Chapter 3: A Signature From a Hospital Bed
“Somebody signed it for you.”
Teddy said it again, slower, like she was testing whether it would hold weight. Then she turned the laptop back around to face herself and started typing with her two fingers, and I sat with my hands under my belly and listened to the keys.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. The recorder scans everything. Give me a second and I’ll have the actual—there.”
She turned it back.
It was my signature.
That was the first thing. Not like my signature. Mine. The L with the loop that went too far left because I’d learned cursive from a left-handed teacher. The way the Whitlock ran downhill at the end like it was tired. I’d signed that name maybe four hundred times in three years, on cards and forms and the back of a check once a month that Grant handed me and took back, and there it was at the bottom of a page I had never seen, in blue ink, dated March ninth.
“That’s mine,” I said.
“It’s a good copy of yours.”
“No, it’s—”
“Lena.” She put a finger on the screen, under the signature, where there was a second block of print and a round purple smear of a stamp. “Who’s Dana Keel?”
I knew the name. I knew the name the way you know the name of the woman who answers your husband’s office phone and says he’s in a meeting, Mrs. Whitlock in a voice that lets you know she’s enjoying it.
“She’s his office manager. At the company.”
“She’s also a notary public.” Teddy sat back. “Which is fine. Lots of office managers are. What she’s done here is certify that on March ninth, at eleven forty in the morning, you appeared before her in person, in Ashford, produced identification, and signed this in her presence.”
“I was in a bed.”
“I know.”
“I was in a bed, I had a—they had me on a monitor, I couldn’t go to the—”
“I know. I believe you. Stop. Breathe.” She waited until I did. “Where was your driver’s license on March ninth?”
I opened my mouth and nothing came out of it.
My purse. On the chair. The purse I hadn’t asked for, that he’d brought back from the house after two hours, and set down on the chair by the window with its strap arranged neatly on top, and I’d thought, that’s sweet, he thought I’d want it.
“He had it,” I said. “He went home for my things. He had my purse for two hours.”
Teddy took the gum out of her mouth, looked at it, and put it in the wastebasket. She got a new piece out of a drawer and didn’t unwrap it. She just held it.
“Here’s what I need you to understand,” she said, “and I need you to understand it before one o’clock, because Parrish is going to try to make this morning about a slap. A slap is bad. A slap in front of a judge is very bad. But a slap is a misdemeanor, and his client’s a Whitlock, and he’s going to stand up there and say regrettable and stressful pregnancy and the parties should attend counseling, and some part of you is going to want to let him, because it’s smaller than the other thing.”
“What’s the other thing?”
“The other thing is that a man took his wife’s identification out of her purse while she was in a hospital bed, and had an employee certify a lie, and used it to transfer a house out of his wife’s name into his own company. That’s not a divorce. That’s not a protective order. That’s a felony, Lena, probably three of them, and the moment anybody with a badge looks at it, it stops being about you and him and starts being about him and the State.” She finally unwrapped the gum. “He knows that. He knew it on the steps. That’s why he took page four.”
I sat with that.
Outside the stuck door, a cart went by with a squeaking wheel. The clock said 10:14. I had less than three hours.
“Why does he want my mother’s house,” I said. “It’s—Teddy, it’s a two-bedroom. The porch is rotten. He makes more than that house is worth in a month.”
“I don’t know yet.” She was typing again. “But I’ll tell you what I’d ask, if I were asking. I’d ask what else Whitlock Development owns on Juniper Lane.”
* * *
Judge Alder had a bow tie and a cold.
He came onto the bench of 3A at four minutes past one blowing his nose into a handkerchief the size of a pillowcase, and he looked at the two tables in front of him, and at Parrish, and at Grant, and at me, and at Teddy, and at the clock, in that order, and he said, “Ms. Ruiz, I’ve read Deputy Okoro’s statement and Judge Hale’s note. I’ve also had the great pleasure of watching forty seconds of security footage with my lunch. Mr. Parrish, I assume you’d like to be heard.”
“Your Honor, my client deeply regrets—”
“I’m sure he does. Sit down.”
Parrish sat down.
It took twenty-two minutes. I know because I watched the clock, because I couldn’t watch Grant, and I couldn’t watch the judge, and the clock was the only thing in that room that didn’t want anything from me.
I testified. It was shorter than I’d rehearsed in Mrs. Pruitt’s kitchen. Teddy asked me what happened on the steps and I said it, and she asked me whether I was afraid to go home and I said yes, and she asked me why, and I started to say the thing about the app on my phone and then I said, instead, “Because he’s never once hit me where anyone could see it, and this morning he did, in front of a courthouse, and I don’t know what that means he’s decided.”
Alder wrote something down.
Grant testified too. He was very good. He stood instead of sitting, with one hand on the back of his chair, and he talked about the pregnancy, and the scare in March, and how worried he’d been, and how I’d gotten it into my head that he was keeping things from me, and how he’d come to the courthouse that morning only because he’d been terrified I’d do something to hurt myself. He said terrified. He let his voice catch on it. He looked at me when he said it, with his whole face, and if I hadn’t lived in his house I would have believed him myself.
Then he ran two fingers down his tie.
Parrish asked for the footage.
I think he thought it would help. I think he’d been told about it and not shown it, and he’d built a picture in his head of a tired husband steadying a stumbling wife, and he stood up in his rising voice and asked that the court view the recording “so that the context is clear,” and Alder looked at him over the handkerchief for a long moment and said, “Mrs. Delacroix, if you would.”
The clerk turned a monitor on the side wall.
It was from above. That was the thing I hadn’t been ready for. The camera on the portico looked down the steps at an angle, so that we were small and foreshortened, two figures and a scatter of white squares on grey stone, and the people around us were the tops of heads. There was no sound. His hand came up and went across and my head went sideways and the folder opened in the air like a bird, and from up there, from God’s view, it looked exactly like what it was. There was no context. There was a man and a woman and his arm.
I watched myself go down on one knee. I watched his shoe.
Nobody in the room moved. Parrish didn’t sit down and he didn’t stay standing; he sort of hung there between the two with his hand on the table. Grant watched the screen the way he watched the evening news, politely, with his head a little on one side. At the forty-second mark a small grey figure one step below him bent at the knees and picked something up, and the clerk stopped it there.
“Thank you, Mr. Parrish,” Alder said. “That was helpful.”
“Mr. Whitlock,” he said. “The footage shows you striking your wife with an open hand and then standing on a document while she knelt in front of you. Which part of that was the terror?”
Grant smiled.
“Your Honor, I understand how it—”
“You don’t need to understand how it looks. I’m telling you how it is.”
He granted the order. Fourteen days, temporary, with a full hearing set for the following Tuesday in front of him, because, he said, blowing his nose, he’d like to see how this one ended. Grant was to have no contact with me, directly or through third parties. He was not to come within five hundred feet of Mrs. Pruitt’s house on Juniper Lane, which Teddy gave as my address without looking at me. I was to be allowed into the house on Fairmont for one hour, with a deputy, to collect my belongings, at a time of the deputy’s choosing.
“Your Honor,” Parrish said, “that is my client’s home.”
“Your client has a mother with eleven bedrooms. I’ve been to two of her parties.” Alder closed the file. “The deed matter that Ms. Ruiz raised is not before me and I’m not going to pretend it is. Ms. Ruiz, you know where the State’s Attorney keeps his office.”
“I do, Your Honor.”
“Then I imagine you’ll be visiting it.” He stood. “We’re adjourned. Mr. Whitlock, you’ll leave first, and you’ll leave by the Pine Street door, and if I see you on the front steps of this building again before Tuesday I will consider it a personal insult.”
Grant left first.
He went past the end of our table on his way to the side door, close enough that I smelled the sandalwood soap I’d bought him for Christmas, and he didn’t look at me, and he didn’t look at Teddy. He looked at his watch. Then he was gone, and Parrish went after him with his face like a cat that had been left out in the rain, and the door closed, and I found that I had been holding my breath for so long that the room had gone grey at the edges.
“Head down,” Teddy said. “Between your knees. No, you can’t, can you. Okay. Just breathe. He’s gone. He’s gone, Lena, that’s a court order, he’s actually gone.”
I breathed.
It didn’t feel like anything. I’d thought it would. I’d thought that when a judge said the words there would be some sound, some change in the air, like the moment on the steps. There wasn’t. There was a woman in a red raincoat rubbing circles on my back and the smell of floor wax and a bow-tied man blowing his nose on his way out a door.
That’s what it’s like, when you win one. Nobody tells you that either.
* * *
Mrs. Pruitt was in the lobby.
She’d been in the lobby since ten. She’d parked the station wagon in a two-hour spot across the street and fed the meter twice and then come in through the front doors, past Deputy Okoro, who’d found her a chair, and she’d sat on it with her purse on her knees and a thermos of coffee between her feet for four and a half hours, and when she saw me come out of the stairwell she stood up like she’d been waiting four and a half minutes.
“Well,” she said.
“Fourteen days.”
“That’s a start.” She looked at my face, at the left side of it, which had gone from red to a sort of dull heat that I could feel but not see. “You’re coming to mine.”
“The judge said—Teddy gave your address, I’m sorry, I should have asked—”
“Lena.” She picked up her thermos. “I’ve had the sewing room made up since the Thursday you used my phone. Get in the car.”
Teddy walked us out the Pine Street door. She’d given me a phone from a drawer in her desk, a cheap grey one that still had the plastic on the screen, with her number and the judge’s clerk and Deputy Okoro already in it. “I buy them by the dozen,” she’d said. “Don’t ask what that tells you about my job.” She’d given me a card for the State’s Attorney’s office, and a sheet of paper with Tuesday’s hearing on it, and the plastic sleeve of my pages with the fourth one still missing, and a hug that I hadn’t expected and didn’t know what to do with.
“He’ll call,” she said, at the door. “Not you. He can’t call you. He’ll call somebody near you and say something that gets to you. That’s what they do. When it happens, you write down the time and what was said and you call me. You don’t call him back. Not for anything.”
“Not for anything?”
“Not for anything,” Teddy said. “I mean it. Not if the house is on fire.”
* * *
Juniper Lane at four in the afternoon in August is a street of shut curtains and sprinklers.
Mrs. Pruitt drove it at fifteen miles an hour with both hands on the wheel, past the Delgados’ and the empty lot where the Kerrigans’ house had burned the year I was in high school, and I sat in the passenger seat with my hands under my belly and watched the houses go by the way you’d watch the faces at a funeral. I’d grown up on this street. I’d learned to ride a bike in front of the house that was coming up on the left, the small yellow one, two doors from Mrs. Pruitt’s, with the porch that needed paint.
Except it wasn’t coming up on the left.
There was a sign on the lawn.
It was the big kind. Four feet by eight, on two posts, the kind they put up when they’re going to build something, with a painting of a building on it that had never existed and a row of little trees that were all the same tree. The painting showed three stories of brick with balconies. Underneath, in the green and white I’d seen on a thousand hard hats and coffee mugs and the pen Grant kept in his inside pocket next to my fourth page, it said:
WHITLOCK DEVELOPMENT
And under that, smaller:
JUNIPER COMMONS. 48 LUXURY RESIDENCES. COMING SOON.
Mrs. Pruitt stopped the car in the middle of the street.
She didn’t pull over. She just stopped, with the engine running and her hands at ten and two, and we both looked at the sign, and then at the yellow house behind it, which still had my mother’s curtains in the front window, the ones with the lemons.
I looked at the curtains. My mother had made them the summer I was fourteen, out of a tablecloth from the church sale, because she’d liked the lemons and because she’d decided that year that curtains were something a person could simply make. She’d done her will at the table under that window, four years later, in blue ink, with the radio on. Two neighbors had signed as witnesses. One of them had been a man named Harlan who was dead now.
The other one was sitting next to me with her hands at ten and two.
“That went up Friday,” Mrs. Pruitt said. “I thought you knew.”
“No.”
“I thought that’s why you were going to court.”
“No.”
She looked at the sign a while longer.
“The Delgados sold in April,” she said. “The Kerrigan lot went in May. Those two rentals at the end, the brothers who own them, they sold in June. I’m the only one on this side of the street who hasn’t had a man in a nice shirt on my porch with an envelope.” She put the car in gear. “Now I know why. He didn’t need me. He already had the one in the middle.”
* * *
She fed me. I don’t remember what. Something with noodles, at the kitchen table, under the yellow curtains, with the wall phone on its hook beside the stove and the cord coiled under it like something asleep. She didn’t ask about the hearing and I didn’t tell her. She talked about the Delgados, and the man in the nice shirt who had come to every porch but hers, and how he’d brought the Kerrigan boy’s mother a fruit basket, an actual fruit basket, with a pineapple in it, the day before he made his offer on the lot.
“Pineapple,” she said. “In April. Where do you even get a pineapple in April.”
I almost smiled. It surprised us both.
Her sewing room had a daybed and a window that looked out on her tomatoes, and I lay on it at eight o’clock with my shoes off and my hand on the place under my ribs, and I didn’t sleep, and I didn’t cry, and I didn’t think, exactly. I lay there and felt the house around me. Mrs. Pruitt’s house sounded different from Grant’s. It ticked. The refrigerator hummed. There was a clock somewhere that was a few seconds off from another clock, so that every minute they argued about it.
At 8:40 the wall phone rang in the kitchen.
I heard her get up out of her husband’s old recliner, the one she still wouldn’t sit in all the way, and I heard her slippers on the linoleum, and I heard the long beige cord drag across the counter as she picked up.
“Pruitt residence.”
A pause.
“Yes, this is she.”
A longer pause. I was already on my feet. I don’t know how. I was on my feet in the doorway of the sewing room with one hand on the frame and the other under my belly and I could see her from there, standing by the stove with the receiver against her ear and her face doing something I had never seen it do in thirty-one years.
“I’ll tell her,” she said. “No. No, I’ll tell her. You don’t need to—I said I’ll tell her.”
She lowered the receiver. She didn’t hang it up. She held it out toward me, across the kitchen, at arm’s length, the way you’d hold out something that might be hot.
“It’s him,” she said. “He says he’s not calling you, he’s calling me.” Her mouth worked. “He says the doctor’s office has been trying to reach you on your phone all afternoon.”
The cord swung between us.
“He says it’s about the baby.”
