It took a week or so to arrange the paperwork for the visit, but she didn’t tell anyone she was coming here, not even Elsie or Margot. They want to investigate these murders, but they wouldn’t agree withthis. Elsie has never visited Albert in prison, and Margot has always seemed more than happy that Stephen is no longer around to visit. Beverley knows that if she did tell them, they would order her not to do it, that they would judge her for even being willing to sit in the same room as Henry, for breaking their pact.
She didn’t tell her mother for a very different reason; she could not stomach the self-satisfied look that Alice would give her.It’s about time,the look would say. Alice seemed to be the only person inCalifornia who thought that Henry deserved to have contact with his children, that Beverley should be grateful that she’d ever had a husband.
Her mother dated men after her father left, but it always seemed to be out of spite rather than anything else. Some were jolly and kind, smelling of wrapped candies and cigar smoke; others were deadbeats, trying to milk Alice for her money. There was one guy, Geoff, who loved to gamble. He wore a tasseled leather vest and reeked of Glen Moray. Beverley never liked being left in a room with him. He’d watch her, his eyes sliding over her legs, her breasts, drinking her in as if she were something served to him in a highball glass. One afternoon, when she’d returned from school and was changing in her bedroom, she’d felt the weight of someone at her door. She moved her face just slightly and saw, through the crack, leather tassels. She could hear his heavy breathing, the rhythmic clink of his unfastened belt as he tugged on himself. He did not notice when her mother twisted the key in the front door. He noticed only once she had approached him from behind, called out and raised an open palm to strike him, hard, across the cheek. Later, that evening, Beverley found her mother red-eyed on the couch, half a bottle of scotch, Geoff’s favorite, on the table. Beverley hovered in the doorway as her mother slowly, shakily turned.
“He never would have done it if you hadn’t been such a flirt,” she slurred. “Get out!” The bottle smashed as Alice hurled it against the wall.
This will be the first time Beverley has seen Henry in the five years since he was arrested. She chose not to go and see him in court. Chose to ignore the letter he sent, via his lawyer, which she knew would be filled with excuses instead of accountability. She has seen photographs of him in the newspapers, of course, has carefully cut them out and fixed them into the pages of her scrapbook. When she sees them, she’s reminded of their first meeting, on set for a soda commercial. Beverley, the nervous teen model possessed of the kind of clean girl-next-door beautythat unadventurous men seemed to like, chaperoned by her mother. Beverley posing with glass soda bottles wet with condensation. Henry striding in to fix the air-conditioning unit—older, cute, magnetic. The space between them crackling with charged ions. Her life never being the same again.
Will he look that way, like her husband, now? Will he still have those same eyes, that same assured, alpha way about him?
She makes her way to the guard post and gives her name, explains that she called earlier in the week, that she’s here to see Henry Lightfoot. She expects the guard to look up at her, to purse his lips—Henry’s crimes are notorious—but he simply ticks her name off a ledger, hands her a badge and waves her toward another uniformed figure.
She follows him across the bleak yard and toward the prison entrance, the keys hanging from his belt loudly jangling. The closer they get, the more the air seems to hum with something hostile. San Quentin has a reputation for violence—riots, escapes, prisoners killing guards, prisoners killing prisoners. She wonders, briefly, how Henry has fit into all of that. Has he had to bargain for his own safety in here, or is he one of the dangerous ones? Are people scared of him in here, too?
She follows the guard through a side door and they make their way along sterile gray corridors. The prison has a fetid feel to it, a stink of boiled cabbage and old disinfectant. Although she cannot see the men in their cells, she can hear them—quarreling, posturing, coughing with phlegmy rattles. They can sense her here; she knows it. They can smell her, a lone female, even from a distance. She keeps her head down, focusing only on her red shoes. They have black tarmac scuffs from the prison parking lot.
Eventually they reach a room and the guard opens a heavy door, waving a hand for her to enter. Inside, the room is long and a thick window runs from wall to wall. On one side of the reinforced glass areseats for visitors; on the other are stools. She hadn’t realized she would have to talk to Henry like this, with people present. Thankfully, there are not many visitors today, just a young woman in a yellow twinset at the very far end of the room. She has tissues bunched to her eyes. Beverley cannot see the prisoner behind the glass. She can hear only the woman’s sobs, her breathy hiccups. The walls are painted a pale salmon pink, and the smell of bleach lingers thick in the air. The guard shows her to a seat and she sits, taking out a pack of cigarettes she has brought for Henry and placing them on the shelf in front of her. The stool opposite her is empty, and that makes Beverley even more anxious. She is going to have to wait for Henry to arrive, to watch him enter.
Without thinking, she moves her hands to her hair, smooths down the stray ends. She is furious to be as nervous as she is. To want to look good for him.
She looks around her. The paint is flaking off the walls and dirt is hunkered in the room’s dark corners. The weak lighting washes everything in an anemic glow. It will not do her face any favors. The circles beneath her eyes will bloat with shadow. Her jawline will look soft; she imagines her mother tapping the underside of her chin with the backs of her fingers, encouraging her to lift her head. She was so distracted this morning that she forwent the skin routine that Alice always prescribed her—a double cleanse followed by immersion in ice water, to make the pores close up tight. Whenever she held her face in that bowl and sensed the ache of the ice behind her eyes, she felt that she could scream from the pain.
She considers reaching into her handbag for her lipstick but grasps her own wrist to stop herself.
That’s when the door on the other side of the partition opens and Henry is led inside.
She looks up and, just for a second, her heart stops its beating. The guard stands with Henry by the stool, unfastening a pair of handcuffs.She cannot take in all the details—everything is blurry and unspecific—just the wash of blue overalls, a shock of black hair, those pale eyes, stony and marbled.
She stands up as if she is at a dinner table, waiting for someone important to sit down.
She cannot meet his eyes just yet, but she knows that he is looking at her. She can feel it. She remembers that first meeting in the studio, by the sandwich table when they broke for lunch. He was a foot or so taller than her, and he smelled like a man from the movies. Well, what she’d always imagined men in the movies smelled like, not of cheap drugstore aftershave or English Leather—she was sure as hell Marlon Brando didn’t smell of English Leather—but of the sweat of being a man: of work, of something animalistic and intoxicating and adult. Henry’s cheeks weren’t smooth. He had a chicken pox scar on his forehead, a tiny crater that, in the years to come, she would press with her finger when they were in bed, when he let her. She could see the creep of tattoos peering out from his shirtsleeves. The boys in her graduating class in high school had clear, hairless skin. They didn’t have smiles like his, either—small but magnetic, as if she had done something secret to amuse him.
From the flash of yellowed-white, Beverley can tell that Henry is smiling now. He is much bigger than she expected him to be, much stronger, more robust than she had envisaged. She had thought prison might have diminished him, hewn meat from his bones. Instead, it has added muscle and sinew. A glance at his forearms suggests days spent lifting weights or boxing. Henry was never into exercise before his arrest, but now he looks powerful, formidable.
“The green suits you.”
A slither of ice water runs through her. His voice. She had almost forgotten his voice, hushed and gentle but with a strange force to it.Henry never had to speak loudly to get what he wanted. She looks down at her green silk blouse, formfitting, with mother-of-pearl buttons. She spent a long time picking it out, along with a claret A-line skirt. She fiddles with the collar, working up the strength to reply. Then she raises her head, and their eyes meet.
She cannot look away from him. She never could.
“Surprised to see me in such good shape?” He flashes that lopsided smile that once drove her crazy. “Yeah, there’s not a lot to do in here except pump weights.”
Is that a bruise? Beneath his right eye? Or just the stain of fatigue? His body looks strong, but age has found its way into his face, scoured it out at the cheekbones, added lines.
“Can’t lie. Didn’t think I’d ever see you here, Bev. You dying or something?” His laugh is hollow, unsure.
She swallows, her eyes trained on him.
“Are the kids okay? Tell them Daddy loves them.”
A sourness pricks at the back of her throat.
He hasn’t lost that arrogance. It wafts off him. Henry was never scared of anything, except his father. He was always so comfortable being the one to speak, the one to manipulate any situation for his own gain. She won’t let him do that now.
“I’m getting married,” he says before she has a chance to open her mouth. “A lovely girl. Lorraine. We’ve been writing each other for a while. We’re in love.”
Her gut sways.Love.She never understood how some people looked at killers and saw rock stars. Sure, someone might be taken in by Henry’s looks, his charisma. He always had a magnetism to him. But since his arrest? Since he had admitted killing seven women? How could someone fall in love with that?
