Rebecca is still married to Ruth’s brother. Their two children are grown now—Allen’s kids go to UDub, Rebecca tells me when she finds me taking the chronological tour of their lives as displayed by the pictures on the mantel. Little League games and dance recitals, prom dresses and graduation gowns, weddings and babies for both.
“Mine is thirty next month,” I tell Rebecca, accepting the glass of lemon water she’s offered me. It scours my throat, the liquid acidic from a rind she let soak too long. I have told her I am an attorney representing a family member of one of The Defendant’s long-ago victims, working through a checklist of evidentiary items that the state has not been able to locate. There was an affidavit in my purse in case she did not invite me in, but she did, warmly, telling me that when Ruth’s mother died in 2001, she had discovered a notice from the Federal Bureau of Prisons in a pile of old mail, alerting her to the release of her daughter’s belongings from evidence and laying out instructions on how to request the items. Rebecca continued to clean out the rest of the house, assuming she would find a box of Ruth’s things somewhere, but it was only after all the shelves in all the closets were down to sawdust that she realized her mother-in-law had likely never done anything but read the notice and cast it aside.
“Shirley had difficulty acknowledging things that were… unpleasant,” Rebecca tells me as she leads me down the carpeted basement stairs. “After Ruth died, we rarely spoke her name again. It was so sad, like she never existed in the first place. I couldn’t stand the idea of her things just sitting in storage somewhere, so I was the one to put in the request.” She hits the light switch, revealing a basement that is half TV room, half junkyard of decorative Bed Bath & Beyond storage boxes.
“I knew right away that some other poor girl’s things got mixed up with Ruth’s,” Rebecca says. “I always wondered who they belonged to.”
Rebecca sits on the flat gray carpet and removes the lid of a faux-leather bin with a hexagonal design. I think I own the same one.
She begins to separate the items she doesn’t recognize as Ruth’s from the ones she does: a halter top with yellow flowers, a white plastic barrette, a paperback with the cover torn off. The first line reads, Beneaththe suede brim of his cowboy hat, his gaze was piercing blue. She bows her head over the box, eyes flicking back and forth, and goes to close it back up.
I take a step forward, arm outstretched as if to say, Halt right there. “Would you mind if I looked through myself? In case you missed anything.”
Rebecca’s smile is protective and vaguely threatening. “That’s it. That’s everything that wasn’t Ruth’s. You can have it. Hopefully, the family recognizes it. Who are they, if you don’t mind me asking?”
There is a beat when I wonder if I should push harder to rummage through that box before coming clean. But she asked point-blank, and I’d have a hard time regaining her trust if she looked back on this moment and realized I didn’t answer honestly when she gave me the chance.
“Martina Cannon,” I answer.
Rebecca’s cautiously friendly face turns panicked. She wraps all her limbs around the box, anchoring it to her person in a wrestler’s hold. “Get out of my house before I call the cops on you.” She is reaching for menacing but it’s a stretch. She is far too afraid of losing Ruth.
I reach into my purse and extract the folder containing the affidavit. “If you do, they’ll only be obligated to enforce this.” Rebecca refuses to release the storage box long enough to take the file from me, so I lay out the broad strokes. “This is a sworn document from Miss Cannon, listing the items she is entitled to inherit as the registered domestic partner of Ruth Wachowsky.”
At that, Rebecca rips the document from my hands, leaving me with matching paper cuts. I hiss under my breath as her eyes go immediately to the items listed. She snorts rudely. “Well, I don’t have what she’s after.”
“If you’ll keep reading,” I say, “I think you’ll find that there is no use lying about that.”
Rebecca scans the language frantically. I know the moment she locates it—undeniable proof that the assets in question were released to her—because her whole body goes slack. It is the response from my old law school friend confirming the identity of the person who requested Carl’s recording after the Lake Sammamish case was closed, as well as a copy of the release form, denying public access to the file, as was the family’s legal right to make in a case where there was no conviction. The confession tape is distinctively human, hereditarily one of a kind. There are no copies made, no more chances after this.
“We intend to keep the recording only long enough to have a copy made for my client,” I tell her. “She is willing to return the original to you.”
Rebecca lets the pages of the affidavit float to the ground. She folds her body over the storage box, resting her cheek on its hard angles as if it’s a pillow. She is taking deep, noisy yoga breaths, whimpering a little on the exhale.
“You have our word that we will return the original to you,” I assure her.
“Well, I don’t want it.” Rebecca weeps petulantly. “Not once she has it too.” She looks up at me, snot-nosed and furious. “I knew Ruth since we were three years old. I knew her.”
“Our goal is to stay out of the courts with this,” I say in the curated tone I use in highly emotional mediations several days a week, “but the only way to do that, and to ensure your husband does not find out about your relationship with his sister, is if you are willing to cooperate.”
“I’m giving it to you,” Rebecca snarls. “Okay? It’s just—” She is holding on to that box like it is a raft in the middle of the Atlantic. “It’s like there’s never been any room for how I feel. The only time I don’t have to hide how much I miss her is when I’m down here.” She gestures. Here, this basement where Allen’s old Atari still sits on the cabinet with the chipped corners, all the remnants of the life she never really wanted packed up and put away, no longer sparking joy, if they ever did in the first place. I am blazing with contempt for Rebecca. You had your chance, I think, to make room for yourself, but you were too much of a coward.
And I might have been too, were it not for Tina. There is no doubt in my mind that I would have become a lawyer even if The Defendant had blundered into a different sorority house that night, but it would have been a passionless practice, something I did to try and connect with my father because I had no real connection with myself. Instead, I have lived the last forty-three years with purpose, not in spite of what happened in the early-morning hours of January 15, 1978, but because of it.
It is only fair that I take from Rebecca what rightfully belongs to the person who helped me live so well with my pain.
* * *
Rebecca lives in one of those neighborhoods with an active Nextdoor community, people who get dogs just to have an excuse to patrol the neighborhood a few times a day and post about it online. God, I sound paranoid, Tina said with forced, nervous laughter. Before she dropped me off at Rebecca’s curb, she pointed out the nearby convenience store where she would wait for me. She was worried about Rebecca spotting her and doing something crazy, like ripping out the reel with her teeth.
When I approach the QuikTrip parking lot, Tina is sitting in the driver’s seat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes closed. For a moment, I am sure she is dead, that the ping-ponging worry over which way this will go has triggered a massive heart event. I rap a knuckle on her window lightly, not wanting to give her one of those if she is in fact only meditating.