I had no right to be angry. When I left Mississippi, I left for good. Except for a few Thanksgivings and Christmases, I hadn’t been home. Paul, on the other hand, had left the army and was working for his father, only forty miles from Millsaps. When I asked Jet what the chances were that she would choose Georgetown, she told me zero—she couldn’t afford it. She’d only come up to see me. She would be entering Ole Miss Law School in the fall.
After that, she and Paul saw each other in a hit-or-miss fashion, at least for some years. But after Jet got her law degree, she took a job with a firm in New Orleans, and they eventually got back together for real. Eight years after our UVA rendezvous, in 2001, she called me from the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C., where she was attending a National Bar Association conference. I met her in a restaurant a few blocks from the hotel, and this time she was straight with me about why she’d come. She’d been dating Paul exclusively for two years, and she sensed that he was about to propose marriage. Before that happened, she wanted to give me a chance to say anything that I might feel needed to be said.
This pragmatic offer stunned me. I was in no position to ask her not to marry Paul. I’d taken a leave of absence from the Post to get a master’s in international relations from Georgetown. I was also dating one of my professors, a French economics expert named Chloe Denard. But it was less my relationship with Chloe that kept me from admitting my feelings for Jet than my resentment at how close Jet had gotten to Paul. If she could sleep with Paul for years without calling me, why the hell was she coming to see me only days before he proposed to her?
I didn’t say that to her, of course. Too many years had passed without me facing hard truths about myself. So I talked around the truth, and she let me. The unspoken fact was that I’d always loved her, and I’d let the gulf between my father and me keep me a thousand miles away from her for eleven years. Jet understood that, I think. But she left it unspoken, too. We drank a lot of wine, and we slept together for the second time in a decade. That one night was better than all the nights I had slept with Chloe Denard, or any other woman.
I didn’t tell Jet that, either.
She married Paul six months later, shortly before 9/11. I was invited to the wedding, but I didn’t attend. After I returned from Iraq in 2004, and The Hague was considering charging Paul and his fellow ShieldCorp contractors with war crimes, she and I spoke privately again. Jet was deeply upset, not only because of Paul’s legal jeopardy, but also because she was afraid that he and his men had really murdered civilians. On top of this, Paul had become depressed and was drinking heavily. She feared he might be suicidal. She wanted my best guess as to whether Paul and his men were guilty. She also wanted to know about my experiences with ShieldCorp in Ramadi.
As I’d done in one draft of the manuscript by that time, I omitted the story of the bullet-riddled Honda from my description of Paul’s rescue. I couldn’t see that any benefit would result from telling her the truth, other than driving her away from her husband. And by then I didn’t see that as a positive. I’d gotten engaged to Molly McGeary two weeks after returning from Ramadi, and we were set to be married three months later. Hearing the strain in Jet’s voice probably weighed heavily in my decision to omit the Accord story from my book. I’ve never told Paul that. Sometimes I wish I had. In any case, he managed to escape prosecution, and their lives moved on.
I had no contact with them for the next thirteen years, unless you count a sympathy card I got after my son drowned. Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2010, but he was angry and defensive about it, and Mom thought I should let her try to handle him alone as long as possible. His initial disease progression was slow, so it was 2016 before I started making trips back to Mississippi. And it was only after his rapid slide began in 2017 that my trips became regular. I was bound to run into Jet eventually, but it didn’t happen until Christmas 2017. Five months ago.
Last Christmas Eve, I tried to have a frank discussion with Dad about his medical prognosis. I also tried to talk to him about the future of the Watchman, which carried enormous debt and was losing more money every month. Dad was combative, and he might have gotten violent if I hadn’t decided to take a break and buy Mom a Christmas present while she tried to settle him down. I was standing in the checkout line at Dillard’s department store (with an expensive glass tub of moisturizer in my hand) when Jet tapped me on the shoulder, then laughed out loud when I turned and became a cartoon caricature of surprise.
Her eleven-year-old son, Kevin, stood at her side. The boy was handsome, like his father and grandfather (and his asshole cousins). The Matheson traits ran deeply in him. He had the strong jaw and high cheekbones, the vaguely Aryan look. But Jet had left her mark in his skin, which was darker than Paul’s had ever been, and in his eyes, which were large and brown. Also, Kevin was tall for eleven, which I suspected had come more from Jet than from Paul.
Jet herself amazed me. Buck’s description of her as an Arabic Emmylou Harris had proved prescient; she’d aged every bit as gracefully as the singer. She was forty-five then, but except for a few tiny lines around her eyes and mouth, slightly wider hips, and a heavier bosom, she could have been the girl I spent the summer riding bikes with in 1986. We traded small talk while we checked out, but then she told Kevin to go look for some new tennis shoes. As soon as the boy vanished, her mask slipped. She asked about my father again, and I gave her a more honest assessment. Then I asked how she was really doing.
“It’s hard,” she said softly, averting her eyes. “Paul’s been unhappy for a long time.”
“Unhappy with what? Life? You? What?”
“All the above.” Then she looked back at me. “How are you really doing? I wrote you a long letter after . . . you know. But I didn’t mail it. It was too personal.”
She meant my son’s death, I supposed. I waved my hand to move the conversation along.
“So you’re divorced,” she said.
“Mm-hm.”
“And very popular, I’m sure. Are you seeing anyone?”
I shrugged. “There’s somebody.”
She forced a smile then. “Serious?”
The silence that followed this question was one of the most pregnant moments of my life. “Define serious.”
She held up her left hand and tapped her wedding ring with her painted thumbnail.
“No,” I said. “Not soon, anyway. Your son looks really great, by the way,” I told her, trying to change the subject. “He looks like you.”
“Oh, he’s something. Paul and Max already have him playing every sport ever invented. They send him off to special camps, and he’s on a traveling baseball team. I think he’s too young for all that.”
“He is a Matheson,” I pointed out.
She let out a long sigh. “About three-quarters Matheson, I’d say. I may have a quarter of him. That’s what keeps me sane.”
In that moment I saw the deep pain working inside her. “Do you have a friend?” I asked. “A good one?”
She gave me a wistful smile. “Not really. Not a close one. You know me. Too private.”
“Does Paul realize how unhappy you are?”
“If so, he doesn’t do anything to help. I think he knows he can’t. Not where it counts. His mother’s been kind to me. Sally. She has some sense of the position I’m in. Being Max’s wife all these years had to be tough. She’s empathetic. But the rest of them, Max and their redneck cousins from Jackson—”
“I remember the cousins,” I said, thinking of the night we climbed the electrical tower.
“They were there when Adam drowned, weren’t they?” she asked. “In the river?”
I nodded, forcing my mind away from Dooley and Trey Matheson.
“So will you be coming down more often? To help take care of your dad?”
“I think so. More to help with the paper, really. It’s been going down fast.”
“I’m sorry. It has gotten a little . . . rickety. But I’m not sorry to hear I might see more of you.”