When the voice came over the answering machine, Bennis was thinking that, if she hadn’t promised Gregor, she would be smoking right this minute. Surely, that would be the thing it made most sense to do, in these last days before Anne Marie died: smoke, and in the evenings, drink. The odd thing was that, now that she had quit smoking, she couldn’t drink, either. All her favorite drinks suddenly tasted foul. Even Benedictine tasted foul. The only thing that didn’t seem to taste awful without a cigarette to mask it was Drambuie, which actually tasted better, but she couldn’t drink too much of that at once. It was meant to be taken in small glasses, after dinner, as dessert.
When the voice started talking, Bennis recognized it, but she couldn’t place it, and she missed the name. The next thing she heard was “ … from the Inquirer,” and then she just shut off her brain. The voice sounded familiar because it was one of the reporters who had been hounding her. She didn’t have to deal with it. She drifted off into a memory of Anne Marie’s fifteenth birthday dinner, with them all seated at the long table in the dining room and a cake sent in from some caterer in the city.
“Fifteen years old and ugly as sin,” her father was saying, and then the voice on the answering machine went, “ … so I thought you’d better look at it, because whoever this woman is, she really has it in for you.”
Bennis sat up in bed. The answering machine turned itself off. She tucked her legs under her almost-yoga style and reached for the phone and the machine. She pressed rewind and play. Outside her big bedroom window, the thin branches of a single spindly tree twisted and snapped in the wind.
“Bennis,” the voice on the machine said. “This is Dick Coggins, from the Inquirer. I’m sorry I didn’t catch you home. It’s been a long time since we talked. I’m faxing you a copy of a submission we got this morning from a woman named Edith Lawton. We’re turning it down, but it concerns you, and if you ask me, it’s really nasty, so I thought you’d better look at it, because whoever this woman is, she really has it in for you.”
The fax machine started its staccato burping. Bennis got up and watched the first page as it came out. She remembered Dick Coggins. He was on the op-ed page. He’d tried, once, months ago, to get her to write a piece on the execution, but he’d had the incredible good taste to take no for an answer and not come back for more. The page came all the way out, and she picked it up.
“The Death Penalty Reconsidered,” by Edith Lawton.
Bennis sat back down on the bed.
There was, of course, nothing odd about the idea of Edith Lawton submitting an op-ed piece to the Inquirer. Edith wanted to be a writer, and submitting pieces was one of the ways one got oneself started being a writer. Bennis herself had suggested that Edith try the op-ed pages. The editors there read what they got and expected to publish at least some blind submissions. If you made it into an important paper, like the Inquirer or the New York Times, you got read by people who could matter to you in the long run. All in all, op-ed was a good way to get yourself taken seriously on the cheap, if you could do it well. Another page came out of the fax machine. Another page started printing. How had she known, as soon as she saw the title and the by-line, that this was going to be a hatchet job? It was more than Dick Coggins’s warning. She would have known even if he hadn’t warned her. She thought of herself and Edith in that little coffee place out near Independence Hall and felt sick to her stomach.
The third fax sheet came out and a fourth started. The fourth came out and a fifth started. The printing noise went on and on, and as it did the world got darker, outside and in. I ought to turn on the light, Bennis thought idly, but she didn’t move from where she was. Now the spindly tree outside her window looked as if it were about to disappear. Across the street, the people in the town houses had started putting on their lights. Really, Bennis thought, I’ve got to make up my mind. Either I have to stop helping people who ask me for help, or I have to accept the fact that some of them will be … Edith Lawton.
The fax machine stopped spitting paper after the sixth page. Bennis got up and got the pages from the table and the floor around it. The table was too small, and faxes were always ending up on the carpet. She sat down on her bed again and turned on the light. It wasn’t night, not really. It was only latish afternoon. She thumbed through the pages, catching her own name dotted across them like pats of butter. She caught three factual errors about the history of the death penalty and two about death-penalty law. Trust Edith, Bennis thought. She can never be bothered to check.