She’s right. We stare at one another without words. This is a new experience, to watch each other with something like loathing. Perhaps we don’t loathe each other so much as ourselves. We say nothing, for there seems nothing to say. My mind makes a few silent forays into the twisted logic of the situation, but my instinct for self-preservation pulls it back. Jet giving herself to Max was like a snake eating its own tail. By consummating her relationship with him, she turned herself inside out, becoming a living negative of the person she was before, and subverting a fundamental family dynamic. She achieved the goal she sought, a son for her suicidal husband, but at what cost? It’s hard not to believe that on the day Kevin Matheson was conceived, the seed of his family’s destruction was planted. And three nights ago, Sally Matheson died.
Who will be next?
Given the true state of affairs in the Matheson family, it’s easy to see how Jet might have viewed me as the only means of escape within her grasp. Knowing I’d never stopped loving her, she could have lured me here in the hope that I could somehow extricate her from the terrible web that bound her, without destroying everyone in it. But her hope was in vain. No one could accomplish that.
“So what now?” I ask, feeling exhausted and close to despair.
“I’m going to go,” she says. “I know I’ve wounded you. I look in your eyes, and I see that you can’t imagine touching me. Don’t deny it. Maybe that will change, I don’t know. I only want to be sure you know one thing. I loved you when we were kids, and I never stopped. I loved you when I came to you before I married Paul. I’ve loved you the whole time I was married. I know you don’t trust me now. But when you think about all this later, consider one thing: to tell you the truth was to risk losing you. It meant that every time you looked at Kevin, you would think of Max. Every time you made love to me . . . the same. Which would have killed any hope for us. Telling you also meant confronting it myself—in the daylight world, outside of Max and me, who were the only two who knew for thirteen years.”
“Tallulah knew.”
“She never told me that.”
“Do you believe now that Sally figured it out?”
Jet turns back toward the window. “I don’t know,” she says distractedly. “Did you hear something?”
“No. What?”
“A deer, maybe? A hoof on concrete?”
The sharp rap of metal on glass reverberates off the kitchen cabinets. So loud and sudden that my heart begins hammering against my breastbone. Jet whirls to me, paler than I’ve ever seen her.
Max? I mouth silently, remembering his earlier visit.
“He’s in the hospital!” she hisses. “If that’s Paul—”
“Open the goddamn door!” shouts a male voice.
Paul’s voice.
Chapter 51
Jet and I stand frozen in my kitchen, staring at the back door. She’s on the far side of the table. I’m nearer the island.
“Do we run?” she whispers. “Or open it?”
My mind goes to Nadine’s pistol in the rag drawer, eight feet from my hand. But arming myself against Paul, who has Special Forces training in firearms, strikes me as a suicidal gesture. “We can’t run from this. He’d hear the car start. He’d get there before we could back out of the driveway. Or he’d follow and catch us at the gate.”
She nods in resignation, still watching the door. “He’s supposed to be in Jackson. He’s been with Max. He may know everything.” She looks back at me. “He may have come to kill us.”
Paul batters the door again with his fist.
“We’ve risked that from the beginning,” I tell her. “There’s no hiding the truth anymore. Whatever happens happens.”
This time Paul hits the window with something hard, and it shatters.
Jet walks forward and lays her hand on the knob. Then she looks over her shoulder and whispers, “I love you. I never lied about that.”
“I know. Open it.”
She pulls the door inward and steps back as though she expects a hail of blows or bullets.
First I see only the empty doorway. Then Paul moves into it, fills it. If Jet looked haunted when she arrived, Paul looks possessed. Pale and unshaven, he’s wearing the same clothes he had on last night at the hospital. But most unnerving are his eyes, which are so inflamed that the sclera appear bloodred. If he doesn’t have an eye infection, then he’s running on alcohol, adrenaline, and maybe something stronger.
“Well?” he says in a conversational tone. “Did I interrupt the foreplay or the afterglow?”
“Neither,” Jet says. “We’re just talking.”
Paul steps over the threshold. The moment his body displaces air from my kitchen, I realize how wrong it is that I’m here alone with Jet. The fact that I loved her first means nothing. That she loved me first means nothing. They exchanged marital vows, and in this moment, in the eyes of the law and of the world, she belongs to him. As I ponder this, a black semiautomatic pistol swings into view, dangling from his right hand. He could kill me now with a reasonable expectation of being acquitted.
“Do not speak,” he orders Jet. “Not unless I ask you a question. You’ve forfeited that right.”
While she gapes at him, he turns his attention to me. “What should I do with you, Marshall? My good friend. Yesterday you denied you were fucking my wife. Today . . .” He waves his gun hand. “Today everybody’s going to tell the truth. Is that understood?”
When no one answers, he looks at Jet. “I know it was you who hit Pop last night. Not Marshall. Correct?”
“Yes.”
Paul takes a step toward the table, then digs a cell phone from his pocket. “To spare us any awkward denials, I want to play a little video short.”
The floor shifts beneath my feet. He holds his phone out toward us.
“Paul, don’t,” Jet pleads.
“Why not? I’ve watched it all the way from Jackson. A forty-minute loop. I could have whacked off a couple of times if I hadn’t had to drive. Noticed something new every time.”
The sound of forest insects comes from the phone. Then the screen lights up with the green sweep of my backyard. Even from the kitchen counter, I can see Jet’s naked body sitting astride mine on the patio steamer chair.
“That didn’t come off Pornhub,” Paul says. “That’s the real deal.”
Jet is looking at the floor.
“Watch it, goddamn it!” Paul roars, walking around the extended phone so that he can watch it with her. “At least have the guts to face up to what you did.”
Jet looks at the screen. Both their backs are to me now, but I’m not stupid enough to think Paul isn’t aware of every move I make.
The geometry of the kitchen suddenly seems important. There’s ten feet of floor space between the table and the back wall. Jet and Paul occupy that rectangle. The table is six feet long and three feet wide and runs parallel to the back wall. There’s eight feet of space between the table and the island, which is tucked into the U of cabinets and appliances. I’m standing between the table and the island. And Nadine’s pistol—
“Here we go!” Paul says with false excitement. “First orgasm coming up!”
“Christ, please stop this,” Jet pleads.
“Aaaaaand . . . boom!” Paul cries. “Good one!”
Jet gives him nothing.
“By my count,” Paul says, “we’ll have thirty-three seconds of rest, then the lady will start again, going for her second pop. Anybody want to wager on how long it takes her to get there? No?”
“Stop,” Jet implores. “This is pathetic.”
“Then how could you do it?” he shouts, so loudly that Jet draws back from him. “Huh? I’m waiting!”
Instead of yielding more ground, Jet stands straight and says, “You ask me that? Like you haven’t screwed a dozen waitresses and assistants since you married me?”
I knew that Paul had cheated on her, but this revelation shocks me.
Paul doesn’t blink. “Not like this! I never loved anybody else.”
Jet shakes her head and looks at him with what must be painful frankness. “You’ve never loved anybody, Paul. Not really. Certainly not me.”
This stops him for a few seconds. “That’s a lie,” he says finally. “I loved you.”
“No. You wanted me to love you. There’s a difference.”
“You don’t know what I feel!” he yells, trying to recapture his initial fury. In this moment Paul looks like a little boy trying to understand a painful world.
“But I do,” Jet says. “Better than anyone alive. And you know it.”
Paul waves his gun at her. “Here’s what I know. You never loved me. You lied to me from the beginning.”