The Last Breath

by Kimberly Belle

  I think about my conversation with my father only yesterday, how he wanted me to leave when I couldn’t tell him, assuredly and unequivocally, that I believed in his innocence. I glance over at Lexi, her face a mixture of mockery and contempt, and suck in a breath at the words I suspect she has for our father. Cal’s lawyer-voice commands aren’t going to make her mince them, and she’s certainly not going to plead the fifth like I did.

  Bo coughs into a hand. “Amy’s waiting for me at home.”

  “Your wife will understand.” Cal turns to Lexi. “And, you. You’re gonna apologize for not visiting, for not writing, for not being there yesterday when he came home. And when he asks you if you believe he’s innocent, you’re gonna lie your little heart out good enough to earn you an Academy Award.”

  Lexi crosses her arms and legs and leans back, but she doesn’t respond.

  Bo shifts on his seat. “And I still have a ton of work to do at the lab. I’ll probably be there all night.”

  “I can call the chairman of the board and explain the situation if I have to.” Bo opens his mouth to protest, but Cal doesn’t give my brother the chance. “Don’t think I don’t have his number on speed dial, ’cause I do. The Tennessee Tiger knows everybody worth knowing. Are we clear?”

  Bo blinks, a rapid-fire of a few dozen flutters, and then he nods.

  Satisfied, Cal turns to Lexi. “Go get in the shower. You’re riding with me.”

  Lexi uncrosses her legs, plants her feet. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Oh, yes, you sure as hellfire are.” Cal stands, puffing his chest with an intensity that makes me shrink a little farther into the couch. “Now go fix yourself up.”

  My sister seems less impressed. She juts her chin and lifts a casual shoulder. “Fine, I’ll go, but I’m not gonna cry, and I’m sure as hell not gonna lie. I didn’t miss him for a second, and I’m not sorry he’s dying. And when he asks me if I think he killed Ella Mae, I’m gonna look him in the eye and say I know he did, and that it’s about damn time he’s finally getting what he deserved all those years ago.”

  “Don’t you say it.” Cal steps around the coffee table until he’s standing right in front of her. The air stretches tight between them. “Don’t you dare say it.”

  Lexi looks up, looks him straight in the eye. “A death sentence.”

  The oxygen leaves the room with an audible whoosh. Or maybe that sound came from me, I don’t know. Either way, my lungs are deflated balloons, empty and useless. My sister’s words just knocked me breathless.

  Cal scrunches his face into a scowl, and his voice takes on an ominous edge. “I’m gonna pretend you didn’t say that.”

  “Pretend away.” Lexi pushes herself off the couch, pushes by Cal toward the back hall. “Y’all help yourself to coffee while I hop in the shower.” At the edge of the room she turns back, trains her beauty pageant smile onto Cal. “I’m actually looking forward to this visit. Will finally be able to get a few things off my chest.” She disappears down the hallway. A few seconds later, a door slams and the shower starts.

  Bo and I turn back to Cal, both of us shocked silent. Cal mutters something under his breath, then points a long finger at Bo. “Gia will drive your car. You’re riding with me.”

  “What about Lexi?” Bo asks.

  Cal doesn’t respond, just snatches his coat from the chair and stomps toward the door. By now he’s been up against enough hostile witnesses to know they’re as unpredictable as a black bear, and can be just as vicious. Bo shrugs, passes me his keys and follows silently behind.

  From what I can tell from the driver’s seat of Bo’s Honda, my brother doesn’t say a word the entire way home. Then again, Cal doesn’t give him much choice. Bo sits, staring straight ahead, his back ramrod straight the entire drive, while Cal spouts what can only be a lecture. An arms-flailing, fingers-pointing lecture. It continues unbroken, for all the five minutes it takes for us to pull onto our street.

  And no. I don’t feel the least bit sorry for Bo.

  Ahead of me, Cal’s Buick brakes, then banks a sudden and sharp left, executing a tight U-turn over the road and a big chunk of Bill Almaroad’s lawn. I follow suit and swing Bo’s car around, trying not to make eye contact with any of the protesters stationed along the edge of our lot with their banners and posters and slogans. What have they done now?

  At the four-way stop, Cal pulls onto the grass and hits the hazards. I park behind him, yanking on the hand brake and leaving the motor running, and race to Cal’s car. Breathless and confused, I slide into the backseat.

  “What?” I lean my head between Cal and Bo, who looks like he’s about to throw up. “What’s wrong?”

  Bo twists around, his eyes wild. “What’s wrong? What do you mean what’s wrong? Every goddamn thing is wrong. Didn’t you see what they did?”

  I shake my head. “What who did? The protesters?”

  Cal slams the steering wheel with the heel of a hand. “Goddammit!” He points a finger at Bo, then at me. “Not one word of this to your father, do you understand?”

  “I don’t understand anything. What’s going on?”

  “I can’t.” Bo thrusts both hands in his hair and pulls, his voice lifting into a wail. “I can’t do this.”

  Cal clutches a palm over Bo’s shoulder, gives it a hard squeeze. “Son, I’m gonna need you to buck up, all right? You buck up and don’t let those people see you hurt, because that’s exactly what they want. Don’t you give them the satisfaction.”

  Good grief. If I’d known Bo would be so squeamish about crossing the protest line, I would’ve brought a blindfold and some earplugs. I settle on a little white lie. “Once you get inside you can barely hear them.”

  Bo looks at me like I’m crazy, and then he looks at Cal.

  “Your father needs you, Bo.”

  My brother shakes his head swiftly, almost violently. “Sorry, Cal.”

  It’s not Bo’s apology that sways Cal, I suspect, but his tears. Bo never ever lets anyone see him cry. Not when Ella Mae was killed, not when our father was taken in for questioning, not even when the gavel came down on the side of guilty. When my brother reaches for the door handle, Cal doesn’t try to stop him.

  After Bo’s gone, Cal puts the Buick into gear and swings the car around, and the two of us head back to the house.

  * * *

  As soon as we crest the hill for the second time, I know something’s off. The protesters are lined up on the asphalt in the middle of the road, but they’re turned the wrong way, facing out instead of aiming their angry chants at the house behind them.

  And speaking of chants, there are none. A scraggly man in a red scarf coughs into his hand as we pull closer, but otherwise, no one makes a sound. They simply watch.

  Cal sets his mouth and stares ahead, steering straight for the driveway. The protesters hustle back, parting to let our car through, and that’s when I see it. Two words, spray painted in thick, capital letters across the front siding of the house, a bloodred reminder of why I’ve come home.

  Die, Murderer.

  Dread punches my stomach like a fist and shoots fire through my veins. Fire so red-hot I can barely see, breathe, think. What greater power did I offend to deserve this shit? A dying father, deadbeat siblings and now a house defiled with the most hurtful words I could ever imagine. I dedicate my life to helping others, and this is what the universe does to thank me?

  I clamber out of the backseat before Cal has pulled to a full stop, gesturing with a wild arm to the house behind me. “Which one of you assholes is the graffiti artist?”

  By now the protesters are huddled at the end of the driveway, Tanya dead center. No one responds.

  “Which one?”

  Behind me, I hear Cal step out of the car. “Let it go, baby girl,” he says softly. “This is a polic
e matter now.”

  “That’s right,” I shriek, not turning, not backing down. “The police. Because we’re calling them as soon as we get inside.”

  Somebody clears their throat, and a few others look away.

  I ignore the cell phones and news cameras capturing my tantrum in full color, high definition and march down the driveway. “What is wrong with you people? A man is dying in there. A man who discounted your prescriptions when you couldn’t pay and made midnight medicine runs when your kids were sick. Why can’t you let him die in peace?”

  Tanya lifts her bullhorn, points it directly at my head and chants, “Life in prison means dying in prison. Send the murderer back!”

  One by one, the others join in.

  In that instant, I understand the phrase crime of passion. Because right now, I am passionately seething. At the scraggly man in the scarf and a bearded mountain man in a ten-gallon hat and a woman in Coke-bottle glasses and a guy with ridiculous fur earmuffs, all repeating Tanya’s words as if by rote. But especially, I’m seething at Tanya.

  Because anyone who would desecrate a man’s last weeks with hate-filled protests in the name of God wouldn’t think twice about defiling that man’s property with graffiti.

  I step right up in front of Tanya, screaming above her chant. “Do your Pentecostal pals know about you?”

  She cuts off midword, putting a screeching stop to the “angry protest” record, and the hand clutching the bullhorn drops to her side. “Don’t you dare.”

  I turn to the first camera lens I see. “Tanya McNeal wasn’t awfully popular back in high school, but her right hand sure was.”

  Cal steps up behind me, reaches for my sleeve. “Let’s go.”

  I wrench my arm from his grip, speak loud and strong into the camera. “Until she and her hand got expelled, that is, for prostitution.”

  “Gia.” It’s Cal, and his tone is urgent. “Inside. Now.”

  I pluck the bullhorn from Tanya’s hand, flip it around, punch the button and holler into the mouthpiece loud enough they hear me clear to Church Hill. “That’s right, y’all. The preacher’s wife was a whore.”

  The protesters give a collective gasp.

  “Oh, man.” A guy with a puffy coat and an iPhone aimed at my head nudges the person next to him. “I’m gonna upload the shit out of this.”

  I flip him a bird. “Upload this, asshole.”

  Tanya’s mouth scrunches into an ugly squiggle, and she draws a deep breath. “Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and He will have mercy on them.”

  I snort. “Whatever that means.”

  “It means I’ve been born again.” She smiles kindly, sweetly, but I’m not fooled. I remember the real Tanya, and she wasn’t half that nice. “It means Jesus Christ has washed away my sins, and I’ve been forgiven.”

  I speak into the bullhorn. “Good for you, Tanya, but tell me. How does Jesus Christ feel about your inability to forgive others?”

  She blinks, and her smile plummets.

  “That’s what I thought.” I shove the bullhorn into her arms, turn and stomp past a chuckling Cal back up the drive.

  “That wasn’t the dumbest thing you’ve ever done, baby girl,” he says, catching up to me on the top step of the porch, “but it was pretty damn close.”

  “I know, I know.” I stop at the door and lean against the siding, shoving my fists into my coat pockets. “But some things needed to be said.”

  He pulls a toothpick from his molars, twirls it between his fingers. “Like that bit about the preacher’s wife being a whore?”

  “Especially that part.”

  Cal pops the stick back into his cheek and grins. “And here I thought Lexi inherited all the Andrews family spunk.”

  I wriggle the phone from my back pocket and slide a thumb across the screen. “Well then stick around. Because I’m calling Jimmy, and somebody goddamn well better be arrested.”

  From inside, Dad’s laugh, a dry heh-heh-heh, floats through the windowpane. “She can stay.”

  * * *

  As it turns out, no one gets arrested. No one gets so much as a slap on their spray-paint-wielding wrist. Until I can prove someone trespassed on private property to commit vandalism, Jimmy claims his hands are tied.

  “I kind of assumed the graffiti was proof of the trespassing and the vandalism.” I don’t bother to disguise the sarcasm seeping from my voice. My veins are still hot with adrenaline, and I have to take my frustration out on someone.

  “Did you identify anyone trespassing on your property?”

  I don’t answer, which Jimmy takes as one.

  “Look, Gia. I’m sorry they’re there, I really am, but call me back as soon as you see anyone crossing the property line. I’ll be there with sirens blazing.”

  “That’ll sure be helpful when the molotov cocktails start flying.” And then I think of something else. “Arrest Tanya McNeal, then. She has a bullhorn.”

  Jimmy sighs, long and deep. “C’mon, Gia. You know I can’t arrest her for a bullhorn, but I can come down there and give her a stern dressin’-down. Would that make you feel better?”

  “I guess,” I tell him after a long moment, even though I don’t. I don’t feel any better at all.

  Cal isn’t much help, either. After an hour-long soliloquy about the difference between direct and circumstantial evidence, he wheels his weekend suitcase out the door and heads back to his flavor-of-the-month in Knoxville.

  After he’s gone, Dad asks Fannie for more morphine then promptly conks out. With nothing more to do, I collapse on the couch.

  “Now what?” I say to Fannie. It’s sometime past seven, and the best thing I can say about the day is that the rain has finally chased the protesters home.

  She twists to face me, her face suddenly solemn. “Now we have some serious issues to discuss.”

  I catch her meaning instantly. All weekend long, I’ve been tiptoeing around her, bending over backward to help around the house, offering her coffee or cookies or a smile. Now, though, she deserves an apology.

  “I feel so crappy for ditching you Friday night, for leaving you here to deal with Dad all by yourself. It was selfish of me, and I won’t do it ever again, I swear. I’m here 24/7 from now on.”

  My heart kicks at what my self-imposed house arrest means for Jake and me, but I reprimand myself. Spending time with my dying father is far more important than with a man I barely know, no matter how talented his hands.

  But Fannie doesn’t seem to think so. She makes a face like she just bit into a June apple. “I’m gonna say this as nice as I know how, sugar, but you gotta go.”

  It takes me a few beats to realize she, like Dad, doesn’t want me here. “What?”

  “I don’t know how much longer I can stand you moping around this house. It’s about to make me lose every last bit of my stuffin’.” When she catches the look of offense on my face, she pats my hand. “Nothing personal, sugar. But this girl needs some alone time every now and then.”

  “But where would I go?” I say, even though I know the answer. Even though I’m already thinking about where I left my keys.

  Her strawberry lips curl up in a grin. “I’m sure you’ll find somewhere.”

  I think both of us know I already have.

  And then I remember what started this conversation. “What were the serious issues you wanted to discuss?”

  Her face fills with confusion. “The serious...? Oh, that.” Fannie gestures to the TV, still dark and silent on the wall unit across from us. “Amazing Race or Celebrity Apprentice?”

  I smile, push to a stand. “That’s easy. Amazing Race, even though I could kick every one of their asses. I once made it from Cairo to Cape Town, over land by the way, in a month an
d on a hundred dollars.”

  Fannie punches a button on the remote and shoos me toward the door. “Just bring me back some of that venison chili, wouldja?”

  18

  THE NEXT FEW days progress something like this: Bo blocks my number and Lexi tells me she liked me better when I lived in Africa; Jake and I explore the challenging world of bar stool sex. Dad wakes up moaning and Fannie ups his morphine to nearly fatal proportions; Jake and I are almost arrested for public indecency while parking at Burem Lake Dam. My YouTube fame peaks at a hundred thousand views; Jake and I duck into a roadside Arby’s bathroom for a particularly rough go that ends in bruises and scratch marks and love bites. It’s like the worse things get at home, the more I can’t get enough of Jake.

  For me, Jake is like a minivacation from the stress of Rogersville. When floodwaters rise or locusts attack or volcanoes threaten to spew lava and ash, he is a welcome distraction from the impending doom. He makes me forget the end is near. He gives me a bubble of happiness in my chest that I think will never burst, until it does, when I walk through my front door.

  I will admit that the dichotomy of my life here feels a little schizophrenic, like there are two distinctly different Gias. Dad Gia feels trapped and claustrophobic, like she’s hiding in a place she doesn’t want to be, being hunted by people who hate her for something she didn’t do. Jake Gia is the polar opposite—the puppy hanging her head out the car window, ears flapping, tail wagging, not caring where she’s going, as long as it’s away from here.

  The only question now is, which Gia is me?

  * * *

  On Thursday night, I awake to a swishing sound.

  The house is dark and quiet. The kind of dark and quiet it can only be in the middle of a winter night in the middle-of-nowhere, Tennessee. Somewhere in the distance, a train rattles and rumbles through the frozen hillside, but otherwise the silence is piercing.

  Except for the gentle swish, swish, swishing.