“I know you wanted his cell phone,” I press. “And I understand why. Max is an existential threat to us, no question. He’s threatened our lives. That video alone does.”
No response. Just when I think she’s shut down completely, she says, “Tonight wasn’t the first time he tried to rape me.”
The cold fist tightens around my heart. A hot wave of shame follows for doubting her initial story. “Will you tell me?”
“He tried it six weeks ago. I stabbed him.”
Stabbed him? Six weeks ago, she and I were making love every day. “Where did this happen?”
“My house. He claimed he’d come by to see Kevin, but he knew Kevin wasn’t going to be there. And he’d sent Paul on an errand to Jackson.”
“Jesus. What did you stab him with?”
“A steak knife.”
“Did anybody find out?”
She shakes her head. “He probably got Warren Lacey to sew him up. He saw it coming, and I caught him in the side. But it was enough to get him off me.”
I’m so dumbfounded by this story that it’s hard to know where to go from here. “Did you and I see each other that day?”
“No. I told you I had business in Tupelo.”
I remember that day now. “Last-minute trip,” I murmur. “You brought me back that Elvis guitar strap.”
A pained smile lights her face for a moment. “I couldn’t have seen you without telling you about it. And I just couldn’t get into it then. I wasn’t ready.”
“I understand. Look, I don’t want to push you . . .”
“Another ‘but’? Go ahead. We’re stuck here anyway.”
“I still feel like there’s something you’re not telling me. Maybe a lot.”
She looks into her lap, biting her lip like an anxious little girl. “What if it’s terrible? What if it’s something you can’t live with?”
I take her left hand and squeeze it. “There’s nothing about you I can’t live with. Nothing.”
She laughs bitterly in the dark. We’re sitting less than a foot apart, yet a gulf has yawned open between us. Can thirty-two years of love not bridge that divide? “Jet . . . a year from now, we’re going to be married. But to get there, we have to get through this, whatever it is. Just tell me. There’s nothing to fear.”
She nods, but her face is filled with torment, as though she’s fighting some invisible restraint. “Six weeks ago wasn’t the only other time,” she says.
I shift in my seat. “Okay. So he tried to rape you before that?”
“No.”
I blink in confusion, trying to understand. At first I don’t get her meaning. Then I do. The cold I felt earlier spreads through me like a numbing anesthetic. “You mean . . . Max didn’t just try to rape you? He succeeded?”
She sets her jaw and looks straight through the windshield. “Yes.”
I’ve clumsily driven my dull scalpel through thick scar tissue, exposing a necrotic cyst that threatens life itself. Max Matheson raped his daughter-in-law.
“Will you tell me how it happened?” I ask softly.
Jet sits silent in the moonlight falling through the windshield, looking out into the dark. She reminds me of crime victims I interviewed as a young reporter, people who had either suffered or witnessed violent acts and were struggling to maintain control. “It was about ten years ago,” she says in a monotone. “Sally was sick. She’d had colon surgery. I was helping take care of her. Tallulah and me. Tallulah was worn out, so I stayed up for a night and a day without sleep. I was exhausted. Paul was drunk, like he always was back then. He’d passed out in the den.”
“This was in Max and Sally’s house?”
She nods. “Max offered to spell me, so I could rest. I went to the guest room, but even though I was wiped out, I couldn’t fall asleep. I went into the kitchen for something to eat, and Max walked in. When I told him I couldn’t sleep, he gave me one of Sally’s pills. A Xanax. A big one. Then he went back in with Sally, and I went back to the guest room. The pill knocked me out.”
Part of me doesn’t want to hear what follows, but I have probably heard worse. In 1993, as a college junior, I interviewed six Bosnian women who had been repeatedly raped in a camp set up solely for that purpose.
Jet wipes her eyes with her torn blouse, then continues in the same lifeless voice. “When I first woke up, I thought it was Paul on top of me. He’d done that before, drunk. This is TMI, but . . . what brought me to my senses was how hard he was. And how rough. Paul was practically impotent by that time. Now and then he would take a Viagra, but he’d never admit it. The whole situation was just . . . shit.”
“It was Max on top of you?” I prompt quietly.
She nods, still facing forward.
“He did this with Paul in the next room?”
“Just down the hall. Max had seen enough of Paul in those years to know he wasn’t going to wake up, not even if I screamed.”
“Did you? Scream?”
“At first. Max just clapped his hand over my mouth and kept on ramming me. I could have screamed after that, but I started thinking about what would happen if I did. If Paul woke up and came in there. Would they fight? Would Paul get a gun? If he shot Max, would he go to jail? Or would Max kill Paul and find some way to blame him? Paul was taking drugs back then, a lot of them. Opiates, but some Adderall and other things, too. He bounced back and forth between zoned out and fighting mad. Anyway, as I lay there spinning all this out in my head, it suddenly ended. Max collapsed on top of me, then rolled off.”
“Did he say anything?”
Jet purses her lips like someone trying to recall a distant detail from childhood. “No. He didn’t even bother warning me not to tell anybody what he’d done. He knew nobody would believe me. Not in that family. He knew I wasn’t going to the police. The Poker Club owned the police then. They still do, but it was worse then. No rape kit evidence would ever have made it to a courtroom.”
The enormity of what she’s telling me has overloaded my analytical faculties. All I can do is try to elicit as many facts as possible, to try to make sense of them later. “Was that the only time this happened?”
“Yes, thank God.”
“Why, do you think? If you kept quiet about it the first time?”
She slowly shakes her head, as though trying to figure this out herself. “I think that’s complicated. You know Max—he always has to be the alpha male. I think he’d been watching me for a long time. He had to have me, to mark me, like a dog pissing on a tree. He saw his chance and he took it.”
“That sounds like him, all right.” The full horror of Max’s act is almost too much to grasp. Yet one obvious question has risen in my mind. Should I shove it down deep and never voice it? Maybe. But if I’m going to spend the rest of my life with this woman, I need to know the answer. “I get why you didn’t report it to the police,” I tell her. “And I agree that either Paul or Max would have killed the other over what happened. But . . . one thing about this doesn’t sound like you.”
Jet looks at me from the corner of her eye, mistrust plain in her face. “What?”
“Why didn’t you just leave? Take Kevin and run. Leave Mississippi. I realize it would have gotten difficult, but it’s hard to see how staying in that family would have been possible after what happened. I know you, Jet. I can’t see you staying after that.”
I expect her to say, Because of Kevin. He was just a baby. They would have come after me, brought me back. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t say anything.
“Because of Kevin?” I lead her.
She looks at me like she’s about to confirm that, but then she pulls back, like a parachutist hesitating in the open door of a plane.
“Where was Kevin when this happened?” I ask, sensing something even more frightening in the darkness of what remains unknown to me. “He was, what, two at the time? Was he home with Tallulah?”
She shakes her head.
“He was in the house?”
She hesitates, then nods.
“My God. Did he hear any of it?”
“No.”
“Well . . . that’s good. Jesus, I can’t believe Max was crazy enough to try this again now. And more than once? I mean, I do believe it. But he’s under indictment for murder! He really must have lost his mind.”