CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

**

After the Sedgwick trial broke open, Tim went back to Jubilee to finish his degree. And I fled to New York.

I’d authorized my business manager to buy a townhouse in my name just before I left the city. The exterior was more post-industrial and functional than either Old-World and charming or shiny and new, but it was on a tony residential street near Central Park West, and it came with a parking space and a doorman who (the building management was quick to assure me) couldn’t be bribed. When I bought the place, I expected the media furor to be all but dead – by now, I was supposed to be yesterday’s news, free to plant window boxes and practice in the late-morning sunshine coming through the bay window into the music room and take the subway to class, assuming I got into Juilliard for the second time.

Whether that was going to happen or not, I didn’t know. The letters still hadn’t gone out.

The condo was better on the inside; the previous owner had rehabbed it. It had high ceilings and custom crown molding and not one but two travertine-tile bathrooms, the larger of which boasted a soaking tub with whirlpool jets and a marble waterfall shower and French doors that could open onto the private postage-stamp garden at the back, if you were lucky enough not to have photographers riding on one another’s shoulders to point their telephoto lenses over the top of the privacy fence.

The landscapers had planted the garden to my specifications while I was in Virginia: cosmos, day lilies, black-eyed Susans, hedges of English lavender, huge hanging baskets of calendula and nasturtiums, seven-foot-tall topiary sculptures of columnar African basil, a trickling, tinkling fountain feeding a pond of baby koi and water chestnuts. Lilacs, dwarf fig trees in terra-cotta pots, thyme and moss roses between the flagstones of the path, a kiwi arbor.

Even in its newly planted, half-raw state, it was a tiny walled paradise of fragrance and color and the lazy hum of velvet-backed bumblebees. And I couldn’t bring myself to go out into it.

It wasn’t just the omnipresence of the lurking photographers. Donner was being held without bail until his trial – the judge at his indictment considered him to be a flight risk – and lounging around on a hammock feeding baguette crumbs to my designer goldfish while he was cooped up in a cell seemed somehow disloyal, even if the mess he was in was his own fault. More often than not, I walled myself into the bedroom with a pen and a pad of staff paper, drew the curtains, and spent the day scribbling lyrics or melodies far too disjointed and trite to use. Hardly one clever or beautiful or even original line in fifty, but at least I kept the pen moving. Right now, blind productivity was just about all I could ask of myself.

My brother was a murderer.

I couldn’t wrap my brain around that.

It made a rational kind of sense, now that I knew to read dark meaning into previously innocuous bits of information that I hadn’t connected before. But the part of me that was still his baby sister couldn’t believe it of him, couldn’t understand how someone so easygoing and laid-back and full of humor could also be so many other more sinister things that I knew nothing about.

Maybe, my brain whispered at me, I’d known it all along. Maybe I just hadn’t chosen to see it.

Maybe.

I’d been to visit him once, at the medium-security facility in North Carolina where they were holding him until the trial. I had every intention of going back. But at the first glimpse of him in the orange jumpsuit with his hands cuffed in front of him, under those grim fluorescent lights that shadowed his eyes and turned his skin gray – or maybe that was the Plexiglas screen between us – I felt a lump lodge in my throat that I couldn’t talk around, could in fact barely breathe through. I sat in my folding chair and stared at him and cried, hating myself for not holding it together but unable to do anything about it, and he sat slumped on the other side of the screen and looked anywhere he could except at me. I didn’t need a trial to tell me he was guilty; I could read it in every line of his averted face.

“Don’t come back,” he said at the end of that disastrous interview, sounding as miserable and choked as I felt. I didn’t argue, just bit my lip and nodded and turned away, unable to voice any of the meaningless comforting things I’d come to say, or even to tell him that I loved him. All my life, he had been the one to comfort me, cheer me up, play my games, keep my secrets. And now that I was in the position to return the favor, I couldn’t even look at him.

I did, however, keep the promise I’d made him. I swallowed my pride and called my mother.

It wasn‘t going to be the same conversation that it would have been. Everything was different now: Donner was in prison, Lou was under indictment on conspiracy and tax fraud charges, and Anthony Kent was heading up a federal investigation into Momma’s involvement in the Sedgwick case. Her accounts were frozen; the public-access television show hadn’t aired in weeks; if Kent could prove that she’d facilitated or even known about Donner’s trip to Virginia, she’d be facing prison time as an accessory to murder. I didn’t have to ask to know that the Fund was a distant memory. My mother was no longer in a position to help anyone else, not even her only son; if it wasn’t for Donner’s songwriter royalties rolling in from ‘More Than You Know’, he’d be stuck with a public defender.

Momma was still Momma, though, her voice on the phone as steady and sharp as ever. “Rae Kellar,” she said, and I felt my mouth go dry.

“It’s me, Momma,” I said.

She didn’t reply for a moment. I tucked my feet underneath myself and wiped my free palm on the leg of my jeans, then switched the phone to my other hand so I could wipe that palm, too. I looked around me, at the pretty yellow-and-blue Provençal kitchen I had yet to cook anything more complicated than frozen pizza in, and reminded myself that I’d won, even if it didn’t feel much like a victory.

“What do you want?” she said finally. I blinked; I’d been ready for a harangue, but not a question. Especially not that one. Momma didn’t usually care what I wanted.

“I promised Donner I’d talk to you,” I said. “I know things are … different now. From when I made the promise. But I wanted to keep it anyway.”

“Big of you,” Momma said. I could hear bitterness leaching through the careful neutrality of her tone. “And what can you possibly have to say to me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I wanted … to make sure you were okay.”

She laughed out loud. It sounded like a spray of acid. “Spare me,” she said. “Let’s clear the air, shall we? So we never have to have this conversation again?”

I swallowed. “Go ahead.”

“I hold you responsible,” Momma said. “Totally and completely. And I want you to know that when they strap your brother into a chair and stop his heart with electricity -- because they will kill him for this; that smirking chimp of a district attorney will see to it -- that it is your fault that he's dead.”

I breathed out -- slowly, carefully, so she wouldn’t hear the sob of my exhalation -- and breathed in again. Calm air from the garden. Nasturtium, basil, lavender, marigold.

“That’s not true,” I said. “You can tell yourself it’s my fault if you want, if it makes you feel better. But I’m not the one who drove those people off the road.”

“He did it for you,” she said. Hint of a break at the end of the word. Was she crying? Was that even possible? “So you could live in a purer, better world. That you would do what you‘ve done, that you‘d spit on his gift like you have, is the most cowardly kind of betrayal there is.”

“A gift is a box of chocolates,” I said. “A gift is a sweater. Not a double murder. I can‘t believe I ever used to think that anything you said made sense.”

“And I can‘t believe you‘d do this to your brother, when you’re the only thing in the world he’s ever really cared about.”

“He should have asked me,” I said, my throat so raw and closed I could barely force the words through it. “If he had, I would have told him. I would have told him that I didn’t want that.”

“You stupid, short-sighted, ungrateful little bitch.”

“It’s easy for you to start calling names, isn’t it?“ I said. “Why am I those things, Momma? Because I’m not happy that Donner drove two people he’d never said five words to off the road to their deaths? I’ve been to that spot, you know. I climbed over the guard rail. I heard how far a rock has to fall before it will hit the bottom. Have you done the same?”

“I’m glad your grandfather’s dead,” Momma said, low-voiced with fury. “I’m glad he didn’t live to see what a disappointment you are. You smug, self-righteous little ignoramus, you‘re the embodiment of everything he despised.”

I could feel anger inside me, pushing at my sternum and my sinuses, pounding at my wrists and ringing in my ears. “I may be a disappointment to you. But at least I’m not a murderer.”

“Better a murderer than a mudfucker and a dyke.”

My hand closed around the telephone; I could feel my nails digging into my skin, but somehow it didn’t hurt. There wasn’t room inside me for anything but rage.

What was it Max had said, half a lifetime ago?

I look at your mama, and I think she‘s not going to change anytime soon.

“Goodbye, Momma,” I said.

“Don’t Momma me; I’m not your mother,” she said. “You’re not my daughter. I don’t have a daughter. You’re not even dead to me. You never existed in the first place.”

“Goodbye,” I repeated, and hung up the phone.

**

I was still shaking an hour later when my phone vibrated and started tinkling Bach at me. Glenn Gould playing a movement from one of the French Suites; Tim’s ringtone. I thumbed the phone open.

“Hi.”

“Did you get it?” he demanded. “Did it come? I got mine in the mail today. You must have gotten it before I did.”

“What?”

“Is it bad news?” he wanted to know. “Is that why you didn’t call me? Or is it good news, and you didn’t call me because you didn’t want to brag?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tim.”

“Your Juilliard letter,” he said impatiently. “Did you get in?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t opened my mail for a couple of days.”

“Go look through the pile,” he said. “I haven’t opened mine yet. I was waiting for you.”

“Okay, hold on a second,” I said, uncurling myself from the wing chair I’d been huddled in. “I’ll go look.”

“Hurry. I’m about to hyperventilate.”

The mail was on the kitchen table. I hooked the phone between my ear and my shoulder and started rifling through it. “Is it there?” Tim asked, and I cleared my throat.

“Yeah. It’s here.”

“On the count of three,” he said. “One. Two.”

“Wait!”

“Why?”

“Let me put the phone on speaker. I need both hands to get it open.”

“Okay. Ready?”

“What do I say if it’s yes?”

“Gioia,” Tim said. I laughed.

“And if it’s no? What then? Dolore?”

“Worse than dolore,” Tim said. “Try vergogna.”

“Everything’s about opera for you.”

“And you’re surprised by that because …?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Tim?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll move anyway, won’t you?” I said, suddenly anxious. “Whether or not we get in. You’ll still come to New York and be my roomie?”

“Don’t be silly. Of course I will.”

“So it doesn’t really matter? It’s just the icing on the cake?”

“Stop quibbling, Lib,” he said. “We’re friends. Nothing’s going to change that.”

“Okay,” I said, and felt the tight cold spot in my chest ease a little bit. “Okay, then. On the count of three.”