Bright Young Women

After, he gagged me with a mildewed dish towel and bound me to a chair between the front windows, using the same twisted dark rope we would have used to tie close the trunk of his car once we’d loaded in the boat. The rotted rag plugged the laugh in my throat. Oh, Ruth, I said kindly to myself, there is no boat.

I was facing the lake water I could still smell in my hair, thousands of feet below. It was as if he wanted me to enjoy the view. The door closed behind him and the car engine caught; the sound of gravel giving it to rubber. He was leaving. I sobbed because it was over and it hadn’t been that bad, right?

I twisted my wrists in the ropes, soundlessly at first. The scream that had collected in me had reach; I had to make sure he was far away before I used it. I tried rotating, shimmying, sawing, bouncing in the seat of the chair, but the ropes were so tight I could not even blister my skin. I screamed and screamed until my chin was slobbered with saliva and my vision spotted, black holes burning through the edges.

I came to with another burst of relief, the kind that must come after a long-dreaded surgery. It’s over. Behind me. I can get on with life now. The lake’s horizon severed the sun in half like a woman in a magician’s box, gutting it orange. The kitchen was dark and the air clammy. I looked down and saw goose bumps flecking my bronzed knees. It had been so long since I’d had a tan.

I thought again that what had happened wasn’t so bad, in the grand scheme of things. This sort of thing happened to women all the time and they still fell in love, had careers, babies, if they wanted those. I hadn’t been disfigured or lost some seminal ability, like my sense of smell or taste. I hadn’t lost the person I loved. I thought of Tina, and relief turned to a gratitude so pure and intense that I wondered if I’d been drugged with something.

I heard the woman’s voice then. The sweetness in it lifted me higher. It’s way nicer than you said! Even after I processed her words, even after I heard his response, with that peculiar, malignant affect, a sort of euphoria stayed with me to the end.

My back was against the wall, the driveway behind me, the front door to my right. I had no way of seeing either of them through the window. I thought about Tina, the way she sat on the kitchen counter swinging her feet and pinching off pieces of cheese while I was cooking, so that I always had to shred more as I went, and I thought about the culinary school where I would learn to properly chiffonade leafy herbs, and I marveled at the pointlessness of it all, at the timing, which did feel pointed in its own way. Why not a year ago, when there was nothing to take from me? It was like he had scoured the beach for the woman most flush with life.

The girl outside said “Hey!” in this funny, outraged way, and then the two of them came squeezing through the door on my right like some sort of black-and-white comedy duo my father used to laugh at on TV. She was younger than I was by a few years, young enough to look invincible and hassled and unafraid, even with a gun muzzle imprinting her cheek. I wanted to shelter in her adolescent hubris for as long as I had left, but it was obliterated the moment she saw the mangled grief on my face.



* * *




“Let’s just say it was chaos.” The Defendant chuckled. “With all three of us there. Total chaos.”

Tina’s face is earthly in the setting Seattle light. We are sitting in teak chairs on her back stone patio at her home on Vashon Island, Patagonia fleeces zipped up under our chins. The Cascade Mountains are reflected in the looking glass of the sound, and we are one foot in both worlds. The one where we have to imagine how it ended for Ruth and the one where we don’t.



* * *




People die of all sorts of things. Cancer, car accidents, old age. This girl, whose name I would never know, whose parents I could never tell—she died of fight. I saw it happen. She was pummeling his head, his neck, left fist, then right. The final swing seemed to connect to some unseen socket. There was an exploding-star jolt; an outage that sounded like electricity itself. The disruption in magnetic fields trembled the house and sent him flying off her. He landed in a crashing heap, tangled up in his own limbs, and dozed off for a moment. I hoped for a concussion, for a brain bleed, his death, and though I didn’t get that, I suppose I got the next best thing.

I saw it all over him as he staggered to his feet, kissing his singed knuckles, as he came toward me with her spit sheening his face. She had scared the ever-loving shit out of him. He was as mortal as me, made small by whatever else was out there, whatever had given her white-hot light at the end.

I did not have long, but I did have enough time to return to the kitchen with Tina, smelling of basil and burned butter. You’re never supposed to turn your back on butter you’re trying to brown, but I’d had to grate more cheese—Tina and her sticky fingers—and I hadn’t noticed the blackening foam until it was too late to salvage. I was rinsing out the pan and I was chiding Tina and I was laughing when it happened. Look what you made me do!

“I’m so sorry,” Tina says, pressing her nose to the back of her hand while the tears fall and fall. “God, I’m sorry, Ruth.”





The Court: Is there anything now you want to say to the Court?

The Defendant: There sure is. Did you think you could get away without me saying something?

The Court: Oh, no. If I thought I could, I wouldn’t have asked.

The Defendant: I’d like to talk about the choice of counsel, but only briefly. I remember when I brought the issue up a week or so ago about me representing myself. The Court said, “Well, if you were a brain surgeon you wouldn’t operate on yourself.”

And I started thinking of that analogy in its real perspective and I said, “Well, think about the education a brain surgeon has. There are some brain surgeons I would rather have represent me in a criminal trial than some attorneys.”

Because, let’s take the medical profession. Four years of medical school, plus six, seven, eight years of residency before they can go out on their own. Think about it.

We have attorneys doing brain surgery after three years. Sort of in a symbolic sense. There’s nothing that prevents a newly graduated law student from representing a person in a capital trial. And I think this is a shortcoming of the legal profession.

It’s like some incredible Greek tragedy. Must have been written sometime. There must be one of those ancient Greek plays that portrays the three faces of man. And I don’t know how the court can reconcile those three roles, because I think they are mutually inclusive. And I think the court, in spite of its experience and wisdom, is just a man.

And I will tell the court that I am really not able to accept the verdict because although the verdict found in part that those crimes had been committed, they erred in finding who committed them. And as a consequence, I cannot accept the sentence, even though one will be imposed…. It is a sentence of someone else who is not standing here today.

—THE DEFENDANT’S CLOSING REMARKS, 1979





PAMELA


New Jersey, 2019

Day 14,997

Not too long ago, I was waiting in line at the Summit Starbucks when I heard Judge Lambert’s distinctive drawl from behind. I ran my tongue over my teeth, used a knuckle to paste down the unruly hairs in the arches of my eyebrows, before realizing it didn’t matter if I was wearing lipstick where it shouldn’t be because the man who deserved my nastiest bitch smile had been dead a decade.

“I think it’s more toward the end,” a girl’s voice said, and there were the craggy, telltale signs of a video, stopping and starting, patches of the wisecracks Judge Lambert managed to work into his final remarks even as he sentenced a man to die by electric chair.

“Of this court as to count two of the indictment—”

“You went too far.”

“No, I didn’t. It’s after the sentencing.”