Five minutes ago I watched Jet walk from the tree line to my patio for the third time this week. As she did, I thought about all that’s happened since she shed her clothes on the same walk three days ago. We live in a different world now—so different that had she stripped while making that walk today, I would have worried she’d lost her mind. As she walked, swiftly today, her gaze on the ground, I wasn’t thinking about Max, or Paul, or even my father. I was thinking about my conversation with Tallulah Williams. Oddly, I also remembered how Jet left her earrings in my bathroom two days ago, as a test. She’d wanted to know whether Nadine would find them there. A human gesture, obviously. But it bothered me more than I’d realized at the time.
She sits before me now with a haunted face, her dark, long-fingered hands flat on the kitchen table. It’s odd to have a table between us, but today it seems appropriate. Something about this visit seems formal, even forced. I have a feeling she’s about to tell me why I feel that way.
“Max sent me here,” Jet says simply.
“I thought he was in the hospital in Jackson.”
“He is. He called me from his room at UMC.”
“Max made you come here?”
She nods. “He told me that if I didn’t, he would tell Paul and Kevin that he’s Kevin’s father.”
My God. The man is lying half-dead in a critical care hospital, and he’s still applying pressure to the object of his obsession.
“Why did he want you to come here?”
Jet closes her eyes, sighs heavily. “Do you know what it’s like to carry a secret that can destroy your life? Your whole family? I’ve heard people describe it as dragging a weight, but it’s not like that. It’s more internal than that. I used to feel it like a tumor inside me, one that could turn malignant any time. Or an aneurysm that could burst. But that’s not really it, either. Do you know what it’s like?”
“No.”
“An explosive vest. I strapped it on thirteen years ago, and Max has the detonator. I’ve been wearing this fucking thing for thirteen years, waiting for it to go off, and the man with the detonator has been slowly going mad.”
I’ve never seen Jet in this much pain. How did she mask it for so long? I want to comfort her, but I have no idea how to go about it.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she says. “I feel like I’m about to knife you in the heart. Or myself. I don’t know if this feels more like homicide or suicide.”
Jet reminds me of my wife in the pit of postpartum depression. There’s a deadness to her voice that I couldn’t have imagined until I heard it. And all the light has been sucked from her eyes.
“Let me try to make this easier for you,” I say gently. “I think I know what you’re about to tell me.”
“How could you?”
“I spoke to Tallulah this morning.”
“Tallulah?” Jet looks blank. “What about?”
“She’s an observant woman.”
Jet shrugs and shakes her head in puzzlement. “What did she ‘observe’?”
“Well . . . nothing terrible, or even untoward. She just described to me a feeling that she had.”
A sudden alertness in Jet’s posture tells me she’s made the connection. “Oh,” she says softly. “Oh.”
“Did you come here to tell me that Max never raped you?”
Her chin begins to quiver, and her eyes close. Even her hands are shivering.
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” I say, meaning it as a kindness. “I have no idea what you were going through then. It had to be a terrible time.”
“I’d prefer to tell you,” she replies, her voice braced with iron. “If you can listen. It’s not what you think. Nothing like what you must think.”
What can she mean? “Did he rape you?”
She looks stricken. “No.”
“Then . . . what should I think?”
“Will you please listen to me? Five minutes. That’s all I ask.”
I nod slowly. “I’m listening.”
Jet takes two deep breaths, then licks her lips like someone about to read aloud from a book. “The situation was pretty much as I described last night. Though Paul was, if anything, in worse shape than I let on. He had constant pain from his head wounds. He was addicted to Oxycontin. Warren Lacey wrote prescriptions for whatever he wanted, but Paul also bought street drugs from a worker at the sawmill. I think the multiple IED concussions had profoundly affected his brain. He would fly into rages, he was impotent nearly all the time, and he refused to seek help for any of it.”
“And you?”
“I did what women always do. I blamed myself.”
“Why?”
“For marrying him.”
I feel like we’re retracing old steps. “You said that last night. That you married a man you didn’t love. But I don’t think you’re being honest with yourself. Or me. You feel that way now, but not when you walked down the aisle.”
Frustration etches itself into her face. “You’re so wrong, Marshall. Did I not come to you in D.C. only weeks before Paul proposed to me? Did I not ask if there was a chance for us?”
“Yes . . . sort of. But you waited until you were right at the edge of the cliff.”
Anger flashes in her eyes. “I still did it. That’s more than you did. But you shut me down. You slept with me, of course. But you let me know you weren’t ready to deal with it in a real way. With us.”
“I wasn’t ready. What was the hurry?”
“We were twenty-eight! Not eighteen.”
I turn up my hands on the table. “To tell you the truth, I was still hurt by you going back to Paul after college. I assumed you wouldn’t have done that if you didn’t love him.”
Jet’s gaze flits over the surface of the table, as though she’s looking for crumbs that need sweeping up. “I’ve come to realize something,” she says. “Marrying someone you don’t love is a sin. Because it sends both of you to hell. It destroys the other person first, but in the end it gets you, too. The magnitude of what you’ve done, the damage you’ve caused by forcing you both to live a lie.”
Her words take me back to my own marriage. “I see the truth in that. I’ve lived that. But that sounds like a lot of marriages, Jet. Wilde said the one charm of marriage was that it made a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.”
“Glib and depressing.”
“Why don’t we focus on you and Max?”
“There is no me and Max! There never was.” Though Jet’s outward affect is melancholy, I sense fearsome anger beneath. “What happened was simple, pragmatic, utilitarian. By 2005, Paul and I had been trying to have a baby for four years—since before he went to Afghanistan after 9/11. All through his rotations home, even when he had that stupid contracting company in Iraq. After one year of failure, I got myself thoroughly checked out. My plumbing was fine. But Paul refused to get even the most basic fertility tests on himself.”
“That I believe.”
“He’d tried to kill himself twice that I know of in that time. He pretended both episodes were accidental overdoses, but I knew. He was about to become another VA statistic. I really believed a baby was the only thing that might save him. He wouldn’t consider adoption, and if I’d mentioned a sperm donor, he’d have killed me. The thing is, even though I knew the situation wasn’t my fault—the infertility, I mean—I felt like a failure.”
Sitting here listening to Jet, I think of how people in the town see her—smart, tough, put together, in control—the mother of an athlete destined to become a star. No one could imagine the life she’s describing to me now.
“So . . . what did you do?”
Something changes in her voice, an alteration in pitch that renders it more mechanical, less human. “It happened a lot like I told you last night. Sally was ill after surgery. I’d been taking care of her, but it was Tallulah in the bedroom with her that night. Max and I were in their living room, by a fire. We’d all been drinking. Paul was passed out twenty feet away.”