In Absentia

In Absentia

by Ann Marie Anglin 

   The first week I started my new job, my car developed a problem with its electrical system, forcing me to take the train to work. This automotive emergency put me in the right place at the right time for what would be one of the most telling events in my life. I’d tentatively accepted the recent promotion, but I had been having serious doubts that I possessed the assertiveness needed to succeed at my new job. From an intellectual/academic standpoint, I had more than enough experience and all of the required credentials. From a social context, however, I lacked three common attributes for this job that many of my colleagues had been born with: old money, self-confidence, and the assurance of belonging in “The Club.” 

   It was totally by chance that I saw her on that fateful autumn day, four years ago. We both stepped onto the northbound passenger train at the same time, at opposite ends of one of the middle cars. I remember the day had been sunny and mild, but as evening approached, it turned windy with a light drizzle making it miserable and bone-chillingly cold. Fall can be so fickle.

   I held my briefcase under my arm as I stepped up into the train car; she carried a worn shopping tote slung over her forearm and clutched her frayed, woolen lapels around her neck with her left hand while struggling to haul herself up with her right. The top and second button of her moth-eaten coat were missing. She saw me, too, although her eyes slid quickly away. But I caught the recognition that briefly flashed across her face before her eyes went blank and she closed in upon herself. 

  We were both late arrivals at the station, and by the time the train began to roll, there was only one available pair of seats remaining. With what appeared to be some reluctance, she settled herself across from me. She threw her bag in the aisle seat and sat in the one next to the window. Her bony shoulder was pressed against the outer wall of the train car, as far away from the rest of the other passengers as she could get. With her face turned away from me, she pretended to watch the people on the platform.

   She was not the beautiful, privileged, laughing girl I remembered, who smirked at me when I passed her in the hallway at school. Her once glossy, golden hair was colorless, stringy and dirty. It hung about her gaunt face in limp, dull strands. Her mouth turned down at the corners, creased with simmering petulance. Although she was turned away from me, I saw her watching my reflection in the glass of the window next to her.

   I flipped down the folding table on the back of the seat in front of me and put on my reading glasses. I opened my briefcase, pulled out my laptop and opened my email. Tossing my trench coat over the back of the seat next to me, I leaned forward, intent on my task. Although I tried to not glance in her direction, I still felt her eyes watching my reflection. 

   I was newly appointed to my position, and still not fully acquainted with all of the cases on my predecessor’s docket. I tapped out a quick reply to the A.D.A., giving my approval to seek conviction in absentia for the mother of a murdered child. The woman had skipped town after her wealthy step-sister bailed her out while she awaited a trial date. All attempts to locate her had failed. Her boyfriend and co-defendant had not been so lucky. No one had been willing to post his bail. He never left police custody, and had recently been convicted for beating the child to death for spilling a box of cereal. 

   How many times had I heard people make excuses for their neglect and cruelty? Their lawyers used their dysfunctional lifestyles or childhoods to try to explain away their horrible behavior. I had no sympathy for these people. It was not in my job description to find mitigating circumstances to reduce their culpability. People were too quick to seek a way out of taking responsibility for their own actions, and the law was too willing to allow them an out in a mediocre attempt to balance misfortune with “political correctness.” I refused to buy into it anymore; it was why I could no longer in good conscience represent them. Sometimes good people did bad things when their backs were up against the wall. That I understood. But sometimes people did bad things because they wanted to, or were just too mired in their own self-pity or apathy to do anything about the bad things they were caught up in. They looked away in a honed myopia and hoped the unpleasantness would soon be gone from their blurred peripheral vision, a socially sanctioned plausible deniability.

   I was considering contributory negligence charges against the public agencies and lazy bureaucrats that failed this child with their indifference. I’d discussed this at length earlier in the day with Detective Stanton, the officer in charge of the investigation in this case from its outset. I sighed and sat back in my seat. I worried that I was in over my head, that I wasn’t cutthroat enough, not hard enough, not aggressive enough. 

   I could see the woman still watched me surreptitiously out of the corner of her eye.

   “Excuse me,” I leaned forward with what I hoped was a reassuring smile, “aren’t you Melanie Kramer?”

   She looked at me with suspicion. “No. My name is Kathy Belinski.” She continued to pretend she didn’t recognize me. Somewhere in the back of my mind, alarm bells rang. I ignored them. But there was something about her. A connection I was missing. 

   I was sure I was not mistaken. “We went to school together,” I prompted. “I’m Elizabeth Barlow.”

   “Sorry. I don’t know you,” she replied, not looking at me. 

   But I wouldn’t leave it alone. “It’s been a long time. My mother and I moved away after my father died, just before our senior year.” I tried to send her the message that there were no hard feelings about the past. Her cold expression did not invite further conversation. I gave up and turned back to my work. 

   The train sped along the tracks, filling the chilly silence with the rhythmic clicking of metal against metal. I remember so vividly the scene laid out before me. I looked out the window into the darkness as the rolling mechanical caterpillar cast strobing shadows across the suburban landscape in jerky flashes like an ancient black and white film being pulled through a projector. Some things burn themselves into our memories, forever branding us with the fire of consequence. 

   I’d been a junior in high school when my father was shot and killed during a robbery in the liquor store where he worked nights. He’d only been working there a week when it happened. It had been over a year since he’d been laid off from his job as a factory foreman for a company that made airplane parts. The job at the liquor store was all he could find when his unemployment ran out. A few months after my father died, my mother and I had to move upstate, where my grandparents had a farm. 

  My mother was a cashier at a thrift store; she’d never finished high school. I worked after school at the diner near our home, taking all the hours they could give me, but we still could not afford to pay the mortgage on our tiny house after my father was gone. Our marginal existence on the lower edge of “middle class” toppled into the abyss of poverty almost overnight. I was suddenly uprooted from all that was familiar. I left behind my friends, the neighborhood I’d grown up in, everything that made up my comfort zone. I graduated the following year at the top of my class in the tiny rural high school upstate, with an unwelcoming group of strangers who had no interest in making friends with the shy girl recently transplanted from the city.

   As the train rounded a sharp turn heading North along the river, it lurched, upending the tote bag the woman had placed on the seat next to her. Its contents spilled into the aisle. I bent over to help her retrieve the loose papers and photos that had fallen onto the floor between us. I picked up a photo of her smiling, with her arms wrapped around the neck of a man I recognized. She noticed me glancing at the photo and snatched it away from me with shaking hands and shoved it back in her bag.

   I looked at her more closely, at the dark circles under her glassy, watery eyes; her pinched face had looked cadaver-like in the harsh glare of the lights from the train platform. Now there was a sweaty sheen on her brow and her face was flushed with agitation. Her rapid breathing was shallow, and she cast her eyes fearfully about like a cornered animal. Then the train began to pick up speed once more, and we were again flying through the deepening twilight, heading toward the next stop. 

  I knew I had to do something. I opened my briefcase and put my laptop away before I turned toward her in the half-light. When I opened my briefcase, I quickly texted Detective Stanton’s cell phone, hit “send” then dialed his number and put my phone on speaker.

   “How is it you know David Hale?” I asked. I furtively placed my phone on the seat next to me, its microphone facing the aisle.

   Still not looking me in the eye, she watched me again from the reflection in the window. “He’s just a friend,” was all she said. She squirmed in her seat.

   “You do know he was just convicted of a horrible crime, don’t you?” I looked at her over the tops of my reading glasses, trying not to sound judgmental. By then her wariness had her on full alert. She pulled her coat more tightly around her.

   “It wasn’t his fault,” she said, voice trembling, lower lip quivering. But her affect was flat and her eyes dry. Her indignation was only for herself. And David Hale.

   “He beat a four-year-old boy to death for spilling a box of cereal. How was that not his fault?” Shock and outrage crept into my voice.

   “That brat made him do it,” she said coldly. Matter-of-factly. “He spilled the whole box on purpose. He was always doing things like that.” 

   “And how is it you knew Timmy?” I asked. But I already knew. It had all clicked into place the instant I saw the photo of her with Hale. She’d always preferred to be called by her middle name (Melanie), but her given name was Kathleen, after her mother; Kathleen Melanie Kramer. 

  The father of the dead child had been Tedd Winthrop, but his mother had never married him, although the child bore his name. A couple of years after her son was born, the mother married a drug dealer who went by the name of Mikey Anthony Belanger, nee Michael Belinski. Over the last two years, she’d used a number of aliases, always taking the last name of her live-in lovers. She’d been listed as Kathleen Hale on the original arrest warrant.

   “I gave birth to that ungrateful little bastard,” she said, her voice a barely audible hiss. “That kid was nothing but trouble from the day he was born. Worthless, just like his father.”   Yes, I knew about Tedd Winthrop: dead from an overdose at the age of 22, a month before Timmy was born. The fatherless little boy had a rude introduction to the world; almost 2 months premature and born addicted to heroin. Why he was even in his mother’s custody was one of those not-so-surprising failures of the “system” to protect the innocent from the incompetent. Something else on my agenda. My ire rose at the sound of her vitriolic contempt for the child she’d failed so miserably. I began to think that maybe I was the right choice for this job after all. I sat up straighter in my seat.

   I recalled Timmy’s morgue photos with an ache in my chest. It was not his first beating. His frail, undernourished little body had been covered with sores and scabs, bruises, cigarette burns, and old scars. X-rays showed evidence of partially healed broken bones and old, untreated breaks that had set at crooked angles.

  “You absconded before the trial began,” I said coldly. “You’re about to be convicted in absentia, Melanie.”

  She turned in my direction and whined at me with incredulous truculence. “They can’t do that. I have rights.”

   I looked at her through narrowed eyes. “You forfeited most of your rights when you absconded. The judge issued the proper Parker warnings. He also issued a bench warrant. You’re out of luck.”

   She snorted. “What do you know anyway, little Bethy Barlow? You’re just some low-class, white-trash-hillbilly.” She glared at me with hatred.

   The train slowed as it pulled into the next stop; the car was again flooded with glaring, harsh light. I took a business card out of my pocket and handed it to her. She stared at my well-manicured hands. She’d teased me mercilessly about my “peasant paws” when we were young. I used to chew my nails to the quick back then, and my hands were always rough and red from the harsh detergent they used at the diner. I’d left those days long behind me. She turned the card over and looked at the raised lettering. It read “Elizabeth Barlow-Hewitt, District Attorney.” She frowned, and slowly looked up into my face for the first time. The disdain was replaced with disbelief. Her eyes turned toward the platform briefly, then back at me. I could see a vein pulsing at her temple. She’d begun to shake uncontrollably, and the look of panic on her face only a moment before mechanically shifted to the stony, cold expression of someone refusing to accept her current reality. Her face turned a shade of fish-belly gray when she looked toward the exit and saw Detective Stanton and two uniformed police officers waiting, arms folded, on the platform. I saw them too and raised a hand in acknowledgment.  

   We all must learn to own our circumstances, earned by either effort or inertia. We are saved or lost by our choices. Both of us had stepped onto the train that night cloaked in the shadow our past selves, but only one of us had learned how to step out of its darkness, into the light.

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