chosen steak frites-it seems a victory over Lauranne-but mystified why he has yet to bring up the confidential matter that this lunch was supposed to feature. They’ve both had a glass of wine and a leisurely appetizer course-an eggplant Napoleon for Lu, a frisée salad with lardons for AJ. She wonders if Lauranne will be able to smell the meat on him when he comes home, then wonders if AJ cares.

He dips a french fry in mayonnaise, sighs with pleasure. “These are perfect.”

“Five Guys are almost as good. That’s where I usually go when I need a fix.”

“There’s not one near me.”

“There’s one in the Harbor and then one over in that neighborhood they’re now calling Brewers Hill. Also, just fifteen minutes down the parkway at Arundel Mills.”

“Sounds like you’ve made quite a study of this. You need better vices, Lu.”

She sips her wine, not at all flustered by the fleeting mental vision of her true vice, Bash. Compartmentalization is not a problem for Lu. Bash has a talent for it, too, despite that worrisome appearance at the open house over Christmas. If her fifty-three-year-old brother knew-well, what would he do? Take a swing at his old friend? AJ may be progressive in his politics, his ideas about climate change, and how to feed the planet, but when it comes to his sister, he’s stuck in retro big-brother mode. How silly.

“How much longer are you going to stall?” she asks him now.

“Stall?”

“I thought you had something to discuss with me. Are you concerned about Dad?” The second she says that, she realizes that she is a little concerned. A line from Wordsworth comes to her: Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. So much getting. So much spending. There’s a hint of mania to their father these past few years, and now she wonders if that means there was a depressive phase she missed. No one expects a man widowered at a young age to be the life of the party, but Lu has begun to suspect her father’s quiet, contained ways were part of something larger, sadder still.

“Should I be? He seems pretty hale. And sharp as ever. If anything, I’m surprised by how little he changes, and I don’t see him day in, day out as you do, so I would be more prone to notice. No, I wanted to talk to you about, um, kids.”

“Kids?”

“Having them.”

“Well, it all begins when two people love each other very much-”

“No, seriously, Lu. I want to talk to you about surrogacy.”

“Oh.” She looks into her lap, startled by how personal this feels.

Penelope and Justin were born by gestational surrogacy, a concept that they still don’t quite grasp, although she tried to explain it to them on their last birthday. They are bewildered by the fact that the dead parent is the one to whom they are genetically connected, while the living one has no blood relation to them. They have met the woman who carried them, but have little information about the eggs that made them, which is because Lu has almost no information about those purchased ova. A doctor slapped some photos on a desk, accompanied by heartfelt, handwritten essays from women who were willing to “donate” their eggs. “I’ve chosen ones that look like you,” he said. “Why?” she asked. Lu tried not to be sentimental or defensive about her infertility. At the age of twenty-nine, she had to have a hysterectomy for fibroids. It was unfortunate, but it was what it was. What did the doctor think she was going to do, walk around for nine months with a series of larger and larger pillows under her lawyer clothes? She ignored the essays and chose the tallest one.

“Lauranne’s still pretty young,” Lu says.

“I’m not.”

“So what?”

“You’ve seen the articles, I’m sure. The suggestion that older sperm might be connected to all sorts of things, like autism.”

“If it’s sperm you’re worried about, you don’t need a surrogate. A sperm bank will do nicely. And be a lot cheaper.”

AJ can no longer meet her gaze. “Lauranne’s willing to be a mother. But she’s terrified of carrying a child.” His words start tumbling out, as if he can hear Lu’s unvoiced skepticism, her immediate inference that Lauranne doesn’t want to sacrifice her body to pregnancy. “She’s genuinely phobic about this. She knows herself well and while she understands that this should be the most natural thing in the world, she believes she’ll have problems. Being pregnant. That it will feel as if something alien has taken over her body. Especially if we’re not using my sperm. But we might be able to use her eggs.”

“Maybe. But the odds of success will be much, much higher with donor eggs. So you’ll have donor eggs and donor sperm and a uterus on loan.”

“You had two of the three.”

“I’m not criticizing. Just thinking out loud. Seriously, AJ, if she doesn’t want to be pregnant, are you sure she wants to be a mother? Who initiated this?”

“It was mutual.”

“Like, one morning, you just both looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s have a kid!’ And then Lauranne says, ‘Only I don’t want to be pregnant!’ And you say, ‘And my sperm’s too old!’ What about adoption?”

“Foreign adoption has gotten much more difficult than most people realize. And with the countries that are still open, I have ethical concerns. I don’t want to be accused of buying a baby. Meanwhile, here, most public agencies won’t accept us because of my age. Private adoption-I’m sorry, but that’s just a way for people with money to leverage their power.”

“You know people will say the same thing about surrogacy. It’s getting more and more controversial. There are very real health risks for both the surrogates and the donors. There are people lobbying to ban it outright.”

“Says the woman with eight-year-old twins born by surrogacy.”

It’s as if AJ wants her to say the sanctimonious thing, to remind him of the hysterectomy. About which she does carry some resentment. At the time, her father and brother seemed cavalier in a way that she can’t imagine her mother would have been. Lu had no choice-with her fibroids, she would never be able to get pregnant-but it was a difficult thing to endure early in her marriage.

Then again, few fathers or brothers would want to have long heart-to-hearts about a woman’s sexual organs. Her father didn’t even tell her the facts of life, delegating Teensy to do it when Lu was eleven and had already figured most of it out.

“I’m sorry. I’m being lawyerly, outlining all the positions. It’s not often I get to advise you. I want you to know what you’re getting into. People can be cruel about it. And when they’re not cruel, they’re ignorant, which is worse. Are those your kids? Do they look like their father because they sure don’t look like you?”

“Did you ever regret having kids?”

“No. Never. But I had moments, when they were very young, when I regretted the fact that my career had to take a hit. Maternity leave was not good for me. I stalled out in the city state’s attorney’s office. Then Fred moved to Howard County and became the boss, so I got a second chance. Even with money and all the child care I could hire, it took a toll. That won’t be a problem for you, though.”

“Lu, I’m going to be a very hands-on father.”

“Uh-huh.” Maybe he will be, this ridiculously rich man who has never known a single failure in his life, who can’t fail despite himself. Yes, maybe this man, raised in a household in which his widowered father did not know how to do a single domestic task, would be superdad. Lu owes him the benefit of the doubt. She guesses.

“You’ll be tired. You can’t believe how tired you’ll be. And you’ll have to fight so hard for those bits of alone time that aren’t absolutely essential. Imagine being in the house on a fine spring night. The children are asleep. Finally. The air is soft and it carries the scent of whatever those blooming trees are. And Five Guys is still open at the mall! But you can’t go anywhere. Oh, wait-that’s my life. Without a partner. You’ll have Lauranne.”

“You have Dad, Lu.”

“Would you leave Dad in charge of young children?”

“He’s fine, I’m telling you. Really, have you seen any evidence that his memory or intellect is diminished?”

She thinks about this. “No. But he’s not-a caretaker. Never was. He was a loving father, AJ. He did his best by us. I wouldn’t trade him for anyone. But did he ever throw a ball with you? Did he even bother to learn how to brush my hair? No, he just took me to the barbershop until I was almost nine.” At which point, she grew out her hair and wears it long to this day, despite the advice in women’s magazines that the style is aging. Her hair, loose, reaches almost to the small of her back. But it is seldom down in public. She wears it in a French knot, which helps make her look more authoritative. The first thing Bash does when she comes into their room is yank the pins from her hair.

“You know, maybe you should go on match.com. Or one of those places.” It’s as if AJ is misreading her mind.

“No. Thank. You. I don’t have anything leftover to give. When the kids go off to college, I’ll start stalking old men.”

“When your kids go off to college, you’ll be two years older than I am right now.”

“Like I said-old men.” She smiles at him, pats his hand. They are not touchers. The Brants do not hug upon coming and going. So this is a big gesture on her part. “If you do this, you’ll be a great dad. Costs an arm and a leg, but you can afford it.”

“Yeah, I can buy anything I want.”

The self-pity on you, she thinks, but doesn’t say.

TO EACH HIS SANCHO PANZA

In the spring of 1978, the all-county musical was Man of La Mancha. That is, the show was theoretically open to students throughout the county, yet the leads were taken by Davey, AJ, and Ariel, with Noel snagging one of the key supporting roles. There was some grumbling, but the director had no link to Wilde Lake High School, so the disgruntled parents had no reason to complain. If anyone deserved to be unhappy, it was Noel, who lost the role of Sancho Panza to AJ, who never played the clown. But the director glimpsed an untapped comedic talent in AJ’s earnestness and wanted to exploit his chemistry with Davey, the inevitable Quixote, even if he had to be coaxed into trying out. AJ, instead of playing this second banana role with wink-wink self-consciousness, approached Sancho as achingly sincere in his hero worship of Quixote. He did not avail himself of any curlicues of irony, not so much as a raised eyebrow to let the audience know he was in on the joke. He was his master’s servant to the end.

If Noel was disappointed not to be given the showy part that everyone assumed would be his, he hid it well. Maybe he enjoyed having a chance to play it straight. And he was wonderful as the padre, especially when he sang the tender ballad, “To Each His Dulcinea.” I attended the final performance, a Sunday matinee, and surprised myself by weeping over Davey/Quixote’s death. I then asked my father what, exactly, the muleteers did to Aldonza while singing “Little Bird.” They appeared to be beating her. Why were they beating her?

“Let’s make sure AJ has a ride to the cast party,” my father said. We went backstage and clapped him on the back, told him he was wonderful and that we would see him at the party.

The Sunday afternoon cast party was an attempt to start a new tradition while thwarting an old one. The year before when the county musical had been South Pacific-AJ and his friends had skipped this, in order to perform in the anniversary gala-there had been a notorious cast party after the Saturday night performance, which had resulted in a disastrous Sunday matinee. Nellie Forbush could not muster any perkiness; Lieutenant Cable had to leave the stage to vomit in a bucket. The director was adamant that this could never happen again; he would cancel the matinee rather than allow hungover students to perform. It was Davey’s parents who stepped forward and offered an alternative: they would have the cast party at their home, after the matinee, and the cast’s family members could attend as well if they so desired. It would be a catered affair and the students would even be allowed beer and wine-if their parents were there to grant permission. People did that then, allowed underage kids to drink a little, and no one thought much of it.

I was disappointed by my first sight of the Robinsons’ house, which AJ had described as luxurious and modern. From the front, it was a boxy one-story cedar bungalow, flat and pugnacious as a bulldog’s face. But when you entered, it was as if you were walking into the sky. The builder had taken advantage of the fact that the lot was on a steep slope that backed up to a thickly wooded area, providing optimal privacy even when the trees were bare. With the exception of the walk-out “basement,” the rear of the house was almost entirely glass. We were told the architect had been a student of Mies van der Rohe, although perhaps not his best one. Five years ago, the Robinson house, which they unloaded in 1980, was sold as a teardown. A few people protested halfheartedly that it was a historic structure, but the new owner had no problem getting permission to raze it. The replacement is surprisingly modest, a soft-green cottage that also blends into the landscape. I drove past there not long ago, trying to jog my memory of this particular day.

The May afternoon was perfect, the kind of weather that late spring was meant to have. And used to have more often then, I think. The weather was better when I was a child, I swear it, with unbroken strings of these amazing May days-temperatures in the seventies, breezes laden with complicated fragrances. The Robinsons had set out croquet wickets on the tiny level patch of lawn behind the house, and there was a Ping-Pong table inside the rec room. It quickly became apparent that the cast party was, in effect, two parties. The adults remained inside, on the upper floors, while the teenagers chose the rec room at the bottom of the house as their base of operations.

I wasn’t sure where I belonged. There were some other younger siblings, but none from my elementary school. Two boys began chucking croquet balls at each other’s heads, while I stood apart, pained by their childishness. As the sun disappeared behind the trees, the house seemed to glow. It was like watching a huge ant farm, only these ants were not particularly industrious. They milled about with drinks in their hands, availing themselves of tiny bites of food-miniquiches, quail eggs-passed by waiters. (On the bottom level, there were hamburgers and hot dogs coming nonstop off a grill, a refrigerator full of soda, even a keg of beer.) I realize now how expensive the Robinsons’ home must have been, how exquisite their taste. That was the point of the party, to let people observe their superior taste. I saw my father talking to the Robinsons. I wonder if he was remembering the first time Davey had come to our home, how he assumed Davey would be the first person in his family to attend college, that quiche would be exotic to him.

I could hear the teenagers-they were blasting the soundtrack of La Mancha and singing along, laughing as they changed the lyrics to private jokes about various cast members-but I couldn’t see them behind the curtained sliding doors of the rec room. They were in high spirits, largely natural ones. You’d have to work hard to get drunk at a party such as this. The one keg, positioned near the man working the grill, made it hard to overindulge, although it was pretty clear that the “rule” about drinking only if a parent were present was being flouted. The cast seemed to feel that the Sunday show was their best yet and were giddy with their sense of achievement. I couldn’t say that the matinee was their best, but it was hard for me to imagine something better than what I had seen. I was especially impressed by how Ariel, normally a tiny mouse, had been transformed into a powerful, big-voiced woman. It was strange to see her at the party, reduced to her usual self, not that much bigger than I was. The experience made me yearn to perform, but even then I knew I had no talent for acting or singing. AJ had gotten all those gifts. I sometimes think that was the beginning of wanting to be a lawyer-my desire to be the center of attention, combined with the knowledge that I could not sing, dance, or act. How else does one perform if one has no talent for playacting?

Suddenly, the curtains that hung across the basement entrance flared, as if from a sudden burst of wind, and two boys in polo shirts emerged, running at top speed, Davey and AJ in pursuit, girls screaming. I didn’t recognize the running boys. They probably weren’t from Wilde Lake High School. Another boy, also a stranger to me, ran out after the others, but headed in the other direction, toward the woods behind the house.

“Assholes!” AJ shouted as he chased the boys up the steep hill to the street. “Why do you have to be such assholes?” The incline was so severe that the four boys, the pursued and the pursuers, were all but crawling up on their hands and knees, grabbing at trees and bushes to keep their balance. “Maybe you cow-tipping Howard High farmers act like that, but we don’t.”

“We’re from Glenelg,” one called back. “And you Wilde Lake people are white-trash hippies.”

Davey didn’t say anything. He was focused on the climb, his face grim. He would have no problem overtaking them.

I ran inside the house and climbed to the top floor, where I told my father breathlessly, if somewhat inaccurately, that AJ was in a fight. Alerted by this self-appointed and self-important town crier, all the adults streamed into the front yard, most still holding their drinks. By now, AJ and Davey had the two strangers cornered in an old-fashioned convertible parked along the curb. My brother and Davey stood on the outside, gripping the passenger-side door. The driver could have tried to pull away, I suppose, but the look on Davey’s face seemed to suggest that he would hold on to that door until it was wrenched from him.

“Okay, okay, let’s calm down, everyone,” my father said. “What’s going on? Davey, you start.”

He didn’t want to show favoritism by asking AJ to recount the story; I understood this somehow. Even as a child, I was acutely aware of my father’s methods.

“These ass-these guys grabbed some poor kid and pantsed him while he was chugging a beer, pulled his pants down in front of a bunch of girls. The guy’s totally humiliated. What did he ever do to you?”

“He’s a creepy little faggot, always spying on everyone. We told him to leave us alone and he didn’t,” the driver yelled.

“He’s the cast photographer,” AJ said. “That’s his job.”

“In the theater, when we’re performing. Not at the cast party. Little creep never puts his camera down.”

“You’re mad because he took a photo of you doing something you didn’t want photographed,” Davey said. “I saw you light up in my parents’ house. That was uncool.”

“Oh, who cares, you stupid nigger. You think you’re so fancy.”

In the deep, shocked silence that fell, I noticed how few black people were in attendance at the party. Davey and his parents, of course. The girl who had been Ariel’s understudy, whose skin and eyes were almost amber. Three of the waiters, and the man who had been tending the grill. Of the fifty or so people still at the party, maybe eight were black. Still, I don’t think you could have said a more shocking thing in Columbia, not at that time. We were good people. Our choice of Columbia was the ultimate proof of that. We were the people tree, sixty-six strong, indifferent to class and race.

Right. The one thing people are never indifferent to are differences. We may not mind them, we may glory in them, but we notice, don’t we? And congratulate ourselves on our tolerance and open-mindedness. But we are never indifferent.

I glimpsed Noel’s face in the crowd. I expected him to be beaming with excitement. Noel was always up for a scene, as he called it, the more dramatic the better. But his big green eyes were full of an unreadable emotion. He wasn’t enjoying this at all.

My father stepped forward and grasped the driver’s side of the car, mirroring Davey’s posture. I believed he needed to hold something to restrain himself from hitting the boy. I worried he might do something intemperate.

“You need to apologize to our hosts,” he said. “For your behavior, for your words. And then, yes, you need to leave. But not before I have your parents’ names. I will be calling them and telling them what transpired here.”

“You can’t make us tell our names,” said the boy in the driver’s seat.

“Do you honestly think I won’t learn them? Others here know who you are. The director knows. For goodness’ sake, son, I’m the state’s attorney of this county.”

“I can say whatever I want. Haven’t you ever heard of the First Amendment? And it’s not against the law to pants some faggot. It’s what they want, to be bare butt in front of a bunch of guys.”

My father seemed, for a moment, at a loss for words. Maybe that’s why I channeled the old schoolyard taunt: “Well, takes one to know one.”

There was a nervous silence, broken by the booming laugh of the grill man. He laughed much harder, I thought, than was warranted by any eight-year-old’s gibe. He bent over, holding himself. He slapped his knees, literally, wiped tears from his eyes. Others began to laugh as well. The two boys in the car blushed furiously. My father stepped away from the car, as did Davey, and the two disgraced boys drove away. They did not race off, as one might expect. They drove the speed limit, even signaled the left turn as they approached the stop sign at the end of the street.

“Our boys are good boys,” my father said to Davey’s parents. “I’m proud that they stood up for the underdog.” I expected the Robinsons to clap him on the back or send up a cheer. But they did nothing more than nod and smile tightly. Their party had been spoiled. People began making their excuses to leave, although there was plenty of light left in the May evening. My father stayed until the end, not something he usually did at social occasions.

At home that night, I asked AJ if I could borrow the Man of La Mancha cast album. But it wasn’t “The Impossible Dream” that I played over and over that night. I wanted to listen to one of Ariel’s songs: “What Does He Want of Me?” Quixote wanted Dulcinea, but not in the way other men did. She thought he was ridiculous, yet she could not laugh at him. The song stirred me in a way I could not explain. I yearned to be wanted. What would that feel like? My father and brother loved me. Even Teensy, in her cranky way, had undeniable affection for me. But what was this feeling that Dulcinea sang about, would I ever experience it? I knew it had something to do with kissing, and yet Quixote’s love was better somehow because he did not want to kiss her, which was what all the men on the soap operas wanted to do with the women they said they loved. Yet I wanted to be kissed, too. I thought I did. Maybe.

Also, what was a faggot? I had meant to ask my father on the drive home, but had forgotten in all the excitement.

JANUARY 30

Lu feels a strange frisson of nerves when she goes before the grand jury to obtain a formal indictment against Rudy Drysdale. As she predicted, Fred had failed in his attempt to obtain a bail reduction for Drysdale at a hearing earlier this week. And he put Arthur Drysdale on the stand, as Lu had hoped, which allowed her to ask if there were any violent episodes in his son’s past. The father had stammered and stuttered, even as Fred quickly objected, and Lu happily withdrew her question. They were on notice now, which was all she needed. She knew. Drysdale could take the Fifth if asked about the fake police report, a crime, if a small one. Either way, Fred has to realize now that she has something on Rudy Drysdale.

Still, she is uncharacteristically jittery. She’s gilding the lily, going for a grand jury indictment when he’s already been charged. What if the grand jury decides it’s not a murder one case? Maybe she shouldn’t have risked this.

But it’s a good trial run for the neighbor, Jonnie Forke, who can place Rudy Drysdale at the scene during the week that Mary McNally was killed. Lu has to be hard on her because she’s sure Fred is going to go after her in court. He’ll be right to do so. In her heart of hearts, Lu has trouble with anything that relies on a person’s ability to remember another person’s face. Maybe that’s her own personal bias, born of her particular inability to remember names and faces. But as the science on memory advances, she wonders how it will affect the future of criminal trials that rely on eyewitnesses. What if criminal attorneys start to use “memory experts,” the way, say, medical trials present experts on both sides of malpractice cases? Then again, the average person is reluctant to admit to a less-than-stellar memory until a certain age, although Lu knows lots of women who will cop to “mom brain” during pregnancy and menopause. The fear of dementia is part of this culture of denial, Lu believes, but she also thinks memory is part of the holy trinity of self. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you: they have a good memory, good taste, and a good sense of humor. Oh, make it the holy quartet: everyone, everyone Lu has ever met, considers themselves superb judges of character.

Jonnie Forke hangs tough on the stand, though. Too tough. They need to sand down her edges a little bit before the trial. She looks fine-in fact, she’s more attractive than Lu realized-but her personality is spiky. She’s sort of the looking-glass version of the victim, according to Lu’s investigator. A waitress at a late-night restaurant at the casino at Arundel Mills, extremely outgoing, divorced, but with grown kids and a lot of family. The night Mary McNally was killed-assuming it was December thirty-first-Jonnie Forke was at her daughter’s house for a family party, seeing in the New Year with three generations. This woman’s death would never go undiscovered for a week.

Lu asks her: “The man you saw that week-was he clean-shaven?”

Trick question. Lu knows Drysdale did not have a beard at the time. But does Jonnie?

“He didn’t have a beard, if that’s what you mean,” she says. “I didn’t get close enough to see how recent his shave was, but he didn’t have a full beard.”

Oh, she’s good.

“How close did you get?”

“Maybe ten feet. He was on the edge of the parking lot, just standing there. I noticed him because he had a big puffy coat. And it wasn’t that kind of cold that day, it was in the forties.”

“So you noticed his coat?”

“And his face. He didn’t have the hood up. So I saw his face and his hair.” A pause. “His hair was longer then.”

She’s really good. Credit Andi, who helped prepare her. Rudy Drysdale does have a fresh haircut, although the suit he’s wearing is almost greenish with age. Fred probably told his parents they didn’t need to splurge on a new suit for a grand jury proceeding.

“Still, he’s not an unusual-looking man, right? Brown hair, brown eyes. It would be easy to confuse him with someone else.”

“Not for me. People in my job, you pay attention to faces, make eye contact. It’s the difference between a decent tip and a good one.”

“And where do you work, Ms. Forke?”

“Luk Fu.” She grimaces. “It’s not like I named it. It’s a noodle bar. It’s pretty good, for the price. Those critics on Yelp can-” Lu’s eyes beseech the witness to get back on message. “They can go somewhere else if they don’t like it.”

Lu toys with her a little longer, but she’s rock-solid. Then she lets the jurors ask her questions. They, too, are curious about how she can be so certain of the ID. She’s almost too adamant, a person who never admits to being wrong. She’s certain that she never forgets a face. An unflattering thought flits through Lu’s mind: probably better with men’s faces than women’s. She just gives off that vibe to Lu. But then, Lu always feels as if she has to overtip extravagantly to make up for people’s biases about women.

Drysdale takes the Fifth, of course. Fred has instructed him not to lock in his testimony. Anything he says here can’t be contradicted in court and who knows what discovery still might bring?

They’re done by midmorning, and the grand jury hands up its indictment before lunch. Murder one.

The courthouse is theoretically within walking distance from the office-but not in January and never in four-inch heels. It’s a two-lane road with no shoulder, risky enough in daytime, dangerous at dusk. Lu drives the scant mile back to the office, parking in the permit spaces. She has no designated space here or at the courthouse, a security measure for the judges and other officers of the court. Back inside the Carroll Building, she shuts herself up in her office. This isn’t the kind of situation in which one does a victory lap. She has to act as if she never doubted she would win. Grand juries are supposed to be slam dunks for prosecutors.

She spends the afternoon attacking the usual raft of phone messages, then tries to put a dent in the e-mail. She tells Della she’s available for media calls, but there are no media calls. Mary McNally’s murder received maybe four paragraphs in the big newspapers, while Rudy Drysdale’s arrest and initial charge were considered only slightly more newsworthy. The Howard County Times, now owned by the Beacon-Light, is content to use the press release put out on the HoCoGov’s Twitter feed and Facebook page.

It is almost seven before Lu leaves, which means Teensy has fed the twins and her father, technically Teensy’s job, but something that Teensy seems to resent terribly. It has become Brant family legend that Teensy is their boss, that she’s the one who gets to pick what she does and doesn’t do, and all because she chose them over the Closters forty-five years ago. The myth is self-serving. Teensy is probably underpaid and overworked by almost any legal standard. Still, it’s a little frustrating having a housekeeper who resents any housekeeping duties that do not serve the man-of-the-house. Does Teensy consider herself Mrs. Brant, in a sense? It’s not the first time that Lu has allowed herself to consider this. It’s a tantalizing and impossible idea, one she has tried to discuss with AJ, who finds it merely impossible. It’s not that Lu thinks they have sex, her father and Teensy. Even when she came to accept that her father was a sexual being, having discreet dalliances with Miss Maude and others, she could not imagine him with Teensy. Tidewater Virginian that he once was, he resisted, for a time, the new information about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. But when he came to accept the scholarship, he turned on his former idol. During a family outing to Monticello last summer, the docents begged Andrew Brant to withhold his side lectures about Jefferson and Hemings-whom her father, rightly, calls by her real name, Sarah-until the tour was over. And yet-there is a sense that Teensy, still married to the seldom-seen Ron, considers herself the Brant matriarch. On nights such as this, she won’t even leave a plate for Lu.

It has been a bitter winter so far. The cold, when Lu pushes through the employees-only door at the rear of the building, invades her sinuses like some spiky parasite. She gasps at the shock of it, then gasps a second time, startled by a woman emerging from the shadows, moving too quickly, her speed almost menacing, yet her stature so petite that it’s hard to see her as a threat. Unnerving, but not threatening. Lu readies herself for a citizen encounter.

“Lu Brant? Eloise Schumann. I really need to talk to you.”

“I’m headed home,” Lu says automatically. “Monday, perhaps. If you call my secretary-”

“I have been calling your secretary. You never call me back.”

“Well, yes.” Might as well tell the truth. “You never say why you’re calling and I’m afraid I have no idea why you’re calling because I don’t know who you are, despite what you think.”

For a moment, the woman looks angry, insulted. She balls her hands, bare despite the subfreezing temperatures.

“How can you forget Ryan Schumann? It was one of your father’s most famous cases.”

“Schumann?” And finally Lu remembers. Schumann. Shoe. Man. That was his surname, not a nickname bestowed on him by Noel, but an inevitable pun: Shoe Man, Sheila Compson’s killer. The victim’s name is burned into her faulty memory, as is the image of that sandal, balanced on the jury box railing. That was her father’s genius, his intent. To make people remember the girl, even if this was all she had left behind. Humanize the victim, demonize the perp. Ryan Schumann.

“But you’re not his wife,” Lu says, her voice rising with uncertainty. She has a mental image of that woman on the stand, grim and angry. This woman seems too young, no more than ten years older than Lu, which would have made her barely twenty at the time. “How old are you?”

“I’m fifty-five. And I’m his second wife. I married him while he was serving his sentence.”

“While-has he been released?”

“No. He died in prison late last year. Just like your father wanted. Even though he was so sick at the end. He should have been given compassionate leave.”

Lu has no compassion to spare for Ryan Schumann, who not only killed and probably raped a young girl, but refused to tell her parents where they might find her body. Life in prison seems right to her.

“How can I help you?”

“I want a posthumous pardon for him.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“What if I can convince you he was innocent?”

“Even less likely.”

“Maybe you should talk to your father before you make up your mind.”

“My fa-”

“He knew me as Ellie Cabot. Ask him. Ask your father what he knows that he never told anyone. Ask him why he railroaded an innocent man, a good man who never did anything wrong.”

She turns, walking swiftly, but not toward the public side of the parking lot. She heads for the dark, two-lane road that leads to the courthouse, the road that Lu won’t walk even in the daytime. Had she gone there first, in search of Lu, thinking to catch her after the hearing, then walked here, not realizing what a dark, dangerous trudge it was in the winter dusk? Although the woman has done her no harm-seems scarcely capable of doing harm-Lu clutches her coat at the throat. She didn’t think it was possible to feel colder than she did a minute ago, and yet she does.

THE AGE OF REASON

The first time I saw Nita Flood-really saw her, noticed her, who knows how many times I had walked past her before-was on my back-to-school shopping trip to the Columbia Mall in 1978. That is, I was supposed to be shopping for new clothes, which my father would come back and pay for, an arrangement reached after a summer devoted to wheedling and arguing. It was a ridiculous thing to grant an eight-year-old girl, but I think even my head-in-the-clouds father had come to understand it was unfair to entrust Teensy with the oversight of my wardrobe, and he certainly wasn’t up to the job. Witness my hair, worn quite short, cut by a barber, so it had no elfin, gamine quality. If my nickname hadn’t already been Lu, it would have been Lou.

Yet when my triumphant shopping day finally arrived, I was in no hurry to get started. Instead, I trailed AJ and his friends through the mall. They roamed in a pack, their agenda clear only to them. They seldom stopped moving and they never went into stores. There was a conceit at the time, a suburban legend if you will, that Wilde Lake students, whose high school was a two-story, windowless octagon built around the hub of a “media center,” had been trained to walk in a circle. When AJ and his friends stopped moving, they leaned on the metal railings along the mall’s second floor, just as they leaned on the railings at school between classes. There was a photograph in AJ’s yearbook, the Glass Hour, showing them doing just that in the fall of 1978. Let the freshmen and sophomores hurry to class. They were juniors now, sure of their power.

On this particular August day, AJ and his group lingered long enough at the Hickory Farms kiosk to grab samples of summer sausage from a girl with stringy hair, a face sodden with acne, and a Barbie-doll figure. If the term “butterface” had been in vogue then, someone might have made that cruel assessment, but I don’t think that crass term existed.

Cruelty did, however. We had plenty of cruelty in 1978. AJ’s friends didn’t even bother to walk out of earshot before they began making fun of the girl.

“If anyone knows sausage,” Lynne said, “it’s Nita Flood.”

Everyone laughed at this, except Ariel, who blushed and looked at the floor. Nita Flood stared stonily in the other direction, as if fascinated by the small camera store tucked into the corner of the mall just opposite her. I didn’t get the joke, but I knew better than to ask. That would only draw attention to my not quite legitimate presence. My arrangement with AJ was that I could follow him when he was with his friends, but I couldn’t interact with them. I was like Casper the Friendly Ghost, condemned to scare off the very people I wanted to befriend. AJ posed this as a win-win-we both got out of the house and away from Teensy, who always found chores to fill our idle summer days. But it was more of a win for AJ. My brother was generally a good big brother. And like our father, he disdained overt unkindness. I was astonished that he didn’t reprimand Lynne for mocking someone, just as he and Davey had come to the defense of that kid at the cast party. But the girl selling sausage apparently wasn’t worthy of his protection.

We were almost to Friendly’s when Lynne whispered something in Bash’s ear and he, with a backward glance at me, whispered in turn to AJ.

My brother stopped and walked back toward me, hands in pockets, eyes fixed at some point behind me. “Lu, don’t you have any friends your own age to hang out with?”

That was cruel. AJ knew I didn’t. Although I did have a plan to take care of that, a strategy for transformation that would make me the most popular girl in the third grade. All summer, I had been reading magazines like Young Miss and Seventeen, trying to figure out the formula for popularity. Clothes were the secret. Clothes and hair and clear skin, but skin was not my problem, unless one counted freckles. Over the summer, I had started growing my hair out, having persuaded our father that I could take care of it. And after studying the magazines, I had decided on a particular back-to-school outfit, which I found later that day in the girls section at Woodward & Lothrop. My father, as promised, came back to the mall with me that evening and paid for the outfit on hold there, along with some other basics-jeans, T-shirts. I wasn’t a tomboy, but I had grown up in a household of men. (Apologies to Teensy, but she never fussed over me. It was easier for her if I wore clothes like my brother’s, even his hand-me-downs in some cases.) I could score a baseball game, but I couldn’t find the business end of a lipstick. I suppose that made my upbringing progressive in a sense, but it was mainly careless and it left me vulnerable to missteps. The outfit I chose that day was disastrous, but no one in my household seemed to recognize that, not even AJ, who always wore the right thing, said the right thing, did the right thing.

Why did he allow me to make such a horrible mistake when it came to my third-grade back-to-school outfit?

Maybe he simply realized it was too late to intervene when I showed up for breakfast a week later in plaid gauchos, a long-sleeved white blouse, a newsboy cap, and a ring-tab-festooned vest I had crocheted that summer under Teensy’s supervision. Had the Annie Hall fad finally trickled down to the junior set? My father immortalized the first day of school with photos, so I don’t have to rely on my memory: I looked like a caddy, circa 1920.

“I’ve heard of high-waters,” one of my classmates said as I took my seat in the second row. (The front row was for brownnosers. I had made that mistake last year.) “But I hope the water never gets knee-high.”

“These are gauchos,” I said. Then, always quick to go on the offensive-if the other kids didn’t appreciate my superiority, I would simply rub their noses in my grandness-“And they cost seventeen dollars.”

To be fair, I don’t think Young Miss or Seventeen had encouraged me to brag about the price of things to gain popularity.

“Isn’t that a kind of a cookie? Gauchos?”

“Or that old guy with a mustache who died last year?”

Randy Nairn bent over at the waist, walked up and down the aisle, pretending to puff a cigar. For the rest of the day, whenever the teacher’s back was turned, kids would point to me and waggle their eyebrows, smoke pretend cigars. Randy, ever bold, even jumped into the aisle a time or two when the teacher’s back was turned and did the loping Groucho walk.

I was dangerously near tears. And I never cried, never. That was one of the things I was famous for as a baby, according to my father. I never cried. Thinking back on this from the vantage point of having had two children, I now have to wonder: Did I really never cry or did my father just not hear me? I’m not saying fathers don’t hear their children cry, only that they may not remember it as a mother would. And he would have been pretty shell-shocked at the time, trying to care for a new baby, alone except for Teensy and AJ.

At any rate, I didn’t cry, not that day. I seethed, intent on revenge. I made sure to leave school the split second the bell rang and went storming down the bike path in the opposite direction of my house. Columbia was full of such trails, and I knew the one Randy had to take home, which led to the town houses near the high school. The ones where poor kids lived, but you weren’t supposed to say that. The town houses were on the other side of a busy street, Twin Rivers Road, so here the path became a tunnel, a culvert under the street. To this day, I marvel that my eight-year-old self had figured out what all those new town planners could not, how predator-friendly those bike paths were. I cut through the culvert then climbed the hill on the other side, scrambling to the top where I would be able to see Randy approaching. I dragged a dead branch up the hill with me-it was heavy enough to strike a blow, sharp enough to scratch or take out an eye.

Was that what I had intended to do? I have thought so often about that day, my intentions, the lengths to which I was willing to go. When do children understand right and wrong? Some people think that Catholics have established seven as the age of reason, but that is a simplification of the church’s rules. Jews established the age of majority at thirteen for boys. (It used to be twelve for girls, which I find interesting, a stray fact discovered when I was still keeping my promise to raise the twins as Jews.) And in the law, my law as I used to think of it-ah, the law. When I first started studying criminal law, there were ironclad rules about juveniles who committed crimes, almost uniform standards throughout the United States. Young offenders were granted anonymity. They were deemed worthy of a second chance. Those days are over. Now younger and younger people are being tried as adults, sent to regular prisons in some cases.

But in 1978, an eight-year-old girl who beat a nine-year-old boy with a stick-Randy had been held back a year in first grade-what would be the consequences? Factor in the not irrelevant information that I was the daughter of the county’s state’s attorney. This would not have been in my favor, by the way. If I had accomplished what I now believe I wanted to do that day, no one would have come down harder on me than my own father. He would have made sure that I faced the full censure of the law.

I watched Randy approach. He was alone. I was going to let him cross under the tunnel, then attack him from behind. I was not only murderous, but cowardly. He disappeared into the tunnel. I estimated it would take him about thirty seconds to pass through. One one thousand, two one thousand…

I crawled down the embankment, stick in hand-

And there was my brother with Noel, approaching from the other direction. The high school students were released earlier than the elementary-school students. They should have been long gone by now, or in practice for something, although AJ did not play a fall sport that year and there would be no rehearsals on the first day of school. AJ and Noel were speaking to each other in arch British voices and doing odd staggering, skipping walks. Noel, whose house had better television reception than ours, watched Monty Python on the D.C. channel on Sunday nights, then acted out the entire show for his friends, who eagerly picked up the most memorable lines and sang the song about the lumberjack, which I didn’t get at all.

But they were not so lost in their silliness that they didn’t see me on the hillside, holding my branch with two hands.

“Lu, what do you think you’re doing?” AJ asked. He didn’t sound particularly urgent or concerned. Randy emerged from the tunnel and looked up, following AJ’s gaze. As soon as he saw me, he laughed and pointed, began walking his Groucho walk. He probably thought I wouldn’t try to do anything with two high schoolers present.

He didn’t know me very well.

I threw my stick down and jumped him. He was a runty kid, probably one reason he picked on me. And he wore the same clothes almost every day, come to think of it, which was worse than wearing new clothes that people thought silly. I kneed him between the legs, pretending I was Angie Dickinson on Police Woman, which had been my favorite show before it went off the air, although I had to watch it on the sly if Teensy was around. (Our father didn’t believe in censoring anything we watched or read.) Randy collapsed, whimpering, and I jumped on top of him, landing blows and kicks wherever I could, pulling his hair.

“Luisa Frida Brant.” AJ was shouting now, trying to pull me off Randy. I could hear Noel laughing, which made me madder, as did the use of my full name, which I had managed to keep secret so far. I began fighting AJ, a losing battle, but I gave it my all, windmilling my arms into his stomach and chest.

“He deserves it. He made fun of my clothes. And him with only two shirts that he alternates and even then, he always smells by Friday. Who is he to make fun of anyone?” There was the true source of my rage. Not that I had been mocked, but that I had been mocked by Randy, that he had been sly enough to exploit my weaknesses so his wouldn’t be noticed. And now he knew my horrible middle name, chosen by my mother for some stupid Mexican artist that no one had ever heard of, not when I was a kid. My fists thrummed on my brother’s chest as if it were a taut drum. “What business is it of yours, anyway, Ajax Homer Brant?”

Randy, no dummy, had fled as soon as my attention was diverted, slowed by his limp. My Pepper Anderson kick had been effective. But no one cared about Randy anymore. Noel had stopped laughing and was looking at AJ, his unearthly green eyes round with wonder and mischief.

“Ajax Homer Brant? I thought you were Andrew Jackson Brant, like your father. How can you be AJ Brant Jr. if you don’t have the same name?”

“I was supposed to be,” AJ said. “It was a mistake, at the hospital. Some stupid nurse who filled in my birth certificate-she got it wrong. I’m going to change it legally, when I’m an adult. Plus, it’s not so bad. Ajax is a hero in the Iliad. That’s where the Homer comes in.”

Noel did not seem to pick up on the inconsistency in AJ’s story. He was probably too busy mulling the possibilities of knowing AJ’s true name. A chink in the armor of AJ the Perfect. Their friends would delight in this information if he shared it with them. Noel was not unlike me, I realized, stockpiling secrets about AJ, unsure how or when they might be used. Yet we never ended up exploiting any knowledge we gained because we both loved him so.

“Couldn’t your parents have changed it right away? I mean, your dad is a lawyer-”

“It’s hard to change a birth certificate. And my mom-”

“Our mom,” I corrected, sniffling.

“Our mom, she thought it was bad luck. To change a baby’s name. Dad said I had to wait until I was eighteen.”

“Even after she died? What did it matter then?”

The answer was obvious to AJ and me, if not to Noel. It mattered more than ever. After our mother was gone, nothing she touched could be changed. And she had named AJ, not some nurse. The house stayed as it had been, despite the fact that she had lived there less than a year. There was still a small pile of books on our mother’s side of the bed, and on the nights when I had bad dreams and went to sleep with my father, he was always far to one side, as if he were still sharing the bed with someone.

AJ, meanwhile, would not speak of her at all. Although not generally selfish, he hoarded his memories of our mother as if they might evaporate in the open air. I envied him, but the truth was, I didn’t want AJ’s stories. I wanted my own and I could never have them. AJ had a mother for eight years. I had one for eight days. That was an injustice that could never be righted. There are a lot of challenges about having twins, but at least one never has that imbalance of time. Penelope can’t begrudge Justin for having had a father longer than she did; Justin will lose his mother at the same time Penelope does.

Our mother had named her son Ajax Homer, her daughter Luisa Frida. That was no error and those names could never be changed. Our names were her legacy, one of the few things she left behind. They were burdensome when we were young, but not horribly so. As an adult, my only regret was that I had allowed myself to be “Lu” for so long that I couldn’t return to the fuller, sweeter name she had given me.

As far as I know, Noel kept the secret of AJ’s name. But in college, AJ was dismayed to discover that there were two warriors named Ajax-Ajax the Great, the son of Telamon, and Ajax the Lesser, who survived so many attempts on his life that he ended up boasting that not even the gods could kill him.

The gods promptly did just that.

“Maybe I was named for Ajax the Lesser,” my brother said to me the last time we spoke.

FEBRUARY 1

It is Sunday night before Lu has a chance to ask her father about Eloise Schumann/Ellie Cabot. She is not avoiding the topic. She is simply too busy trying to survive the weekend. Her kids are far from overscheduled. In fact, they have had to accept the hard truth that a single mom with a demanding job cannot be on call to take them to every practice, game, rehearsal, and activity. (Justin has his uncle’s flare for singing and dramatics, while Penelope loves soccer.) That’s what Melissa the babysitter is for. Lu does what she can and she manages to make the truly important stuff-pageants and “championships.” But she grew up without a parent attending most of her milestone moments, and she doesn’t feel she was harmed by this.

Even if Gabe had lived, Lu doubts the two of them would have been able to handle life with the twins without multiple babysitters, not as long as she insisted on working. And Gabe was too evolved to admit that he wanted her to be a stay-at-home mom. A SAHM. The very acronym looks like some dreary department within the Social Security Administration, or a form that one has to fill out for benefits. SAHM. Say it out loud and it’s just one letter away from “Om,” the chant of peace and contentment and centeredness. But the SAHM, in Lu’s opinion, sacrifices her center, hollows herself out by caring for others. Before Gabe’s death, they were probably on a collision course over this issue, although he was the person far more suited to staying at home. Is there such a thing as a SAHD? Say that out loud and it sounds like a toddler trying to describe her feelings. I’m so sahd.

But, having checked out of her kids’ after-school lives, Lu does cater to them on weekends as much as possible. They go to movies. They go to the place with the climbing wall. They go make pottery together. They go. And they are good company, her kids. For one thing, they have exquisite manners, thanks to Teensy and their grandfather. They also eat everything. Lu tries hard not to be Ms. Smug McSmugginton when the topic of fussy eaters comes up because she knows she didn’t really do anything to instill good eating habits in her kids. She was just too lazy to make two dinners from scratch every night and Teensy, bless her heart, is lazier still. This weekend, the twins asked to try a Korean restaurant in D.C. and they both ate kimchi.

Then Sunday evening comes and it’s like a bad storm front sweeping through. Much of this is due to Penelope’s anxiety over school, which reminds Lu of her own struggles with math, although she was in high school before she hit the wall. Still, she develops a sympathy stomachache as Penelope heads tearfully to bed. Penelope continues to rail at the unfairness of it all. Why does she struggle in math when Justin doesn’t? Yet Justin is not bothered by his problems in spelling, while Penelope excels in anything to do with language. They are, more than one person has noted, very much like their parents. People even think they see Lu in Penelope’s features. It’s funny how suggestible people are. They see a woman with two children and they begin to see resemblances that are not there, can never be there. And yet-Lu does see herself in Penelope’s temperament. She is competitive, more competitive than Justin. She loves to argue. Even in math, she wants to debate. The answers seem arbitrary to her. Lu understands, although she is baffled by her daughter’s resistance to geometry. Lu loved geometry, with its clear-cut rules and elegant proofs.

Penelope and Justin have adjoining rooms in the new wing of the house, upstairs from Lu’s. Until recently, she would find one of them in the other’s bed most mornings. They are still close. But they are turning out so differently. Penelope is that odd combination of baby-girl and forty-year-old divorcée, while Justin seems to live happily at the bull’s-eye of eight-year-old boyhood. Penelope often reminds Lu of Noel’s mother, that hard little number in her tennis whites. But tonight, Penelope is her baby self and she needs to be rocked to sleep. Lu almost falls asleep at the same time, but catches herself, snatching up her head in a whiplash of awareness. Almost nine o’clock. She should talk to her father.

He is in his study, enjoying one last glass of wine, not yet drowsing as he often is at this hour. This room feels like a time capsule for a time that never was, a false memory of genteel contemplation-the globe of red wine, opera on the stereo. Her father, like Lu, used to fall asleep while putting his children to sleep. The days are long, but the years are short, that old cliché. The years are long, too. Will her father even remember the events of forty years ago?

“A woman came to see me,” Lu says without preamble. “Eloise Schumann. She said you’d know her as Ellie Cabot.”

“So that’s why you’ve seemed so distracted all weekend,” he says. “Or abstracted, as Teensy likes to say.”

Has she been distant? She thought she had just been enjoying her time with the twins, fully present. Sure, sometimes her mind wandered, but it was to the McNally case, not that woman outside the courthouse.

“She was waiting for me, in the parking lot at work Friday. She thinks Ryan Schumann deserves a posthumous pardon.”

“She never stops. She’s like that”-he pauses, one of those pauses that grip Lu’s heart. Her father’s pauses are more suspenseful than any horror movie with a racing soundtrack. His pauses, to paraphrase Whitman, contain multitudes. When does groping for a word become the first signpost on the road to dementia? She thinks, bizarrely, of the sign on Interstate 70, the one that shows the mileage to Columbus, St. Louis, and Denver for no reason she can fathom. How far out are they? When will they get there?

But he finishes strong: “Pink bunny, the Energizer. She goes on and on and on. Although she’s always beating a slightly different drum. What is it this time?”

“This time?”

“What’s her latest reason for claiming Ryan Schumann is innocent?”

“She-oh, she… Wait, is she the witness? The one who came forward in 1978 and accused you of violating Brady?”

“Yes, and she did talk to me back during the original case. But she didn’t say she was a witness.” He chuckles. “She claimed she did it.”

“What?”

“After her second story was shot down, she told yet another one. She said she was at the rest stop where Sheila Compson was dropped off. She said she told Sheila Compson it would be safer if they hitchhiked together as darkness was coming on. According to her, Sheila had pot-in a rucksack, just like the rucksack Schumann kept claiming the girl was carrying-and they hiked into the woods to smoke. And, according to Miss Cabot, Sheila Compson became violent and tried to attack her. She jumped on her and she pushed her off. Sheila Compson hit her head on a rock and died. According to this young woman. Who was, by the way, eight inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than Sheila Compson. But we humored her. We told her to take us into the woods and show us the body. She couldn’t do it. She didn’t even pick the right rest stop. So, no, our office did not provide her testimony during the discovery phase because it was false. I was doing a professional kindness not sending them down that rabbit hole.”

“Why would she do this?”

“Women fall in love with killers all the time. Girls still love bad boys, that’s never going away. And she was very young. Nineteen, I think? Eighteen? Saw his photo in the paper, I guess, and decided she loved him. And you say she’s calling herself Eloise Schumann now. Did she really marry him or is that another fiction?”

Lu is ashamed to tell her father that she didn’t even think to check for a marriage license. He wouldn’t have made the same mistake. “I probably should.”

“So he’s dead,” her father continues. “He was only…”-that pause again. “He was only twenty-six when he was on trial. So born 1950. Lived to almost sixty-five, then. Spent more than half his life in prison. Yet he never told us where the body was. I asked him. I asked him every year until I retired. He always said, ‘I can’t say.’ Won’t, I would correct him. You won’t say. Oh, I understood he didn’t know exactly. The woods near that rest stop were vast. Where is she, Mr. Schumann? Sheila Compson’s parents died, denied the ritual of burial. Now he’s dead. Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t really feel anything for him.”

“Hashtag sorrynotsorry,” Lu jokes. Her father looks utterly mystified. He uses a computer but has drawn a line at all forms of social media. He was horrified to learn that the state’s attorney’s office puts out press releases using the Twitter handle HoCoGov, while Lu was miffed that her office, unlike the library and the cops, didn’t merit a unique Twitter feed.

Intemperate. She remembered her father’s rage when the appeal was announced, his ill-considered words. The mild profanity he used would never inflame people today. Or would it? Even as standards for behavior seem to fall, it also seems easier, quicker, to end a career forever with one verbal transgression. An intemperate moment, a wrong choice of words, can go viral if it is captured on video, or in a screen grab.

Forever. One photograph. Girls still love bad boys. If Lu’s secret life were ever to become known-but, no, it won’t. She has built it that way. Certainly, there are no photographs. She seldom texts Bash and their phone conversations are matter-of-fact arrangements of when they might meet, no where or when stipulated. No records, except for the occasional bruise, scratch, or bite mark. She is careful. She will continue to be careful.

But it would be fascinating if a female public servant had to defend her legal-but-not-exactly mainstream love life. Fascinating as long as it happened to another female public official. Can’t you take that hit for the team, Hillary Rodham Clinton? Step on down, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now that would be true equality, a female politician coming back after an ignominious sex scandal.

There is the fact that Bash is married. That alone could be enough to torpedo Lu’s career-unless they pretend to be IN LOVE and are therefore given dispensation to break with common decency. Why are people allowed to hurt others in the name of love? Why is love given so much credit, as if it is always a power for good? Does Eloise Schumann love Ryan Schumann, a man she can’t possibly know, a man she never knew, not sexually. Only six states allow conjugal visits and Maryland is not one of them. Even if Maryland were to permit it, an inmate such as Ryan Schumann, sentenced to life in prison for a capital crime, might have a hard time earning the privilege. How had any woman managed to become attracted to him? Lu remembers him as weaselly and small, even to her six-year-old eyes. As a small woman, she is always careful to avoid small men because she doesn’t want anyone to think the man had settled, choosing her for stature alone. Gabe was slender as a reed, but a respectable five foot eleven. Bash is shockingly broad-but, no, Bash doesn’t count because no one has ever seen them together. No one will ever see them together.

Maybe when Penelope and Justin are out of the house, she will go on match.com. For now, this is the best solution she can fashion.

She sips her glass of wine, enjoying the companionable silence, the strains of-ah, it’s Carmen. Old age looks pretty good from here. And she will be all of fifty-five when the twins leave for college, far from old despite the joke she made to AJ. Some women are just getting started at fifty-five. Again, look at Clinton and Ginsburg. In Lu’s third act, whatever that proves to be, she might finally eclipse her brother and her father professionally.

Not that she’s competitive or anything like that.

K-I-S-S-I-N-G

By the time fourth grade rolled around in 1979, I had a best friend. Because he was a boy, my classmates tried to tease us, say he was my boyfriend, I was his girlfriend. We didn’t care. Two people can brave the taunts that one person finds intolerable. We left school every afternoon, their silly words bouncing off our backs.

Lu and Randy / Sitting in a tree / K I S S I N G / First comes love / then comes marriage / Lu and Randy with a baby carriage.

Yes, my new best friend was the boy I had wanted to kill a year earlier. It happens. For us, it happened this way.

When AJ told our father about the fight on the first day of third grade-a rare betrayal on my brother’s part; I think he was mad about me giving up his real name to Noel-our father drove me to Randy’s house the next day and insisted I apologize.

Randy’s house was like a funhouse mirror version of my own-a distorted, disturbing mirror version. A motherless household, where the boy was the youngest. Chaotic and cramped and messy, with far too many people, whereas my house always felt as if it didn’t really have enough people to justify all its rooms. Randy’s father worked as a night watchman, although I think that was his second job. He was getting ready to go to work when we arrived. He looked surprised, yet not surprised.

The moment my father introduced himself, Mr. Nairn seemed to assume that Randy was in the wrong. Why else would the state’s attorney be in this postage stamp of a living room, trying to be heard above the blasting television that no one thought to turn off?

“Randy,” he screamed. “You get down here right now.” He wore a gray uniform. The living room wall had a hole in the Sheetrock, and there were what seemed like a hundred teenage girls milling about, although there were only three, Randy’s sisters.

Randy came downstairs, cowering like a pup. My father said swiftly, “I think you misunderstood, sir-it was Lu who started the fight, Lu who needs to apologize to Randy.”

I wanted to explain myself, tell the full story, how Randy had provoked the attack. But I also wanted to get out of that strange house, away from its smells and damage and the sensation that a fight might start at any minute, over anything. Staring at a point over Randy’s shoulder, which happened to be the hole in the wall, I mumbled. “I’m-sorry-I-hit-you-it-was-wrong-I-won’t-do-it-again.”

My father had told me I had to shake Randy’s hand, so I stuck out my hand, feeling ridiculous. Randy looked around as if he thought an enormous joke was being played on him, but he took my hand in his smaller, sweatier one, giving it the fastest shake ever.

Still, I doubted he was finished with me. He knew my middle name. I assumed he would use the information to seal my fate, move me from the category of someone who was merely friendless to being a true goat, the butt of every classroom joke, a walking punch line. It might not seem much, my odd middle name, but I could not bear to have it dragged out into the open and mocked. It had been my mother’s gift to me and, as much as I disliked it, my distaste for it was private.

I went to school the next day, resigned to the beginning of the end. Inside my desk, I found an eraser shaped like a giraffe and a pack of Now and Laters, lime ones. Lime Now and Laters were my favorite. I was not likely to put an unopened pack in my desk and forget about it. I looked around, wondering if there was a new kid who had gotten confused, tried to take my desk. I was careful not to let the candy be seen; it was contraband and would be seized. But the eraser-I held it up, examined it. I caught Randy looking at me, but his eyes scooted away. I was still thinking about my middle name.

During recess, it was my habit to take a book and sit by myself. The book was usually something chosen to impress, even though I knew by then that nothing I did could impress my classmates. On that particular day, I was reading Jason and the Golden Fleece. A simplified version of the myth, but a real book, with chapters.

“Why do you read so much?” Randy. It wasn’t the first time he had asked me that question. But it was the first time it hadn’t been a taunt, for an audience. He was alone, standing at the edge of the playground as if he didn’t dare touch the grass where I sat.

“Well, I like it,” I said. “You can do it everywhere, so you’re never bored. In a car, at night before you go to bed. In the bathtub.”

“Not the shower, though.”

My temper almost flared. I hated being contradicted, topped. But then I realized that Randy was only trying to build on what I said. He was trying to have a conversation.

“Yeah, but I don’t take showers.”

“I do. There are five of us and only one bathroom with a tub. We each get three minutes, in and out. Even then, the hot water is kind of weak.” He was explaining to me, I think, the faint odor he carried. Randy didn’t stink, exactly. But he had a particular smell about him, sort of like fall, only not as pleasant.

“I’d like having a lot of brothers and sisters.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Not my sisters. They’re horrible. It’s better just to have one good one. Like AJ.”

I knew then that Randy had fallen for AJ, that the friend he really craved was that golden high school boy who had saved him. But he would settle for me. It was an oddly satisfactory friendship, conducted in secret at first. At school, we kept our distance, trying to look out for each other, but not too obviously. At the end of the day, we walked off in different directions, with Randy circling back to my house. Teensy did not approve of him. He did not receive the kind of extra attention that she had lavished on Noel and Davey. Teensy was the biggest snob in our household, which is saying a lot.

“He lives in those town houses by the high school,” she said one day when I asked if he could stay for dinner.

“Well, Daddy can drive him home,” I said. “If he’s here. Or AJ could. AJ could drive him home in the family car. He loves to drive.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s not about the drive. It’s about-” Teensy didn’t finish the sentence.

By fourth grade, we no longer cared if the other kids knew we were friends. We felt superior to them.

“Don’t pay them any mind,” I told Randy as we headed out together. “They’re jealous because they know we’re having fun. More fun than anyone else has.”

Which was to say, we were the two least supervised kids in our class. Did that make us neglected? Maybe so. But it was a benign kind of neglect. No, more than that, it was constructive. Other kids went home to inquisitive, nosy moms. Randy, like me, had no mom. We were stronger, tougher than our classmates. If we did not know what it was like to come home to a cold glass of milk, a plate of cookies-Teensy was up for the milk, not the cookies-we had learned other things. We knew every inch of open space in our neighborhood. The bike paths on which I had tried to kill Randy the first day of third grade were now battle maps to us. We named them things that revealed our complete ignorance of history-Mason-Dixon Line, Maginot Line. We ran raids, hid in bushes. The only thing we knew about war for certain was that the United States had never lost one. We were winners.

One November afternoon, a Friday, we were lying on our bellies in a patch of overgrown grass near that culvert tunnel that led to Randy’s house, waiting for a German tank to roll by. We held sticks like rifles, pretending to “sight” through the points of the twigs. The game was to pretend to shoot any cyclist who came into view. But the first person we saw was on foot, a familiar figure, at least to me, tall and dark, moving with lanky grace.

“Davey!” I cried, jumping up. I might have been eager to show off a little. Davey was such a natural star. Even if Randy knew nothing about Davey and his accomplishments, he would see that, be impressed that I knew such an amazing person.

“Little… Lu,” Davey said with a distracted, almost sleepy tone, as if he had just awakened from a nap. I frowned at the “Little”-and the pause. Did he not know me? He and AJ had been friends for more than two years at this point. “Who’s your buddy?”

“Randy Nairn,” I said. Davey shook hands with him, very solemn, as if greeting an important dignitary. “Nice to know you, dude.” It was like Zeus leaning out of the heavens and introducing himself to a mere mortal. Yet Randy did not seem particularly awed.

“What are you doing around here?” I asked. “Are you coming to our house?”

“Your house? No, I just-I just sometimes like to… perambulate,” Davey said. “Nice day like this. I like to wander. No practice today, tomorrow is a bye week, so I decided to kill some time before taking the bus home. You think my parents might give me a car, they have the dough, but no, no, no. That might be a distraction. You’ll get a car when you graduate, young man.” The last said in a prissy voice, only deep, so I guess he was quoting his father. “But what am I going to do with a car when I go to college, especially if I get into Stanford? I need wheels now.”

It was hard enough to talk to Davey when he was just hanging with my brother. One-on-one, him in this odd state, it was almost impossible. But I kept trying.

“Yeah, AJ wants a car, too.”

“We all want so much,” Davey said. “Everybody, whatever they have, it’s never enough. You know what? Not only can you not get what you want, you can’t always get what you need. No matter how hard you try.”

“Uh-huh.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Yeah, well-I thought I might hit the McDonald’s at the mall. See ya, Little Lu.”

That name again. I winced. Davey went weaving down the path.

“I see that guy all the time,” Randy said.

“Where?”

“Near where I live. Like, at least once a week.”

“What would he be doing-over there?” I did not want to say: You live in those town houses where poor people live. Davey lives in Hobbit’s Glen, miles away, near the golf course, in a really nice house.

“Buying pot, I guess.”

“Davey doesn’t buy pot,” I said.

“Then I guess someone gives it to him because he was H-I-G-H high just then. My sisters get high all the time. I know what it looks like.”

“Davey’s an athlete,” I said. “And a good student. You can’t do those things if you get high.”

“Ah, who cares? Let’s play something new. You know I have to go home by dark and that’s getting earlier and earlier. Next week is Thanksgiving already.”

“I know. Four whole days without school.”

“Yeah.”

“You sound like you don’t like days off.” Even this year, when I finally had a friend and a teacher who seemed to like me, I was happy to have two extra days off. I would watch the parades on Thursday morning, then watch my father and brother watch football in the afternoon. Our dinner wouldn’t be anything much-Teensy made most of the sides a day ahead, and they weren’t very good reheated. My dad roasted the smallest turkey that Butterball sold. But he couldn’t make gravy, and he never remembered to put the Parker House rolls in the oven. There was a part of me that felt as if I should take over in the kitchen, learn how to do some things. Certainly, Teensy was pushing me in that direction. But there was also a part of me that never wanted to be that person, someone I thought of, dismissively, as the girl. No cooking, no sewing, especially not after the crocheted vest debacle. Once, when I was particularly unhappy at school, my father asked if I wanted to go to a private one. It turned out he had in mind some all-female place up near Baltimore, which horrified me. I’d have rather gone to an all-boy school. And not because I disliked females. I’m not one of those women. But if you weren’t competing with boys, it seemed to me, the bar had been lowered. I ran against boys, played their games on their terms, ceded no ground to them in schoolwork. I don’t think it’s an accident that I married the smartest person I’ve ever known, the only person who was unequivocally smarter than I am. Except for my father, of course. My father and AJ.

“We don’t really do Thanksgiving at my house,” Randy said. “My dad almost always has to work, and my sisters just want to eat Chef Boyardee out of the can.”

“Maybe you could come to our house,” I said. “I can ask.”

I think he had been hinting for just this invitation, but he kept his reaction simple: “Okay, you ask, and if your dad says okay, I’ll ask my dad. It would be better if your dad called my dad, though. I don’t think my dad can say no to your dad.”

The sun was down, the light fading rapidly. It was time for us to part, but it was hard to say good-bye for some reason. The days were growing shorter, and our time outside would be coming to an end soon. Where would we go, as the days grew dark and cold? It doesn’t seem a stretch to say that we felt a little like Adam and Eve, about to be thrust out of Eden.

Maybe Randy felt this, too, judging by what he said next.

“Should we kiss?” Randy asked me.

The question threw me.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I’m just not-a kisser. I’m not a girl who goes around kissing.”

“Have you tried it?”

“Have you?”

“No, but my sisters sure do seem to like it. Their boyfriends come over, after dinner, when my dad has left for work. I think that’s all they do. I stay in my room. If I didn’t stay in my room, one of them would take it and do her kissing in there and I don’t want anyone kissing in my bed. Except me, I guess. They’re mad that they have to share a room; they think I should sleep with my dad if there are only three bedrooms. It’s not my fault I’m the only boy. Amanda, that’s the next one up-she tells me I wasn’t planned, that I’m not supposed to even be here and that’s why our mom left. She said I was the last straw. What does that even mean?”

“Your mom left?” I knew moms died. I had no idea they left.

“Yeah. She got a job in Ohio or something. Don’t forget to ask your dad about Thanksgiving, okay?”

He insisted on walking me back to my street, as far as the communal mailboxes. That was another Columbia concept-the mail didn’t come to your house, it was delivered to a locked compartment in a large box that served the entire cul-de-sac. This was supposed to foster community spirit. In my house, it meant that AJ or I had to get the mail because the last thing my father wanted at the end of a long day of serving the community was to talk to actual members of the community.

I watched Randy walk away. He walked like a grown-up, an old one, his narrow shoulders rounded, his feet shuffling like the characters in the animated Peanuts cartoons. He walked as if he hoped he never got to where he was going. Why had he brought that thing up about kissing? Was it because of what the other kids said, planting the idea in his head that we should be kissing? I wanted none of that. Now I was going to have to watch him all the time, make sure he didn’t try it on the sly. Kissing ruined everything.

FEBRUARY 11

Lu looks at her plate. She has seen this plate of food many times. It is the meal inevitably served at such luncheons, luncheons that make up too much of her life. There is a salad with iceberg lettuce, two slices of cucumber, edges crimped, carrot shavings, and one-always one-cherry tomato. The salad is always served with a choice of ranch or raspberry vinaigrette dressing, both of which she declines. Always. The salad will be followed by string beans and one’s choice of beef, salmon, or chicken. Lu has learned over the years that the salmon, counterintuitively, is always the safest choice. Dessert, which looks fantastic-a fudgy brownie with ice cream on top-is served at the exact moment she is called to the podium. She knows the harried waitstaff will have cleared her brownie before she returns.

Today’s luncheon is for a professional women’s group in Howard County and Lu is the keynote speaker. More insultingly, she is the fill-in speaker. They wanted the state’s attorney of Baltimore City. She is younger, an African American woman whose election last fall was considered big news, overshadowing Lu’s election as the first female state’s attorney in the history of Howard County. (Baltimore has not only had a female state’s attorney before, but she was African American, too, so the only notable thing about the new attorney’s election was that she defeated a well-financed incumbent. But Lu did that, too.) Now, listening to her introduction, she has a sinking feeling that it may not have been updated, that the woman at the lectern might be describing the originally scheduled speaker. No, wait, there it is, the telltale phrase-

“And, not incidentally, the daughter of one of the most beloved men in Howard County, the former state’s attorney Andrew J. Brant.”

Former state’s attorney. Why did he stop there? Strangely, Lu has never reopened that topic with her father, not since 1986 when he stepped down, amid speculation that he would run for Congress. Yet he never did. He said, at the time, that he felt he was out of step with the county and the country. Reagan was still president. Lu suspects her father’s real problem is that he preferred the Senate to the Congress; her father’s temperament was better suited to that more sedate, formal body. But Barbara Mikulski was elected to the Senate that year and it was believed it would be a long time before there would be a vacancy in the Maryland seats. The belief was true. Sarbanes, elected in ’76, didn’t leave until the 2007; Mikulski is still in office, although speculation is rife that she might announce this is her last term. Now Lu wonders if her father worried that moving up through the political ranks would cost him that adjective, beloved. Certainly, almost no politician is described that way anymore. Even the people who vote for you didn’t seem to like you that much.

In front of an audience such as this, she can go on autopilot. Lu never prepares her speeches ahead of time but works from a menu of discrete topics, which she can arrange in endless forms depending on her audience. This group wants heartwarming empowerment, so she talks about work-life balance, the challenges of being a woman in public office, especially a single parent. That went well, she thinks, as she tries to rush out without seeming to rush out. (Sure enough, her brownie was gone. So it goes.)

But as she moves through the kind, smiling, congratulatory women, a younger one blocks her way. Lu, still on autopilot, extends her hand, but the woman, whose suit looks like a cheap knockoff of the rag & bone suit that Lu is wearing, keeps her arms crossed on her chest, a bad sign unless she’s chilly-and it’s not cold in this room. Overheated if anything.

“That’s a bit disingenuous, isn’t it? Describing yourself as a single mother.”

“I don’t know what else you would call me,” Lu says. “I am a single mother. My husband died.”

She chooses to speak bluntly as a rebuke to the young woman’s borderline rudeness. In another situation, she might have used the more genteel “widow” or said that Gabe had “passed away.”

“And left you millions, right? So you can afford to send your children to private schools and you have help.”

“My husband’s money was left primarily in trust for our children and I administer those trusts. I live with my father and the housekeeper who cared for me when I was young. In the village of Wilde Lake, in my childhood home. I have a babysitter, a college student, who takes my children to school and picks them up in the afternoon because I work at least twelve hours a day. It’s not a particularly high-flying lifestyle.”

“But you don’t have to work, right? So are we returning to that model in which public service is only for those people who don’t need the salary? What am I supposed to take away from your story? I’m thirty, I have a three-year-old and so much college debt that I can’t ever see getting out from under. Your earrings probably cost more than I make in a week.”

Alas, they did, although they’re not showy in that way. They are vintage rose gold, from a flash-shopping site. On Saturday nights, Lu likes to have an extra glass of wine and shop the no-return sales on certain websites for the thrill of it. Yes, she’s crazy that way. Buzzed shopping is her biggest vice. Second biggest.

“They’re used,” Lu says. “And I bought them at 50 percent off. I’m sorry if my personal experience doesn’t speak to you. But I think the point is that women, whatever their challenges, benefit from networking and support. I’m so sorry-I really do have to go. Thank you for having me.”

“Does your office have an on-site child-care facility?” the woman calls after her.

Back in the office, trying to catch up on all the things she might have done while she was sharing cheery anecdotes about work-life balance, she sighs and says to Della: “I guess the day can only go up from here.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Della says. “You have that meeting with a community watch group tonight, the one that’s worried about cemetery vandalism.”

“Maybe there will be cookies.” She thinks of the strident young woman who seemed so angered by the fact that Lu did not “have to” work. Yet Lu feels she must. And while she would never say the words noblesse oblige out loud, is it the worst thing in the world when a public official doesn’t need the paycheck? The building in which Lu works, the Carroll Building is-she assumes, she has never thought to question it-named for one of Maryland’s first U.S. senators, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, an immensely wealthy man.

Also a slaveholder who disapproved of slavery in principle-yet never freed his own slaves. A man of his times, as they say. But aren’t we all? Lincoln freed the slaves-but he believed they should go back to Africa. And the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free the slaves in Maryland because the Old Line State fought, however reluctantly, for the Union. The despot’s heel is on thy shore, the state song begins, and everyone tries to pretend they don’t know the despot is Lincoln. Then again, almost no one sings the state song, whose tune was stolen from “Oh, Tannenbaum.”

Oh, Maryland.

Lu sighs, resigns herself to an afternoon of e-mail and phone calls, then heads out to the community meeting. There are no cookies. There is nothing to eat at all. I should have stopped at Five Guys, she thinks. Then a bad accident on I-95 leaves her stuck in traffic, listening to the rebroadcast of a local NPR show, where Davey Robinson is one of the panelists. He’s still talking about marriage equality, more than two years after Maryland voters approved it overwhelmingly. Hey, if Ben Carson can toy with the idea of running for president, why can’t Davey Robinson dabble in politics? It is almost 9:30 when she arrives home and begins foraging in the refrigerator for something she can pretend is a reasonable facsimile of a meal. She has lost five pounds since taking office. She has missed too many dinners, attended too many luncheons with iceberg lettuce salads, thin slivers of salmon, one cherry tomato, a dessert that is always whisked away before she eats it. She checks her cell, on mute since she walked into the meeting at the synagogue. Mike Hunt has called. Three times.

“Took you long enough,” he says. “You allergic to good news or something? At least-I think it’s good news.”

“What?”

“The Rudy Drysdale case? Remind me to heed your hunches. They found his DNA on that spread. His and nobody else’s. Down near a corner, like he, um, cleaned himself off after. Or maybe just a few drips-”

“I’m eating, Mike.” Or about to be, if she can find something edible. Whatever Teensy has prepared-pork, chicken?-has aged poorly, congealing on the plate in an unappetizing sauce.

“This late? That’s a bad habit. Anyway, it’s something to throw into the mix.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t necessarily help. I mean, there’s definitely no sign of sexual assault. His DNA could confuse jurors.”

“I think she walks in on him. While he’s-taking care of himself. He freaks.”

“You mean he broke into her place to masturbate?”

“Or he breaks in, thinking’s he found a vacant place to spend a night. It’s the holidays. She’s got no trees, no lights. Looks like a safe bet. Maybe that’s why he’s lurking, sizing the place up. But he screws up, picks a place where someone’s not away. She comes home and he’s got, you know, one hand full. She screams, he freaks out. She’s between him and the door. He panics. What’s the defense going to argue, that she brought him home for consensual sex? That he broke in to sleep there, found her dead body, then stayed to jerk off? That he broke in before she died, jerked off and left, then reset the thermostat on his way out because he’s worried about climate change?”

“I’ll worry about the defense’s case,” Lu says, a little curt. Her mind is racing. A jury will love the DNA because juries love DNA. But they might get stuck on it, too. The presence of semen doesn’t make it a sex crime, and there’s no need to alter the charge, anyway. She’s already got murder one. But she should go ahead and tell Fred now, not make him wait for discovery. Because if Drysdale wants to confess now, she’s fine with it. She told the cops to test the bedspread, it’s her legit victory. Oh, yes, she’ll welcome a confession, but not to a lesser charge. It will be murder one or nothing; the only negotiation will be on the length of his sentence. Under those circumstances, the win goes into her column, no asterisk.

This makes the day a winner in her book. Then she finds a pint of raspberry chocolate chip in the freezer. And while she’s eating it from the carton, her phone buzzes, a text from a familiar number, although it is one that she has never entered into her Contacts.

NEXT WEEK?

Her first instinct is to say yes, but then she thinks about the timing. The week after Valentine’s Day. Ugh. So she types back only:

Maybe

Who’s she kidding? It’s probably going to be yes.

I’M DREAMING OF A WHITE (TRASH) THANKSGIVING

Our fathers spoke and Randy was granted permission to attend our Thanksgiving dinner. He arrived at 1 P.M., bearing a bottle of crème de menthe in a paper bag; the seal was broken and the bottle appeared to be about three-quarters full. My father thanked him with grave courtesy and placed it on the butler’s bar alongside his cut-glass bottles of clear and amber liquors.

“Won’t you get in trouble?” I asked Randy while we played checkers in my room. “For taking that bottle?”

“I didn’t take it,” he said.

“Randy-it’s not even full.”

“Okay, I took it, but my dad will never know. He’ll think one of my sisters took it and they’ll blame one another, or even their boyfriends. I’ll be fine.”

Randy had a cunning streak. Was it always there or was he coming into it now that he was almost eleven? I just hoped he wouldn’t use his cleverness to try to kiss me. I made sure the door to my room stayed open, and I tried not to turn my back to him at any point. But he seemed far more interested in my stuff than he was in me, pulling board games off my shelves, exclaiming over such ordinary things as playing cards and Trouble, which I considered way too babyish for fourth graders.

At dinner, he was polite about my father’s dryish turkey, the cold Parker House rolls, the reheated cornbread dressing. That is, I assumed at the time he was trying to showcase his good manners. I realize now that our lackluster meal seemed like a feast to Randy. Dinner done, Randy, as our guest, was exempt from cleaning, not that he objected with even token protests. While AJ and I washed the good china and silver by hand, Randy sat with my father in front of the football game, a plate with a slice of (store-bought) pumpkin pie on his lap. He looked terrified, too terrified to eat. He perched on the edge of the wing chair and balanced that plate of pie on his lap, unsure what to do. Eventually, he began to pick at it with his fingers, one crumb at a time, careful not to let any crumbs fall from his plate. His fingers inched closer and closer to the glop of Reddi-wip I had added to his slice.

“Use a fork, Randy,” I said, coming out to the living room with my own piece of pie.

“That’s not good manners, Lu,” my father said.

“Eating with your fingers isn’t good manners-” I started. My father stood and summoned me back to the kitchen, where I received what can only be described as a tongue lashing. Manners, my father said in a low, hard whisper, are about making one’s guest feel comfortable. When someone who didn’t have the privilege of my upbringing came into our home, it was my duty to demonstrate good manners without calling the guest out. This lecture went on and on.

“But how’s he going to learn?” I asked. “Maybe he doesn’t notice what he’s doing wrong. And other people won’t be nice. They’ll laugh at him. At least I’m nice. But, Jesus, Dad, he’s just white trash.”

And that’s how I ended up in my room on Thanksgiving Day. I’m not sure if it was the “Jesus” or “white trash.” Possibly the combination. Or maybe it was because I was carelessly loud and Randy overheard what I said. My father urged him to stay, but once I was exiled, I don’t think Randy could get out of there fast enough. He had come to our house for a respite from fighting.

Ah, well, holidays always end badly, don’t they? Anticipation builds up; anticlimax is inevitable. Confined to my room, I found the deadness of the day especially acute. It didn’t help that AJ was pacing the halls like a tiger, unused to being at home. Toward early evening, “his” phone rang and he pounced on it.

“That was Bash,” he told our father. “He wants to come by and pick me up, go out for the evening.”

“And do what?” Our father had an intense loathing for “just hanging.” He allowed AJ to roam the mall because AJ always claimed to have an errand, a purpose. But the mall would be closed on Thanksgiving night.

“Well, nothing’s really open, except the movies, and we’ve seen what’s playing. We just thought we’d drive, maybe go to Roy Rogers or the Double T Diner.”

“You can’t possibly be hungry,” our father said. “And if you are, go make yourself a turkey sandwich. Driving around, with no plans-that’s how young people get in trouble. Young people and not-so-young people. I see it all the time. I’m not a churchgoing man, but the Bible got it right, about idle hands.”

“Honestly, Dad-”

“Not tonight, AJ. You can go out tomorrow and Saturday, if you have concrete plans. But not tonight. Your friends, however, are free to come here if their parents agree.”

“There’s nothing to do here.” AJ, usually so amiable, stormed into his room and didn’t emerge again except to slice another piece of pie.

Over dinner the next evening, AJ told my father that his group had worked up a definite plan for the evening: “The girls want to go bowling, up on Route 40. And they always want to go get ice cream after, even when it’s cold out.”

Our father was not the kind of man to gloat in victory. He was so glad AJ was doing things his way that he gave him twenty dollars. But when AJ asked if he could have the family car, he demurred. “Can’t Bash come get you?” he said. “It’s practically on his way.”

“In what universe? He could go straight out 108 to 29 if he didn’t have to come down here first.”

“I just hate that turn,” our father said. “That left onto 29 from Governor Warfield Parkway, with no lights and that enormous blind spot-I worry when I know you’re headed that way.”

“But if Bash picks me up, he has to make the turn. What difference does it make?”

“I’m not always rational,” our father said, smiling at his own inconsistency. “Sometimes, I’m a father first and a lawyer second. But, okay, you make a good point. Take the car. All I ask is that you be home by midnight.”

“Midnight,” AJ groaned.

“How late are bowling alleys open?”

“I said the girls wanted to go out after and they’ll want ice cream, but the guys will want sandwiches or burgers, so we’ll probably choose the Double T because you can get everything there, and it’s open all night.”

“Twelve thirty.”

AJ was home by 12:25. Could I have been awake? Is that how I remember hearing him, then checking his arrival against my digital clock, a gift at Christmas a year ago? A digital clock. I am old enough to remember when they seemed magical. Or do I know the time AJ returned home because he would have to repeat the fact again and again over the next few months, and our father would confirm it? He arrived home at 12:25 A.M. and went straight to bed.

Eleven hours later, the Howard County chief of police called and said my brother might be a material witness to a felony.

FEBRUARY 17

Lu waits a week before sending the DNA report to Fred. In her heart of hearts, she has come to believe that Rudy Drysdale did not set out that evening to kill someone. But that is not how the law defines intent, which can be formed in an instant. He broke into Mary McNally’s apartment. He was probably masturbating when she walked in. Imagine the moment for both of them-she finds a strange man seated on her bed in midstroke or perhaps just finishing up, tidying himself with a corner of her pretty red-and-khaki bedspread. She screams. Maybe they both scream. It’s New Year’s Eve. Her nearest neighbor is out, and a hoarse shout or two, even a scream, might not attract attention. He can’t let her scream again. She has to stop screaming. Maybe he panics because she’s between him and the door. He hits her in the back of the head, knocks her down, chokes her. He has to stop the screaming. Then, when she’s dead, he takes whatever he has used to hit her-what, they still don’t know, and Lu is resigned to the fact that the weapon will never be discovered-and hits her again and again and again. Is it his humiliation that accounts for the ferocity of the attack? Is he trying to blind her?

But, also-if his pants are down, how does he move so quickly? Or is he pleasuring himself through the fly? God, it’s almost comic. Until the moment he strikes Mary McNally on the back of the head. Blood must have been everywhere-on his face, his coat. Yet his clothing was clean when he was picked up. She thinks again of the walk-out basement below the deck of the Drysdales’ home-would he have been bold enough to sneak in there and do his laundry? He had time, although he couldn’t have known it would be a week before the body was found. How far would Mrs. Drysdale go to protect her son? How far would Lu go to protect her son and daughter? She hopes never to find out.

At any rate, she can’t accept a plea to anything but first-degree murder. The only thing she’s willing to negotiate are the terms: a minimum of twenty years, no parole. It’s a capital crime, with or without a semen stain on the bedspread. What if he sat down and masturbated after killing her? What if the act of violence was what got him off? He would have to be pretty cold-blooded, but then-he was cool and collected enough to adjust the thermostat, open the sliding door. That’s the story she’ll tell, and if he wants to tell another one, he’ll have to get on the stand. If he doesn’t take the stand, then Fred has to convince the jury that Rudy Drysdale entered the apartment after Mary McNally was dead, then sat down within arm’s reach of her body and masturbated. Or that he has been in the apartment twice, returning for another date with himself and finding the body.

Twenty years is generous. He’s a time bomb, the kind of guy who could go crazy in the Columbia Mall, attacking kids on the carousel, running around the fountain with a machete.

Of course, twenty years is also tantamount to life in prison for him. Prison shortens a man’s life. She thinks of Eloise Schumann, realizes she never bothered to check the clerk’s office to see if she was legit married or just appropriated Ryan Schumann’s name. The woman never came back, never called again, so chances are she’s every inch the nutcase her father says she is, programmed to go off at staggered intervals.

“Murder two,” Fred says. It’s practically the first thing he says after arriving at her office. How odd it must be for him to sit on the other side of the desk, to see how quickly she has made this space hers. The walls have been painted white with the tiniest hint of teal-one has to look closely to realize they are not white-white. Lu painted them herself over the MLK long weekend, using a Farrow & Ball shade called “Borrowed Light.” (Her father’s newfound snobbery about decor must be contagious. He’s been adamant about using that pricey brand for all their remodeled rooms.) The three chairs in the office are strictly government issue; it seemed in bad taste to have chairs different from those her staff uses. But she has created a sitting area, with a small blue love seat and a low coffee table fashioned from an antique door. She found the latter piece in a store on Ellicott City’s Main Street; the seller claimed the door was from the original jail, which makes no sense, but it’s a good story. The overall vibe is of a serious room with subtle feminine touches. Of course, for a meeting such as this, she would never use the love seat, or ask Della to bring them coffee. Fred can sit in a wooden chair and get his own damn coffee.

“How do you make the case for second-degree? He broke into her apartment. He jacked off.” Using the vulgarity to establish dominance, to make him uncomfortable. “He beat himself off, then he beat her face off.”

“I can make the case for second-degree because nothing you have actually proves he killed her. A homeless guy sneaks into an empty apartment, spends the night, leaves. Just because you have his prints on the thermostat and the door doesn’t make him a killer. For all you know, she turned it down whenever she went out. His thumbprint doesn’t prove he set the temperature.”

“I hope you’ve pulled her utility bills and established that pattern, of her turning down her thermostat to save money. Oh, wait-utilities are paid by the apartment complex, so that makes no sense. Not her money, so why does she care?”

Lu doesn’t know if this is actually true. Then again, Fred probably doesn’t either.

“Okay, middle-aged lady having night sweats, so she turns her thermostat down every night as soon as she comes in. Rudy left the patio door open, another guy came in and is lying in wait. He kills her.”

Fred can’t possibly believe he can sell this story to a jury. Not with the DNA on a bedspread.

“What does your client want to do, Fred?”

Fred’s eyes slide to the right, toward the triptych of pen-and-ink drawings by Aaron Sopher, city scenes that Lu and Gabe once had in their dining room. They don’t really fit in her father’s house-our house, she reminds herself-and she likes having them in her workplace. There’s an energy in Sopher’s economical line drawings that gives her a lift. She’s a city person at heart, like her mother. Her life in the suburbs is an accident of birth. And death.

“My client wants to go to trial. Because he intends to walk.”

“I hope you’ve told him that changing to a plea of not criminally responsible doesn’t mean he won’t do serious time.”

“He understands that. And you know, for all his, uh, issues, he’s actually kind of brilliant. But between his learning disabilities and his claustrophobia-”

“Learning disabilities-please. He got into Bennington, Fred.”

“Which didn’t require standardized tests. And he dropped out freshman year because of depression. But no, he’s not crazy enough, cuckoo Froot Loops crazy. In fact, he’s looked at his case pretty rationally and he believes he has an excellent chance for an acquittal.”

“And what advice do you, as a lawyer, give your client, Fred? I have to think that your legal acumen is better than his, no matter how smart or rational he might be.”

Sitting opposite her former boss, in what was his office less than two months ago-it’s like a perverse job evaluation. Do you think you can beat me, Fred? On this case, with these facts? What would you have done, Fred? He offered murder two because that’s what he would have taken. Fred wouldn’t have gone to the scene. Fred wouldn’t have told the cops to make sure to grab the bedspread because it was mussed.

“I would be willing to tell him that murder two and ten years would be a pretty good deal.”

“No way.”

“Then we’ve got a trial.”

“Yes, we do. Still intent on invoking Hicks?”

“My client wants to get in there as soon as possible. Really, it’s almost inhuman to keep him confined.”

It’s inhuman to beat a woman to death for no crime greater than walking into her own bedroom.

“Let me ask you this, Fred-what makes Drysdale so confident that I can’t win this case?”

“The obvious answer, Lu, is that he didn’t do it, so he believes justice will be done.”

“I guess I’m asking you why your client would think there’s any likelihood that I can’t get a conviction, based on these facts?”

“You know, you’re good, Lu. But you’re not as good as you think you are. Few people are, when it comes down to it. There’s been one great Howard County state’s attorney-and that was your dad.”

It has the whiff of something he has long planned to say, an insult held back for the most perfect, hurtful moment. And it does hurt, but Lu won’t give Fred the satisfaction of seeing that.

“One great Howard County state’s attorney so far. I’ve been in office less than two months. Let’s see where I am in four years. Who knows, Fred? One day, maybe you’ll be arguing a case before the Court of Appeals-and I’ll be sitting above you in one of those crimson robes.”

“Court of Appeals-oh, I’m sure your ambitions go much higher than that, Lu. After all, there are plenty of women who have risen to that position. I assume you’ve set your cap for attorney general, or maybe even governor. Hasn’t been a woman alone in the governor’s mansion since Bootsie Mandel kicked Marvin out for having a mistress.”

“See you in court, Fred. Can’t wait to see how you spin this. Don’t forget to ask Drysdale what he used to take her face off. You know how jurors get obsessed with those little details, let their imaginations take them to the darkest places. Oh, and although you don’t represent them, you might ask which of Rudy’s parents wants to take the stand to testify about the time he attacked his father.”

Fred may have devolved into a timid prosecutor, but he was never a dumb one. “You can’t introduce past crimes unless Rudy takes the stand. Besides, there are no records of any violent behavior on his part.”

“True. But you also can’t claim he has no history of violence. There is a history, Fred, and it’s a very troubling one. But let’s move forward, get everything on the schedule, assuming there’s no chance for a murder one plea.”

“No chance. He’s rolling the dice, all or nothing.”

“Well, then, I’m going to have to assume probability is not one of the things at which Mr. Drysdale is brilliant.”

THE GAME OF LIFE

Even on a Saturday during a long holiday weekend, our father went to the office. We were used to his workaholism. Complaining about it would be like complaining about cold weather in winter, humidity in summer. AJ was still asleep when he left. AJ seldom rose before noon on holidays and weekends, a pattern established early in his teens. I could not believe how much he slept, my brother. My father said I would sleep like that one day, too, that the enormous physical changes of adolescence would exhaust me. He was wrong about that, as it turned out. But I grew very slowly and not very much, maybe only six inches in all from age twelve to age eighteen.

So I was doubly surprised when our father returned home two hours later and expressed annoyance at AJ still being in bed at 11:00. He walked upstairs to AJ’s room, his voice loud, almost yelling. Our father never yelled.

“AJ, get up. I need to talk to you.”

Inaudible mutters, moans.

“Now, AJ. Don’t get dressed. Don’t brush your teeth. Come straight to my room.”

More muttering.

“Then go to the bathroom, for sweet Christ’s sake, but get moving.”

My room shared part of a wall with my father’s. Intensely curious about what AJ had done to be in such trouble, I decided I would clean my room, as I was supposed to do on the weekends, although I usually waited until Sunday evening.

“Where did you go last night?” our father asked AJ. Then, before he could answer: “The truth. You need to tell the truth.”

The whole truth and nothing but the truth, I silently amended.

A long pause. I could almost feel AJ sifting through the consequences of his answer. Clearly, he had not gone bowling. But what could he have done to make our father sound like this? Angry, yet scared, too, a slight tremble in his voice. He didn’t know the answers to the questions he asked. That was rare for our father.

“The girls did go bowling. But Bash and Lynne are in a fight, he didn’t want to go. And Davey was stuck at home. So we went over there.”

“Were his parents there?”

Soft, barely audible. “No, sir. They drove up to Harrisburg to see Davey’s grandmother. They let Davey stay home because he said he wanted to work on a report for AP European History, but they said he couldn’t go out.”

“Who else was there?”

“Only Bash, Noel, and I were invited. It wasn’t a party. We just wanted to hang out, listen to Mr. Robinson’s stereo.”

“AJ, stop trying to skirt the truth by the way you phrase things. Okay, Davey invited you, Noel, and Bash. Was anyone else there, invited or no?”

“A girl named Nita Flood showed up.”

“Who is Nita Flood?”

I almost spoke out loud, excited to know the answer. Nita Flood. She sells sausage at the mall.

“A girl in our class. Not a friend of ours, not really.”

“Just showed up?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How did she get there?”

“Someone dropped her off. She hitched, I think. She said she had been working and she bummed a ride. But she lives near the high school, not Hobbit’s Glen.”

“Why did she come to Davey’s house?”

“She was mad at him.”

“Why?”

“Because he took a girl from Glenelg to our homecoming dance. She thought he should have taken her.”

“Why?”

My father was in attorney mode. He wanted AJ to tell the story, line by line, fact by fact. He was trying very hard not to put words in AJ’s mouth, I could tell, not to lead him in any way.

“Because-because they’ve been having sex.” The embarrassment in AJ’s voice was palpable. My face burned with mortification and I wasn’t in the room. “Off and on for more than a year, only in secret. Davey never takes her anywhere, doesn’t talk to her in front of other people. He goes over to where she lives, after school, and they have sex. Nobody knew. Bash, Noel, and I didn’t suspect a thing. She said she was his girlfriend and Davey said she wasn’t, that his parents don’t want him to go steady with anyone. They had a big fight, in the Robinsons’ bedroom. We could hear them all the way down in the rec room. But then they, um, made up.”

“What do you mean?”

An interminable silence.

“AJ? What do you mean by ‘they made up’?”

“They had sex.” I knew AJ was not looking at our father when he said those words. “They had sex and they came downstairs and we played a drinking game. We played Life and you had to take a drink every time you had a kid. She got wasted, really fast, because she drank vodka and the rest of us were having beer. Bash and Noel drove her home. She threw up inside Bash’s car. He came back to Davey’s house and we helped him clean it up. I also helped Davey clean up the house.”

“What do you mean by clean up?”

He was almost whispering now. “We added water to the vodka so his parents wouldn’t know someone drank a bunch. And we bagged up the beer cans, took them to the Dumpster behind Jack in the Box.” A beat. “I was home on time. I’m sorry I let you think I was going bowling. I thought I was going bowling. It was only when I went to Davey’s house that they told me there was a change in plan.”

“Is there any more to the story?”

“No, sir.”

“Think hard. Is that the whole story?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fine, because you’re going to tell it to a police detective.”

AJ’s gasp was loud enough that it provided cover for my stifled one.

“Why, sir? I mean, I know I was wrong to drink and that I lied to you about where I was going last night, but are you really going to turn me in to the police? I promise I won’t do it again, I really do. I mean-”

“Juanita Flood was admitted to Howard County General this morning. She has been beaten. And she says that she was raped by Davey Robinson last night.”

“Raped, beaten-no sir!-”

“Don’t speak any further, AJ. A lawyer is going to meet you at headquarters. I have advised Bash’s and Noel’s parents to bring attorneys as well, if possible. But they, at least, can sit in on their sons’ interviews. I have to recuse myself from yours. This is all-this is very complicated. You may go get dressed now.”

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“Just now, when you talked to me-were you speaking as my father or the state’s attorney?”

AJ had hit on the same question I had, even if I hadn’t been able to articulate it. What was our father’s role in this? What was AJ’s role? Would his story help or hurt Davey? I didn’t know because I wasn’t sure what rape was. Something bad, but how bad?

“I am always your father, AJ. Always. If this goes forward-I’m not sure how it will work. My deputy will be there, monitoring all the interviews. Just tell the truth, tell them what you told me. Don’t lie. Don’t try to outthink this. Tell the truth and everyone will be fine.”

AJ left our father’s room. Quicker than I thought possible, my father entered my room through the hallway. He looked at me thoughtfully. I was sitting on my bed, but it had not occurred to me to pick up a book or make myself look busy. I probably looked as suspicious as any nine-year-old ever had, sitting on her freshly made bed, hands folded in her lap.

“I have to go out, Lu. AJ and I-we have to go out.”

“Okay,” I said, then wanted to kick myself. I should have said “Where?” or asked to accompany them. My ready acquiescence was even more suspicious. But my father didn’t seem to notice.

“I really shouldn’t leave you here alone, but-you’re big enough, I think. You’ll be ten in less than two months.” He seemed to be trying to think of the single most important warning he could give me. “Stay inside, don’t open the door to strangers. Don’t touch the stove.”

“I’ve been making my own hot dogs and soup since I was in second grade,” I reminded him.

“Not today,” he said. “There’s still plenty of leftovers. Eat those if you get hungry.”

“Even pie?” I asked. I always liked to spell out all the terms. “With Reddi-wip and ice cream if I want?”

“Sure.”

He called upstairs to AJ: “What’s taking you so long?”

“Ariel and I were supposed to meet to rehearse our duet for madrigals. I just wanted her to know I couldn’t make it.”

“Well, get a move on.”

I assumed they would be gone for maybe an hour at the most. After all, the conversation in my father’s room had taken very little time. But it would be almost 5 P.M. before they returned.

As soon as they left the house, I climbed the stairs to AJ’s room and looked up the word rape in the dictionary on his desk. It was defined as an assault. I looked up assault, which was defined as an attack. Stymied by the circular nature of these definitions, I headed to our father’s room, where he kept a big, old-fashioned dictionary on a stand. This was a marvelous book, with full-color plates that I loved to study-butterflies, flowers, the internal organs of the human body-but I ignored those today. I had only one thing on my mind: rape.

The act of seizing and carrying off by force. That was the first definition.

But Nita Flood had not been seized or carried off. This made no sense. She had been taken home after she drank too much.

It was the second definition that specified: To force a woman to have sexual intercourse.

But how could you force someone to do that? I honestly could not fathom this. I went into the bathroom and examined my own private parts. It seemed impossible to me that they could be accessed without my cooperation. Was that why she had bruises? Because someone had tried to force her body to have sex? My mind reeled. Soap operas, hours of The Big Valley-nothing had prepared me for this. A body would close itself to such an attack. It would have to.

Dinner was a silent meal that night, although not in an unhappy way. If anything, my brother and father seemed relieved, as if they had faced down something difficult and put it behind them. My father even opened a bottle of red wine and offered small glasses to AJ and me. I thought it would taste velvety and rich, like a deeper, sweeter grape juice. But it was vile and I ran to the sink, spitting out my mouthful. AJ didn’t like it much more, I could tell, but he swallowed his sip by sip, as if it were medicine.

“I don’t really care for alcohol that much,” he said.

“Yet you drink, sometimes,” our father said. “Why is that?”

“I-I don’t know.”

“Don’t be a sheep, AJ. Don’t do things just because others do them.”

“I’m not. I don’t.”

“Good.”

Davey was at school Monday morning. Nita Flood was not. No charges were filed. There probably would not have been a grand jury hearing if not for my father’s insistence. He wrestled with this decision. Given that he was sure of the outcome, he worried it was unkind to Nita Flood to make her tell her story again-and to be exposed, again, as a liar. But his son’s best friend had been accused, his son was a witness. He wanted to be as transparent as possible, to avoid any accusations of favoritism. He recused himself from the case, asking his deputy to convene the grand jury, which listened to the boys who were there, the ER attendants, Nita Flood herself. Ultimately, they no-billed Davey Robinson on the charge of rape. Because it was a matter for the grand jury, it remained private. Besides, the accuser and accused were minors, deserving of protection even in open court. Not a word about the case appeared in newspapers.

Of course, those records are available to a state’s attorney, so I have read them. The testimony of Davey, AJ, Bash, and Noel is consistent. They were having a party. Nita Flood came by, uninvited. She quarreled with Davey, but they made up, apparently having sex in Davey’s room. She insisted on playing a drinking game with them, a version of Monopoly in which people could choose to pay fines or drink, although the amount of the drink was relative to the size of the fine. AJ had told our father it was the game of Life, but I guess he realized later he misspoke, as he and the other boys all agreed it was Monopoly. Nita became woozy, they took her home. No one hit her. They were, according to them, exceedingly gentle with her. Their only failure, as gentlemen, was to leave her on the doorstep, terrified to come face-to-face with the fearsome Mr. Flood.

Nita’s testimony is, of course, different. She says she hitched to Davey’s house, bumming a ride from another mall worker whose name she didn’t know. She said she had not been drinking before she arrived. Yes, she went upstairs with Davey but she had told him she would never have sex with him again if he didn’t treat her like a girlfriend. He held her down-those were the bruises on both her shoulders-and forced her to have sex.

“Did you scream?” she was asked by the assistant state’s attorney, the closest thing she had to an advocate in the court.

No, she was too embarrassed. If she screamed, the other boys might come upstairs and she was naked below the waist. She wouldn’t want anyone to see that. But that’s why she began drinking, during the board game. Because she was embarrassed and she just wanted to forget what had happened. She remembered drinking-then waking up on her own front steps, vomit crusted on her top, in the corners of her mouth.

“What about the bruises on your face?”

“I guess they happened while I was passed out.”

“You think Davey-or the other boys-beat you for fun while you were unconscious?”

“I don’t know.”

The medical record from the ER was entered into evidence.

“There are marks on both shoulders, but the bruises were only on the right side of your face. Does that sound right to you?”

“Yeah.”

The boys were asked if they were right-handed or left-handed. Each one said he was right-handed.

Nita’s father was left-handed. Her father, Al Flood, who was the reason that Bash and Noel had left Nita on her steps and fled, not even bothering to ring the bell. If the Flood brothers were famous for being raucous, their father was more so. Randy had told me he was the one who had punched a hole in the Nairns’ living room wall, during a particularly rowdy poker game.

Boiled down to the testimony before the grand jury, it all seems so obvious, even thirty-five years later. A jealous girl felt she had been spurned. She wanted revenge. Or she feared the wrath of her father, who probably did beat her when he discovered her drunk on the doorstep. She said she had been raped. It was easier than telling the truth. The kindest interpretation was that she had lied to end the beating, that she hadn’t set out to punish Davey at all. Or that she was confused, the next day, unclear on the events of the night before. She didn’t remember vomiting in Bash’s car, didn’t even remember getting into Bash’s car.

It was possible, in 1979, for such things to happen and not make the news. If we’re honest, I think we know it’s possible today, as long as no one pulls out a phone and begins taking photos or video. Again, they were all minors. Under any circumstances, Nita Flood’s name would have been protected. But the initial police report, taken at the Howard County ER, was never made public. The accused was seventeen. It could-and should-have remained confidential.

Yet it didn’t. The story got out, traveling through that octagon of a school with such speed and ferocity, it was as if lightning had struck the metal railings that circled the hallways. Within a week, all the students seemed to know the story and they favored the vengeance version. Nita Flood had lied. She had tried to ruin Davey’s life, torpedo his chances for Stanford and medical school. I heard about the stories from Randy, whose sisters brought home the high school gossip. Nita lived just three houses down from them.

“They said she pulled a train,” Randy reported to me, his eyes wide.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you.”

“You don’t know.”

“I do.”

“Then tell me.”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“You don’t know.”

We were walking around the lake. It was a blustery January day, but we couldn’t figure out anything else to do. Teensy was waxing the floors and said we couldn’t stay inside unless we wanted to help.

“It’s when you do a bunch of guys, one after another.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. “You can only have sex when you’re in love. Besides, my brother was there and he’s never had sex.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

And I couldn’t imagine Noel, either, doing such a thing. It was hard enough to imagine Davey had done it. Bash, of course, I could envision. But only with Lynne.

Lynne, it turned out, was the source of the stories. She and Bash had broken up again and she was angry with him. She told people that Bash and Nita had sex that night when he took her home, which seems unlikely, given the vomit. Yet the rumor grew and grew. Four boys, eight boys, sixteen boys. Her brothers, her father. Nita Flood would have sex with anyone.

At the end of the semester, Nita Flood transferred to Centennial High School, where she finished her senior year, the first Flood to earn a real high school diploma, as opposed to a GED. But she didn’t show up on graduation night. She took a bottle of pills the week before and ended up in the ER again, this time needing her stomach pumped.

And that’s when her brothers decided to go looking for Davey Robinson and his friends. Did they intend to kill them? Did they understand what it meant to take a knife and shove it into another person? Were they any wiser than I was the day I stood next to the culvert, ready to hit Randy Nairn across the back of his head with a stick? Certainly, Ben Flood never anticipated falling on his own knife when AJ tackled him from behind. Perhaps AJ did save Davey’s life that night. But Ben Flood lost his. As I understand AJ’s quite personal definition of karma, he broke even at best.

APRIL 1

Jury selection is a misnomer. It is more properly jury elimination: the lawyers, prosecution and defense alike, meet in circuit court to select the people they don’t want to serve. For a first-degree murder charge, Lu will have a large pool from which to choose, including a good number of recidivists in the bunch, as she thinks of them, people who have served before. Her staff investigator has already pored over the list of citizens called today, checking to see who had experience in the jury pool-and what that experience was.

Howard County is a good place to be a prosecutor. Law-abiding citizens, concerned with their quality of life, with warm fuzzies for the people paid to protect and serve them. Murder is shocking here, and the federal investigation into possible gang activity distressed some old-timers, who never thought “urban” problems could find their way to Howard County. Advantage: Lu.

But one determined contrarian can infect eleven law-and-order types. Lu will pay particular attention to anyone who brings a book to jury duty, which indicates someone who expects to spend at least a day in court. If it’s a crime novel, so much the better. But there are outliers, respectable citizens happy to serve, who end up being enormous pains in the ass. Lu distrusts early Columbia “settlers,” despite the fact that her family was among them. That first generation of Columbia homeowners, now in their seventies and eighties, skew bleeding-heart liberal. Rudy’s status as one of them, along with his mental health issues, could win him sympathy with that crowd. And there are crotchety libertarians scattered throughout the county, people who think that North Laurel doesn’t belong in Howard County, that Prince George’s County should be forced to annex it. If people “down there” want to kill one another-that’s their problem.

I’m so happy this is a white-on-white crime, Lu thinks, and not for the first time. No race issues, not in the crime itself. It still factors into jury selection, however. Although it is strictly forbidden to consider race as an issue when striking a juror, almost every attorney has theories about how race affects an individual’s behavior on the panel. African Americans tend to hold police in a lower regard than do white citizens. It’s an earned contempt, but a troubling one for prosecutors. In a case where cop testimony is crucial, Lu will try to find a legit reason to keep her jury as white as possible.

The judge reads the standard boilerplate questions to the jury. Fred has requested-and Lu has acquiesced, happily-to add a question about whether potential jurors have any ingrained ideas about mental illness. She understands that Fred is going to try to use Drysdale’s mental issues as a kind of a subtext, hoping to find the sweet spot between sympathy and hostility. Most citizens dislike insanity pleas and have no problem sending mentally ill people to prison. Whatever it takes to get them off the streets, they reason.

She sits at her table, her back to the jury pool, and even as potential jurors move in and out of the box throughout the morning, she tries not to make too much eye contact. People don’t like it. Men in particular can take it the wrong way. Lu is just pretty enough that she has to be careful in her courtroom interactions with the opposite sex. It’s amazing what men can infer from a woman’s direct gaze. Romantic interest, often, but also arrogance, which will not work for her in this situation. She needs the men on the jury to take her seriously enough, but she can’t come across as aggressive or angry. She wants the women to respect her, but not resent her. These are her private ideas, culled from years of trial experience. There are thousands of theories about jury selection, but the science is far from perfect. Lu goes with her gut. Fred, backed by the deep pockets of Howard & Howard, has access to the services of jury consultants, but that costs extra. She’s sure that the Drysdales have eliminated any frills they can.

Lu has dressed with particular care today as this will be the potential jury’s first impression of her. A suit, tailored as all her clothes must be, in a flattering shade of loden green. Luckily, it is unseasonably cool for early April. By tomorrow, if the forecast holds, she will be in a blouse and a pencil skirt, which means she will have to forgo her beloved boots for regular heels.

Fred calls a middle-aged man for voir dire. Plaid shirt, horn-rims, short salt-and-pepper hair. During the boilerplate, he raised his hand on two questions-the one about law enforcement and the one about mental illness. Interrogated by the judge, he reveals that he has a son in the military and he’s an MP.

“Do you think you can be a fair and impartial juror in this trial?” the judge asks.

“No,” the man says like a shot. Probably lying, but if he doesn’t want to be here, Lu doesn’t want him. She hates using one of her strikes on him, but it’s probably worth it. She wants women on this jury. Preferably middle-aged women who can imagine themselves alone and vulnerable, being beaten to death for the simple fact of arriving home after a movie.

After voir dire, they start seating the potential jury, moving people in and out of the seats in the box, alternating their strikes. It’s going pretty smoothly. How long has it been since Fred tried a case? Lu can’t even remember. She thought he would be more puffed up and cock-of-the-walk, but he’s keeping it low-key.

Rudy Drysdale is restless, shifting in his chair, sometimes making little grunts. Is he trying to create the impression of a man more unstable than he is? Lu thinks his brief exposure to his beloved outdoors might have riled him up this morning. He is clean-shaven and his suit, while cheap looking, is new, not the greenish one she remembers from the grand jury hearing. Another expense for Ma and Pa Drysdale. What would it be like to be Rudy’s parents, to be responsible for a manchild who never found his place in the world? She can’t imagine it. Rudy is almost AJ’s age, yet he seems trapped in late adolescence. Petulant, moody, incapable of taking any responsibility for his actions. He wanted a place to sleep and a woman ended up dead.

He had a place to sleep, she thinks. But maybe he didn’t feel comfortable masturbating under his parents’ roof. Could it be that simple? This forever teenager needed a place where he could experience relief. Not his childhood home and definitely not in a shelter.

By lunchtime, they are so close-eight jurors have been seated, several returned to the jury room to see if they are called for another trial. Lu wishes they could keep going, but the meal break is sacred. Sure enough, all momentum is lost an hour later when they reconvene. Everyone is logy, irritable. Especially Judge Sampson, who is generally friendly to prosecutors. Even Lu, who has eaten sensibly-some roast chicken, a banana-feels her energy flagging. And her boots hurt even while sitting. It is almost 4 P.M. by the time they have a full jury-four women, eight men, with two women as alternates. Overall, Lu is pleased. But two of the women are African American, which gives Lu some concern. They might have sons who have had run-ins with cops, even if they didn’t raise their hands when asked if they had any ingrained biases about law enforcement. Sadly, the odds for young black men having bad experiences with cops are almost 100 percent. Luckily, the case against Rudy is more about science than police work-fingerprints at the scene, the DNA. That helps a little, Lu thinks, glancing at her watch. No time for even opening arguments today. The judge gives the jury its instructions-don’t talk to anyone about the case, and that includes social media; don’t research the case; be back at the courthouse by 8:30 tomorrow, ready to go. The trial is expected to last only two to three days. Lu hopes she can wrap it up before the weekend. Juries are very prosecutor friendly on Friday afternoons, in her experience.

“Everybody rise,” the clerk says.

Later, Lu will describe what happens as a whoosh, more a sensation of noise than movement, then almost blinding pain as she hits the floor on her left side. She then hears gasps and screams, but all she knows is that her left arm hurts like a son of a bitch, as does her head, which is now being pounded on the floor-by Rudy Drysdale. It’s as if he flew from where he was standing, not quite ten feet away. He bangs her head once, twice, three times, then stands and races for the door, marshals in pursuit. Lu, dizzy and disoriented, struggles to sit up, and it seems, in her blurred vision, that Drysdale is surrounded by a halo of light, shimmering, almost suspended before the closed courtroom doors, so close to freedom. Yet the bailiff, who is old and rotund, has no problem grabbing him and throwing him to the ground, where he is quickly cuffed.

“Motion for a mistrial,” Fred screams at the judge. “Motion for a mistrial, Your Honor.”

His timing is a little disconcerting-he could at least pretend to care about Lu, who is feeling her head, her wrist, shocked that there’s no blood, nothing actually broken. But, hell, if Fred didn’t ask for a mistrial, she might. She doesn’t want to try a case in front of a jury that has just seen her flung to the floor like a rag doll, even if it does establish Rudy’s predilection for violence. Maybe this guy is mentally ill. What the hell was he trying to do? Fred’s been saying all along that Rudy’s desperate to get to trial as soon as possible, in hopes that he might be released. Yet he’s just delayed his own case by days, possibly weeks. And if the attack is reported in the press-luckily, there are no reporters here; the local reporter went home when it was clear there would be no opening statements-Fred might even demand a change of venue. With shaky fingertips, Lu traces the goose egg rising above her left ear. Rudy really could have killed her if he wanted. Had he come at Mary McNally this way? Did he intend to hurt Lu more seriously? No, he was focused on escape.

She hears a woman crying, saying his name over and over. Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. For some reason, Lu thinks of Cary Grant and almost starts to laugh. Is inappropriate laughter a symptom of concussion? Someone-the judge?-crouches down next to her and tells her not to move, to wait for paramedics. She shakes her head impatiently, then realizes it really hurts to shake her head.

“Lu,” a familiar voice says. “Lu. Can you hear me?”

Shit, her father is here. He must have sneaked in toward the end or she would have seen him before now.

“Lu,” he says. “Lu.” Mrs. Drysdale says Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. Lu senses that her father wants to hold her but is restraining himself, in part because he’s not a very huggy guy, but also because he doesn’t want to undermine her authority.

“How do you feel, child?” She should be angry at that word, child, but it makes her happy.

“I’m fine. It probably looked worse than it was. It was the first blow-when he jumped me and knocked me down-that really hurt. After that, it was more like he was trying to shake me and my head kept hitting the floor because he didn’t have a good hold on my shoulders.”

Having said it, she realizes it’s true. The impact of his body hitting hers, knocking her to the ground-that hurt like hell. But his hands on her throat, her shoulders-well, she’s known rougher, for sure.

Saying that to her father right now would probably not be all that comforting.

The EMT guys decide to let her go home, although with muttered imprecations about concussions, and while Lu scoffs at them, she finds herself unaccountably nervous as bedtime nears. She drinks cognac, knowing it’s a terrible idea-it will knock her out, only to have her wide-eyed at 3 A.M. Then it doesn’t knock her out anyway. She simply cannot sleep. It’s not that she experiences the attack when she closes her eyes. Instead, she has the strangest sense of déjà vu. That whooshing noise. A man running. Rudy at the door of the courtroom, so close to the outdoors for which he longed. Yes, the attack on her was a diversion, an attempt to throw the court into chaos. So why didn’t he then break for daylight, as the saying goes?

Because he’s crazy. But not crazy in the way that counts. Not crazy in the way that allows you not to be legally culpable for another person’s death. Lu is sure of one thing now-Rudy Drysdale knows how to blindside a person, can move fast when he wants to. And he had the strength to kill her if that’s what he wanted. Rudy Drysdale has killed.

But it wasn’t what he wanted, not today.

She checks the Internet, winces at the light of her laptop in the dark room. The story of the attack has made it to the news, but with no video, the TV stations can’t do much with it, and even the newspapers are hard-pressed to flesh it out. Her office has been asked what charges Drysdale will face. The answer, so far, issued through Andi, has been that Lu cares more about the charges he already faces for the murder of Mary McNally. What happened to her is unfortunate, but it cannot distract from the matter at hand: murder in the first, of a citizen, a woman who never harmed anyone.

Lu and her father agreed before he drove her home to spare Justin and Penelope the story for now. Easy enough for twelve hours. It’s not like they watch the news. Delightfully self-centered, they didn’t notice how slowly she was moving, like someone with potential whiplash. (Maybe she does have whiplash. It was, after all, a collision of sorts.) But she will have to tell them before school tomorrow, or risk a well-intentioned teacher asking them about it. She will downplay the incident as much as possible. It’s not as if she had a brush with death. There wasn’t even time for fear.

The phone rings before breakfast, before there’s time to tell the twins anything. Lu does not, despite her out-of-body feeling at the courthouse, actually believe in déjà vu. She has read that such sensations are simply a neurological blip in which the brain processes a new experience or image so quickly that one believes it has been seen before.

Yet she will come to believe that she knows, when her cell phone rings at 6:45, what has happened. It’s a county number. What kind of news comes in at 6:45 A.M.? Death. Only death calls this early. Someone is dead and almost everyone she knows and loves is accounted for, sleeping under this very roof. She is going to answer the phone and find out that Rudy Drysdale is dead.

He is.

THE BOY WITH MOONLIGHT IN HIS EYES

And then there were none.

When AJ and his friends left for school that September, I was startled by the intense, lonely silence that overtook our house. I had never realized how much buzzy excitement AJ had generated just by coming and going. Noel, Davey, Bash, and Ariel had felt like my friends. (I never cared for Lynne, who in an unguarded moment told me I could be a cheerleader if I took gymnastics, as I had the right size and build. “But you’ll have to be really good because if you’re not cute, you have to do all the moves perfectly.”)

My father, sensing my melancholy, tried to help. He established the ritual of our weekly call with AJ, one that I maintained even after I went away to college. He signed me up for a gymnastics camp, where I did excel, although I decided never to try out for cheerleading. I knew I was good enough that I could make the team on merit-and then I would never know if I was cute. And I was intensely curious about whether I was cute, or going to be, when I was a teenager. Of course, I could have tanked the tryout, muddled a leg on a cartwheel, to see what would happen. But even as a ten-year-old, imagining my life as a fourteen-year-old, I could not envision failing on purpose, ever.

My father also gave me a book about two children whose older brothers and sister went off to boarding schools, their left-behind siblings desolate. We read it together at night, although I was long past the age of needing to read with him. And the book didn’t really make me feel better. First of all, someone created a scavenger hunt of sorts to amuse and distract the pair in their loneliness. I hoped this was a hint, checked the mail every day, but no one sent me on a quest. Besides they were two. I was one. Randy and I were still friends, but he had a growth spurt over the summer and now towered over me, which made me wary of him. I was worried he would bring up that kissing thing again. I was worried he wouldn’t. He found a girl named Amanda, who had no ambivalence about kissing, and they started going together, which meant we couldn’t hang out anymore. Even in fifth grade, that rule was clear.

Finally it was Thanksgiving. AJ came home, as did Noel and Ariel, but San Antonio was too far for Bash to return. As for Davey-he had never left. He had deferred his admission to Stanford because he needed a long time to recuperate from the Flood brothers’ attack. When he was finally well enough to attend school, it had seemed formidable, traveling cross-country in a wheelchair.

Ben Flood’s knife may have struck only once, but that was enough. He had sliced Davey’s vertebrae, leaving him a paraplegic. Davey never walked again. His parents bought him a car as they had promised, but it was a van equipped with hand pedals, and he used it to commute to the University of Maryland, which at the time took almost any in-state kid with a high school diploma.

“Are you going to see Davey?” my father asked AJ that Thanksgiving weekend, which felt as if it were a decade later than the previous one, given how much had happened. Our father was issuing an instruction, not asking a question: AJ was going to see Davey, whether he wanted to or not. Dutifully, he drove to Hobbit’s Glen, spent an hour in the company of his friend, Sancho Panza visiting Quixote on his deathbed, mind, body, and spirit shattered.

I was more curious about when Noel would stop by. Only he didn’t. It was a hectic three days, with AJ constantly on the move, going from party to party. Nor did we see Noel at Christmas break, but by then his mother had returned to D.C. and his father, more or less in that order. It was a hassle for Noel to get to Columbia from D.C. Summer came, but Noel didn’t come back. He landed a summer theater gig, interning in Chicago. He was paid nothing, but they liked him, invited him back the next summer, began to use him as an actor. By the age of twenty, Noel was a member of Steppenwolf. At twenty-two, he moved to New York, began landing small parts. He was six foot four then, very slender. Some say that one’s eyes appear large as a child because eyes never grow while our heads do. But the photographs I saw of Noel-the Columbia Flier was quite proprietary about his success-made them look as large as ever. And as green as ever, I assume, but the photos were black and white. Remember that, when newspapers were black and white and read all over?

And then, at age twenty-six, Noel was dead. AIDS. Remember when young men didn’t die from “viruses” at the age of twenty-six?

Noel had come out in college. Was that even the phrase used then? I’m not sure. I don’t even remember if I was ever told that Noel was gay, much less if I would have understood what that word meant. What I remember is a Christmas party at our house, one not attended by Noel-the distance from D.C., again, the lack of a car-where Ariel, his classmate at Northwestern, spoke almost exclusively about his life, not hers. “He’s just so happy,” she said over and over again. Which seemed odd to me, because I thought Noel had always been happy. Happiness had seemed to be one of Noel’s many talents.

The discussion of Noel-and happiness, come to think of it-ended when Davey arrived. Our old house was not well suited to a wheelchair, even an electric one. He needed help over the threshold, then had trouble coming down the skittery rug in the hallway that led to our living room. And while his friends had seen him in the chair before, his appearance seemed to throw them, as if they kept thinking this was a play that would eventually end, Davey standing up, announcing himself healed. Don Quixote is not dead, Dulcinea tells Sancho. Some man she never knew has died. Then the man rises from his deathbed, reverts to his true self, Miguel de Cervantes, and goes to face the Inquisition, manuscript in hand. Seeing Davey for the first time, it was all I could do not to say something stupid about Ironside, which was my only frame of reference for anyone in a wheelchair. People gathered around him, trying to pretend that they were interested in his stories about rehabilitation, that his autumn had been like theirs. Davey played along. Maybe it wasn’t playing, come to think of it. This was a time when everyone had gone off and crafted a new persona. Hadn’t Davey in effect done the same thing, to a greater extent? Everyone was starting over.

The sextet of AJ, Davey, Noel, Bash, Ariel, and Lynne would never be together again, unless one counts Noel’s funeral in May 1988. I’m not even sure the surviving five wanted to be together then. But Ariel had prevailed on all of them to come, no matter how difficult. (AJ, having finished law school at Yale, was now getting an MBA at Wharton, which was a factor in my decision to apply to Bryn Mawr. As was the realization that I would totally dominate everything at a girls-only school. Unfair, but I wanted to go to law school and I felt I needed not only top marks, but a résumé that showed me as president of the student body, or something equally impressive.) Ariel even asked Davey, who was active in his church choir, to sing at the service. It seemed to me his voice was more beautiful than ever, with richer, deeper tones. He sang a ballad, one requested by Noel, the song AJ had played on his record player so many years ago while they spied on Miss Maude, the one about the girl with moonlight in her eyes.

AJ, sitting next to me, coughed at the word girl. Liberace had died only a year before. Rock Hudson, whom I knew as McMillan of McMillan and Wife-television cops were basically my window on the world, if that’s not clear by now-had been dead three years. People, real people, people we knew, did not die this way. Yet Noel had.

The funeral was in D.C., Georgetown. The church was exceedingly pretty. In fact, I think it was chosen for its prettiness. There was no sense that the Episcopal priest who spoke had ever known Noel or his parents. An impressive number of Noel’s new friends came-from New York, even from Chicago. In fact, they quite outnumbered the family and the high school gang. The old friends-AJ, Bash, Davey, Ariel, Lynne-did not sit together in the church, but they gravitated toward one another at the reception, which was terrifyingly fancy, with an open bar and passed hors d’oeuvres. I was reminded of the party at Davey’s house, his gleaming glass house with all those levels; no wonder his parents had sold it. And I remembered Noel’s face when those boys screamed “faggot” and no one took offense. Had it really been almost ten years ago?

“Did Noel pick the song you sang?” AJ asked Davey. I sensed he wanted to ask: Why were you picked to sing, not me? Noel and I were closer.

Ariel answered for him. “He did. Noel accepted he was dying. He began making plans a year ago. All of this-the church, this restaurant, the service-was his idea. He outlined his plans to his mother and me months ago. He knew what was happening. It was the rest of us who were in denial, even when he went into hospice.”

“So you two were still close,” Bash said.

“Why wouldn’t we be?” Ariel, mild and quiet as a teenager, had become flamboyant. Her hair was full on one side, almost shaved on the other. She wore only one enormous earring, on the shaved side; her black dress had a bubble skirt, which I knew to be very fashionable. (It had taken years, but I had cracked the code of popularity. I dressed well, was cute verging on pretty, and was even considered somewhat cool. Too bad it had taken me until junior year in high school to get there.) Lynne, by contrast, wore a red “power” suit with padded shoulders. She was getting a little thick, I noticed, filing that information away. Petite women such as us had to stay petite as we aged or we would look like fireplugs. Maybe I could offer Lynne that helpful advice, as she had once advised me on my gymnastics career.

“Settle down,” Bash said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“It just would have been nice,” Ariel said, “if other people had visited him. He knew, even when he couldn’t really talk anymore. He knew when people came to see him.”

“Noel stopped talking to me,” AJ said. “Not the other way around. I just assumed he didn’t want to see me. Those are his friends.” Using his chin, he indicated the men who had come from New York and Chicago. And they were almost all men. Extremely somber, haunted-looking men, wearing red ribbons in their lapels. Looking back, I realize these men were just beginning to understand that their lives had become a horror film. They were being stalked. Their ranks would be decimated. How many of them would die within a decade? The conventional wisdom is that people my age, who came into their sexuality in a post-HIV world, were denied something. But I never felt that way. Maybe it came down to the old adage of not being able to miss what you never had. Noel had a few giddy years of finding his place in the world, of being his authentic self. It had killed him. Even at the age of eighteen, I could see how horribly unfair that was.

“The phone works both ways, AJ,” Ariel said. “You could have picked it up any time.”

“And said what? ‘Hey, it’s your old friend you cut off without a word of explanation’?”

“Really? Without a word?”

AJ had grown dangerously fond of arguing. That was my father’s observation, issued just yesterday, when AJ had arrived home for the funeral. “You have grown dangerously fond of arguing. You need to watch out for that. You don’t have to win all the time. Not even with me.”

AJ said now: “Is there something you’re trying to suggest, Ariel? Did Noel ever tell you why he stopped talking to me?”

Ariel considered, started to say something, changed her mind. “No,” she said. “We really didn’t talk that much about you, AJ. Believe it or not. You were no longer the center of our universe.”

Davey, using the mild tone of someone hoping to derail an argument, said: “It doesn’t matter now, does it? I just hope he had a chance to renounce his sins and make a clean breast of things with God.”

“What?” Ariel and AJ were united in their dismay at least.

“I’m sorry, but it’s a sin. Homosexuality. Why do you think they’re being punished this way? It goes against God’s will.”

“If Noel knew you felt this way, he never would have asked you-I wouldn’t have asked you-” In her distress, Ariel could not put a sentence together.

“Look, I was punished, too. For my sins.”

“What sin?” AJ asked. “You didn’t do anything.”

“Sex outside marriage is a sin, too. I almost died and maybe I should have. Noel helped to save my life that night, getting the paramedics there.” I noticed that Davey did not credit AJ. “I’ll never forget that, and that’s why I was happy to sing here today. I owed him that much. But my church, my calling, considers homosexuality a sin. I’m sorry, Ariel. There aren’t exceptions for friends when it comes to God’s law. No loopholes.”

“I think I’ll go check with Noel’s mom to see if there’s anything she needs,” Ariel muttered. Bash and Lynne, who seemed to be getting back together yet again, went to the bar, his arm around her waist. (I did not understand then that funerals, as much as weddings, could lead to hookups.)

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Davey,” AJ repeated.

“I didn’t break the law. But the law, as written, allows a lot of sin. You went to law school. I’m going to seminary. We’re not going to see things the same way.”

“Do you really believe premarital sex between consenting adults is a sin?”

“I believe in God’s word. Laws are made by men. Sin has been defined by God.”

“I feel like I don’t even know you anymore, Davey.”

“I’ve changed. I’m sorry if that threatens you-”

“Why would it threaten me?”

“It threatens everyone. A change like this, a big change. It’s like when a person stops drinking or doing drugs. A lot of people in their lives don’t support them. I’ve found meaning. I understand things now. You know, it’s never too late to start being good, AJ.”

After a long silence, AJ said: “Speaking of drink, I need one.”

Now I was left alone with Davey. That had never happened before, just the two of us, one-on-one. Had we ever spoken other than the day on the path, when I was with Randy? He must have been coming from Nita Flood’s house that day, I realized. Randy thought he was high, but maybe he was just a young man besotted with a young woman. Were his parents the only reason that Davey hid his relationship with Nita? Or was it her reputation, her acne-scarred face? Nita Flood knows her sausage. God, Lynne had always been a bitch.

“You’ve gotten very pretty, Lu,” Davey said.

“Not really,” I protested, although I was pleased he had registered the change in me. Then, because I had no idea what else to say: “Are you really going to be a minister?”

“I hope so. People need God. It was a mistake, I think, not having real churches in Columbia when we were kids. Or synagogues or mosques or whatever. An Interfaith Center. What’s that? It sounds like a good idea. Everyone equal, everyone welcome. That’s a lie. So much about where we lived-it was a lie.”

I was flattered that he was speaking to me as if I were a peer, but I had no idea how to respond. I had been raised to think that religion was, if not an opiate, then something for lesser minds. My father, the son of Methodists, had been appalled that his parents, who considered themselves religious, saw no contradiction in being hateful racists. He had disliked his in-laws’ Judaism, too, because it did not make them kind or ease their materialism. His affiliation with the Quakers was more political than religious.

Out of conversation, I asked Davey: “Can I get you something to eat?”

“No, thank you. I’m being careful.”

“Careful?”

“To tell you the truth, I was a little scared to come here today. No one really knows how you catch this thing. But I prayed on it and realized it was the right thing to do. Noel wanted me to sing, so I sang. And the song was okay. I would have preferred a hymn, but it was a respectful song.”

“Why did Noel want you to sing if you-” I wanted to say, thought he was a sinner, but settled for: “Didn’t really see him or talk to him?”

“I have theories, but they’re only theories. You should ask your brother.”

“AJ?”

“He’s your only brother, isn’t he?” And with that Davey glided away.

Left alone, surveying the room of gorgeous men and Noel’s friends and family, I realized Davey was the only black man. Not even Noel’s actor friends, from New York and Chicago, included anyone dark-skinned. Again, I thought of the party in the glass house, the sense of an ant farm, but so many white ants, so few black ones. African American, I guess I should say here. In just my lifetime-from 1970 to now-the accepted term has kept evolving. Negro. Black. African American. And now politicians such as myself are trying to learn the minefields around gender-identity issues. Not that long ago, two prostitutes from Baltimore stole a car, drove into the National Security Agency campus, got shot, one of them fatally. They were originally identified as “cross-dressers,” men in women’s clothing. But they were trans women. “Had they had the surgery?” my father asked and I tried to explain that the question is no longer allowed, that we accept people as they see themselves. “Then they’re transvestites!” “No, Dad, no.” I tried to explain “trans” and “cis,” which, it turns out, I didn’t completely understand myself. He waved his hand in front of his face, as if I were an ignorant child again, frustrating in my stupidity. Only my father never treated me that way when I was a child. It is only quite recently that he has become impatient, crotchety. Well, he has cause. I remember Gabe’s father, on his deathbed when we tried to explain how we were going to have children, the nice lady in Texas who was carrying our twins. Gabe knelt by his father’s bed, saying, “So the first thing you do, is you find a Texas lesbian-” His father waved his hand, said “Pah!” Or was it “Pa”? He was lucid, but down to words of one syllable. He probably thought we did not know how babies were made. Ten days before he died, the twins were born. He saw their photos, but it was never clear if he understood he finally had grandchildren, thanks to some cheerleader’s donor eggs, a Texas lesbian and a suave Egyptian doctor who had blended our baby cocktail and then inserted it into our beloved surrogate. On Yom Kippur of all days. So while Gabe was in synagogue, praying and fasting and atoning for whatever, I was roaming the sterile suburbs of Northern Virginia, trying to find a Five Guys for our ravenous savior, a woman who could do the one thing that had eluded me: hold two fertilized eggs in the lining of her uterus. She was the one who introduced me, in fact, to the wonder that is Five Guys.

Thirty-five years ago, I would have had no chance to have children with a biological link to their father; Penelope and Justin would not exist. How can I long for that world? Thirty-five years ago, people I loved made disastrous decisions that made perfect sense within the context of the world they knew, the moment in which they had to act. They were men of their times. How can I fault them?

Then again, people died, people were hurt, however indirectly, because of those decisions.

You can argue people died because of my decisions. Some people blame me for Rudy Drysdale’s death. But I regret his death only because I will never know exactly what happened, despite my best efforts. To be clear: Rudy Drysdale was guilty of murder and he killed himself. He hit his head against the wall of his cell over and over again. Do you know how determined you have to be to kill yourself that way? Determined and stoic. And stealthy. He beat his own brains out with a steady, persistent drumming on the wall. If he had miscalculated, he might have ended up in a coma. Maybe he wouldn’t have minded that. And maybe you’re a step ahead of me, or have been all along, but I understood, when I got that phone call, why Rudy had attacked me in court. He was counting on being shot. Suicide by cop is a glib term, but it’s real, it happens. That’s why Rudy hesitated at the courthouse doors. It wasn’t my imagination or a case of blurred vision brought on by being slammed to the floor. He wanted to be shot. Yearned to be shot. It was April 2015. Police were obligingly shooting young men everywhere. Four weeks later, Baltimore would burn in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, his body broken on a classic Baltimore bounce, an unsecured rough ride in a police van.

But Howard County is not Baltimore. Or Ferguson or North Charleston or Cleveland or-you get the point. Rudy Drysdale was a middle-aged white man in a suit that his mother had bought from JCPenney only a week earlier. Now she would bury him in it. Did that mean I got the win, even if I never made it to opening statements? I decided it did.

It was a victory that cost me almost everything I hold dear.