Tell No Lies Page 23

  Jack shut his eyes to block the mental image that accompanied her words, but it didn't work.

  "My dad's eyes . . . God . . . I've never seen anything like it." She paused. "The whole time, in my mind, I'm getting ready to run if I have to. I wasn't thinking about what I could do to help. I was thinking only of saving myself. Brian told me later, much later when we were grown, that I was shaking and whimpering like a dog left out in the cold, and he had to clamp his hand over my mouth to stifle the noise. I have no memory of that. He told me that the guy searched the upstairs, presumably suspecting or perhaps knowing that Andrea wasn't the only child. I find it ironic that it was Andrea, in a way, and not my parents, who saved us. Don't you?"

  Jack was unable to answer her question. Instead, he found himself wondering what he would do in the same situation, what Claire would do. Would the fear paralyze him, as it apparently had Jenny's father, or would he find the courage somewhere within himself to put up resistance? And what about Claire? She was always so strong, in her own quiet way. Would she submit to execution without a fight? He didn't think so, but he envisioned her version of a fight as an attempt at reason, a negotiated settlement.

  He'd been staring at his hand, at Jenny's fingers nervously weaving their way through his without any awareness of the movement. Whom was he betraying just then, by thinking about his family, about Claire? Surely Claire, merely for his being there. And Jenny? Did her sharing this with him elevate their obligations to each other to an even higher level than their actions just an hour before? He knew that it must, yet he didn't know what she expected from him, and he was afraid to ask.

  "Really, I have no memory of anything past the actual gunfire," she continued. "Everything else I learned from Brian, or later from the news stories and police reports."

  "Was he prosecuted?" It seemed like a logical question when it was in his head but out loud the words sounded ridiculous. As if that could matter to her, really.

  "Well, they caught him."

  The ticking of the clock on the wall behind her punctuated her sentence. He jumped when one of her cats rubbed up against his leg, and as a result, he missed the nuance of her answer; it wasn't until much later that he would realize his mistake.

  To his surprise, she smiled slightly. "You're behaving like I'm telling you a ghost story, Jack. You're all jumpy." Her smile lingered and he returned it, but he didn't know what to say. It was a ghost story, wasn't it? And he still felt the weight of it, but she seemed lighter now. He'd asked to carry her burden and she'd let him; now he didn't know what to do with it.

  "The picture. It's your sister?" he asked.

  She knew without explanation what picture he was referring to. "Yes."

  "So who schooled you at home?"

  "An aunt. My dad's sister. For some strange reason, she thought it would be too hard for us to go back to school. But that was exactly what we needed."

  "Yale, Jenny. She must have done something right."

  She shrugged. "Yeah, well, I'm not talking about the academics. You want some more OJ?"

  He nodded and handed her his glass. Just like that, she'd moved on. Did she sense he couldn't hear more? Or had she finished, anyway? But she hadn't explained her father's connection to the murderer. She hadn't explained the "interrupted negotiations."

  She stood, letting the shawl fall onto the chair behind her. She went to the refrigerator and refilled his glass. He'd never seen a woman so comfortable in her own skin. He wondered what the aunt had been like. Who had instilled all this confidence?

  "Do you have pictures?" he asked. "Of your family?"

  "Upstairs. Come on, I'll show you."

  Her bedroom seemed warmer now. The wind still blew, but the air it pushed in felt almost tropical compared to earlier. He smelled rain as he cranked the casement windows, leaving them open just a crack. She waited for him on the bed with an old photo album.

  "That's my mom and dad," she began when he joined her, pointing to a picture. "I have to admit that it's hard to know which of my memories are real and which I've created from looking at pictures. But I remember my sister so well. Isn't that funny?"

  Jack looked at the man and woman in the photo. His eyes immediately focused on the woman. There it was. There was what he'd seen in Jenny the first night they'd met, what in his white-breaded ignorance he couldn't identify. There was the darkness, the black hair.

  "She was born in India, in Kanpur," Jenny explained.

  "And your dad?"

  "Oh, he was a full-fledged American. As Waspy as they come. Like you, Jack." He couldn't tell if he'd just been insulted. "According to my aunt, neither set of parents was too excited when they married. His didn't speak to him for a few years, but finally softened when us kids came along. Hers disowned her, but she was already in the States by then, so there wasn't much they could do to stop it."

  Jack looked at the man in the picture. He appeared to tower above his wife. Jenny might have received her coloring and her lips from her mother, but Jack could see that her other features most definitely belonged to her father. The little sharp nose, the prominent cheekbones, her height.

  "How'd they meet?"

  "She was in the States on a student visa."

  "Show me your sister."

  She flipped a few pages, searching, and then stopped when she found the page she wanted. Jack saw the same little girl from the photo on her dresser, but in these pictures she looked more childlike, more innocent. In one picture she played on the floor with two kittens, her mouth wide open in endless giggles. In another, Jenny sat in front of a birthday cake with a big pout on her face, her sister on one side of her, Brian on the other. Frosting and more giggles lit her sister's face; the cake in front of Jenny had been poked and the culprit wasn't trying to hide anything.

  "She was younger than you."

  "Yes, by almost three years."

  "More of a trouble-maker than you, huh?"

  She smiled, just barely. "It seems so, doesn't it? I think I just took over where she left off."

  A gust of wind slammed one of the windows shut. Jack turned at the sound, but Jenny's voice brought him back. "He had a mistress."

  "What?" The statement took Jack by surprise. She was still gazing at the picture from her birthday, and the only "he" in the picture was her brother.

  "My dad. They said he had a mistress. But she denied it."

  Jack swallowed. "Jenny, I don't think—"

  "You know what the only real memory I have of him is? You know, a memory that's not overshadowed by that night? He built this raft with us. Told us we were going to be just like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and take that raft out on the river. My mom thought he was crazy—swore he'd have us all drowned before it was over. But we could all swim well, we weren't worried." She shrugged. "My mom didn't really understand the allure of the Mississippi. It wasn't the Ganga so it held no meaning for her."

  "The Ganga?"

  "Hindus believe that bathing in the waters of the Ganges River will wash away their sins," she explained.

  "We'll have to book a trip soon, then."

  She gave him a bittersweet smile but didn't say anything.

  "Do you miss them?" he asked.

  "I don't know. I barely knew them."

  "I guess." He watched her turn the pages of the album slowly without really looking at the pictures. "You seem sort of mad at them."

  She turned to him, glaring. "Why would I be mad at them, Jack?" Her tone was smart, challenging him. But the answer seemed obvious to him.

  "I don't know." He tried to speak gently. "You just seem angry. At your dad, especially, like it was his fault."

  Her eyes pierced into him. He heard himself swallow. He wanted to take back what he'd just said.

  "You are fucking amazing, Jack Hilliard. Who the hell are you to analyze me and my dead parents? It's taken you nine years to even acknowledge that my skin is darker than yours, but you think you can come in here and in five minutes psychoanalyze our relationsh
ip?"

  "What are you talking about? Nine years to acknowledge your skin is darker than mine?"

  She grunted. "Give me a break, will you? You think I don't know why you're so attracted to me? Like I'm some dark, exotic thing compared to your lily-white wife."

  "You're wrong," he said quietly, shocked.

  "Yeah, why don't we analyze that, since you seem to want to play amateur psychologist tonight? Why don't we analyze why you're here instead of in Jeff City, where you're supposed to be? Huh? Or, better yet, why aren't you at home, in bed next to Claire?"

  The use of Claire's name made him wince in a way her use of the generic term wife hadn't. He reached for her left hand, but she raised it and shook it to brush his away.

  "Fuck you, Jack. You've got a lot of nerve."

  He rolled onto his side, propped his head up with his left arm, and watched her staring blankly at the photo album. They lay there like that for what seemed to him forever, while he waited for the tension in her jaw to relax and her eyes to clear. When he thought she wouldn't rebuff him, he reached up and touched her hair, tucking it behind her ear. She let him, closing her eyes as he did. "This is so wrong," she mumbled.

  He leaned close to her face. "Jenny, I'm sorry," he whispered. "I just thought you wanted to talk about it."

  She nodded and spoke without opening her eyes. "You want too much from me. You're moving way too fast."

  "I'm sorry," he said again. When he laughed a little, she turned to him. "First you complain that it takes me nine years to notice the color of your skin—"

  "Acknowledge," she interrupted, correcting him.

  "And then you tell me I'm moving too fast." After a moment, he said, "Tell me something."

  "What?"

  "Did it float?"

  "What?"

  "The raft."

  "You're changing the subject."

  "Did it?"

  "I don't know. We never got the chance to take it out before that night."

  "What happened to it? Afterward, I mean."

  "I don't know that either. Maybe my aunt put it out for the trash one day. Brian and I never asked. Didn't want to know, I guess."

  Rain began to fall outside, gently at first, and then picked up force. No more wind, though; the sheers hung still. Despite the horror of the story she'd told him, this, finally, was how he'd imagined it: her opening up to him, letting him in.

  "Jenny."

  "Hmm?"

  "I think we've got a problem."

  "Yeah, and what's that?"

  "I think I've fallen in love with you."

  She tensed visibly and turned her head back to the album. "Jack—"

  "Don't say anything. There's something else." He grinned slightly. "I want to do it my way now."

  She turned on her side and looked relieved that he hadn't mentioned love again.

  "Really? And what's your way?"

  He closed the album, carefully set it on the floor, and then gave her a lazy kiss. "Slow. Slow and easy. Like the Mississippi."

  She seemed to like that answer. She closed her eyes and let him roll her over onto her back. When he climbed on top of her, she opened her eyes to him and he felt that he had fallen in, that he was sinking into the swirling eddy of their blackness. It startled him at first, the speed and the depths to which he fell. But he went willingly; he didn't even make an effort to save himself.

  When he woke the second time, daylight had arrived. But it was still raining, thundering. He heard the water hitting the pavement on the street outside her windows; every once in a while a car drove slowly past. They were under the covers, snuggled as if in a cocoon.

  "Jenny?" Jack whispered. She lay with her back to him. He wondered if she was awake yet.

  "What?" She spoke softly, but he sensed impatience in her voice.

  "Do you believe in soul mates? You know, that everyone has a soul mate somewhere?"

  She was quiet and he waited for her to answer. When several moments had passed and she still hadn't responded, he brushed the hair from her back and traced his finger between her shoulder blades. He saw red marks on her back and for a moment felt ashamed, remembering how furious, almost violent, their lovemaking had been the first time.

  "Jenny?" Had she drifted off? He caressed her arm and felt the muscles tense.

  "Don't make this into more than what it was." Her voice was cold, unrecognizable. He removed his hand from her arm and leaned over, trying to see her face. "Yeah, I believe in soul mates—and yours is home right now wondering where you are while you're here fucking me."

  Her expression matched her voice. Her eyes pierced the wall across from her, refusing to meet his. Was she playing some sort of sick joke on him?

  "I'm not your soul mate, Jack," she continued. "We're just two people who have been dying to get into each other's pants since the day we met and we finally broke down and did it. It's as simple as that. Like two animals in heat." She finally turned to him, and he looked into her eyes, but nothing was there. He tried to gulp air, but it was as if every life-supporting mechanism in his body had shut down. "A couple fucks do not a soul mate make," she said.

  The oxygen in the room continued to compress, and he felt as if he was about to pass out. He wanted her to stop talking, to let him catch his breath, but her cruelty seemed relentless. She sat up, and the sheet that had draped her body fell to her waist, exposing her breasts. He wanted to lean over and cover her nakedness, it seemed vulgar now, but she had rendered him incapable of movement, incapable of speech. He wished that she had rendered him deaf, too.

  She reached up and held his chin in her hand, roughly, as if to guarantee he wouldn't look away. "You're a hopeless romantic, Jack Hilliard. You're the type of guy who thinks there has to be some cosmic purpose for everything." She released him and lay back down, rolling onto her stomach with her sinewy arms stretched out above her head, as if she were going to take a long nap. "The woman who loves you isn't here right now—so if that's who you're looking for, I'd suggest you get dressed and go home."

  He stared at her bare back, and for a moment he thought of the raw intoxication he'd felt when he was inside her. And then he was outside himself, above them both, watching as they writhed on the mattress, twisting and pushing the sheet at their feet until it had fallen off the end of the bed. Like animals in heat. He shivered and his stomach began to spasm violently. He sprang up and into the bathroom across the hall, where he fell in front of the toilet and began to vomit. At first it was only the sandwiches she'd made for them, and the wine, but as he knelt there, groaning with each spasm—not from the contractions of his stomach muscles but from the pain of her words—he began to lose it all. All the lunches, all the late-night dinners at Newman, every cup of coffee, erupted from him. And like a volcano finally erupting after resting dormant for many years, it wouldn't stop. With each convulsion, he felt as if something were reaching into the depths of his stomach. He continued to lose everything else, too. Every meal that Claire had lovingly prepared for him: the fried eggs and bacon that she made him every Sunday morning, the carrot cake—his favorite—that she baked from scratch every November for his birthday. The pretzels and popcorn he and Michael devoured together in the bleachers at Busch Stadium; the burnt Toll House cookies the kids baked for him; the chocolate-covered ants Michael made at camp one year and dared him to eat; the watery Kool-Aid on the deck; the cotton candy that Jamie insisted on sharing with him at the carnival each summer. It all came up against his will, burning his esophagus with contempt as it made its journey. He was helpless to stop it. When it finally ebbed, when he thought at last it was over, he vomited one last time and imagined that he had expelled his heart, that it floated there in the bowl below him, red and withered, amidst the debris of his life.

  He didn't know how long he crouched there, how much time had passed before he heard the creak of the bedsprings and assumed that Jenny had stood up. He lifted his heavy head to listen, but he didn't hear footsteps. Summoning the energy to pul
l his heavy body off the tiled floor, he stood up and flushed the toilet. His vision blacked out briefly, and he steadied himself against the sink until he could see again. He turned on the cold water and hovered over the sink, taking care not to look at his reflection in the mirror. He rinsed his mouth, splashed some water on his face, and after only a second of contemplation grabbed her toothbrush, squeezed some paste onto it, and brushed his teeth. When he was finished he almost tossed it into the wastebasket, but a touch of orneriness caused him to replace it in its holder.

  Gathering strength, he returned to the bedroom. She was in the same position on the bed as he'd left her, but she lay uncovered this time, the sheet and comforter underneath her. One of her cats, the Siamese one, was curled up in the crook of her arm, as if it had been lying in wait, ready to take Jack's place. He leaned against the doorway.

  "Did you write that speech ahead of time?" he asked. His throat was raw, his voice barely audible.

  When she didn't respond, didn't even move, he went to her side of the bed and sat on the edge. His hip brushed against hers. He grabbed her shoulder and rolled her over; the cat, disturbed, pounced onto the floor. She didn't resist but she didn't help him, either. Her body was limp and spiritless, but the intensity of her eyes almost punctured his resolve.

  "I said, did you write that speech ahead of time?" His voice was stronger.

  She shook her head slightly.

  He knew then he could place his palm on her skin and run it gently along the contours of her body while he began to kiss her, and she would let him. He knew he could climb on top of her and split her open. And he knew this would probably be the last chance he would have to lie down with her again and feel her nakedness against him. But something in him had changed; rather, something in him had returned during the time he'd spent bent in the bathroom, retching until there was nothing left except the acrid taste of bile and grief.

  So instead, he took her chin in his hand, as she had done to him, but more gently, and said, "Well, I don't believe it. I will never believe what you said."

  The rain was still falling steadily when he stepped outside. He didn't bother to button his coat; at this point it didn't matter to him if he got wet. He walked in the rain to the stoop adjacent to her place. He sat on the top step and raised his face to the sky. He wished the rain could wash away everything he'd done wrong. It didn't take long for the cold water streaming down his cheeks and neck to soak under the collar of his coat and through to his clothes. He looked down at his feet. The rain had drenched his shoes and socks, too, and the exposed bottom of his pant legs. Chilled, he began to shiver. He gazed out into the street and watched the morning's increasing traffic. He thought about his next step. Not his next step with Jenny, or his next step with Claire, or even how to get to Jefferson City in dry clothes so that he wouldn't arrive late for the seminar. He thought only about how he would get from the stoop to his car in the garage downtown. Whatever happened after that struck him as beyond his ability to comprehend. He tried not to, but he couldn't help but think of her again, of both of them, as they struggled on her bed, desperately trying to satiate the hunger that all their willpower over the past years couldn't make go away.