Faithful Unto Death

by Stephanie Jaye Evans

  I said, “Now, Mr. Parker—”

  Dr. Fallon pressed an intercom on the wall.

  “Catherine, I need some orderlies to come escort an unruly guest from my examination room.”

  Parker looked like he was having apoplexy.

  “Are you joking? Do you know who I am? I am HD goddamn Parker, that’s who I am. I will buy this hospital tomorrow and put you on the street. You will be disbarred. I’ll have your stripes! I can have that done. I can have that done by six p.m. this evening, you see if I can’t. You’ll be working in the USS of R in the space of a week.”

  Mentally ticking off the errors in that one outburst, I came up with at least three and wondered if Parker’s education had extended much outside of the oil field. Or if the man was beginning to lose it.

  The door pushed open quietly and two large gentlemen in scrubs came in and very gently herded out an increasingly indignant Parker. He continued to sputter, his voice growing less distinct as he was moved down the corridor. I heard the orderlies saying, “That’s right, you say it, sir, we hear you,” and other calming things.

  Honey had her hands over her face. She lowered them and said to Fallon, “He can’t buy the hospital. Not anymore. And I don’t think he can really get your license revoked.”

  Dr. Fallon said, “Imagine my relief.”

  I gave a snort. I couldn’t help it but it stopped with Annie’s elbow reminder. I had never liked Dr. Fallon so well as I did at that moment. Right then, Dr. Fallon was my hero.

  Dr. Fallon knelt next to Honey. He went on like HD Parker had never interrupted.

  “Mrs. Garcia, Alex isn’t blind and he doesn’t have a brain tumor. He can see perfectly well now. He will be up and about in a few minutes. I’ll explain what happened. But first, take this, please. It’s Xanax.”

  He nodded his head at her look of alarm. “I know you’ve heard things, but you aren’t going to get addicted from one pill. This is a low dosage. It’s to help you pull yourself together so you can be there for Alex.”

  Those were magic words.

  Honey took the pill from Dr. Fallon, swallowed it, and then held on to his hand tightly.

  Dr. Fallon cleared his throat wetly and said, “I’m so very sorry for your loss.” He paused for a moment before going on. “What Alex has experienced is called a vasovagal attack. That sounds scarier than it is. It’s a kind of shock. Lots of things can bring it on. If you ever had to stand at attention for a long period of time, your commanding officer would be sure to tell you not to lock your knees. That can bring on a vasovagal attack, too, so you see, it isn’t that serious, despite the temporary bout of blindness.

  “In Alex’s case, he hadn’t slept last night, hasn’t had much to eat today, and he got some terrible news when he came home. I don’t know who delivered the news, but it might have been a good idea if they had asked Alex to sit down before they laid that burden on the child.”

  Dr. Fallon, Cruz, Honey, and Annie Laurie all looked at me. I had asked the kid to sit down. I had.

  “I’m going to ask you to stay a little longer so that I can run some blood tests, but I want to assure you that the tests are to rule out some extremely unlikely scenarios. You have a fine, healthy boy there.”

  All this was pretty much what Detective Wanderley had said as Alex was being trussed up and hoisted into the ambulance, but I could see why Honey took more store in it coming from a doctor, especially one who looked like the wise old family doctor from a Norman Rockwell picture.

  Dr. Fallon stood up, using the arm of Honey’s chair for support. His eyes went to Alex and he put a hand on the boy’s huge sneakered foot.

  “It’s hard to lose a father when you’re still so young, son, but you’ll get through this. You’ll find that God will work good through even this.”

  Alex uncovered his eyes and sat up. His big feet dangled, as disproportionate as a puppy’s. Honey stood up and wrapped her arms around her son. He looked at us over her shoulder, his face a bleak and barren desert. He gave me a chin tilt.

  “Do you believe that, Mr. Wells? That this was God’s will?”

  Annie started forward, answering for me, “That’s not what Dr. Fallon said, Alex. He said God could use even this terrible death to the good of those who love Him. I do believe that. It may take years to see the good; we may not be privileged to recognize the good, but it will come.” My lovely, precious wife.

  Alex still stared at me and I nodded. I thought Annie Laurie had said all there was to say.

  Four

  I dropped Annie Laurie, my “little bit of fluff,” off at home to get her car; she had her own work to do. She designs educational computer programs for homeschoolers, so she spends a lot of time doing research at the University of Houston’s main campus and at the big downtown Houston Library. I drove to the golf course, to the corner where a man was murdered in the early hours of the morning.

  Sugar Land doesn’t make a good setting for a murder. The name is all wrong, for one thing. Sugar Land. Sounds like a kid’s game I played a hundred years ago. The name comes from Imperial, one of the country’s oldest sugar factories, which still stands across the freeway and was in operation until a few years back. Although even that had a dark side, since for years the sugar company had used slave labor, then convict labor. Not so sweet.

  Now Sugar Land has been developed into a number of master-planned communities. In fact, Fort Bend County has more master-planned communities than any other county in America—I know that because it’s used as a promotional tag. Why, I’m not sure. Are master-planned communities what everybody’s looking for now?

  What it amounts to in Sugar Land are lots of cleverly designed playgrounds, community centers, neighborhood pools, and schools. Schools all over the place, with their accompanying school zones to accommodate the thousands of families living in the bland two-story redbrick homes all up and down the live oak-lined streets.

  Even the fast-food restaurants have to have discreet, redbrick-bordered signs. So as to be tasteful and unoffending.

  I’m pretty sure that murder isn’t just against the law in Sugar Land; it’s a violation of the Neighborhood Association Guidelines. Nearly everything else is. I can’t even paint my front door without written Neighborhood Association permission, and you can bet permission will be denied—front doors in my neighborhood have to be stained and polished.

  It’s not that we don’t get some excitement. We get a lot of professional sports players out here. I’ve seen Mercedes and Porsches modified with the backseats removed so that the front seats can be pushed back practically to the trunk, to allow room for impossibly long basketball-playing legs. Shaquille O’Neal owns a home out here in the Sweetwater neighborhood, where the homes all have media rooms with theater seating and five-car garages. Friend of mine saw him checking out at Randalls grocery store with a twelve-pack of beer and she said he palmed it. No lie. That’s a big hand.

  You go to school auctions and see autographed footballs, baseballs, basketballs, and golf balls that would sell for hundreds on eBay. I’ve got a professional baseball player and golfer in my very own congregation. When I see the golfer on Sunday, I know it was a bad weekend for him; he didn’t make the cut.

  In our subdivision there are people who were born in Vietnam, the Ukraine, China, Spain, Korea, Africa, India, Japan, all over the Middle East … that’s off the top of my head. My girls may be growing up in a small Texas community, but they’re brought into contact with as many different cultures as any kid in Manhattan could boast.

  Merrie and Jo have lit Shabbat candles, gone to Mormon dances where Coke couldn’t be served, been invited to the Hindu engagement parties of the older siblings of friends. When my girls have pizza parties, the pizza is all cheese or veggie. Some of their friends can’t eat beef; some can’t eat pork. Jo won’t eat meat, period.

  All different. All the same. We all live out here in the hinterlands of Houston because of the incredibly affordable housing, the superb safety
record, and—the number one draw—the award-winning schools.

  We have all kinds of people here in Sugar Land.

  Apparently, even a murderer.

  The Bridgewater golf course was green and smooth, and I could see touches of color burgeoning out through the required iron fencing around the houses bordering the golf course. Azaleas, mostly; they give such a lot of show for the little effort you have to put into it. But pansies, too, they do fine till it gets too hot.

  I stood there, watching greens keepers walk past the spot where a man had died only hours before, and wondered what Graham Garcia had done to get himself killed.

  Assuming it wasn’t Honey who killed him.

  Because if it was Honey, then I knew exactly why she’d killed him.

  Five

  From: Walker Wells

  To: Merrie Wells

  Subject: Jenasy Garcia

  Didn’t you spend some time with Jenasy Garcia through volleyball? Sad news, her father died. You might want to send her a note or call her.

  From: Merrie Wells

  To: Walker Wells

  Re: Jenasy Garcia

  Never competed—J went to St. John’s. Met her at volleyball camp. Not sure I know her well enough to contact. We’re only Facebook friends.

  From: Walker Wells

  To: Merrie Wells

  Re: Jenasy Garcia

  It would be a kindness.

  From: Merrie Wells

  To: Walker Wells

  Re: Jenasy Garcia

  Okaaaaaay Dad.

  Six

  Graham Garcia had arrived at my office the previous Friday at three o’clock on the dot. It was Honey, not Graham, who’d made the appointment.

  I hadn’t seen much of her lately but hadn’t really noticed until she called. The church draws one thousand plus most Sundays and we have three services. I’m hard put to tell when someone goes AWOL for a while. I rely on getting a heads-up from the attendance committee; they’re the ones who collect the attendance cards we ask people to fill out each Sunday. I’m not totally satisfied with the system, but I haven’t come up with a better one.

  When Honey called on Friday to make the appointment, she said, “Bear, it’s Honey and I want you to talk to Graham. He’s got a problem.”

  I said I’d be glad to and what was the problem.

  “If I knew what the problem was, I wouldn’t need you, I’d take care of this on my own. But I can’t get it out of him, and if we don’t get this solved in a hurry, it’s going to kill me. Or him. I don’t know, Bear, I feel like I’m dying.”

  This didn’t send me reeling back in my chair. Honey tends to be a tad overemphatic, and it was nothing new to hear that something was going to “just kill” her.

  I asked Honey if it might not be a good idea for her to come in at the same time, but that wasn’t what she wanted, and she didn’t want to see me on her own, either.

  “No offense, Bear, but I’m seeing a real therapist. The only reason I’m sending you Graham is because you’re the only one I could get him to agree to see.”

  I reminded Honey that I had a degree in pastoral counseling and she said, “Well, whatever.” So I gave her a time for the appointment and she hung up.

  I didn’t know why Graham had agreed to see me. Graham wasn’t a parishioner of mine; he was Catholic, and went to St. Laurence. I know a number of the priests at St. Laurence, and I count Father Nat Fontana as a good friend. He’s also a fully accredited family therapist. Like me. I mean, I am, too. Accredited.

  In the years I’ve known the Garcias, Graham and I hadn’t spent much time together alone. Honey was all over the place—heading committees, hosting showers, planning the seniors’ high school graduation dinner in May each year—but my time with Graham was limited to a few rounds of golf when the church would have a charity tournament, or dinner parties where he played with his wineglass and let Honey do most of the talking. Great food at those parties. Cruz is a wicked good cook and Honey is fun.

  On Friday afternoon, Graham came in wearing a business suit. Not a Joseph Banks sales suit, but something that looked fluid and Italian. I tried on an Armani once, for kicks; I looked like a gangster, a made man, the kind that breaks knees, not the kind that sits behind a desk and makes offers you can’t refuse. Annie Laurie started laughing and that was the day I discovered that she could recite almost all the dialogue from the first Godfather movie. Who knew?

  Graham, however, looked like a model for GQ. He gave me his hand, sat in a chair in my “conversation nook” (that’s what the designer called my coffee table, love seat, and two easy chairs arrangement), and crossed his legs. His arms were relaxed, his hands loose. His face was a still mask.

  I said, “Honey tells me you wanted to talk to me about a problem.”

  He smiled. “Is that what she told you? Did she tell you I wanted to talk to you about a problem?” There was an emphasis on the “I.”

  I thought back. “No. She said she wanted me to talk to you. Is there something I can help you with, Graham? Is there a problem?”

  Graham smiled again. It was a dry smile, not sarcastic, not sardonic. It was bleak. He leaned his head back in the chair, eyes on the ceiling. There wasn’t anything to see up there. He wasn’t looking.

  “There isn’t anything you can help me with.”

  Alrighty, then.

  “So why’d you come see me? Drive all the way out from downtown on a workday? You’re wasting billable hours on me,” I said.

  He let a good ten seconds pass, a long time in a conversation. “Because it was the only way I could get her to shut up. For a while, at least. Nothing works for long.”

  He snapped his chair forward. “I can’t get Honey to shut up. She won’t shut her mouth. She thinks if she understands, she can make it better. She can’t. She follows me around when I’m home. ‘Can we talk? What is it? We can work it out. Whatever’s wrong, I’ll change. Whatever you’ve done, I can forgive.’ Of course, it has to be something that I’ve done.”

  He stood up and walked to the windows. “I don’t want Honey to forgive me. There’s nothing to forgive. This isn’t my fault.”

  He didn’t raise his voice; his movements were smooth and controlled, a little too precise. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life seen a man so tightly controlled.

  Graham leaned against the window, his hands grasping the sill. I could see, on one white French cuff, a black embroidered monogram, “GVG.” The cuff links were gold scales of justice.

  “I don’t need her to forgive me,” Graham repeated, “I need her to let me go.” His voice was low, uninflected, but it didn’t lose any of its power.

  There wasn’t a whole lot for me to say at this point. This wasn’t a man who was trying to find his way back to loving his wife. This was a man who was done.

  Some ministers believe that any marriage can be saved. You get the couple together, get on your knees and pray with them, enlist the help of a good Christian counselor, have elders drop by, make some phone calls. Theoretically, I agree. But it only works if both partners want that marriage to last, want it enough to give up a lot, even give up part of who they are.

  Sometimes, when the couple comes to see me, the marriage is dead. All they really want from me is to help them get it decently buried.

  Honey didn’t know it, but her marriage was dead.

  There was a time when I would have pushed with everything I had to save a marriage. I wasn’t interested in the couple’s happiness. I was interested in their salvation. I’ve come to see that single-mindedness as a kind of arrogance.

  I tried to listen, see if Graham had anything to tell me, something that could help them stay together, but I didn’t hear anything.

  “Why don’t you divorce her?” I said. “If you want out so bad. You’re a lawyer; you know it only takes one to end a marriage. You don’t have to have any reason except you don’t want to be married to her anymore.”

  Graham shook his head, pushed back from the window.
He was looking out the window, not seeing anything more out there than he had on my ceiling. Those long fingers laced together and then did an inside-out motion, cracking the knuckles. He looked at me a moment, his face a blank, then his gaze turned toward the window again. He put his hands in his trouser pockets and I could hear him jingling coins.

  “Is there someone else?”

  He didn’t say anything, so of course there was.

  “If you tell Honey, I’m pretty sure she’ll let you go. Adultery is the magic key for most of us Church of Christers. Your kids are too old to be fought over. You have plenty of money. You do, don’t you? You’d take care of Honey and the kids, wouldn’t you?”

  Texas is notoriously hard on a nonworking wife in a divorce. There’s no alimony in Texas. A lawyer at the church once joked, “You want to divorce your wife, do it in Texas. You want to kill her, do it in California.” He said California punishes a man for marrying a woman; Texas punishes him for killing her.

  We’re a community property state, so no matter what, assets are split fifty-fifty. For the Garcias, that might mean something—but in lots of situations, the couple’s real financial investment was in the husband’s education and career. Then, just when he’s starting to make really good money but long before there’s been time to build up savings, he divorces his wife, they sell the house and split the profits (if there are any). She might get a nominal spousal support payment—for a maximum of two years—if they have been married for at least ten years and she is a stay-home mother. Yes, there is child support—until the child is eighteen, but no assurance of financial assistance with college, no matter what the father’s income is. The husband may go on to enjoy three or four hundred thousand a year, and if the wife has been out of the workforce for fifteen or twenty years, she may find herself clerking at the Gap. It’s hard to start over under those circumstances if the husband doesn’t make a good settlement. A decent man does. I’ve almost never seen it happen.

  Graham shook his head at me as if he couldn’t understand how I might think he wouldn’t.

  I can’t tell you how many people I get in my office, men and women, who let me know they’ve broken one of the most sacred vows we ever make, and then are surprised when I’m not certain they’ll do the right thing in other areas. It makes me want to give them a smack on the side of the head.