Free A Private Sorcery by Lisa Gornick Page A

federal charges, and they have mandatory minimums.”
    I didn’t touch wood. All along, I’ve been putting one foot in front of another by focusing on how this is temporary: until the trial, until you got out to do public service or a drug rehabilitation program or something. Suspension of your license. Anything other than staying where you are.
    â€œWhat sort of minimums?” My voice is almost a groan.
    â€œWith these charges, we’re talking forty-eight months with fifty-some days off a year for good behavior.”
    I put the phone down on the desk and cradle my face in my hands. I can hear Morton talking and talking and then my name, Leonard, Leonard .
    Forty-eight months.
    There’s silence, then the high-pitched screech of a receiver off the hook, then a woman’s whine, over and over, If you’d like to make a call, please hang up.
    Four years.

4 Rena
    She senses Leonard’s caution, the care he takes not to call her more than every few days. An outsider might say that it’s impossible to tell from which of them the distance originates—whether he’s stepped back and she has in that inchoate way people gauge closeness and distance shifted in kind or vice versa—but she knows it’s her. Mostly they talk about the case, the newest updates they’ve each received from Morton.
    When she calls Morton today, he suggests that a certain amount hinges on whether they can apprehend Reed. If so, Morton says, they might let Saul cut a deal by supplying information on Reed.
    â€œDo you think he’d do that?” she asks.
    â€œHard to say. Every day’s a different story the first month with them. On the one hand, Saul tells me this Reed character sacrificed him—left knowing Saul would get caught. Then he turns around and says it’s irrelevant, he still did what he did.”
    A disturbing protectiveness toward Reed surfaces in Rena at Morton’s reference to him as this character, disturbing because to anyone looking at Saul and Reed together, as she does often in the one photo she has of the two of them, Reed seems so clearly in control. It’s one of those photographs composed by convention: a stranger walks over to two people taking pictures of each other and says, “I’ll snap you guystogether,” and one guy throws an arm across the other and both mug smiles for the camera. They’re in a box at Madison Square Garden and it’s Reed’s arm over Saul—a thick, muscular arm sheathed in the sleeve of an expensive-looking black suit. Blond hair frames a face as perfectly chiseled as a Greek statue.
    Still, she thinks Saul is wrong. Although she’s hardly seen Reed these past ten years, really only a few times after she and Saul had bumped into him at the Whitney, it’s inconceivable to her that Reed, who believed in the karma of everyday life, who’d taken her camping in the Sierras, taught her the Eagle Scout method for making a fire, carting out not only his own garbage but litter collected along the trail, had left knowing Saul would get caught.
    W HEN L EONARD COMES to visit, it’s clear that his goal is to try and figure out Reed. It strikes her as unseemly to make Leonard fish. She shows him the photograph.
    â€œI’d pictured beady eyes, a little goatee. Not a California All-American boy.”
    â€œThat’s exactly what he was. His father owned an engineering firm in Palo Alto, made a lot of money in the sixties and seventies on radar systems for airplanes.” Spook stuff, he’d called it, none of it used for any good. He’d taken the football scholarship at Stanford, he told her, even though he’d already lost interest in the game, rather than coming east to Harvard, where there would have been no sports scholarship, because he hadn’t wanted to take his father’s dirty money.
    â€œYou said he had a drug problem back when he was your roommate?”
    â€œBefore.