Open Windows, by Erica Orloff

In my bottom right-hand desk drawer, I keep a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. I keep it for celebratory cases, hard-won. I keep it for the God-awful cases that trail me home like shadows at the end of the day. The Marsh case was both.

I set the glass on my desk and poured it more than half full. My hand shook and the first sip raced through me. I imagined it purging my brain of the shadows. I took the second slip slower and shut my eyes. Another one for you.

Someone tapped on my glass. My assistant opened my door and stuck his head in. “There’s a woman here to see you, Joe.”

I glanced at my watch. “It’s been a long day. Can you take a message?”

He shook his head. “She says she has to see you. Today. Said her name is Grace Ann.”

I set the Scotch down unsure I could trust my voice. “How old is she?”

“About your age. Beautiful. Blonde.”

I exhaled. “You can send her in.”

When he shut the door, I downed the rest of the Johnnie Walker.

She walked in not three minutes later, tall, willowy, expensive bracelets on her wrists, and the scar. The little star-shaped scar on her forehead that she got the time she fell from my treehouse.

“Hello, Joe,” she whispered.

“Hello, Grace Ann. Sit down,” I gestured toward the chair. I wasn’t sure if I was even breathing.

“I followed the case, and . . . I saw your picture. I thought of coming here a dozen times and always chickened out. But . . . I wanted you to nail the bastard.”

Nail the bastard.

I’d spent fifteen years of my life atoning for not rescuing Grace Ann from the shadows on her wall.

“How are you?” I managed to speak. “Do you live in the city? What do you do? Are you married?”

“Do you cross-examine everyone this way? Good, yes, actress, no.” She smiled. Her eyes didn’t though. Sad eyes behind the flirtatious voice.

“Occupational hazard. I ask a lot of questions.” I blinked and I remembered a day in fifth grade when she smiled at me. Maybe the only time I ever saw her smile that way. A pure laugh. “So . . . It’s been what? Fifteen years?”

“Yeah. I . . . God, where to even start. I ended up, believe it or not, in L.A. You can fill in the blanks. I did some things I’m not proud of. A lot of things, actually. And I woke up one day and looked in the mirror and wasn’t sure who I even was anymore. So I took all my money, came east. Took real acting classes. Ever see that commercial for—”

“Oh my God,” recognition flooded through me. “You’re the toothpaste girl.”

She laughed. I saw a hint of the girl gazing at the stars. “Yeah. That’s me.”

I leaned back. “I didn’t recognize you.”

“And how about you, Mr. Prosecutor?”

I didn’t answer for a minute. Finally, I whispered. “I’ve spent my life going after bastards like your stepfather. It’s my penance.”

She bent her head. “Joe . . . you were a boy.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does. You were so kind to me. I’ve held onto that night in the field my whole life. Kind of measured people up against you, Joe.”

How could I tell her I did the same?

She looked up from her lap. “So I just had to come say thank you, Joe. And shake your hand.” She stood up and put her hand out in the space over my desk.

I stood. “Do you want to have dinner, Grace Ann?” I took her hand and didn’t so much shake it as hold it.

“Considering how I left town and what you do for a living, Joe . . . I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. It’s sort of why I haven’t come before now. But this case, the Marsh girl. She might have been me.”

I’d actually thought about what would happen if I ever found Grace Ann. “How you left town doesn’t matter to me.”

“Maybe not now. But someday it might.” She withdrew her hand and started toward the door.

“Grace Ann . . .” I just couldn’t let her walk out.

Her back was to me, but she didn’t say anything.

“You were right, that night. I was spying on you. I could hear what he did to you. See what he did, through the open window. In shadows on the wall. My entire career has been about saving every Grace Ann there is. Every last one. I have something to show you.”

I opened my bottom desk draw where I keep the Johnnie Walker and took out the envelope.

“Here.” I walked to her and put it in her hand. She still didn’t move.

Then slowly, she opened it. A single Polaroid our fifth-grade teacher had taken of her and pinned on the bulletin board along with all our pictures. I had stolen hers and kept it until the colors faded to sepia tinges.

She turned around. “They say you are the prosecutor who never sleeps. That your assistants quit from exhaustion. That you’re driven like no one the city has seen before. You’re forgiven, Joe. Now you can sleep.”

“Don’t go,” I heard a panic in my voice I didn’t recognize.

She held my gaze, then looked down at the picture. We stood there like statues. Finally, she said, “All right.” She smiled at me. “Dinner, then, Joe.”

I nodded and opened the door for her. And for the first time for as long as I remembered, a shadow didn’t follow me home or come in echoes through an open window.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a companion story to the earlier Open Windows.]

Open Windows, By Erica Orloff

Sometimes, on hot summer nights, when my mom kept the windows open, hoping for a breeze to float through after dark, I heard it. Hidden in the symphony of crickets and tree frogs echoing across the fields, I could hear Grace’s stepfather raping her. At least that was what I thought I heard.

I’d climb out my bedroom window onto the trellis and scramble down, running across summer grass, cool and wet on my bare feet. When I got close to her house, I’d crouch down and listen. And I swear that’s what it sounded like. Whimpers, grunts, a mattress squeaking, the occasional slap of hand against cheek. Then I’d see his six-foot hulking frame rise up, a monstrous shadow on the wall, and leave her pink bedroom.

And right then and there, I decided one day I’d marry Grace. And one day I’d kill the bastard. I never said anything to her. But in my mind, I’d told her and I convinced myself she heard me.

In August, I heard her cries traveling in Morse code on the backs of a flock of cawing crows. I did the same thing, climbing down, sneaking to her house, sitting on the grass and trying to conjure the nerve to get my granddad’s rifle. Then, like a wild angel in a white nightgown, she came tearing from back door, running straight for me and crashing into me.

“Shit,” I said. Blood spurted from my nose where her kneed landed square on the bridge.

“Shh!” she whispered. Then she squinted her pale gray eyes. “What the hell are you doing here? You spying on me, Joe? Is that what you’re doing?”

I scooted away, wiping my bloody palm on the grass. “No!”

“Come on,” she urged. She grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the grassy fields where the old horse owned by Mr. Morris—a sway-backed mare a step from glue—grazed.

Behind us, I heard a screen door crash open, and a man’s voice calling out, “Grace Ann! Grace Ann, you get home now before I bust your face wide open.”

I stared at her in the moonlight. “You going back?”

She shook her head, her face streaked with tears and dirt from our tumble. “I’m not ever going back.”

“What if he was dead? Would you go back then?”
She shook her head. “Nope. I’m leaving here, Joe.”

“In a nightgown?” Her blonde hair reflected moonbeams. “Where are you going? You got any money?”

“I have a hundred and ten dollars in a savings account.”

“Hmm.” Even I knew that was only going to get her just so far. “What about going to the sheriff?”

She looked at me like I was the stupidest boy in the whole town. Maybe even the whole world.

“Oh. Yeah,” I breathed. Her stepfather was a deputy. “All right then, I’ve got a savings bond for $500. You can have it.”

I heard the old mare whinny. I sat down, out of breath from fear and from being so close to her. She sat down next to me.

“I hate him.”

“I do, too,” I whispered. “You think he’ll come chasing you?”

“Nah. Too drunk.”

“What about your mother?”

“She’s just plain crazy.”

I ran my fingers along the grass. “What if they were both dead? Would you get the house? Would you get their money?”

“I suppose. But I don’t want nothin’ from them. I just want to get away.”

She flopped back on the ground and stared up at the night sky. “I wish I was a shooting star.”

I leaned back. I didn’t know what I wished.

The two of us whispered all night. I don’t even remember what we talked about. Everything and nothing, until a pink-gray wash chased the moon away.

“You better go home,” she said. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Thanks, Joe.”

“Why don’t you come home with me? My mom will help you. I swear she will.”

Grace jutted her chin out. “I’m going home. I’ve got things to do.”

She rose slowly, and gave me a half wave, then walked toward the house.

The next night, there was a fire.

Supposedly, her stepfather fell asleep, drunk in bed, and his cigarette lit the mattress on fire.

He and his wife died, their bodies charred to blackness.

And Grace Ann was nowhere to be found.

Now, on hot summer nights, through the open window, I just hear the sounds of crickets and tree frogs. I shimmy down the trellis and run, barefoot, to the house. I sit on the grass and smile, and I like to think Grace Ann is somewhere else. A shooting star. An angel in a nightgown in a grassy field.

Sonnet, by Erica Orloff

Janet stamped on the accelerator. A bottle of Jim Beam slid toward the gas pedal, and she kicked it sideways as she drove, wiping angry tears.

When she reached the cemetery, darkness had settled like a heavy blanket of silence. She climbed out of the car, her cowboy boots crunching in the gravel. She grabbed the bottle of bourbon, slammed the heavy Cadillac door shut with a thud and surveyed the locked gate.

“Never stopped me before,” she muttered, and climbed an oak tree, slid out on thick branch and dropped on the other side of the stone wall.

The moon filtered through a cloud and she saw the freshly dug grave at the top of the sloping hill, a mound of dirt that infuriated her. He wanted to be cremated. He told her so. Told her that. Told her a million things she bet no one knew. Secret things.

Janet hiked up the hill and sank to her knees in the fresh earth, the scent of mowed grass and damp soil making her heart ache as surely as if someone had squeezed it. She unscrewed the bottle and took and healthy swig. She splashed a little on the grave. Then a sob sprang up, and she tried to choke it down, choke it with another swallow of bourbon, but it refused to be choked.

She slid down, almost in slow motion, pressing her face to the earth and whispered. “I know you loved me, but I couldn’t go to the funeral. I just couldn’t. Couldn’t watch them put you in this box, Professor.”

She stretched her arms, hugging the dirt, then rolled over on her back and stared up at the stars.

He had been 72. She was 23. He taught her things. Like Shakespeare. He listened to her. She made him laugh.

The stars made the squeezing in her heart hurt more. They used to sit on his back deck and drink red wine—from Napa, really good red wine. He taught her about finish and the scent of laurel. And he gave her his old Cadillac, and a bunch of books, and a telescope. A really good one that let them see the rings of Saturn. And they looked at stars. He showed her Orion and Canis Minor. Then they would make love. He took his time. She loved his eyes.

“But no one would understand,” she said to the stars and the dirt.

When he got sick, near the end, he made her promise. You will find someone young. Someone to grow old with in your own time. Someone to have babies with. Promise me.

She had nodded. But she never spoke the words. Never said “I promise” out loud, so it didn’t really count.

The pain was worse thinking of him sick. She sat up and sipped the bourbon. Her face was wet and mixed with the dirt, she was muddy and tired. She whispered Shakespeare,

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose Worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved

She let the words linger with him in the soil. Then she brushed her hair back, dirt on her palms, and stood up. “I won’t come back,” she said to him, firmly. “Not here. This isn’t where you really are.”

She made her way down the hill. She would go use the telescope he gave her. The one that showed her Saturn. The one that let her dream of things beyond her world.

He wasn’t in the dirt but in the stars.

Balls, By Erica Orloff

“He used to feel my ass.”
“Your ass.”
“Yes, my ass.”
“Did you ever tell him to stop?”
“Look, Detective Garcia or whatever the hell your name is, if you were a single mother with three kids at home and your deadbeat ex hadn’t paid his child support in 14 months even though he bought his new girlfriend a set of 42D boobs, you’d let the jerk feel your ass, too. I needed that job.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You have no idea.”
“You’re right. I probably don’t. Okay, so he used to sexually harass you. Did anyone else in the company know about it?”
“Everyone knew about it. But he’s the president of the company’s son, and his damn sister is head of human resources. And for the record, it wasn’t just my ass. He pinched my boobs, too.”
“Did this happen often?”
“Every day. But only after lunch.”
“Why only after lunch?”
“Because he had a liquid lunch every day. And when he’s drunk? He’s a pervert. And worse than that, mean as a snake, though maybe being mean isn’t worse than being a pervert. They’re both pretty awful.”
“All right, so take me through tonight. The company Christmas party.”
“Well, Darlene from the sixth floor, she comes up to me and says Irv is completely out of control. He trapped her in the conference room, pulled up her skirt, pulled down her panties and whipped it out. I mean WHIPPED-IT-OUT. Disgusting, right?”
“Yes. And Darlene is in with Detective Jones in one of the other offices right now.”
“She’ll tell him. And another thing, I’ve seen it, too. It ain’t much to look at, but it has a distinguishing characteristic, if you understand what I’m saying, so that’ll be proof he really did whip it out. I can identify that sucker.”
“All right. Back to Darlene. Did he rape her?”
“No. She kneed him in the balls. And then he gets all in her face and says he’s going to fire her, even though he knows her husband got laid off. Her Patrick used to work in manufacturing in the other building. Anyway, she says to me that she’s going to fix Irv once and for all.”
“And how was she going to do that?”
“With the little blue pill. Viagra. She was going to slip a couple in his drink, all mashed up, and give him one of those 4-hour erections like they tell you about on the commercial.”
“I see.”
“You’re laughing.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“You’re smiling then. It is kind of funny, when you think about it.”
“So did she do it?”
“I guess it all depends.”
“Depends?”
“Look, Detective Garcia, there’s a long line of people who wanted Irv dead. A long, long line. So I guess it all depends on whether that stiff in the hallway has . . . you know, a four-hour hard-on.”
“He’s been stabbed.”
“Then I guess it wasn’t Darlene.”
“Was it you?”
“Me? Nah, if I was going to do it, I planned on feeding him a little arsenic in his morning coffee each day.”
“And did you?”
“Nope. I just dreamed about it real hard.”
“All right then, Carla. Thank you for your time. We’ll contact you if we have any further questions.”
“By the way . . . what kind of knife was it?”
“By the looks of it, a kitchen knife.”
“Hmm. Like from the company cafeteria?”
“It was actually from the display of cheddar balls on the Christmas party buffet table.”
“Really?”
“Why are you laughing?”
“I’m not laughing.”
“You’re smiling then. Do you know who did it?”
“No, Detective Garcia. But let me put it to you this way. Those cheese balls were real popular tonight. I kind of wished I thought of it. Nice pearl handle on the knife, too.”
“Yes.”
“And I bet about a hundred fingerprints. They were really tasty balls. Well . . . good night. I sure am gonna sleep well myself.”