My heart met my throat, with bold intentions at first. She had to know the answer; asking implied I had some reason to explain myself. To her, of all people. I raised my chin and said, “I do.”
I was prepared for disgust, but to my complete surprise, Rebecca put her hand on my wrist tenderly. “You know, Ruth? If you’re trying to punish your family for the way they’ve treated you… I wouldn’t blame you one bit.” She sank into a cross-legged position with a heavy exhale. “I should have thanked you a long time ago. I was so scared the first few months after you went away. I kept waiting for someone to tell your brother about us. For someone to tell my parents. But no one ever did. I got off scot-free. But you”—her eyes glistened with tears—“you suffered, and I’m sorry.”
I was so moved I couldn’t speak for a moment. “Thank you,” I managed finally.
“But Ruth,” Rebecca said, tougher now. “This behavior with Tina? Psychologically, it will damage you.”
“I no longer believe that’s true,” I said calmly, and I felt an immediate and welcome weightlessness, realizing I really didn’t believe it.
“Oh, Ruth!” Rebecca cried, exasperated. “I’m on your side. I am. And maybe some of your family would be too if you didn’t always have to make such an ordeal out of everything. Look what you’re doing now! Sleeping in the same bed as another woman! Wearing her fancy clothes and acting like the lady of the manor. Too good for a normal life. All over what? And at the end of the day, you had good parents. They loved you and they gave you a nice life and they were trying to do their best by you. You know I always defended you when your mother called you selfish, but sometimes I think she might be right.”
Her voice was dripping with sanctimony, and the baby started to fuss. Rebecca threw the thrashing bundle over her shoulder, and I brought my hands to cover my mouth as her big head snapped back on her little neck. My niece looked dazed a moment before stretching her mouth around an earsplitting yowl. “That’s enough!” Rebecca yelled at her, loud enough to make me, a twenty-five-year-old woman, cower.
Rebecca turned the wrong way out of the door, and I sat there waiting for her to realize her mistake when she got to the powder room at the end of the hall. The baby lit up each room Rebecca stalked into; she finally gave up and came back the other way, muttering something about the house being ugly and a maze. Downstairs, I heard the women trying to convince her to stay, but whatever Rebecca said back to them, it was at the same decibel my parents had used the night they found out about us. I only felt her leave. The bespoke hulk of a door socked the frame, and the ground shifted and resettled along new fault lines beneath my knees.
PAMELA
New York City, 1979
Day 445
I was nearing the end of my first year at Columbia Law, a single woman with a bold and unfortunate haircut. After breaking up with Brian last year, I decided I was tired of looking like an apple-cheeked schoolgirl. I wanted something more grown up to mark this next chapter in my life. My mother’s hairdresser tried to talk me out of a shag—that round Irish chin—but I told him, regrettably, that it was only hair and it would grow back. Tina mailed me a few hats from her extensive collection that she was needing less and less thanks to the sorcery of Denise’s multivitamin, and I hid in the back of lecture halls, too self-conscious to put myself out there to anyone. I certainly couldn’t bring myself to speak to him—the man I would one day marry, sitting four rows in front of me in Civil Procedure.
I would not see him on campus again after that first year. My husband is a careful thinker, someone who likes to mull, to talk things over, before he arrives at a solution to a problem, and he felt law school penalized this quality. The summer after his first year, he interned at a talent agency, reviewing contracts for the theater department, and never left. Today he represents Tony-winning performers and directors; he has producing credits on some of the longest-running shows on Broadway. If you read the playbills closely enough, you’ll see my name under special thanks to, for all the times I’ve come home from my own family law practice to advise him on acquiring rights or box office compensation clauses.
In 1987, one year into my thirties, I returned to Tallahassee for the funeral of Catherine McCall, the alumna who had invited us into her home the night after the attack. I had just stepped off the plane when I heard someone say my name with that sort of cautious upspeak people use when they are sure they are mistaken, you can’t possibly be who they think you are, but maybe? I turned to see the guy from my civil procedure class, who was not traditionally handsome, as Brian had been, but somehow his prominent features—crooked nose and full lips, dark, deep-set eyes—came together in a way that had always made me blush beneath the brim of Tina’s donated hat.
“I couldn’t tell if that was you,” he said. He brought a hand up, wheeling the crown of his head. Your hair. (It’s normal.)
I had taken to wearing it in a shoulder-length blunt cut that I knew suited me well. I hooked it behind my ear with a self-effacing smile. “That was a tough year for me.”
We laughed and started down the small terminal, which in a few years would be leveled in a deadly tornado, then built back up, stronger and shinier than before.
“What are—” we both started, then laughed again. I gestured at him. You go.
“I’m here for a funeral, unfortunately. How about you?”
I felt my heart race. “Not for Catherine McCall, by any chance?”
David stopped walking and turned to stare at me, thunderstruck. My husband’s name is David. “Yes, actually. She’s my great-aunt.”
That weekend, in the house where I was once as much a stranger to myself as I was to the man I thought I would marry, I got to know the one I did.
* * *
But before that charmed reunion could happen, before my father walked me down the aisle asking if I’d heard the one about the divorce lawyer who gets married (something about the wedding qualifying as a billable hour), and after the difficult pregnancy that resulted in the daughter who made me go easier on my mother, I still had the trial to get through. And The Defendant seemed hell-bent on dragging it out as long as legally possible.
I was descending Columbia’s Low Library steps, on one of those crisp East Coast April days that feels more like fall than spring, when I passed another first-year who lived on my hall. “Oh, Pamela!” she cried without slowing down. “There’s a message for you back at the dorm. The guy said it was important.”
I pivoted on the spot, shielding the sun from my eyes in what looked like a salute. “Do you remember his name?” I called up to her.
“Pearl something!” she yelled before the Ionic-style columns absorbed her.
When I arrived at the dorm, the hair at the back of my neck was damp with sweat. I knew of only one man with the last name Pearl. He didn’t call about important matters; his calls were a matter of life or death.
“This is Pamela Schumacher,” I said to the receptionist at the state attorney’s office in Tallahassee.
“One moment, please.”
I bounced on my toes anxiously while I waited for the prosecutor to come to the phone. Henry Pearl and I had yet to meet in person, but that would soon change, since we’d officially entered the discovery phase of The Defendant’s trial.
“Afternoon, Pamela,” Mr. Pearl said in a brusque voice that made my throat go dry.
“The message said it was important.”
“I have good news and bad news. Which do you want—”
“Bad.”
Mr. Pearl coughed and cleared his throat. “I received notice of your deposition. It’s scheduled in two weeks’ time at the Leon County Jail, which can mean only one thing.”