Paul slowly folded the paper, slipped it into his pocket, and walked out of the hospital room. As he boarded the big elevator with a legless black man in a wheelchair, he realized he had ascended to a plane where earthly concerns no longer mattered. That piece of paper, combined with his memory of the lovemaking video, had wounded him in a way that blades and bullets never could. But it was his father’s revelation about Kevin’s paternity—and the obscene ongoing deception that it implied—that triggered a dark epiphany unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
Max was right. All his life Paul had sensed some ineffable distance between himself and his son. He had never spoken of it to a soul. In fact, he’d hardly let himself dwell on the feeling long enough to analyze it. To do so would have been like walking out onto four inches of ice over a bottomless lake. But now . . . his father had dredged the unspeakable secret from that lake bottom and winched it to the surface. Paul’s new awareness blotted out all else and could be expressed in a single sentence that played over and over in his mind: I may be a fool, but you’ll die before you take my son . . .
Chapter 50
Death is absolute. It sweeps all before it. Death long expected arrives like the eye of a slow hurricane: days of wind, rain, and thunder—then silence. The rain will return as the storm moves through, but you won’t feel it, being numb. Once the storm passes, you won’t ever be the same. Feeling returns to a person changed.
When a parent dies, your center of gravity is altered. Even if you lived apart from them—even if you walled yourself off from all contact—you are irrevocably lessened by their passing. Death, like gravity, respects no barriers.
The hours since my father died have blurred into vignettes of my mother’s old friends stopping by with foil-covered casserole dishes and Mom compulsively straightening up the house. Intermittent thunder has made the house shudder, but the rain never comes. I’ve checked my iPhone at least a dozen times, but as yet I’ve received no call or text from Blake Donnelly or Arthur Pine. Perhaps my father’s death has made them reluctant to call, but I can’t imagine sentimentality getting in the way of Poker Club business—especially with their reputations and even their liberty on the line. More than once I’ve worried that they might decide to kill Beau Holland rather than force him to stand trial for Buck’s murder, then present me with a fait accompli. Claude Buckman and company are nothing if not practical.
I took it upon myself to remove the assistive apparatus of Dad’s illness from the front room, though I could see it upset Mom to watch it packed away. She wanted it out of sight, but its removal was like an erasure of his final months in this house. During the silent caesuras between neighbors’ visits, she and I sit in the den, going through old photo albums she dug from a cabinet in the guest room. Most date to before Adam’s death. Some of the best pictures are from those rare occasions—once every year or two—that it snowed in Bienville, and we hauled pizza pans out to the Indian Village to slide down the snow-covered ceremonial mounds. In one shot, Dad, wrapped like a Sherpa, carries me up a steep mound while Adam, who looks about seven, trudges beside him like Edmund Hillary summiting Everest. No one looking at these photos would guess that this happy triumvirate would be shattered only a decade later.
“Duncan did his best,” my mother says beside me. “He really did.”
“I know,” I tell her, granting her this fiction.
“I wish he could have lived to see you reopen the Watchman.”
All I’ve done so far is pass the keys to Ben Tate, who has a skeleton staff downtown, setting up tomorrow’s edition. Ben’s more than a little pissed that I’ve restrained him from going hard after the Poker Club, and I can foresee problems in hewing to the deal I made with Buckman. But right now Ben is content to focus on the murders of Buck and Sally, as well as the imminent arrival of the Department of Archives and History archaeologists who will assess the paper mill site.
“We’ll do it tomorrow in style,” I tell her. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take that portrait of Dad from your bedroom and hang it in the lobby of the building.”
This takes her by surprise, and moves her deeply. I have seen other widows become faithful tenders of their husbands’ legacies. “I think that’s a wonderful idea,” she says. To hide her tears, Mom changes the subject. “I’ve heard Buck Ferris’s memorial is tomorrow afternoon, out at the cemetery. Do you plan to go?”
“Sure, of course. I didn’t know.”
“I’d like to go with you. Buck did this family a great service.”
That he did. “We’ll go together.”
As she turns the album’s pages, I see the shining faces of people I haven’t spoken to in years. Bienville children who grew up and spread across the country, though most remained in the South. In every photograph, the kids seem oriented in relation to Adam, like bodies of lesser density finding their position in relation to a star.
“That boy was something,” Mom says softly. “Wasn’t he?”
“He was.”
As she slowly turns the pages, moving through Christmas presents and Fourth of July firecrackers, I remember Tim Hayden talking to me in the little park up the street from Nadine’s bookstore. “Mom, can I ask you something personal?”
“About your father?”
“No, Adam.”
“Of course.”
“Did you ever wonder if he might be gay?”
“Adam?”
I instantly regret the question.
Mom lays her hands flat on the plastic-covered album pages, draws back her head, and looks at me. “What makes you ask that?”
“I . . . never mind. I just wondered.”
After a few moments, she smiles in a way I’ve never seen before, defenselessly, as though allowing her deepest self to become manifest on her face. “Of course he was,” she says. “Your father never knew. I don’t think Duncan could have handled it. Not back then. Although . . . for him, Adam could do no wrong. I suppose that would have tested his love.”
“How long have you known?” I ask.
“Oh, I suspected when he was a little boy. Never mind why. Mothers know these things, if they pay attention. They don’t always react well, of course. But they know. At least I did.”
“Did you ever talk to anybody about it?”
Another smile touches her mouth and eyes, this one wistful. “Jenny Anderson,” she says. “His girlfriend from junior and senior year. About ten years ago, she was in town for Christmas, and she stopped by to see me. Jenny knew. And she loved him like we did. For what he was. All he was.”
“I must be blind,” I murmur, feeling ashamed.
“We’re all blind about some things. Different things for each of us. That’s what makes life so hard.”
I lean back on the sofa, and Mom lays her hand on my knee. “I’m not teasing you now, Marshall. You know who reminds me of Jenny Anderson? Nadine. That young lady has a pure heart and an old soul. I hope you’re not blind to that.”
Before I can answer, my burner phone pings in my pocket.
“Excuse me a sec, Mom. This is work.” I get up and take the phone out of my pocket, feeling her gaze on me as I walk to the door. Looking down at the screen, I see a text from Jet: Have to see you ASAP. I know it’s worst possible time, but this is an emergency. Things falling apart. Leaving for your house now. I’ll park in the woods till you let me know it’s ok to approach house. So sorry about your dad!
“Is everything all right?” Mom calls.
“Yes,” I tell her, leaning back through the wide door. “It’s just work. Would you be all right if I had to leave for about an hour?”
She nods without speaking, but in her eyes I see the knowledge granted by her phenomenal perception. “Be careful,” she says. “That blindness we were talking about gets people hurt.”
This is as close as she’ll ever come to warning me away from Jet.
“I will, Mom. I’ll be back before you know it.”