Free And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman Page A

eighteen years old.

F RIDAY, O CTOBER 7
    H eloise is having dinner with Scott when the home phone rings. She lets it go to voice mail. Calls to the landline are almost always telemarketers, although girls have started calling Scott, who does not have his own cell phone and is not allowed to chat on Facebook. And even if tonight’s call is something uncharacteristically urgent, it can wait. Almost everything can wait. It’s funny how few people figure this out, how they allow their phones and their BlackBerrys and their computers to enslave them. Heloise can’t completely leave work behind on the nights she doesn’t have appointments—there are almost always girls out on call, although Fridays tend to be slow—but she leaves it to Audrey to monitor the office, checking the GPS program from time to time, making sure everyone is where she’s supposed to be. The ritual of the meal with Scott is important to her, even if she has never learned to enjoy food. She blames her father, the way she had to rush through dinner in order to escape him.
    Food has never mattered that much to Heloise. Her mother was too exhausted to rise above the cheap conveniences she could afford—frozen vegetables and waffles, Hamburger Helper, casseroles made with Campbell’s chicken soup. Heloise’s experience behind the scenes at Il Cielo, her memories of being up to her elbows in Marshmallow Fluff, left her skeptical of all restaurants. Even when she dines in celebrated places, she finds it hard to have much of an appetite. During the years with Val, that cocaine-addled household had huge quantities of food, but it tended toward junk food and doggie bags from high-end chains, Styrofoam containers of unfinished sandwiches. Val didn’t believe in wasting food. He was thrifty about everything. Even human beings. He squeezed every ounce out of them. Val was the person who could always get one more dab of toothpaste out of a spent tube, one more trick from an almost-done hooker.
    Yet Scott, completely on his own, has become a little foodie. He bakes, he knows what an emulsion is. Heloise thinks his fascination with food must have started when he began watching cooking shows with Audrey or a previous baby-sitter. The cooking shows were probably an accident, sandwiched between the hideous reality shows that Audrey loves. Heloise cannot understand this. Audrey, whom she introduces as her au pair—her odd speaking voice makes her sound as if she’s from some unplaceable foreign land, although she grew up in Wilkes-Barre, then moved to Aberdeen, Maryland—has had more reality in her relatively short life than most women could stand. Married at eighteen, she was abused by her husband for several years. One of the beatings resulted in a partial hearing loss, which is what makes her speech sound odd. Then, after catching The Burning Bed in a rerun, she decided that the old television film was meant to be instructional, that God wanted her to watch it and learn from it. Audrey doused her husband’s bed with lighter fluid and set him on fire. The thing that troubled prosecutors was that it had been months since she’d been beaten. “But it was only a matter of time before he hit me again,” Audrey told Heloise when they met. “And those were the worst times. The waiting. The best times were immediately after the beating, and not just because he was nicer. He wasn’t, not always. He would apologize, but in that lame way where you say you’re sorry but make it clear that the other person is at fault. Sort of like, ‘I’m sorry that you behaved so badly I felt I had to hit you. I’ll try to do better, but you have to try, too.’ Although at least I wasn’t wondering when he was going to hit me again.”
    Heloise understood. The prosecutor did not, nor did the police, and Audrey was convicted and imprisoned for manslaughter.
    Five years later, pardoned by the