Bernadette leaped into the back seat of Brian’s car, but before I could follow, someone grabbed my elbow and yanked me back, saying excitedly, “It’s her.” A flash went off inches from my face, stunning me senseless. I couldn’t see; I couldn’t move. I only heard—I only smelled—what happened next.
There was a man’s high-pitched screech, one acrid inhale, and I was released. I stumbled, trying to wave away the colorful spots before my eyes like a cloud of gnats.
“Watch it with that thing, lady!” a man shouted.
“Go,” the hatted woman whispered, close to my ear. Though the flash had blinded me, I knew it was her because I could smell the cigarette smoke on her breath. She gave me a boost up into the back seat of the car, and the door slammed shut, and Brian’s voice was asking me frantically if I was hurt. I rubbed my eyes, blinking away the constellation of spots, and saw the guy I was planning on marrying, how badly he needed to hear that I wasn’t.
Seven p.m.
Mrs. McCall opened the door wearing a belted shirtdress, her shoulder-length white hair immovably curled. She sighed at the state of us standing on her porch, between the Corinthian columns, the boys loaded down with overnight bags and the girls with limp, uncombed hair.
“What an absolute ordeal you’ve all had,” she said, her sigh fatalist, as though the events of the last twenty-four hours were both atrocious and completely inevitable in the world in which we lived. She narrowed her eyes at something over my shoulder. “Are we expecting anyone else this evening?”
We all turned to see she was speaking to the police guard who had trailed us through the velvety dark of the canopy roads. “Just me, ma’am,” he said. He was clean-shaven and all arms and legs, no more than twenty-five. The needle palms clattered in a sudden wind, and his hand shot to his holster, eyes sweeping the remote landscape with a petrified vigilance I wished I hadn’t seen.
Mrs. McCall frowned. “How do you take your coffee?”
In the dome-shaped entrance hall, we were told to set down our bags. I never saw anyone else in the house other than Mr. and Mrs. McCall, but someone took our things upstairs and into the rooms where we would sleep. In the dining room, we were fed oily bowls of beef and barley soup beneath a bronze crucifix, agony stretching the mouth of Jesus diagonal.
I traced letters in the fatty foam of my supper while everyone sat around talking about everything except what had happened. The cold, the new grading system that was making it harder to earn A’s, the cold, the ugly new Capitol Building. Denise had called it a brutalist scourge on Tallahassee, too tall and too gray, a man’s idea of modernity.
I looked down and realized my plate had been cleared, that Mr. McCall had downed the last of his sherry and moved on to something in a darker shade of brown that had turned his nose scalded and bulbous.
“You let me know if your fraternity brother needs a lawyer,” he said to Brian. “I’ve got a good one.”
Brian nodded dutifully. “Yes, sir. I’ll let Roger know.”
I felt capable of violence in that moment. Not against anyone in that room—but my crystal water glass, the marble bust of some slave-owning relative regarding me from a pedestal between the windows, those I wanted to blast to pieces.
“I can’t believe they took him away in handcuffs,” I fumed. “I told Sheriff Cruso it wasn’t Roger.”
“Sheriff has the election to think about,” Mr. McCall said in his defense.
“Might actually turn his prospects around if he gets this guy,” Brian added with a wry laugh. Brian’s father was a congressman in Orlando. He knew all about campaign strategy.
“I’ll tell ya what,” Mr. McCall said, lips slick with beef marrow, “I wouldn’t mind taking a crack at the animal once they catch him.” This man was a Christian.
Mrs. McCall stood with a trained smile. “Who wants coffee with dessert?”
“Give me twenty minutes alone in a room with him,” Brian agreed, in a ravenous, juicy way that churned my stomach. This became something of a Rorschach test over the years. There were men who cracked their knuckles while divulging to me what they would do to The Defendant if they got the chance, thinking this was somehow reassuring for me to hear. But all it did was make me realize that there wasn’t so big a difference between the man who’d brutalized Denise and half the men I passed every day on the street.
Mrs. McCall went into the kitchen. I could hear slices of her conversation through the swinging door, with someone whose only contribution was a series of yes ma’ams and no ma’ams.