by Greg Iles
“Max sent me here,” Jet says simply.
“I thought he was in the hospital in Jackson.”
“He is. He called me from his room at UMC.”
“Max made you come here?”
She nods. “He told me that if I didn’t, he would tell Paul and Kevin that he’s Kevin’s father.”
My God. The man is lying half-dead in a critical care hospital, and he’s still applying pressure to the object of his obsession.
“Why did he want you to come here?”
Jet closes her eyes, sighs heavily. “Do you know what it’s like to carry a secret that can destroy your life? Your whole family? I’ve heard people describe it as dragging a weight, but it’s not like that. It’s more internal than that. I used to feel it like a tumor inside me, one that could turn malignant any time. Or an aneurysm that could burst. But that’s not really it, either. Do you know what it’s like?”
“No.”
“An explosive vest. I strapped it on thirteen years ago, and Max has the detonator. I’ve been wearing this fucking thing for thirteen years, waiting for it to go off, and the man with the detonator has been slowly going mad.”
I’ve never seen Jet in this much pain. How did she mask it for so long? I want to comfort her, but I have no idea how to go about it.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she says. “I feel like I’m about to knife you in the heart. Or myself. I don’t know if this feels more like homicide or suicide.”
Jet reminds me of my wife in the pit of postpartum depression. There’s a deadness to her voice that I couldn’t have imagined until I heard it. And all the light has been sucked from her eyes.
“Let me try to make this easier for you,” I say gently. “I think I know what you’re about to tell me.”
“How could you?”
“I spoke to Tallulah this morning.”
“Tallulah?” Jet looks blank. “What about?”
“She’s an observant woman.”
Jet shrugs and shakes her head in puzzlement. “What did she ‘observe’?”
“Well . . . nothing terrible, or even untoward. She just described to me a feeling that she had.”
A sudden alertness in Jet’s posture tells me she’s made the connection. “Oh,” she says softly. “Oh.”
“Did you come here to tell me that Max never raped you?”
Her chin begins to quiver, and her eyes close. Even her hands are shivering.
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” I say, meaning it as a kindness. “I have no idea what you were going through then. It had to be a terrible time.”
“I’d prefer to tell you,” she replies, her voice braced with iron. “If you can listen. It’s not what you think. Nothing like what you must think.”
What can she mean? “Did he rape you?”
She looks stricken. “No.”
“Then . . . what should I think?”
“Will you please listen to me? Five minutes. That’s all I ask.”
I nod slowly. “I’m listening.”
Jet takes two deep breaths, then licks her lips like someone about to read aloud from a book. “The situation was pretty much as I described last night. Though Paul was, if anything, in worse shape than I let on. He had constant pain from his head wounds. He was addicted to Oxycontin. Warren Lacey wrote prescriptions for whatever he wanted, but Paul also bought street drugs from a worker at the sawmill. I think the multiple IED concussions had profoundly affected his brain. He would fly into rages, he was impotent nearly all the time, and he refused to seek help for any of it.”
“And you?”
“I did what women always do. I blamed myself.”
“Why?”
“For marrying him.”
I feel like we’re retracing old steps. “You said that last night. That you married a man you didn’t love. But I don’t think you’re being honest with yourself. Or me. You feel that way now, but not when you walked down the aisle.”
Frustration etches itself into her face. “You’re so wrong, Marshall. Did I not come to you in D.C. only weeks before Paul proposed to me? Did I not ask if there was a chance for us?”
“Yes . . . sort of. But you waited until you were right at the edge of the cliff.”
Anger flashes in her eyes. “I still did it. That’s more than you did. But you shut me down. You slept with me, of course. But you let me know you weren’t ready to deal with it in a real way. With us.”
“I wasn’t ready. What was the hurry?”
“We were twenty-eight! Not eighteen.”
I turn up my hands on the table. “To tell you the truth, I was still hurt by you going back to Paul after college. I assumed you wouldn’t have done that if you didn’t love him.”
Jet’s gaze flits over the surface of the table, as though she’s looking for crumbs that need sweeping up. “I’ve come to realize something,” she says. “Marrying someone you don’t love is a sin. Because it sends both of you to hell. It destroys the other person first, but in the end it gets you, too. The magnitude of what you’ve done, the damage you’ve caused by forcing you both to live a lie.”
Her words take me back to my own marriage. “I see the truth in that. I’ve lived that. But that sounds like a lot of marriages, Jet. Wilde said the one charm of marriage was that it made a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.”
“Glib and depressing.”
“Why don’t we focus on you and Max?”
“There is no me and Max! There never was.” Though Jet’s outward affect is melancholy, I sense fearsome anger beneath. “What happened was simple, pragmatic, utilitarian. By 2005, Paul and I had been trying to have a baby for four years—since before he went to Afghanistan after 9/11. All through his rotations home, even when he had that stupid contracting company in Iraq. After one year of failure, I got myself thoroughly checked out. My plumbing was fine. But Paul refused to get even the most basic fertility tests on himself.”
“That I believe.”
“He’d tried to kill himself twice that I know of in that time. He pretended both episodes were accidental overdoses, but I knew. He was about to become another VA statistic. I really believed a baby was the only thing that might save him. He wouldn’t consider adoption, and if I’d mentioned a sperm donor, he’d have killed me. The thing is, even though I knew the situation wasn’t my fault—the infertility, I mean—I felt like a failure.”
Sitting here listening to Jet, I think of how people in the town see her—smart, tough, put together, in control—the mother of an athlete destined to become a star. No one could imagine the life she’s describing to me now.
“So . . . what did you do?”
Something changes in her voice, an alteration in pitch that renders it more mechanical, less human. “It happened a lot like I told you last night. Sally was ill after surgery. I’d been taking care of her, but it was Tallulah in the bedroom with her that night. Max and I were in their living room, by a fire. We’d all been drinking. Paul was passed out twenty feet away.”
“And?”
“Max asked me what was wrong with Paul. He could see his son dying before his eyes. Killing himself. He said he didn’t blame me, but he wondered why we hadn’t had any kids. He said Paul refused to talk to him about it.”
“So you told Max the truth.”
Jet nods. “He listened. He didn’t say anything for a while. I just sat there, drunk, wondering what the endpoint of all this was. I was very near getting in my car and driving away from that family. I think Max knew that. Sally certainly did. She’d already begged me not to go.”
At last, I realize, I’m hearing the truth.
“Max just threw it out there,” she says suddenly. “I’ll never forget it. He said, ‘Hell, if the problem’s that you can’t get pregnant, we can solve that easily enough. No use anybody dying over that.’ I just stared at him, trying to understand what he meant. I know it sounds sleazy, but . . . it wasn’t like you think. Max wasn�
�t creepy or lechy about it or anything. Not back then. It was a calculated solution. A transaction. Like, ‘If this is what needs to happen to give Paul a chance, then let’s make it happen.’”
I can’t believe how reasonable it sounds. Maybe from the outside, someone would think she was crazy. But when I put myself in her place, I can almost understand it. “Go on,” I say gently. “I’m not judging you. Seriously. Did you sleep with him that night?”
“No. I thought about it for twenty-four hours. The truth is, I’d considered desperate options before. I’d thought about going to New Orleans and picking up some stranger in a bar. Telling him a different name and having sex with him. But the risks of that just seemed insane.”
Compared to sleeping with your father-in-law? I ask silently.
“I’d also considered asking a male friend to help me. But I didn’t have any male friends I could ask that of. You, maybe. But you weren’t exactly a friend.”
“No. And there’s the resemblance factor.”
Her eyes flash. “Exactly. Any resemblance to you, Paul would have seen in a minute. I think that’s what settled my decision. Because if the baby looked like Max, there’d be no problem. Everybody would simply say he looked like his grandfather, which is the most natural thing in the world. From a logistical point of view, the plan was perfect.”
“But from a psychological one, a nightmare.”
She sighs deeply. “I know that now. The thing is, Marshall . . . it worked. For the first nine or ten years. Max wasn’t weird about it at all. He was a sperm donor, that’s it. Once I was pregnant, he played his role perfectly. And as I told you last night, Kevin was Paul’s salvation. The whole family’s, really.”
“Until Max started getting older?”
“Right. And Sally. We went through all this last night. Kevin started turning into the boy Paul never quite was, at least in Max’s eyes—”
“And Max wants him. God, this is bad. If Paul ever learns the truth, it’ll end in violence. No question.”
Jet gives me a sickly smile. “Do you think anything else would have brought me here like this? The explosive vest, remember? Max has his hand on the detonator. And there are a lot of people standing close to me.”
Me, for one. “He won’t keep your secret forever, Jet. Max wants that boy. And he wants you.”
“I know.” Her eyes close again. “All I can do now is try to postpone that day.”
“Or hope Max dies.”
Her eyes open. There’s a burning light in them that wasn’t there before. “I did what I could in that direction last night. But the bastard lived.”
I’ve got a much deeper appreciation than I did last night of why she wanted Max dead on Parnassus Hill. Very gently, I ask, “Did he really try to rape you last night?”
“He did.”
“And six weeks ago? When you stabbed him?”
She looks away. “Not that time, no. That was the first time he threatened to tell Paul and Kevin the truth. He told me he loved me, that we were meant to be together, and Kevin was the proof. I lost my shit. I couldn’t stand to listen anymore. I grabbed a knife off the counter and aimed for his stomach, but he jerked left and caught the blade in his side.”
“Dr. Lacey must have patched him up that time, too.”
“I guess. But last night was worse, Marshall. He told me if I didn’t break it off with you and divorce Paul, he was going to ask Paul to step aside. He repeated that when he called me today, from the hospital.”
The colloquial syntax sends a chill through me. “What does ‘step aside’ mean in that context?”
“Set Paul up in Dallas or Atlanta—in theory expanding their business. Once Paul was committed, Max would tell him the truth about Kevin. Threaten to cut him off completely if he resisted. No job, no inheritance, nothing. Then make sure my divorce went smoothly and I got custody.”
“That’s delusional,” I whisper. “Paul wouldn’t go for that, no matter how much money Max gave him. In fact, Paul would blow his brains out.”
“Max’s?” she asks. “Or his own?”
I think about this. “Max’s first, then his own. That’s my bet.”
Jet slides her chair back and stands, then begins pacing between the table and the back window. “I think Max believes Paul would kill himself, leaving no obstacle between Max and a life with Kevin and me.”
“Except me,” I remind her. “And he sent you here to end that.”
She nods but says nothing. Reflecting on Max’s desire to remove me from his life makes me miss Nadine’s pistol, which I slipped into the rag drawer by the refrigerator before Jet arrived. If Max were not bedridden in University Hospital in Jackson, I wouldn’t risk being even that far from the gun. As I look into Jet’s tired face, Tallulah Williams’s description of the “funny time” in the Matheson home comes back to me.
“Jet, I get that you basically used Max as a sperm donor. But it’s not like you used a turkey baster.”
Her head turns sharply, and I see a warning in her eyes.
“I have to ask you something,” I say in a low voice.
“Please don’t,” she says, reading my mind.
“How many times, Jet?”
She raises her hand to her face, covers her eyes.
“Jet . . . ?”
“Three, okay? I checked to be sure I was ovulating. Then I did it.”
“Where?”
“Don’t.”
I wish I could save her the pain of this. But I can’t. “I hate myself for asking, but I need to know.”
She blows out a rush of air, trying to bleed off anger or guilt. “Once at their house. In the guest room, like I told you last night.”
Only in a very different way than you described. “And the other two times?”
“At the spring.”
This takes me aback. “Delphi Springs? On Parnassus Hill?”
She nods, looking at the curtained window.
“Where we used to go,” I say softly. The awful symmetry of this makes me hate her for an instant. The thought of Max plunging into Jet’s willing body beside that pool gives me vertigo—
“It was the most secluded place we could think of,” she says, still refusing to look at me.
“Not Max. He manages thousands of acres of timber. Even you could have found some other place.”
She turns back to me in desolation. “Does it matter what patch of grass my naked ass lay on? I did it, Marshall. I gave myself to him. Surely that’s the only relevant fact.”
She’s right. We stare at one another without words. This is a new experience, to watch each other with something like loathing. Perhaps we don’t loathe each other so much as ourselves. We say nothing, for there seems nothing to say. My mind makes a few silent forays into the twisted logic of the situation, but my instinct for self-preservation pulls it back. Jet giving herself to Max was like a snake eating its own tail. By consummating her relationship with him, she turned herself inside out, becoming a living negative of the person she was before, and subverting a fundamental family dynamic. She achieved the goal she sought, a son for her suicidal husband, but at what cost? It’s hard not to believe that on the day Kevin Matheson was conceived, the seed of his family’s destruction was planted. And three nights ago, Sally Matheson died.
Who will be next?
Given the true state of affairs in the Matheson family, it’s easy to see how Jet might have viewed me as the only means of escape within her grasp. Knowing I’d never stopped loving her, she could have lured me here in the hope that I could somehow extricate her from the terrible web that bound her, without destroying everyone in it. But her hope was in vain. No one could accomplish that.
“So what now?” I ask, feeling exhausted and close to despair.
“I’m going to go,” she says. “I know I’ve wounded you. I look in your eyes, and I see that you can’t imagine touching me. Don’t deny it. Maybe that will change, I don’t know. I only want to be sure you know one thing. I lov
ed you when we were kids, and I never stopped. I loved you when I came to you before I married Paul. I’ve loved you the whole time I was married. I know you don’t trust me now. But when you think about all this later, consider one thing: to tell you the truth was to risk losing you. It meant that every time you looked at Kevin, you would think of Max. Every time you made love to me . . . the same. Which would have killed any hope for us. Telling you also meant confronting it myself—in the daylight world, outside of Max and me, who were the only two who knew for thirteen years.”
“Tallulah knew.”
“She never told me that.”
“Do you believe now that Sally figured it out?”
Jet turns back toward the window. “I don’t know,” she says distractedly. “Did you hear something?”
“No. What?”
“A deer, maybe? A hoof on concrete?”
The sharp rap of metal on glass reverberates off the kitchen cabinets. So loud and sudden that my heart begins hammering against my breastbone. Jet whirls to me, paler than I’ve ever seen her.
Max? I mouth silently, remembering his earlier visit.
“He’s in the hospital!” she hisses. “If that’s Paul—”
“Open the goddamn door!” shouts a male voice.
Paul’s voice.
Chapter 51
Jet and I stand frozen in my kitchen, staring at the back door. She’s on the far side of the table. I’m nearer the island.
“Do we run?” she whispers. “Or open it?”
My mind goes to Nadine’s pistol in the rag drawer, eight feet from my hand. But arming myself against Paul, who has Special Forces training in firearms, strikes me as a suicidal gesture. “We can’t run from this. He’d hear the car start. He’d get there before we could back out of the driveway. Or he’d follow and catch us at the gate.”
She nods in resignation, still watching the door. “He’s supposed to be in Jackson. He’s been with Max. He may know everything.” She looks back at me. “He may have come to kill us.”
Paul batters the door again with his fist.
“We’ve risked that from the beginning,” I tell her. “There’s no hiding the truth anymore. Whatever happens happens.”
