The Third Child (23 page)

“You’re right. That pig doesn’t matter. We’re legal.” He clutched her hand. “We did it.”

Sara knelt backwards on the front seat, grinning at them. “So when are you telling the folks?”

“I’m not in a hurry.” Blake shook his head.

“I think you better before they find out accidentally.”

Blake grabbed her by the shoulder. “You won’t tell them.”

“No way. They don’t even know I’m here…. But I’m serious, you better carry the news yourself.” She turned to Melissa. “What about you? When are you breaking the news?”

“My aunt Karen will be the first to know. I trust her. But I’ll tell my mother only when I have to. Not before.”

“Bunch of cowards. What are you afraid of?”

Emily said, “You don’t know her mother. She’s to be afraid of, believe me.”

“Yeah? What could she do?”

“Call out the National Guard,” Melissa said. “Send me to Devil’s Island. Cut off my head.”

“Seriously, what can anybody do except yell and moan?”

“She could try to have the wedding annulled,” Emily said. “Right, Lissa?”

Sara shook her spiked black hair. “Wouldn’t that cause a great big scandal? As I understand it, your mother would do anything to avoid that. Besides, you’ve consummated it.”

“Not in the last five minutes,” Blake said. “Maybe it doesn’t count before. Could you pull the car over? We can do it now. You all shut your eyes.”

“He’s so romantic,” Emily said. “I see why you fell for him.”

“My husband,” Melissa said, trying out the words. “He’s my husband.”

“It sounds so weird,” Emily said. “I know every girl is supposed to want one, but I think I’ll stick to dogs for pets, no offense meant, Blake.”

“Arf!” He was sunny again. “I can do any trick your dog can. And more! I’m a bargain.”

“If Rosemary was thinking straight,” Emily said, “she’d thank you profusely. Your brother’s wedding must have cost twenty-five, thirty thousand minimum. I can’t even guess. You saved her a bundle.”

“I’ll be sure to tell her that when she goes ballistic.” Melissa shuddered, not bothering to say that the bride’s family had paid that bill. She could scarcely believe how everything had changed. She was a real grownup, a married lady like friends of Rosemary’s. Who would ever have expected it? She felt as if she had done something totally clever, that eventually would show them all how mistaken they had been about her. One, a handsome brilliant man had married her. Two, she had married before her older sister. Three, she had brought it all off secretly and they couldn’t touch her. She had escaped for good and forever from Rosemary and Dick and them all. She was somebody else now, somebody much better. She almost wished she could call them up and tell them and hear their reaction, but
almost
wasn’t enough to jump into the shark’s mouth. Her own satisfaction with herself would do her just fine.

M
elissa decided that she would confide in Karen first. She called her Monday night. “That was a huge step,” Karen said. “What prompted you?”

“Rosemary and Dick walked in on us, I told you. They know I’ve been seeing him.”

“But you said you were just eating supper. They didn’t walk in on a sex scene or anything they could wax heavy about, right?”

“Blake isn’t white. That’s all they saw. And then they found out who his adopted father is—Si Ackerman, an attorney—”

“I know who he is. A top-notch defense lawyer, does a lot of appeals on capital cases. He’s the genuine article, Melissa. No wonder Dick can’t stand him. They’ve gone head-to-head since Dick was a prosecutor.”

“It gets worse.” She told Karen about Toussaint Parker.

“How come you didn’t tell me all this before? Did you think it would scare me? Come on. You should trust me more.”

“Well, Blake didn’t tell you either when you were talking, did he?” She couldn’t bring herself to admit to Karen that she had not known. “I didn’t think it was terribly relevant. I wanted you to meet him, not to be thinking about his father.”

“Still, you could have told me after I’d met him, when we were talking about him together.”

“I’m sorry. I just didn’t think of it. After all, his father isn’t very real to me. I was just a kid when he was executed.”

“It was a cause célèbre for a lot of us. We thought he was innocent and that he was framed and railroaded.”

“Do you still think so?”

“Nothing ever came up to change my mind.”

“Blake knows his father didn’t kill that cop.” She told Karen the story.

“That’s enough to drive anyone crazy. Knowing the truth and not being able to do anything about it. It’s scary, kiddo, really scary.” Karen was silent for a moment. Melissa waited her out. She was disappointed in Karen’s reaction. It seemed as if no one was going to rejoice with her. Karen finally continued, “It just seems like too much of a coincidence, the two of you getting together.”

“We had the same writing class. It wasn’t like we hit it off right away, but we liked what each other wrote.”

“I have never been a great fan of coincidence, that’s all.”

“Okay, the truth is out. Blake went to Wesleyan just because I was enrolled there. Somehow he found out. Then he bribed the registration people to put us in the same class. Actually maybe I went there because he did, since he was accepted way before me. He got better grades in high school.”

“I guess I’m being paranoid.”

“I guess you are.”

“Melissa, did he know about your family before you started going out?”

“Of course not.” She was getting used to lying, because she was beginning to understand she was going to have trouble getting others to accept their union. “It was a shock to him. He didn’t actually know till we were both in Washington last summer.”

“I want to be happy for you, kiddo. You’re both just a bit young to get married. And it’s bound to cause a huge flap.”

“For now, it’s a secret. I’m not going to tell anybody else, except maybe Billy, I haven’t decided. You can’t say a word to anyone, drop a hint, anything.”

“I don’t have much communication with the rest of the Dickinsons. I’m the black sheep. The lavender sheep, whatever. Unless somebody dies, I never see them. And I sure don’t call them up to chat.”

“Anyhow, I wanted you to know.” Melissa wished someone would say, How wonderful, you have married the man of your dreams. She had.

“IT’S LIKE
Romeo and Juliet,
” Emily said. “Star-crossed lovers who secretly marry.”

“I never read it.” Melissa was sitting cross-legged on her bed brushing her hair. She was startled every time she looked at her roommate. Emily had dyed her hair red—not reddish like Karen’s had been or Billy’s was, but bright garish red. She decided she wasn’t interesting enough looking to attract interesting men, and this was her solution.

“Maybe you should,” Emily said. “It’s so much apropos.”

“Didn’t they end up badly?”

“Well, it’s a tragedy. Shakespeare’s tragedies all end with body counts.”

MELISSA WENT
to see Fern, who was home in the room she shared with her girlfriend Harriet, a short slim girl with light brown hair worn in a single pigtail. Harriet was sitting cross-legged on the double bed. Fern sat straddling her desk chair. Tammy had proven to be a kind of lesbian predator, who brought out young women and then moved on, but Fern had not remained alone long. She had been seeing Harriet for a month and they seemed tight.

Harriet said, “It’s heterosexual privilege, you know. Like we couldn’t get married, no matter how much we wanted to.” She was glaring, her forehead creased in a frown.

But Fern squeezed Melissa’s hand. “I know what this means to you. You’re crazy about him. I hope it all works out. No matter what, you have what you want. My mother never got to marry my father before he was killed, and she always regretted that.”

“I always assumed your parents were divorced?”

“He’s the only soldier I ever heard of who got killed on a training mission. He drowned. She was mad at him for enlisting, and she didn’t even tell him she was pregnant…. So at least, no matter what happens, you get to be together now, and that’s what matters.”

Melissa felt at least slightly congratulated. Jeez, marry him now before he drops dead. Nobody was going to cheer, so she had to settle for being glad herself. She walked from Fern’s through the streets of Middletown past the Victorian houses, the trees dropping their leaves in huge drifts in the gutters and on lawns students didn’t bother raking, onto campus itself and past College Row, with its nineteenth-century brownstone buildings that always struck her as gloomy and even more so today. Why didn’t anyone understand?

HE SENT HER
an e-mail:

He was pacing, sparking energy. Like a great cat, he covered his little room in three strides, turned and strode back, again and again. “I deciphered the papers that we were handed. I finally figured out at least part of it.”

“So what is it? More contributions.”

“There are two lists.” He handed her the lists from the guy who had met them at Foxwoods. “One of them has numbers beside it that I bet are contributions. But the other list had me stumped. I chased these names down through database after database.”

She shook his shoulder impatiently. “So cut to the chase.”

“This is the chase, babe-aroni. I finally found them. They’re all convicted of crimes in Pennsylvania.”

“Crimes? I don’t get it. He’s getting contributions from prisoners?”

“That’s what the guy was giving us. Lists of contributors and lists of convicted criminals. And the link between at least some of them—gubernatorial pardons or releases from the parole board he appointed. I’ve only begun to work through the list, but I can link pardons and early paroles to contributions to a special fund by family members, business partners, whatever. He was selling pardons and paroles, Melissa. Is that corrupt or what?”

“Like he was letting people out of prison for money? That’s hard to swallow. He’s always been so over the top about punishing criminals, locking them up forever and throwing away the key.”

“We’re not talking about petty criminals, your mule caught with cocaine in her tummy, the guy peddling smoke in the ’hood, guys boosting cars. We’re talking white-collar criminals.”

“Like what? I still don’t get it.”

“Like the guy embezzling old ladies out of their savings, the guy with his hand in the till at the corporation, the assistant principal who gets pay-backs from contractors. The savings and loan officer who lent himself a bundle. Real estate scams. Second mortgage scams. Contractors caught using second-rate material when the bridge or the roof collapses. I’ve just begun digging. That guy gave us gold, Lissa, solid gold.”

“That’s hard to believe—that my father would just sell pardons or early paroles. It just seems too gross. I can’t imagine Rosemary letting him get involved with anything so shady.”

“It’s oblique. The funds come roundabout. You have to follow the computer trail to get back to King Richard. I’m still trying to sort it out.”

She closed her eyes and considered her parents, trying to imagine them from outside of the box of family. They certainly always needed money. Dick had family and connections; Rosemary had brains. Neither of them had brought cash to the table. Rosemary had invested shrewdly and obviously nowadays there was a lot more money than when she was little. But Rosemary hated to use their own investments to subsidize campaigns. Politics ran on money, Melissa had known that as far back as she could remember. Backers, supporters were the people who had to be pleased, whose desires ruled the city, the state, the nation. The corporations that spent money on a candidate bought the official’s votes. That was simple enough; she had always understood those facts. But selling pardons seemed worse—if he really had done that. Briefly she wondered if they could not use this information to blackmail Dick and Rosemary into letting her stay in school. But they could not “let” or “refuse” any longer. She was a married woman. That was hard to believe while she was still living in her dorm and he, in his. Nonetheless they were legally married, mean
ing her parents could no longer coerce her. She finally had someone to stand between her and their power over her. She could see that Blake was really excited by what he had uncovered, and she could recognize that it looked as if her father had engaged in underhanded practices. The discovery was something that potentially could hurt him, although he had weathered many considerable scandals during his years in office. She supposed, in an ideal world, Dick would be punished for his abuse of public office, but this world was a mess anyhow.

Why wasn’t she more excited? Perhaps because she no longer needed to fight her parents to kick free. She had put herself beyond their reach. She was safe from their meddling. Safe from the swift, lethally sharp blade of their decisions that had always whacked through her life whenever they chose. Blake was not the first person they had decided she could not consort with. Boyfriends, girlfriends, families of whom they did not approve, the Korean-American boy Mark. “No, you may
not
go to Rosalia’s birthday party.” “We don’t want you seeing that Levin boy again.” “No, you may not,” again and again. They had done the same thing to Merilee; they were still doing the same thing to Merilee. She, who was supposed to be the weak one, had dared what her golden brilliant sister could not: she had set a barrier between herself and Dick and Rosemary’s ability to control.

He was still going on about his discovery. “We have to work our way down this whole list to prove our case. I thought we’d split the names. I’ve noted the ones I was able to get the details on so far. I’ll print it out for you.”

“Why not just e-mail it to me? Then I’d have it right on my computer. Easier.”

“Because e-mail is never secure, and I don’t want them getting one of their jazzy research assistants to hack into our e-mail and find out what we know.”

She didn’t much feel like traipsing back to her dorm and sitting at the computer until the wee hours running down meaningless names. “You know, I can’t just hack into databases the way you can. It’s not my expertise.”

“I’ll help you. At some point you have to learn how to do it anyhow. It’s a necessary skill.”

She put her hand on his knee. “Blake, we’re together now. We’re in it for life. How much longer do we have to go on bothering with my father? When do we just say good-bye to them and get on with our lives?”

“When I’ve got justice at last. And this
is
my life.” His tone was cold. He was disappointed, she could tell, that she wasn’t more enthusiastic.

“Did you ever really want to dig up stuff on him so I could influence him? Or was that just to get me involved?”

“I never knew your father personally. I thought you might be able to approach him. I even thought by and by he might issue a posthumous pardon for my father, to clear his name. As I’ve gotten to know your parents, I’ve begun to doubt that either of us could ever persuade your father to change his mind or his course. But I still need justice, and if we have to blackmail him to get it, so be it. Right now, we need to make them back off. I don’t think you want a showdown with them just yet. We can distract them with some bad publicity, maybe, and get them off your back.”

To please him, she sat down beside him at his computer and tried to follow what he was doing. In the end, however, he decided that it would take more time than he was willing to spend to teach her some of his tricks. Now she was disappointed too, because he was clearly going to spend the whole evening at his computer. He did not really care if she stayed or went back to the room she shared with Emily. She decided she might as well return and catch up on classwork.

She had to take an interest in his crusade, she told herself as she walked across the path to her dorm through the bleak chilly night. After all, investigating Dick was something they could share. Her father wielded great power as a senator. The reasons she had agreed to investigate him still held, in spite of her own feelings that she had escaped them. Blake had liberated her, but she could not therefore decide that she was indifferent to her father’s errors. She would do better next time Blake approached her with the results of his research. She would force out enthusiasm. Since investigating Dick was so important to Blake, she would try to make it important to herself. But she was beginning to feel caught between her husband and her parents.

The next day she did not hear from him at all. They had taken care to
enroll in the same European history class, but he was not there. She took careful notes so she could share them with him. Finally, on Thursday, she rushed over to see him in the late afternoon. She was determined to heal the little rift her lack of enthusiasm had caused.

He was sitting at his computer, as she had guessed. His eyes were bloodshot. His clothes looked as if he had not changed them since yesterday at least. The dregs of old coffee sat in paper cups on the floor, the desk. Remnants of pizza lay in the box it had arrived in, on his bed, in which he clearly had not spent the night. He had not shaved, and his black beard with coppery glints shadowed his cheeks and chin. His room was usually so neat, the chaos and the litter were almost shocking.