The Knight

by Steven James

  “Shh!” she quieted him. “You should know better than to interrupt me when I’m talking on the phone.” Then she spoke to Ari again. “I’ll do some checking, make sure there’s no way to link things to you. I’ll call you later.”

  She ended the call without waiting for his reply.

  And she smiled.

  So, her article was stirring things up. Good.

  Time to start working on the second installment.

  81

  Three minutes after leaving the dispatch office, I was standing beside Cheyenne’s Saturn and she was handing me the St. Francis of Assisi pendant that she’d had hanging from her rearview mirror.

  “What’s this for?” I asked.

  “St. Francis is the patron saint of the archdiocese of Denver,” she explained. “And last year I found out he’s also the patron saint against dying alone. I think that’s the worst way to die, so I keep this as a . . . well, it helps me remember why I do what I do. No one should have to die alone.”

  She paused for a moment and then recited the words I’d read the day before from Keats’s poem about the pot of basil: “‘For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die; will die a death too lone and incomplete.’ When you read that yesterday, I thought of the pendant, but I kept forgetting to give it to you.”

  “I can’t take this, it’s—”

  “Please. I thought that if you had this at Basque’s trial, it wouldn’t hurt. I don’t know . . . I just . . . As a reminder. I want you to have it. I can get another one easy enough.”

  Even though she’d mentioned yesterday that she’d gone to Catholic school, I could see now that she was much more devoted to her faith than I would have guessed. She must have noticed my surprise because she said, “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m just a little . . . I didn’t know you were so religious.”

  “Hard to pigeonhole, remember?”

  “Right.” I didn’t really believe in relics, praying to saints, or good luck charms, but the gesture meant a lot to me. “Thank you.” I slipped the pendant into my pocket.

  A moment passed. “Well,” she said. “I’m going to swing over to visit Kelsey Nash, see how she’s doing; then maybe check in with the officers who are keeping an eye on Bryant.”

  I realized that my feelings for Cheyenne were growing stronger and more intense by the hour, and I began to wonder how much the stress from the case might be affecting my attraction to her—maybe my heart was reaching out to her because it needed something she seemed to offer—comfort, strength, intimacy. Probably all three.

  “I’ll have Tessa’s cell with me,” I said. “Keep me up to speed, OK?”

  “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  I gave her the number, and she programmed it into her phone. She looked like she wanted to say more.

  I hated to consider the possibility that I was using her as a crutch, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was.

  “I should go,” I said hastily.

  “Yeah.”

  Then, before the conversation could slip into anything more personal, I said a hurried good-bye and left for my car.

  And I didn’t look back because I was afraid she might be watching me, and even though part of me hoped that she was, another part of me had started to wonder if it might be better for both of us if she wasn’t.

  Tessa reached the entry dated November 15 of her mother’s sophomore year at the University of Minnesota—just two months before she was conceived.

  And her mom was still seeing Brad.

  Tessa didn’t know if he was her father, but it was appearing more and more likely that he was, and whenever she read his name she began to feel that old mixture of pain, anger, and heartache that she felt whenever she thought of her absentee dad.

  Then she read:

  November 29

  No, no, no, no, no!

  So he tells me today he likes this other girl, that he’s just “not into me anymore.” Not into me anymore??!! We’ve been going out for six months! And why did he have to tell me he likes someone else? Why couldn’t he have just said it’s over? Why did he have to mention her—

  The entry ended abruptly, but then her mother spent the next dozen or so entries sorting through her feelings about the breakup, and Tessa discovered that her mom had done pretty much the same things she did when she broke up with a guy—ranted, cried, pretended that she’d never liked him in the first place, and then found another guy a little too quickly and fell for him a little too hard.

  And that’s what happened to her mother on December 20th.

  This guy’s name was Paul.

  Tessa felt a wisp of fear and anticipation flutter through her, and she just couldn’t wait anymore. She had to know. She scanned the pages. Raced through the next few weeks.

  Into January—her mother broke up with Paul. But they’d slept together a few times. So, unless there was someone else she hadn’t written about—

  Then February, March.

  Her mom had started getting queasy, sick more and more often. Yes, it has to be him.

  April.

  She’d missed her last couple periods, wasn’t ready for exams, just wanted vacation to come and was trying to find a job for the summer—

  If there was someone else, if she’d slept with someone else, she would have said so . . .

  And then Tessa read the entry her mother had written on May 5th, and the world tipped upside down.

  Dear Diary,

  This morning I found out I’m pregnant. It’s Paul’s. I don’t know what to do. I can’t have a baby. I can’t! This was the worst day of my life.

  And Tessa sat motionless, speechless, staring at the page.

  Obviously it would be hard for a teenager to hear that she’s going to be a single mom. Obviously. Tessa knew that. But still, the words knifed through her.

  “This was the worst day of my life.”

  Her throat tightened so much that she could barely breathe, and her fingers were shaking as she turned the page.

  But the next entry was not written by her mother.

  Instead, it was a handwritten letter pasted onto the page.

  A letter from Paul.

  82

  Christie,

  I’m sorry for how things are, for how they’ve been. But please, I’m the father. Don’t do this. I’ll do whatever you want—pay the medical bills, help raise the baby, find someone to adopt it, but please don’t do this. Whatever you think of me, I’m a jerk, OK, I’m a loser, but let me do something right here. Let me help. Let me do one good thing. Please, keep our baby.

  —Paul

  Tessa did not breathe for a long time. She let her eyes walk through the words two, three times.

  All of her life she had hated her father, had thought that he didn’t want anything to do with her. So now, even though the main intent of the letter should have probably struck her the most, her initial reaction was shock that her biological father, her real father, had wanted to be part of her life.

  His name is Paul.

  Your dad’s name is Paul. And he wanted to help raise you.

  But then the deeper, more obvious impact of the words settled in.

  “Please don’t do this . . .” he’d written. “I’m the father.”

  “I’ll do whatever you want—pay the medical bills, help raise the baby, find someone to adopt it, but please don’t do this.”

  “No . . .” she whispered. “Oh, please no.”

  “Keep our baby.”

  The truth slammed into her.

  Harsh and brutal.

  Her mother, the person Tessa had loved and trusted more than anyone else on the planet, had wanted to abort her and her father, the man she’d always hated, had begged to save her life.

  83

  Everything Tessa had believed about her mother and her father, all of it, everything, had been a lie.

  A lie.

  A lie—

  The front door to the house banged open, and she heard Patrick�
�s voice: “Hey, guys. I came to say good-bye.”

  He knew about this. He had to have known!

  She snatched up the diary and, using her finger to mark the place, stormed downstairs and into the living room. Patrick stood beside the door. “So, Raven, how’s the—”

  “What do you know about this?” She held up the diary.

  “What do you mean?”

  Martha emerged from the kitchen.

  “Tell me. Don’t lie to me,” Tessa said to him. “Did you read it?”

  “I told you before, I didn’t read it. What’s going on?”

  “Did you know about this!” She flipped the diary to Paul’s letter.

  “It’s a letter from my dad, my real dad. And he’s telling Mom that he doesn’t want her to get a . . . a . . .” Her voice broke apart, and she couldn’t finish her sentence.

  Patrick looked at the page but didn’t answer.

  “Did you know!”

  “Here,” he said softly. “Let me see that.” He took the diary from her and Martha eased a few quiet steps toward them, and then everything sort of came to a standstill while Patrick read the letter.

  After a few moments he slowly closed the diary and handed it back to her. “I’m not sure what to say.”

  “Huh, imagine that.”

  “You have to remember how much your mother loved you.”

  “Oh, wow? Really? I guess that’s why she wanted to abort me, then—because she loved me so much.”

  “Listen, she did love you. You know that. It’s not right to—”

  “To do what? Judge her? She wrote that the day she found out she was pregnant was the worst day of her life. What is there to judge? She didn’t want me!”

  “She did want you.” Patrick reached for her shoulder, but she pulled back. “She was a loving woman, a caring woman—”

  “No.”

  “But she was human.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Just as human as you or me. And she—”

  “Stop it! I know what you’re trying to do. It’s not gonna work.”

  “Tessa.” His voice had become firm, but she could tell he wasn’t mad. Not really. “I know you’re upset, but just stop and listen for a second. Please. She never regretted having you. She told me that you were the best thing that ever happened to her. She told me that before she died.”

  “June 3rd, Patrick,” she said, and she could feel something deep inside of her cracking. “Paul wrote that letter on June 3rd. You know when my birthday is, right? So, do the math. Mom was twenty weeks along when he wrote this letter. You know what that means.”

  “Tessa. Please don’t do this.”

  “My heart was beating. My brain was working. I could learn things. I could feel pain. Be calmed by music, experience mood swings.” She could hear the hurt filling her voice, but she didn’t care, didn’t try to hide anything anymore. “I could have been delivered and survived, but—”

  “Tessa—”

  “You know what they do in a late-term abortion? Maybe a D & E? Maybe she could have done that to ‘get it taken care of.’ They insert a clamp up through the uterus, grab a part of the body, and they—”

  “Shh,” Martha said.

  “—pull it apart—”

  Patrick shook his head. “Tessa—”

  “—piece by piece and then they crush the head and suction out the pieces. Or a D & X? Stick a surgical scissors in right here.” Tessa pointed at the base of her skull. Her finger was trembling. “It would have been right here on me. Right here! They pry open a hole . . . and insert a . . .”

  Martha rested her hand gently on Tessa’s shoulder. “Don’t think about such—”

  “Then after they’ve suctioned out the brains . . . the skull collapses and they . . . they can finally . . .” She felt dizzy, physically ill, and she couldn’t say the words. She just couldn’t.

  Patrick drew her into his arms, and this time she let him. And then she felt Martha holding her too, her frail arm bent around her shoulder. And she was glad they were there.

  But that was all she was glad about.

  Tessa leaned her face against her stepfather’s chest.

  And trembled as she cried.

  84

  I tried to comfort Tessa but had no idea what to say, so I just hugged her and told her that I loved her and tried to think of something, anything that I could do to help.

  Moments passed.

  My mother found a box of tissues for Tessa, and after a little while she began to control her breathing again.

  Finally, she pulled away from me, wiped a handful of tissues across her face, and said softly, “I wish I never read it. The diary. I wish . . .”

  “I’m so sorry, Tessa. If I’d known it would hurt you, I never would have given it to you. You have to believe me.”

  She took a small breath. “I need to be alone.” Then she left for her room, and I thought she might slam the bedroom door, but instead I heard it close gently.

  So gently that, in a way, it frightened me.

  It wasn’t at all clear to me what to do—give her some space, or go to her, see if there was something more I could say.

  In the past, Tessa had struggled with cutting as a way to cope, and although she’d mostly moved past it, I was concerned for her and I didn’t like the idea of standing here doing nothing.

  I walked upstairs. Knocked softly on her door.

  “Leave me alone.” I could tell that she was crying again.

  My mother was climbing the stairs to join me.

  “Please, Tessa,” I said.

  “Just leave me alone. I want to be alone.”

  I tried the doorknob. Locked. “C’mon. Unlock the door.”

  “I’m OK. I just wanna be by myself.”

  As I stood there trying to figure out how to solve things, my mother approached and whispered, “She needs some time, Patrick. Let her be for now. She’ll come out when she’s ready.”

  “How do you know?” I kept my voice low enough so that Tessa wouldn’t hear. “Maybe I can—”

  “Listen to your mother,” Tessa called from inside her bedroom.

  I blinked.

  Martha raised a gentle, knowing eyebrow.

  “Did you hear me?” Tessa said.

  “Yes.”

  Knowingly, my mother patted my arm and then turned to leave.

  “I guess I’ll be downstairs then,” I told Tessa through the door.

  “In the kitchen. I won’t leave for the airport until you’re ready for me to go, OK?”

  No response.

  I stood in the hallway for a few more minutes, sorting through everything, then Tessa called through the wall, “Don’t lurk,” and I finally left to join my mother in the kitchen.

  I looked at my watch.

  As much as I wanted to stay and work through things with Tessa, I definitely needed to leave in the next twenty minutes if I was going to make my flight.

  But that was no longer my priority.

  Last night I’d told Cheyenne that Tessa meant the world to me. And now I realized how true that was.

  I would stay here if I needed to. Even if I didn’t make it to the trial.

  Still, I did feel a little guilty and conflicted, because even though I hadn’t known about Paul or the letter, one time while we were dating Christie had told me about her decision to abort her child.

  85

  Christie and I had been going out for about four months when she told me the story.

  We were both single and in our midthirties and things were getting serious, so we’d finally decided to get everything on the table, see if there was anything in our respective pasts that would make the other person shy away from something long term.

  And we chose to share those secrets on a hike in the Adirondacks on a crisp and cool Sunday afternoon in September.

  We’d been hiking for a few hours, slowly revealing more and more intimate details from our lives, when I lost the trail and ended up spending n
early half an hour leading her aimlessly through the underbrush looking for it. Finally, I was so irritated at myself that I kicked a log. “OK. Here’s one: sometimes I can get impatient.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” I shoved a branch out of the way. Hard. It snapped back toward Christie, and thankfully she was far enough behind me so that it didn’t smack her in the face. “And moody.”

  “Huh.” I couldn’t quite read her tone. “I’ll have to keep an eye out for that.”

  Then I found something that might have been a trail, at least at one time, and it was leading vaguely in the direction we wanted to go, so I decided to give it a shot.

  As we walked, I told her about the problems I’d had over the years getting along with my older brother, who owned a bait shop in Wisconsin and spent most of his time muskie fishing when he could have been doing something meaningful with his life.

  “Well.” She stepped over a fallen tree lying across our path. “At least you’re not judgmental.”

  “One of my few virtues.”

  Then I admitted to a tendency of getting caught up a little too much in my work. Occasionally.

  Once in a while.

  And then, though it was a little embarrassing, I talked about dealing with some of the temptations all single guys face.

  She listened quietly, asked a few questions, but didn’t act as if any of this was a big surprise. And then she told me about how she wasn’t really good with money and had built up almost twenty thousand dollars of credit card debt and how she hated housework and sometimes got panic attacks when she was really stressed.

  The trail ended.

  She’d tried to commit suicide twice in high school; she told me that too. And after a long pause, she added that she wasn’t able to have any more children.

  Then we were both silent.

  I got the impression she wasn’t finished sharing, so I waited for her to speak. After walking about a hundred meters she suggested we backtrack and as we turned around she said, “I never told you about when I was pregnant with Tessa. Maybe I should have.”

  We came to an overlook, but she kept walking.

  “I was nineteen when I found out I was expecting. I was scared and single, and I wasn’t in love with her father.” She paused, then added, “And I was ashamed too. My parents didn’t take sex outside of marriage lightly. At the time I didn’t understand their point of view. Since then, well . . .”