OCTOBER 3, 2002 I'd been charged with murder. The lawyers had pleaded it down to manslaughter. Manslaughter. The slaughter of a man: the bloody sound of it had seemed to me worse than murder, and still does. They'd pronounced me lucky, my lawyers had: lucky that it had been Paul's gun; lucky I'd put in for the court order of protection against him even if it hadn't had time to come through; lucky that everyone knew about my monumental losses - my father, my business; lucky I had behaved erratically in public. All of this supported the claim that the killing was unpremeditated. After all, I hadn't gone out and bought a gun, but simply been swept away, provoked in my vulnerable state into the impulse to use a weapon ready at hand - Paul's weapon. Premeditated. Swept away. Provoked. Vulnerable. Impulse: the terms with their self-important airs marched, heads high, masquerading as hard facts. Like little soldiers they'd protected my flanks. Oh yes, one lucky lady, that's me . But of course I was: five to twelve, out in seven, as opposed to, say, seven to fifteen, six to eighteen - life. That could be seen as luck. Here I stood now in a changing room for just-released prisoners, peering at myself full-length: charcoal pants, black turtleneck sweater, shiny black shoes with small silver buckles and, unseen in the mirror but a definite presence, silken underwear - every item expensive; every item brandnew. I was unused to looking into mirrors and the experience jarred. It seemed like the reflection had dimension, life, was ready to walk away, while I was flat and without substance, a figment of my own imagination. I'm half an inch shy of six feet. My build used to be generous like an Olympic swimmer's, skin taut over a layer of insulating flesh. But seven years in prison lost me the habit of eating much, developed the habit of exercise, lots of it, which had leaned my body out. The eyes that looked back at me were still my eyes: the color of Russian amber, yellow flecked with dark bits - tiny prehistoric fossils maybe. They are set wide, shaped by the high cheekbones beneath them into crescent moons, suggesting a smile no matter what. My nose is straight and emphatic; the chin, though small, has a jut to it, and my long, mobile mouth belongs on a comedian. The features were there, intact, but my face had changed anyway: it reminded me of a slum store shuttered for the night. And then there was my hair. During the first two years up here in Bedford Hills, its Indian black began a leaching to white - all but a wide, off-center skunk streak that held stubbornly onto darkness. The hair hung in a fat braid to my waist. Funny, I'd always wondered whether there was Indian blood in me - hoped there was. I glanced down at the stylish, witchy points on my shoes. The new leather felt stiff on toes used to spreading themselves in sneakers. Sheilah Donlan had arrived here early this morning, her arms filled with tissue-plumped Bergdorf shopping bags. Sheilah and I went back as far as third grade together - the only person on the outside I knew anymore. For the past half an hour she'd been bustling around me like a mother dressing her child for the first day at a new school, handing over the outfit piece by piece, talking up the provenance of each item, its particular claim to wonderfulness. Sheilah's mirror reflection stood behind mine, holding out a hand now, offering "A little blush?" I turned to the actual Sheilah and said, "I don't know a fancier way to say thanks, but if I did I would." Sheilah said, "I'm your friend. It's what friends do. You'd do it for me. You've done it for me." True, I'd seen Sheilah through a booze and pills crack-up, checked her into Four Winds Hospital not so many miles from here, collected her two months later, clean and sober. But that was then. Now I seriously doubted whether I had the emotional horsepower to fuel the complicated demands of a civilian friendship, particularly one with Sheilah who gives too much and wants too much back. I thought of Toukie and Wanda and Mercedes, lifelines during the years that are about to become the past - friendships rooted in impermanence, stripped of demands, vigorous maybe for just those reasons. Chiefly, I pictured Toukie's smart black eyes and the gold tooth that twinkles when she laughs. We'd had a special bond: two women who had killed their men. "Thanks, Sheil. I'll just leave it at thanks for now," I said, taking the blush compact and brush, turning back to the mirror to apply it. The luxurious fabrics felt illicit against my skin as I moved, taunting in a way that I thought for a moment might make me cry. Actually, I'd have loved to cry. A big, long jag of wet sobs would've been as satisfying as ... a comparison did not spring to mind immediately, then it did: as satisfying as a good come. The homecoming queen, Paul used to call me. But that was then too. In these seven years I had schooled the riskier emotions with a hard hand, dressage discipline of dangerously frisky horses - something like that. I could laugh within bounds but produce not a tear; rushes of anger sparked and quickly fizzled like wet firecrackers: mad, sad, glad - all three were there but powerless. Sex? The ex-homecoming queen's urges were frozen or dried to dust - one way or another, so out of commission that going gay for the stay, as they put it up here, had not been even vaguely tempting. Yet ... yet, as I stood before that mirror, Sheilah watching expectantly, my insides asked for the buzz of strong feeling, the kind that bucks in the gut, races the pulses. A first day of freedom should be marked, shouldn't it, if only to prove you're alive? But no luck. I could tap no feeling other than the craving for feeling, a feeling in the second degree. Maybe this was how it would be now: a life in the second degree to pay for a death in the second degree. Laid on the line that way, it seemed only fair. "Do you feel remorse?" they had asked. I'd said, "Yes," knowing it was the answer they - the judge, the psychiatrist, the parole board - needed. The parole board didn't buy it at the first hearing, the five-year mark; they almost never did, I'd been warned, in a case like this. They'd hit me for two more years. At the second hearing the same simple "yes" rang truer to them. Did it ring true to me? Does it now? Well, it was true that at the crack of the shot, the kick of the gun in my hand, Paul's body jerking back, I had hollered "No." I remembered clearly my finger tightening on the trigger, knowing that it was; the terrific jolt to my own body - then, his slow wilting collapse, the sounds from him, except for the very last one, drowned out by my scream. I remembered also the preceding hour, every bit of it, every word, every move, though I said I did not. "Yes": a clear answer to their clear questions. But how could I seriously claim remorse when I knew that given the final moments to relive exactly as they'd gone, I might do exactly what I'd done? "You feeling bad?" Sheilah asked, moving toward me. "You look a little shaky." "No," I lied, fooling neither of us. "No, I'm good - just ready to get the hell out of here." "The owner's a dancer on tour with some Andrew Lloyd Webber show," Sheilah said. It was maybe half an hour later and we were driving down the Hutch, The Bedford Hills Women's Correctional Facility a good five miles behind us. "Look, don't expect anything grand. It's kind of a skinny building scrunched in between two better ones - no doorman, but you said you didn't care. I signed a nine-month lease for you. That's when he'll be back." "Sounds perfect," I said, trying to be positive despite a sense of dread beginning to rise like a fog around my heart. So this was freedom: a vast, shapeless space said to be filled with possibilities - but I could see only pieces of possibilities and even those felt beyond my reach. "Ninety-third Street, you said, Sheil?" "Ninety-fourth, just east of Amsterdam, remember?" "Oh right, you told me that. And I do care about the doorman. I'm Goddamned relieved there isn't one. I've had enough hall monitors to last me awhile." "Ah, Sweets. It's going to take you time to get over this." Like a cold or a car accident or a divorce. After years spent thickening my skin, I found myself suddenly skinless, too ready to be chafed by a brush against anything, even a friend's sympathy. "How much money do I have left from the loft sale and all?" I asked. "I know you told me that too, but ..." "God, for someone who's made a fair amount of it, you're really hopeless about money." Paul: "Back in Century One B.C. some smart Roman said, 'Money alone sets all the world in motion.' Ergo, the one who runs the money spins the earth. I'm pretty good at it." Grace: "I'm not. I seem to know how to make it and how to save it. Want to feed my nest egg some growth hormones? Just tell me where to sign." Paul: "Hmm. Let me think about that. You're my wife, may be a bad idea." Paul had been nothing if not subtle. No rush. I reminded myself that replays like this one were hot coals, to be handled with tongs - imagery picked up in the stress-management therapy group, Tuesdays and Thursdays at four. "Hopeless about sums up money and me," I said, back with Sheilah. "So what's the bad news?" Her nose wrinkled with the arithmetic of my finances. "After brokers, lawyers and all, just over twenty-three thousand, except for the paintings and sculptures you wanted to keep." Just a few of the many I'd owned - mostly by artists who'd been friends of mine. "I'd have to be flat-out broke to sell those, not that they'd be worth all that much in the world of dealers and collectors." "Probably not. But look, you're not flat-out. You'll have the salary from me, at least for the short range." We'd known each other at close range for thirty years - long enough for us both to recognize it would be no walk on the beach, me working for her. But we recognized also that for a paroled convict a solid job in waiting was worth almost any walk required, plus a kiss on the ground beneath her feet. "I still suspect you didn't exactly need another mouth to feed," I said. "I really will try to be useful. Hey, thanks to you I am, in discharge-manual lingo, an employed woman with a domicile and bank account - a good bet to reenter society as a responsible citizen." "Bet your ass you are! And I didn't invent the job. Swear. I've taken on another recruiter and a full-time research guy - who's fabulous, by the way, and I pay him a fortune. I admit it's scary, the extra expense, but I had to do it. The search business is way more complicated than it was - much more work, and thank God the work's coming to me. Used to be that our mandate was finding and wooing the best candidates. Now we practically have to do an FBI check to make sure they've been good boys and girls as well as good executives. Not all of them have, which means more recruits, more meetings. So I'm there some nights till ten, phoning and e-mailing my little heart out. What I'm saying is I need to be nicer to myself. I mean what's the good of making it if all you get is the chance to work harder?" "Right." A shrink's question and Sheilah, always the student with her hand raised highest, had the right answer. But the answer in her case came with a footnote: her fingers would never really come off those details, not if she had a dozen schedulers. "e-mail," I said, "you'll have to teach me that. The Internet got big just about the time I went in. We weren't allowed to mouse around in cyberspace up there." "You'll learn it in half a second. But look, you know and I know this isn't the kind of work you're used to, or ought to be doing in the long run." No use in recapping what I was currently used to, or in pointing out that the long run was territory as remote to me as the afterlife. "By the time the dancer gets back and wants his apartment, Gracie, you'll be ..." Sheilah kept talking but I didn't hear the rest. My thoughts had cut and run down a private path after "Gracie." She called me that only occasionally. With George gone, she was the only one who did. I'd been Gracie; he'd been George, never been Dad or Daddy. He was George from the time I could talk. It suited the way we were with each other. Now say Jawge. Atta girl . I could hear his charred voice, with its Noo Yawk dips and swells. And you're Gracie. Gray-see. What else would a Jawge name his girl? Especially this George: when I saw George Burns on television reruns and later in the movies, the fox-faced, dapper look, as well as the hoarse vaudeville sound of him, were uncannily like my father - well, like George Leshansky might have been, given the luck and swagger to be a winner. Burns and Allen were our household mascots, a scratchy record of their stage and radio skits on the priority list of stuff that came along each time we moved: George, the faintly gruff, exasperated but protective leader; Gracie, the adorably child-voiced dumbbell always trumping his ace, far wiser in her innocence than he. I said mascots, not models - I was no more adorable than George was protective, and wisdom was scarce in our household. How to explain about George and me ... we were a team, just us two. Originally, there must have been a third team member, but she was gone before my memories began. George never mentioned her, and during my earliest years there seemed nothing strange about that. By the time my curiosity began to put out shoots, George's elusiveness about anything to do with family ties was normal too. Asking became a kind of halfhearted game: "So who was my mom? Come on, George, did she run away or die or what?" "Who do you want her to be?" "A Indian warrior princess." "You got it, kid." "No, tell me, really." "A seven-foot Indian warrior princess with very long legs. That's how come she could run so fast and not trip on her bow and arrows. Look, I'm going out for a coupla hours. You be okay?" "Sure. Bring back ice cream. Chocolate." "Say goodnight, Gracie." But sometimes I couldn't summon up even half a heart for the game, and ice cream, even chocolate, would've curdled inside me. On those occasions I would mumble my "sure" and wish him out the door before my impotent tears began to flow. I can tell you what my first retrievable memory is: I am sitting in a corner of an unfamiliar room, one eye shut, the other pressed against the peephole of a kaleidoscope, fixed on the stained-glass patterns inside that change at the slightest move of my hand, loving the look of them, frustrated that I can't save the ones I like best, keep them forever, because if I could, I would be safe - safe from what I don't really know; I have no recollection of feeling scared ... exactly. At a table in the center of the room, men are smoking and dealing out cards, slap, slap, slap. Continues... Excerpted from A Fractured Truth by Caroline Slate Copyright © 2003 by Carol Brennan Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
