So Like Sleep Read Free

in.”
    “You did?”
    “Yeah. I had the impression they were in the insurance business, too.”
    “Insurance?”
    “Car insurance. Vandalism protection.”
    “Oh,” she said, upset. “I’m sorry, I hope everything’s all right. I should have come to your office.
    I held up a palm. “The car is old, and my office stinks of wet paint. Everything will be fine. Please go on.”
    “Well, the kids got William into a lot of trouble, police trouble, but nothing big. Shoplifting, loitering, some fights. He never hurt anybody bad, but it got to my father; he died of a heart attack. My mother, too, but because of Dad, not William, you know?”
    “I understand.”
    “Well, William’s stuff was small-time, but I was still scared for him, only there’s just so much a woman can do alone.”
    “It’s a big jump from street gangs to Calem.”
    “Oh, yes. When William was in high school, he scored very high on the standard tests. So high his friends got mad, and he got embarrassed, so he started to intentionally miss things, questions, I mean, to level himself off a little, not stand out so much. Well, one of his teachers noticed this, and she was real good with him and got him to try going to U Mass out at Columbia Point. He went and saw a psychologist there for free a lot and straightened out. It was like a salvation.”
    “What was this psychologist’s name?”
    “Dr. Lopez. Mariah Lopez.”
    “M-a-r-i-a-h?”
    “I think so.”
    “And the teacher?”
    “You mean, like to talk to her?”
    “Yes.”
    “Her name was Sheridan. Emily Sheridan. But she retired, oh, two years back and moved to Arizona somewhere.”
    “Did William like U Mass?”
    “Yes. He went there for two years and did real well. All his teachers just raved about him. In fact, that was kind of the problem.”
    “I don’t get you.”
    “Well,” she said, reaching down for the coffee cup, but then hesitating, “the teachers thought that he could do better than U Mass, and a couple of them, along with Dr. Lopez, they pushed and pulled and got him into Goreham College for his junior year.”
    “Fine school.”
    “Yes, and so expensive. But there was plenty of scholarship money, it seems.”
    “Did he live there?”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “Did he stay at Goreham? In a dormitory?”
    “Oh, yes. At least, at first. Then something happened—he never would tell me what—and he moved home halfway through.”
    “Halfway through?”
    “Through his first semester there.”
    “How was he doing gradewise?”
    Mrs. Daniels unnecessarily stirred her coffee. “Not so good. Maybe too much change. Maybe too much …”
    “Too much …?”
    She looked up. “He took up with the white girl. Or maybe better to say she took up with him. I never did know which.”
    “The girl he’s accused of killing?”
    “Yes, but he didn’t. He didn’t kill her or anybody else.” Mrs. Daniels said it evenly, like a much-quoted religious tenet she knew by heart and believed was true beyond reasonable doubt.
    “The girl was shot. Your son produced the gun that killed her.”
    She focused on the cup and spoon again.
    “Was it William’s gun, Mrs. Daniels?”
    “He needed it. He said ’cause of the other kids on the block here.” She mimicked them: “ ‘White school, white girl, white Willll-yum.’ ” She moved her mouth as if she’d bit a sour grape.
    “He carried a gun because of the other kids’ taunting him?”
    Mrs. Daniels fixed me with a “c’mon” stare. “You been outside here, you seen ’em.”
    She was probably right. They looked more like “sticks and stones will break my bones” than “words will never hurt me.”
    “Had William had a fight with the girl?”
    Mrs. Daniels became more agitated, waving her hands in an abbreviated version of an umpire’s “safe” sign. “I don’t know. I just don’t. He never would talk with me about her. Or about college. Goreham, I mean. Or even the new doctor he was seeing.”
    “What doctor was