One Life Passes for Another

By Jill Stephenson

I was rewarded for being afraid, Teri Lang confesses as her respectable life begins to shatter.
Working her way into the citys circle of moneyed elite, Teris career excels at a lightnings pace. Embracing the rules of the powerful who chart her meteoric rise, Teri accepts their honors and benefits from their connections. But just as her future approaches the brink of limitless success, Teri meets a young radical whose personal mission is to destroy the web Teri has so slavishly served.
A study in greed and politics, One Life Passes for Another takes the reader through a complex canvas of characters, agendas and motives. It is a story of ideals gone astray and the nameless drive that leads even the well-intentioned into places they never thought possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 29, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465319203

Jill Stephenson

Jill Stephenson grew up in Rochester, NY. She attended The State University of New York at New Paltz and has an MA in English from Columbia University. She is the author of six works of fiction and lives in Central Florida.

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Copyright © 2008 by Jill Stephenson.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

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Contents

Paths

Defense

Walking on Platforms

Her Honor

Citizens Agenda

Out of Order

Rain

Another Life

To Ed

For His Abiding Love and Devotion

Paths

1

Beneath her feet the soil yielded gently. The ground still moist from an afternoon rain, she left diamond grids, sneaker patterns, as she ran through the brown clay. The park lights were stuttering into service, their globes illuminating designated arcs of terrain. Thick air, humid, it moved sluggishly through her lungs. Trees shed droplets from their leaves. Touching her skin, Natalie tipped her head to catch the wet with her tongue.

As she passed the courts and central meadow the sky turned seamless black. But she knew her way. She ran every night. She liked the way her hair felt, clinging to her neck in sweat, the feel of her legs liberated from panty hose and the soft hairs of her arm touching open air. Strength in her limbs, her pulse a resolute rhythm, the world dissolved. All the hustle and bustle of the mundane, work-day routine blew away.

At the mouth of the woods the trail pulled her forward. A scent of pine and fresh earth, she thought of the distance between the path and her other life. She wished she could feel so at peace more of the time. Away from the boulevard, the traffic, sirens, the noise of her neighbors arguing over money, her boss (a punctilious pain in the ass), the bills, the thousand things that nagged.

She did not hear their voices until she was already a few feet in front of the ridge where they were sitting. Their laughter was a crack of brittle sticks. Their words, muffled by the sway of the trees, were slurred. One uttered a short string of syllables and the others laughed staccato, breaking the scene into pieces.

Too far into the woods to retreat, a weak bulb lit a swath she would have to take. She would have to pass through, the light accentuating her presence, spotlighting her appearance. She pulled in her breath, trying to hold it in her chest. She was a moth trembling at the flame, her wings suddenly too close to the candle. Her ears filled with pulse throb. If I scream, they’ll only come faster, she thought. Sensing their eyes turning upon her, zeroing in, gathering their full height and potency to her direction. If I stay calm, act like nothing is wrong . . . The pat of her soles on the soil was suddenly loud, too large. She was so small. The boys, tall and gangling, came out of the shadows. She felt their intent keen as a brand burning her skin. Marking her. I have to run. Quick! Getaway . . . But her legs would not go any faster. On automatics, frozen in the motion with which she had entered the secluded snare, Natalie pushed at the ground. Her sneakers were too flimsy to deliver escape. As if nothing is wrong, she thought. So nothing will happen.

She heard leaves. Insensate to the drama about to occur, the trees continued to flutter beads of rainwater on her skin. She was magnified in her shorts and tee shirt. An easy kill. There would be little effort required to bruise and gut her. Her vulnerability was the helplessness of flesh and blood. Suddenly in the presence of heartless adrenaline, pumped up machismo, Natalie was in the center of the vicious swagger of proving manhood to the pack.

Hey, bitch, one yelled. His voice a pornographic razor.

The others snickered.

I said, c’mere, bitch. He liked the word; it caused reaction.

Her ankles buckled as she pushed forward. If she could get past the light, if she could regain the swallow of the woods. Find a protective canopy into which she could slip away.

C’mere!

He caught her shoulder and snapped her back, his fingers squeezing tight. I’m sorry, she said, tasting the plea as she spoke it: insincere, bundled, senseless.

Standing in a circle around her, they pushed her back and forth. A schoolyard game. Natalie held her arms tight, elbows pressed together below her breasts though the shielding was foolish. She was a little girl in the throes of bullies no one would stop. Out of sight of anyone. No more rules or penalties, the game shifted to the final rounds with one conclusion only. Winner take all. Multiple players. Consolation prizes for second comers.

And they advanced. Lunging at her legs, her head, throat, their hands grabbing and tearing as if she were all they had ever craved. Deprived and tainted by their deprivations they would make up for all the humiliations, imagined and real. Get even. Get her. The fabric of her clothes gouged her arms and buttocks as the cloth shred from the seams. They laughed. She smelled rotted, cold-cellar onions, stale cigarettes, an alcohol sour in the spit they spewed on her face and mouth. Her spine slammed the ground. Her head abruptly met rock. Or a rock was raised and smashed. Against her skull. She didn’t know. Her legs banged rocks and soil. Clutching at the ground, moss mashing through her fingers, they pressed their hands over her mouth as they ground her down. Taste of grease, sweat, mud in the grain of their hands. Her body was a blaze of pain as her heart pummeled her chest for release. Blood screaming, muscle and sinew writhing in their own tight space, she could not move.

There was a siren or maybe a wail. Sounds from somewhere out there. Her own sounds faded in the solitude of herself.

No more wind. Trees shedding rainwater.

A moment . . . of light on the path. It seemed to be changing. The night sky receding from her vision, she could no longer hear . . . Limbs numb, melting. The humidity was a moist blanket, a smell of pine.

2

On the street wet dust clung to the air. Teri Lang moved through the crowds coming and going from restaurants, after-work shoppers picking up milk, soda, bread. Heavy in the oppressive heat, she was weighed down by humidity and exhaustion. Her shoes were rubbing blisters into her heels. The socks she put on over her nylons before leaving the office had become a small combustion of burn and scrape. Everything about the night was an irritant. The black exhaust of a passing bus’s diesel slithered round the crowds at the intersection, mingling with the paler gasps of flumes from cars. People were pressed into a narrow space of sidewalk exchanging the stale air, trouble breathing, trouble keeping their chafed nerves from exploding to jabs, taunts or worse. Everyone sought relief. Some rushed to the private succor of air-conditioned abodes, while others, caught in the street, were fleeing the inferno of open windowed apartments, acute with the inability to find any comfort at all.

Teri did not have a car yet. Her office was five blocks from the apartment. Under less oppressive conditions the walk was easy enough. Three months into her first job out of law school she usually welcomed the chance to wind down a bit in the trip home. Usually the walk gave her time to catch her breath. Stretch her muscles. In the maze of the firm, Teri expended energy with as much rigor as a person working the gym. But in the carpeted office corridors such calisthenics were controlled and prescribed. An exercise of stamina, latent with overtones. As an underling and part of a flock of new associates, Teri had to prove her flexibility and acumen. Stay on her feet and keep up a pace. No room to lag. She was learning to hide any weaknesses and finding she harbored more than she had previously been aware.

Colored lights and paper lanterns wobbled from the rim of a deli’s awning. It was carnival festive. Rows of crated produce—broccoli, bok choy, radishes, red and yellow peppers—glistened in the waxy light. Fresh quarters of watermelon, cling-wrapped and bedded in mounds of shaved ice, were hucksters beckoning passersby with the lure of heat-wave salvation. Teri hesitated, turning several quarters as she imagined the red bliss sliding down her throat. But she was too tired to choose a piece and picked up a handful of ice instead. Against her forehead the fragments immediately converted to liquid.

She and Carr, her husband, lived around the corner in a one-bedroom brownstone apartment. It had wood floors, high ceilings and a view of the park. She wondered if he would be there yet. If so, she would find him sprawled before the air conditioner, dial set to tundra blast. He worked for a brokerage firm. Six years older, he was that much farther in his career. Nearing his partnership.

Beads of the melted ice blended with the beads of her sweat. Teri moved her feet in the direction of Griffin Street. Cumbersome, her body was aflame in the confines of office wear. Her briefcase (still more prop than necessity) was making her arm ache. Pharmacy on the right as she plodded along. Its neon, advertising prescriptions and cosmetics, lay like a pool of emptied party punch on the gray cracked sidewalk.

The mirth of the whole strip was a subtle mockery of her mood. Teri worried she did not have the strength—to get home, to get through the years ahead of her at Kemper, Southey. What she got herself into was only a vague diagram thus far, based more on ambition and monetary reward than any actual knowledge of the process and paperwork. She was annoyed with herself for even remotely dreaming years when she was so exhausted and severely (new in the firm) untried.

Just as her sore heels touched the uneven cement of her street, a blare of sirens, red lights blazing, careened towards the park from the southern end of the commercial lane. With the atmosphere a soup, the sound stuck upright like a fork plunged in gelatin. The buildings lining the block, though seemingly solid against the shrill, were as wizened by the heat as the pedestrians of the street. The noise was raw.

Everything was louder in the steam. Teri clapped her hand to her ears against the shrill. An ambulance and several police cars converged on the intersection. Civilians jostled lane to lane to hit the light before the emergency vehicles reached the turn. Which caused more screech as the cops and paramedics slammed their sirens on/off to punctuate their need to get through.

Though people stopped to stare, Teri went on to her building. Dragging herself up the wide stone steps was an effort. The onslaught of wail continued, almost physical, as she reached the front door.

The entry hall smelled of garlic and disinfectant. A fifth-floor walkup, Teri thought a lot of people would think she and Carr completely out of their minds to pay so much for an apartment in a building without an elevator. But this was a newly gentrified neighborhood. Most of its inhabitants were professionals like them. The Langs wanted an address that said something of their place in the world. A starting point that defined their destination. Before the wedding Carr had lived in a large studio apartment in a modern high-rise. This was their first shared residence. Teri graduated law school, got married and had a week’s cruise before starting her new job. Everything had been neatly arranged and accomplished. She thought the efficiency an omen of their future. If all their plans were so seamlessly effectuated, they would be a successful couple in no time. Painlessly arrived at the upper reaches to which they aspired. There was no reason Teri could envision their lives following any other course. They had the right degrees from the right schools. Well-groomed, intelligent, imbued with the required work ethic, they had everything going their way.

Shoving the mail under her arm as she made the stairs to the top, a sticky swamp of shut-in air languidly surrounded her as Teri crossed the threshold. A huge drawback to the apartment, all the heat of the street and sweat of their downstairs neighbors steadily seeped up through the floorboards and crevices in the time she and Carr were out working.

Dumping her bag and briefcase on the foyer chair, Teri perused the mail before dropping it into a crystal bowl atop the phone stand. She finally got out of her shoes and peeled her panty hose in the center of the room. Opening the windows she saw the police again, the ambulance lights and bustle in the park across the street. Looked like a television van parked outside, its brash spots lighting manicured reporters with a clinical glint. Carr would want the air conditioner on. Stifling as it was, she preferred the fresh. She watched the scene at the park. No telling what was going on. Except she had a slithery feeling of bad news. Not for herself directly maybe, but something that would give everyone pause about the area. The renovations in this part of Braxton covered only a small square. The rest of the zone was still low-income and dilapidated. High-risk for the kind of people newly arrived in Braxton’s inner core.

Carr’s heavy walk pulled her from the window. She jumped as though an intruder, an escapee from whatever drama had unfolded in the park, were about to burst in on her. He would be cranked up by the heat and annoyed that she did not have the place cooled off. Just as she heard his last step on the landing, Teri threw the conditioner dial to high. Foolishly hurrying to cover herself; she winced with the reaction. As if caught doing something wrong. To restore her sense of balance, Teri deliberately crossed the living room to the kitchenette, changing the look of her actions. Carr came through the door at the same time she was passing between the rooms.

Hey, she said, brushing his skin with her lips, too warm to embrace.

He was dripping. Geez. Those stairs are a killer. His forehead pocked with sweat, his hair sticking to his scalp, he wore the effects of a fat man who had run for a train, despite his lean frame.

I just turned on the air.

Carr set his briefcase near the phone stand, pulling at his tie and collar. His summer-weight jacket was soaked through.

Did you see the commotion across the street?

Yeah. What a pain. I had to go all the way around Willow Avenue to get to the garage. The whole area’s blocked off. He wiped his forehead and neck with an already damp handkerchief. Then those stairs . . . Why didn’t we foresee what a pain? Especially in this heat.

It’s the location, remember?

Yeah, yeah.

Teri walked barefoot into the kitchenette. Refrigerator door open, she uncapped a bottle of water and drank while she assessed the dinner possibilities. Which looked rather dismal. Her day had started at six, now it was nine-thirty. She had snacked during the afternoon: a cup of yogurt, some pretzel sticks, an orange around 4:30. Did you have any dinner? She yelled to the next room. Carr could not hear her over the whir of the air conditioner. He probably had his head flat against it, she thought, he had such a mania for cold air. Teri put the bottle back on the lower door shelf and opened a drawer. Some ham and a few pieces of yellow American cheese. Atop the counter was a bag of rye bread that had been there she did not remember how long. Spots of mold on the edges, she scraped two pieces and put them in the toaster.

When she brought the sandwiches to the living room Carr was standing over the air conditioner with the pose of a skier at a lodge fireplace. The television was on but inaudible.

We got any pickles? he asked.

Teri sat down on the couch and pressed the remote till the volume overcame the other machine hum. Commercial for a sports utility vehicle showing the ruggedness of the product with the props of rodeo cowboys converging on the rough rider from all sides. Followed by a pitch for a men’s hair coloring displaying miraculous improvement of the man’s sex appeal (women suddenly running their fingers through the no-longer gray hair) after only one application. Preview of the news at 10. A piece about how safe is your day care and the next segment in a series on hidden fat in everyday foods.

Until she bit into it, however stale and verge of turning the meat was, Teri had not realized how hungry she had been. Her whole system was off. The long hours were changing the way she assessed her needs. Her priorities were dictated by the firm, most of the direction more a matter of her reading signs than anything specifically imparted by anyone, superior or peer, at the office. Regular meals, time alone with Carr, time for herself, were all in the back space of her cluttered schedule. Paper, whatever paper she had in possession to process, was the ruling focus of any day. Every day belonged to the firm. Sustenance was the proper completion of tasks assigned her. Nothing else was to sustain her more than service to Kemper, Southey. As she relished each bite of sandwich, Teri watched Carr eat as if it were just another obligation of his twenty-four hours. His jaw moved but his eyes were fixed on the images of the television screen. His chewing as unengaged as his attention.

Anything interesting happen at the office today?

Carr shrugged, staring at the tube. His exhaustion transformed him to a blank. Teri’s tired made her irritable, easily roused to verbal spar, over any trivial object she could close in on. As though she could displace her tired by throwing out the nerves that were egging her on to further depletion. She could be downright surly.

Did you see Jack or Lewis?

Carr mumbled that he’d seen them briefly.

Are you working on anything exciting and incredible that will make us rich?

Honey, let’s watch the news. He patted her knee. I want to hear it.

I was just asking about your day.

He shushed her as the screen displayed an immaculately coifed anchorwoman frowning over latest developments. Breaking news, cut to a live shot as she addressed the reporter on the scene.

We’re in Center City Park where police say a woman was brutally beaten, raped and murdered earlier this evening.

Oh my god. Teri gasped.

Carr set his plate down and leaned forward on the couch.

That’s what . . .

Let’s hear it, Carr said.

Police say the woman, whose name has been withheld pending notification of the family, was running the paths in Center City Park sometime earlier this evening. According to police spokespersons she was dragged into the woods where she was beaten and raped. Sources say there is strong evidence of more than one attacker. A group, rather than an individual, seems to be involved though the police have not named any suspects at this time.

The camera showed a dreary patch of woods, mulchy dark leaves and trees close together. The small circumference of horror was cordoned off by yellow tape. Detectives and police tread the perimeter, lit by abrasive floods as if now, the white exposing the hole, the tragedy could be bleached out and blotted away. Any further evil this remote spot might engender could be exorcised with strategically placed tripods and uniformed men. Though it was too late for the dead woman.

Called to the scene by a 911 call made by another jogger, the woman was deceased before rescue teams arrived. A reporter stood stoop-shouldered amid the lingering swarm of official personnel, his posture imbued with the sadness of the situation, With a solemn expression he held a microphone to the mouth of a bald man whose face quivered as he relayed, again, his discovery of the body. She already looked gone to me, you know, but I was so . . . I may have just imagined her coloring, you know? I thought she looked blue.

So you didn’t hear any last words, maybe some murmuring . . . The reporter was cool as he suggested more, trying to elicit ghoulish peculiarities for the home audience. Did you hear her moan or cry?

The man shook his head, more a shiver than a refusal. Nothing. She wasn’t moving at all.

That’s right across the street. Teri went to the window. Across the street and at the far side of a knoll, past the courts and baseball diamond, Teri saw the flashers and brights on a service road near the spot. With the shallow night breeze bending tree limbs in unfazed irregularity, the probes appeared to be blinking a warning across the width of park. The rest of the message was filled in by the television narrative at her back. She opened the window again, wanting to hear the summations of the police first hand, to make out the cliché phrases of the reporters. For a sliver of a second she thought she had actually tuned into the necessary frequency. A policeman or detective listing evidence or repeating useless bits of conjecture while the television exposed the other perspective, the side she could not see, into the living room. Teri was centered in a myopic stereo of images. She had the sensation of being caught in a movie projector’s light, shadowing the picture. Double-sided and tangential.

I thought the park closed at dusk, Carr said disconnectedly.

No, Teri said. Anyway, maybe it happened before dark. They probably don’t know for sure.

Well they can approximate pretty darn close to the time.

In a related story, the news went on, a Millrock Road man was convicted today of murdering his wife in their suburban home and attempting to destroy the body by carving it up with a chain saw.

Teri hesitated at the open window. The air turned cool against her skin. Moisture still present yet chilling as she squeezed her eyes to absorb the view, she was intimate with misgivings, with that feeling of panic and helplessness, the coupling of excitement and fear where intuition and sense collide. It came up bitter in her mouth. A ripple slid so quickly through her lower chest it mimicked the sensation of a centipede scurrying from a place it had mysteriously found itself trapped.

The aluminum frame against her fingers, Teri closed the window and sat back down on the couch. She no longer wanted to eat. The food was tasteless.

You think she screamed? As soon as she asked Teri realized the story of the rape was already three stories back or more. The television screen was confetti. She hadn’t noticed the end of the headline news or the beginning of the weather report. For a moment she could not have said what show they were watching.

Who?

And though she knew he was not tuned to her wavelength and had no way of following her from the woman in the park to the details she was arranging into a probability of sequence, Teri was wounded by his callousness. Her tears surfaced instantly.

Carr took her hand. You’re tired, honey. Let’s call it a day. You need your sleep.

She knew she was exhausted but did not want to let go of the woman. Lurid and sick she was sure, anyone would say so. But she wanted to think it through. She wanted to re-run the scene. Thread the frames in slow motion, trail to savagery, rewind, run it again.

In a little while she was chasing sleep. Beside her Carr snored with a sonorous rasp, the pillow crammed in a ball against his head. His breathing was a dripping faucet to her sleeplessness. The bedroom was freezing with Carr’s precious air conditioning. She wondered if her breath hovered visibly in the room. Last she looked it was 2:48 on the illuminated digital. The television news, snips and pieces of her day at the office, the park, the view from their window where cop car beacons blinkered through the thick of trees, tumbled in clumsy somersaults through her troubled mind. When she did sleep, she fell deeply, dreaming she and Carr were ascending a steep ridge in a ski lift. There’s not enough snow, she was saying. They would bang against the cliffs, the edges of rock face. The lift began to swing like a pendant finding magnetic attraction between the length of cable behind them and the gray granite ahead. Carr was silent. Teri grew more anxious. They would crash. The cable would snap them to the sudden death of snowless valley. There’s not enough snow, Carr.

3

Josh Salendar, arms stiff at his sides, stared at the black lacquer finish of the coffin as the minister read the psalm over Natalie. Her mother whimpered like a pup trapped in a cardboard box. Her breathing was stifled and labored. The media hovered at the fringes of the otherwise small crowd. Most of the mourners were women with whom Natalie had worked. Outside of Josh and her parents, a couple of cousins, an aunt, uncle, her little sister Felicia, there were few who knew her well at all.

The sun was a merciless bitch, Josh thought. In a perfect blue sky it beamed down on the grim proceeding with the cheek of a mid-day whore strutting gold lame on a ghetto boulevard. It was out of place and flagrant. All he could feel was that searing sun. Legs clenched, unattached except as wooden pegs set up at grave side to keep him propped. Ashes to ashes, the minister droned. Roses dropped on the lid were wilted in the blazing summer heat. Below his arms Josh felt the sweat running, the only thing about himself still living. Though each time he conjured the picture of his beloved Natalie, his heart made a leap to his throat.

It’s all over, he wrote in his journal. She’s gone. I’m alone. The bed still smells like her. She left her jeans in the closet. Yesterday I picked up the laundry. Her grey sweatshirt was in with my underwear and shirts. Idiot objects. If I keep the sweatshirt until I’m seventy, will it still exude memories? Over time the material will disintegrate till practically transparent. Like those tissue papers I used to trace pictures with as a kid. Something I will easily see through to know she is no longer here. I want so badly to have her back. Be able, at least, to conjure her three dimensionally. But much as I try, she only comes in pieces and I can’t touch her. It’s impossible to reach or to hold her long enough in my mind’s eye for every side to materialize. For me to get more than a faint image of her smile, body, the way she moved.

No matter how much I wish it, I will never experience her completely again. We’re such shallow creatures. Shallow to one another in life, we become shallow to one another in death. The departed are rearrangements of our own selves. Natalie becomes the woman as I want to remember her. It’s not like she’d able to contradict me anymore. She can’t correct my inaccuracies or tell me I’m full of shit though we would both know that I am. She could spot my insincerity in a second. Always clouding things, confusing and complicating things with my bullshit analysis. My inability to shut the flick up.

I write, desperate as the marooned man filling banana leaves with messages. I scratch them into the frail veins with a fingernail and throw them into the sea for deliverance. In a code only a desperate man can understand. Deranged as he is beyond all normal concerns and the preoccupations of the wider world. Ranting. I’m ranting on this page and making little sense. What sense is there in this random world where anyone can be killed by someone’s whimsy? Something to take up, murder like stamp collecting, to wile away the boredom. I’m the deranged man. Stranded on my own patch of ground far away from the rest of the world. Writing my fears, developing a code of myself. Trying to gain an accurate measure of my own cartography of pain.

From the corridor Josh hears laughing. It breaks in through the apartment door. It is derisive, though the group tramping the stairs has no idea there is a wounded man in 3B. A few guys, a couple girls with voices like lust and axle grease, a messy mix, they seem to be swapping bar escapades, tales of quantities and antics that followed. At the last place on the left, a ring of keys bang the knob. A bolt lock is turned over, they slam the metal door shut.

I thought I should leave. There’s nothing to hold me here now. If not for Natalie, Braxton would have been any other town. My restlessness has always been a curse as well as my main source of energy.

He dropped the pen. A hum of a fan from a neighbor’s window, children’s rhymes drifting in on the sooty air of the alleyway, the hyperbolic talk of new laundry products bouncing off the bricks of the buildings from an upstairs television, the tenement was teaming though it was already early evening. The time when Natalie liked to run. She told him once that she felt like a winged angel gliding, no longer earth-bound, when she got to a certain place on certain evenings.

4

Teri shared an office with two other associates: Debra Klein and Mercer Stanclif. It was a cramped space with three desks, a file cabinet and a rickety oval table that apparently had been dumped in the room for a lack of anywhere else to put it. The walls were bland. Their beige reflected the bluish tint of the florescence in a sickish sort of glare. Debra was constantly fussing about the lighting. Thinking herself a beauty queen, or at the very least, an expert on make-up and fashion, Debra just could not abide by the way the room played havoc with the fine balance of her liquids, powders, and other color-enhancing essentials. Teri was uncomfortable in the proximity of Debra’s vanity. Like being reminded that real femininity required an exacting vigilance to which Teri was not presently paying sufficient homage, Debra was an irksome cosmetic commercial one could not tune out with a change of channel.

Mercer either ignored Debra or treated her with scorn. His vanity took on the guise of wit. His delivery utterly cool, Teri perceived Mercer as her real rival. He was sharp, aggressive, determined. He would get ahead at any cost. For Mercer, Debra was an entertainment when he was bored. Teri marveled at Debra’s incapacity to hear the sarcasm whenever Mercer turned his attentions her way. Though perhaps, Teri reasoned, Debra just didn’t care what Mercer thought of her. Maybe Debra was better able to ignore Mercer’s rapier remarks. They made Teri cringe. The hostility cut through her even as it was directed elsewhere. One of these days, she feared, he would come around to her, when Debra was no longer amusing for him, when he knew, finally, his baiting would not puncture Debra no matter how pointed or relentless.

Debra was the more easily dismissed, however. Teri saw no longevity for Miss Klein. But Mercer was different. His observations were symptoms of a larger sense of himself. In Teri’s estimation, Mercer was the kind who could let fly such disdain for another because he had a self-image of superiority. He perceived himself a winner. Or so it looked thus far. One thing was quite clear, even with only these three months in: the game was still young and the rules more complex by the day.

Entering the office was assuming a role. Teri was different soon as she crossed the threshold. The heavy glass door of the Kemper, Southey entry gave a low whoosh of sound as Teri pulled it open. Sitting properly with her hair pinned up in a demur bun, the receptionist would respectfully nod a good morning. She’d seen a hundred come and go, Teri thought. A string of first-year hopefuls that did not last a full cycle of seasons till the next crop arrived. Teri always smiled at the receptionist. She wanted the woman to know she was in for the long haul. She intended to move through every rung of the ladder at the firm. The receptionist might as well get used to her.

Hallways hushed with the solemnity of the lawerly tasks at hand, the mornings were generally subdued. Few clients called before mid-morning. The afternoons, for most of the forty-some attorneys in the firm, were taken by phone calls, negotiations, conferences. The buzz began much later when word processing the documents, making final revisions and preparations for follow-ups, changed the calm. When production began it was that much more frantic for Teri and her peers. Learning to anticipate what needed to be done was only a modicum of the hours she had to spend on her feet. Not to miss a nuance, an inference, an opening that would give her some distinction from the rest of the pack was the real job.

Using coffee as her opiate, soon as she dropped her bag and briefcase Teri got a large mug from the kitchenette at the end of the hall. Everyone she met en route was bleary-eyed but poised for another round. Mercer, as usual, was already in. When she got back to their office he was reading the paper.

Did you see the news? Mercer asked.

Teri blew on the hot coffee, taking small sips. No, not yet.

About that woman jogger?

Wasn’t the funeral yesterday?

Mercer folded the paper to have the inside section on top of his blotter. Her family’s filing a suit against the city.

Teri raised her brows. Lack of sleep and the absence of sufficient caffeine made her feel pasty. Her features felt puffy and difficult to manipulate. Debra had not yet arrived. The space was almost human without her. She was such a cyclone of perfume and profoundly ludicrous concerns. Who’s representing them?

Mercer named the firm in answer to her question. Then said, You guys worried about living in that section now?

The swivel chair whined as she reached for a stack of folders. He was watching her answer. Studying her, she thought. She wanted to ask him if paranoia, in his estimation, was a by-product of success. A requirement, perhaps, for cleanly reaching a pinnacle. His shirt was crisp white, his suit the color of bible leather. In her pastel dress Teri felt a lowly parishioner to his groomed posture. We’re only on one side of a decent area anyway, she said. I mean, with the projects at the south end and Crane Street so uneven. I don’t know. Living in the city’s a lottery, I guess. We thought it would be convenient.

You should move out, Mercer said. Go to one of the suburbs. Wallingford’s nice, where I am. It’s close to East Braxton.

It is nice out there.

Or one of the towns outside. You can get into a condo in a new development dirt cheap.

I don’t know if I’d like a development.

Probably pay a lot less.

She shrugged and sipped the coffee. Slowly waking, her body giving itself over to the slow drip of artificial energy once again, her senses were beginning to loosen. You’re just renting too, though.

His eyes retreated to his desk. For now.

When we all make partner we’ll move to East Braxton and have lawn parties for our wealthy clients.

Don’t talk so loud, you’ll jinx us.

Teri smirked.

Though you know you’ll probably get to East Braxton sooner than I will. With Carr’s career, a modest promotion here would put you into the next bracket.

Teri stepped furtively. Land mines abundantly placed and impossible to see in advance, she did not take up his comment. For a while Mercer returned to his paper, Teri to putting order to the work on her desk.

Before Teri could finish her first cup, Debra blew in on a wave of fragrance. A smell of creamy flowers or a synthetic pastry—the scent could be divined either way. I had the worst time getting up this morning, she announced. The leather case in which she carried her papers fell from her arms as her shoulder bag slipped to the floor.

Mercer and Teri exchanged glances. But did Allen have any trouble, Mercer said, arising and so forth? Allen was Debra’s boyfriend.

Oh, Allen, she was breathless, he’s so incredible. You know last night he had violins at our table.

Nothing like a little sax and violins. Mercer enjoyed his own insipid cracks immensely.

We went to this restaurant near the lake. Well, not real close to the lake, but over there somewhere. I don’t know, he was driving.

While Debra rattled off the incredibly interesting events of her evening with magnificent Allen, Teri picked up the paper, The Examiner, from Mercer’s desk.

The photo of the funeral was dark. It could have been anywhere, a file copy of anyone’s last moments. The woman, Natalie’s, loved ones stood in black clothes in front of the church. Juxtaposed with the gathering to honor the deceased was the snap of the three young men, heads hooded with towels, mere teens, in a detective escort for the arraignment. The text recalled the incident and gave a few new details. Teri’s eyes glazed. She could not read every word of the article. Cigarette butts found near the body. A few footprints. She stared at the dull reportage, the photo with its shadows, grays and mourners. The print announcing the attack came off on Teri’s hands as she turned the pages. A companion piece outlined the family’s news conference, their attorney giving a statement regarding the suit just filed.

Teri knew what it was like to scream and not be heard. To have her voice caged. The sensation of someone’s fingers holding tight around the larynx and on the verge of eternal silence. Not in any actual, physical struggle—Teri never had to face the bodily bruises. But she knew desperation. Inlayed and rooted till it was organically entwined with every tissue. She was most aware of it as a child when she had to endure the evening meal with her mother and father. A tension wire barely perceptible yet capable of cleanly slicing flesh from the bone hung in an imaginary cold shimmer above the scene. Her father’s austere religious views were traps she could fall into any second. Her mother hunched over the plate of food, pulled in tight with her face the shade of paper, crumpled into a taut little ball. A tin halo encased her father like one whose beliefs were hammered out with a flat-headed instrument. The hits shown on the surface. He believed in heaven and hell, wrath and divine intervention. His family, Teri and her mother, the shepherds of his faith, he believed it his mission to imbue them with the instruction of the Lord. A presence with which he had constant and intimate contact, a personal relationship, which gave him the direction he needed to impart to her, her mother. Missing any flaw in either of them, any misstep, no matter how small, was a reflection of his failure. As if any mistake was one less point in some unspoken sum he needed to get into the blessed hereafter. God was keeping track, writing everything down. Teri and her mother knew not to speak. With every breath exhumed in that claustrophobic house the knowledge of ledgers was a presence. Teri and her mother tried not to look too far from their plates. Constrained like being tied into jackets too small, both in their own unspoken prayers sought reprieve. Needing invisibility. As demons danced in the shadows. Mocking. Any moment to stealthily slip into an opening, lending the spark to her father’s short fuse.

Sucking the phlegm from the back of his throat, her father scraped the plate as he stabbed his meat. Teri chewed small as she could, keeping her arms hugged to her sides. Visions of sin and familial transgressions floated in his unsteady gaze. She and her mother made sure he did not catch them looking at him. His hands shook jaggedly. Her mother’s mouth barely moved as she worked the mashed potatoes in her mouth, cautious as an old woman missing teeth. Teri kept chewing, the piece refusing to break down. Her jaw started to hurt in the overworking. Chewing and chewing, this meat takes forever to eat, she blurted.

Her father’s words flew; he’d had them positioned in advance. You’re lucky to have food on your plate. A wicked fire struck Teri in the chest, a singe of blows she expected to feel on her face and arms. He never used his hands to strike but she always expected it just the same. She was sure one day his hands would reach across the table and seize her. Until then he used his words cleverly. Heated irons. For his own form of branding those he was commissioned to deliver from evil.

Teri’s eyes immediately teared. Her vision swirling the room to liquid, all the corners diminished. Anything once solid, potentially steady, was swimming around her.

You oughta be grateful, he snarled. "The good Lord has provided you with food and shelter a million children in the world would be thankful to receive. No one cares what I go through. What I gotta do to get food on this table. Just take and take. Just like your mother. Ignoring the graciousness of your Maker. Treating me with the same low thoughts."

Teri forced the unchewable meat down her throat though the swallowing tore her insides. His anger was molten and it oozed to the pores, covering her nose. Teri could barely breathe. Her wind pipe filled thickishly. She was sinking and choking, quicksand beneath her chair and no means of escape. While her mother stayed with her food, barely moving and clinging so intensely to herself she resembled an insect whose instincts signaled stillness as its only means of survival. A bug that became a scaly wrap soon as it was touched.

Teri realized she was still holding The Examiner in her hands. The newspaper speculated on the jogger’s last moments of pain as police continued to pick through the leaves for evidence. At one point in her growing up Teri wondered if voices did not also leave impressions in a room. Like a fingerprint. That for centuries people had left voiceprints and it was only a matter of the right instrument, the invention of a Geiger, for all those voices to be resuscitated. But she knew the screams would have to be audible for even a sensitive device to gather the trace. Staring at the story Teri thought of such imprints. She looked at the picture of a woman who was no longer there while spectators huddled around the absence. A picture of where a body was found, a portrait of a person no longer present.

Teri, time for the meeting. Mercer said.

Debra said, I haven’t had time to potty.

5

Teri and Mercer let Debra walk ahead, finding it amusing to snicker behind her back. When they walked the hallways as a group, their behavior was high school: a lot of giggling and the ambience of a field trip where the chaperones have lagged behind. Some of the most serious secretaries scowled as the unseasoned crew passed by. The meeting was the biweekly handout of assignments, conducted in one of the smaller Kemper, Southey conference rooms. The gathering was equivalent to an induction ceremony. All the newcomers were sized and rated for their possible contribution to the image of the whole.

At the head of the organization, Ed Beringer was elite and slim. Olive eyes, a complexion that appeared fragile in daylight like one too long exposed to the artificials of office and club, he suggested British admiralty, that is, a man fulfilling service from a tradition of largesse rather than the desire for income. Precisely the kind of visual deception that benefited his success. He could entice a woman to surrender her child or a terrorist to sing a lullaby. Some would call it charm. Yet it was the discrepancy between his demeanor and the ruthlessness of his words that brought him his victories. One could be outraged by the things that flowed from his mouth, but he looked so kind as he said them.

The associates barely dared to breathe as Beringer made his preliminary statements. Gathered round the table as a group of knights at the legendary round, these recruits had none of the nobility and much less of the courage of those defenders of yore, though some would argue, and rightly so, their pledge was no less imperative. Peoples lives would be in their hands. Final outcomes and twists of fate were dependent upon their abilities. To look at the group one would not think such lofty ideals existed. It was the age of money, of what one owned and could trade. Everyone around the table was fully aware of Kemper, Southey’s reputation for winning at all costs. Everyone present had come for a share in the spoils.

Hoping for favorable notice, they sat solemnly. Cleanly shaven, buffed and polished, their expressions ranged from compensatory cockiness to evident terror. Beneath the table someone was nervously pumping a leg. Teri moved her hands from the yellow note pad to her knees to make sure it wasn’t her. She could very well be doing things, emitting twitches, flinches and nods without cognizance. The scene was such a high frequency play of Russian roulette, the stakes could not seem any more crucial.

Her lips were too moist; Teri was swallowing too often. She wanted to seem assured and worked to make her eyes display a confident gaze. Then she thought her eyes were darting around the room or she was nodding too often. She was too anxious. Beringer would think her an idiot, too quick to please. A poor trait in an attorney. Beside her Mercer was stone. Immobile. Eyes glued to the master, a firm grip on the chin he posed just so, elbow upon the table. Teri had trouble absorbing Beringer’s speech—her nerves were affecting her hearing. A lot of chatter about their responsibilities to the firm, representatives of the Kemper, Southey culture, that sort of thing. Between his words Debra’s creamy flowers/pastry vanilla aroma was wafting about the room. From the looks on several of her peers Teri suspected the scent was making them all queasy. While Debra obliviously batted her blue mascara eyes at the boss most supreme. She looked like a dance hall girl who’d lost her way, Teri thought. But going along on instincts nonetheless, Debra’s red ripe lips were perfect as a china doll’s.

Summing his assessment of case progressions and completions, Beringer left one of his senior associates to read the list of assignments. Everyone watched as he traversed the room to exit, his shoulders square with the doorframe as though the firm and Beringer were fashioned from the same design, a symmetry of tailored suits and fitted angles.

So far their assignments had been matters of paper, collecting and checking citations. Teri spent the last three weeks collating litigation documents for a case in which Kemper, Southey had been engaged for nearly six years. A dispute concerning a certain (wealthy) family’s kidnapping of a child. Teri read the pieces of the extended drama putting chronology to cartons for the file room. The child belonged to the family through the son whose unfortunate liaison predictably ended in divorce. The ensuing custody battle was waged by the adamant mother who was far from acquiescent in allowing her progeny to be swiped from her loving arms. No matter how rich and powerful her in-laws, she wanted the kid and the child-care funds to raise it. She wanted alimony and access to junior’s trust find. After a protracted campaign, the child was declared an entitlement by both sides, its trust fund to be guarded by a neutral third party appointed by the court until such time as the little heir reached the age of twenty-one. Kemper, Southey claimed victory for keeping the trust out of the hands of the mother, however much she swore, undyingly, she had only the child’s welfare in mind. In channeling the briefs, motions, the back and forth of a war ultimately rendered tame by its delineation of facts and events, Teri got her first look at the way Kemper, Southey operated. It was a cool balance of scrimmage and parlay, a saber thrust by a practiced hand.

Helen Schaffer, left with the reading of assignments, was a twitchy woman, slender and severely wound. Her veins, so blue at the surface of flesh, were a spidery flutter despite the multi-layers of make-up. Hers was a perfection maintained with great difficulty. One time, in the woman’s room, Teri politely prattled on about offices moves while Helen obsessively applied pancake. A face showing perspiration or shine was apparently one of Helen Schaffer’s greatest terrors. It was a wonder Helen had survived at all. The picture frightened Teri. Watching Helen with that powder made her shudder at the thought that the price