Lydia
The kitchen is dark. A tinny laugh track from the TV in the apartment upstairs spells the silence. Lydia pulls her chair closer to the kitchen table, and as she does, it softly scrapes the floor. She holds the receiver to her ear with both hands and asks Winton if he is still there.
Always, he answers calmly, as if he’s been waiting to say this exact word.
Good . . . just stay there. Lydia draws in a deep breath and exhales slowly. She’s still shaking from her run-in on the sidewalk with the boy who must be Kathleen Riley’s son and the woman who slapped her minutes ago, but she’s not afraid. She closes her eyes as she speaks.
I never told you about Rex. He’s someone I met at the Tap a long time ago. The Tap is a bar that’s been here forever and will stay here forever like the people who drink there. People like me. And like Earl, who went there every night until they threw him out for good a few years after we divorced. It takes a lot to get banned from the Tap, so that should give you an idea of the kind of guy he is. I guess if Earl hadn’t been thrown out of the Tap, I’d never have started going there in the first place, so if you think about it, I have Earl to thank for Rex. This was a long time after Earl, but I was still young enough to go there and not pay for drinks.
Maybe this starts with the fact that I was in my forties and still expecting free drinks. You’ve never seen me, Winton, but until not too long ago I could turn a few heads. It never did me any good, but it got me free drinks and that night it got me Rex. Rex was not from here but not from too far either. He owned a gym in Amenia and had a bunch of small businesses. I never could keep track of what he was doing, and he always had a story to explain a new car or a new motorcycle. Things sort of fell into his lap—TVs, log splitters, tires, snowmobiles—and I never understood exactly how. It didn’t matter to me. He was funny and liked to take me to nice restaurants. This was when I still thought going to a nice restaurant meant something.
Lydia’s voice has risen. She is not shouting, but she speaks with purpose, and swiftly, with the energy that comes from making connections, detecting a pattern, figuring something out. It is, she knows soon after she begins, a story she’s in a hurry to finish.
Besides my son and my ex-husband, Earl, the longest relationship I’ve had with a man is with Rex. Luke was in high school then and still living with me, but he was never around. He had swimming practice and college applications and whatever girlfriend he was running with.
When Rex came along, it felt good to have my own plans, different company besides my son, who’d been my whole life since he was born. It felt a little too good because I didn’t pay close enough attention to what should have been warning signs. Rex would disappear for a few days without giving me a heads-up, and at first it seemed strange but after a while I got used to it. Also, there were stories that didn’t add up—like yours, Winton, names that would change, places and times that didn’t match—but I got used to that, too, and told myself none of it mattered. When he was around, Rex was fun. He could be mysterious and unreliable, but he made me laugh. Like Earl could. Like you.
Luke never bothered me about Rex. He was respectful, but I could tell he didn’t like him. He never said so, but with Luke you could always tell how he felt about someone by the way he listened to them. His face would either be open or closed—there is no better way to describe it—and with Rex he was closed, like he knew whatever was coming out of his mouth was bullshit. This was not a talent he got from me. I’ve only ever recognized bullshit once I was covered in it. Like now.
A few weeks after Luke graduated from high school, Rex asked to borrow the car. It was on a Saturday afternoon that he asked, and he needed it to run errands the next day. Something was wrong with his Corvette, he told me, and promised he’d have the car back by evening. I remember Luke was annoyed because our deal was that I had the car for work during the week and he could use it on weekends. I don’t remember what I said exactly, but reluctantly he agreed.
So Rex slept over Saturday night, and on Sunday morning, before I was awake, he took off. Three or four hours later he called me from a jail in Beacon. He’d been pulled over by a state trooper near Kingston, and a large amount of cocaine was found in the car. He asked me to post bail but I didn’t have access to that kind of money; so his lawyer, a man with a woman’s name, Carol, somehow got the money and he was out the next morning. What Rex told me outside the courthouse that day was that the drugs were not his. That they were Luke’s and that he’d been hiding them in the car. He even said he’d heard him on the phone arranging drop-offs and deals and never told me because he wanted to protect me. Winton, you told me you wanted to protect me, too. Do you remember? From your bosses? Why would I need you to protect me from people who run a lottery I’d supposedly won? That’s when I should have hung up the phone on you, but I didn’t. And when Rex told me he’d been protecting me from the truth about Luke, I should have turned my back and walked away. But I didn’t. I listened. Just like I listened to you. I actually listened. I listened to his lawyer, too, who told me that Luke would be in jail for ten years if he didn’t plead guilty. A few days later, I listened to the DA, who told me the drugs were in one of Luke’s gym bags with his school ID and other belongings, some swim goggles and a portable CD player. He also told me that a dealer from White Plains, a guy by the name of Ray Hale, who’d been busted around the same time, gave a statement that Luke was his distributor in Litchfield County. He said he also had two more people to testify that they’d bought cocaine from Luke. When I found out that Rex and this Ray Hale had the same lawyer, Rex told me it was a coincidence, that there are only so many people who handle drug cases in the Hudson Valley. And guess what? I believed him. I believed all of them. All of them except my son, who begged me to get him a good lawyer, who recruited teachers and coaches and friends to testify and write letters on his behalf. Everyone in his life stood by him, but I failed him. I did worse than fail him.
The afternoon after Rex’s arrest, three police officers showed up at the apartment with a search warrant. I called Luke’s public defender, who said they had probable cause because not only did they have depositions claiming Luke was a dealer, they found the drugs in his gym bag in a car that he drove regularly. He told me I didn’t have a choice but to let them search the place. So I let them in, and as if they’d been given a map in advance they went straight to Luke’s bedroom and in less than a few minutes found two more bags of cocaine stuffed in a coffee can under his bed. It was like being in a nightmare. Luke, who had been watching from the hallway with me, went crazy. Yelling that he’d been framed, that Rex must have planted the drugs there in case he was caught. He yelled at me, too. Told me I had ruined his life by bringing Rex into our lives. I don’t think I really understood how right he was until the police officers wrestled him to the kitchen floor and handcuffed him while one of them read his rights. And still, I didn’t protect him. I should have thrown myself on that car and screamed and yelled until the cops and the judges and the lawyers all believed that I was the one responsible for the drugs. I should have been the one to go to prison. My life was nothing and Luke’s was just beginning. But I did not move. I did not yell. I did nothing as I watched the police drive my son away.
Lydia lowers the phone to her chest. Her face is a mix of agony and disbelief, and when she returns the receiver to her ear, her voice is softer than before, less hurried.
I know you think I’m a stupid woman, Winton, but even you won’t believe the next part. The next part is possible only when you have a weak woman who is afraid to be alone. Whose son has a scholarship to a school on the other side of the country and is leaving without looking back. It’s only possible when you are an idiot like me who will listen to a guy like you hour after hour, for months, listening to lies like songs on the radio.
The next part is when I stopped being a mother. I agreed to give a deposition about where Rex had been the days before the arrest, which was actually nowhere I knew. The truth was that he’d taken off without explanation or phone calls for three days, which was normal for Rex. He turned up that Saturday afternoon, without his Corvette, dropped off by a friend he’d been helping set up a restaurant in the city, he said. This was when he asked to borrow our car the next morning. His lawyer said that this little deposition from me was the last thing Rex needed to make sure he didn’t take part of the fall for Luke. It was, Carol said, the least I could do given the circumstances. So despite the fact that I had on the same day found out that Rex had a police record that included fraud and multiple drug charges, I gave the deposition. And when the lawyers and the DA and Rex then told me that I needed to convince Luke to plead guilty and get a reduced sentence, I did that, too. They told me that even though Luke was eighteen and not a minor, he would only get a slap on the wrist because it was his first offense, that it wouldn’t affect his scholarship or his life in any way. Do you think I bothered to check with anyone—Stanford, his coach, another lawyer—to see if they knew what they were talking about? Of course I didn’t. I listened to Rex. And instead of hiring a decent lawyer and letting a jury decide, I convinced Luke to go along with the plea that they all wanted from him. He was terrified by this point, in jail for days, and the DA spooked him with threats of spending all of his twenties behind bars. The public defender told Luke it was his best shot at a normal life, and in the end he pled guilty. He pleaded guilty and spent eleven months in prison.
What happened next won’t surprise you. Rex got off scot-free and in three weeks was gone. No good-bye, no phone call, no note, no thank-you. Nothing. I never saw or heard from him again. I’ll bet you saw that part coming, Winton. That part in the story when the dumb woman does or gives the guy who can make her laugh the thing he wants and then he disappears. You’ve heard that part of the story before. You’ve heard it and seen it and done it a thousand times.
Did I tell you a woman came to my door tonight and hit me in the face? She did. You probably know her father. Another dumb sucker like me sending money to strangers. At least he’s lucky enough to have a daughter to step in. Which she did. She let me have it. And thank God. She knocked some sense into me. Finally, someone knocked some goddamned sense into me! You know what she said? She said I destroyed people’s lives and she was right. She told me I had to stop, Winton. She told me to stop, and right now, even though it’s too late to do anyone any good, I’m stopping.
Before Winton speaks, Lydia stands up from the kitchen table. She drops the receiver from her ear and hugs it to her chest for a few seconds before carefully returning it to its cradle. Upstairs, the television has been turned off, and for the first time all evening her apartment is silent.