Woman Justice, Sample Chapters
© Copyright Rosalyn Wraight
Chapter 1
A promiscuous quiet crept over the dim sleeping city as Jansen marched a sentinel’s path. His eyes darted from corner to corner; his nervous steps click-clacked. His buffed and black shoes reflected the incandescent moon. A good Catholic girl would not walk here: shiny shoes were a devil’s mirror to what hid beneath a pleated skirt. But Jansen walked; he paced.
"McCallister," he suddenly grumbled beneath his breath, as he eyeballed the red Subaru® that sliced through the darkness and verged the sedan-dotted curb. Jansen’s heart quickened in apprehension; he gulped a deep breath. Before the engine even sputtered to submission, the door opened with a mighty reeeeeck.
"What we got, Jansen?" she asked, as she downed the last urgent swallow of 3:00 a.m. coffee. "Better be good. Dragging me out of bed."
Her feet moved faster than her words as she rounded the car. A cigarette dangled from her lips, billowing smoke into her face; she squinted one eye, her cheek defensively toad-like by the time she reached the sidewalk.
With a swift, yet fumbling effort, Jansen reached into his jacket to retrieve his notebook. Madly, he scoured his notes, praying they were thorough enough. He gulped another breath and readied his mouth to speak, but before his words rallied to formation…
"Well, Jansen? You gonna stand here all night? There’s not much of it left," she pelted, inching her sleeve up, exposing her watch to emphasize. "So what we got?"
"Bones—bones, Detective. All over the place."
"Bones, Jansen? You don’t say!" she retorted, her hand slapping the side of her face, feigning utter shock. "Now what precisely are we talking here, Jansen? Chicken bones? Fish bones? Dr. McCoy beamed off the Enterprise? Or perhaps something a bit more impressive to justify waking me?"
Jansen’s face reddened, as she leaned into him to deliver her words. He watched her drop her cigarette, extinguishing it with a menacing and merciless twist of her foot. He envisioned the Benson & Hedges® sporting a tiny policeman’s cap, grimacing, panicking, shrieking at her descending shoe.
"Human bones, Detective. The M.E. got here a few minutes ago. Said they were definitely human bones."
Wordlessly, McCallister moved away from him and started down a wooded path sanctioned by the Crime Scene Unit. Jansen followed. He noted her off-hour sweat pants and tennis shoes; a red T-shirt hung below her Bomber jacket. Suddenly, he felt even more uneasy in her presence, his face reddening again: the hint of a pale green camise peeked out from under her shirt. ‘She’ wore silk?!
"Who found the bones?" she asked in a finger-snap tone, bulldozing branches and brush out of her way.
"That guy over there," Jansen replied, pointing ahead to a clearing aglow with portable floodlights. In the distance, a shivering man braced himself against the November wind; he looked like the only motionless insect on an anthill.
"Man named Beaumont," Jansen continued. "Age 29. Works the late shift at St. Vincent’s. He’s an orderly. Verified by his supervisor. Let’s see—" he paused, shining his flashlight to illuminate his notes, "a Janet Linsmeyer. She said he worked the 5–1 shift as usual," Jansen resumed, reciting his notes with a tentative, yet boasting tone. "Beaumont said he was walking home after work and cut through here to save some time. Only lives a few blocks away, 442 Henchman Circle. Said he found the bones about 1:20 and then went home to call. The department received the call at 1:37. My partner, Jessop, and I met him at his residence, interviewed him briefly, and then brought him back here to locate the scene."
Seemingly disinterested in Jansen’s dissertation, McCallister interrupted, "I would guess this area’s pretty dark without department lights. Wouldn’t you say, Jansen?" As she spoke, she made a point of scanning the undersides of the dense, leafless trees that formed a webbed ceiling.
His eyes mimed hers, expecting to find her line of reasoning looped over a tree branch like a fisherman’s miscalculation.
"Well, it was pretty dark when we got here," he recalled aloud. "Pitch black, in fact. Even with that full moon up there."
"And this Beaumont fellow—did he give you any indication how he just happened to find human bones in pitch black woods?" Her words reached Jansen as abruptly as she had stopped to deliver them. As if coming face to face with a cold brick wall, Jansen froze just inches from colliding with her.
"Question him again. Now," she ordered, pausing long enough to make her point. "Oh, and Jansen…please see if the poor boy might need a manicure."
"Yes, ma’am. I will get right on that," he fumbled, dispatching his words to follow her as she continued down the path. He watched her move on, away from him, becoming smaller and smaller with distance.
Jansen’s entire body slumped in exasperation. He feared that, in a matter of only minutes, he had proved himself inept: his inexperience, the wetness behind his ears, glowing neon against the backdrop of a sleeping city. He watched McCallister until she moved beyond his sight; she would commence with the real investigation while he repeated a menial task. He inhaled deeply to resuscitate his dignity and went, again, to question the hospital worker.
Marching briskly into the clearing, Detective McCallister paused amid the police officers who were hurried by duty and procedure. She gazed in a luscious circle: a queen valuating her kingdom—a dog sniffing a fire hydrant. She swilled the adrenalin of challenge and ideal. All around, giant, yet painfully intricate, puzzle pieces whispered to her, beckoned her, pleaded. With obsessive delight, she would tend to them. With tenacity, she would assemble, until the image was clear, the scheme—grand. The only thing she would not do? Give in to the fiendish desire to contort her face, rub her hands coarsely together, and release the sinister guffaw from the small of her throat.
Her eyes veered to the center of the scene where the Medical Examiner squatted, bones strewn at his feet. Diligently, he sorted his collection, removed the dank earth and half-rotten leaves, and held each bone in the floodlight’s glow: turning them rotisserie–style, studying each angle, each nuance. McCallister thought he resembled an archaeologist in ‘The City of Gold,’ rather than a doctor, stationed among the dead.
Long before McCallister had ever clutched the rung of detective, Peter Hastings had been appointed Medical Examiner. He inspired the respect of the force, the entire community, with his expertise and dedication. But McCallister was far from awed by his accolade. Their history spanned back to grade school like a spider’s intricate web: delicate yet durable, a myriad of junctures and divergences, and so very difficult to cast aside.
Having once played Cowboys & Indians with the illustrious doctor, McCallister found herself unwilling to modernize her view of him. In her mind, he remained a sobbing boy: overpowered, tied to a crooked elm with her jump rope, held hostage with her cap-gun, until he groveled for his freedom, as the sun sank beneath their childhood days.
Although the sniveling boy evolved into a man, a doctor, and quickly, the county’s Medical Examiner, McCallister maintained that success befriended him too easily. It stemmed from a diploma, an undisputed acceptance of who he was and what he did—while her success arrived with an abundance of sweat and blood. As cadet, rookie, officer, and finally—detective, she had much more than simple ability to demonstrate; she had to prove herself capable as a woman in a man’s world, stretching beyond societal perception. Yet at this moment in time, McCallister and Hastings traveled different paths with synonymous destinations.
"So what do you think, Hastings?" she asked as she approached him. His eyes acknowledged her only briefly and then returned to the bone he held.
"I think you people ought to learn how to call each other something besides last names. This is like some bad movie from the 30s. I would think that late night rendezvous in the woods would put us on intimate terms, wouldn’t you?" he proposed, and then added, in a ruling baritone, "What precisely would you like to know, McCallister?"
Expecting the long-arm of her law to throttle the M.E., every officer within earshot poised to hear her reply. She simply laughed—surprising them—surprising Hastings most of all.
She laughed at his remark because she knew he was right. Somehow, yellow police lines and a corpse made cops stiff and sanctimonious. Or maybe it was the rarity of the occasion. In a midwestern city of 80,000, corpses weren’t cloaked in mystery. They were the victims of accidents or suicides; bodies with names and identities; shells with clear, yet voiceless explanations. Murders and mysteries, in these parts, were left to Friday night movies and bookstore shelves.
"All right, Peter. I get the drift," she said, her impatience now pointing beyond small-talk. "So, what do you think?"
"Well, these are human remains all right. Definitely an adult. Seems to have been elaborately dismembered. Look at this femur," he remarked, wielding half of a thigh bone in front of her. "Cut clean through, and the lack of a bending effect would suggest that the dismemberment was not perimortem. And not in a crude fashion…no, not with a hatchet or an axe. No, it’s not like that at all. The bisection is too clean. Whoever did this knew what he was doing. Took a lot of time. I mean look at this!" he said, spinning on the balls of his feet, his hands out in a solemn ta-da maneuver.
Behind the spot where Hastings squatted, there lay a furrow—maybe less than a foot deep, adjacent to a thick oak tree.
"The remains were left in this shallow grave here," he continued. "Looks like something—probably an animal—maybe a dog—must have started to dig it up."
McCallister equated the sight of the bones to fleas on a dog: at first, unseen, but in the simple recognition of one, vision instantaneously becomes wide-eyed and infested. As soon as she acknowledged the first bone, even the dim light could no longer hide them all—sticking out—here and there—through clumps of dirt and wet leaves.
"Any idea how long it’s been here?" McCallister asked.
"I’ll have to run some tests. There’s no tissue left on the bones, even with the cold weather, and I cannot detect any evidence of larvae. The bones appear corroded, blackened—which would indicate that the defleshing was chemical, rather than natural," his answer came, but it seemed as if he said the words more for himself than for McCallister, a cognitive checking-off. "We’ll have to just wait and see. It would be premature of me to make any suppositions at this point. It’ll take some time before this area is even close to being fully explored."
"How about male or female? Can you—at least—tell me that?" she asked, the Crime Scene Unit’s camera flashing behind her, turning bones into tasteless still-lifes.
"I’d rather wait to answer that until I get these all in some kind of order so I can make more precise measurements. We found the skull—it might indicate a female gender, but I’m certainly not prepared to state that as fact. It’s in pretty rough shape. Appears to have been smashed repeatedly, but not with the precision of how it was dismembered. I would suspect this will prove to be cause of death. But I can’t be certain yet. Whatever happened was pretty gruesome. I’ll be honest with you, Laura, it’s going to take some time for me to get a handle on exactly what—or who—we’re dealing with."
"Ah, come on, Hastings! What do I need to do to get a straight answer from you? Tie you to a tree?" she sniped. "You’ve got to be able to give me something solid to start with. Hey, what’s that?"
As the camera flashed again, McCallister noticed a glint in the burrow behind Hastings. Quickly, she pointed to it and crouched down for a closer look. Hastings spun around to join her, a huddle of inquisition.
"It’s metallic—a ring…" Hastings noted as he dug around it, tapped it with one of his instruments. "Personal effects? In this menagerie? Laura, yell for one of your boys to come and collect this."
McCallister, far too intrigued to chastise him for his sexist assumption, made a point, nonetheless, of summoning a woman from the Crime Scene Unit.
With a methodical swish-swish of blue overalls, a worker promptly approached. She carried a translucent evidence container, housing five or six cigarette butts, the word Newport still legible. She held it out in front of the detective, obviously inviting some hoopla for her tagged and numbered specimen.
"You really should quit, Ristow," McCallister said with a garish grin and a roll of her eyes. Without further comment, she turned toward the Medical Examiner. "Now, Hastings. How about it, Hastings? I need something solid to go on. Just what am I supposed to do while you get your jollies in that lab of yours? Twiddle my thumbs?"
"I don’t know, McCallister. Maybe you could learn some first names."
"Give me a break, Peter."
Chapter 2
Here’s your coffee, dear. Just the way you like it," the silver–haired woman said, placing a plum–colored cup and matching carafe amid the clutter. The table depicted a housekeeper’s worst nightmare: where there should have been the sheen of a good polish…books, papers, pencils, cigarettes, ashes, ashtrays, ribbons, and a typewriter abounded. She shifted things around until her place-setting looked respectable.
“Can I get you anything else before I leave?” she asked. “Something to eat? Pie maybe?”
Failing to notice her housekeeper, the coffee, the familiar words, Emily stared a hole through the wall; despondency loured back at her with a fiendish eye.
“Emily!” the woman said, toppling Emily’s vapid stance.
"No—no, Olivia. This is fine. Thank you," she answered distractedly.
“Well then, how about I just tidy up a bit here while you start on that coffee of yours,” she pressed, trying to keep her involved, but Emily resumed her inattentiveness and offered no reply.
With calculated clumsiness, Olivia rolled a few pencils off the table, a giant lumberjack letting miniature logs break free. Surely, that would evoke some sort of emotion. What perfectionistic writer would allow anyone to touch the precious instruments of her work? But Emily still did not move.
"Aw, come on, Emily. I hate seeing you like this. You get a little farther away from the world everyday," she said, almost pleading with her to react, to do something, anything—even if it was to reprimand her deliberate aggravation. "Here, let me rub your shoulders for a bit. You don’t get enough exercise, you know. Sometimes I wonder if this oak chair hasn’t become a permanent part of you."
Olivia inched closer, extending her hands to shoulders knotted with tension. Like a weakened prizefighter between rounds, Emily moved into her touch, raising her head slightly, pulling her blond hair aside, complying.
“That’s it, hon. Just relax. Drink your coffee and relax,” Olivia encouraged. “Maybe today will be different. Oh, how I hope that is so. Maybe today it will happen like it always has.”
“And maybe not,” Emily spat, abruptly retreating from the touch, forcibly pushing the typewriter across the table like a frustrated child. “It’s been six months now. Six whole months! I just can’t write. I can’t. It’s over. Somehow, I’ve got to accept that it’s over with,” she purged, slamming her fist onto the table, refusing to succumb to rising tears.
Taken aback by the reaction that she, herself, had provoked, Olivia cautiously responded, “It’s not over. Don’t talk nonsense. Maybe today will be different. I’ll get out of your way here. Just keep trying, dear. Keep trying.”
Hesitantly, Olivia pulled away and turned to leave. Emily listened to her footsteps through the house. She listened to the opening and the shutting of the front door. The horrid sound made every nerve wince: the sound of a tomb being sealed, confining her in a morbid silence, caging her, alone with herself.
Stiffening her back to the wooden chair, she clutched the cup of coffee, the daily prelude to her writing time. She inhaled its aroma, swirled the bitter goodness in her mouth. There had always seemed something magical about one o’clock coffee. Olivia purchased the beans at the gourmet shop every Tuesday after marketing. And each afternoon, she would grind them, bringing Emily the black magic, a brew notorious for summoning the Muse within her, making the words pour forth onto paper.
But today—today again, the coffee tasted only of bitter sadness. It embodied no magic, no Muse, no promise.
As she swallowed, her mind strayed from her makeshift office in the dining room, away from what she could not accomplish. Like a lost soul, her focus slipped through the French doors on the opposite side of the table…
The black-bellied clouds surrendered the rain they had long hoarded, every drop greedily claimed by the parched July earth. The midwestern land had been dying: a slow, agonizing death, turning farmers and mosquitoes into vigilant mourners, turning the sounds of summer into a dirge. But now, a shimmering mist treaded the breeze like scores of diamonds returning wealth to the earth. Would the miser sky redeem itself in time? Was salvation the silverlining?
The crystal doors, through which Emily watched the rain, always made her feel like a sentinel, a gatekeeper to the secrets of life; the faithful things, things that could not hurt, things that few noticed—but she thrived upon.
The doors framed a small patch of forest, completely hidden from the bustling city around it. No one, but Emily, applauded the pheasant’s daily rendition of an old woman scolding a child dashing through her flowerbed. No one else neighbored tenant rabbits, squatter squirrels, landlord crows—kept time with the soprano crickets, acappella treefrogs, portly toads with a bent for the Blues. No one wished upon the fireflies, speckling the night like momentary stars—or envied the slurping sounds of the earth, as it swilled life back into it.
Beyond the private view the doors gave her, Emily respected the very panes themselves. She delighted in polishing them everyday, rain or shine, ritual, routine. Like the English having tea. Like children fleeing the schoolyard. With a ripped, shapeless T-shirt and a pail of ammonia water, she rubbed them clean—as if in payment for the things the doors provided her in her solitary life.
Until six months ago, Emily had had no wishes. Everything she needed was framed by the dining room doors. As long as her view remained steadfast, she felt safe. She didn’t have to see cars pass on the street in front of her house—contend with God’s fleet of overzealous salesmen at the front door, offering to save her soul—acknowledge people out for walks, strolling, hand in hand, advertising the overrated ties that bind.
Despite her self-imposed quarantine, Emily knew the talk of the neighborhood, the outpouring from the rumor-mill about the eccentric writer who rarely left her house. Over the years, she watched curiosity turn to fear. The woman next door, making a frenzied dash into the yard to recapture her barking dog. The gardener, hastily cutting the lawn in order to flee her inspecting, suspicious eye. Children, cautiously, yet eagerly, struggling to steal a glimpse as she retrieved the morning mail. At times, she was defiantly tempted to greet them, donning some frightful Halloween mask. Just to satisfy them. Just to teach them. How frustrating it was when monsters did not look like monsters, she often thought. The entire world in front of her house was an intrusion. Unwanted. Unneeded. Uninvited.
Few people were welcomed into Emily’s world, and even then, relationships were functional, rather than emotional. Each ensured her isolation from life, rather than bridged it. The agent. The housekeeper. The mailman. The accountant. Each, a title, a task. Each accorded her things, but in her mind, they were replaceable. They could not hurt her. They could not leave with more than she chose to give to them. They could not reside within her heart. There was fondness for them. But love? No, love was something that hurt. Love was one of those monsters that didn’t look like a monster.
Writers were allowed to be reclusive, aberrant, mysterious. She took proud delight in fostering the world’s stereotype, affording her the sanctuary of home. Maybe the image fit her in a lot of ways, but moreso, she wore it as a badge that set her apart. As if by sleight of hand, her unpretentious brick house transformed into a forbidding fortress…surrounded by a moat filled with crocodiles…shrouded by a roof where Poe’s raven perched, ready to impale any intruder.
The stereotype justified keeping odd hours, getting lost in the simplest of thoughts. It made her contend a biological relation to Juan Valdez and the Marlboro man. In a whirl of caffeine and cigarette smoke, the typewriter keys moved in unison with Chopin’s moodiness and Beethoven’s nerve.
Emily shaped nights into daylight by hammering at the keyboard, and when the lack of inspiration made her bitter, she would do nothing but stare through her French doors and wait. Sometimes she would sit and wait for days, existing only where her line of sight took her. Waiting, as if in suspended animation. Waiting, as if inspiration itself would emerge from the wooded lot to greet her, to bring the seeds of her work—seeds that germinated into material, typeset in a manner that fulfilled a writer, in a style that brought fans racing to bookstores for her latest creation.
At a tender age, the ambition to be a writer had infested her soul. She was the only child ever known, in her small hometown, to have kidnapped Shakespeare from the local library. She had tried so fervently to convince the librarian to let her keep the book, but at the expense of poetic justice, Emily realized that all shrews could not be tamed. She was assessed a fine for her deed and ordered to release the immortal writer—unharmed.
Maybe that was when her passions and eccentricities became apparent to others, as well as to herself. Maybe that was when her non-conformity became glaring, forcing her to seek accepting shadows. “You couldn’t pay me to even touch a book of Shakespeare,” the joke began, leaving Emily as the punchline.
To her, the words she found on musty, yellowed pages were as prophets to the things she wanted for herself. A command of the language. The immortality of ink on paper. She consumed the words with fervent obsession. She had lost herself—and found herself—in the words, the works of the masters. Yeats. Tennyson. Sisters, Bronte. Hemingway. Whitman. Michelangelo. Twain. Dickinson. Steinbeck. They confirmed that she, too, had verbs and nouns and adjectives attached to the very cells of her being. Not DNA. Not chromosomes. Language surged through her veins. Metaphors and similes were her heartbeat. Allusions, the pulse.
She always believed that something forced her hand to move, to scrawl words on paper—something quenchless inside—something driven, despite the many years of frustration and despair it had brought. She even went so far as to believe she was destined to be a writer because of her given name, Emily Elizabeth. Many times, she wondered: who in their right mind would name an innocent child Emily Elizabeth, if not as a namesake to the great master, Dickinson, herself. In this century, the name sounded more like a Lily Tomlin character, than a girl—a woman—who could command her future and gain respect.
Throughout her life, she tried to get her mother to admit the namesake, the fateful meaning she must have insinuated. “Your great-grandmother’s name was Emily and your grandmother’s was Elizabeth. Nothing more. I gave you your name to make your place in the family.”
The family! Emily loathed her place in the family. The family! What was this sacred honor? What was this hallowed place she was expected to be so eager to assume? Generations of men had run the family business. That was all it was. No infamous legacy to uphold. Just a business. The loathsome expectation to continue the line was put on her at an early age: to learn the business from her father, to take it over when her father was ready to retire. The age-old arguments had nearly come to blows over Emily’s refusal to be the obedient, only child. “For Christ’s sake, we’re talking about a butcher shop, not the royal throne!”
“It put a roof over your head. It put you through school,” her mother’s moralizing always began. “Maybe you think it’s not much, but your great-grandfather built it with his bare hands. And his family and his son’s son and now you, Emily. Now you. And once you marry, you will have a son to carry on.”
The family! Bah! She would be a great writer—not just another commoner to carry on the name and the iron-fisted traditions of family. She was different from them. But not in the belligerent, ungrateful, disrespectful way they were so quick to assume. She had language surging through her veins—not some desire to make headcheese!
The butcher shop cornered Main & 16th Street for nearly a hundred years. Built there by family. Tended by family. Perpetuated by each generation without question, without flaw. And now, it was Emily’s turn. She wasn’t the first only child, but she was the first ‘only daughter.’ Already a glitch in tradition. Oh, but then Emily further entangled the lineage, proclaiming the word lesbian as an adjective to describe herself. There would be no sons. No traditions. No congruence with the grand scheme her ancestry had etched into cold, cold stone.
“If I’m going to break family tradition, I might as well demolish it!” she had tearfully screamed the last time she saw them those many years ago, leaving them behind, moving on with her life. Her soul was tired of trying to gain an acceptance they refused to give.
No, this Emily—she would not propitiate them by assuming a role as the makeshift male in a butcher shop. She cared nothing for worn, wooden floors that were the foundation of family ways. She cared nothing for worn, wooden floors, stained with animal blood. Like the world on the front side of the house, those wooden floors were simply another intrusion. Unwanted. Unneeded. Uninvited.
Emily continued to watch the growing puddles of July rain, keeping her back stiff to the chair. Melodiously, each drop of rain rejuvenated something in the world, relieved something thirsty, abated the slow death of drought. Each was but a promise that life would proceed, not pause, not end. Despite its hopeful sound, Emily heard only anger, an intense jealousy, for she knew that those droplets could cease only the drought of soil, not of soul.
The reservoir of words within Emily had dried up six months ago. Without words and their place on paper, the meaning in her life was gone. She teetered on the edge of herself, a gnawing inside with no panacea. Deadlines had been long passed. Her agent slowed her urgings to a near-silence that made Emily’s failure deafening. Even the mailman hid his face, seemingly guilty, as if empty hands were his own making. The language that had always raced through her veins to sustain her, waned, until finally—hopelessly—it had stopped.
Emily sensed, then, that breath was not what was important in staking a claim to life. Breath meant nothing. It became, simply, a useless, mechanical motion, a somber beacon if the very life had been gutted from her. Her tortured soul resigned in silence, next to a typewriter webbed in idleness.
For months, she had tried and failed to bring forth the words of substance and sustenance. Under six moons, she sat at the dining room table, refusing to give up the discipline of the craft, but found no words, no compulsion, no meaning. Just a profound inertia, a sense that the blood had been drained from her, leaving her limp and listless.
She had published thirteen mysteries, collections of poetry here and there. Far more than any sense of accomplishment, brimmed a fear of being impinged by an apex: her career amounted to these things and nothing more. To Emily, what had been written lost importance in quest of the next paragraph, the next page, the next book. Each triumph she perceived as a bridge, not a landing. But the bridges felt to be burning and July rain could not extinguish them.
Emily rose from her chair as if movement was formidable. Riddled with self–doubt and bitterness, she wandered the house, finding solace in nothing. The living room couch and the antique rocker were mere pieces of furniture set down only for show; tokens, facades that seated no one anymore. Her fingers snaked the dusty spines of shelved books. The masters’, her own—each but a merciless memento. She flipped open the music box, given by a lover when there was time and trust in her world, its tune faint and fractured. Her world inside contained things; things could not fill her. The world outside contained strangers; no one could fulfill her.
With the simple turning around, the physical shift between one frame of her life and the next, a tempest…
A woman stood in the French doors of the dining room. She ventured forth, her movements graceful, soft, the breath of a summer breeze. The incredible air about her suckled the image: nearly floating, hovering, scarcely touching the subservient ground at her feet.
As soon as Emily’s eyes touched her, they were fixed; moving only when the woman moved, following her, tracing her. No—it was even more than that. The woman had become the very sockets of Emily’s eyes: seizing them, owning them, making them powerless to seek anything but the sight of her. And the sight of her was nearly hypnotic—like a hazy dream—a fragment of something so real, so vivid that it seemed the contrary. Emily’s eyes were adrift with her, lost, possessed.
“My dear woman,” she breathed, now just inches from Emily’s face, “why is your heart so heavy? It flattens the world around you.”
"What?" Emily blurted, struggling to unshackle herself from the force abducting her. "What did you say? Who—who are you? Where did you come from?"
The woman didn’t answer. There was only a pause, filled by the bellowing silence of their eyes meeting. Oh, her eyes were so blue—periwinkle—a sky, right before the dripping sun is swallowed by the night—a sea, that thinks the white shore its mistress. Something like that—she thought to herself—something profound.
“Why is your heart so heavy?” the woman soon reiterated.
“My heart is not heavy,” Emily answered in polite reflex, smiling at the sudden and surprising honesty of it, realizing that the deadness inside was gone. “No, there is no heaviness. Now, please tell me who you are.”
“I am Milicent. Milicent Baylor. Do you remember now?”
“Remember what? You? Oh, trust me, there would not be a way to forget you,” Emily responded, feeling reduced to an awkward schoolgirl, drowning in the bluest eyes she had ever seen.
“Good, then you do remember. I was afraid that you wouldn’t.”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “I didn’t say I remembered you. I said if we had met, I would be certain to remember you. But we’ve never met. Who are you?”
“Milicent Baylor. I already told you,” her tone hinging on indignation.
"And we’ve met before? Is that what you’re saying? I’m sorry, I don’t—I don’t remember," Emily spoke in an incompatible mixture of apology and self-pity.
“I don’t know why that surprises me. I guess I should have expected it from you,” she said, turning her eyes away, retreating. “I’m sorry I came. I’m sorry it still mattered.”
"Wait! You can’t go just like that. You can’t just walk into my house like this and leave without some plausible explanation! Please, just tell me," Emily pleaded, desperate to keep even just the sight of her, desperate—as if her very survival depended upon it. "Tell me where we met."
“Check your notes, Big Shot Writer.”
“Notes? What notes? What do you mean?”
But the woman didn’t answer. As gracefully as she had entered, she was leaving. Emily’s mind ricocheted between trying to stop her, and simply watching her move: a hungry mind, starving eyes.
“What notes?” the words reached to her, but fell short. “What notes?”
She was gone.
Chapter 3
After only a brief meeting the day before, the woman, Milicent Baylor, had altered Emily’s life. As if caught in the vortex of obsession, Emily felt herself being twisted, weakened, gradually pulled under by thoughts of her. Passion had been revived—but not for words, not the hunger needed for her work; rather, the face of a woman besieged her soul.
Foregoing the one o’clock writing, Emily scoured her memories for Milicent—for something—anything to validate the notion that they had once met. Certainly, any woman as beguiling would own hallowed ground in her mind—high ground—and be revered, recalled with gentle, unerring ease. But her mind found nothing.
Swift and fleeting images of her, poised in the French doors, implied a maiden meeting, the very first glimpse. The encounter was a catalyst, indeed—but for fantasy, not remembrance. A hundred times, she replayed her entrance, her exit, savoring each detail: her eyes were pools she wanted to bathe in…beads of July mist trickled down her brow in sultry foreplay…her satiny hair wept on her shoulders like a satiated lover. Each image, each description: an undertow, pulling her deeper into obsession.
Questions wove themselves through a fragmenting reality, neon strands in her black and white world. Questions posed before; unanswered, but still faithful in their wait for reply. Was she sane? Had the threads of rationality unraveled altogether, allowing her to see what did not exist? Was the woman simply a delusion? An apparition, birthed by a mind being torn between responsibility and resignation?
But her eyes! No matter how earnest Emily’s resistance, she could not stop envisioning those eyes. So blue. So distinct. So consuming. And her hair…the way she moved—glided—floated, and the way her white sun-dress vigilantly hoarded her breasts: a miser with understandable and profound greed…the way the limpid dress danced with the breeze—waved—gestured…no, beseeched the very surrender of her soul.
Like a clock keeping maniacal time, Emily’s mind violently pitched between shrewd analysis and the unkempt side of her that craved only to thumb through Milicent like an erotic mystery. She was life within a tomb—the sight of her, a sacred unsealing.
Propelled by the to-and-fro sensation inside, Emily embarked upon a frenzied mission of ransacking the stacks and boxes, the shelves and trunks so bloated with the remnants of her life. Her home: a museum, a mausoleum stuffed with useless, yet time–honored, things. The garage, the attic, rooms, closets—each a resting place, garnering everything, forbidding escape. People left. Feelings faded. Times changed. But things? Emily could control things. Tight fists relinquished nothing.
Emily flitted from room to room, blazing a path, leaving a trail of destruction behind her. Rifling, searching, examining, throwing. Gasping, smiling, swearing, scowling. The near entirety of her life was strewn at her feet in pack-rat style. There were carcasses of dried-up pens that had, perhaps, etched one of her short stories. Yellowing first-drafts, long revised and published. Canceled checks, stretching back to 1973. Calenders, dating themselves a decade or more. There were appointment books just as old—from when there were places to go that mattered. And old, brittle photographs—from when there were people who mattered, faces that afforded some icon.
All these things, all these memories, and yet nothing. Not one pen-scratching of the name Milicent Baylor. Not one face even close to resembling the woman whose image felt branded into her soul. No worn matchbooks, forcing her to recall some faded liaison, nor any notations in an appointment book that forecasted some business lunch. Not one thing jarred her memory. Not one thing pointed to the woman’s place in her history, nor made her fit into her world. Nothing. Just fragments of time. Time that now stood still and smelled musty.
Emily sat pretzel-legged on the floor, a sense of defeat clinging to her like a spider’s web. As she scanned the attic, the Middle East came to mind—Jupiter, clobbered by a comet—a spinning Kansas house, aimed at a sister-witch’s head. Olivia’s going to kill me, she thought, recalling the recent week Olivia had spent cleaning. In an effort to mask her frantic deed, Emily began tossing things back into boxes, suddenly caring nothing about the sanctity of order.
As she worked, Emily spied an untouched box in the back corner of the room. A fondness, throbbing with pain, tagged along as she lugged it near. Too old and worn to covet or conceal anymore, the cardboard flaps sunk inward, as open invitations to the dust of uselessness. Writing occupied the side, as if an official term could some how vindicate the contents. But the only things capable of that: the lines of age etched in her face, a bank account swollen from success, fingerprints inside of her soul from the kneading and the needing to write. This was the box that hoarded the true beginnings of her life…
Half-written tales that expired before they were even spirited. Short stories too short to stand tall. Crippled poems that limped and fell off the page. The germs of ideas not cultured. Characters who lived and lapsed as mere stick people, never bestowed the authority of flesh or voice, purpose or plot. These—the relentless imaginings of an undisciplined, wild mind.
To Emily, exploring the box mimicked the maudlin leafing of pages in a scrapbook. She could still smell the Cappuccino: two o’clock in the morning, a tiny cafe, alternating between writing and studying the faces of vagrants ambling past the greasy windows. She could still feel the claustrophobic commotion in a crowded Chicago bus depot: trying to block it out, positioning words in a ragged, coffee-spattered notebook. She could still taste the bitterness of rejection: envelopes ripped open with the optimism of a child believing in Santa Claus. The unmasked Santa—a disinterested editor; the thoughtless form letter—the dreaded lump of coal.
The lamentable scrapbook served almost to humiliate her, now—now that she understood how prolifically Discipline and Competence held a pen. Years ago, a lifetime ago: it seemed almost painful to look, to remember. Until…
Suddenly, swiftly—like a flash of a beacon—it loomed off a page. That name! That woman! Her eyes. Oh, those eyes! Her face! Milicent Baylor held residence on a worn scrap of paper. She had found her, among her things, amid her memories, in her notes—just as the dreamlike woman had said.
With hope re-inflating her veins, Emily studied the words, her soul likening it to a treasure map that would somehow lead her back to the sight of the woman. CHARACTER SKETCH: Milicent Baylor, the handwriting announced, making her hover above what was real, away from what was dependable in her life. As she read, she realized that the Milicent Baylor in her notes was merely the genesis of a character in an unwritten story named The Verge, a story she plotted when she was seventeen—1966, in that small town, in that cramped back room of her father’s butcher shop.
Under a rapid wave of nostalgia, seventeen seemed like yesterday; images and feelings became vivid, almost touchable. Emily retraced that confusing time in her life. How the war, raging in Vietnam, had punctuated, amplified the approach of her adulthood, the fearful sense of her own fragile existence. Friends and acquaintances were suddenly old enough to fight a war, to fight for their lives, wielding rifles to defend themselves, not the squirt-guns and spitballs of youth. Her peers were old enough to die. She was old enough to die. The horrifying realization altered her soul, caused her to grieve for something not yet hers to lose. She had become an adult, but not by age. The innocence of childhood shrunk, slain by the caustic fact that life was no longer carefree and certain. It reeked of responsibilities. A closed-ended proposition, one that didn’t allow for wild dreams without an abiding regard for time. At seventeen, childhood ceased to exist in the grand shadow of her own mortality.
Emily had distilled that inner turmoil until words poured forth, words becoming sentences, paragraphs becoming epitaphs to the loss inside. This was the ground, the soil, the very womb in which the fictitious Milicent Baylor had been conceived. Emily skimmed the raw plotline: a few awkward words, describing a waitress in some cafe. But Emily found no resolve, no insight into why some glorious woman, claiming the same name, would emerge through her French doors.
Overcome by weakening dishonor, Emily witnessed yet another truth dawning; its redness oozed into Emily’s fair skin. The entire characterization of Milicent Baylor had been based upon her first love for a woman, a slender and stunning waitress at the cafe next to her father’s butcher shop. Emily had coddled an intense infatuation, an enchantment with her beauty, her enthusiasm. The wanton, yet hidden heart of a seventeen–year–old, had vicariously painted the portrait, a reflection—of her housekeeper—of Olivia.
Olivia! My, how time rearranges.
But even in finding proof of what the woman had said, even in seeing the threads of her story, in seeing the genesis—none of it seemed real: not the character, not the likeness to Olivia, and certainly not the woman in the dining room. Maybe seeing her was just a dream, taking shape in the same turmoil, different moments. The similarities aligned: grief at the loss of her own self. At seventeen, the child inside of herself gasped, succumbed. Now, in her forties, Emily swam in the fear that the writer, the very basis of her life, clutched in vain at the final breath.
The sight of Milicent Baylor, standing before her, seemed as if she had seen an angel. Was she an Angel of Death concocted out of pain? Another one of those monsters that didn’t look like a monster? Was she simply a beautiful monster? A deception to make swallowing a bitter pill seem like consuming the sublime? She certainly made an idle typewriter lose its significance. She returned life to a dying soul. Just the mere vision of her made Emily feel as if she were losing herself—to a woman—to something alive, not to the gnawing pain inside.
Emily hastily shoved everything back into the cardboard box—everything but the dirty scrap of paper with the name on it. Forcing the box back into the corner, back into her subconscious, she rose to her feet, determined, and yet terrified of the inconsistencies and questions in her mind. She hurried down the creaky stairs to the dining room, to the French doors that had framed the glorious woman.
“I remember you now, Milicent Baylor,” her words, a foghorn reaching across a foggy spance. “I remember you.”
Like breath returning to aching lungs, Emily sighed with the woman’s return. She watched the dance of her walk. She seemed to come from the sky. Maybe she was the sky, a miracle sky that gave her form and movement. Without a word, she stood in front of Emily. Her eyes screamed, a thundering statement that sometimes, just being remembered was salvation itself.
“I remember you now,” Emily repeated, waiting for some response, hoping for clarity. Not one part of her dared believe she was the same woman in the character sketch, but perhaps by acknowledging her in this way, Emily would be given the truth.
“What have you remembered?” Milicent Baylor asked in challenge.
"When I was seventeen—I wrote your name—for that story. Is that who you are? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Or is this all something else?"
“Is there shame in having forgotten me, Big Shot Writer?” she spat.
“I don’t understand any of this. This has to be some kind of trick. Just tell me the truth. You must have known about the story; now you pretend to climb up from my pages and be someone real. Why have you done this? Just tell me why,” Emily demanded, refusing to lose herself, again, in those blue eyes.
“You are the one who pretends. You have no right to be angry with me. I haven’t done anything wrong. You are the one—you, Big Shot Writer."
Emily jumped to her own defense. "And just what the hell have I done?" she fired machine-gun words. "You came into my house. You tell these lies. You—not me."
"You pretend you’re God, Emily. You give people names and faces and little lives. Then you just snuff them out and move on to something else. Like it shouldn’t bother me to be alive one minute, and then in the very next, I’m discarded—I don’t matter to you anymore? Shouldn’t that bother me? Hasn’t it ever bothered you?” she upbraided, her hands pressing into her hips.
“I did not do that,” Emily maintained. “There is no way I’m going to stand here and believe that I’m talking to some character I concocted almost thirty-years ago. There’s no way! You had just better tell me what the hell this is all about!”
“Then who am I, Emily? Some gypsy who blew in on the breeze? Some obsessed fan? Some woman beside herself with attraction to you? Spare me whatever your ego wants to think. Just look at me. Look!” she directed, raising her arms and bringing them down the length of her body. “Look at me! At these eyes, at this hair, this face. Haven’t you seen them before? Aren’t they just the way you made them in that god-awful story you were going to put me in? Look, Big Shot Writer! Look!”
Emily couldn’t help but look. There was something so captivating about her. But her anger—her lies—they turned her beauty into something that stung. Part of Emily thought it best to look away, and yet, she was indeed, the precise picture of what a seventeen-year-old had imagined Milicent Baylor to be, the perfect derivative of her image of Olivia.
But this was beyond reason! This was beyond fiction—beyond anything she had ever cultivated within her own imagination. Temperance and logic were Emily’s hallmarks. Anything that dared to deform the rigid framework was spontaneously dismissed as an intrusion. Milicent Baylor was an intrusion! But more to her soul than to her life—and so she looked. She could not help but look.
“Do you recognize more than my name now?” she asked, moving toward her until their eyes were only inches apart. “Do you really remember?”
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me,” Emily said, her mind stone-walling, her head trying to turn away. “Expecting me to believe something so ludicrous. Of course, you look like her. It’s all a part of your game. You wouldn’t try to make me believe you were Milicent Baylor if you were some ugly old woman. It’s all a part of your plan. That’s all. Right?”
“You’re not really this stupid, are you, Emily? Funny, I always thought you were a dreamer, a thinker, able to see far more than what seems reasonable,” she challenged with a shaming shake of her head.
“I can see enough,” Emily hesitated, but continued, “to know that what you’re telling me isn’t the truth. None of this is possible. Even if I wanted it to be, it’s just not possible.”
"Then touch me," she said, her tone changing, her anger weakening, jolting Emily. "Just touch me. Please? I will show you exactly what you have done. You won’t be able to touch what you see, but try—try to touch me."
Milicent stretched her arm before her, her eyes begging, daring. But Emily didn’t move, paralyzed by a fear of touching her. Afraid of her skin. Afraid it might be as soft as it looked. Afraid it was warm and addictive.
“Please try to touch me, Emily. Can’t you remember how you made my skin like silk?”
Silk—Emily thought. Maybe there was nothing wrong with touching silk that invited her. Maybe it was safe to touch just silk. Cautiously, slowly, she reached for Milicent, expecting a grand explosion inside. Like fireworks on a hot July night. Like ecstasy and fear colliding. Like…
Emily moved to stroke the length of her arm, but felt nothing. She moved again, watching her hand seemingly pass through Milicent like a mirage. Her lips pursed to speak—to scream—to do whatever bewilderment demands.
“Not what you imagined, Emily? Silk, you spun silk, but not long enough. You spun silk and then let it fade, Big Shot Writer. Why? Please just tell me why,” her voice cracking with festered pain. “Wasn’t I pretty enough? Wasn’t the silk soft enough? Were my eyes too blue? Why couldn’t you have finished me?”
“I did this? I really did this?” Emily implored, shaking her head, eyes widening.
“I must go now. I’m getting weak.”
“No! You can’t go yet. No!” Emily’s words were rabid, frantic. “Make me understand this. Make me believe. Let me help you. Let me make it right. If I did this to you, let me make it right.”
But Milicent said nothing. She had toyed with Emily, confused her, overwhelmed her. She led her through the entire spectrum of feelings; guilt and confusion were the brass ring piercing Emily’s nose. Leaving her in a pool of vulnerable shame, Milicent simply turned and disappeared through the French doors. The thought of the bluest eyes remained, lancing Emily’s soul. Were the blind eyes of Justice the bluest of blue?
