Charlottesville, Virginia
On their second date, Rebecca told Brian how she had played the piano, what it meant to her.
They were at a Japanese restaurant. She was a second-year law student at the University of Virginia. He was a freelance Web developer. This was the nineties. She hardly knew what the Web was. She had opened her first email account the year before, through the law school.
“You good?”
“I’m not bad.”
He smiled. He was tall, blue eyes, dark blond hair, a nose that looked like it had been broken in a bar fight. His smile was crooked too, a badly hung picture. Higher to the right. She was tall as well, long black hair, eyes so brown they too were almost black, muscular legs, and small, high breasts. She already knew they’d make a striking couple. Looks-wise, anyway.
“Why’d you quit?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lying. So you don’t play at all?”
Something else she liked: His boldness, his willingness to challenge her before they had done anything more than kiss. The fact he was right didn’t hurt. “Even if I wanted to, and I don’t, I don’t know where to find a piano.”
He didn’t mention it again.
But two dates later he picked her up in his old Ford F-150, dark green, tinted windows, rust drooping from the quarter panels. He made a left, a right, and they were heading north on 601, out of Charlottesville.
“Is this the right way?” She was almost sure the multiplex was the other direction.
He didn’t answer.
“Where are you taking me?”
“It’s a surprise.” His tone was flat, affectless. Her stomach tightened. How much did she know about Brian? Not much. He wasn’t a student. She’d never seen his apartment, wasn’t even sure exactly where he lived. They’d met in a bar. He had a mysterious backpack between his legs. And this truck was the rapiest vehicle imaginable short of a camper van.
Her uncle Ned was a cop in Boston, she’d heard too many terrible stories. Had she told anyone where she was going?
“Relax, ’kay?”
After a few minutes, he made a hard right onto a narrow road that ran east past farmhouses and a trailer park screened by a hedge. Not even 6 p.m., but the sun was disappearing over the hills behind them. She couldn’t decide how scared to be. She had pepper spray in her purse, police-grade, a gift from Ned. She told herself if Brian turned onto a back road she would use it.
A couple miles on, a sign proclaimed the entrance to the JEFFERSON HOME FOR THE AGED AND INFIRM. To her surprise Brian swung the pickup into it, revealing a run-down three-story brick building. Beige Buicks filled the parking lot. Rebecca felt embarrassed at her nervousness. Whatever he had in mind tonight didn’t end with her being fed through a woodchipper.
Though she still didn’t know what he did have in mind.
“This your way of telling me you want us to grow old together? One day, Rebecca, we will fill our diapers here, as our children fail to visit…”
He grabbed his backpack, came around, opened her door. “Come on, they’re waiting.”
“Don’t tell me your grandparents are in there or something.”
She followed him through the front doors. As the smell of disinfectant hit her, she saw a black grand piano in the center of the lobby. Maybe forty women and men sat in folding chairs around it.
Up close she saw that the piano was a Steinway. A Model B, vintage, the paint scuffed but otherwise in great shape, the soundboard perfect. Worth she didn’t even know how much. Lots.
An unexpected fear rose in her as she walked around the Steinway. Five years. What if she couldn’t? What if she embarrassed herself?
Brian whistled, long and piercing. All the conversations in the lobby stopped at once.
“Please welcome Rebecca Kelly,” Brian said. “America’s favorite pianist.” He winked her way and clapped. The oldsters followed uncertainly.
Oh why not? The Jefferson Home wasn’t exactly Carnegie Hall. She could mangle Billy Joel and they’d be happy to have her. Sing us a song you’re the piano lady…
He held out the backpack. “I brought music if you need it—”
She shook her head.
He nodded like he wasn’t surprised she could play from memory. She took off her jacket, pushed up her sleeves, sat down, stared at the keys. Cracked her knuckles. Flexed her fingers. Scooted the bench close.
She started with Schubert’s Sonata in D Major, a showy but technically simple crowd-pleaser, making sure she hadn’t forgotten how to play. The piano sounded like it had just been tuned, which surprised her until it didn’t. Brian must have brought in a tuner. He’d found her a Steinway… and had it tuned before he brought her to it. He’d brought music.
Gonna marry this guy. She’d never thought that about anyone before. The words were so surprising that she almost missed a note. Focus.
After the Schubert, Bach, the Italian Concerto, another crowd-pleaser, nice and slow, with chances to experiment. Then Beethoven, the Moonlight Sonata, always a winner.
The Steinway was fantastic. And so was she. Maybe the low stakes relaxed her. Maybe the years off had allowed her to understand her technique in a way she couldn’t when she was practicing all the time. Whatever the reason, she grew stronger as the minutes passed, her hands loosening, quickening. She wished her last teacher, who toward the end had told her, Rebecca, playing like you do is supposed to be fun, I wish I could see you smile, had been there to watch.
Halfway through the Beethoven her hands weakened. She’d forgotten how much stamina these pieces required. She would quit while she was ahead. She quickly ended, turned to the oldsters.
She’d assumed half of them would be asleep. Wrong. They were enraptured, leaning forward in their seats. A woman cried, the tears cutting runnels through her heavy mascara. A man simply stared, his jaw open wide, revealing his empty mouth.
She’d forgotten how much power music could have.
Brian stood against the wall by the front desk, smiling. He gave her a silent thumbs-up and tears stung her eyes. Embarrassing. But he had given this joy back to her, he had seen what she couldn’t.
She stood, bowed formally to the crowd like she really was at Carnegie Hall. “Thank you.” They clapped, uncertainly at first, then steadily—
Then a thump echoed from the back row and a woman shouted “Gordon!” in a high, frightened voice.
Brian got to him before Rebecca. “Call 911!”
The man was heavy, maybe seventy-five, his thin gray hair was combed across the top of his speckled head.
He had landed on his side. Brian snaked an arm under him, put him on his back.
“Sir! Gordon! Can you hear me?”
Nothing. Brian touched two fingers to the man’s neck, then reached down and slapped his face. The man’s fleshy jowls jiggled. Otherwise he didn’t blink, didn’t stir. “Oh God,” the woman said. Rebecca was pretty sure he was dead. She’d never been this close to a newly dead person before.
The man wore a white button-down shirt with a greasy stained collar. Brian tore it open, revealing flabby breasts covered with white hair. Brian didn’t seem fazed. He put his fingers in the man’s mouth, tugged open his lower jaw. Two quick breaths, puff puff, the strange intimacy of CPR. Then pressed down on the man’s chest with interlaced fingers, began compressions, counting aloud, One two three four five…
“My husband,” the woman beside Rebecca said. She was among the younger residents, early sixties maybe, and wore shocking-red lipstick that had skidded onto her teeth.
“I’m so sorry.” Rebecca reached to hug her.
“Don’t touch me.” The woman stepped back. “He’s dead and you killed him.” The woman’s brown eyes bulged. She clawed at Rebecca, a skeletal hand topped with red fingernails. “Witch.” Screaming now. “Witch! WITCH!”
Rebecca staggered back as a staff member finally reached them. “Mrs. Hendricks, please—”
His name was Gordon Hendricks, they found out a half hour later in the manager’s office. He was seventy-four and had worked in the UVA maintenance department for thirty-five years.
“A smoker, two previous heart attacks, a coronary waiting to happen,” the manager told them. The screaming woman was his wife, Delilah, who was suffering from early-onset dementia. “She’s flat-out crazy.”
“I’m so sorry,” Rebecca said. “Is she going to be okay?”
“She should be. I hope you know it wasn’t your fault. They loved you. In fact, if that hadn’t happened we’d probably ask you to come back every month.”
“You still can,” Brian said. “Free up some rooms.”
“We take the death of any resident very seriously,” the manager said.
“Too soon?”
The manager didn’t smile. Rebecca didn’t think what Brian had said was very funny either.
They walked back through the lobby, empty now, the chairs gone. A guy in a blue uniform mopped the floor where Gordon had collapsed.
Outside the parking lot lights glared down.
“Strumming my pain with his fingers,” Brian murmured. “Singing my life with his words…”
Rebecca knew the lyrics. Everyone did. They’d been inescapable for almost a year. Lauryn Hill and the Fugees, a remake of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” She couldn’t believe he was same man who had gone to the trouble to find her a piano to play. “He just died, Brian. He’s still warm.”
“You want to cry about it? Or laugh.”
“Are those my only choices? Jesus, what’s wrong with you.” She stopped midstride, stared at him.
He nodded, then blinked. The humanity seemed to come back to his eyes. “Sorry.”
She followed him silently to the truck. Inside the cab, he put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it.
“I am sorry. I mean it.”
“How did you learn how to do that?” She needed to talk about something besides his ghoulishness.
“CPR, you mean? My dad was a medic—”
“Really?”
“Yeah, in the army, served in Vietnam. He taught me the basics when I was like twelve. Practically the only good thing he ever did for me. When I was eighteen I got my EMT training. I was thinking about becoming a paramedic, too.”
The longest speech he’d given her in four dates. Maybe he was trying to forget his ghoulishness too. “What’s the difference?”
“As a tech you can’t do much more than CPR, oxygen mask. Paramedics can intubate, use needles.” He looked over at her, tried a smile. “Not that any of it would have done Gordon much good. He was dead before he hit the floor. I would have needed Jesus training, that’s like eight months plus a saint has to recommend you.”
She laughed a little, the tension easing out of her.
“Before the Internet stuff I worked overnights as a tech. I guess, I don’t want to make an excuse, but see enough ODs, car accidents, your skin gets thick.”
He turned the ignition, and they were quiet as he steered the pickup out of the parking lot.
“So was this the worst date ever?” he said a few minutes later. “Or the best?”
“I’m trying to figure that out too.” She’d married him and divorced him in barely two hours.
“I have to tell you one thing, though. You are a fantastic piano player.”
A flush reddened her cheeks. “Stop.”
“I’m serious. I mean, I don’t know much about it, but you are great.”
At 601 he signaled to turn left, back toward Charlottesville.
“Other way,” she said. “I want a beer somewhere I’m guaranteed not to see anyone from school.”
He swept the steering wheel right and the pickup rumbled north. She could already feel herself forgiving him, deciding that his fearless reaction when Gordon collapsed and his odd coldness afterward were inseparable.
The Virginia fields were dark, but she saw a big black horse silhouetted against the white light of an open barn door. She thought of the Steinway, how he’d found it and brought her to it.
They spent that night together, and the next, and the next.
Now they were curled up on her couch, and he was explaining the Internet.
“It’s the future. I’m telling you.”
“How is buying books on your computer changing anyone’s life?”
“Instant communication with anyone, anywhere? That doesn’t sound like a big deal?”
“You mean like a telephone?”
They were sitting on her couch, eating chocolate-chip pancakes and scrambled eggs with cheese. Saturday night. They’d said they were going to a movie. Then they’d started fooling around. Leaving the apartment had seemed like too much trouble. He’d said, Let me cook. Breakfast for dinner. His range was limited, but what he did make was perfect. He baked, too: blueberry muffins, warm and crumbly and tangy. He’d worked as a short-order cook for a few months up in Seattle, he said. Cooks never starve I can walk into a diner anywhere and get hired in ten minutes. Those places always need people.
He was so different from the men she met in school. They thought smart was all that mattered, didn’t care if they couldn’t change their oil. Even the ones who could, who knew how to use their hands—the Virginia bros who spent weekends hunting, the Connecticut boys who built their own bookcases—weren’t actually tough. They were hobbyists.
Not Brian. He was a survivor. He’d paid his bills a half dozen ways, from driving cabs to working as a landscaper—a fancy way to say mowing lawns, he’d said. Now he was a computer programmer who made “Web pages” for the Internet.
“Telephone?” he said now. “Tell me you’re joking. Pretty soon you’ll get music and movies and television this way. Right on your computer.”
“It takes two minutes to see the picture.”
“The connections aren’t fast enough yet. But they will be.”
“People aren’t going to watch television on their computers, Bri.”
“Why not?” He sounded genuinely surprised.
“They just aren’t. Computers are for work.”
“You’ll see.”
If he’d been one of her classmates, this certainty would have infuriated her. But they weren’t talking about some case they’d both studied. She couldn’t pretend she knew anything about the Internet. He was looking at a future she had never even tried to imagine.
She already felt how well they meshed. Not that they agreed on everything. He didn’t care much about her friends or her family. Then again he wasn’t close to his own parents. When she’d asked about them he mumbled, My mom’s long gone. My dad and I don’t talk much, he’s such an asshole. She’d tried to press him a little, gently. But he shut down.
Yet. During the day, she found herself wishing she could talk to him after every class. They spent most nights together now, though he never pushed her. If she told him she would be studying late and couldn’t see him he never minded. Do your thing, I’ll be here.
And the sex. She wanted to tell her friends, but then again she didn’t want to jinx it. Like if she talked about it too much she risked losing it.
“Bri?” I love you. But she couldn’t say the words, she’d never said them to any guy. “I love you.”
No. Not so soon, out of nowhere. She probably had scrambled eggs between her teeth, it wasn’t like they’d been together for years.
He leaned over, kissed her, open-mouthed, slow and gentle. He tasted of Tabasco sauce. He laced his fingers through her hair.
“Love you too, Becks.”
His blue eyes shimmered and for the first time in her life she found herself thinking, Nothing else, let the world stop, I don’t mind.
“Never said that to anyone before,” he said.
She traced a finger down his cheek. “I do. All the time.”
Outside she heard Charlottesville on a Saturday night, boys yelling, girls hooting, glass breaking. I’ll never have to hit another bar. No more dates. I’ve made my choice. It’s all good.
They didn’t have to discuss anything more.
She didn’t tell her parents, not right away. But Eve, her mother, must have sniffed out what was happening, even from five states away. Two weeks after I love you, she caught Rebecca in her apartment: “I’m in D.C. for a conference this weekend, I’ll come see you. Brunch.”
“That’s crazy, Mom. It’s like three hundred miles.”
“No it isn’t. And we’ve barely spoken this semester. Whenever I call, you don’t answer or you’re busy—”
“Law school, Mom.”
“Big kiss, see you Sunday.”
She told Brian. “It makes me nervous.”
“Your mom’s coming. So what? You embarrassed about me?” Brian grinned like the idea was impossible. Then his grin winked off. “Wow, you are.”
“I’m not.” She wasn’t, not exactly. But she wasn’t sure what her parents would make of Brian. They were snobby enough to dislike the fact he hadn’t gone to college. Eve was a documentary filmmaker who taught at Boston University and Pete an English professor at Northeastern and a very minor poet—was there any other kind?
They were decent and loving. But they were also pretentious Massachusetts intellectuals, and predictably hypocritical about money. They’d always lived above their salaries and depended on Eve’s father, Jerome, to make up the difference. Jerome had made a couple million bucks in the seventies inventing the first commercially usable insulin pump. Over the years he’d quote-unquote helped Eve and Pete out, first buying a house for them in Cambridge, then paying for college for Rebecca and her sisters.
Rebecca didn’t want to explain any of this to Brian, not yet. Maybe not ever. Discovering that your parents were fallible was one of the most unpleasant parts of growing up. It had been for her, anyway. Maybe Brian had known all along.
But the impulse to keep her parents away ran deeper than that. She didn’t want to let anyone inside the world she and Brian had created. Not even her family. She didn’t want her mom to ask if Brian wanted kids. You need to make sure you two have the same expectations. Someone like him, from a different background, he might not want what you do.
Different background. Ugh.
“I just want to keep you mine for a while.” True, or true enough, anyway.
He wasn’t ready to let her off. “You think I don’t clean up nice. Maybe I better sleep at my place for a few days. Wouldn’t want to scandalize dear old mom.”
His tone bothered her. Cold. So cold, so fast. Like he was arguing over a parking spot with an annoying neighbor. Could he cut her off this easily?
“I promise this stresses me out more than you—” She heard the wheedling in her voice and hated it.
“Fine. But in that case, I’ll meet your mom here. Let’s not pretend I’m not practically living here.”
She laid a hand on his shoulder. Her touch seemed to do the trick. He relaxed, sighed.
“I’m sorry, Becks. People looking down on me, it pisses me off.”
“Eve’s gonna love you. I promise.”
And she did.
Brian was the best version of himself that Sunday, charming and polite without trying too hard. He and her mother wound up talking about novels that Becks hadn’t read, early twentieth-century fiction, Upton Sinclair and John O’Hara, all the worthy books she’d missed in her headlong pre-law rush. I had a lot of long bus trips, Brian said. He explained the Internet to her mom without being condescending. He listened to the mildly embarrassing stories she told about teenage Rebecca, She almost failed her driving test, not that she couldn’t drive, she was just so stressed about it—
Becks was stressed? No way.
Rebecca could feel Eve settle in as the afternoon passed. “I really have to go,” she said around five.
“Sure you won’t stay for dinner?” Brian asked.
“Bri’s a great cook.”
“He cooks too?”
“Just this and that, not like I know what I’m doing.”
“Come on, Rebecca, walk me to my car.”
Rebecca came back to the apartment expecting to find Brian excited. Instead he sat on the couch, staring morosely at the television. She knelt in front of him, rested her hands on his legs. His eyes were flat, exhausted.
“What’s wrong, babe?”
He ignored her.
“Brian. What is it?” Her confusion was real. “She loved you, Bri, you know she did. You know what she said? He’s a keeper.” She had actually said, He’s a keeper, don’t blow it. Thanks, Mom.
He didn’t speak.
“Come on, Bri?”
“I wish I had a family like yours.”
He went to a knee as they were picnicking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her surprise was genuine. They’d been together just five months. Her surprise and her pleasure. Yes, she said, yes yes yes. The day was perfect, a bright blue May afternoon, finals just over. On Monday she’d start her internship with Poynter Stone, a corporate law firm based in Philly. She was near the top of her class. She could have wound up at a high-end New York firm. But Poynter suited her because of its criminal defense practice. Even before she started law school she’d seen the degree as a means to an end.
By the end of her sophomore year at Wesleyan, she’d grown sick of the intellectual pretension around her. Worst of all was the way the kids talked about cops. Criminals with badges. Her uncle Ned, her dad’s brother, was a Boston police sergeant. He wouldn’t even take a free cup of coffee.
She decided to do something about it. At Thanksgiving break junior year, she told Ned she wanted to join the Boston police.
“Wesleyan to the BPD?” Ned was fleshy and strong, shaped like a keg, with oven-mitt hands. He looked her up and down, appraising her. “You’re serious, huh? Let’s go to Drakes.”
He seemed grim, but the invitation thrilled her. She’d heard him talk about Drakes. Cop bar at the edge of Roxbury, where he worked. District B-2, worst neighborhood in Boston.
He wound through the city’s streets like he was on autopilot. She tried to talk, but he turned up the radio. Late November in Massachusetts meant loooong nights. Only 7 p.m., but the sun seemed to have been gone forever. A freezing rain coated the windows.
He parked outside a two-story concrete building with a single reinforced window. No sign.
Inside, a dingy room reeking of smoke. Two jukeboxes, neither plugged in. A television playing Wheel of Fortune. Everyone in the place looked like Ned; they all had the same bulk in their shoulders and arms.
“New girlfriend, Neddie?” the bartender asked. “Little old for ya.”
“My niece.”
“Niece, sure, right.”
“Nah, true.”
Ned’s accent was thicker here than at her house.
“Rebecca goes to Wesleyan. She wants to be a cop.”
“Yeah?” one guy said to her. He was kinda cute, black hair, thirty or so. “Joking, yeah?”
“No.”
“Fucking idiot.”
“Thinks she’s gonna toss her college degree,” Ned said. “So she can do some good. I thought we should enlighten her about the realities of law enforcement in underserved communities.”
He brought her to a booth. For a solid hour cops came over to tell her horror stories. Getting domestic violence calls from cockroach-infested apartments until the calls turned into murders. Fourteen-year-old girls pimped by their boyfriends, sold to a dozen guys a night. Fifteen-year-old boys shooting each other in the head for the chance to sell a couple hundred dollars of crack. Menageries straight from hell, dead cats and half-starved pit bulls. On and on, each tale worse than the next. In the early nineties, Boston had plenty of senseless violence to go ’round.
Even worse than the stories was the way the cops told them, flat and affectless, but with a hint of showmanship. Like they were numb to the horror, yet almost proud of it.
Rebecca barely spoke. She sipped her beer until it was flat and warm. Finally, even Ned seemed to have had enough. He waved them off, went to the bar, came back with two big shots. He lifted his glass.
“To Boston’s finest.”
The whiskey burned her throat. He didn’t even blink.
“Half the guys in here are alcoholics. Maybe two-thirds.”
“You’re not.”
“You’d be surprised how much I drink. Don’t be a cop, Rebecca.”
“I get it.”
“Thought I might have to do this to my boys”—Ned had three sons—“but they just want to go to business school. Marry blondes, live in Cohasset, play golf. God bless ’em.” He grabbed her hand. “Not that I think you can’t do it. I mean, the street, it helps if you can ring somebody’s bell, but the girls find ways around that.”
“The girls. The female cops, you mean?”
He nodded. “It’s everything else. All those cop shows get it wrong. We don’t solve anything. We’re san workers. Clean up after people who are too stupid, too bored, too mean, to do anything but hurt other people. And the bureaucracy, the crap lieutenants who decide they don’t like you and find a hundred different ways to mess up your life—”
“It can’t be that bad. You do it.”
“I don’t have a choice, Rebecca, I didn’t go to Wesleyan. And guess what? The guys in here? They’re the good ones. Not the ones too scared to be out there, or the freaks who’ve gone all the way over and get off on it. They’re drinking because they still care.”
He went back to the bar, left her alone. Occasionally the black-haired cop looked over his shoulder and smirked. Ned came back with four more shots, little ones, the liquor inside yellow and dangerous looking.
“Te-kee-la.” He rattled two home, quick, slamming down the empty glasses. “Don’t forget the guys on the take, we all know them, the smear sticks to everyone. But nobody busts them, nobody says a word. Because anyone who sees what we see is on one side of the line, and everybody else, they’re on the other. Even the DAs.”
Ned didn’t usually talk this much. Now she knew why. She felt like he’d slapped her.
“Asshole.”
“You do this, go in with your eyes open. That’s all.” He pushed a shot of tequila at her, grabbed the last one himself. “I have a solution.” He raised his glass. “Drink, I’ll tell you.”
She’d known him her whole life and not seen him this way before, not ever, the alcohol in charge of him. The view unsettled her. She raised the glass, unwillingly. They drank. The tequila burned.
“Three words.”
“I’m listening.”
But he said nothing, went back to the bar, came back with two pints of beer and another shot of whiskey.
“You going to be okay to drive?”
“Good girl.” He slid his keys to her.
“Three words, you said.”
“FBI.”
She’d always been under the impression Ned hated the FBI. “I’m not sure that’s three words.”
“College girl. How about this? Stupid fuckin’ FBI. That three? Not in Boston, they suck here, protecting half the Irish mob, too dumb to figure out they’re getting played. But over the years a couple of our best boyos have gone to the federales. They make cases, understand? They pick and choose, they have the time and money and toys.”
“I thought you didn’t like them.”
“ ’Cause I’m jealous. ’Cause you need a college degree, plus, to get in. They love lawyers, the feds. ’Cause you wear a suit and go after guys who deserve it. Not some chick who smoked rock laced with PCP and drowned her babies like kittens.”
She remembered that case. She’d been in eighth grade.
Ned slumped in the booth. “First on the scene. Lisa Grant was her name. Sitting on the couch. Leaning forward, watching General Hospital. Didn’t even move when I came in. Just nodded at the bathroom. I take a look, come out, I say, You do this, ma’am? Always give ’em a sir, a ma’am, they love that. Respect. Know what young Miss Grant said to me?”
Rebecca tried to imagine. Couldn’t.
“Suck your dick for rock. Officer.” Ned lifted the shot glass to his mouth. “It’s the officer that always gets me. She wanted me to know she knew who I was. All I could do not to pick her up and put her in the bathtub along with the kids, but I kept myself steady, I wanted to be sure we didn’t blow the case. Only she didn’t even get life, she had some do-good defense lawyer talking about her circumstances, her history of abuse. Be out when she’s sixty. Sometimes in the middle of the night I promise myself if I’m still around then I’ll find her, put three in her. One for each kid. Dare ’em to arrest me in my wheelchair. You want to do some good, go nuts. Just not the BPD.”
She drove home alone, left Ned at Drakes. I don’t want your dad to see me like this. Someone’ll drop me off, get the car tomorrow.
The next morning she dragged herself to the library to read about applying to the FBI. She had one advantage, she was good at languages. She was nearly fluent in Spanish and had some Russian too. But she could see that law school was a sure ticket in. Ned was right, the bureau liked lawyers.
Junior year at Wesleyan she worked as hard as she’d ever had, straight As across the board. She spent every spare hour practicing on the LSAT. The logic puzzles didn’t agree with her, but eventually she cracked them. She wound up at the University of Virginia, one of the best.
Columbia had let her in too, but UVA was offering a partial scholarship, which she wanted. She knew she’d have to take out loans. Her parents wouldn’t be paying, and Jerome didn’t like lawyers. Even with the scholarship and working summers, she would graduate law school fifty thousand in the hole.
She told Brian about the FBI the day after Eve left. Her parents were the only other people she’d told at that point. They hadn’t exactly been positive. You know it’s a paramilitary organization, right? her dad had said. I have a hard time seeing you there. Her mom made the inevitable Silence of the Lambs joke, the movie had come out a couple of years before. Like Clarice Starling, only your shoes aren’t cheap.
She didn’t even try to tell anyone at law school. Her classmates were mainly worried about which firms paid the most. You hear Cravath just went to eighty-six K for first years? The few who did want to be in public service came at it from the left, environmental defense or death penalty appeals. Rebecca couldn’t forget the way Ned had spat do-good defense lawyer like a curse. She kept her plans to herself.
But she figured Brian would understand.
“Sure it’s what you want?” he said when she finished.
She nodded.
“Then it’s good enough for me. How’s it work? You go straight after you graduate?”
Not exactly. She explained her plan. She would work for a big firm for two or three years, pay down her law school debt so it wasn’t hanging over her head when she became an agent. Getting into the bureau was a tough, multistage process. Long multiple-choice exams, interviews, a fitness exam, and a background check. If they took her, she’d train at Quantico for several months. Then they could send her anywhere in the country for her first post.
“You’re okay carrying a gun?”
The idea of wearing a weapon made her nervous. Ned had promised her she’d get used to it. It’s a tool. Probably you’ll never need it. But if you do you’ll be glad to have it.
“I better be.”
He ran a hand down her back, let it rest on her hip. They were in bed together; no surprise, they were always in bed together. “Becks?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t mean to jump ahead, but what’s it mean for kids? Do you even want them?”
Oh. The question thrilled and frightened her at once. “I want kids, yes.”
“But you’re going to have to wait a while.”
Could she tell him? Were they ready to be this grown-up?
“In a perfect world I think I’d have them before the bureau. Being a pregnant FBI agent, it seems weird.”
Also, big law firms tended to have good maternity leave policies. The unspoken quid pro quo was that female associates who wanted a chance at partner would make up the hours, work twice as hard later. But Rebecca had no interest in making partner. She could use the system to her advantage, take the paid leave twice and then get out. A cynical move, she had to admit. But ultimately it would help at the bureau.
He was quiet. She wondered if the talk of kids had scared him off.
“Cool,” he finally said.
She punched him, harder than she’d intended. “Cool? That’s all?”
“That’s all. You have a plan, I like it, I’ll roll with it.”
She couldn’t let the unspoken contrast rest. “And you don’t. Have a plan.”
“I don’t. Can you roll with that?”
She thought about her classmates, looking for the summer internship that would lead to the associate offer that would put them on a partnership track. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she was being a snob in reverse. But she didn’t want one of those men. Nothing was more boring than intensity without imagination.
They went to Philly for the internship, came back for third year. Still he wouldn’t talk about his family. He deflected her every time she tried to ask. She started to wonder if his dad was even alive. Then, October, the phone rang.
“Hello?”
A gravelly voice, a smoker’s voice, an old man’s voice. “Bri there?”
“He’ll be back shortly.” He was out for a run.
“This Rebecca?”
She wondered how this stranger knew her name. “Who’s this?”
“It’s his dad.” Pause. “Jerry.” As if he might have another dad. “Could you tell him I said hello?”
“Of course, Mr. Unsworth, my pleasure. Will I ever get to meet you?”
“That’s up to my son.” Then he was gone.
Somehow she waited until Brian showered and dried himself off before jumping him with the call.
“My dad? You talk to him?”
“Not really, no. It sounded like he wanted to talk to you.”
“Forget it, Becks.”
“Why won’t you talk about him? Or to him?”
He laughed, hollow and bitter. His face reminded her of the way he’d looked in the nursing home after Gordon Hendricks died.
“Maybe he was fine before he went to Vietnam, I don’t know, I wasn’t alive, but he came back with a drinking problem and a heroin solution, that’s who he’s been ever since. He gets clean, but you can never trust him.”
“But if you tried to forgive him—not for him, for you.”
“For me? He’s got nothing for me. Most selfish person I ever met. You don’t get it. Everyone you know is basically decent.”
“Brian. I’m on your side.”
He’d turned away from her, letting her know the conversation was over.
Again his coldness unnerved her. Yet some part of her respected him for his unwillingness to compromise his own anger.
Wow. She must really be in love.
They married not even a year later, spring break of her third year. Nothing fancy. A quick wedding in Boston, dinner with her family. Her idea more than Brian’s, a way to handle the fact that his family wouldn’t be there. Her friend Jane officiated, a quasi-civil ceremony. Rebecca didn’t care. Her mom was Jewish and her dad Catholic. They both regarded religion more as an inconvenience than anything else.
As for the wedding itself, she’d already gone to enough friends’ weddings to be over them. She didn’t have the time or energy to pick the right band, the right venue, the right dress. They would have had to do it on the cheap, too, because her parents didn’t have fifty thousand dollars lying around, and Brian certainly couldn’t ask his dad. Grandpa Jerome was giving her ten thousand dollars as a wedding present. Only one rule, Becks, you have to spend it, can’t put it against your law school loans. For ten grand they could have a lousy wedding or a great honeymoon.
Okay, sure, some part of her wouldn’t have minded walking down the aisle in a perfect white dress. Having her dad give her away. The vision was manufactured, what she’d been sold her whole life. But she couldn’t deny it held a certain surface appeal.
She asked Brian what he thought, but he was no help. She had begun to see that he considered displays of emotion—even private displays—contrived. Almost shameful. His vision of masculinity came straight out of a John Ford Western. Tight-lipped, straight-backed. Of course, that attitude was what had helped attract her to him in the first place. But sometimes she wished he’d tell her how he felt.
“We can do it however you like,” he said.
“Maybe a chance to get all your friends together.” In the year they’d been together, she’d met only one of his friends, a squirrelly guy named Jimmy who’d slept on their couch for a couple of days before vanishing. Afterward, Rebecca realized he’d filched the money from her purse. Brian hadn’t even looked surprised when she told him.
“Not exactly the fancy wedding type, my friends.”
“So whatever I want.”
“I don’t care about the wedding, Becks. I care about the girl.”
That fast everything was fine.
They went for the perfect honeymoon instead of the lousy wedding. They spent Jerome’s money on a five-star trip to St. Barts. A thousand bucks a day for ten days, endless blue skies, a suite with an ocean view. They swam, they snorkeled, they sailed a catamaran. They rode scooters. They drank. They watched sunsets.
Two weeks before, Rebecca had gone to her gyno, had her IUD taken out. She felt almost giddy as the doctor put it in a plastic bag and handed it to her. Her own fertility, returned.
Why not? We’re getting married. Becks and Bri 4-ever.
She was pregnant by the time they flew home.